Cloudsplitter (24 page)
Father rode ahead of me, seated like a preacher, erect and reflective-seeming, as if he were not admiring or even conscious of the splendid scenery that surrounded us. He was fully as aware of the landscape as I, however. More so, probably. He no longer surprised me when, after a journey during which I had believed him throughout to have been lost in thought, he gave to Mary or the others who had remained at home a vividly detailed report of everything that we had passed, even including the flowers in the glades, the birds in the trees, and the trees and shrubs, all of which he had carefully noted to himself and had named in passing and had remembered.
“When we have named a thing, we have begun to
see
it,” he often said. “And in so doing we praise and give continual thanks to our heavenly Father. Thus it is to God’s greater glory that we name the most obscure flower in His field.” He had made a game of it when we were children, testing our abilities to identify by name, not the hawkweed or purple vetch or red milium, which everyone knew and admired, but the tiny heal-all, the spotted knapweed, and the lowly squawroot. Salmon was the best of us. Even as a small boy of seven or eight, he knew the names and uses of hundreds of flowers and plants that the rest of us, including Father, barely noticed. He knew that the burnet weed will stanch a wound, that coltsfoot will cure a cough, and that a sick deer will eat pickerelweed, and he knew where in forest and field to find them all.
Father’s and my arrival at the settlement was not quite the grand occasion that I had expected. But it was more the fault of my high expectations than the somewhat dismal reality I encountered, and my expectations, I felt, were more the fault of Lyman than of Father. Earlier, as our journey into the mountains from Westport had progressed, Lyman had spoken to me with increasing friendliness and sincerity. Then, lying side by side in the stale hay of the Partridge barn, he and I had talked long after the others had fallen to sleep. That was when he told me to call him Lyman, since we were close in age, and I agreed, but with reluctance, for somehow my calling him by his given name seemed, in my eyes, at least, to demean him.
“You’ll have to call me Owen, then,” I told him, and after he had done it several times, it no longer seemed so strange for me not to be addressing him in Father’s way, as Mr. Epps.
He was eager to hear about the famous Negro abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who had visited Father several times in Springfield the previous year. Lyman was mightily impressed that Father was sufficiently connected to Mr. Douglass that the great man had actually visited our home and had even stayed overnight with us. I may have been a little over-impressed with it myself and thus doubtless exaggerated somewhat the firmness of the connection, for Father and Mr. Douglass had not yet formed the close association that would mark their later relations. And that in turn might account for Lyman’s exaggerated report of the Negro settlement in North Elba, in terms both of their number and of their achievements as settlers. He may have been trying to impress the son of a close friend of the famous Frederick Douglass.
There were, he said, close to a hundred Negroes living in North Elba, most of them freedmen, with a small number of fugitives secreted among them, individuals who could not be named. “Could be, Owen, that I myself am running from a slavemaster” he said, “and the next man be the freedman. You can’t know which is which, can’t tell one from the other, freedman or slave, unless I name him for you—and even then, how you going to be sure? So long as you know that
one
of us is free, then the next man is safe. Leastways up there in the mountains he’s safe, because the slave-catchers, they don’t dare show their faces in Timbuctoo.”
The Negroes were armed, he said, and would kill any man who came sneaking around looking to haul a single one of them, man, woman, or child, back to slavery. I lay there in the darkness next to him, rapt with pleasure, as he described a remnant people settled in the wilderness and living off the land, an industrious people, secure and vigilant, setting lookouts on the peaks, with elaborate signaling systems, rams’ horns and drums, to give the warning whenever a stranger entered their wild domain. I pictured valiant Negroes ambushing their enemies at the mountain passes.
For years, Father had told us stories about the Maroons of Jamaica, whom he so admired—those escaped slaves who had fled into the mountainous interior of their island and who for half a century fought off the mighty British army, until finally the King of England gave up the fight and let them stay in their highland villages, where they raised their families and ruled their territory unimpeded. I saw the Negroes of Timbuctoo as a modern American version of those old Jamaicans, and of the rebellious slaves who had followed Toussaint L’Ouverture into the mountain fastness of Hispaniola, waiting for the moment when they would have the numbers and the occasion to sweep down upon the sugarcane plantations along the coastal plain and strike a death blow against their French owners, freeing themselves from servitude forever. I imagined the Negroes of Timbuctoo to be warriors of that high order.
