Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Our involvement with the Underground Railroad aside, our concern for the welfare of the Negroes of Timbuctoo, and our private virtues, along with the ways in which those virtues organized our behavior — all that aside, Miss Mayo, we were to every casual appearance very much like our North Elba neighbors. Country people. A stranger passing through the broad valley that lay between Whiteface and Tahawus would have had little reason to remark upon us (unless, like Mr. Dana and his party of lost hikers, he sat at table with us and stayed the night). He would likely merely have thought that we Browns were nothing unusual for our time and place. Except, perhaps, for our way of speaking, which a stranger would perceive at once and which was, I believe, regarded by some as downright peculiar. And here, in the matter of the manner of our speaking, we get to a thing that was both striking and readily apparent to all who met us, even for a moment, a thing that, to my knowledge, has never been described before, certainly not in print.

It is perhaps inevitable that the speech mannerisms of a family will be significantly influenced by the single strongest member of that family, and so it was with us. Thus, to a one, even to the littlest child, we sounded very like Father. Elaborately plainspoken, you might say — a manner or style of speech that originated, so far as I know, with Grandfather Owen Brown, who, having had a profound effect on Father’s way of speaking, is indirectly an influence on my way, too, even here and now, and on that of the rest of the family as well. So let me speak first of him.

Grandfather, who was born and raised in Connecticut back before the Revolution, chose and spoke his words in that old, now-forgotten, New England Puritan manner — deliberately, carefully, with a few thees and thous for leavening, almost as if he were writing his words down on paper, instead of speaking them aloud. He went beyond even the old New Englanders, however, for Grandfather was a stammerer and as a child had trained himself to speak with a formal, dry precision, slowly and in complete sentences, so as not to be controlled or confounded by his affliction. The man cultivated silences and used them as exclamations. He seemed to rehearse his statements in his mind before making any utterance, which gave to him a stately manner overall and provided others with the impression that he was an unusually reflective manas, indeed, he was. By thinking his words first, by silently phrasing and parsing them in his mind, and only afterwards, when he was satisfied with their lightness, speaking them aloud, Grandfather cultivated his thought more thoroughly than ordinary folk, and as a result his words not only seemed, by virtue of the way they were presented, to be wise; they in fact, more often than not, were wise. “You think as you speak, not vice versa” Father often said, and a man forced by an affliction such as stammering to control his speech will in turn soon learn to control his thoughts. So it was with Grandfather.

Father, with no such handicap as stammering to straiten his way, was obliged to impose one upon himself. When he was a young man, he curbed his reckless speech, and hence his thoughts, by placing into his mouth a stone that was sufficiently large to forbid easy and casual talk, and he carried the stone all day long in silence, except when he deliberately plucked it out and unplugged his mouth, as it were. He used the trick of Demosthenes, but in reverse, and not to overcome a handicap, but to simulate one, so as to obtain its compensatory advantages, which he had observed and admired in his own father.

“The inner man and the outer are one, unless ye be a hypocrite and dissembler. Control one of the two, and soon ye will control both,” the Old Man often said, applying his prescription as much to himself as to us children, whom he was instructing. All his instructions, admonitions, and rules were as much for him to follow, honor, and obey as for us. Never did I feel that Father had not himself contended with passions or desires fully as strong as my own, or that he had not, on numerous occasions, felt himself as weak, afraid, lonely, despondent, or frustrated as I and my brothers were, and my sisters, too. Quite the opposite. And from our point of view, all the more virtue accrued to him for his not having given himself over to those feelings. Thus his authority over us resided to a considerable degree in our awareness of his, and not our, struggle with vice, and his, not our, triumph over it.

Similarly, whatever self-imposed deprivation, whatever forms of abstinence, he requested of us, he demanded of himself also, despite what he confessed were his larger-than-normal desires to indulge in them. We none of us drank tea or coffee. We used no tobacco. We drank no whiskey, brandy, beer, or fermented cider, and kept none in the house. A visitor or houseguest unable to endure a meal without these stimulants and intoxicants would have to provide his own and then would find himself in the uncomfortable position of being observed by all the children and even those of us who were adults with curiosity and slight condescension, as if he were a Chinaman sucking on an opium pipe. If one of us secretly indulged in the use of tobacco, tea, or coffee, or accepted a sip of whiskey from a friend or an acquaintance, as each of us, especially we boys, did from time to time, his physical and mental reactions to it were all out of proportion to his expectations, and he backed off quickly and in fear. The high degree of excitation provided by these stimulants and intoxicants, due perhaps to our lack of experience with their use and to our shame, was almost always sufficient to keep us from returning for a second try. In addition, there was the threat of exile, of feeling cast out from the family, to keep us from disobeying Father’s rules of abstinence. No one of us wanted to be the only one unable to keep his rules. Whether the rest of the family knew of it hardly mattered: we knew of it, and that was enough to guarantee an intolerable loneliness. An occasional taste of that loneliness, like the single sip of whiskey or puff of tobacco smoke, was all any of us needed to renew his commitment to purity, abstinence, self-discipline, and to the orderly comportment of his mind, language, and private acts.

With regard to sexual matters, we all, except possibly poor Fred, were normal enough boys and then young men. Little as I know of what is normal for girls and women in such matters, I assume the same was true for the females in the family. And in this as in all things, Father’s advice bore the weight of a proscription and sometimes even that of a command: he advised us boys, offered as if in passing, with no room for discussion or further inquiry, to keep ourselves pure and to marry young and to study St. Paul’s letters.

Forgive me for speaking of the subject — I wish above all to be as frank as I have been truthful — but did Father believe that I, at least, was unable to forbear from self-abuse? It’s a question that has long worried me. I suspect he thought I was, just as I was sure that my brothers, both older and younger, must occasionally have abandoned themselves to this vice, although none of us ever confessed it. All of us — except Fred, whose sensitivity to sin and whose measure of guilt was so much greater than ours — possessed large animal spirits. John and Jason married young; Fred did not marry. Nor did I. Ruth and Annie married young, as did Watson and Oliver, who, along with Fred, died young. But I lived on for many long years, struggling even into old age to maintain my purity as diligently and with the same meager degree of success and heaped-up unhappiness over failure as when I was a boy. In later years, naturally, my animal spirits diminished to a great degree, and my struggle to control them abated at last. But without the struggle, there was no virtue; I take no particular pride, therefore, in the relative purity of my old age.