The Good Lord Bird

by James McBride

  “Yes, General.” That’s the first and only time I ever heard the Old Man capitulate to anyone, colored or white, or ever call anyone a general.

  “And the map I gived you of the various routes through Virginia and Maryland, you must memorize and destroy. You got to do that.”

  “Course, General.”

  “Okay. God bless you, then. Send me the word when you is ready, and I will send as many to you as I can. And I will come myself.” She gived him the address of the tavern in Canada where she was staying, and made ready to leave.

  “Remember, you must be organized, Captain. Do not get too hung up on emotional matters. Some is gonna die in this war. God don’t need your prayers. He needs your action. Make your date solid. Hold tight to it. The wheres and whats of your plan, don’t nobody need to know, but hold tight to the date, for folks is coming a long way. My people will be coming from a long way. And I will be coming from a long way.”

  “I will make it clear, General,” he said. “And I will hold tight to the date.”

  “Good,” she said. “May God bless you and keep you for what you has done and is ’bout to do.”

  She flung on her shawl and prepared to leave. As she did, she spotted me toward the door, sweeping the floor, hiding behind that broom more or less, for that woman had my number. She motioned to me. “Come over here, child,” she said.

  “I’m busy here, ma’am,” I croaked.

  “Git over here.”

  I went over, still sweeping.

  She looked at me a long time, watching me sweep the floor, wearing that damn fool dress. I didn’t say a word. Just kept on sweeping.

  Finally she placed her small foot on the broom and stopped it. I had to look up at her then. Them eyes was staring down at me. I can’t say they was kind eyes. Rather they was tight as balled fists. Full. Firm. Stirred. The wind seemed to live in that woman’s face. Looking at her was like staring at a hurricane.

  “You done good to speak out,” she said. “To make some of these fellers stand up as men. But the wind of change got to blow in your heart, too,” she said softly. “A body can be whatever they want to be in this world. It ain’t no business of mine. Slavery done made a fool out of a lot of folks. Twisted ’em all different kinds of ways. I seen it happen many a time in my day. I expect it’ll happen in all our tomorrows, too, for when you slave a person, you slave the one in front and the one behind.”

  She looked off out the window. It was snowing out there. She looked right lonely at that moment. “I had a husband once,” she said. “But he was fearful. He wanted a wife and not a soldier. He became something like a woman hisself. He was fearful. Couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand being a man. But I led him to freedom land anyway.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We all got to die,” she said. “But dying as your true self is always better. God’ll take you however you come to Him. But it’s easier on a soul to come to Him clean. You’re forever free that way. From top to bottom.”

  With that, she turned and walked past the other side of the room toward the door, where the Old Man was busy picking up his papers, maps, and his seven-shooter. He seen she was leaving, and dropped his papers to hurry to open the door to let her out. She stood at the open door a minute, watching the snow, her eyes glancing up and down at the empty, snowy road. She studied the street carefully a long moment, looking for slave stealers, I reckon. That woman was always on the lookout. She watched the street as she spoke to him.

  “Remember, Captain, whatever your plan, be on time. Don’t deviate the time. Compromise life before you compromise time. Time is the one thing you can’t compromise.”

  “Right, General.”

  She bid him a hasty good-bye and left, walking down the road in them boots and that colorful shawl draped on her shoulders, snow falling on the empty road around her, as me and the Old Man watched her.

  Then she quickly turned back, as if she forgot something, walked to the steps where we stood, still wearing her beaten colorful shawl, and held it out for me. “Take that and hold it,” she said, “for it may be useful.” Then she said to the Old Man again, “Remember, Captain. Be on time. Don’t compromise the time.”

  “Right, General.”

  But he did compromise the time. He blowed that one, too. And for that reason, the one person he could count on, the greatest slave emancipator in American history, the best fighter he could’a got, the one person who knowed more ’bout escaping the white man’s troubling waters than any man alive, never showed up. The last he seen of her was the back of her head as she walked down the road in Chatham, Canada. At the time, I weren’t sad to see her go, neither.

