Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

As instructed by the Old Man, Lyman and I had been three days and nights down along Indian Pass, cutting a trail wide enough for a man on horseback to get through to North Elba from the old Tahawus mining camp. Father would be away that September, once again — this time, as usual, for the last time, he hoped — settling his besieged financial affairs with Mr. Perkins, and he had charged the two of us with this task before leaving. The Underground Railroad station at Timbuctoo, with its links south to Tahawus and north to Canada, was the one segment of Father’s Subterranean Passway that he felt he could control, and he wished to make it a model and a beginning for the whole. He intended to make it off-limits at pain of death for slave-catchers, man-stealers, and bounty-hunters, so that once he had made this small segment of the Railroad secure, with armed men posted at the passes and gorges and up on strategic ridges, with fortified resting places and storehouses along the way, and with only the most trusted radical whites living in the farmlands below the Adirondacks allowed to provide arms, provisions, and safe houses, he would begin extending the Passway southward into the Appalachians, mile by mile into the mountainous forests of eastern Pennsylvania, until he came to western Maryland, where he would commence his invasion of the enemy’s homeland itself. By this means we would bleed the South white, he declared. His fantasy for years; and then his dream; and finally his plan, too: now the three had at last coalesced, and he was beginning in this small way in our very neighborhood to put all three, fantasy, dream, and plan, into action.

At the Tahawus mining camp, called the Upper Village, there was a new manager, a man named Seybolt Johnson from Albany, replacing the previous supervisor, the infamous Mr. Wilkinson. Mr. Johnson was a genuine abolitionist, faithful and true, who had worked the Underground Railroad for years out of Albany and Troy. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, he, like so many others, had sought alternative routes north for the escaping slaves, and as he was a longtime employee of the Adirondack Mining Company’s main office, in Albany, he knew, even before he assumed the position of manager of the Tahawus mines, that he could play an important role in aiding the Underground Railroad out there in the wilderness. Which he had done, for on his arrival at the Upper Village, he at once contacted Father and quickly arranged to regularize the passage of escaped slaves from towns and cities south of Albany to the Upper Village mining camp and on through the northwoods to Timbuctoo, North Elba, Paul Smith’s famous hunting lodge, Massena, and Canada.

Father trusted Mr. Johnson, mainly because Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman trusted him, but also because, immediately upon his arrival at Tahawus, Mr. Johnson had set about to improve the lot of his Irish workers, who had suffered so terribly under the iron hand of the hypocritical Mr. Wilkinson. Mr. Seybolt Johnson was that rarity, a white man of the managerial class who felt towards his workers and Negroes alike that there but for the grace of God went he. “The man is a true Christian,” Father had pronounced after his first visit with him. “We can work with him.”

Thus Lyman and I, with axes and crowbars, were sent out to bush the old footpath through Indian Pass and make it into a proper trail. Starting at Timbuctoo, we worked from north to south and in three days had gotten nearly to the halfway point, about seven miles in from North Elba, with Mount Colden on our right and, hovering above its shoulder, the huge, rocky chest and head of Mount Mclntyre. Mount Marcy — or Tahawus, as we still called it, Cloudsplitter, the old Indian name for the giant — was on our left, its great shadow permanently cast across the rocky bottom where we labored day after day and camped in a sweet-smelling balsam lean-to at night. Indian Pass was dangerous, rough ground. A man or a horse could easily fall and break a leg or tumble from a ledge into a rocky pit. The long, narrow defile was shaded in the daytime, and down in the gorge between the mountains, the Northern Star was blocked out at night, and moonlight rarely fell, and a man had to be able to trust the feel of the trail under his feet in order to get through. It was all too easy to get lost there, even at midday, to wander inadvertently down a bear path or deer trail and soon become disoriented in the darkness and dense woods. People had been known to disappear into these woods and starve or freeze to death, their picked bones found years later by a lone hunter or trapper.

The pass itself was colder than the peaks and cliffs that towered above it, and in some places slubs of old, gray snow remained year-round. High, sheer walls of mossy rock rose up beside us and disappeared into the mists overhead, while below on the floor of the gorge we chopped, dug, and shoved, and when necessary laid down narrow log bridges to cross the gills and brooks and the peaty muskegs that abounded there. We would finish one arduous task of clearing and move on to the next bend in the path and instantly come to a new obstacle — a fallen, primeval spruce tree six feet in circumference, a head-high tangle of thick, twisted roots, a mudslide, a wall of enormous boulders — which we were obliged to cut or move aside when we could or, when we couldn’t, carve a pathway through lesser trees or around smaller rocks. Our simple intent, our one thought and standard, was to make it possible for a horse or a string of horses, by day or night in any season, to carry frightened, exhausted fugitives from slavery through to freedom. That thought drove and organized us, and as we worked we talked of little else.

At night, though, lying back on our mattress of layered balsam boughs, with the fire guttering out, we spoke of other things, naturally. Lyman and I had not been together like this for a long time, a sad time, which I regarded with considerable regret. But out here alone in the wilderness, as of old, we soon found ourselves speaking our innermost thoughts to one another once again, talking of our respective childhoods and early days, our hopes for the future, and our beliefs regarding all first things. Our lives in every way were significantly different, but in a paradoxical way, this let us know all the better how we ourselves might have lived, had Lyman been born white and I black. Despite our differences, Lyman and I regarded ourselves, except for race, as remarkably similar, the way that lovers often do.

This is a complicated and painful recognition for a black and a white man to make. On both sides, envy and anger get confusedly mingled with love and trust. And so it was with us. Or at least with me. I now knew, for instance, that my thwarted love for Susan was my love for Lyman gone all wrong, fatally corrupted by guilt and envy. I did not want to love her — I did not love her at all — so much as I wanted to neutralize my powerful feelings for Lyman. For they had frightened me: they were unnatural; they were the unavoidable consequence of a manly love finding itself locked inside a white maris racialist guilt, of Abel’s sweet, brotherly trust betrayed by Cain’s murderous envy.

We were on that third night out seated before our fire, after having eaten a supper of trout pulled from a pool in the trickling beginnings of the Au Sable and potatoes carried in from home, and we were speculating on the nature of the earth before the arrival of the plants and animals — whether it had been a warm planet, as some scientists were then claiming, or cold and covered with ice, as others thought, or whether the Bible was to be believed in this matter in a literal way, when so many self-professed Christians nowadays, even including Father, regarded its description of God’s creation of the earth as figurative and allegorical.