Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

In early June, as Mary came close to her time, we were conducting to Canada an elderly couple whose sons had gone before them the previous year and a young boy accompanied by his gentle, bespectacled uncle. All four had escaped off the same Maryland plantation, which had become notorious along the Railroad, due to the cruelty of its master, a Dutchman named Hammlicher, and to the particular viciousness of his white overseer, a man named Camden, and due to the fact that Harriet Tubman herself had taken a special interest in facilitating the escape of the Hammlicher slaves. Mysterious, elusive, and yet seemingly everywhere at once, Miss Tubman was thought to have had a family connection among the Hammlicher slaves, through one of her own lost children, perhaps, and thus had lent it her special attention. Already at least fifteen of the several hundred human beings owned by this man had been spirited up along the Chesapeake Bay to Philadelphia and New York and thence on up the Hudson to Troy and freedom. But now, because of the increase in the number of slave-catchers in those cities along the old route, Miss Tubman had decided to send her charges north across the Adirondacks by way of Timbuctoo.

When Father had met her in Hartford that winter, he had convinced her of the good use to which she might put this previously obscure route, and his personal connection with her, when he revealed it to the Timbuctoo Negroes, had instantly won them back. Father’s reputation for honesty was such that no one questioned his claim; it was sufficient unto itself. How could they have refused to ally themselves with John Brown, when he came to them with the endorsement of the famous Harriet Tubman? The great Harriet! The General! None of them had ever met her or even seen her at a distance — she was all legend to them, one of the great African women, like Sojourner Truth, who seemed less a modern American saboteur of slavery than an ancient spirit-leader, an invincible, sometimes invisible, female warrior protected by the old African gods. Father’s having met and, at the instigation of Frederick Douglass, having spoken privately with Miss Tubman gave him an authority that at once renewed Lyman’s commitment to running fugitives with us Browns and drew with him more of the others in the settlement than we would need. It made our Timbuctoo stop on the Underground Railroad suddenly important in the only world that mattered to the Negroes and to Father, and once again, increasingly as the summer wore on, the only one that mattered to me.

Slavery, slavery, slavery! I could not have a thought that was not somehow linked to it. It was an obsession. At times, it came to feel like a form of insanity, for I was incapable of a normal thought, a single private thought that began and ended with me and did not identify me as a white man. And this was all due to Father.

It was during our run with the four Hammlicher fugitives that Mary came to her time. And before we were able to get back from the Canadian border to North Elba, she gave birth to a son, her next-to-last child, born strangled and crushed by the terrible trial of his birth, leaving Mary herself nearly dead and Father frantic with fear that he would lose her.

The excitement of our run to Canada had made our blood race, and we were still thrilled by it when we returned home. It was almost as if we had Miss Tubman herself aboard, her long rifle at the ready, and for the first time in months there was no tension between me and Lyman, which put even Father into a jolly mood as we rode the wagon back down along the rough roads from Massena. We had passed a party of Indian hunters along the way, Abenakis, French-speaking Algonquins from Lower Canada, a remnant of a remnant people, and had engaged in deep speculation amongst ourselves as to their racial origins, Lyman arguing for ancient Africa, Father for Asia, and Watson for the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Then, when we arrived at the farm, we were met by the grim sight of a birthing gone bad, the sad familiarity of it, the desolation and dashed hopes and expectations, the terrible, bloody, failed work of it, and all our male heartiness and camaraderie, our blustery pride in our good and difficult work, went suddenly silent and cold. Men go numb at these times, I discovered. That’s what they do. All feeling bleeds out of us. We suddenly realize that we know nothing of what it means to the woman who has carried this child inside her body for nine months and has suffered through the excruciating pain and work of bearing it and has had to see its tiny body emerge into the world lifeless, battered and bruised by the vain effort, a grotesque, sorrowful waste. We do think sorrow and grief and pity. But we feel nothing. Husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers, we all respond the same way. First we say to ourselves that we are to blame, then we say that we are unfairly deprived; we are the cause, we are not the agent; we are the custodian, we are a mere bystander: every feeling is cut down by its near opposite, so that in the end we come up numb, silent, too large, too rough, too coarse, too healthy and strong, to be in the same room with the poor, devastated women, our shattered, weary mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters.

Numb. Cold. This, I know, was how Father felt that June afternoon when we men, dirty, exhausted, full of our own importance and valor, entered the house and saw that Mary’s baby had been born dead. We are there at the beginning and almost never at the end. Father, Watson, Salmon, Oliver, and I, and it was how Lyman felt, too, and how he had felt when his own baby was born dead, I now understood. There’s no way to change this; we are men and must remain men. It was how my brothers felt, their young faces dark and worried with the fruitless search for an appropriate emotion. And it was how I felt. Numb. Cold.

But so different was it from when I had exploded with rage on the raw, gray morning seven weeks before, when Susan’s baby was born dead, that I was forced to remember the earlier event anew and this time to regard it with dismay. My rage then made no sense to me now. Lyman’s silence and withdrawal, which had seemed strange to me then, I now saw as having been the only sensible, normal response for a man. I should have reacted as he had. From what hole in my unconscious mind had that rage of mine emerged? Why had I not reacted instead with this all-too-familiar, cold cancellation of feeling that surrounded me now?

I saw that my anger had been caused not by Susan’s suffering and loss at all but by my guilt for wishing that I could have stood that morning in Lyman’s place instead of mine, for believing somehow that I should have been Susan’s husband and the father of her dead infant and should not have been this farmer standing at his side. I had felt guilt but could not show it, even to myself, and so I had pounded the walls with my fists and roared like a wounded lion. Lyman had instinctively understood the nature and source of my rage, and he had hastily withdrawn himself and his wife from my presence and had stayed away from us, until now, until Father had returned and displaced me and reshaped the family and its priorities. Until once again it was slavery, slavery, slavery. And — inescapably — race, race, race. Until once again, due to our obsession, we were, as it were, insane. Which to the Negroes, to Lyman, made us perfectly comprehensible and trustworthy — sane. Not just another dangerous batch of well-intentioned, Christian white folks.

Mary’s recovery from her delivery was slow and erratic. It had, in fact, been many years since she had been able to return to her normal state of good health following a pregnancy; she was no longer young, after all, and this had been an especially difficult and painful birthing, leaving her physically devastated, without even the joy of a new infant to help her heal.