Cloudsplitter (43 page)
With thoughts like these, then, and in a kind of dulled despondency, I took my seat in a pew at the rear of the sanctuary, for the church was nearly filled by now with proper Bostonians, all of them white people, well-dressed, with the benignly expectant faces of people gathered for the dedication of an equestrian statue. Indeed, the meeting itself, once it got under way, was not unlike just such a ceremony. Father would have been appalled, and even I was somewhat embarrassed for being there.
My mind wandered during the benediction and the welcome to new members and guests, and I did not rise like the other newcomers to introduce myself to the assembly—out of embarrassment, no doubt, but also because at the proper moment I was thinking of something else and was not sure, when I saw a scattering of folks in the audience stand and heard them, one by one, say their names, what the ceremony was all about. I was thinking about the packs of wild boys and men outside and their dark domain beyond.
Even before Mr. Garrison appeared, I rose from my seat and left. In a moment, I was back on the street. The howlers were gone, disappeared into the darkness of the Common, where I supposed they now lurked, waiting for their prey to emerge from the church, when they would resume barking and snarling at them.
I think back to that night from this vantage point a half-century later, and I cannot remember what, if anything, was in my mind when I crossed the street and stepped into the thicket there. I cannot imagine what my intentions were, as I stumbled down the unfamiliar slope in darkness and made my way towards the rough pasture in the middle, where in the distance I saw what appeared to be a scattering of small campfires and huts made of cast-off boards and old pieces of canvas sheeting. Now and again, the figure of a man or a pair of men passed near enough for me to see and be seen, and, once, a fellow said to me, “Evenin, mate,” almost as if hed recognized my face, and passed into the darkness close by. When I looked back over my shoulder to see where he had gone, I saw him stop and step forward from the shadows towards me, as if expecting me to follow. I said nothing and plunged ahead, in the direction of the distant firelight.
Giddy with an unidentifiable excitement and breathing heavily, as if after great exertion, I made my way slowly over the rough, cloddy ground, which gradually opened onto a broad, unmowed field. Oddly, I felt myself to be in no danger. I was not being pushed from behind, but rather was being drawn forward, as if by some powerful, magnetic force emanating from in front of me.
It was a clear, warm night. The sky was crossed with broad swaths of stars and a gibbous moon, which gave enough light for me gradually to gain a sense of the space I was in. Although it lay just beyond a ridge of elms blackly silhouetted in the moonlight, the city of Boston seemed miles from here. High-minded meetings and church services, elegantly appointed dining rooms and parlors and university lecture halls and counting houses, all the manufactories and dwelling places of proper Boston, seemed far away—and when I pictured Father at that moment seated in Dr. Howe’s fine, paneled library in the house on Louisburg Square, reading from the Doctor’s leather-bound edition of Milton or one of the old Puritan divines, it was as if the Old Man were located, not a mere half-mile from me, but someplace halfway to California.
Suddenly, in a way that I had never experienced before, not even when I went roaming through the nighttime streets and alleyways of Springfield the previous spring, I felt free of Father. Free of the force of his personality and the authority of his mind. Free of his r
ightness.
Yes, more than anything else, it was his rightness that so oppressed me in those years. I could in no way honestly or openly oppose it. It exhausted me, humiliated and punished me, and divided me against my true self whenever I sought to liberate myself from his iron control of my will. Inevitably, his moral correctness, which I could never deny, brought me to heel. It was in my bones and blood to follow him wherever his God led him. For, although I did not believe in my father’s God, I believed in the principles that my father attributed to Him. And so long as the Old Man did not waver in his loyalty to those principles, I could not waver in my loyalty to the Old Man.
Yet tonight, in this strange sanctuary of darkness, I felt as if I were afloat on stilled, black waters, drifting in a slow, aimless swirl whose very aimlessness thrilled me. A slight shift in the breeze could fix my direction or alter it, and thus I wandered left and right around boulders and bushes, as the land sloped gradually away from the place where moments earlier I had departed from the street. I slipped past a knot of men gathered before a small fire and passing a clay jug and smoking short pipes. One of them spoke to me in a friendly voice. “Out lookin’ for y’ cat, lad?” he asked. I said no and passed on, and they laughed lightly behind me. Ghostly figures stepped forward and silently withdrew, and every third or fourth of them hissed to me or beckoned for me to follow.
