Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  And eventually, after considerable trouble, which we watched from above, he did. He came clambering over sharp-edged layers of granite with a companion, a balding, large-eyed Negro man of early middle years and athletic build. Mr. Douglass, as always, was dressed in a fine woolen suit and wore a black cravat and brimmed hat; his companion was in a workingman’s blouse and pants and boots, with a tattered old straw on his head; and the two were puffing and wet with sweat when they suddenly came around a granite pylon and encountered us—no doubt unexpectedly, for they had by then probably begun to believe that we had been delayed or that they had misunderstood Father’s directions to the quarry or perhaps had gone to the wrong place in it.

  “Ah, Brown, here you are!” Mr. Douglass exclaimed, much relieved. He smiled, and the two men shook hands warmly and embraced.

  Father began at once to speak of the purpose of the meeting, but Mr. Douglass interrupted him and elaborately introduced his friend Shields Green, who he said was very interested in meeting the famous Osawatomie Brown and possibly in “joining him down here in the fray,” as he put it. Then he greeted me with a smile and handshake and gave Father to understand that he and Mr. Green needed to catch their breath for a moment or two. He was sorry, he said, that he had not brought water or refreshment with him.

  It was impossible not to honor Frederick Douglass. His handsome presence was commanding without ever seeming pompous or condescending, and he was gregarious and gracious without a taint of servility. He made you feel that you and he were equals on a very high plane. And he was the only man I ever saw silence Father good-naturedly.

  He leaned against the rock wall of our aerie and fanned his dark, bearded face with his hat-brim, while Shields Green sat and rested upon a table-sized stone nearby and wiped down his neck and face with a large blue handkerchief. Finally, Mr. Douglass said to Father, “All right, Old John, let me hear it. There are some wild rumors circulating up North about you and your boys, and I need to know the truth of the matter. I’ll tell you, friend, some of your strongest supporters and allies are afraid that you’re about to commence some wild, foolhardy action down here, and I’d like to go home and tell them otherwise.”

  “There’s nothing wild or foolhardy about my plans, except to men who lack courage and principles,” Father began, and here he commenced the recitation with which I and the others hidden back at the attic of the Kennedy farmhouse had become so familiar that we could recite it word by word ourselves. He told Mr. Douglass how the old plan had been modified to such a degree that it amounted now to a new plan, and, just as with us, he brought out and unrolled his maps and went over each step of the raid, until he had got to the end of the raid and our rendez-vous in the wilderness with Frederick Douglass and the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of newly liberated slaves.

  Mr. Douglass was silent for a few moments and studied the maps with pursed lips and furrowed brow. At last, he sighed and said, “I love you, John Brown. I do. You’ve been a true hero, and I don’t want you killed. You and those brave young men with you.”

  “We may suffer losses” Father said, interrupting. “It’s inevitable in war. But we will triumph over our enemies in the end. We will. I know it, Frederick. The Lord will protect us.”

  “The Lord can’t protect you from the nature of that place, Harpers Ferry. It’s a steel trap, John. You’ll get in and not be able to get out. Please, forget this.”

  “Our hostages will shield us while we’re down there, and the wilderness and the mountains will preserve us when we’ve left.”

  “No, no, no, no! Impossible! Remember, I know these white Southerners; you don’t. These men will cut down every tree from here to Tennessee but one, and when they have caught you, they’ll hang you from it. And along the way, they’ll butcher any slave who even dreams of rebellion in his sleep.”

  “We’ll be too many too soon for them to go against us, and we’ll be everywhere across the South, so they’ll never be able to unite against us in any one place. This is no conventional war I’m fomenting here, Frederick.”

  “The federal army, John. Remember that.”

  “Yes, and remember the Seminoles. The Alleghenies will be my Everglades.”

  “And our Negroes, are they to be your Indian warriors?”

