American Histories. John Edgar Wideman

I’d hoped all morning words would materialize on the page while I sat here in this unprepossessing room attempting to imagine a boy alone on a wilderness trail who drives his father’s cattle along a shore of Lake Erie. How many miles there and back to supply a military encampment during the War of 1812, the boy on a horse or a mule, I assume, although it’s possible he may have been on foot, armed with a long stick or a cudgel to protect himself and prod the stream of cattle along whichever edge of Lake Erie he advances—north, south, east, west—from Hudson, a small, new town in Ohio’s Western Reserve, where the boy’s family resides, to a base on the Detroit front occupied by a General Hull and his troops.

      I had never been a white teenager with a strict, pious Calvinist father named Owen Brown whom I had accompanied often on cattle drives, never punched cows alone, never a slave like the boy his age John Brown immediately would befriend and never forget, the colored boy encountered in an isolated cabin located somewhere along his route. Very likely John Brown himself couldn’t say exactly where, disoriented by an unexpected snowstorm that erased the usual familiar terrain and forced him for caution’s sake to seek shelter for his animals and himself before nightfall, before he found himself lost completely, not sure how far he may have drifted from the trail, not even clear in which direction the trail might lie after hours of thick, swirling snow, certain of nothing but snow, wind, chilling cold, and the necessity to keep track of the cattle, perhaps round them up, count them, maybe drive them into a tight circle for warmth, cows huddled, hunkered down in a ring, and maybe him or him and his horse or mule bedded down close enough to share the heat of three, five, seven large beasts in a heap, a dark snowdrift in the middle of nowhere. Or perhaps drawn by the sight of a cabin ahead, you keep the animals moving as best you can and ride towards it, then dismount, or you’ve been plodding on foot and you reach a door and knock, embolden yourself, a shy, stranded twelve- or thirteen-year-old, to share the unhappy story of your plight, the errand your father entrusted to you, his livestock, his livelihood, delivering beef for General Hull’s soldiers to eat so the Brown family can eat, so there’s food on the table back in Hudson. Not army beef—cornmeal mush his mother measures, spoons out to John Brown and his siblings Ruth, Salmon, Oliver, and Levi Blakeslee, an orphan who, thanks to Owen Brown’s charitable heart, was adopted and traveled as part of the Brown family to Hudson from New York State. Taut, hungry, lean faces at home, and now John Brown’s duty to feed them.

      Night deepening. Storm trapping him, a boy who’s desperately seeking assistance, refuge, only or at least till daylight and he can relocate trail or landmarks and be on his way. I compare his predicament to mine, and I’m ashamed. My problem simply finding words, simply pretending to be in another time and place, another consciousness while settled in the comforts of a motel room along the interstate, fumbling around in storms of my own making, staring out a window at an increasingly postcard-perfect snowscape.

      John Brown’s storm does not subside but intensifies, lasting through the next afternoon perhaps, so he stays a night and half the following day in a cabin with a settler and his family, stranded here in a stranger’s cabin for far too long, too far away from accomplishing his task. Owen Brown’s cows outside maybe wandering off, lost in blinding snow. How many of them? Count them, band them together, search for strays, coax up the slovenly ones who otherwise would be content to die where they kneel, sunken into the snow.

      These people are pioneers of sorts, like his, hovering at the edge of raw wilderness. Dark inside the cabin. Fireplace logs shiver, smolder, smoke. Spit loud as mountain streams thawing in spring. A question arising daily, as predictable as the sun: will they survive for another twenty-four hours on this not-quite-civilized frontier. Prayers each time they awaken, each time they break bread. Bread coarse, dark, hard, a little milk on occasion or water to soften it, a rare dab of honey to sweeten, or it’s cornmeal porridge or cornmeal fried in grease to make a square of hot mush like John Brown receives that night in a cabin familiar to him from home, the wooden plates and heavy mush no strangers, nor the wife who smiles twice—John Brown notices, counts—during the hours of his stay.

