The Good Lord Bird

by James McBride

  “Why would he send you?”

  “He ain’t got but two coloreds in his army. The other ones he weren’t too sure ’bout.”

  “In what way?”

  “Thought they might trot off before they done what the Captain told ’em what to do.”

  “The Captain. Who’s that?”

  “I already told you. John Brown.”

  “And what did the Captain tell you to do?”

  “Hive the bees. Ain’t you heard me?”

  Cook came to the kitchen, holding a pot of water. Then moved to put some kindling on the fire to make some hot water. “You hive her yet?” he said gaily. He was just a fool. He was the gayest man I ever saw. It would cost him. He’d be deadened ’cause of it, acting a fool.

  “She don’t believe it,” I said.

  “What part of it?”

  “No parts of it.”

  He stood up and cleared his throat, agitated. “Now listen, Aunt Polly, we come all this way to fr—”

  “Becky’s my name, if you please.”

  “Becky. A great man’s ’bout to come here and free your people. I just got a letter from him. He’ll be here in less than three weeks. He needs to hive the bees. Free you all.”

  “I done heard all I need to hear about hiving and freeing,” Becky said. “How’s all this hiving and freeing gonna happen?”

  “I can’t right tell all of it. But Old John Brown is coming, surely. From out west. Freedom’s nigh for you and your people. Onion here ain’t lying.”

  “Onion?”

  “That’s what we call her.”

  “Her?”

  I piped up quickly, “Miss Becky, if you ain’t one to hive or get on board with what John Brown’s selling, you ain’t got to come.”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said. “I wants to know what he’s selling. Freedom? Here? He might as well be singing to a dead hog if he thinks he’s gonna come here and get away scot-free with that. There’s a damn armory here.”

  “That’s why he’s coming,” Cook said. “To take the armory.”

  “What’s he gonna take it with?”

  “Men.”

  “And what else?”

  “And all the Negroes that’s gonna join ’em once he takes it over.”

  “Mister, you talking crazy.”

  Cook was a braggert, and it clean plucked his feathers to talk to a person that didn’t believe him or talked back to him. Especially a colored. “Am I?” he said. “Looky here.”

  He led her to the other room, where the stacks of the mining boxes marked Mining Tools lay ’bout. He took a crowbar to one and opened it up. Inside, stacked in neat rows, were thirty clean, brand-new Sharps rifles, one after another.

  I had never seen the inside of them boxes neither, and the fullness of the thing hit me and Miss Becky at the same time. Her eyes got wide. “Glory,” she said.

  Cook snorted, bragging. “We got fourteen boxes here, just like this one. There’s more coming by shipment. The Captain’s got enough arms to furnish two thousand people.”

  “There ain’t but ninety slaves in Harpers Ferry, mister.”

  That stopped him dead. The smile disappeared from his face.

  “I thought there was twelve hundred colored here. That’s what the man at the post office said yesterday.”

  “That’s right. And most of ’em’s free colored.”

  “That ain’t the same,” he muttered.

  “It’s close enough,” Miss Becky said. “Free colored’s connected to bondage, too. Many of ’em’s married to those in bondage. I’m free, but my husband, he’s a slave. Most free colored’s got slave relations. They ain’t for slavery. Believe me.”

  “Good! Then they’ll fight with us.”

  “I ain’t say that.” She sat down, rubbing her head. “Coachman done sent me into a dilemma,” she mumbled. Then she uttered hotly, “This is some damn trickeration!”

  “You ain’t got to believe,” Cook said gaily. “Just tell all your friends that Old John Brown is coming in three weeks. We attack on October twenty-third. He gived me the date by letter. Spread that around.”

  Now, I was just a young boy dressed like a girl and foolish as a dimwit and not able to hold anybody in their wrong, stupid as I was, but still, I was a young man coming into myself, and even I weren’t that dim. It occurred to me that it didn’t take but one of them colored angling for a can of peaches or a nice fresh watermelon from their master to rouse the whole bit, to spill the beans, and the jig was up for everybody.

