Raising holy hell, p.16
Raising Holy Hell, page 16
“Very well then, Mr. Brown,” says a vastly bemused Gerrit Smith. “I believe we have ascertained your position. If you would be so kind as to step outside? We will inform you of our decision directly. Thank you, sir.”
As the old man sees himself out, each of the Six—save Smith, who is too much troubled by the gout to bestir himself, and the young cleric Wentworth Higginson, who perched astraddle his hogshead is engrossed in the application of an emery board to his thumbnails—rustle to their feet and undertake to pace the floor. The storeroom is not capacious; the jostling at once becomes problematic.
“So, what say you, gentlemen?” remarks Smith bluffly. At sixty-two, he is both the oldest, and more important in this instance, the wealthiest of the cartel. “What answer ought we give our friend? What wisdom offer?
“Chev?”
Chev is Samuel Gridley Howe, so-called owing to his having received the Chevalier of the Order of St. Savior from the king of Greece for his surgeon’s service in the Greek War of Independence some thirty years before. His wife, Julia Ward, will shortly author the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” thereby so eclipsing her husband’s reputation that he will sink into a neuralgia-ridden depression from which he will never recover.
This evening, Chev appears wound even tighter than is his custom.
“Well, Gerrit, it is a singular and most startling proposition, I must say. The Virginia Plan did he call it. My, my. Desperate in character, dubious in method, its success wholly uncertain. And yet, yet, I believe it will succeed. Absolutely. If the nation is to survive, I believe that it must.”
“I disagree,” interjects a bespectacled Theodore Parker.
Well now, this is a surprise. Howe and the balding Unitarian minister are soulmates and bosom friends. Indeed, the childless Parker once requested of Howe, presumably in the spirit of that transcendent friendship, that he persuade Julia Ward, as a gift to him and his wife, one understands, to conceive a child—a request, it bears mention, which Mrs. Howe was only too delighted to decline. The men here cannot recall the pair ever wrangling over anything more momentous than who ought foot the dinner bill.
“But Parkie,” pleads Howe, “surely you do not mean to say that you believe the plan foredoomed.”
“Foredoomed, Chev? No, not foredoomed. From time to time miracles do occur. Yet I cannot conceive that the slaves shall rise, or if they do, shall fight. The race is utterly docile. Were it otherwise, they should have thrown off their shackles long since.
“Still,” he turns to Smith, “however ill-fated, I might wish for our friend to try on, for I suspect the mere attempt is more the point than his success or failure. Indeed, it may be precisely from his failure that our success will spring.”
Higginson, who has pocketed the emery board, barstools down from the hogshead with an athlete’s effortlessness and, arms akimbo, unfolds to each of his splendidly proportioned six feet. The firebrand pastor with the heartthrob good looks is a notorious gym rat; he can bench-press twice his weight and execute without apparent tax a one-armed handstand. His chest is as broad as a park bench.
Much the most militant of the lot, he has lately been involved—sub rosa, naturally—in the recruitment of what he calls “the Army of Mobile Retribution,” several hundred exotically accoutred minutemen capable of scrambling on the moment to the site of such slave insurrections at the South as he is convinced shortly must erupt. Higginson conceives of the old man much as the old man conceives of himself, as the lit match struck by God to ignite the powderkeg of civil conflict.
“I concur with the Reverend,” he says matter-of-factly. “It is scarcely a question of feasibility, as I am confident Mr. Brown would agree, but of morality, of right and wrong. That the old man suffers on his side from a certain lack of reason, I shall not argue, but he most certainly is possessed of an abundance of right, and I for one am always eager to invest money in treason where treason is no longer treason, but patriotism.”
Leave it to Higginson to twist home the shiv. The man’s knack for blunt-spokenness is too well honed by half. The room appears palpably to constrict beneath a collective cringe.
“Well,” sighs Stearns, “I would be loathe to go quite that far Went, but it is an intriguing experiment, I daresay, and doubtless far from the last that necessity shall place in our path before slavery can be toppled once and forever.”
“Fine then, fine,” stammers the beardless Franklin Sanborn, “but I insist that he tell us no more of his plans.” At twenty-six, the Connecticut boys’ academy headmaster is by far the youngest—and most skittish—in the room. “Indeed, I fear that he has told us too much already. Can we not direct him to give us no more guilty knowledge, no incriminating reports of further progress? Is it not wisdom to suggest that from this moment forward we allow his actions alone to speak for themselves?”
“Oh, agreed, agreed, a thousand times agreed,” enthuses Howe, oblivious to the expression of disgust scrawling itself upon Higginson’s face. “I am with Sanborn utterly. It is simple prudence. The less contact we have with him henceforward, the better for us all.
“As to the money, I suppose he must have what he requires. But surpassing that, I wish to know neither what he is about, nor where he is going, nor when he intends to go there. Let us of these matters remain perfectly ignorant, hence out of harm’s way.”
“As you wish, Chev,” says Smith. “Still, you see how it is. Our dear friend is unswerving in his course. Our choices are clear—betrayal, desertion, or support.
