Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Father’s physical presence could inspire people, could instill in them a quantity of courage even to the point of recklessness, which, when he was not himself physically present to argue, chide, and explain, seemed to dissipate as fast as it had arisen. It was not so much his oratory that did it, although to be sure he spoke well and preached with conviction and imagination on any number of subjects, from abolitionism to animal husbandry, from the Bible, which he knew better than any trained and ordained preacher I had ever met, to the United States Constitution, which he knew like a Washington lawyer. But it was not his oratory that swayed people. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  Instead, folks were impressed and then, perhaps to their surprise, led by his stubborn refusal to rely on common oratorical devices and embellishments, by his evident disdain for the tricks of voice and gesture that most public speakers relied on in those days. As if he were a Channing or a Parker or a white Frederick Douglass, he made people feel empowered by having come in contact with him, so that they felt larger, stronger, more righteous, clearer of purpose and more sure of victory than they ever had before. But unlike those exemplary speakers, Channing, Parker, Douglass, and so on, Father never lifted his voice, never shouted, never pointed to the heavens, never quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson—he never quoted any writer, except for those who wrote the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the United States Constitution.

  The effect of Father’s speech and personal presence on otherwise rational and even skeptical men and women was uncanny and never failed to amaze me. No matter the audience—a hall filled with illustrious New England abolitionists or a convention of hundreds of distinguished Negroes, his country congregation at church on the Sabbath or a gathering of Negro farmers at a barn-raising in Timbuctoo, a meeting of his fallen-away white neighbors in North Elba or his own family gathered around the fire at home—Father always spoke simply and directly, his hands at his sides or merely clasped in front of him, an ordinary man in a plain brown suit who happened to possess the truth. Some of it was his sense of timing: he had an instinct for knowing when to remain silent so as to gather everyone’s attention and when to speak so that it would sound most impressive; thus, when he was expected to speak up, he often held his peace and stood against the furthest wall, and when he was expected to go silent and withdraw, he suddenly came forward and gave sharp utterance to his thoughts.

  His voice was in no way stentorian or authoritative: it was pitched at not quite the level of a tenor’s. Most people who wrote about him afterwards regarded him as tall and well-built, a man of heroic proportions, but Father was of average height, tanned and sinewy, strong but not bulky or broad, and he walked like a soldier on parade, straight-backed and a little stiff-legged, with his arms swinging. His face was essentially that of a Yankee farmer: sharp-nosed, with tight lips and a jutting chin and a rough-hewn maris large ears sticking out beneath his coarse, reddish-gray hair, which he wore cropped short and spikey, like a stevedore’s. The visible center of his face was in his eyes, pale gray and fierce and steady. When the Old Man locked his gaze onto yours, it was very difficult not to give way before it, as if he’d seen your secret shame. Like an owl or a hawk, a powerful bird of prey, he rarely blinked. He could hold your gaze with his as if with physical force, as if he had reached out and clamped onto your chin and cheeks with both hands and had drawn your face up to his so that he could stare directly into it; and look into it he did, deeply, with curiosity and undisguised self-interest, as if he were examining, not a human soul, but a complex, unfamiliar piece of machinery, which, if properly understood, might save him a lifetime’s labor.

  In early June, as Mary came close to her time, we were conducting to Canada an elderly couple whose sons had gone before them the previous year and a young boy accompanied by his gentle, bespectacled uncle. All four had escaped off the same Maryland plantation, which had become notorious along the Railroad, due to the cruelty of its master, a Dutchman named Hammlicher, and to the particular viciousness of his white overseer, a man named Camden, and due to the fact that Harriet Tubman herself had taken a special interest in facilitating the escape of the Hammlicher slaves. Mysterious, elusive, and yet seemingly everywhere at once, Miss Tubman was thought to have had a family connection among the Hammlicher slaves, through one of her own lost children, perhaps, and thus had lent it her special attention. Already at least fifteen of the several hundred human beings owned by this man had been spirited up along the Chesapeake Bay to Philadelphia and New York and thence on up the Hudson to Troy and freedom. But now, because of the increase in the number of slave-catchers in those cities along the old route, Miss Tubman had decided to send her charges north across the Adirondacks by way of Timbuctoo.

