Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  And before long I did indeed think that I was dreaming, for our reality that morning corresponded uncannily to a nighttime dream that I frequently had in those years. Father and I were the only white people in a crowd of well-dressed Negroes. As we moved through the large gathering of black, brown, and tan men, women, and children, they parted for us and nodded respectfully, some of the men touching the brims of their hats, the women politely averting their gazes, the children looking at us with surprised eyes—lovely people of all the many Negro shades, from pale butterscotch and ginger all the way to ebony and even a few of that most African hue of blue-black. It was as if every tribe of the continent of Africa, from Egypt to the southernmost tip, were represented there. Father walked cleanly through the crowd in his usual manner—back straight as a hoe handle, head pitched slightly forward and led by his out-thrust jaw, arms swinging loosely at his sides, like a man pacing out a field for a survey—and I struggled to keep up, my feet heavy and difficult to move, as if I were wading through mud or walking underwater.

  Soon the crowd closed around him and filled in between us, and I found myself cut off from him, falling further and further back, and suddenly I became afraid, not so much of the Negroes who surrounded me as of being separated from Father. Like a small child, I cried out to him, “Father! Wait!” At that, the crowd seemed to part again and to open up a corridor between us. Father slowly turned and peered at me. Then, impatiently waving me on, he resumed walking up the broad steps of a small brick church and entered and disappeared from my view into the darkness of the sanctuary. The narrow corridor through the crowd remained open, however. Laboriously, I made my way along it, sweating from the effort and the heat of the day and the many aches and pains of my beating the night before, when I had walked another gauntlet, that one amongst white people. I was never so conscious as I was then, during those few moments that I spent traversing the short, paved space at the entrance to the Negro church of Boston, of the difference between the faces of the oppressors and the oppressed, or the faces of my white-skinned brethren and my black. And I was never so conscious of my own bewildering, sad difference from both. My face was invisible to me. Father! I nearly cried out. Wait for me! I cannot bear to be so alone! Without thee beside me, I seem not to exist at all! Without thee to look upon me, whether I am amongst white people or black, I am invisible!

  I found him inside the church, of course, seated in a pew close to the front, and I took the empty seat next to him, fairly collapsing into it. He studied my face with sudden concern and felt my brow. “You’re unwell, son|’ he said. “Perhaps you should have stayed at the Howes’ today.”

  “No, no, I want to be here. I’m very happy here, Father,” I said to him. And I was. Frightened of nameless things; and filled to overflowing with chaotic emotions; yet happy! I felt an inexplicable readiness, as if for a religious awakening, as if for an infusion of light and power. I sensed it coming, not from a truly divine source like Father’s God, but from some other, up to now wholly unknown source of light and power, which lay outside myself and beyond all my previous experiences of awakening, beyond all my earlier resolves and oaths, all the sudden stages of my moral growth, all my old degrees and kinds of enlightenment and the pledges that had followed hard upon them. Filled with trembling expectation, then, I waited to become a new man. Or, perhaps, for the first time, a man.

  And, indeed, it happened there, on that Sunday morning in September, in the African American Meeting House on Belknap Street in Boston, Massachusetts. While the choir sang a familiar old Methodist hymn, I began to shake and shiver and then experienced a great seizure. I remember the beautiful Negro voices pealing like heavy, dark bells, like distant thunder rolling down the valleys and across the fields of North Elba, coming closer and closer to me:

  Come, O thou Traveler unknown,

  Whom still I hold but cannot see;

  My company before is gone,

  And I am left alone with thee.

  With thee all night I mean to stay

  And wrestle till the break of day!

  The fingers of both my hands tingled and buzzed, and I believed that the power of movement had returned to my long-dead arm, and I looked down and saw it move unbid, saw it bend at the elbow for the first time since boyhood, saw it rise and fall as easily as my right arm, until I was clapping my hands together and swinging both arms like the rest of the congregation and like Father beside me. The choir sang, and the preacher, a large, white-haired, full-faced man the color of mahogany, joined in at the second verse, and the rest of the people sang, too, including Father, who knew the words well, for it was one of his favorites.

