Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  In the work of the elder British dramatists, he said, there was a constant, obsessive recognition of gentility, just as skin color is recognized in our society today. A marvelous and original reversal, I thought, of how we normally think of those two aspects of society—gentility, or the classes of men, and race. Opposites are made to seem apposite. Yes, this was a freshened way of looking at things.

  Then, after a while, he began to isolate and examine the various manifestations of heroism, as if, on the surface, he were discussing merely the literary heros, but all the same, with hints and subtle asides, indicating that our present national crisis over slavery was the necessary field for such a person. He was calling for the arrival of a man out of Plutarch, one of Father’s favorite authors also, I noted with pleasure, a man who could refute the despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists with “a wild courage, a stoicism not of the schools, but of the blood!” Mr. Emerson wanted a “tart cathartic virtue!’ he said, that could contend with the violations of the laws of nature committed by our predecessors and by our contemporaries. And here he lapsed into language—or I should say, he rose to language—that, although not once uttering the word itself, excoriated slavery horribly and with great originality. It is a lock-jaw, he said, that bends a man’s head back to his heels. It is a hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes, an insanity that makes him eat grass.

  A man must confront and confound all this external evil, he explained, with a military attitude of the soul. This is the beginnings of heroism, this attitude. The hero advances to his own music, and there is somewhat that is not philosophical in heroism, he noted, somewhat not holy in it. “Heroism seems not to know that other souls are of one texture with it. It has pride. It is the extreme of individual nature,” he declared. These words struck fire with me, for, of course, they described my father perfectly, and I wondered if the Old Man himself realized it. Or was that, too, characteristic of heroism—that the hero does not recognize himself as heroic?

  There was more, much more, that put me in mind of Father, as Mr. Emerson continued. Heroism, he told us, is almost ashamed of its body.

  And this: that the stoical temperance of the hero is loved by him for its elegance, not for its austerity. “A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses, but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.”

  Mr. Emerson spoke in an aphoristic style that, no matter how obscure or abstract his thought and language, made it easy for me to understand his ideas and remember his words and quote them afterwards to those who were not so lucky as to have heard them in person. I remember, years later, spouting, as if they were my own, Mr. Emerson’s words that night in Boston. My companions were humble men, Negro and white men, huddled with me around a campfire in Kansas or holed up in a freezing cabin in Iowa or a farmhouse in Maryland, and I would try to inspire them by saying things like, “The characteristic of heroism is its persistency.” And, “If you would serve your brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you.” And this, which became thereafter my personal motto: “Always do what you are most afraid to do.”

  High counsel was how I took Mr. Emerson’s talk on heroism. High counsel, and prophecy, too. “Times of heroism!” he explained, “are generally times of terror.” And then he recalled for us the martyrdom of the brave Lovejoy who, in the name of the Bill of Rights and his right to shout against the sin of slavery, gave himself over to the rage of the mob. We now are living in a time of terror, was Mr. Emerson’s point, and thus are we likewise about to see the arrival of our heroes. They are coming soon. And we must be prepared to recognize them when they appear in our midst, and Mr. Emerson was bending all his considerable, all his incomparable, talents and wisdom to that end. Who could not be grateful?

  Well, Father, for one. Perhaps Father alone. In the midst of the applause at the end of Mr. Emerson’s lecture, Father rose from his seat, to applaud the more enthusiastically, I first thought. But, no, it was to leave the hall, and with a glower on his face, he made his way past the laps of his neighbors and hurriedly, pointedly, stalked up the aisle to the exit at the rear. Shocked and more than slightly embarrassed by his rude departure, I followed, head down, and joined him on the street.

  For a few moments, we walked in silence. “That man’s truly a boob!” Father blurted. “For the life of me, I can’t understand his fame. Unless the whole world is just as foolish as he is. Godless? He’s not even rational! You’d think, given his godlessness, his sec-u-laahr-ity, he’d be at least rational” he said, and gave a sardonic laugh.

