Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Uncle looked at him with the same bewildered amazement as I had earlier. “Africa, John? What are you saying?”

  “You will know it when I’ve done it;’ Father said. And at that I suddenly remembered his old plan, his Subterranean Passway into the South, and I finally understood his meaning and knew that for him, and lor us, this dismal, murderous war in Kansas was nearly finished.

  “Come on, boys,” he said. “Your brother is with the Lord. You’ll see him again soon enough.” Then he stepped from the cabin into the night, and we trooped silently after.

  Chapter 21

  There commenced then a lengthy period which in hindsight could be called the calm before the storm, although we did not know then that the storm was truly coming, even though Father increasingly predicted it. He never said the name of the place, Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the town down in the very heart of the Slavocracy where the federal government manufactured its famed Sharps rifles. He called it Africa. But we knew roughly the place he meant and that a new, more dangerous, and more consequential work on a different front was about to begin.

  And having come to this point in my account, dear Miss Mayo, where begin the more publically known and recorded events in Father’s life, let me declare that I wish only to tell you here what you cannot more easily and reliably learn elsewhere from the now hundreds of published histories and memoirs of those days half a century gone. My memory for facts, dates, names, and so on is not sharp; it never was: you don’t need me for those anyhow. But my feelings and emotions, my whole sensibility, are today, as I scribble here in my cabin, the same as they were back then. I fear that is all I have now to offer you. It is as if I have throughout these intervening years been insensible to everything that has since then occurred or passed before me, and I am today in my brain and heart the very same man I was a half-century ago, a man suffering incoherently through each new day, whether in North Elba or Kansas or Virginia, with no sure knowledge of what the next day will bring. I am still a man stuck in that same, old killing game, a man who—having contrived to set his father in motion and having shaped matters in such a way as to set the Old Man onto a bloody track straight to perdition, or at least to purgatory—is condemned to follow him there and, if possible, with these words, with the truthfulness of this account, with this confession of my intentions, my desires, and my secret acts, finally to release him. I want Father’s soul to be free of me at last, and mine to be free of him, regardless of where from this purgatory we each afterwards must go.

  I wonder sometimes if you can understand this. And if you can accept and make use of it. Oh, I know that there is a public reality and a private reality and that my best use—for you, for me, and for all those lingering ghosts as well—has been to keep to the private and ignore the rest. But even so, I do want my story, if possible, to impinge upon the public reality, on history, and I mean here and there to tell it accordingly. For instance, it has become almost a commonplace in recent years to say that Father, like many Christians of his generation, began as a principled, religious-minded young Northern man agitated by Negro slavery in the South and racialism everywhere, and that, like many such men, he understandably became in middle-age an actively engaged opponent of slavery and racialism, but that in his old age he changed, suddenly and inexplicably, into a free-booting guerilla, whence he moved swiftly on to become a terrorist and finally, astonishingly, a martyr. Thus, looking back through a glass colored by the Civil War, most Americans nowadays find his actions incomprehensible, and they call him mad, or wish to. So while I’m here to tell you certain things that you cannot otherwise know, I also wish to remind you that Father’s progression from activist to martyr, his slow march to willed disaster, can be viewed, not as a descent into madness, but as a reasonable progression—especially if one consider the political strength of those who in those days meant to keep chattel slavery the law of the land. Remember, all-out war between the North and the South was unthinkable to us: due to an ancient, deeply ingrained racialism, any war undertaken by the citizens of the North for the purpose of freeing an enslaved people whose skins were black seemed a pure impossibility. We believed instead that the Northerners—when it finally came clear to them what we already knew, that the South now wholly owned the government of the nation—would simply secede from the Union, leaving behind a nation in which a huge number of our fellow Americans and all their unborn progeny were chattel slaves: literal, unrepatriated prisoners-of-war. Before that could happen, we meant to liberate as many of them as possible. And failing that, failing to free our prisoners-of-war prior to the eventual and, as it seemed to us, inevitable cessation of hostilities between the Northern and Southern states, the one side cowardly and the other evil, we meant to slay every slaveholder we could lay our hands on. And those whose throats we could not reach directly or whose heads we could not find in the sights of our guns, we would terrorize from afar, hoping thereby to rouse them to bloody acts of reprisal, which might in turn straighten the spines of our Northern citizenry and bring a few of them over to our side.

