Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  “Anyhow, I stayed up there for a spell with a very gentlemanly landlord, a man once a United States marshal, who held a slave boy very near my own age. The boy was a very active, congenial lad, intelligent and full of good feeling, and to whom I was under considerable obligation for numerous little acts of kindness. The master made a great pet of me” he said. The man had brought Father to table with his first company and friends and called their attention to every little smart thing he said or did and to the fact of his being more than a hundred miles from home alone with a herd of cattle.

  “All the while, this fine Negro boy, who was fully my equal, if not more, was badly clothed, poorly fed and lodged in cold weather, and he was beaten before my very eyes with an iron shovel or any other thing that came to the master’s hand. This terribly insulted my new-found pride in my accomplishments and my general smartness. It was as if I myself were being insulted and beaten. I’m ashamed to this day that I said nothing in protest,” he declared. It brought him, however, to reflect in a way that was new to him on the wretched, hopeless condition of slave children. On their being without a father or mother to protect and provide for them. That lad was alone in the world, and it was hateful to Father, the way the boy was treated. “The boy was so alone, Owen, that later, in my bed, I wept bitterly for him.” He said nothing for a few moments as we rode along the rough trail, and I thought that he was fighting off tears now at the memory of the Negro boy. After a while, he seemed to gather his emotions and said, “I was decidedly not a Christian at that age. But I remember wondering for the first time if perhaps only God was that slave boy’s father.”

  “Who would have been his mother, then, if God was his father?” I asked.

  “Well, he would have no mother, I guess. No earthly mother, for certain, and no heavenly mother, either. God alone would have to be sufficient. As He is sufficient for us all. And had he not been one of God’s children, the boy would have been a truly lost soul. That was a thing I could not imagine in a child.” He paused for a moment and added, “I understood that, I suppose, for I had lost my own mother by then.”

  “Like me.”

  “Yes. Like you.”

  Ordinarily, when such an exchange occurred between us, Father would have corrected me, pointing out that I had a mother, after all, my stepmother, Mary. But this time he must have been remembering with unusual vividness how it been for him when he, too, was only eight years old and had not yet found God when his mother died and left him with only his earthly father. When he had been a truly lost soul. So he did not correct me, and we rode on into Missouri in a brooding silence.

  I had learned something important, though. For the first time, I had perceived, however dimly, that there existed a significant connection between the way Father felt towards the Negro and the terrible, desolating wound he had suffered in his heart when his mother died. Though no one knew of it, of course—probably not even Father himself—it was not his principles but the lifelong effects of his childhood wound that had made the American Negroes his natural ally and that, in their eyes, made him that rarest of things, a trustworthy American white man. They trusted his rage, which he had come to direct entirely against slavery. And they trusted his permanent suspicions of white people, especially when it came to the subject of race: he was always ready to be betrayed by whites and even often thought Negroes too easily duped by them. Also, Negroes trusted his inability to forget about race, his insistence on seeing it as a factor in every dealing, every relationship, every conflict, between any two Americans, whether they were of the same race or not. Father took race to be the central and inescapable fact of American life and character, and thus he did not apologize for its being the central fact of his own life and character. And to the degree that my nature resembled his, by virtue of my upbringing, of my own desolating wound, which was so like Father’s, and of my having deliberately modeled myself on him, race was the central factor of my life and character, too. And by the time we returned from our English journey to Springfield and took up the fight anew, I had become sufficiently accepting of my nature that I, too, no longer apologized for it.

  It did not take long for Father to throw himself into a plan for creating in Springfield an armed and trained militia among the Negroes there. And while it was perhaps my plan as much as his, for he had begun increasingly to consult with me, it was his forcefulness, his public voice, and his prestige among the Negro population that drove it to completion.

  Ever since his first arrival in Springfield as a woolen merchant back in ’47, he had attended the Zion Methodist Church, which was an abolitionist dissident church, half of whose parishioners were Negro, and he had preached there frequently and from time to time had taught a Bible class. Consequently, he was well-known and admired in the community he most wished to reach.

  Within a day of our return from England, he secretly gave out to several of the most outspoken and respected Negro men of the town that he would be holding a series of late-night meetings at the Zion Methodist sanctuary, to which only Negro men and women were welcome. Further, they were to be Negroes who trusted in God and were willing to keep their powder dry. “I wish to speak with and listen to Negro Christians willing and able to give a white man a hard knock. No others. Prepare yourselves by reading and pondering the meaning of Judges, chapter 7, verse 3. Also Deuteronomy, chapter 20, verse 8,” he instructed.

  The meetings, he told them, would concern several proposals which he would be making solely to the people whose very lives were directly threatened by Mr. Webster’s cowardly capitulation to the slavers—his “compromise.” Father did not wish to address or hear from anyone else. He wanted no Garrisonians. No Anti-Slavery Socialites. No white people at all. “Let the whites make their own policy, as they always have. We must have our own.”

