Cloudsplitter (102 page)

Authors: Russell Banks

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BOOK: Cloudsplitter

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While I was in the midst of this task, I heard a group of horsemen approach from the direction of Harpers Ferry and stop before the house. “Hello, the house!” one of them shouted. “Anyone there?”

I quickly placed the lid onto the half-filled case. Then I lifted it and carried it out the rear door of the kitchen, where, silently, carefully, as if it were a child’s coffin, I set it into the wagon bed. I climbed up on the driver’s box and sat there, waiting.

For several minutes, all was quiet. Then I heard the clump of boots on the porch at the front of the house, and someone rapped on the door. “It appears there ain’t anyone home, Cap’n!” he called back.

“No matter,” came the response. “We got most of what we come for back at the schoolhouse anyhow.” A moment later, I heard them leave.

I sat motionless for a long while, until the horse abruptly shifted her weight, signaling me to give her direction. But I had no plan. I barely had thoughts. I had spent my entire life following Father’s plans, thinking his thoughts. And at that moment, as I sat up on the wagon with the reins in my hands and my horse impatient to move on, I did not know what to do or think.

I was in considerable physical pain, for I had cut and bruised myself badly in my fall, and my clothes were torn. I was lightly armed—I had my revolver but no rifle, which I had lost in the darkness after dropping it from my treetop lookout. And I had no food or supplies or money. But I was alone. Alone, and free. The entire continent lay out there. I was a man, a white man, and could go to any place on it where no one knew me, and I could become new. I could become an American without a history and with no story to tell. I believed that then and for many years to come.

So if I had a plan, that was it. If I had a thought, that was the thought.

About the Author

RUSSELL BANKS
is the author of thirteen works of fiction, including
Rule of the Bone, The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction,
and
Continental Drift.
He lives in upstate New York.

Author’s Note

This is a work of the imagination. While some of the characters and incidents portrayed here can be found in accounts of the life and times of John Brown, the famous abolitionist, they have been altered and rearranged by the author to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. These characters and incidents, despite their resemblance to actual persons and known events, are therefore the products of the author’s imagination. Accordingly, the book should be read solely as a work of fiction, not as a version or interpretation of history.

Nevertheless, the author wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the help and inspiration that he has received from Oswald Garrison Villard’s magisterial
John Brown: A Biography
Fifty Years
After
(Boston, 1910), Richard Boyer’s The
Legend of
John Brown (New York, 1973), and Stephen Oates’s
To Purge This Land with Blood,
second edition (Amherst, Mass., 1984). They are excellent, deep works of biographical history. This, it bears repeating, is a work of fiction.

The author also wishes to acknowledge and thank the many people who so generously provided information, aid, and encouragement, among them: Edwin Cotter, superintendent of the John Brown Farm and Grave, in North Elba, N.Y.; Michael S. Harper; Thomas Hughes; Paul Matthews, Chuck Wachtel; Cornel West; C. K. Williams; friends and colleagues in the Creative Writing Program and African American Studies at Princeton University; Ellen Levine of the Ellen Levine Literary Agency; and, most emphatically, Robert Jones of HarperCollins Publishers.

MORE RAVES FOR
Cloudsplitter

“Extraordinary. . . . The most important novel about race published in America since William Faulkner’s The
Sound and the Fury.”
.

—Baltimore Sun

“Massive, startlingly vivid, morally and intellectually challenging.”

—People

“It is difficult these days to find a book as ambitious, as intelligent and spiritual and compelling and, simply, as important as Russell Banks’ twelfth work of fiction
Cloudsplitter.
But here it is, what I want to call, never before having used this term in a review, a great American novel Russell Banks’ achievement in the writing of
Cloudsplitter
is substantial, the novel one of consequence and significance. This book matters, and we as readers can only be thankful to have heard this voice, Owen Brown’s tale of guilt and liberation, of adventure and sorrow. This is, indeed, a great American novel.”

—Brett Lott, News & Observer of Raleigh

“Stunningly absorbing By the time [readers] skid at last into the novel’s final phrase ... they surely will have collapsed into an exhausted, satisfied heap, oversated with sensation and emotion and knowing they have been under the spell of a first-rate storyteller who has plunged them not only into the moral and political tremors shuddering through a place and time but also into the heart of a large and exuberant family and deep into one man’s enigmatic soul.”.

—Miami Herald

“Rich and soulful . . . with a sturdy, modern momentum.... A novel of near-biblical proportions.”

—New York Times
Book Review

“Powerfully told,
Cloudsplitter
is much more than a historical novel. It is a long meditation on America’s shameful enslavement of 4 million people in the land of the free. It is also a captivating portrait of a 19th century family.”

—Playboy

“Ambitious and haunting A valuable novel about a significant American and an important reminder of the debilitating effects of race in America.”

—San Frannseo Chronicle

“A pitch-perfect novel.”

—Esquire

“Every writer’s desktop miscellanea should include a statuette of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Marine’, he who so entrances his listeners that they cannot choose but hear such a voice speaks through Russell Banks’ new novel, a book the size of a small continent formed not by shale and lava but by themes equally raw and elemental.”

—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“
Cloudsplitter
is breathtaking, and, despite its length, demands to be read at breakneck speed.... If you want to know the history of that time, read history. If you want to read a superb novel of that time, read Cloudsplitter.”

—San Jose Mercury News

“An epic family tragedy.... A powerful tale of an idealist’s hold on the hearts and minds of his family.”

—Boston Sunday Herald

“A vibrant, out-sized, mesmerizing portrait of the mercurial Brown that reveals his charm as well as his piety, his compassion as well as his demonic wrath, his intellect as well as his willfulness.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A powerful contemporary novel... it tells a crucial story from this nation’s long epic struggle against racism.”

—Lexington Herald-Leader

“In
Cloudsplitter,
Russell Banks’ mammoth novel about the raving abolitionist John Brown, we have a character of such scale and complexity that mere history of biography cannot do him justice. . . . Mr. Banks has presented himself as one of America’s most accomplished novelists.”

—Dallas Morning News

“A spellbinding tale, not the least of which concerns the depiction of hard, hard life in the 1840s and 1850s.”

—San Diego Union

“A fine novel.... This is fiction on a large scale, even more ambitious than the books Banks has written before, and the writer carries it off with strength and subtlety.”

—Newark Star-Ledger

“A beautiful and terrifying book.”

—Newsday

Also by Russell Banks

Rule of the Bone
The Sweet Hereafter
Affliction
Success Stories
Continental Drift
The Relation of My Imprisonment
Trailerpark
The Book of Jamaica
The New World
Hamilton Stark
Family Life
Searching for Survivors

Credits

Cover design
©
1998 by Marc Cohen
Cover photograph courtesy of The Pasadena Historical Museum, Pasadena, Calif.

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