Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
In the terrible winter of ’43,1 remember, when the four children died—the first Sarah, Charles, Peter, and the baby, Austin—Father fell into such a prolonged numbness that, before he recovered his feelings, we ourselves had descended into deepest despond, and he was obliged to nurse us, every one, back to health again. It was as if the sickness that took the children one after the other that bleak winter first invaded his spirit and from him spread like a pestilence to Mary and thence to John and Jason and me and on to Ruth and the younger children, even to poor Salmon, who was only a small boy at the time, seven years old, the youngest child not to be taken from us. It was an unsupportable burden. The fires dwindled and flickered out, and the ashes grew cold, and we walked about the house with our arms wrapped around ourselves and silently cursed the day of our birth. No one of us could rouse the other from his despair.
Father took to his Bible, and for the first time he did not read aloud or instruct us from it. He sat on a stool in the corner, muttering the words to himself, as if seeking, but not finding there, some explanation of why God had done this to us. Poverty he could endure with good spirits, and every setback and disappointment he regarded as temporary. And he had lost a child before, the first Frederick, who had died at the age of five and for whom he had grieved, and after a normal period of mourning he had resumed his life—he even named his next male child Frederick, as I have already described. But this disaster, this terrible loss, was beyond all his worst expectations, beyond all his understanding. His faith was sorely tested by it—that fact alone humiliated him and beat him down. To have four of his beloved children taken from him, each of them in its pitiful turn dying in his arms, this defeated him utterly. There was no one amongst us who could console or uplift him, for all of us, even Mary, had grown so accustomed to relying on him for consolation and uplift that if he was emptied of force, then we were, too.
This was the other, the darker side of our family’s strength. When the Old Man went down, we all went down. Happily, almost nothing ever discouraged or defeated Father, except the death of children, which, by the time of his own death, he had endured so many times that his heart must have been nearly covered over with a skein of thick gray scars.
Knowing his terrible, long suffering, one can forgive him anything, I suppose. It rarely happened, he was so strong and so right, but there were times, certainly, when I felt called to forgive Father. Not by him—he seldom asked for my forgiveness, and when he did ask, it was for some trivial transgression, some slight oversight—but called upon by myself alone. In order to save me from him.
Forgive the Old Man, I would say to myself. Come on, now, grow large, Owen, and be generous with understanding and compassion. Yes, understanding, especially that—for when one understands a human being, no matter how oppressive he has been, compassion inevitably follows. Yet there was so much that I could not understand about this man, my father, and the life we led because of him—my thoughts, my questions, were blocked, occluded: by the absolute tightness of his cause, which none of us could question, ever; and by the sheer power of Father’s personality, the relentlessness of it, how it wore us down, until we seemed to have no personalities of our own, even to each other. Certainly we spoke like him, but we could not hear it ourselves. We had to be told of it first by strangers.
The Old Man seemed to burn us out: whenever he rode off on one of his journeys to raise money for the work or on business of his own, he left us behind him, glad to have him gone. Yes, thrilled to have him gone—but dry and cold and light, like pieces of char or bits of cinder, like ash. When the Old Man left, we did not speak much, not to one another, not to strangers.
I meant here to write about how we spoke and why our speech was so strangely mannered. I see that I have done something else. I close now, as ash, again... or still: I do not know which.
Chapter 9
It’s as if I’m actually living there, in North Elba, and in those olden times when I was young. As if, weeks ago, when I first began speaking of it, I went tumbling down some twisting, narrow shaft that emerged there. And now, still clambering along a descending maze of tunnels and caves, I am unable to find my way back again to the surface of the earth, to my cabin in Altadena and daylight. The only light down inside these cold, rock-walled chambers is the light of memory flaring up, illuminating rough pictures and writings overhead, like those the Indians drew in ages past to invoke and placate their pagan gods. I stand below, gazing in wonder at the pictures, and the figures begin to move and speak, and my wonder, as you have seen so many times in these pages, turns first to warmth of recognition, then to gladness, and then, as the story told by the figures grows violent or somber, turns fearful and sad, I stumble backwards away from the pictures and into the darkness of the cave again. Soon I am falling, scrambling, clawing my way along yet another shaft in this warren, until the floor beneath my feet finally levels out, and once more I stop and stand, and when the light of memory spreads from my face, I see in its glow that I have arrived in a new chamber... and there, up on the walls—a mingling of shadow and light—it moves and dances ... and another, different event in my long-ago, half-forgotten life commences to unfold before me!
Today as I write I find myself still situated in the chamber of that first summer in North Elba, the summer of ’50, when I was twenty-six, and I am recalling that it was for me an especially instructive time, perhaps because of the absence at the farm of my recently married elder brothers, John and Jason, who were ranked above me at that time in Father’s little army and who, therefore, normally would have superseded me in the work. Father’s work. The Lord’s work, as he constantly reminded us, of freeing the slaves. For until the slaves were free—as he told us over and over again—none of us were free.
