Fire on the Mountain (7 page)

The Blue Ridge at Harper’s Ferry is low but steep, tangled with laurel and stones, and split as if by a bread knife at the gap where the Shenandoah and the Potomac join together and slice through for the seaboard. After breakfast Grissom took Yasmin and Harriet for a tour. The museum’s inertial car was big enough, but Yasmin could tell Grissom wanted to drive the university’s, so she suggested it. It took them only twenty minutes to cover the steep streets of Harper’s Ferry. There wasn’t much to see. Floods and time had done what war had failed to accomplish, and except for the guests at the Shenandoah Inn, nobody lived below the Bolivar Heights—the bluff that edged the plain to the west. There were only the stumps and shells of brick buildings from the brief boom years before the War. The treasure of the town was not in its dank stone buildings but, as John Brown had so correctly noted, its strategic situation: cradled between two forked mountain rivers where they plunge through the gap in a mountain that was straight, smooth, and almost unbroken to the south, looking to Brown and Tubman like a spear pointing at the heart of the slave South.

There was nothing in Harper’s Ferry to indicate its place in history, except the museum. Most of the John Brown memorials, Grissom told Yasmin and Harriet, were fifty miles up the Valley near Roanoke, his captured city, where he fought most of his battles, died, and, it was said, was buried on one of the peaks.

But no one knew exactly which one. “One of the interesting things about your great-grandfather’s paper is the light he sheds on that subject.” Grissom took a holo of his two visitors standing in front of the old engine house, where Brown had locked up his hostages, and they headed east for Charles Town.

The three of them sat in the wide front seat, Harriet in the middle. She seemed in a better mood, Yasmin noticed. Perhaps it was the shoes: they were no more colorful and the soles were still thick, but they had stretched a little up her ankles in a graceful curve.

Grissom stepped on the gas pedal, easing the big machine up to one hundred, enjoying the smooth rumble of the hydrogen-fired internal-combustion eight. The inertials, which ran on electric flywheel motors, made only a hum that barely changed in pitch or volume; with a top speed of ninety-five, they were steady, cheap, and safe. But unexciting. This magnificent antique roared like a corn picker when it was opened up.

“It’s wonderful,” Grissom said. “Do you drive it all the time?”

Yasmin laughed and shook her head. “The university keeps it for special occasions. I only got it because the motor pool manager’s father was a friend of my great-grandfather’s, and he convinced the school that it would be appropriate for the trip.”

“And because she’s afraid to fly,” Harriet chimed in.

“I will fly. I just don’t like to. I flew back from Africa.”

“Gritting your teeth all the way,” Harriet said.

“Still.”

“I think driving is boring,” Harriet said. “You can’t see anything but bugs and sticks.”

“Well, it’s not boring to me,” Grissom said, easing on up to 120. “I drove one of these in Chicago when I was a kid. I worked one summer for a millionaire out in Evanston. Speaking of the past, did you read the letters?”

“Most of them,” Yasmin said. She remembered going to sleep with them on her lap. As always, when she remembered her recurring dream, her heart leaped up in her breast, as if someone had come for it: then it fell back, disappointed. “What a sad story,” she said.

“I read some of them,” Harriet said. “They’re neat. But when does this Doctor Hunter meet granddaddy?”

“Keep reading, you’ll see. Tomorrow morning I’d like you both to meet the woman who loaned the letters to the museum. I promised her I would bring you by.”

“Tomorrow morning? But we have to be back in Staunton.”

“It’s the Mars landing,” Harriet said. “We’re going to watch it with Granny. Know why?”

“Of course he knows why,” Yasmin broke in.

“I know who your father was,” said Grissom. “And I know you’re proud of him. Well, let me at least show you Charles Town while you’re here.”

Yasmin had been born and raised in Nova Africa, near Savannah. Like most n’African families, hers had its roots in the South but some of its branches north of the border, in the U.S.S.A. Most black people had moved south to the new nation after Independence in 1865; but many, like Leon’s ancestors, had not. Yasmin had been to Virginia many times, but usually as Leon’s wife (and then as his widow), always at the other end of the Valley near Staunton. She had never really known the Shenandoah, flowing northward like the Nile, where her own great-granddad had been born. He had left as a boy and she had no relatives living here now, as far as she knew.

Once, after her father had died, her mother had driven her through this part of the country, but that was twenty-five years ago, before the Revolution in the U.S., and Yasmin remembered only the filthy bathrooms and twisted faces of a country at war with itself.

It seemed more peaceful now, but still not prosperous. Maybe Africa had spoiled her. Even Nova Africa had seemed provincial and a little shabby after the grand plains, sweeping highways, and soaring cities of Zimbabwe and Azania.