  “Mr. Cook,” I said. “We don’t know if we can trust this woman.”

  “You invited her,” he said.

  “Suppose she tells!”

  Miss Becky frowned. “You is got some nerve,” she said. “You busted in on Coachman’s property, damn near gave him away to his runny-mouth wife, and now you tellin’ me who can be trusted. It’s you we can’t trust. You could be selling us a heap of lies, child. You better hope your yarn matches up. If not, the Blacksmith will deaden you right where you is and be done with it. Ain’t nobody in this town gonna fret over a nigger child dead in an alley someplace.”

  “What I done to him?”

  “You endangering his railroad.”

  “He owns a railroad?”

  “The underground, child.”

  “Hold on,” Cook said. “Your Blacksmith ain’t deadening nobody. Onion here is like a child to the Old Man. She’s his favorite.”

  “Sure. And I’m George Washington.”

  Now Cook got hot. “Don’t get sassy with me. We coming here to rescue you. Not the other way ’round. Onion here, the Captain stole her out of slavery. She’s like his kin. So you ought not to talk about your Blacksmith hurting this one here, or nobody else. Your Blacksmith won’t be drawing air long, fooling with the Captain’s plans. He don’t want to be on the wrong side of Captain Brown.”

  Becky put her head in her hands. “I reckon I don’t know what to believe,” she said. “I don’t know what to tell the Coachman.”

  “Is he the Negro in charge around here?” Cook asked.

  “One of ’em. The main one’s the Rail Man.”

  “Where’s he at?”

  “Where you think? On the railroad.”

  “The underground?”

  “No. The real railroad. The B&O. The one that goes chug-chug. I reckon he’s in Baltimore or Washington, D.C., today.”

  “Perfect! He can hive the bees there. How can I reach him?”

  She stood up. “I’ll take my leave, now. I done told you too much already, sir. For all’s I know, you could be a slave stealer from New Orleans, come up here to steal souls and sell ’em off down river. You can have one of them brooms. It’s a gift. Use it to sweep the lies out this place. Watch the lady next door, if you don’t want deputies around. She’s a nosybody. Mrs. Huffmaster’s her name. And she don’t like niggers nor slave stealers nor abolitionists.”

  As she moved toward the door, I blurted out, “You ought to check with your people. Check with your Rail Man.”

  “I ain’t checking with nobody. It’s a trick.”

  “G’wan, then. You’ll see. We don’t need you, neither.” She showed me her back, but as she moved to the door, there was a coat hook there, and she noticed the beaten shawl that the General gived me in Canada hanging on it. The shawl from Harriet Tubman herself.

  “Where’d you get this?” she asked.

  “It’s a gift,” I said.

  “From who?”

  “One of the Captain’s friends gived it to me. Said it would be useful. I just brung it ’cause . . . I used it to cover some of my things in the wagon.”

  “Did you now . . .” she said. She gently took the General’s shawl off the coat hook. She held it in the light, then laid it on the table, her brown fingers spr
eading it wide. She stared carefully at the designs on it. I hadn’t paid them no mind. It weren’t nothing but a crude dog in a box with his feet pointed at all four corners of the box, with his snout nearly touching one of the top corners. Something in that design moved her, and she shook her head.

  “I don’t believe it. Where’d you meet . . . the person that gived you this?”

  “I can’t say, for I don’t know you, neither.”

  “Oh, you can tell her,” Cook said, runny mouth that he was.

  But I didn’t open my mouth a bit. Miss Becky stared at the shawl, her eyes suddenly bright and full. “If you ain’t lying, child, it’s a great day. Did the soul who gived you this say anything else?”

  “No. Well . . . She did say don’t change the time, ’cause she was coming herself. With her people. She did say that. To the Captain. Not me.”

  Miss Becky stood silent a minute. You’d a thunk I gived her a million dollars, for it seemed like a spell come over her. The old wrinkles in her face evened out and her lips broke into a small smile. The lines in her forehead seemed to vanish. She picked up the shawl and held it out away from her. “Can I keep this?” she asked.

