The Good Lord Bird

by James McBride

  That was the only time I ever heard the Old Man refer to his growing-up years. He watched the train till it was a tiny dot in the mountains. When it was gone, he took a long look around. He looked downright troubled.

  “This ain’t no way for a general to be living. But now I know why the Lord gived me a hankering to see my old home. See these mountains?” He pointed around.

  I couldn’t see nothing but mountains, and I said, “What about ’em, Captain.”

  He pointed to the wide passages and craggy cliffs all around us. “A man can hide in these passes for years. There’s plenty game. Plenty timber for shelter. An army of thousands couldn’t dig out a small army that’s well hidden. God pressed His thumb against the earth and made these passages for the poor, Onion. I ain’t the first to know it. Spartacus, Toussaint-Louverture, Garibaldi, they all knowed it. It worked for them. They hid thousands of soldiers that way. These tiny passages will entrench hundreds of Negroes against an enemy of thousands. Trench warfare. You see?”

  I didn’t see. I was fretting that we was standing out in the cold in the middle of no place, and come night, it’d be even colder. I weren’t liking that idea. But, being that he never asked my opinion, I told him truthfully, “I don’t rightly know ’bout them things, Captain, having never been in no mountains myself.”

  He looked at me. The Old Man never smiled, but the gray eyes got soft a minute. “Well, you’ll be in ’em soon enough.”

  We weren’t far from Pittsburgh, turns out. We followed the tracks all day back down the mountain to the nearest town, waited, and caught a train to Boston. On the train, the Old Man announced his plan. “I got to raise money by speechifying. It ain’t nothing to it. It’s just a show. After I raise enough chips, we’ll head out west again with a full purse to gather the men and raise the hive in our fight against the infernal institution. Don’t tell nobody nothing ’bout our purpose in the meantime.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “And I might ask you to tell some of our donors about your life of deprivation and starvation as a slave. Being hungry and all. Whipped scandalous, and them type of things. You can tell them that.”

  I didn’t want to confess to him I weren’t never hungry as a slave, nor was never whipped scandalous. Fact is, only time I was hungry and eating out of garbage barrels and sleeping out in the cold was when I was free with him. But it weren’t proper to say it, so I nodded.

  “And while I gives the show,” he said, “you must watch the back of the hall for any federal agents. That’s important. They is warm on us now.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “Hmm. I reckon they got oily hair and is done up in proper clothing. You’ll see ’em. Don’t worry. I done arranged everything. Yours won’t be the only eyes watching. We’ll have plenty help.”

  True to his word, we was met up at the Boston train station by two of the finest, richest-looking white fellers I ever seen. They treated him like a king, fed us well, and drug him along to a couple of churches for some speechifying. He pretended he weren’t for it at first, but they insisted it was already arranged—and he went along as though it come as a surprise. At the churches he gived boring speeches to crowds of white folks who wanted to hear all about his adventures fighting out west. I never been one for speeching and carrying on, unless course there’s joy juice or paying money involved, but I must say that while the Old Man was hated out on the plains, he was a star back east. They couldn’t get enough of his stories about the rebels. You would’a thunk that every Pro Slaver, including Dutch, Miss Abby, Chase, and all them other low drummers, scammers, four-flushers, and pickpockets, who mostly lived off pennies and generally didn’t treat the Negro any worse than they treated each other, was a bunch of cranks, heathens, and drunks who runned around murdering one another while the Free Staters spent all day setting in church at choir practice and making paper cutout dolls on Wednesday nights. Three minutes into his talk, the Old Man had them high-siddity white folks hollering bloody murder against the rebels, nigh shouting against slavery. He weren’t much of a speaker, to be honest, but for once he got the wind in his sails about our Dear Maker Who Restoreth Our Fortunes, he got ’em going, and the word spread fast, so by the time we hit the next church, all he had to say was, “I’m John Brown from Kansas, and I’s fighting slavery,” and they roared. They called for them rebels’ heads, announced they’d trounce ’em, bounce ’em, kill ’em, deaden ’em where they stood. Some of the women broke into tears once the Old Man spoke. It made me a bit sad, truth be to tell it, to watch them hundreds of white folks crying for the Negro, for there weren’t hardly ever any Negroes present at most of them gatherings, and them that was there was doodied up and quiet as a mouse. It seemed to me the whole business of the Negro’s life out there weren’t no different than it was out west, to my mind. It was like a big, long lynching. Everybody got to make a speech about the Negro but the Negro.