  21

  The Plan

  By the time the Old Man got back to Iowa, he was so excited, it was a pity. He left the U.S.A. for Canada with twelve men, expecting to pick up hundreds. He come back to the U.S.A. with thirteen, on account of O. P. Anderson, who joined us on the spot, as well as a few white stragglers who come along for a while and dropped off like usual when they seen that freeing the slaves was liable to get your head squared by an ax or butchered some other way. The rest of the coloreds we’d met up in Canada went back to their homes in various parts of America but had promised to come when called. Whether they was gonna be true to their word or not, the Old Man didn’t seem worried, for by the time he got back to Iowa, he was downright joyful. He’d got the General behind him, that was Mrs. Tubman.

  He almost weren’t sensible in his excitement. He was joyful. It ain’t a clean proposition when you decides to mount thirteen fellers and declare a war on something rather than somebody. It occurred to me then he might be slippin’ and I ought to maybe take my leave when we got back home before he got too deep into whatever foolishness he planned next, for he didn’t seem right. But in them days I didn’t linger on any subject so long as I was shoving eggs, fried okra, and boiled partridge down my throat. Besides, the Old Man had more bad luck than any man I ever knowed, and that can’t help but to make a person likable and interesting to be around. He spent long hours in his tent, praying, studying maps, compasses, and scribbling numbers. He always wrote letters like a madman, but now he wrote triple the letters he wrote before, so much that his army’s main job in them first weeks in Tabor involved nothing more than sending and getting his mail. He sent his men to Pee Dee, Springdale, and Johnston City, to pick up letters from safe houses and taverns and friends and send off letters to Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. It took him hours to go through his mail, and while he done that, his men trained with wood swords and pistols. Some of that mail was letters with money from his abolitionist supporters back east. He had a group of six white fellers in New England who gived him big lumps of money. Even his friend Mr. Douglass sent him a shilling or three. But the truth of it is, most of them letters, the ones that weren’t from creditors, contained not money but questions. Them white folks back east was asking for—no begging for—his plans.

  “Look at this, Onion,” he railed, holding up a letter. “All they do is ask questions. Talk, talk, talk, that’s all they do. Armchair soldiers. Setting around while someone destroys their house and home with the infernal institution. And they call me insane! Whyn’t they just send the money? I’m the one they trusted to take on the fight, why tie my hands behind my back by asking me how. There ain’t no ‘how,’ Onion. One must do, like Cromwell. There are spies everywhere. I’d be a fool to tell ’em my top-secret plans!” He was confounded with it. He was furious when some of his supporters declared they weren’t going to send him a dime more if he didn’t tell them their plans.

  The ironical thing is, I reckon he would have told them his plans. He wanted to tell ’em his plans. Problem is, I don’t think the Old Man knowed what his plan was hisself.

  He knowed what he wanted to do. But as to the exactness of it—and I knowed many has studied it and declared this and that and the other on the su
bject—Old John Brown didn’t know exactly what he was gonna do from sunup to sundown on the slavery question. He knowed what he weren’t gonna do. He weren’t going to go down quiet. He weren’t going to have a sit-down committee meeting with the Pro Slavers and nag and commingle and jingle with ’em over punch and lemonade and go bobbing for apples with ’em. He was going down raising hell. But what kind of hell, he was waiting on the Lord to tell him what that is, is my reckonings, and the Lord weren’t tellin’, at least that first part of the year in Tabor. So we set ’bout Tabor in a rented cabin, the men training with swords and fussin’ over spiritual matters and fetching his mail and grousing amongst themselves, waiting for him to bark out what was next. I got the ague and was on my back for a month of that time, and not long after I got well, the ague hit the Old Man. It floored him. Knocked him on his back. He didn’t move for a week. Then two. Then a month. March. April. At times I thought he was gone. He’d lay there, mumbling and murmuring, saying, “Napoleon used the mountains of the Iberians! I ain’t done yet!” and “Josephus, catch me if you can!” only to fall out again. Sometimes he’d sit straight up, feverish, staring at the ceiling, and holler, “Frederick. Charles! Amelia. Get that bird!” then drop off again, like he was dead. The two of his sons, Jason and John Jr., who declared they was out of the slave war and had already quit, he’d call out their names sometimes, hollering, “John! Get Jason in here!” when neither was within five hundred miles. Several of his army left, promising to return, and did not. But others replaced them. The main ones though—Kagi, Stevens, Cook, Hinton, O. P. Anderson—they stayed, training themselves with wood swords. “We promised to fight with the Old Man till death,” Kagi said, “even if it’s his.”