  “If it’ll help, all right,” I said.

  “It helps,” she said. “It helps a great deal. Oh, the Lord is in the blessing business, ain’t He? He done blessed me today.” She got in a hurry then, whipping the shawl onto her shoulders, gathering up her brooms and tossing them in the wheelbarrow, as me and Cook stared.

  “Where you going?” Cook said.

  Miss Becky paused at the door, grabbed the door handle and held it tight, staring at it as she spoke. The happiness fell off her then, and she was all business again. Serious and straight on. “Wait a few days,” she said. “Just wait. And be quiet. Don’t say nothing else to nobody, white or colored. If a colored comes here asking ’bout your Captain, be careful. If they don’t mention the Blacksmith or the Rail Man in their first breath, draw your knife on ’em and make it count, for we is all blown. You’ll get word soon.”

  And with that she opened the door, grabbed her wheelbarrow, and left.

  24

  The Rail Man

  Not long after, Cook got a job at the Ferry working at the Wager House, a tavern and railroad depot right at the armory where he could annoy the folks. His hours was long. He worked into the night, while I stayed at the farm, tidied house, tried to cook, hide what I could of them crates, and pretended to be his consort. ’Bout a week after he started, Cook come back to the house one evening and said, “Somebody wants to talk with you.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Somebody colored at the railroad.”

  “Can you bring ’em here?”

  “Says he don’t want to come here. Too dangerous.”

  “Whyn’t he tell you what he got to tell?”

  “Said it clearly. You the one he wants.”

  “He say anything ’bout the Blacksmith?”

  Cook shrugged. “I don’t know nothing ’bout that. Just said he wanted to talk to you.” I made ready to go. I was bored to tears cooped up in that house anyway.

  “Not now,” Cook said. “Tonight in the wee hour. One in the morning, he said. . . . Just set tight and go to bed. I’m going back to the tavern. I’ll wake you up when it’s time.”

  He didn’t have to wake me up ’cause I set up. All evening, waiting, anxious, till Cook finally come in around midnight. We walked down the mountain from the Kennedy farm to the Ferry together. It was dark and drizzling as we came off the mountain. We crossed the Potomac side of the bridge, and as we done so, we saw the train had arrived, the B&O, a huge railway engine setting just outside the rifle works building at the Ferry. The locomotive set there, steaming, taking on water. The train’s passenger cars was empty.

  Cook led me around to the back side of the station and down the entire length of the train. When we reached the last car, he split off into the thickets and headed down toward the Potomac, to the water’s edge. The Potomac runned underneath the railroad tracks. It was pretty dark down there, nothing to see but the swirling water in the moonlight. He pointed to the riverbank. “Feller wants to talk to you down there. Alone,” he said. “These coloreds is distrustful.”

  He waited up at the top of the bank while I moved down to the bank of the Potomac. I sat there and waited.

  A few minutes later, a tall, hulking figure emerged from the far end of the bank. He was a right-powerful-looking man, dressed in the neat uniform of a railroad porter. He didn’t come right up on me, but rather stayed in the shadow of the railroad trestle as he come closer. When he seen me, he didn’t come closer but stopped a few feet off and turned and leaned on the trestle, staring at the river. Above us, the train gived a sudden clank and burst of steam, its valves and all clacking thusly so, blowing that steam. I jumped as I heard it, and he glanced at me, then looked away back toward the river again.

  “Take ’em an hour to get the steam up,” he said. “Maybe two. That’s all the time I got.”

  “You the Rail Man?”

  “It don’t matter what I am. Matters what you is. What are you?”

  “I’m a messenger.”

  “So was Jesus. You ain’t seen Him running ’round in a skirt and bloomer panties. Is you a girl or a boy?”

  “I don’t know why everyone’s huffing and puffing ’bout what I am,” I said. “I’m just carrying a word.”

