Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Now, I cannot doubt, notwithstanding I have been unsuccessful, that you will allow me full credit for my peculiar quick-sightedness. As fast as I say it, I can see where I missed it.’

  Father lowered the sheaf of lined pale blue paper, looked to me, and awaited my admiration. “Well? What do you think, son?” he asked.

  “Yes... well;’ said I. “Yes, it’s... it’s very good. And you seem to have touched on everything that concerns you. Though it does end rather abruptly, don’t you think? I mean, is it enough simply to keep saying that you see in a twink where you have missed it?”

  “No!” he said. “Of course not! That’s my point. Or will be, when I have made it. It’s what my second chapter will propose: what to do when you have seen the error of your ways. You see, American Negroes don’t have a figure like Benjamin Franklin, and that’s what I’m trying to establish here. A friendly, wise scold. Franklin spoke only to white people, wisely and well, to be sure, but what he said is of little use to a people despised and downtrodden because of their race. Franklin’s book never addresses the whole race question. But Negroes—I’m talking about the rank and file here, you understand, not the leaders—they need a book of practical wisdom which is as accessible and amusing to them as Franklin’s is to us white folks, and as down-to-earth. Sambo is my Poor Richard, son.

  “When this is published in the Ram’s Horn, I’ll ask my colored friends what they think of it—innocently, you understand, as if I knew nothing of the authorship, testing their responses, getting suggestions as to what’s been left out. And then I’ll write my second chapter. A third and fourth chapter will follow, and so on, until I’ll have written an entire book, a book that can serve as a new primer for Negroes in the fight against slavery.”

  “Fine, but why not let a Negro man write such a book?” I asked him, pointing out that there were plenty who were more than capable of it: Mr. Douglass, for instance, or the Reverends Garnet and Loguen. “They could do it without a disguise,” I added.

  “Please!” He laughed, as if he thought the idea ridiculous. “Owen, we’re after a black Ben Franklin here, and none of those fine men is especially humorous or down-to-earth. And even if he were, he’d have to disguise himself just as much as I have. For different reasons, of course. Not because of race, but because he’d be so well-known amongst the Negro readership. Mister Douglass would have to call himself Sambo, too, just as I have, or else he’d sound like the famous Frederick Douglass, and who would believe these were his mistakes?”

  “Who will believe, Father, that they are yours?” “No one knows who I am,” he said with a wink.

  No, indeed. Back in ’48 in Springfield, Massachusetts, black or white, they did not know who John Brown was. Not even I knew. There was a day coming, however, and not far off, when the whole world would know his name—from the literary salons of Paris, France, to the humblest white farmer’s cabin of Kentucky, from the Scottish castles of the English queen to the daub-and-wattle slave-quarters of Alabama. So go ahead, write your story now, Old Man. Be for black folks a friendly, ordinary Negro scold, and do it while you can. Soon enough the man who is Sambo will be Old John Brown, Captain John Brown, Osawatomie Brown, a man who cannot hide who he is, even behind a beard and a dozen false names, and who can never again claim to be other than white, who can no longer even cultivate a fantasy that he is other than white. Though it will be rarely said so baldly, his race—that he is a white man and in the interests of Negroes has coldly killed other white men—will become the most important thing about him.

  The image of Father reading beside me has faded. The light that accompanied my memory of him is gone, and although I cannot see him, I can still hear his voice. He says to me, “It’s very dark here. You don’t mind the darkness, Owen? And the cold? It’s grown very cold since the sun set. Why not go inside and light a fire?”

  “I do mind the darkness. It’s making me feel too much the pain of being alone. But the cold, no. I don’t feel the cold.”

  “Then go inside your cabin, my boy, and light a candle.”

