Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  Suddenly, Meriam, who had been strangely silent, blurted in his nervous, high-pitched voice, “Owen, where are the slaves? There should be hundreds of escaped slaves coming to us by now, right? Isn’t that right, Owen? We’ve got all these damned pikes and guns and no one to give them to!” He laughed edgily.

  “Shut up, Frank,” Coppoc said. “They’ll come in. And it’s all right if they don’t. Or if only a few make it here tonight. They’ll catch up with us later in the mountains. We’ll arm them then.”

  “No, Barclay,” I said. “They won’t.”

  “How’s that?”

  “They’re not coming. Not now. Not ever.”

  The two looked at me angrily. ’Course they’re coming in,” Coppoc said. “Good Lord, Owen, this is way beyond arguing now. We’ve got options anyhow.”

  “Yes, and we got of Fred Douglass a-waiting in the wings,” said Meriam.

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Now, come on, Owen, what’re you talking about?” Meriam demanded, his voice rising. “We got options. Plenty of’em. You heard the Old Man, same as us.”

  “Say it, Owen.”

  And so I said it. “Boys, Frederick Douglass is in Rochester, New York, tonight, asleep in his bed. I know that, and Shields Green knows it, and Father knows it. We lied to you,” I said. “At least, I did. Father and Shields, I think, lied to themselves and each other and believed their lies, and so they told you only what they thought was the truth.” Then in a few sentences I revealed to Meriam and Coppoc what had happened at the quarry in Chambersburg and how later, riding back down to Virginia, Father had insisted that, once Mr. Douglass realized we were deadly serious, he would change his mind. Maybe he would wait until the raid had actually begun, but in the end Mr. Douglass would fly to our side, for he was a man of deep principle and great personal courage. Father was sure of it. And Shields had agreed, in a way that made it seem that his friend Mr. Douglass had given him some private assurances.

  Father instructed us not to report to the other men what had been said at the quarry. “It will only make them unnecessarily fearful and will sow disunity amongst them,” he said.

  And we obeyed—Shields because he believed that my father knew things that no other man knew, and I because I was his son. “Shields thinks Osawatomie Brown is a prophet,” I said.

  “And I take it you don’t,” Coppoc said, disgusted.

  “No.”

  “For God’s sake, none of that matters now! What’re we going to do?” Meriam cried.

  “My brother Ed’s down there!’ said Coppoc.

  “And two of mine. And two brothers-in-law. And a father.”

  “Owen Brown, what kind of man are you?” Coppoc said, and turned away from me.

  We heard more gunshots then, rifle shots, coming from the vicinity of the church a short ways above the armory and overlooking it. Some townspeople were running and ducking behind walls, and it looked like they were taking potshots at our men in the armory yard below. Then our men returned fire, and one of the townspeople went down. The others quickly grabbed up his body and pulled it behind a shed, and the guns went silent for a while.

  Meriam was frantic by now, confused by the war between his mortal fear, which made him want to flee, and his long-held desire to become the man whose sacrificial death would save the others, and he careened amongst the trees like a blind man, while Coppoc stared coldly from the cliff to the town. “You should have kept them from going in,” he said finally. “You should have told us the truth.”

  “That wouldn’t have kept Father out. Nothing would. He’d have gone alone, if necessary. You know that. And there’d always have been some of the men to follow him. Maybe not Kagi, maybe not Cook or you. But your brother would. And mine, Watson and Oliver, and the Thompsons, some of the others. Those boys would follow the Old Man straight through the gates of hell. You know it as well as I. No, it’s better they all went in together, not just five or six of them. Even me, if Father had not posted me on this side of the river, I’d have gone in, too. Twenty men have a better chance of getting out than five or six.”

  “Maybe. But only if they leave that place now!’ Coppoc replied, and then he declared that he was going over. He would tell them the truth of the matter himself. “To let them know their real situation,” he said. He called Meriarn to him, calmed him somewhat, and asked him to go down into the town with him. Coppoc explained that they could get across the bridge all right, as it was still evidently under Father’s control, and if they hurried and got across before full daylight, they could sneak unseen into the armory yard and help the Old Man and the boys fight their way out.

