Brown put together a troupe of 21 recruits, including at least two Canadians: a black man named Osborn Anderson, and a white man named Stewart Taylor. There is a possibility that a third Canadian, Langston Cane of Oakville, Ontario, took part in the raid. That possibility is currently being investigated by Cane’s great-great-grandson, who carries the same name. But I digress.
The men attacked on a rainy night in October, 1859. The battle lasted for 36 hours. Most of the raiders never escaped from Harpers Ferry once they stormed the town. They killed five people — the first of whom was a black baggage master at the train station — and wounded nine others. Ten of the raiders, including two of Brown’s own sons, were killed right then or fatally wounded. Seven, including Brown, were captured, tried, and hanged. Five escaped.
In the short run, the raid was a catastrophe. In the long run, the raid — and the sensational news coverage that it and Brown’s trial sparked — drove the United States closer to the Civil War that ended slavery.
On his way to the rope, the 59-year-old man said: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood.”
What would you have done, had he knocked on your door?
I told Yoyo the article looked fine, but that I didn’t want him referring to Langston Cane the First, or to me. “This is the story of my family. I’ve brought you into it in confidence, and I’m asking you to respect that. I’ll tell it publicly when I’m ready.”
“All right,” Yoyo said. “I’ll take it out. But will you let me write about it, if you determine that your great-great-grandfather did take part in the raid?”
“Let’s talk about it later. We’re going out for a walk. Want to come?”
“No, I have to change this story, and then send it to Toronto.”
Ron Alleyne had swept and dusted the library and opened the windows. Mill gave him five dollars “for a hot lunch.” Annette and Yoyo had come along to help out, and we all had bagged lunches prepared by the hotel.
The last five boxes in the Storer College library contained papers from the 1800s.
Mill and I figured that Langston Cane the Second had graduated from Storer around 1880. We found class records for that year, but nothing on my great-grandfather. We looked at 1881. Nothing. Back to 1879. Bingo. There he was. Photo. Tall, dark, nothing if not serious. Tightly curled hair. The records included a copy of his valedictory speech. His academic records. A personal statement required as part of his application to the college. A written undertaking by his guardian, Nathan Shoemaker, to pay tuition and room and board fees.
We got out of Storer College in time for lunch, so we picnicked in the Harpers Ferry National Park. I dropped Mill off at the hotel. She wanted to nap. Yoyo headed out for a walk. Annette and I spent an hour or so looking around the Harpers Ferry museum. I had a word with the archivist working there. I explained that I was looking for information about my great-great-grandfather who, although not in the history books, may have played a role in John Brown’s raid. The archivist said he’d see what he could find under the name of Cane. Was there a number at which I could be reached? I gave him my name and the hotel’s number, dropped Annette off at the hotel, and went to a quiet café. I let the waitress know that I’d be staying for several hours, and I settled down to write my great-grandfather’s story.
Chapter 20
LANGSTON CANE THE SECOND remembered it as the longest trip he’d taken in his life. It had seemed endless. Later, he wrote in a journal that he and his mother and brothers had crossed Lake Ontario in a steam ship, waited in Buffalo for ten hours, taken a horse-drawn cart east to Rochester, waited six hours there, and taken a series of trains that eventually led to Baltimore.
They traveled in the summer, so as not to suffer from the cold. Instead, they suffered from the heat. One of Langston’s brothers took along a puppy, but it died while they were in Pittsburgh, waiting in the sun for a train.
Matilda Cane had not been well during the trip. She coughed every hour when the trip began. Two days later, as they pulled into the Penn Station in Baltimore, she was gagging and spitting blood.
In the dust and the heat and the stench of foul fruit and sewers, the woman and her three young sons walked out onto Charles Street.
A man aimed his team of horses at them. Matilda flung her youngest Langston back. This was our Langston. His brothers, also named Langston, were called Senior and Junior. But the little one, aged eight, and already a better reader than his older brothers, was simply called Langston.
