Fire on the Mountain (10 page)

The marshal slowly lowered his piece, then lowered its hammer.

Everyone else in the church stood stock still for a breath, then two, then three. I counted them. I was standing with the armed men and without intending it I had become part of the tableau; at least the marshals looking up seemed to include me in it as we faced each other across a newly opened gulf in our common history as white men, a gulf John Brown had opened when he had drawn his sword in common cause with the black. This moment lasted no more than a minute, and no less than a hundred years.

Then with a flourish like Othello, Douglass was
exeunt
through the low choir door.

A low hubbub grew to a shout as the marshals backed slowly out the front door; the pews emptied into the aisles, the balcony into the galleries, the back door into the alley, and with the others, my heart pounding, I melted away into the night, which had fallen unannounced while we had been fighting our War in the Church.

It was the old Minister who was the only loser. For later that same night, Cowardice daring where Courage had faltered, his church was burned to the ground, probably by the same marshals who had been unwilling to take us on.

If I say Us, does that make me one of the Stalwarts? I think not; I still cannot imagine myself taking up arms (odd Virginian, I!), though, my dear friend and colleague, I definitely passed over a line in my own Understanding that night; the scales fell from my eyes, which is appropriate in Church, I suppose. Not about violence, which was the false issue, for that was never the question, slavery itself being the very perfection of violence; and not about my poor beloved South, for her corrupt true nature had long been clear to me. No, I understood that to end slavery we would have to be fighting the Nation itself and not just a section of it. Those were not Virginians that had come to take Douglass. We had to go against the might of America itself. This was what the slaves had always understood.

So, as you see, if Life is the great Instructor, I have been attending Classes. I only hope now that my family does not find out about this attendance, on the very night of my young Cousin’s funeral; I have never hidden my abolitionary sentiments from them, but it is a fool that adds insult to injury. But I have, as I have said, only sorrows and no regrets. I remain, as always, your admirer and always devoted friend and colleague,

Thos. Hunter, M.D.
(ad imminen)
Philadelphia,
City of Brotherly Love

Aug. 16, 1859
Miss Laura Sue Hunter
Miss Colby’s School
Richmond

Dearest Laura Sue:

I was sorry to say I was unable to attend our dear young Cousin’s funeral, which was held in Staunton, you know, not Baltimore, our uncle saying that since John bad died for Virginia he must be buried there. I would rather say, since it was Virginia that threw his life away, since it is a prodigious misapprehension of the Slave to think that he would submit to a Boy. I managed to get to Church on the night of the funeral, and my prayers were with you all.

Your loving
Thomas

Socialism was good for teeth, and Elvis Presley Cardwell had a new set. He was sitting on the trailer steps when the car rolled in, as silent as a hummer, under his sycamores and stopped. It was the museum man with two colored women, one of them a child. But it was the car that interested Elvis.

“Haven’t seen one of these in years,” he said. “I don’t work on cars no more. I don’t call them little hummers cars. Sooner fool with a toaster. But this is different.” He unpinned the engine cover, and Harriet and Grissom helped him lift it away.

He was the skinniest man Harriet had ever seen. He looked like a piece of string standing up.

He whistled approvingly between blinding white teeth. “This is pottery, children.” He shut off the hydrogen on the firewall, connected a nearby battery into the ‘lube’ circuit with jumper cables, and heaved on the flywheel with a broomstick. When the crankshaft turned, it sounded like the lid on a pickle crock being slid over. He nodded; the problem was the ‘oil’ field. The reason the old pottery engines never wore out, Elvis explained to Harriet (who was the only one listening) was because the moving parts were separated by a magnetic field that kept the porcelain cylinder walls and the contra-porcelain pistons a ‘fraction of a corn husk’ apart. The circuit board that kept the field awake had popped a coil, and that’s why the engine had rattled like a basket of pots. It shouldn’t have even turned over, Cardwell said, much less fired. If they’d run it, they’d have killed it in less than a minute.

“Shame, too,” he said, “to kill something that otherwise could live forever. Let’s look under the injector board, right here, and see how old she is.”

She was twice Harriet’s age and less than half his own.

“I’d rather go to hell in a car than to heaven in a hummer,” Cardwell said.

“I don’t care what I go in,” said Yasmin. “I just have to get to Staunton tomorrow, and I have to get that car back to Nova Africa in one piece.”

Cardwell said the co-op wouldn’t have a board this old; it would have to come from New York or maybe even Charleston. However, he just might find a board in a junked corn picker that just might work; there just might be one with a hydrogen pottery engine behind a dairy barn on the old Gentry place just this side of Winchester.

Leave the car and call in the morning.

It was getting dark by the time they got back to the Shenandoah Inn in a borrowed hummer. Yasmin called Charleston to tell them about the car. “Don’t worry about it,” the motor pool manager said. “Come back on the airship. We’ll mail a board up, and somebody else can drive her down.”

“No, I think it’ll be fixed tomorrow,” Yasmin said. “Besides, I have to stop back in at my mother-in-law’s. I don’t want her to have to watch the Mars landing alone.”

Then Yasmin called Pearl to tell her they would be late.

“They’re late too, honey,” Pearl said. “Turn on your vid. There’s a big storm on Mars and they can’t go down. They’re liable to be parked all of a week in orbit.”

Oh no, Yasmin thought as she logged off and punched on the vid. She felt as if she was circling the planet with them; she wished they would go ahead and land so she could get on with her life. “Planet wide dust storm,” the woman on the vid was saying.

That settles it, Yasmin thought, scanning past. She decided to go on and tell Harriet she was pregnant, tonight.

