The Good Lord Bird

by James McBride

  Soon as that was arranged, the Old Man announced, “I has sold the wagons and our supplies for a purpose. I needs a train ticket to go back east. I will leave you here, men, in comparative warmth and safety, whilst I travel to Boston alone to seek out funds in the name of our Redeemer. For we needs to eat, and our fight requires money, of which there is plenty back east, which I will fetch from our many supporters there.” They agreed, for a warm place to sleep was golden and we was exhausted, whereas the Old Man was kicking like a Texas mule.

  As the Old Man made ready to go east, his men gived him a few things to take with him, letters for home, gifts for friends, and blankets to keep warm. As he gathered them things, he announced, “Kagi, you is my lieutenant, and you will be in charge of training the men in military exercises and the like that they’ll need in our fight against slavery.”

  Kagi nodded his agreement. Then the Captain cast an eye at yours truly. “Onion, you will come with me.”

  Owen looked surprised. “Why her?” he asked.

  “Onion is a good-luck charm. She is reminiscent of your dear brother Frederick, who lies sleeping in this territory and whose goodness attracted both beast and human. We need every tool now for our purpose, thus it is time to bring the Negro to the fore for his own liberation. I will need her to help hive the Negro. Both the Negro and our white supporters will see the innocence of her countenance and say, ‘Yea, child, ye of the Blessed Father, we will inherit the kingdom. He has prepared for us, and we will join up to fight for the cause of our children!’ They will come by the thousands!” And he clapped his hands and nodded his head. There weren’t no stopping him in the way of enthusiasm on the matter of freedom.

  I weren’t against it, naturally. I wanted to get out the plains fast as possible. It was my intention to jump off soon as he looked the other way. But Bob was there. He’d clung on through the cold trek over the prairie, having been grabbed up by Owen in Pikesville and pulled along, like always. And just like always in the past, Bob laid low for his chance to cut, and when he seen the Old Man’s intent to head east to free country, he spoke out.

  “I can help you find Negro soldiers,” he announced, “for the Negro is more inclined to listen to the saying of a colored man than a girl.”

  Before I could argue the point, the Old Man snorted. “God is no respecter of men over women, good Bob. If a man can’t meet the needs of his own women or children, why, he’s just half a man. You stay here with the rest, for the thousands of Negroes that will flock to our stead will need you to calm them and keep them from pounding the bushes until our war starts, for they will be anxious to go at it. Me and Onion will lay the groundwork, and then you, sir, will be our ambassador to welcome them into our army of men.”

  Bob sulked and stayed back and kept his peace, which, as it turned out, weren’t long, for two weeks after we got back east, a letter come to the Captain that Bob had run off.

  —

  We took a train that hauled us from Chicago to Boston, which is what the Old Man said his plan was. Rolling behind that steam engine was a slam-banging, bumpy, clickety-clackety situation, but it was righteous warmer and more comfortable than the prairie. He traveled variously as “Nelson Hawkins,” “Shubel Morgan,” or “Mr. Smith,” depending on what he could remember, for he often generally forgot his fake names and often asked me to remind him which one he was using. He made various attempts to comb out his beard without success, but with me traveling incog-Negro, posing as a consort, he weren’t tricking nobody. I looked raggedy as an old knot rope from weeks on the prairie, and the Captain was famous as bad whiskey. The Pro Slavery passengers cleared out the car when they saw him, and anytime he professed a need for food or drink on the train, why, the other Yankee passengers ponied up whatever food they had for his pleasure. He took these gifts without a blink. “These is not for ourselves, Onion, but rather in the name of our Great Haymaker and for the cause of liberty of our enslaved brothers and sisters.” He ate only what he could eat and not a drop more. That was the ironical thing about the Old Man. He stole more wagons, horses, mules, shovels, knives, guns, and plows than any man I ever knowed, but he never took anything for hisself other than what he used personally. Whatever he stole was for the cause of fighting slavery. If he stole something and didn’t use it, why, he’d run it back to the poor drummer he stole it from to return it, less’n course the feller was disagreeable, in which case he’d liable to find himself dead or roped to a pole, with the Old Man lecturing him on the evils of slavery. The Captain enjoyed lecturing captured Pro Slavers on the evils of slavery, so much so that a couple of ’em said, “Captain, I’d ruther you plugged me now and get it over with than lecture my ears one more second, for your words is drowning me. You is killing me here.” Several prisoners quit the game altogether and dropped off to sleep as he lectured, for many of ’em was drunk, only to wake up sober to find the Old Man praying over them, which was even worse torture, being that they was now sober and the Old Man carried on his prayers longer when he had an audience.

