Predictably, with a few changes made—none of them, however, designed to placate the wishes of our white neighbors—Father went straight back to work on the Underground Railroad. In his mind, all our white neighbors were now cowards and hypocrites, every one of them, and periodically he denounced them to any of us in the family who would listen. He denounced even his good friend Mr. Thompson, for, although the Old Man at first thought that he had successfully shamed our neighbors with his sermon, his message evidently hadn’t taken hold: no one in the village was willing anymore to aid him in his efforts to spirit fugitive slaves out of the country—except, of course, for the Negroes themselves. And except for the rest of us Browns. Meaning me, I suppose, although there was considerable sacrifice required as well of the others in the family, who had to accommodate themselves to Father’s and my and Lyman’s frequent and protracted absences from the farm.
The most significant change in our
modus operandi,
however, was in cutting Mr. Wilkinson of the Tahawus mining camp out of the operation. In a flurry of letters to Mr. Frederick Douglass in Rochester, Father made it clear that he would not work with the man. Thenceforth, cargo from the South would have to be shipped to Father in North Elba via an agent named Reuben Shiloh, in care of a Mrs. Ebenezer Rankin, resident of the town of Long Lake, New York, a small, rough lumbering community in the southern Adirondack wilderness about forty miles from North Elba. Reuben Shiloh was in fact Father himself, a pseudonym. Mrs. Rankin, his point of contact in Long Lake, was the elderly widow of a veteran of the War of the Revolution. She lived alone in a cabin on the land her husband had homesteaded after the war, was regarded in the village as mildly eccentric and harmless, and, due to her deep religious feeling and independence of spirit, was sympathetic to the cause. Father first met her after a sermon he had made on the subject of abolitionism at the Congregational church there in Long Lake and, as was his wont, had trusted her instantly. Generally, the Old Man made decisions as to a person’s trustworthiness at once and without consulting others. When it had to do with business matters, of course, he was usually wrong, well off the mark, absurdly so; but when it concerned the question of slavery, he was almost always right.
“It’s a thing you can tell in an instant. You know it from a person’s speech or the cast of his eyes, as soon as you begin to speak with him on the subject of race,” he said, trying to explain his procedure. “Early on, Owen, I conceived the idea of placing myself, when speaking of such matters with white people, in the position of a Negro.” Which is to say that he listened to whites and watched them as if his self-respect, his well-being, his very life, were always at stake, and consequently, as he claimed, he quickly saw things that most whites ignore or blind themselves to. For example, if he spoke of the horrors of slavery to a stranger and the man’s face went all slack and sad over it, as if he wished to be admired for the tenderness of his feelings, then Father knew not to trust him. But if the man reacted, not with sadness and regret, but with righteous wrathfulness, then he would brighten and feel secure in confiding in that person. Father said he loved seeing that old-time righteous anger fill up a white man’s face. It happened rarely, however. “No, Owen” he said, “when it comes to race and slavery, white people, try as they may, cannot hide their true feelings. Not to their fellow Americans who happen to be born black, that is. And not to me, either. Only to themselves.”
Mr. Wilkinson of Tahawus had not hidden his true feelings, not even from me, and I believe that he somewhat resented being cut away from the operation, not out of any love for the Negro or some deep desire to help destroy slavery, but because his work on the Railroad made it significantly easier for him to view himself as a man who acted kindly towards people he regarded as his inferiors. Perhaps he believed that by working for the Underground Railroad and alongside Father, whose motives were pure, he might be able to strike a balance against his hard treatment of the indentured Irish miners and their families. At any rate, soon after he was dropped by the wayside, he joined, unbeknownst to us, with our known enemies, with the slave-catchers and bounty-hunters, with the folks in the region who regarded us as fanatical trouble-makers, and with the marshal from Albany, whose pursuit of the Virginia couple accused of murdering their master had continued throughout the summer.
