Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“Like me.”

“Yes. Like you.”

Ordinarily, when such an exchange occurred between us, Father would have corrected me, pointing out that I had a mother, after all, my stepmother, Mary. But this time he must have been remembering with unusual vividness how it been for him when he, too, was only eight years old and had not yet found God when his mother died and left him with only his earthly father. When he had been a truly lost soul. So he did not correct me, and we rode on into Missouri in a brooding silence.

I had learned something important, though. For the first time, I had perceived, however dimly, that there existed a significant connection between the way Father felt towards the Negro and the terrible, desolating wound he had suffered in his heart when his mother died. Though no one knew of it, of course — probably not even Father himself — it was not his principles but the lifelong effects of his childhood wound that had made the American Negroes his natural ally and that, in their eyes, made him that rarest of things, a trustworthy American white man. They trusted his rage, which he had come to direct entirely against slavery. And they trusted his permanent suspicions of white people, especially when it came to the subject of race: he was always ready to be betrayed by whites and even often thought Negroes too easily duped by them. Also, Negroes trusted his inability to forget about race, his insistence on seeing it as a factor in every dealing, every relationship, every conflict, between any two Americans, whether they were of the same race or not. Father took race to be the central and inescapable fact of American life and character, and thus he did not apologize for its being the central fact of his own life and character. And to the degree that my nature resembled his, by virtue of my upbringing, of my own desolating wound, which was so like Father’s, and of my having deliberately modeled myself on him, race was the central factor of my life and character, too. And by the time we returned from our English journey to Springfield and took up the fight anew, I had become sufficiently accepting of my nature that I, too, no longer apologized for it.

It did not take long for Father to throw himself into a plan for creating in Springfield an armed and trained militia among the Negroes there. And while it was perhaps my plan as much as his, for he had begun increasingly to consult with me, it was his forcefulness, his public voice, and his prestige among the Negro population that drove it to completion.

Ever since his first arrival in Springfield as a woolen merchant back in ’47, he had attended the Zion Methodist Church, which was an abolitionist dissident church, half of whose parishioners were Negro, and he had preached there frequently and from time to time had taught a Bible class. Consequently, he was well-known and admired in the community he most wished to reach.

Within a day of our return from England, he secretly gave out to several of the most outspoken and respected Negro men of the town that he would be holding a series of late-night meetings at the Zion Methodist sanctuary, to which only Negro men and women were welcome. Further, they were to be Negroes who trusted in God and were willing to keep their powder dry. “I wish to speak with and listen to Negro Christians willing and able to give a white man a hard knock. No others. Prepare yourselves by reading and pondering the meaning of Judges, chapter 7, verse 3. Also Deuteronomy, chapter 20, verse 8,” he instructed.

The meetings, he told them, would concern several proposals which he would be making solely to the people whose very lives were directly threatened by Mr. Webster’s cowardly capitulation to the slavers — his “compromise.” Father did not wish to address or hear from anyone else. He wanted no Garrisonians. No Anti-Slavery Socialites. No white people at all. “Let the whites make their own policy, as they always have. We must have our own.”

In a thoroughly racialized society, it was a strange kind of loneliness, and perhaps a peculiarly American one, to feel cut off from your own race. But in those agonizing years before the War, for a small number of us, that’s what it had come to. This matter of difference and sameness — the ways in which we were different from the Negroes and the same as the whites, and, vice versa, the ways in which we were the same as the Negroes and different from the whites — was a vexing one. If a white person persists, as we did, in delineating and defining these areas, soon he will find himself uncomfortable with people of both races — with the one, because of his unwanted knowledge of their deepest loyalties and prejudices, for, as a fellow white, privy to their private race conversations and an adept at decoding those closed, tribal communiques, he understands their true motives and basic attitudes all too well; and uncomfortable with the other also, because, whenever he chooses to allow it, his pale skin will keep him safe from their predators.

If you yourself are not a victim, you cannot claim to see the world as the victim does. A man may have chosen deliberately to abandon one race — I will no longer adhere to white people merely because I happen to be one myself, says the good fellow — but if he is honest, he will quickly see that he is incapable of adhering to the other, too. Amongst Negroes, a white man is always white; they cannot forget it, and therefore neither can he. It’s only amongst whites that he suddenly turns colorless, is privileged to forget his skin, is allowed to move inside it, as it were. But beware, because if he does forget his skin, he becomes like them — he becomes another, specially privileged white man, a man who thinks the word “colored” does not apply to him. No, in America, whites are as much stuck with their skin color and bannered by it as the Negroes, and the Indians and Orientals, too. We may be a society founded on racial differences, a society poisoned at the root, perhaps, but we also aspire to be a democracy. Thus, until we have truly become a democracy, every American, white as much as black, red, or yellow, lives not in his skin but on it. If one person is called “colored,” let all be colored.

Paradoxically, then, it is when a white person resists the privilege of turning colorless that he frees himself, at least partially, from the sickness of racialism. It’s the only way for a white man finally to clamber up and out of the pit of Negro slavery wherein this nation was unnaturally conceived and born in a bloody caul and raised into twisted, sick adulthood. He has to separate himself from the luxurious unconsciousness that characterizes his own race, without claiming as his own the historical experience of the other. There is a price, though. He pays with cold loneliness, an itching inner solitude, a permanent feeling of separation from his tribe. He has to be willing to lose his own history without gaining another. He will feel like a man waking at dawn in a village that was abandoned while he slept, all his kith and kin having departed during the night for another, better place in an unknown land far, far away. All the huts and houses are empty, the chimneys are cold, and the doors hang open.

If I had not known that Father felt as I did, if I had not daily seen his brow furrow with the pain of it, his shoulders slump with the fatigue of having constantly to defeat the cynicism it proposed, had not heard him reduced to a sputter, his words all run dry of meaning, then I do not think that I could have withstood that peculiar loneliness. Without Father’s steady example and companionship, I would have capitulated to my own pain, fatigue, and frustration, and would either have given up and, lying to the whites, who sang one siren song of race, cleaved to them; or, lying to myself, cleaved to the blacks, who sang another.