Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  They were boys, mostly, and young men, idlers and drunkards, brawlers, louts, whoremongers, and common thieves; there were numerous females among them, too, maps and doxies as wild and brutal looking as their brothers. It was not so much their unwashed physiognomies that made them appear brutal and coarse, as their rage. No matter how noble the human face in repose, how symmetrical, fresh, and clear it may appear, when the brow is bent and glowered down, the mouth misshapen by an obscene word, the nostrils flared in revulsion and the lips sneering, and when the fist gets doubled and held out like a weapon, one recoils as if from a sub-species, as if from a demonic, bestial version of one’s self. How can we all be humans alike, when one of us has turned suddenly so ugly? And when a whole crowd turns ugly, turns itself into a mob, what species is it then?

  I could fairly well smell the brandy and beer on the breath of the youths who stuck their whiskered faces out at me and brayed their Negro-hating sentiments at me and the other men and women who were silently, peacefully walking the sidewalk alongside me. The gang cackled and screeched and sometimes even tossed a rock and then ducked back into the bushes out of sight, to be replaced a few rods further on by another gang, whose drunken members would pick up the chant. “Nigger-lovers!” they hollered. “Yer nigger-lovers! Yer niggers yerself! Ugly black niggers! Ugly black niggers!” And so on, stupidly, even idiotically, they ranted—until we were walking a kind of gauntlet, it seemed, or proceeding through a maddened, howling mob to our own public hanging, headed not to a place of worship but to a scaffold. How courageous, I thought, were these men and women beside me, many of them elderly, who walked in silence along the sidewalk, being jeered and tormented by people with murder in their eyes. That our pale complexions protected us, keeping us from being physically attacked by them and possibly even killed, caused me to realize anew that white is as much a color as black. Our flag, our uniform, was our white skin, and while it provoked this attack from our fellow whites, it also shielded us from serious harm.

  Nonetheless, once inside the large, clean, rationally proportioned sanctuary of the church, I breathed a great sigh of relief and realized that I had been seriously frightened by the harassment of the mob—although it was hard to distinguish fear from anger. My legs felt watery, and my heart was thumping. I wanted to strike out, to hit and hurt those foul mouths, and it had taken great restraint for me simply to appear to ignore them and walk serenely along to my meeting like the others, instead of picking up a loose brick or thrown rock and hurling it back at the coward who had thrown it, or chasing the fellows into the bushes and thrashing them there. I was a big, sturdy young man then and could easily have tossed three or four of them around like so much cordwood. Indeed, had one of them actually struck me with a rock, I believe I would have lost my serenity and rushed across Beacon Street after him. I was never a Quaker.

  None of the others, however, as they entered the church, seemed in the slightest bothered by the caterwauling of the mob outside. They treated it like a disagreeable rain and seemed to brush it off their cloaks and shawls as they entered the foyer and greeted one another cheerfully and took their seats inside. Standing there in the foyer, shivering with rage—or fear—and tamping down fantasies of violent retribution, I, however, suddenly felt ashamed of myself. “Action, action, action!” was Father’s call, but here, in this serene and pacifistic context, action seemed vile, easy, childish. Mr. Garrison’s perspective, I knew, and that of the Anti-Slavery Society as a whole, was based on the Quaker philosophy of non-violence, and it was easy to criticize it from afar, while gnashing one’s teeth over the ongoing injustice of slavery and its growing power in Washington during those years. But here, in the face of the mob, pacifism seemed downright courageous and almost beautiful.

  I was suddenly glad that Father was not at my side, for although he, like me, probably would not have charged into the woods of the Common to thrash his tormentors, he surely would have entered the foyer of the church growling and snarling at the weakness of the Society members for not having created a stout and well-armed security force from amongst their membership and posting it all along Park Street to protect their meetings.

  “If you behave as slaves, you will be treated as slaves,” he often said. He said it to freed Negroes; he said it to sympathetic whites. “If you wish to do the Lord’s work on earth, you must gird your loins and buckle on your armor and sword and march straightway against the enemy.”