  It was on the train that I learned that John Brown was a poor man. He had a large family, even by prairie standards he birthed twenty-two children altogether with two wives. He outlived the first wife and still had the second one living in Elba, New York, along with twelve children, them that weren’t killed off through sickness and disease. Most of his young’uns at home was knee-high children or girls, and he constantly scooped up small items and remembrances for them on the train to Boston, such as colorful paper and spools of thread he found tossed about on the passenger car floor, saying, “I’ll give this one to Abby,” and “This would delight my little Ellen.” It was there that I come to understand how guilty he felt for my Pa getting kilt when he first kidnapped me two years prior. He’d given me a store-bought dress he’d got for his own daughter Ellen. The Old Man never bought his goods in any store. That store-bought dress had long wore out by then. I was sporting a fine embroidered number I’d gotten from Pie when he found me in Pikesville. But that gived way on the plains to trousers, undergarments, shirt, and hat, all stolen, course, which I was allowed to wear on account of the fierce weather. The Old Man seen I took to that clothing and it delighted him, for he figured me as being a tomboy of sorts, which generally amused him. Rough and gruff as he was, he was kindhearted to every child he come across. Many a time I seen him set up all night with a colicky colored child who was part of whatever exhausted band of runaway Negroes he was slinging along to freedom. He’d feed her as her tired parents slept, pouring hot milk or soup down her throat, and sing her to sleep. He pined for his own little children and wife, but seen that his fight against slavery was more important than them.

  He spent most of the journey reading the Bible, studying maps, and writing letters. You never seen a man write more letters than Old John Brown. He wrote letters to newspapers, politicians, enemies, his wife, his children, his old Pa, his brother, and several cousins. He received letters from his wife and creditors, mostly—considerable amounts from creditors, for he outworked a cooter in the borrowing department in the old days and owed money on every business he’d owned which gone belly-up and there was considerable numbers of them. He also got letters from Negroes on the run and even Indians asking for help, for he was partial to the red man as well. In most every town where the train stopped, he had some friend or other living there who could post letters for him, and, like as not, when the train stopped to pick up passengers, a child would leap aboard or hand him through the window a bunch of letters addressed to him, for which the Old Man passed him a shilling, then throwed a bunch of letters at him to mail. A few letters arrived with a bit of money in them, from his supporters back east. Which was one reason why letters was so important to him. When he weren’t writing letters, he constantly scribbled on maps, several small ones and one big one. He carried that thing rolled up like a large scroll, and unscrolled it and scratched at it constantly in pencil, scrawling numbers and lines,
muttering about troops and flanking maneuvers and so forth. He’d sometimes set it down and walk the railroad car, pacing back and forth, figuring. The other passengers was mostly finely dressed businessmen from Missouri, Pro Slavers, and to them, the Captain walking the aisle bearing two seven-shooters barely hidden inside his ragged frock coat and the broadsword sticking out his gunnysack, along with a colored child dressed in farm trousers and hat, was quite a sight. Other than a few Yanks who offered him a nibble or two for himself and his “consort,” nobody much bothered him.

  The journey to Boston was supposed to take four days, but on the third day, as we swung through Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the train stopped to take on water, and he announced, “We are getting off here, Onion.”

  “I thought we was going to Boston, Captain.”

  “Not directly,” he said. “I suspect there might be a spy among my men in Iowa. I don’t want the federal hounds to catch us.”

