Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  “Yes,” he said. “I do see. And I confess, I’m mightily impressed by all this. My brothers Garnet and Loguen, when they told me that you’re a very unusual white man, were not wrong.” He admitted, however, that all talk of slave rebellion made him nervous, especially when it was generated by men who themselves, white or Negro, would remain safely at home in the North, while the poor slaves rose up and got cut to pieces. Very few men were willing to be a Nat Turner. “But no matter how it goes, win or lose, there’ll be death and gore enough for any man, believe me, Mister Brown. No matter how ingenious your plan or how brave you and your sons are, there will be killing on both sides. And I’m not sure I want to be responsible for that. Not yet anyhow. These are mighty questions before us, sir.”

  Mary and Ruth had set the table and were now carrying our supper out from the kitchen in several steaming pots. Father cleared away his charts and papers, as the children came and joined us, and soon we were ten people gathered around the table. Father, as always, commenced to pray over the food. While he prayed, I stole a glance down the table at Mr. Douglass, who was watching the scene as if from a great height with an expression of sweet approval on his broad face.

  I looked over the scene myself then, to view it from his mild perspective—and saw a deeply religious family of modest means, a family with great peace of mind, with total unity and strange clarity of purpose, the wife and the children, from the eldest to the infant, instructed and led in all things by the firm but kindly Puritan patriarch, this straight-backed, gray-eyed man with light in his face, praying over them all: and most amazing of all, they were a clan of white people who saw the world, inexplicably, the way Negroes did.

  We did not, of course. Not back then, we didn’t—except possibly for Father. As a family, we had not yet undergone our trial by fire, our harrowing in Kansas and Virginia. And I dare not believe that even Father saw the world back then in Springfield as Negroes did; it only seemed so, because of the vast difference between him and other white abolitionists in their personal treatment of Negroes, and because of the quality of his rage.

  Besides, I had lied to Mr. Douglass. I was not willing to die for the freedom of the Negro, or for any other reason. But I did not know that then—I had thought that I was telling the truth, when in fact I was merely incapable of imagining my own death. Though I was twenty-four years old, I was still a boy. It really wasn’t until nearly two years later, during my journey to England, that I came to a point where I was truly willing to pay the price of being the man I wished to be and was willing, therefore, to die in the war against slavery. Once I’d reached that point, I was myself free and was no longer a boy. I had become a warrior, and thenceforth began increasingly to be of good use to Father, whose force and clarity of purpose, as happens to all warriors, sometimes weakened or grew confused.

  Father had been right about the British cloth manufacturers. They had purchased our wool at prices so low they could sell it at a considerable profit straight back to their American counterparts, those same sly fellows whose monopolistic bids for Brown & Perkins wool had driven the Old Man into the English market in the first place. Thus, by shipping his and Mr. Perkins’s one hundred tons of wool off to England and selling it at discount there, Father had succeeded only in increasing the company’s indebtedness to its western suppliers. He had nearly doubled it, in fact. And the sheepmen were furious. From their perspective, their wool, a full year’s work, had been practically given away.

  For a few days, before leaving England, the Old Man had tried blaming the sheepmen themselves, for trapping him with a few unlucky bales of dirty wool, but that would not hold up. He’d trapped himself, and knew it. In his rush to move all his stock to England, he had abandoned his usual rigor in checking the wool, and he’d graded it carelessly as well—a surprising amount of XXX and XX turned out to be number 1 and number 2. Thus, by the time we were aboard ship and headed home, he had ceased to blame anyone but himself, and for most of the crossing back, the Old Man beat his breast and spoke with thees and thous.

