The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
“Ain’t nobody here but us chickens,” I said.
“C’mon out here,” he snapped. “I seen you from the window.”
I done like he said. He was a thick-sprouted, broad-chested man. Close up, he looked even more splendid in tails and coachman’s costume than he did from afar. His shoulders was broad, and though he was short, his face was bright and sharp, and his gloves shone in the afternoon sun. He stared at me, frowning. “The Blacksmith send you?”
“Who?”
“The Blacksmith.”
“Don’t know no Blacksmith.”
“What’s the word?”
“I can’t think of none.”
“What song you singing, then? ‘We Can Break Bread Together’? That’s the song, ain’t it?”
“Got no song. I only know them Dixie songs like ‘Old Coon Callaway Come On Home.’”
He looked at me, puzzled. “What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“You on the gospel train?”
“The what?”
“The railroad.”
“What railroad?”
He glanced behind him at the house. “You run off? You a runaway?”
“No. Not yet. Not exactly.”
“Them’s three answers, child,” he snapped. “Which of ’em is it?”
“Pick any one you want, sir.”
“I ain’t got time for fooling. State your business quick. You in thick lard already, out here prowling the Colonel Washington’s road without permission. You bet’ not be here when he comes back. I got to fetch him in town in thirty minutes.”
“Would that town be Harpers Ferry?”
He pointed down the mountain at the town. “Do that look like Philadelphia down there, child? Course that’s Harpers Ferry. Every day of the week. Where else would it be?”
“Well, I come to warn you,” I said. “Something’s ’bout to kick off there.”
“Something’s always ’bout to kick off someplace.”
“I mean with the white folks.”
“White folks always got the kick, to everything and everybody. They got the mojo and say-so, too. What else is new? By the way, is you a sissy? You look mighty queer, child.”
I ignored that, for I had work to do. “If I was to tell you that something big’s coming,” I said, “something very big, would you be akin to rousing the hive?”
“Rousing the what?”
“Helping me. Rouse the hive. Gather the colored people up.”
“Girl, you weeding a bad hoe for satisfaction, talking that way. If you was my child, I’d warm your two little cakes with my switch and send you hooting and hollering down that road, just for popping off to my wife ’bout reading. You’ll get every nigger ’round here throwed in hot water talking that way. She ain’t with the cause, y’know.”
“The what?”
“The cause, the gospel train, she ain’t with it. Don’t know nothing ’bout it. Don’t wanna know. Can’t know. Can’t be trusted to know, you get my drift?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking ’bout.”
“G’wan down the road, then, with your foolish self.”
He climbed up on his wagon and readied up to har up his horses.
“I got news. Important news!”
“Big head, big wit. Little head, not a bit. That’s you, child. You got a condition.” He lifted his traces to har up his horses. “Good day.”
“Old John Brown’s coming,” I blurted out.
That got him. Stopped him dead. There weren’t a colored person east of the Mississippi who hadn’t heard of John Brown. Why, he was just a saint. Magic to the colored.
He stared down at me, holding his reins still in his hands. “I ought to whip you something scandalous just for standing there and lying like you is. Spouting dangerous lies, too.”
“I swear ’fore God, he’s coming.”
The Coachman glanced at the house. He swung the wagon ’round and faced it so that the far side of the coach door was blocked from the view of the house. “Git in there and lay down low on the floor. If you pop your head up before I tell you to, I’mma ride you straight to the deputy and say you was a stowaway and let him have you.”
I done as he said. He harred up them horses, and we rode.
—
Ten minutes later the wagon halted, and the Coachman climbed down. “Git out,” he said. He said it before the door was halfway open. He was done with me. I climbed out. We was on a mountain road in thick woods, high above Harpers Ferry, on a deserted stretch of trail.
He climbed up on the wagon and pointed behind him. “This here is the road to Chambersburg,” he said. “It’s ’bout twenty miles yonder. Go up there and see Henry Watson. He’s a barber. Tell ’em the Coachman sent you. He’ll tell you what to do next. Stay off the road and in the thickets.”
“But I ain’t a runaway.”
“I don’t know who you is, child, but git gone,” the Coachman said. “You sporting trouble, popping up out of nowhere and running your talking hole full steam ’bout Old John Brown and knowing your letters and all. Old Brown’s dead. One of the greatest helpers to the Negro in the world, deader than yesterday’s love. You ain’t worthy to speak his name, child.”
“He ain’t dead!”
“Dead in Kansas Territory,” the Coachman said. He seemed certain. “We got a man here who reads. I was in the church the day he read that newspaper to us. I heard it myself. Old Brown was out west and had militia chasing him and the U.S. Cavalry hot on his tail and everybody and his brother, for there was a reward on him. They say he outshot ’em all, he did, but they caught him after a while and drowned him. God bless him. My master hates him. Now git.”
“I can prove he ain’t dead.”
“How so?”
“’Cause I seen him. I knows him. I’ll take you to him when he comes.”
The Coachman smirked, grabbing his reins. “Why, if I was your Pa, I’d put my boot so far up your arse you’d cough out my big toe, standing there lyin’! What the devil is wrong with you, to stand there and lie like that in God’s hearing? What’s the great John Brown want with a little nigger sissy like you? Now put your foot in the road ’fore I warm your two little brown buns! And don’t tell nobody you know me. I’m ’bout filled up with that damn gospel train today! And tell the Blacksmith if you see him, don’t send me no more packages.”
