Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  There were now fewer than half a hundred remaining, somber-faced men of various ages and a few women here and there. Mr. Wheeler had not moved from my side, I was glad to see, nor had any of the people whom I knew from personal acquaintance to be brave and proud defenders of their few rights, people who would under no circumstances shuffle and scrape before a white man. They leaned forward in their seats expectantly. There was in Father’s words and manner something that they wanted badly to hear and see, and they wanted to hear and see it not only in a white man but in themselves. And, indeed, it was for us all now that he began to speak, substituting the word “we” for the “you” and “I” of his previous harangue.

  We must take up arms, he said, and we must become united amongst ourselves, and we must be prepared to die in the defense of our homes, of our loved ones, and of our brethren who are in flight from the slave-catcher. We must go home and take down the old musket or rabbit gun or the seldom-fired revolver that we bought at auction, and we will clean and oil it and make sure that the powder is dry and that we have bullets a-plenty, and then we must go out and fire it in our yard and in the fields beyond town, to test our weapon and to improve our aim, but also so that the general public will hear reports of it and know that we are armed. And we will sharpen our knives and attach them to poles, and we will let ourselves be seen walking abroad in the bright of day and dark of night with gleaming pikes on our shoulders, so that the general public will know that we mean to engage the enemy in close quarters, if necessary. And we will let it out that, in our houses, in the windows above the doors, we have put large cauldrons ready to be filled with scalding hot water that can be poured down upon the slave-catcher when he comes with his writs and warrants and pounds on our door demanding entry. That way the general public will know that we will employ any means necessary to defend our homes and whoever happens to be inside them.

  “We must form a cadre;’ he declared, “a rock-hard core at the center of our community. It shall be a League of Gileadites! And its members’ names shall be known only to those of us who have taken an oath that, in the defense of our community and our enslaved brethren who have put themselves under our protection, in their names, we are prepared to die! Whenever the cry goes out from anyone in the Negro community for help against the slave-catcher, we will, like the old Concord Minutemen, drop our work or rise from our beds and grab up our weapons and come a-running!” No one who was himself not a Gileadite, he explained, would know which man among us had taken this vow, and thus no one would know which man among us was ready to die and was not afraid even of hanging for his actions. A single one of us standing invisible in a crowd of Negroes would make every person in the crowd more powerful, for all would be seen as potential Gileadites. We must let it out, therefore, without naming names, that some among the Gileadites were white men and some were Negro women, some were young and some were old, so that no single, small group could be separated from the population and persecuted generally. “In unity there is strength!” he stated. “And God will protect us only if we are willing to protect ourselves and each other.”

  There were a number of Amens and other shows of enthusiasm from the people, whereupon Father, without changing the stern expression of his face, extended his open hands, palms up, at his sides, as was his habit when particularly pleased with himself. Several men in the room, including Mr. Wheeler, had stood and, wishing to speak, were waiting, hats in hand, for Father to acknowledge and call on them. “Anyone who wants to be heard may come up here now and speak,” Father said. “If there is a Gideon among us, let him come forward now, and let him forthwith divide the timid from the brave.”

  Mr. Wheeler and the others hitched a bit and sat back down, and when no one came forward, as Father knew they would not, for all those who would have opposed him or would have wished to wrest leadership from him had already departed from the group, he walked to the further end of one of the nearly empty pews and himself sat down.

  A moment or two passed in silence, as if everyone were waiting for the arrival of an important visitor, and then Father rose again from his seat and returned to the front. “We will let the Lord separate us out,”he declared in a low, calm voice. “Therefore, let us go to our homes now, and there shall each one of us pray alone for guidance in this matter. And whosoever returns to this place tomorrow night at this same hour, let him come prepared to swear the Oath of the Gileadites, which I myself shall be the first to take and then shall deliver to each of thee, one by one.” At that, he marched down the center aisle of the sanctuary and passed out the door to the vestry beyond and into the cold autumn night, and the rest of us followed.

  Father had inspired and moved us beyond measure, it appeared, and me he had moved beyond expectation. It was as if he had been speaking for me, and I had through him become wonderfully articulate and clear. It was as if my crippled arm had been magically healed and, full-faced, I had stood forward, bright and challenging, my two arms extended for the first time in public, and, speaking before an audience of hesitant, frightened, and angry people, an audience of suspicious Negroes, I had succeeded in transforming myself into an old-time, Biblical prophet capable of leading men into a holy war, a war in which, as a result of my words, men and women were prepared to sacrifice themselves for the lives of others and for the greater glory of God.

  Father’s thoughts and beliefs were mine. He had spoken for me, or, rather, I had spoken through him, and it seemed to me then to have occurred not because I had contrived for him to do it or had subtly managed him somehow—although in a certain light I suppose that my aid to him and reassurance could have been construed as such—but because now, for the first time, I was no longer resisting his will, no longer holding back from his calls for action, action, action. I had finally taken him at his word, the word which he had been laying in the porches of my ears since I’d drawn my first breath, and now his word was mine, his personal power mine, his ease with speech, his natural movement, his hard, gray eye, his intelligence and imagination, mine!

