The Good Lord Bird (22 page)

“I reckons your oration's done drove me to thirst,” I said. “I wonders if you have some libations around in one of these cabinets here that would help loosen up my gibbles and put me in the right understanding of some of your deepest comminglings about our peoples.”

“By God, pardon my rudeness! I've just the thing!” he said. “Would that I had thought of that first.” He fair dived for his liquor cabinet and pulled out a tall bottle and two tall glasses, pouring me a tall one and a short one for himself. He didn't know but that I could drink like a man, having already gulped a bit of his hot sauce without his knowing and having absorbed rummy sauce with Pro Slave rebels out west who could hoist a barrel of whiskey down their throats and see double without a hitch. Even your basic pioneer settler church woman out west could outdrink any soft Yank who ate food stored in jars and cabinets and prepared in a hot stove. They could drink him right under the table on the spot.

He shoved the tall glass of whiskey at me and hoisted the short glass for himself.

“Here. Let us toast to the education of a country girl who learns about the plights of our people from its greatest orator,” he said. “Careful now, for this is strong.” He turned his glass to his talking hole and drunk it down.

The effect of that whiskey hitting his gizzards was altogether righteous. He sat up as if electrified. It throwed him. He shook and rattled a bit. His large mane of hair stood on end. His eyes growed wide. He seemed sotted right off. “Whew. That's a sip, a sot, and a mop!”

“Why, you is right,” I said. I drunk mine's down and placed the empty glass on the table. He stared at the empty glass. “Impressive,” he grumbled. “You means business, you little harlot.” He filled both glasses again, this time filling both to the brim.

“How's about one for the plights of our people in the South who ain't here to hear your speech on 'em?” I said, for I aimed to get pixilated, and his whiskey was weak. He poured another and I drunk mine down again.

“Hear, hear,” he said, and he followed suit, downing his a second time and looking bleary-eyed.

Mine's was gone, but I growed to like the taste. “What about the pets who is in slavery, too, suffering in all the heat and cold without your word on 'em?” I said. He poured and I downed it again.

Well, that surprised him, seeing me throw that essence down so easy. See, I learned my drinking out on the prairie of Kansas and Missouri with redshirts, Pro Slavers, and abolitionists, of which even the women could drain a gallon or three and not get two-fisted so long as somebody else was pouring. It pushed his confidence a bit, seeing a girl outdo him. He couldn't stand it.

“Surely,” he said. He refilled both glasses again. “Preach it, my country waif, sing that they needs to hear me everywhere in the world!” He was getting addled now, all his fancy prattling started to drop off him like raindrops bouncing off a roof, and the country in him begun to come out. “Nothin' like a spree and a jag then a bout!” he barked, and he poured that weepy, sorry, tea-tasting willowy whiskey down his red lane one more time. I followed him.

Well, we just went on like that. We run through that bottle and then runned into a second. The more stupefied he got, the more he forgot about the hanky-panky he had in mind and instead germinated on what he knowed—orating. First he orated on the plight of the Negro. He just about wore the Negro out. When he was done orating on them, he orated about the fowl, the fishes, the poultry, the white man, the red man, the aunties, uncles, cousins, the second cousins, his cousin Clementine, the bees, the flies, and by the time he worked down to the ants, the butterflies, and the crickets, he was stone-cold, sloppy, clouded-up, sweet-blind drunk, whereas yours truly was simply buzzing, for that tea was weaker than bird piss, though when you drunk it by volume, it growed more to your liking and tasted better each lick. By the third bottle of essence, he had gone to pot completely, tripping over his oration and skunking about the birds and bees, which was the point of it all, I reckon, for while I was not even half-mud-eyed, he was bent on not being outdrunk by a girl. But being the great leader that he was, he never let go of himself, though he seemed to lose his fancy for me. The more bleary-eyed he got, the more he talked like a right regular down-home, pig-knuckle-eatin' Negro. “I had a mule once,” he bawled, “and she wouldn't pull the hat off your head. But I loved that damn mule. She was a stinkin' good mule! When she died, I rolled her in the creek. I would'a buried her, but she was too heavy. A fat thousand-pounder. By God, that mule could single-trot, double-trot. . . .” I rather fancied him then, not in the nature-wanting sort of a way, but knowing that he was a good soul, too muddled to be of much use. But after a while I seen my out, for he was off the edge, wasted and looped beyond redemption, and couldn't hurt me now. I got up. “I got to go,” I said.