Were these shadowy figures, these frail, gray wraiths and dark spirits, the same demonic figures I had seen earlier howling at the good Quaker abolitionists on their way to meeting? These people hardly seemed capable of raising their voices, much less shrieking obscenities and tossing rocks and other missiles. But then I saw a band of ruffians, seven or eight of them, boldly approaching me, swigging from a shared bottle and laughing boisterously. They marched straight towards me, as if we were on a path and their intent was to force me out of it. They were boys, fifteen or sixteen years old, amusing themselves by banding together and playing the bully to solitaries like me. As they neared me, one of them hollered, “Out of our way, ye damned bunter, or we’ll slice off y’ prick and make y’ eat it!” and the others laughed.
Shabby Irish laddies they were, all puffed up with alcohol and the rough pleasure of each other’s company, and I knew what they thought I was, out here in the night alone—a catamite, a molly-coddle, in search of another. Possibly, in a strange sense, they were right about who I was and what I was doing there, at least for this one night in my life. They had no way of knowing for sure, however, and neither did I. But regardless, I was not about to play the girl for them, or the nigger, and step aside so they could march past unimpeded. Instead, I waded straight into them, as if they were a low wave at a beach.
There is an anger that drives one, not to suicide or even to contemplate it, but to place oneself in a situation which has as its outcome only two logical conclusions—a miraculous triumph over one’s enemies, or one’s own death—so that the line between suicide and martyrdom is drawn so fine as not to exist. It was a contrivance of my own making, but I did not know it yet, when the first of the lads reached forward as if to grasp me by my placket, and I tore his hand away with my right hand and clubbed him in his grinning face with my left, sending him sprawling.
That was as close to miraculous triumph as I came, however. At once, the rest of the gang was upon me like a pack of wolves taking down an elk in deep snow. In pairs and from all sides, they darted in on me and struck me in the face and belly and groin, kicked at my knees, and although I did some damage to them, they soon had me crouched over, and in seconds, with several hard, well-placed kicks to my ankles, they had me on the ground face-down, curling in on myself to protect my head and nether parts from their continuing barrage of kicks and blows. They said not a word to me or to each other, and now that they had me down, businesslike, went straight to work, pounding at me as if they wished to murder me. The beating went on for many minutes, until I was beyond pain, or so encased by it that I could no longer distinguish the individual blows. Their boots and fists smacked loudly against my spine and ribs and the back of my head and the meat of my arms and legs, pitching my limp body this way and that, until finally the force of the blows tumbled me off the path into a shallow gully beside it, where there was enough bilge and foul-smelling trash that they did not want to pursue me there.
I lay still and kept my eyes shut and heard them spit at me but did not feel it. I heard them laugh and call me names that I did not understand, and then at last they either grew bored with the game or thought me unconscious or dead, for the spitting and derision ceased, and I heard their boots against the gravel as they strode off. And then silence.
For a long while I lay there in the wet filth. Every time I tried to raise myself, pain shot through my body and forced me back down. Then I believe I lost consciousness, for the next I remember is the broad red face of a white-whiskered police officer. I was lying on my back in the pathway, looking up at his worried expression. I remember his words to me. “Well, now, lad, I guess you’re not dead after all,” he said.
It took two policemen to bring me to Father at Dr. Howe’s house, where I was laid out like a corpse on a pallet next to the fireplace in our chamber on the third floor. The Doctor and Mrs. Howe wished to attend to me personally, but Father, after examining me for broken bones and not finding any, other than several likely cracked ribs, would have none of it and insisted on cleaning and caring for me himself. To which I had no objection, for Father was a wonderful and knowledgeable nurse. I was not quite capable of making an objection anyhow, as I could barely speak through my bloodied and swollen mouth. Besides, I was deeply ashamed of my condition, of how I had gotten into it, and wanted as little fuss made over me as possible and as few witnesses. It was obvious that I had been set upon and beaten. The policeman, when he brought me through the door into the parlor, said only that he had found me like this in the middle of the Common, but, oddly, no one interrogated me further, not the police, not Dr. and Mrs. Howe, and not Father.
As soon as we were alone, Father stripped my torn clothing off and washed me down in placid silence, as if I were one of his lambs and had been attacked by a wild animal or a pack of feral dogs. Throughout, Father said not a word. Finally, when he had me wrapped in a warm blanket and I was drifting towards sleep, he peered down at my face as if examining it for further wounds and said, “Owen, tell me now what happened to you tonight.”
