Cloudsplitter (42 page)

I thought that Father would then upbraid me, but instead he pursed his lips as he often did when thinking something through for the first time and said, “Very interesting. That’s interesting to me, Owen. And prophecy? You heard that, too?”

“Well, yes. I believe so.”

“Very interesting. High counsel and prophecy. Well, who knows? God speaks to us in unexpected ways. Even in the words of philosophers,” he said, and smiled and reached up and put his arm over my shoulder.

We briskly walked that way, side by side, the remaining few blocks to Dr. Howe’s home, and the entire distance, as I strode along, I whistled the same, nearly tuneless tune that I’d heard the happy young man whistle before. I believe that I felt for those few moments just as he had; and it was grand.

I was no more eager to depart with Father from Boston, even for a place as inviting as England, than I had been to leave Springfield for Timbuctoo, and for many of the same reasons. Here, in a city amongst a multitude of distractions and competing truths, it was easier not to succumb to the singular force of Father’s truth. I was stronger here. Isolation—such as we had endured in Timbuctoo and even to a lesser degree back in Ohio and before that in New Richmond, and such as I knew I would endure with Father aboard a ship and in a foreign land-bound me, bound all us Browns, the more tightly to the Old Man’s view of things.

Here in Boston, however, even more than in Springfield, I saw good men and women everywhere who despised slavery, who had thought deeply and long on matters of religion and moral philosophy, and who loved goodness and truth fully as much as did Father, and yet they seemed not so fierce and judgemental in their ways as he. Perhaps they were indeed soft and compromised by wealth and privilege, as Father claimed, made prideful by their fame and the admiration of their like-minded, high-minded compatriots. Perhaps Father was right, and they were, as he liked to say, “boobs.” But I could not help but admire their easy tolerance of one another and their patient optimism. Father’s way was lonely, painfully lonely to me, and I never felt it so much as when we were circulating in cities amongst the men and women who should normally have been our natural allies.

In the holy war against slavery, Father seemed more and more, and especially here in Boston, like a Separatist. I found myself growing cross and impatient with him for it and the next day nearly quarreled with him. He and I had gone down to the docks from Dr. Howe’s to confirm our bookings aboard the
Cumbria
and to verify our Monday morning departure with the tide two days thence, and also just to look at the ship itself, to appraise her size and proportions, so as to anticipate better the degree of our physical discomfort for the duration of our journey. Neither of us had ever traveled so far before—our longest journey by boat may have been the ferry across Lake Champlain from Vermont to New York or a horse-drawn barge on the Erie Canal. And though, naturally, we did not speak of it to one another, we were both more than a little nervous and even somewhat fearful.

I had been noticing, as we walked along the thronged streets, printed advertisements for an address by Mr. William Lloyd Garrison that evening at the Park Street Church. They had been posted all over the city, many of them deliberately torn down and trampled underfoot, it seemed. Despite its reputation, Boston was no more undivided in those days over the issue of slavery than any other Northern city—which is to say that the white citizens who opposed the institution altogether, who were for abolition, complete and forever, in all the states, were a distinct minority—a tiny minority. And those who were
for
slavery, who thought it a positive good, which ought to be extended over all the western territories, they, too, were a tiny minority. The vast majority in between just wanted the problem to go away. And while the majority did not exactly approve of the enslavement of Negroes, they deeply resented their white neighbors who had chosen to make an issue of it.

In Boston, however, numbered among the people who did make an issue of it were some of the most respectable and admired citizens in the entire country. Thanks to the reputations of Theodore Parker and William Ellery Channing and Dr. and Mrs. Howe and dozens of other luminaries in the fields of education, the arts, public service, commerce, and religion, it was here, more than anywhere else in America, that civic virtue, high-mindedness, and theology had gotten associated with abolitionism. Overt opposition to it, therefore, got expressed mostly by ruffians and drunkards, while the respectable citizens stayed home, silently tolerated both sides, and felt smugly above the fray, as if the two minorities, in the eyes of God and the ongoing history of the Republic, neatly canceled each other out.

Stopped for a moment at a crowded intersection, I suggested to Father that it would be nice if we could hear Mr. William Lloyd Garrison speak tonight at the meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. “We might not have another chance to hear him in person,” I said brightly.

