Fire on the Mountain (14 page)

September 26
Miss Laura Sue Hunter
Mint Springs
Staunton, Virginia

Dear Lee Little Laura Sue:

Don’t believe everything you hear. I was at exams, not at Bethel Church, though I had friends there who did indeed hear Douglass: who is hardly the Devil Incarnate as our father would have it, but only seeking that which God ordains, indeed, commands, all men to seek. Nor did he call for the blood of all Whites. Don’t listen to our father, or any slave owner, for that matter, on political matters.

I found your young Bewley’s poem very nice, though I am less given than he to regular meter. I do hope that in addition to Honor and Courage, he will consider Sentiment among Man’s estate. I look forward eagerly to meeting him in Baltimore next week, and to seeing you also. I must tell you, Lee Little Sister, in all confidence, that I, also, have met Someone, a woman (not
merely
a Lady) I have known for a while but only recently discovered in my own heart the feelings which I have not yet disclosed to her. She is from the North. I will tell all when I see you next week. Meanwhile, not a word!

On his return Payson will be passing through Staunton with my bay, Emmanuel, which was street-injured and doesn’t take to Philadelphia. Please remind our father to ask old Hosea to check his withers; he was always the best with horses. I can find no vet here who has the way with animals of our Virginia Colored.

Your Loving and Intrigued Brother,
Thomas

Grissom had been a revolutionary for forty-seven years: in wars for twenty-one, six of these overseas (he was a veteran of Berlin as well as Chicago); in prison for eleven; in peace for nine. Peace had its own difficulties. Yasmin was right. Old Mrs. Hunter was an unreconstructed racist (no surprise), and he was an opportunist for catering to her so uncritically. He could find a way to relate to the old folks in the area without accommodating himself so completely to their political backwardness. He would write to Yasmin, accept her criticism, and thank her for it. The incident had made saying good-bye a little awkward when he dropped her at Cardwell’s. She was in a hurry to get to Staunton. It was odd how childishly she dealt with her husband’s death. How easy it is to spot other people’s weaknesses!

Grissom hoped she got onto the highway before it started pouring rain. He punched on the radio and found the weather, but it sounded backward; it said the storm was finally breaking. But he could see the top of the Blue Ridge, even now, gathering clouds around it like a cloak . . . Then he realized that the weather report was not about the Shenandoah at all, but about Mars. Faraway Mars. The weather had broken and the ship was going down. Grissom would have sat in the car to hear the rest, but when he pulled into his garage in back of the museum the phone was ringing—the high-pitched, close-together rings that meant the caller was holding the ‘urgent’ button all the way down. Not bothering with his crutches for the first time in years (and amazed at how fast he could move without them), Grissom got through the door and caught it.

It was Yasmin.

“Harriet is gone,” she said.

