Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Mr. Douglass said to Father, “Well, I do admire your plan, Mister Brown. Or, rather, I should say that I admire portions of your plan. Naturally, you aren’t the first man, white or Negro, to propose leading an armed rebellion among the slaves. It’s a common enough dream. But, unlike most others, you’ve anticipated many of the difficulties. And you have the large picture in mind as well. One thing, however. A question. I have many questions, sir, but this one first. I assume that you yourself plan to be the general for this army. And also the president of this ‘temporary’ Negro republic in the mountains. Does this mean that you, sir, would be our Moses?” Mr. Douglass smiled, but his words belied the smile.

Father looked at him straight. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll tell you the reason I’ve revealed all this to you tonight, Mister Douglass. I would have you be the Moses of your people, sir. Not me, and not any other white man. No, Mister Douglass, I would be Aaron unto thee, anointed and consecrated by thee, and then I would go forth and make the blood sacrifice for both our peoples. The crime against one is the sin of the other, and to avenge the crime is to expunge the sin.”

There was a long silence as the two looked directly into one another’s eyes — dark, melancholy eyes and flashing gray eyes. On the Negro man’s face was imprinted a great question, and on the white maris face a great statement, and the two, wordlessly, were struggling to make them match. I don’t think that Mr. Douglass had ever heard a white man speak like this before, at least a white man whom he did not think crazy. And I don’t believe that Father had ever spoken quite like this before.

In a low voice, Father said, “I have four grown sons who will follow me into the South.”

Who was the fourth? I thought, and then remembered our poor Fred. But, yes, why not Fred, too? In this matter, what was true of John, Jason, and me was true of him also. Yes, we will follow you, all four of us.

Father then said, “I have raised every member of my family to take this war straight to the slavemasters. They and I are prepared to die for it.”

Mr. Douglass slowly turned his great head to me. He looked me up and down and said, “Well, is this true, young man? That you’re prepared to die in battle? To die for the benefit of Negro slaves? Are you ready to give up your young life so that another young man, whose skin is black, can live as a free man?”

I glanced again at Father’s map of the Passway and saw that it was a good plan; it would work; he was right — victory would fall into our lap like overripe fruit. And I remember thinking then that I would not die; I could not: I was strong and intelligent, I could run very fast, I was a fine shot and a first-rate horseman and could live in the forest like an Indian: and so I said to Mr. Douglass, “Yes, sir, I’m prepared for that. Father has prepared me pretty well. He has anointed and consecrated me and prepared me for the blood sacrifice, like Moses did for Aaron.”

I saw Father suppress a look of simple pride and perhaps surprise at the boldness of my speech. He said, “So you see, Mister Douglass. I may well be Moses, but only here, in my own house.”

“Yes,” he said. “I do see. And I confess, I’m mightily impressed by all this. My brothers Garnet and Loguen, when they told me that you’re a very unusual white man, were not wrong.” He admitted, however, that all talk of slave rebellion made him nervous, especially when it was generated by men who themselves, white or Negro, would remain safely at home in the North, while the poor slaves rose up and got cut to pieces. Very few men were willing to be a Nat Turner. “But no matter how it goes, win or lose, there’ll be death and gore enough for any man, believe me, Mister Brown. No matter how ingenious your plan or how brave you and your sons are, there will be killing on both sides. And I’m not sure I want to be responsible for that. Not yet anyhow. These are mighty questions before us, sir.”

Mary and Ruth had set the table and were now carrying our supper out from the kitchen in several steaming pots. Father cleared away his charts and papers, as the children came and joined us, and soon we were ten people gathered around the table. Father, as always, commenced to pray over the food. While he prayed, I stole a glance down the table at Mr. Douglass, who was watching the scene as if from a great height with an expression of sweet approval on his broad face.

I looked over the scene myself then, to view it from his mild perspective — and saw a deeply religious family of modest means, a family with great peace of mind, with total unity and strange clarity of purpose, the wife and the children, from the eldest to the infant, instructed and led in all things by the firm but kindly Puritan patriarch, this straight-backed, gray-eyed man with light in his face, praying over them all: and most amazing of all, they were a clan of white people who saw the world, inexplicably, the way Negroes did.

We did not, of course. Not back then, we didn’t — except possibly for Father. As a family, we had not yet undergone our trial by fire, our harrowing in Kansas and Virginia. And I dare not believe that even Father saw the world back then in Springfield as Negroes did; it only seemed so, because of the vast difference between him and other white abolitionists in their personal treatment of Negroes, and because of the quality of his rage.

Besides, I had lied to Mr. Douglass. I was not willing to die for the freedom of the Negro, or for any other reason. But I did not know that then — I had thought that I was telling the truth, when in fact I was merely incapable of imagining my own death. Though I was twenty-four years old, I was still a boy. It really wasn’t until nearly two years later, during my journey to England, that I came to a point where I was truly willing to pay the price of being the man I wished to be and was willing, therefore, to die in the war against slavery. Once I’d reached that point, I was myself free and was no longer a boy. I had become a warrior, and thenceforth began increasingly to be of good use to Father, whose force and clarity of purpose, as happens to all warriors, sometimes weakened or grew confused.

Father had been right about the British cloth manufacturers. They had purchased our wool at prices so low they could sell it at a considerable profit straight back to their American counterparts, those same sly fellows whose monopolistic bids for Brown & Perkins wool had driven the Old Man into the English market in the first place. Thus, by shipping his and Mr. Perkins’s one hundred tons of wool off to England and selling it at discount there, Father had succeeded only in increasing the company’s indebtedness to its western suppliers. He had nearly doubled it, in fact. And the sheepmen were furious. From their perspective, their wool, a full year’s work, had been practically given away.

For a few days, before leaving England, the Old Man had tried blaming the sheepmen themselves, for trapping him with a few unlucky bales of dirty wool, but that would not hold up. He’d trapped himself, and knew it. In his rush to move all his stock to England, he had abandoned his usual rigor in checking the wool, and he’d graded it carelessly as well — a surprising amount of XXX and XX turned out to be number 1 and number 2. Thus, by the time we were aboard ship and headed home, he had ceased to blame anyone but himself, and for most of the crossing back, the Old Man beat his breast and spoke with thees and thous.

The truth was, again, that he had failed miserably, and there was no hiding it, not even from himself. The absurdity of his situation, the ridiculously tangled nature of his finances, had reached a point where he could no longer imagine ever getting free of it and would be forced to work now mainly to keep himself out of prison, for he knew that he was about to be deluged by a flood of lawsuits, large and small. Many of the sheepmen were convinced, unfairly but understandably, that Father had taken a bribe to ship their wool to England and sell it at such a devastating loss. They could not believe that a sane man would have done such a thing otherwise, and they were already serving notice to John in Springfield that they thought so. Fortunately, Mr. Perkins was still willing to stand by the Old Man, which would enable him to keep the family intact and sheltered in North Elba: if we had land, we could always feed and clothe ourselves. Father himself, however, would soon be racing from courthouse to courthouse, back and forth from New England out to the old Western Reserve, defending himself and Mr. Perkins against the myriad charges of fraud and deceit that were being raised by their creditors.