* * *
No simple business to slaughter men with broadswords. To hack and slice human flesh with less ceremony than we butcher sheep and pigs. Dark that late night, early morning in Kansas when we descended upon homesteads of the worst proslavery vigilantes and fell to killing along Pottawatomie Creek. I was in command. Ordered the guilty to come out from their homes. Ordered executions in the woods. I knew the men I condemned had assaulted and murdered peaceful settlers, and among their victims were members of my family. Still, I stood aside at first, appalled by the fury, blood, screams, the mayhem perpetrated by weapons wielded by my sons Owen and Salmon and our companions. Though I entertained not the slightest of doubts, Frederick—the awful acts committed that day were justified, even if they moved the clock only one minute closer to the day our nation must free itself from the sin of slavery—yet I stayed my hand until the quiet of dawn had returned. Then, in silence broken only by pitiful moans, I delivered a pistol shot to the brain of a dying James Doyle.
6
Here is a letter (some historians call it fiction) written by Mahala Doyle in the winter of 1859 and delivered to John Brown awaiting execution in his prison cell in Virginia:
I do feel gratified to hear that you were stopped in your fiendish career at Harpers Ferry, with the loss of your two sons, you can now appreciate my distress in Kansas, when you . . . entered my house at midnight and arrested my Husband and two boys, and took them out of the yard and shot them in cold blood, shot them dead in my hearing, you can’t say you done it to free slaves, we had none and never expected to own one, but has only made me a poor disconsolate widow with helpless children. . . . Oh how it pained my heart to hear the dying groans of my Husband & children.
7
On the road between Cleveland and Kansas, gazing up at the stars, John Brown’s son Frederick said, “If God, then this. If no God, then this.”
John Brown remembers the wonder in Frederick’s voice, how softly, reverently his son spoke, so many stars overhead in the black sky, remembers the wagon wheels’ jolt, yield, bounce had spun a seemingly unending length of rough fabric from the road’s coarse thread, then a seamless, silky ride for John Brown lasting until Frederick’s words returned him to an invisible chaos of slippery mud, rocks, craters that snatch them, tumble them, rattle their bones. Any moment a sudden, unavoidable accident might pitch both men overboard or smash the wagon to splinters as it traverses this broken section of road between Cleveland and Kansas, and there is no other road except the one spun for a few minutes during John Brown’s forgiving sleep, his forgetful sleep.
How many minutes, hours, how much unbroken silence of sleep before he awakened abruptly to hear his son Frederick’s voice asking how many miles covered, how many more miles to go to Kansas, Father. His poor, half-mad, feeble-brained son, the one of all his children, people agree, who resembles him most in face and figure, Fred, loyal and uncomplaining as a shoe. Tall, sturdy Frederick, who will die in a few weeks in Kansas. Dead once before as an infant, then reborn, rebaptized Frederick in remembrance of his lost little brother. Frederick’s second chance to live cut short by ruffians in a border war, my second perished Frederick. Then a third chance, a dark son or dark father or mysteriously both, bearing the same Christian name my sons bore, Frederick, and John Brown trembles after his sleeping eyes pop open when he hears his son’s declaration, Frederick’s soft blasphemy revealing his wonder at a thought he had brewed all by himself while he drove the wagon transporting father and son to the killing fields of Missouri and Kansas, driving through this great holy world, this conundrum, John Brown thinks, far too perplexing, too fearful for a father to grasp or explicate.
In his cell in Virginia, John Brown will remember riding in a wagon at night with his dead son Frederick on the way to rejoin family in the camp in Kansas. His arm stiffens, his fist grips the hilt of an imaginary broadsword, and he mimics blows he witnessed in predawn darkness, blows his sons Salmon and Owen inflicted on outlaws they attacked on Pottawatomie Creek. This stroke for a dead grandson, Austin. This one for dead baby Frederick. This for Frederick who shared his lost brother’s name and died too soon, twenty-six years old, in those Kansas Territory wars. And more blows struck for other, darker Fredericks, all of them his children, God’s children, Brown almost shouts aloud as he presses again a revolver’s actual barrel against the skull of whimpering, murdering night rider Doyle. An act of mercy or vengeance, he will ask God in his cell, to end the suffering of a nearly dead evil wretch when he pulls the trigger.
8
(1856)
Mrs. Thomas Russell wrote: Our house was chosen as a refuge because no one would have dreamed of looking for Brown therein . . .
John Brown stayed a week with us, keeping to his room almost always, except at meal time, and never coming down unless one of us went up to fetch him. He proved a most amiable guest, and when he left, I missed him greatly . . .
First time that I went up to call John Brown, I thought he would never open his door. Nothing ensued but an interminable sound of the dragging of furniture.
“I have been finding the best way to barricade,” he remarked, when he appeared at last. “I shall never be taken alive, you know. And I should hate to spoil your carpet.”
“You may burn down the house, if you want to,” I exclaimed.
“No, my dear, I shall not do that.”
Mrs. Russell goes on to record: John Brown had the keenest possible sense of humor, and never missed the point of a joke or of a situation. Negroes’ long words, exaggerations, and grandiloquence afforded him endless amusement, as did pretentiousness of any sort . . .
He was acute in observing the quality of spoken English, and would often show himself highly diverted by the blunders of uneducated tongues. He himself spoke somewhat rustically, but his phrases were well formed, his words well chosen, and his constructions always forcible and direct. When he laughed he made not the slightest sound, not even a whisper or an intake of breath; but he shook all over and laughed violently. It was the most curious thing imaginable to see him, in utter silence, rock and quake with mirth. . . .
(1858)
John Brown thinks of it as molting. His feathers shed. A change of color. Him shriven. Cleansed. Pale feathers giving way to darker. Darker giving way to pale. Not seasonal, not a yearly exchange of plumage as God sees fit to arrange for birds or for trees whose leaves alter their hue before they drop each fall. His molting occurs in an instant. He stands naked. A tree suddenly stripped of leaves. Empty branches full again in the blink of an eye.
I see such alterations in myself, Douglass, in my dreams and often in God’s plain daylight, and wonder if others notice my skin falling away, turning a different color, but I do not ask, not even my wife or children, for fear I will be thought mad. One more instance of insanity my enemies could add to discredit me. Old Brown thinks he changes colors like a bird or a leaf.
Free slaves, mad Brown shouts. Free the coloreds, as if color simply a removable outer shell, as if color doesn’t permanently bind men into different kinds of men. As if feathers, leaves, fur, skin, fleece, all one substance, and all colors a single color. Yet I believe they are the same in God’s eye.
I thank you again for the kindness and generosity you and your wife have extended towards me. I arrived here weary, despondent, exhausted by the Kansas wars, and you offered shelter. A respite from enemies who pursue me as if there’s a price on my head here in the North as well as in