Cloudsplitter

by Russell Banks

  There was a lull until about three P.M., when a B & O train pulled in from the west and stopped on a siding at the upper end of the armory, a safe distance from the firehouse. Several dozen civilian riflemen stepped down from the passenger cars and quickly arranged themselves in assault formation and began marching on the firehouse from the rear. They had scaling ladders and got over the fence back there with ease and were halfway across the armory grounds before Father and the boys spotted them and began firing out the windows and the partly opened door of the firehouse. The raid might have ended there and then, but neither of the other two militia companies present in town thought to charge the undefended front gate and storm the firehouse, and consequently, in about ten minutes, despite taking some serious casualties, Father and his remaining men managed to drive the first company back out of the armory grounds and over the fence.

  Towards dusk and starting around four P.M., more men rode into town, uniformed soldiers and officers this time—five companies I counted of the Maryland Volunteers, and several additional civilian militias from nearby towns like Hamtramck and Shepherdstown: hundreds of angry, frightened, armed white Southerners coming in on horseback and by train and on foot, until the town square and many of the main streets were filled with federal soldiers, top-hatted riflemen and sharpshooters in buckskins, excitable slope-shouldered boys with pistols, vagrants and drunkards, men, and women, too, carousing and firing their guns into the air and scuffling amongst themselves, and the occasional mounted U.S. Army officer waving his saber and trying vainly to restore order and bivouac his men.

  Except for the pall of death that hung over the small, blockaded building at the center, it was a carnival scene down there—chaotic and sensual and violent, with torches and a bonfire, and there was even a fiddler, and drunken dancers lurched up and down the hotel porch. Hawkers were selling food and whiskey, caissons and wagons clogged the streets and gouged deep tracks across front yards, and a riderless, terrified horse galloped down a side street, scattering people in all directions, and down by the river, boys were still potshooting at the bodies of my comrades.

  Overhead, the stippled ridges in the white October sky were plated with gold, and in the east, red and cold, zinc-colored streaks had appeared, as the rain clouds rippled and broke, and the autumn sun slipped quickly towards the darkly shadowed, wooded horizon behind me. It had grown suddenly cold, but there was still plenty of bright daylight up on the rocky escarpment, where I remained clinging to the topmost branches of the highest oak tree. Down in the gorge, however, where the two broad, slate-gray rivers converged, the town was falling into darkness. It had grown nearly impossible for me to make out what this morning I had climbed up into the tree to view and could not bring myself, these many hours later, to leave, despite the horror of it—my brothers and my friends making their last stand against slavery; and, of course, my father, Father Abraham, making his terrible, final sacrifice to his God.

  In the end, I could see only the lights—lamps starting to flicker from the windows of the houses and public buildings, dancing torches and bonfires casting dark, erratic shadows onto the cobbled streets and against the red-brick sides of the buildings. Occasionally, there was the rattle of gunfire, but it seemed random and almost celebratory, not the sustained noise of combat. An excited waiting had begun down there, a tense, almost hysterical pause, as before the public execution of a famous criminal. I shifted my position in my roost amongst the spindly limbs of the tree, and at that instant from the darkness below heard a rifle shot ring out, and a bullet tore through the leaves close beside my cheek. Then a second gun barked, a muzzle-loader this time. I heard the ball crack against a branch a few feet above me, and a flurry of yellow leaves fluttered across my head and floated past to the ground. I was awash in the last remaining light of day up here, and the soldiers and townspeople below, standing in darkness, had finally seen me. A third shot went wide of the mark, but I heard it tick through the leaves of a nearby tree and saw the leaves fall. A fourth shot slammed into the trunk just below my foot, and I began frantically to climb down, which was difficult, for I had my rifle, useless to me now, and my crippled arm. I must get out of the light, was my one thought. Just a little ways further down, and I, too, will be in darkness and invisible. I let go of my rifle, heard it clatter to the ground, and felt my way to the next-lower branch. A whole crowd of shooters was firing at me now. Bullets zipped through the foliage and crackled against the tree, shattering limbs and tossing splinters, twigs, and leaves into the air: I saw that I was game, a treed bear, pathetically large and cumbersome, all unable to hide, unable toflee, but still alive and struggling to stay alive, still a pleasure to kill. Like the bear, I had fled to the topmost branches of the tallest tree in the forest, not, as I had thought, so that I could better view my enemy, but in terror and delirium and in the crazed hope that I could not be seen there.

