Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Father and his men are well down in the gorge now, as if they have entered the den of the monstrous snake. Behind them and before them on their left, like thick, black curtains hanging from the blacker sky, loom high walls, where clusters of scrub oak and thickets of thorn bushes cling to wet, rocky escarpments all the way to the tops, and tall, windblown chestnut and walnut trees rise from the bluffs above. There can be no return now: Father and his men have reached the bridge over the Potomac and must enter it and go on, straight into the town at the further end. Father halts the wagon at the entrance for a moment and stations Watson and Stewart Taylor as a rear guard on the Maryland side. Then, at the Old Man’s command, Kagi and Stevens march straight into the mouth of the bridge. Fifty yards back, Father follows in the rumbling wagon, and the rest of the men, rifles at the ready and cartridge boxes clipped to the outside of their clothing for quick access, march wordlessly along behind, walking stiffly on the loose planks, as if on ice, and taking shallow, tight breaths, as if afraid to fill their chests with the blackness that surrounds them.

  A few moments later, Kagi and Stevens emerge from the long throat of the bridge. They are the first of the raiders to enter the town, and as soon as they have set their boots onto the rain-slicked cobbles of Potomac Street, a watchman hears their step and calls, Who goes there! Kagi answers, Hallo, Billy Williams! It’s a friend! The watchman draws close to the two and lifts his lantern and says, Oh, it’s Mister Kagi who’s out so late, and they instantly throw down on him and take him prisoner and douse his lamp.

  The raid has begun. Osawatomie Brown and his men are inside Harpers Ferry and have taken their first hostage. The raiders are able to breathe and walk normally now, and they move rapidly and efficiently from one place and situation to the next, exactly as planned and rehearsed. Turning right on Potomac Street at the B & O train depot, they pass the deserted porch and darkened windows of the Wager Hotel, where the last guests have finally gone upstairs to their rooms, and head straight towards the armory, a long double row of brick buildings situated between the railroad siding and the canal. On the left, adjacent to the gate of the armory grounds, there is a square brick building, a single-storey, two-room structure that serves as a fire-engine house for the town and a guardhouse for the armory. When Father has drawn the wagon close to the iron gate, the armory watchman, whose name is Daniel Whelan, cracks open the timbered door of the firehouse, pauses, squints into the darkness, and then reluctantly steps outside into the rain. In a sleepy voice, he says, That you, Williams?

  Open the gate, Mister Whelan, Father says.

  You’re not Williams, says the watchman, more confused than frightened. At once, Oliver and Newby step forward with their rifles leveled and take him prisoner. Aaron Stevens grabs the crowbar from the wagon bed and twists it into the chain holding the gate. When the lock snaps, he and Kagi swing open the gate, and Father drives the wagon straight into the yard. The other men, including the two captured watchmen, follow at gunpoint, and Kagi swings the gate closed again.

  Now Father climbs down from the wagon and, turning to his dumbfounded prisoners, declares that he has come here from Kansas, for this is a slave state, and he has come to free all its Negro slaves.

  Williams and Whelan look wide-eyed in disbelief at the old man. The rain drips from the tattered brim of his hat and from his white beard. Barely hearing his words, they stare at him, this bony, sharp-eyed old fellow in the frock coat, who, except for his rifle and the two pistols at his waist, resembles more a poor, hardscrabble farmer from the hills than a Yankee liberator of slaves, and they look around at the small, shabbily dressed, heavily armed group of white and Negro young men who stand near him, and finally at each other, and say nothing. What is happening here? For Williams and Whelan, this is a strange, waking dream, a shared hallucination.

  I have taken possession of the United States armory, the old man calmly continues. And if the citizens of the town interfere with me and my men, we must burn the town and have blood.

  Father now proceeds to dispatch his men so as to take control of the remaining arms supplies and defenses of the town. Under guard by Dauphin Thompson and Lewis Leary, the two hostages are shut into the firehouse, while Oliver and Will Thompson are sent three blocks south on Shenandoah Street to take command of the bridge that crosses the Shenandoah River into town. The tollbooth proves to be empty and the bridge unguarded. Hazlett and Edwin Coppoc take over the arsenal, also unguarded, just off the main square and in sight of the hotel, where they will wait for further orders and a wagon to empty it. Stevens, Kagi, and Copeland are ordered to the rifle factory, which is located a short ways further down Shenandoah Street at Lower Hall’s Island, a long, narrow rise of land in the Shendandoah River that is separated from the shore by a canal. Once more, a single watchman is surprised by the raiders and, when captured, is marched by Stevens back to the firehouse, leaving Kagi and Copeland behind to hold the rifle works. On his return to the firehouse, Stevens comes upon three half-drunk, unarmed young men, carousers straggling home late from the Wager Hotel, and he swiftly puts them under his gun and brings them in with the watchman.

