Rebel falls, p.4
Rebel Falls, page 4
I smiled at her mention of my old regiment. I missed being in their ranks. How much easier things would have been if I had been born a man, instead of so often having to act like one!
“Your father is certain?” I asked. “That I could be of help in the Falls, along the border?”
Fanny tried to appear noncommittal. “Of course, it’s up to you. Still, you know the towns, the river there. I have to agree that you’d be well suited for the assignment.”
“Hardly,” I said, trying to smile.
Fanny stepped closer and looked at the sketches I’d done of John Yates Beall and Bennet Burley.
“It is fine work,” she said. “I’ll fetch a cylinder, something to put them in.”
“You know I so want to help,” I said. “But of all the places? Niagara Falls?”
Fanny pulled up a chair and huddled close with me.
“You’ve never told me everything that happened to you there,” she said. “All I remember is that you were gone with your mother for that summer and into the fall. Then you were back home with us in Auburn.”
I nodded. “It was nothing.”
“I don’t know about that, Rory Chase. For when the topic comes up, the look on your face? Well, I believe Father is right. Haunted may be the best word for what comes over you.”
“It’s difficult to explain,” I said.
“You can tell me,” Fanny said. “There are no secrets between us.”
I considered this and realized there was no disagreeing with her.
“Mother was working at the Cataract House. We lived there that summer when she was helping with the Underground Railroad. Between such doings, the carnies and barkers, the very Falls itself, the place was as checkered as anywhere I’ve ever been.”
“It had to be,” Fanny said. “After the Fugitive Slave Act became law, the slavers were emboldened to chase the escapees right up to the border itself.”
“But the staff at the Cataract was there to help them get across the border.”
“The hotel workers?” Fanny asked. “Father says many of them are escaped slaves themselves.”
“Yes, the owner of the Cataract House, Mr. Chapman, a white man, had abolitionist sympathies. Mother said as much.”
I looked out upon State Street, and in my mind the years peeled back to that long summer when we were in the Falls. How Mother helped escapees reach Canada, on the opposite side of the Niagara River. But not everyone was so lucky.
“It was a few days after the Fourth of July,” I began. “Hot as blazes, and this rich family from Charleston arrived at the hotel for the week. They had two young women in their service. They looked like sisters. They were called Mary and Bessie.”
“And the wait staff spoke to them?” Fanny said. “Seeing if they wanted to escape across the river to Canada?”
I nodded. “The head waiter at the Cataract House was John Douglas. Mr. Douglas. Perhaps he’s still there. All I know is he was polite as could be on the outside, but always with a plan and at the ready. He had a rowboat at Ferry Landing. That’s about a quarter-mile from the back door of the hotel. It was docked down a ragged set of wooden stairs that were always slick from the mist coming off the Falls. That’s how close it was.”
“So, he approached this Mary and Bessie?”
“Yes, and an opportunity presented itself. Mr. Douglas informed them that the time was right—a chance to escape across the river, to Canada and freedom. Mary immediately said yes, she would go. No questions asked, and soon she and Mr. Douglas were making a beeline to the stairs down to the river and his boat. I happened to be helping Mother at the hotel that morning, and Bessie couldn’t decide what to do. She dithered and dithered until Mr. Douglas and Mary were away, and then she decided she would go, too.”
“Oh, no.”
“I took her by the hand and led her across the hotel lawn, running for the stairs and the river. But her owner by then had caught wind of what was going on, and he and several others were soon on our heels. I can still remember him howling for someone, anyone, to help him save his property. Those were the words he used—‘help me save my property.’ That soon drew a crowd, and in short order a mob was right behind us.