He shot me a puzzled, slightly irritated look and, without answering, darted into the cobbled street and strode on ahead of me.

I hurried to catch up, and when I was beside him again, I said in a loud voice, “Well, if not Ralph Waldo Emerson calling for a new heroism at the Charles Street Meeting House, then why not William Lloyd Garrison denouncing slavery at the Park Street Church?”

“What?”

“If not the radical Transcendentalist, then why not the radical Christian? Are we too pure for
The Liberator,
too?” Since my early childhood, Mr. Garrison’s sheet had come to us on the front lines like a trusted messenger sent from the headquarters of the army waging war against slavery. Father had used that very figure himself. Numerous times, I reminded him.

“Yes, I have used the figure,” he admitted. “But you mistook it. I meant it as a criticism of what’s exactly the problem with these pacifistic ‘society’ men and women.” We were by now down amongst the piers below the Custom House—a whole city of wharves and warehouses, a clattering tangle of crates, bales, tubs, and kegs and all manner of cartons and free-standing goods arriving, departing, and stopped at various stages in between; of shippers and trans-shippers and receivers of goods from all over the world. There was tea and silk from China, rum and molasses from the West Indies, carpets and ivory from India, and from the European nations everything from French lace to Lancaster steel, from Dresden paper to Portuguese wine.

“They think that we’re the corporals and they’re the generals’ he went on. “And men like Garrison, all they’re interested in is becoming commander-in-chief. So they waste their time and other people’s money squabbling amongst themselves, while our Negro brethren languish in slavery. Action, action, action, Owen!
That’s
what I want! Enough of this talk, talk, talk.”

“Then you won’t go with me” I said.

It was a noisy, chaotic scene down there amongst the stone wharves and warehouses, and difficult to carry on a normal conversation with wagons and carts rumbling past and stevedores, lumpers, and teamsters hollering and drunken seamen lurching through the throng. Although it was a September afternoon, it was as warm and humid as mid-summer, and most of the workmen were shirtless and sweating. Seagulls screamed and begged in brazen crowds or waddled along the edges of the piers or perched half-asleep on the stanchions and atop the hundreds of chimneys and masts of steamers and sailing ships and coastal packets reaching into the sky like a forest of pines. The smells of fish and rum were heavy in the air. In later years, I always associated those odors with the Boston waterfront: fish at the edge of turning, and the sweet, burnt-sugar smell of Jamaican rum—a dizzying, in no way unpleasant smell that touched my brain and staggered me like a drink of raw whiskey.

Father said, “Well, yes, I might be willing to hear Mister Garrison. Out of curiosity. But he’s elected to speak on the Sabbath.” He meant, of course, after sunset on a Saturday. “If it were to be a prayer meeting, fine. I’d attend. But otherwise, no. And it does seem otherwise, as he is a Quaker.”

“May I attend, then, and report back to you?”

“As you wish. You’re not bound by my religion, Owen.” “No.”

“I will return to the Howes’ and read awhile and pray.” “Why do I not feel released, Father?” I said.

He smiled back. “I dare not guess.”

We did not speak of it again but went about our business at the office of the shipping agent for the
Cumbria—
which, to these landlubbers and viewed from the dock, appeared quite seaworthy—and returned to the Howes’ in time for a pleasant early supper of stuffed grouse served on fancy China plates with genuine antique silverware from France. Later that evening, still secretly angry with Father, who remained closeted in our rooms at prayer, I headed out, by way of Beacon Street, to the Park Street Church, which was located not far from Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill. Beacon Street ran alongside the wide expanse of the famed Common, with a facing row opposite of large, old brick town houses, the patrician homes of many of Boston’s elite. As I walked, I kept to that side of the street, close by the tall, elegant houses and as far from the darkened Common as possible, for there—lurking among the shrubs and trees and appearing suddenly out of the darkness to glare and howl at the decorous, well-dressed men and women walking peacefully towards the church—was the enemy.