  It is not yet midnight, and both bridges into town, the armory, the arsenal, and the rifle factory have been brought under the control of the raiders. Six men have been taken hostage and locked into the firehouse. Unknown to the rest of its citizens, unknown to the world, Harpers Ferry, Virginia, belongs to Osawatomie Brown. Around this time, the rain lets up, and the clouds slowly pull away and open the starry sky to view. Soon the dog-tooth moon breaks the dark horizon above the Maryland Heights north of town, where, just before one A.M., as Father expected, a fourth watchman, Patrick Higgins, comes down the moonlit footpath from his home in Sandy Hook to relieve Williams at the Maryland side of the Potomac bridge. As he enters the covered bridge, Watson and Stewart Taylor, Father’s rear guard, step from the shadows and capture the man. In silence, dutifully following the plan, they direct their prisoner to the bridge and commence marching him over to the firehouse, when suddenly Higgins turns and swats Watson on the forehead and races ahead of them into the darkness. Before Watson can stay his hand, Taylor raises his rifle and fires, his bullet slightly grazing the forehead of the escaping man, who is able nonetheless to get safely to the end of the bridge and into the Wager Hotel, where he is the first to raise the alarm, although he cannot say who has shot at him or why.

  This is an eventuality that Father has anticipated, a part of his overall plan, and so long as it happens after the bridges and the arms stores have been captured and hostages have been taken, it does not much concern him that sometime in the night a shot or two will be fired, alerting the citizens that a violent action is under way. By daylight, they will know of it, anyhow, and will be told by him then of its purpose, and soon the whole country will begin to apprehend its scale. After all, this raid is meant to be a public act, not a private one, he has reminded us, and if our aims are to be met, we must actually invite a certain hue-and-cry and, so long as we are in control of events and not they us, welcome it. Still, the echoing sound of the first shot shocks the men, and Watson’s and Taylor’s breathless report that their prisoner has escaped into the hotel frightens them. Father, however, is calm as ice.

  At this moment, he is mainly concerned with Aaron Stevens’s mission into the countryside. He has sent Stevens with Tidd and Cook and three of the Negro men, Anderson, Leary, and Green, five miles west of Harpers Ferry to Halltown, where resides the wealthy planter Colonel Lewis Washington, a man who is a direct descendant of General George Washington and, for that, something of a local celebrity and politician, an aide to Virginia’s Governor Wise. Further, he is known to have inherited from his incomparable ancestor an elaborately engraved pistol presented to the General after the Revolution by the Marquis de Lafayette and a ceremonial sword given him by King Frederick the Great of Prussia. The Old Man wants Colonel Lewis Washington as a hostage, and he wants to free the Colonel’s half-dozen slaves, but most of all, to help
place his own acts into their proper context, he wants General George Washington’s pistol and his sword.

  With a rail pulled from the fence by the meadow in front of the house, Stevens and his men batter down the Colonel’s door and roust him and his terrified family from their beds. When the Colonel has dressed and has delivered over to the raiders his ancestor’s famous weapons, Stevens formally places him under arrest and, leaving the man’s wife and young children behind, seats him next to Tidd in a two-horse carriage appropriated from the barn. Behind them, Anderson, Leary, and Green have hitched the Colonel’s four remaining horses to a farm wagon and have placed into it three liberated slaves, two men and a young woman—all they could find in the house and barn, or maybe they’re the only Negroes on the place not too frightened to show themselves, Anderson explains to Stevens, for these poor people can’t know for sure yet that we are who we say we are. Stevens agrees, and they start back along the Charles Town Turnpike towards Harpers Ferry.

  A mile west of Bolivar Heights, still following Father’s orders, they draw the wagons up before a large farm owned by John Allstadt, after Colonel Washington the wealthiest planter in the region and, like him, a slaveholder—the owner, in fact, of the young woman who was sold off into the Deep South and her young husband who a week ago hung himself because of it. A second time, Stevens and his men break down a front door and enter a stranger’s home unopposed. They quickly make hostages of the man of the house, Mr. Allstadt, and his eighteen-year-old son, and unceremoniously liberate Allstadt’s four remaining slaves, who are added to the group in the farm wagon. As instructed, Stevens and the other raiders are scrupulously polite to their prisoners and to the women and children, just as they were at Colonel Washington’s, and they try not to frighten them overmuch and take pains to cause no unnecessary damage to the house or personal property, other than that of converting the slaves into free men and women. They state clearly to the whites their sole reason for breaking into their homes in the middle of the night and making prisoners of the husbands and sons—which is strictly to end slavery. If we are not opposed, Stevens says, no blood will be spilt. The husbands and sons, like the wagons and horses, will eventually be returned to them, but their slaves are no longer owned by them, he says. The slaves of Virginia are owned henceforth by themselves and cannot be returned to any man.

  In the meantime, back at Harpers Ferry, at 1:25 A.M., precisely as scheduled, the Baltimore-bound B & O passenger train rolls in, and when it has hissed to a noisy stop at the station, the night clerk from the hotel next door skitters low from the door of the railroad station, and before the conductor can step down from the train to the platform, the man has leapt aboard, bearing the startling news that gunmen are out on the Potomac bridge and have shot a watchman, who lies bleeding inside the hotel! Worse, the other three town watchmen are nowhere about and may even have been murdered! And here’s something else: when the clerk slipped unseen into the station by a rear window adjacent to the hotel, he tried to telegraph the stationmaster in Charles Town and discovered that the wires had been cut. There is something very strange, something dangerous, happening, and until now, with no idea of how many gunmen might be out there or where they may be hiding, no one but the night clerk has dared to leave the hotel or been able to raise a general alarm.

