I was a grown man before I knowed there weren’t no book of Heziekial in the Bible. Nor was there any Captain Ahab. Fact is, Pa couldn’t read a lick, and only recited Bible verses he heard white folks tell him.
Now, it’s true there was a movement in town to hang my Pa, on account of his getting filled with the Holy Ghost and throwing hisself at the flood of westward pioneers who stopped to lay in supplies at Dutch Henry’s—speculators, trappers, children, merchants, Mormons, even white women. Them poor settlers had enough to worry ’bout what with rattlers popping up from the floorboards and breechloaders that fired for nothing and building chimneys the wrong way that choked ’em to death, without having to fret ’bout a Negro flinging hisself at them in the name of our Great Redeemer Who Wore the Crown. In fact, by the time I was ten years old in 1856, there was open talk in town of blowing Pa’s brains out.
They would’a done it, I think, had not a visitor come that spring and got the job done for ’em.
Dutch Henry’s sat right near the Missouri border. It served as a kind of post office, courthouse, rumor mill, and gin house for Missouri rebels who come across the Kansas line to drink, throw cards, tell lies, frequent whores, and holler to the moon ’bout niggers taking over the world and the white man’s constitutional rights being throwed in the outhouse by the Yankees and so forth. I paid no attention to that talk, for my aim in them days was to shine shoes while my Pa cut hair and shove as much johnnycake and ale down my little red lane as possible. But come spring, talk in Dutch’s circled ’round a certain murderous white scoundrel named Old John Brown, a Yank from back east who’d come to Kansas Territory to stir up trouble with his gang of sons called the Pottawatomie Rifles. To hear them tell it, Old John Brown and his murderous sons planned to deaden every man, woman, and child on the prairie. Old John Brown stole horses. Old John Brown burned homesteads. Old John Brown raped women and hacked off heads. Old John Brown done this, and Old John Brown done that, and why, by God, by the time they was done with him, Old John Brown sounded like the most onerous, murderous, low-down son of a bitch you ever saw, and I resolved that if I ever was to run across him, why, by God, I would do him in myself, just on account of what he done or was gonna do to the good white people I knowed.
Well, not long after I decided them proclamations, an old, tottering Irishman teetered into Dutch Henry’s and sat in Pa’s barber chair. Weren’t nothing special ’bout him. There was a hundred prospecting prairie bums wandering around Kansas Territory in them days looking for a lift west or a job rustling cattle. This drummer weren’t nothing special. He was a stooped, skinny feller, fresh off the prairie, smelling like buffalo dung, with a nervous twitch in his jaw and a chin full of ragged whiskers. His face had so many lines and wrinkles running between his mouth and eyes that if you bundled ’em up, you could make ’em a canal. His thin lips was pulled back to a permanent frown. His coat, vest, pants, and string tie looked like mice had chewed on every corner of ’em, and his boots was altogether done in. His toes stuck clean through the toe points. He was a sorry-looking package altogether, even by prairie standards, but he was white, so when he set in Pa’s chair for a haircut and a shave, Pa put a bib on him and went to work. As usual, Pa worked at the top end and I done the bottom, shining his boots, which in this case was more toes than leather.
After a few minutes, the Irishman glanced around, and, seeing as nobody was standing too close, said to Pa quietly, “You a Bible man?”
Well, Pa was a lunatic when it come to God, and that perked him right up. He said, “Why, boss, I surely is. I knows all kinds of Bible verses.”
The old coot smiled. I can’t say it was a real smile, for his face was so stern it weren’t capable of smiling. But his lips kind of widened out. The mention of the Lord clearly pleased him, and it should have, for he was running on the Lord’s grace right then and there, for that was the murderer Old John Brown hisself, the scourge of Kansas Territory, setting right there in Dutch’s Tavern, with a fifteen-hundred-dollar reward on his head and half the population in Kansas Territory aiming to put a charge in him.
“Wonderful,” he said. “Tell me. Which books in the Bible do you favor?”
“Oh, I favors ’em all,” Pa said. “But I mostly like Hezekiel, Ahab, Trotter, and Pontiff the Emperor.”
The Old Man frowned. “I don’t recollect I have read those,” he said, “and I have read the Bible through and through.”
“I don’t know ’em exact,” Pa said. “But whatever verses you know, stranger, why, if it would please you to share them, I would be happy to hear ’em.”
“It would please me indeed, brother,” said the stranger. “Here’s one: Whosoever stoppeth his ear at the cry of the Lord, he also shall cry himself.”
“Hot goodness, that’s a winner!” Pa said, leaping into the air and clapping his boots together. “Tell me another.”
“The Lord puts forth his hand and touches all evil and kills it.”
“That warms my soul!” Pa said, leaping up and clapping his hands. “Gimme more!”
The old coot was rolling now. “Put a Christian in the presence of sin and he will spring at its throat!” he said.
“C’mon, stranger!”
“Free the slave from the tyranny of sin!” the old coot nearly shouted.
“Preach it!”
“And scatter the sinners as stubble so that the slave shall forever be free!”
“Yes, sir!”
Now, them two was setting dead center in Dutch Henry’s Tavern as they went at it, and there must’ve been ten people milling ’bout within five feet of them, traders, Mormons, Indians, whores—even the Old John Brown hisself—who could’a leaned over to Pa and whispered a word or two that would have saved his life, for the question of slavery had throwed Kansas Territory into war. Lawrence was sacked. The governor had fled. There weren’t no law to speak of. Every Yankee settler from Palmyra to Kansas City was getting his duff kicked from front to back by Missouri roughriders. But Pa didn’t know nothing ’bout that. He had never been more than a mile from Dutch’s Tavern. But nobody said a word. And Pa, being a lunatic for the Lord, hopped about, clicking his scissors and laughing. “Oh, the Holy Spirit’s a’comin’! The blood of Christ! Yes indeedy. Scatter that stubble! Scatter it! I feel like I done met the Lawd!”
All around him, the tavern had quieted up.
And just then, Dutch Henry walked into the room.
Dutch Henry Sherman was a German feller, big in feature, standing six hands tall without his boots. He had hands the size of meat cleavers, lips the color of veal, and a rumbling voice. He owned me, Pa, my aunt and uncle, and several Indian squaws, which he used for privilege. It weren’t beyond old Dutch to use a white man in that manner, too, if he could buy his goods that way. Pa was Dutch’s very first slave, so Pa was privileged. He come and go as he pleased. But at noon every day, Dutch came in to collect his money, which Pa faithfully kept in a cigar box behind the barber’s chair. And as luck would have it, it was noon.
Dutch walked over, reached behind Pa’s barber chair to the cashbox, removed his money, and was about to turn away when he glanced at the old man setting in Pa’s barber chair and saw something he didn’t like.