“You mean West Virginia.”
“It was Virginia then. Anyway, that and the time they had spent helped him figure out that it was Independence, Virginia, they were talking about. He spent a long time asking them questions and writing down their answers, trying to make sense out of where they had come from and how they had come, but they really didn’t know. They had heard of ‘North,’ and that a man could be free there, and that if you spoke to a particular man in a particular way, he would show you how to get there, and so they had run away to Charleston and found the man and he had passed them on. They had come up the valley under cover of darkness, twenty-five miles in one dark night, and a preacher in town had hidden them through the day and then told them to come west until they saw a three-storied mill and wait there.
“So they waited, eating C.K.’s food and making jokes about slavery, and how good it was to be free, and asking C.K. questions about what life was like in the North, and how long it took a black man to talk as well as he did, and wear a suit, and ride a horse. C.K. kept trying to quiet them, trying to explain that they were a long way from being free, but they wouldn’t listen. It was lucky there wasn’t anybody around.
“Just before dawn two men came, black men with a hay wagon. They wouldn’t give their names, but took the slaves and hid them under the hay, and drove on. And an hour later, just after dawn, a party of slave-catchers came by, searching the woods on either side of the road with bloodhounds. But by that time C.K. was bathed and shaved and mounted, and was watching from the other side of the river.”
“They would have taken him, wouldn’t they?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. You can’t tell. And he couldn’t, either. So he made sure of his safety in the only way he could: he rode hard and slept light and didn’t go near a town until he got to Pittsburgh. And it worked; he made it without being bothered.
“But not without being changed. The experience had done something to him. It shows in his writing style. While he was writing about this area he was really emotional, enthusiastic, and even though the style was flowery there was some enthusiasm for the content as well as the style, and it isn’t half as bad as the other stuff about so-and-so, the great colored citizen. But what he wrote after he got to Pittsburgh—and he didn’t write anything else until he did get there—was just like the earlier stuff, only worse. It seems like he lost the enthusiasm for the style too. The style didn’t change—he was still throwing around quotes and tossing off metaphors—but it wasn’t really a style anymore; more like an empty form. He wrote about the convention as though it were…I don’t know. There were a hundred and forty-seven delegates, and Pittsburgh wasn’t even a major black population center, so it must have been an important gathering, but C.K. makes it sound like a tea party. I don’t know what actually caused the change, but I suspect it was being so close to slavery again, and being afraid of being taken, because when he got back to Philadelphia, he started writing about the things he was doing to protect his wife against kidnap, even though Priscilla Langley had evidently been born free. The fear he had wasn’t unreal—a lot of free blacks were being kidnapped, especially attractive females, of which she was evidently one—but he made more out of it than he had before. He had papers of manumission forged for himself, and he had affidavits drawn up testifying to Priscilla’s freedom, and he hired people to watch the house when he was away. So he must have been preoccupied with the whole thing, but you couldn’t tell it; the style stayed florid and empty for a solid year, right up until the riot in 1842. And then he dropped the flowery style and started putting down the facts, nothing else: names, dates—”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “You lost me at the riot.”
“Sorry,” I said. “The anti-free-black sentiment erupted again in 1842. Actually, it had been going on all along. There was a major riot in 1834, when C.K. met Priscilla, and one a year later, and in 1838 they had burned down Pennsylvania Hall, which had been built by the Abolition movement, and they had done it while the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women was meeting there, so they were getting pretty unchivalrous in their anger. Part of it was due to the Panic of 1837, which made for a lot of idle whites and resentment, but some of it was just…I don’t know…background hatred. It wasn’t just Philadelphia, either; the black section of Pittsburgh had been burned down in 1839. Anyway, in 1833 the British Parliament had passed a law ending slavery in the Empire as of August 1, 1834, and in 1842 the Philadelphia blacks got together to celebrate the anniversary, and evidently a gang of whites didn’t like the idea of blacks taking a day off and celebrating freedom, so they went tearing into the Negro section, beating up on people and killing a few, and burning property left and right. It was a regular Long Hot Summer act, and the militia had to be called out to quell the riot. And C.K. was right in the middle of it. He dropped the florid style like a shot and he just set down fact after fact. He got everything. Names, dates, places, ages, everything.”
