Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Father and I divided the large attic into two chambers with sawn boards, and with rocks taken from the brooks below the house, we constructed a second fireplace, so that in short order we had a proper farmhouse with a kitchen and eating room, where Father and Mary slept, and a proper parlor downstairs, and two sleeping chambers upstairs for the rest of us. We rebuilt the old privy and repaired and enlarged the crumbling barn and sheds so that we could adequately shelter our animals and store the hay and corn when they came in and firewood for the winter. The boys spent most of their time clearing trees and extending our fields on both sides of the narrow road that passed by the house, cutting and burning the stumps and then planting vegetables in the burned-over ground, like Indians fertilizing the corn, potatoes, turnips, and other root crops with fish that they pulled in great numbers from the streams that churned in those early days with thick schools of silvery trout. Lyman, who was not especially skilled as a woodcutter or farmer, but who had clever hands nonetheless, took to manufacturing and repairing tools and harness for the farm: he constructed a fine chestnut harrow to follow the plow and an iron-railed sledge for hauling logs out of the deep woods, and he and the Old Man set up a small tannery in one of the sheds and commenced to tan the hides of the deer we shot and salted, and soon the women, Mary, Ruth, and Susan, were at work manufacturing shoes and leather aprons and other items of clothing to protect us against the elements.

  Every morning, before beginning our day’s labor, we gathered together in the parlor for prayers and Father’s brief sermon, and even though I had grown long used to these solemn services, they nevertheless uplifted me, as I believe they did the others, and made the day’s work easier, for despite my unbelief, the services connected our labor to something larger than ourselves and our petty daily needs. Father’s intention, I am sure, was precisely that—to lead us to understand our woodcutting and plowing and constant care of animals, the day-long manufacture of our meals and the permanent ongoing repair of our tools and equipment, and our endless preparation for the long winter, such that we would believe that we were participating in a great cycle of life, as if we were tiny arcs of an enormous curve, a universal template that began with birth and ended with death and which, if participated in fully and without shirking, would lead us to a second and still larger cycle of rebirth and regeneration, to an infinite spiral, as it were. Thus, as the fields were prepared and sown, so too were our inner lives being prepared and sown, and as our land and our livestock grew fruitful and multiplied, so did our spirits blossom and bear fruit, and as we dried and salted and stored our food and supplies in sawdust and hay for winter, so would our spirits and minds be prepared to endure the inescapable suffering and deaths of our loved ones, which would come to us as inevitably as the freezing winds and the deep, drifting snows of winter.

  But in those warm days of spring and early summer, as we settled into our farm, the tumult that habitually inhabited my own mind was eased somewhat, and my earlier turbulence and confusion seemed almost to have occurred in the mind of another man than myself, some fellow younger than I, whose wrathfulness and turmoil had kept him from appreciating the singular beauty of the place and the pleasures of hard work well done and the company of a large, skilled, and cheerfully employed family. Towards Lyman I felt a renewed sense of comradeships as if he were a brother, kin. and despite his having a wife, a woman whom I grew quickly fond of, for her sober wit and decorum. My squallish feelings of before appeared to wane and then to blow away like clouds off the mountains that daily stood before us in their forested summer majesty—great, green pillars holding up the sky—cloudsplitters, indeed.

  As he had promised, the Old Man right away took himself off from the farm and began his survey of the lands granted by Mr. Gerrit Smith to the Negroes, assisted sometimes by me or Lyman, but increasingly accompanied by the sturdy, bearded fellow we had met on our first visit to Timbuctoo, a man who, as it turned out, was their unofficial chieftain and an altogether admirable gentleman. Elden Fleete was a freedman from Brooklyn, New York, a self-educated, somewhat bookish man whose mouth, like Father’s, was full of quotations from the Bible, but also from the plays of Shakespeare and authors of antiquity. He had been a printer and for many years had edited and published an abolitionist newspaper called The Gileadite, which circulated mainly among Negroes in Brooklyn and New York City and was little known elsewhere. Although to my mind it compared favorably to the better-known newspapers, such as The Liberator, published by William Lloyd Garrison—who, as I am well aware, is your Professor Oswald Garrison Villard’s distinguished, and no doubt much admired, late grandfather. In my praise of Mr. Fleete’s little paper, I mean no criticism of your colleague’s ancestor.