While her mother was on the wire with Charleston, Harriet stood on the terrace outside the hotel room and scanned the mountainside with her eyes narrowed, trying to make out the trail Grissom had shown her on the map—the trail Tubman and Brown and their men had followed up the mountain on the Fourth, a hundred years ago, loaded down with weapons and cornmeal, shot and powder and dry beans, pursued by a lynch mob the size of a nation. All she could see were scarlet trees and dark green laurel, waving like pond weeds. There was a storm coming up, and the air was filled with leaves. Then suddenly there it was—the trail, revealed by three figures hurrying down the mountain on a long diagonal—day hikers, not carrying packs, trying to beat the darkness home. Just like in Dialectics class, the trail discovered itself when somebody walked on it.

Behind her she could hear her mother scanning through the vid. There was a story on about the Mars landing only hours away, but Harriet heard the finder scan past it, then double-click on eastern Kentucky quilts, ‘patterns as unchanging as the hills,’ as if anybody cared. Harriet wondered if they wrapped the dead in them, as the old-fashioned Gullahs on the Congaree River in Nova Africa still did. She bet they used pretty worn-out quilts.

She wished her mother would just let her father be gone, be dead, sail on, and quit worrying about him never coming home. Her grandmother said it was because Leon had never been buried. People were old-fashioned that way, she explained, they wanted to cover you up. But for Harriet there was nothing strange about her father sailing through space and never touching ground. She didn’t want him covered up.

It was time to get home. Harriet had wanted to have her mother to herself for just a few days, before getting back to Charleston, school, friends, family, collective. But it hadn’t been much fun. Her mother was distracted, vague, as far away as when she’d been halfway around the world, in Africa.

Maybe something had happened there. Maybe she had met a man and was going to get married. Harriet didn’t even like to think about that.

She put one foot up on the railing and looked at her new shoes. It was neat that they were from space; she bet her mother wouldn’t have gotten them if she had known. They had grown up her ankles, and when she stroked the high tops, they loosened slightly. They felt nice. The problem was, she had slept in them two nights and they still looked stupid: like gray house slippers with thick yellow soles.

She heard the finder scan back to the Mars story, double-clicking on it this time. The whole world was poised in orbit with the
Lion
, waiting on the storm that was scouring the canyonlands 1,200 klicks below.

When Harriet was at Vesey Youth Camp on Wadmalaw Island the summer before last, a woman from the Pan African Space Administration had made a special visit to show her the memorial plaque that the Second Expedition was going to put on Mars for her father. Harriet held it for a school picture. It was as light as a palm leaf, but it would last, the woman said, a million years. A million years. It was embarrassing because she had cried when they asked her to read it out loud.

“Harriet.” She heard her mother’s voice from right behind her, startling her. Then she felt her arms around her, as surprising and warm as sunlight from between clouds. “I have something to tell you. Don’t look at me so worried like that, honey. Some good news.”

If Brown and Tubman are going to free the slaves, when are they going to do it? That was the question on most folks’ minds as summer turned into the fall of ‘59. Of course, black folks and white were worrying about it from somewhat different perspectives. By September they had been on the mountain two months, and nothing had happened except for the disaster when the militia, and then the cadets, went after them. No slaves had been freed that anybody knew about. Meanwhile, federal troops—real troops and not just whiskey-tossers and hog-callers—were gathering in the Loudon Valley east of the mountain; and the slaves were waiting, watching, wondering, pondering. Freedom. What did it mean? Did it mean I had to live like the white folks? In spite of their nicer houses, I didn’t envy them their mean, pinched lives. I envied the ‘free’ black folks some, but not much. I even figured to be free myself someday, since Deihl had promised Mama and me our papers when we moved North. But it didn’t mean much to me. There were plenty of ‘free colored’ around Charles Town, and from what I had seen, a black man’s freedom in a white man’s world didn’t amount to much. My real dream, which not even Cricket knew, was to go far away, beyond the mountains, away from the black folks as well as the white, away from Virginia, from America: and I imagined that somewhere over the rainbow (which I had seen once straddling the mountain like a bridge) there was a land where people lived in peace and harmony, didn’t spit in the corners for boys to mop up; talked sweet to children; read books; didn’t fight; didn’t smell like wood smoke and horse shit. I know now it was Lebanon, a dream imparted to me along with reading by my homesick friend, the Arab—his idealized childhood Lebanon, mixed with every child’s original dream of socialism, that genetic (I insist!) utopia without which there would be no actual socialism, with all its warts, for soul-hungering man. Some but not all of this sweetness I was to find in Nova Africa, some in Cuba, some in Ireland; but all that was still a lifetime away. Meanwhile, every night the fire on the mountain burned, and the question burned in folks’ heads: If they’re going to free the slaves, when are they going to do it? Then one night something happened that struck fire to my soul and settled forever all my questions about ‘freedom.’

Cricket and I had been digging ginseng on the mountainside to trade, a perilous business since the Shenandoah’s main ‘sang’-digger, a poor white called Round Man, had claimed it all and was as jealous of his south slopes as a moonshiner of his springs. We gathered the stuff on Wednesday nights when he was at prayer meeting with his latest wife. I had been working late at Mama’s, which was so busy since the hotel at Harper’s Ferry was burned that we were serving cornbread and beans in the backyard in wooden bowls, and renting blanket rolls and a space in the barn for a quarter. Old Deihl was making money hand over fist. It put him in a good mood, and he was more willing than ever to let me ride Sees Her, since he was in a hurry to gentle and sell him. Cricket didn’t like horses in general and Sees Her in particular, though, and I always left him tied up in the locust grove at the side of the home house at Green Gables, and true enough, he seemed to belong there: a finer-looking horse than what most of the white folks arrived on. Then I would cut on down to the cabins out back, giving out one of the many signal calls Cricket and I had.