  I remained, of course, still the hulking, crippled, red-headed country boy, the same shy, inarticulate bumpkin as before. But now all that was like a clever disguise designed to hide and shelter the real person inside—a man who, neither white nor Negro, was dangerous. A man who, whenever necessary, could step out of the shadows where in silence he silently labored his days away and suddenly stand revealed as a warrior for the Lord, a man of God who would inspire and lead God’s chosen people out of Egypt into the promised land, and who would do it even as he denied he was doing it, who would be Moses while claiming merely to be Aaron. Whom or what we love, although it can never be our reason for loving them, we become. Without his love of God, my father, I saw, would have been a pitiful man. But in giving himself over to God, Father had become many times larger and more powerful a man than he could ever have been otherwise. Now I, too, having finally come to love my father as totally as he loved God—I, too, was no longer pitiful.

  That same night, we adjourned to the rooms where John and Wealthy had been living—since the removal to North Elba, Father had not maintained living quarters in Springfield, and consequently he and I had been sleeping in the office of Brown & Perkins’s empty warehouse. There Father instructed me to write up a statement of advice and principles which he could present to the Negroes tomorrow night and a draft of a pledge. He had arrived over the years at a high estimation of my literary abilities, although he had little more to go on than my letters and the help I gave him with his own. He also knew that I believed his style to be on the eccentric side of my own. Reluctantly, he had come to agree with me, and thus he frequently enjoyed employing me as a kind of village scribe, in which he was the village. He would say aloud what he meant or wished to mean, pacing back and forth, hands clasped behind him, brow furrowed in thought, while I scratched away with my pen, setting down his thoughts and intentions in language that I hoped would be readily understood by the man or woman to whom those thoughts and inten
tions were directed, a person who, with a transcription of Father’s own words in hand, would very likely have been puzzled or merely annoyed.

  With his composition “Sambo’s Mistakes,” Father had tried working alone, and I think that afterwards he was sorry he had done so and in time blamed its failure to be published on his inability to set down on the page the true nature of his thoughts. Since then, whenever he wished to make a written statement of any importance or delicacy, he’d taken to calling on me. Increasingly, this job of scribe had become a pleasure for me—it gave me, naturally, a certain degree of importance not otherwise available, and it provided me with the chance to voice some of my own thoughts and beliefs as well.

  Father talked and tried out first one sentence and then another, rejecting, editing, retracing his words, struggling to make his statement to the Negroes. He paced the length and breadth of the sitting room and rumbled on into the cold autumn night, while John and Wealthy slept in the adjacent chamber, and I sat at the little table and by the dim, flickering light of a Nantucket lamp, wrote down much of what he said and most of what he meant or wanted to say.

  It was nearly dawn before we had a preamble, which we entitled “Words of Advice,” and a pledge, entitled “Agreement;” whereupon we adjourned to the Brown & Perkins office and slept a few hours on our cots, before having to commence the day’s work, which then consisted mostly of writing letters to attorneys and creditors and attempting to find a tenant for the warehouse who would take over Brown & Perkins’s lease.

  That evening, Father and I—this time without John and Wealthy, for she was newly pregnant, and they would soon be departing for their farm in Ohio and thus could not be a part of our work here—returned to the Zion Methodist Church, where we were joined by most of the Negroes who had remained until the end of the meeting the evening before. They numbered thirty-two men and nine women, the majority of them between thirty and forty years of age, with a sprinkling of very young and elderly men among them. Seen together like that, grim-visaged, muscular, and healthy, their dark brown and black faces stern and determined, they constituted a formidable-looking force. I felt proud to be associated with them.

  More than half of the company were friends and acquaintances of ours, the best among the blacks of Springfield. I was glad to see Mr. Harrison Wheeler still there, and Deacon Samuels, also the apothecary Mr. Minahan and his teenaged son, and several of the fellows who at different times had worked alongside me in the warehouse sorting and baling wool, trustworthy young men with stout arms and strong backs and anger to spare. Most of the Negroes who were lucky enough to be properly employed or have a profession were engaged at a level below their natural or acquired abilities, and as a result a Negro apothecary often had the intelligence and many of the skills of a white physician, and a Negro laborer was frequently the equal of a white foreman. Thus Father’s determination to do business with Negroes was based on no condescending desire to provide charity; it was, as he said, practical. And he was rarely disappointed by them—nowhere near as often as when he had to employ or deal financially with white people, who he believed were more likely than blacks to cheat or cut corners.

  When everyone had been seated and the door closed and, at Father’s instructions, bolted, we began with a singing of the hymn “Broad Is the Path That Leads to Death,” a favorite of mine. Then Father announced that he would present to us a statement which he had drawn up. Holding the paper close to his eyes, like a court clerk reading a judge’s sentence, he commenced to read.

  Words of Advice! To the Springfield, Massachusetts, branch of the United States League of Gileadites. Adopted November 15,1850, as written and recommended by John Brown.

