Free I Am Abraham by Jerome Charyn

to accomplish a letter to Ann. It wasn’t Mack, or the ghost of him, who got in the way. Mack wasn’t such a heart smasher, more like an invisible man. I jerked my own jelly night after night, with spiders and ants as my lone companions in the privy, while I rose above the stink and dreamt about her aromas and red bush. I kept imagining Ann under a wedding veil, and it frightened the tar out of me—I wanted to rip that veil and run like a prairie hog. But I heard her Bible songs in my ear.
    What are thy hopes beyond the grave?
    How stands that dark account!
    Vandalians were making a rumpus in the next room. The lantern shook. I shivered in my nightshirt. And like a fool with his own dark account, I never writ that letter to Ann.

    A CELEBRITY HAD COME to the capital. The generals had used some of Black Hawk’s own stealth to wear him down and capture that old warrior , and now the country had put him on display. He wasn’t shackled. He met with that dictator, Andy Jackson, at the White House. He stood with Jackson in the East Room—general to general, king to king—while an artist sketched them together and Jackson palavered about peace treaties with Black Hawk’s band, when he was nothing but an Indian killer with a chief on his hands too famous to kill. And then Black Hawk was hustled off to a fortress inside Virginia. He remained there less than three weeks. He’d become a national sensation, like a monster in his own monster show. He even wrote his autobiography— The Book of Black Hawk . It was the first account of an Indian chief that ever appeared in the press. He went on a speaking tour—the crowds lined up for him in Philadelphia and Baltimore, entranced by an Injun in a blanket who could vanish with all his warriors into the wind. People wanted him to vanish right there—he wouldn’t. They were still eager to hear about his late rebellion against Illinois.
    But the Vandalians didn’t consider him much of a warrior. He was no different from a caged animal. They built a straw dummy of Black Hawk and set fire to it. He had a hard time lecturing at the town hall. A dozen soldiers stood near Black Hawk to guard him from any threats to life and limb. He was wearing a silk hat over his Indian bonnet—and a frock coat, like some medicine salesman. People wanted to know why he had murdered women and children. They were mystified when he answered without the help of an army interpreter. His English was far more melodious than theirs. They were struck dumb by the sound of it, yet I grabbed at every word. It near ripped my throat to listen—and watch a man with such skill and pluck treated worse than a zoo animal in the capital of Sangamon County.
    “I did not murder,” he said, like some tragedian at a playhouse. “Children died. That is true. But I took no delight in this. I fought to save my homeland. I had to set houses on fire, or the white generals would not listen. They were deaf to all my pleas. ‘Go away, Black Hawk,’ they said. ‘Go away. You are a nuisance.’ And so I made them listen.”
    The audience was silent for a moment. Folks hadn’t expected to meet an Injun with a logic as fine as any white man’s. Then they grew angry. And they wanted to attack the stage.
    “Liar, liar,” they shouted, “you and your devil tongue.”
    A small army of them strode onto the platform and were ready to tear into Black Hawk, even with a dozen soldiers at his side. These were Andy Jackson’s scalp hunters in another guise. So I leapt onto the stage and hurled them one by one into the laps of their neighbors as gently I could.
    “Who is that giant?” the audience screeched. “Is he an Indian agent who’s gone sour?”
    “No, no,” someone shouted from amidst their fold. “That’s Long Lincoln, the Legislature man from New Salem.”
    “Well, he’d best account for himself before we hang him with the Injun.”
    I stood in front of Black Hawk, who hadn’t twitched once, while his bodyguards