Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

We saw it at once, and we saw it together, and we saw it for a long time. The vision was like a flame that melted us, and afterwards, when it finally cooled, we had been hardened into a new and unexpected shape. We had been re-cast as a single entity, and each one of us had been forged and hammered into an inseparable part of the whole.

At last, after I had recited the irrefutable and terrifyingly detailed rebuttals to the slavers’ objections to the abolition of slavery — with Objection III, “Slaveholders Are Proverbial for Their Kindness, Hospitality, Benevolence, and Generosity”—I saw that I had come to the end of Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. I closed the book on my lap. I remember that for a long time we remained silent.

Then slowly Father got up from his chair and placed a fresh log on the dying fire and stayed there, his back to us, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, and watched the flames blaze up. Without turning, he began to speak. He was at first calm and deliberate in speech, as was his habit, but gradually he warmed to the subject and began to sputter loudly, as he often did when excited by the meaning and implications of his words.

He reminded us of an event some two years past, when, in this same month of November, on learning of the assassination, in Alton, Illinois, of that holy man Elijah Lovejoy, Father had publically pledged his life to the overthrow of slavery. We all knew this. He had done it in church, and we and our neighbors had witnessed his pledge, and so had the Lord, who sees everything, Father declared. And we and the Lord had also seen that, since then, just as he had done all the long years of his life before making that pledge, Father had continued to be a weak and despicable man.

We said no, but he said yes and waved us off. The truth was that he had not made himself into the implacable foe of this crime against God and man which he had sworn publically to oppose. Then he said, “My children, the years of my life are passing swiftly.” He fisted his hands and placed them before his eyes like a child about to weep. He said that while he had been idling selfishly and in sinful distraction, lured by his vanity and by pathetic dreams of wealth and fame, the slavers had dug in deeper all across the Southern states. They had spread out like foetid waters, flooding over the plains into Texas and the territories. They had steadily entrenched themselves in positions of power in Washington, until now the poor slaves could no longer even raise their voices to cry for help without being slain for it or being swiftly sold off into Alabama and Mississippi. Black heroes, and now and again a white man like Lovejoy, had risen in our midst and were everywhere being persecuted and even executed for their heroism, legally, by the people of these United States.

“My children,” he said, “it’s mobs that rule us now. And all the while Mister Garrison and his anti-slavery socialites bray and pray and keep their soft, pink hands clean. Politicians keep on politicking. For the businessmen it’s business as usual: ‘Sell us your cheap cotton, we’ll sell you back iron chains for binding the slaves who pick it.’”

Father then cursed them; he cursed them all. And he cursed himself. For his weakness and his vanity, he said, “I curse myself”

He turned to us and now crossed his arms over his chest. His face was like a mask carved of wood by an Indian sachem. His eyes gazed sadly down at us through holes in the mask. It was the face of a man who had been gazing at fires, who had roused the attendants of the fires, serpents and demons hissing back at the man who had dared to swing open the iron door and peer inside. We all knew what Father had seen there. We had seen it, too. But he, due to his nature and characteristic desire, had gazed overlong and with too great a directness, and his gray eyes had been scorched by the sight.

I was a boy; I was frightened by my father’s face. I remember recoiling from him, as if he himself were one of the guardian serpents. I remember Father looking straight into our eyes, burning us with his gaze, as he told us to hear him now. He had determined that he would henceforth put his sins of pride and vanity behind him. And he would go out from here and wage war on slavery. The time has come, he declared, and he wished to join the time in full cry. “And I mean to make war by force and arms!” he said. “Not such weak-kneed war as Mister Garrison is determined to make, he and that crowd of Boston, parlor-polite abolitionists. I mean to make the sort of war that was waged by the great Negroes, Cinque, Nat Turner, and L’Ouverture, and by the Roman slave Spartacus. I mean to make war in which the enemy is known and strictly named as such and is slain for his enmity to our cause.”

He called us his children, even Mary, and said that the time for talk was past. The time for seeking the abolition of slavery by means of negotiations with Satan had always been long past. There never was such a time. Therefore, before us, his beloved family, before his wife and sons, and before God, he was making tonight his sacred pledge.

Here Father explained what we already knew, that he had long entertained such a purpose anyhow, despite his slackness and distraction, but that he now believed it was his duty, the utmost duty of his life, to devote himself to this purpose, and he wished us fully to understand this duty and its implications. Then, after spending considerable time in setting forth in most impressive language the hopeless and hideous condition of the slave, much of the details borrowed from our just-completed reading of Mr. Weld’s American Slavery as It Is, Father seemed to have finished his declaration, when suddenly he asked us, “Which of you is willing to make common cause with me?” He looked from one face to the next. “Which of you, I want to know, is willing to do everything in your power to break the jaws of the wicked and pluck the spoil from Satan’s teeth?” He put the question to us one by one. “Are you, Mary? John? Jason? Owen?”

My stepmother, my elder brothers, and I, we each of us in turn softly answered yes.

Whereupon Father kneeled down in prayer and bade us to do likewise. This position in prayer impressed me greatly, I remember, as it was the first time I had ever known him to assume it, for normally he remained standing in prayer, with his hands grasping a chair-back and his head merely lowered.

When he had finished the prayer, which was for guidance and protection in our new task, he stood, as did we, and he asked us to raise our right hands to him. He then administered to us an oath, which bound us to secrecy and total devotion to the purpose of fighting slavery by force and arms to the extent of our ability.

“We have thus now begun to wage war!” he declared. Although it seemed to me then, as it does now, so many years later, that he had already begun his war against slavery numerous times before this, here he was, in a sense beginning it again. And although I did not know it on that particular night, he would find himself obliged to bind himself to this sacred purpose many more times in the future as well. Father’s repeated declarations of war against slavery, and his asking us to witness them, were his ongoing pronouncement of his lifelong intention and desire. It was how he renewed and created his future.

Tonight, however, was significantly different. This was the first time that he had determined forthrightly to take up arms and wage war by force. Also, and more importantly, perhaps, it was the first time that I myself was a part of his pledge, that we all were sworn together, bound by our war on slavery to see the end of it, or of us. The overthrow of slavery was no longer Father’s private obsession. I had allowed him to make it mine as well.