Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

I had been noticing, as we walked along the thronged streets, printed advertisements for an address by Mr. William Lloyd Garrison that evening at the Park Street Church. They had been posted all over the city, many of them deliberately torn down and trampled underfoot, it seemed. Despite its reputation, Boston was no more undivided in those days over the issue of slavery than any other Northern city — which is to say that the white citizens who opposed the institution altogether, who were for abolition, complete and forever, in all the states, were a distinct minority — a tiny minority. And those who were for slavery, who thought it a positive good, which ought to be extended over all the western territories, they, too, were a tiny minority. The vast majority in between just wanted the problem to go away. And while the majority did not exactly approve of the enslavement of Negroes, they deeply resented their white neighbors who had chosen to make an issue of it.

In Boston, however, numbered among the people who did make an issue of it were some of the most respectable and admired citizens in the entire country. Thanks to the reputations of Theodore Parker and William Ellery Channing and Dr. and Mrs. Howe and dozens of other luminaries in the fields of education, the arts, public service, commerce, and religion, it was here, more than anywhere else in America, that civic virtue, high-mindedness, and theology had gotten associated with abolitionism. Overt opposition to it, therefore, got expressed mostly by ruffians and drunkards, while the respectable citizens stayed home, silently tolerated both sides, and felt smugly above the fray, as if the two minorities, in the eyes of God and the ongoing history of the Republic, neatly canceled each other out.

Stopped for a moment at a crowded intersection, I suggested to Father that it would be nice if we could hear Mr. William Lloyd Garrison speak tonight at the meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. “We might not have another chance to hear him in person,” I said brightly.

He shot me a puzzled, slightly irritated look and, without answering, darted into the cobbled street and strode on ahead of me.

I hurried to catch up, and when I was beside him again, I said in a loud voice, “Well, if not Ralph Waldo Emerson calling for a new heroism at the Charles Street Meeting House, then why not William Lloyd Garrison denouncing slavery at the Park Street Church?”

“What?”

“If not the radical Transcendentalist, then why not the radical Christian? Are we too pure for The Liberator, too?” Since my early childhood, Mr. Garrison’s sheet had come to us on the front lines like a trusted messenger sent from the headquarters of the army waging war against slavery. Father had used that very figure himself. Numerous times, I reminded him.

“Yes, I have used the figure,” he admitted. “But you mistook it. I meant it as a criticism of what’s exactly the problem with these pacifistic ‘society’ men and women.” We were by now down amongst the piers below the Custom House — a whole city of wharves and warehouses, a clattering tangle of crates, bales, tubs, and kegs and all manner of cartons and free-standing goods arriving, departing, and stopped at various stages in between; of shippers and trans-shippers and receivers of goods from all over the world. There was tea and silk from China, rum and molasses from the West Indies, carpets and ivory from India, and from the European nations everything from French lace to Lancaster steel, from Dresden paper to Portuguese wine.

“They think that we’re the corporals and they’re the generals’ he went on. “And men like Garrison, all they’re interested in is becoming commander-in-chief. So they waste their time and other people’s money squabbling amongst themselves, while our Negro brethren languish in slavery. Action, action, action, Owen! That’s what I want! Enough of this talk, talk, talk.”

“Then you won’t go with me” I said.

It was a noisy, chaotic scene down there amongst the stone wharves and warehouses, and difficult to carry on a normal conversation with wagons and carts rumbling past and stevedores, lumpers, and teamsters hollering and drunken seamen lurching through the throng. Although it was a September afternoon, it was as warm and humid as mid-summer, and most of the workmen were shirtless and sweating. Seagulls screamed and begged in brazen crowds or waddled along the edges of the piers or perched half-asleep on the stanchions and atop the hundreds of chimneys and masts of steamers and sailing ships and coastal packets reaching into the sky like a forest of pines. The smells of fish and rum were heavy in the air. In later years, I always associated those odors with the Boston waterfront: fish at the edge of turning, and the sweet, burnt-sugar smell of Jamaican rum — a dizzying, in no way unpleasant smell that touched my brain and staggered me like a drink of raw whiskey.

Father said, “Well, yes, I might be willing to hear Mister Garrison. Out of curiosity. But he’s elected to speak on the Sabbath.” He meant, of course, after sunset on a Saturday. “If it were to be a prayer meeting, fine. I’d attend. But otherwise, no. And it does seem otherwise, as he is a Quaker.”

“May I attend, then, and report back to you?”

“As you wish. You’re not bound by my religion, Owen.” “No.”

“I will return to the Howes’ and read awhile and pray.” “Why do I not feel released, Father?” I said.

He smiled back. “I dare not guess.”

We did not speak of it again but went about our business at the office of the shipping agent for the Cumbria— which, to these landlubbers and viewed from the dock, appeared quite seaworthy — and returned to the Howes’ in time for a pleasant early supper of stuffed grouse served on fancy China plates with genuine antique silverware from France. Later that evening, still secretly angry with Father, who remained closeted in our rooms at prayer, I headed out, by way of Beacon Street, to the Park Street Church, which was located not far from Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill. Beacon Street ran alongside the wide expanse of the famed Common, with a facing row opposite of large, old brick town houses, the patrician homes of many of Boston’s elite. As I walked, I kept to that side of the street, close by the tall, elegant houses and as far from the darkened Common as possible, for there — lurking among the shrubs and trees and appearing suddenly out of the darkness to glare and howl at the decorous, well-dressed men and women walking peacefully towards the church — was the enemy.

They were boys, mostly, and young men, idlers and drunkards, brawlers, louts, whoremongers, and common thieves; there were numerous females among them, too, maps and doxies as wild and brutal looking as their brothers. It was not so much their unwashed physiognomies that made them appear brutal and coarse, as their rage. No matter how noble the human face in repose, how symmetrical, fresh, and clear it may appear, when the brow is bent and glowered down, the mouth misshapen by an obscene word, the nostrils flared in revulsion and the lips sneering, and when the fist gets doubled and held out like a weapon, one recoils as if from a sub-species, as if from a demonic, bestial version of one’s self. How can we all be humans alike, when one of us has turned suddenly so ugly? And when a whole crowd turns ugly, turns itself into a mob, what species is it then?

I could fairly well smell the brandy and beer on the breath of the youths who stuck their whiskered faces out at me and brayed their Negro-hating sentiments at me and the other men and women who were silently, peacefully walking the sidewalk alongside me. The gang cackled and screeched and sometimes even tossed a rock and then ducked back into the bushes out of sight, to be replaced a few rods further on by another gang, whose drunken members would pick up the chant. “Nigger-lovers!” they hollered. “Yer nigger-lovers! Yer niggers yerself! Ugly black niggers! Ugly black niggers!” And so on, stupidly, even idiotically, they ranted — until we were walking a kind of gauntlet, it seemed, or proceeding through a maddened, howling mob to our own public hanging, headed not to a place of worship but to a scaffold. How courageous, I thought, were these men and women beside me, many of them elderly, who walked in silence along the sidewalk, being jeered and tormented by people with murder in their eyes. That our pale complexions protected us, keeping us from being physically attacked by them and possibly even killed, caused me to realize anew that white is as much a color as black. Our flag, our uniform, was our white skin, and while it provoked this attack from our fellow whites, it also shielded us from serious harm.