Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  For as long as I could remember, we had as a family been unified and empowered by the single great Idea. But despite that, or perhaps because of it, we had been fragmented and split off from one another—with Father charging about the countryside and traveling back and forth on his various missions; with strangers black and white coming into our household and departing as quickly as we became familiar with them; with half a household here and another half there; with plans and fantasies simultaneously multiplying and disintegrating, as circumstances shifted subtly or got dramatically altered by forces invisible and beyond our control; with the very shape and number of our family constantly changing from one season to the next, as a new child was born every year, year after year, 1834, ’35, ’36, ’37, all the way to ’48, and the terrible, sad deaths of children coming between those births, until we barely knew the names, birth dates, and death dates of our brothers and sisters. For every new child that arrived, there seemed to be one recently departed, due to the ague, to dysentery, to consumption, to calamitous accidental scalding, from the first Fred, back when I was but six years old, to the first Sarah, and Charles, Peter, and Austin, who all went in that horrific winter of ’43, to little Amelia in ’46, and most recently, in Springfield, the baby Ellen. Now, after all that, there had come a small but significant measure of stability here among these Negro and white farmers in these mountains, and for the first time in my life I felt I stood at the center of things.

  I had not expected that. I had not in fact known that such a feeling was even possible or that, once experienced, it would seem, not merely desireable, but necessary. But it was here in North Elba and nowhere else that the whirl of the one great Idea seemed for me to slow and even to cease hurtling me from one place and set of feelings and loyalties to another. It was here that I felt like a normal son and brother in a normal family, farming our rough acres of northern land, tending our livestock, and aiding our neighbors. I had even begun to imagine, on seeing my sister Ruth grow attracted to Henry Thompson, my own possibilities for finding a wife here, building a house, raising my own herd of sheep, fathering my own children. And, alongside my Negro and white neighbors alike, continuing to do my bit of the Lord’s and Father’s work.

  For the Old Man, of course, this was not enough. It was not nearly enough; it was in fact a sin, to be making a home and in addition doing merely our bit of the Lord’s work. We had to be doing all of it; and all our work had to be the Lord’s. Making a home had to be incidental. Or else we were doing Satan’s work.

  Thus we Browns were once again shifting our mode of contention against those who would oppose us, and shifting our base of operations as well. We would head south to Springfield and thence to London, England, from where, Father said, we might well briefly cross over to the Continent and there make an on-site study of Napoleon’s military campaigns in the Lowlands. Upon the sale of our wool, we would return freed at last of debt, so as to devote ourselves completely, once and for all, to the proper business of waging war against slavery.

  “Then shall all the world see the fruits of our discipline, of our principled savagery, and of our strategic intelligence,” Father declared to us that last night in North Elba. Then might the war properly commence. This valley would be our base camp, our headquarters, as we moved down the Appalachians. Modeling our tactics and our principles on the tactics and principles that brought about the great achievements of Toussaint, Spartacus, and Nat Turner, we would liberate the South—plantation by plantation, town by town, county by county, state by state—until we had at last broken the back of the beast.

  So, yes, he had his plan, even then. And little by little he had made it known to us. He had maps and texts to support his theories, and he would draw them out in the evenings to illustrate them to us and demonstrate their feasibility. Also, he was no doubt practicing for the time when he would have to place his plan before the gaze of more skeptical audiences than his wife and children and the Negro members of his household, audiences made up of people like Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith, men whose support he personally would depend upon and whose support his plan was in fact premised on.

  To bed, then: the child Sarah, asleep on Father’s lap, carried to her bed by sister Ruth; the lads Watson, Salmon, and Oliver grumpily climbing to the loft, to await the arrival of their elder brothers. And we did follow along shortly after, with Lyman Epps, who surely would have preferred to be sleeping in a private chamber in his own bed with his wife, but who must live like a Shaker now, celibate and communal. And Ruth and Susan Epps to the chamber where the females slept, where the little girls, Annie and Sarah, were slumbering already.

  Leaving Father and Mary alone downstairs in their bed near the parlor fireplace, where the Old Man, I knew, in his enthusiasm for this new turn of events, and conscious of the oncoming prolonged absence from his wife and home, would be reaching towards her in the darkness, doing the Lord’s work, being fruitful, multiplying. While Great-Grandfather Brown’s clock ticked loudly from the fireplace mantel.

  III

  Chapter 10

  A sparkling blue day it was, in early September of that year, when the Old Man and I took passage for Liverpool aboard the side-wheeler Cumbria, a packet out of Boston. We had arrived in the city three days earlier, after nearly a fortnight’s stay in Springfield, where Father had made his usual, tireless attempt to set things right with his and Mr. Perkins’s creditors, succeeding only in extending his and Mr. Perkins’s line of credit with the western sheepmen for the length of time it would take him to sell in England the wool he could not sell in America. Or would not sell in America. Not for the sixty-five cents per pound he was then being offered—some ten to twenty cents per pound less than he had agreed to pay the sheepmen in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

  It was a simple problem. Father had taken shipment of vast quantities of wool from the west and had been storing it in the Springfield warehouse, after having promised, with Mr. Perkins’s guarantees, to pay the western producers significantly more for it than the woolen merchants and cloth manufacturers in New England were then offering. And now, twelve and more months later, the producers were clamoring for their money, which Father, of course, did not have. To break a monopoly among the buyers, Father had tried to create a monopoly among the sellers. Basically, the problem had arisen because the buyers could afford to wait out the sellers.