  —

  If the Old Man was hiding from a federal agent, he had a strange way of showing it. From Boston to Connecticut, New York City, Poughkeepsie, and Philadelphia, we done one show after another. It was always the same deal. He’d say, “I’m John Brown from Kansas, and I’s fighting slavery,” and they’d howl. We collected quite a bit of money in this fashion, with me movin’ ’bout the hall passing the hat. Sometimes I collected as much as twenty-five dollars, sometimes more, sometimes less. But the Old Man made it clear to all them followers that he was planning to head back west to fight slavery, clean, in his own fashion. Some questioned him about how he planned to do it, how he planned to fight slavery and all, who he was gonna do it with, and so forth. They put the question to him ten times, twenty times, in every town. “How you gonna fight the Pro Slavers, Captain Brown? How you gonna conduct the war?” He didn’t tell a straight-out fib. Rather he bounced around the question. I knowed he weren’t going to tell them. He never told his men or even his own sons his plans. If he weren’t tellin’ his own people, he weren’t tellin’ no group of strangers who throwed him a quarter apiece. Truth is, he didn’t trust nobody with his plans, especially his own race. “These house-born city-grubbers is good for talk only, Onion,” he muttered. “Talk, talk, talk. That’s all they do. The Negro has heard talk for two hundred years.”

  I could’a heard it another two hundred years the way I was living, for I was mostly satisfied in them times. I had the Old Man to myself, and we lived high. I ate well. Slept well. In feather beds. Traveled on trains in white folks’ compartments. Them Yanks treated me fine. They didn’t no more notice me of being a boy under that dress and bonnet than they would notice a speck of dust in a room full of cash. I was simply a Negro to them. “Where did you find her?” was the question most asked of the Old Man. He’d shrug and say, “She is one of the many multitudes of enshackled persons whom I has freed in God’s name.” Them women fussed over me something fierce. They oohed and ahhed and gived me dresses, cakes, bonnets, powder, ear loops, pompons, feathers, and gauze. I was always wise enough to keep silent around white folks in them days, but there weren’t no call for me to talk nohow. There ain’t nothing gets a Yankee madder than a smart colored person, of which I reckon they figured there was only one in the world, Mr. Douglass. So I played dumb and tragic, and in this manner I managed to finagle a full set of boy’s pantaloons, shirt, jacket, and shoes, plus twenty-five cents from a woman in Connecticut who sobbed when I told her I was aiming on freeing my enslaved brother, of which I had nar one. I hid those clothes in my gunnysack for my own purpose, for I always had my eye on movement, always kept myself ready to roll. In the back of my mind was the notion that the Old Man would one day be deadened by somebody, for he was a fool about dying. He’d say, “I’m on God’s clock, Onion. I’m prepared to die fighting against the infernal institution,” which was fine for him but not for me. I always made ready for the day I’d be on my own.

  We slung along like that for a few weeks till spring
approached, and the Old Man begun pining for the prairie. Them city parlor halls and speakings was wearing him down. “I’d like to go back west to smell the spring air and fight the infernal institution, Onion,” he said, “but we still has not made enough yet to raise our army. And there is still one special interest I must tend to here.” So instead of leaving from Philadelphia the way he planned, he decided to make a second pass at Boston before heading west for good.

  They had him set up at a big hall there. His handlers had primed the thing. There was a fine, mighty crowd standing outside, waiting to be let in, which meant much money to be collected. But they delayed it. Me and the Old Man was standing behind the big organ pipes in the pulpit, waiting for the crowd to come in, when the Old Man asked one of his handlers who was standing about, “What’s the delay for?”

  The man was in a tizzy. He seemed scared. “A federal agent from Kansas has come to this area to arrest you,” he said.

