The Good Lord Bird

Well, Old John Brown lived, too. They tried killing him, according to Mr. Caldwell. When they busted down the door, a lieutenant runned a sword right into the Old Man’s head as the Captain was trying to reload. Mr. Caldwell said the Lord saved him. The lieutenant was called to emergency duty on account of the uprising and was in a hurry when he left his house. He was so hot to get out, he grabbed the wrong sword off his mantelpiece as he runned out the door. He snatched up his military parade sword instead of his regular broadsword. Had he used a regular sword, he would’a deadened the Old Man easily. “But the Lord didn’t want him killed,” Mr. Caldwell said proudly. “He still got more work for him.”

That may be true, but Providence laid down a hard hand for the Negroes in Charles Town in them days following the Old Man’s defeat, for he was jailed and scheduled to be put on trial. I lived hidden in the back room of Mr. Caldwell’s barbershop during them weeks and heard it all. Charles Town was just up the road from Harpers Ferry, and white folks there was in a state of panic that bordered on insanity. They was plain terrified. Every day the constable would bust into Mr. Caldwell’s shop and rouse up Negro customers. He drug two or three men out at a time, brung them to the jail to question them ’bout the insurrection, then jailed some and released some. Even the most trusted Negroes in the slave owner’s houses was put out in the fields to work, for their masters didn’t trust them to work in the house, thinking their slaves would turn on ’em and kill ’em. Dozens of slaved Negroes was sold south, and dozens more run off, thinking they’d be sold. One colored slave come into Mr. Caldwell’s shop, complaining that if a rat’s tail touched the wall in his master’s house in the middle of the night, the entire house was roused, guns was grabbed, and this feller would be sent downstairs first to go see ’bout it. The white newspaper said that Baltimore arms dealers sold ten thousand guns to Virginians during Old John Brown’s trial. One Negro in the barbershop joked, “The Colt Company ought to do something nice for Captain Brown’s family.” Several fires were set on Charles Town plantations, and nobody knowed who done it. And a story in the Charles Town paper said that slave owners was complaining that their horses and sheep was dying suddenly, as if they’d been poisoned. I’d heard that one, too, whispered in the back of Mr. Caldwell’s barbershop. And when I heard it, I said to Mr. Caldwell, “Would that all these fellers doing that devilment today had showed up at the Ferry. It would have been a different game.”

“No,” he said. “It had to end the way it did. Old John Brown knows what he’s doing. They should’a killed him. He’s raising more hell now writing letters and talking than he ever did with a gun.”

And that was true. They put the Old Man and his men in jail in Charles Town, the ones from his army that lived through the fight: Hazlett, Cook, Stevens, the two coloreds, John Copeman, and the Emperor, and by the time the Captain got done writing letters and getting visitors from his friends in New England, why, he was a star all over again. The whole country was talking ’bout him. I hear tell the last six weeks of his life the Old Man got more folks moved ’bout the slavery question than he ever did spilling blood back in Kansas, or in all them speeches he gived up in New England. Folks was listening now that white blood was spilled on the floor. And it weren’t just any old white blood. John Brown was a Christian man. A bit off his biscuit, but a better Christian you never saw. And he had lots of friends, white and colored. I do believe he done more against slavery in them last six weeks with letter writings and talking than he ever done raising one gun or sword.

They set a quick trial for him, convicted him right off, and set a date for the Old Man to hang, and all the while that Old Man kept writing letters and squawking and hollering ’bout slavery, sounding off like the devil to every newspaper in America that would listen, and they was listening, for them insurrections scared the devil out the white man. It set the table for the war that was to come, is what it did, for nothing scared the South more than the idea of niggers running ’round with guns and wanting to be free.

But I wasn’t thinking them thoughts back then. Them fall nights become long for me. And lonesome. I was a boy for the first time in years, and being a boy, with the end of November coming, that meant in five weeks’ time it would be January, and I would be fifteen. I never knowed my true birth date, but like most coloreds, I celebrated it on the first of the year. I wanted to move on. Five weeks after the insurrection, in late November, I caught Mr. Caldwell one evening when he come to the back of the shop to give me some bacon, biscuits, and gravy and asked ’bout me maybe leaving for Philadelphia.