Cloudsplitter
Cloudsplitter
A NOVEL
Russell Banks
for C.T., the beloved,
and in memory of William Matthews (1942-1997)
... and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
JOB 1:16
Contents
Upon waking this cold, gray morning from a troubled sleep, I realized for the hundredth time, but this time with deep conviction, that my words and behavior towards you were disrespectful, and rude and selfish as well. Prompting me now, however belatedly, to apologize and beg your forgiveness.
You were merely doing your duty, as assistant to your Professor Villard, who in turn is engaged in a mighty and important task, which is intended, when it has been completed, not only to benefit all mankind but also to cast a favorable light upon the family of John Brown. And since I myself am both—both a man and a member of the family of John Brown—then I myself stand to benefit twice over from your and Professor Villard’s honest labors.
Self-defeating, then, as well as cruel and foolish of me, to thwart you. Especially when you are so clearly an open-minded, sincere, and intelligent seeker of the truth, the whole truth—so help me, Miss Mayo, I am sorry.
I ask you to understand, however: I have remained silent for so many years on all matters touching on Father and our family that by the time you arrived at my cabin door I had long since ceased even to question my silence. I greeted your polite arrival and inquiries with a policy made nearly half a century ago, a policy neither questioned nor revised in all the years between. Policy had frozen into habit, and habit character.
Also, in the years since the events you are investigating, my life has been that of an
isolate,
a shepherd on a mountaintop, situated as far from so-called civilization as possible, and it has made me unnaturally brusque and awkward. Nor am I used, especially, to speaking with a young woman.
I remind you of all this, of my
character,
I guess you could call it, so that you can place my remarks, memories, and revelations—even the documents that you requested and which I will soon sort out and provide for you—into their proper context. Without continuous consideration of context, no truth told of my father’s life and work can be the whole truth. If I have learned nothing else in the forty years since his execution, I have learned at least that. It is one of the main reasons for my having kept so long so silent. I have sat out here tending my sheep on my mountaintop, and the books and newspaper articles and the many thick volumes of memoirs have come floating down upon my head like autumn leaves year after year, and I have read them all, the scurrilous attacks on Father and me and my brothers in blood and in arms, as well as the foolish, dreamy, sentimental celebrations of our “heroism” and “manly courage” in defense of the Negro—oh, I have read them all! Those who made Father out to be mad, I have read them. Those who called him a common horse thief and murderer hiding beneath the blanket of abolitionism, I read them, too. Those who met Father and me and my brothers but once, on a cloudy, cold December afternoon in Kansas, and later wrote of us as if they had ridden with us for months all across the territory—yes, those, too. And those who, on hearing of Father’s execution, wept with righteousness in their pious Concord parlors, comparing him to the very Christ on His very cross—I read them, too, although it was hard not to smile at the thought of how Father himself would have viewed the comparison. Father believed in the incomparable
reality
of Christ, after all, not the incorporeal idea. Father’s cross was a neatly carpentered scaffold in Virginia, not a spiked pair of rough timbers in Jerusalem.
Forgive me, I am wandering. I want to tell you everything—now that I have decided to tell a little. It’s as if I have opened a floodgate, and a vast inland sea of words held back for half a lifetime has commenced to pour through. I knew it would be like this. And that’s yet another reason for my prolonged silence—made worse, made more emphatic and burdensome and, let me say, made confusing, by the irony that the longer I remained silent, the more I had to tell. My truth has been held in silence for so long that it has given the field over entirely to those who have lied and risks having become a lie itself, or at least it risks being heard as such. Perhaps even by you. Thus, although I have begun at last to speak, and to speak the truth, it feels oddly and at the edges as if I am lying.
I say again that I am sorry that I rebuffed you the other day. You are young and may not know, but solitude, extended for a sufficiently long time, becomes its own reward and nourishment. And an old man’s voice aloud can become repugnant to his own ears, which is perhaps why I have chosen to write to you, and to write at as great a length as will prove necessary, instead of merely speaking with you and politely answering your questions in person as you wished. The anxious bleat of my sheep, the bark of my dog, and the gurgle and crack of my fire—these, for decades, are practically the only voices that I have heard and spoken back to, until they have become my own voice. It is not a voice suitable for a lengthy interview with a young, educated woman like yourself come all the way out here from the city of New York to my hill in Altadena, California.
