“No. He don’t look back there. They’re deep in the yard, near the thickets.” And she broke down and howled again.
“It’s just a flower, Annie,” I said.
“No, it’s not. Father said a good sign is signals from heaven. Good omens is important. Like Frederick’s Good Lord Bird. That’s why he always used those feathers for his army. They’re not just feathers. Or passwords. They’re omens. They’re things you don’t forget easily, even in times of trouble. You remember your good omens in times of trouble. You can’t forget them.”
A horrible, dread feeling come over me as she said that, for I suddenly remembered that I clean forgot to tell the Captain the password the Rail Man told me to pass on to him at the bridge when they stopped the train. He’d said to tell them the password. He’d say, “Who goes there?” and they’d pass it back, “Jesus is walkin’.” And if he didn’t hear that password, he weren’t gonna bring his men on.
“Good God,” I said.
“I know,” she howled. “It’s just a bad omen.”
I didn’t say nothing to her but I lay there as she howled, and God knows it, my heart was pounding something dreadful. To hell with it, was my thinking. Weren’t no way in the world I was gonna crawl out from under that hay, walk that toll road in daylight, privy to every paddie slave snatcher between Virginia and Pennsylvania and go back to the Ferry and get shot to pieces. We’d ridden nearly three hours. I felt the sun’s heat bouncing off the ground into the bottom of the wagon where I lay. We had to be near Chambersburg by then, just near the Virginia line, smack dab in slave country.
Annie howled a bit more, then steadied herself. “I know you’re thinking of Philadelphia, Onion. But I’m wondering ... I’m wondering if you’ll come to North Elba with me,” she said. “Maybe we could start a school together. I know your heart. North Elba is quiet country. Free country. We could start a school together. We could use—I could use a friend.” And she busted into tears again.
Well, that done it. I lay under that hay thinking I weren’t no better than them speechifying, low-life reverends and doctors up in Canada who promised to show up for the Old Man’s war and likely wouldn’t. The whole bit shamed me, just pushed up against me something terrible as she howled. It pushed on me harder with each mile we went, pressing on my heart like a stone. What was I gonna do in Philadelphia? Who was gonna love me? I’d be alone. But in upstate New York, how long could I go on before she’d find out who I was? She’d know it before long. Besides, how can somebody love you if you don’t know who you is? I had thoroughly been a girl so long by then that I’d grown to like it, got used to it, got used to not having to lift things, and have folks make excuses for me on account of me not being strong enough, or fast enough, or powerful enough like a boy, on account of my size. But that’s the thing. You can play one part in life, but you can’t be that thing. You just playing it. You’re not real. I was a Negro above all else, and Negroes plays their part, too: Hiding. Smiling. Pretending bondage is okay till they’re free, and then what? Free to do what? To be like the white man? Is he so right? Not according to the Old Man. It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment. And that includes loving somebody. If you can’t be your own self, how can you love somebody? How can you be free? That pressed on my heart like a vise right then. Just mashed me down. I was head over heels for that girl, I loved her with all my heart, I confess it here, and her father’s charge would be against me for the rest of my life if he got killed on account of the Rail Man not hearing the right password. Curse that son of a bitch father of hers! And the Rail Man too! That self-righteous, ignorant, risk-taking, elephant-looking bum! And all them slave-fightin’ no-gooders! It would be on my head. The thought of the Captain getting deadened on account of me made me feel ten times worse than Annie not loving me, which if she’d’a knowed what I was, she’d’a been disgusted with me, a nigger, playing a girl, not man enough to be a man, loving her and all, and she wouldn’t love me back in the least, or even like me, no matter how much she felt for me at that moment as a full-hearted girlfriend. She was loving a mirage. And I’d have her father’s blood on my hands the rest of my life, laying there like a coward under the hay and not being a natural man, man enough to go back and tell him the words that might help him live five minutes longer, for while he was a fool, his life was dear to him as mine’s was to me, and he’d risked that life many times on my account. God damn it to hell.
To have the Captain’s blood on my hands on account of something I was supposed to do, it was just too much. I couldn’t stand it.
The plank she was setting on was propped on two boards. With both hands I pushed it a foot or so forward and burst out the hay and sat up.
“I got to go,” I said.
“What?”
“Tell Salmon to stop.”
“We can’t. We in slave country. Get back in that hay!”
“I won’t.”
Before she could move to it, I slid out from under the plank, pulled the bonnet off my head, and ripped the dress down to my waist. Her mouth opened in shock.
“I love you, Annie. I won’t ever see you again.”
With one swift motion, I grabbed my gunnysack and leaped out the back of the wagon, rolling on the road, her shocked cry echoing into the woods and trees around me. Salmon harred up the wagon and yelled back for me, but he might as well been hollering down an empty hole. I was up the road and gone.
28.
Attack
I runned down the road like the wind, and caught a ride with an old colored man from Frederick, Maryland, who was driving his master’s wagon to the Ferry to pick up a shipment of lumber. It took us a full day to roll back for he was sharp, and had to roll past slave patrollers while stating his marse’s business. He dropped me off a few miles from the Ferry on the Maryland side and I done the rest on foot. I made it to the farmhouse late, several hours after dark.
The house was dark as I approached and I couldn’t see no candlelight. It was drizzling and there was no moon. I had no timepiece, but I guessed it was close to midnight.
I burst in the door and they were gone. I turned toward the door, and a figure blocked it and a rifle barrel met me right in the face. A light was throwed on me, and behind it stood three of the Old Man’s army: Barclay Coppoc, one of the shooting Quakers, Owen, and Francis Merriam, a one-eyed batty feller, crazy as a weasel, who had joined up late in the doings. All three was holding rifles and armed to the teeth with sidearms and broadswords.
“What you doing here?” Owen asked.
“I forgot to give your Pa the password for the Rail Man.”
“Father didn’t have a password for him.”
“That’s just it. The Rail Man had one for me to give him.”
“It’s too late. They left four hours ago.”
“I got to tell him.”
“Sit tight.”
“For what?”
“They’ll figure it out. We could use you here. We is guarding the arms and waiting for the colored to hive,” Owen said.
“Well, that is the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life, Owen. Can’t you wake up to it?”
I looked at Owen, I swear ’fore God he tried to keep a straight face on it. “I’m dead set against slavery, and anyone who ain’t is a fool,” he said. “They’ll come. And I will set here and wait till then,” he said. I guess this was his way of showing his faith in his Pa, and also getting out the deal. The farm was five miles from the Ferry, and I reckon the Old Man left him ’cause Owen had seen enough of his crazy Pa’s doings. He’d been all through the Kansas Wars and seen the worst of it. Those other two up there, the Old Man probably left them there to relieve them from the action, for Coppoc weren’t but twenty, and Merriam was thick as mud in his mind.