“First you shoot me, then you offer me a drink. Oh, man, I’m shot bad. Tell your friends that plugging a colored man in the back ain’t no way to free slaves.”
“Have a sip. Here.” I tilted the flask toward the man’s lips. Some got in his mouth. Some dribbled down his chin and onto the dirt.
“Shoot a colored man in the back. What kind of thing is that to do? I’ll be hanging mad if I don’t live to see my children. My boy and my girl were just sitting on my knee after dinner.”
Somebody in the street shot at me and missed. I ran back to the cover of the bridge.
“Hastings, you shot that man in the back.”
“He didn’t obey my command.”
“You shot him in the back, Hastings. He was going back.” “Got him good, did I?”
“You shot a black man, Hastings. A free Negro. His name is — “ “Don’t tell me his name. I don’t want to know. I’m sorry, he didn’t obey, and I had to shoot.”
I made Hastings lower his rifle, and I shouted out to a man on the street — probably the one who’d tried to kill me — that we were giving him two minutes to go fetch Hayward Shepherd and drag him to safety. The man walked out to help Shepherd back to the station platform.
“Let me plug the other one,” Hastings said.
“Hold your fire, you fool. He’s dragging a wounded man to safety.”
“All right, all right. I’ll let him go this time.”
Why I didn’t put down my Sharps rifle and walk back across the Potomac River bridge and leave at that moment, I don’t know. I had no more fight in me. I suppose I never had any in the first place. Hayward Shepherd, colored man, father of two kids, was dying. We had shot him. One person was dead, or close to it, and that was enough for me. But I stayed. I don’t know why. But I stayed. And things soon got bad enough that leaving was no longer a simple matter.
John Brown looked confused. He ordered us back to the arsenal, and then came to see us twenty minutes later, asking who’d given us the order to leave the bridge. We explained that it was him, and he nodded and headed off. He walked with an aide or two along the Shenandoah, presumably to check on his positions at the Shenandoah bridge and at the rifle works. He walked back to the armory. He walked back to see us, and then to see the men at the mouth of the Potomac bridge, and then back to the armory.
An eastbound train pulled into the station. Some of our men had it halted, and there was a great deal of discussion between Brown and the conductor. I didn’t see what there was to discuss. Brown should have stopped the train, and ensured that everyone stayed inside it, and that was that. But no, Holy John had to discuss. He had to make his purpose known to the conductor. I could hear it all from my position in the arsenal. We weren’t occupied at all, except for once, when a man from the town approached, presumably thinking he’d arm himself, and Hastings took a shot at him. The man turned and ran and Hastings said, “Cane, I have yet to see you use that Sharps.” We went back to watching John Brown haggle with the conductor. It went on for hours. Our leader had brought us into a bloody rat trap, and here he was talking with a train conductor. To my astonishment, Brown let the train go at dawn. That was when I resolved to get out as soon as I could. But getting out was no easy matter.
I had to wait a long, long day. No food. No warmth. Nothing but the pungent odor of gunpowder in the air. Not long after Brown let the train go, church bells started ringing. They rang and rang and rang. People swarmed around the town. One man walked to within thirty yards of the armory and started shooting at it. Someone shot back at him, and he fell flat on his face. A group of militiamen arrived from the west, chasing Dangerfield Newby, Oliver Brown, and William Thompson — the three who had been ordered to guard the Shenandoah bridge. Brown and Thompson made it to the armory, although I don’t know how, with musket fire all around their heads. Newby, who just the day before had been reading me a letter from his wife — a letter he’d had for months, and reread every day — fell on the cobblestones just a stone’s throw from safety. At first I thought he had tripped. But he hadn’t. Blood gushed from his throat. Hastings fired at the militiamen, downing one of them. The others ran back for cover.
“If you don’t get in on this,” Hastings warned, “I’m gonna report you to the chief, and we’re gonna have to court-martial you.”