Lyman told me that they had built their cabins close together all in one place to make them easy to defend, and when they worked their fields, which were often located far from their cabins, they went armed with swords and guns. Even the women and children, he said. I asked who was their general or leader. Was there one among them who functioned as a chieftain, and how had they elected him? I remember peering through a broken window in Mr. Partridge’s loft to the shrubby field behind the barn, where fireflies lit up the spring night like the silent firing of the guns of a hundred scattered, hidden warriors—here, here, here; gone, gone, gone—harassing their huge, clumsy enemy, maddening him with the accumulated pain of many small blows struck by an army of black-skinned warriors made invisible by the darkness.
“No one chief rules us,” Lyman said. “What we do, Owen, is reason together. We sit and talk things out, mostly amongst the men who knows a thing or two. Men such as myself. And then we comes to an agreement together about how we going to do this and that. Course, there’s some folks who gets listened to more closely than the others, there’s some who don’t get no never mind at all, and there’s some who’re in between. Me, I’m one of the in-between fellows. On account of my still being a young man and all. But with me working for Mister Brown now, that could change some. Folks up there thinks highly of Mister Brown,” he said, wistfully, as if he had forgotten that I was the son of Mr. Brown, almost as if he had forgotten for a moment that I was white, which pleased me. More than that, it comforted me.
It never happened that when in the presence of a Negro I did not feel perceived as white and then at once begin to think of myself in those terms also. No matter how used to the presence of Negroes I became—and since my early childhood, Father, whenever possible, had brought all types of Negroes into our household, providing us with daily, respectful proximity to them—a black person made me constantly conscious of my whiteness. I could not forget it. It angered me in a way that left me secretly ashamed. And on those occasions, in a childish way, I sometimes actually wished that Negroes did not exist as if their very presence in our country were pestilential and the disease of race-consciousness were their fault and not ours.
I didn’t know how to inoculate myself against this disease, except to associate strictly with whites, which I could never do and call myself a man. Because of our history together, I didn’t know how to see around or through a black person’s race, and thus I could not see around or through my own. And whenever I became aware of my whiteness, I was ashamed. Not just because of the horrors of slavery, although that surely provided plenty of reason for any white American to feel ashamed of his race, but because, in the eyes of the God of my father and, most importantly, in the eyes of my father himself, race-consciousness was wrong. Just as wrong as not being able to forget, whenever I found myself in the presence of a woman, that I was a man and not just a fellow human being. It was as if race-consciousness, like sex-consciousness, were some kind of uncontrollable lust that left a white man with no regard for the deep, personal relations of friendship and family.
Pride, lust, envy—these are the certain consequences of race-consciousness, whether you are black or white, just as they are the consequences of thinking constantly of your maleness or femaleness when in the presence of the other sex. It affects you in such a way that you either feel proud of your race or sex, mere accidents of birth, or envy the other’s; proud, you think of the other person as available for your base and sensual use, or else, ashamed, you wish to have the other person make use of you. You do not view yourself or the other person simply as a
person.
Perhaps only the old New England Puritans or certain of their latter-day descendants, like Father, were properly equipped, morally and intellectually, to recognize and defeat such serpentine failings. I, however, despite Father’s best intentions and teaching, was not so equipped, and as a result, I frequently added a fourth sin to the list-wrath. For on those occasions when I had become enraged by my inability to overcome my weakness, I directed my anger, not at myself, as I should have, but against the person whose race had made me conscious of my own race or the person whose sex had enflamed me. The latter I might defeat by living like an anchorite and withholding myself from the company of women other than those related to me by blood, which, of course, is precisely what I have done. The former, however, I could defeat only by abandoning my pledge to dedicate my life to the destruction of slavery and arranging my life so as to associate only with white people. But waging war against slavery was my sworn duty, as marriage was not, and by the time I had reached my young manhood, thanks to the imprint made upon my mind and spirit by Father, abdication of it was no longer imagineable.