  When Father had met her in Hartford that winter, he had convinced her of the good use to which she might put this previously obscure route, and his personal connection with her, when he revealed it to the Timbuctoo Negroes, had instantly won them back. Father’s reputation for honesty was such that no one questioned his claim; it was sufficient unto itself. How could they have refused to ally themselves with John Brown, when he came to them with the endorsement of the famous Harriet Tubman? The great Harriet! The General! None of them had ever met her or even seen her at a distance—she was all legend to them, one of the great African women, like Sojourner Truth, who seemed less a modern American saboteur of slavery than an ancient spirit-leader, an invincible, sometimes invisible, female warrior protected by the old African gods. Father’s having met and, at the instigation of Frederick Douglass, having spoken privately with Miss Tubman gave him an authority that at once renewed Lyman’s commitment to running fugitives with us Browns and drew with him more of the others in the settlement than we would need. It made our Timbuctoo stop on the Underground Railroad suddenly important in the only world that mattered to the Negroes and to Father, and once again, increasingly as the summer wore on, the only one that mattered to me.

  Slavery, slavery, slavery! I could not have a thought that was not somehow linked to it. It was an obsession. At times, it came to feel like a form of insanity, for I was incapable of a normal thought, a single private thought that began and ended with me and did not identify me as a white man. And this was all due to Father.

  It was during our run with the four Hammlicher fugitives that Mary came to her time. And before we were able to get back from the Canadian border to North Elba, she gave birth to a son, her next-to-last child, born strangled and crushed by the terrible trial of his birth, leaving Mary herself nearly dead and Father frantic with fear that he would lose her.

  The excitement of our run to Canada had made our blood race, and we were still thrilled by it when we returned home. It was almost as if we had Miss Tubman herself aboard, her long rifle at the ready, and for the first time in months there was no tension between me and Lyman, which put even Father into a jolly mood as we rode the wagon back down along the rough roads from Massena. We had passed a party of Indian hunters along the way, Abenakis, French-speaking Algonquins from Lower Canada, a remnant of a remnant people, and had engaged in deep speculation amongst ourselves as to their racial origins, Lyman arguing for ancient Africa, Father for Asia, and Watson for the Lost Tribes of Israel.

  Then, when we arrived at the farm, we were met by the grim sight of a birthing gone bad, the sad familiarity of it, the desolation and dashed hopes and expectations, the terrible, bloody, failed work of it, and all our male heartiness and camaraderie, our blustery pride in our good and difficult work, went suddenly silent and cold. Men go numb at these times, I discovered. That’s what they do. All feeling bleeds out of us. We suddenly realize that we know nothing of what it means to the woman who has carried this child inside her body for nine months and has suffered through the excruciating pain and work of bearing it and has had to see its tiny body emerge into the world lifeless, battered and bruised by the vain effort, a grotesque, sorrowful waste. We do think sorrow and grief and pity. But we feel nothing. Husbands, fathers, sons, and
brothers, we all respond the same way. First we say to ourselves that we are to blame, then we say that we are unfairly deprived; we are the cause, we are not the agent; we are the custodian, we are a mere bystander: every feeling is cut down by its near opposite, so that in the end we come up numb, silent, too large, too rough, too coarse, too healthy and strong, to be in the same room with the poor, devastated women, our shattered, weary mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters.

  Numb. Cold. This, I know, was how Father felt that June afternoon when we men, dirty, exhausted, full of our own importance and valor, entered the house and saw that Mary’s baby had been born dead. We are there at the beginning and almost never at the end. Father, Watson, Salmon, Oliver, and I, and it was how Lyman felt, too, and how he had felt when his own baby was born dead, I now understood. There’s no way to change this; we are men and must remain men. It was how my brothers felt, their young faces dark and worried with the fruitless search for an appropriate emotion. And it was how I felt. Numb. Cold.