“We had almost reached the stairs down to the river when they caught up to us. Bessie was pulled away from me. Then they took potshots with their pistols at Mr. Douglas out there in the middle of the rapids, pulling on his oars like a madman, with Mary huddled down in the rear of the craft. I knew Mr. Douglas was working those oars faster than he would have liked against that fierce current. He must have been a waterman in another time, in another life, because no one knew the Niagara River like he did. And on that day, in the shadow of the Falls itself, the waters nearly capsized him several times. How the slave owner and his kind would have cheered at that sight. As I said, it is about a quarter-mile from the Cataract Hotel to the Ferry Landing, another quarter-mile across those raging waters, and then up the embankment to the Canadian side and freedom.”
“And did they make it?” Fanny asked.
“Yes. Somehow Mr. Douglas kept his boat afloat and got safely to the other side. Soon afterward, the mob on the American side dispersed, with Bessie in tow. Several in the mob threatened me, and by the next day, Mother was making plans for us to return home to Auburn.”
After my story ended, the two of us sat quietly in the Sewards’ parlor.
“The Cataract House, Mr. Douglas, crossing below the Falls,” Fanny eventually said. “I didn’t know the place was so much a part of your past, Rory.”
“I wish it wasn’t.”
Fanny stood and briefly rested a hand on my shoulder.
“All I know is that if you could go there, simply look around, it would help our effort so much,” she said.
I nodded.
“But nothing more,” my friend said. “After that you come home, back to Auburn. You promise?”
“I promise, Fanny.”
A dozen or more people stood alongside the train scheduled for Washington, waiting for Secretary Seward to address them. I carried my mother’s small suitcase, its sides scraped and scarred like a beaten mule, to the other side of the station platform for the train heading in the opposite direction—west to Buffalo and beyond.
The good secretary would never disappoint an audience, and he soon came to the rear of his train, looking upon his supporters. Many applauded his appearance. Over his shoulder, I saw Fanny survey the crowd, always watching out for her beloved father. Our eyes briefly met, and she waved, just a flutter of the fingers. Then she disappeared into the last car of the train, which was reserved for the secretary when he traveled south to the nation’s capital.
Secretary Seward told his gathering about how it had been a long fight, certainly longer than either the Union or the rebels had expected. But he believed that with the victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg that “history’s unpredictable pageant has now turned in our favor.”
Those words brought a round of applause and some hearty cheers. As one who had heard Secretary Seward speak on more occasions than I could remember, I half-expected him to stop there. He so enjoyed ending things with a slight crescendo, as Fanny would say.
Yet this time he said a bit more, telling his impromptu assembly to “be ever vigilant. To not be lulled into the misconception that all our battles lie hundreds of miles away. Sometimes the most vexed, the most difficult ordeals lie closer to home, festering at our back door.”
As he spoke those words, he was looking past his well-wishers—his eyes only on me.
7
Almost every day I find time to gaze upon the river,
And when I see those roiling waters, it gives me hope.
Cesar tells me that the ravine from the edge of the Falls
Has moved back almost six feet during my lifetime.
Eroded away by those fast-flowing, green-blue waters,
And while that may be too rosy for me,
There is no denying the power of water upon hard rock.
How what we may consider solid and impenetrable
Can be worn away over the years and centuries.
It is water over stone, relentless and every day,
And I believe in the power of such notions,
More than anything else I’ve ever encountered in my days.
Water over stone. I bear witness to the process daily
And I’ve been an active participant in this holy war.
Water over stone. Believe. Just believe.
John Douglas
Wreet Thayer opened the small white envelope that had been slipped in with the morning mail. Outside the skies promised light rain and perhaps sun in the afternoon. If the heavens did brighten, she would walk to the Falls and then visit the Cataract House and thank Mr. Douglas for his latest page of verse. Such offerings always gladdened her heart.