  Mr. Fleete, despite his bookishness, was a humorous, energetic man of high ideals who had come to Timbuctoo not so much to own land and farm it as to help in the creation of an autonomous African community in the mountains of North America. He had come here strictly in order to establish a precedent and model for what he hoped would someday be a separate nation of Negro freedmen on the North American continent. In those early days before the Fugitive Slave Act and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, before it had become inescapably clear to everyone that the slavers had taken over every branch of the government of the United States, abolitionists black and white were much divided over how to deal with the fact that there were more than three million people of African descent living in the United States. Regardless of how, or even whether, slavery was banished from the land, so long as most whites regarded them as inferior, these millions would remain here a despised, abject race incapable of rising to the level of white people. Certain Negroes, like Frederick Douglass, for example, and a few whites, like Father, persisted in believing that white people could eventually learn to regard Negroes as their equals; others thought that the only solution to the problem was to force all three million American Negroes to return to Africa; and there were numerous positions between these two extremes. Mr. Fleete was among a small minority of black abolitionists who hoped that the United States government would establish in the western territories a separate state for Negro freedmen, and he had been calling for this in the pages of The Gileadite. The state would be named Gilead and would be ruled by a legislature and a governor elected by its citizenry. Its people would be no more answerable to the government of the United States than were the citizens of France or England. He had even written a constitution for his nation of Gileadites, which was modeled closely on the Constitution of the United States, except, of course, for the provisions therein designed to advance and support chattel slavery.

  Father thought the notion of Gilead the height of absurdity and said so, frequently and loud, but he had high regard for Mr. Fleete’s general intelligence and character, and as he was a man much admired by the other Negroes of Timbuctoo, the Old Man befriended him and worked easily with him in the several areas where they found agreement. They both recognized the need to make a proper survey of the freedmen’s lands, they both felt the urgency of teaching the residents of Timbuctoo how best to survive as independent farmers and stockmen in this climate, and they agreed on the usefulness of establishing Timbuctoo as an actively operating station on the Underground Railroad.

  They knew that the routes in the east along the Hudson and Champlain Valleys and in the west into Ontario by way of Niagara and Detroit were becoming increasingly dangerous in those years and subject to betrayal and savage attack by pro-slavery people residing along the lines and by kidnappers hired by Southern slaveholders. “The fact is, we’ve got to head up into the hills and move across the ridges and peaks where we cannot be pursued,” the Old Man had decided way back in Springfield. Also, he had long wished anyhow to establish an escape route for the slaves which would be protected, not by well-meaning whites, but by heavily armed black men: he believed that only when the Negroes themselves were able to threaten the slavers with deadly force would the cost of the “peculiar institution” become so great as to crumble of its
own weight. It was from these residents of Timbuctoo that he believed he would draw his initial cadre of armed black men.

  Thus, with Mr. Fleete at his side, as soon as his surveys were finished and the deeds registered at the county courthouse in Elizabethtown, Father at the first opportunity hiked the long way south to Indian Pass, crossing through the tangled forests where Mr. Dana, the author, and his Boston companions had gotten lost, on to the tiny village of Tahawus, which had been settled some years earlier for the purposes of mining iron ore from the red cliffs there. In that isolated place, living amongst a population of mostly Irish miners and their Yankee supervisors, was a family named Wilkinson, people known to Father and Mr. Fleete as dedicated and trustworthy abolitionists, who in the recent past had hidden an occasional escaped slave in their storage cellar or barn until such time as he or, as was sometimes the case, she could be passed along or directed northward through the forests to North Elba and thence on to Canada.

  The head of the household, Mr. Jonas Wilkinson, in his capacity of engineer and geologist, had previously worked for Gerrit Smith on certain of his enterprises in the western section of the state of New York, having to do with the construction of canals, and it was through Mr. Smith that Father had first come to know of him. Mr. Fleete, of course, knew him strictly through his benevolence towards the occasional escaped slave who passed through Tahawus and on to Timbuctoo.