  We hopped another train in Pittsburgh for Philadelphia, and got off there for a day to wait for the next train to Boston which weren’t due to leave till morning, whereupon the Old Man decided to walk about the city for he was an outdoor man and couldn’t bear the thought of setting by a warm woodstove in the station and resting his feet. That city was right enjoyable. The sights and colors of it whirled up before my eyes like a peacock’s feathers. Even the smallest street in Philadelphia made the biggest road in Kansas Territory seem like a rutted back alley, full of nags and chickens. Folks in fine clothing strutted about; and there were homes of red brick with perfect, straight chimneys. Telegraph wires, wooden sidewalks, and inside privies lined every street. The trading stores were loaded with fresh poultry, cooked fish, brass candles, ladles, cradles, warming pans, hot-water bottles, commodes, brass ware, even bugles. As I took it all in, I decided the Old Man was a fool to leave the east to fight on the prairie on behalf of the colored. Even the colored in Philadelphia didn’t seem to care about their slave brothers. I seen a few of them strolling about, sporting pocket watches, walking canes, breast pins, and finger rings just like white folks, they were right dandy. In fact, they was dressed better than the Old Man.

  The next morning, at the train station, the Old Man, he got into a wrangle with the ticket agent, for he was nearly out of money and had changed his mind about going to Boston straight off. Instead he wanted to stop off at Rochester, New York, first. That stretched him to the limit, and he spent his last money getting the tickets changed. “You perhaps question why I am spending my last before we get to Boston,” he said. “Fret not, Onion. We will find more funds where we’re going. It is worth the cost of ten tickets to Boston, for we are going to meet with the king of the Negro people. He is a great man and a dear friend. Have no doubt, Onion, that in the coming years his exploits will be heralded across this country for generations, and you will be able to tell your children that you have met him. He has promised to fight with us to the end, and that is important, for we will need his help in our cause, to hive the bees. We will need thousands of Negroes, and with him, we will get them. So be kind to him. And polite. He has promised to fight with us. We must convince him to keep his promise to help us hive the bees.”

  We arrived at Rochester station in the early morning, and as the train pulled in, there upon the platform stood a Negro unlike any I’d ever seen. He was a stout, handsome mulatto with long dark hair parted in the middle. His shirt was starched and clean. His suit was pressed and flat. His boots spotless. His face was shaved and smooth. He waited still as a statue, proud, erect. He stood like a king.

  The Old Man descended the train, and the two shook hands and embraced warmly. “Onion,” he said, “meet Mr. Frederick Douglass, the man who will help lead our cause. Frederick, meet Henrietta Shackleford, my consort, who goes by the name of the Onion.”

  “Morning, Fred,” I said.

  Mr. Douglass looked at me coldly. Seemed like the bottom of his nose opened up two inches as he peered down.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Then where is your manners, young lady? What kind of a name is Onion for a young lady? And why are you dressed in that fashion? And why do you address me as Fred? Don’t you know you are not addressing a pork chop, but rather a fairly considerable and incorrigible piece of the American Negro diaspora?”

  “Sir?”

  “I am Mr. Douglass.”

  “Why, howdy, sir. I am here to help hive the bees.”

  “And hive them she will,” the Old Man said cheerily. I never seen him knuck to somebody the way he knucked to Mr. Douglass.

  Mr. Douglass looked me over close. “I suspect there is a pretty little piece of pork chop under all them rags, Mr. Brown,” he said. “And we will forthrightly teach her some manners to go with them fair looks. Welcome to Rochester, young lady.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Fred,” I said.

  “Mr. Douglass.”

  “Mr. Douglass.”

  “She a spritely little package, Douglass,” the Old Man said proudly, “and has showed pluck and courage through many a battle. I reckon it is the highlight of her life to meet the man who is going to lift her people from the chains of the underling world. Onion,” he said, clapping Mr. Douglass on the back, “I has been disappointed many times in my life. But this is one man on whom the Old Captain can always depend.”

