Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Lyman drew the wagon to a halt, and the family came and gathered around it and admired the wonderful sight together. We removed the damp blankets from our shoulders, folded them and placed them back into the wagon. Then Father took himself off from us a ways and lowered his head and silently prayed, while the rest of us continued simply to admire the generosity and beauty of the land.

For a long time, no one spoke, and then, when Father had rejoined us, Lyman said, “We better keep moving, Browns, if we wants to get home by nightfall.” He slapped the reins, and the wagon jerked forward along the rocky, narrow road, and we all moved back into line behind it, walking easily downhill into the valley, as the sun descended towards the hills and mountains beyond.

On our arrival at North Elba, after Lyman Epps had departed for his own home, we passed nearly a full week at the long-abandoned farm on the Keene Road, before any of us ventured forth again — time spent unpacking the wagon and cleaning, re-organizing, and repairing the tumble-down cabin and shed, which were too small to be properly called a house and barn. In various ways we were stretching the structures so as to fit our many belongings and our numerous selves. Then, on the morning that I came to breakfast ready to commence plowing the one sizeable, cleared field on the place, Father instructed me not to plow.

This surprised me. With the shortness of the growing season, there was a clear need to get the ground turned over and the seed sown as quickly as possible. It was a clear, dry day, and Watson and Salmon were already waiting for me in the shed. I stood at the door to the cabin on my way outside, while Father perched on a three-legged stool next to the stove, finishing his morning shave.

“You don’t want me to plow today,” I said to him, making it a statement, not a question. Repeating his words was one of my ways of getting the Old Man to explain his purpose without seeming to question his authority.

“No. Saddle the lead horse, Adelphi, for me. I’ve developed a real fondness for the animal. And hitch the off-horse to the wagon and load up my transit and lines,” he said. “It’s time for you and me to call on our African neighbors. Time for us to go to Timbuctoo.”

Although I wasn’t particularly glad of the chance to put off the plowing, I was eager to see Timbuctoo, for I had never visited a Negro farming community before. As far as I knew, this was the only one in the Northeast, although Father said there were a few just across the border, in Canada. I remember wishing that it had a different name, however. I knew from Lyman that, while the acreage that Gerrit Smith had given them to farm was located in the valley in various spots, the Negroes had clustered their cabins together on a narrow, rising section of the tableland southeast of the village of North Elba. They might have called their settlement the Heights, I thought, or South Elba. But, no, they had named it Timbuctoo.

“Same as Timbuctoo in Guinea,” Lyman had explained to me. “You know, like the way white folks call their towns New London and New York and Manchester and such, so as to bring back to their minds the place they came from.” They had even made a flag to fly above the settlement, he told me. “Red, like the blood of the slaves, with one star on it. The freedom star.”

I could see that from their perspective, although they had no more memory of Africa than I had of England, Timbuctoo was an affectionate and respectful name, which I am sure is how Father took it. No doubt their need went beyond that, for while I was connected to my English forefathers by means of the language I spoke, the Negroes’ links to their ancestors had been cut away by slavery, which gave the word “Timbuctoo” a greater resonance in their ears than did words like “Manchester” and “New London” in mine. But I could also hear the whites in the region saying the Negroes’ name for their settlement in a derisive and derogatory way.

“Wouldn’t it be better, this first time, for us just to walk over there?” I asked the Old Man. “In a neighborly way, as equals among equals?” I didn’t want to make our first appearance there with Father up on horseback and me driving a wagon. The picture put me out somewhat, made me feel slightly uncomfortable, for it placed us on a height in our first meetings with these people, who, according to Lyman, owned no horses or oxen, had but a few swine and dunghill fowl, and drew their plows themselves or chopped their soil by hand with hoes and spades. Our elevated position might suggest that we regarded ourselves as Mr. Gerrit Smith’s newly hired overseers riding out to examine the number and condition of the plantation darkies.

Father wiped his razor clean and stood and buttoned his waistcoat. Mary, who was again feeling poorly, lay abed where she and Father had slept on the mattress placed next to the stove. The rest of us had slept in the attic above. With just two rooms downstairs, the cabin, though cozy and clean, was crowded as a small boat. “No” Father said. “I can understand your discomfort, but it’s necessary for us to make a proper show for them. They are a downtrodden people, Owen. And we need them to see that Mister Smith has taken them seriously enough to send out a significant sort of man to deal with them.” When you offer your services to men who consider themselves mighty, he explained, it’s good to go modestly and small. An honest man approaches Herod’s tent with dust on his sandals. But when you come to help people who for generations have been made to regard themselves as lowly and undeserving, you come as grandly as you can and with fanfare. The first gift we offer them, he said, will be a sense of their great value as human beings. They are not simply the despised ex-property of men, they are the blessed children of God, and until they possess that high a view of themselves, they will not be able to utilize our further gifts. “So wear your coat and hat, son,” he said, with a hint of a smile on his thin lips. “And button your shirt to your throat. Today you must look like the son of an important man. A surveyor. You can wear your plowman’s smock tomorrow.”

Father rode ahead of me, seated like a preacher, erect and reflective-seeming, as if he were not admiring or even conscious of the splendid scenery that surrounded us. He was fully as aware of the landscape as I, however. More so, probably. He no longer surprised me when, after a journey during which I had believed him throughout to have been lost in thought, he gave to Mary or the others who had remained at home a vividly detailed report of everything that we had passed, even including the flowers in the glades, the birds in the trees, and the trees and shrubs, all of which he had carefully noted to himself and had named in passing and had remembered.

“When we have named a thing, we have begun to see it,” he often said. “And in so doing we praise and give continual thanks to our heavenly Father. Thus it is to God’s greater glory that we name the most obscure flower in His field.” He had made a game of it when we were children, testing our abilities to identify by name, not the hawkweed or purple vetch or red milium, which everyone knew and admired, but the tiny heal-all, the spotted knapweed, and the lowly squawroot. Salmon was the best of us. Even as a small boy of seven or eight, he knew the names and uses of hundreds of flowers and plants that the rest of us, including Father, barely noticed. He knew that the burnet weed will stanch a wound, that coltsfoot will cure a cough, and that a sick deer will eat pickerelweed, and he knew where in forest and field to find them all.

Father’s and my arrival at the settlement was not quite the grand occasion that I had expected. But it was more the fault of my high expectations than the somewhat dismal reality I encountered, and my expectations, I felt, were more the fault of Lyman than of Father. Earlier, as our journey into the mountains from Westport had progressed, Lyman had spoken to me with increasing friendliness and sincerity. Then, lying side by side in the stale hay of the Partridge barn, he and I had talked long after the others had fallen to sleep. That was when he told me to call him Lyman, since we were close in age, and I agreed, but with reluctance, for somehow my calling him by his given name seemed, in my eyes, at least, to demean him.