Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Mostly, it was this Fugitive Slave Act that provided the Old Man with a new focus for his rage, which, since the debacle in Timbuctoo, had been somewhat deflected by the now-failed mission to England for Brown & Perkins and by our Flemish holiday, as I thought of it. Also, quietly, I had begun to encourage his rage, for I was now eager to test my own mettle in the fires of battle. This was a new role for me, heating up Father’s blood, and it was strangely exhilarating to me. Who would have thought it: Owen Brown, the quiet son, encouraging the Old Man to march steadily against the enemy?

Despite our love and respect for him, I don’t think we took his plan all that seriously, even when he rolled out his maps and described his strategies to people outside the family fold, as he had done with our friend Lyman Epps and poor Mr. Fleete, shot in the escape from Elizabethtown. Father had revealed his secret plan to a few white people, too, such as Mr. Thompson, our friend and neighbor in North Elba, before they broke over the matter of transporting the Negro couple from Richmond, and Mr. Gerrit Smith, back when he first made the arrangement to settle us in Timbuctoo. Whenever he did reveal his plan, the Old Man always swore his listener to absolute secrecy, naturally, but who would not eagerly guarantee silence? The plan seemed so crack-brained then that no one would have believed you if you told him what Old Brown was up to. We in the family certainly told no one, if for no other reason than that we were somewhat embarrassed by it. We wished to protect Father’s reputation for probity, after all, and also our own. And who wants to be laughed at, especially on someone else’s account?

Generally, then, until the autumn that Father and I returned from England, I had treated his plan for invading the South and liberating the slaves as another of his harmless diversions, an elaborate way for him to express the anger and frustration caused by his financial failures and by the pacifism and compromises of the other whites in the anti-slave movement and by the fearfulness and lack of unity among so many Negroes. It kept him from despair over his money-problems, and it stopped him from throwing up his hands in disgust and walking out on the abolitionists altogether. It was his fantasy, not mine.

There was one early occasion, however, when I actually, whole-heartedly, shared his dream of a war of liberation and terror. It occurred when he first revealed his plan to Frederick Douglass. I watched this distinguished, intelligent, worldly gentleman, a Southerner and an escaped slave himself, a man who knew the risks and stakes personally, a true warrior in the war against slavery — I watched Mr. Douglass take Father’s military strategies seriously and felt ashamed of my skepticism and temporarily cast it off. Although it would be another two years before I rid myself of it for good, that night in ‘48 in Springfield, when Mr. Douglass first came to visit, was an important beginning of my life as a warrior, too.

I remember hurrying home on a dark, wintry night from the Brown & Perkins warehouse to our crowded little house on Franklin Street, hoping to be there in time for supper with the others. Walking slam-bang through the door into the front parlor, I saw Father seated at the table with a tall, broad-shouldered, dark brown man with a forceful jaw and a great leonine mass of hair. I recognized Mr. Douglass instantly, of course, for although I had not seen him in the flesh before this, engravings of his handsome, impressive face had appeared in any number of issues of The Liberator and other abolitionist periodicals. He was younger than I had thought him to be, still in his early thirties then, but with beginning streaks of gray in his hair. He had a massive face and a broad, high forehead, a wonderfully patrician look, but in an African way, as if he were a direct descendant of a long line of Ethiopian kings. Seated side by side at the old pine table where we normally took our meals, both men were gazing intently at a large sheet of paper Father’s map of Virginia and points south, I saw at once. His Subterranean Passway.

Back then, when we were newly located in Springfield and Brown & Perkins was briefly thought to be a thriving business, visitors to our home were often visibly surprised to see how modestly we lived. Mr. Douglass, in his fine woolen suit, sat stiffly at the table, his feet squarely under his chair, as if he were more accustomed to meeting white abolitionists in formal, velvet-covered parlors than in a workingman’s dwelling-place. We owned very little furniture then, a continuing effect of the Ohio bankruptcy, which was actually of a benefit to us in that narrow, wood-frame row house — the rooms were tiny, like hutches, and we were a family of nine people and needed the space for our very bodies. We utilized the six small chambers in an unorthodox way, determined more by need than by convention, making the kitchen serve as a combination cookroom, washroom, and workshop and the front parlor as an office and for taking our meals. Father and Mary slept in the dining room proper, and we children, seven of us, were distributed by sex and age in the three sleeping rooms upstairs. It was a spartan home in a laborers’ neighborhood but, withal, a cozy and cheerful place, where we had many guests and visitors, mostly unpretentious people, sheepmen from out west and Negroes connecting through Father to a line or way-station of the Underground Railroad, people who made themselves comfortable in such bare surroundings more easily, perhaps, than Mr. Douglass.

Father introduced me to the man. “This is my third son, Owen. He’s been working late at the warehouse,”he said, to explain the tufts of wool clinging to my clothing and hair and the dirt on my face and hands.

Mr. Douglass rose from his seat and extended his large hand and smiled gently. “A pleasure” he said, a simple statement made almost lordly by his powerful, deep voice and regal bearing. This was a man! I rubbed my hand on my coveralls and grasped his and shook it with enthusiasm, although I was too shy and awed by him to speak a single word.

“Mister Douglass is on his way to Rochester, from a speaking engagement in Boston. He learned of us from the Reverends Garnet and Loguen,” Father said, obviously pleased by having been recommended by the two Negro radicals. “They said we were to be trusted. No small encomium for a white man, if I may say so, coming from those two,”he said to Mr. Douglass with evident pride.

Mr. Douglass smiled generously at Father. “Yes, that’s true, I’m afraid.”

“When you’ve washed and changed your shin, Owen, you may come and join us,” Father then said.

I rushed through my ablutions back in the kitchen, where Mary and Ruth and the younger children were at work preparing supper. John was then still in Akron, finishing his business school studies, and Jason and Fred were situated in Hudson, minding Mr. Simon Perkins’s flocks. Although I was the eldest son then in residence, I was still young enough to be surprised and honored by Father’s invitation to join him and Mr. Douglass in the parlor.

When I arrived back at the table and took my seat next to Father, I saw that he was showing Mr. Douglass his sketches of the log blockhouses that he intended to build at strategic points along the Passway, forts to serve both as supply depots for his army and as way-stations for passing the liberated slaves north — those who chose not to stay in the South and fight alongside him and his main force. Father had long ago designed these simple structures: easily defended, windowless cubes made of thick logs with firing slots and secret basements and long escape tunnels, they were to be tucked away in the narrow defiles and gorges of the Appalachians. He believed, against all conventional thinking on the matter, that a military force could better defend a low place than a high. In Deuteronomy, the Lord had warned the Israelites against settling in high places — and for good reason, according to Father. “First, because in a low place you’ll have a well, and your water won’t run out. And second, because if the defile is sufficiently narrow, you can’t be surrounded. In order to lay a siege against you, the enemy will be obliged to divide his force and climb to the heights. At which point, you proceed at once to charge against the weakened force left below, and then you quickly surround the climbers on high, who will now be under siege by you, trapped without water and with no way down except by your leave.”