I knew we were losing as the day wore on. Still no food, no contact any longer with John Brown or his men in the armory. It was freezing. I had been shivering all night. I thought of Diana waiting for me in that barn. Good-bye, Diana, I thought. I won’t see you again. Good-bye, Captain Robert Wilson, and good for you for having that whiskey over John Brown’s objections. Whiskey. Good idea. I had a sip from the flask, shared it with Hastings, who clapped me on the back and admitted that I was at least good for something and said, “Isn’t this fun? Isn’t this just the best thing you’ve ever done?”
While Hastings stood watch, I looked around the arsenal. Rifles and pistols and boxes of ammunition were stacked everywhere. At the back of the arsenal, I used a crowbar to break into an iron cage and smashed the lock of a cash box. I saw more bills in there than I’ve ever seen in my life. I grabbed a few hundred dollars and slapped the box shut and stuffed the money in my pocket and kept moving. Hastings didn’t have to know about it. If I made it out of Harpers Ferry, that money could make the difference between life and death. I also found a window at the back of the arsenal. From the window, I could see the Shenandoah River. As I looked out at the river, I saw a body floating by. It belonged to John Kagi. He had been stationed at the rifle works. So it, too, had been overtaken.
I figured that I had a chance if John Brown could hang on to the armory until nightfall. People wandered near and took potshots at the armory. They seemed to have forgotten about Hastings and me in the arsenal. The mayor of the town — I knew, because I heard the people shouting — wandered into the thick of things and got himself shot dead.
Brown was totally hemmed in. He had lost control of the Shenandoah bridge, and he had lost control of the Potomac bridge, and I didn’t have a clue what he was doing in that armory.
“Where do you think you’ll sleep tonight?” I asked Hastings.
“Haven’t a clue,” he said. “I wish I was in that armory. There’s more action going on over there.”
“Don’t shoot from here again unless you have to,” I told him.
“Why?”
“Because everybody is focusing on Brown in the armory. We don’t want to remind them that we’re here.”
“You got a point there. You’re not so dumb, Cane.”
A mob rushed into the Wager Hotel, which was between the Potomac bridge and the armory, and dragged one of our men into the street. It was Oliver Brown. He was dragged to the Potomac bridge, shot twice in the head, and thrown in the river.
The day went on, sometimes with sporadic shooting, occasionally with someone being felled in the street, but mostly with men shooting in the air and swilling beer and throwing their bottles up and shooting at them. Militiamen spilled into town. Townspeople milled about, shouted, laughed, swore about colored people, and grabbed women. A carnival had erupted in Harpers Ferry. Colonel Robert E. Lee of the United States army entered the town via the Potomac bridge. I didn’t know his name until later. But I saw all the soldiers with him, and I saw the hundreds of townsfolk and militiamen flock to greet him, and darkness was falling, and I knew that this was my one and only moment.
I didn’t say good-bye to Hastings. I didn’t offer to help him. He didn’t need my help. He was happy where he was. I moved to the back of the arsenal and removed my cape and Sharps rifle. I pulled on an old jacket lying in the cage near the cash box and took another fifty dollars. Thousands were there for the taking, but I felt I should limit my theft. I climbed out the back window and around the side of the arsenal. I walked, calmly, across the street. Nobody paid any special attention to me.
There were people drinking and shouting. One slapped me on the back and said, “
Hey, boy, better get home.”
I nodded and kept going. I walked up a street, took a lane to the right and followed it to the end. I ran past a house and down a long slope to the Potomac River. That took me ten minutes, crashing around in the bush. Luckily, a full moon shone. Down at the river, I walked upstream five minutes and found a boathouse and a rowboat. Nobody around. I rowed across the river — it was only fifty yards or so — and gained the Maryland side. Up the hills I went, through the trees, heading north and east to the best of my judgment. After an hour, I sighted the road that we’d come in on the night before.
I heard voices on it, so I stayed back, and followed it from well within the woods. I fell three times on my way. I hadn’t slept, or eaten, for thirty-six hours. It was still dark when I got to the barn. I opened the door, and saw the candle flickering, and dropped to the floor. A figure emerged from behind a beam.
“Diana?” I whispered.
