Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  It was a startling thing to do! If it had hit Father, it might have killed him. But the Old Man must have jumped aside at the last second, for we heard the timber bang resoundingly against the floor below and, an instant later, heard the barn door open and then close, as Father tiptoed away. I remember lying up there in the hay for a long time afterwards, shaking with fear and biting off a sudden, inexplicable impulse to laugh aloud.

  John was altogether silent and lay a ways apart from me and Jason, and, when Jason said, “What if you had hit him?” did not answer. Turning to me, Jason said, “You know, we’re lucky it didn’t hit him,” and to my astonishment I found myself laughing loudly, wildly, almost crying. I rolled back in the hay and turned myself over and around, squirming like a snake, all the while laughing hilariously, as if a great joke had just been told me. And when at last the laughter stopped, and I lay still, I realized that I had wet myself. My trousers were soaked. Ashamed and miserable then, I crawled as far from my brothers in the haymow as I could get and curled up like a little animal in the far corner and lay awake for most of the rest of the night.

  We had defeated Father, yes, indeed, but the event had terrified us. Or at least it had terrified me. As for my brothers, I cannot say. It was one of those things we never spoke about afterwards, even years later, when there was a second humorous event involving cow-itch, which with surprising pointedness, involved Father as well.

  I wonder if I should tell it here, for it seems, except in my memory of the event, unrelated. Yet there is no more compelling principle of organization in this long telling than that of memory, and no other principle of selection than that of revealing to you what you cannot otherwise know. So, yes, I’ll tell it here, and you can decide for yourself if you can take from it further understanding of my father and of me.

  One night many years later than the event described above, when we were living in Springfield—in the fall of ’47, it must have been, the year before Father made his first journey to North Elba—after several nights of listening to John preach the virtues of some of the newer sciences and health therapies, such as phrenology and Mesmerism, which he was then studying in a mail-order course from New York City, Father, who had been airily dismissive of all such notions, agreed to attend a demonstration by a well-known hypnotist, a Professor La Roy Sunderland. Coming from Father, this was a considerable and unexpected concession, and John was delighted by it.

  Together, the three of us, Father, John, and I, marched off immediately after supper to the Palace Theater, where we took our seats as near to the front as possible. The Professor was an imposing figure of a man, with a flowing blond beard and a scarlet face and a grand, oratorical voice and manner. Most if not all of the people in the audience that night were true believers in the powers of hypnotism, so the Professor had the pleasure of speaking to the already converted, and his demonstration was laced with sarcastic, condescending references to those ignorant folks who, like Father, “preferred superstition to science.” This did not sit well with Father, naturally, and he squirmed and muttered throughout, as the florid Professor, with charts of the brain and diagrams of nervous impulses and connectors, explained how hypnotism successfully blocked off pain and could be used wonderfully, if only people were sufficiently enlightened, in surgery and in the treatment of fractures and injuries.

  He had many anecdotes to bolster his reasoning, and after a while, when he felt that his audience had been adequately instructed and prepared, he called for some volunteers, so as to demonstrate before our very eyes the power of this marvelous new science. Immediately, a half-dozen men and women, mostly young, left their seats in various sections of the auditorium and made their way to the stage.

  “The man’s a charlatan,” Father grumbled in a low voice. “His ‘volunteers’ are no more genuine than play-actors.”

  “So why don’t you volunteer, Father?” John suggested.

  “I think I’ll enjoy the show more from here, thank you.”

  “What about you, Owen?” John said.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll just watch, and make up my mind later.” I was shy about being seen up on a stage like that. Because of my arm, perhaps, but mainly because of an innate desire to blend in with the crowd and not seem showy or self-advertising. Besides, I did not particularly want to play a role in this ongoing quarrel between John and Father. It was their fight, not mine. For some years now, John had seemed intent on converting Father to his belief in “science” and “objectivity!” which Father well knew was merely a covert way of arguing with him about the truth of the Bible and religion. I had long since decided to keep my apostasy as private as possible and never tried to defend it against Father’s faith.

