‘Great-grandpapa’s tired,’ whispers John. ‘Let’s go in for tea.’
‘What – tired? Not a bit of it!’ You can’t have grandlings taking pity on you, even at ninety-one. ‘But tea, what? Capital idea! Who’s for a bellyful of gingerbread, eh? Tell you what, pups – you make yourselves decent, straighten your hair, find Gus’s other shoe, put your socks on, Alice – yes, Jemima, you look positively queenly – and we’ll march up to tea, shall we? At least, you lot will, while I call the step and look after remounts. Won’t that be jolly? And we’ll sing his song as we go –’
‘Jombrown’s body? Gory Halooyah?’
‘The very same, Gus! Now, then, fall in, tallest on the right, shortest on the left – heels together, John, eyes front, Jemima, pull in your guts, Augustus, stop giggling, Alice – and I’ll teach you some capital verses you never heard before! Ready?’
I don’t suppose there’s a soul speaks English in the world who couldn’t sing the chorus today, but of course it hadn’t been written when we went down to Harper’s Ferry – J.B.’s army of ragamuffins, adventurers, escaped slaves, rustlers and lunatics. ‘God’s crusaders’, some enthusiast called us – but then again, I’ve read that we were ‘swaggering, swearing bullies and infidels’ (well, thank’ee, sir). We were twenty-one strong, fifteen white (one with pure terror, I can tell you), six black, and all set to conquer Dixie, if you please! We didn’t make it at the time, quite – but we did in the end, by God, didn’t we just, with Sherman’s bugles blowing thirty miles in latitude three hundred to the main …
Not that I gave a two-cent dam for that, you understand, and still don’t. They could have kept their idiotic Civil War for me, for (my own skin’s safety apart) it was the foulest, most useless conflict in history, the mass suicide of the flower of the British-American race – and for what? Black freedom, which would have come in a few years anyway, as sure as sunrise. And all those boys could have been sitting in the twilight, watching their Johns and Jemimas.
Still, I’ve got a soft spot for the old song – and for J.B., for that matter. Aye, that song which, the historian says, was sung by every Union regiment because ‘it dealt not with John Brown’s feeble sword, but with his soul.’ His soul, my eye – as often as not the poor old maniac wasn’t even mentioned, and it would be:
Wild Bill Sherman’s got a rope around his neck,
An’ we’ll all catch hold an’ give-it-one-hell-of-a-pull!
Glory, glory, hallelujah, etc …
Or it might be ‘our sergeant-major’, or Jeff Davis hanging from a sour apple tree, or any of the unprintable choruses that inspired the pious Mrs Howe to write ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory’.3 But all that’s another story, for another day … in the meantime, I taught my small descendants some versions which were entirely to their liking, and we trooped up to the house, the infants in column of twos and the venerable patriarch hobbling painfully behind, flask at the high port, and all waking the echoes with:
John Brown’s donkey’s got an india-rubber tail,
An’ he rubbed it with camphorated oil!
followed by:
Our Great-grandpa saved the Viceroy
In the – good – old – Khyber – Pass!
and concluding with:
Flashy had an army of a hundred Bashi-bazouks
An’ the whole dam’ lot got shot!
Glory, glory, hallelujah …
Spirited stuff, and it was just sheer bad luck that the Bishop and other visiting Pecksniffs should already be taking tea with Elspeth and Miss Prentice when we rolled in through the french windows, the damp and dirty grandlings in full voice and myself measuring my ancient length across the threshold, flask and all. Very well, the grandlings were raucous and dishevelled, and I ain’t at my best sprawled supine on the carpet leaking brandy, but to judge from his lordship’s, disgusted aspect and Miss Prentice’s frozen pince-nez you’d have thought I’d been teaching them to smoke opium and sing ‘One-eyed Riley’.
The upshot was that the infants were packed off in disgrace to a defaulters’ tea of dry bread and milk, Gus was sent to bed early – oh, aye, Jemima ratted on him – and when the guests had departed in an odour of sanctity, withdrawing the hems of their garments from me and making commiserating murmurs to Elspeth, she loosed her wrath on me for an Evil Influence, corrupting young innocence with my barrack-room ribaldry, letting them get their feet wet, and did I know what shoes cost nowadays, and she was Black Affronted, and how was she ever going to look the Bishop in the face again, would I tell her?
Contrition not being my style, and useless anyway, I let the storm blow itself out, and later, having ensured that La Prentice was snug in her lair – polishing her knout and supping gin on the sly, I daresay – I raided the pantry and smuggled gingerbread and lemonade to the grandlings’ bedroom, where at their insistence I regaled them with the story of John Brown (suitably edited for tender ears). They fell asleep in the middle of it, and so did I, among the broken meats on John’s coverlet, and woke at last to the touch of soft lips on my aged brow to find Elspeth shaking her head in fond despair.
Well, the old girl knows I’m past reforming now, and that Jemima’s right: I’ll certainly go to the bad fire. I know one who won’t though, and that’s old Ossawatomie John Brown, ‘that new saint, than whom nothing purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death’, and who made ‘the gallows glorious like the Cross’. That’s Ralph Waldo Emerson on J.B. ‘A saint, noble, brave, trusting in God’, ‘honest, truthful, conscientious’, comparable with William Wallace, Washington, and William Tell – those are the words of Parker and Garrison, who knew him, and they ain’t the half of his worshippers; talk about a mixture of Jesus, Apollo, Goliath and Julius Caesar! On the other hand … ‘a faker, shifty, crafty, vain, selfish, intolerant, brutal’, ‘an unscrupulous soldier of fortune, a horse-thief, a hypocrite’ who didn’t care about freeing slaves and would have been happy to use slave labour himself, a liar, a criminal, and a murderer – that’s his most recent biographer talking. Interesting chap, Brown, wouldn’t you say?
A good deal of it’s true, both sides, and you may take my word for it; scoundrel I may be, but I’ve no axe to grind about J.B.’s reputation. I helped to make it, though, by not shooting him in the back when I had the chance. Didn’t want to, and wouldn’t have had the nerve, anyway.
You might even say that I, all unwitting, launched him on the path to immortal glory. Aye, if there’s a company of saints up yonder, they’ll be dressing by the right on J.B., for when the Recording Angel has racked up all his crimes and lies and thefts and follies and deceits and cold-blooded killings, he’ll still be saved when better men are damned. Why? ’Cos if he wasn’t, there’d be such an almighty roar of indignation from the Heavenly Host it would bust the firmament; God would never live it down. That’s the beauty of a martyr’s crown, you see; it outshines everything, and they don’t come any brighter than old J.B.’s. I’m not saying he deserves it; I only know, perhaps better than anyone, how he came by it.
You will wonder, if you’re familiar with my inglorious record, how I came to take part with John Brown at all. Old Flashy, the bully and poltroon, cad and turncoat, lecher and toady – bearing Freedom’s banner aloft in the noblest cause of all, the liberation of the enslaved and downtrodden? Striking off the shackles at the risk of death and dishonour? Gad, I wish Arnold could have seen me. That’s the irony of it – if I’d bitten the dust at the Ferry, I’d have had a martyr’s crown, too, on top of all the honours and glory I’d already won in Her Majesty’s service (by turning tail and lying and posturing and pinching other chaps’ credit, but nobody knew that, not even wily old Colin Campbell who’d pinned the