They were boys, mostly, and young men, idlers and drunkards, brawlers, louts, whoremongers, and common thieves; there were numerous females among them, too, maps and doxies as wild and brutal looking as their brothers. It was not so much their unwashed physiognomies that made them appear brutal and coarse, as their rage. No matter how noble the human face in repose, how symmetrical, fresh, and clear it may appear, when the brow is bent and glowered down, the mouth misshapen by an obscene word, the nostrils flared in revulsion and the lips sneering, and when the fist gets doubled and held out like a weapon, one recoils as if from a sub-species, as if from a demonic, bestial version of one’s self. How can we all be humans alike, when one of us has turned suddenly so ugly? And when a whole crowd turns ugly, turns itself into a mob, what species is it then?

I could fairly well smell the brandy and beer on the breath of the youths who stuck their whiskered faces out at me and brayed their Negro-hating sentiments at me and the other men and women who were silently, peacefully walking the sidewalk alongside me. The gang cackled and screeched and sometimes even tossed a rock and then ducked back into the bushes out of sight, to be replaced a few rods further on by another gang, whose drunken members would pick up the chant. “Nigger-lovers!” they hollered. “Yer nigger-lovers! Yer niggers yerself! Ugly black niggers! Ugly black niggers!” And so on, stupidly, even idiotically, they ranted—until we were walking a kind of gauntlet, it seemed, or proceeding through a maddened, howling mob to our own public hanging, headed not to a place of worship but to a scaffold. How courageous, I thought, were these men and women beside me, many of them elderly, who walked in silence along the sidewalk, being jeered and tormented by people with murder in their eyes. That our pale complexions protected us, keeping us from being physically attacked by them and possibly even killed, caused me to realize anew that white is as much a color as black. Our flag, our uniform, was our white skin, and while it provoked this attack from our fellow whites, it also shielded us from serious harm.

Nonetheless, once inside the large, clean, rationally proportioned sanctuary of the church, I breathed a great sigh of relief and realized that I had been seriously frightened by the harassment of the mob—although it was hard to distinguish fear from anger. My legs felt watery, and my heart was thumping. I wanted to strike out, to hit and hurt those foul mouths, and it had taken great restraint for me simply to appear to ignore them and walk serenely along to my meeting like the others, instead of picking up a loose brick or thrown rock and hurling it back at the coward who had thrown it, or chasing the fellows into the bushes and thrashing them there. I was a big, sturdy young man then and could easily have tossed three or four of them around like so much cordwood. Indeed, had one of them actually struck me with a rock, I believe I would have lost my serenity and rushed across Beacon Street after him. I was never a Quaker.

None of the others, however, as they entered the church, seemed in the slightest bothered by the caterwauling of the mob outside. They treated it like a disagreeable rain and seemed to brush it off their cloaks and shawls as they entered the foyer and greeted one another cheerfully and took their seats inside. Standing there in the foyer, shivering with rage—or fear—and tamping down fantasies of violent retribution, I, however, suddenly felt ashamed of myself. “Action, action, action!” was Father’s call, but here, in this serene and pacifistic context, action seemed vile, easy, childish. Mr. Garrison’s perspective, I knew, and that of the Anti-Slavery Society as a whole, was based on the Quaker philosophy of non-violence, and it was easy to criticize it from afar, while gnashing one’s teeth over the ongoing injustice of slavery and its growing power in Washington during those years. But here, in the face of the mob, pacifism seemed downright courageous and almost beautiful.

I was suddenly glad that Father was not at my side, for although he, like me, probably would not have charged into the woods of the Common to thrash his tormentors, he surely would have entered the foyer of the church growling and snarling at the weakness of the Society members for not having created a stout and well-armed security force from amongst their membership and posting it all along Park Street to protect their meetings.

“If you behave as slaves, you will be treated as slaves,” he often said. He said it to freed Negroes; he said it to sympathetic whites. “If you wish to do the Lord’s work on earth, you must gird your loins and buckle on your armor and sword and march straightway against the enemy.”

Ah, Father, how you shame me one minute and anger me the next. How your practical wisdom, which at times borders on a love of violence for its own sake, challenges my intermittent pacifism, which borders on cowardice. Your voice stops me cold, and then divides me. One day and in one context, I am a warrior for Christ. The next day, in a different context, I am one of His meekest lambs. If only in the beginning, when I was a child, I had been able, like so many of my white countrymen, to believe that the fight to end slavery was
not
my fight, that it was merely one more item in the long list of human failings and society’s evils that we must endure, then I surely would have become a happy, undivided man.