Fire on the Mountain (11 page)

This particular night Cricket and I were just coming back from our hillside piracy with a half a tow sack filled with Round Man’s ‘sang’ when we heard a bell ringing. It was the courthouse bell in Charles Town, almost three miles away. Then we heard another bell from Harper’s Ferry, four miles to the north. One deep and one deeper. My first thought was to worry about Mama, for the bells were fire bells, but we found all the folks standing in front of the home house, on the high ground, muttering and milling around, looking off toward town. One old man called Uncle Tom said with a wide, sly grin: “It’s Brown and Tubman. They burnt the courthouse. Brown and Tubman. Burnt the courthouse.” He said it over and over as if it were a stick he was whittling. I asked him which courthouse, and how did he know; but at that moment we heard a lone horse, and a white man rode up on a lathered, sorry-looking pony waving an old bowlprimed buggy pistol at the sky and hollering out: “They’ve burnt the church and the courthouse at the Ferry, and they’re a-coming this way. An army of niggers a-coming this way.” I guess he thought he was Paul Revere until he calmed down and realized who he was talking to, and his face went cold. “Where’s the white folks?” he demanded. “Where’s the old man?” he asked Cricket (referring to old man Calhoun, who owned Green Gables). Cricket was never first to respond when white folks asked a question; he had a way of stepping back, out of his grin, so that he was gone but the grin was still hanging there, almost visible in the air. It infuriated white folks and they didn’t know why. “They all in the house, mister, sir,” Uncle Tom called out. “Well, you all get back where you belong, you hear?” our Paul Revere said. He wheeled and rode toward the house with Uncle Tom and one other following to take his horse. He hit the porch with his boots clattering and started hammering on the door with his gun butt, looking over his shoulder, until they let him in. Meanwhile Uncle Tom tied the horse to the porch rail. By now the sky to the west, in the direction of Charles Town, was reddening, and I could hear, or thought I could hear, thunder. Cricket had stepped back into his grin and he shushed me: the thunder was horses, far off, coming closer. We thought for sure it was paddy rollers. All the slaves started melting back into the darkness, and Cricket pulled me back into the shadows of the big elms, but I didn’t need pulling. Horses meant white men, and we knew they would be out for blood tonight if their courthouse was burned. Then they rode into my life like absolute thunder: for it was not the paddy rollers but John Brown’s men. I looked, but I could not pick out either him or Tubman. I learned later that it was Kagi who led these early raids. There were sixteen of them, mounted on fair-to-good horses, with one mount doubled. They all held identical Sharps carbines at the ready, blackened with soot so they wouldn’t gleam; and they were all masked. They all had black faces, but several had white hands showing through the laid-on soot. Oh, great-grandson, they were smart! They were bold. I had never seen so many black men on horseback, carrying such weapons. But the most astonishing thing of all was, they carried a flag—a new flag, an unknown flag. It was as big as a sail, and green and black and red in broad stripes, like Ahmad’s of the Sudan or Garibaldi’s flag of Italy (though I had never seen either at the time); all I knew was that it was not the American flag and the man carrying it was black like me. He held it in one hand on a long pole braced against his saddle horn, and it whipped in the wind he made as he rode it around the yard once, twice, fast, for all of us to see. Well, the slaves were coming out of the shadows now! We heard the windows scraping shut in the house behind us while we slaves gathered in the yard at gunpoint; there must have been twenty of us in all. I’ve never seen men and women so eager to be held at gunpoint, even fetching their children for the honor. The horses stood stamping and blowing in the dust while the rebels sent two of us out back with a rider to empty the smokehouse; it was the end of summer, and all they found were two of last year’s hams (which the slaves had neglected to steal themselves). Somebody else came up with two sacks of yellow cornmeal. We only heard one sound from the house—a window scraping slowly open. In a flash an abolitionist turned and fired; a bullet whined off the slate roof, and the window slammed shut again. No more was seen or heard from the home house. Brown’s men were all silent except for one African who barked out orders and made no attempt to explain their actions. I understood right away that they were robbing us at gunpoint so none of us could be accused of helping them, protecting us not just from the whites (who were too scared to be watching anyway) but from the traitors among us. They demanded horses, and Uncle Tom delivered up Paul Revere’s pony without hesitation. I admit I hesitated for a moment, but only a moment, before I went to the locust grove and pulled Sees Her from the shadows; and without a tear (those came later, on command, for Deihl and his belt-whip) I handed the reins to the rider who was doubled up, who obligingly held a Sharps in my face. Then he did the strangest thing: he bent down and his rifle touched my cheek, like a cold little pat, and I burst into tears! Cricket thought he had hurt me and pulled me back angrily, cocking his fist and swearing at the man. But I wasn’t hurt; I wasn’t scared. The man behind this rider was wounded; he held his side and groaned as he slid off the back of his mount, and Uncle Tom helped him onto Sees Her. I patted his long old cold nose fondly and backed away, never to see him again. He was killed at Signal Knob. Then they were gone. I don’t remember them riding away, but I remember their hoof beats and someone shouting, “Fire!” Folks were banging on the door of Green Gables while others milled around in the darkness, confused. Somebody in the house was firing shots at the sky out a window while a few shadowy figures threw hay bales against the smoldering woodshed at the side of the house. “Good Lord, Miss Ann, they set the house afire!” It was burning (though it was to be put out and didn’t truly burn until later in the war). It wasn’t Brown’s men who had started the fire, though of course they were blamed. Equally characteristic of the confusion of the times was that, collectively at least, the same Africans who set the house on fire, helped put it out. Cricket was shaking me by the shoulders: “Did he hurt you? Did you see those guns? Did you see that flag? Are you crying because they took your old horse?”

