Cloudsplitter (10 page)

WITNESS: Mr.
Bryant
Johnson, Fort Valley,
Houston Co., Ga., in
the
“Standard of Union”
Milledgeville, Ga.,
Oct.
2,
1838.
TESTIMONY:
“Ranaway,
a negro
woman named Maria, some scars on her back occasioned by
the whip.”

WITNESS: Mr. James T. De Jarnett,
Vernon, Autauga Co., Ala., in the
“Pensacola Gazette,” July 14,1838. TESTIMONY: “Stolen, a
negro woman named Celia. On
examining her
back you will find marks caused by the whip.”

WITNESS:
Maurice
Y.
Garcia, sheriff of the County of Jefferson,
La.,
in the
“New Orleans Bee,” Aug. 14,1838. TESTIMONY:
“Lodged in jail,
a mulatto
boy
having large marks
of the whip on his
shoulders
and other parts of his body.”

WITNESS: R. J. Bland,
sheriff of Claiborne
Co., Miss., in the
“Charleston
(S.C.) Courier,” Aug. 28,1838. TESTIMONY: “Was committed
to jail, a negro boy named Tom; is much marked with
the whip.”

WITNESS: Mr. James Noe, Red River
Landing, La., in the “Sentinel”
Vicksburg, Miss., Aug. 22,1838. TESTIMONY:
“Ranaway, a negro fellow named Dick—has many scars on his back from being whipped”

WITNESS:
William Craze, jailor, Alexandria, La., in
the “Planter’s Intelligencer,” Sept. 21,1838. TESTIMONY: “Committed
to jail, a negro
slave—his
back is very badly scarred.”

WITNESS: James A.
Rowland, jailor, Lumberton,
N.C.,
in the
“Fayetteville (N.C.)
Observer” June 20,
1838. TESTIMONY:
“Committed, a mulatto fellow-his back shows lasting impressions of the whip and leaves no doubt of his being
a slave.”

WITNESS: J. K. Roberts,
sheriff,
Blount Co., Ala.,
in the
“Huntsville
Democrat” Dec.
9,1838. TESTIMONY: “Committed
to jail, a negro man—his back much marked by the whip.”

WITNESS: Mr. H. Varillat, No. 23
Girod
St., New
Orleans, La., in
the “Commercial Bulletin,” Aug. 27,1838. TESTIMONY:
“Ranaway, the
negro slave
named
Jupiter—has a fresh
mark of a cowskin on one of his cheeks.”

WITNESS: Mr.
Cornelius
D. T
olin, Augusta,
Ga.,
in the
“Chronicle Sentinel,” Oct. 18,1838. TESTIMONY: “Ranaway, a negro
man named
Johnson-has a great many
marks of the whip on his hack.”

Here, with trembling hand, I delivered the book across to Father, who throughout had sat peering somberly into the fire that blazed in the great open fireplace. He brought the book near to his face, as he customarily did, and in his reedy voice continued where I had left off.

The
slaves are often branded with hot irons, pursued with firearms and shot, hunted with dogs and torn
by them, shockingly
maimed with
knives, dirks,&C.;have their ears
cut off, their eyes knocked out, their hones dislocated and
broken with bludgeons,
their fingers and toes cut off, their faces and other parts of their persons disfigured with scars and
gashes, besides those
made with the lash.

We shall
adopt, under this head, the same course as that pursued under previous
ones—first
give the testimony
of the slaveholders themselves
to the mutilations &c,
by
copying their own
graphic
descriptions of them in advertisements
published
under their own names and in newspapers published in
the
slave states and, generally, in their own
immediate
vicinity.
We shall, as
heretofore, insert only so much of each advertisement as will be necessary to make the point
intelligible.

Father ceased to read, and we five sat for a moment in silence. All the younger children were long asleep in the rooms above. Then Father passed the book, still open at the page where he had left off, over to me, and falling into the antique manner of speech that he sometimes used, especially when overcome by emotion, he said, “Owen, thou hast still at times the voice of a child. Read these words, so that we may better hear in thy innocent voice their terrible, indicting evil.”