  Ah, Father, how you shame me one minute and anger me the next. How your practical wisdom, which at times borders on a love of violence for its own sake, challenges my intermittent pacifism, which borders on cowardice. Your voice stops me cold, and then divides me. One day and in one context, I am a warrior for Christ. The next day, in a different context, I am one of His meekest lambs. If only in the beginning, when I was a child, I had been able, like so many of my white countrymen, to believe that the fight to end slavery was not my fight, that it was merely one more item in the long list of human failings and society’s evils that we must endure, then I surely would have become a happy, undivided man.

  With thoughts like these, then, and in a kind of dulled despondency, I took my seat in a pew at the rear of the sanctuary, for the church was nearly filled by now with proper Bostonians, all of them white people, well-dressed, with the benignly expectant faces of people gathered for the dedication of an equestrian statue. Indeed, the meeting itself, once it got under way, was not unlike just such a ceremony. Father would have been appalled, and even I was somewhat embarrassed for being there.

  My mind wandered during the benediction and the welcome to new members and guests, and I did not rise like the other newcomers to introduce myself to the assembly—out of embarrassment, no doubt, but also because at the proper moment I was thinking of something else and was not sure, when I saw a scattering of folks in the audience stand and heard them, one by one, say their names, what the ceremony was all about. I was thinking about the packs of wild boys and men outside and their dark domain beyond.

  Even before Mr. Garrison appeared, I rose from my seat and left. In a moment, I was back on the street. The howlers were gone, disappeared into the darkness of the Common, where I supposed they now lurked, waiting for their prey to emerge from the church, when they would resume barking and snarling at them.

  I think back to that night from this vantage point a half-century later, and I cannot remember what, if anything, was in my mind when I crossed the street and stepped into the thicket there. I cannot imagine what my intentions were, as I stumbled down the unfamiliar slope in darkness and made my way towards the rough pasture in the middle, where in the distance I saw what appeared to be a scattering of small campfires and huts made of cast-off boards and old pieces of canvas sheeting. Now and again, the figure of a man or a pair of men passed near enough for me to see and be seen, and, once, a fellow said to me, “Evenin, mate,” almost as if hed recognized my face, and passed into the darkness close by. When I looked back over my shoulder to see where he had gone, I saw him stop and step forward from the shadows towards me, as if expecting me to follow. I said nothing and plunged ahead, in the direction of the distant firelight.

  Giddy with an unidentifiable excitement and breathing heavily, as if after great exertion, I made my way slowly over the rough, cloddy ground, which gradually opened onto a broad, unmowed field. Oddly, I felt myself to be in no danger. I was not being pushed from behind, but rather was being drawn forward, as if by some powerful, magnetic force emanating from in front of me.

  It was a clear, warm night. The sky was crossed with broad swaths of stars and a gibbous moon, which gave enough light for me gradually to gain a sense of the space I was in. Although it lay just beyond a ridge of elms blackly silhouetted in the moonlight, the city of Boston seemed miles from here. High-minded meetings and church services, elegantly appointed dining rooms and parlors and university lecture halls and counting houses, all the manufactories and dwelling places of proper Boston, seemed far away—and wh
en I pictured Father at that moment seated in Dr. Howe’s fine, paneled library in the house on Louisburg Square, reading from the Doctor’s leather-bound edition of Milton or one of the old Puritan divines, it was as if the Old Man were located, not a mere half-mile from me, but someplace halfway to California.

  Suddenly, in a way that I had never experienced before, not even when I went roaming through the nighttime streets and alleyways of Springfield the previous spring, I felt free of Father. Free of the force of his personality and the authority of his mind. Free of his rightness. Yes, more than anything else, it was his rightness that so oppressed me in those years. I could in no way honestly or openly oppose it. It exhausted me, humiliated and punished me, and divided me against my true self whenever I sought to liberate myself from his iron control of my will. Inevitably, his moral correctness, which I could never deny, brought me to heel. It was in my bones and blood to follow him wherever his God led him. For, although I did not believe in my father’s God, I believed in the principles that my father attributed to Him. And so long as the Old Man did not waver in his loyalty to those principles, I could not waver in my loyalty to the Old Man.

