Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

In normal circumstances, this difference between us and Father did not create any painful conflict; but when we, too, were suffering, when we ourselves were grieving, it only angered us that he regarded the ragged edge of our pain as merely a consequence of our moral failings. There was no telling him of this, however.

Oh, we could tell him of it, yes; but he could not hear us, his own belief was so powerful, so constantly clanging in his ears: with all those hosannas, halleluiahs, and simple hoo-rahs he was hearing, it was to his large, hairy ears as if nothing but a serpent’s hiss were coming from our mouths. Divine Providence seems to lay a heavy burden & responsibility on you in particular, my dear Mary; but I trust that you will be enabled to bear it in some measure, as you ought. I exceedingly regret that I am unable to return & be present to share your trials with you; but anxious as I am to be once more at home, I do not feel at liberty to return to Akron yet. I hope to be able to get away before very long; but cannot say when. These words I could barely transcribe without breaking off the point of my pen, and the tension in my hand caused me to spatter the paper with several ugly blots of ink. But he was not through. I trust that none of you will feel disposed to cast an unreasonable blame on my dear Ruth on account of the dreadful trial we are called to suffer; for if the want of proper care in each all of us has not been attended with fatal consequences, it is no thanks to us. With a cold fury in my heart, though I said nothing of it to anyone, I saw that Father could forgive Ruth only by including the rest of us in her blame, which, of course, allowed him to forgive no one. As he saw it, not just Ruth, but we, all of us, were guilty of wanting proper care, so that it was only the Lord’s will that had kept the rest of us from the fatal consequences of our sloth and inattention.

If I had a right sense of my habitual neglect of my family’s Eternal interests, I should probably go crazy from shame, he said, and I transcribed. And as he had apparently not gone crazy, were we to assume then that he did not have a right sense of his habitual neglect of his family’s Eternal interests? Was that his point? Or was he merely changing the subject, at which he was so skilled, in order to invite us to reassure him, to praise him, to be thankful that he was out there in Springfield looking after his family’s temporal, rather than Eternal, interests? I humbly hope that this dreadful, afflictive Providence will lead us all more properly to appreciate the amazing, unforeseen, untold consequences that hang upon the right or wrong doing of things seemingly of trifling account. Who can tell or comprehend the vast results for good or evil that are to follow the saying of one little word? Everything worthy of being done at all is worthy of being done in good earnest & in the best possible manner. Not that again, I said to myself and dutifully wrote his words into the tablet as if they were my own. Not more platitudes and maxims, not more of Ben Franklin’s rules for living. We are in middling health, & expect to write to some of you again soon. Our warmest thanks to Mr. & Mrs. Perkins & family. From your affectionate husband, & father,

John Brown

When I had finished transcribing the letter, I put the tablet away in the folder where we kept his papers, and we none of us read or spoke of the letter again. It was odd, for we had suffered numerous deaths in the family by then, and each of them had drawn us closer together; but the death of little Kitty caused me, and I think the rest of us as well, to withdraw ourselves from Father to a greater degree than any previous event or circumstance. Of course, here and there, now and again, one or the other of us had gone through a period of withdrawal from intimacy with Father, but it was almost always a solitary act, a brief and lonely rebellion. But on the occasion of Kitty’s death, we all as a group rebelled, even including Mary, and shut Father away from our feelings and conversations with one another for many weeks afterwards.

1 believe that I learned then for the first time that it was possible to oppose Father, to swell with anger against him and to walk away from his sputterings and recriminations, without any terrible cost to my own sense of worth as a man and without the crippling loneliness that I usually associated with opposing him. But I could not do it until the rest of the family marched with me. The awful irony is that we could never march against him unless one of us was capable of sacrificing another of us beforehand — as Ruth had sacrificed the baby Amelia, little Kitty. Only then could we stand against him and say to him, “Father, you do not understand.”

Yesterday, while searching through my cache of Father’s papers for the letters concerning the death of poor Kitty, I happened onto another long-forgotten transcription, which I am sure you have not read and which will show you an aspect of Father’s character that may surprise and even amuse you. It may also give you some further insight into the true nature of my relationship with Father, so that later, when I have told everything, you will believe me.

The document of which I speak, when it came to my hand, caused me unexpectedly to think back to the time when Father corked his face, as it were, and actually tried to pass himself off as a Negro. It was an audacious thing, but he was fully aware of that and did it anyhow. His ostensible purpose was to instruct and warn. He had carefully composed an essay entitled “Sambo’s Mistakes,” which he read many times over to any of us who would listen and after much hesitation finally submitted anonymously to the Negro editors of the Ram’s Horn, in Brooklyn, New York. It was not published, probably because it was seen for what it was — a white man in blackface telling Negroes how to behave. The rejection of his little essay infuriated Father, for he believed that he was saying things to Negroes that they ought to hear and rarely did, except when he himself told them in meetings or when invited to speak to the congregations of Negro churches. He explained that he had chosen to speak as Sambo because when he said these things to Negroes in whiteface, he was perceived strictly as a white man and thus was not truly heard. “Racialism infects everybody’s ears,” he said. “Negro ears as much as white.”

This was in the winter of ’48, after we had left Akron and were newly settled in Springfield, and I found the whole thing somewhat embarrassing then, although later on I came to see that in a sense, perhaps subconsciously, Father was advising and correcting himself as much as his Negro brethren. He was speaking his little narrative, in spite of his intentions to disguise himself, with his own genuine voice quite as much as when he wrote letters home and advised and corrected us. This may be of interest to you, for you were born long after Father’s death and can have no idea of how he sounded in actual conversation. Father’s voice, including his grammar and choice of words and his pacing, was more or less the same whether spoken aloud or written down on paper. It was uniquely his own — although I was often told that I myself spoke very much like him.

Earlier today, I carried Father’s original manuscript of “Sambo’s Mistakes,” from which I had made the “official” copy that he submitted to the Rum’s Horn, outside my cabin and read it in the dying light of day. It is perhaps the nearness of our voices, his and mine, that enabled me to recall his voice exactly when I read through this composition, for I could hear him speaking to me quite as if he were seated next to me on the stoop, the ink on the paper barely dry.

“Tell me truthfully, Owen’ he said, “if you think I have left anything of use and importance out. And note any particular infelicities of language, son, if you will.” And then he began to read “Sambo’s Mistakes” aloud, very slowly, savoring all the words as if they were great poetry.