  The truth was, again, that he had failed miserably, and there was no hiding it, not even from himself. The absurdity of his situation, the ridiculously tangled nature of his finances, had reached a point where he could no longer imagine ever getting free of it and would be forced to work now mainly to keep himself out of prison, for he knew that he was about to be deluged by a flood of lawsuits, large and small. Many of the sheepmen were convinced, unfairly but understandably, that Father had taken a bribe to ship their wool to England and sell it at such a devastating loss. They could not believe that a sane man would have done such a thing otherwise, and they were already serving notice to John in Springfield that they thought so. Fortunately, Mr. Perkins was still willing to stand by the Old Man, which would enable him to keep the family intact and sheltered in North Elba: if we had land, we could always feed and clothe ourselves. Father himself, however, would soon be racing from courthouse to courthouse, back and forth from New England out to the old Western Reserve, defending himself and Mr. Perkins against the myriad charges of fraud and deceit that were being raised by their creditors.

  Knowing that this would become his main activity for a while had the unexpected benefit of taking Father’s mind for the first time in decades completely off moneymaking. It would allow him, when he was not preparing his attorneys to defend him and Mr. Perkins in court, to concentrate on his anti-slave activities. The catastrophic losses in England were such that, at last, he would be able to forget about becoming a rich man. Released from that possibility, he went through a sort of sea-change and began to be instead the man who entered history.

  And, of course, things had changed at home, too. The passage of the heinous Fugitive Slave Act at once lit up the Northern sky like sheets of lightning and electrified thousands of white men and women who up to now had regarded themselves as moderate abolitionists. And suddenly our anger, our consuming rage, did not seem so odd anymore. Which was strange to me, for I had grown used to our family’s being both charged by its anger, as if it were our responsibility, and isolated by it, as if it were our curse. Now that rage was the norm, however, ours seemed to have been oddly premature and, in this new context, somehow inappropriate and useless. At least to me it did.

  Father simply declared that it proved we had been right all along. But we had spent so much time and energy for so many years, all the years of my life, justifying in moral, legal, and Biblical terms the ferocity of our position, that we had not stepped away from it and considered its deeper and more personal sources. We had not even considered whether it had such sources. What was abnormal to others had long seemed normal to us—until, thanks to the Fugitive Law, everyone else turned out as alarmed and angry as we and as determined as we to commit acts of violence in order to deter the further extension of slavery. Earlier, our alarm and anger and commitment had seemed evidence of our election, as it were, proof of our moral superiority. Now, however, we were no longer positioned amongst our people like prophets, for every decent person in the North was finally awake to the emergency. Or so it briefly seemed. And during this period, instead of feeling at one with my neighbors and grateful for that, I began to wonder why had we seen so early the horrors of slavery, when practically everyone else was blind to it, and why we had been so ferocious, when nearly every other well-intended Northern white man and woman had merely been concerned or, at best, disgusted.

  It is difficult for me now, a whole lifetime beyond those years, to cross over all the terrible intervening events and alterations in the sensibilities and values of ordinary folks and remember how we thought then. The Civil War changed everything for everybody, white and Negro, North and South, East and West; but it was the war before the War, in Kansas and then at Harpers Ferry, that changed us Browns. That’s when we went from being angry activists and prophets in the wilderness to being cold-blooded warriors. We went from helping Negroes escape from slavery to killing those who would enslave them. Those were the yea
rs when John Brown and his sons—farmers, shepherds, tanners, hopeful businessmen—became famous killers.

  Who else in our time went through this transition? No one, until later, when forced to by the War. By then, John Brown and his sons, most of them anyhow, were dead—slain in battle or executed on the scaffold. It was as if, when our white neighbors finally woke to the threat of slavery and grew angry, as angry as we had been all along, we moved at once to the next stage and in that way kept our old position towards them intact. It was as if our true nature, Father’s nature, certainly, and mine, and to a lesser degree the nature of our family as a whole, arose from our insistence on maintaining a constant distance from others, on holding to our radical extremity. We would not allow ourselves to be like other white people. We would be angrier than they; we would risk and sacrifice more than they; we would be bloodier, more brutal, more consistently merciless and desperate than they.

