Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

All our virtues — of piety, honesty, abstinence, and so on, of cleanliness and orderliness, of devotion to work and industry, of love of learning and of neighborliness — were the products and expressions of struggle. This was not much understood by those who observed us and later wrote about our life and character. Remember, Father, first and perhaps foremost among us, and every other member of the family as well, even including the women, pious Mary, sweet Ruth, and my younger sisters, Annie and Sarah — all of us were normal people. Which is to say, there was not a one of us who was not tempted by impiety. And we were intelligently skeptical about so much — Father, after all, encouraged it in us practically from infancy — that it was difficult not to apply that same skepticism to our entire way of life. Many was the time when we wanted to give ourselves over to another way. What was this crackbrained obsession with slavery and Negroes anyhow? one might well ask, and sometimes we did ask it as, exhausted and exasperated by another of Father’s plans to move us to a new place or to start a school for Negro children or to drop everything and ride off in search of escaped slaves who, without us, would have made their own way to Canada safely just the same, we would look at one another and roll our eyes upward and trudge out to the barn in the dark of night and harness up the horses yet again.

At bottom, then, we were ordinary people and were tempted, not just by impiety, but by typical American dishonesty as well — and not so much to lie or cheat or steal, but simply to push an advantage on occasion, to charge for a service or good whatever the buyer was willing to pay, for instance, instead of charging only what was fair. That is, instead of asking no more than the cost of that same service or good to us. Which was Father’s monetary policy’s ethical base. We were all obliged to stand upon it firmly, yet here we were, always in deep debt, scrambling for ways to avoid foreclosure, bankruptcy, imprisonment. Honesty in these matters, especially considering our dire circumstances, was thus always the result of struggle, and was all the more virtuous therefore — even as our financial circumstances worsened, and Father tumbled towards out-and-out bankruptcy, and all around us others prospered.

Likewise, our abstinence was achieved only through struggle against constant temptation, for we did not remove ourselves, as Shakers and Mennonites do, from ordinary, daily contact with people who rationalized the indulgence of every sensual appetite. On the contrary, we befriended and moved freely amongst them all — drunkards, boisterers, brawlers, and sensualists of every stripe and type. They were everywhere in those days, especially out at the edges of civilized society, which is, after all, where we most often resided ourselves, and many of them were our strongest allies in the work. We associated with such folks as much on principle as convenience and as a consequence of our natural sociability. We thought it necessary and right and believed that it helped in the work, for there were many radical abolitionists whose genteel fastidiousness rendered them wholly ineffective, and Father enjoyed pointing them out to us. “Boston ladies,” he called them, although most of them were men.

No, we Browns maintained our virtue in the face of daily temptation, willfully, elaborately contriving it, as if the virtue were not worth much without it. And though it may have sometimes encouraged in us a feeling of superiority to other “normal” people, that, too, was a temptation to be met, struggled with, and overcome, in public and in private, just as I am doing here, even now. Just as Father himself did throughout his life.

Always, Father taught by example and instruction: the two were deliberately interwoven; he made of our childhood understandings a fabric that could not be unraveled or torn. For instance, with regard to our well-known love of learning, had we not watched since earliest childhood the Old Man every evening turn to his bookcase and draw out from it a treasured, much-thumbed tome and commence to read from it and comment on what he read there, we would not have believed, due to our lack of formal education, that there was anything of great value to be obtained from books, especially such books as Father, no matter how unsettled or hectic the circumstances, loved and studied all his life. Like most of our neighbors and friends, we would normally have thought that books of philosophy and history and natural science were better left to the learned and were not proper fields of study for such rough country types as we. Father’s sustained example, however, led us to the experience itself. And by imitating his hard-earned love of learning, we were gradually filled with a love of learning ourselves, and thus we came to possess it as if it were a gift to be treasured for life and not a dour, burdensome consequence of blind obedience, cast off as soon as darkness fell.

We all saw our father, Mary saw her husband, struggle with temptation — he made us see it, he spoke of it constantly: his sensuality, his slothfulness, his vain desire for wealth and fame, his pridefulness — and we saw him daily overcome each and every one of those temptations. How could we not go forward, then, and do likewise? We who were no more and no less sensual, slothful, vain, and proud than he? It was his weakness as much as his strength that guided and instructed us; his pitiful, simple, common humanity that inspired us. Those who later wrote that Father was like an infallible god to us were wrong.

We were much misunderstood always. That, I suppose, is yet another of the many ways in which we Browns paid for our virtues. Poverty is one, too. We were hard-working, a large and highly skilled family of workers, and yet, because of our devotion to our Negro neighbors and their cause, all our enterprises failed. Father was regarded by some, rightly, as a genius when it came to livestock. And he was a self-taught surveyor of great skill and understood all the ways in which a piece of land was valuable or poor. He was a tanner capable at the age of twenty of organizing and operating a large tannery on his own. He was a businessman who understood the subtle connections between the producer of wool, the wholesale purveyor of wool, the manipulation by the purveyor of the market price for wool, and the consequent exploitation of the producer, and he was able to conceive and put into place a complex scheme to block that exploitation. And yet we ourselves remained poor, in permanent debt, living on the kindness and philanthropy of men like Mr. Gerrit Smith and Mr. Simon Perkins. For while in many ways we may well have been self-sufficient, growing all our own food and manufacturing all our clothing and tools, we were obliged to do it on land that, in the end, belonged to others.

Even in North Elba, where Mr. Smith had deeded Father two hundred forty acres of first-rate tableland at one dollar per acre. Father died owing for most of it. The Old Man raised money, many thousands of dollars, for the Negroes from white strangers all over the United States, but when he died, his widow had not a dollar to her name. I remember hunger; I remember cold; I remember public humiliation — these were the hard prices we paid for our much-admired devotion to principle. And I did not think it would ever end, despite Father’s schemes and his permanent willingness to launch every year a new enterprise for raising money: gathering wool all over Ohio and Pennsylvania and warehousing it for Mr. Perkins in Springfield until the prices rose; buying and selling purebred cattle; speculating on land where canals were rumored to be going in any day now; and on and on, his face bright with the vision of all his debts at last being paid off, of finally owning his own farm outright, of being able to provide for his large, ever-growing family against the rigors that he believed would characterize the long years ahead. For he was sure that Mary would survive him — she was so much younger than he — and believed that she would be left with young children to care for. He did not want to die without having provided for his widow and children.