Not fully understanding, I nonetheless obeyed, and read on.

WITNESS: Mr. Micajah
Kicks,
Nash Co., N.C., in the Raleigh “Standard,” July 18,
1838.
TESTIMONY:
“Ranaway, a negro woman and two children; a few days before she went off,
I
burnt her with a hot iron on the left side of her face;
I tried
to make the letter
M.”

WITNESS: Mr. Asa B.
Metcalf Adams
Co., Miss.,
in the “Natchez Courier” June 1
5,1832. TESTIMONY:
“Ranaway, Mary, a black woman; has a scar on her back and right arm near
the shoulder,
caused by a rifle ball!’

WITNESS: Mr. William Overstreet,
Benton, Yazoo
Co., Miss.,
in the “Lexington (Kentucky)
Observer,” July 22,1838. TESTIMONY:
“Ranaway,
a negro
man named
Henry, his left eye
out, some scars from a dirk on and under his left arm, and much scarred with
the
whip.”

WITNESS: Mr. R. P
Carney, Clark Co.,
Ala.,
in the “Mobile
Register,” Dec. 22,1832. TESTIMONY: “One
hundred dollars reward for a negro fellow, Pompey,
40
years old; he is branded on the left jaw.”

WITNESS: Mr. J. Guyler, Savannah, Ga.,
in the
“Republican,” April 12,1837. TESTIMONY:
“Ranaway, Laman, an old negro, grey, has only one eye”

WITNESS: J. A. Brown,
jailor,
Charleston,
S.C., in the “Mercury” Jan.
12,1837. TESTIMONY:
“Committed to jail a negro man, has no toes on left foot.”

WITNESS: Mr. J.
Scrivener,
HerringBay, Anne
Arundel Co., Md., in
the “Annapolis Republican,” April
18,
1837. TESTIMONY:
“Ranaway, a negro man,
Elijah; has a
scar on his left cheek, apparently occasioned by a shot”

WITNESS:
Madame Burvant, corner of Chartres and Toulouse Sts.,
New
Orleans, in the
“New
Orleans Bee” Dec.
21,1838. TESTIMONY:

“Ranaway, a negro woman named Rachel, has
lost
all her toes except the large one”

WITNESS: Mr. O. W. Lains,
in the
“Helena
(Ark.)
Journal,” June 1
,
1833. TESTIMONY:
“Ranaway, Sam; he was shot a short time since
through the hand
and has
several
shots in his left arm and side.”

WITNESS: Mr. R. W Sizer, in the “Grand Gulf
(Miss.)” June
1, 1833. TESTIMONY:
“Ranaway, my negro man, Dennis; said negro has been shot in the left arm
between the shoulder
and elbow, which has paralyzed the hand”

WITNESS: Mr. Nicholas
Edmunds, in the
“Petersburgh (Va.) Intelligencer,” May 22,1838. TESTIMONY:
“Ranaway, my negro man named
Simon; he has been shot badly in the back
and
right
arm.”

Long into the winter night I read, my voice breaking like glass at times, as it did then naturally, due to my youth, but more particularly because of the horrors that loomed before my eyes. My breath caught in my throat, my eyes watered over, my hands trembled, and it seemed that I could not go on saying the words that described such incredible cruelties. Yet I continued. It was as if I were merely the voice for all five of us seated together in that candlelit room before the fire, and we were together very like a single person—Father, Mary, John, Jason, and I, bound together by a vision of the charnel house of Negro slavery.

I said the words on the page before me, but I felt situated outside myself, huddled with the others, listening with them to the broken voice of a white boy reading from a terrible book in a farmhouse kitchen in the old Western Reserve of Ohio. Those cold, calm accounts from newspapers, those mild and dispassionate descriptions of floggings, torture, and maimings, of families torn asunder, of husbands sold off from wives, of children yanked from their mother’s arms, of human beings treated as no rational man would treat his beasts of burden—they dissolved the differences of age and sex and temperament that separated the five of us into our individual selves and then welded us together as nothing before ever had. Not the deaths of infant children, not the long years of debt and poverty, not our religion, not our labor in the fields, not even the death of my mother, had so united us as our hushed reading, hour after hour, of that litany of suffering.