To Father, white and black Americans alike were bound by slavery: the physical condition of the enslaved, he insisted, was the moral condition of the free. This was not some vague, safely abstract principle, such as propounded by the New England philosophers. No, for Father, quite literally, we Americans, white as much as black, Northern as much as Southern, anti-slave as much as pro-, we were, all of us, presently living under the rule of Satan. It was an inarguable truth to Father that man’s essential task while on this earth was to bring both his personal and his civic life into total accord with the will and overarching law of God. And since a republic is a type of state that by definition is governed by laws created and enforced by its citizens, whenever in a republic those laws do not conform to the laws of God, because those laws can be changed by men, they must be changed by men. And not to change them placed the mortal soul of every one of its citizens in terrible jeopardy. Not to struggle constantly to overthrow the system of slavery was to abandon our Republic, was to surrender our civic freedoms and responsibilities, was to give our mortal souls over to the rule of Satan. We were obliged to oppose slavery, then, not merely to preserve and perfect the Republic, although that alone was a worthy enough task, but to defeat Satan. It was our holy, our peculiarly American, obligation.
Simple. Or so it seemed. For even though I understood Father’s logic well enough, I didn’t always understand his applications of that logic to the specific circumstances, contingencies, and conditions that arose daily in our lives. Which meant that, on a day-to-day basis, I sometimes did not know right from wrong.
For instance, there was the time—after we had passed the young Negro couple, Emma and James Cannon, on to safety, as we assumed—when we discovered that, in fact, there was considerable evidence that they had murdered their master and that there was indeed a warrant from the Commonwealth of Virginia for their arrest and return. When this came out, many of the whites in North Elba grew fearful and angry. These were the same, good people who, before this episode, as I have shown, had been quietly aiding Father and me and various of the Negroes of Timbuctoo in our attempts to spirit escaped slaves northward. Now, however, they wished us to cease this activity. And I found myself in partial agreement with them.
When Father simply answered that he knew nothing of the Negro couple, there was little the marshal could do but pass north to the next known stop on the Railroad, there to interrogate the Quaker Captain Keifer. Up there, most officers of the law in those days had a pretty good idea of who was working on the Underground Railroad and who was not and, unless prodded by warrants and writs, did little to obstruct them.
It was our white neighbors, the Brewsters, the Nashes, and even Mr. Thompson, who, when they learned of the warrant for the arrest of the Cannons, grew frightened and came to Father and spoke angrily against our having escorted murderers north. Father sat on his stool and, while the men stood around him, heard them out. They were a delegation of three, apparently chosen to represent to Father the views and desires of the entire community. As known abolitionists themselves and friends of John Brown, they were no doubt thought to be more likely to get a hearing from him than if others, less sympathetic to the cause, had come.
Mr. Thompson was their spokesman. “Helping slaves to escape from slavery is a good thing to do,” he said. “A good thing. Upright. But, really, John, helping to spirit known murderers out of the country—that’s a different matter altogether.” He told Father that, as we Browns could not assure the community that the people we were escorting to freedom were decent Christians and not criminals or moral reprobates, it was our neighbors’ wish that we cease our activities at once. It was partly a consequence, he said, of our insistence on working outside and separate from the churches and other white institutions and individuals who could provide our cargo with bona fides to certify that the fugitives were not criminals. But it was also a consequence, he pointed out, of Father’s determination to work with the Negroes of Timbuctoo, especially with men like Elden Fleete and Lyman Epps, men who, Mr. Thompson and the others believed, had no particular interest in farming here. All the whites but Father, Mr. Thompson pointed out, had come here to North Elba solely to farm and raise their families in peace and security. Even many of the Negroes had come here for that purpose. Now, however, everyone, white and black alike, was being interrogated by a United States marshal, and bounty-hunters like Billingsly and lazy rascals like Partridge had taken to skulking around the place. “Let the abolitionist Negroes themselves, Fleete and Epps, conduct escaping slaves, or people who claim to be escaping slaves, on to Canada on their own, if that’s what they want to do with their time,” Mr. Thompson told Father. “But we whites, John, we should stay clear of it. Completely.”
He took a long while to make his case, and when he had finished, Father stood and drew himself up to his full height, which was not exceptional, but because of his large face, he often appeared quite tall. He said, “Gentlemen, you are all my friends. And I would like to put you at your ease, but I cannot just now. I will make my complete answer to your charges and concerns, but I prefer to make it to the entire community, and not just you three. I’ll do it come Sunday morning in the church, where I have grown accustomed to speaking now and then. I would be pleased if you gave this out to the others, so that all who have an interest in the matter may hear me.”
