Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

A man can keep a betrayal like mine shut inside himself and unacknowledged all the way down the years of his life to his grave. But the dead whom he betrayed will not let him rest until he has finally revealed it to himself and confessed it to them. The world need not know it; only those whose deaths he caused must hear him. The world at large can go on making up, revising, and believing its received truth. (It will do so anyway — history little notices last-minute or even deathbed confessions.) The received truth of history is shot through and falsified by unknown secrets carried to the grave.

The burden of carrying a terrible and incriminating secret for a lifetime, of dying with it untold, is not great. It’s done all the time. For long periods of one’s life — especially if one goes off, as I did, and lives alone on a mountaintop — one doesn’t even have to think about it. As the years go by, it grows encrusted with rationalizations and elaborate, self-serving explanations and gets distorted by the pliability of living memory, one’s own and others’. And so long as one remains silent, other people will inevitably construct a believable narrative that makes the inexplicable plausible.

What really happened at the Pottawatomie massacre? Why did Old Brown go down into Harpers Ferry and stay there long after he could have come out alive? Why did he take his sons and his sons-in-law and all those other fine young men to certain death with him? How did his third son, Owen Brown, come to be the one son who escaped? All these inexplicable events have been explained hundreds of times, hundreds of ways, some of them ingenious, some foolish, all of them plausible. But all without the backing of truth.

No matter. So long as I remained silent, so long as I myself did not try to explain the inexplicable, my secret went unnoticed and proved thus to be no great burden for me to keep untold, to keep unrevealed, even to myself.

I had believed, when I first agreed to write to you, that it was my task to tell Father’s untold story, to fill out the historical record with my eyewitness account so as to revise once and for all the received truth about John Brown and his sons and followers. All my life I had resisted doing that, and it seemed wonderful to me that, as it then appeared, I had been given a final chance to set it down. But now it seems that I am not so much revising history as making a confession of a crime, a terrible, secret crime which — if I had been able to keep to my original intentions and long-nurtured desires and had not been obliged to pass beyond them, there to discover strange, unexpected new intentions and desires — would have remained safely hidden. A crime still known by me alone.

This, then, is not simply a report to you or Professor Villard. A dead man confesses to other dead men so that he may join them. And to dead women, too, all of them gone before me now — stepmother Mary, sister Ruth, my younger sisters, Annie, Sarah, and even the lastborn, Ellen — the women who lost and for the rest of their lives grieved over father, brother, husband; the women who, though their bodies were not buried here alongside Father’s and the others’, nevertheless are out there with them, waiting to hear me. I confess to mere acquaintances and strangers, too. I confess to all the men and women, Negro and white, who believed in Father and his mission, who gave him their life’s trust and treasure and even gave him their sons and brothers.

I peer from the window and now and again step forward into the doorframe and look away into the darkness. There they are. All of them are out there; a vast multitude silently awaits me, as if I were on a brightly illumined stage and the broad, grassy valley were a darkened amphitheater. In dim, reflected moonlight I see their sober faces uplifted, expectant, as free of judgement of me as I am of them, for they cannot know their own true stories until they have heard mine.

They knew me, and they hear me now neither with particular sympathy nor without it, for, while no one of them may have committed any such crime as I, they all surely were tempted and at times were as confused as I and as enfeebled, conflicted, and angry. Certainly my brothers were, and my sisters and stepmother and the young men who sacrificed their lives in the long war against slavery. I knew them, too, and in those terrible, fierce years leading up to Harpers Ferry there was not a one of them who was at all times clearer of motive and understanding than I. They will not judge me. They will merely hear me out. My account is a gift. Permanent rest, for them as much as for me, is impossible without it.

You may not know this, but I have been remembering what follows here below and don’t know what else to do with the memory than to convey it by this means to you. Somehow, my words seem more a proper indictment written down like this; they cannot be so easily ignored or forgotten or denied by me as when I merely mouth them.

In the spring of ’31, when he was four months old, my brother Fred’s birth-name got replaced by the name of an earlier Frederick, a boy who was born between me and Ruth, a five-year-old boy who had died in March that year of the ague. I cannot recall even the face of that first Frederick. And, to my regret, I long ago forgot the birth-name of the second, the infant who eventually became the true Frederick, our Fred, and there is no one else left who would remember it.

Then, a year and a half after the re-naming, in the autumn of ’32, when my sister Ruth was three years old and little more than a baby herself, we lost our mother. We were living in the wilds of New Richmond in western Pennsylvania, having recently removed there from Hudson, in Ohio. The new Frederick was by then nearly two. There was another baby, unnamed, who was born and died a few days before my mother herself died. John and Jason were eleven and ten and were out of school and regularly employed in the tannery with Father. I was eight and thus still a schoolboy.

But until Mother died, we Browns had been to all appearances a normal family of our time and place, if a bit overly strict in matters of religion. After that, we became like some ancient Hebrew tribe of wanderers and sufferers, burdened by the death of women and children and by our endless obligations to our father’s restless, yet implacable, God. Isolated from our neighbors and tangled in tribulation and increasingly dire financial circumstances, we were weighed down further by complicated vows and covenants that made sense only after Father had explained them to us. And even though his explanations made our life briefly comprehensible, since there was always a reason for everything that we did, over the long run they made things worse, for he likened our life, not to the lives of the modern American people who surrounded us, but to those of his Biblical heroes. It was as if, after Mother died, we moved outside of conventional time and wandered with our herds and puny belongings through some distant land and epoch, so that we were not living in Ohio, but in Canaan, not in Pennsylvania, but among the Philistines, not in Massachusetts, but in Pharaoh’s Egypt.

Probably, Father had viewed himself and others in that peculiarly vivid, Biblical light from early in his life, for he had been a devout and an unusually imaginative Christian since boyhood, when he had practically memorized the entire Bible. But, for me, it began when Mother died. It seems strange to me now, strange that I didn’t know it earlier, when I was still a believer, but as my Christian faith secretly began to fade, a fading surely occasioned and probably even caused by the sudden death of my mother, I came gradually, at the same time and pace as the fading, to an awareness of the unusual degree to which our lives as a family and as individuals were described, prescribed, and subscribed by the Bible. The Word of God. His Holy Writ. As understood, interpreted, and applied by our father, John Brown. It was almost as if we were characters in the Good Book and had no other lives or destinies than what Father said had been given to us there.