  We did not want the North to secede from the Union and make its own slave-free republic or join with Canada in some new, colonized relation to Olde England or even make with Canada an independent, slave-free nation of the north. And it never once occurred to us that the Southerners would leave the Union. They didn’t have to. They already owned the entire machinery of government in Washington and in those years, the late ’50s, were merely solidifying and making permanent their control of it by carrying slavery into the western territories. In our own way, with no knowledge of the coming Civil War, we were fighting to preserve the American Republic.

  But I was speaking of my father’s gradual progression from antislavery agitator all the way to terrorist, guerilla captain, and martyr, how it seemed—not in hindsight, but at the time of its occurrence—a reasonable and moral response to the times and to the deep, continuous frustration they created. Father may have been the first to resort to pure terrorism for political and military purposes, but the wisdom and necessity of it were early on as plain to the other side as to us: they never needed our example to inspire them to butcher innocent civilians. And without Father, that’s what I would have been, merely an innocent civilian, wifeless, childless, and alone, a Northern bachelor tending his flock of merinos out on the rolling, grassy shoulder of the Marais des Cygnes a few miles from the abolitionist enclave of Osawatomie—easy pickings for one of the roving, drunken bands of Ruffians, who would have treated me as they treated so many other isolated Free-State farmers and herdsmen: they’d have shot me dead, burned my cabin, stolen off my sheep and horse, and ridden on to the next farmstead.

  Sometimes I think it would have been better for me, for Father, for our entire family, for everyone, if it had happened that way. Better for everyone, perhaps, if, back in Springfield, when Father gave me leave to go my own way and not return to North Elba, I had gone. “Just go, Owen, follow your elder brothers to Ohio and beyond, if that’s what you prefer, or follow the elephant and go to Californ-i-ay in search of gold, if that interests you!” If I had taken him at his word and, with his permission, had forsaken what he called my duty, so many terrible things would never have happened: the death of Lyman Epps; Fred’s self-mutilation and migration with me to Kansas; and Father’s, and Salmon’s, Oliver’s, and Henry Thompson’s, migration there, too, for without me and Fred in tow, John and Jason and their families surely would have given up that first cruel winter and come home to Ohio; and then there would have been no Pottawatomie killings and possibly no war at all in the Kansas Territory, which in ’58 would have come into the Union as a slave state instead of a free, an event surely to be followed by the secession of most of the northern states and their probable, eventual union with Canada. There would have been no debacle at Harpers Ferry. No Civil War.

  Think of it! Father would have ended his days peacefully in the manner he so often wished, as a farmer and preacher in North Elba, aiding and instructing his
white and Negro neighbors, dying in old age in his bed, surrounded by his beloved family, and buried in the shade of his favorite mountain, Tahawus, the Cloudsplitter.

  Is it ridiculous and grandiose to speculate this way? To think that so much depends upon so little? Miss Mayo, I think it’s no more ridiculous or grandiose than to believe that our trivial lives here on earth are watched over and fated by an all-seeing, all-knowing God. But cannot the law of cause-and-effect be rationally thought to operate from the ground up, as well as from the top down? And if there is an order to the universe, then all our affairs here on earth are, surely, inextricably linked one to the other. I believe that the universe is like a desert, and each of our lives is a grain of sand that touches three or four adjacent to it, and when one grain turns in the wind or is moved or adjusted even slightly, those next to it will move also, and they in turn will shift the others next to each of them, and so on, all across the vast, uncountable billions of grains in the desert, until over time a great storm arises and alters the face of the planet. So why should I forbid myself from believing that my single action, or even my inaction, one day in my youth in my father’s warehouse in Springfield, Massachusetts, altered history? And that it was instrumental in shaping, not only my destiny, but Father’s, too, and my entire family’s, and even, if I may be forgiven this vision, the destiny of an entire people?