  In vain did I argue the wisdom of cutting all his losses off at once and returning quickly to the farm in North Elba, there to build a small tannery, such as he had established in New Richmond when I was a child, back before Mother died—a modest, local business adequate to our needs and in no way dependent upon his abilities to anticipate and resist the machinations of shrewd, calculating men of great wealth residing elsewhere.

  To me, paper money, promissory notes, letters and lines of credit, market fluctuations, tariff laws, and so on were as abstract and metaphysical as German speculative philosophy. To Father, however, they were oddly concrete, as real as the food he ate, as the water he heated for his morning shave, as the tobacco-colored long-tailed wool suit he wore every day of his adult life. Consequently, he believed that he could move among the elements of finance with the same ease and control he employed in ordering up his supper in a hotel dining room or firing a kettle of cold water every morning or pressing out the wrinkles in his trousers by placing them beneath his mattress while he slept. He was like the unlucky gambler who can’t believe in any luck but good and keeps on trying to cover his old losses by making new bets.

  I never thought Father mad, as he was so often later portrayed, except now and again, and especially in these matters of finance. But it was a madness that in those days he shared with most men of ability and restless intelligence. It was like a plague, this dream of growing rich by speculation, and not to become infected with it was a sign of dullness and low intelligence. My argument against Father’s scheme, then, carried very little weight. To him, it was the argument of a simple man or a man with no am
bition.

  Brother John, I believe, was on the Old Man’s side in this and had caught the disease himself, although he had not as extreme a case as Father’s, and while Jason seemed as immune from the plague as I, he, unlike me, appeared little bothered by the Old Man’s feverish schemes and delusions and, except when Father demanded his filial aid and comfort, tended quietly to his own affairs—his vineyards and orchards in Ohio. Jason maintained a benign independence of Father that I envied but barely understood. “Owen,” he used to say to me, with that sweet, yet slightly ironic, smile playing across his lips, “you’ve got to let it alone. The Old Man’s going to do what he wants, no matter how much you fret and fume over it. You might as well stand back, brother, and just try to enjoy the show.”

  It was never that easy for me. How was it possible not to go along with the Old Man and not fail him? I could not imagine myself doing it. I was tied to him like a wife, a child, a slave, it sometimes seemed—although, of course, I well knew that the chains that bound me to him were entirely of my own making. After all, from the end of my childhood, at about the age of sixteen, Father had not once forbade me from leading any sort of life that I wanted. That I was living his life, as it appeared, or one that was a mere appendage of his, was a measure not so much of his power as of my weakness.

  In Boston for the few days before our departure on the Cumbria, I trailed after the Old Man like a puppy as he attended afternoon and evening public and private meetings. Abolitionism was everywhere in Boston then. Argued and articulated with all the zeal and refined intelligence of the old Puritans’ debate over Free Will and Grace, it was, for all of that, mere talk, or so it seemed to Father and me—talk driven and framed by reckless passion, as if being right or wrong on the subject were more important to the debaters than saving people’s lives, not to mention their souls.

  We were staying at the home of an abolitionist colleague of Father’s—a philanthropic friend of Mr. Gerrit Smith’s, actually, from whom Father had obtained a general-purpose letter of introduction for use in England. The gentleman was the well-known Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, and he and his pleasant, hospitable wife, the poet Julia Ward Howe, an heiress, had given us a room in their grand residence on Louisburg Square. It was a tall brick house with bow windows facing the street on every storey, so that you could stand and look down upon the busy street below, like a captain of industry surveying his shop. The city of Boston was like that then, a busy manufactory where everything, from bread and feathered hats to religious ideas and fine art, was manufactured, purveyed, distributed, consumed, and commented upon with remarkable efficiency and general alacrity, a humming machine in which every citizen was a part, from the humblest illiterate Irish newsboy or maid to the loftiest Harvard scholar or Beacon Hill theologian.

  I loved the city at once and might well have run off from Father then and there and made it my permanent home, like the young Ben Franklin fleeing his home to seek his fortune in Philadelphia, had I, like Franklin, a proper trade or some other means of making my living than that of caring for sheep or homesteading northern wildernesses. If, in other words, I had not been my father’s third son. It was strange, although I did not recognize it as such then, to be so young and to be filled already with regret. It was as if, at the age of twenty-six, I viewed my daily life with a nostalgia for a life that I had never led and never would lead. I knew other young men who felt as I did, but they were men who had married too quickly and woke every morning with the vain desire to start their lives over again, youths who, every day, by the time they dressed for work and came to the table for breakfast, had to accept yet again that they were stuck with a life they did not want. But no man of my acquaintance who was my age and was not unhappily married felt as sadly trapped as I. Nor would any one of them have understood it in me. They might well have wished to be me.