What sense could you have made, anyhow, of an old, bearded man bleating, barking, and cracking all day and night long? I picture you—had I actually granted the interview that you so kindly requested—becoming embarrassed, confused, finally angry and resigned; and you, closing your notebook and taking polite leave of me, reporting back to your eminent Professor Oswald Garrison Villard at Columbia University that you arrived too late. Poor old Owen Brown, third son of John Brown, the last living witness and party to the Pottawatomie massacre and the victories and tragedies of Bleeding Kansas and the long, terrible series of battles in the War Against Slavery that culminated in the disastrous raid on Harpers Ferry—that pathetic, aged, solitary man, Owen Brown, is now quite mad himself, and so we shall never know the truth of whether his father, too, was mad. We shall never know if John Brown was in his right mind when he butchered those men and boys down on the Pottawatomie that awful night in ’57. Or whether, when he terrorized the pro-slavers in Kansas, he was in fact the old-time, Puritan hero and military genius that so many made him out to be. Or if, when he took Harpers Ferry and refused to flee into the mountains, he had by then lost his mind altogether. The son himself, the hermit-shepherd Owen Brown, is mad, you would say to your professor (and perhaps are saying to him even now), and we shall never know conclusively if the father was mad also. Thus, given what we already know of John Brown, you will say, and in the absence of significant evidence to the contrary, we must concur with our century’s received opinion and, before the next century begins, adjudge him a madman.
I hope, therefore, that your quick receipt of this first of what shall be several, perhaps many, such letters will slow that judgement and eventually reverse it.
Was my father mad? I realize it is the only question that can matter to you. Since they first heard his name, men and women have been asking it. They asked it continuously during his lifetime, even before he became famous. Strangers, loyal followers, enemies, friends, and family alike. It was then and is now no merely academic question. And how you and the professor answer it will determine to a considerable degree how you and whoever reads your book will come to view the long, savage war between the white race and the black race on this continent. If the book that your good professor is presently composing, though it contain all the known and previously unrecorded facts of my father’s life, cannot show and declare once and for all that Old Brown either was or was not mad, then it will be a useless addition to the head-high pile of useless books already written about him. More than the
facts
of my father’s hectic life, people do need to know if he was sane or not. For if he was sane, then terrible things about race and human nature, especially here in North America, are true. If he was insane, then other, quite different, and perhaps not so terrible things about race and human nature are true.
And, yes, just as you said, I am probably the only person remaining alive who has the knowledge and information that will enable you and your professor to answer the question. But you must understand. The three-hundred-year-long War Between the Races, from before the Revolution up to and including Harpers Ferry, was being fought mainly as the War Against Slavery. Then, briefly, in ’61, it became the War Between the States. And from then until now, there has been such a grieving, angry clamor that I knew I would not be heard, except as one of the sons of John Brown trying to justify his father’s and his own bloody deeds—a puny, crippled man who fled the carnage he helped create and for the rest of his long life hid alone in the West.
The truth is, for us, the so-called Civil War was merely an aftermath. Or, rather, it was part of a continuum. Just another protracted battle. Ours was very much a minority view, however. It still is. But from the day it began, to Northerner and Southerner alike, the Civil War was a concussive trauma that erased all memory of what life had been like before it. On both sides, white Americans woke to war and forgot altogether the preceding nightmare, which had wakened them in the first place. Or they made it a pastoral dream. Even the abolitionists forgot. But for those few of us whose lives had been most thrillingly lived in the decade preceding the War, one thing has led obviously and with sad predictability to another, with no break or permanent ending point between the early years of the slave uprisings in Haiti and Virginia and the Underground Railroad in Ohio and New York and the Kansas battles and Harpers Ferry and the firing on Fort Sumter and Shiloh and Gettysburg and Vicksburg and Appomattox Courthouse and the killing of Abraham Lincoln and the savage, dark, murderous days that have followed, even to today, at century’s end. They are like beads on a string to us, bubbles of blood on a barbed steel strand that stretches from the day the first enslaved African was brought ashore in Virginia to today, and we have not reached the end of it yet.
Thus, when the Civil War ended, I found myself feeling towards the rest of my white countrymen, both Northern and Southern, the way Negroes in America, and Indians, too, must always have felt towards white Americans generally—as if the white man’s history were separate from ours and did not honor or even recognize ours. That is yet another reason why I have remained silent for so long. I did not want my testimony captured and used in the manufacture of an American history that at bottom is alien to me. I did not want to help tell a story that, when it does not ignore mine altogether, effectively contradicts it. That would be treasonous. It would aid and abet our common enemy, who wants nothing more than to declare the war between the races non-existent. Or if not non-existent, then short-lived and well over.
So now perhaps you understand somewhat why I drove you off, and why I have come in this way to call you back again.