  “Bringing trouble is what you doing. If a body ain’t sure, it’ll cost you.”

  “What I done wrong?”

  “I understands you is looking to buy some of the Coachman’s brooms. We carries them to Baltimore and beyond,” he said.

  “Says who?” I asked.

  “Says the Blacksmith.”

  “Who is he, anyway?”

  “You don’t wanna know.”

  He stared across the water. By the light of the moon, I could see the outline of his face. He looked to be a friendly-faced feller, but his face was strained and tight. He weren’t in no happy mood.

  “Now I’ll ask it again,” he said. He glimpsed over his shoulder at Cook, who watched down on us, and then back at the water. “Who are you. Where you from. And what you want.”

  “Well, I don’t reckon I know what to say to you, for I done told it twice already.”

  “When you roll up on a watery mouth like the Coachman’s wife, hooting and hollering ’bout insurrection, you better state yourself clean.”

  “I weren’t hollering ’bout insurrection. I just told her I knowed how to read.”

  “That’s the same thing. You keep quiet ’bout them kinds of things ’round here. Or you’ll have the Blacksmith to deal with.”

  “I ain’t come all the way down here for you to throw threats at me. I’m speaking for the Captain. I ain’t got nothing to do with it.”

  “With what?”

  “You know what.”

  “No, I don’t. Tell me.”

  “Why’s every colored ’round here talking in circles?”

  “’Cause the white man shoots straight—with real bullets, child. ’Specially if a Negro’s thick enough to talk insurrection!”

  “It weren’t my idea.”

  “I don’t care whose idea it is. You in it now. And if your man—if your man is who you says he is—if your man’s on the line ’bout rousting out the colored, he come to the wrong town. Ain’t but a hundred here at most will roll with him, if that.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Ain’t but twelve hundred colored here. A good number of ’em’s women and children. The rest would fatten hogs under a tree with their own offspring ’fore they even raised an eyebrow to the white man. Shit. If Old John Brown wanted some coloreds to fight in his favor, he could’a gone sixty miles east to Baltimore, or Washington, or, or even the eastern shore of Maryland. Them coloreds there read
the papers. They got boats. Guns. Some of ’em’s watermen. People who can move people. That would’a been sugar in his bowl. Even in southern Virginia, down in cotton country. There’s plantations down there loaded fat with colored who’ll do anything to get out. But here?” He shook his head, he glanced over his back at the Ferry. “He’s in the wrong country. We’s outnumbered. Surrounded on all sides by whites in every county.”

  “There’s guns here,” I said. “That’s why he’s coming. He wants the guns from the armory to arm the colored.”

  “Please. These niggers ’round here wouldn’t know a rifle from a load of greens. They can’t handle nobody’s rifle. They won’t let a nigger near them guns.”

  “He got pikes. And swords. A lot of ’em. Thousands of ’em.”

  The Rail Man snorted bitterly. “It ain’t gonna matter. First shot he fires, these white folks is gonna burn him.”

  “You ain’t seen him when he’s battlin’.”

  “Don’t matter. They’ll pull his head off his body and when they’re done, they’ll air out every colored within a hundred miles just to make ’em forget we ever saw Old John in these parts. They hate that man. If he’s living. Which I don’t think he is.”

  “Go on, then. I’m tired of fending and proving. When he comes, you’ll see. I seen his planning. He got maps full of colors and drawings where the coloreds is gonna come from. He says they’ll come from everywhere: New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh. He got it all planned out. It’s a surprise attack.”

  The Rail Man waved his hand, disgusted. “It ain’t no surprise here,” he snorted.

  “You knowed he was coming?”

  “I never liked the idea from first I heard it. Never thought he’d be stupid enough to try it, either.”

  That’s the first time I ever heard anyone outside the Old Man’s circle mention the plan. “Where’d you hear it from?”

  “The General. That’s why I’m here.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “Is she coming?”

  “I hope not. She’ll get her head blowed off.”

  “How you know so much?”