He was setting in the middle of the floor by then, his suspenders off, clasping the bottle. “Don't marry two women at once,” he managed to burble. “Colored or white, it'll whip you scandalous.”

I made for the door. He took one final dive for me as I made for it, but fell on his face.

He looked up at me, grinning sheepishly as I opened the door, then said, “It's hot in here. Open da winder.” Then laid his mighty Negro head, with his mighty hair like a lion's mane, down flat on his face, and was out cold, snoring when I quietly took my leave.

Smelling Like Bear

I
didn't tell the Old Man about his friend's exploits. I hated to disappoint him and it didn't seem proper. Besides, once the Old Man made up his mind about somebody, nothing could change him. If the Old Man liked somebody, it didn't matter whether they was heathen or reckless or a boy sporting life as a girl. So long as they was against slavery, that was good enough.

He left Mr. Douglass's house roaring pleased, which meant his face weren't scrunched up like a prune and his mouth weren't closed like a pair of tight britches. That was unusual for him. “Mr. Douglass gived me his word on something important, Onion,” he said. “That is good news indeed.” We loaded onto a westbound train to Chicago, which didn't make sense, for Boston was the other way, but I weren't going to question him. As we settled in for the ride, he proclaimed loudly so that all the passengers to hear, “We is aiming to change in Chicago for horses and wagon to Kansas.”

We click-clacked along for nearly a day and I fell asleep. A few hours later, the Old Man shook me awake. “Grab our bags, Onion,” he whispered. “We got to jump.”

“Why, Captain?”

“No time for questions.”

I cast a glance outside and it was nearly dawn. In the train car, the rest of the passengers was dead asleep. We moved to a seat near the car's edge and lollygagged there till the train stopped to take on water, then jumped off. We hid in the thickets on the side of the tracks a good while, waiting for the engine to get up steam and roll again, the Old Man with his hand on one of his seven-shooters. Only when the train pulled away did his hand drop off his hardware.

“Federal agents is tracking us,” he said. “I want them thinking I'm out west.”

I watched the train pull away slowly. It was a long stretch of straight track up the mountains, and as the train huffed up it, the Old Man stood up, dusted himself off, and stared at it a long time.

“Where are we?”

“Pennsylvania. These is the Allegheny Mountains,” he said, pointing at the winding mountains in the direction of the train, which struggled up the straight track to a winding curve. “This was my boyhood home.”

That was the only time I ever heard the Old Man refer to his growing-up years. He watched the train till it was a tiny dot in the mountains. When it was gone, he took a long look around. He looked downright troubled.

“This ain't no way for a general to be living. But now I know why the Lord gived me a hankering to see my old home. See these mountains?” He pointed around.

I couldn't see nothing
but
mountains, and I said, “What about 'em, Captain.”

He pointed to the wide passages and craggy cliffs all around us. “A man can hide in these passes for years. There's plenty game. Plenty timber for shelter. An army of thousands couldn't dig out a small army that's well hidden. God pressed His thumb against the earth and made these passages for the poor, Onion. I ain't the first to know it. Spartacus, Toussaint-Louverture, Garibaldi, they all knowed it. It worked for them. They hid thousands of soldiers that way. These tiny passages will entrench hundreds of Negroes against an enemy of thousands. Trench warfare. You see?”

I didn't see. I was fretting that we was standing out in the cold in the middle of no place, and come night, it'd be even colder. I weren't liking that idea. But, being that he never asked my opinion, I told him truthfully, “I don't rightly know 'bout them things, Captain, having never been in no mountains myself.”

He looked at me. The Old Man never smiled, but the gray eyes got soft a minute. “Well, you'll be in 'em soon enough.”

We weren't far from Pittsburgh, turns out. We followed the tracks all day back down the mountain to the nearest town, waited, and caught a train to Boston. On the train, the Old Man announced his plan. “I got to raise money by speechifying. It ain't nothing to it. It's just a show. After I raise enough chips, we'll head out west again with a full purse to gather the men and raise the hive in our fight against the infernal institution. Don't tell nobody nothing 'bout our purpose in the meantime.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“And I might ask you to tell some of our donors about your life of deprivation and starvation as a slave. Being hungry and all. Whipped scandalous, and them type of things. You can tell them that.”

