Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

For as long as I could remember, we had as a family been unified and empowered by the single great Idea. But despite that, or perhaps because of it, we had been fragmented and split off from one another — with Father charging about the countryside and traveling back and forth on his various missions; with strangers black and white coming into our household and departing as quickly as we became familiar with them; with half a household here and another half there; with plans and fantasies simultaneously multiplying and disintegrating, as circumstances shifted subtly or got dramatically altered by forces invisible and beyond our control; with the very shape and number of our family constantly changing from one season to the next, as a new child was born every year, year after year, 1834, ’35, ’36, ’37, all the way to ’48, and the terrible, sad deaths of children coming between those births, until we barely knew the names, birth dates, and death dates of our brothers and sisters. For every new child that arrived, there seemed to be one recently departed, due to the ague, to dysentery, to consumption, to calamitous accidental scalding, from the first Fred, back when I was but six years old, to the first Sarah, and Charles, Peter, and Austin, who all went in that horrific winter of ’43, to little Amelia in ’46, and most recently, in Springfield, the baby Ellen. Now, after all that, there had come a small but significant measure of stability here among these Negro and white farmers in these mountains, and for the first time in my life I felt I stood at the center of things.

I had not expected that. I had not in fact known that such a feeling was even possible or that, once experienced, it would seem, not merely desireable, but necessary. But it was here in North Elba and nowhere else that the whirl of the one great Idea seemed for me to slow and even to cease hurtling me from one place and set of feelings and loyalties to another. It was here that I felt like a normal son and brother in a normal family, farming our rough acres of northern land, tending our livestock, and aiding our neighbors. I had even begun to imagine, on seeing my sister Ruth grow attracted to Henry Thompson, my own possibilities for finding a wife here, building a house, raising my own herd of sheep, fathering my own children. And, alongside my Negro and white neighbors alike, continuing to do my bit of the Lord’s and Father’s work.

For the Old Man, of course, this was not enough. It was not nearly enough; it was in fact a sin, to be making a home and in addition doing merely our bit of the Lord’s work. We had to be doing all of it; and all our work had to be the Lord’s. Making a home had to be incidental. Or else we were doing Satan’s work.

Thus we Browns were once again shifting our mode of contention against those who would oppose us, and shifting our base of operations as well. We would head south to Springfield and thence to London, England, from where, Father said, we might well briefly cross over to the Continent and there make an on-site study of Napoleon’s military campaigns in the Lowlands. Upon the sale of our wool, we would return freed at last of debt, so as to devote ourselves completely, once and for all, to the proper business of waging war against slavery.

“Then shall all the world see the fruits of our discipline, of our principled savagery, and of our strategic intelligence,” Father declared to us that last night in North Elba. Then might the war properly commence. This valley would be our base camp, our headquarters, as we moved down the Appalachians. Modeling our tactics and our principles on the tactics and principles that brought about the great achievements of Toussaint, Spartacus, and Nat Turner, we would liberate the South — plantation by plantation, town by town, county by county, state by state — until we had at last broken the back of the beast.

So, yes, he had his plan, even then. And little by little he had made it known to us. He had maps and texts to support his theories, and he would draw them out in the evenings to illustrate them to us and demonstrate their feasibility. Also, he was no doubt practicing for the time when he would have to place his plan before the gaze of more skeptical audiences than his wife and children and the Negro members of his household, audiences made up of people like Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith, men whose support he personally would depend upon and whose support his plan was in fact premised on.

To bed, then: the child Sarah, asleep on Father’s lap, carried to her bed by sister Ruth; the lads Watson, Salmon, and Oliver grumpily climbing to the loft, to await the arrival of their elder brothers. And we did follow along shortly after, with Lyman Epps, who surely would have preferred to be sleeping in a private chamber in his own bed with his wife, but who must live like a Shaker now, celibate and communal. And Ruth and Susan Epps to the chamber where the females slept, where the little girls, Annie and Sarah, were slumbering already.

Leaving Father and Mary alone downstairs in their bed near the parlor fireplace, where the Old Man, I knew, in his enthusiasm for this new turn of events, and conscious of the oncoming prolonged absence from his wife and home, would be reaching towards her in the darkness, doing the Lord’s work, being fruitful, multiplying. While Great-Grandfather Brown’s clock ticked loudly from the fireplace mantel.

A sparkling blue day it was, in early September of that year, when the Old Man and I took passage for Liverpool aboard the side-wheeler Cumbria, a packet out of Boston. We had arrived in the city three days earlier, after nearly a fortnight’s stay in Springfield, where Father had made his usual, tireless attempt to set things right with his and Mr. Perkins’s creditors, succeeding only in extending his and Mr. Perkins’s line of credit with the western sheepmen for the length of time it would take him to sell in England the wool he could not sell in America. Or would not sell in America. Not for the sixty-five cents per pound he was then being offered — some ten to twenty cents per pound less than he had agreed to pay the sheepmen in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

It was a simple problem. Father had taken shipment of vast quantities of wool from the west and had been storing it in the Springfield warehouse, after having promised, with Mr. Perkins’s guarantees, to pay the western producers significantly more for it than the woolen merchants and cloth manufacturers in New England were then offering. And now, twelve and more months later, the producers were clamoring for their money, which Father, of course, did not have. To break a monopoly among the buyers, Father had tried to create a monopoly among the sellers. Basically, the problem had arisen because the buyers could afford to wait out the sellers.

In vain did I argue the wisdom of cutting all his losses off at once and returning quickly to the farm in North Elba, there to build a small tannery, such as he had established in New Richmond when I was a child, back before Mother died — a modest, local business adequate to our needs and in no way dependent upon his abilities to anticipate and resist the machinations of shrewd, calculating men of great wealth residing elsewhere.

To me, paper money, promissory notes, letters and lines of credit, market fluctuations, tariff laws, and so on were as abstract and metaphysical as German speculative philosophy. To Father, however, they were oddly concrete, as real as the food he ate, as the water he heated for his morning shave, as the tobacco-colored long-tailed wool suit he wore every day of his adult life. Consequently, he believed that he could move among the elements of finance with the same ease and control he employed in ordering up his supper in a hotel dining room or firing a kettle of cold water every morning or pressing out the wrinkles in his trousers by placing them beneath his mattress while he slept. He was like the unlucky gambler who can’t believe in any luck but good and keeps on trying to cover his old losses by making new bets.