  I could not sing, however. I knew the hymn by heart, but it was as if I had been struck dumb. I opened my mouth, and no sound came. In silence, I made the words:

  I need not tell thee who I am;

  My sin and mis’ry declare;

  Thyself has call’d me by my name;

  Look on thy hands and read it there.

  But who, I ask thee, who art thou?

  Tell me thy name, and tell me now.

  I did not believe in ghosts then, nor angels nor spirits of any kind, but it was as if I myself had become one, ghost, angel, or spirit, as if I had been lifted by the music and the clapping and swaying of the congregation and now hovered above them all, like a spot of reflected sunlight. Way down below, standing amongst the crowd of black and brown people, I saw clearly the two white men, my father and his large, red-haired son, swaying and clapping and singing with the others. For a few moments, I was split off from my body, entire and yet wholly invisible to the others, who sang with a mighty voice:

  In vain thou strugglest to get free;

  I never will unloose my hold;

  Art thou the Man who died for me?

  The secret of thy love unfold;

  Wrestling, I will not let thee go,

  Till I thy name, thy nature, know’.

  All the universe seemed contained for those moments in that room, and the room was filled with music. I watched as my body below began to quake, and I saw my head snap back and my eyes roll in their sockets. I saw Father stare at me with alarm, and when my body stiffened and jerked about as if in a death-dance, I saw him place his arms around my shoulders to calm and comfort me, for he could not know that I was insensible of him and as much at peace as I had ever been in my life. I wished that I could reassure him of that, but I could not. The standing crowd, intent on its singing and in perfect unison swinging their arms and clapping their hands, appeared not to notice the grimly anxious white man in the snuff-colored suit and his large, flailing son.

  What though my shrinking flesh complain

  And murmur to contend so long?

  I rise superior to my pain: When I am weak, then am I strong.!

  And when my all of strength shall fail,

  I shall with the God-man prevail.

  Slowly, I descended and re-entered my body, and it seemed to soften somewhat and then to resume its former comportment, and Father eased me back down into my seat. When I opened my eyes, there he was, looking earnestly into my face. I smiled up at him.

  “Son? Truthfully, now. Have you been brushed by an angel of the Lord?” was his whispered question.

  I said, “Yes.”

  He let a triumphant smile pass over his face and turned back to the front, where the members of the choir had now taken their seats and the preacher was moving towards the altar to begin his sermon. With a great barrel of a voice, large and round, he began. “My children. My brothers and sisters. Let me speak today on this question. Let me ask, let all of us ask, ‘Why should the children of a King go mourning all their days?’“

  He continued, but I heard almost none of the sermon and little of what followed, for I was still be-dazzled; and would remain so for many days and even weeks afterwards: bedazzled by my new solidity and strength, and by my wonderful clarity of purpose.

  Chapter 11

  For Father, the long sea-voyage t
o England was a splendid occasion for his expectations of success to rise steadily. Leaps and bounds, in fact. Solitude, any kind of extended isolation from the everyday world of petty disappointments and frustrations, did that to him—released his fantasies from curtailment and got him feverish with mental dramas and schemes, which, with each new day’s dreaming, he built upon freshly. Dream upon dream he went, quickly constructing an immense tower of expectation too fragile to stand against the first opposing breeze and too brittle to bend before the press of mundane reality. But there was no holding him back beforehand, no way of warning him or of forcing him to remember what happened last time. On a ship at sea for nearly a fortnight, with no one but the captain and crew and a handful of other passengers and me to correct him, the Old Man was free to sail, as it were, inside his own thrilled mind. And so he did.

