The stakes are raised as Brown approaches October 1859, for even Onion recognizes the futility of the raid, where Brown expects hundreds of slaves to rise in revolt and gets only a handful. In that time, Brown visits Frederick Douglass, and, in the most implausible scene in the novel, Douglass gets tight and chases after the nubile Onion. The interlude with Pie occurs during a two-year period where Brown disappears from Onion’s life, but they’re reunited a few months before the debacle at Harpers Ferry. This fluidity of gender identity allows Onion a certain leeway in his life, for example, he gets taken in by Pie, a beautiful prostitute, where he witnesses some activity almost more unseemly than a 12-year-old can stand. Brown whisks the 12-year-old away thinking he’s a girl, and Onion keeps up the disguise for the next few years. The unlikely narrator of the events leading up to Brown’s quixotic raid at Harpers Ferry is Henry Shackleford, aka Little Onion, whose father is killed when Brown comes in to liberate some slaves. In McBride’s version of events, John Brown’s body doesn’t lie a-mouldering in the grave-he’s alive and vigorous and fanatical and doomed, so one could say his soul does indeed go marching on.
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