  Mr. Douglass smiled. He had perfect teeth. The two of them stood there proudly, beaming there, standing on the train platform, white and colored together. It made for a pretty picture, and if I’d had one of them picture-taking contraptions that had just come out in them days, I’d have recorded the whole thing. But the fact is, like most things the Old Man done, his business didn’t work out the way it was drawed up. He couldn’t have been more wrong about Mr. Douglass. Had I knowed what was coming, I expect I’d have taken that little derringer I kept from my Pikesville days out my pants pocket and popped Mr. Douglass off in the foot, or at least cleaned him up with the handle of it, for he would short the Old Man something terrible going forward, at a time when the Captain needed him the most. And it would cost the Old Man a lot more than a train ticket to Rochester.

  18

  Meeting a Great Man

  The Old Man laid up at Mr. Frederick Douglass’s house for three weeks. He spent most of that time in his room, writing and studying. That weren’t unusual for him, to set over paper and write, or walk about with a pocket full of compasses, scribbling notes and consulting maps and so forth. It never amounted to nothing, but three weeks was a long time for me to sit inside anybody’s house, and for the Old Man, I expect it was worse. The Captain was an outdoor man. He couldn’t sit at a hearth long, or sleep on a feather bed, or even eat food that was cooked for civilized people. He liked wild things: coons, possum, squirrel, wild turkeys, beavers. But food prepared inside a proper kitchen—biscuits, pie, jam, butter—he couldn’t stand the taste of them things. So it was suspicious that he set there that long, for that’s all they ate in that house. But he hunkered down in a bedroom by hisself, coming out only to use the privy. From time to time Mr. Douglass went in there, and I overheard them two jawing with raised voices. I overheard Mr. Douglass at one point say, “Unto the death!” but I made nothing of it.

  Three weeks gived me plenty of time to get acquainted with the Douglass household, which was run by Mr. Douglass’s two wives—a white one and a colored one. That was the first time I ever saw such a thing, two women married to one man, and both of ’em being of a different race. Them two women hardly spoke to one another. When they did, you’d a thunk a chunk of ice dropped into the room, for Miss Ottilie was a German white woman, and Miss Anna was a colored woman from the South. They was polite enough to each other, more or less, though I expect if they weren’t civilized, they’d a punched each other wobbly. They hated each other’s guts, is the real picture, and took their rage out on me, for I was uncouth in their eyes and needing barbering and
learning of proper manners, ways to sit and curtsy and all them things. I gived them a lot of work in that department, for what few manners and ways Pie taught me out on the prairie was cow dung to these women, who didn’t use an outdoor privy, and never chewed tobacco or used words like “haw” and “git.” After Mr. Douglass introduced me to them and retired to his own scribbling—he scribbled, too, like the Old Man, them two scribbled in separate rooms—them two women stood me before ’em in the parlor and studied me. “Take them pantaloons off,” Miss Anna barked. “Throw them boots out,” Miss Ottilie throwed in. I allowed I’d do what they asked but would do it in private. They fought over it, which gived me time to slip off and change alone. But that drove Miss Anna mad, and she made a comeback two days later by dragging me into her kitchen to draw me a bath. I scooted out to the drawing room and runned to the white wife, Miss Ottilie, who insisted she draw me a bath, and let them two wrangle over that. In that manner I kept them off me and let them catfight the whole business out.

  Them two women would’a grinded each other up if I’d remained there long. But luckily they didn’t have time to fool with me much, being that every inch of movement in that house, every speck of cleaning, cooking, dusting, working, writing, pouring of lye, and sewing of undergarments revolved around Mr. Douglass, who walked about the house like a king in pantaloons and suspenders, practicing his orations, his mane of dark hair almost wide as the hallways, his voice booming down the halls. I once heard the mighty marching band at Tuskegee in Tennessee beating at a parade, and that band of two hundred strong, with drums beating and trumpets wailing was an enjoyment. But it weren’t nothing compared to the blasting of Mr. Douglass practicing his orations about the fate of the Negro race in his house.