“Langston. I was so frightened! I was going to leave at dawn.”
“Hold me,” I said. She started putting kisses all over my face. “No, not that. Just hold me. I’m freezing.”
“Come under these blankets,” she said. She had a number of them, so one went under us, and several on top. She undressed me, and undressed herself, and pressed up close against me, and reached for food, which was there on the floor, and fed me cheese and apples and bread. We stayed like that for an hour. I told her what I knew. I said her father was doomed. I said we had to leave. We dressed. Diana got the horses ready. She said she’d kept them well fed all day and all night, so that they’d be in form for a long trip. She said her sister and sister-in-law had put up a fuss when she’d said she was staying behind. Finally, she had run out and taken her horses and buggy and left while they were packing in the kitchen. She assumed they must have left without her. They didn’t know where she was. She asked me if her father was likely to die. I said he was.
We headed north. We agreed that if anyone stopped us, I was to be her slave, she my mistress, and I was driving her to her father’s funeral. I got behind the reins, and we took off.
We put as much distance as possible between ourselves and Harpers Ferry. We rode through the last of the night and into the morning. We came to a town. I got out at the outskirts and hid. Diana proceeded into town, identified herself as a Quaker to the first sympathetic-looking person she found, and asked where she could find someone of her faith. She found a Quaker, explained that she was assisting a fugitive slave, and asked for help. They returned to get me. The Quaker gentlemen fed and sheltered our horses and us for the rest of the day and the night. The next day, Diana and I headed out in the horse and buggy, maintaining the pretense of Lady and Slave. We made it to York, sold the horses, and caught a train to Philadelphia, where we stayed together, in the most trying circumstances, for several months.
Diana was shaken by the fate of her father and of Oliver and Owen. News of their deaths came to us — as it did to the entire nation — very quickly. I made enough money to support the two of us doing construction work and catching rats.
When Diana left me to return to her family, I drifted out to California, and spent many years there before drifting back east, and it seems to me now that I’ve been drifting all my life, and that drifting is all that is left to me. I’m an old man now, old beyond my years. I have escaped death more than a few times. Yet with each escape, years have fallen off my life. I wish my wife and sons well, wherever they are. I stopped by Toronto, about a year ago, and paid a young man to travel to Oakville and to make some inquiries. I don’t know what I would have done if he had found Mattie or my boys there, but they were gone. Long gone. Gone back to the States, apparently, at the close of the Civil War. I walked about Toronto for a day, remembering the time I’d come to attend a black abolitionists’ convention. It seemed, then, that I loved my wife and children, but didn’t know it. Didn’t know it, or was afraid of it. Their claim on me felt suffocating. Nothing could have changed my mind, or made me think far ahead to a time in life when no one would want to have a claim on me. I was strong, when I was young, but I feared human ties. Now that I have none and no hope of any, I am but a shell of the man I once was. There’s no point regretting what I’ve done. I had to live the way I was born. That ends my account.
Chapter 23
I DON’T BELIEVE ANNETTE SAID A WORD to me on the trip from Harpers Ferry back to Baltimore. Yoyo scribbled notes on a pad of paper. Mill stared out the car window. Annette slept. She had barely spoken to me since the afternoon before, when she said she wouldn’t bother sleeping with me if I was going to be up late poring over the story of Langston Cane of Harpers Ferry fame. In Baltimore, I dropped off Yoyo, and then Mill, and was planning to join Annette inside her flat. But she told me not to bother parking the car.
“Just let me out,” she said. “I want to be alone.” “What’s wrong, Annette?”
“You don’t know?” She turned in the seat to stare at me. She had on red lipstick again, and was wearing a red leather jacket.
“No, I don’t, actually, unless it’s because I was up late reading.”
“I am not your tagalong toy. I do not exist for your amusement, when you’re too tired to work.”
“Who suggested that?” I said. “I invited you to come along. I was happy to have you. Why are we having this fight?”
“You didn’t show me I was in any way special. You made me feel like a tramp. Condescending to let me hang out with you, when you had nothing better to do. You shouldn’t have invited me to Harpers Ferry, and I shouldn’t have accepted.” “You knew I was going there to work.”