  Union is Strength!

  Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery.

  Witness the case of Cinque, he of everlasting memory, who seized the slave-ship Amistad, and the outpouring of sympathy and interest that followed hard upon it. The trial for life of one so bold and to some extent a successful man, for having defended his rights as a man in good earnest, aroused more sympathy amongst whites throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of more than the three millions of our submissive Negro population.

  We need not mention our American white people’s response to the Greeks who are now struggling valiantly against the oppressive Turks, their sympathy for the Poles against mighty Russia, and for the Hungarians against Austria and Russia combined, in order to prove this. The truth is, no jury can be found in the Northern states that would convict a man, whether black or white, for defending his legitimate rights to the last extremity. That this is well understood by Southern Congressmen, who now appear to govern us, we see by their insistence that the right of trial by jury should not be granted to the fugitive slave.

  Then he recited several sentences which I had tried to excise but which Father had insisted on including, for he could not leave off giving advice of this sort, not just to Negroes, but to everyone. Although he assured me that it would be obvious to all that he was criticizing white people, not black, I knew how it would sound to his audience, for I had endured a form of the same hectoring lecture for my whole life. But giving unwanted advice was his characteristic tic, and there was no avoiding it, so I cringed and awaited its passing.

  Colored people have ten times the number of fast friends among the whites as they suppose. But they would have ten times the number they have now, were blacks but half as much in earnest to secure their dearest rights as they are to ape the follies and extravagances of their white neighbors and to indulge in idle show, in ease, and in luxury, if Negroes in America were to demonstrate in their private and public behavior the virtues which whites claim to admire but seem for the most part unable to practice themselves, of temperance, modesty, and decorum in all things, thrift, and charity, then they would acquire for themselves the widespread admiration of many of those who today revile and scorn them for their frivolity and wastefulness.

  Soon, happily, his scolding done, he was again delivering his charge to us.

  Should one of our number be arrested, all the rest of us must collect together and sternly surround the officers and constables as quickly as possible, so as to outnumber and intimidate our adversaries, even those who were not present and only afterwards heard rumor of our seriousness of purpose and our surprising numbers. And no able-bodied man shall appear on the ground unequipped and without his weapons, and thus his intentions, clearly exposed to view. Your musket and your sword, you may say, are to exterminate varmints. Let our adversary ponder whether of two legs or four.

  Let that much be understood beforehand by all who see us abroad in the town, but our actual plans must be known only to ourselves, with the understanding that all traitors, wherever caught and proven to be guilty, must die. Yet we must not forget the admonition of the Lord to Gideon, “Whosoever is fearful or afraid, let him return and part early from Mount Gilead.” That is, give all cowards an opportunity to show their cowardice early, on condition of holding their peace and their tongues, for while we do not want them among us when in battle, our victory must be a victory for all.

  Now this is most important to success. When the moment of confrontation with the enemy arrives, do not delay for a moment once you have made ready to strike him down! You will lose all resolution if you do. And let the first blow be the signal for all to engage. And once engaged, we shall not do our deadly work by halves. We will make clean work of our enemies, as one would butcher a steer—and be sure you meddle not with any others. Choose wisely who will be cut down, then do it swiftly to him alone. By going about our bloody business quickly and quietly, we will get the job done with efficiency, and the number that an uproar would bring together cannot collect and stop us.

  We will have the advantage anyhow of those who would come out against us, for they will be wholly unprepared with either equipment or matured plans. All with them will be confusion and terror. Then our enemies will be slow to attack us after we have don
e up the work so nicely. And if, after they have re-gathered their thoughts and the terror has passed, should they still decide to attack us, they will have to encounter our white friends as well, for we may safely calculate on a division appearing among the whites and by that means may get to an honorable parley.

  Be firm, determined, and cool, but let it be understood that we are not to be driven to desperation without making it as awful a job to others as it is to us. Give them to know distinctly that those who live in wooden houses should not throw fire and that we are more able to suffer and make pay than are our white neighbors, for our very lives are at stake.

  Also, after effecting a rescue, if you are assailed, we must not go to our own houses but make straight for the houses of our most prominent and influential white friends, carrying with us our wives and small children. This will fasten upon the whites the suspicion of being connected with the blacks and will compel them to make a common cause with us, whether they would otherwise live up to their previous professions of sympathy or not. They would have then no choice in the matter. Some of their own volition will doubtless prove themselves true, most others would flinch, but either way, we would be guilty only of taking them at their earlier words.

  In the courtroom where a trial is going on which is more show than trial, we can disrupt the proceedings and effect a rescue if we make a tumult—by burning gunpowder freely in paper packages, if you cannot think of a better way to make a momentary alarm. And might not a lasso be applied to a slave-catcher for once with good effect? Well we might n the process give one or more of our enemies a proper hoist, but m such a case the prisoner will need to take the hint at once and bestir himself, and his friends in the dock should use the occasion to improve the opportunity of a general rush.