Cloudsplitter (14 page)
For years, every morning, afternoon, and evening, we passed by this list, until it was engraved in our memories, like the books of the Bible or the names of the English kings. We older boys, especially Jason, could recite them like an alphabet, and often did, to the amusement of Mary and the younger children and to Father’s slight consternation—although he surely saw the joke, for he could have removed the list from the wall at once, if hed wanted.
10 Dining Plates
1 set of Cups & Saucers
1 set Teaspoons
2 Earthen Crocks
1 Pepper Mill
1 Cider Barrel
4 Wooden Tails
6 Bedsteads
1 Writing Desk
4 Blankets
1 Wash Tub
1 pr. Flat Irons
Also, these provisions:
1 bushel Dried Apples
20 bushels Corn
15 gals. Vinegar
8 bushels Potatoes
1 bushel Beans
20 gals. Soap
150 lbs. Pork
10 lbs. Sugar
These books:
11 Bibles & Testaments
1 vol. Beauties of the Bible
1 vol. Flints Surveying
1 vol. Kush
1 vol. Church Members’ Guide
36 Miscellaneous Works
These “articles and necessaries”:
2 Mares
2 Halters
2 Hogs
19 Hens
1 Mattock
1 Pitchfork
1 Brandinglron
1 Handsaw
4 Old Axes
2 Beaming Knives
2 Roping Knives
2 Ink Stands
4 Slates
4 cords of Bark
2 Saddles
1 ton of Hay
19 Sheep pledged to S. Perkins
1 Shovel
1 Harrow
1 Plane
1 Log Chain
1 Crow Bar
2 Milch Cows
2 Hoes
1 Iron Wedge
1 pr. Sheep Shears
3 Pocket Knives
4 Muskets with Powder, Caps & Balls
And this clothing:
2 Overcoats
5 Coats
10 Vests
12 prs. Pantaloons
26 Shirts
10 Women’s and Girls’ Dresses
3 Shirts
2 Cloaks
4 Shawls
8 Womens and Children’s Aprons
5 prs. Boots
3 prs. Shoes
13 prs. Socks & Stockings
7 Stocks & Handkerchiefs
4 Bonnets
1 Hat
5 Palmlea/Hats
8 Men’s and Boys’ Cloth Caps
1 Fur Cap
1 Leather Cap
Such were all the worldly goods of a farming family of thirteen people, and over the following years our inventory did not vary much, for we did not add to our property: that was quite impossible, except here and there, with the addition of a revolver, for instance, or a few more cows or hogs. We simply replaced what wore out or got eaten.
Certain things said and described in my last missive have prompted in me fresh thoughts and memories of how we as a family loved Father, and how I in particular loved him. But from the tender shape of your inquiry when we met, I deduce that you and Professor Villard believe my father to have been a great man. I’m not so sure I agree.
Perhaps my opinion on this question is of no account here, for I was never in a position to take his measure, except as his son. And maybe we mean different things by greatness. I wonder if you mean something more like fame. For me, Father could have been great without having been famous. Nonetheless, I can understand your position. You have a historian’s perspective.
To you, it matters not that during his lifetime, like all abolitionists, Father was a much despised man, and that not just slaveholders hated him, but Whigs as much as Democrats; that he was hated by white people generally; and then, after Kansas and Harpers Ferry and during the Civil War years and beyond, even to today, that he was reviled by Southerners and Copperheads and even by many who had long supported the abolitionist cause, Republicans and the such. Nor, very probably, does it matter to you that he was also widely admired and even loved, loved passionately and almost universally by Negroes and by the more radical white abolitionists, and that he was celebrated and sung by all the most famous poets, writers, and philosophers here and abroad. What matters to you is that between those two extreme poles of opinion concerning John Brown, since December 12, 1859, every American man, woman, and child has held an opinion of his own. So, yes, Miss Mayo, if greatness is merely great fame and is defined by an ability to arouse strong feelings of an entire people for many generations, then Father, like Caesar, like Napoleon and Lincoln, was indeed a great man.
But who amongst your new, young historians and biographers, even amongst those who loathe him or think him mad, has considered the price paid for that sort of greatness by those of us who were his family? Those of us who neither examined him from a safe distance, as you do, nor stood demurely in his protective shadow, as we have so often been portrayed, but who lived every single day in the full glare of his light?