In my lifetime up to that point and for many years before, despite our earnest desires, especially Father’s, all that we had shared as a family—birth, death, poverty, religion, and work—had proved incapable of making our blood ties mystical and transcendent. It took the sudden, unexpected sharing of a vision of the fate of our Negro brethren to do it. And though many times prior to that winter night we had obtained glimpses of their fate, through pamphlets and publications of the various anti-slavery societies and from the personal testimonies given at abolitionist meetings by Negro men and women who had themselves been slaves or by white people who had traveled into the stronghold of slavery and had witnessed firsthand the nature of the beast, we had never before seen it with such long clarity ourselves, stared at it as if the beast itself were here in our kitchen, writhing before us.

We saw it at once, and we saw it together, and we saw it for a long time. The vision was like a flame that melted us, and afterwards, when it finally cooled, we had been hardened into a new and unexpected shape. We had been re-cast as a single entity, and each one of us had been forged and hammered into an inseparable part of the whole.

At last, after I had recited the irrefutable and terrifyingly detailed rebuttals to the slavers’ objections to the abolition of slavery—with Objection III, “Slaveholders Are Proverbial for Their Kindness, Hospitality, Benevolence, and Generosity”—I saw that I had come to the end of
Testimony of a
Thousand Witnesses. I closed the book on my lap. I remember that for a long time we remained silent.

Then slowly Father got up from his chair and placed a fresh log on the dying fire and stayed there, his back to us, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, and watched the flames blaze up. Without turning, he began to speak. He was at first calm and deliberate in speech, as was his habit, but gradually he warmed to the subject and began to sputter loudly, as he often did when excited by the meaning and implications of his words.

He reminded us of an event some two years past, when, in this same month of November, on learning of the assassination, in Alton, Illinois, of that holy man Elijah Lovejoy, Father had publically pledged his life to the overthrow of slavery. We all knew this. He had done it in church, and we and our neighbors had witnessed his pledge, and so had the Lord, who sees everything, Father declared. And we and the Lord had also seen that, since then, just as he had done all the long years of his life before making that pledge, Father had continued to be a weak and despicable man.

We said no, but he said yes and waved us off. The truth was that he had not made himself into the implacable foe of this crime against God and man which he had sworn publically to oppose. Then he said, “My children, the years of my life are passing swiftly.” He fisted his hands and placed them before his eyes like a child about to weep. He said that while he had been idling selfishly and in sinful distraction, lured by his vanity and by pathetic dreams of wealth and fame, the slavers had dug in deeper all across the Southern states. They had spread out like foetid waters, flooding over the plains into Texas and the territories. They had steadily entrenched themselves in positions of power in Washington, until now the poor slaves could no longer even raise their voices to cry for help without being slain for it or being swiftly sold off into Alabama and Mississippi. Black heroes, and now and again a white man like Lovejoy, had risen in our midst and were everywhere being persecuted and even executed for their heroism, legally, by the people of these United States.

“My children,” he said, “it’s mobs that rule us now. And all the while Mister Garrison and his anti-slavery socialites bray and pray and keep their soft, pink hands clean. Politicians keep on politicking. For the businessmen it’s business as usual: ‘Sell us your cheap cotton, we’ll sell you back iron chains for binding the slaves who pick it.’”

Father then cursed them; he cursed them all. And he cursed himself. For his weakness and his vanity, he said, “I curse myself”

He turned to us and now crossed his arms over his chest. His face was like a mask carved of wood by an Indian sachem. His eyes gazed sadly down at us through holes in the mask. It was the face of a man who had been gazing at fires, who had roused the attendants of the fires, serpents and demons hissing back at the man who had dared to swing open the iron door and peer inside. We all knew what Father had seen there. We had seen it, too. But he, due to his nature and characteristic desire, had gazed overlong and with too great a directness, and his gray eyes had been scorched by the sight.