Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Even so, the time to act is fast approaching, Father tells us. Already there have appeared numerous signs from the Lord—such as the sudden recent arrival of the pikes from Chambersburg, where they had been oddly delayed for weeks, despite Kagi’s best attempts to get them released and sent on to us. And soon from the Lord there will come additional signs, emblems and omens dressed as incidental events and information, to encourage us and make us the more eager to risk our lives in battle rather than continue with this suffocating waiting game at the farm on the Maryland Heights. For instance, Father will dispatch Cook down along the Charles Town Turnpike to determine the numbers and disposition of the slaves there, his only attempt to reconnoiter the region beyond the town of Harpers Ferry itself, and Cook will return aflame with news that the moon is right for insurrection, for it is nearly a dog-tooth moon, the type that makes Africans particularly discontented, he has learned. This, too, is a sign from the Lord, Father tells us. Cook has also been told of a young male slave at a farm nearby who just yesterday hung himself because his owner sold the man’s wife down South. A shipment of spears suddenly released, a dog-tooth moon, and a hanging man: on the strength of these and other similarly propitious portents, Father has sent sister Annie and Martha back home to North Elba. We are now awaiting only the arrival of Mr. Douglass, who we hope will bring with him a phalanx of well-armed Negro fighters from the North, although Father warns us that lately letters from his black cohorts back there are suggesting otherwise.

  Finally, one night Father climbs up to our attic with his lamp in one hand and a fat packet of papers and maps in the other, and taking his customary seat at the center of the group, he spreads the contents of his packet at his feet. As he begins to speak, he raises one of the maps from the pile—we see at once that it is the now-familiar drawing of the streets and buildings of Harpers Ferry, made by Cook—and, as usual, he shows it to us and allows it to be passed amongst us, so that, while Father sets out the plan, each man can better visualize what he is to do and where he shall stand when he does it. This time, however, when he has gone through, once again, step by step, the taking of Harpers Ferry, he retrieves and sets aside Cook’s map and is silent and looks somberly at his clasped hands, as if in prayer. After a long moment, without looking up, he abruptly declares that tonight he has decided to reveal to us that we will not be conducting the sort of raid that most of us still believe we have come here for. This is not to be merely a larger, more dangerous and dramatic, slave-running expedition than any of us has ever undertaken before. There is instead a much larger task before us, a greater thing than we have yet dared imagine.

  Kagi has long known of this grand, about-to-be-revealed scheme, as have I, of course, and a few of the others, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson, and we have argued privately amongst ourselves as to its feasibility and have agreed, after much disputation, that it can be done and must be attempted; but my brothers Watson and Oliver have not heard it before, nor my brothers-in-law Will and Dauphin Thompson, nor has Father until now trusted any of the recent arrivals with this vision, for it is truly a vision and not so much a plan, and to see it as he does, we must first for a long time not have seen or heard much else. Our long confinement together and our isolation from the world outside have finally made us all visionaries, capable at last of seeing what Father sees and of believing his words as if they were true prophecy.

  Here, men, I want you to examine these maps, he says, and he picks up and flaps at us a set of cambric-cloth squares onto which he has pasted the states of Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas—eight squares, and one state to a square. In the margin of each map, he has written numerals: 491,000, for the number of slaves in Virginia, he explains, 87,000 in Maryland, and so on, which comes to a total of 1,996,366 slaves, he pronounces, looking up at us. But he does not see us, his twenty followers, unshaven, unwashed, gaunt, and sober-faced, all of us young men and a few of us mere boys: instead, his gray eyes gleam with excitement at the sight of a spreading black wave of mutinous slaves, nearly two million strong, as all across the South they flee their cabins and shops and barns and rise from the cotton and tobacco and sugarcane fields and take up pitchforks, axes, machetes, and the thousands of Sharps rifles that will come flowing down the Alleghenies from the North; he sees them, first hundreds, then thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands of black men, women, and children, flowing down the country roads and highways, meeting in town squares and on city streets and merging into the largest army ever seen in this land, an army with but one purpose, and that is to take back from the slaveholders what for a quarter of a millennium has been stolen from them—their freedom, their American birthrights, their very lives. This raid will establish no Underground Railroad operation, he tells us, for regardless of scale, it is no mere slave raid. This will be an act of an entirely different order. Yes, after we have taken Harpers Ferry, we will make our appointed rendezvous with Mr. Douglass in the Allegheny foothills west of here, as planned, but then we will not, as some of us believed, hole up in small forts and siphon escaped slaves into the North. Instead, we shall divide our forces into two portions, the Defenders, under Mr. Douglass’s command, and the Liberators, under Father’s, and whilst the Defenders protect and hurry into the North those women, children, elderly, and infirm slaves who wish to resettle there, the Liberators will commence to march rapidly southward along the densely wooded north-south mountain passes, making lightning-like strikes against the plantations on the plains lower down, seizing armories and arsenals and supplies as they go, building a cavalry, like Toussaint L’Ouverture, and even seizing artillery, like the Maroons of Jamaica, destroying railroads and fortifications. When the Shenandoah Valley goes, the plantations along the James River will quickly fall, and then the Tidewater tobacco farms, and when Virginia goes, the rest of the Southern states will nearly conquer themselves, there being down there, as in Haiti and Jamaica, such a disproportionate number of Negroes to whites. And there will be thousands of non-slaveholding whites, too, God-fearing, decent Southerners, who will come running to our side, once they understand that our true intentions are not to slay white men and women in their beds or to overthrow their state or federal government or to dissolve the Union, but merely to end American slavery. To end it now, here, in these years. Look, look! he says, excitedly showing us the map of Alabama, where with X’she has marked, county by county, the heaviest concentrations of slaves. When we emerge from the Tennessee hills here in Augusta County, the slaves will rise up spontaneously in adjacent Montgomery County, and in a week or perhaps two, when the news has arrived there, the same will occur in Macon and Russell Counties, and the flames of rebellion will leap like a wildfire from one district to the next, straight across into Georgia, whence the fire will roar all the way east to the Sea Isles, causing it to curl back north into the Carolinas, until we have ignited a great, encircling conflagration, which cannot be extinguished until it has burnt the ancient sin and scourge of slavery entirely away, from one end of the South to the other, from Maryland to Louisiana, until at last nothing remains of the Slavocracy but a smoldering pile of char!