  With my left arm, I clamped myself to a slender branch close to my head and reached down with my right hand to grasp a sturdier limb below. I let my weight go and groped in the air for a footing, and for a few seconds my body was suspended entirely on my poor arm—that childhood curse: never had it so enraged and humiliated me as now! Suddenly, there was an extended barrage of gunfire from the town, a booming fusillade, and bullets and balls exploded through the tree all around me, snapping off limbs and showering me with torn leaves, and I thought, Surely, now, I am a dead man, they will kill me this instant, when the limb I clung to with my hooked arm let go. Shot through, it floated away from the tree still clamped in the crook of my arm, and I fell, slamming against the branches, tearing foliage away with my free hand—a long, clattering drop into the darkness and safety and silence of the forest.

  Here in my cabin, I have fallen. A sympathetic act, no doubt, caused by my account of falling, and I watch myself now from outside myself and above, as astonished and detached as I was that October night on Bolivar Heights, and as I was so many years before in the Negro church in Boston, and long, long ago, when I followed my brothers out along the steeply pitched roof and, in falling against the stone steps of the dry-cellar below, betrayed their Sabbath-day flight and permanently smashed my arm. It is as if a huge, invisible hand above me has pushed me down, or as if since childhood I have been carrying an insupportable weight and have finally been borne down by it.

  I write these words with painful slowness now. I know that I am coming to the end of my ability to set down my story, which has proved to be not just my story, after all, but Father’s as well. His is the one that I had hoped to tell you; the other, mine, which lies beneath it, I wished only to tell to Father himself and my brothers and comrades, those ghosts standing in the shadow of the mountain Cloudsplitter, the men whose bodies lie buried beneath the great, gray stone in North Elba.

  I tell you this so that if you someday read these pages, you will know that I have finally gone where I always wanted to go, for this morning, after I fell, I managed in the fading dark to crawl across the cluttered floor to the table and locate there my old revolver: it lay cold and heavy as an iron skillet beneath a sheaf of loose papers, where I had placed it—how long ago? Weeks? Months? A year? It doesn’t matter: there is no more time for me, no more chronology. I’m becoming my own ghost at last.

  Father believed that the universe was a gigantic clockworks, brilliantly lit. But it’s not. It’s an endless sea of darkness moving beneath a dark sky, between which, isolate bits of light, we constantly rise and fall. We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another’s light to keep our own light from going out: abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water. For most of my life, surely since that day in October when I fled the field at Harpers Ferry, I have been a steadily diminishing light—until the day when I began to set down this long account, and
my light flared up as it never had before. It has continued to burn brightly against the night ever since.

  But now there is little left to tell, almost nothing, and soon I will learn if this has been all for naught, if this passage between the firmaments has been no more than the dying fall of a cinder into the dark waters of the swirling deep. When I have told the little that is left to tell, if I have not died by then and still have the bodily strength, I will simply put down my pencil and pick up my revolver, and I will use it to place me at my father’s side, where I have always properly belonged. If I cannot lie there next to him and my ghost cannot reside alongside his, then it will mean only that my light went out forever on that night those many long years ago at Harpers Ferry, and this account has been but a meaningless, phosphorescent flare, the memory of light, instead of the thing itself, and it will not matter.

  Here, Miss Mayo, is all that I have left to tell.

  I took the horse and wagon and returned from the schoolhouse to the Kennedy farm. Once there, I pulled the wagon in behind the house, well out of sight from the road, and went straight to the storage shed, where in the darkness I groped over the half-dozen wooden crates that Father and the boys had emptied before setting out, when they loaded their wagon with weapons for the slaves. They had broken most of the crates apart in the process, and it took several minutes before I found one that was intact and had its topside boards. It was a crate that had contained the long pikes, those poles with knives attached that Father had imagined would terrorize the slaveholders. The box was stoutly constructed of pine and plenty large enough for my purposes, so I carried it to the kitchen and set it by the stove. Then I commenced filling it from the huge heap of papers and books that lay untouched on the floor where I had placed them the night before.

  While I was in the midst of this task, I heard a group of horsemen approach from the direction of Harpers Ferry and stop before the house. “Hello, the house!” one of them shouted. “Anyone there?”

  I quickly placed the lid onto the half-filled case. Then I lifted it and carried it out the rear door of the kitchen, where, silently, carefully, as if it were a child’s coffin, I set it into the wagon bed. I climbed up on the driver’s box and sat there, waiting.

  For several minutes, all was quiet. Then I heard the clump of boots on the porch at the front of the house, and someone rapped on the door. “It appears there ain’t anyone home, Cap’n!” he called back.

  “No matter,” came the response. “We got most of what we come for back at the schoolhouse anyhow.” A moment later, I heard them leave.

  I sat motionless for a long while, until the horse abruptly shifted her weight, signaling me to give her direction. But I had no plan. I barely had thoughts. I had spent my entire life following Father’s plans, thinking his thoughts. And at that moment, as I sat up on the wagon with the reins in my hands and my horse impatient to move on, I did not know what to do or think.