“Packages?”
“Packages,” he said. “Yes! No more packages.”
“What kind of packages?”
“Is you thick, child? Git along.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking ’bout.”
He glared down at me. “Is you on the underground or not?” he said.
“What underground?”
I was confused, and he stared down at me, hot. “Git on up the road to Chambersburg ’fore I kick you up there!”
“I can’t go there. I’m staying at the Kennedy farm.”
“See!” the Coachman snorted. “Caught you in another lie. Old man Kennedy drawed his last breath last year ’bout this time.”
“One of Brown’s men rented the house from his widow. I come to this country with him.”
That cooled him some. “You mean that new chatty white feller running ’round town? The one sporting ’round with fat Miss Mary, the blond maid who lives up the road from there?”
“Him.”
“He’s with Old John Brown?”
“Yes sir.”
“Why’s he running ’round with her then? That silly nag’s been boarded more than the B&O railroad.”
“I don’t know.”
The Coachman frowned. “My brother told me to quit fooling with runaways,” he grumbled. “You can’t tell the straight truth from a crooked lie with ’em.” He sighed. “I r
I growed a little warm then. “Sir, I ain’t here for your money,” I said. “And I ain’t here to go to nobody’s Chambersburg. I come to warn you Old John Brown’s coming. With an army. He’s planning to take Harpers Ferry and start an insurrection. He told me to ‘hive the bees.’ That’s his instruction. Said, ‘Onion, you tell all the colored that I’m coming and to hive ’em up. Hive the bees.’ So I’m tellin’ you. And I ain’t tellin’ nobody no more, for it ain’t worth the trouble.”
With that, I turned and started down the mountain road toward Harpers Ferry, for he had rode me a ways out.
He called out to me, “Chambersburg’s the other direction.”
“I knows where I’m going,” I said.
His coach was pointed toward Chambersburg, too, up the mountain, away from me. He harred up his horses and galloped up the mountain trail. It took him several minutes to get up the road and find a place to turn around, for he had those four horses drawing it. He got it done in a snap, and brought them horses banging down the mountain behind me at a full trot. When he reached me, he pulled them beasts to a dead stop. Stopped ’em on a dime. He could drive the shit outta that coach. He stared down at me.
“I don’t know you,” he said. “I don’t know who you are or where you come from. But I know you ain’t from this country, so your word ain’t worth a pinch of snuff. But lemme ask you: If I was to ask at old Kennedy’s farm ’bout you, would they know you?”
“Ain’t but one feller there now. That feller I told you ’bout. His name is Mr. Cook. The Old Man sent him to spy on the town ahead of his coming, but he ought not to have sent him, for he talks too much. He’s likely done spread the word to every white man in town ’bout the Captain.”
“Good God, you surely fib like a winner,” the Coachman said. He sat for a long moment. Then he looked around to see if the way was clear and nobody was coming. “I’mma test you,” he said. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled-up piece of paper. “You say you know your letters?”
“I do.”
“Well read that,” he said. Sitting up in the driver’s seat, he handed it down to me.
I took the paper and read it aloud. “It says, ‘Dear Rufus, please give my coachman Jim four ladles and two spoons from your store and make sure he don’t eat any more store-bought biscuits from you, which is charged to my account. That nigger is fat enough as it is.’”
I handed it back to him. “It’s signed, ‘Col. Lewis F. Washington,’” I said. “That’s your master?”
“God damn that elephant-faced old bugger,” he muttered. “Never drew a short breath in his life. Never done a day’s work. And feeding me boiled grits and sour biscuits. What’s he expect?”
“Say what?”
He shoved the paper in his pocket. “If you was speaking the truth, it’d be hard to tell it,” he said. “Why would the great John Brown send a sissy to do a man’s job?”
“You can ask him yourself when he comes,” I said, “for you is full of insults and nothing more.” I started down the mountain, for there was no convincing him.
“Wait a minute.”
“Nope. You been told, sir. You been warned. G’wan ’round to the Kennedy farm and see if you don’t find Mr. Cook setting there talking in ways he shouldn’t.”
“What ’bout Miss Mary? She working with Old John Brown too?”
“No. He just made her acquaintance.”
“Sheesh, he couldn’t do no better than that? That woman’s face could stop a clock. What manner of man is your Mr. Cook that he runs behind her?”
“The rest of his army don’t act in the manner of Mr. Cook,” I said. “They coming to shoot men, not chase women. They is dangerous. They coming all the way from Iowa and they got more hardware than you ever saw, and when they load their breachloaders they drop the hammer and tell it to hurry. That’s a fact, sir.”
That got him, and for the first time I seen the doubt move off his face a little. “Your story is fetching, but it sounds like a lie,” he said. “Still, ain’t no harm in me sending somebody by old man Kennedy’s farm, if that’s where you say you living, to check on your fibbing. In the meantime, I reckon you ain’t dumb enough to mention me or the Blacksmith or Henry Watson to nobody in town. You liable to end up on the cooling board if you do. Them two is as bad as they get. They’d bust a charge into your head and feed you to the pigs if they thunk you gived away their doings.”
“They better makes sure they got all their back teeth if they do it,” I said. “For when Captain Brown comes I’mma tell him you and your friends here was a hinderance, and y’all will have to deal with him. He’ll curdle your cheese for treatin’ me like a liar.”
“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.
23
The Word
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 Coa
“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.”