Perhaps my opinion on this question is of no account here, for I was never in a position to take his measure, except as his son. And maybe we mean different things by greatness. I wonder if you mean something more like fame. For me, Father could have been great without having been famous. Nonetheless, I can understand your position. You have a historian’s perspective.
To you, it matters not that during his lifetime, like all abolitionists, Father was a much despised man, and that not just slaveholders hated him, but Whigs as much as Democrats; that he was hated by white people generally; and then, after Kansas and Harpers Ferry and during the Civil War years and beyond, even to today, that he was reviled by Southerners and Copperheads and even by many who had long supported the abolitionist cause, Republicans and the such. Nor, very probably, does it matter to you that he was also widely admired and even loved, loved passionately and almost universally by Negroes and by the more radical white abolitionists, and that he was celebrated and sung by all the most famous poets, writers, and philosophers here and abroad. What matters to you is that between those two extreme poles of opinion concerning John Brown, since December 12, 1859, every American man, woman, and child has held an opinion of his own. So, yes, Miss Mayo, if greatness is merely great fame and is defined by an ability to arouse strong feelings of an entire people for many generations, then Father, like Caesar, like Napoleon and Lincoln, was indeed a great man.
But who amongst your new, young historians and biographers, even amongst those who loathe him or think him mad, has considered the price paid for that sort of greatness by those of us who were his family? Those of us who neither examined him from a safe distance, as you do, nor stood demurely in his protective shadow, as we have so often been portrayed, but who lived every single day in the full glare of his light?
We were, after all, none of us dullards or witless. Every one of us Browns was of the energetic, sanguinary type, stubborn in thought and garrulous in speech. Why, even poor Fred, for all his innocent simplicity, when grown was a formidable figure of a man, independent and capable of astonishing acts: witness his bravery at the Battle of Black Jack in Kansas; witness his shocking self-mutilation. And both of Father’s wives, my mother, Dianthe, and my stepmother, Mary, were willful, extremely capable women of considerable intelligence and sound judgement. How else could they have managed the hard life that Father imposed upon them?
We were not easily cowed or led. We rose early, worked hard, and talked constantly. We reacted intensely and elaborately to every person, idea, and opinion that passed into our ken, to everything that occurred in the private life of each member of the family and that we heard about in the larger world as well. Whatever passed for news in those days, especially if it in the slightest way concerned the slavery question, went discussed at our table and afterwards around the fire and while we rode into town for supplies and worked in the fields and tannery. We talked and talked and talked, and we argued with one another; even the smaller children, though they could barely form sentences yet, were encouraged to speak out on great topics and small. And at night in our beds, lying in the darkness of the loft, we continued talking, arguing, explaining, with lowered voices now, slower, rumbling towards sleep, one by one breaking off from the discussion of right and wrong, true and false, until one voice only remained, speculative, exploratory, tentative, and then, at long last, silence.
Only to be broken at first light, usually by Father at the bottom of the stairs, calling to begin the day: Rise and shine, children!. Rise and shine! He’d already be up and dressed, with his Bible open on the table where he’d had his few moments of solitary study. And the round of the day would begin again, like a great wheel spinning, and its prime mover was not the sun—it only seemed so—but Father and his words and his bright, gray-eyed face. For, compared to the rest of us, no matter how hotly burned our individual flame, Father’s was a conflagration. He burned and burned, ceaselessly, it seemed, and though we were sometimes scorched by his flame, we were seldom warmed by it.