  “If you will lead them with me. If you are at my side, they will rise up and follow me into battle against their white masters.” Then for a long while Father explained how their army of escaped slaves would be divided into two parts, one to conduct raids on the plantations and towns of the South, the other to provide logistical support for the raiders and safe transportation out of the South for those escaping slaves who, because of age or infirmity or temperament, were unable to join the battle or merely wished to flee into the North. It all seemed so logical and so likely to succeed that Mr. Douglass’s persistent objections and skepticism began to look, to me, like a reflection of his character more than his mind, as if a fearful heart had shut down his brain.

  Back and forth they went, first one arguing his case, then the other, like attorneys pleading before a stern, inscrutable judge. Who was right, Father or Frederick Douglass? Not in hindsight, but at the moment of their argument. In hindsight, Mr. Douglass obviously seems to have been right. But back then, before the raid, was not Father right to believe that if Mr. Douglass made the raid on Harpers Ferry the opening act of a slave rebellion led by him and Old John Brown together, then it almost had to be a successful rebellion?

  “With you at my side, this enterprise will be larger than any previous event in American history. It will be a true revolution, the revolution we should have fought back in ’76!”

  “No, Brown, it won’t. It’ll be suicidal. Worse than Nat Turner. With or without me, it’s destined to fail. We are too few, too poorly armed, too ill-equipped, and too untrained as soldiers to accomplish what you have imagined.”

  Father stepped away and stared down at the large, open pit of the quarry below. In a low, sulky voice, he said, “I’m glad you weren’t around to advise our Revolutionary forebears, Frederick. We’d all still be British subjects.”

  Mr. Douglass smiled. “Yes, well, given the fact that the British have outlawed slavery for close to a quarter-century now, it might not be a bad thing to be a British subject.”

  For many hours, long into the afternoon, the two men went back and forth, first one making his argument, citing precedent and pointing to principle for support, and then the other. Shields Green and I listened first to one, then to the other, and said nothing: we were like children listening to their parents argue over a matter that, for good or evil, would shape all their lives to come and wishing that both parents could be right. Mr. Douglass would speak for a while, marshaling his arguments with care and generosity towards Father, with sympathetic understanding of the Old Man’s objectives and firm disapproval of his means, not on principle but for practical reasons only; and Shields and I would nod, as if thinking, yes, Harpers Ferry is a steel trap, we will get in and never be able to get out, and if by some miracle we do fight our way through the outraged townspeople and avoid being cut to pieces by the local militiamen as we flee the Shenandoah Valley into the wilderness, then, yes, the federal army will be arrayed against us and will in a short while cut us off in our mountain retreat and will lay down a siege from which our only escape will be death by starvation or a bullet, and, yes, our raid and the mere threat of the slave rebellion it poses will bring down upon the head of every Negro in the South untold suffering, lynchings, mutilations, chains, for the worst sort of oppression imaginable would be the inevitable consequence of raising fear of a slave revolt in the hearts of white Southerners, and, yes, the Northern whites will not come to our aid, for they will never go to war against their white brethren in the defense of black people and a handful of white radical abolitionists: it is an absurd plan, absurd, and cruel beyond belief.

  Then, as the sun passed overhead and moved towards the western Pennsylvania hills, and the shadows of the roc
k that surrounded us grew long, Father would commence to answer, and now Shields and I nodded in support of his reasoning, too, saying to ourselves, yes, we can take the town by surprise and hold it by means of hostages long enough to capture sufficient weaponry to arm the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slaves who will surely seize the opportunity to rise against their masters, once they know they are being led by men they trust as warriors and as men of principle, and, yes, we can flee to safety in the densely forested mountains of the South, and with a hundred bands of disciplined, well-armed, guerilla fighters we can hold off any army for months, even years, during which time our ranks will swell to such numbers that the Southern states, just to restore their economy, will make peace with their workers, for is that not, after all, who has gone to war against them, their workers?

  “In the end, Frederick, it’s right principles and simple economics that will settle this thing in our favor,” Father said, and I could not disagree.

