Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Father ceased to read, and we five sat for a moment in silence. All the younger children were long asleep in the rooms above. Then Father passed the book, still open at the page where he had left off, over to me, and falling into the antique manner of speech that he sometimes used, especially when overcome by emotion, he said, “Owen, thou hast still at times the voice of a child. Read these words, so that we may better hear in thy innocent voice their terrible, indicting evil.”

  Not fully understanding, I nonetheless obeyed, and read on.

  WITNESS: Mr. Micajah Kicks, Nash Co., N.C., in the Raleigh “Standard,” July 18,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, a negro woman and two children; a few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron on the left side of her face; I tried to make the letter M.”

  WITNESS: Mr. Asa B. Metcalf Adams Co., Miss., in the “Natchez Courier” June 15,1832. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, Mary, a black woman; has a scar on her back and right arm near the shoulder, caused by a rifle ball!’

  WITNESS: Mr. William Overstreet, Benton, Yazoo Co., Miss., in the “Lexington (Kentucky) Observer,” July 22,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway,a negro man named Henry, his left eye out, some scars from a dirk on and under his left arm, and much scarred with the whip.”

  WITNESS: Mr. R. P Carney, Clark Co., Ala., in the “Mobile Register,” Dec. 22,1832. TESTIMONY: “One hundred dollars reward for a negro fellow, Pompey,40 years old; he is branded on the left jaw.”

  WITNESS: Mr. J. Guyler, Savannah, Ga., in the “Republican,” April 12,1837. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, Laman, an old negro, grey, has only one eye”

  WITNESS: J. A. Brown, jailor, Charleston, S.C., in the “Mercury” Jan. 12,1837. TESTIMONY: “Committed to jail a negro man, has no toes on left foot.”

  WITNESS: Mr. J. Scrivener, HerringBay, Anne Arundel Co., Md., in the “Annapolis Republican,” April 18,1837. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, a negro man, Elijah; has a scar on his left cheek, apparently occasioned by a shot”

  WITNESS: Madame Burvant, corner of Chartres and Toulouse Sts., New Orleans, in the “New Orleans Bee” Dec. 21,1838. TESTIMONY:

  “Ranaway, a negro woman named Rachel, has lost all her toes except the large one”

  WITNESS: Mr. O. W. Lains, in the “Helena (Ark.) Journal,” June 1, 1833. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, Sam; he was shot a short time since through the hand and has several shots in his left arm and side.”

  WITNESS: Mr. R. W Sizer, in the “Grand Gulf (Miss.)” June 1, 1833. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, my negro man, Dennis; said negro has been shot in the left arm between the shoulder and elbow, which has paralyzed the hand”

  WITNESS: Mr. Nicholas Edmunds, in the “Petersburgh (Va.) Intelligencer,” May 22,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, my negro man named Simon; he has been shot badly in the back and right arm.”

  Long into the winter night I read, my voice breaking like glass at times, as it did then naturally, due to my youth, but more particularly because of the horrors that loomed before my eyes. My breath caught in my throat, my eyes watered over, my hands trembled, and it seemed that I could not go on saying the words that described such incredible cruelties. Yet I continued. It was as if I were merely the voice for all five of us seated together in that candlelit room before the fire, and we were together very like a single person—Father, Mary, John, Jason, and I, bound together by a vision of the charnel house of Negro slavery.

  I said the words on the page before me, but I felt situated outside myself, huddled with the others, listening with them to the broken voice of a white boy reading from a terrible book in a farmhouse kitchen in the old Western Reserve of Ohio. Those cold, calm accounts from newspapers, those mild and dispassionate descriptions of floggings, torture, and maimings, of families torn asunder, of husbands sold off from wives, of children yanked from their mother’s arms, of human beings treated as no rational man would treat his beasts of burden—they dissolved the differences of age and sex and temperament that separated the five of us into our individual selves and then welded us together as nothing before ever had. Not the deaths of infant children, not the long years of debt and poverty, not our religion, not our labor in the fields, not even the death of my mother, had so united us as our hushed reading, hour after hour, of that litany of suffering.