Rereading the poem, lingering over it like a fine wine, she would later file it away in the scrapbook where she kept such gifts from her old friend. As the war stretched on, Mr. Douglas had been writing more, which she took as a good sign. Even though the way stations for the Underground Railroad stretched far from western New York, such activity had slowed to a halt. Nothing like it was in the decade before the firing on Fort Sumter and the start of the war. Back when the Fugitive Slave Act made it the law of the land that local authorities were required to assist slavers in retrieving their so-called property—even if the poor wretch was within the shadow of the Falls itself. Back when the Niagara River, which was only a few blocks from Wreet’s door, just over by the Cataract House itself, had been literally the last river to cross.
Wreet knew that Mr. Douglas still kept a longboat tethered to the small dock down the flights of stairs in the mist and shadow of the American side of the Falls. How many had crossed there or via the Suspension Bridge north of downtown, high above the gorge? She had lost track long ago. Still, Mr. Douglas would know. He kept ledgers of such attempts. Those that ended well and those that didn’t. Those who escaped and the others who were led back into slavery.
If Wreet’s days became too long, she would flip the sign on the front door from OPEN to CLOSED and retire upstairs to sit on the small balcony that looked toward the Falls, where she couldn’t quite make out the raging waters but could regularly spy the clouds from the cataract billowing to the heavens. She was tempted to do so this morning when a knock came on her shop’s front door.
It was Ronnie, the errand boy from the telegram office. Although Ronnie wasn’t much of a boy anymore. The younger ones had been drawn south, like moths to the flame, to fight the Confederates.
Opening her door, hearing the familiar bell atop the frame jingle, Wreet took the message and tipped him a coin. Back inside, she saw that it wasn’t a conventional gram. Instead, it was a letter on official letterhead from Secretary William Seward. She hadn’t received one of those in months.
She read the letter and then reviewed it, noting the important passages. More rebel spies were now in the borderlands. Well, that was nothing new. If anything, the secretary was repeating information that Mr. Douglas and others had relayed to the secretary in the first place. What was novel here was that the good secretary had sent a new courier to help them. This one would be arriving soon.
Certainly, they could use all the help they could get. She, Mr. Douglas, even the others at the Cataract House weren’t getting any younger. Still, whoever was sent their way had best be on their toes. While the Falls billed itself as an escape from the everyday world, the war had encroached here as well. Their struggle wasn’t with armies and firepower, at least not yet. Instead, it was about disguise and stealth and whom to ultimately trust.
Part 2
Along the Border
To have Niagara before me, lighted by the sun and by the moon, red in the day’s decline, and grey as evening slowly fell upon it; to look upon it every day, and wake up in the night and hear its ceaseless voice; this was enough.
—Charles Dickens
8
The Suspension Bridge that spanned the Niagara River had two levels, one sitting over the other. “A grand wedding cake of construction,” Mother used to say, but I remembered it as something more beguiling and dangerous than anything of true beauty.
The top level supported a railroad branch line, connecting the northern outskirts of Niagara Falls on the American side to the less populated Canadian side. At the Bridge Station on the American side, a second rail line traveled south a short distance to the larger terminal in downtown Niagara Falls. From there, it continued south to the prosperous city of Buffalo and the way back east to Auburn and Albany and eventually to New York City. Or, from Buffalo, one could go in the opposite direction, sweeping along the southern edge of Lake Erie toward Cleveland and Chicago.
From the bridge’s upper tier, the enormity of the Niagara Gorge revealed itself beneath the structure, and when crossing over the abyss the mist from the Falls often hung like a veil. When those clouds did part, the distant smoke from the factories closer to Buffalo could be seen. Off to the other side, the Niagara River flowed north past sheer cliffs until it soon emptied into Lake Ontario. In the early morning, mist could hug those shale-green walls like ghosts from some forgotten cemetery.
After checking into the Cataract House, I walked over to Prospect Point to view the American Falls. Even here, next to one of the famed wonders of the world, the region was parceled out and broken into contrary pieces. The American Falls are smaller in size than their Canadian counterpart, due to Goat Island and the necklace of Three Sisters Islands that stand like a small fortress reaching toward the middle of the Niagara River.