  The captain of the Cumbria, Captain Ebediah Roote out of New Bedford, a small, trim cube of a man with Quaker chin-whiskers, wanted only to make his passengers comfortable and then to forget them and attend to his crew, craft, and cargo, which were worth so much more to his employers than the comfort of the passengers. For this reason, he gave Father permission to conduct daily prayers and services in the main cabin, hoping no doubt that Father, with his evident fervor and tirelessness, would organize and sufficiently distract the rest of the passengers to keep them out from under foot. And, indeed, Father did just that, and perhaps as a consequence, at least from the captain’s point of view, the crossing for the first eleven days went smoothly.

  The Cumbria was a steam-assisted, two-masted packet of fifteen hundred tons, a small freighter built in the ’30s and renovated periodically since. She provided few of the sumptuous diversions and accommodations of the more typical and modern passenger ships that crossed between England and the United States then. People who chose to travel aboard a freighter like ours were usually supercargoes—small-businessmen or their agents accompanying their own cargo—or poor students and artists traveling on the cheap, or people who did not want to be seen by members of their own society. We, I suppose, were passengers of both the first two types, businessmen, but, like poor students, without cargo, for our shipment of wool had gone before us. Nearly two hundred thousand pounds of borrowed Ohio and Pennsylvania wool, it lay ready for auction to the English cloth manufacturers—seven hundred bales of it stacked to the roof and surrounded by hundreds of tons of Irish, Scottish, and Yorkshire wool in a warehouse in Liverpool.

  I remember cringing at the thought of it, almost with embarrassment, certainly with dread. Father, on the other hand, contemplated the image with pride and heady anticipation of a great, hard-earned triumph. “When old John Bull sees the quality of our stock, the price of his will drop like a stone, and ours will rise,” he frequently declared, rubbing his hands together with glee. “And then, finally, our greedy New England merchants will find themselves competing instead of conspiring with one another. They’ll be up against non-collaborationists! Real money-men! After this, they’ll have to pay our price, or else we’ll just sell it abroad!”

  How, I asked him, could we be so sure that our wool was markedly superior to what the British grew?

  “How? How? We’ve seen the shoddy goods they try to foist off on us poor colonials, pitching it to us at prices way above our own. Owen, that stuff’s grown by peasants!” he pronounced. The Irish and Scottish shepherds were poor and demoralized, he explained. They were practically serfs, a conquered, abject population impoverished for generations by a feudal over-lordship. They were farmers who couldn’t even own the land they worked or the animals they raised, and thus they had no more pride in the products of their labor than did slaves in the American South. And off he’d go on an elaborate comparison between the products of slave labor and free, quite as if all the cotton being produced in the South by slave labor were not of sufficient quality to control the world market in cotton and make the slaveowners richer than Croesus and their senators and congressmen powerful all out of proportion to their numbers.

  Dream on, Old Man, I thought, but said nothing. Scheme on, Father. But even if you’re right, and the price of English wool drops like a stone because our product is so much more desirable in Liverpool than their own, the New England merchants will simply turn around and buy cheap English wool instead of ours, and the cotton kings of Washington, as soon as they discover it, will vote heavy tariffs on imports, until the prices are equalized again and the cost of trans-Atlantic shipping makes the difference, favoring the buyer at home again. A wasted enterprise.

  None of that mattered to the Old Man, though. To him it was a self-evident truth: our wool was superior to the British wool; therefore, the British would pay more for it than for their own; and thus, despite the tariffs and the costs of shipping, we could beat the New England merchants at their own game. His anger—at the collaborationists, as he called them, and at English feudalism, as he saw it, and at slavery and the slave-powered cotton economy, which he viewed as the root cause of the sufferings of all Northern sheepmen—made him deaf and blind. Deaf to me, and blind to the winking smiles of the Boston merchants who traveled with us aboard the Cumbria and who were subjected to Father’s constant explanations of his plans to crack the English woolen market.