  That was the winter and spring when we lived in Springfield in the house on Franklin Street, a wood-frame row house no wider than a single room, somewhat dilapidated, barely furnished, in a neighborhood of mostly Negro freedmen, people who were even poorer than we. We were content, however, because for the first time in several years we were residing together, a regular family, and Father was not working someplace far off, careening about the skies like a wandering star or a comet due to return home sometime in the distant future. Even John, with his new wife, Wealthy, was with us that year, helping Father run Mr. Perkins’s wool warehouse.

  John was easier to deal with than Father, or so it appeared, for as soon as John arrived from Ohio, the buyers of our wool began asking to see him, instead of the Old Man. This left Father free to pursue his several projects concerning the welfare and future of the Negroes in Springfield, who that year were particularly alarmed by the growing number of slave-catchers prowling through Northern cities. Father’s abolitionist work had taken on a new intensity there and a freshened singleness of purpose, probably because of the presence in Springfield of a large number of freedmen who were agreeable to him for their intelligence and for the ferocity of their opposition to slavery. It no doubt helped that he, in his fervor and clarity of purpose, was agreeable to them as well.

  I myself was attached to the warehouse, where I was responsible for cleaning and sorting the wool that came in from the west, mostly from Father’s and Mr. Perkins’s associates in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and attending to its proper storage and, when the occasional sale was made to one of the woolen manufacturers, packing and shipping it on to the huge new factory looms of eastern Massachusetts. It was boring work, but not particularly arduous, and left me perhaps too much solitary time for dreaming about a future that in my heart I suspected would never be mine.

  My dreams were for the most part the foolish fancies of a very naive and unusually immature young man—a shepherd boy’s idea of sophisticated Eastern society. I was twenty-four years old that winter, and Springfield was the largest town I had ever seen. The regular proximity of exotic (or so they seemed to me) young women kept me in an agitated state of mind and body, and I spent many an evening and early morning hour walking the streets alone, not so much to look at the young women, for they were not so much to be found on the streets during those hours anyhow, as to be alone with my tangled thoughts and feelings, struggling to control and organize them.

  Most of my thoughts and feelings were surely driven by simple, natural male curiosity, unnaturally heightened by my lifelong fear of women and my shyness when among them and the rural isolation of my life so far, but they disturbed and confused me. I hesitate to make this confession, especially to someone I do not know and a woman, and very possibly I will write this down and then burn it, as I have certain other pages already written. In fact, I cannot say for certain if I have sent you some of these pages, all of them, or none. They are scattered and strewn about my table and cabin, and much of the time, when I am not seated here with pencil in hand, I am confused and lose myself and can’t distinguish what I have done from what I have not done.

  I will tell everything. During the daylight hours, whenever I noticed an attractive woman, whether a pious young woman at church or a neighborhood friend of Ruth’s or one of the daughters of a Negro cohort of Father’s at an abolitionist meeting, I quickly averted my gaze and made every attempt to remove myself from her presence. But later, in the nighttime—while alone and walking the gaslit streets of the city, down along muddy, trash-strewn lanes and alleys by the river and past the taverns and brothels there, where I lingered outside and peered through fogged-over windows and glanced furtively through doors as whiskeyed patrons entered and left, and along tree-lined boulevards up on the heights where the large mansions were located and I stopped and gazed across lawns to darkened verandas—I imagined all sorts of encounters with all types of women, and little p
lays took place on the stage of my mind, in which I spoke all the parts.

  “How do you do, miss? Are you out for an evening stroll? May I accompany you a ways?”

  “Why, thank you, sir, I would appreciate your company and protection. Are you a native of these parts, sir? For I do not think I know you.”

  They were pathetic little dramas, which enflamed my passions and sent me reeling back to our house on Franklin Street, where the rest of the family slept peacefully and virtuously. There I would toss and writhe in my cot in the room that I shared with my younger brothers, miserable, guilty, self-abusing.