  From his group of volunteers, Professor Sunderland selected the most attractive person, a buxom, fair-skinned young woman with brown hair wound neatly around her head, and drew her to the center of the stage. He asked her if she had ever been hypnotized before. She responded in the negative, and he said, “Excellent, excellent,” and invited her to sit down on a stool that his assistant had placed there. When she was seated, he proceeded to wave his fingers lightly before her face and then asked her to count aloud backwards from ten. Before she reached five, she had ceased counting altogether and was gazing insensibly out at the audience.

  “This lovely young lady,”the Professor announced, “has not left us. She hears and understands my every word. She has, however, been rendered insensible to pain.”

  “Nonsense,”‘ Father muttered.

  The Professor informed the young woman that she would not remember any of what was about to occur, that he would do nothing to harm her or anyone else, and he would not ask her to do or say anything that was morally repugnant to her. She gave no indication that she had heard or understood him but merely sat there on the stool with a small smile on her lips, as if she were remembering a pleasant incident from earlier in the day. She seemed quite peaceful and at rest.

  At a gesture from the Professor, his assistant suddenly appeared beside him with a lit candle. “Extend your left hand, palm to the floor, please,” the hypnotist said, and the woman instantly complied. When he brought the flame of the candle to within an inch of her palm, she showed no evidence of having felt its heat. For a long time, he held it there, before taking it away and handing it back to his assistant, retrieving this time a bit of ice. He told the woman to turn her hand over, which she did, and he placed the ice into her hand and closed her fingers over it. Her pleasantly calm expression and relaxed physical manner did not change; the cold bothered her no more than had the heat.

  At this point, the Professor’s assistant brought out a medium-sized anvil, an object he carried with obvious difficulty, due to its great weight, probably some seventy-five pounds. The hypnotist hefted the anvil, then passed it to one of the sturdy young men amongst the volunteers still on the stage, and noted that the young man had difficulty hefting it. “Is it genuine?” he asked the fellow, who grinned and said yes. “Our frail young woman” he said, “will handle this anvil as if it were made of paper. It will seem to her as light as a sack of feathers.”

  Suddenly, Father stood up and was calling out to the Professor. “Hold on there, mister! Just hold on a minute!”

  “Sir?” The hypnotist was clearly startled and perhaps a little alarmed. Father’s manner was severe, and he seemed, even to me, in a fume.

  “The woman is insensible to pain, you say!”

  “I do, indeed.”

  “Well, sir, I do not believe you or her! You have not sufficiently tested her, as far as I am concerned. I believe that I can make her instantly sensible to pain, if given the opportunity.”

  Professor Sunderland hesitated a moment, as if taking the measure of his opponent. Then he smiled politely and said, “Sir, you may yourself test the subject. But only if you yourself are willing to undergo the same test.” The man had met this sort of challenge before.

  Father, who had already moved from his seat to the aisle, stopp
ed in his tracks. “Well, sir, I am not the one claiming to be insensible to pain. No one has waved his fingers before me and said abra-ca-dabra.”

  “To be sure. But to protect my subject from injury, I must insist that you yourself endure whatever pain you wish to test her with. How do you propose to test her, may I ask?” He smiled broadly at the audience.

  Father would not back down. His face reddening noticeably, he made his way down to the front and mounted to the stage, where, to my surprise, he produced from his coat pocket two small vials. Then, turning to us, he announced that one of the vials contained ammonia, which he was sure would cause the girl to flinch and weep. In the other, he said, was a strong medicine known as cow-itch, which he was sure many in the audience were familiar with, although I suspected he was wrong on that. The ammonia alone, he said, would do the trick, and he uncorked the bottle and held it under the nose of the girl. He held it there for nearly a full minute, to be sure that she inhaled it. She made no response at all.

  The crowd was delighted and applauded cheerfully.

  “Ah, but now, sir,” said the Professor, “you must undergo the same test.”

  Father said, “She may have held her breath.”

  “Try it again, if you wish. And hold it there as long as you like.” Again, Father held the ammonia below the girl’s nostrils, this time for perhaps three minutes, while we all watched her face carefully for the slightest sign of discomfort. But it was as if the bottle were filled with fresh spring water.