  The conductor, A. J. Phelps, takes immediate charge and directs the engineer and the baggagemaster, who carries a pistol, to step from the train and investigate the bridge, for it may have been sabotaged. Who knows but what these gunmen are train robbers and have blocked the bridge somehow? If the tracks appear clear, he says, they straightway will pass across the river and, at the station in Monococy in Maryland, will telegraph the news of these startling events over to Charles Town, the county seat, where there is a federal marshal’s office and a regiment of town militia available for help.

  Sleepy passengers peer out their windows, wondering why the delay, as the engineer and the baggagemaster, his pistol at the ready, walk slowly along the station platform, step down to the railbed, and crunch over the cinders and gravel towards the dark mouth of the covered bridge. When the pair are about fifteen feet from the entrance, Watson speaks to them from the darkness ahead. Drop your pistol, sir, and both of you walk slowly towards us. Keep your hands in full view. You’re under a hundred guns, gentlemen, and are now our prisoners. You won’t be harmed, if you do as we say.

  The baggagemaster lets his pistol fall to the railbed, and the two men, as instructed, extend their hands as if ready to be manacled and walk forward. Meanwhile, behind them, up on the platform, a Negro man named Hayward Shepherd, a freedman employed at the station as the night baggageman, has stepped from the office to the platform to see what is going on, and Phelps, the conductor—too far from the bridge for him or the clerk or anyone on the train to see in the darkness that the engineer and the baggagemaster have been all but taken prisoner—orders him to go and assist them in their investigation. Shepherd jumps to the ground and hurries to join the two, who have disappeared inside the bridge. When he, too, has neared the entrance and is now beyond earshot of the men on the platform, he hears a calm, low voice from the darkness, Watson Brown’s, ordering him to stop and listen. Shepherd, a middle-aged bachelor affectionately called “Uncle Hay” by the white citizens of the town, stops and listens. In a conversational tone, Watson tells him what Father has instructed all of us to say to the Virginia freedmen. We have come from Kansas to free the slaves. You may join us in this enterprise or not. But if you refuse to join us, we will treat with you as with any white man who refuses to join us. We will be forced to consider you our enemy.

  For a second, Shepherd hesitates, as if not quite getting Watson’s meaning, and then abruptly he turns and runs. Watson—or perhaps it is Stewart Taylor, or maybe some other raider, standing in the shadows of the storefronts nearby; any one of us could have done it—fires his rifle, and Shepherd falls, mortally wounded by a single bullet in the spine, running through to the chest. With everyone watching him and no one daring to move to help—not Watson or Stewart inside the covered bridge, not their two prisoners, not the several raiders hiding in the shadows along the street or Father standing unseen at the gate of the armory, not the men up on the platform by the station or the passengers staring in horror from the windows of the train: no one who sees it can make himself come forward to help the fallen man—as Shepherd lifts his bloody chest from the cinders and with his arms slowly drags his numbed, dying body away from the bridge towards the station. After what seems like a long while, he succeeds in getting to a protected place below the platform that is close enough for Phelps and the hotel clerk safely to reach down and draw him up to it, where they quickly pull his body inside the station as if he were already a dead man.

  Prepare yourselves for sad ironies, Father forewarned us, often enough for us to have expected it. But it has come nonetheless as a dismaying shock. Men, the cruel perversity of slavery will snap back betimes and will try to bite us in our face, he told us. We have to be hard, hard. This surely is what he meant: that in the liberation of the slaves, the first to die may well be neither a white man nor a slave, but a free Negro.

  This sad event has the immediate good effect, however, of closing down the train and trapping its passengers inside it, with Conductor Phelps and the hotel clerk retreating to the station, and the guests, those few wakened by this, the second gunshot of the night, holing up inside the hotel. For the time being, the town is still ours. A little after four A.M., Aaron Stevens’s party comes clattering down Potomac Street, the trap driven by Tidd, with Colonel Washington and Mr. Allstadt and his son in it, and the farm wagon driven by Cook, with the seven liberated slaves huddled in back. Stevens, who carries General Washington’s pistol and sword wrapped in a blanket, and the other raiders, Anderson, Leary, and Green, are on horseback, their mounts taken from Allstadt’s farm.

  As soon as they have arrived at the armory yard, Father tells the newly freed slaves who he is, Osawatomie Brown
of Kansas, which, as he expected, evokes in them a certain fearfulness, until he reveals that his principal ally is the famous Negro Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave himself, and this seems to impress and calm them somewhat, for these are Virginia ex-slaves and rebellious types, surely, or they would not have come in with Stevens and his men, and being from a border town, they no doubt have had secret access to abolitionist information and literature. He places pikes into their hands and stations them inside the firehouse to guard the growing number of hostages. For now, these white men are your prisoners, he says. Treat them honestly, for they are hostages, whom we will deploy if we need to bargain for our continued safety, and as we will be freeing them later, we want them to tell other white people the truth about us, that we want not revenge but liberty.