“And he didn’t feel a thing.”
“Of course he did,” I said. “As a matter of fact, after the riot a white Abolitionist named Henry C. Wright wrote to him asking for information, and C.K. wrote back and said…” I stopped for a minute, to remember the exact words. “ ‘To attempt a reply to your letter, now, is impractical.’ He couldn’t give the man facts, you see; he was still sorting through things—”
“Sorting through things,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Rubble. And emotions were part of the rubble. In the same letter he wrote: ‘I feel that my life, weighed down and crushed by a despotism whose sway makes a hell of earth…’ But those weren’t facts. The white folks didn’t mind; they published the letter in The Liberator, anonymously, of course. But C.K. was—”
“Busy sorting through things,” she said. “I know. Just like a good little historian. You like him, don’t you?”
“I admire the hell out of him,” I said.
“And you want to be just like him. You think there’s something good about getting the feelings out of things. Don’t you?” She was looking at me hard, and I could see the fire’s glow reflected in her eyes.
“Yes,” I said. “Not ordinary feelings; a historian has to have ordinary feelings—a little sympathy, a little anger. That’s what makes him human. But if the feelings are so strong they get in the way of the facts—”
“And you think that’s what he had?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t.”
“I don’t give a damn what you think,” I said. “Because you don’t have the facts. But I’ll tell you, it takes one hell of a historian to sit at a desk with a quill and ink and write down, without even making a blot, that among those killed was Priscilla Langley Washington, aged twenty-seven, and in her seventh month of pregnancy.”
She didn’t say anything. I didn’t look at her, just sat there, looking at the fire. It was dying a little now, the glowing center eating into the fourth log. I could already feel myself chilling. I pulled my clothing close about me and stirred.
“Where are you going?” she said. There was a little alarm in her voice.
“More wood,” I said. I pulled my hat and gloves back on and stood up. The wind hit my head and chest, hard and frigid, and I felt the chill drive into the pit of my stomach. I climbed quickly over the windbreak, shaking as the wind sliced at my knees, and plowed to the wood I had piled. I had to spend a moment estimating, but it was all right; there was enough there to last. I picked out two logs and carried them back and laid them carefully on the fire, trying not to break the structure of it, trying to keep it going while adding to it. When I had it done as well as I could, I sat down again. My cup was half full, but the toddy was cold. I added hot water to it and sipped, feeling the warmth run through me, feeling the cold go away; not far, but away.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What for?”
“For …being impatient.”
I shrugged. “I get impatient
too,” I said. “I want to hurry. I want to know everything now. But history doesn’t work that way; the truth is usually in the footnotes, not in the headlines. One of the local historians said history was ‘the sayings and doings and surroundings of individuals; their rivalries, and quarrels, and amusements, and witticisms, and sarcasms; their mechanical and professional pursuits; their erection of houses and fulling mills and grist- and sawmills…their births and marriages and deaths; their removal to other localities, and how they prospered, and what descendants they left….’ ”
“C.K.?” she said.
“What?” I said. “Oh, no. No, a man named William Maclay Hall.”
“Does he come into it?”
“Yes,” I said. “He comes into it.” I didn’t say anything for a while then, and she left me to my silence, snuggling down next to me and laying her hand against my belly. But I could not feel her hand through my clothes, and though the fire blazed brightly, I felt the chill growing in me. When I began to shiver I leaned forward to mix another toddy. She took her hand away, but said nothing. I sipped the whiskey and, for a time, felt the chills recede.