  But so different was it from when I had exploded with rage on the raw, gray morning seven weeks before, when Susan’s baby was born dead, that I was forced to remember the earlier event anew and this time to regard it with dismay. My rage then made no sense to me now. Lyman’s silence and withdrawal, which had seemed strange to me then, I now saw as having been the only sensible, normal response for a man. I should have reacted as he had. From what hole in my unconscious mind had that rage of mine emerged? Why had I not reacted instead with this all-too-familiar, cold cancellation of feeling that surrounded me now?

  I saw that my anger had been caused not by Susan’s suffering and loss at all but by my guilt for wishing that I could have stood that morning in Lyman’s place instead of mine, for believing somehow that I should have been Susan’s husband and the father of her dead infant and should not have been this farmer standing at his side. I had felt guilt but could not show it, even to myself, and so I had pounded the walls with my fists and roared like a wounded lion. Lyman had instinctively understood the nature and source of my rage, and he had hastily withdrawn himself and his wife from my presence and had stayed away from us, until now, until Father had returned and displaced me and reshaped the family and its priorities. Until once again it was slavery, slavery, slavery. And—inescapably—race, race, race. Until once again, due to our obsession, we were, as it were, insane. Which to the Negroes, to Lyman, made us perfectly comprehensible and trustworthy—sane. Not just another dangerous batch of well-intentioned, Christian white folks.

  Mary’s recovery from her delivery was slow and erratic. It had, in fact, been many years since she had been able to return to her normal state of good health following a pregnancy; she was no longer young, after all, and this had been an especially difficult and painful birthing, leaving her physically devastated, without even the joy of a new infant to help her heal.

  Father managed to obtain several postponements of trial downstate, where he had been scheduled to defend himself and Mr. Perkins against their creditors, and he by-passed the July convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Syracuse, so that he could stay at the side of his wife throughout this period of her recovery. Night and day, he prayed at her side and nursed her back to health in his inimitable, tireless fashion, leaving most of the work on the farm and the risk and work of running the Underground Railroad to his sons and Lyman and the other residents of Timbuctoo. But it was not clear, until nearly a month had passed, that Mary would recover at all. She waxed and waned, came forward and fell back, with the entire family growing increasingly fretful. Each day commenced with an announcement from Father as to our mother’s condition, followed by appropriate family prayers, either for her continued good progress towards health or for a fresh resumption of that progress. Happily, the Lord blessed us all, and slowly the good woman began to come around, and from midsummer on, her progress was steady and in a straight line, until Father was freed once again to resume his normal activities at his usual, furious pace, exercising over us and everyone associated with those activities his characteristic authority and force.

  The farm was flourishing, religion was properly established, and our white neighbors had begun again to join us in aiding our black neighbors and the fugitive slaves. Sister Ruth and Henry Thompson were set to marry in the fall, as soon as Henry and his brothers finished building the couple a proper cabin on a piece of land that his father had deeded over to them. Miss Tubman and associates of Mr. Douglass were steadily sending escaped slaves north to us from Utica, Syracuse, and Troy, two and sometimes three times a fortnight, and though ours was a difficult route, it was now the safest, as slave-catchers and their helpers no longer dared to come slinking around North Elba or Timbuctoo. The word was out: the mad abolitionist, John Brown, and his sons and neighbors and a pack of Gerrit Smith’s niggers were holed up there in the mountains all armed and ready to drive off anyone who came looking for fugitives.

