“What you want child, a gold medal? I don’t know you from Adam. You come out the blue, spinning a heap of tall yarns for somebody so young. You lucky your lie landed with me, and not with some of these other niggers ’round here, for there’s a heap of ’em would hand you over to the slave patrollers for a goosefeather pillow. I’ll check your story with Mr. Cook. Either you is lying or you is not. If you lying, you had to work like the devil to dream up that yarn. If you not, you is disobeying God’s orders to the limit in some kind of devilish fashion, for ain’t no way on God’s green earth that Old John Brown, hot as he is, is gonna come here, where all these weapons and soldiers is, to fight for the colored’s freedom. He’d be putting his head right in the lion’s mouth. He’s a brave man if he’s living, but he ain’t a straight fool.”
“You don’t know him,” I said.
But he didn’t hear me. He had harred up his horses and was gone.
Two days later, an old colored woman bearing brooms inside a wheelbarrow pushed up to the door of the Kennedy farm and knocked. Cook was fast asleep. He woke up, grabbing his pistol, and runned to the door. He spoke with the door closed, his pistol down by his side. “Who is it?”
“Name’s Becky, massa. I’m selling brooms.”
“Don’t want none.”
“The Coachman says you did.”
Cook looked at me, puzzled. “That’s the feller I told you ’bout,” I said. He stood there blinking a minute, half-sleep. He didn’t no more remember what I told him ’bout the Coachman than a dog would remember his birthday. Fat Mary from down the road was wearing him out. He didn’t get back to the house the night before till the wee hours. He come in with his disheveled clothes and his hair a mess, smelling like liquor, laughing and whistling.
“All right, then. But come in slow.”
The woman walked in slowly and purposeful, pushing the barrel before her. She was old, slender, deep brown, with furried white hair, a wrinkled face, and a tattered dress. She pulled two new brooms out of the barrel and held one in each hand. “I made these myself,” she said, “fashioned from the best straw and brand-new pine handles. Made from southern pine, the best kinds.”
“We don’t need no brooms,” Mr. Cook said.
The woman took a long look around. She saw the boxes marked “Mining” and “Tools.” The clean mining picks and axes, which hadn’t seen a bit of dirt. She looked at me once, then again, blinking, then at Cook. “Surely the little missus here”—she nodded at me—“could use a broom to clean up after the young master.”
Cook was sleepy and irritable. “We got brooms enough here.”
“But if you mining and getting all dirtied up, you’ll be bringing in all kinds of filth and dirt and so forth, and I wouldn’t want the master to get too sullied up.”
“Can’t you hear?”
“I’m sorry, then. The Coachman said you’d need brooms.”
“Who is that again?”
“That’s the feller I told you ’bout,” I piped up again. Cook looked at me and frowned. He weren’t like the Old Man. He didn’t quite know what to do with me. He was all right when we was on the trail out west and there weren’t nobody else around to shoot the yarn with. But once he got around civilization, he didn’t know whether he should act white or colored, or be a soldier or a spy, or shit or go blind. He hadn’t paid me the least bit of attention since we got to the Ferry, and what attention he did pay to me weren’t respectful. I was just a bother to him. It was all fun to him. I don’t know but that he didn’t think anything would come of the Old Man’s plans, or believed him in the least, for Cook had never been in a real war, and never seen the Old Man fight. “Is she one of them you supposed to be hivin’?” he asked.
“One of ’em,” I said.
“Well, hive her,” he said, “and I will brew us up some coffee.” He picked up a bucket and moved outside. There was a water well out back, and he stumbled out there holding that bucket, rubbing his eyes.
Becky looked at me. “We is here on a mission,” I said. “I reckon the Coachman told you.”
“He told me he met a strange li’l cooter on the road dressed funny, who gived him bad instructions, and was likely stretching his blanket lying.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me names, for I has done you no wrong.”
“I’ll be calling you dead if you continues on as you is. You do much harm to yourself when you paddle ’bout, selling fool’s gold. Talking ’bout a great man. And talking it into the ears of the wrong folks. The Coachman’s wife don’t work on the gospel train. She got a mouth like a waterfall. You putting a lot of people in danger, hooting and railing ’bout John Brown like you is.”
“I already had a mouthful ’bout that from the Coachman,” I said. “I don’t know nothing ’bout nobody’s gospel train, not in no way, form, or fashion. I ain’t a runaway and ain’t from these parts. I been sent forward to hive the bees. Get the colored together. That’s what the Old Man sent me for.”
“Why would he send you?”
“He ain’t got but two coloreds in his army. The other ones he weren’t too sure ’bout.”
“In what way?”
