Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Even so, the time to act is fast approaching, Father tells us. Already there have appeared numerous signs from the Lord — such as the sudden recent arrival of the pikes from Chambersburg, where they had been oddly delayed for weeks, despite Kagi’s best attempts to get them released and sent on to us. And soon from the Lord there will come additional signs, emblems and omens dressed as incidental events and information, to encourage us and make us the more eager to risk our lives in battle rather than continue with this suffocating waiting game at the farm on the Maryland Heights. For instance, Father will dispatch Cook down along the Charles Town Turnpike to determine the numbers and disposition of the slaves there, his only attempt to reconnoiter the region beyond the town of Harpers Ferry itself, and Cook will return aflame with news that the moon is right for insurrection, for it is nearly a dog-tooth moon, the type that makes Africans particularly discontented, he has learned. This, too, is a sign from the Lord, Father tells us. Cook has also been told of a young male slave at a farm nearby who just yesterday hung himself because his owner sold the man’s wife down South. A shipment of spears suddenly released, a dog-tooth moon, and a hanging man: on the strength of these and other similarly propitious portents, Father has sent sister Annie and Martha back home to North Elba. We are now awaiting only the arrival of Mr. Douglass, who we hope will bring with him a phalanx of well-armed Negro fighters from the North, although Father warns us that lately letters from his black cohorts back there are suggesting otherwise.

Finally, one night Father climbs up to our attic with his lamp in one hand and a fat packet of papers and maps in the other, and taking his customary seat at the center of the group, he spreads the contents of his packet at his feet. As he begins to speak, he raises one of the maps from the pile — we see at once that it is the now-familiar drawing of the streets and buildings of Harpers Ferry, made by Cook — and, as usual, he shows it to us and allows it to be passed amongst us, so that, while Father sets out the plan, each man can better visualize what he is to do and where he shall stand when he does it. This time, however, when he has gone through, once again, step by step, the taking of Harpers Ferry, he retrieves and sets aside Cook’s map and is silent and looks somberly at his clasped hands, as if in prayer. After a long moment, without looking up, he abruptly declares that tonight he has decided to reveal to us that we will not be conducting the sort of raid that most of us still believe we have come here for. This is not to be merely a larger, more dangerous and dramatic, slave-running expedition than any of us has ever undertaken before. There is instead a much larger task before us, a greater thing than we have yet dared imagine.

Kagi has long known of this grand, about-to-be-revealed scheme, as have I, of course, and a few of the others, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson, and we have argued privately amongst ourselves as to its feasibility and have agreed, after much disputation, that it can be done and must be attempted; but my brothers Watson and Oliver have not heard it before, nor my brothers-in-law Will and Dauphin Thompson, nor has Father until now trusted any of the recent arrivals with this vision, for it is truly a vision and not so much a plan, and to see it as he does, we must first for a long time not have seen or heard much else. Our long confinement together and our isolation from the world outside have finally made us all visionaries, capable at last of seeing what Father sees and of believing his words as if they were true prophecy.

Here, men, I want you to examine these maps, he says, and he picks up and flaps at us a set of cambric-cloth squares onto which he has pasted the states of Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas — eight squares, and one state to a square. In the margin of each map, he has written numerals: 491,000, for the number of slaves in Virginia, he explains, 87,000 in Maryland, and so on, which comes to a total of 1,996,366 slaves, he pronounces, looking up at us. But he does not see us, his twenty followers, unshaven, unwashed, gaunt, and sober-faced, all of us young men and a few of us mere boys: instead, his gray eyes gleam with excitement at the sight of a spreading black wave of mutinous slaves, nearly two million strong, as all across the South they flee their cabins and shops and barns and rise from the cotton and tobacco and sugarcane fields and take up pitchforks, axes, machetes, and the thousands of Sharps rifles that will come flowing down the Alleghenies from the North; he sees them, first hundreds, then thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands of black men, women, and children, flowing down the country roads and highways, meeting in town squares and on city streets and merging into the largest army ever seen in this land, an army with but one purpose, and that is to take back from the slaveholders what for a quarter of a millennium has been stolen from them — their freedom, their American birthrights, their very lives. This raid will establish no Underground Railroad operation, he tells us, for regardless of scale, it is no mere slave raid. This will be an act of an entirely different order. Yes, after we have taken Harpers Ferry, we will make our appointed rendezvous with Mr. Douglass in the Allegheny foothills west of here, as planned, but then we will not, as some of us believed, hole up in small forts and siphon escaped slaves into the North. Instead, we shall divide our forces into two portions, the Defenders, under Mr. Douglass’s command, and the Liberators, under Father’s, and whilst the Defenders protect and hurry into the North those women, children, elderly, and infirm slaves who wish to resettle there, the Liberators will commence to march rapidly southward along the densely wooded north-south mountain passes, making lightning-like strikes against the plantations on the plains lower down, seizing armories and arsenals and supplies as they go, building a cavalry, like Toussaint L’Ouverture, and even seizing artillery, like the Maroons of Jamaica, destroying railroads and fortifications. When the Shenandoah Valley goes, the plantations along the James River will quickly fall, and then the Tidewater tobacco farms, and when Virginia goes, the rest of the Southern states will nearly conquer themselves, there being down there, as in Haiti and Jamaica, such a disproportionate number of Negroes to whites. And there will be thousands of non-slaveholding whites, too, God-fearing, decent Southerners, who will come running to our side, once they understand that our true intentions are not to slay white men and women in their beds or to overthrow their state or federal government or to dissolve the Union, but merely to end American slavery. To end it now, here, in these years. Look, look! he says, excitedly showing us the map of Alabama, where with X’she has marked, county by county, the heaviest concentrations of slaves. When we emerge from the Tennessee hills here in Augusta County, the slaves will rise up spontaneously in adjacent Montgomery County, and in a week or perhaps two, when the news has arrived there, the same will occur in Macon and Russell Counties, and the flames of rebellion will leap like a wildfire from one district to the next, straight across into Georgia, whence the fire will roar all the way east to the Sea Isles, causing it to curl back north into the Carolinas, until we have ignited a great, encircling conflagration, which cannot be extinguished until it has burnt the ancient sin and scourge of slavery entirely away, from one end of the South to the other, from Maryland to Louisiana, until at last nothing remains of the Slavocracy but a smoldering pile of char!