  The two, Mr. Fleete and Father, arranged to have Mr. Wilkinson notify them whenever “cargo” sent from the South for trans-shipment north arrived at his home. He was to send one of his sons through the forest to our place, and then Father and I, Mr. Fleete and Lyman Epps, carrying rifles as if on a hunt, would go back with the boy, retrieve the cargo, and under cover of darkness transport it back to North Elba, where, as soon as possible, we would move it north by wagon to the next trans-shipping point, which at that time was Port Kent on Lake Champlain, a mere forty miles south of the Canadian border.

  By means of carefully worded letters to Mr. Smith at his home in Walpole, New York, and to Frederick Douglass over in Rochester, the Old Man alerted many of the agents, conductors, and stationmasters in downstate New York and Pennsylvania and even as far south as Maryland that there was now an effectively manned link in the Underground Railroad that ran right up the center of New York State straight into the mountainous wilderness of the north, If we utilize this route, he wrote to Messrs. Smith and Douglass in a pair of letters which he asked me one evening to transcribe for him, there is unlikely to be any interference with our shipments from those parties who remain hostile to our interests. It is my fond hope that in time this route can be extended southward through the Allegheny and Appalachian Mountains and that we will have reliable trans-shipping agents and conductors posted all the way to New Orleans. In a postscript, Father had me add, I myself must first interview all who wish to join this enterprise, for, as you know, the strength of any chain is determined by its weakest link.

  Cautiously, I pointed out to him that it might prove impossible to interview the agents and conductors, except for Mr. Wilkinson in Tahawus and the fellow in Port Kent, known to us only by name and reputation: Mr. Solomon Keifer was a Quaker shipwright originally from Rhode Island, who for several years had been moving fugitive slaves north by boat. Father’s insistence on controlling every aspect of the operation, I feared, would doom it, as it had doomed similar ventures before.

  But he would hear none of it. “If a thing can’t be done right, then it’s not worth doing,” he said. “It’s the Lord whose work this is, Owen, not Mister Douglass’s or Mister Smith’s. I trust only in the Lord. And in myself, who serves Him.”

  If this venture failed, it would not be because Father hadn’t done his utmost to get the job done right. No, he declared, he would interview and appoint every man who wished to act as an agent or conductor for us. No exceptions. And if that meant we could not extend our line and station now to those already in existence among the slaves in the Southern states, well, then, so be it. We would find another way to siphon off the human chattel from the plantations, another way to bring about the collapse of that satanic institution. “We will triumph in the end,” he insisted. “But the end may be much further off than we realize, and when it comes, it may appear in terms that we cannot now imagine. In the meantime, Owen, we must trust our principles large and small, for the end is always and forever the Lord’s, and thus will take care of itself, with or without us.”

  Who could argue with him? Certainly not I—who at that age had too little experience of the world, of the Lord’s will, and of slavery to know that he was wrong, and too little command of language and the forms of reasoning to name and rebut his fallacies. I was not altogether a passive or unquestioningly obedient son, but I was aware of my own limitations and so allowed him to rule me, in spite of our frequent disagreements and disputes.

  Late one bright afternoon in early June, Mr. Wilkinson’s young son, Daniel, a boy about the age of Watson, fourteen or fifteen, appeared at our farm bearing the information that cargo had arrived in Tahawus, trans-shipped from the town of New Trenton in Oneida County. Mary, who was beginning by then to recover from her malady, although she was not yet able to take on any of the heavy household duties, welcomed the boy in and gave him something to eat. Meanwhile, Oliver chased down Father, who was off in Timbuctoo helping to raise a barn, and Salmon came for me, who that afternoon had gone with Watson to build an Indian-style fishing weir on the tableland below, where the west branch of the Au Sable passed through a rocky gorge on a corner of our land. Lyman remained waiting at the farm, where he had been constructing a small forge for smithing next to the tannery that he and Father had built.

