Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

The Old Man’s peroration ends and is met with soft silence. At first, Kagi, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson look slowly around the dim, shadowy room, as if searching the faces of the others for a sign that their collective silence indicates collective skepticism, which was Kagi’s early reaction to Father’s vision, or dismay, Cook’s and Stevens’s first response, or simple awe, Anderson’s. I myself look to my brothers’ eyes, Watson and Oliver, seeking there a clarifying version of my own thoughts and feelings, for in my earlier disputations with Kagi, Cook, and Stevens, I defended the logic of Father’s grand plan with no other desire than to defeat their objections to it, my old role, and in winning them over have not made my own private position strong to myself or even clear. But it is too late. Watson and Oliver and the Thompsons, my brothers and brothers-in-law, all of the men, wear on their faces a single expression, the expression worn also by Kagi, Cook, Stevens, and Anderson, and no doubt by me, too: it is the hungry look of a follower, of a true believer. There is no Thomas the Doubter in this room, no sober skeptic, no ironist, no dark materialist. We have all been confined here in this isolated place for too many weeks and months to have any mentality left that is not a piece of a single mind, and that mind is shaped and filled by Father alone.

But, yes, much of what you have expected will be met, he continues, calmer now, comforted by our silence. He again holds out Cook’s large, detailed map of the streets and buildings of Harpers Ferry and says that we shall indeed, as we have intended all along, soon attack and seize the town. That has not changed. It will be our first formally declared act of war against the slaveholders, the first act of our mighty drama. And when we have seized the town, we shall, as planned, take control of the arms stored in three buildings there — the government armory, where the muskets are made, the Hall rifle works, and the arsenal. As we all know, there are no federal troops presently posted in the town and only a few private guards protecting these stores of weapons and munitions, so we will not be much opposed, and if we strike quickly and under cover of night, it will be done before we are even noticed by the townspeople. We shall nevertheless take hostages and hold them, probably in the armory yard, to protect us against the local militias, should they be roused, whilst we await the first reinforcing arrival of mutinous slaves from the surrounding countryside, and then, in a matter of hours, we shall have flown back up into the mountain fastness south and west of the town, whence shall come our Republic’s salvation.

Shortly after nightfall on a Sabbath, it will begin with a fervent prayer offered up to God, that we may be assisted by Him in the total, final liberation of all the slaves on this continent. We shall not ask the Lord to spare or even to protect our own lives in this venture: our lives have been pledged strictly to our duty; that is all. We must not ask the Lord to release us of our duty. Then, with everyone gathered in the room below, so that we may be mentally clear as to our legal rights and obligations and our principles, Aaron Stevens, who has the most impressive voice of us all, will read aloud Father’s Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States, which so nobly begins: Whereas slavery is a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence: therefore, we, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do, for the time being, ordain and establish for ourselves the following Provisional Constitution and Ordinances. He will read all forty-five articles, ending thusly, with the carefully worded reassurance that The foregoing articles shall not be construed so as in any way to encourage the overthrow of any State government, or of the general government of the United States, and look to no dissolution of the

Union, but simply to amendment and repeal. And our flag shall be the same that our fathers fought under in the Revolution .

Following this somber recitation, our commander-in-chief will administer anew to us as a group the same oath of secrecy that, individually, upon our first arrival at the farm, each of us has already been sworn to. Father then will say simply, “Men, get on your arms. We now proceed to the Ferry.”

I am to stay behind with Francis Meriam and Barclay Coppoc, the two men Father and I have come to view as the weakest links in our chain, the one because of his physical frailty and tendency to hysteria, the other because of his youth and his residual Quaker timidity. I would prefer to be at the front with Father and the others, but I know better than to object to this assignment, for no one else in the group can be trusted with it, he says, and besides, it places me in a position of authority as second-in-command and at Father’s flank, so that if something goes dreadfully wrong, my duty will be to rescue them. My immediate charge, however, is to transfer all the arms from the house and storage shed, except for those taken by the advance party, to a small, unused schoolhouse situated in the woods overlooking the Potomac and directly across the river from Harpers Ferry, there to await the first arrival of liberated slaves, to arm them and lead them into the mountains, where a few days later we will rendez-vous with Father and the others. On his map of Virginia, Father shows us our Allegheny meeting place in Frederick County, which he himself scouted years ago, while on a surveying expedition of lands owned by Oberlin College. Mr. Douglass should have joined us by then, Father assures us, and will take overall command of my unit. I am to remain as captain of the new recruits, however, and as executive officer of the operation, until Father himself has joined us. After that, I am to ride at Father’s side with the Liberators. I have also been charged with the obligation to remove or destroy any incriminating evidence that we might have left here at the farmhouse, such as letters, maps, journals, and other personal effects.

We have in our possession two wagons, one for my use and the other for Father’s advance party. It must be on a night with no moon shining, no stars, a night overcast and drear, and when Father’s men have loaded their wagon with the half a hundred pikes and twenty rifles they require for the taking of Harpers Ferry, immediately and without ceremony, at a simple command from Father, they will set off down the public road, Father perched on the wagon seat with his head uncharacteristically bent forward, stooped as if in deep thought or prayer, and our old North Elba farmhorse, the bay Morgan mare, between the shafts, and the sixteen men marching silently in the cold drizzle alongside the wagon and behind. I will stand by the door of the house with Meriam and young Barclay Coppoc and watch them disappear into the darkness as if being swallowed by it. I do not know yet what I will feel when that moment comes, but it will not be fear or dread. It is too late for that.

After a few moments, when we can no longer hear the tramp of their boots on the wet ground or the creak and chop of their wagon and horse, my two men and I will turn quickly to our tasks — Meriam and Coppoc to load our wagon with the remaining weapons from the shed, whilst I gather all our scattered papers from the house. By candlelight, I will prowl carefully through the entire house, from basement kitchen to our attic hideout, collecting every shred of paper I can find and stuffing all of it loosely into a cloth valise. To my slight surprise, I will be obliged to fill the bag several times over, emptying it each time in the basement next to the woodstove on the flagstone floor of the kitchen. Soon I will have made a large, disordered pile, at first glance much of it rubbish, which I plan to separate from the rest and burn. But when I commence to sort the papers, I will discover with a little shock that most of the remaining papers, a whole heap of them, are Father’s, and amongst them are dozens of letters, many from family members in North Elba and Ohio, and numerous others, only slightly coded, written by his secret Northern supporters, Dr. Howe, Gerrit Smith, Franklin Sanborn, and so on, and even several letters from Frederick Douglass, and receipts for Father’s purchases of arms back in Iowa and Ohio and for the pikes in Hartford, Connecticut, and here are all of Father’s maps, the very maps with which he showed us his grand plan, and Cook’s drawing of Harpers Ferry, and Father’s pocket notebooks, where he has listed, county by county, as on his maps, slave population figures taken from the 1850 national census, and the names of many towns and cities of the South and their marching distance from one another, such as Montgomery to Memphis, 3 da., and Charleston to Savannah, 2 1/2 da. I have known this would happen, for I have seen most of these papers, maps, and notebooks lying carelessly about for weeks, as if, having shown them to us, Father no longer wished to order or hide them, and I have felt a twinge of fear that, in the rush of last-minute preparations, he would neglect to take them up. But I would not reflect upon it until later, until after Father and I had ridden up for our final, secret meeting with Mr. Douglass in Chambersburg.