Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

20 gals. Soap

150 lbs. Pork

10 lbs. Sugar

These books:

11 Bibles & Testaments

1 vol. Beauties of the Bible

1 vol. Flints Surveying

1 vol. Kush

1 vol. Church Members’ Guide

36 Miscellaneous Works

These “articles and necessaries”:

2 Mares

2 Halters

2 Hogs

19 Hens

1 Mattock

1 Pitchfork

1 Brandinglron

1 Handsaw

4 Old Axes

2 Beaming Knives

2 Roping Knives

2 Ink Stands

4 Slates

4 cords of Bark

2 Saddles

1 ton of Hay

19 Sheep pledged to S. Perkins

1 Shovel

1 Harrow

1 Plane

1 Log Chain

1 Crow Bar

2 Milch Cows

2 Hoes

1 Iron Wedge

1 pr. Sheep Shears

3 Pocket Knives

4 Muskets with Powder, Caps & Balls

And this clothing:

2 Overcoats

5 Coats

10 Vests

12 prs. Pantaloons

26 Shirts

10 Women’s and Girls’ Dresses

3 Shirts

2 Cloaks

4 Shawls

8 Womens and Children’s Aprons

5 prs. Boots

3 prs. Shoes

13 prs. Socks & Stockings

7 Stocks & Handkerchiefs

4 Bonnets

1 Hat

5 Palmlea/Hats

8 Men’s and Boys’ Cloth Caps

1 Fur Cap

1 Leather Cap

Such were all the worldly goods of a farming family of thirteen people, and over the following years our inventory did not vary much, for we did not add to our property: that was quite impossible, except here and there, with the addition of a revolver, for instance, or a few more cows or hogs. We simply replaced what wore out or got eaten.

Certain things said and described in my last missive have prompted in me fresh thoughts and memories of how we as a family loved Father, and how I in particular loved him. But from the tender shape of your inquiry when we met, I deduce that you and Professor Villard believe my father to have been a great man. I’m not so sure I agree.

Perhaps my opinion on this question is of no account here, for I was never in a position to take his measure, except as his son. And maybe we mean different things by greatness. I wonder if you mean something more like fame. For me, Father could have been great without having been famous. Nonetheless, I can understand your position. You have a historian’s perspective.

To you, it matters not that during his lifetime, like all abolitionists, Father was a much despised man, and that not just slaveholders hated him, but Whigs as much as Democrats; that he was hated by white people generally; and then, after Kansas and Harpers Ferry and during the Civil War years and beyond, even to today, that he was reviled by Southerners and Copperheads and even by many who had long supported the abolitionist cause, Republicans and the such. Nor, very probably, does it matter to you that he was also widely admired and even loved, loved passionately and almost universally by Negroes and by the more radical white abolitionists, and that he was celebrated and sung by all the most famous poets, writers, and philosophers here and abroad. What matters to you is that between those two extreme poles of opinion concerning John Brown, since December 12, 1859, every American man, woman, and child has held an opinion of his own. So, yes, Miss Mayo, if greatness is merely great fame and is defined by an ability to arouse strong feelings of an entire people for many generations, then Father, like Caesar, like Napoleon and Lincoln, was indeed a great man.

But who amongst your new, young historians and biographers, even amongst those who loathe him or think him mad, has considered the price paid for that sort of greatness by those of us who were his family? Those of us who neither examined him from a safe distance, as you do, nor stood demurely in his protective shadow, as we have so often been portrayed, but who lived every single day in the full glare of his light?

We were, after all, none of us dullards or witless. Every one of us Browns was of the energetic, sanguinary type, stubborn in thought and garrulous in speech. Why, even poor Fred, for all his innocent simplicity, when grown was a formidable figure of a man, independent and capable of astonishing acts: witness his bravery at the Battle of Black Jack in Kansas; witness his shocking self-mutilation. And both of Father’s wives, my mother, Dianthe, and my stepmother, Mary, were willful, extremely capable women of considerable intelligence and sound judgement. How else could they have managed the hard life that Father imposed upon them?

We were not easily cowed or led. We rose early, worked hard, and talked constantly. We reacted intensely and elaborately to every person, idea, and opinion that passed into our ken, to everything that occurred in the private life of each member of the family and that we heard about in the larger world as well. Whatever passed for news in those days, especially if it in the slightest way concerned the slavery question, went discussed at our table and afterwards around the fire and while we rode into town for supplies and worked in the fields and tannery. We talked and talked and talked, and we argued with one another; even the smaller children, though they could barely form sentences yet, were encouraged to speak out on great topics and small. And at night in our beds, lying in the darkness of the loft, we continued talking, arguing, explaining, with lowered voices now, slower, rumbling towards sleep, one by one breaking off from the discussion of right and wrong, true and false, until one voice only remained, speculative, exploratory, tentative, and then, at long last, silence.

Only to be broken at first light, usually by Father at the bottom of the stairs, calling to begin the day: Rise and shine, children!. Rise and shine! He’d already be up and dressed, with his Bible open on the table where he’d had his few moments of solitary study. And the round of the day would begin again, like a great wheel spinning, and its prime mover was not the sun — it only seemed so — but Father and his words and his bright, gray-eyed face. For, compared to the rest of us, no matter how hotly burned our individual flame, Father’s was a conflagration. He burned and burned, ceaselessly, it seemed, and though we were sometimes scorched by his flame, we were seldom warmed by it.

True, I loved the man beyond measure. He shaped me and gave me a life that took on great meaning. Many was the time, however, when I grew angry and wished to flee from him and his harsh, demanding God. Yet I stayed. It’s strange, but regardless of the pain and self-recrimination that my inability to worship Father’s God caused me, during all those years when other young men were separating themselves off from their fathers and mothers and establishing their own households, often far away in the West, more than any other single thing, it may well have been my discomfiting apostasy itself that kept me at his side. I was not as intelligent or skilled as some of my brothers and sisters — as Jason, for instance, who, besides being saintly in his moral sensitivity, was an almost preternaturally clever mechanic and agronomist. And compared to Ruth, whose emotions were consistently of an even and balanced nature, I was turbulent and changeable and sometimes truculent. Unlike the eldest of us, John, who had a deep, philosophical cast of mind, I seemed often shallow and merely pragmatic. Thus I was an ordinary fellow struggling with a tangled, profoundly conflicted set of views and feelings, and I came late, slowly, and only partially, and in fits and starts, to a clear understanding of the true nature of my relation to Father and to the family as a whole, and I just as often lost my grasp on the subject as I discovered it. I was like Jonah, it sometimes seemed, fleeing not God’s wrath but His will and His fierce, irrefutable logic. I cannot speak for the others, of course, but we often had to console one another to keep ourselves from falling into despair because of having temporarily lost Father’s approval. To a surprising degree, we who fell away from belief in Father’s God were able to do so, perhaps were invited to do so, because we were stuck with Father himself for a God, and try as we might, we could no more escape our god than he could his. Especially I.