“It wasn’t an old horse,” I said. Tears that I could not understand until decades later were streaming down my face. I had seen freedom and, yes, great-grandson, I wanted it. Bad. Though I was only twelve, youth and age drink from the same deep pool, and I knew then, as now, the sorrow in the heart of joy: I knew that I was saying good-bye not only to my horse but to my mother and my childhood as well. I rode off with those horsemen, and I am riding with them still.

One of the goals of the U.S.S.A.’s second Five Year Plan (1955-60) was to reduce dependency on Canadian and Menominee small grain, and much of the former pastureland in the northern Shendandoah was golden with wheat. The valley opened out between Charles Town and Martinsburg, and it was like setting out on a golden sea.

“It’s beautiful from an airship,” Grissom said.

“Wouldn’t know,” Yasmin said.

She had called, but the car wasn’t ready. Afternoon for sure, Mr. Cardwell had said. Since they had to wait around all morning anyway, Grissom was driving her in his little hummer to Martinsburg to meet Laura May Hunter, the owner of the Hunter letters. Harriet had stayed behind. To sleep late, Yasmin said. And to read.

“And watch vid?” Grissom ventured.

“I guess. The dust storm on Mars will be all over the news today. At least it will hold things up so we can get to Staunton, and Leon’s mother won’t have to watch the landing alone. I suppose you think I’m totally reactionary and neurotic for never talking about it.”

“Not really,” said Grissom.

“Well, I am. I guess.”

“I’ve been thinking about your situation,” Grissom said. “It’s hard enough to lose somebody, but when they’re famous like that, you lose them but they’re not gone. They’re everybody else’s. They’ve been expropriated, nationalized.”

Yasmin laughed grimly. “I never thought of it like that. Isn’t that sort of a weird way to look at a relationship?”

“I bet it’s different for Harriet, though,” Grissom went on. “I bet it doesn’t hurt her as much as it does you. It would probably do you good to talk about it yourself.”

“I know,” Yasmin said. “Actually, she and I had . . . a little talk last night.”

Unlike Harper’s Ferry silently commotioned by the shadows of airships sliding overhead, Martinsburg wasn’t on the way to anywhere. The only things sliding over were clouds. It was a flat, bustling little city north of the Potomac, where the valley widened out so that the mountains weren’t visible on either side. Yasmin found it ugly. Socialism to the Mericans apparently meant that the new buildings should be all the same size, shape, and color, like soldiers in uniform; and in Martinsburg many of the buildings were new. In Nova Africa that phase had lasted only a few years, but now even those turn-of-the-century buildings seemed charming in their naive sameness.

Maybe I’m just homesick, Yasmin thought. She was flooded with a sudden desire, almost frightening in its intensity, to see her little wood-frame ochre house on the canal in Charleston.

They stopped to top off the battery, and Grissom phoned the old lady’s house. Yasmin noticed that people down here talked a little more like Grissom and a little less like her mother-in-law. The African-softened accent of the border was noticeably beginning to give way to the harsh Northern twang.

But Laura May Hunter still lived on the border. The first thing Yasmin saw when the uniformed day nurse let her and Grissom into the little house was a tinted picture of Abraham Lincoln on the wall.

Lincoln was a Whig, backed by U.S. capital, who had organized a fifth column of Southern whites to support an invasion of Nova Africa in 1870, right after the Independence War. If the whites couldn’t keep the slaves, they at least wanted the land back. Though the invaders had been routed at the Battle of Shoat’s Bend without crossing the Cumberland River, ‘One nation indivisible’ had become a rallying cry for white nationalists on both sides of the border. The next five years, 1870-75, were as close to a civil war as Nova Africa was to see. When it began, the new nation south of the Tennessee River was 42 percent white; when it ended, it was 81 percent black. In the U.S., veterans and descendants of the ‘Exitus’ formed the racist backbone of the rightist movements for years: in the Bible Wars of the 1920s, the Homestead Rebellion, even the Second Revolutionary War of ‘48. In Nova Africa the whites who embraced (or made their peace with) socialism were called ‘comebacks’—even if they had never left—and Lincoln was no hero to them; but before his body had even been cut down in 1871, he had become a legend among the border whites in Kentucky, Virginia, and parts of Missouri.

Apparently he still was.

Yasmin pointed the picture out to Grissom, who nodded, then shrugged. “The Lost Cause,” he whispered.

Following Grissom, who was following the nurse, Yasmin entered a dark parlor and sat in one of three floral-print chairs while the nurse went out with a wheelchair, one of three parked in a row in the corner. “She doesn’t have the same politics as her ancestor,” Grissom whispered. To say the least, Yasmin thought, beginning to wonder what was the purpose of this visit. The room was like a shrine to white supremacy. A painting showed Andrew Jackson strutting under a twenty-six-star flag across a field of dying Creek and Cherokee. On an end table several books sat upright between harp bookends:
The Holy Bible
; Palgrave’s
Golden
Treasury
; Walker’s
Sea to Shining Sea
; Emerson’s
Lament for a
Lost America
;
Gone With the Wind
; and one title that caught Yasmin’s eye,
John Brown’s Body
. She pulled it out far enough to see a lurid picture of a hanged man on the cover, then shoved it back just as the nurse wheeled her patient into the room. Above the lumpy sofa another Lincoln, this one a holo, stared down with big, mournful, calculating hound eyes.