  “When?”

  “No one knows when or where, but someone spotted him at the train station this morning. You want to cancel today’s event?”

  Oh, that primed the Old Man. That drug him out. He loved a fight. He touched his seven-shooters. “He better not show his face in here,” he said. And the others standing around allowed that they agreed, and promised that if the agent showed himself, why, he’d be jumped and shackled. But I had no trust in them Yanks. They weren’t uncivilized like the raw Yanks out west, who would knock you cold and drug you along from a stirrup by one boot and beat you something scandalous like a good Pro Slaver would. These Yanks was civilized.

  “There will be no arrest in here today,” the Old Man said. “Open the doors.”

  They ran and done as he said, and the crowd filed in. But before he walked out to the pulpit to speak, the Captain pulled me aside and gived me warning. “Stand along the far wall and watch the room,” he said. “Keep your eyes open for that federal agent.”

  “What do a federal agent look like?”

  “You can smell him. A federal man smells like bear, for he uses bear grease to oil his hair and lives indoors. He don’t cut stove wood or plow a mule. He’ll be clean looking. Yellow and pale.”

  I looked into the hall. Seemed like about five hundred folks out there fit that description, not including the women. The Old Man and his boys had taken down a bear or two in our travels, but other than eating the meat and using the fur to warm my gizzards, weren’t nothing I could remember about the bear smell. But I said, “What do I do if I see him?”

  “Don’t say nothing or interrupt my talking. Just wave the Good Lord feather in your bonnet.” That was our sign, see. That feather he gived me from the Good Lord Bird, which I gived to Frederick, and got back from Frederick after he died. I kept that thing stuffed in my bonnet flush to my face.

  I allowed that I would do as he said, and he went up to the pulpit while I moved into the room.

  He walked up to the podium wearing both his seven-shooters and his broadsword with a look on his face that showed he was ready to crust over on some evil. When the Old Man got to boiling and was ready to throw hot grits around and raise hell, he wouldn’t get excited. He’d go the other way. He’d calm up, get holy, and his voice, normally flat like the plains, would get high and tight, curvy and jagged sharp, like the Pennsylvania mountains he favored. First thing he said was, “I has word a federal agent is on my tail. If he is present, let him show himself. I will meet him with an iron fist right here.”

  Blessed God if you couldn’t hear a pin drop in there let me drop a corpse by the telling of it. Good God, he put a scare into them Yanks then. They growed quiet when he said that, for he feared ’em up something good. They seen his true nature. Then, after a few moments, they got their courage up, and growed mad, and booed and hissed. They flew hot as the devil, and shouted out they was ready to leap on anyone who would so much as look at the Old Man sideways. That brought me some relief, but not much, for they was cowards and talkers, whereas the Old Man, when he beat his drum wrong about somebody, he’d drug ’em over the quit line without too much tearing his hair out ’bout the whole bit. But he couldn’t kill nobody in there, not with all them people there, and that gived me some comfort.

  The room quieted after he shussed ’em and assured ’em no agent would dare show himself anyhow. Then he went on into his normal speech, pissing all over the Pro Slavers as usual, hollering ’bout all the killings they done, without mentioning his own, of course.

  I knowed that speech like the back of my hand, having heard it many times by then, so I got bored and fell asleep. Near the end of things, I woke up and runned my eyeballs along the walls, just to be safe, and darned if I didn’t spot a feller who seemed suspicious.

  He stood along the back wall among several other fellers who hooted and hollered against the Pro Slavers. He didn’t join them in that. Didn’t gnash his teeth or grind his hands or nod his head, or cry and pull his hair and holler against the Pro Slavers like those around him did. He weren’t enraptured with the Old Man. He stood stone-cold silent, cool as spring water, watching. He was a clean-cut feller. Short, stout, pale from living inside, wearing a bowler cap, white shirt, and bow tie, with a handlebar mustache. When the Old Man paused in his speech for a moment, the crowd shifted, for it growed hot in the room, and the feller removed his hat, showing a mane of thick, oily hair. By the time he pushed back a lick of that oily hair and throwed the hat back on his head, the thought had gathered in my mind. That was an oily-haired man if I ever saw one, and I ought to go over there and at least smell him for bear.

