Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson Read Free Book Online

is not Harvard, it will afford you some knowledge, and while our father has many old-fashioned ideas, he is at least enlightened enough to educate his daughter, and that much can’t be said of many of his generation.
    I can appreciate the Excitement there, but no, I do not regard Brown as a Great Satan, nor do I think it is the end of the world. Do you not think it only Just, that the Slave, who has such willing oppressors, should also find willing friends? I’m afraid, however, that Brown will pay dearly for his boldness and, yes, humanity when the army brings him down. I share these Sentiments, of course, with none in the family but you.
    Your loving brother,
Thomas

    Grave robbing! Brown and Tubman left behind no wounded, but four dead, who were ignorantly and drunkenly abused and mutilated, then buried in a common grave in the mud of the sycamore flats near the Shenandoah. A week later the graves were robbed. The story whispered around was that some among the black folk had given them a proper heroes’ burial. Well, that was not to be tolerated; the local authorities finally had something they could get their teeth (such as they were) into, and on the testimony of an ignorant “house nigger” called Jameson Jameson, arrested Granny Lizbeth at Green Gables and carried her into Charles Town caparisoned in chains. They tried to make her walk, but she wouldn’t, so they brought her in a wagon escorted by six militiamen in matching outfits on horses with matching Hall’s pattern muskets. It was quite a show for a 120-year-old woman. Mama all but tied me to the stove, but since Deihl needed me in the stable and was too busy to keep track of me, what with all the journalists and railroad men in town, I managed to get to the courthouse twice on the day she was tried. I watched them bring her in, and I watched the crowd outside the courthouse when it was all over. White folks had come from miles around, and one of them called out the proceedings from the courthouse door to all those who couldn’t fit into Charles Town’s tiny courtroom. You have to understand that these Virginians had never seen an African in a courtroom before; it was as unusual to them as trying a horse, and the fact that it was happening at all was an indication of the utter strangeness of things since Brown’s raid. Well, Jameson Jameson was brought in but now said he didn’t remember anything. The crowd in the courtroom booed. The prosecutor slapped Jameson, the judge admonished the prosecutor, and Jameson cried, and the crowd in the square laughed and ate fried chicken. As for Granny Lizbeth, they had three lawyers against her and only one for, but still she lost (as that old joke goes). After a one-hour trial she was found guilty of defacing a Christian grave (Christian, since two of the four dead were White men: I have always fancied that one of them was the boy I saw on the road) and sentenced to a public whipping, the first in this part of Virginia in almost twenty years, although in the more elegant Tidewater such traditions die more slowly. Well, Granny Lizbeth, who was approaching 120 (she claimed, and we believed such things in those days) and had even less in life to fear than the rest of us Africans (though mostly we did not know it yet), bared up her yellow teeth (the cryer said) and threatened to call up the “very fires from Hell” if any “man, jack, or devil” so much as laid a hand on her. The judge, looking over his shoulder, suspended her sentence “on account of her advanced age and decrepit condition” and sent her home in the same wagon, without the chains. She rode out with her chin in the air like a conquering hero, and no wonder. A few of the white folks in the crowd booed and hollered, but most were dead silent: like the judge, they were looking over their shoulders; like me, they were afraid of granny women. Such was the state of mind among the whites the first week after the raid. Scared but angry. Angry but scared.