Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

That same night, we adjourned to the rooms where John and Wealthy had been living — since the removal to North Elba, Father had not maintained living quarters in Springfield, and consequently he and I had been sleeping in the office of Brown & Perkins’s empty warehouse. There Father instructed me to write up a statement of advice and principles which he could present to the Negroes tomorrow night and a draft of a pledge. He had arrived over the years at a high estimation of my literary abilities, although he had little more to go on than my letters and the help I gave him with his own. He also knew that I believed his style to be on the eccentric side of my own. Reluctantly, he had come to agree with me, and thus he frequently enjoyed employing me as a kind of village scribe, in which he was the village. He would say aloud what he meant or wished to mean, pacing back and forth, hands clasped behind him, brow furrowed in thought, while I scratched away with my pen, setting down his thoughts and intentions in language that I hoped would be readily understood by the man or woman to whom those thoughts and intentions were directed, a person who, with a transcription of Father’s own words in hand, would very likely have been puzzled or merely annoyed.

With his composition “Sambo’s Mistakes,” Father had tried working alone, and I think that afterwards he was sorry he had done so and in time blamed its failure to be published on his inability to set down on the page the true nature of his thoughts. Since then, whenever he wished to make a written statement of any importance or delicacy, he’d taken to calling on me. Increasingly, this job of scribe had become a pleasure for me — it gave me, naturally, a certain degree of importance not otherwise available, and it provided me with the chance to voice some of my own thoughts and beliefs as well.

Father talked and tried out first one sentence and then another, rejecting, editing, retracing his words, struggling to make his statement to the Negroes. He paced the length and breadth of the sitting room and rumbled on into the cold autumn night, while John and Wealthy slept in the adjacent chamber, and I sat at the little table and by the dim, flickering light of a Nantucket lamp, wrote down much of what he said and most of what he meant or wanted to say.

It was nearly dawn before we had a preamble, which we entitled “Words of Advice,” and a pledge, entitled “Agreement;” whereupon we adjourned to the Brown & Perkins office and slept a few hours on our cots, before having to commence the day’s work, which then consisted mostly of writing letters to attorneys and creditors and attempting to find a tenant for the warehouse who would take over Brown & Perkins’s lease.

That evening, Father and I — this time without John and Wealthy, for she was newly pregnant, and they would soon be departing for their farm in Ohio and thus could not be a part of our work here — returned to the Zion Methodist Church, where we were joined by most of the Negroes who had remained until the end of the meeting the evening before. They numbered thirty-two men and nine women, the majority of them between thirty and forty years of age, with a sprinkling of very young and elderly men among them. Seen together like that, grim-visaged, muscular, and healthy, their dark brown and black faces stern and determined, they constituted a formidable-looking force. I felt proud to be associated with them.

More than half of the company were friends and acquaintances of ours, the best among the blacks of Springfield. I was glad to see Mr. Harrison Wheeler still there, and Deacon Samuels, also the apothecary Mr. Minahan and his teenaged son, and several of the fellows who at different times had worked alongside me in the warehouse sorting and baling wool, trustworthy young men with stout arms and strong backs and anger to spare. Most of the Negroes who were lucky enough to be properly employed or have a profession were engaged at a level below their natural or acquired abilities, and as a result a Negro apothecary often had the intelligence and many of the skills of a white physician, and a Negro laborer was frequently the equal of a white foreman. Thus Father’s determination to do business with Negroes was based on no condescending desire to provide charity; it was, as he said, practical. And he was rarely disappointed by them — nowhere near as often as when he had to employ or deal financially with white people, who he believed were more likely than blacks to cheat or cut corners.

When everyone had been seated and the door closed and, at Father’s instructions, bolted, we began with a singing of the hymn “Broad Is the Path That Leads to Death,” a favorite of mine. Then Father announced that he would present to us a statement which he had drawn up. Holding the paper close to his eyes, like a court clerk reading a judge’s sentence, he commenced to read.

Words of Advice! To the Springfield, Massachusetts, branch of the United States League of Gileadites. Adopted November 15,1850, as written and recommended by John Brown.

Union is Strength!

Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery.

Witness the case of Cinque, he of everlasting memory, who seized the slave-ship Amistad, and the outpouring of sympathy and interest that followed hard upon it. The trial for life of one so bold and to some extent a successful man, for having defended his rights as a man in good earnest, aroused more sympathy amongst whites throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of more than the three millions of our submissive Negro population.

We need not mention our American white people’s response to the Greeks who are now struggling valiantly against the oppressive Turks, their sympathy for the Poles against mighty Russia, and for the Hungarians against Austria and Russia combined, in order to prove this. The truth is, no jury can be found in the Northern states that would convict a man, whether black or white, for defending his legitimate rights to the last extremity. That this is well understood by Southern Congressmen, who now appear to govern us, we see by their insistence that the right of trial by jury should not be granted to the fugitive slave.

Then he recited several sentences which I had tried to excise but which Father had insisted on including, for he could not leave off giving advice of this sort, not just to Negroes, but to everyone. Although he assured me that it would be obvious to all that he was criticizing white people, not black, I knew how it would sound to his audience, for I had endured a form of the same hectoring lecture for my whole life. But giving unwanted advice was his characteristic tic, and there was no avoiding it, so I cringed and awaited its passing.

Colored people have ten times the number of fast friends among the whites as they suppose. But they would have ten times the number they have now, were blacks but half as much in earnest to secure their dearest rights as they are to ape the follies and extravagances of their white neighbors and to indulge in idle show, in ease, and in luxury, if Negroes in America were to demonstrate in their private and public behavior the virtues which whites claim to admire but seem for the most part unable to practice themselves, of temperance, modesty, and decorum in all things, thrift, and charity, then they would acquire for themselves the widespread admiration of many of those who today revile and scorn them for their frivolity and wastefulness.

Soon, happily, his scolding done, he was again delivering his charge to us.

Should one of our number be arrested, all the rest of us must collect together and sternly surround the officers and constables as quickly as possible, so as to outnumber and intimidate our adversaries, even those who were not present and only afterwards heard rumor of our seriousness of purpose and our surprising numbers. And no able-bodied man shall appear on the ground unequipped and without his weapons, and thus his intentions, clearly exposed to view. Your musket and your sword, you may say, are to exterminate varmints. Let our adversary ponder whether of two legs or four.