  In a thoroughly racialized society, it was a strange kind of loneliness, and perhaps a peculiarly American one, to feel cut off from your own race. But in those agonizing years before the War, for a small number of us, that’s what it had come to. This matter of difference and sameness—the ways in which we were different from the Negroes and the same as the whites, and, vice versa, the ways in which we were the same as the Negroes and different from the whites—was a vexing one. If a white person persists, as we did, in delineating and defining these areas, soon he will find himself uncomfortable with people of both races—with the one, because of his unwanted knowledge of their deepest loyalties and prejudices, for, as a fellow white, privy to their private race conversations and an adept at decoding those closed, tribal communiques, he understands their true motives and basic attitudes all too well; and uncomfortable with the other also, because, whenever he chooses to allow it, his pale skin will keep him safe from their predators.

  If you yourself are not a victim, you cannot claim to see the world as the victim does. A man may have chosen deliberately to abandon one race—I will no longer adhere to white people merely because I happen to be one myself, says the good fellow—but if he is honest, he will quickly see that he is incapable of adhering to the other, too. Amongst Negroes, a white man is always white; they cannot forget it, and therefore neither can he. It’s only amongst whites that he suddenly turns colorless, is privileged to forget his skin, is allowed to move inside it, as it were. But beware, because if he does forget his skin, he becomes like them—he becomes another, specially privileged white man, a man who thinks the word “colored” does not apply to him. No, in America, whites are as much stuck with their skin color and bannered by it as the Negroes, and the Indians and Orientals, too. We may be a society founded on racial differences, a society poisoned at the root, perhaps, but we also aspire to be a democracy. Thus, until we have truly become a democracy, every American, white as much as black, red, or yellow, lives not in his skin but on it. If one person is called “colored,” let all be colored.

  Paradoxically, then, it is when a white person resists the privilege of turning colorless that he frees himself, at least partially, fr
om the sickness of racialism. It’s the only way for a white man finally to clamber up and out of the pit of Negro slavery wherein this nation was unnaturally conceived and born in a bloody caul and raised into twisted, sick adulthood. He has to separate himself from the luxurious unconsciousness that characterizes his own race, without claiming as his own the historical experience of the other. There is a price, though. He pays with cold loneliness, an itching inner solitude, a permanent feeling of separation from his tribe. He has to be willing to lose his own history without gaining another. He will feel like a man waking at dawn in a village that was abandoned while he slept, all his kith and kin having departed during the night for another, better place in an unknown land far, far away. All the huts and houses are empty, the chimneys are cold, and the doors hang open.

  If I had not known that Father felt as I did, if I had not daily seen his brow furrow with the pain of it, his shoulders slump with the fatigue of having constantly to defeat the cynicism it proposed, had not heard him reduced to a sputter, his words all run dry of meaning, then I do not think that I could have withstood that peculiar loneliness. Without Father’s steady example and companionship, I would have capitulated to my own pain, fatigue, and frustration, and would either have given up and, lying to the whites, who sang one siren song of race, cleaved to them; or, lying to myself, cleaved to the blacks, who sang another.

  At the start of the first meeting held in the sanctuary of the Zion Methodist Church, there were, to my surprise and pleasure, more than a hundred Negroes present, although by the end Father had driven away more than half. Like Gideon, he wished to separate the timid from the brave, and he did it with the fire of his rhetoric, the glare of his eye, and his insistence that if, in order to protect their homes and families from the bounty-hunters, they were not prepared to die, then they should depart forthwith.

  They were, most of them, respectable freedmen, with even a few freed women in attendance and several deacons of the church and members of the choir. There were also numerous artisans and shopkeepers with whom we were well-acquainted—as Father made it a point to do business with Negroes whenever possible—and many young men whom I knew personally: roustabouts, stevedores, laborers, and factory hands with whom I had often spoken at abolition meetings. It was a crowd of earnest and intelligent people who understood perfectly the threat posed by this new slave-catching law, not only to the slaves who succeeded in escaping from their bonds but also to these free Negroes themselves, many of whose parents had been born in freedom in the North and had never been within two hundred miles of a slave state.

  Well they knew that the color of their skin was now more than ever the mark of Cain. It was their brand, and with the passage of the Fugitive Law, they would have to prove that somehow the brand had been burned into their flesh by mistake. And who could prove this? Virginia courts had displaced Massachusetts courts. Any dark-skinned man, woman, or child, escaped slave or no, could be sworn a slave by a white man with forged papers and hauled back down South and sold off to the plantations there. At a single stroke of the pen, a free man or woman could be converted into valuable property. This was surely the evilest alchemy ever invented.

  There was shock and anger amongst the whites of the North, certainly. Daniel Webster’s “compromise” may well have made more abolitionists of previously acquiescent whites than twenty years of steady preaching had done—which sometimes caused Father to say that the law must have been a significant part of God’s secret design. But this gave little comfort to the Negroes, as the outrage felt by whites was mostly spent on stoking their own righteousness and warming themselves before its fire. “Words, words, words,” Father said. “They won’t act until they themselves are physically or financially threatened,” he insisted.

