Charles Johnson - Soulcatcher - And other stories

He awoke, his head pounding, in the spare bedroom of Neal Hardy, one of his Quaker friends in Pendleton. Experimentally, he tried to sit up, felt a pain — prismatic in its complexity — pierce through his chest, and fell back with a moan onto his pillow, closing his eyes. Was he still alive? He wasn't sure at first. Did he still have all his teeth? Was it night or day? One of his hands, bandaged, was badly throbbing. Although it hurt to raise his arm, he did so, then poked the index finger of his unbandaged hand into his mouth, probing until he was satisfied that, yes, all his teeth were there. He took deep, long breaths just to see if he still could. If he didn't know better, he'd swear from the throbbing ache in his legs and arms that he was back on his pallet in the slave quarters of Edward Covey, who worked his bondsmen in all weather — indeed, worked beside them sometimes so he knew how much effort a chore demanded and if a slave was slacking off — and drove his field hands until they dropped. Or, if they endured his hellish regimen, they turned to drink to dull their minds when their master was not working them or watching them in secret.

Gradually, he opened his eyes again, peering from left to right, taking in a candlestand, a fireplace directly in front of him, and away to his right Neal Hardy, who sat in a ladder-backed chair, his long face full of sorrow.

Worst of all, must hope grow dim,

And withhold her cheering beam?

Rather let me sleep and dream

Forever!

"Fred," said Hardy, "you've been out a long time. We've been worried."

"Have I? What day is this?"

"Wednesday. It's almost midnight We brought you to my home straightaway after those hooligans beat you this afternoon."

"Beat me? I barely remember it I recall a fight, but I thought I was winning. Did I give as good as I got?"

Hardy smiled. "Better, given the odds. But for a little while there I was afraid we were going to lose you. We would have lost any other man, but thank God you've got the constitution of a horse."

"A tired horse, I daresay." He struggled to sit up. Hardy quickly moved to his side, helping him as he winced, biting down on his lower lip, his eyes squeezed shut from the pain of changing his posture. "Thank you, Neal. I guess I'd better rest for a few hours before we move on to the next engagement tomorrow. Where is it?"

"Noblesville, but you're not going. I won't allow it."

"What's this now?"

"You heard me. That hand of yours is broken. And I'm not a doctor, so I pray my wife and I set it correctly. Not only do I want you in bed for the rest of the week, I'd like to have a doctor drop by in the morning to examine you for anything I might have missed. For all I know, the blows you took could prove fatal. Here now, look at me. How many fingers am I holding up?"

Actually, he wasn't sure. He squinted, seeing two, but… there was a hazy, wavering digit between them that might have been a third.

"I can count, Neal," he said, trying to dodge the examination. "And I must be in Noblesville tomorrow evening. I've been beaten before — you know that — at the hands of drunken slaveholders and other mobs drunk with hatred. They've not stopped me yet."

"No, they haven't. But I am. For a week at least." Hardy felt the orator's brow with his fingers, frowned at its warmth, then stepped toward the bedroom door. "We are not finished with Frederick Douglass. We need him too dearly to allow him to push himself into an early grave. I'll be just outside this door. Try to rest. I plan to. I'm too exhausted to even un-hitch the horses until morning—"

"Am I a prisoner then?"

"A guest! You've been on the road speaking for over a month now, traveling to five towns a week! That beating you took may be a good thing. It may be a blessing, God's way of telling you to slow down, for heaven's sake, in order to preserve yourself until this fight is over!" He paused, his voice and eyes softening. "Please do as I say. If anything happens to you, our cause will be severly impaired."

"As you wish. I'll rest"

"Good… and good night"

Something still my heart surveys,

Groping through this dreary maze;

It is Hope? — then burn and blaze

Forever!

He lay awake for hours, his body burning with injuries so varied, ranging from mild aches and tender spots to outright agony in his broken hand, that he spent close to an hour marveling at just how badly white men had hurt him this time. Perhaps Neal Hardy was right. Since his escape to New Bedford in 1838 when he was twenty years old, since changing his name from Frederick Augustus Bailey to Frederick Johnson and at last to Frederick Douglass (an abolitionist friend, Nathan Johnson, suggested "Douglass" after reading Lady of the Lake, and he settled into that new incarnation), since the day the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society discovered his gifts and engaged him as a lecturer, he had not rested. Nor had he wanted to. How could his spirit sleep as long as a single black man or woman was in chains? But was he too wounded this time? Yes, he ached from chin to calves, but despite Hardy's obvious compassion and concern for his health, it annoyed him a little whenever white men told him what to do. He'd had quite enough of their hostile — or benign — advice when he was in bondage. If they could not truly understand all he'd endured or had not walked a mile in his boots (when he had boots, which was seldom during his childhood), then how could they recommend anything to him? And besides, most of the time their advice was wrong. Like the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, which initially asked him only to describe his victimization as a slave, not launch into a devastating critique of the country as a whole— that, they told him, was the province of white men like the society's William Collins or the venerated Garrison. Stay in your place is what they were telling him, We know best. Well, they had not. Only he knew what was best for Douglass. They warned him against publishing an undisguised narrative on his life, insisting that such a document would reveal that he was Frederick Bailey, a runaway slave, and bring the slave catchers to his door. He'd thought, Damn the slave catchers, and planned one day to re-lease his account of his life anyway, and if it brought him even greater fame than white freedom fighters or black ones, would that cause tension within the movement? If so, very well. He had no time for the petty reactions of lesser men, black or white.

Leave me not a wretch confined,

Altogether lame and blind—

Unto gross despair consigned,

Forever!

Yet perhaps — just perhaps — he should stay abed long enough to heal a little. If he needed convalescence it would give him time to write. His thoughts began to drift to possible subjects and alighted on the class of forty slaves he once taught to read on Sundays at the home of a free colored man. He was breaking the law, doing that. How might he describe them when time permitted him to turn to the narrative he hoped to compose?…

They were noble souls; they not only possessed loving hearts, but brave ones. We were linked and interlinked with each other… I believe we would have died for each other. We never undertook to do anything, of any importance, without a mutual consultation… We were one… When I think that these precious souls are to-day shut up in the prison-house of slavery, my feelings overcome me, and I am almost ready to ask, "Does a righteous God govern the universe? and for what does he hold the thunders in his right hand, if not to smite the oppressor, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the spoiler? "