Matilda steered her brood to the closest black church, and found a woman who gave them temporary shelter near the Chesapeake Bay dockyards. Shelter meant sleeping on the dirt floor of a cabin where the air was even worse than the rank and fetid stench of the street.
Langston noticed the noise. The commotion. The stink. The heat. But, more than anything else, he gaped at the masses of Negroes. He’d never seen so many black people in his life. In Oakville, colored people were few and spread out. Here, they squeezed into neighborhoods festering with screams and smoke and excrement.
Langston listened to his mother talk to the woman who had taken them in. He heard Matilda explain that she had run out of work in Canada and had come south, now that the war was over, in search of something better.
“Gal, you outa your head?” the other said. “This place is better than nowhere. You oughta git on back up north.”
“I can’t,” Matilda said. “My health is failing.”
“The problem with Baltimore is there’s too many culluds. There’s gettin’ to be so many of us that the white peoples are starting to hate us.”
Matilda took her boys along for a visit to the Freedmen’s Bureau. She had heard that the U.S. government had set it up to protect the rights of the newly freed. After waiting in line, she was asked to state her complaint. She said she didn’t have any, but just was in need of work. Langston saw that the man speaking to Matilda wore a U.S. army uniform. He had a mustache, and he had a gun.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but we don’t offer employment here. We help people who’ve been done wrong, and want to put it right.” “I haven’t been done wrong, but —”
“Well, watch out, then. Watch those boys. Keep ‘em out of the hands of the snatchers.” “The snatchers?”
“Where you been, woman? I’m talking about unscrupulous men who come along and snatch colored children and take them off to become apprentices.”
Apprentices. Langston knew that word. He’d seen boys working as apprentices in Oakville. Apprentices to shipbuilders, carpenters, blacksmiths.
Matilda and the boys were turned away. They tried to pass the day walking, but were chased off one street, and away from a water fountain. Matilda, who had money enough to last them a few months, found a market where colored people were buying and selling. She bought four rolls, four apples, and four chunks of cheese. Eat slowly, she told the boys. Chew every bite good and long. It’s got to last all day.
The next day, Matilda took the boys back to the Freedmen’s Bureau. Thankfully, a different soldier was on duty. She spun out the conversation with him as long as she could. All the while, following advice she’d been given, Matilda kept her eye out for a white man with a kind face. Find yourself a white man to hire you to clean his house. But stand back when you first try to talk. You talk to the wrong one, he’s likely to make a fist and hit you to Kingdom Come.
There were pencils and paper in the Freedmen’s Bureau. For noting complaints, presumably. Langston took to scribbling while his mother talked. Hello. I’m Langston. I’m eight. Can my mother clean your house? She’s an excellent cleaner. This he wrote on a piece of paper. He gave it to one man who walked into the bureau. The man crumpled the paper and threw it down. Langston waited a moment for the man to move on, then ran over and picked it up and unfolded it and handed it to another man. The man tried to kick him, but Langston danced out of his way. Three more times, he tried to pass the paper a
long. Once it was ripped in half, once dropped to the floor, and once stuffed in the pocket of a man who didn’t look at it. Langston saw his mother engaged in a long conversation with a man in the building. The man reached around and put his hand on Matilda’s backside. She slapped the hand away, and he grabbed her hand and slapped her. She kneed him in the groin. Langston watched in horror as the man drew in a long, raspy breath. A soldier urged Matilda to leave immediately, and told the aggressor that he deserved the blow. Matilda gathered up Langston and the others and hurried them out the door. She spat on the road. Langston noticed her saliva was specked with blood. He looked up and saw a tall white man in fine clothes get off his horse-drawn cart.
Langston stepped right up to him. He came up to the man’s chest. He looked up at sky blue eyes, and hair brushed to the side. He saw thin, sloping cheeks and a long, square chin. It was a gentle face.
“Mister, can I hold your horse for you, if you’re going to tarry?”