We were, after all, none of us dullards or witless. Every one of us Browns was of the energetic, sanguinary type, stubborn in thought and garrulous in speech. Why, even poor Fred, for all his innocent simplicity, when grown was a formidable figure of a man, independent and capable of astonishing acts: witness his bravery at the Battle of Black Jack in Kansas; witness his shocking self-mutilation. And both of Father’s wives, my mother, Dianthe, and my stepmother, Mary, were willful, extremely capable women of considerable intelligence and sound judgement. How else could they have managed the hard life that Father imposed upon them?
We were not easily cowed or led. We rose early, worked hard, and talked constantly. We reacted intensely and elaborately to every person, idea, and opinion that passed into our ken, to everything that occurred in the private life of each member of the family and that we heard about in the larger world as well. Whatever passed for news in those days, especially if it in the slightest way concerned the slavery question, went discussed at our table and afterwards around the fire and while we rode into town for supplies and worked in the fields and tannery. We talked and talked and talked, and we argued with one another; even the smaller children, though they could barely form sentences yet, were encouraged to speak out on great topics and small. And at night in our beds, lying in the darkness of the loft, we continued talking, arguing, explaining, with lowered voices now, slower, rumbling towards sleep, one by one breaking off from the discussion of right and wrong, true and false, until one voice only remained, speculative, exploratory, tentative, and then, at long last, silence.
Only to be broken at first light, usually by Father at the bottom of the stairs, calling to begin the day:
Rise and shine, children!. Rise and shine!
He’d already be up and dressed, with his Bible open on the table where he’d had his few moments of solitary study. And the round of the day would begin again, like a great wheel spinning, and its prime mover was not the sun—it only seemed so—but Father and his words and his bright, gray-eyed face. For, compared to the rest of us, no matter how hotly burned our individual flame, Father’s was a conflagration. He burned and burned, ceaselessly, it seemed, and though we were sometimes scorched by his flame, we were seldom warmed by it.
True, I loved the man beyond measure. He shaped me and gave me a life that took on great meaning. Many was the time, however, when I grew angry and wished to flee from him and his harsh, demanding God. Yet I stayed. It’s strange, but regardless of the pain and self-recrimination that my inability to worship Father’s God caused me, during all those years when other young men were separating themselves off from their fathers and mothers and establishing their own households, often far away in the West, more than any other single thing, it may well have been my discomfiting apostasy itself that kept me at his side. I was not as intelligent or skilled as some of my brothers and sisters—as Jason, for instance, who, besides being saintly in his moral sensitivity, was an almost preternaturally clever mechanic and agronomist. And compared to Ruth, whose emotions were consistently of an even and balanced nature, I was turbulent and changeable and sometimes truculent. Unlike the eldest of us, John, who had a deep, philosophical cast of mind, I seemed often shallow and merely pragmatic. Thus I was an ordinary fellow struggling with a tangled, profoundly conflicted set of views and feelings, and I came late, slowly, and only partially, and in fits and starts, to a clear understanding of the true nature of my relation to Father and to the family as a whole, and I just as often lost my grasp on the subject as I discovered it. I was like Jonah, it sometimes seemed, fleeing not God’s wrath but His will and His fierce, irrefutable logic. I cannot speak for the others, of course, but we often had to console one another to keep ourselves from falling into despair because of having temporarily lost Father’s approval. To a surprising degree, we who fell away from belief in Father’s God were able to do so, perhaps were invited to do so, because we were stuck with Father himself for a God, and try as we might, we could no more escape our god than he could his. Especially I.
It is ironic, then, that Father regarded as his supreme failure his inability to bring all of us children to share his belief. We were godly enough in our comportment; we were pious. But we would not believe. Even some of his daughters, as they became adults, would not believe. Although, unlike us boys, they did not think they should tell him of it. Perhaps because they were women and had more faith than we males in the usefulness of secrecy and decorum, perhaps because they were kinder than we—regardless, for all of us, it was as if Father’s own light burned so brightly that it eclipsed the Sun that shone on him. Thus it came to seem to us that it shone on him alone. And because from him we received only reflected light, as from the moon, we were not always so much warmed by it as merely illuminated.