I didn't want to confess to him I weren't never hungry as a slave, nor was never whipped scandalous. Fact is, only time I was hungry and eating out of garbage barrels and sleeping out in the cold was when I was free with him. But it weren't proper to say it, so I nodded.

“And while I gives the show,” he said, “you must watch the back of the hall for any federal agents. That's important. They is warm on us now.”

“What do they look like?”

“Hmm. I reckon they got oily hair and is done up in proper clothing. You'll see 'em. Don't worry. I done arranged everything. Yours won't be the only eyes watching. We'll have plenty help.”

True to his word, we was met up at the Boston train station by two of the finest, richest-looking white fellers I ever seen. They treated him like a king, fed us well, and drug him along to a couple of churches for some speechifying. He pretended he weren't for it at first, but they insisted it was already arranged—and he went along as though it come as a surprise. At the churches he gived boring speeches to crowds of white folks who wanted to hear all about his adventures fighting out west. I never been one for speeching and carrying on, unless course there's joy juice or paying money involved, but I must say that while the Old Man was hated out on the plains, he was a star back east. They couldn't get enough of his stories about the rebels. You would'a thunk that every Pro Slaver, including Dutch, Miss Abby, Chase, and all them other low drummers, scammers, four-flushers, and pickpockets, who mostly lived off pennies and generally didn't treat the Negro any worse than they treated each other, was a bunch of cranks, heathens, and drunks who runned around murdering one another while the Free Staters spent all day setting in church at choir practice and making paper cutout dolls on Wednesday nights. Three minutes into his talk, the Old Man had them high-siddity white folks hollering bloody murder against the rebels, nigh shouting against slavery. He weren't much of a speaker, to be honest, but for once he got the wind in his sails about our Dear Maker Who Restoreth Our Fortunes, he got 'em going, and the word spread fast, so by the time we hit the next church, all he had to say was, “I'm John Brown from Kansas, and I's fighting slavery,” and they roared. They called for them rebels' heads, announced they'd trounce 'em, bounce 'em, kill 'em, deaden 'em where they stood. Some of the women broke into tears once the Old Man spoke. It made me a bit sad, truth be to tell it, to watch them hundreds of white folks crying for the Negro, for there weren't hardly ever any Negroes present at most of them gatherings, and them that was there was doodied up and quiet as a mouse. It seemed to me the whole business of the Negro's life out there weren't no different than it was out west, to my mind. It was like a big, long lynching. Everybody got to make a speech about the Negro but the Negro.

—

If the Old Man was hiding from a federal agent, he had a strange way of showing it. From Boston to Connecticut, New York City, Poughkeepsie, and Philadelphia, we done one show after another. It was always the same deal. He'd say, “I'm John Brown from Kansas, and I's fighting slavery,” and they'd howl. We collected quite a bit of money in this fashion, with me movin' 'bout the hall passing the hat. Sometimes I collected as much as twenty-five dollars, sometimes more, sometimes less. But the Old Man made it clear to all them followers that he was planning to head back west to fight slavery, clean, in his own fashion. Some questioned him about how he planned to do it, how he planned to fight slavery and all, who he was gonna do it with, and so forth. They put the question to him ten times, twenty times, in every town.
“How you gonna fight the Pro Slavers, Captain Brown? How you gonna conduct the war?”
He didn't tell a straight-out fib. Rather he bounced around the question. I knowed he weren't going to tell them. He never told his men or even his own sons his plans. If he weren't tellin' his own people, he weren't tellin' no group of strangers who throwed him a quarter apiece. Truth is, he didn't trust nobody with his plans, especially his own race. “These house-born city-grubbers is good for talk only, Onion,” he muttered. “Talk, talk, talk. That's all they do. The Negro has heard talk for two hundred years.”