“I don’t know exactly what he did then,” I said. “I know he buried her and I know that he stopped attending meetings and things like that as soon as he did, because he kept the journal, and there’s nothing in there about any of that. But there isn’t anything in there about grieving, either, nothing about anger. All I know is that he went about the business of selling everything that he had, converting everything into cash, and that on Christmas Day, 1842, he donated the entire sum to the Abolition movement. Or most of it; he must have kept something back, or perhaps he went to work to live. He doesn’t say. For the next six months the journal is nothing more than a list of books he’s finished reading. Up until this time, he’d make casual reference to a book, or quote from it; for those six months he simply listed titles and quotations. He was reading fast—three, four books a day. And he was reading different things than he had been: literature. He finally read Jonathan Swift, and he read Sir Walter Scott, and Charles Dickens—evidently he had met Dickens when he was in this country in 1842—and a lot of the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Shelley. He read contemporary criticism too, and he spent an awful lot of time reading Southern writing, not that much of it was worth reading. But he followed Poe’s career carefully, and managed to meet the man during that year—Poe was living in Philadelphia at the time. He doesn’t mention any of his old associations, but I suspect they were after him to become active again, because in July of 1843 he wrote that he had been selected to attend the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, and that he had decided to go.
“I don’t know what all the reading had done for him; it may have changed his outlook, but it didn’t show. He wrote about the Buffalo convention in a very flat style, recording votes, positions, and not doing much else. He made it sound like a sewing circle, when actually it was one of the most important events of the decade. The New York blacks had always been more militant than the Philadelphia people, and the ones in Buffalo were downright rebellious, and during the course of the convention, a man named Henry Highland Garnet got up and called Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner patriots and called for revolt among the slaves. Tough words: ‘You cannot be more oppressed than you have been—you cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die free men than live to be slaves.’ It caused quite a stir, and a motion was made to adopt it as the sentiment of the convention. They called the roll in alphabetical order; G.K. was the last delegate to vote. He voted no. The motion failed by one.”
“After all that, he voted no?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know any more about it than that. There’s nothing more in his journal about that, or about anything to do with the Abolitionist movement. Maybe he got disgusted with it. There were all kinds of factions now; the whole movement was dividing over militancy, and over whether or not blacks should be more or less prominent, and whether it was proper to buy slaves in order to free them, and whether or not women should be allowed to vote in meetings—all kinds of things. Maybe he just walked away from it all. But the next things he writes about are trails and points of vantage and concealment, and the wholesale price of corn.”
“What… Oh. Moonshine.”
“That’s right. Moonshine. Sometime in the fall of 1843 he left Philadelphia and came across the mountains, and spent a good bit of time exploring the mountains hereabouts. I’d say he must have arrived in mid-September. Not that anybody saw him; it just seems that he would have needed that much time to scout the area as thoroughly as he did. He drew maps, routes of access, charted caves, everything. He spent some time improving shelters, expanding natural caves and such. And he bought corn. He bought it through an agent, a man named Mickle, down in the South County, and he had Mickle believing he was a white man who was buying food for a plantation owner in Virginia. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but he waved enough money in Mickle’s face to keep him quiet and honest. And he bought the corn, and picked it up at a South County mill, and nobody figured out what it was going for. Or where it was going. Which was up in the mountains, a little here and a little there. By the end of November he had everything set up—I guess he brought the hardware with him, or maybe he made it; I don’t know. He let his mash ferment, and in late February he started to cook.
“He didn’t cook much that year, just a few hundred gallons. But he cooked carefully and did different batches in different ways. In late April he came down from the mountains and looked up his buddy Mickle and told him that he had come up with some whiskey. Mickle was greedy enough to handle the selling for a large profit. But I don’t thing C.K. was much interested in profit; he wanted to know which one of his formulae had worked the best. He found out by how much of each Mickle sold, and how fast. That fall, he had Mickle buying more corn, but without the pretense about the plantation. Of course, Mickle still thought C.K. was a white man. C.K. cooked again that winter, using the most popular recipe, adding a few variations. And that spring the whiskey that sold the best was exactly the formula he thought it would be. And then he was ready to go into business.
“He has it all laid out in the journal, exactly what he did and exactly how he did it: transactions made, actions taken. There isn’t a single place where he puts down a question, or a doubt; it’s all facts and logic, step by step. First he went out by himself, at night, looking over cornfields by moonlight, rousting farmers out of bed and buying their corn before it was halfway ready. He bought the best corn, and arranged contracts for delivery. When the time came, Mickle delivered wagonloads to points C.K. set up. By late November he had gotten the mash stored and the accounts paid. Then he killed Mickle and—”
“What?”