It was for such complicated and barely understood reasons as these, then, that I found myself strangely and powerfully soothed by Lyman’s presence that night in the barn in Keene. It was the idea of an oppressed people’s flight to sanctuary in the impenetrable mountains that seduced me—that and the brief relief from the burden of race-consciousness that came over me as I lay in the dark beside Lyman Epps, a black man my own age who spoke to me as if I were not white, as if, in fact, I were black or he were white—as if we two were of the same race.
I lay there in the hay, astonished and full of wonder and delight. My usual high agitation, which I had come to think of as a permanent aspect of my mind, had ceased altogether. And for a few precious moments that night, I did not feel like a stranger to myself. A peculiar restfulness had come over me like a warm breeze—and I thought that all the years of my life so far, since the death of my mother long before, I had been traveling far from home, a child moving through the world disguised as an adult; and now, unexpectedly, on this May night in a barn in the Adirondack mountains, I had been allowed to remove my disguise and settle into my childhood bed, a boy again. I reached out in the dark and took Lyman’s hand in mine, and held it for a long time, with neither of us moving or saying anything, until, still holding his hand, I fell peacefully asleep.
The next day, on returning to my usual agitated state, I realized with horror that, for all its innocence, my simple, affectionate gesture might well have been regarded by Lyman as brazen or even wanton, and therefore despicable. To my immense relief, Lyman showed no sign of having misunderstood me, and we continued to engage one another for the rest of our journey to North Elba with the same easy familiarity of the evening before. When our little caravan finally arrived at our new home, Father paid him for his services with the sack of seed and supplies that he had promised, and Lyman waved a simple goodbye and walked on down the road. And I did not see him again until Father and I rode into the place called Timbuctoo.
A few miles south of the village of North Elba, we passed off the old Military Road onto a rutted, rocky lane and into the woods, with Father in the lead on Adelphi and me in the wagon behind him, driving the horse we had named Poke. From the condition of the trail, it was clear that not many wagons had passed this way before, and several times Father had to dismount and clear away fallen branches before I could proceed. Then suddenly we entered a cleared space marred by the charred stumps of trees, and before us were some eight or ten cabins, which were more like shanties than proper log cabins, little huts made of sticks and old cast-off boards and patches of canvas.
It was a camp, not a village, with no sign of the palisade and neat log houses set around a protected square as I had imagined. There was indeed a flagpole set in the middle of the clearing, just as Lyman had said, but the pole, stuck into a pile of rocks, was tilted at a pathetic angle, and dangling from the top was a tattered banner made from an old piece of red wool, a shirt or piece of a blanket, upon which I could make out a roughly cut five-pointed yellow star.
Except for a few undersized pigs rooting about in heaps of garbage and a half-dozen scrawny fowl picking at the wet, smelly ground that lay behind the privies, the place looked abandoned. Then I saw several small children with somber brown and black faces peering out from the doorways, and I noticed that here and there an adult’s dark hand had drawn back a rag from a window so that the owner of the hand could observe our approach unseen from the gloom of the cabin.
After a moment, a bearded Negro man of middle-age appeared at the door of one of the shacks and for a second regarded us with caution, when, apparently recognizing Father from his earlier visit, he smiled broadly and said, “Mis-ter Brown!” and stepped forward to greet us. Then several others, men and women with children trailing behind, emerged from their homes—which I must call hovels, for I do not know what else to call them, they were so poorly constructed and maintained. I could not imagine enduring the bitterly cold winter winds and snow with no more protection than those sad bits of shelter provided. I myself would have fled long since, I thought. Or else I would have built me a proper log cabin and fireplace. The lassitude and disarray of these people amazed and bewildered me. They seemed exhausted and demoralized.
