Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

I wonder sometimes if you can understand this. And if you can accept and make use of it. Oh, I know that there is a public reality and a private reality and that my best use — for you, for me, and for all those lingering ghosts as well — has been to keep to the private and ignore the rest. But even so, I do want my story, if possible, to impinge upon the public reality, on history, and I mean here and there to tell it accordingly. For instance, it has become almost a commonplace in recent years to say that Father, like many Christians of his generation, began as a principled, religious-minded young Northern man agitated by Negro slavery in the South and racialism everywhere, and that, like many such men, he understandably became in middle-age an actively engaged opponent of slavery and racialism, but that in his old age he changed, suddenly and inexplicably, into a free-booting guerilla, whence he moved swiftly on to become a terrorist and finally, astonishingly, a martyr. Thus, looking back through a glass colored by the Civil War, most Americans nowadays find his actions incomprehensible, and they call him mad, or wish to. So while I’m here to tell you certain things that you cannot otherwise know, I also wish to remind you that Father’s progression from activist to martyr, his slow march to willed disaster, can be viewed, not as a descent into madness, but as a reasonable progression — especially if one consider the political strength of those who in those days meant to keep chattel slavery the law of the land. Remember, all-out war between the North and the South was unthinkable to us: due to an ancient, deeply ingrained racialism, any war undertaken by the citizens of the North for the purpose of freeing an enslaved people whose skins were black seemed a pure impossibility. We believed instead that the Northerners — when it finally came clear to them what we already knew, that the South now wholly owned the government of the nation — would simply secede from the Union, leaving behind a nation in which a huge number of our fellow Americans and all their unborn progeny were chattel slaves: literal, unrepatriated prisoners-of-war. Before that could happen, we meant to liberate as many of them as possible. And failing that, failing to free our prisoners-of-war prior to the eventual and, as it seemed to us, inevitable cessation of hostilities between the Northern and Southern states, the one side cowardly and the other evil, we meant to slay every slaveholder we could lay our hands on. And those whose throats we could not reach directly or whose heads we could not find in the sights of our guns, we would terrorize from afar, hoping thereby to rouse them to bloody acts of reprisal, which might in turn straighten the spines of our Northern citizenry and bring a few of them over to our side.

We did not want the North to secede from the Union and make its own slave-free republic or join with Canada in some new, colonized relation to Olde England or even make with Canada an independent, slave-free nation of the north. And it never once occurred to us that the Southerners would leave the Union. They didn’t have to. They already owned the entire machinery of government in Washington and in those years, the late ’50s, were merely solidifying and making permanent their control of it by carrying slavery into the western territories. In our own way, with no knowledge of the coming Civil War, we were fighting to preserve the American Republic.

But I was speaking of my father’s gradual progression from antislavery agitator all the way to terrorist, guerilla captain, and martyr, how it seemed — not in hindsight, but at the time of its occurrence — a reasonable and moral response to the times and to the deep, continuous frustration they created. Father may have been the first to resort to pure terrorism for political and military purposes, but the wisdom and necessity of it were early on as plain to the other side as to us: they never needed our example to inspire them to butcher innocent civilians. And without Father, that’s what I would have been, merely an innocent civilian, wifeless, childless, and alone, a Northern bachelor tending his flock of merinos out on the rolling, grassy shoulder of the Marais des Cygnes a few miles from the abolitionist enclave of Osawatomie — easy pickings for one of the roving, drunken bands of Ruffians, who would have treated me as they treated so many other isolated Free-State farmers and herdsmen: they’d have shot me dead, burned my cabin, stolen off my sheep and horse, and ridden on to the next farmstead.

Sometimes I think it would have been better for me, for Father, for our entire family, for everyone, if it had happened that way. Better for everyone, perhaps, if, back in Springfield, when Father gave me leave to go my own way and not return to North Elba, I had gone. “Just go, Owen, follow your elder brothers to Ohio and beyond, if that’s what you prefer, or follow the elephant and go to Californ-i-ay in search of gold, if that interests you!” If I had taken him at his word and, with his permission, had forsaken what he called my duty, so many terrible things would never have happened: the death of Lyman Epps; Fred’s self-mutilation and migration with me to Kansas; and Father’s, and Salmon’s, Oliver’s, and Henry Thompson’s, migration there, too, for without me and Fred in tow, John and Jason and their families surely would have given up that first cruel winter and come home to Ohio; and then there would have been no Pottawatomie killings and possibly no war at all in the Kansas Territory, which in ’58 would have come into the Union as a slave state instead of a free, an event surely to be followed by the secession of most of the northern states and their probable, eventual union with Canada. There would have been no debacle at Harpers Ferry. No Civil War.

Think of it! Father would have ended his days peacefully in the manner he so often wished, as a farmer and preacher in North Elba, aiding and instructing his white and Negro neighbors, dying in old age in his bed, surrounded by his beloved family, and buried in the shade of his favorite mountain, Tahawus, the Cloudsplitter.

Is it ridiculous and grandiose to speculate this way? To think that so much depends upon so little? Miss Mayo, I think it’s no more ridiculous or grandiose than to believe that our trivial lives here on earth are watched over and fated by an all-seeing, all-knowing God. But cannot the law of cause-and-effect be rationally thought to operate from the ground up, as well as from the top down? And if there is an order to the universe, then all our affairs here on earth are, surely, inextricably linked one to the other. I believe that the universe is like a desert, and each of our lives is a grain of sand that touches three or four adjacent to it, and when one grain turns in the wind or is moved or adjusted even slightly, those next to it will move also, and they in turn will shift the others next to each of them, and so on, all across the vast, uncountable billions of grains in the desert, until over time a great storm arises and alters the face of the planet. So why should I forbid myself from believing that my single action, or even my inaction, one day in my youth in my father’s warehouse in Springfield, Massachusetts, altered history? And that it was instrumental in shaping, not only my destiny, but Father’s, too, and my entire family’s, and even, if I may be forgiven this vision, the destiny of an entire people?

Which is why I did what I did — why I returned that fall from Springfield to the farm in North Elba, why I went there to do my duty. For even if we cannot know the ultimate consequences of our actions or inactions, we must nonetheless behave as if they do have ultimate consequences. No little thing in our lives is without meaning; never mind that we can never know it ourselves. I did what I did, my duty, in order to free the slaves. I did it to change history. It is finally that simple. My immediate motives, of course, at every step of the way were like everyone else’s, even Father’s — mixed, often confused and selfish, and frequently unknown even to me until many years later. But so long as I was doing my duty, so long as I was acting on the principles that I had learned when a child, then I was bending my life to free the slaves: I was shaping and curving it like a barrel stave that would someday fit with other lives similarly bent, so as to construct a vessel capable of measuring out and transporting into the future the history of our time and place. It would be a history capable of establishing forever the true nature and meaning of the nineteenth century in the United States of America, and thus would my tiny life raise a storm that would alter the face of the planet. Father’s God-fearing, typological vision of the events that surrounded us then was not so different from mine. My vision may have been secular and his Biblical, but neither was materialistic. They were both, perhaps, versions of Mr. Emerson’s grand, over-arching, transcendental vision, just not so clearly or poetically expressed. At least in my case. In Father’s, I’m not so sure, for the Bible is nothing if not clear and poetical.