"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?"
He sat bolt upright in bed, the sudden move sending pain through his back. But, no! He must not rest. They were still in bondage, those others, suffering like the slave in George Moses Horton's tragic poem. Waiting for him…
Heaven! in whom can I confide?
Canst thou not for all provide?
Condescend to be my guide
Forever!
With an effort that brought beads of glistening sweat to his forehead, he climbed down from the bed, swinging his feet over the side first, then standing. The room spun. He steadied himself by gripping the ladder-backed chair with his good hand. (Would the injured one, he wondered, ever heal?) His clothes were on the chair. Slowly, he pulled them on with one hand. Given his injuries, dressing took an hour. When he was fully clothed, he padded quietly to the bedroom door, opened it cautiously, and found Hardy just outside the room, where he'd promised to be, but sleeping, his arms crossed over his chest and head tilted forward.
He tipped past him, exited through the house's rear door, and made his way to Hardy's carriage. The horses were still hitched to it, hardly a situation his host would have allowed under normal circumstances, but Lord knew they'd had an extraordinary day in Pendleton. He pulled himself up onto the seat. He took the reins in his left hand, snapped them, and geed the horses out onto the dark road. If he drove through the night and morning surely he would be in Noblesville in time for his next speech: yet another nail driven into slavery's casket. And if his death delivered his loved ones to freedom one day sooner, then so be it. Hardy, he supposed, would be upset when he awakened, discovering him and his horses gone. But this Quaker friend would know where to find him. Possibly he would follow him to Noblesville, arriving just toward the end of his engagement — a little late, as white men fighting oppression often were. And perhaps he would understand why his guest left. If Hardy did not, more's the pity, for, as he drove the horses on through the darkness, he did not have a spare moment to explain. Or to wait for white men — even the good ones — to catch up to him.
And when this transient life shall end,
Oh, may some kind, eternal friend,
Bid me from servitude ascend,
Forever!
The Mayor's Tale
ONCE UPON A TIME in a nation not very old the people of a large, northeastern city awoke one morning and discovered to their surprise (though they should have seen it coming) that something had changed in their lives.