True, I loved the man beyond measure. He shaped me and gave me a life that took on great meaning. Many was the time, however, when I grew angry and wished to flee from him and his harsh, demanding God. Yet I stayed. It’s strange, but regardless of the pain and self-recrimination that my inability to worship Father’s God caused me, during all those years when other young men were separating themselves off from their fathers and mothers and establishing their own households, often far away in the West, more than any other single thing, it may well have been my discomfiting apostasy itself that kept me at his side. I was not as intelligent or skilled as some of my brothers and sisters—as Jason, for instance, who, besides being saintly in his moral sensitivity, was an almost preternaturally clever mechanic and agronomist. And compared to Ruth, whose emotions were consistently of an even and balanced nature, I was turbulent and changeable and sometimes truculent. Unlike the eldest of us, John, who had a deep, philosophical cast of mind, I seemed often shallow and merely pragmatic. Thus I was an ordinary fellow struggling with a tangled, profoundly conflicted set of views and feelings, and I came late, slowly, and only partially, and in fits and starts, to a clear understanding of the true nature of my relation to Father and to the family as a whole, and I just as often lost my grasp on the subject as I discovered it. I was like Jonah, it sometimes seemed, fleeing not God’s wrath but His will and His fierce, irrefutable logic. I cannot speak for the others, of course, but we often had to console one another to keep ourselves from falling into despair because of having temporarily lost Father’s approval. To a surprising degree, we who fell away from belief in Father’s God were able to do so, perhaps were invited to do so, because we were stuck with Father himself for a God, and try as we might, we could no more escape our god than he could his. Especially I.
It is ironic, then, that Father regarded as his supreme failure his inability to bring all of us children to share his belief. We were godly enough in our comportment; we were pious. But we would not believe. Even some of his daughters, as they became adults, would not believe. Although, unlike us boys, they did not think they should tell him of it. Perhaps because they were women and had more faith than we males in the usefulness of secrecy and decorum, perhaps because they were kinder than we—regardless, for all of us, it was as if Father’s own light burned so brightly that it eclipsed the Sun that shone on him. Thus it came to seem to us that it shone on him alone. And because from him we received only reflected light, as from the moon, we were not always so much warmed by it as merely illuminated.
There did come a time, however, when I arrived at an understanding and got a glimpse of the cost of the only path through life that was not revealed to us solely by Father’s light. It was in the fall of ’46,1 remember, and Father was out east alone, in Springfield, establishing his warehousing scheme for Mr. Simon Perkins, of whom you have no doubt already heard. We were then living on Mr. Perkins’s farm in Akron, not as servants, exactly, but at his sufferance, which Father preferred to think of as a partnership.
Ruth was seventeen years old that fall, a blooming young woman whose sprightly company was much sought after by the young fellows in the neighborhood, for her good sense, her good humor, and her broad-faced good looks. Not including Fred, who was sixteen years old and more or less looked after himself, there were six young children then at home—the youngest being Amelia, or Kitty, as we called her, who was barely one year old. Consequently, Ruth was obliged to be constantly at work with Mary, caring for the younger children and managing the house. Oliver was only six years old, but the other boys, Salmon, Watson, and Fred, were, like me, tending Mr. Perkins’s—and, as Father would have it, John Brown’s—large flock of sheep and running the farm. Mutton Hill was our affectionate name for the place, and an appropriate one, for Mr. Perkins’s flock numbered close to two hundred at that time.
All told, it was not a difficult operation, but there was no leisure time for any of us, a lack that was probably felt more by poor Rut
h than by anyone else, due to her oncoming young womanhood and the presence there in Akron of a lively community of young men and women her age, all of them scouting and reconnoitering each other with the intensity and restlessness typical of rural youth in the throes of first rut. Despite her high spirits, Ruth was, as always, singularly pious and virtuous, but that did not mean she was not as moody and distracted as the other boys and girls of her acquaintance. Perhaps, because of her piety and virtue, she was even more agitated than the others. But who can say? I’m probably thinking of how I myself was at that age; I know next to nothing of what females experience.
Even so, I remember her seeming sometimes to smile absently and day-dream her way through those long, darkening fall afternoons and in the evenings to sigh a lot, letting loose with plaintive exhalations, as if pining for a lover far away. She had no lover, of course; and no one special was courting her then. But she was on occasion uncharacteristically withdrawn and thoughtful that summer and fall and was noticeably awkward at times, which was unusual enough for us to comment on, and when she bumped her head or stumbled over a doorstoop, we teased her for it.