  Four months in that cabin gived me plenty of time to hear the Old Man’s thoughts, for he was in a fever and prone to blab ’bout himself. Come to find out he’d failed at just ’bout everything. He had several businesses that failed: cattle rustling, tannery, land speculating. All gone belly up. Bills and lawsuits from his old business partners followed him everywhere. To the end of his life, the Old Man wrote letters to creditors and throwed a dollar here or there to whomever he owed money to, which was a considerable amount of people. Between his first wife, Dianthe, who he outlived, and his second wife, Mary, who he did not, he had twenty-two children. Three of them, all little ones, died in a bunch in Ritchfield, Ohio, where he worked in a tannery; one of ’em, Amelia, was scalded to death in an accident. Losing them children hurt his heart sorely, but Frederick’s dying, he always seed that as murder, and it was always the biggest hurt on his heart.

  We caught Frederick’s murderer, Rev. Martin, by the way. Cold got the drop on him back outside Osawatomie, Kansas, six months earlier, in fall, while rolling through there out of the western territory. We come upon him sleeping in a hammock at his settlement, a small spread tucked in a valley beneath a long, sloping ridge just outside Osawatomie. The Old Man was leading his crew along the edge of that ridge with his eye out for the federals when he suddenly stopped and held up the column, peering down at a figure in his front yard laying in a hammock, dead asleep. It was Rev. Martin, all right.

  The Old Man sat atop his stolen mount and stared at Rev. Martin a long time.

  Owen and Kagi rode up next to him.

  “That’s the Rev,” Owen said.

  “It is,” the Old Man said.

  Kagi said calmly, “Let’s ride down there and have a talk with him.”

  The Old Man stared down the ridge a long time. Then he shook his head. “No, Lieutenant. Let’s ride on. We’ve a war to fight. I don’t ride for revenge. ‘Revenge,’ says the Lord, ‘is Mine’s.’ I ride against the infernal institution.” And he upped and nicked his horse on the side, and we rode on.

  —

  His fever stayed on into May, then June. I nursed him during that time. I’d come in to give him soup and find him sleeping, only to bust awake in a sweat. Sometimes, when his mind came back to him, he’d brood over military books, poring over maps, land drawings, circling various towns and mountain ranges with a pencil. He seemed to edge toward getting better at them times, then suddenly bust back into full-out sickness. When he felt better, he’d wake up and pray like a fiend, two, three, four hours at a time, then drop off to peaceful sleep. When the fever got him again, he’d fall into feverish talking with our Maker. He had whole conversations with the Lord then, with backbiting arguments and sharing thoughts and biscuits with an imaginary man standing there, sometimes throwing pieces of cornmeal or johnnycake ’bout the room, as if he and the Maker, who was standing somewhere ’bout him, was having a marriage spat and throwing food ’bout the kitchen. “What do you think I am?” he’d say. “A money tree? A fool for gold? But that’s hardly a righteous request!” Or he’d suddenly set up and blurt out, “Frederick! Ride on! Ride on, son!” then fall out, asleep, only to wake up hours later, not remembering a thing he’d said or done. His mind had gone off on a jolt and fling, so to speak, it had ginned and baled hay and gone on home, and toward July, the men got to burbling ’bout disbanding altogether. Meanwhile, he allowed no one except me to enter his cabin to nurse and feed him and see ’bout him. It got to when I’d come out the cabin, his men would gather ’round me and say, “Is he living, Onion?”

  “Yet living. Sleeping.”

  “He ain’t dying, is he?”

  “No. Praying and reading. Eating a little.”