  Until Mr. Douglass, in his low, melodious, melancholy voice, answered, “No, John. It’s race that will settle it. And it will settle it against us. Race and simple arithmetic. Not principles and not economics. Simply put, there are more of you in this country than of us. This is not Haiti or Jamaica, and the northern United States are not a separate nation than the southern United States. It’s race, John. Skin color and hair and physiognomy. You say us, John, and you mean all Americans willing to go to war to end slavery. But every other American who says us means race, means us white people, or us Negroes. You are a noble, good man. But you are nearly alone in this country. Even me, when I say us, I mean we Negroes.”

  “Then you will not join me.”

  “John, I cannot. My practical judgement forbids it. My conscience forbids it. My love of my people forbids it.”

  “You are making my task all the more difficult. Without you beside me ... my boys, my men ...” He stopped and could not speak for a moment. “Without you,” he continued, “the slaves won’t rise up and follow me in such numbers. ...”

  Mr. Douglass placed his heavy hands onto Father’s narrow shoulders and looked into the Old Man’s eyes, and I thought that both men would weep, for their eyes were full. “Please, come away from this. Come back with me, John. Let your son here return to Virginia by himself and send your men home. Fight this war on another front.”

  “This is the only front left to me.”

  Mr. Douglass turned away and said to Shields Green, “I shall return home to Rochester. If you wish, you may go back with me, or you may stay. You’ve heard all the arguments as well as I.”

  Shields looked at the ground and said nothing.

  Father reached out and touched Mr. Douglass’s sleeve and, in a soft, plaintive voice, almost a whisper, said, “When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I will need you to help hive them.” It was a trope that he had used many times, and he spoke it mechanically, as if his thoughts, as if he himself, were elsewhere now.

  Mr. Douglass did not answer. He looked again at Shields Green and said, “What have you decided to do?“

  Shields turned his face, not to Mr. Douglass, but to Father, and he replied, “I believe I’ll go with the Old Man.”

  Mr. Douglass nodded and slowly shook hands with us one by one, and when he had finished, he embraced us each in a heartfelt way one by one, as if it were he who was going to war and not we, and then he departed from us straightway for his home in Rochester. That same night, Father, Shields Green, and I returned in the wagon to Virginia.

  Chapter 24

  This morning I woke in the dark, and my cabin was cold as a grave, and my heart leapt up when I thought again that I had died in the night and had joined Father and the others in purgatory. But then the chalky light of dawn drifted through the window like a fog and erased the comforting clarity of darkness, and I saw where I was, crumpled under my filthy blanket in a corner—a scrawny old man with matted beard and hair lying in his dirty underclothes in an unheated, bare room, my shelves, cot, chair, and tabletop covered with paper spilling onto the floor. I saw that I am nothing but paper. My life has finally come to only this: a tiny bubble of consciousness surrounded by thousands of sheets and scraps of paper—these dozens of tablets filled with disordered scribblings and all the letters and notebooks and documents and yellowed newspaper clippings and tattered old books and periodicals that I so long ago promised to deliver over to you, a great, disheveled heap of words, an incoherent jumble and snarl of truths, lies, memories, fantasies, and even recipes and lists, some of the words as mundane as a description of the several grades of wool in 1848, others as lofty as philosophical speculations on the nature of true religion and heroism, words taken from the floor of the marketplace to Emerson’s brain, but all of it, all these words, adding up to ... what? To nothing worth anything to anyone but me, I suppose, and worth nothing to me; so why have I collected and saved it all these years?

  I’m struggling to think clearly. Why did I pack and carry Father’s letters sent and received and his pocket notes and the many ledgers and books, an entire wooden crate of them, away out here to my California mountaintop and keep them here beside me these many years? I added to them over the years, as books, articles, and memoirs were published, and now, in feeble old age, I have been adding to the pile still more paper, more useless truths and speculation. Why have I done this?