The marshal, whose name was Saunders, had gotten himself caught in a squeeze between the Canadian and American authorities and also between the states of Virginia and New York, as the Canadians, after conducting an extensive investigation, had asserted unequivocably that the Cannons had never crossed the border at all. The authorities in Virginia insisted that the couple had been last located over in New-Trenton, New York, where they had been detained briefly by a local deputy whom they had somehow bribed to leave their cell door unlocked—the money for the bribe possibly originating with Mr. Douglass, who had visited the couple during their brief confinement. The New-Trenton deputy was himself now awaiting trial, and in order to save his own skin was telling Marshal Saunders everything he knew or thought he knew about the Cannons and their confederates.
Meanwhile, we were moving regular shipments of human cargo over Father’s, or Reuben Shiloh’s, new link between Long Lake and North Elba, and due to the rising vigilance of the authorities and the greater presence of slave-catchers west of us in Buffalo and east of us in Troy, our cargo was increasing significantly in volume and degree of risk, so that three or four times a week we were obliged to make a run down along the old Military Road from North Elba through the pine forests and across the swamps and muskegs to the cabin of Mrs. Rankin, where we loaded up and then raced back through the night to Timbuctoo, and the next night moved our cargo on to Port Kemp, where Captain Keifer carried it aboard his boat and sailed it north to Canada.
It was a wild and exciting time. We were like a gang of outlaws, Lyman and I and Mr. Fleete and Father, armed and reckless, and several times we narrowly escaped capture. Lyman seemed to have found his proper vocation. He grew stern and brave and was no longer so garrulous and puffed up as he had sometimes been earlier. Our days on the farm now seemed merely to be resting periods, interludes that we impatiently waited out, until we again received word from Mrs. Rankin that a new shipment for Reuben Shiloh had arrived in Long Lake, and we would be off, Father and Mr. Fleete on horseback, Lyman and I in the wagon, with our guns close at hand and supplies and tarpaulins and blankets stashed in the bed of the wagon. At Mrs. Rankin’s cabin we’d hole up for the daylight hours in the shed she had out back, beneath which we had early on dug a secret cellar hidingplace where the escaped slaves could await our arrival undetected. And then at sundown we’d load the fugitives into the wagon—men, women, and children in various combinations. We’d cover them with the tarpaulin and race back northeast to Timbuctoo, and if we made good time, we’d keep right on towards Port Kent, arriving there just before sunrise, and Captain Keifer would transfer the cargo from our wagon to his boat. Later that same day, usually in the afternoon, we would pull into the yard in front of the house in North Elba, men and animals alike exhausted and hungry, and we’d eat and fall into bed and sleep like corpses for ten or twelve hours.
Twice, I remember, we were accosted by law officers—a sheriff in Long Lake and a deputy U.S. marshal in Ausable Forks—but on both occasions our wagon was empty, and after suffering a brief and surly interrogation, we were allowed to continue unimpeded. Nonetheless, we were ready for the worst. Although we weren’t actually pursued at any time and thus weren’t obliged to fire our weapons, there was always the danger of betrayal and discovery. People would look up from their work in the fields and woodlots and stare at us as we passed by or peer out the windows of their bedrooms late in the night when the sound of our horses’ hooves and the loud rattle and clack of the wagon disturbed their sleep. Those people must have known who we were and what we were up to.
Our operation, however, was narrow, secretive, and private, cut off from any communications with the communities that surrounded us, cut off, even, from the rest of the anti-slavery movement and its committees and churches and the old mainlines of the Underground Railroad. We worked in a kind of darkness and solitude, as if no one else on the planet were engaged in the same or similar activities. As if there were no one who was not utterly opposed to our activities. And, as had happened in the past, back in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where for an extended period we shuttled fugitive slaves successfully out of the South into Canada, we got caught up in the day-to-day rhythms and excitement of the work, and this put us off the larger rhythms of the movement as a whole. It was as if our little four-man operation, our overnight link between Long Lake and Port Kent, New York, were the entire anti-slavery program for America. It wasn’t arrogance or pride that did it, although it did sometimes seem that Father honestly believed that under his leadership our work was more crucial to the movement than any other and that it was more rigorous and disciplined, morally clearer, better planned, and more efficiently executed than the work of everyone else—beliefs dangerously close to arrogance and pride. No, we lost sight of the larger picture because we were obliged to respond constantly and quickly day in and out to the immediate needs of desperate people who had entrusted their lives to us. And just as we forgot about the helpful existence of our distant or indirect allies, we forgot about the conniving actions of our distant and indirect enemies. We operated without reconnoiter and in the absence of intelligence.