  Which is why I did what I did—why I returned that fall from Springfield to the farm in North Elba, why I went there to do my duty. For even if we cannot know the ultimate consequences of our actions or inactions, we must nonetheless behave as if they do have ultimate consequences. No little thing in our lives is without meaning; never mind that we can never know it ourselves. I did what I did, my duty, in order to free the slaves. I did it to change history. It is finally that simple. My immediate motives, of course, at every step of the way were like everyone else’s, even Father’s—mixed, often confused and selfish, and frequently unknown even to me until many years later. But so long as I was doing my duty, so long as I was acting on the principles that I had learned when a child, then I was bending my life to free the slaves: I was shaping and curving it like a barrel stave that would someday fit with other lives similarly bent, so as to construct a vessel capable of measuring out and transporting into the future the history of our time and place. It would be a history capable of establishing forever the true nature and meaning of the nineteenth century in the United States of America, and thus would my tiny life raise a storm that would alter the face of the planet. Father’s God-fearing, typological vision of the events that surrounded us then was not so different from mine. My vision may have been secular and his Biblical, but neither was materialistic. They were both, perhaps, versions of Mr. Emerson’s grand, over-arching, transcendental vision, just not so clearly or poetically expressed. At least in my case. In Father’s, I’m not so sure, for the Bible is nothing if not clear and poetical.

  In a sense, I suppose that what I am inscribing on these pages is the Secret History of John Brown. You may, of course, do with it what you wish, or do nothing with it, if it seems worthless to you and Professor Villard. As I have said, we each will have very different uses for it anyhow, uses shaped by those to whom we each imagine we are telling our respective tales. For you and the professor, it is told to present and future generations of students of the history of nineteenth-century America; for me, it is being told to the dead, the long dead and buried companions of my past. And told especially to my dead father.

  Your history of John Brown, however, will be of no use to the dead. It is for the living and the unborn: you are in the business of creating received knowledge. I am in the business of coming along behind and correcting it. I remind you of this for several reasons, but mostly so that you will understand that what I leave out of my account is all that I see no reason to correct or to enlarge upon. Simply put, I accept the truth of whatever is absent from these pages.

  And for that reason, you will not find here any further description of the war in Kansas, even though it continued to burn beyond the so-called Battle of Osawatomie for fully another year and a half, before finally flickering down to a charred pile of ash in the winter of ’58, with the Free-State forces arrived at last in exhausted ascendancy. By then, Father’s and my attentions were elsewhere. His attention was on the Eastern sources of funding for his African Campaign, as he had come to call it; mine was on the recruitment and training, in our secret encampment at Tabor, Iowa, of the young men who would follow Father into Africa, and the long, broody wait for him to signal that the moment to attack had at last arrived. Also not here: Father’s lengthy visits and planning sessions during the spring and summer of ’57 and all throughout ’58 with Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, and Gerrit Smith in Peterboro; and, over in Massachusetts, his fiery speeches at Springfield, Worcester, Medford, Concord, and Boston; and his stay in Concord with the distinguished authors Messrs. Emerson, Thoreau, Higginson, and Sanborn, all of whom have since published what I assume to be truthful accounts of Father’s appearance, words, and deportment there. By then, his apotheosis was nearly completed anyhow, and he was to everyone he met a grand, Cromwellian figure transfigured in the glow of their lofty, optimistic thought. But I was not myself present at any of those meetings so cannot know how, in fact, he behaved.