  Professor Sunderland finally reached forward and took the bottle from Father and gently turned Father to face the audience. “Now, my friend, let us see if you do indeed have ammonia here.”

  Father closed his eyes and faced squarely ahead. And when the Professor waved the vial under his nose, Father jerked his head back and visibly winced. The audience broke into loud laughter and applause.

  “The woman has some ability to hide her reactions to strong smell,” Father said. “Let me try her with the cow-itch.”

  “As you wish, sir,” said the hypnotist.

  With the corner of his handkerchief, Father applied a swab of the stuff to the girl’s bare neck. She did not flinch or change her expression in the slightest. Father’s shoulders sank.

  “Well, my friend, may we test you the same way?” said the hypnotist. “You have the advantage of her, I notice, as a man apparently used to working outdoors in the sun.” He crooked a finger over Father’s collar and drew down his leather tie, exposing to the audience Father’s dark red neck. “May I?” he politely asked, and took the handkerchief from Father’s hand and rubbed it vigorously across the back of Father’s neck.

  The Old Man winced, but he did not otherwise reveal the awful pain that I knew he was experiencing and which was growing worse by the instant. Poor man. Along with everyone else in the audience, John was laughing loudly now, as Father struggled to maintain his compo. sure and depart from the stage as swiftly as possible. Practically at a run, he came back up the aisle and, ignoring us as he passed, kept going, straight out the door.

  “Should we go with him?” I whispered to John.

  “Naw, he’ll befine,”he said, grinning. “In a few days.”

  I departed from my seat then and followed the Old Man, feeling too much sympathy to leave him alone. I found him outside on the street, clawing in a frenzy at his collar, struggling to rub the stuff out, but only succeeding in driving it deeper into his flesh. I decided to say nothing and accompanied him all the way home in silence, hanging back a few steps while he stopped at nearly every light pole to rub the back of his neck violently against the cold metal like a poor, stricken beast. It was a pathetic and oddly moving sight, and I was as much fascinated and compelled to stare as I was embarrassed by Father’s antics. I felt ashamed for looking at him. But how I enjoyed seeing Father suffer in public! And how, at the same time, I wished it had not happened at all.

  These small stories which I have lately written out for you have drawn me back to the origins of our larger story, to the unknown parts of it, at least. And there is a particular, important book in our life as a family which you may not yet have come upon in your research. Half a century ago, it was very popular amongst the abolitionists. I have this morning retrieved it from the box of Father’s books, which, as you know, remain, along with many of his letters, in my custody, and have been recalling the first time I read in it. The book is called American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. I urge you to read aloud the portions of the book which I will copy out here below, so that you will have a more exact idea of how it was for us. We were seated around the fire in the kitchen fireplace of the old Haymaker Place in Hudson, Ohio, where we then lived. Father opened it to the first page and, with his voice very loud, commenced to read from it. After he had read for several moments, he passed the book to us and bade each in turn to read from it.

  First, my stepmother Mary read, haltingly and sometimes stumbling over unfamiliar words, for she was not a skillful reader. Then my brother John, who was eighteen years of age that winter, rapidly read a page or two. And after him, Jason, who was seventeen, in a voice that was almost a whisper, took his place. Finally, the book came to me, and I began to read.

  We will, in the first place, prove by a cloud of witnesses that the slaves are whipped with such inhuman severity as to lacerate and mangle their flesh in the most shocking manner, leaving permanent scars and ridges. After establishing this, we will present a mass of testimony confirming a great variety of other tortures. The testimony, for the most part, will he that of the slaveholders themselves, and in their own chosen words. A large portion of it will he taken from the advertisements, which they have published in their own newspapers, describing their runaway slaves by the scars on their bodies made by the whip. To copy these advertisements entire would require a great amount of space and flood the reader with a vast mass of matter irrelevant to the point before us; we shall therefore insert only so much of each as will intelligibly set forth the precise point under consideration. In the column following the word “WITNESS” will be found the name of the individual, his place of residence, and the name and date of the paper in which it appeared, and generally the place where it was published. Following the identification of each witness will be an extract from the advertisement containing his or her TESTIMONY....