Thus we were not prepared for the re-appearance, one hot August afternoon, of Marshal Saunders at the farm in North Elba. He arrived on horseback in the company of a pair of sober-visaged deputies, bearing testimony from Mr. Wilkinson of the Tahawus mining camp, who the marshal claimed had accused Father and me and two unnamed Negroes presently residing in the vicinity of North Elba of having aided and abetted the escape of the indicted murderers James and Emma Cannon, of Richmond, Virginia.
The officers came up on us shortly after we had returned from a two-night run to Port Kent with four Maryland Negroes—an elderly man, his daughter, and her two nearly grown sons. Our wagon was empty, and Father and I, fortunately, were alone, as Lyman had accompanied Mr. Fleete back to Timbuctoo, there to rest and afterwards to do some much needed blacksmithing among the Negro farmers.
We were standing outside the house by the water trough, stripped to our waists, washing ourselves. The boys and the women, including Lyman’s wife, Susan, were cutting the first crop of hay in the front field. Father looked up at the three men, who sat relaxed and open-faced on their horses as if they meant us no harm. Introductions were not necessary, and Marshal Saunders got straight to the point of this his second visit to our farm. When he had told us of Mr. Wilkinson’s betrayal, he said, “Mister Brown, I’ve not come here to charge you and your son with anything. I’m here peaceable. But I do need to know the names of the two colored men who helped you carry the Cannons through here. It wasn’t but a month ago,” he said, with a slow smile. “You no doubt recall their names.”
Father dried himself deliberately and said nothing. He looked at me, and I saw his boiling rage. Then he passed the drying cloth to me.
“If we helped anyone named Cannon, and I don’t recall that we did, but if we did, then my son and I did it alone,” Father said. “Wilkinson is a liar.”
Marshal Saunders said that he was looking for a slim, dark Negro man in his twenties and a heavy-set mulatto man in his fifties with a full beard. “I’m going to assume, Mister Brown, that you and your son here didn’t have no notion that the coloreds from Virginia was murderers, all right? And you thought you was only helping a couple of escaped slaves scoot through to Canada, that’s all. Just as was the case with Mister Wilkinson down there at Tahawus. And I don’t consider him a liar, sir. I realize that you all were only doing what you thought was your Christian duty. Your Negro associates, however, probably knew better. They have their little secrets that they keep from us,” he said sourly. He believed that they probably knew where the Cannons were hiding. His aim was to cut a deal with our friends. The same deal, he said, that he was cutting with us. If they could give him some small help in locating the Cannons, then he wouldn’t press charges against anyone up here in North Elba. “They’re free niggers, far as I’m concerned, and that’s how I’ll treat them, so long’s they do the same as you and give me a bit of help in performing my duties as a federal officer of the law. You understand what I’m telling you, Mister Brown?”
Father stared up at the man in silence. The horses shifted their weight, sweating under the sun. “Certainly I understand,” he finally said. “But I will not help you, sir. My son and I, if indeed we did help some poor Negro slaves escape from the evil clutches of some Southern slavemaster—a man who may well have deserved to die anyhow, since well-treated slaves rarely risk the rigors of flight—then we did so on our own.” The burden of proof lay with the marshal, Father pointed out, and he believed that giving a stranger in a strange land a ride in your wagon was not yet illegal in the state of New York.
Well, yes, the marshal agreed. It was a gray area of the law, a person might say. Father would benefit everyone concerned, however, himself included, if he saw fit to aid the law. The marshal rolled his head slowly on his shoulders, as if his neck were stiff and this were a casual conversation. The two deputies kept their right hands open and close to the handles of their revolvers.
Father said, “You don’t know who you’re looking for, except on Mister Wilkinson’s perjured say-so. And I can’t help you, and if I could, I’ll tell you frankly, sir, I wouldn’t. Find your Negroes on your own,” he snapped, and he turned and walked towards the house.