  We were becoming like Negroes, or wanted to become like them. Or, to be honest and exact, we were becoming the kind of men and women that we wanted Negroes themselves to be.

  Can that have been true? For many years, I had sometimes thought that Father’s obsession with the enslavement of the Negroes was an unnatural thing. No other white man or woman in my acquaintance was so singularly enraged by the fate of black people, not even the most radical abolitionists, not even Gerrit Smith, who had given so much of his huge personal fortune to the cause. There were heroes in the movement, of course, men and women like Theodore Weld and the Grimké sisters, even a few who had given their lives for it, like Lovejoy. And there were many unknown people, men and women in small towns, clergymen, teachers, even businessmen, who had risked fortune, reputation, and physical well-being in order to advance the war against slavery. And everywhere there were poor, humble, God-fearing white folks, ordinary men and women who daily made sacrifices and endangered themselves for the benefit of the Negro slaves.

  But none of these, at least none that I ever met or even heard about, engaged the Negro on such a personal level as did Father. It was as if he secretly believed that at bottom he himself was a Negro. He seemed to believe that his white skin—and the skins of his children, too, and of his wife, and the skin of anyone who would cleave to him in his enterprise—was black underneath. As if his rust-colored hair, if he did not dye and forcibly straighten it, were black and crinkled. As if his old-fashioned, pointy, New England Yankee face, that long, narrow hooked nose, grim slash of a mouth, and large red ears, were a mask hiding an African nose, mouth, and ears.

  In a racialist society like ours, such a belief might be seen as merely absurd or as self-contemptuous, especially by white people, and in any society, racialist or not, it might be viewed as morally reprehensible. He could be accused, after all, of appropriating another man’s rewards for having endured great pain without having first been obliged to experience that pain himself. I have thought about this matter for most of my life, for I came to be very like my father in it, and I may well be dead wrong about it, but Father’s love for Negroes was not a simple extension of his love of justice, of his belief in the essential equality of all mankind, or of his abhorrence of cruelty, which was the case for most abolitionists and which should have been sufficient unto the cause. And mostly was. For most white abolitionists it was sufficient, certainly, and for most Negroes. Negroes, after all, did not need white people to love them. They merely needed us to deal justly with them, to grant them legal rights equal to our own, and not to be cruel to them merely because their skins were darker than ours. They only wanted us to treat them as well as we treated each other. As they saw it, the word “colored” described all human beings. To Negroes, white was as much a color as black, red, or yellow—if not more so.

  If the country had been made of one race of people, if everyone had been white, then Father would not have singled out white people for his love, obviously. But he would not have looked eastward across the Atlantic and loved African Negroes, either; or black-skinned people anywhere. No, he loved American blacks, and he loved them, I believe, because of their relation to the dominant race of American whites. He saw our nation as divided unfairly between light-colored people and dark, and he chose early and passionately to side with the dark. Something deep within his soul, regardless of his own skin color, something at the very bottom of his own sense of who he was, of who he was especially in relation to the dominant, lighter race, went out to the souls of American Negroes, so that he was able to ally himself with them in their struggle against slavery and American racialism, not merely because he believed they were in the right, but because he believed that somehow he himself was one of them.

  Of course, he was not one of them. He was a white man, with all the inescapable powers, privileges, and prerogatives of his race and sex: he could vote, own property, move about the land and settle wherever he chose; he could belong to any institution or church or attend any school he could afford; he could borrow money and loan it; he could invest his money in land or livestock and grow rich or become a bankrupt; he could own firearms; he could go to sleep at night and not fear that he would be wakened by slave-catchers and bounty-hunters come to sell him down the river; he knew who his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were and where they were buried; his children and wife would never be taken from him by another man; he was a white man, and he knew it.