  Yet tonight, in this strange sanctuary of darkness, I felt as if I were afloat on stilled, black waters, drifting in a slow, aimless swirl whose very aimlessness thrilled me. A slight shift in the breeze could fix my direction or alter it, and thus I wandered left and right around boulders and bushes, as the land sloped gradually away from the place where moments earlier I had departed from the street. I slipped past a knot of men gathered before a small fire and passing a clay jug and smoking short pipes. One of them spoke to me in a friendly voice. “Out lookin’ for y’ cat, lad?” he asked. I said no and passed on, and they laughed lightly behind me. Ghostly figures stepped forward and silently withdrew, and every third or fourth of them hissed to me or beckoned for me to follow.

  Were these shadowy figures, these frail, gray wraiths and dark spirits, the same demonic figures I had seen earlier howling at the good Quaker abolitionists on their way to meeting? These people hardly seemed capable of raising their voices, much less shrieking obscenities and tossing rocks and other missiles. But then I saw a band of ruffians, seven or eight of them, boldly approaching me, swigging from a shared bottle and laughing boisterously. They marched straight towards me, as if we were on a path and their intent was to force me out of it. They were boys, fifteen or sixteen years old, amusing themselves by banding together and playing the bully to solitaries like me. As they neared me, one of them hollered, “Out of our way, ye damned bunter, or we’ll slice off y’ prick and make y’ eat it!” and the others laughed.

  Shabby Irish laddies they were, all puffed up with alcohol and the rough pleasure of each other’s company, and I knew what they thought I was, out here in the night alone—a catamite, a molly-coddle, in search of another. Possibly, in a strange sense, they were right about who I was and what I was doing there, at least for this one night in my life. They had no way of knowing for sure, however, and neither did I. But regardless, I was not about to play the girl for them, or the nigger, and step aside so they could march past unimpeded. Instead, I waded straight into them, as if they were a low wave at a beach.

  There is an anger that drives one, not to suicide or even to contemplate it, but to place oneself in a situation which has as its outcome only two logical conclusions—a miraculous triumph over one’s enemies, or one’s own death—so that the line between suicide and martyrdom is drawn so fine as not to exist. It was a contrivance of my own making, but I did not know it yet, when the first of the lads reached forward as if to grasp me by my placket, and I tore his hand away with my right hand and clubbed him in his grinning face with my left, sending him sprawling.

  That was as close to miraculous triumph as I came, however. At once, the rest of the gang was upon me like a pack of wolves taking down an elk in deep snow. In pairs and from all sides, they darted in on me and struck me in the face and belly and groin, kicked at my knees, and although I did some damage to them, they soon had me crouched over, and in seconds, with several hard, well-placed kicks to my ankles, they had me on the ground face-down, curling in on myself to protect my head and nether parts from their continuing barrage of kicks and blows. They said not a word to me or to each other, and now that they had me down, businesslike, went straight to work, pounding at me as if they wished to murder me. The beating went on for many minutes, until I was beyond pain, or so encased by it that I could no longer distinguish the individual blows. Their boots and fists smacked loudly against my spine and ribs and the back of my head and the meat of my arms and legs, pitching my limp body this way and that, until finally the force of the blows tumbled me off the path into a shallow gully beside it, where there was enough bilge and foul-smelling trash that they did not want to pursue me there.

  I lay still and kept my eyes shut and heard them spit at me but did not feel it. I heard them laugh and call me names that I did not understand, and then at last they either grew bored with the game or thought me unconscious or dead, for the spitting and derision ceased, and I heard their boots against the gravel as they strode off. And then silence.

