True to his word, we was met up at the Boston train station by two of the finest, richest-looking white fellers I ever seen. They treated him like a king, fed us well, and drug him along to a couple of churches for some speechifying. He pretended he weren’t for it at first, but they insisted it was already arranged—and he went along as though it come as a surprise. At the churches he gived boring speeches to crowds of white folks who wanted to hear all about his adventures fighting out west. I never been one for speeching and carrying on, unless course there’s joy juice or paying money involved, but I must say that while the Old Man was hated out on the plains, he was a star back east. They couldn’t get enough of his stories about the rebels. You would’a thunk that every Pro Slaver, including Dutch, Miss Abby, Chase, and all them other low drummers, scammers, four-flushers, and pickpockets, who mostly lived off pennies and generally didn’t treat the Negro any worse than they treated each other, was a bunch of cranks, heathens, and drunks who runned around murdering one another while the Free Staters spent all day setting in church at choir practice and making paper cutout dolls on Wednesday nights. Three minutes into his talk, the Old Man had them high-siddity white folks hollering bloody murder against the rebels, nigh shouting against slavery. He weren’t much of a speaker, to be honest, but for once he got the wind in his sails about our Dear Maker Who Restoreth Our Fortunes, he got ’em going, and the word spread fast, so by the time we hit the next church, all he had to say was, “I’m John Brown from Kansas, and I’s fighting slavery,” and they roared. They called for them rebels’ heads, announced they’d trounce ’em, bounce ’em, kill ’em, deaden ’em where they stood. Some of the women broke into tears once the Old Man spoke. It made me a bit sad, truth be to tell it, to watch them hundreds of white folks crying for the Negro, for there weren’t hardly ever any Negroes present at most of them gatherings, and them that was there was doodied up and quiet as a mouse. It seemed to me the whole business of the Negro’s life out there weren’t no different than it was out west, to my mind. It was like a big, long lynching. Everybody got to make a speech about the Negro but the Negro.
If the Old Man was hiding from a federal agent, he had a strange way of showing it. From Boston to Connecticut, New York City, Poughkeepsie, and Philadelphia, we done one show after another. It was always the same deal. He’d say, “I’m John Brown from Kansas, and I’s fighting slavery,” and they’d howl. We collected quite a bit of money in this fashion, with me movin’ ’bout the hall passing the hat. Sometimes I collected as much as twenty-five dollars, sometimes more, sometimes less. But the Old Man made it clear to all them followers that he was planning to head back west to fight slavery, clean, in his own fashion. Some questioned him about how he planned to do it, how he planned to fight slavery and all, who he was gonna do it with, and so forth. They put the question to him ten times, twenty times, in every town.