There did come a time, however, when I arrived at an understanding and got a glimpse of the cost of the only path through life that was not revealed to us solely by Father’s light. It was in the fall of ’46,1 remember, and Father was out east alone, in Springfield, establishing his warehousing scheme for Mr. Simon Perkins, of whom you have no doubt already heard. We were then living on Mr. Perkins’s farm in Akron, not as servants, exactly, but at his sufferance, which Father preferred to think of as a partnership.
Ruth was seventeen years old that fall, a blooming young woman whose sprightly company was much sought after by the young fellows in the neighborhood, for her good sense, her good humor, and her broad-faced good looks. Not including Fred, who was sixteen years old and more or less looked after himself, there were six young children then at home—the youngest being Amelia, or Kitty, as we called her, who was barely one year old. Consequently, Ruth was obliged to be constantly at work with Mary, caring for the younger children and managing the house. Oliver was only six years old, but the other boys, Salmon, Watson, and Fred, were, like me, tending Mr. Perkins’s—and, as Father would have it, John Brown’s—large flock of sheep and running the farm. Mutton Hill was our affectionate name for the place, and an appropriate one, for Mr. Perkins’s flock numbered close to two hundred at that time.
All told, it was not a difficult operation, but there was no leisure time for any of us, a lack that was probably felt more by poor Ruth than by anyone else, due to her oncoming young womanhood and the presence there in Akron of a lively community of young men and women her age, all of them scouting and reconnoitering each other with the intensity and restlessness typical of rural youth in the throes of first rut. Despite her high spirits, Ruth was, as always, singularly pious and virtuous, but that did not mean she was not as moody and distracted as the other boys and girls of her acquaintance. Perhaps, because of her piety and virtue, she was even more agitated than the others. But who can say? I’m probably thinking of how I myself was at that age; I know next to nothing of what females experience.
Even so, I remember her seeming sometimes to smile absently and day-dream her way through those long, darkening fall afternoons and in the evenings to sigh a lot, letting loose with plaintive exhalations, as if pining for a lover far away. She had no lover, of course; and no one special was courting her then. But she was on occasion uncharacteristically withdrawn and thoughtful that summer and fall and was noticeably awkward at times, which was unusual enough for us to comment on, and when she bumped her head or stumbled over a doorstoop, we teased her for it.
I have been unfortunately blessed by having been placed in my life so as to witness firsthand most of the tragic and painful events that have afflicted my family, and thus have been too often obliged to carry the sad news to the others. This is no complaint, but there was a peculiar loneliness to the task, for neither was I the victim nor was I permitted to fall down in the dust and grieve: I had to speak as if I had no pain. For most of my life, it seems, that is how I was forced to speak. Perhaps that is why, when I grew older and the great events that marked our family were in the past, I withdrew to my mountain in California and remained silent altogether; and why now, when I know that I will never again have to witness the suffering of my loved ones, for they have all died or grown old themselves, I am compelled to tell so much.
On the occasion of which I speak here, I was obliged to write Father a terrible letter. I cannot now say exactly why I was chosen, but John and Jason were living apart from us for the first time, and there was no other adult at home then, except for Mary, whose letter-writing skills were not so developed as mine, and Ruth, who, as a principal in the awful news I was obliged to transmit, had been rendered incapable of speaking for herself, either in a letter or in person.
Dear Father
, I wrote with trembling hand. I
do not know how to begin, for
I
must write to you of a dreadful event which occurred here the evening before last.
Mary was upstairs in the girls’ bedroom with three-year-old Annie, who had been feeling poorly all day and appeared to be coming down with the croup, which had almost taken her off the previous spring, so it was an occasion for some alarm. I heard Mary’s footsteps overhead as she walked back and forth in the bedroom, from Annie’s small bed to the nightstand and dresser, easing the child into bed and towards sleep. Oliver and Salmon were in the second bedroom, the loft where we boys slept, practicing the wrestling holds that I had taught them earlier that summer, making their usual grunting sounds, as if they were ancient Greeks in an arena instead of little American boys grappling on the floor and colliding with the homemade furniture of a farmhouse bedroom. Watson was up there with them, seated on one of the beds, no doubt, instructing his younger brothers and criticizing their lack of wrestling skills. Fred and I were in the parlor, off the kitchen, where he sat by the front window, talking through the glass to the two little collies outside, who leapt about and barked at the sight of his friendly face, hoping to be let in where it was warm and where all their people had gone.