Then, with no further ceremony or words, he let them out of the house and, by abruptly turning his back and shutting fast the door, dismissed them.
That Sunday morning, a cold, rainy day, I remember, we all, including Lyman and Susan Epps, rode in the wagon into the village of North Elba and marched into the little white Presbyterian church there and took our accustomed seats in our usual pew towards the front. We sat in a single row, with Father on the aisle. There was an unusually large turnout, for this matter had generated considerable heat and feeling in the town. The small chapel was packed with red-faced farmers and their families and smelled of their boots and wet wool clothing. The entire Thompson clan was present, taking up two pews to our one, and I noted Ruth and young Henry Thompson exchange a significantly friendly glance, and I remember saying to myself, A-ha! What have we here?
The preacher, the Reverend Spofford Hall from Vermont, a scrawny, somewhat insipid fellow whom Father abhorred for his lax liberalism in religion, gave out with his usual, mechanical invocation, after which the small choir stood and sang the opening hymn. Sang it with unaccustomed force, I thought, due perhaps to four of the eight being Negroes from the settlement, who must have known that there was scheduled in today’s ceremonies a thing of particular significance to them. They sounded like a choir three times their size, and Father’s knees joggled up and down in close time to the music, and his eyes glistened happily as they sang.
At last, the Reverend Hall stepped to the lectern set before the spare, New England-style altar and announced in his high, watery voice, “Today our neighbor Mister Brown will address us.” Then he stood down and turned the meeting over to Father.
It was a sermon that I had heard by then numerous times and listened to often enough afterwards, and I can hear the Old Man’s voice today, these many years later, as clearly as I did that cold, gray morning in North Elba. I see him standing there, straight as a tree, screw-faced and tense, his wet, fox-red hair sticking up, and I listen to him begin his first sentence, and as I write, my mouth seems to open, as if I am to speak his entire sermon for him, word for word.
“Good morning, neighbors” the Old Man said.
“Though outside these walls the rain falls, and the mountains be all hid in clouds, and though the chilled wind today blows out of the northwest, we here inside our small sanctuary are dry and warm together, are we not?
“We are comfortable, friends and neighbors, and we are safe, and we sing praises to the Lord, our heavenly Father, and we offer Him our prayers of thanksgiving, so as to signify our pleasure and our heartfelt gratitude to Him who, at His pleasure, hath granted that comfort and that safety to us. Do we not?
“Comfort and safety which has been granted to us—we who clear the forests, we who till the fields, we who raise our livestock. Little people of the valley between the mountains, that is what we are, friends. Men, women, and children struggling merely to survive and if possible to prosper in a hard place in a hard time. Are we not?
“Comfort and safety granted to us—who deserve nothing. Who deserve neither comfort nor safety, certainly, but who deserve neither discomfort nor danger, either. Understand me—granted to us, who deserve nothing! Not even to exist. Is this not the case, friends?
“I speak of everyone in the community, all of us—the blackest and the poorest among us, and the whitest and the richest. The most innocent, and the most foully corrupted. The most pious, and the least pious. The young, and the old. For we do not, not a one of us, deserve to live. It is not something the Lord owes us! Can you argue with that, friends?
“So that, if there is a debt, neighbors, if there is something that is owed someone, then it runs the other way, does it not?
“For who among us asked to be born? Who among us made such a request? No, white or black, rich or poor, not a one of us had such a right or even the means to make that request. And now, having been born, having been
“The Lord giveth, neighbors, and the Lord taketh away. And does He not do so at His pleasure, friends? Not ours! No, it is only at the Lord’s own pleasure that we exist, is it not?
“We cannot cajole Him, we cannot argue our case, as if He were an Elizabethtown judge and we a plaintiff’s attorney. We cannot even beg. No, all we poor people can do, having come to an awareness of our lives, is give thanks. Give thanks, and then live out our lives according to that high, holy purpose, the purpose of continuing to give thanks, over and over again, amen.
“Contemplate the alternative, neighbors. Briefly, just briefly, is all—for to contemplate that alternative is truly painful. Nothingness is the alternative! A blasted absence! Contemplate nothingness for a few short seconds, neighbors, and you will turn away in horror, and then you will give thanks unto the Lord. Then you will sing His praises. And you will leap and dance with joy! Not for the pleasure of being alive, for life is all too often no pleasure whatsoever, but you will leap and dance with joy and thanksgiving for having had the opportunity to exist at all!
“I am thinking, this rainy, cold morning, neighbors, of old Job. A farmer and stockman, like many of us here. I am thinking of a pious man with a large, loving family who, like us, lived in a broad valley surrounded by mountains, where there were wolves and lions and bears, where the cold winds blew in winter, and where, beyond the mountains, there were enemies lurking who coveted his fields and crops and envied the peacefulness and the fruitfulness of his life. Can you imagine Job as a man very like us? Can you?