James McBride - The Good Lord Bird

“It’s an armory. It’s guarded!”

“By two night watchmen only.”

“How we gonna sneak out a hundred thousand guns? In a boxcar? We need ten boxcars!”

“We don’t need all of ’em. Just five thousand will do.”

“How we gonna get out the area?”

“We won’t. We slip into the nearby mountains. The slaves will hive with us once they know where we are. They will join and fight with us.”

“We don’t know the routes! Are there rivers about? Roads? Trails?”

“I know the land,” the Old Man said. “I have drawn it for you. Come inside and see.”

They reluctantly followed him and crowded into his cabin, where he unfurled a huge, canvas map on the table, the giant map I’d seen him secreting in his jacket and scrawling at and chewing the edges on from the first day I’d met him. Atop the map, labeled Harpers Ferry, were dozens of lines which showed the armory, nearby plantations, roads, trails, mountain ranges, and even the number of slaved Negroes living on nearby plantations. He’d done a lot of work, and the men were impressed.

He held the candle over the map so the men could see it, and after they looked at it for a few moments, he pointed to it and began to speak.

“This,” he said, pointing with his pencil, “is the Ferry. It is guarded by a single night watchman on either end of it. With the element of surprise, we will take them easily. Once we take them, we cut the telegraph wires here, and take the guardhouse easily, right here. The railroad tracks and the gunnery factory we hold till we load our weapons. It’s that easy. We can take the whole place in the middle of the night and be done in three hours and be gone. We gather our weapons and slip into the line of mountains”—here he pointed to his map—“that surround it. These mountains pass through Maryland, Virginia, down into Tennessee and Alabama. They’re thin passes. Too narrow for cannons, too tight for wide columns of troops to pass.”

He put the candle down.

“I surveyed these places several times. I know them like the back of my hand. I have studied them for years, before any of you were born. Once we establish ourselves in those passes, we can easily defend against any hostile action. From there, the slaves will flock to our stead, and we can attack plantations in the plains on both sides from our mountain posts.”

“Why would they join us?” Kagi asked.

The Old Man looked at him as if he’d just pulled out his teeth.

“For the same reason that this little girl”—here he pointed to me—“has risked life and limb to join us and lived out on the plains and braved battle like a man. Can’t you see, Lieutenant? If a little girl will do it, a man certainly will. They will join us ’cause we will offer them something their masters cannot: their freedom. They are thirsting for the opportunity to fight for it. They are dying to be free. To free their wives. To free their children. And the courage of one will move the next. We’ll arm the first five thousand, then move farther south, arming more Negroes as they join with the plunder and arms of the Pro Slavers we defeat as we go. As we move south, the planters will not be able to withstand their Negroes leaving. They will stand to lose everything. They will not be able to sleep at night worrying about their Negroes joining the masses that approach them from the north. They will quit this infernal institution forever.”

He placed his pencil down.

“That, in essence,” he said, “is the plan.”

You had to reckon, for an insane man, he sure knowed how to cook it up, and for the first time, the looks of doubt started to fall off the men’s faces, and that put me back to feeling chickenhearted, for I knowed the Old Man’s schemes never worked out to the dot the way he drawed them up, but he was sure to do whatever they was, anyway.

Kagi rubbed his jaw. “There are a thousand places where it can fail,” he said.

“We have already failed, Lieutenant. Slavery is an unjustifiable, barbarous, unprovoked sin before God—”

“Spare us the sermon, Pa,” Owen snapped. “We ain’t got to bite off the head of the whole thing.” He was nervous, and that was unsettling, for Owen was coolheaded and usually went along with his Pa’s ideas, no matter how corn-headed they was.

“Do you prefer that we await the outcome of moral persuasion to end slavery, son?”

“I prefers a plan that keeps me from becoming an urn in somebody’s backyard.”

There was a fire going in the cabin, and the Old Man moved to pick up a log and place it on the dying fire. He stared at the campfire as he spoke. “You is here out of your own choice,” he said. “Every one of you, including Onion,” he said, pointing to me, “a plain and simple colored girl, which should tell you something about courage, big men that you are. But if any man here feels the plan will not work, you are welcome to leave. I bear no ill will toward any man who does so, for Lieutenant Kagi is right. It is dangerous work I propose. Once the element of surprise is done, they will come at us hard. Of that there is no doubt.”

He looked ’bout. There was silence. The Old Man spoke softly now, comforting. “Don’t worry. I thought it clean through. We will make our business known to the struggling Negroes in the surrounding areas beforehand, and they will hive to us. Once that is done, we can attack the armory with even greater numbers. We will seize it in minutes, hold it long enough to load our weapons, then slip out into the mountains and be gone by the time the militia get wind of it. I has it on good word that the slaves from the surrounding counties and plantations will hive to us like bees.”

“On whose word?”

“On good word,” he said. “There are twelve hundred coloreds living at the Ferry. There’s thirty thousand coloreds within fifty miles of the Ferry, if you include Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Virginia. They will hear of our revolt, flock to us, and demand that we arm them. The Negro is primed and ready. He need only the chance. This is what we are giving him.”

“Negroes are not trained soldiers,” Owen said. “They can’t handle weapons.”

“No man needs training to fight for his freedom, son. I have prepared for that eventuality. I have ordered two thousand pikes, simple broadswords that can be wielded by any man or woman for the purpose of destroying an enemy combatant. They are stored in various warehouses and safe houses that we will pick up along route. Others we will have sent to us in Maryland. That is why I let John and Jason quit. To prepare those weapons for us before they went home.”

“It sounds easy as grazing oats the way you sell it,” Cook said, “though I am not sure I am for it.”

“If God wills it that you should stay back while the rest of us ride into history, I am not against it.”

Cook growled, “I didn’t say I was staying back.”

“I gived you an out, Mr. Cook. With full redemption for your service and no hard feelings. But should you stay, I will guard your life with as much jealousy as if it were my own. And I will do that for every man here.”

That calmed them down some, for he was still Old John Brown, and he was still fearsome. One by one, the Old Man checked their doubts. He had studied the question. He insisted the Ferry weren’t closely guarded. It weren’t a fort, but rather a factory. Weren’t but two night watchmen to take out to get into it. Should the plan fail, the place was built where two rivers, the Potomac and Shenandoah, met. Both were getaways for a quick escape. The town was remote, in the mountains, with less than 2,500 people—workers, not soldiers—living there. We’d cut the telegraph wires, and without a telegraph, it would be impossible for word of our attack to pass. The two rail lines that ran through it had a train scheduled to stop there during our attack. We’d stop that train, hold it, and if necessary use it as an extra escape route if trapped. The Negroes would help us. They were there in numbers. He had suitcases full of government numbers on Negroes. They lived in the town. They lived ’bout on plantations. They had already gotten word. Thousands would flock to our stead. In three hours it would be done. In twenty-four hours we would be gone in the mountains and safe. In and out. Easy as pie.