Father believed that the universe was a gigantic clockworks, brilliantly lit. But it’s not. It’s an endless sea of darkness moving beneath a dark sky, between which, isolate bits of light, we constantly rise and fall. We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another’s light to keep our own light from going out: abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water. For most of my life, surely since that day in October when I fled the field at Harpers Ferry, I have been a steadily diminishing light — until the day when I began to set down this long account, and my light flared up as it never had before. It has continued to burn brightly against the night ever since.
But now there is little left to tell, almost nothing, and soon I will learn if this has been all for naught, if this passage between the firmaments has been no more than the dying fall of a cinder into the dark waters of the swirling deep. When I have told the little that is left to tell, if I have not died by then and still have the bodily strength, I will simply put down my pencil and pick up my revolver, and I will use it to place me at my father’s side, where I have always properly belonged. If I cannot lie there next to him and my ghost cannot reside alongside his, then it will mean only that my light went out forever on that night those many long years ago at Harpers Ferry, and this account has been but a meaningless, phosphorescent flare, the memory of light, instead of the thing itself, and it will not matter.
Here, Miss Mayo, is all that I have left to tell.
I took the horse and wagon and returned from the schoolhouse to the Kennedy farm. Once there, I pulled the wagon in behind the house, well out of sight from the road, and went straight to the storage shed, where in the darkness I groped over the half-dozen wooden crates that Father and the boys had emptied before setting out, when they loaded their wagon with weapons for the slaves. They had broken most of the crates apart in the process, and it took several minutes before I found one that was intact and had its topside boards. It was a crate that had contained the long pikes, those poles with knives attached that Father had imagined would terrorize the slaveholders. The box was stoutly constructed of pine and plenty large enough for my purposes, so I carried it to the kitchen and set it by the stove. Then I commenced filling it from the huge heap of papers and books that lay untouched on the floor where I had placed them the night before.
While I was in the midst of this task, I heard a group of horsemen approach from the direction of Harpers Ferry and stop before the house. “Hello, the house!” one of them shouted. “Anyone there?”
I quickly placed the lid onto the half-filled case. Then I lifted it and carried it out the rear door of the kitchen, where, silently, carefully, as if it were a child’s coffin, I set it into the wagon bed. I climbed up on the driver’s box and sat there, waiting.
For several minutes, all was quiet. Then I heard the clump of boots on the porch at the front of the house, and someone rapped on the door. “It appears there ain’t anyone home, Cap’n!” he called back.
“No matter,” came the response. “We got most of what we come for back at the schoolhouse anyhow.” A moment later, I heard them leave.
I sat motionless for a long while, until the horse abruptly shifted her weight, signaling me to give her direction. But I had no plan. I barely had thoughts. I had spent my entire life following Father’s plans, thinking his thoughts. And at that moment, as I sat up on the wagon with the reins in my hands and my horse impatient to move on, I did not know what to do or think.
I was in considerable physical pain, for I had cut and bruised myself badly in my fall, and my clothes were torn. I was lightly armed — I had my revolver but no rifle, which I had lost in the darkness after dropping it from my treetop lookout. And I had no food or supplies or money. But I was alone. Alone, and free. The entire continent lay out there. I was a man, a white man, and could go to any place on it where no one knew me, and I could become new. I could become an American without a history and with no story to tell. I believed that then and for many years to come.
So if I had a plan, that was it. If I had a thought, that was the thought.
About the Author
RUSSELL BANKS is the author of thirteen works of fiction, including Rule of the Bone, The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction, and Continental Drift. He lives in upstate New York.
Author’s Note
This is a work of the imagination. While some of the characters and incidents portrayed here can be found in accounts of the life and times of John Brown, the famous abolitionist, they have been altered and rearranged by the author to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. These characters and incidents, despite their resemblance to actual persons and known events, are therefore the products of the author’s imagination. Accordingly, the book should be read solely as a work of fiction, not as a version or interpretation of history.
Nevertheless, the author wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the help and inspiration that he has received from Oswald Garrison Villard’s magisterial John Brown: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston, 1910), Richard Boyer’s The Legend of John Brown (New York, 1973), and Stephen Oates’s To Purge This Land with Blood, second edition (Amherst, Mass., 1984). They are excellent, deep works of biographical history. This, it bears repeating, is a work of fiction.
The author also wishes to acknowledge and thank the many people who so generously provided information, aid, and encouragement, among them: Edwin Cotter, superintendent of the John Brown Farm and Grave, in North Elba, N.Y.; Michael S. Harper; Thomas Hughes; Paul Matthews, Chuck Wachtel; Cornel West; C. K. Williams; friends and colleagues in the Creative Writing Program and African American Studies at Princeton University; Ellen Levine of the Ellen Levine Literary Agency; and, most emphatically, Robert Jones of HarperCollins Publishers.