Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

But our spirits, mine and Father’s, were soaring, despite my distrust of Mr. Forbes and our constant awareness of the suffering of Miss Peabody. Not even the shocking sight at dusk of the sooty mills of Manchester and the blackened hovels of the thousands of laborers whose lives were given over to the mills dampened our enthusiasm and curiosity. The crimes evidenced by these monstrous, huge, prisonlike factories were English crimes, not American; and the greed that drove the mighty engines of the mills and the owners’ callous disregard for the lives devoured in their service were English greed and callousness, not American; and as we passed through the city, the raggedy, exhausted, vacant-eyed men and women and pathetic small children whom we saw wending their way along the narrow streets from the mills to their teeming tenements were English, Scottish, and Irish workers — not a one of them American. It was a luxurious detachment that we enjoyed as we crossed this benighted land, and though it was but a respite, I could only hope that we had earned it, Father and I, and that our inability when in America to disassociate ourselves from the sufferings of our Negro brethren, our constant anguish, shame, and rage when at home, had purchased this brief holiday honestly and fairly.

“This is a fine country, isn’t it, Owen?” Father said, peering out his window at the passing villages and farms. He commented on the scenery as if we, his fellow passengers, could not see it, which was his habit anyhow, although it was somehow not so noticeable to me in America as here. “Their farming and stonemasonry are very good, Owen. But look, their cattle are generally only more than middling good, I would say. And on average their horses, at least those I’ve seen so far, bear no comparison with those of our Northern states, especially. The hogs look healthy and slick, though, wouldn’t you say? And the mutton-sheep are almost as fat as their porkers.”

Soon it began to rain, and then it grew dark, and our world was reduced to the cramped interior of the coach. While I tried intermittently to doze and Miss Peabody, as it appeared, gloomily meditated on the death of her young charge, Father drew Mr. Forbes forward into a discussion of military tactics, which rambled on into the night. Mr. Forbes did seem to know his subject, however, well enough at least to speak convincingly about the ways and means of training and maintaining a small, disciplined, easily deployed force of insurrectionists so that it could effectively oppose a much larger, slower-moving, national army.

This was, of course, the very subject the Old Man was most interested in hearing about, and he quickly warmed to it. I knew that he was transposing everything Mr. Forbes said, which mostly concerned the failed wars in Italy, into victory on an Appalachian landscape in the American South, and that, in Father’s mind, Mazzini’s ragtag army of republicans was a rapidly growing force of freed and escaped Negro slaves and a few courageous whites, a citizens’ army broken into small bands operating from thickly forested mountains, fighting mostly with weapons seized from the enemy and living off the land and goods and foods donated by secret sympathizers, darting down from their mountain hideouts under the cover of darkness to make lightning-like raids against the lowland plantations, liberating the slaves there and steadily enlarging their forces with the able-bodied African men and women willing to join the fight, and sending the others north along the great Subterranean Passway, as he called it, all the way up the chain of mountains from the Appalachians to the Alleghenies to the Adirondacks, on to the home base in Timbuctoo and thence to Canada.

Mr. Forbes was a slender, talkative man in his middle thirties, with a high, balding head and dark, wavy hair, which he kept long and combed across the top in a vain attempt to hide his baldness, although it shone through nonetheless. He had the chalky complexion of a man not used to outdoor work, dark, deep-set eyes, a long, aquiline nose, and he wore a drooping moustache. His teeth were not good, but, withal, he was a handsome man and intelligent-looking, if in a delicate, slightly effeminate way, as when now and again he winced at the rising volume of Father’s voice and looked somehow pained, as if embarrassed, when the coach crunched over a stone or dropped into a narrow ditch and tossed him in his seat.

“I suppose some things seem obscure, Mister Brown, but really, they’re quite obvious, aren’t they?” said Mr. Forbes. “Once they’ve been pointed out, of course. Either by genius before the fact or, as is more often the case, after the fact by disaster. Don’t you think so?” He had a habit of pausing in his statements and briefly admiring his fingernails, then going on. “For instance, Mister Brown, here’s some after-the-fact wisdom, if you like. Taken from the Italian campaign. Taught by disaster.” The smaller force, he said, had of necessity always to be made of men who, though they believed many things, must believe but two. Number one, each soldier must believe that he is engaged in a struggle in which he and his comrades are morally right and their opposition morally wrong. No middle way. No room to negotiate a compromise. It couldn’t be a simple dispute over land. Basic principles, not mere borders, must be at stake. And number two, he must believe that he is fighting for his own life and for the lives of his loved ones. So that the only imaginable alternative to his participating in this dreadful war is death for him and his loved ones. No going home for a season to harvest the olives and the grapes. “Give me liberty or give me death,” Mr. Forbes said, smiling. “That sort of thing. A bit like your American revolution, wouldn’t you say? It helped, of course, that you were lucky. And had brilliant leadership, I must say. Brilliant. At a time when ours was inept. Lovely. For you, I mean.”

Mr. Forbes did not seem particularly to like the brave Italian soldiers he was describing or even to admire the great Giuseppe Mazzini. Like many of the journalists whom I came to know later, during the Kansas War and afterwards, he seemed to feel himself superior to his subjects and affected a cynical and amused detachment towards them. This didn’t bother Father, apparently, or else he simply didn’t notice it, which worried me, as Father continued to interrogate the man and appeared at times to confide in him certain plans and intentions which I thought were better left secret. I would turn out much later to have been correct in my estimation of the character of Mr. Hugh Forbes, for, as is well known, he joined us as an ally late in the Kansas campaign and then at a crucial moment afterwards became one of our chief betrayers and nearly brought us down. For now, though, and even right up to the point of his betrayal, he was to Father a man possessing much valuable knowledge, and the Old Man meant to use him. I sat and watched and listened. And whenever I thought the Old Man was going too far, or coming too close, I interrupted him and led them to a different aspect of the topic, for I could not get him off the topic altogether.

The rain poured down, and the coach sloshed roughly forward towards London. The leather curtains flapped and slapped against the sides, and now and then a fine spray of water entered the dark interior, wetting us. Father asked Mr. Forbes, “I’m wondering, how, sir, would you be able to discipline and train such an insurrectionary force? You can’t go out and conscript soldiers and drill them in public and instruct them and so on. You have to operate in secret and in small numbers. Especially in the beginning.” No matter how much your soldiers shared those two essential beliefs — that in the face of outrageous wrong they were morally right, and that they were fighting for their and their loved ones’ lives — they still were not professional soldiers, after all. Most of them would be unskilled laborers, he pointed out to Mr. Forbes. Our recruits, he explained, would be people who were likely to be illiterate, unused to military machinery and weapons, untrained in distinguishing between occasions that require independent action and those that require submission to authority. And they would be people who had been taught for generations to hold themselves beneath the very men they were now opposing.