  The Old Man had kicked his speech into full-out blast by that time, for near the end of his speech he always worked his talk up full, and was in high spirits anyway for he knowed he was heading west after this last big throw-down. He gived his usual proclamations against the dreaded master and the poor slave not prospering and so forth. The crowd was loving it, the women crying and pulling out their hair and gnashing their teeth—it was a good show—but I was alarmed now, watching that spy.

  I weren’t taking no chances. I slung my feather out my bonnet and waved it toward the podium, but the Old Man was in high spirits and had peaked by then. He had launched into the final part of his talk, where he busted loose to God in prayer, which he always done at the end, and course he always done his praying with his eyes closed.

  I already done told you how long the Old Man’s prayers went. He could tear into a prayer for two hours and spout the Bible easy as you and I can spout the alphabet, and he could do that alone, by hisself, with nobody standing around. So imagine when he had a few hundred folks setting there listening on his thoughts and pleas to our Great King of Kings who made rubber and trees and honey and jam with biscuits and all them good things. He could go on for hours, and we actually lost money on account of that, for sometimes them Yanks got worn out with his rumblings to our Maker and cleared the hall before the basket got passed. He growed wise to that tactic by that time and begun to keep his speculatings short, which for him meant still at least a half hour, his eyes shut at the pulpit, howling at our Maker to hold him in high stead while he done His duty of murdering the slavers and sending them to Glory or Lucifer, though he had a devil of a time keeping it to that length.

  I reckon the agent had spied the show before, ’cause he knowed the Old Man was winding down, too. He saw the Old Man close his eyes to start his Bibling and quickly slipped off the back wall and worked through the crowd gathered along the side aisle of the hall, making his way to the front. I quick waved my feather at the Old Man again, but his eyes was shut tight as he gived the Lord ninety cents on the dollar. There weren’t nothing to do but move with the agent.

  I came off the back wall and worked my way around the room behind him fast as I could. He was closer to the stage than I was, and movin’ quick.

  The Old Man must’a smelled a rat, for in the middle of his proclamations ’bout immortal souls and th
e afflicted, his eyes suddenly popped open and he blurted out a quick “Amen.” The crowd hopped out their seats and surged to the front of the hall, making a beeline to commingle with their hero and shake his hand and get his autograph and give him coin donations and so forth.

  They swarmed the agent as well, and slowed his progress. But he was still ahead of me, and I was but a colored girl, and the crowd pushed me aside in the scramble to shake the Old Man’s hand. I was being thumped ’bout by Yankees trying to swarm the Old Man. I waved the Good Lord feather again but I was drowned out by taller adults all around. I caught a glimpse of a little girl up front who beat the crowd to the Old Man, holding out a paper for him to sign. He leaned down to sign it, and as he done so, the agent busted through the crowd and made it to the front of the room and was nearly on him. I jumped into the pews and leaped over the seats toward the front.

  I was ten feet off when the agent was within arm’s length of the Captain, who had bent down with his back to the agent to put his mark on the paper for the little girl. I crowed out, “Captain! I smell bear!”

  The crowd paused a moment, and I do believe the Captain heard me, for his head snapped up and the old, stern, wrinkled face clicked to alertness. He stood and spun around in a snap, his hands on his seven-shooters and I ducked low, for that gun makes a powerful boom when it wakes up. He caught the feller cold. Had the drop on him, for the agent hadn’t quite reached him yet, nor gone for his metal. He was a dead man.

  “Aha!” the Old Man said.

  Then, to my surprise, his hands came off his seven-shooters and his tight face uncrinkled. He stuck his hand out. “I see you has got my letters.”

  The stout feller with a mustache and bow tie stopped short and bowed low in his bowler cap. “Indeed!” he said. He spoke with an English accent. “Hugh Forbes at your service, General. It is an honor to meet the great warrior of slavery of whom I have heard so much. May I shake your hand?”