  It was nearly dusk before we all—Father, me, Lyman, and Mr. Fleete—forgathered at the house and then with considerable excitement struck out with the Wilkinson lad for Tahawus, a good eight hours’ hike away. The boy was intelligent and articulate and proud to have been given such a heavy responsibility, and as we walked rapidly along, he conveyed his father’s message to us in bits, barely restraining his pleasure. He told us that a Negro man and his wife, both in a somewhat debilitated condition, had arrived the previous night. They had been forwarded by Mr. Frederick Douglass himself and had come mostly under cover of night alone from Utica, along cart tracks and footpaths through the woods all the way to the Wilkinsons’ house. They were from Richmond, Virginia, and had run off a fancy James River estate, had nearly been caught twice and were terrified of being returned to their owner, who they believed would separate them by selling the man off as a field hand to Alabama, where their owner had interests in a cotton plantation. They were a well-spoken couple, he said, and claimed they could read and write. And there was a considerable reward for their return, he added as a warning, for he knew that this fact increased the danger of transporting them.

  I believe that this was the first time that young Daniel had been personally involved with helping slaves to escape, and the thing was for him a considerable adventure. For Father and me, of course, it was a welcome resumption of the activity that had given us so much extreme satisfaction back in Ohio and Pennsylvania, when we used to take off into the hills of Virginia and Maryland or drive down along the Ohio River with John and Jason and be gone from home for days transporting whole wagonloads of escaped slaves north to Canada, traveling at night and hiding out in the barns of Quakers and other sympathizers or camping in the deep woods during the daylight hours. We had not been able to participate in this activity since Father’s removal east to Springfield, partially because there was in Springfield an already functioning network of abolitionist transporters who were white and with whom Father would not cooperate, and also because, with all the demands of the woolen business there, he simply could not take off and turn day into night carrying Negroes under tarpaulins in the back of a wagon racing down country roads. Also, in Springfield, there had been other venues available to his activism.

  For Mr. Fleete, this was a great opportu
nity; without the material support and protection of the Old Man, he had up to now been limited to only the most passive of roles in aiding the escapes of his enslaved brethren. Lyman Epps, like almost every freedman in those days, wished to work on the Underground Railroad, but he also had a young man’s natural desire to test himself under fire. As it was highly unlikely that we would meet up with a bounty-hunting slave-catcher and be obliged to defend our cargo against seizure or that we would be seriously opposed by any local people up here in the mountains, this was a perfect opportunity for Lyman to do both without risking much. In those years, most of the settlers in the Adirondacks were New Englanders, people who, even if not wholly sympathetic with the work being done by the radical abolitionists, were nonetheless unwilling to obstruct it, so long as they themselves were not put in physical or legal danger. They did not like Negroes, but they did not especially want to help those who enslaved them. If others wished to move them through to Canada, fine, they would not interfere. Even so, we had to be prepared for any emergency, and thus we marched on to Tahawus under cover of darkness, and armed.

  In the weeks since we first arrived and took up residence there, we had grown increasingly familiar with the forest pathways that linked the various Adirondack settlements, so that now, even at night, we were in no great danger of getting lost, especially since there was a bright, nearly full moon floating overhead. Most of the footpaths we used had been deer tracks laid down in ancient times in the narrow valleys and defiles and along the connecting ridges, followed later by the Algonquin and Iroquois Indians, who never settled here but for hundreds of years had fought each other for control of the region as a hunting preserve. Once you had in your mind a map of the land and understood the logic of its topography, you could pretty well predict where the path from one place to another would be found. In our first weeks in North Elba, Watson, Salmon, Oliver, and I had explored all the woods for several miles around the farm and Timbuctoo and felt as much at home there now as we had back in the neat villages and cultivated fields of Ohio. Wed even taken to racing one another after work up several of the nearby mountains and back to the house before supper, vying amongst us to find the quickest route up and down Pitch-off or Sentinel. Mr. Fleete and Lyman, of course, knew the woods intimately, for they had resided there for nearly three years by then, and Father’s recent tramping over thousands of acres of field and forest with his surveying instruments had given him a refined intelligence concerning the neighborhood. When a place enters your daily life, you quickly lose your fear of it, and I almost had to laugh at my first awestruck, fearful impressions of these forested mountains and valleys barely a month earlier, when we came up from Elizabethtown and Keene.