“We can’t save everyone. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing’s going to grow in this mean cold, but we can still have flowers.
“Here’s one delusion: that we can escape slavery. We can’t. Its scars will never fade. When you saw your mother sold off, your father beaten, your sister abused by some boss or master, did you ever think you would sit here today, without chains, without the yoke, among a new family? Everything you ever knew told you that freedom was a trick—yet here you are. Still we run, tracking by the good full moon to sanctuary.
“Valentine farm is a delusion. Who told you the negro deserved a place of refuge? Who told you that you had that right? Every minute of your life’s suffering has argued otherwise. By every fact of history, it can’t exist. This place must be a delusion, too. Yet here we are.
“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes—believes with all its heart—that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.
“I’m supposed to answer Mingo’s call for gradual progress, for closing our doors to those in need. I’m supposed to answer those who think this place is too close to the grievous influence of slavery, and that we should move west. I don’t have an answer for you. I don’t know what we should do. The word we. In some ways, the only thing we have in common is the color of our skin. Our ancestors came from all over the African continent. It’s quite large. Brother Valentine has the maps of the world in his splendid library, you can look for yourself. They had different ways of subsistence, different customs, spoke a hundred different languages. And that great mixture was brought to America in the holds of slave ships. To the north, the south. Their sons and daughters picked tobacco, cultivated cotton, worked on the largest estates and smallest farms. We are craftsmen and midwives and preachers and peddlers. Black hands built the White House, the seat of our nation’s government. The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race—which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wishes for ourselves and our children?
“For we are Africans in America. Something new in the history of the world, without models for what we will become.
“Color must suffice. It has brought us to this night, this discussion, and it will take us into the future. All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together.”
—
WHEN the former residents of the Valentine farm recalled that moment, when they told strangers and grandchildren of how they used to live and how it came to an end, their voices still trembled years later. In Philadelphia, in San Francisco, in the cow towns and ranches where they eventually made a home, they mourned those who died that day. The air in the room turned prickly, they told their families, quickened by an unseen power. Whether they had been born free or in chains, they inhabited that moment as one: the moment when you aim yourself at the north star and decide to run. Perhaps they were on the verge of some new order, on the verge of clasping reason to disorder, of putting all the lessons of their history to bear on the future. Or perhaps time, as it will, lent the occasion a gravity that it did not possess, and everything was as Lander insisted: They were deluded.
But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
The shot hit Lander in the chest. He fell back, dragging down the lectern. Royal was the first one to his feet. As he ran to the fallen man, three bullets bit into his back. He jerked like one of Saint Vitus’s dancers and dropped. Then came a chorus of rifle fire, screams, and broken glass, and a mad scramble overtook the meeting hall.
The white men outside whooped and howled