  I know that I began with the belief that I would compose a relation of my memories and knowledge of my father and that I would send it to you and Professor Villard, along with all the documents that I collected and kept over the years—for your purposes, for the composition of what you properly hope will be the defining biography of John Brown, a great book, no doubt, scheduled to make its public appearance in auspicious conjunction with the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the raid on Harpers Ferry and my father’s capture by the federal army and his execution by the government of Virginia. But, surely, this long after I first began, that memorial year has come and passed us by. And yet here I sit, still scribbling, writing now in the margins of my long-filled tablets and on the backs of Father’s letters and in his notebooks, even in the margins and blank end-pages of his broken-backed personal books, his Flint’s Survey, his Jonathan Edwards, Milton, and Franklin, his own published writings, too, “Sambo’s Mistakes” and the Provisional Constitution, old copies of The Liberator, scrolled maps of the Subterranean Passway, newspaper accounts of the raid and of Father’s final words on the scaffold, and Redpath’s and Higginson’s and Hinton’s and Sanborn’s biographies and memoirs—each day that passes, I write a few new sentences, sometimes only one, and sometimes, when my heart beats fast with feeling and my vision of the past is sharp and bright, as many as a hundred.

  But I have long since given up any hope of ordering these pages and sending them to you. I write now only so that I can someday cease to write. I speak in order to go silent. And I listen to my voice so that I will soon no longer be obliged to hear it.

  That fateful October night at the Kennedy farmhouse, after Father and the others had departed for the town, I spent a good while gathering and heaping everything together on the floor in front of the stove, and when I stood and stared down at the mass of incrimination, it was like listening to a thousand low, choked confessions all at once, as if the voices, mingling and merging with one another, were the sad, accumulated results of a long, unforgiving Inquisition into the heresy and betrayal of their Puritan fathers by an entire generation of sons. I burned none of it. My heretical refusal to play Isaac to my father’s Abraham seemed not mine alone: it felt emblematic to me—as if an Age of Heroism had acceded to an Age of Cowardice. As if, in the context of those last days at Harpers Ferry and the one great moral issue of our time, I had become a man of another time: a man of the future, I suppose. A modern man.

  Stepping back from the cold stove, I set my candle on the table and blew it out, dropping the house into darkness. Then I went into the rain and crossed the stubbled field to the shed, where Barclay Cop
poc and Frank Meriam had finished loading the weapons onto the wagon. Coppoc was seated up on the box with the reins in his hands, scowling impatiently at me, while Meriam sat ashen-faced behind him.

  “You finally done in there?” Coppoc said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, let’s get a move on. The Old Man must already be across the bridge. Me and Frank heard gunfire a minute ago.”

  “Fine,” I said, and climbed onto the wagon, taking a place on the wooden cases next to Meriam. Coppoc clucked to the horse, Adelphi, the second of our old North Elba pair of Morgans, and we moved slowly away from the Kennedy farm onto the wet, rumpled road and headed gradually downhill towards the abandoned schoolhouse overlooking the river and the town below. By the time we reached our destination, we could hear guns firing below, intermittently and from several different places—from near the armory, we thought, then from the Maryland side of the bridge, and a little later from the factory at the further edge of town. As instructed by Father, we quickly unloaded the weapons from the wagon and stacked the unopened cases along the walls inside the one room of the schoolhouse.

  About an hour before daylight, when the rain let up, we went outside and walked through the woods a short ways to the edge of a cliff high above the Potomac, and stood together there, looking down in the hazy, pre-dawn light. Behind us, still hitched to the empty wagon, the horse browsed peacefully on a blond patch of grass. The sky was smeared gray beyond the far, dark bluffs, and in the town below, a few lights dully shone from the windows of the hotel and firehouse. We could see the train where it had stopped on the siding next to the railroad station and a few dark figures standing on the platform. Coppoc said he could make out some of our boys and a couple of Negroes posted inside the armory walls by the firehouse, where the hostages were supposed to be kept, but I couldn’t distinguish them from this distance.