  I stopped and looked up at Father, expecting him to reach forward for the book. But he merely nodded for me to go on, and so I obeyed.

  WITNESS: Mr. D. Judd, jailor, Davidson Co., Tenn., in the “Nashville Banner” Dec. 10,1838. TESTIMONY: “Committed to jail as a runaway, a negro woman named Martha, 17 or 18 years of age, has numerous scars of the whip on her back.”

  WITNESS: Mr. Robert Nicoll, Dauphin St., between Emmanuel and Conception Sts., Mobile, Ala., in the “Mobile Commercial Advertiser” Oct. 30,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ten dollars reward for my woman Siby, very much scarred about the neck and ears by whipping.”

  WITNESS: Mr. Bryant Johnson, Fort Valley, Houston Co., Ga., in the “Standard of Union” Milledgeville, Ga., Oct. 2,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, a negro woman named Maria, some scars on her back occasioned by the whip.”

  WITNESS: Mr. James T. De Jarnett, Vernon, Autauga Co., Ala., in the “Pensacola Gazette,” July 14,1838. TESTIMONY: “Stolen, a negro woman named Celia. On examining her back you will find marks caused by the whip.”

  WITNESS: Maurice Y. Garcia, sheriff of the County of Jefferson, La., in the “New Orleans Bee,” Aug. 14,1838. TESTIMONY: “Lodged in jail, a mulatto boy having large marks of the whip on his shoulders and other parts of his body.”

  WITNESS: R. J. Bland, sheriff of Claiborne Co., Miss., in the “Charleston (S.C.) Courier,” Aug. 28,1838. TESTIMONY: “Was committed to jail, a negro boy named Tom; is much marked with the whip.”

  WITNESS: Mr. James Noe, Red River Landing, La., in the “Sentinel” Vicksburg, Miss., Aug. 22,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, a negro fellow named Dick—has many scars on his back from being
whipped”

  WITNESS: William Craze, jailor, Alexandria, La., in the “Planter’s Intelligencer,” Sept. 21,1838. TESTIMONY: “Committed to jail, a negro slave—his back is very badly scarred.”

  WITNESS: James A. Rowland, jailor, Lumberton, N.C., in the “Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer” June 20,1838. TESTIMONY: “Committed, a mulatto fellow-his back shows lasting impressions of the whip and leaves no doubt of his being a slave.”

  WITNESS: J. K. Roberts, sheriff, Blount Co., Ala., in the “Huntsville Democrat” Dec. 9,1838. TESTIMONY: “Committed to jail, a negro man—his back much marked by the whip.”

  WITNESS: Mr. H. Varillat, No. 23 Girod St., New Orleans, La., in the “Commercial Bulletin,” Aug. 27,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, the negro slave named Jupiter—has a fresh mark of a cowskin on one of his cheeks.”

  WITNESS: Mr. Cornelius D. Tolin, Augusta, Ga., in the “Chronicle Sentinel,” Oct. 18,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, a negro man named Johnson-has a great many marks of the whip on his hack.”

  Here, with trembling hand, I delivered the book across to Father, who throughout had sat peering somberly into the fire that blazed in the great open fireplace. He brought the book near to his face, as he customarily did, and in his reedy voice continued where I had left off.

  The slaves are often branded with hot irons, pursued with firearms and shot, hunted with dogs and torn by them, shockingly maimed with knives, dirks,&C.;have their ears cut off, their eyes knocked out, their hones dislocated and broken with bludgeons, their fingers and toes cut off, their faces and other parts of their persons disfigured with scars and gashes, besides those made with the lash.

  We shall adopt, under this head, the same course as that pursued under previous ones—first give the testimony of the slaveholders themselves to the mutilations &c, by copying their own graphic descriptions of them in advertisements published under their own names and in newspapers published in the slave states and, generally, in their own immediate vicinity. We shall, as heretofore, insert only so much of each advertisement as will be necessary to make the point intelligible.