Walking along those glittering green-white waters, I recalled the summer a few years before when Mother came here, ostensibly to work at the hotel as the assistant supervisor of the cleaning staff. Actually, she came at the request of Harriet Tubman, her friend from back in Auburn. In the time before the war began, Mother did all she could for Miss Harriet and the Underground Railroad.
These memories crowded my mind as I turned and took in the Suspension Bridge, which towered above the river, just downstream from the Falls. In the distance, the bridge rose like something from a madman’s fantasy. Soon enough, I’d have to cross over to the other side, to British Canada. It was expected for the work I would be doing. Spy work. But on this afternoon, the day of my return, I watched the train chug across on the top level and remembered that day almost five years ago when Mother decided we wouldn’t wait for the next train. Instead, we crossed on the bridge’s lower level in a hack from the hotel.
As we approached the Suspension Bridge that afternoon, I got my first glimpse of the bridge’s bottom rung, which rolled out as a long dark tunnel, an opening of shadow and malice. Framed by the wooden beams overhead and along both sides, the lower level traveled directly beneath the railroad tracks, with only a few feet overtop for clearance. At the entrance, Mother paid the few pennies toll as men in long coats and wide-brimmed hats eyed our rig.
“Bystanders,” the cabbie muttered. “Looking for no good.”
“Looking for what?” Mother asked.
“Anyone they decide shouldn’t be crossing, ma’am. That they can blow the whistle on.”
Before we could ask anything more, the cabbie gave the reins a flick, and we were off.
Gaps in the wooden frame allowed us to see some of the river below us and the mist that billowed up from the Falls. It was an extreme, even disjointed landscape, so unlike the rolling hills and tranquil long lakes near Auburn.
We were almost across when a commotion broke out behind us. A moment later, a man, a Negro, ran past the carriage. I edged forward for a better look.
“Make room,” shouted a white man atop a horse standing at least seventeen hands high. He galloped up behind and then past us. As he rushed by, I stood, leaning alongside the driver for a better look.
“Missy, you best sit back where you belong,” he warned.
“What’s this about?” I demanded, sounding older than my sixteen years. Once he saw that I had no intention of returning to my seat next to Mother, he nodded at the Black man running as fast as he could for the far side of the bridge.
“Another runaway,” the driver said. “The Bystanders back at the toll entrance must have sounded the alarm.”
I turned to see more figures moving about at the entrance to the bridge’s tunnel-like passageway.
“He’ll be safe if he makes it to the other side,” I said.
“But that ain’t going to happen, young one. Not today.”
Our driver was correct. The man on horseback was soon pulling alongside the fleeing figure. With a practiced motion, he tossed his lasso high into the air, and it settled over the escaped slave’s torso. With a tug, the man tied the rope to the saddle horn, and when the horse braked, the Black man toppled to the ground like a small tree going down in a windstorm.
“He was nearly to the other side,” I protested.
“And what of it?”
“The boundary line must be the middle of the bridge, right over the heart of the river. By that measure, he had already made it to British Canada.”
The cabbie chuckled. “Nobody has ever fully sorted out such things, let alone drawn a proper line down the middle of the Suspension Bridge. You know how the slavers work. They always hedge things in their favor when it comes to the fugitive laws.”
Soon afterward, the poor creature, his hands now tied behind him and pulled along by a second rope around his neck, was led back to the American side. Back to captivity.
That was years ago, I told myself, and so much has changed since then. War now rages across the country, and President Lincoln has declared all the slaves to be free. Still, as I gazed past the rising mist, toward the Suspension Bridge, the buggies and carriages crowding the adjoining streets, I saw the so-called Bystanders still milling around the entrance to the tunnel-like passageway, and I knew I had once again fallen into a world where past and present could swirl like the raging waters of the Niagara below. While history may march on, as learned men like Secretary Seward like to say, this part of the world can conjure up more ghosts than any philosopher or scholar or statesman will ever explain away.