“Is it necessary?”
He answered that he wished only to know how I came to be walking at night through the woods and fields of the Common, when the place was a well-known haunt of hooligans and prostitutes. “Your private business is your own business;’ he said, “but I pray that it’s not what it looks like.”
I almost wished that it were; it would have been somehow more natural; but I could not lie to him. I told him the story of my evening, just as I have related it now—of my having passed along the gauntlet of taunts and derision on my way to the meeting, and of the strange, yet seductive, passivity of the abolitionists as they walked through this assault and afterwards at the meeting, and of my slow-boiling, confused rage, how it eventually drove me from the meeting back to the street and thence into the Common.
Father drew a chair up to my bed, and with thread and needle in hand and my torn shirt, sat listening in grim, attentive silence as I spoke through broken lips. “I don’t truly know why I went there, though. It was because of what happened earlier, I suppose. There were all kinds of strange, demented people in that place,”I said. “It’s as if the place has been specially set aside for them. I felt like I was inside a vast cage with packs of wild animals roaming, and that I was one of the animals.” I told him that when a group of them wished me to step aside and defer to them, I had attacked them.
“You attacked them?” His eyes opened wide, and he ceased sewing. “Yes.”
He reached out and set his hand on my head. “You went in there and purposely attacked this gang of Negro-hating hooligans?”
“Yes. It looks that way. It felt that way, too.”
“Didn’t you realize, son, that they were capable of stabbing you, of killing you, of simply beating you to death, as they nearly succeeded in doing? Didn’t you know that, or are you merely that naive?”
“No, I knew.”
“Yet you went in there anyhow. You went after them.”
“Yes.”
Gently he stroked my hair. “I see you freshly, son.” He sat back and looked steadily at me. “You have as much of the lion in you as the lamb. In my prayers tonight, I will be thanking God for that,” he said, and smiled, and went peacefully back to his sewing, and I to sleep.
The next morning was a fine, bright day, still unseasonably warm. I woke feeling broken, however, in pieces and chunks, barely able to stand, pummeled by a hundred shooting pains from crown to foot, and feverish. It was Sunday, and I remember, when Father marched me off to church services, that I was fuzzy-headed and dizzy and only dimly aware of what we were up to. I did not recognize the streets we passed along, and if Father had told me that we were now in Liverpool and I had slept through the crossing to England, I would have believed him.
And before long I did indeed think that I was dreaming, for our reality that morning corresponded uncannily to a nighttime dream that I frequently had in those years. Father and I were the only white people in a crowd of well-dressed Negroes. As we moved through the large gathering of black, brown, and tan men, women, and children, they parted for us and nodded respectfully, some of the men touching the brims of their hats, the women politely averting their gazes, the children looking at us with surprised eyes—lovely people of all the many Negro shades, from pale butterscotch and ginger all the way to ebony and even a few of that most African hue of blue-black. It was as if every tribe of the continent of Africa, from Egypt to the southernmost tip, were represented there. Father walked cleanly through the crowd in his usual manner—back straight as a hoe handle, head pitched slightly forward and led by his out-thrust jaw, arms swinging loosely at his sides, like a man pacing out a field for a survey—and I struggled to keep up, my feet heavy and difficult to move, as if I were wading through mud or walking underwater.
Soon the crowd closed around him and filled in between us, and I found myself cut off from him, falling further and further back, and suddenly I became afraid, not so much of the Negroes who surrounded me as of being separated from Father. Like a small child, I cried out to him, “Father! Wait!” At that, the crowd seemed to part again and to open up a corridor between us. Father slowly turned and peered at me. Then, impatiently waving me on, he resumed walking up the broad steps of a small brick church and entered and disappeared from my view into the darkness of the sanctuary. The narrow corridor through the crowd remained open, however. Laboriously, I made my way along it, sweating from the effort and the heat of the day and the many aches and pains of my beating the night before, when I had walked another gauntlet, that one amongst white people. I was never so conscious as I was then, during those few moments that I spent traversing the short, paved space at the entrance to the Negro church of Boston, of the difference between the faces of the oppressors and the oppressed, or the faces of my white-skinned brethren and my black. And I was never so conscious of my own bewildering, sad difference from both. My face was invisible to me. Father! I nearly cried out. Wait for me! I cannot bear to be so alone! Without thee beside me, I seem not to exist at all! Without thee to look upon me, whether I am amongst white people or black, I am invisible!