What should be done, Mr. President. Our nation is deeply unsafe. I feel threatened and vulnerable. What can I do. Or you. Do we need another Harpers Ferry. Do we possess in our bottomless arsenal a weapon to demolish lies that connect race, color, and slavery.
By the time this note reaches your desk, Mr. President, if it ever does, you may be a woman. No surprise. Once we had elected a colored President, the block was busted. Perhaps you are a colored woman, and that would be an edifying surprise.
This note is getting too long. And to be perfectly honest, Mr. President, I believe terminating slavery may be beyond even your vast powers. My guess is that slavery won’t disappear until only two human beings left alive, neither one strong enough to enslave the other.
Anyway, please read on and enjoy the stories that follow. No strings attached. No obligation to free a single slave of any color, Ms. or Mr. President.
JB & FD
1
To need his glasses and be struck by an awareness that they are not at hand, an ordinary-enough circumstance for Frederick Douglass, except sometimes it’s accompanied by a flash of extraordinary dread. If not quite panic, certainly an unease disproportionate to a simple recurring situation. Dread that may be immediately extinguished if he locates his horn-rimmed, owlish-eyed spectacles exactly where he anticipated they should be.
He sees them and almost sighs. Nearly feels their slightly uncomfortable weight palpable on his nose. Finding the glasses is enough to reassure him that he remains here among the living in this material world where he depends on glasses to read, glasses to help him negotiate stubbornly solid objects he cannot glide through. Enough to remember that he’s able to recall or backtrack, anyway, and understand how the present moment connects to moments preceding it, a trail of hows and whys causing him to wind up where he is now, at this particular moment, stretching out a hand to pick up eyeglasses because he is the same person who placed them on the desk, beside a stack of three books at the desk’s upper-left-hand corner so he wouldn’t forget, and there, here they would be when he needed glasses.
Sometimes dread does not vanish when he locates his glasses. They turn up where he thinks they should, his fingers curl, prepare to reach out for them. But glasses are not enough. Not convincing enough. They do not belong to him. Not glasses. Not hand. He vaguely recognizes both. Glasses too heavy to lift. Or hand too heavy. He’s observing from an incalculable distance. Sometimes that detachment is a gift, sometimes it dooms him, and he cannot animate or orchestrate what he desires to come next. John Brown spreads his ancient, musty wool cloak—cloak the brown color of his name—over glasses, books, desk, study, house, wife, him, and when John Brown snatches the cloak away, nothing’s there. Douglass has fled to the mountains, the woods to join him.
2
Ah, Frederick, my friend. Look at you, Fred Douglass. I knew after a single glance you could be the one. Your manly form and bearing left no room for doubt. And today, these dozen hard years later, you still stand tall, straight, gleaming. I see God’s promise of freedom in you. Yours. Mine. Our nation’s. A man who could lead his people, all people, out of slavery’s bondage. Your beard dark that day we first spoke and now tinged with spools of gray, but you gleam still, my friend. Despite the iron cloud of suffering and oppression slavery casts over this land.
Douglass remembers no beard. Not wearing one himself, nor a beard on Brown’s gaunt face. Certainly not the patriarch’s thicket of white flowing—no, a torrent—today, halfway down John Brown’s chest. He misremembers me.
But if God ignites a man to believe himself a prophet, if visions burst upon him and seize him, as an ordinary man is seized by a roiling gut and must rush behind a bush to squat and relieve himself, if such urgency is the case, I suppose, Douglass instructs himself, a prophet can be forgiven for mistaking petty details. Prophecies forgiven for confusing time and place, for compounding truth and error, wisdom and foolishness, for mixing wishful thinking with logic. John Brown thus forgiven for believing that ignorant, isolated slaves, cowed into submission by a master’s whip, will grasp the purpose of a raid on Harpers Ferry and flock instantly to his banner. Enraptured by his vision, Brown foresees colored slaves armed with sticks and stones prevailing against cannons, Sharps carbines, the disciplined troops of a nation dedicated absolutely to upholding the principle that color makes some men less equal than others. I embrace the fiery justness of John Brown’s prophecies, his unflinching willingness to sacrifice himself and his sons, yet I cannot forgive my friend for untempered speech, demagoguery, the impetuosity and rage that grip him. That transform dream to madness.
3
Douglass watches himself step out from behind the curtain and stride to the bunting-draped podium. They will welcome him. He is famous. Broad chest bemedaled, gold baton, field marshal’s crimson sash decorating his resplendent uniform, veteran of a terrible war, though he never fired a shot in anger. Fine figure of a man still. After seven decades on earth. After a protracted, blood-drenched conflict settling nothing. Certainly not settling his fate. Nor his color’s fate. Nor his nation’s.
A drumroll of applause greets him, deepening as he moves step-by-step across the stage, a thunder of hands accompanying him. In the front rows his new white wife’s white women friends. When a journalist asked Douglass to speak about his marriage, seeking details to spice the story he intended to write about newlyweds whose union scandalously ignored great disparities of age and race, Douglass replied, “My first wife the color of my mother, second the color of my father.”
Tonight in this hall where he’d spoken once before, where once he’d been property, a fugitive hosted by abolitionists, a piece of animated chattel curiously endowed with speech, tonight in this hall he would address “The Woman Question.” Proclaim every woman’s God-granted entitlement, like his, to all the Rights of Man.
A born orator. Born with that gift and many glorious others, his mother assured him in stories told at night, whispering while she lay next to him in the darkness, their only time together, half hours she stole from her master, slipping away to walk an hour each way, plantation to plantation, to earn their half hour.
Second rumble of applause when he concludes his remarks. Head bowed, he waves away the noise and stirs it, conducts it, loves it even as his gesturing arm seems dismissive, seems modest, a humble man, a veteran tempering, allaying the crowd’s enthusiasm just as he strokes and soothes and quiets and fine-tunes his new young wife’s pale hair and pale skin, her passion that makes him tender, wistful, as often as aroused. These happy newlyweds. Her ferocious coven of female friends among the loudest of clappers.
The evening will be a success, and he will return home to drop dead. Douglass dead as suddenly as Lincoln felled by an assassin’s bullet. Except the president lingered. Douglass won’t. Dead. He sees this as surely as he sees his old face in the vanity mirror in their freshly papered bedroom. As surely as old man Brown saw blood. Only pools, rivers, an ocean of blood, John Brown swore, would cleanse the sin of man-stealing. No. Not cleanse. Not expunge or redeem or expiate. No. Blood must be shed. No promises. No better, cleaner South or North. Only a simple certainty that blood must be shed. Douglass read that dire text in Brown’s distracted gaze, his stare. Same fire in himself as a boy who struck back, no fear of consequences, at bullying slave driver Covey. Same fire fanned by waves of hands striking hands that primes him, guides, draws him as he crosses to a podium. Fire in the young woman he’s taken after forty years with his colored first wife, this second wife who will discover him lying comfortably on the floor as he would have been lying comfortably across their canopied bed awaiting her had his heart not stopped and dropped him like an ax drops an ox, Douglass lying there on the Turkish carpet he sees so clearly now and never will again. Won’t see it when he falls, when the abyss blackens suddenly and his head slams down into the rug’s elaborately woven prayers.
4
Through a smallish window in a small motel I watched snow falling, a heavy snow, probably more than enough coming down to transform in a couple of hours the unprepossessing landscape