“If you can take care of a horse as well as you can talk, we’re in business,” the man said.
Langston’s mother looked at the man. He looked at her. She smiled and raised her hand, as if to say, what can you do with a boy like that? He said he wouldn’t be but a minute, and hurried into the Freedmen’s Bureau. He was not one but ten minutes. Langston stood waiting and holding the reins of the fine black horse. His mother and brothers stood next to him, waiting.
The man returned. “That was a gentlemanly act. What may I do for you? How about a dime?”
“No, thank you, but could you read this, instead?” Langston asked, handing over a piece of paper.
“Did you write this, lad?”
“Yes, I did. I’ve been to school. With my brothers. We all can write.”
“And where have you learned to write so well, at such a young age?”
“In Canada.”
“Aren’t you full of surprises. Are you the lad’s mother?” Matilda nodded. “And you are experienced in housecleaning?”
“Most experienced, sir. I spent the last three years cleaning the home of Captain Robert Wilson, in Oakville.”
“And where is that?”
“In Canada West. On Lake Ontario. Near Toronto.” “You people surprise me with every sentence,” the man said. “Do you know who I am?” “No, sir.”
“Nathan Shoemaker. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“We just arrived from Canada yesterday.”
“Consider yourself hired. Meet me here tomorrow morning at nine. My wife will keep you awfully busy cleaning, so you’ll have to make arrangements to have someone watch over your boys. But keep them somewhere safe. Many have disappeared. Keep well. Until tomorrow!” Matilda Cane cleaned the man’s house for three weeks. Through the church, she found a family that would let them rent a tiny room in their tin and wood shack. There was nothing to sleep on but some old blankets that Nathan Shoemaker had given her to take away. They slept there, and they ate what they could. Cornmeal, and bits of fried bacon, and chunks of bread. Water from public fountains, when nobody was looking, or close enough to give them trouble. The boys were told to spend their days in the church, reading. They stayed in the church and read for a few minutes after their mother’s departure. But then the janitor would boot them out. They didn’t tell their mother they spent their days on the streets. Why worry her?
Matilda walked to the Shoemaker home and back every day. It took her an hour, each day, and she started work at nine. Each day, she coughed more. And spat more blood. One day, she woke feverish. She was so hot that Langston, who slept beside her, dreamed that his leg was touching a boiling pot. Matilda couldn’t go to work. She couldn’t get up. For three days, she was sick. She told her boys to go see Nathan Shoemaker if something happened to her. She told Langston that he was the smartest boy she’d ever met, already reading like an adult. She wiped his nose and gave him Shoemaker’s address and made him memorize it. On the fourth day, she got up slowly, dressed with great discomfort, and hobbled with the boys to the Freedmen’s Bureau. Langston noticed a man following them for the last blocks to the bureau. His mother got to see a soldier fairly quickly. She said she was afraid she was dying. She said she was afraid of what would happen to her boys. She was advised to put them in someone else’s custody. Otherwise, she was told, who knew what could happen in the event of her demise. She was advised to see a doctor. She smiled limply. All a doctor’s going to tell me is what I already know, she whispered.
Langston saw the man follow them out of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He noticed him follow them home. He noticed him for several days running, in the streets nearby, while his mother got more and more sick. She died on a Wednesday morning with her eyes open. Langston and his brothers left her eyes open, thinking that if the phantom man, as they’d dubbed him, came in, he’d think she was still alive. They were alone in the shack. It was raining. Water was getting in through the tin on the roof, and dripping on the floor. They couldn’t decide what to do. Langston wanted to go ask Shoemaker for help. His brothers agreed to go with him. They stepped out into the alley. Three men jumped out at them. Phantom man and two others. A horse and cart were just down the lane. Phantom man held Langston. He had white cheeks, stubble, and stinking breath. Langston wriggled free and kicked the man with all his might, right between the legs. And he ran. And ran. And ran. Swearing, and crying, and wailing, and more crying, and the sound of horses moving behind him. Down a side street, up another lane, right through somebody’s house, through the front door and through the cabbage-smelling stove area out the back, and onto another street. He knew better than to go back to where his mother lay, dead. He had read the newspaper accounts. Children were being stolen away and made to work. The papers said it was like slavery all over again. Where were his brothers? He had lost them. Where had they been taken? He never found out.