  And yet are there not adult men and women, with all the powers, privileges, and prerogatives of adults, who secretly think of themselves as children? Is it not as if our large, hairy bodies are merely fortunate disguises, and some of us are children going about in the adult world like spies, our hearts breaking daily at the sight of what our fellow children must suffer solely as a consequence of their not being as cleverly disguised as we? In cautious silence, we observe the cruelties and indignities, the inequities and powerlessness they must endure, until at last their bodies, too, grow large and hairy like ours and they are able to pass into the general population of adults, where, like most people, they either forget that they were ever children themselves or else they, too, become spies. We dare not identify ourselves one to the other, for fear that we will lose the powers and privileges of adulthood, and so we remain silent, whilst other people’s children are beaten instead of nurtured, whilst other people’s children are humiliated and bullied instead of taught, whilst other people’s children are treated as property, as objects of little value, instead of as human beings no less valuable in the eyes of the Lord than are we ourselves.

  I believe that it was like this for Father, and became like this for me as well: that very early in his life, he came to feel towards white people generally as an unusually sensitive child feels towards brutal, unfeeling adults generally. He felt powerless, humiliated, and deprived, and felt it so strongly, so vividly, that he could not put it away when the circumstances which had brought about those feelings changed and no longer applied to him—that is to say, when he had become an adult himself and saw himself as white. Instead, he began dreaming himself as a Negro man, if he was anything like me—and I believe that he was—because his dream of himself as a child was too much a nightmare to endure and too powerful an experience for him to forget. This did not mean that he saw Negroes as children, and certainly not as child-like, any more than he saw himself as a child or child-like. He merely saw them, in their relation to white people, as his natural allies.

  Once, I tried to bring this to him. I had been telling him of a dream I myself had had, in which I looked down at my arms and hands, and they were black. Where were we? I remember, it was the winter of ’58, and we were in Kansas, crossing down into Vernon County, Missouri, the time that we brought out eleven slaves and made such a wondrous fuss, our first raid into a slave state, and Father and I drove the wagon. Jason and Watson were with us then, along with Jeremiah Anderson, Albert Hazlett, and John Kagi, several of the men who came out of the Kansas wars and made up the core of our little army later in Virginia.

  In my dream, I w
as surprised to see that I was a black-skinned man, but the discovery had pleased me and even made me proud, although it made me realize that from now on, when amongst white people, I would have to hide my true self.

  It was at that time a strange dream to me, and I asked Father as we rode along if he ever had such a dream. He said yes, certainly, he had often dreamed himself as a Negro man, and whenever he did, he took it to mean simply that the Lord was reminding him not to allow himself to feel separate from His Negro children. He had the dream mostly when Negroes were giving him a lot of trouble, he said. When they would not do what he wanted, or when he could not do what they wanted.

  I asked him then, “When did you first know that Negroes were as human as you yourself?”

  Father knew that I wasn’t merely inquiring into the origins of his principles, for they had evolved naturally over years, as principles must. I was asking him about the sources of his understanding. He answered that he had been little more than a boy when, for the first time, he believed that Negro people were actually people, and he had never forgotten it. Many white people, including his own father, had taught it, of course, but Father had not until then truly understood it. Most white people don’t ever get that understanding, he said. Just as most men don’t believe, truly and deeply, that women are people. They think that, because they’re different than we, they are another type of creature than we, as a beloved horse or dog is.

  “I was twelve” he went on, “and my father sent me by myself with a herd of livestock—cattle, mostly, but a few wild steers, too, and pigs, a sizeable, troublesome herd—all the way to General Hull’s headquarters at Detroit. It was a hundred-mile trek, west from our place in Hudson in Ohio along the long shore of Lake Erie through hostile Indian territory, because of the War and the British agitations, to where the American forces were holding off the British in the western campaign. No easy task for a boy of twelve,” he said simply. Grandfather Brown was then supplying meat to the army, and Father had accompanied him on several previous journeys to the front, but this was the first time that he had done it alone. He had told this much of the story before, but mainly as an example of his youthful independence.