  “Yes, but didn’t... didn’t you admire his language?” Mr. Emerson had used language in an oblique and original way that, while it made his personality shine brilliantly, also had made the ostensible subject of his talk opaque, so that, to understand him, one had practically to invent for oneself what he was saying. I found this experience nearly wonderful, as if he were speaking poetry. But I knew not what to point to in Mr. Emerson’s lecture that might have appealed to Father. If you did not swallow the whole of it, you could not accept a part. And if you accepted a part, you had to be nourished by the whole.

  “His language? Come on, Owen. Airy nonsense, that’s all it is. For substance, the man offers us clouds, fogs, mists of words. ‘Times of terror; indeed! What does he know of terror? Ralph Waldo Emerson has neither the wit nor the soul to know terror. And he surely has no Christian belief in him! That’s what ought to be terrifying him, the state of his own naked soul.” He sputtered on as we walked back to Dr. Howe’s residence, where the good Mrs. Howe had promised to leave us some cold supper.

  I followed silently, pondering the meaning and import of his fulmination, even as I nurtured an odd thought which had come to me towards the end of Mr. Emerson’s peroration—that Father resembled no man so much as the Concord poet himself. The Old Man was a rough-cut, Puritan version of Ralph Waldo Emerson, it seemed to me that first night in Boston and for many years afterwards, and even unto the present time, when it matters probably not at all. But it was that night of some personal significance to me.

  Even physically, the two looked enough alike to have been brothers—although Father would have been the cruder, more muscular version. They both wore old-fashioned, hawk-nosed, Yankee faces with pale, deep-set eyes that looked out at the world with such an unblinking gaze as to force you to avert your own gaze at once or give yourself over to the man’s will. And just as easily and selflessly as Father believed in his God, Mr. Emerson believed in the power and everlasting truth of what he called Nature. For both men, God, or Nature, was beginning, cause, and end, and man was merely an agent for beginning, cause, and end.

  As I walked, dropping further and further behind the Old Man in my reverie, I found myself amusing myself with the picture of Mr. Emerson coming off a meeting with Father and imagined him saying the same things to his son about the crazy man John Brown. “The man’s truly a boob! For the life of me, I can’t understand his fame!” For if there was a flaw in Mr. Emerson’s argument, it is that he was probably incapable of seeing my father as the very hero he was calling for. And if there was a flaw in my father’s heroism, it may be that he could not see himself in Mr. Emerson’s portrait.

  We turned off Charles Street to make our way uphill towards Louisburg Square, and I remember a young man striding downhill in our direction, well-dressed, fresh-faced, and whistling a tune—no tune I recognized; like a bird he was, whistling for the sheer pleasure of it. A purely happy fellow, undivided in himself, it seemed, as if he’d been successfully courting a lovely maiden and had been invited to return tomorrow evening to continue. He whistled past and continued down the street, to his bachelor rooms, no doubt. A happy man! I stopped in my tracks and watched him for a few seconds, wondering what it felt like, to be so uncomplicatedly happy as he, when Father called, “Hurry, Owen! Keep up, keep up! Don’t stare after people like a bumpkin.” />
  I quickly caught up to him, and when we had walked on in silence a ways, the Old Man, in a low voice that suggested he was having second thoughts, asked me what was my true opinion of Mr. Emerson’s lecture. I saw that he was now somewhat embarrassed by his earlier outburst and that some of the poet’s words may in fact have touched him. Perhaps he had been stung by their similarity to his own thoughts and beliefs and had never before heard them so handsomely expressed, and thus his anger had been directed not at Mr. Emerson but at himself.

  “Truthfully?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I have to say, I took his words as high counsel, Father. And prophecy.”

  He did not answer at first. Then he said, “High counsel, eh? You heard that? You heard that and nothing else, nothing that contradicted your beliefs?”

  “No. What I heard only corroborated my beliefs and strengthened me in them. Not everything Mister Emerson said was altogether clear to me, of course, but all of it was very beautiful. All of it.”

  I thought that Father would then upbraid me, but instead he pursed his lips as he often did when thinking something through for the first time and said, “Very interesting. That’s interesting to me, Owen. And prophecy? You heard that, too?”