  “He got a plan?”

  “Nar word.”

  They waited like that and didn’t make a fuss with him, busying themselves under Kagi by clanking away with their swords, reading the military pamphlet written by Colonel Forbes, which is all the Old Man got out of that little gamer. They played with a cat named Lulu that wandered in, and picked corn and done other odd jobs for farmers that lived nearby. They got to know one another in that fashion, and Kagi stuck out in that time as a leader of men, for fighting and squabbling erupted among them during many an idle hour of chess and fighting with wood swords and fussin’ ’bout spirituality, for some of ’em was nonbelievers. He was a thoughtful feller, firm and steady, and he kept them together. He talked into line the more doubtful ones who mumbled ’bout disbanding and going back east to teach school or work jobs, and kept the rest of the rough ones in check. He didn’t take no backwater off nobody, not even Stevens, and that scoundrel was rough work and would bust out the brains of anybody who looked at him sideways. Kagi could handle him too. Come one evening in late June, I walked into the Captain’s cabin bearing a bowl of turtle soup, which always seemed to revive the Old Man some, and found him setting up on his bed, looking strong and wide-awake. A huge map, the favorite one he always fiddled with, lay in his lap, along with a bunch of letters. His gray eyes was bright. His long beard flowed down his shirt, for he never cut it from that day forward after he got that ague. He seemed well. He spoke in a strong way, his voice high and tight, like it is when he is in battle. “I has spoken with God and He has given me the word, Onion,” he said. “Summon the men. I’m ready to share my plan.”

  I gathered them up and they congregated outside his cabin. He emerged shortly after, pushing back the canvas flap covering the door, stepping before them with his usual stern expression. He stood tall, without his jacket, without a walking stick to lean on nor did he lean against the doorway, to let them know he weren’t weak or sick no more. The campfire was lit before him, for dark was coming, and the prairie dust blowed leaves and tumbleweeds ’bout. In the long ridge behind his cabin, wolves howled. In his old knarled hands he held a sheaf of papers, his big map, and a compass.

  “I has commingled with the Lord,” he said, “and I has a battle plan which I aims to share. I knows you all wants to hear it. But first off, I wants to give thanks to our Great Redeemer, He Who sheddeth His blood on the cross of holy held high.”

  Here he folded his hands before him and prattled off a prayer for a good fifteen minutes. Several of his men, non
believers, got bored, turned on their heels, and wandered off. Kagi departed to a nearby tree, sat down under it, and fiddled with his knife. Stevens turned around and walked off, cursing. A feller named Realf produced pen and paper and commenced to scribbling poetry. The others, Christians and heathens alike, stood patiently as the Captain railed at God, the wind blowing against his face, going high and low with his prayer, up and down, round and round, asking the Redeemer for guidance, direction, chatting ’bout Paul when he wrote Corinthians and how he weren’t good enough to take the strap off Jesus’s shoes and so forth. He gone on with that railing and ranting at full steam, and when he finally throwed out the last “Amen,” those who had departed to read their mail and monkey with their horses saw he was finally ready and returned hastily.

  “Well, now,” he said, “as I said before, I has commingled with our Great Redeemer, He Who hath sheddeth His blood. We has discussed this entire enterprise from top to bottom. We has wrapped our minds around each other like a cocoon wraps a boll weevil. I has heard His thoughts, and I, having heard them, I must say here that I am but a tiny peanut in the corner sill of the window of our Savior’s great and powerful thoughts. But, having studied with Him and asked Him several times, going on years now, of what to do about the hellish institution of evil that exists in this land, I am certain now that He has chosen me to be an instrument of His purpose. Course, I already knowed that, just like Cromwell and Ezra the prophet of the old knowed it, for they was instruments in the same fashion, especially Ezra, who prayed and afflicted himself before God in the same fashion as I have, and when Ezra and his people were in a strait, the Lord busily and quietly engaged them to the arrangement of safety without harm. So fear not, men! God is no respecter of persons! Indeed it says in the Bible, the book of Jeremiah, ‘For these are the days of vengeance and there shall—’”