“I confess to a certain queasiness myself. Will the slaves rise? Is it in them to fight? Can the business be accomplished with so few men? Can they hold off all those who must be certain to pursue them? And what if our friend should fail? If he should be captured? What will he tell? What might he be compelled to tell?
“That said, I remain undaunted. I shall not stint. I know no truer Christian in all the world than that old man, and I will not give him up to dash himself upon the rocks without lending such aid as I am able.
“Sanborn, would you be so kind as to butler our friend back in then?”
By the time the old man reenters the room, Smith, with a companionable if altogether manly assist from Higginson’s right forearm, has succeeded in heave-ho-ing to his feet.
“Mr. Brown, it is the earnest prayer of each of us that you might carry forward with your work as expeditiously as possible. To that end,” he reaches into the apron-deep pocket of his topcoat and hoists out a drawstrung leather cinchbag, “you will find there, I believe, four hundred dollars in gold.”
Before the old man can utter so much as a word in gratitude, Stearns, never one to be outshone, hornpipes forward with an envelope containing—as the old man discovers when he opens the packet later—twelve hundred dollars in new-issue banknotes.
“Check your Hartford account on Monday,” he whispers cryptically, placing a hand on the old man’s bony shoulder and babying it with a squeeze.
“God bless you, sir,” says Howe warmly, breasting up to extend a hand.
“Yes indeed,” enjoins Parker close on his heels. “May God bless you and keep you and speed you all the same. I, we, all of us pray that the Lord may smile upon your endeavor and crown your labors with laurels.”
“We do indeed,” chimes in Sanborn. “We do indeed pray that.”
Higginson patrols the rear, but before he can properly pay his respects, it is the old man who elbows past the others to address him.
“Well, Mr. Higginson,” his voice sounds ironed flat, “as I suspect that this may well be the last we shall see of one another in this world, I pray you in my absence to carry the good fight forward.”
When Higginson swears an oath and recoils in protest, the old man raises his hand like a pledge and shakes his head. “No, no, you must listen. I do not say so lightly. As there is every prospect that I shall not return alive, you must promise that if the Lord so wills, you will plow on undeterred.”
Higginson’s eyes are lipped with tears. “My word, sir. I will. As God is my witness.”
“Good then. I will pray for you, son. I will keep you in my prayers.”
“And I you, John Brown,” says Higginson, clasping the old man’s hand in the both of his. “And I you.”
Referring to his account (#001273) at the Cashier State Bank in Hartford, he discovers that it has been replenished to the amount of eighteen hundred dollars.
He withdraws five hundred and fifty, jackrabbits by carriage up to Collinsville, and places five hundred upon the countertop before the forgemaster.
“What’s this then?” asks Blair.
“Your payment in full, sir,” says the old man. “Per our contract.”
The forgemaster appears nonplussed. “But the order is but part filled.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Well sir, it’s like this. You want ’em right, or you want ’em fast?”
“Both, sir,” says the old man sternly. “I insist that I shall have both. The use I intend for them cannot wait.
“You have been paid in full, Mr. Blair. I wish delivery in full. I wish the items properly crated and clearly marked. You will mark the crates on each of their outer sides by hand stamp, label, or some such, in this fashion.” He slides a scrap of paper across the countertop like a dealer dishing out a playing card. On it Blair reads the words:
Hardware & Castings
Via R. Rd. to Cumberland Valley Depot
Oakes & Caufman Warehouse
“You will ship the crates by freight to this name and address,” here he hands Blair what appears a professionally embossed business card, “and you will make such arrangements as are necessary to ensure that they arrive at that address no later than the first of August.
“Can you accommodate me, sir?”
“I guess you’ll get what’s coming to you,” mopes Blair. “I ain’t no piker.”
After the old man has gone, Blair scrutinizes the address on the card.
Nelson Hawkins Esq. & Sons
c/o J. Henrie
225 E. King St.
Chambersburg, Pa.
Cantankering something indecipherable, he rolls his eyes, shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders, and jams the card deep into the pocket of his dungarees before curmudgeoning it again.
“Fucking lunatic!” he crabs, and disappears into the backroom.
(It’s W. A. Phillips, special correspondent of the New York Trib.)
“Mr. Brown, sir, a word if I might.”
(Knew Phillips in Kansas where we palavered a time or two, where he coined the nickname “Osawatomie Brown.” Regular mythmaker, Phillips; useful man.)
“Mr. Brown, a word, sir.”
(Well, why not? Final interview before the Ferry; farewell words to a fissioning nation.)
Ask away Mr. Phillips. But be brief sir, be brief. I have other affairs to attend to.
Mr. Brown, what now?”
War.
[Reeling] But—war, sir? Why?
The Republican candidate for president wins in November. The South secedes from the union and sets itself up as a rival nation aided by Europe. War follows as does night day.
But war, sir. Surely war can be avoided.
It cannot. We are on the eve of the greatest war in history. I do not fault your skepticism. Even our best people do not understand this. Our so-called leaders have compromised themselves at such length that they no longer believe the power of right and wrong can wreak change upon this earth. I know better, and I intend to act upon what I know with all the power that God has given me.
And what power might that be, sir?
Why, you need only recall Spartacus and his slave war against the Roman Empire.
