The Good Lord Bird полностью

She looked off out the window. It was snowing out there. She looked right lonely at that moment. “I had a husband once,” she said. “But he was fearful. He wanted a wife and not a soldier. He became something like a woman hisself. He was fearful. Couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand being a man. But I led him to freedom land anyway.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We all got to die,” she said. “But dying as your true self is always better. God’ll take you however you come to Him. But it’s easier on a soul to come to Him clean. You’re forever free that way. From top to bottom.”

With that, she turned and walked past the other side of the room toward the door, where the Old Man was busy picking up his papers, maps, and his seven-shooter. He seen she was leaving, and dropped his papers to hurry to open the door to let her out. She stood at the open door a minute, watching the snow, her eyes glancing up and down at the empty, snowy road. She studied the street carefully a long moment, looking for slave stealers, I reckon. That woman was always on the lookout. She watched the street as she spoke to him.

“Remember, Captain, whatever your plan, be on time. Don’t deviate the time. Compromise life before you compromise time. Time is the one thing you can’t compromise.”

“Right, General.”

She bid him a hasty good-bye and left, walking down the road in them boots and that colorful shawl draped on her shoulders, snow falling on the empty road around her, as me and the Old Man watched her.

Then she quickly turned back, as if she forgot something, walked to the steps where we stood, still wearing her beaten colorful shawl, and held it out for me. “Take that and hold it,” she said, “for it may be useful.” Then she said to the Old Man again, “Remember, Captain. Be on time. Don’t compromise the time.”

“Right, General.”

But he did compromise the time. He blowed that one, too. And for that reason, the one person he could count on, the greatest slave emancipator in American history, the best fighter he could’a got, the one person who knowed more ’bout escaping the white man’s troubling waters than any man alive, never showed up. The last he seen of her was the back of her head as she walked down the road in Chatham, Canada. At the time, I weren’t sad to see her go, neither.

By the time the Old Man got back to Iowa, he was so excited, it was a pity. He left the U.S.A. for Canada with twelve men, expecting to pick up hundreds. He come back to the U.S.A. with thirteen, on account of O. P. Anderson, who joined us on the spot, as well as a few white stragglers who come along for a while and dropped off like usual when they seen that freeing the slaves was liable to get your head squared by an ax or butchered some other way. The rest of the coloreds we’d met up in Canada went back to their homes in various parts of America but had promised to come when called. Whether they was gonna be true to their word or not, the Old Man didn’t seem worried, for by the time he got back to Iowa, he was downright joyful. He’d got the General behind him, that was Mrs. Tubman.

He almost weren’t sensible in his excitement. He was joyful. It ain’t a clean proposition when you decides to mount thirteen fellers and declare a war on something rather than somebody. It occurred to me then he might be slippin’ and I ought to maybe take my leave when we got back home before he got too deep into whatever foolishness he planned next, for he didn’t seem right. But in them days I didn’t linger on any subject so long as I was shoving eggs, fried okra, and boiled partridge down my throat. Besides, the Old Man had more bad luck than any man I ever knowed, and that can’t help but to make a person likable and interesting to be around. He spent long hours in his tent, praying, studying maps, compasses, and scribbling numbers. He always wrote letters like a madman, but now he wrote triple the letters he wrote before, so much that his army’s main job in them first weeks in Tabor involved nothing more than sending and getting his mail. He sent his men to Pee Dee, Springdale, and Johnston City, to pick up letters from safe houses and taverns and friends and send off letters to Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. It took him hours to go through his mail, and while he done that, his men trained with wood swords and pistols. Some of that mail was letters with money from his abolitionist supporters back east. He had a group of six white fellers in New England who gived him big lumps of money. Even his friend Mr. Douglass sent him a shilling or three. But the truth of it is, most of them letters, the ones that weren’t from creditors, contained not money but questions. Them white folks back east was asking for—no begging for—his plans.