A white woman answered the door. He asked for Mr. Shoemaker. He was told that Mr. Shoemaker wasn’t in. He expected to be sent out into the streets, but he was asked if he was accompanied by a parent, and answered, “My mother is dead.” He was told to come right in. Langston waited all day for Nathan Shoemaker. He wouldn’t talk or eat until the man came home.
Shoemaker took him immediately to the place where Langston had been living.
“My God, the stench,” said a man, apparently a brother to Mr. Shoemaker, as they slowed down in the lane.
“It’s not their fault,” Nathan Shoemaker said. “They’ve been squeezed in here like animals. What else could you expect?”
The one-room shack had been torn inside out. The belongings had been rifled through, torn apart, scattered against the walls. The money, which had been in a sock under the pallet, was gone. Matilda Cane lay there. Eyes still open. Nathan Shoemaker closed the lids and stood and put his arm around the boy.
Nathan Shoemaker was a Quaker. He was the grandson of a Shoemaker who had been a vocal abolitionist and friend of the Negroes. Shoemaker, the grandson, lived off his interest in a number of mines in western Maryland. He kept a regular diary, and made a few entries about the colored boy he had adopted.
Jan. 15, 1867
It has been five months, now, that Langston Cane has been with us. The Negro lad has little joy in his heart, but he is quiet and industrious and excels at school. I have entered him in a good Negro school at the corner of Calvert and Saratoga. It is run by the Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People. I have arranged to have one of our servants take the lad in a buggy to the school. He is also picked up after school. This provokes a good deal of teasing from his peers, but I think it wise, considering the fate of his brothers, whom I have been unable to locate. I suspect they were taken out of the state.
I have informed the lad that I will never replace his father, and that he must eventually take his place among the colored people. I am but his keeper, providing security and shelter. Even in matters spiritual, I have preferred not to introduce him to the Quaker faith, but to escort
him weekly to a Baptist church, where he can be among his people.
I do not own this child. I am merely steering him, until he can take the helm.
March 11, 1875
Within a year or two, the Cane lad will be ready to assert his independence. He will attend college, and then university if inclined, and then he will return to his people.
He is respectful to me, and well loved by my daughters, who pamper him. He likes to eat, I can say that for him. I have seen the boy eat six scrambled eggs at a sitting. But he is sixteen and growing strong, and I thank God I am fortunate enough to give him a home.
I have been tutoring him privately in Latin and Greek. The boy can recite extensive sections of The Iliad by memory. He is more mentally agile than any lad I have met. I am soon to arrange French tutoring for him. If he is to walk with distinction among his people, he will need much learning.
Langston leads Sunday school classes for children at his church, and consistently earns the number one academic ranking at his school. I couldn’t ask for more of him. He is a good boy. He will serve his people well. And he will serve God well.
June 15, 1879
Today, I attended Cane’s graduation ceremony at Storer College. It was a special day, especially given that Langston spoke as the class valedictorian. People filled the four-hundred-seat auditorium and the aisles. Most had come to hear a speech by the famous Frederick Douglass. In the weeks prior to the event, posters advertising the address by Douglass were posted widely, even in Baltimore.
I have kept a brochure outlining the day’s program. And I was reading it, in the company of the young Cane, where he was quietly composing himself, when Frederick Douglass himself entered our dressing room. I stood and introduced ourselves.
“Pleasure to meet both of you,” Douglass said. “I have people to meet before I speak, so you will forgive me for rushing to the point, but I must ask the question that first came to my mind when I saw your name on the program.”