      She reminds him of his mother—busy without a pause, quiet as a shadow, a kindly shadow, she lets you know without saying a word, nor could you say how you know that deep kindness and deep fear hide inside her busyness. Her mouth like his mother’s a tight line, lips nearly invisible even when she unseals them to address briskly, not often above a tight whisper, her three tiny girls or the man who is her husband, who’s quite impressed by any youngish boy a father would trust to drive cattle along miles and miles of wilderness trail, a man who offers encouragement to John Brown to linger longer, though the boy and perhaps the host know he must refuse and he will, politely, this well-spoken boy. A boy who understands his mission. Determined, as long as he can draw breath into his body, to reach his destination and discharge his responsibilities. Then walk, ride, or crawl back to Hudson, money collected in hand. Hurry, hurry, not a moment to spare, so many crucial hours consumed, lost, wasted already.

      Not a problem for me to identify with his anxious state of mind, his despondency and disappointment with himself, with John Brown’s sense he could, should have been better prepared for any emergency that might sap precious time. His sister Ruth would not understand why her bowl is empty. Her big eyes, severe even when a very young child, hold back tears she knows better than to shed, not because she fears being disciplined for weeping at the dinner table—her parents love her, teach her, pray over her and with her every day. Tears would vex her mother, worry her father, tears might cause them to think she is blaming them for no food or, worse, blaming the Good Lord she knows is always watching over her, His grace abounding, more precious than thousands of earthly platters heaped with food.

      John Brown imagines Ruth inside him and peeks out at himself with her deep, famished eyes, the way the slave boy looks at him, speaking with eyes, gestures, a silent conversation, a wordless friendship struck up with the first glances they exchange in the cabin, fellow outsiders, alien presences, raw boys of similar size, age.

      * * *

      John Brown winces but holds his tongue, his tears, when the dark boy cowers under a sudden flurry of blows, many thuds, cracks across his back, shoulders, arms, not ducking or fleeing, hands not thrust up to protect himself from blows delivered by a stout stick that must have been leaning against the head of the rough log table, stationed there at the man’s hand, John Brown immediately perceives, for exactly this purpose. Rapid, loud blows that are—is it fair to suggest?—as painful in John Brown’s mind as they are on the slave boy’s body, fair to say the sting of this not-uncommon beating cools soon and is forgotten by a black boy’s tough flesh, but a white boy’s shock endures. Surprise, surprise for John Brown the evil in the heart of this grown-up man nothing but kind to him, offering succor from a storm to one of his kind, a stranger, a mere feckless boy who let down his father, his family. I’ve lost my way, good sir. A father like his father but unlike, too, as John Brown feels himself like and unlike the black slave boy his age who serves them, who eats and sleeps under the same roof with this family, with him that night, but in a corner. Eats over there, sleeping there under rags, rags his bedding, clothes, roof, walls, floor all nothing but rags, a dark mound of rags the wind has blown into the house perhaps when the door opened to let John Brown enter or leave or when the man who’s father of the house passes in and out to piss or the slave boy’s endless chores drive him into the storm to do whatever he’s ordered to do until he’s swept by a final gust of wind one last time back into the cabin, a piece of night, ash, cinder trying to stay warm in a corner where it lands.

      5

      Spring rains swelled the rivers the year my sons John and Jason set off to join their brothers in Kansas and be counted among antislavery settlers when the territory voted to decide its future as a free or slave state. They left Ohio with their families, traveling by boat on the Ohio, then Mississippi River to St. Louis, Missouri, where they bought passage on a steamer, the New Lucy, to reach the camp at Osawatomie that the family had taken to calling Brown’s Station.

      A long, cold, wet journey to Kansas, Douglass, and on the final leg God saw fit to take back the soul of my grandson, four-year-old Austin, Jason’s elder son, stricken during an outbreak of cholera on board the steamer. When the boat docked at Waverly, Missouri, the grieving families of Jason and John, despite a drenching thunderstorm, disembarked to bury young Austin. The boat’s