  “Well, yes. I believe so.”

  “Very interesting. High counsel and prophecy. Well, who knows? God speaks to us in unexpected ways. Even in the words of philosophers,” he said, and smiled and reached up and put his arm over my shoulder.

  We briskly walked that way, side by side, the remaining few blocks to Dr. Howe’s home, and the entire distance, as I strode along, I whistled the same, nearly tuneless tune that I’d heard the happy young man whistle before. I believe that I felt for those few moments just as he had; and it was grand.

  I was no more eager to depart with Father from Boston, even for a place as inviting as England, than I had been to leave Springfield for Timbuctoo, and for many of the same reasons. Here, in a city amongst a multitude of distractions and competing truths, it was easier not to succumb to the singular force of Father’s truth. I was stronger here. Isolation—such as we had endured in Timbuctoo and even to a lesser degree back in Ohio and before that in New Richmond, and such as I knew I would endure with Father aboard a ship and in a foreign land-bound me, bound all us Browns, the more tightly to the Old Man’s view of things.

  Here in Boston, however, even more than in Springfield, I saw good men and women everywhere who despised slavery, who had thought deeply and long on matters of religion and moral philosophy, and who loved goodness and truth fully as much as did Father, and yet they seemed not so fierce and judgemental in their ways as he. Perhaps they were indeed soft and compromised by wealth and privilege, as Father claimed, made prideful by their fame and the admiration of their like-minded, high-minded compatriots. Perhaps Father was right, and they were, as he liked to say, “boobs.” But I could not help but admire their easy tolerance of one another and their patient optimism. Father’s way was lonely, painfully lonely to me, and I never felt it so much as when we were circulating in cities amongst the men and women who should normally have been our natural allies.

  In the holy war against slavery, Father seemed more and more, and especially here in Boston, like a Separatist. I found myself growing cross and impatient with him for it and the next day nearly quarreled with him. He and I had gone down to the docks from Dr. Howe’s to confirm our bookings aboard the Cumbria and to verify our Monday morning departure with the tide two days thence, and also just to look at the ship itself, to appraise her size and proportions, so as to anticipate better the degree of our physical discomfort for the duration of our journey. Neither of us had ever traveled so far before—our longest journey by boat may have been the ferry across Lake Champlain from Vermont to New York or a horse-drawn barge on the Erie Canal. And though, naturally, we did not speak of it to one another, we were both more than a little nervous and even somewhat fearful.

  I had been noticing, as we walked along the thronged streets, printed advertisements for an address by Mr. William Lloyd Garrison that evening at the Park Street Church. They had been posted all over the city, many of them deliberately torn down and trampled underfoot, it seemed. Despite its reputation, Boston was no more undivided in those days over the issue of slavery than any other Northern city—which is to say that the white citizens who opposed the institution altogether, who were for abolition, complete and forever, in all the states, were a distinct minority—a tiny minority. And those who were for slavery, who thought it a positive good, which ought to be extended over all the western territories, they, too, were a tiny minority. The vast majority in between just wanted the problem to go away. And while the majority did not exactly approve of the enslavement of Negroes, they deeply resented their white neighbors who had chosen to make an issue of it.

  In Boston, however, numbered among the people who did make an issue of it were some of the most respectable and admired citizens in the entire country. Thanks to the reputations of Theodore Parker and William Ellery Channing and Dr. and Mrs. Howe and dozens of other luminaries in the fields of education, the arts, public service, commerce, and religion, it was here, more than anywhere else in America, that civic virtue, high-mindedness, and theology had gotten associated with abolitionism. Overt opposition to it, therefore, got expressed mostly by ruffians and drunkards, while the respectable citizens stayed home, silently tolerated both sides, and felt smugly above the fray, as if the two minorities, in the eyes of God and the ongoing history of the Republic, neatly canceled each other out.

  Stopped for a moment at a crowded intersection, I suggested to Father that it would be nice if we could hear Mr. William Lloyd Garrison speak tonight at the meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. “We might not have another chance to hear him in person,” I said brightly.