  Meriam agreed at once. Coppoc had resolved his dilemma. “It’s how I knew it would happen,” he said. “I foresaw it, and now it’s the Lord’s will running things, not mine. It’s how it has to be. So I must go with you, Barclay.”

  “What about you, Owen?”

  “Father said to wait here for the Negroes. You two ought to do the same. He ordered us to arm the slaves when they came here and to meet up with him and the others later in Cumberland.”

  “Well, now, that’s done with, isn’t it? Countermand the Old Man’s order, for heaven’s sake! You got the right. You’re in command up here.”

  “My father does not want me to save him,” I said.

  “Seems to me that’s the only order you’re following. Back at the house there, when we loaded the wagon, I never smelled chimney smoke. You didn’t burn those papers like he said to, did you, Owen?”

  “I needed more time. There was more material than I thought, books and so on. I’ll go back and destroy them later. Or carry them away,” I added.

  “So, Owen Brown, it’s over. And you’ve single-handedly done the whole thing in. Amazing.” Coppoc shook his head in weary resignation. “Well, what about it, are you coming with me and Frank?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t intend to try stopping us, do you?” he said, and he leveled his rifle at me.

  “My orders are to stand fast, unless he sends for us. And if you go down there with what I’ve told you, Barclay, all you’ll do is sow disunity amongst the men,” I said. “Father was right about that much. One by one, they’ll sneak off and run, and not a one will come out of that place alive unless every one of them believes he’s fighting for more than just to save his own life. Those are brave men, Barclay, and they still have a chance, but this news will make cowards of them all.”

  “You sound like the Old Man. All theory. You ready, Frank?” Meriam nodded solemnly, and they slowly backed away from me, with Coppoc still keeping me under his gun, although I had no intentions of trying to force them to stay. It was too late. They were already doing exactly what I feared the others would do, cutting away from Father and running for their lives. I knew that Coppoc and Meriam would never make it into town, that before they reached the bridge they would realize the extremity of their situation and would disappear into the Virginia woods, and that eventually they would be hunted down out there and shot dead or else hog-tied and brought in to be hung.

  The dawn wind blew through the leaves overhead. Then I heard the train locomotive hissing and blowing steam below and turned my gaze back to the town. Slowly, the train pulled out of the station and entered the bridge. A minute later, it reappeared on the other, the near, bank of the river, where it bore away to the east, curling along the broadening valley of the Potomac, carrying to the nation the fearful and exciting intelligence of the Negro insurrection raised this October night by Old John Brown and his men at Harpers Ferry.

  It was nearly full daylight, and the tall oaks stood around me like sentries. For a long while, as if I could not, I did not move. I was alone, as alone as I had ever been in my life. But strangely—all unexpectedly—free. As if, after a lifetime bound to my father’s fierce will and companionship by heavy steel manacles and chains, I had watched them come suddenly unlocked, and I had simply, almost casually, pitched them aside.

  But wer
e my actions from then on those of a free man? I cannot say. To be sure, I followed no impulses but my own. It sounds ridiculous now as I write it, but when Coppoc and Meriam had been gone awhile, I climbed the branches of the tallest oak tree up there on the cliff, climbed to the topmost branch that would safely support my weight, and, with my Sharps rifle in my lap, made for myself a sort of crow’s nest from which I could see clearly the streets and buildings of Harpers Ferry—from the rifle factory at the further, southern end of town, where Kagi, Leary, and Copeland were pinned down by local riflemen, to the Maryland side of the B & O bridge, where Oliver, Will Thompson, and Dangerfield Newby were posted. I could also see along the remaining length of the high ridge of Bolivar Heights, down to where the road from the Kennedy farmhouse emerged from the woods and crossed the canal to the tow path. And I could look directly into the armory yard itself, where Father and most of his raiders had positioned themselves behind the high, iron-rail walls and cut-stone pylons and inside the firehouse with the hostages.

  All was still and silent down there, until, from my watchtower, I saw Father walk out of the firehouse with a man I did not recognize and appear to send him from the armory across the open square to the hotel. After a time, the man returned, carrying a large, open carton of what must have been food—breakfast for the hostages and the raiders both, I assumed. Again, all was calm for a while, until around midmorning, when movement and the sound of men and horses below me and to my right drew my attention away from the town. A large party of armed white civilians under the flag of the notorious Jefferson Guards was riding in from the west along the tow path.

