Well, we just went on like that. We run through that bottle and then runned into a second. The more stupefied he got, the more he forgot about the hanky-panky he had in mind and instead germinated on what he knowed—orating. First he orated on the plight of the Negro. He just about wore the Negro out. When he was done orating on them, he orated about the fowl, the fishes, the poultry, the white man, the red man, the aunties, uncles, cousins, the second cousins, his cousin Clementine, the bees, the flies, and by the time he worked down to the ants, the butterflies, and the crickets, he was stone-cold, sloppy, clouded-up, sweet-blind drunk, whereas yours truly was simply buzzing, for that tea was weaker than bird piss, though when you drunk it by volume, it growed more to your liking and tasted better each lick. By the third bottle of essence, he had gone to pot completely, tripping over his oration and skunking about the birds and bees, which was the point of it all, I reckon, for while I was not even half-mud-eyed, he was bent on not being outdrunk by a girl. But being the great leader that he was, he never let go of himself, though he seemed to lose his fancy for me. The more bleary-eyed he got, the more he talked like a right regular down-home, pig-knuckle-eatin’ Negro. “I had a mule once,” he bawled, “and she wouldn’t pull the hat off your head. But I loved that damn mule. She was a stinkin’ good mule! When she died, I rolled her in the creek. I would’a buried her, but she was too heavy. A fat thousand-pounder. By God, that mule could single-trot, double-trot... .” I rather fancied him then, not in the nature-wanting sort of a way, but knowing that he was a good soul, too muddled to be of much use. But after a while I seen my out, for he was off the edge, wasted and looped beyond redemption, and couldn’t hurt me now. I got up. “I got to go,” I said.
He was setting in the middle of the floor by then, his suspenders off, clasping the bottle. “Don’t marry two women at once,” he managed to burble. “Colored or white, it’ll whip you scandalous.”
I made for the door. He took one final dive for me as I made for it, but fell on his face.
He looked up at me, grinning sheepishly as I opened the door, then said, “It’s hot in here. Open da winder.” Then laid his mighty Negro head, with his mighty hair like a lion’s mane, down flat on his face, and was out cold, snoring when I quietly took my leave.
19.
Smelling Like Bear
I didn’t tell the Old Man about his friend’s exploits. I hated to disappoint him and it didn’t seem proper. Besides, once the Old Man made up his mind about somebody, nothing could change him. If the Old Man liked somebody, it didn’t matter whether they was heathen or reckless or a boy sporting life as a girl. So long as they was against slavery, that was good enough.
He left Mr. Douglass’s house roaring pleased, which meant his face weren’t scrunched up like a prune and his mouth weren’t closed like a pair of tight britches. That was unusual for him. “Mr. Douglass gived me his word on something important, Onion,” he said. “That is good news indeed.” We loaded onto a westbound train to Chicago, which didn’t make sense, for Boston was the other way, but I weren’t going to question him. As we settled in for the ride, he proclaimed loudly so that all the passengers to hear, “We is aiming to change in Chicago for horses and wagon to Kansas.”
We click-clacked along for nearly a day and I fell asleep. A few hours later, the Old Man shook me awake. “Grab our bags, Onion,” he whispered. “We got to jump.”
“Why, Captain?”
“No time for questions.”
I cast a glance outside and it was nearly dawn. In the train car, the rest of the passengers was dead asleep. We moved to a seat near the car’s edge and lollygagged there till the train stopped to take on water, then jumped off. We hid in the thickets on the side of the tracks a good while, waiting for the engine to get up steam and roll again, the Old Man with his hand on one of his seven-shooters. Only when the train pulled away did his hand drop off his hardware.
“Federal agents is tracking us,” he said. “I want them thinking I’m out west.”
I watched the train pull away slowly. It was a long stretch of straight track up the mountains, and as the train huffed up it, the Old Man stood up, dusted himself off, and stared at it a long time.
“Where are we?”
“Pennsylvania. These is the Allegheny Mountains,” he said, pointing at the winding mountains in the direction of the train, which struggled up the straight track to a winding curve. “This was my boyhood home.”
That was the only time I ever heard the Old Man refer to his growing-up years. He watched the train till it was a tiny dot in the mountains. When it was gone, he took a long look around. He looked downright troubled.
“This ain’t no way for a general to be living. But now I know why the Lord gived me a hankering to see my old home. See these mountains?” He pointed around.
I couldn’t see nothing but mountains, and I said, “What about ’em, Captain.”
He pointed to the wide passages and craggy cliffs all around us. “A man can hide in these passes for years. There’s plenty game. Plenty timber for shelter. An army of thousands couldn’t dig out a small army that’s well hidden. God pressed His thumb against the earth and made these passages for the poor, Onion. I ain’t the first to know it. Spartacus, Toussaint-Louverture, Garibaldi, they all knowed it. It worked for them. They hid thousands of soldiers that way. These tiny passages will entrench hundreds of Negroes against an enemy of thousands. Trench warfare. You see?”
I didn’t see. I was fretting that we was standing out in the cold in the middle of no place, and come night, it’d be even colder. I weren’t liking that idea. But, being that he never asked my opinion, I told him truthfully, “I don’t rightly know ’bout them things, Captain, having never been in no mountains myself.”
He looked at me. The Old Man never smiled, but the gray eyes got soft a minute. “Well, you’ll be in ’em soon enough.”
We weren’t far from Pittsburgh, turns out. We followed the tracks all day back down the mountain to the nearest town, waited, and caught a train to Boston. On the train, the Old Man announced his plan. “I got to raise money by speechifying. It ain’t nothing to it. It’s just a show. After I raise enough chips, we’ll head out west again with a full purse to gather the men and raise the hive in our fight against the infernal institution. Don’t tell nobody nothing ’bout our purpose in the meantime.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“And I might ask you to tell some of our donors about your life of deprivation and starvation as a slave. Being hungry and all. Whipped scandalous, and them type of things. You can tell them that.”
I didn’t want to confess to him I weren’t never hungry as a slave, nor was never whipped scandalous. Fact is, only time I was hungry and eating out of garbage barrels and sleeping out in the cold was when I was free with him. But it weren’t proper to say it, so I nodded.
“And while I gives the show,” he said, “you must watch the back of the hall for any federal agents. That’s important. They is warm on us now.”
“What do they look like?”
“Hmm. I reckon they got oily hair and is done up in proper clothing. You’ll see ’em. Don’t worry. I done arranged everything. Yours won’t be the only eyes watching. We’ll have plenty help.”