Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

But in those warm days of spring and early summer, as we settled into our farm, the tumult that habitually inhabited my own mind was eased somewhat, and my earlier turbulence and confusion seemed almost to have occurred in the mind of another man than myself, some fellow younger than I, whose wrathfulness and turmoil had kept him from appreciating the singular beauty of the place and the pleasures of hard work well done and the company of a large, skilled, and cheerfully employed family. Towards Lyman I felt a renewed sense of comradeships as if he were a brother, kin. and despite his having a wife, a woman whom I grew quickly fond of, for her sober wit and decorum. My squallish feelings of before appeared to wane and then to blow away like clouds off the mountains that daily stood before us in their forested summer majesty — great, green pillars holding up the sky — cloudsplitters, indeed.

As he had promised, the Old Man right away took himself off from the farm and began his survey of the lands granted by Mr. Gerrit Smith to the Negroes, assisted sometimes by me or Lyman, but increasingly accompanied by the sturdy, bearded fellow we had met on our first visit to Timbuctoo, a man who, as it turned out, was their unofficial chieftain and an altogether admirable gentleman. Elden Fleete was a freedman from Brooklyn, New York, a self-educated, somewhat bookish man whose mouth, like Father’s, was full of quotations from the Bible, but also from the plays of Shakespeare and authors of antiquity. He had been a printer and for many years had edited and published an abolitionist newspaper called The Gileadite, which circulated mainly among Negroes in Brooklyn and New York City and was little known elsewhere. Although to my mind it compared favorably to the better-known newspapers, such as The Liberator, published by William Lloyd Garrison — who, as I am well aware, is your Professor Oswald Garrison Villard’s distinguished, and no doubt much admired, late grandfather. In my praise of Mr. Fleete’s little paper, I mean no criticism of your colleague’s ancestor.

Mr. Fleete, despite his bookishness, was a humorous, energetic man of high ideals who had come to Timbuctoo not so much to own land and farm it as to help in the creation of an autonomous African community in the mountains of North America. He had come here strictly in order to establish a precedent and model for what he hoped would someday be a separate nation of Negro freedmen on the North American continent. In those early days before the Fugitive Slave Act and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, before it had become inescapably clear to everyone that the slavers had taken over every branch of the government of the United States, abolitionists black and white were much divided over how to deal with the fact that there were more than three million people of African descent living in the United States. Regardless of how, or even whether, slavery was banished from the land, so long as most whites regarded them as inferior, these millions would remain here a despised, abject race incapable of rising to the level of white people. Certain Negroes, like Frederick Douglass, for example, and a few whites, like Father, persisted in believing that white people could eventually learn to regard Negroes as their equals; others thought that the only solution to the problem was to force all three million American Negroes to return to Africa; and there were numerous positions between these two extremes. Mr. Fleete was among a small minority of black abolitionists who hoped that the United States government would establish in the western territories a separate state for Negro freedmen, and he had been calling for this in the pages of The G ileadite. The state would be named Gilead and would be ruled by a legislature and a governor elected by its citizenry. Its people would be no more answerable to the government of the United States than were the citizens of France or England. He had even written a constitution for his nation of Gileadites, which was modeled closely on the Constitution of the United States, except, of course, for the provisions therein designed to advance and support chattel slavery.

Father thought the notion of Gilead the height of absurdity and said so, frequently and loud, but he had high regard for Mr. Fleete’s general intelligence and character, and as he was a man much admired by the other Negroes of Timbuctoo, the Old Man befriended him and worked easily with him in the several areas where they found agreement. They both recognized the need to make a proper survey of the freedmen’s lands, they both felt the urgency of teaching the residents of Timbuctoo how best to survive as independent farmers and stockmen in this climate, and they agreed on the usefulness of establishing Timbuctoo as an actively operating station on the Underground Railroad.

They knew that the routes in the east along the Hudson and Champlain Valleys and in the west into Ontario by way of Niagara and Detroit were becoming increasingly dangerous in those years and subject to betrayal and savage attack by pro-slavery people residing along the lines and by kidnappers hired by Southern slaveholders. “The fact is, we’ve got to head up into the hills and move across the ridges and peaks where we cannot be pursued,” the Old Man had decided way back in Springfield. Also, he had long wished anyhow to establish an escape route for the slaves which would be protected, not by well-meaning whites, but by heavily armed black men: he believed that only when the Negroes themselves were able to threaten the slavers with deadly force would the cost of the “peculiar institution” become so great as to crumble of its own weight. It was from these residents of Timbuctoo that he believed he would draw his initial cadre of armed black men.

Thus, with Mr. Fleete at his side, as soon as his surveys were finished and the deeds registered at the county courthouse in Elizabethtown, Father at the first opportunity hiked the long way south to Indian Pass, crossing through the tangled forests where Mr. Dana, the author, and his Boston companions had gotten lost, on to the tiny village of Tahawus, which had been settled some years earlier for the purposes of mining iron ore from the red cliffs there. In that isolated place, living amongst a population of mostly Irish miners and their Yankee supervisors, was a family named Wilkinson, people known to Father and Mr. Fleete as dedicated and trustworthy abolitionists, who in the recent past had hidden an occasional escaped slave in their storage cellar or barn until such time as he or, as was sometimes the case, she could be passed along or directed northward through the forests to North Elba and thence on to Canada.

The head of the household, Mr. Jonas Wilkinson, in his capacity of engineer and geologist, had previously worked for Gerrit Smith on certain of his enterprises in the western section of the state of New York, having to do with the construction of canals, and it was through Mr. Smith that Father had first come to know of him. Mr. Fleete, of course, knew him strictly through his benevolence towards the occasional escaped slave who passed through Tahawus and on to Timbuctoo.

The two, Mr. Fleete and Father, arranged to have Mr. Wilkinson notify them whenever “cargo” sent from the South for trans-shipment north arrived at his home. He was to send one of his sons through the forest to our place, and then Father and I, Mr. Fleete and Lyman Epps, carrying rifles as if on a hunt, would go back with the boy, retrieve the cargo, and under cover of darkness transport it back to North Elba, where, as soon as possible, we would move it north by wagon to the next trans-shipping point, which at that time was Port Kent on Lake Champlain, a mere forty miles south of the Canadian border.

By means of carefully worded letters to Mr. Smith at his home in Walpole, New York, and to Frederick Douglass over in Rochester, the Old Man alerted many of the agents, conductors, and stationmasters in downstate New York and Pennsylvania and even as far south as Maryland that there was now an effectively manned link in the Underground Railroad that ran right up the center of New York State straight into the mountainous wilderness of the north, If we utilize this route, he wrote to Messrs. Smith and Douglass in a pair of letters which he asked me one evening to transcribe for him, there is unlikely to be any interference with our shipments from those parties who remain hostile to our interests. It is my fond hope that in time this route can be extended southward through the Allegheny and Appalachian Mountains and that we will have reliable trans-shipping agents and conductors posted all the way to New Orleans. In a postscript, Father had me add, I myself must first interview all who wish to join this enterprise, for, as you know, the strength of any chain is determined by its weakest link.