  Emboldened by this change in the community, the residents of Timbuctoo began to move about the settlement more freely and to mingle with the whites in a more regular fashion, showing up at barn-raisings, for instance, in considerable numbers and taking their ease down at the grist mill or joining the whites after church at a huckleberry-picking prayer picnic up on the sunny slopes of Whiteface Mountain. On several of these occasions, I saw Susan, always at a distance from her, which distance I studiously kept, but each time I saw her—a glimpse of her coffee-brown face, half-hidden by her bonnet, or her shoulder and arm, visible for a second, until a crowd of Negroes surrounded her—my heart pounded like a hammer, and the blood rushed to my ears, and if I happened to be speaking with a person, I began to stammer and had to lapse into silence or else sound foolish as a mooncalf. I averted my gaze and then stole glances out from under it, until she disappeared from my sight.

  She, of course, made no attempt to speak with me. Nor did Lyman, when he was with her. Any initiative would have to be mine, and I had neither the courage nor the clarity to take it.

  I know now what was the cause and true nature of my fixation on the woman, how thwarted and misshapen it was, how far from its true object; but I did not understand it then in the least. I was ashamed of it, naturally; but ashamed for all the wrong reasons.

  Often, at an hour close to dawn, I found myself, after a long night of prowling alone through the forests, lurking in the close vicinity of the cabins of Timbuctoo, peering through the mist and the languorous, sifting pines at the very cabin where she slept beside her husband. I would crouch in low bushes for hours, lost in a sort of reverie, my heart furiously pounding, my hands trembling, my legs weak and watery, as if I were a hunter who at last had sighted his long-sought prey. Then I would suddenly shudder and come back to myself and, horrified, would steal away home.

  These prowls were not unlike my sordid, secret, nighttime walks several years earlier in the streets and alleyways of Springfield, and my family accepted them more or less as they had then, which is to say, as evidence of a solitary young man’s restless nature. And to a degree, they were correct to think that. Also, I always carried my rifle and sometimes brought home the carcass of a raccoon or fisher or some other nocturnal animal, as explanation for my having been out so late and long. As long as they did not interfere with my work on the farm, Father did not acknowledge my late night absences; perhaps he did not even notice them, so preoccupied was he that summer, first with Mary’s long recovery, then with the planting and further clearing of our woodlands, and with his local abolitionist activities and the Railroad. Also, he was busily educating his neighbors as to the advantages and virtues of raising blooded stock by selling them some of his Spanish merino ewes and carting his best ram around for stud and showing off and now and then selling one of his red Devon cattle. After lengthy negotiations by mail with a farmer in Litchfield, Connecticut, whom he knew from his past dealings with Wadsworth & Wells, he had succeeded in having a fine young Devon bull delivered as far north as Westport for him. I do not know how h
e paid for it, as such an animal did not come cheaply; possibly with promises of eventual returns from stud fees, possibly with a portion of the monies he accepted from our neighbors to help feed and clothe the fugitives. It was not beneath Father to mix ingredients like that; despite all, he was still unaccountably optimistic when it came to financial matters. But in early July, he sent Salmon and Oliver over the mountains to the lake to retrieve the beast, and soon it had become a source of much pride and the occasion for his traveling about the settlement in the attempt to improve the stock of his friends and neighbors.

  Thus, except for my brothers, who watched me go out late and come back in the early pre-dawn hours, my nighttime prowls went largely unnoticed by the family and, in a significant sense, unnoticed by me as well. My brothers teased me some, privately, for they suspected that I was secretly courting one of the maidens in the settlement, but they did not otherwise speak of it.

  Then in August, like most of the farm families of the region, we took ourselves, our best produce and manufactured items, and our finest livestock down to the Essex County Fair, in Westport. We loaded the wagon with jugs of maple syrup, Mary’s and Ruth’s quilts, blankets made from the wool of our sheep, willow reed baskets and fishing weirs, tanned hides, and various leather items the boys had made during the winter—wallets, purses, sheaths for knives, belts, harnesses, and, a specialty of Oliver’s, plaited bullwhips. Father made up a small, handpicked herd of merino sheep, together with his finest red Devon heifer and the widely admired new bull, and off we went—a triumphant return to Westport, as it were, proof that our spiritual errand into the wilderness, despite our reputation as non-farming, abolitionist troublemakers, had turned out an agricultural success, too.