  In my lifetime up to that point and for many years before, despite our earnest desires, especially Father’s, all that we had shared as a family—birth, death, poverty, religion, and work—had proved incapable of making our blood ties mystical and transcendent. It took the sudden, unexpected sharing of a vision of the fate of our Negro brethren to do it. And though many times prior to that winter night we had obtained glimpses of their fate, through pamphlets and publications of the various anti-slavery societies and from the personal testimonies given at abolitionist meetings by Negro men and women who had themselves been slaves or by white people who had traveled into the stronghold of slavery and had witnessed firsthand the nature of the beast, we had never before seen it with such long clarity ourselves, stared at it as if the beast itself were here in our kitchen, writhing before us.

  We saw it at once, and we saw it together, and we saw it for a long time. The vision was like a flame that melted us, and afterwards, when it finally cooled, we had been hardened into a new and unexpected shape. We had been re-cast as a single entity, and each one of us had been forged and hammered into an inseparable part of the whole.

  At last, after I had recited the irrefutable and terrifyingly detailed rebuttals to the slavers’ objections to the abolition of slavery—with Objection III, “Slaveholders Are Proverbial for Their Kindness, Hospitality, Benevolence, and Generosity”—I saw that I had come to the end of Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. I closed the book on my lap. I remember that for a long time we remained silent.

  Then slowly Father got up from his chair and placed a fresh log on the dying fire and stayed there, his back to us, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, and watched the flames blaze up. Without turning, he began to speak. He was at first calm and deliberate in speech, as was his habit, but gradually he warmed to the subject and began to sputter loudly, as he often did when excited by the meaning and implications of his words.

  He reminded us of an event some two years past, when, in this same month of November, on learning of the assassination, in Alton, Illinois, of that holy man Elijah Lovejoy, Father had publically pledged his life to the overthrow of slavery. We all knew this. He had done it in church, and we and our neighbors had witnessed his pledge, and so had the Lord, who sees everything, Father declared. And we and the Lord had also seen that, since then, just as he had done all the long years of his life before making that pledge, Father had continued to be a weak and despicable man.

  We said no, but he said yes and waved us off. The truth was that he had not made himself into the implacable foe of this crime against God and man which he had sworn publically to oppose. Then he said, “My children, the years of my life are passing swiftly.” He fisted his hands and placed them before his eyes like a child about to weep. He said that while he had been idling selfishly and in sinful distraction, lured by his vanity and by pathetic dreams of wealth and fame, the slavers had dug in deeper all across the Southern states. They had spread out like foetid waters, flooding over the plains into Texas and the territories. They had steadily entrenched themselves in positions of power in Washington, until now the poor slaves could no longer even raise their voices to cry for help without being slain for it or being swiftly sold off into Alabama and Mississippi. Black heroes, and now and again a white man like Lovejoy, had risen in our midst and were everywhere being persecuted and even executed for their heroism, legally, by the people of these United States.

  “My children,” he said, “it’s mobs that rule us now. And all the while Mister Garrison and his anti-slavery socialites bray and pray and keep their soft, pink hands clean. Politicians keep on politicking. For the businessmen it’s business as usual: ‘Sell us your cheap cotton, we’ll sell you back iron chains for binding the slaves who pi
ck it.’”

  Father then cursed them; he cursed them all. And he cursed himself. For his weakness and his vanity, he said, “I curse myself”

  He turned to us and now crossed his arms over his chest. His face was like a mask carved of wood by an Indian sachem. His eyes gazed sadly down at us through holes in the mask. It was the face of a man who had been gazing at fires, who had roused the attendants of the fires, serpents and demons hissing back at the man who had dared to swing open the iron door and peer inside. We all knew what Father had seen there. We had seen it, too. But he, due to his nature and characteristic desire, had gazed overlong and with too great a directness, and his gray eyes had been scorched by the sight.

