Carrie
The Kansas Territory, September 1856
The night is passing swiftly and dawn is almost upon us. Already the east is tinged with red and choked with huge thunderheads that are turning purple and gold. The violence of the sunrise makes me think of blood and slaughter. I am not a violent person by nature, but I will fight Henry Clark and his band of border ruffians with every ounce of strength, cunning, and courage God gives me.
I have no military training. I am only leading the men into Missouri because I know the way to Beau Rivage. My father taught me to track anything that doesn’t fly, and even though my skills were honed in the jungles of Brazil, I can easily see the signs of men passing over the prairie. The long grasses bend and break, campfires leave indelible traces, horses rub themselves against trees more gently than buffalo, and there are fewer trees to inspect. As for foot and hoofprints: in the Amazon it rains constantly, but here the land can go for days without being thoroughly soaked. When rain does come, the result is a muddy gumbo that catches prints and dries like unfired pottery, so reading a trail isn’t much harder than reading a book of nursery rhymes.
It takes skill for a band of men on horseback to leave no trace, and Henry Clark and his band of border ruffians not only know nothing about hiding their tracks, they have no interest in doing so. After they massacred my friends and took those I love best captive, they rode toward the Missouri border drunk on arrogance and cheap whiskey. I tracked them to Beau Rivage like an invisible ghost and killed three before they reached the river.
Yet although I spread terror through their ranks, there were too many for one woman to defeat, so I had to return to Kansas for reinforcements. Clark’s Raiders are afraid of me now, but they still have their hostages. My greatest worry is that they will kill me, take the prisoners to a slave market, and sell them South. If they do, Ni has sworn to follow them to hell and back if necessary.
Ni is a better scout than I will ever be. His slave name was Toby, but after he escaped from his master, he went to live with the Kaw Indians, whose name, he tells me means People of the South Wind. The Kaw treated him well, and before they were driven off their lands onto the reservation, they sent him on a vision quest. Now he calls himself Ni, which means water in Kaw.
Like me, he has a special reason for risking his life: His wife, Jane, and his two little daughters are Clark’s prisoners. I say “wife” even though slaves are not legally permitted to marry. Jane is more Ni’s wife than I was ever Deacon’s even though I was fool enough to marry Deacon in church in a white dress, surrounded by flowers and witnesses.
The courage of Ni and his companions humbles me. Even if I am captured, the slavers probably will not hang me, although the penalty for helping slaves escape is death. It would cause too great a scandal to execute a white woman, particularly the daughter-in-law of Senator Bennett Presgrove. So provided no one can prove I killed three of Clark’s men, I have a chance to survive. But the men who ride with me can expect nothing but execution or re-enslavement. At best they will be sold back into bondage, and they have all sworn to die rather than become slaves again.
They are fifteen in number, all ages, some nearly as white as their masters, some dark as Africans. Two, Andrew and Charles, are actually African-born “saltwater slaves,” smuggled into South Carolina twelve years ago, although the United States government has outlawed the importation of slaves since 1808.
John Brown secretly trained them to ride and shoot, and he trained them well. They were going to be the cavalry of his secret army, and he planned to have them lead the slave insurrection that he believes will ignite a second American Revolution. If they make it back from Beau Rivage alive, they may indeed help end slavery in the United States, but in the next few days their aim and mine is to end it on a much smaller scale.
The oldest of my companions is forty-two; the youngest not more than fifteen. The fifteen-year-old’s name is Spartacus, by which you may deduce he was not named by his master. My friend Elizabeth Newberry named all three of her sons after the leaders of great slave rebellions: Prosser, Toussaint, and Spartacus. Nine days ago, Clark killed Prosser and Toussaint, so although I have pleaded with Spartacus not to ride with us, arguing that he is not old enough, he tells me defiantly that he is not too young to die if it means evening up the score.
Spartacus and the others are armed with Beecher’s Bibles, those fine rifled muskets that New England minister Henry Beecher supplies to anti-slavery immigrants heading to Kansas. I doubt Reverend Beecher ever imagined his guns would fall into the hands of a guerilla band composed of escaped slaves, but having met him personally, I believe he would approve. None of us have uniforms, because the federal government has not yet recognized it is involved in a war with the slaveholding South. We wear what we can. I have put on one of my lover’s old flannel shirts and a pair of his trousers, Ni wears buckskin leggings, the others wear the clothes they were wearing when they escaped from their masters or clothes that have been given to them since. One is dressed in an old jacket of John Brown’s, out at the elbows but still serviceable.
Before we set out, I want to list the men by name because if any fall in the coming battle, I am determined to build a memorial to them in Lawrence, just as we have built memorials to honor the soldiers who fell in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War.
They are: Abel, Andrew, Bilander, Caesar, Cush, Charles, Ebenezer, Ishmael, Jack, Jordan, Marcellus, Ni, Peet, Samuel, and Spartacus. Only Spartacus has a last name because, unlike the others, he was born free. The rest have no desire to adopt the names of their former masters, although several are considering taking the name “Brown” in honor of the man who trained them in the art of warfare.
I suspect that we are all afraid of what may happen once we cross into Missouri—I know I am—but we don’t discuss our fears. We have food, shoes, horses, and guns. We have a righteous cause and the will to succeed. We have each other.