  Thus I little noticed the continued and worsening illness of another of the children, the baby, Ellen, born in Ohio the previous autumn, and I did not realize that my stepmother, Mary, had not fully recovered from her lying-in period following the birth. I lived in a household whose rhythms and concerns were being shaped once again by illness, and I did not notice. Here I was, this large, healthy young fellow lumbering out to work at the warehouse every morning, returning in the evening for supper and then slipping out again, stumbling through his days and nights with his mind filled only by the turbulence of lustful fantasies at war with private shames, while the rest of the family worried over another frail and failing babe and a mother unable to recover from the rigors of giving birth. In such a way did my preoccupation with trivial sins, with my sensual indulgence and guilt, cause me to commit a graver sin and to feel no guilt for it. No wonder Father seemed short with me that winter and spring: in my self-absorption, I thought that he and Mary and the rest of the family, John and Wealthy, Ruth, even the younger children, were casting me out, were not including me in their circle of intimate relations—when in fact it was I who had cast them out.

  Then one night late in April, a few weeks before we planned to depart for our new home in the Adirondacks, I left the house in an unusually heightened state of alarm. I felt I had reached a fork in my road, and if I did not take a turning now I would be forever bound to follow the track I was on. A foolish desperation, I know, but the oncoming move to the wilderness of North Elba frightened me. We had begun dismantling and packing up our life in Springfield, almost without having yet settled there, and the house was filling with crates and cartons, and Father was making lists of goods and tools and was negotiating for a large wagon to carry everything north. That very evening he had informed me over our supper that my job would be to take the boys Salmon and Watson out to Litchfield, Connecticut, where he had been boarding his merino sheep and small herd of Devon cattle at the farm of a cousin, there to gather the livestock and move them north separately from the rest of the family, to meet up in the town of Westport, New York, on Lake Champlain.

  I nodded and, on getting up from the table, sullenly announced that I would be going out to say goodbye to a few friends, since I did not expect to see them again. Father showed no interest in my stated intentions: I did not know, of course, thanks to my inane self-absorption, that his mind and the minds of everyone else in the family were very much distracted by the worsening condition of the sick baby, Ellen. It appeared to me that, but for our preparations to move, life was going on as usual. Except, as I saw it, no one particularly cared about me. So deluded was I that I had grown angry at them, at Father especially, for not having asked me pointedly where I was going, who were my friends, why did I need to tell them goodbye with two weeks yet to go before we left town? For not having caught my lie.

  In a huff, then, and puffed up with self-righteous relief, I left the crowded little house on Franklin Street and made my way downtown towards the dark, broad Connecticut River, where barges and sloops and Long Island coasters tied up at the docks, and their crews and the stevedores gathered in dim, smoky taverns. In and around these taverns and boarding houses there were women—women waiting for the company and pay of lonely men and boys who came ashore for a night or two, women waiting for the drovers and woodcutters from the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire to come in from the marketplaces of the town with fresh money in their pockets and reckless intentions in their hearts.

  Women, women, women! The mere idea of femaleness made me mad with desire, although I knew not what it was exactly that I desired. Sex? Copulation? Simple, carnal love? All that, I suppose. All that. The very fact of it. But something else, too. I craved knowledge, knowledge of a sort that up to then I’d had no access to, and here I speak of the certain and unmistakeable smell of a woman, the touch of her soft skin, the flow of her hair across my hand, the sound of a woman’s whispered voice in my ear, even the sight of her naked body. What were these smells, touches, sounds, and sights like? I had never experienced these aspects of femaleness. But I knew they existed, and that small knowledge made me wildly desirous of the further, larger, and much more dangerous knowledge beyond.

  It was a warm night, the April air thick with the smell of lilacs and new, wet grass. I strode along, determined tonight not to leave this river town without learning at least something of what I was sure I would miss afterwards—for the remainder of my life, as it seemed. For I still believed the Old Man then, believed him when he said that our move up into the Adirondack wilderness of northern New York would be permanent. And had accepted that, because of the blacks settled there, Timbuctoo would be our base for all future operations in the war against slavery. I was sure that my permanent, lifelong job would be to run the farm and tend the flocks, so that Father could preach and organize and fight, activities to which his character and temperament were so much more neatly adapted than mine. I felt that I had reached the end of a conscripted childhood and was about to begin a similarly conscripted adult life. But on this April night, for a few hours, at least, I meant to be a free man.

