I cannot say I agreed with him there, for I hadn’t done nothing but fumble ’bout. It didn’t matter to me what he said then, to be truthful, for I had my own problems. As the days passed, Annie became a powerful force in my heart. I didn’t want it to happen, course, never seen it coming, which is how these things work, but even in all my running around outside, it couldn’t help but that the three of us, Annie, Martha, and myself, was kept busy as bees in the house once the Old Man’s army rolled in. There weren’t no time to make a clean break with all that scrambling around, and my idea of running off to Philadelphia, which was always my plan, got lost in all that busywork. There just weren’t no time. The men come pouring in, a trickle at first, in the dead of the night, by twos and threes, then more steadily and in bigger numbers. The old players came first: Kagi, Stevens, Tidd, O. P. Anderson. Then some new ones—Francis Merriam—a wild-eyed feller a bit off his rocker. Stewart Taylor, a bad-tempered soul, and the rest, the Thompson brothers and the Coppocs, the two shooting Quaker brothers. Lastly, two Negroes arrived, Lewis Leary and John Copeland, two stalwart, strong-willed, handsome fellers who hailed from Oberlin, Ohio. Their arrival perked the Old Man’s ears toward the colored again, for them two was college fellers and arrived out of nowhere, having heard the fight for freedom was coming through the colored grapevine. He got much encouragement from seeing them pop into place, and one evening he looked up from his map and asked me how the hiving ’bout the Ferry was going.
“Going fine, Captain. They hiving hard.”
What else was there to say to him? He was a lunatic by then. Hardly eating, not sleeping, poring over maps and census numbers and papers and scribbling letters and getting more letters in the mail than seemed possible for one man to get. Some of them letters was full of money, which he gived to the girls to buy food and provisions. Others was urging him to leave Virginia. My mind was so confused in them days, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. There weren’t no room to think. The tiny house was like a train station and armed camp put together: There was guns to ready, ammo to figure, troop strength to discuss. They dispatched me all over, to the Ferry and back, here and there in the valley and all around it to get supplies, count men, spy on the rifle works, tell how many windows was in the engine house at the Ferry, fetch newspapers from the local general store, and count the number of people in it and the like. The Old Man and Kagi begun several late-night runs back and forth to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, ’bout fifteen miles, to collect other arms by wagon, which he had shipped to secret addresses in Chambersburg. It was just too much work. Annie and Martha was a cooking and washing service and entertainment sensations, for the men had to stay cooped upstairs in the house all day playing checkers and reading books, and them two kept them amused and entertained, in addition to the three of us scurrying ’bout downstairs preparing food.
This went on for nearly six weeks. The only solace from that madness was to hive the colored, which got me out the house, or at times, to set out on the porch with Annie in the evenings. That was one of her jobs, to set there serving as lookout and to keep the house looking normal and keep the downstairs presentable to make sure that nobody wandered in and found the hundreds of guns and pikes laying around in crates. Many an evening she asked me to set out on the porch with her, for none of the men was allowed to show themselves, and besides, she saw it as her business to educate me as to the ways of the Bible and living a Christian life. We spent them hours reading the Bible together in the dusk and discussing its passages. I come to enjoy them talks, for even though I’d gotten used to living a lie—being a girl—it come to me this way: Being a Negro’s a lie, anyway. Nobody sees the real you. Nobody knows who you are inside. You just judged on what you are on the outside whatever your color. Mulatto, colored, black, it don’t matter. You just a Negro to the world. But somehow, setting on the bench of that porch, conversating with her, watching the sun go down over the mountains above the Ferry, made me forget ’bout what was covering me and the fact that the Old Man was aiming to get us all minced to pieces. I come to the understanding that maybe what was on the inside was more important, and that your outer covering didn’t count so much as folks thought it did, colored or white, man or woman.
“What do you want to be someday?” Annie asked me one evening as we set out on the porch at sunset.
“What you mean?”
“When this is all done.”
“When what is all done?”
“When this war is over. And the Negro is free.”