  This night, for the first time, Father preached violence in public. Moreover, he preached it to Negroes. Defensive violence, however. An over-fine distinction, some might say, yet it was an important one to Father. He was still not ready to carry the war straight to the oppressor, although he had begun to insist that, by virtue of their support of slavery, white Southerners had established a condition of war against all Negroes and those whites who sided with them, and they had therefore forfeited their right to live. “Pro-slavers are fair game,” Father had begun to say. His actions would not catch up to his words, however, until we got to Kansas. For now, a merely defensive action would have to suffice.

  He began by asking his audience how they proposed to keep the slave-catchers from coming openly into the town and, with aid and comfort provided by the Springfield constabulary, taking off their sons and daughters to the cotton plantations of Mississippi and Alabama. How did they propose to prove that their child was not the same boy or girl who, according to the slave-catcher’s sworn statement, had run off with Harriet Tubman to an uncle and aunt in Massachusetts? The slave-catcher would have papers to support his case. He would have depositions and warrants. How did they propose to support their case? Remember, Father said, the slave-catcher can look at your innocent, beautiful daughter and say, “That’s not Ruth Johnson of Springfield, Massachusetts! That’s Celia McNair of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, property of Mister Jubal McNair!” How did they propose to answer him, when the word of a Negro man could no longer stand in a court of law against the word of a white?

  And how did they intend now to deal with the poor, starving escaped slave, wounded and bleeding from the rigors of his escape and half-frozen from the New England cold, when he came late in the night scratching at their door, begging to be let in and fed and warmed by their fire and hidden for a night from the hounds of hell bent on re-capturing him? That man, who might well turn out to be a brother or an elderly uncle, could be seized now and sent back without a Massachusetts trial. And they themselves could be arrested and jailed for having stolen a Southern white man’s property—just as if his fine thoroughbred horse had been discovered blanketed and feeding inside their barn or his wife’s pearls hidden in their flour tin. “How do you intend to deal with that?” Father asked.

  Several of the younger men grew restless and angry at these words, as if they felt indicted by them, perhaps hearing Father’s questions as accusations, and they stood up and began to edge towards the door. Others sat looking down at their hands as if ashamed, or crossed their arms over their chests and dropped their gaze, feigning deep thought, but mainly avoiding the eyes of their neighbors and of Father, especially.

  His words surely caused them pain. He was saying nothing that they did not already know, but he was saying it in a way that must only have reminded them of their terrible helplessness. This made some angry, others ashamed, but it must have moved still others to some new and unexpected state of mind. The angry ones muttered and scowled and began to leave the church. Those who were ashamed averted their eyes. But the rest appeared to be waiting eagerly for Father to continue.

  In the pew directly behind me sat brother John and his wife, Wealthy, the only other white people. I was seated in the front pew beside Father’s friend Mr. Harrison Wheeler, the tailor, a brave man who had tried to escape from slavery three times before finally succeeding. Having taken the name of a dead cousin who had purchased his own freedom some years past, Mr. Wheeler now lived as a free man. I did not know his slave-name.

  I heard the door opening and closing—people were departing from the church one by one. A general restlessness was sweeping over the crowd, as most of those who remained shifted in their seats and cleared their throats, coughed, and murmured to one another. Father stood at the front, silently facing us all, his eyes glaring out beneath his heavy brow, mouth tight as an axe and jaw set, his hands fisted on his hips and feet apart like a man challenging another to a fight. When several moments had passed and no one any longer rose from his seat either to leave or to speak out, Father resumed his challenge, this time not by asking what his audience intended to do but by speaking of himself instead and what he would not do.

  He and his sons and daughter-in-law, he said
—and here, as if amongst the crowd of black and brown faces ours needed identifying, he pointed straight at us, which made me hot with embarrassment—he and his family would not recruit and lead a militia of our fellow white citizens to drive off the slave-catchers. No, he would not go about the town arguing armed resistance with the Anti-Slavery Society folks, and he would not beg money from the gentry to purchase weapons, and he would not wheedle and whine with the Quakers and the Presbyterians and the Methodists to load their muskets and protect their free Negro neighbors and open their doors to escaped slaves and defend them with their sanctified lives. No, he had done plenty of that, and look at what it had got them. It had got them this cowardly Fugitive Law.

  From now on, he said, he would leave the white people to their own devices, to their speeches and meetings, to their proud denouncements and announcements, their newspapers, their atheneums and churches, their poems and philosophical essays. Not for him, not for John Brown, to make soldiers of white poets, philosophers, clergymen, journalists, and clerks. Not for any man. He knew a useless thing when he saw it. He, John Brown, though a white man, would no longer speak to his fellow whites for the Negroes of Springfield or anywhere else. From now on, Negroes would have to speak for themselves.

  For a long while, he went on in that manner, and it seemed to drive many of the older people from the room and the more prosperous among them as well, some of whom may have thought that there were, after all, quite a number of Negroes who had been speaking to whites for them for many long years now, speaking, testifying, arguing, and praying for help and understanding with extraordinary eloquence and power, and they did not need to hear this white man signing off on them. Did he think they would beg him to speak for them? Why should they? He was right: look at what it had got them.