Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“Then you will not join me.”

“John, I cannot. My practical judgement forbids it. My conscience forbids it. My love of my people forbids it.”

“You are making my task all the more difficult. Without you beside me… my boys, my men…” He stopped and could not speak for a moment. “Without you,” he continued, “the slaves won’t rise up and follow me in such numbers…”

Mr. Douglass placed his heavy hands onto Father’s narrow shoulders and looked into the Old Man’s eyes, and I thought that both men would weep, for their eyes were full. “Please, come away from this. Come back with me, John. Let your son here return to Virginia by himself and send your men home. Fight this war on another front.”

“This is the only front left to me.”

Mr. Douglass turned away and said to Shields Green, “I shall return home to Rochester. If you wish, you may go back with me, or you may stay. You’ve heard all the arguments as well as I.”

Shields looked at the ground and said nothing.

Father reached out and touched Mr. Douglass’s sleeve and, in a soft, plaintive voice, almost a whisper, said, “When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I will need you to help hive them.” It was a trope that he had used many times, and he spoke it mechanically, as if his thoughts, as if he himself, were elsewhere now.

Mr. Douglass did not answer. He looked again at Shields Green and said, “What have you decided to do?“

Shields turned his face, not to Mr. Douglass, but to Father, and he replied, “I believe I’ll go with the Old Man.”

Mr. Douglass nodded and slowly shook hands with us one by one, and when he had finished, he embraced us each in a heartfelt way one by one, as if it were he who was going to war and not we, and then he departed from us straightway for his home in Rochester. That same night, Father, Shields Green, and I returned in the wagon to Virginia.

This morning I woke in the dark, and my cabin was cold as a grave, and my heart leapt up when I thought again that I had died in the night and had joined Father and the others in purgatory. But then the chalky light of dawn drifted through the window like a fog and erased the comforting clarity of darkness, and I saw where I was, crumpled under my filthy blanket in a corner — a scrawny old man with matted beard and hair lying in his dirty underclothes in an unheated, bare room, my shelves, cot, chair, and tabletop covered with paper spilling onto the floor. I saw that I am nothing but paper. My life has finally come to only this: a tiny bubble of consciousness surrounded by thousands of sheets and scraps of paper — these dozens of tablets filled with disordered scribblings and all the letters and notebooks and documents and yellowed newspaper clippings and tattered old books and periodicals that I so long ago promised to deliver over to you, a great, disheveled heap of words, an incoherent jumble and snarl of truths, lies, memories, fantasies, and even recipes and lists, some of the words as mundane as a description of the several grades of wool in 1848, others as lofty as philosophical speculations on the nature of true religion and heroism, words taken from the floor of the marketplace to Emerson’s brain, but all of it, all these words, adding up to… what? To nothing worth anything to anyone but me, I suppose, and worth nothing to me; so why have I collected and saved it all these years?

I’m struggling to think clearly. Why did I pack and carry Father’s letters sent and received and his pocket notes and the many ledgers and books, an entire wooden crate of them, away out here to my California mountaintop and keep them here beside me these many years? I added to them over the years, as books, articles, and memoirs were published, and now, in feeble old age, I have been adding to the pile still more paper, more useless truths and speculation. Why have I done this?

I know that I began with the belief that I would compose a relation of my memories and knowledge of my father and that I would send it to you and Professor Villard, along with all the documents that I collected and kept over the years — for your purposes, for the composition of what you properly hope will be the defining biography of John Brown, a great book, no doubt, scheduled to make its public appearance in auspicious conjunction with the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the raid on Harpers Ferry and my father’s capture by the federal army and his execution by the government of Virginia. But, surely, this long after I first began, that memorial year has come and passed us by. And yet here I sit, still scribbling, writing now in the margins of my long-filled tablets and on the backs of Father’s letters and in his notebooks, even in the margins and blank end-pages of his broken-backed personal books, his Flint’s Survey, his Jonathan Edwards, Milton, and Franklin, his own published writings, too, “Sambo’s Mistakes” and the Provisional Constitution, old copies of The Liberator, scrolled maps of the Subterranean Passway, newspaper accounts of the raid and of Father’s final words on the scaffold, and Redpath’s and Higginson’s and Hinton’s and Sanborn’s biographies and memoirs — each day that passes, I write a few new sentences, sometimes only one, and sometimes, when my heart beats fast with feeling and my vision of the past is sharp and bright, as many as a hundred.

But I have long since given up any hope of ordering these pages and sending them to you. I write now only so that I can someday cease to write. I speak in order to go silent. And I listen to my voice so that I will soon no longer be obliged to hear it.

That fateful October night at the Kennedy farmhouse, after Father and the others had departed for the town, I spent a good while gathering and heaping everything together on the floor in front of the stove, and when I stood and stared down at the mass of incrimination, it was like listening to a thousand low, choked confessions all at once, as if the voices, mingling and merging with one another, were the sad, accumulated results of a long, unforgiving Inquisition into the heresy and betrayal of their Puritan fathers by an entire generation of sons. I burned none of it. My heretical refusal to play Isaac to my father’s Abraham seemed not mine alone: it felt emblematic to me — as if an Age of Heroism had acceded to an Age of Cowardice. As if, in the context of those last days at Harpers Ferry and the one great moral issue of our time, I had become a man of another time: a man of the future, I suppose. A modern man.

Stepping back from the cold stove, I set my candle on the table and blew it out, dropping the house into darkness. Then I went into the rain and crossed the stubbled field to the shed, where Barclay Coppoc and Frank Meriam had finished loading the weapons onto the wagon. Coppoc was seated up on the box with the reins in his hands, scowling impatiently at me, while Meriam sat ashen-faced behind him.

“You finally done in there?” Coppoc said.

“Yes.”

“Well, then, let’s get a move on. The Old Man must already be across the bridge. Me and Frank heard gunfire a minute ago.”

“Fine,” I said, and climbed onto the wagon, taking a place on the wooden cases next to Meriam. Coppoc clucked to the horse, Adelphi, the second of our old North Elba pair of Morgans, and we moved slowly away from the Kennedy farm onto the wet, rumpled road and headed gradually downhill towards the abandoned schoolhouse overlooking the river and the town below. By the time we reached our destination, we could hear guns firing below, intermittently and from several different places — from near the armory, we thought, then from the Maryland side of the bridge, and a little later from the factory at the further edge of town. As instructed by Father, we quickly unloaded the weapons from the wagon and stacked the unopened cases along the walls inside the one room of the schoolhouse.