John Brown's Body

A few weeks before the election, in the middle of a hot, bright autumn that never seemed to end, I took a trip to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.

The entire East Coast was deep in drought, and the landscape soughing by the car windows felt parched. At Harper’s Ferry, an awesomely beautiful national park at the intersection of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, that bright, hot dryness attained a kind of magnificence. The Appalachians swelled soft and high around us in a leafy riot, some boughs still full of unturned green, the hills a patchwork of flaming colors.

We were there to pay our respects to John Brown, the man whose 1859 raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry was both a doomed and fanatical salvo in his own war on the institution of slavery, and one of the precipitating incidents of the broader war that would finally, in blood and fire, cause the end of that “peculiar institution” in this country.

It was so, so beautiful. The rivers, each blue-gold. The leaves gold too. The white and silent obelisk paying tribute to Brown, and the now-empty arsenal he’d died for, alongside his sons, and sixteen more. The Blue Ridge mountains precipitate and lovely in their height, old and awesome and indifferent.

I knew we were, as a nation, standing on a precipice; the tribute to Brown was an acknowledgement of that, a sense that, despite the small cushion of hope I still clung to, there was a strong possibility that rage and zeal spent in fruitless struggle might again be needed, that the forces of reaction were marshaling all around us. In his final note, slipped to his jailor before his last dance at the gallows, Brown wrote, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood.” Now, after the election, in a winter of discontent—those sun-bright days gone, and that wisp of hope with it—I think back on that brief interval on the banks of the Shenandoah with half bitterness, half wistfulness.

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I’ve spent the past ten years gazing into the abyss of America’s darkest communities—from neo-Nazi fight clubs to Christian child-abuse manuals—and had hoped, among myriad less selfish hopes, for a reprieve. I remember the daily sordid ugliness of Trump’s first term, and know this one will be worse—whatever guardrails there were long rusted, another half-decade of apathy and despair accrued—and tried to take a little piece of time to build a little piece of strength, because the words didn’t want to come, because I felt burnt-out and hollow as the land.

Now the days are cold, and the daily accumulation of corruption has sped up. Last week a less zealous if not more cunning folk hero has made another doomed stand against another American institution drenched in blood—a young gunman who shot down an executive of America’s health insurance industry, which, while it has the benefit of not actually being chattel slavery, deals similarly in profit and blood. Like other American outlaws, the gunman inspired a few murder ballads, a frisson of adulation. This is a country that likes its lawmen, and likes its outlaw killers, too.

Compared to the raid on Harpers Ferry, this incident seems unlikely to kick off an overdue war—the class war, which is only recognized as violence when waged by labor against capital; the everyday slow murder by prior authorization and wage theft waged by the latter against the former is viewed as the natural and civil order of things. The incoming cabinet is distinguished not just for its odiousness, but for its singular wealth: a murderer’s row of billionaires, selected to loot what remains in the public’s coffers. And John Brown’s body has for too long lain a-mouldering in his grave, with no one to replace him.

Still: the rains came back to New York. They came back, and the fires went out, and soon the sun will start returning—in only a week the days get longer. They always do. I spent some time with my own despair, and have elected, for the most part, not to indulge it. If I am not the same person I was during Trump’s first term, some of that lost enthusiasm has been tempered by rough-won knowledge. By the examples of history, and the tumult of the present—a dictator toppled in Syria, and martial law revoked in South Korea on the back of popular revolt, and Ukraine persists in its long and lonely war against invasion.

This summer salmon spawned in the Klamath River for the first time in a century, after Indigenous activists worked for decades to remove dams. Very little is inevitable, besides the sun’s return and the rush of the Shenandoah down to the Potomac into Chesapeake Bay, into whose broad wide mouth you can wade and walk in salt for a long way.

There’s been so much talk about not complying in advance, about training your own mind to rebel against injustice. Some of that rebellion is innate in this soil, which has bred rebels and outlaws for so long. Some of it is inside us, in the joyous chaos of our oddities, our undisciplined loves and bodies, our ideals and faiths that the dour worship of Christ and capital would gladly disallow. In that raucous chorus, in the sound of returning rain, in the sound of the Shenandoah hurling itself against the green banks, comes strength returning. And possibility, and the end of drought.