  I saw several women and avoided passing each one by crossing the street to the other side. But then came one I could not avoid, and after I had passed her by with my habitually averted gaze, she called out, “Hullo, Red! Would y’ be needin’ company tonight?”

  She was a girl, practically, I had glimpsed that much, and red-haired herself, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, with bright white powder all over her face and a broad slash of painted lips and smudge-blackened eyes. She wore erratic scraps of cloth elaborately draped across her shoulders, wrapped, sashed, and pinned so as to suggest an exotic gown, although it was more a child’s motley costume than a woman’s dress.

  I stopped and turned back to her, and she said, with a curl to her voice and a pronunciation that was noticeably Irish, “You’re a big feller, ain’t you, now.”

  Because I could see that she was a child, she did not frighten me as a full-grown woman would, and I took a step towards her. “I’m ... I’m only out for a walk,” I said. She was small and thin. Her head, covered with a crumpled black lace bonnet, came barely to my chest, the thickness of her wrist seemed not much greater than that of my thumb, and her waist was smaller than the circumference of my right arm.

  When I approached her, she stopped smiling and stepped back from me into a bank of shadows that fell from a cut-stone retaining wall. We were down by the canal tow path, with the river passing in the darkness below and a cobbled street out of view above. I heard a horse clop past and the iron-sheathed wheels of a wagon. It was a lonely, dark, and dangerous place for a girl, even a girl such as she—perhaps especially for one such as she, whose purpose for being there was to solicit the attentions of men likely to be drunk or angry, men likely to regard her as disposable. More particularly, of course, she was there to solicit men like me—timid, passionately curious bumpkins, who would pay to use her, yes, but would not otherwise harm her.

  I was useless to her, however, a waste of her time, for I had no more than a few loose coins in my pocket. Father, I thought, with more coins in his pocket than I, would try to save such a woman. He would lecture her on the evils of her ways and give her his last money and instruct her to go home and feed herself and her babes, if she had any. John and Jason were both recently married and, even if they had been as unattached as
I, would have done likewise. I knew that I, however, had I the means, would only try to use her. I am confident that Father never in his life performed the sexual act outside the matrimonial bed (where, to be sure, he performed it frequently); the same for my brothers; but I, by contrast, even at the young age of twenty-four, still and perhaps forever too much the son and brother, could not imagine myself as husband, as father, as regular visitor to the marriage bed. And so here I was, where my father and brothers would never be, soliciting a prostitute.

  Though I was a full-grown man, I wore my manhood like an ill-fitting costume—not unlike the way the girl before me wore her make-up and rags, her woman’s costume. We had met in the shadows of a high stone wall, two children ineptly disguised as adults. But where she had costumed herself as a grown woman in order to keep from starving or freezing to death, I was a child got up merely to accommodate the size and appearance and the startling impulses of a man’s body. But I was probably no more successful at disguising my childishness than she, and in a diminished sense, I, too, was in danger out here—a cull, easy prey to robbers, tricksters, confidence men and women, cutpurses and cutthroats of every stripe.

  “I... I have no money!’ I said to her.

  “Aw, come on, now, a nicely dressed feller like yourself?”

  “Yes. I live not far from here. I’m just walking, out for a walk... as I said. I... I like to be by the river.”

  “Then what d’ you want with me?” She took a further, backwards step into the deeper shadows, and I could not make out her powdered and painted face any longer.

  “Nothing. Nothing. Just... I’m sorry, miss. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You didn’t scare me.”

  “No?” I moved towards her, and she jumped awkwardly away, like a broken-winged bird, her parti-colored feathers all dusty and awry. I reached out with my right hand and placed it on her bony shoulder. Instantly, she ducked out from under it and turned her back to me, pressing herself against the cold stone wall.