But Roman slaves were captured warriors, many of them seasoned gladiators. Our Negroes are a peaceful, pliant, docile race, incapable of resentment much less reprisal against their owners.
You have not studied them right, and you have not studied them long enough. Why, in Africa their men were the fiercest of warriors, a good many of them tribal chieftains. No, human nature is the same everywhere. It hungers after freedom. Given the right opportunity and the proper leadership, it will fight to attain it.
Mark me well, Mr. Phillips. The white people of this country can undertake no more critical business in the years ahead than to enlighten themselves upon the subject of the Negro—his history and folkways, his culture and personality, his character and customs.
And why is that, sir?
Because nothing could be clearer than that the future of our nation must be largely determined by the fate of the Negro. Either we accept the Negro as one with us and become as a people the stronger for it, or we reject, persecute, and revile him, and stand the price. And sir, you must write in your newspaper so that none can mistake it—that price, to black and white alike, will be unspeakably steep.
Begging your pardon, sir, but when you say ‘accept the Negro as one with us,’ how exactly do mean?
Do you know your Latin, Mr. Phillips?
Not so you’d notice, I’m afraid.
Well then, take the Latin verb miscere, meaning “to mix,” append it to the Latin noun genus, meaning “race,” and you have my meaning wholecloth and in detail.
But sir [horrified], surely you do not mean to suggest …
But I do, Mr. Phillips, as God is my witness I do. Were the choice that a daughter of mine marry an industrious and honest Negro, or an indolent and deceitful white, I would urge that she choose the former, and rejoice in such mulatto grandchildren as might issue.
Then sir, I daresay your sentiment exists exclusive to yourself. I am aware of no citizen of these United States—which is to say no white person—who shares anything approximating it.
No, of course you don’t, though I take it you are aware of the thousands of slaveholders who in private thrust their baser nature upon any number of African Negresses while in public scorning them as scarce fit to lick their chamber pots. Who furthermore sire by those Negresses tens of thousands of mulatto progeny whom they decidedly do not rejoice in, but rather enslave to their personal profit.
A scandal, I grant you.
No sir! A sin. A sin against God and a crime against humanity. Whatever else the South may be, it has always been a vast brothel whose Negro women are capriciously reduced to cloacae at the hands of white fornicators, adulterers, and sodomites. I ask you, sir, how in good conscience deplore miscegenation when the entire South has for two hundred years winked at the rampant defilement of Negro women? How revile race mixing, when from Richmond to San Antone little brown and yellow babies suckle tonight at black teats?
Am I to take it, Mr. Phillips, that you find it more acceptable that a white man rape a black woman than that he ask for her hand in marriage?
[Reddening] You are to take it that the overwhelming majority of white people are perfectly content to leave the overwhelming majority of black people alone. You are to take it that ending slavery is one thing, and marrying Negroes another.
Oh, but they are absolutely one and the same.
Now you have lost me utterly.
Simple syllogistics, Mr. Phillips, simple syllogistics.
To wit, and I will go slowly:
Abolition equals freedom.
Freedom equals justice.
Justice equals equality.
Equality equals integration.
Integration equals miscegenation.
Free the slave today, and tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that—the timing will take care of itself—we must mingle blood with him. As the nation can today no longer survive half slave and half free, so tomorrow it will not survive half black and half white. Abolition and miscegenation, or continued enslavement and mass rapine. That is the choice. There can be no other.
I must disagree, sir. Why, even as I sit here I can conjure …
Two. You can conceive of two others, am I correct? Abolition and segregation, or deportation en masse from the country.
Both are chimeras, sir. The first is unworkable in theory, the second impracticable in fact. Segregation contradicts equality. Deportation defies logistics. No, if the slave is to be liberated, and I intend to do all in my power to ensure precisely that, then it is inevitable that miscegenation will follow, and it serves no useful purpose to pretend otherwise.
To be perfectly frank, the prospect does not cheer me, but what cheers me less is the alternative: to free the slave by law, yet disown and ghettoize him in fact. Down that path, Mr. Phillips—and that path has a name, sir, and that name, sir, is apartheid—lies our undoing as a nation, and we can only pray that God will grant us the good sense not to take it.
In the meantime, the issue remains a good bit less entangled. The slaves must be freed, and I intend to free them though it require the raising of holy hell itself.
Black as aubergine.
As poppyseed.
Batwing.
Bark.
Their fear; eyes behind the peepholes augured from the hood.
As the heart of the matter.
When in 1661 the Virginia House of Burgesses passed legislation aimed at stemming the plaguelike spread of the dread “abominable mixture and spurious issue,” the remaining Southern colonies marched in lockstep.
But the laws apparently contained certain loopholes, for an arcane and esoteric vocabulary shortly arose as a way of tracking with mathematical precision the progress of that “mixture” through the national bloodstream.
This was the nomenclature of Negrophobia, of the secret life of slavery, an American phenomenon unprecedented in all the world.
sacatra: 7⁄8s a Negro
griffe: ¾s a Negro
marabou: 5⁄8s a Negro
mulatto: ½ a Negro
quadroon: ¼ a Negro
octoroon (or mustee): 1⁄8 a Negro
