Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Now, I cannot doubt, notwithstanding I have been unsuccessful, that you will allow me full credit for my peculiar quick-sightedness. As fast as I say it, I can see where I missed it.’

Father lowered the sheaf of lined pale blue paper, looked to me, and awaited my admiration. “Well? What do you think, son?” he asked.

“Yes… well;’ said I. “Yes, it’s… it’s very good. And you seem to have touched on everything that concerns you. Though it does end rather abruptly, don’t you think? I mean, is it enough simply to keep saying that you see in a twink where you have missed it?”

“No!” he said. “Of course not! That’s my point. Or will be, when I have made it. It’s what my second chapter will propose: what to do when you have seen the error of your ways. You see, American Negroes don’t have a figure like Benjamin Franklin, and that’s what I’m trying to establish here. A friendly, wise scold. Franklin spoke only to white people, wisely and well, to be sure, but what he said is of little use to a people despised and downtrodden because of their race. Franklin’s book never addresses the whole race question. But Negroes — I’m talking about the rank and file here, you understand, not the leaders — they need a book of practical wisdom which is as accessible and amusing to them as Franklin’s is to us white folks, and as down-to-earth. Sambo is my Poor Richard, son.

“When this is published in the Ram’s Horn, I’ll ask my colored friends what they think of it — innocently, you understand, as if I knew nothing of the authorship, testing their responses, getting suggestions as to what’s been left out. And then I’ll write my second chapter. A third and fourth chapter will follow, and so on, until I’ll have written an entire book, a book that can serve as a new primer for Negroes in the fight against slavery.”

“Fine, but why not let a Negro man write such a book?” I asked him, pointing out that there were plenty who were more than capable of it: Mr. Douglass, for instance, or the Reverends Garnet and Loguen. “They could do it without a disguise,” I added.

“Please!” He laughed, as if he thought the idea ridiculous. “Owen, we’re after a black Ben Franklin here, and none of those fine men is especially humorous or down-to-earth. And even if he were, he’d have to disguise himself just as much as I have. For different reasons, of course. Not because of race, but because he’d be so well-known amongst the Negro readership. Mister Douglass would have to call himself Sambo, too, just as I have, or else he’d sound like the famous Frederick Douglass, and who would believe these were his mistakes?”

“Who will believe, Father, that they are yours?” “No one knows who I am,” he said with a wink.

No, indeed. Back in ’48 in Springfield, Massachusetts, black or white, they did not know who John Brown was. Not even I knew. There was a day coming, however, and not far off, when the whole world would know his name — from the literary salons of Paris, France, to the humblest white farmer’s cabin of Kentucky, from the Scottish castles of the English queen to the daub-and-wattle slave-quarters of Alabama. So go ahead, write your story now, Old Man. Be for black folks a friendly, ordinary Negro scold, and do it while you can. Soon enough the man who is Sambo will be Old John Brown, Captain John Brown, Osawatomie Brown, a man who cannot hide who he is, even behind a beard and a dozen false names, and who can never again claim to be other than white, who can no longer even cultivate a fantasy that he is other than white. Though it will be rarely said so baldly, his race — that he is a white man and in the interests of Negroes has coldly killed other white men — will become the most important thing about him.

The image of Father reading beside me has faded. The light that accompanied my memory of him is gone, and although I cannot see him, I can still hear his voice. He says to me, “It’s very dark here. You don’t mind the darkness, Owen? And the cold? It’s grown very cold since the sun set. Why not go inside and light a fire?”

“I do mind the darkness. It’s making me feel too much the pain of being alone. But the cold, no. I don’t feel the cold.”

“Then go inside your cabin, my boy, and light a candle.”

That was the winter and spring when we lived in Springfield in the house on Franklin Street, a wood-frame row house no wider than a single room, somewhat dilapidated, barely furnished, in a neighborhood of mostly Negro freedmen, people who were even poorer than we. We were content, however, because for the first time in several years we were residing together, a regular family, and Father was not working someplace far off, careening about the skies like a wandering star or a comet due to return home sometime in the distant future. Even John, with his new wife, Wealthy, was with us that year, helping Father run Mr. Perkins’s wool warehouse.

John was easier to deal with than Father, or so it appeared, for as soon as John arrived from Ohio, the buyers of our wool began asking to see him, instead of the Old Man. This left Father free to pursue his several projects concerning the welfare and future of the Negroes in Springfield, who that year were particularly alarmed by the growing number of slave-catchers prowling through Northern cities. Father’s abolitionist work had taken on a new intensity there and a freshened singleness of purpose, probably because of the presence in Springfield of a large number of freedmen who were agreeable to him for their intelligence and for the ferocity of their opposition to slavery. It no doubt helped that he, in his fervor and clarity of purpose, was agreeable to them as well.

I myself was attached to the warehouse, where I was responsible for cleaning and sorting the wool that came in from the west, mostly from Father’s and Mr. Perkins’s associates in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and attending to its proper storage and, when the occasional sale was made to one of the woolen manufacturers, packing and shipping it on to the huge new factory looms of eastern Massachusetts. It was boring work, but not particularly arduous, and left me perhaps too much solitary time for dreaming about a future that in my heart I suspected would never be mine.

My dreams were for the most part the foolish fancies of a very naive and unusually immature young man — a shepherd boy’s idea of sophisticated Eastern society. I was twenty-four years old that winter, and Springfield was the largest town I had ever seen. The regular proximity of exotic (or so they seemed to me) young women kept me in an agitated state of mind and body, and I spent many an evening and early morning hour walking the streets alone, not so much to look at the young women, for they were not so much to be found on the streets during those hours anyhow, as to be alone with my tangled thoughts and feelings, struggling to control and organize them.

Most of my thoughts and feelings were surely driven by simple, natural male curiosity, unnaturally heightened by my lifelong fear of women and my shyness when among them and the rural isolation of my life so far, but they disturbed and confused me. I hesitate to make this confession, especially to someone I do not know and a woman, and very possibly I will write this down and then burn it, as I have certain other pages already written. In fact, I cannot say for certain if I have sent you some of these pages, all of them, or none. They are scattered and strewn about my table and cabin, and much of the time, when I am not seated here with pencil in hand, I am confused and lose myself and can’t distinguish what I have done from what I have not done.

I will tell everything. During the daylight hours, whenever I noticed an attractive woman, whether a pious young woman at church or a neighborhood friend of Ruth’s or one of the daughters of a Negro cohort of Father’s at an abolitionist meeting, I quickly averted my gaze and made every attempt to remove myself from her presence. But later, in the nighttime — while alone and walking the gaslit streets of the city, down along muddy, trash-strewn lanes and alleys by the river and past the taverns and brothels there, where I lingered outside and peered through fogged-over windows and glanced furtively through doors as whiskeyed patrons entered and left, and along tree-lined boulevards up on the heights where the large mansions were located and I stopped and gazed across lawns to darkened verandas — I imagined all sorts of encounters with all types of women, and little plays took place on the stage of my mind, in which I spoke all the parts.