Russell Banks: Cloudsplitter

And, yes, just as you said, I am probably the only person remaining alive who has the knowledge and information that will enable you and your professor to answer the question. But you must understand. The three-hundred-year-long War Between the Races, from before the Revolution up to and including Harpers Ferry, was being fought mainly as the War Against Slavery. Then, briefly, in ’61, it became the War Between the States. And from then until now, there has been such a grieving, angry clamor that I knew I would not be heard, except as one of the sons of John Brown trying to justify his father’s and his own bloody deeds — a puny, crippled man who fled the carnage he helped create and for the rest of his long life hid alone in the West.

The truth is, for us, the so-called Civil War was merely an aftermath. Or, rather, it was part of a continuum. Just another protracted battle. Ours was very much a minority view, however. It still is. But from the day it began, to Northerner and Southerner alike, the Civil War was a concussive trauma that erased all memory of what life had been like before it. On both sides, white Americans woke to war and forgot altogether the preceding nightmare, which had wakened them in the first place. Or they made it a pastoral dream. Even the abolitionists forgot. But for those few of us whose lives had been most thrillingly lived in the decade preceding the War, one thing has led obviously and with sad predictability to another, with no break or permanent ending point between the early years of the slave uprisings in Haiti and Virginia and the Underground Railroad in Ohio and New York and the Kansas battles and Harpers Ferry and the firing on Fort Sumter and Shiloh and Gettysburg and Vicksburg and Appomattox Courthouse and the killing of Abraham Lincoln and the savage, dark, murderous days that have followed, even to today, at century’s end. They are like beads on a string to us, bubbles of blood on a barbed steel strand that stretches from the day the first enslaved African was brought ashore in Virginia to today, and we have not reached the end of it yet.

Thus, when the Civil War ended, I found myself feeling towards the rest of my white countrymen, both Northern and Southern, the way Negroes in America, and Indians, too, must always have felt towards white Americans generally — as if the white man’s history were separate from ours and did not honor or even recognize ours. That is yet another reason why I have remained silent for so long. I did not want my testimony captured and used in the manufacture of an American history that at bottom is alien to me. I did not want to help tell a story that, when it does not ignore mine altogether, effectively contradicts it. That would be treasonous. It would aid and abet our common enemy, who wants nothing more than to declare the war between the races non-existent. Or if not non-existent, then short-lived and well over.

So now perhaps you understand somewhat why I drove you off, and why I have come in this way to call you back again.

There is yet a further reason, I suddenly realize, for my having called you back, and I must attempt to confess it, painful as it is to admit, even to myself.

I am dying. Or I am already dead and have been dead these forty years, with nothing left of me, who once was Owen Brown, except a shadow cast on the near wall by my lamplight and these words tumbling from me like a death rattle, a last, prolonged exhalation. Absurd as it may sound to you who read these words, it is to me the literal truth. I am more the ghost of Owen Brown than I am the man himself.

Although I was but thirty-five years old in ’59 and escaped from Harpers Ferry like a rabbit through the corn and ended up safe here on my western mountaintop, my life since that day has been an after-life. In recent years, as I have grown into an old man, there have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of mornings when I have wakened in my cold cabin with my lungs flooded and, before the sun has dried the dew off the window pane, have concluded that sometime during the night I finally died. But then hunger or some other bodily need or the animals — my dog scratching at the door, the sheep bleating, the cry of a hawk — bring me back to the sad awareness that, no, I have not died, not yet, and thus am obliged once more to grope through the gray veils that wrap me and come to full wakefulness and begin again the daily rounds of a man alive.

Until the night that followed your arrival at my door, however, when I must indeed have gone deeper into the embrace of death than ever before. So that when in the morning I finally woke, if waking it truly was, I knew beyond all doubt that I am now he who was Owen Brown. Not he who is Owen Brown. Not that crotchety old man you met growling at you like a bear in its cave, but his past, his childhood and youth and his young manhood, that’s who I am. It was as if your visit had sounded a final knell that drove me into a purgatory which I had been longing for all these years but had neither the courage nor the wisdom to seek on my own. As if, now that I am here, there is no going forward or back, no possible ascent to heaven or descent to hell, until I have told my story.

Thus these words, these letters, and the packets of materials which in time I will turn over to you. All my worldly effects, as it were, I bequeath to thee. Make of them, you and your professor, whatever you will. In the long, ongoing War Between the Races, this, I suppose, must be my final act, and I pray only that, before I am in error judged good, if cowardly, and my father mad, if courageous, I be given the time to complete it.

It is all very strange. Now that I have opened communications with you, I find myself unable to keep my inner voice silent. I have given off all work — my sheep and the spring lambs wander the grassy hills unaccompanied in search of water and pasturage, protected only by my faithful little dog, Flossie who returns from the herd every few hours to the cabin door and scratches and whines outside, as if angered by my protracted absence and intent on rousing me from an inexplicable sleep.

But I am not asleep. I do now and then drift towards a dozing state, but I am driven back from it each time by the rising sound of my voice, as if it, too, has a will of its own and, like Flossie, does not want me to sleep. Whether I am seated at my table, as now, writing the words down, or in my chair in the darkness by the window with the silvery moonlight falling across my lap, or lying in my cot by the back wall staring at the low ceiling all night long and into the next day, my ears are filled always with my own voice. The words are like water in a brook that bubbles from an underground spring and spills downhill across rocks and fallen trees to where it gathers in eddies and builds a dark, still pool, moving me finally to rise from my cot and sit down at my table and begin again to write them down, my purpose being merely to break the little dam or jam and release the pressure against it and let the flow of words resume.

It is more than passing strange. And joyous, somehow. I see where I am, and yet it is as if I who was Owen Brown have flown from my mountaintop. I have today been recalling an earlier, my first, departure from this place and its similarity to this day’s dying — although that was literal and this, of course, is merely figurative. Then, just as now, what a strange joy I felt! It was a full decade ago, in the spring of ’89, and I had been lingering alone on this high, treeless hill for close to thirty years, waiting for the moment of my death to finish its last flash through my weary body, biding my time, helpless and silent as smoke and with all the patience of the long-dead. I was waiting, silently waiting, not so much for my actual death, which meant little to me, one way or the other, as for the pine box that contained my bones to be carried three thousand miles from the hills of California back along the railroad lines to my family’s house and farm in the Adirondack mountain village of North Elba, New York. To the place that, because of the Negroes living there, we called Timbuctoo.