  For a long while I lay there in the wet filth. Every time I tried to raise myself, pain shot through my body and forced me back down. Then I believe I lost consciousness, for the next I remember is the broad red face of a white-whiskered police officer. I was lying on my back in the pathway, looking up at his worried expression. I remember his words to me. “Well, now, lad, I guess you’re not dead after all,” he said.

  It took two policemen to bring me to Father at Dr. Howe’s house, where I was laid out like a corpse on a pallet next to the fireplace in our chamber on the third floor. The Doctor and Mrs. Howe wished to attend to me personally, but Father, after examining me for broken bones and not finding any, other than several likely cracked ribs, would have none of it and insisted on cleaning and caring for me himself. To which I had no objection, for Father was a wonderful and knowledgeable nurse. I was not quite capable of making an objection anyhow, as I could barely speak through my bloodied and swollen mouth. Besides, I was deeply ashamed of my condition, of how I had gotten into it, and wanted as little fuss made over me as possible and as few witnesses. It was obvious that I had been set upon and beaten. The policeman, when he brought me through the door into the parlor, said only that he had found me like this in the middle of the Common, but, oddly, no one interrogated me further, not the police, not Dr. and Mrs. Howe, and not Father.

  As soon as we were alone, Father stripped my torn clothing off and washed me down in placid silence, as if I were one of his lambs and had been attacked by a wild animal or a pack of feral dogs. Throughout, Father said not a word. Finally, when he had me wrapped in a warm blanket and I was drifting towards sleep, he peered down at my face as if examining it for further wounds and said, “Owen, tell me now what happened to you tonight.”

  “Is it necessary?”

  He answered that he wished only to know how I came to be walking at night through the woods and fields of the Common, when the place was a well-known haunt of hooligans and prostitutes. “Your private business is your own business;’ he said, “but I pray that it’s not what it looks like.”

  I almost wished that it were; it would have been somehow more natural; but I could not lie to him. I told him the story of my evening, just as I have related it now—of my having passed along the gauntlet of taunts and derision on my way to the meeting, and of the strange, yet seductive, passivity of the abolitionists as they walked through this assault and afterwards at the meeting, and of my slow-boiling, confused rage, how it eventually drove me from the meeting back to the street and thence into the Common.

  Father drew a chair up to my bed, and with thread and needle in hand and my torn shirt, sat listening in grim, attentive silence as I spoke through broken lips. “I don’t truly know why I went there, though. It was because of what happened earlier, I suppose. There were all kinds of strange, deme
nted people in that place,”I said. “It’s as if the place has been specially set aside for them. I felt like I was inside a vast cage with packs of wild animals roaming, and that I was one of the animals.” I told him that when a group of them wished me to step aside and defer to them, I had attacked them.

  “You attacked them?” His eyes opened wide, and he ceased sewing. “Yes.”

  He reached out and set his hand on my head. “You went in there and purposely attacked this gang of Negro-hating hooligans?”

  “Yes. It looks that way. It felt that way, too.”

  “Didn’t you realize, son, that they were capable of stabbing you, of killing you, of simply beating you to death, as they nearly succeeded in doing? Didn’t you know that, or are you merely that naive?”

  “No, I knew.”

  “Yet you went in there anyhow. You went after them.”

  “Yes.”

  Gently he stroked my hair. “I see you freshly, son.” He sat back and looked steadily at me. “You have as much of the lion in you as the lamb. In my prayers tonight, I will be thanking God for that,” he said, and smiled, and went peacefully back to his sewing, and I to sleep.

  The next morning was a fine, bright day, still unseasonably warm. I woke feeling broken, however, in pieces and chunks, barely able to stand, pummeled by a hundred shooting pains from crown to foot, and feverish. It was Sunday, and I remember, when Father marched me off to church services, that I was fuzzy-headed and dizzy and only dimly aware of what we were up to. I did not recognize the streets we passed along, and if Father had told me that we were now in Liverpool and I had slept through the crossing to England, I would have believed him.