The slave leaned lazily against a pile until the gangplank was pulled up, his eyes under the flopping straw hat darting in every direction, watching. Then, as the space of dirty water widened and the boat became a living thing, he stood up, waved his hat in the air and, after wiping the beads of sweat from his forehead, spoke fervently.
“Do Jesus!”
Washington, D. C. had become a tough problem to the Boston Abolitionists. A group was meeting one evening in the Liberator office to map out some course of action.
“Every road barred to us! Our papers not even delivered in the mail!” Parker Pillsbury tossed his head angrily.
“Washington is a slave city. Thee must accept facts.” The Quaker, William Coffin, spoke in conciliatory tones.
“But it’s our Capital, too—a city of several thousand inhabitants—and the slaveholders build high walls around it.” The Reverend Wendell Phillips was impatient.
“We should hold a meeting in Washington!” William Lloyd Garrison sighed, thinking of all the uninformed people in that city.
His remark was followed by a heavy silence. An Abolitionist meeting in Washington was out of the question. Several Southern states had already put a price on Garrison’s head. Frederick, sitting in the shadows, studied the glum faces and realized that, in one way or another, every man in the room was marked. They were agents of the Anti-Slavery Society and they, no more than he, could go South. Washington was South. Then from near the door came a drawling voice.
“Gentlemen, trouble your heads no longer. I’m going home.” A slender man was coming forward into the lamplight.