I have been unfortunately blessed by having been placed in my life so as to witness firsthand most of the tragic and painful events that have afflicted my family, and thus have been too often obliged to carry the sad news to the others. This is no complaint, but there was a peculiar loneliness to the task, for neither was I the victim nor was I permitted to fall down in the dust and grieve: I had to speak as if I had no pain. For most of my life, it seems, that is how I was forced to speak. Perhaps that is why, when I grew older and the great events that marked our family were in the past, I withdrew to my mountain in California and remained silent altogether; and why now, when I know that I will never again have to witness the suffering of my loved ones, for they have all died or grown old themselves, I am compelled to tell so much.
On the occasion of which I speak here, I was obliged to write Father a terrible letter. I cannot now say exactly why I was chosen, but John and Jason were living apart from us for the first time, and there was no other adult at home then, except for Mary, whose letter-writing skills were not so developed as mine, and Ruth, who, as a principal in the awful news I was obliged to transmit, had been rendered incapable of speaking for herself, either in a letter or in person. Dear Father, I wrote with trembling hand. I do not know how to begin, for I must write to you of a dreadful event which occurred here the evening before last. Mary was upstairs in the girls’ bedroom with three-year-old Annie, who had been feeling poorly all day and appeared to be coming down with the croup, which had almost taken her off the previous spring, so it was an occasion for some alarm. I heard Mary’s footsteps overhead as she walked back and forth in the bedroom, from Annie’s small bed to the nightstand and dresser, easing the child into bed and towards sleep. Oliver and Salmon were in the second bedroom, the loft where we boys slept, practicing the wrestling holds that I had taught them earlier that summer, making their usual grunting sounds, as if they were ancient Greeks in an arena instead of little American boys grappling on the floor and colliding with the homemade furniture of a farmhouse bedroom. Watson was up there with them, seated on one of the beds, no doubt, instructing his younger brothers and criticizing their lack of wrestling skills. Fred and I were in the parlor, off the kitchen, where he sat by the front window, talking through the glass to the two little collies outside, who leapt about and barked at the sight of his friendly face, hoping to be let in where it was warm and where all their people had gone.
Having just set and lit the evening fire, I was seated next to it and, as I had made a trip that afternoon into town for feed and some nails, was preparing to enter into the account book the day’s expenses. Mr. Perkins was responsible for all costs associated with the keeping of the flock, and thus we kept scrupulous track of our expenses. I would have written to you at once, but there has been no time for it until now. Our little Kitty has died, a painful & tragic death with much suffering that thankfully she did not have to long endure. From where I sat, I could see around the corner the tin bathtub on the floor of the kitchen. The kitchen stove, however, was out of my line of sight, as were Ruth and the baby, Kitty, whom I could hear gurgling and burbling over one of the house cats.
Ruth was silent. Perhaps she, like Fred in the parlor, was looking out her window in the kitchen, looking not at the dogs begging Fred to let them come inside but at some imagined young man strolling down the pathway from the road from town, a beau come to call, a sweetheart of her own venturing forth to meet her large, boisterous, somewhat notorious family in the absence of the stern, demanding father, hoping to befriend the brothers and talk politely and deferentially to the woman of the house, so that when the father returned they would all speak well of the young man, and the father would then allow his eldest daughter to go walking with him. Kitty’s untimely death was the result of a simple, blameless accident. It was in the evening about 7o’clock & Ruth was heating water, so that the little children could bathe; and due to some business about the house, what with the usual commotion of the children & cooking supper, the water heated to a boil, and when Ruth ran to fetch the pot from the stove, she did not realize it was so hot & as a result she dropped it; & the boiling water splashed all over little Kitty, who was standing naked next to her waiting for her bath, and who evidently swallowed a great gulp of it when it spilled over her body, which was a mercy, for otherwise she would not have died so swiftly and would have lingered in terrible pain. I heard a horrible yowl, the cry of a wild animal, not that of a human being, and not so much a cry of pain as an enraged, savage shriek. That was the last utterance made by our baby sister Kitty, who had just begun to walk and say our names in ways that made us laugh and re-name ourselves, a blond, pink-skinned, robust child, made suddenly monstrous by her wild, final howl.