  I do not include here anything that I myself know nothing of or know only through hearsay. For instance, Father’s journey to Canada in April and May of ’58, where, at the famous Chatham Convention of Negro leaders, he first presented to the public, as it were, his plan for the Subterranean Passway and obtained from the most prominent Negroes, Frederick Douglass and the Reverends Loguen and Garnet and Harriet Tubman and others of that radical ilk, the same sort of trust and financial support that he had earlier secured in private from the radical whites in New York and New England. It was at Chatham that he recruited into our little army its first Negro member, Osborn Anderson. Later, of course, as you may know by now, there were four other Negroes who went the full route with us, courageous, doomed men—the mulatto Lewis Leary and his nephew John Copeland, who had been a student at Oberlin College in Ohio; and the splendid Dangerfield Newby; and Frederick Douglass’s friend and valet, Shields Green, of whom, despite his willingness to abandon Mr. Douglass and follow Father, I had no particularly high opinion, and of that I may later write. I have at this moment no desire to puncture Shields’s somewhat inflated reputation, for he was young and ignorant and surely did not realize what he had let himself in for, when he left his protector and went down with Father into “the steel trap!’ as Mr. Douglass called it. He died horribly. One must, as long as one remains alive, forgive the dead everything.

  There is, of course, the well-known story of Father’s seeking out and recruiting in New York City Mr. Hugh Forbes, the conceited British journalist who had accompanied us on shipboard from Boston to Liverpool and by carriage to London during our ill-fated voyage abroad. That sordid story has been told often elsewhere, told more by Father’s enemies than by his friends, probably because of its tendency to portray Father as a deluded old man or, at best, as disastrously naive. I’m reluctant to enter it here, however, because Forbes, too, like Shields Green, may be dead by now, and I had few dealings with him myself and from the start viewed him as a callow, cynical, pompous man and a dissembler. But then, I was never so innocent as Father, especially when it came to a certain type of man, of which Forbes was a prime example—the carefully reticent, smooth-talking fellow with a casual claim to experiences and knowledge that, to Father, were cosmopolitan, which is to say, European. And because he did not boast in the usual loud American way of having fought alongside Mazzini and Garibaldi in Italy and of composing a military handbook for the Austrian army and reporting on the cataclysmic events in Europe in ’48 for the New York Herald and his own periodical, The European, but instead implied and insinuated them into conversation in the educated British way, the Old Man, the rough-cut Yankee auto-didact, believed h
im and hired him on as our only salaried recruit. He even commissioned the velvety fellow with the rank of colonel and sent him west to Tabor to drill and train his troop of young, ragtag volunteers, all of whom by then were hardened veterans of the Kansas campaign and needed, not drilling exercises, but weaponry, supplies, and more fighting men. We certainly did not need a man like Forbes, Colonel Forbes, telling us what to do.

  Little matter, for he did not turn up in Iowa for months anyhow, and when he finally arrived, he was mainly taken up with the composition of his military handbook for the coming American anti-slavery revolution, which, thanks to Father, he was convinced was imminent, a volume that, as soon as it was properly published, he expected to see purchased and eagerly read by all Americans, north and south, and by Europeans, too. He expected this book to make his personal fortune.

  Though Forbes was the first, he was the most transparent of the many men who tried to exploit Father for personal, financial gain. There was also the growing number of journalists who wrote for the Eastern newspapers and periodicals and now followed Father every-where and sent back to their editors lavishly embellished accounts of the Old Man’s adventures in Kansas and his public appearances in New York and New England. Father had taken to traveling under the name of Shubel Morgan again, ostensibly to conceal his identity from federal officers still seeking to arrest him for his actions in Kansas, and wore the long white beard with which after his death he was so famously portrayed; but under any name and in whatever disguise, the comings and goings of Osawatomie Brown were by now well-known to the press, for he had become a colorful character, one whom all Americans enjoyed reading about, regardless of their views on slavery. With these journalists I have little quarrel, however, for quite as effectively as they exploited him, Father exploited them back by using their vivid, exaggerated stories of his military exploits and his spiritual and moral clarity to advertise and confirm his own accounts of his bravery, personal sacrifice, and character.