  At a point very close to the Maryland end of the B & O bridge, they spotted Oliver and Will Thompson and Dangerfield Newby, dismounted, and at once began firing at them. The three raiders took shelter behind the toll house and returned fire, but the fusillade from the militiamen drove them steadily backwards towards the bridge, where I saw Newby at the entrance suddenly fall down dead, slain by what appeared to be a long spike or a bolt shot from a smooth-bore musket that tore through him ear-to-ear at the throat. Dangerfield Newby—the mulatto slave-son of a Scotchman from Fairfax County, Virginia—was forty-four and the oldest, after Father, of the raiders. He had joined us early on, with the main intention of freeing his wife and children, who were slaves of a man in Warrenton, Virginia. A tall man of light color, well over six feet, and a splendid physical specimen, he was a melancholy man, a good man, and my friend. And now he lay dead—the first of the raiders to go down—while Oliver and Will Thompson fled to safety in the firehouse.

  Soon after this, another detachment of armed civilians led by a man in uniform, a second militia force, I supposed, came riding into town from the southwest along Shendandoah Street, where they swiftly secured the Shenandoah bridge and took up positions behind the arsenal, thus commanding the town square and the front of the armory yard. Their position, combined with that of the Jefferson Guards at the B & O bridge, effectively shut off the only escape routes left to Father and his men. They also made it impossible for Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam or anyone else to slip in from the Maryland side and help rescue them. Except for Kagi and his men out at the rifle works, Father and his Provisional Army were now trapped with their hostages in the armory yard and firehouse.

  In about an hour, a pair of men—one of whom I did not know and figured was a hostage, the other being Will Thompson, my brother-inlaw—emerged from the firehouse bearing a white flag, the signal to parley. There was by now an emboldened crowd of armed townspeople in the square and on the porch of the hotel and the platform of the railroad station, and when they saw the two men come forward from the firehouse, the crowd rushed them and seized and beat Will, dragging him into the hotel. The other man they made much of and slapped him on the shoulders and offered him pulls from their bottles, for many of them were by now freely drinking.

  A few moments later, my brother Watson and the dark-browed Aaron Stevens and a third man, another hostage, I assumed, came out of the firehouse and walked into the cobbled square with a white flag. Suddenly, there was a barrage of gunfire from the crowd, and Watson fell, and Stevens fell, both bleeding from the face and torso. The hostage ran towards the crowd, but Watson pulled himself to his knees and dragged his gut-shot body back inside the armory grounds to the safety of the firehouse. Stevens lay writhing in pain, shot four or more times and unable to lift himself from the pavement, when, strange to see, one of the hostages came out of the firehouse, picked him up, and lugged him across the square and into the hotel. Shortly afterwards, the same man walked from the hotel and returned to the firehouse, a hostage again, but choosing it this time, which made me think that Father must be close to surrendering, if for no other reason than to get medical attention for Watson, who had looked to be seriously wounded.

  More time passed, while the crowd at the hotel and railroad station and in the town square grew larger by the minute and more courageous and raucous with drink and rage, when I spotted a man climbing from the rear window of the firehouse into the armory yard. It was not a hostage escaping, I suddenly realized, it was young Willie Leeman, our wild and pretty boy from Maine, skittering across the yard away from the front gate to the rear. A slender lad, barely twenty years old, he slipped between the bars of the wall, dashed across the railroad tracks, and made for the Potomac. I was not surprised to see him abandon the others. He had come up the hard way—Poor Willie, we called him. Sent to work in a Haverhill shoe factory at fourteen, he had run off at seventeen to join Father’s volunteers in Kansas, where he had been difficult for us to control, a lonely, uneducated boy who liked his drink and when drunk shouted his principles to anyone who would listen.