  I was a boy; I was frightened by my father’s face. I remember recoiling from him, as if he himself were one of the guardian serpents. I remember Father looking straight into our eyes, burning us with his gaze, as he told us to hear him now. He had determined that he would henceforth put his sins of pride and vanity behind him. And he would go out from here and wage war on slavery. The time has come, he declared, and he wished to join the time in full cry. “And I mean to make war by force and arms!” he said. “Not such weak-kneed war as Mister Garrison is determined to make, he and that crowd of Boston, parlor-polite abolitionists. I mean to make the sort of war that was waged by the great Negroes, Cinque, Nat Turner, and L’Ouverture, and by the Roman slave Spartacus. I mean to make war in which the enemy is known and strictly named as such and is slain for his enmity to our cause.”

  He called us his children, even Mary, and said that the time for talk was past. The time for seeking the abolition of slavery by means of negotiations with Satan had always been long past. There never was such a time. Therefore, before us, his beloved family, before his wife and sons, and before God, he was making tonight his sacred pledge.

  Here Father explained what we already knew, that he had long entertained such a purpose anyhow, despite his slackness and distraction, but that he now believed it was his duty, the utmost duty of his life, to devote himself to this purpose, and he wished us fully to understand this duty and its implications. Then, after spending considerable time in setting forth in most impressive language the hopeless and hideous condition of the slave, much of the details borrowed from our just-completed reading of Mr. Weld’s American Slavery as It Is, Father seemed to have finished his declaration, when suddenly he asked us, “Which of you is willing to make common cause with me?” He looked from one face to the next. “Which of you, I want to know, is willing to do everything in your power to break the jaws of the wicked and pluck the spoil from Satan’s teeth?” He put the question to us one by one. “Are you, Mary? John? Jason? Owen?”

  My stepmother, my elder brothers, and I, we each of us in turn softly answered yes.

  Whereupon Father kneeled down in prayer and bade us to do likewise. This position in prayer impressed me greatly, I remember, as it was the first time I had ever known him to assume it, for normally he remained standing in prayer, with his hands grasping a chair-back and his head merely lowered.

  When he had finished the prayer, which was for guidance and protection in our new task, he stood, as did we, and he asked us to raise our right hands to him. He then administered to us an oath, which bound us to secrecy and total devotion to the purpose of fighting slavery by force and arms to the extent of our ability.

  “We have thus now begun to wage war!” he declared. Although it seemed to me then, as it does now, so many years later, that he had already begun his war against slavery numerous times before this, here he was, in a sense beginning it again. And although I did not know it on that particular night, he would find himself obliged to bind himself to this sacred purpose many more times in the future as well. Father’s repeated declarations of war against slavery, and his asking us to witness them, were his ongoing pronouncement of his lifelong intention and desire. It was how he renewed and created his future.

  Tonight, however, was significantly different. This was the first time that he had determined forthrightly to take up arms and wage war by force. Also, and more importantly, perhaps, it was the first time that I myself was a part of his pledge, that we all were sworn together, bound by our war on slavery to see the end of it, or of us. The overthrow of slavery was no longer Father’s private obsession. I had allowed him to make it mine as well.

  Chapter 3

  There is something that I have always wanted to explain, because in the various considerations of Father’s lifelong commitment to the overthrow of slavery, it has been much misunderstood. A great but little noted problem faced by Father throughout his life was his constantly divided mind. This division arose because, as much as he wished to be a warrior against slavery, he also wished to be, like most Americans, a man of means.

  To be fair, it was a more basic and praiseworthy need than that. He had a large family, after all, and merely to house and feed and clothe them required enormous, sustained effort, especially if his only sources of income were his farm and his tannery. And by the time he had reached his mid-thirties, he was beginning to fear that, because of this requirement, he would always be a poor man with no time to wage war against slavery. His poverty, therefore, sabotaged his moral life. That is how it seemed to him. And that is what eventually led him down a path that very nearly did indeed sabotage his moral life.

