2. Ride to the Yard

By the fifth of July the shop smelled of ink, paper and hot candle wax, and a tall stack of printed sheets stood on the table.

Tom had not slept. He did not feel tired. He felt like a lantern that somebody had lit from the inside.

"These must go to the thirteen states," said Mr. Dunlap, tying the sheets into bundles. "To the generals, to the town leaders, to anyone who can read it out loud. Riders will carry them. But the first reading belongs to Philadelphia, and it is happening on the eighth, in the yard behind the State House. I want one clean copy there, and I want it carried by someone nobody will suspect."

"Who would suspect a printer's boy?" said Tom.

"Exactly."

So on the morning of the eighth, Tom tucked one perfect sheet inside his shirt, wrapped in an old apron, and walked down Market Street. The city was awake and humming. Wagons rattled by. People stood in doorways whispering. A woman at a baker's stall looked at his black fingers and said, "You've been up all night, lad."

"Yes, ma'am," said Tom. He kept walking.

At the State House yard a crowd was already gathering, hundreds of people, shoulder to shoulder in the summer heat. There were farmers and sailors, shopkeepers and clerks, women with babies on their hips, and boys perched on fences. At the front stood a man named Colonel Nixon, holding a paper of his own. Tom pushed through the crowd, ducking under elbows, until he reached him.

"Sir," he said, and pulled the page out of his shirt. "From Mr. Dunlap. It's the cleanest one."

The colonel took it, glanced at the crisp black print, and nodded. "Your master does fine work. Stay close, son. You earned a front seat."

A hush spread across the yard. Colonel Nixon climbed onto a platform and unfolded the page, and he began to read in a voice that carried over every head.

Tom had set those words himself, letter by backwards letter. He knew them the way he knew the creaks of the press. But hearing them said aloud, to hundreds of faces turned toward one voice, was a different thing altogether.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...

Tom looked around him. An old man was crying quietly. A sailor had taken off his hat. Somewhere behind him, someone began to cheer, and then everyone was cheering, and a bell started ringing over the rooftops, loud and bright and wild.

Years later, people would argue about which bell it had been, and who had rung it, and whether it rang at all that day. Tom never argued. He knew what he had heard.

There was one more thing he knew, and it was harder. Those words said all men are created equal, but not everyone in that yard was free, and not everyone who had been counted in those words would be counted in the new country. The promise had been written down. Keeping it would take a very long time, and a lot of people willing to hold the nation to what it had said.

Tom wiped his hands on his apron and watched the crowd. He felt proud, and he felt something else too, something that sat quietly under the pride.

It's only ink on paper, he thought. Now somebody has to make it true.

When he got back to the shop, Mr. Dunlap was waiting at the door.

"Well?" said the printer.

"They cheered," said Tom. "They all cheered."

Mr. Dunlap nodded slowly. He looked tired and happy, and a little afraid.

"Good," he said. "Then the easy part is over. Wash your hands, Tom. We have more printing to do."

The End