  The Old Man’s peroration ends and is met with soft silence. At first, Kagi, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson look slowly around the dim, shadowy room, as if searching the faces of the others for a sign that their collective silence indicates collective skepticism, which was Kagi’s early reaction to Father’s vision, or dismay, Cook’s and Stevens’s first response, or simple awe, Anderson’s. I myself look to my brothers’ eyes, Watson and Oliver, seeking there a clarifying version of my own thoughts and feelings, for in my earlier disputations with Kagi, Cook, and Stevens, I defended the logic of Father’s grand plan with no other desire than to defeat their objections to it, my old role, and in winning them over have not made my own private position strong to myself or even clear. But it is too late. Watson and Oliver and the Thompsons, my brothers and brothers-in-law, all of the men, wear on their faces a single expressio
n, the expression worn also by Kagi, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson, and no doubt by me, too: it is the hungry look of a follower, of a true believer. There is no Thomas the Doubter in this room, no sober skeptic, no ironist, no dark materialist. We have all been confined here in this isolated place for too many weeks and months to have any mentality left that is not a piece of a single mind, and that mind is shaped and filled by Father alone.

  But, yes, much of what you have expected will be met, he continues, calmer now, comforted by our silence. He again holds out Cook’s large, detailed map of the streets and buildings of Harpers Ferry and says that we shall indeed, as we have intended all along, soon attack and seize the town. That has not changed. It will be our first formally declared act of war against the slaveholders, the first act of our mighty drama. And when we have seized the town, we shall, as planned, take control of the arms stored in three buildings there—the government armory, where the muskets are made, the Hall rifle works, and the arsenal. As we all know, there are no federal troops presently posted in the town and only a few private guards protecting these stores of weapons and munitions, so we will not be much opposed, and if we strike quickly and under cover of night, it will be done before we are even noticed by the townspeople. We shall nevertheless take hostages and hold them, probably in the armory yard, to protect us against the local militias, should they be roused, whilst we await the first reinforcing arrival of mutinous slaves from the surrounding countryside, and then, in a matter of hours, we shall have flown back up into the mountain fastness south and west of the town, whence shall come our Republic’s salvation.

  Shortly after nightfall on a Sabbath, it will begin with a fervent prayer offered up to God, that we may be assisted by Him in the total, final liberation of all the slaves on this continent. We shall not ask the Lord to spare or even to protect our own lives in this venture: our lives have been pledged strictly to our duty; that is all. We must not ask the Lord to release us of our duty. Then, with everyone gathered in the room below, so that we may be mentally clear as to our legal rights and obligations and our principles, Aaron Stevens, who has the most impressive voice of us all, will read aloud Father’s Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States, which so nobly begins: Whereas slavery is a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence: therefore, we, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do, for the time being, ordain and establish for ourselves the following Provisional Constitution and Ordinances. He will read all forty-five articles, ending thusly, with the carefully worded reassurance that The foregoing articles shall not be construed so as in any way to encourage the overthrow of any State government, or of the general government of the United States, and look to no dissolution of the

  Union, but simply to amendment and repeal. And our flag shall be the same that our fathers fought under in the Revolution.

  Following this somber recitation, our commander-in-chief will administer anew to us as a group the same oath of secrecy that, individually, upon our first arrival at the farm, each of us has already been sworn to. Father then will say simply, “Men, get on your arms. We now proceed to the Ferry.”