  Despite his having been poor and struggling since childhood, the Old Man himself dated the onset of his true financial woes to his thirty-ninth year, to the period of what he called his “extreme calamity.” Father always believed that there were three ways to make money in America: manufacturing or growing things; buying things low; and selling things high. A man who did only one of these would forever remain poor. He had to do at least two of them: best if he did all three, but without capital to invest in large-scale manufacture, impossible. A farmer made things, as it were, and sold them; a tanner did the same. Father had tried making and selling for nearly two decades, but he was still poor and exhausted: the process of manufacturing food, livestock, or leather goods took too long and consumed all a man’s days and nights, and thus he would never in his lifetime accumulate sufficient capital to manufacture steel, for instance, or some other item of great cost where the margins of profit were large enough to enrich him in his own time. He might turn to buying low and selling high, then. And what could be easily bought and rapidly sold by a man with little or no capital? Land. Hundreds of thousands, millions, of acres of loamy land rolling west from the Alleghenies all the way to the Mississippi and beyond. There was no greater or cheaper material resource available to an Ohio man in those days.

  Inexpensive, arable land—it lay for miles all around him, and every month new immigrants from the crowded New England states and the eastern seaboard cities and even parts of Europe were pouring into the Western Reserve, bringing with them an insatiable hunger for farmland. They would also need new roads and canals to ship their produce east, new settlements and villages to reside and do business in, new schools and churches and public buildings to accommodate their expanding society. But before all else, they needed land, for they were mostly small farmers and young, and they brought with them or could easily borrow the necessary cash to buy it with. And in those years the bankers were eager to loan money with little or no collateral to secure it, for they well understood that a man who did not need that land for his own use, if he borrowed enough money to buy it first, could turn around and sell it for a higher price tomorrow, could pocket the difference, borrow more and buy more and sell that, too.

  Basically, that was how Father fell into debt—by following the advice of bankers—and afterwards no amount of time and energy spent at war against the slavers, no amount of preaching to his neighbors, and no amount of training and conditioning his large family to become an army for the Lord could keep his mind free of his terrible indebtedness. Thus his divided mind.

  It was very complicated, how Father first got himself into debt and then proceeded to worsen h
is situation permanently, and as I was but a boy in my early and middle teens then, I did not much understand it. Besides, it was not then or ever Father’s way to provide people with the details of his business matters, so that most of what I know I learned years later and gleaned from others. He could not keep everything from us, of course. Especially since we, his family, had so often to cover for him and over time were called upon to make so many material sacrifices that were a direct result of the Old Man’s schemes. But I do not think that anyone—family member, friend, or business associate, or even Father’s own lawyers, when later he was suing and being sued—knew all the facts of his financial dealings. He tended to give out partial or contradictory information and sometimes even false information, all designed, or so it seemed, to keep his interrogator from asking further questions, as if somewhere at the bottom there were a secret fraud, when in fact there was none—it was only Father who was being fooled, and for the most part fooled by himself. He was deceived by his desires, actually, which is why, when it all came crashing down on his head, he blamed his own greed and vanity.

  Early on, his secrecy had sprung from an ingrained sense of decorum and desire for privacy. Then for many years, when he was in flight from bankruptcy and, later, from the consequences of bankruptcy itself, he probably felt that secrecy was necessary to protect his family and business associates. “A man who is wholly candid about his finances, who opens his ledgers to anyone who asks, such a man abandons his responsibility to Others,”Father insisted, although he had arrived at this philosophy by a somewhat circuitous route. It served him well in the end, however, and others also. After Kansas and Harpers Ferry—when what had originally been Yankee manners, and then self-interested necessity, had become military policy—these habits of secrecy and occasional dissembling protected many of the people who were his chief supporters, and they may well have even saved the lives of some good men, like Frederick Douglass and Dr. Howe and Frank Sanborn.