Lee moved fast, and then he moved slow. Within a week of Quarry Road, he had filled the Valley with troops; then for another week he marched them around in circles. They arrived all at once on trains on the newly repaired track from north, south, and east (there were neither tracks nor roads through the blue wall of the Cumberlands to the west). The population of the town doubled, all with men, all of them white, most of them young and filled with a festive spirit. They were going slave hunting. There was artillery in light blue uniform from Connecticut and Ohio, for this was before the abolitionists began their work in the ranks; the Richmond Grays with their beaver hats, and North Carolina militia too; trainloads of cadets, who looked naked to me now without the black flies on their throats, though this time they would not walk point up the mountain. There was cavalry as well; and even with their own provender and smiths and spares there was profit for old Deihl, whose face showed those seams that passed for smiles in those days. Having filled Charles Town with troops, having stirred it with the steel spoon of martial ceremony, Lee let it simmer for a week. There were balls with the local debutantes (such as they were) for the billeted officers (such as they were); turkey shoots for the enlisted men; bowling on the green; horseshoes; horse races; and, new to our backward, over-the-mountain area, duels. These were not blood fights but half-load, triple-waistcoat Virginia gentleman duels—but what did we know? At first they caused quite a stir among the town boys, among whom I still included myself for such adventures as these. Three times at dawn that week there were shots on the sycamore flats near Caney Creek, and all three times the brush piles were filled with boys’ expectant eyes. What disappointment—a bar fight was bloodier than these affairs! Every morning there was drilling in the town square, and every afternoon on the outskirts, more drilling, near the Charles Town racetrack, where the bulk of the troops were tented. Lee made no secret of his plans. He was to trap Brown and Tubman on the mountain between the deep gap where the rivers plunged through, at Harper’s Ferry, and Key’s Gap, a high notch some eight miles to the south, past Iron Bridge. Lee’s second-in-command was J.E.B. Stuart, the same who was later to become infamous in the campaign of southwestern Virginia; he controlled the Loudon Valley to the east of the Blue Ridge with a smaller force. As the Federals saw it, the heavily populated eastern valleys were less hospitable to Brown even though there were more black people there, because they were slaves and afraid of the ‘abs’—unlike the free blacks of the Harper’s Ferry area, whom Lee suspected of supporting Brown. This illusion (that slaves fear freedom) cost Lee plenty; it cost him the Shenandoah Valley campaign; it cost him, in fact, Brown. Harper’s Ferry was easy enough to secure. The south side of the Potomac for two miles was blue with troops, though these were not Lee’s best, for no one thought that Brown would break that way. Meanwhile, mounted pickets covered Key’s Gap, up the hill from Iron Bridge, seasoned men with the new Henry repeaters. Brown was trapped, and Lee was playing with him. I watched all these preparations with the dumb fascination of a turkey on the stump watching the ax get fetched; that was, I think, the point of them. Looking back, I can see that Lee’s assault was as much on the sensibilities of the Africans watching and waiting as on the actual few (so far) who had picked up arms. And, of course, it was all designed to succor and reassure the whites, abolitionists as well as slavery supporters, since all (or most) were making it clear in the newspapers of the North that as much as they hated slavery (oh, none could hate it more!), they abhorred murder and insurrection worse. The whites were closing ranks while we were yet to do this. Colonel Lee was in no hurry. He had his Captain Brown and he was playing with him. I heard his strategy discussed with perfect candor at Mama’s table by cavalry sergeants and mule-skinners alike. Moving with vastly superior numbers, from east and west at once, while the gaps to the north and south were sealed, in high daylight, after a devastating cannonade, Lee intended to squeeze Brown onto the narrow mountaintop and swat him and his pitiful hundred men like a single fly. Lee’s expedition numbered 2,600 in all, of whom 900 were to ascend the Blue Ridge. It was not to be a battle; this was, in their eyes, extermination, not war. It was not a fox hunt but a mad-dog clubbing. There were no provisions to bring prisoners down. It was assumed by now that the renegade whites would not give up; and the blacks, after such an escapade, were valueless. It was over for them all. The town had a week to consider all this. Pity and scorn for Brown’s fanatical enthusiasm was balanced with admiration for Lee’s deliberation, regularity, determination, and strength. For six days we were all awaiting this great execution while Lee drilled his men and moved his artillery into place on the Bolivar Heights at the foot of the ridge. But except for the morning duels of the hungover officers (which we boys now slept through), not a shot was fired. On Friday, September 29, the Washington train brought across the newly repaired Maryland bridge a great rifled gun the size of a church steeple, riding on a flat car and covered with soldiers, newspapermen, excursionists, and boys looking for excitement; they had ridden the train all the way from Frederick, Maryland—some from Washington! The giant Ericsson gun (named after its Swedish inventor, who was along in a club car, with his own entourage) was parked on a siding near the stockyard, then moved because of the smell to the Fairgrounds on the east side of Charles Town. Clearly the plan was not only to punish Brown but punish the mountain as well for sheltering him; to knock it down. On Sunday night I stole out to Green Gables. The fire on the mountain no longer looked brave, but stupid, like the fevered eye of an idiot; like the eye of the turkey watching the ax get fetched. I wished it weren’t even there. I wished they had run away, but of course it was too late for that; there was no place to go. Since Little John, no one was slipping up the mountain; it would have made about as much sense as hiding in the muzzle of the Ericsson gun. Cricket said old man Calhoun still hadn’t reported Little John’s loss: not only was there uncertainty about the insurance claim, but there were rumors that owners of rebel slaves would be assessed for the damages caused by Brown, and perhaps even for the expense of Lee’s expedition. These rumors all, of course, turned out to be groundless. On Monday morning, October 1, at precisely 7:00 A.M., the cannonade began with the Ericsson gun firing from the siding near the Fairgrounds. I was in the barn helping Deihl with the horses, and the great boom shivered the water in my pail. It sounded like a giant door slamming shut in the sky. It was echoed by the smaller pieces at the foot of the mountain; then a distant rumble from over the mountain in the Loudon Valley. There was no more work that morning. The battle was joined.

There were signs of war everywhere, but not of humankind’s puny conflicts; the giant stones had been piled up not by Lee’s cannonade of a hundred years before, but by the slow vast collision of the continents a hundred million years before that. The mountainside discouraged thought. There was no view, no turns in the path—just a long, straight, steady tramp leading up the slope, inviting neither hurry nor rest. That was all right. Harriet didn’t feel like thinking, hurrying, or resting. She felt like walking.