  He shot me a puzzled, slightly irritated look and, without answering, darted into the cobbled street and strode on ahead of me.

  I hurried to catch up, and when I was beside him again, I said in a loud voice, “Well, if not Ralph Waldo Emerson calling for a new heroism at the Charles Street Meeting House, then why not William Lloyd Garrison denouncing slavery at the Park Street Church?”

  “What?”

  “If not the radical Transcendentalist, then why not the radical Christian? Are we too pure for The Liberator, too?” Since my early childhood, Mr. Garrison’s sheet had come to us on the front lines like a trusted messenger sent from the headquarters of the army waging war against slavery. Father had used that very figure himself. Numerous times, I reminded him.

  “Yes, I have used the figure,” he admitted. “But you mistook it. I meant it as a criticism of what’s exactly the problem with these pacifistic ‘society’ men and women.” We were by now down amongst the piers below the Custom House—a whole city of wharves and warehouses, a clattering tangle of crates, bales, tubs, and kegs and all manner of cartons and free-standing goods arriving, departing, and stopped at various stages in between; of shippers and trans-shippers and receivers of goods from all over the world. There was tea and silk from China, rum and molasses from the West Indies, carpets and ivory from India, and from the European nations everything from French lace to Lancaster steel, from Dresden paper to Portuguese wine.

  “They think that we’re the corporals and they’re the generals’ he went on. “And men like Garrison, all they’re interested in is becoming commander-in-chief. So they waste their time and other people’s money squabbling amongst themselves, while our Negro brethren languish in slavery. Action, action, action, Owen! That’s what I want! Enough of this talk, talk, talk.”

  “Then you won’t go with me” I said.

  It was a noisy, chaotic scene down there amongst the stone wharves and warehouses, and difficult to carry on a normal conversation with wagons and carts rumbling past and stevedores, lumpers, and teamsters hollering and drunken seamen lurching through the throng. Although it was a September afternoon, it was as warm and humid a
s mid-summer, and most of the workmen were shirtless and sweating. Seagulls screamed and begged in brazen crowds or waddled along the edges of the piers or perched half-asleep on the stanchions and atop the hundreds of chimneys and masts of steamers and sailing ships and coastal packets reaching into the sky like a forest of pines. The smells of fish and rum were heavy in the air. In later years, I always associated those odors with the Boston waterfront: fish at the edge of turning, and the sweet, burnt-sugar smell of Jamaican rum—a dizzying, in no way unpleasant smell that touched my brain and staggered me like a drink of raw whiskey.

  Father said, “Well, yes, I might be willing to hear Mister Garrison. Out of curiosity. But he’s elected to speak on the Sabbath.” He meant, of course, after sunset on a Saturday. “If it were to be a prayer meeting, fine. I’d attend. But otherwise, no. And it does seem otherwise, as he is a Quaker.”

  “May I attend, then, and report back to you?”

  “As you wish. You’re not bound by my religion, Owen.” “No.”

  “I will return to the Howes’ and read awhile and pray.” “Why do I not feel released, Father?” I said.

  He smiled back. “I dare not guess.”

  We did not speak of it again but went about our business at the office of the shipping agent for the Cumbria—which, to these landlubbers and viewed from the dock, appeared quite seaworthy—and returned to the Howes’ in time for a pleasant early supper of stuffed grouse served on fancy China plates with genuine antique silverware from France. Later that evening, still secretly angry with Father, who remained closeted in our rooms at prayer, I headed out, by way of Beacon Street, to the Park Street Church, which was located not far from Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill. Beacon Street ran alongside the wide expanse of the famed Common, with a facing row opposite of large, old brick town houses, the patrician homes of many of Boston’s elite. As I walked, I kept to that side of the street, close by the tall, elegant houses and as far from the darkened Common as possible, for there—lurking among the shrubs and trees and appearing suddenly out of the darkness to glare and howl at the decorous, well-dressed men and women walking peacefully towards the church—was the enemy.