  Business was not his only subject, needless to say. Every day following breakfast, Father sermonized to our fellow passengers, leading his tiny congregation in long prayers and hymn-singing and Bible study. Later, he harangued them on the evils of slavery. His congregants were four Boston merchants, a young English journalist, Mr. Hugh Forbes, who said he was attached to the New York Tribune and was returning to England to visit his wife and children, and a middle-aged woman and her young female companion. These two were an aunt and her niece, going abroad for the senior woman’s health, supposedly, although Father believed that the motives for their journey had more to do with the younger woman’s likely pregnancy than the other’s health. It was the journalist, Forbes, who most intrigued Father, for he claimed to have fought alongside Garibaldi in the recent, failed Italian revolution, was supposed to have written a two-volume manual on military tactics, and had once (or so he said) been a Viennese silk merchant. In Father’s daily reports back to me in the cabin, the most frequently discussed passenger was Mr. Forbes.

  Unfortunately, I was miserable and sick with nausea, with giddiness, headache, and vomiting, from the first hour of our crossing to nearly the end of it, from Boston Harbor to the Irish Sea. It was the first time at sea for me, and except for our return, it would be the last. According to several passengers and the crew, who had much experience in these matters, the crossing was a relatively calm one; yet I suffered as if we were aboard a small barque upon storm-tossed waters, as if we were at sea in a hurricane.

  There was, of course, an element of convenience in this for me, for it kept me belowdecks in our tiny cabin day and night and thus well out of sight and sound of Father, except when he came to our cabin to report on his day’s activities and conversations and then to read, pray alone, and sleep, all of which he did no more than necessary, as the cabin stank of vomit and my chamber pot, and my company was that of a man curled in his bunk like a cutworm, bloodless face to the wall, body wrapped in sweat-soaked sheets, conversation limited to moans and chattering teeth.

  For a time, Father tried various remedies, some of them suggested by his fellow passengers and some by Captain Roote himself—drinking warm water, sassafras tea, herbal potions, eating bits of biscuit, loblolly, and so forth. But nothing cured me of my sea-sickness, and so, after a few days, I became a pathetic object of the other passengers’ derisive, feigned concern, until gradually everyone, even Father, seemed to forget that I was aboard or else regarded me as if I were merely Father’s cargo, out of sight and mind until we landed.

  This did not displease me. I wanted no more than to be left alone with my thoughts and memories. For it seemed to me then, as it does even now, half a century later, that I was passing out of one life into another. I was like
a snake shedding its skin. There was no single event or insight that had instigated this painful transition, nor was it the result of careful reasoning and analysis. Certainly, the three disturbing days and nights in Boston had played a crucial part, leading as they did to my seizure and apparent conversion at the Negro church, my “awakening.” But the rapid collapse of our work back in Timbuctoo, its easy, deadly violence and our inability to stave it off—indeed, the relish with which we all, Father, John, Jason, and I, had taken it up, and then the tragic and, as it seemed to me, unnecessary death of poor Mr. Fleete—all this mattered greatly. And yet somehow, due mainly I suppose to Father’s fervor and singleness of purpose, and due also to my ignorance of my own true nature, I could not fully acknowledge these experiences or absorb them with understanding. And so I welcomed the chance to re-read them, as it were, in my mind.

  Meanwhile, Father preached to our fellow passengers and the ship’s captain and crew. Much to their consternation, surely. It may have been the failure of his work in North Elba, combined with his fears of financial ruin, but he was possessed by a sort of mania during those weeks at sea, which must have frightened some of his listeners and surely amused others, for he would come back to our cabin in the evenings and condemn them all roundly for their mocking refusals to hear him out.

  The merchants, he said, were more attentive and polite, more religious even, than the two Transcendental women, as he called them, and the English journalist, Mr. Forbes. Which was a puzzle to Father, because when it came to the question of slavery, it was the women and Mr. Forbes who sided with him, and the merchants who thought him foolish. “But regardless of their stance on slavery,”‘ he said, “they all split the Bible off from the Declaration and the Laws, and in that way they mis-read both. Consequently, every one of them gets away with feeling smug and above it all. I don’t understand these people. It’s the Holy Bible that impels us to action, and it’s the Declaration and the Laws that show us precisely where to act. What’s the problem with these people?”