Charles Town was a disappointment. Livery stables are as transient as clouds in the storm of history, and there was no sign of the one where Yasmin’s great-grandfather had spent his boyhood. Yasmin had hoped Grissom would show them something more interesting than just the courthouse they had driven by the day before, but there was little to see. If Harper’s Ferry had been left behind by history, Charles Town had been worked over: everything in the town looked new.

Socialist reconstruction, having patched up the ruined cities of the U.S.S.A., was finally coming to the little county seats.

From Charles Town they drove back west, but cut south before Harper’s Ferry on a road alongside the Shenandoah. The west or Valley side of the river was gentle, golden, with wheat fields leading almost down to the water; but the east, the mountain side, was steep and wild. The river itself seemed wilder and rockier there, under the looming laurel thickets and jutting cliffs. Harriet looked up, trying to imagine what it was like for a band of men to make their way up, loaded with rifles and supplies and even wounded.

Ten klicks south of Harper’s Ferry, Grissom seemed to find what he was looking for. He turned onto a growstone bridge near a small riverside compound consisting of three trailers and a broken-down welding shop and garage. He surprised Yasmin by stopping the car in the middle of the bridge and shutting off the engine.

“This is,” he said, “or once was—Iron Bridge.”

August 10, 1859
Miss Laura Sue Hunter
Miss Colby’s School
Richmond

Dear Laura Sue:

I was very sorry to get the word about John. He was Dear to us all but dearest and closest to you, and my Heart is with you at this time. I hear from Uncle Reuben he is to be buried in Baltimore, by Aunt Clare. I will be there when they bring him from the train. War is cruelest to the Innocent. Do not fill your Heart with hatred against those who mistakenly, but irrevocably, took his Life.

Your loving and sorrowing brother,
Thomas
Philadelphia

Yasmin got out of the car while Grissom began telling the story of the Iron Bridge Massacre to Harriet, who had of course heard it in school. “Served them right,” she said. Yasmin agreed, she guessed.

Still . . .

Yasmin stared over the rail into the fast, unblinking, cold little eye of the river. She had always found the story fascinatingly cruel, almost like a fairy tale, even though it was true. At Iron Bridge the first effort to go after Brown and Tubman had met with a spectacular and horrifying defeat. A volunteer squad of Shenandoah Military Institute cadets, enthusiastic and foolish, swelled up with the arrogance of slave Virginia, had started up the mountain, led by one of their teachers with a special commission from Governor Wise (which he later tried to deny and hide). Not one had survived. They had been killed and laid out on the new iron bridge with their throats cut as a warning. That act of terror, Grissom explained to Harriet, had established in the mind of the South the seriousness of the revolt. It had given Brown and Tubman breathing space; it had discouraged volunteers. Yasmin had seen the old drawings from
Frank
Leslie’s Illustrated
, more precise and horrifying than any holo or photo could be, of the boys all arranged face up along the boards of the bridge. Throat up. The youngest of them hardly more than Harriet’s age. Her horror and pity was not only for the boys, but for those to whom was given the work of slicing their pink, new necks, one after the other, fourteen in all. She looked down at the road and expected to still see the blood splashed around, beading up the dust.

Crueler still, they had let the teacher live.

“Cruel?” Grissom had sensed her mood. “Don’t forget that these cadets were the scions of the old Virginia and Caroline slave-owning families,” he said. “Black women wiped their noses all their lives. Black men saddled their horses and shined their boots at SMI. Maybe they didn’t look so sweet and innocent to slaves.”

“Brown and Tubman’s men were mostly whites and free blacks then,” Yasmin objected. “Slaves didn’t join until later in the summer, up the Valley, nearer Roanoke.”

“Still, the army had the political viewpoint of the slave,” Grissom said enthusiastically.

It seemed an odd argument for a white Merican to be having with a black n’African, and Yasmin let it drop. She didn’t exactly disagree. Anyway, it was part of building socialism; the Mericans were trying to rectify their view of history. There were still plenty of whites who in their heart of hearts (and some not so secretly) thought Brown was the Devil incarnate. As a historian and a revolutionary, straightening out the story was Grissom’s job. And he was right: the killings struck a blow straight into the heart of old Virginia, wounding the myth of white invulnerability, the arrogance that would send armed boys after rebel slaves.

Still.

Did they cry for their mothers? Yasmin wondered, to herself. How did the knife feel in the hand? Heavy. Light. Like thunder and lightning together.

It alarmed and fascinated her that somehow her hand knew.