And then, just as suddenly, there was silence in the whole house. It was a terrible scene, Father, as you can no doubt imagine, horrible to us all; & especially to poor Ruth, who is suffering from unspeakable guilt & remorse. She has shut herself away from the rest of us, & weeps constantly, & when she does speak, it is to beg for forgiveness, especially of Mary, who is seriously shaken from the incident but asks me to say to you that she trusts in God and knows that Kitty is in heaven with Him. The silence may have lasted no more than a second, but it seemed to go on for a long while, before Ruth began to moan, “Oh-h-h, oh-h-h ... ,” a moan that, in contrast to Kitty’s howl, was purely, uniquely, pathetically human, a noise that is made by no creature but one who has been the direct cause of the death of a child.
Without having observed anything of the accident, except for the steaming skin of water that spread slowly across the floor towards the empty tin bathtub, I knew at once what had happened. And I believe that Fred knew, too, for we looked at one another for an instant, and his eyes were filled with unutterable sorrow. Ruth begged me at first not to write to you, so that she could be the one to bear this burden; but then said that she could not do it. So I have done it. By the time I reached the kitchen, Mary had come down the stairs, her face white with knowledge of what had already happened, and we saw Ruth standing in the far corner of the room with the scarlet body of the baby in her arms. The large black kettle, like a head with a gaping mouth, lay on its side on the floor next to the stove, the spilled, translucent water a carpet of snakes spreading around table legs and chairs.
Ruth’s eyes had rolled back, and she was making a guttural noise now, as if she were choking. The baby had already died. Its scalded, bright red body was emptied of spirit. It was a thing, a tiny, shriveled sack, and its small soul was bouncing wildly around the room near the ceiling, like a maddened, dying moth, a bit of quickly diminishing light. I held Mary by her shoulders, and together we approached Ruth, and very gently Mary reached out and took the body of her baby from her stepdaughter, turned, and walked away from us into the parlor, past poor Fred, who stood at the door with his hands over his ears, as if he stil
l heard the baby’s howl. Silently, I came and stood before Ruth and held her in my arms, but she was insensible of my presence and went on making a choking noise, her head tilted back, eyes whitened and unseeing, as if she had fallen into a deep trance. She needs to hear from you, Father, the same as she has heard from Mary & me (& from John & Jason as well, for they have come down from Ashtabula). She needs to hear that you do not blame her for the death of Kitty. She blames herself more than enough for any of us to add a word. I tell you, it was not Ruth’s fault. She will never see it that way herself, however. It was a simple accident, & any one of us could have been the agency for it to happen as easily as was poor Ruth. Mary dressed the body of the child in a tiny flannel nightgown, wrapped it in a blanket, as if preparing it for sleep, and that same night I went into the barn, and as Father himself had done only a few years before, in that terrible winter of ’43, when four of his children sickened one by one and died, I built for the first time in my life a small pine coffin.
The boys, not knowing what else to do, followed me out to the barn and in the dim lantern light watched me in silence, as I had watched Father, the four of them standing there like somber acolytes, learning how to cut the boards to the correct size for the body of a child, so that the coffin would hold the child snugly, without confining it or bending it out of its natural shape, watching me carefully plane and fit the boards neatly together and drive the nails without damaging the wood and hinge the cover and latch it. We have buried little Kitty out behind the house, near where you planted the crab-apple trees last spring, & am making a proper marker for her that will say her dates and name, & any little motto, if you wish one for her. Mr. and Mrs. Perkins have been a great comfort to Mary & to the rest of us, & Mrs. Perkins has taken Annie & Oliver over to the big house for the time being, to make things easier for Mary; & many other local folks have come to the house with condolences Gsympathy. At the burial, I touched Ruth on the cheek with the fingertips of my right hand and put my claw of a left hand around her back and drew my sister close to me, as if to take into myself her grief and to share with her the shame she felt. The others at the graveside, our friends and neighbors, looked at us, and I was glad of that, for I wished them to see that all of us Browns were equally to blame for the death of our Kitty and that, therefore, no single one of us was to blame. I am sorry, Father, to be bringing you such terrible news. I hope that the business is going well. No particular problems with the flocks or the farm here. Your loving son,