“Work. Give it a break. You’re investigating your family’s history. Don’t get me wrong. I think that’s great. But it doesn’t preclude making a woman feel good.”
“Let’s go out tonight. I’ll make it up to you.”
“No. That’s my point. You can’t just make it up by being available when you’re too tired to work.”
“I’ll come see you soon, then.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll come see you — if I have nothing better to do.”
During the next two weeks, I dropped by Annette’s apartment three times. I left notes. Got no response. I finally spoke about it with Mill.
“She’s making you wait. A woman’s way is a woman’s way, Langston.”
“I’m not so sure. She was mad after Harpers Ferry. And she hasn’t responded since.”
“I’ll tell her to come over, and you can come over at the same time, and I’ll stand you each in a corner of my living room and say, ‘Okay, you two, kiss and make up.’“
“Thanks, Mill, but I’ll take care of this problem. I’ve made an effort. Three times. I won’t grovel. I groveled enough, after Ellen left me. Annette knows I want to see her. If she wants to see me, she’ll come back.”
“You’re a young man, Langston. Wait a little longer.”
“Pushing forty is young?”
“It’s young enough, if you know where you’re going.”
I finished the first full draft of my family story. I spent two weeks cleaning it up, organizing it, paring it back, and digging through Mill’s boxes, and visiting the Maryland Historical Society. I offered to show the draft to Mill.
She said, “Newspapers are the only reading I have time for.” She did seem willing, however, to talk about what had happened to Langston Cane the First. “He stayed alive. You gotta give that to him. He shouldn’t have messed with that white girl, but he stayed alive and he didn’t kill nobody at Harpers Ferry.”
I told Mill that I felt strangely connected to Langston the First. “I love the fact that he didn’t fit in. I love him for his mixture of weakness and dignity.”
“Don’t make a hero out of him,” Mill said. “He lived in hard times, but he was a regular man. But you’re right about him not fitting in. If you ask me, the man had a loose chromosome that skipped a few generations and turned up in you.”
She had a point.
I
went out a few times with Yoyo. We hit some bars, visited jazz clubs, walked in parks. Fall was descending. It was mid-October, the season of John Brown’s raid. Baltimore wasn’t the place for me to stay. It was a great town — if you didn’t get mugged or shot — but it wasn’t mine. When I finished this book, I would try to sell it. And I would carry on with my life in a place where I was likely to stay. Where I was likely to meet someone. It was time for me to love somebody. It was the first time I could think of such a thing, without thinking of Ellen. And it was time for me to be a father. There was no denying that I had been a royal screw-up for most of my life. But my kids, if I was lucky enough to have them, wouldn’t care about that. They would just care about being loved.
The Toronto Times published Yoyo’s story about Harpers Ferry. His angle was that new evidence had been uncovered to the effect that John Brown had traveled to Oakville in the summer of 1859 to recruit troops and seek financial aid for his October 1859 raid, and that it now appeared clear for the first time that Brown had an extra man in his unit — a fugitive slave named Langston Cane, who had lived nine years in Oakville. The article generated a phenomenal amount of interest. Letters poured in to the newspaper. Historians and journalists contacted Yoyo and me. A publisher even expressed interest in looking at my novel. One evening, while I spoke about it with Yoyo, he produced a letter from Hélène.
“She says that if I come, I can stay with her. No promises, she says. But I would have a place to stay. Did you hear that, Langston? She wants me!”
“She said no promises, just a place to stay,” I reminded him.
“What else is she going to say? Wait till I get there, and the night is cold, and her shoulders need rubbing. Wait till we’ve talked for seven days straight. Langston, I had that woman once, and I lost her. I won’t lose her this time. Take me to Canada, Langston. When it’s time for you to go, take me with you.”
“How am I going to get you over the border?” I said. “They won’t let you in if you say you’re a visitor. You need a visa, if you’re coming to Canada as a Cameroonian. And you’re illegal here. If you try to cross the border, you could get arrested and deported.”