  I was in considerable physical pain, for I had cut and bruised myself badly in my fall, and my clothes were torn. I was lightly armed—I had my revolver but no rifle, which I had lost in the darkness after dropping it from my treetop lookout. And I had no food or supplies or money. But I was alone. Alone, and free. The entire continent lay out there. I was a man, a white man, and could go to any place on it where no one knew me, and I could become new. I could become an American without a history and with no story to tell. I believed that then and for many years to come.

  So if I had a plan, that was it. If I had a thought, that was the thought.

  About the Author

  RUSSELL BANKS is the author of thirteen works of fiction, including Rule of the Bone, The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction, and Continental Drift. He lives in upstate New York.

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of the imagination. While some of the characters and incidents portrayed here can be found in accounts of the life and times of John Brown, the famous abolitionist, they have been altered and rearranged by the author to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. These characters and incidents, despite their resemblance to actual persons and known events, are therefore the products of the author’s imagination. Accordingly, the book should be read solely as a work of fiction, not as a version or interpretation of history.

  Nevertheless, the author wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the help and inspiration that he has received from Oswald Garrison Villard’s magisterial John Brown: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston, 1910), Richard Boyer’s The Legend of John Brown (New York, 1973), and Stephen Oates’s To Purge This Land with Blood, second edition (Amherst, Mass., 1984). They are excellent, deep works of biographical history. This, it bears repeating, is a work of fiction.

  The author also wishes to acknowledge and thank the many people who so generously provided information, aid, and encouragement, among them: Edwin Cotter, superintendent of the John Brown Farm and Grave, in North Elba, N.Y.; Michael S. Harper; Thomas Hughes; Paul Matthews, Chuck Wachtel; Cornel West; C. K. Williams; friends and colleagues in the Creative Writing Program and African American Studies at Princeton University; Ellen Levine of the Ellen Levine Literary Agency; and, most emphatically, Robert Jones of HarperCollins Publishers.

  MORE RAVES FOR

  Cloudsplitter

  “Extraordinary. . . . The most important novel about race published in America since William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.”.

  —Baltimore Sun

  “Massive, startlingly vivid, morally and intellectually challenging.”

  —People

  “It is difficult these days to find a book as ambitious, as intelligent and spiritual and compelling and, simply, as important as Russell Banks’ twelfth work of fiction Cloudsplitter. But here it is, what I want to call, never before having used this term in a review, a great American novel Russell Banks’ achievement in the writing of Cloudsplitter is substantial, the novel one of consequence and significance. This book matters, and we as readers can only be thankful to have heard this voice, Owen Brown’s tale of guilt and liberation, of adventure and sorrow. This is, indeed, a great American novel.”

  —Brett Lott, News & Observer of Raleigh

  “Stunningly absorbing By the time [readers] skid at last into the novel’s final phrase ... they surely will have collapsed into an exhausted, satisfied heap, oversated with sensation and emotion and knowing they have been under the spell of a first-rate storyteller who has plunged them not only into the moral and political tremors shuddering through a place and time but also into the heart of a large and exuberant family and deep into one man’s enigmatic soul.”.

  —Miami Herald

  “Rich and soulful . . . with a sturdy, modern momentum.... A novel of near-biblical proportions.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Powerfully told, Cloudsplitter is much more than a historical novel. It is a long meditation on America’s shameful enslavement of 4 million people in the land of the free. It is also a captivating portrait of a 19th century family.”

  —Playboy

  “Ambitious and haunting A valuable novel about a significant American and an important reminder of the debilitating effects of race in America.”

  —San Frannseo Chronicle

  “A pitch-perfect novel.”

  —Esquire

  “Every writer’s desktop miscellanea should include a statuette of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Marine’, he who so entrances his listeners that they cannot choose but hear such a voice speaks through Russell Banks’ new novel, a book the size of a small continent formed not by shale and lava but by themes equally raw and elemental.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Cloudsplitter is breathtaking, and, despite its length, demands to be read at breakneck speed.... If you want to know the history of that time, read history. If you want to read a superb novel of that time, read Cloudsplitter.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “An epic family tragedy.... A powerful tale of an idealis
t’s hold on the hearts and minds of his family.”

  —Boston Sunday Herald

  “A vibrant, out-sized, mesmerizing portrait of the mercurial Brown that reveals his charm as well as his piety, his compassion as well as his demonic wrath, his intellect as well as his willfulness.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “A powerful contemporary novel... it tells a crucial story from this nation’s long epic struggle against racism.”

  —Lexington Herald-Leader

  “In Cloudsplitter, Russell Banks’ mammoth novel about the raving abolitionist John Brown, we have a character of such scale and complexity that mere history of biography cannot do him justice. . . . Mr. Banks has presented himself as one of America’s most accomplished novelists.”

  —Dallas Morning News