  Just as he reached the river, which ran fairly shallow there, and waded in, someone in the crowd spotted him, and a batch of men up on the railroad station platform commenced firing at him, while he swam frantically for the Maryland side. With bullets splashing all around, he managed to get no more than fifty feet from shore before he was hit. Unable to swim any further, he turned back and hauled himself onto a tiny mudflat and collapsed. Several men ran along the tracks and down to the shore, and one of them waded out to the islet where Willie lay bleeding, put his revolver to the boy’s head, and shot him dead. The man returned to his comrades and they raced back to the station platform and joined the crowd, making from there a target of Willie’s body, shooting into it over and over, as if it were a sack of wet grain.

  By midday, the youngest of the raiders, Will Leeman, was dead; and the oldest, Dangerfield Newby. Inside the firehouse, and inside the hotel across the way, my brother Watson and Aaron Stevens lay wounded, perhaps mortally, and my brother-in-law Will Thompson, brutally beaten, sat in the hotel under armed guard. I was sure that Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam had by now fled into the woods, and there may well have been others among the raiders who, to save themselves, had abandoned Father—John Cook, who was clever and knew the streets and alleys of the town better than any of us and had friends and even family amongst the townspeople, he was one; and Charlie Tidd was another. I had seen neither of them all morning; nor Albert Hazlett and Osborn Anderson, who had been stationed alone at the arsenal. The small brick building on Shenandoah Street was close to the town square, and the militiamen, with guards posted at the doors, were now treating it as if they had taken it back.

  At one point, I noticed a fellow walking exposed on the railroad loading-trestle that bordered the armory buildings, and when he neared the firehouse, he dropped to one knee and peered around the water tower from an angle that would have given him an easy rifle-shot into the firehouse, except that he did not appear to be armed. Even so, when the door to the firehouse opened, and I saw Edwin Coppoc and my brother Oliver standing there, I feared that the man on the trestle would shoot them, for they were exposed and unsuspecting. But, no, Coppoc spotted the fellow, raised his rifle, and fired, dropping him like a stone, at which point a second man, who had been following a few yards behind the first, sho
t straight down into the engine house and caught Oliver full-bore in the chest, knocking him backwards inside.

  Coppocs having killed an apparently unarmed man seemed to fuel the crowd’s drunken rage. In minutes, they were dragging their prisoner Will Thompson from the hotel, pummeling and screaming wildly at him. They set him out on the edge of the B & O bridge, stepped a few feet away, and shot him many times, after which they tossed his body into the river, where the current carried it against a thicket of driftwood. It caught there, and as they had with Willie Leeman, the townsmen made a target of my brother-in-law and shot into his dead body for a long while.

  About mid-afternoon, I noticed a significant number of gun-toting townsmen separate themselves from the mob and in an organized way move up Shenandoah Street in the direction of the rifle works, where it appeared that Kagi, Lewis Leary, and John Copeland were still successfully holding off the militia—thanks to the deep, fast-running, twenty-foot-wide channel that cut between the mainland and the island on which the factory was situated. A footbridge led from the shore to the island, but the walls of the factory came right to the water’s edge, as if to a moat, and up to now the militiamen had been hesitant about rushing it and had contented themselves with keeping the three raiders inside under siege. Now, however, encouraged by the arrival of a crowd of heavily armed townsmen, they put up a protective shield of steady gunfire at the factory windows, whilst a gang of men ran against the timbered gate with a battering-ram and smashed it in. Then the entire combined force of militiamen and townspeople charged into the factory.

  A hundred yards downriver, from my treetop aerie high above the further shore, I watched three figures—a white man, whom I knew to be Kagi, and two Negro men, Leary and Copeland—climb out one of the large windows that faced the river. The three men hung from the sill above the churning water for a second and then dropped. In seconds, fifty riflemen were firing down at them from the upper-storey windows, killing John Kagi, who sank beneath the water almost at once, and hitting Lewis Leary numerous times but not killing him outright, for he managed to struggle back to shore downstream a ways, where a contingent of militiamen pulled him limp and bleeding up the embankment into custody. Copeland made it to a large, flat rock in mid-river, where he was immediately spotted by some Jefferson Guards posted on the further shore, who began shooting at him. Caught hopelessly in a cross-fire, he raised his hands in the air, and a few minutes later, a pair of fellows rowed out, made him their prisoner, and saved him from Willie Leeman’s and Will Thompson’s fate for another.