Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Of course, he was not one of them. He was a white man, with all the inescapable powers, privileges, and prerogatives of his race and sex: he could vote, own property, move about the land and settle wherever he chose; he could belong to any institution or church or attend any school he could afford; he could borrow money and loan it; he could invest his money in land or livestock and grow rich or become a bankrupt; he could own firearms; he could go to sleep at night and not fear that he would be wakened by slave-catchers and bounty-hunters come to sell him down the river; he knew who his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were and where they were buried; his children and wife would never be taken from him by another man; he was a white man, and he knew it.

And yet are there not adult men and women, with all the powers, privileges, and prerogatives of adults, who secretly think of themselves as children? Is it not as if our large, hairy bodies are merely fortunate disguises, and some of us are children going about in the adult world like spies, our hearts breaking daily at the sight of what our fellow children must suffer solely as a consequence of their not being as cleverly disguised as we? In cautious silence, we observe the cruelties and indignities, the inequities and powerlessness they must endure, until at last their bodies, too, grow large and hairy like ours and they are able to pass into the general population of adults, where, like most people, they either forget that they were ever children themselves or else they, too, become spies. We dare not identify ourselves one to the other, for fear that we will lose the powers and privileges of adulthood, and so we remain silent, whilst other people’s children are beaten instead of nurtured, whilst other people’s children are humiliated and bullied instead of taught, whilst other people’s children are treated as property, as objects of little value, instead of as human beings no less valuable in the eyes of the Lord than are we ourselves.

I believe that it was like this for Father, and became like this for me as well: that very early in his life, he came to feel towards white people generally as an unusually sensitive child feels towards brutal, unfeeling adults generally. He felt powerless, humiliated, and deprived, and felt it so strongly, so vividly, that he could not put it away when the circumstances which had brought about those feelings changed and no longer applied to him — that is to say, when he had become an adult himself and saw himself as white. Instead, he began dreaming himself as a Negro man, if he was anything like me — and I believe that he was — because his dream of himself as a child was too much a nightmare to endure and too powerful an experience for him to forget. This did not mean that he saw Negroes as children, and certainly not as child-like, any more than he saw himself as a child or child-like. He merely saw them, in their relation to white people, as his natural allies.

Once, I tried to bring this to him. I had been telling him of a dream I myself had had, in which I looked down at my arms and hands, and they were black. Where were we? I remember, it was the winter of ’58, and we were in Kansas, crossing down into Vernon County, Missouri, the time that we brought out eleven slaves and made such a wondrous fuss, our first raid into a slave state, and Father and I drove the wagon. Jason and Watson were with us then, along with Jeremiah Anderson, Albert Hazlett, and John Kagi, several of the men who came out of the Kansas wars and made up the core of our little army later in Virginia.

In my dream, I was surprised to see that I was a black-skinned man, but the discovery had pleased me and even made me proud, although it made me realize that from now on, when amongst white people, I would have to hide my true self.

It was at that time a strange dream to me, and I asked Father as we rode along if he ever had such a dream. He said yes, certainly, he had often dreamed himself as a Negro man, and whenever he did, he took it to mean simply that the Lord was reminding him not to allow himself to feel separate from His Negro children. He had the dream mostly when Negroes were giving him a lot of trouble, he said. When they would not do what he wanted, or when he could not do what they wanted.

I asked him then, “When did you first know that Negroes were as human as you yourself?”

Father knew that I wasn’t merely inquiring into the origins of his principles, for they had evolved naturally over years, as principles must. I was asking him about the sources of his understanding. He answered that he had been little more than a boy when, for the first time, he believed that Negro people were actually people, and he had never forgotten it. Many white people, including his own father, had taught it, of course, but Father had not until then truly understood it. Most white people don’t ever get that understanding, he said. Just as most men don’t believe, truly and deeply, that women are people. They think that, because they’re different than we, they are another type of creature than we, as a beloved horse or dog is.

“I was twelve” he went on, “and my father sent me by myself with a herd of livestock — cattle, mostly, but a few wild steers, too, and pigs, a sizeable, troublesome herd — all the way to General Hull’s headquarters at Detroit. It was a hundred-mile trek, west from our place in Hudson in Ohio along the long shore of Lake Erie through hostile Indian territory, because of the War and the British agitations, to where the American forces were holding off the British in the western campaign. No easy task for a boy of twelve,” he said simply. Grandfather Brown was then supplying meat to the army, and Father had accompanied him on several previous journeys to the front, but this was the first time that he had done it alone. He had told this much of the story before, but mainly as an example of his youthful independence.

“Anyhow, I stayed up there for a spell with a very gentlemanly landlord, a man once a United States marshal, who held a slave boy very near my own age. The boy was a very active, congenial lad, intelligent and full of good feeling, and to whom I was under considerable obligation for numerous little acts of kindness. The master made a great pet of me” he said. The man had brought Father to table with his first company and friends and called their attention to every little smart thing he said or did and to the fact of his being more than a hundred miles from home alone with a herd of cattle.

“All the while, this fine Negro boy, who was fully my equal, if not more, was badly clothed, poorly fed and lodged in cold weather, and he was beaten before my very eyes with an iron shovel or any other thing that came to the master’s hand. This terribly insulted my new-found pride in my accomplishments and my general smartness. It was as if I myself were being insulted and beaten. I’m ashamed to this day that I said nothing in protest,” he declared. It brought him, however, to reflect in a way that was new to him on the wretched, hopeless condition of slave children. On their being without a father or mother to protect and provide for them. That lad was alone in the world, and it was hateful to Father, the way the boy was treated. “The boy was so alone, Owen, that later, in my bed, I wept bitterly for him.” He said nothing for a few moments as we rode along the rough trail, and I thought that he was fighting off tears now at the memory of the Negro boy. After a while, he seemed to gather his emotions and said, “I was decidedly not a Christian at that age. But I remember wondering for the first time if perhaps only God was that slave boy’s father.”

“Who would have been his mother, then, if God was his father?” I asked.

“Well, he would have no mother, I guess. No earthly mother, for certain, and no heavenly mother, either. God alone would have to be sufficient. As He is sufficient for us all. And had he not been one of God’s children, the boy would have been a truly lost soul. That was a thing I could not imagine in a child.” He paused for a moment and added, “I understood that, I suppose, for I had lost my own mother by then.”