Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Knowing that this would become his main activity for a while had the unexpected benefit of taking Father’s mind for the first time in decades completely off moneymaking. It would allow him, when he was not preparing his attorneys to defend him and Mr. Perkins in court, to concentrate on his anti-slave activities. The catastrophic losses in England were such that, at last, he would be able to forget about becoming a rich man. Released from that possibility, he went through a sort of sea-change and began to be instead the man who entered history.

And, of course, things had changed at home, too. The passage of the heinous Fugitive Slave Act at once lit up the Northern sky like sheets of lightning and electrified thousands of white men and women who up to now had regarded themselves as moderate abolitionists. And suddenly our anger, our consuming rage, did not seem so odd anymore. Which was strange to me, for I had grown used to our family’s being both charged by its anger, as if it were our responsibility, and isolated by it, as if it were our curse. Now that rage was the norm, however, ours seemed to have been oddly premature and, in this new context, somehow inappropriate and useless. At least to me it did.

Father simply declared that it proved we had been right all along. But we had spent so much time and energy for so many years, all the years of my life, justifying in moral, legal, and Biblical terms the ferocity of our position, that we had not stepped away from it and considered its deeper and more personal sources. We had not even considered whether it had such sources. What was abnormal to others had long seemed normal to us — until, thanks to the Fugitive Law, everyone else turned out as alarmed and angry as we and as determined as we to commit acts of violence in order to deter the further extension of slavery. Earlier, our alarm and anger and commitment had seemed evidence of our election, as it were, proof of our moral superiority. Now, however, we were no longer positioned amongst our people like prophets, for every decent person in the North was finally awake to the emergency. Or so it briefly seemed. And during this period, instead of feeling at one with my neighbors and grateful for that, I began to wonder why had we seen so early the horrors of slavery, when practically everyone else was blind to it, and why we had been so ferocious, when nearly every other well-intended Northern white man and woman had merely been concerned or, at best, disgusted.

It is difficult for me now, a whole lifetime beyond those years, to cross over all the terrible intervening events and alterations in the sensibilities and values of ordinary folks and remember how we thought then. The Civil War changed everything for everybody, white and Negro, North and South, East and West; but it was the war before the War, in Kansas and then at Harpers Ferry, that changed us Browns. That’s when we went from being angry activists and prophets in the wilderness to being cold-blooded warriors. We went from helping Negroes escape from slavery to killing those who would enslave them. Those were the years when John Brown and his sons — farmers, shepherds, tanners, hopeful businessmen — became famous killers.

Who else in our time went through this transition? No one, until later, when forced to by the War. By then, John Brown and his sons, most of them anyhow, were dead — slain in battle or executed on the scaffold. It was as if, when our white neighbors finally woke to the threat of slavery and grew angry, as angry as we had been all along, we moved at once to the next stage and in that way kept our old position towards them intact. It was as if our true nature, Father’s nature, certainly, and mine, and to a lesser degree the nature of our family as a whole, arose from our insistence on maintaining a constant distance from others, on holding to our radical extremity. We would not allow ourselves to be like other white people. We would be angrier than they; we would risk and sacrifice more than they; we would be bloodier, more brutal, more consistently merciless and desperate than they.

We were becoming like Negroes, or wanted to become like them. Or, to be honest and exact, we were becoming the kind of men and women that we wanted Negroes themselves to be.

Can that have been true? For many years, I had sometimes thought that Father’s obsession with the enslavement of the Negroes was an unnatural thing. No other white man or woman in my acquaintance was so singularly enraged by the fate of black people, not even the most radical abolitionists, not even Gerrit Smith, who had given so much of his huge personal fortune to the cause. There were heroes in the movement, of course, men and women like Theodore Weld and the Grimké sisters, even a few who had given their lives for it, like Lovejoy. And there were many unknown people, men and women in small towns, clergymen, teachers, even businessmen, who had risked fortune, reputation, and physical well-being in order to advance the war against slavery. And everywhere there were poor, humble, God-fearing white folks, ordinary men and women who daily made sacrifices and endangered themselves for the benefit of the Negro slaves.

But none of these, at least none that I ever met or even heard about, engaged the Negro on such a personal level as did Father. It was as if he secretly believed that at bottom he himself was a Negro. He seemed to believe that his white skin — and the skins of his children, too, and of his wife, and the skin of anyone who would cleave to him in his enterprise — was black underneath. As if his rust-colored hair, if he did not dye and forcibly straighten it, were black and crinkled. As if his old-fashioned, pointy, New England Yankee face, that long, narrow hooked nose, grim slash of a mouth, and large red ears, were a mask hiding an African nose, mouth, and ears.

In a racialist society like ours, such a belief might be seen as merely absurd or as self-contemptuous, especially by white people, and in any society, racialist or not, it might be viewed as morally reprehensible. He could be accused, after all, of appropriating another man’s rewards for having endured great pain without having first been obliged to experience that pain himself. I have thought about this matter for most of my life, for I came to be very like my father in it, and I may well be dead wrong about it, but Father’s love for Negroes was not a simple extension of his love of justice, of his belief in the essential equality of all mankind, or of his abhorrence of cruelty, which was the case for most abolitionists and which should have been sufficient unto the cause. And mostly was. For most white abolitionists it was sufficient, certainly, and for most Negroes. Negroes, after all, did not need white people to love them. They merely needed us to deal justly with them, to grant them legal rights equal to our own, and not to be cruel to them merely because their skins were darker than ours. They only wanted us to treat them as well as we treated each other. As they saw it, the word “colored” described all human beings. To Negroes, white was as much a color as black, red, or yellow — if not more so.

If the country had been made of one race of people, if everyone had been white, then Father would not have singled out white people for his love, obviously. But he would not have looked eastward across the Atlantic and loved African Negroes, either; or black-skinned people anywhere. No, he loved American blacks, and he loved them, I believe, because of their relation to the dominant race of American whites. He saw our nation as divided unfairly between light-colored people and dark, and he chose early and passionately to side with the dark. Something deep within his soul, regardless of his own skin color, something at the very bottom of his own sense of who he was, of who he was especially in relation to the dominant, lighter race, went out to the souls of American Negroes, so that he was able to ally himself with them in their struggle against slavery and American racialism, not merely because he believed they were in the right, but because he believed that somehow he himself was one of them.