Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Lyman put one hand on her shoulder and drew her forward. “Come meet young Mister Brown. This here’s my wife, Susan,” he announced to me.

“How… how do,” I stammered, for I was surprised by this information, that Lyman had a wife; in all our conversations, he hadn’t mentioned her, not even in passing. I hadn’t inquired into his marital state, but nevertheless it’s difficult to spend several days and nights with a person, as he had with me, and not mention a wife, if you have one, and consequently I had simply assumed that his silence on the subject, like mine, meant that he was unmarried. Now I found myself angry at him, as if he had deliberately deceived me.

“You never mentioned you were married,” I said to him.

Father, having heard me speak, turned and saw Lyman. “Ah, Mister Epps, there you are!” he said, and at once Lyman left me and, with his hand still on his wife’s shoulder, moved towards the Old Man, who swung down from his horse and shook hands with him and made a pleasant fuss over the woman — as I should have done.

I did follow the Old Man’s example of getting down from the wagon, though, and joined him as he spoke with Lyman and his wife. Father was gracious with her, as he always was with women; regardless of their race or station, he pointedly treated them as equal to himself. I myself was too shy to speak with any woman directly — except, of course, for my sisters and my stepmother, Mary. It was Mary whom Father was speaking of when I drew up to him. He was explaining that she was ill and needed more help with the household chores than could be provided by Ruth and the younger children.

“Since the birth of our infant who died this April past, my wife has been poorly!’ he said. “But not so poorly that she could not stand and work, until now. I believe, however, that if she is allowed to keep to her bed for a spell, she will recover.”

This was news to me, but Mary naturally did not confide in me, and I confess that I did not make a habit of observing her condition. I bore great good will towards the woman but could not help feeling somewhat distant from her, through no fault of her own, certainly. Unlike Ruth, Fred, Jason, and John, I had remained unable to shift my affections for our true mother over to my father’s wife.

“Would you be willing to work for me in the fields?” Father asked Lyman. “Susan I would also like to hire, to keep house and care for the smaller children. You could both put up at our place until the fall, eat at our table, and take a quarter-share in the harvest, so that you could then get your own farm off to a proper start next year.”

I touched Father’s sleeve with my hand. “We have barely enough room for ourselves, Father;’ I said in a low voice. “The boys and I can handle the planting and haying and the livestock ourselves. Ruth is capable of the rest, with the little ones to help her.”

Father gave me a hard look. “Owen,” was all he said. He resumed talking to Lyman and Susan, and I stalked off. I knew that Lyman and his wife would agree at once to come over and live with us. However crowded it was at our place, there would be more room for the couple there than in their shack here in Timbuctoo, and a quarter-share of our crop would probably be twice what the man could raise alone on his own land. At our table they would eat a full meal every day, which they surely never did at their own. Also, Lyman’s standing in the Negro community, which seemed to me on the low side, would rise considerably from his and his wife’s association with our family.

But I also knew what the Old Man was up to: if he was going to be of any use to these people, he needed to bring at least one of them into close affiliation with our family, a trusted and trusting person who would help him penetrate the community, to speak for him to the others and to inform him as to their thoughts and needs. It was how he always worked. Beyond surveying their land grants, beyond teaching the Negroes how to farm in this climate and on this stingy soil, Father wanted to set up an Underground Railroad station in North Elba, where there was none, at least no station with any known connections to the lines that ran to Canada along the New York side of the Champlain Valley. He intended to carry escaped slaves out of the South by way of the Adirondack mountain passes, a route that until now had been used only in isolated cases, when some poor soul somehow got off the main route by accident and slipped through the iron-mining camps on the south side of Tahawus and followed rumor north through Indian Pass to Timbuctoo and then, traveling alone and at great risk, worked his lonely way north and east to connect finally with the Lake Champlain line by means of the Quaker stationmasters in Port Kent and Plattsburgh.

In Father’s mind, the passes and ridges of the Adirondacks were the northernmost extension of the entire Appalachian Range, which ran all the way back through New York State to the Pennsylvania Alleghenies down into Virginia and on into the very center of the slaveholding region. His map of the Railroad was unlike anyone else’s — unlike Harriet Tubman’s, unlike Frederick Douglass’s, unlike the Quakers’. On Father’s map, the southernmost lines fed like taproots from the cotton plantations of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia up into the mountains of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, where the main trunk line flowed north and east. It did not split one way towards Niagara and the other towards the Hudson Valley and Lake Champlain, as the other maps had it, but ran in a single line between the two into the rocky heart of the Adirondacks, straight to North Elba, where a long night’s ride could get you over the border into Canada.

Father spoke often and elaborately of this map, and to implement it, he needed Lyman Epps and his wife, Susan — because the Old Man worked his Railroad alone. He had always done it that way. Whether in Ohio or Pennsylvania or Springfield, Massachusetts, John Brown ran his own Underground Railroad line, and that obliged him to forge his own connections to the Negroes. Except for the members of his immediate family, Father did not trust white people, not even the lifelong radical abolitionists like himself, as much as he trusted black people. “In this work, it’s their lives that are at stake,” he often said. “Not ours. When it comes to a showdown, white people can always go home and pretend to read their Bibles, if they want. A black man will have to fire his gun. Who would you rather have at your side, a well-meaning white fellow who can cut and run if he wants, or a Negro man whose freedom is on the line?”

Later in the day, after Father had assured the community that they were the legal landholders in Timbuctoo and that he would return and commence his survey on the following day, we took our leave of the gloomy place. In order to prepare his next day’s work, he carried with him all such bills of sale and contracts and deeds as the landholders had in their possession — so greatly did the Negroes trust the Old Man that they willingly delivered up to him their only evidence of their rights to their land. Not that Father would ever betray them; they were right to trust him. But the effect Father had on Negroes was difficult to understand. Mostly I attributed it to the rage against slavery that he never ceased to express; although sometimes, when I was down on Father myself, I attributed it to the gullibility of the Negroes. The fact is, more than any other white man, Father consistently managed to make Negro people believe that their struggle against the evils of slavery and the daily pain and suffering imposed on them by racial prejudice were his as well, despite the fact that he was so often a white man in a preacher’s suit sitting up on a very tall horse.