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PARTISAN REVIEW
or buying something here or there. They had a place south of
town, down on the Marais des Cygnes, where my brother-in-law
Horace always talked about settling. Free Staters and proslavery
people were all mixed up down there-it wasn't pure enclaves, as
it was in the north. Later, Mr. Holmes said that he saw Old
Brown with his famous weapon, some kind of thing like an adze
or a pike, odd-looking. But afterwards, as with everything else, all
sorts of poeple wanted to get next to it, and that is why I want
to stress that I never saw Old Brown or his sons or friends, nor
did I know at the time that what Old Brown did would become
the most famous thing about K.T. in some quarters and utterly
unknown in others. The fact was, what Old Brown did, and to
whom, and why, was a common story around the time that it
happened, and it showed us all the new world we had gotten into
and what that meant, and so most people didn't say much about
it, because that was a world that most people in their right mind
didn't enter willingly.
When Lidie hears about "those killings," she shocks Thomas Newton,
her New England abolitionist husband, by saying, in an "unwomanly"
way, "How many times do they vow to hang us or shoot us or clear us out?
How many times do they call for our destruction in the bloodiest terms?
It seems to me that if people talk about these sorts of things long enough,
they can't be surprised when these things happen." Yet far from defining
the era as it does in
Cloudsplitter,
the subject ofJohn Brown hardly surfaces
again in
The All- True Travels and Adventures.
As the eighteenth-century-style
title suggests, this is a picaresque novel, a novel of the kind meant, in that
famous comparison to a mirror dawdling down a highway, to reflect all
and sundry scenes and persons encountered by a wandering adventurer.
Born in Quincy, Illinois, which is only about twenty-five miles north of
Mark Twain's Hannibal on the Missouri side of the Mississippi, Lidie is an
orphan rebel who craves escape from conventional society. She has "per–
versely cultivated uselessness" in the performance of such prescribed
female tasks as "making a ball fringe for our carpets and regular dishes of
light egg custard"-as urged in the
Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use
ofYoung Ladies at Home
written by Catherine Beecher, whose "female sem–
inary" she has attended. Instead, she can "ride a horse astride, saddle or no
saddle, ...walk for miles without tiring, ...bait a hook and catch a fish and
swim the width of the river and write a good letter in a clear hand." Like
Huck, she takes off "for the Territory"-which is, of course, Kansas. She
seizes the chance of another life when the Emigrant Aid Company pioneer
who appreciates her qualities offers to marry her and take her with
him
to