  I remember that we arrived in Boston from Springfield by train in the late afternoon and had no sooner set down our bags and paid our respects to Dr. and Mrs. Howe than we were off, headed down the tilted brick sidewalks of Beacon Hill to the Charles Street Meeting House to see and hear the famous Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was to speak that very evening on the wonderful subject of heroism. Dr. Howe had put Father onto this event with the observation that the Concord sage would be addressing the issue of the proper response to slavery for the modern intellectual. It was apparently a talk the Doctor and his wife had already been privileged to hear at the Concord Atheneum, where it had been delivered to an audience of skeptics, a crew of Garrisonian, non-violent abolitionists, and had swept them all over to the radical side of the debate. An inflammatory gesture, then, was what Father expected, a call to arms, a prescriptive description of a new kind of American hero.

  We arrived early and sat in the third row of seats, as close to the front as possible. Soon the large hall was filled, mostly with distinguished-looking men and women whose bearing and gazes were the epitome of benevolent intelligence and whose manners bespoke, not arrogance, but simple, if well-fed, self-confidence. A more civilized collection of human beings I had never seen, and I could not keep myself from turning in my seat and craning my neck to see and admire them as they entered from the darkening street and took their places.

  Father sat stiffly with his hands on his knees, staring straight ahead, as if he were alone in the audience or were in an antechamber awaiting an interview with a prospective employer. There were several people who must be famous, I thought, if only because of the way other folks, when this one or that entered and took his seat, at once stared and whispered to their companions. But I recognized no one, of course. Could that handsome, eagle-eyed man be Charles Sumner? Could that small burl of a woman next to him be the famous agitator for female rights and abolition, Lydia Maria Child? Might the sublimely intelligent Transcendentalist philosopher William Everett Channing be here amongst us?

  I knew none of these illustrious people, of course, except by their marvelous reputations, and I believed that anyone who looked more distinguished than Father, as these people surely did, must be at least as distinguished as he and then some. Unlike Father, they had lived in Boston all their lives and came from wealthy old families and had been privileged by fine educations and social relations with one another: they were bound to be beacons on a height. So I believed. And Father’s light, by comparison, was a flickering candle cupped in his hand against the wind. I was, therefore, not so much ashamed of Father in this context as sorry for him, especially sitting there stock-still and stiff in his seat, red-faced and tense, his large, workingman’s hands and wrists sticking out from his sleeves, his mouth tight, his gray eyes staring straight up at the podium. In this impressive company of likeminded people, Father seemed, not enhanced, but sadly, surprisingly diminished.

  And when a hush settled over the crowd and Mr. Emerson in utter simplicity and with no introduction came forward and began to speak, Father, poor Father, seemed even smaller than before, to the point of disappearing altogether from my ken, which almost never happened in a public place, for I was rarely able to ignore him or his reactions to a speech or sermon. Busily fashioning my own reaction around what I supposed was his, I seldom heard clearly the speech or sermon itself.

  This occasion was different, however. To me, Mr. Emerson was every inch the ideal poet and sage, and if a man may be said to be beautiful, he was that. Slender, but strong and supple-looking, like a man used to outdoor exercise, of medium height with a noble carriage and easy, natural gestures, he stood before us and spoke in a voice that, while intimate and almost conversational in tone, carried to the furthest reaches of the hall, for his every word seemed raptly attended to, even by the last few fellows to squeeze in at the door in back. From his first sentence to his last, there was not a whisper or a rustle from the audience. He relied on none of the usual rhetorical flourishes of the arm and mighty brow that were then so popular with public speakers; none of the tricks of voice and variations of pace and volume to surprise the audience and gain its attent
ion cheaply. Instead, he spoke simply, directly, in a way that made you feel that he was speaking to you alone and to no one else in the hall. His bright eyes were the color of bluebells and did not fix on any single person but fixed on the space just above one’s own head, as if he were contemplating one’s thoughts as they rose in the air. Now and again, he would glance down at the text before him, as if to take in a new paragraph or sometimes an entire page, and then his large, handsome head would lift, and he would go on, with no hesitation or break in the flow of his speech. He was at that time in his mid-forties, I suppose, in the prime of his manhood, although he seemed both younger—in the clarity and openness of his expression—and older—in the wise self-assurance of his delivery.

  Awed and rapt as I was, especially at the start, I did not make out much of what he said, as he was at first speaking of figures and literary works I had never heard of—a playwright named Beaumont Fletcher was one, and various characters from the plays. But I did catch that he was indeed speaking of heroism and how it had been misunderstood in the past, as much misunderstood by poets and playwrights as by politicians. He intended here, he declared, to understand it freshly. And he seemed, as Dr. Howe and his wife had promised, to be applying that new understanding of heroism to our present dilemma with regard to the issue of slavery generally and the abolitionist movement in particular.