  I am to stay behind with Francis Meriam and Barclay Coppoc, the two men Father and I have come to view as the weakest links in our chain, the one because of his physical frailty and tendency to hysteria, the other because of his youth and his residual Quaker timidity. I would prefer to be at the front with Father and the others, but I know better than to object to this assignment, for no one else in the group can be trusted with it, he says, and besides, it places me in a position of authority as second-in-command and at Father’s flank, so that if something goes dreadfully wrong, my duty will be to rescue them. My immediate charge, however, is to transfer all the arms from the house and storage shed, except for those taken by the advance party, to a small, unused schoolhouse situated in the woods overlooking the Potomac and directly across the river from Harpers Ferry, there to await the first arrival of liberated slaves, to arm them and lead them into the mountains, where a few days later we will rendez-vous with Father and the others. On his map of Virginia, Father shows us our Allegheny meeting place in Frederick County, which he himself scouted years ago, while on a surveying expedition of lands owned by Oberlin College. Mr. Douglass should have joined us by then, Father assures us, and will take overall command of my unit. I am to remain as captain of the new recruits, however, and as executive officer of the operation, until Father himself has joined us. After that, I am to ride at Father’s side with the Liberators. I have also been charged with the obligation to remove or destroy any incriminating evidence that we might have left here at the farmhouse, such as letters, maps, journals, and other personal effects.

  We have in our possession two wagons, one for my use and the other for Father’s advance party. It must be on a night with no moon shining, no stars, a night overcast and drear, and when Father’s men have loaded their wagon with the half a hundred pikes and twenty rifles they require for the taking of Harpers Ferry, immediately and without ceremony, at a simple command from Father, they will set off down the public road, Father perched on the wagon seat with his head uncharacteristically bent forward, stooped as if in deep thought or prayer, and our old North Elba farmhorse, the bay Morgan mare, between the shafts, and the sixteen men marching silently in the cold drizzle alongside the wagon and behind. I will stand by the door of the house with Meriam and young Barclay Coppoc and watch them disappear into the darkness as if being swallowed by it. I do not know yet what I will feel when that moment comes, but it will not be fear or dread. It is too late for that.

  After a few moments, when we can no longer hear the tramp of their boots on the wet ground or the creak and chop of their wagon and horse, my two men and I will turn quickly to our tasks—Meriam and Coppoc to load our wagon with the remaining weapons from the shed, whilst I gather all our scattered papers from the house. By candlelight, I will prowl carefully through the entire house, from basement kitchen to our attic hideout, collecting every shred of paper I can find and stuffing all of it loosely into a cloth valise. To my slight surprise, I will be obliged to fill the bag several times over, emptying it each time in the basement next to the woodstove on the flagstone floor of the kitchen. Soon I will have made a large, disordered pile, at first glance much of it rubbish, which I plan to separate from the rest and burn. But when I commence to sort the papers, I will discover with a little shock that most of the remaining papers, a whole heap of them, are Father’s, and amongst them are dozens of letters, many from family members in North Elba and Ohio, and numerous others, only slightly coded, written by his secret Northern supporters, Dr. Howe, Gerrit Smith, Franklin Sanborn, and so on, and even several letters from Frederick Douglass, and receipts for Father’s purchases of arms back in Iowa and Ohio and for the pikes in Hartford, Connecticut, and here are all of Father’s maps, the very maps with which he showed us his grand plan, and Cook’s drawing of Harpers Ferry, and Father’s pocket notebooks, where he has listed, county by county, as on his maps, slave population figures taken from the 1850 national census, and the names of many towns and cities of the South and their marching distance from one another, such as Montgomery to Memphis, 3 da., and Charleston to Savannah, 2 1/2 da. I have known this would happen, for I have seen most of these papers, maps, and notebooks lying carelessly about for weeks, as if, having shown them to us, Father no longer wished to order or hide them, and I have felt a twinge of fear that, in the rush of last-minute preparations, he would neglect to take them up. But I would not reflect upon it until later, until after Father and I had ridden up for our final, secret meeting with Mr. Douglass in Chambersburg.

/>   While I clear the house and my men stack the arms into our wagon, Father and his men will be nearing the covered bridge that crosses the Potomac from Maryland into the state of Virginia and the town of Harpers Ferry. This is how it will go. Around nine o’clock, the drizzle shifts over to a straight rain. At ten-thirty, they reach the Maryland Heights, a steep, wooded thousand-foot-high cliff above the cut of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge. Although from up here it is too dark to make out the shapes of the brick-front buildings and cobbled streets below, the men can see through the rain a few dim, last lights from the slumbering town. Passing by the abandoned log schoolhouse, where I am to store our weapons and later arm the escaping slaves, Father and his men descend on the narrow, winding lane to the grassy riverbank and march for a while alongside the wide, swift-flowing, steel-colored river to the covered bridge, which crosses to Harpers Ferry a short ways upstream from the place where the east-running Potomac River is joined from the south by the Shendandoah. Well in sight of the bridge now, its wide, black entrance beckoning like the mouth of a gigantic serpent, they leave the road and cross the C & O Canal at lock 23 and make their way in the cold rain along the tow path to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad tracks running in from the east. Here the tracks turn, cross the canal, and pass through the covered bridge alongside the narrow roadway, passing over the wide, gray river in pitch darkness to the station and loading platforms in the town center, where they turn again and lead out of town on the further side of the Potomac into western Virginia and on to Ohio.