Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“What… what do you mean?”

“I bear Lyman no resentment for this, but it’s hurt me, Susan.”

She appeared shocked and said that it could not be true. “You shouldn’t be envious of Lyman. He loves and admires your father over all other men,” she said. “But you, you’re your father’s son, Mister Brown. And your father, he loves you for that, I know. More than he can ever love Lyman.”

“No! You don’t understand. You see, Lyman is more important to him than I am. And with good reason.”

She sighed heavily. “What are you wanting me to say to you, Mister Brown?”

I was silent for a moment. Finally, I said, “Please, just tell me why you’ve moved away from us.”

For the first time, she shifted her eyes away from mine. “Well, I explained it to your mother and your sister back then, back when we first decided. It was due to Lyman wanting to farm his own land and to live in his own house. That’s all. We been with you all for a long time.”

“No, not Lyman! I know why he left, and I know the real reason, too! I’m the cause of that. No, I want you to tell me why you left us.”

“It’s very simple, Mister Brown. I went where my husband said. That’s the whole of it. And you’re not the cause of anything Lyman done, Mister Brown,” she declared. Then she lifted herself to her full height and said, “This is not a right conversation for us to be having.”

“Yes, it is, because we need to talk. I need you to hear me. Even though you’ll despise me, because it’s… it’s a sin for me to feel for you as I do, and I have no right to say anything about it to you, because—”

She placed her hand gently on my arm and stopped me. “Mister Brown, please, sir, I know you’re a decent man. You are. But you are all mixed up” she declared, looking straight at me. “I’m saying this to you, Mister Brown, because I like you, I truly do, and I know you don’t mean me no harm. But Lyman, he told me what happened last winter between you and him, when you come back from all your travels to England and you beat on him out there in the barn that day. So I know things, Mister Brown. Maybe more even than Lyman knows, since he is a man and is a little mixed up about these same things, too. But I’ve watched you, Mister Brown, and felt sorry for you, because I can see that you are all confused and mixed up and angered. Maybe due to your father. Who is a strong, good man doing good works, and he believes that he needs your help, so he won’t send you off from him. Mainly that, I think. That, and us being coloreds and you wanting to help our people like you do. It’s the two things. They make you think about Lyman too much, which is how you come now to be thinking about me too much.”

“No;’ I said. “It’s not that. None of it.”

“Just stop that now! Stop. I’m not angry with you, Mister Brown, because I know you don’t mean any harm. But I’m a colored woman, and my husband is a colored man. And we wouldn’t be having this conversation, you know, not a word of it, if my husband and I was white people.”

I stepped back from her. “Yes. You’re right. Please, then, please tell me what should I do.”

“Do? Not for me to say, Mister Brown,” she said tenderly. “I know you want to be natural and peaceful and respectful with colored folks. But if you can’t, well, maybe you should stick to your own kind. Lots of good folks, white and colored alike, that’s what they do. Go away from your father and live amongst white people. Why not go out there to Ohio, Mister Brown, where your other brothers are, and find yourself a wife and settle down with her?”

“A white woman.”

“Well, yes.”

For a long time, I said nothing. Then I whispered, “I can’t do that.” She smiled at me, but as if from a great height. “Well, Mister Brown, then I don’t know what you can do,” she said. And, abruptly, she turned her back and walked away.

“You ain’t half the man your father is.”

The words came without warning, and they chilled my blood. They do even now, more than a half-century later. They were true then; they are true now.

The first time I heard them, they were uttered by Lyman; but after that, from then on, they were said to me in my own voice, the sentence dripping into my ear like slow poison. You ain’t half the man your father is. To silence them, I would, again and again, for years, be obliged to rouse myself into a fury, a literal blood-letting, making of my whole body a visible and tangible shout. For as long as my shout reverberated in the air, I would not hear them.

You ain’t half the man your father is. And who was he? Twice the man I was, and twice the man he seemed. And yet not half himself, either. Before Kansas, the Old Man had always been larger than his reputation; after Kansas, he was smaller. Although, over time, he himself changed not a whit. I changed, certainly, and nearly everyone else changed. But not Father. Merely, his reputation caught up to the reality and then surpassed it, so that the man who, outside the family, had been known as a somewhat peculiar radical abolitionist with a violent temperament, a somber activist with a huge reservoir of religious enthusiasm, a wild fellow who, despite his vague, crack-brained plan for a slave insurrection, was nonetheless oddly trusted by influential and otherwise rational Negroes and was likewise understandably mistrusted by most whites — that man came over time to be known as a heroic guerilla leader, a courageous and brilliant military man who feared only God and had no other ambition than to bring slavery to an end. He came quickly to be known as a magnificent fighter on horseback, an inspiration and example to lesser men, which is to say, to all decent, anti-slavery white men: for none of them, no matter how thoroughly he loathed slavery and loved his Negro brethren, in his loathing and love was as pure as Captain John Brown, as clear-eyed as he, as unequivocal and uncompromised as he. So that when my father-Father, the Old Man, Mister Brown, Citizen John Brown — got himself turned into Captain John Brown, it was not merely a military rank that had been added to his name but an honorific, and the rank, as if he had been given it at birth, instantly became an integral part of his name, permanently attached to his identity, like that of Governor Bradford, Admiral Nelson, Chief Tecumseh.

In North Elba, though, and to Lyman Epps especially, Father was known entirely for what he was — known more clearly for that to Lyman than even to me. So when Lyman told me I was not half that, he downright shriveled me. He struck my manhood away and left me standing before him a child. Worse than a child: a failed adult.

Most men secretly know that there lies hidden inside them the boy they once were and believe they still are, and all the work a man does in his life is accompanied by various stratagems designed to keep that child hidden from view. From his own view, especially. But that night in late summer at Indian Pass, which lies yonder in the darkness seven miles to the south of our old farmhouse, when Lyman raised his lip and sneered and then declared that I was not half the man my father was, he made it impossible for me ever after to hide my true self from my false self. It was as if, that night in the cave, Lyman were the only man alive who could testify as to both my true character and the true character of my father: he was our sole shared character witness and, thus, was the only man capable of making the comparison between me and Father and making it stick.

I don’t know why this was so. Lyman knew us both well, of course, intimately, domestically, out in the fields, and on the Railroad running slaves north; for several years, he had observed both Father and me more closely than had anyone else who was not a family member. But that was not it. The truth is, I made Lyman the authoritative witness myself; I myself validated his testimony.