“He killed Mickle,” I said. “What did you expect him to do?”
“I don’t know. Not that.”
“Why not? It’s perfectly logical. He couldn’t have somebody like Mickle knowing what he was doing and how, and probably even where. He had to kill him.”
“But you said he voted against—”
“A call for slave insurrection. It was a stupid idea, and Henry Highland Garnet didn’t know what he was talking about. He had been born in slavery but had gotten out of it when he was a child; he spent the rest of his life being a pampered darling in Troy, New York, and screwing liberal white ladies. C.K. was probably laughing all the time. And whatever he thought, that vote doesn’t make him nonviolent.”
“But—”
“The man had been a slave twice and could have been taken back at any time. He’d lost a wife, maybe seen her killed. You think he was going to lose sleep over some piece of poor white trash? The man couldn’t be trusted; he had to go.”
“Well, why didn’t he find somebody he could trust?”
I just looked at her.
“You’re going to say there was nobody he could trust, aren’
t you?”
“No,” I said. “No, I’m not going to tell you that. Because I’ve already told you enough times, and you don’t understand. But it’s true anyway, whether you understand it or not.”
“All right,” she said. “Never mind the reason. He killed the man.”
“Yes,” I said. “He killed the man. And then he made his mash and cooked his whiskey, and in the spring of 1845 he loaded it into a freight wagon and hauled it over the mountains to Philadelphia. He sold it there. I don’t know exactly how he went about it, because he evidently didn’t take the journal with him, and all he wrote down when he got back was the money he had made and the places where he had deposited it. All solid banks. And it was a good bit of money for the time, evidently. I’m not too sure about the conversion. But none of that is really all that important at this stage. What is important is that he had some whiskey left, not enough to make it profitable to haul it east, but too much for private consumption. As a matter of a fact, C.K. didn’t even drink whiskey, or anything else besides water. I don’t know why; I guess he had just never gotten into the habit. At any rate, he didn’t know enough about the stuff to judge on his own what was good.
“Anyway, he decided to sell the stuff locally. He drove his wagon into town with just one barrel loaded on the back, and he stopped on the shady side of the town square, right in front of the old jail, and he tapped the keg and took a tin cup and handed out free samples to all the old bench-sitters and railbirds and farmers that were hanging around, and then, when the barrel was empty, he just drove away without a word to anybody. Then he waited about a week, until the word had time to get around, and then he came back, but he came at night, with the whiskey in jugs instead of kegs, and he went to the houses of all the top men in town, the doctors and the lawyers and the men on the civil list, and he sold it to them, six jugs a man, no more, no less. They had heard about it by this time—everybody had heard about that whiskey; it was the best whiskey anybody around had ever tasted, and this was whiskey-making country. So they bought, and they paid his price, and for weeks after they talked about it; not so much about the whiskey—they all knew about the whiskey by now, from the railbirds and the bench-sitters—but about who hadn’t been offered any. It was a good way to assure a market, and I have a suspicion C.K. liked the idea of a bunch of white men giving each other airs over a colored man’s whiskey, not even knowing that he was colored or that what they had gotten was the bottom of the barrel. But that isn’t really important, either. What is important is that selling that whiskey made him a part of the Town. It brought him into contact with the most powerful men and the best-known men, and it made him well known. That was about the best way to be sure of his safety; because if somebody saw him and said, ‘Isn’t that a runaway nigger?’ thinking to haul him south and sell him, they’d take him before a local magistrate, and that local magistrate would think he was white; and what’s more, he wouldn’t want to see the source of the best whiskey he’d ever had going south. So after that, C.K. became a lot more open. Not that he let anybody know where he came from, or what he did, or where he hid out in the mountains, but he did come into town now and again. And that meant he got to know people. He became good friends with Nelson Gates, the bootblack, and with two other men, John Crawley and John Graham; he got to know them because he recognized them as the two who had been on the wagon that came for the runaways. They introduced him to the preacher, John Fiddler, but C.K. never had much use for him, even though he did write that his first impressions about the local blacks had to be wrong if even the ministers were risking working for the Underground. And he met William Maclay Hall.
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