Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Cautiously, I pointed out to him that it might prove impossible to interview the agents and conductors, except for Mr. Wilkinson in Tahawus and the fellow in Port Kent, known to us only by name and reputation: Mr. Solomon Keifer was a Quaker shipwright originally from Rhode Island, who for several years had been moving fugitive slaves north by boat. Father’s insistence on controlling every aspect of the operation, I feared, would doom it, as it had doomed similar ventures before.

But he would hear none of it. “If a thing can’t be done right, then it’s not worth doing,” he said. “It’s the Lord whose work this is, Owen, not Mister Douglass’s or Mister Smith’s. I trust only in the Lord. And in myself, who serves Him.”

If this venture failed, it would not be because Father hadn’t done his utmost to get the job done right. No, he declared, he would interview and appoint every man who wished to act as an agent or conductor for us. No exceptions. And if that meant we could not extend our line and station now to those already in existence among the slaves in the Southern states, well, then, so be it. We would find another way to siphon off the human chattel from the plantations, another way to bring about the collapse of that satanic institution. “We will triumph in the end,” he insisted. “But the end may be much further off than we realize, and when it comes, it may appear in terms that we cannot now imagine. In the meantime, Owen, we must trust our principles large and small, for the end is always and forever the Lord’s, and thus will take care of itself, with or without us.”

Who could argue with him? Certainly not I — who at that age had too little experience of the world, of the Lord’s will, and of slavery to know that he was wrong, and too little command of language and the forms of reasoning to name and rebut his fallacies. I was not altogether a passive or unquestioningly obedient son, but I was aware of my own limitations and so allowed him to rule me, in spite of our frequent disagreements and disputes.

Late one bright afternoon in early June, Mr. Wilkinson’s young son, Daniel, a boy about the age of Watson, fourteen or fifteen, appeared at our farm bearing the information that cargo had arrived in Tahawus, trans-shipped from the town of New Trenton in Oneida County. Mary, who was beginning by then to recover from her malady, although she was not yet able to take on any of the heavy household duties, welcomed the boy in and gave him something to eat. Meanwhile, Oliver chased down Father, who was off in Timbuctoo helping to raise a barn, and Salmon came for me, who that afternoon had gone with Watson to build an Indian-style fishing weir on the tableland below, where the west branch of the Au Sable passed through a rocky gorge on a corner of our land. Lyman remained waiting at the farm, where he had been constructing a small forge for smithing next to the tannery that he and Father had built.

It was nearly dusk before we all — Father, me, Lyman, and Mr. Fleete — forgathered at the house and then with considerable excitement struck out with the Wilkinson lad for Tahawus, a good eight hours’ hike away. The boy was intelligent and articulate and proud to have been given such a heavy responsibility, and as we walked rapidly along, he conveyed his father’s message to us in bits, barely restraining his pleasure. He told us that a Negro man and his wife, both in a somewhat debilitated condition, had arrived the previous night. They had been forwarded by Mr. Frederick Douglass himself and had come mostly under cover of night alone from Utica, along cart tracks and footpaths through the woods all the way to the Wilkinsons’ house. They were from Richmond, Virginia, and had run off a fancy James River estate, had nearly been caught twice and were terrified of being returned to their owner, who they believed would separate them by selling the man off as a field hand to Alabama, where their owner had interests in a cotton plantation. They were a well-spoken couple, he said, and claimed they could read and write. And there was a considerable reward for their return, he added as a warning, for he knew that this fact increased the danger of transporting them.

I believe that this was the first time that young Daniel had been personally involved with helping slaves to escape, and the thing was for him a considerable adventure. For Father and me, of course, it was a welcome resumption of the activity that had given us so much extreme satisfaction back in Ohio and Pennsylvania, when we used to take off into the hills of Virginia and Maryland or drive down along the Ohio River with John and Jason and be gone from home for days transporting whole wagonloads of escaped slaves north to Canada, traveling at night and hiding out in the barns of Quakers and other sympathizers or camping in the deep woods during the daylight hours. We had not been able to participate in this activity since Father’s removal east to Springfield, partially because there was in Springfield an already functioning network of abolitionist transporters who were white and with whom Father would not cooperate, and also because, with all the demands of the woolen business there, he simply could not take off and turn day into night carrying Negroes under tarpaulins in the back of a wagon racing down country roads. Also, in Springfield, there had been other venues available to his activism.

For Mr. Fleete, this was a great opportunity; without the material support and protection of the Old Man, he had up to now been limited to only the most passive of roles in aiding the escapes of his enslaved brethren. Lyman Epps, like almost every freedman in those days, wished to work on the Underground Railroad, but he also had a young man’s natural desire to test himself under fire. As it was highly unlikely that we would meet up with a bounty-hunting slave-catcher and be obliged to defend our cargo against seizure or that we would be seriously opposed by any local people up here in the mountains, this was a perfect opportunity for Lyman to do both without risking much. In those years, most of the settlers in the Adirondacks were New Englanders, people who, even if not wholly sympathetic with the work being done by the radical abolitionists, were nonetheless unwilling to obstruct it, so long as they themselves were not put in physical or legal danger. They did not like Negroes, but they did not especially want to help those who enslaved them. If others wished to move them through to Canada, fine, they would not interfere. Even so, we had to be prepared for any emergency, and thus we marched on to Tahawus under cover of darkness, and armed.

In the weeks since we first arrived and took up residence there, we had grown increasingly familiar with the forest pathways that linked the various Adirondack settlements, so that now, even at night, we were in no great danger of getting lost, especially since there was a bright, nearly full moon floating overhead. Most of the footpaths we used had been deer tracks laid down in ancient times in the narrow valleys and defiles and along the connecting ridges, followed later by the Algonquin and Iroquois Indians, who never settled here but for hundreds of years had fought each other for control of the region as a hunting preserve. Once you had in your mind a map of the land and understood the logic of its topography, you could pretty well predict where the path from one place to another would be found. In our first weeks in North Elba, Watson, Salmon, Oliver, and I had explored all the woods for several miles around the farm and Timbuctoo and felt as much at home there now as we had back in the neat villages and cultivated fields of Ohio. Wed even taken to racing one another after work up several of the nearby mountains and back to the house before supper, vying amongst us to find the quickest route up and down Pitch-off or Sentinel. Mr. Fleete and Lyman, of course, knew the woods intimately, for they had resided there for nearly three years by then, and Father’s recent tramping over thousands of acres of field and forest with his surveying instruments had given him a refined intelligence concerning the neighborhood. When a place enters your daily life, you quickly lose your fear of it, and I almost had to laugh at my first awestruck, fearful impressions of these forested mountains and valleys barely a month earlier, when we came up from Elizabethtown and Keene.