I could'a heard it another two hundred years the way I was living, for I was mostly satisfied in them times. I had the Old Man to myself, and we lived high. I ate well. Slept well. In feather beds. Traveled on trains in white folks' compartments. Them Yanks treated me fine. They didn't no more notice me of being a boy under that dress and bonnet than they would notice a speck of dust in a room full of cash. I was simply a Negro to them. “Where did you find her?” was the question most asked of the Old Man. He'd shrug and say, “She is one of the many multitudes of enshackled persons whom I has freed in God's name.” Them women fussed over me something fierce. They oohed and ahhed and gived me dresses, cakes, bonnets, powder, ear loops, pompons, feathers, and gauze. I was always wise enough to keep silent around white folks in them days, but there weren't no call for me to talk nohow. There ain't nothing gets a Yankee madder than a smart colored person, of which I reckon they figured there was only one in the world, Mr. Douglass. So I played dumb and tragic, and in this manner I managed to finagle a full set of boy's pantaloons, shirt, jacket, and shoes, plus twenty-five cents from a woman in Connecticut who sobbed when I told her I was aiming on freeing my enslaved brother, of which I had nar one. I hid those clothes in my gunnysack for my own purpose, for I always had my eye on movement, always kept myself ready to roll. In the back of my mind was the notion that the Old Man would one day be deadened by somebody, for he was a fool about dying. He'd say, “I'm on God's clock, Onion. I'm prepared to die fighting against the infernal institution,” which was fine for him but not for me. I always made ready for the day I'd be on my own.

We slung along like that for a few weeks till spring approached, and the Old Man begun pining for the prairie. Them city parlor halls and speakings was wearing him down. “I'd like to go back west to smell the spring air and fight the infernal institution, Onion,” he said, “but we still has not made enough yet to raise our army. And there is still one special interest I must tend to here.” So instead of leaving from Philadelphia the way he planned, he decided to make a second pass at Boston before heading west for good.

They had him set up at a big hall there. His handlers had primed the thing. There was a fine, mighty crowd standing outside, waiting to be let in, which meant much money to be collected. But they delayed it. Me and the Old Man was standing behind the big organ pipes in the pulpit, waiting for the crowd to come in, when the Old Man asked one of his handlers who was standing about, “What's the delay for?”

The man was in a tizzy. He seemed scared. “A federal agent from Kansas has come to this area to arrest you,” he said.

“When?”

“No one knows when or where, but someone spotted him at the train station this morning. You want to cancel today's event?”

Oh, that primed the Old Man. That drug him out. He loved a fight. He touched his seven-shooters. “He better not show his face in here,” he said. And the others standing around allowed that they agreed, and promised that if the agent showed himself, why, he'd be jumped and shackled. But I had no trust in them Yanks. They weren't uncivilized like the raw Yanks out west, who would knock you cold and drug you along from a stirrup by one boot and beat you something scandalous like a good Pro Slaver would. These Yanks was civilized.

“There will be no arrest in here today,” the Old Man said. “Open the doors.”

They ran and done as he said, and the crowd filed in. But before he walked out to the pulpit to speak, the Captain pulled me aside and gived me warning. “Stand along the far wall and watch the room,” he said. “Keep your eyes open for that federal agent.”

“What do a federal agent look like?”

“You can smell him. A federal man smells like bear, for he uses bear grease to oil his hair and lives indoors. He don't cut stove wood or plow a mule. He'll be clean looking. Yellow and pale.”

I looked into the hall. Seemed like about five hundred folks out there fit that description, not including the women. The Old Man and his boys had taken down a bear or two in our travels, but other than eating the meat and using the fur to warm my gizzards, weren't nothing I could remember about the bear smell. But I said, “What do I do if I see him?”

“Don't say nothing or interrupt my talking. Just wave the Good Lord feather in your bonnet.” That was our sign, see. That feather he gived me from the Good Lord Bird, which I gived to Frederick, and got back from Frederick after he died. I kept that thing stuffed in my bonnet flush to my face.

I allowed that I would do as he said, and he went up to the pulpit while I moved into the room.

He walked up to the podium wearing both his seven-shooters and his broadsword with a look on his face that showed he was ready to crust over on some evil. When the Old Man got to boiling and was ready to throw hot grits around and raise hell, he wouldn't get excited. He'd go the other way. He'd calm up, get holy, and his voice, normally flat like the plains, would get high and tight, curvy and jagged sharp, like the Pennsylvania mountains he favored. First thing he said was, “I has word a federal agent is on my tail. If he is present, let him show himself. I will meet him with an iron fist right here.”