Cloudsplitter (65 page)

“You’ll get your money,’ I said. “Don’t fret yourself”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see, Red. We’ll see how them pelts and fleeces add up,” he said, and handed me a stub of a pencil and the bill of lading, which I signed with a surly flourish, John Brown,
by his son Owen Brown
, and as I wrote the date, I realized that tomorrow was Father’s birthday.

I was twenty-seven that spring. When Father was my age, he had been married for nearly a decade and had fathered four children. His wife, my mother, had not yet died. When he was my age, he had already made himself a professional surveyor, had established a successful tannery that employed two grown men and four or five boys, had built a house, raised a herd of blooded sheep, cleared twenty acres of hardwood forest and carved a farm out of the wilderness of western Pennsylvania. He had founded a settlement school, and when he was my age, at a time when most respectable white people preferred that folks show slavery their blind eye, he had publically pledged his life to its overthrow. At twenty-seven, he knew what he stood for, what he could and could not do. At my age, Father had become in all visible ways a man.

And here was I, still a boy. How was that possible? In what crucial ways was my nature so different from his that our lives and works would diverge by this much?

John had once said to me, in a complaining tone, that Father had taught us to be afraid of no man except him. And it was true. Father always insisted that we think for ourselves in every way, except when we disagreed with him, and that we hold ourselves independent of every man’s will, except his. He wanted us simultaneously to be independent and yet to serve him. Father was to be our Abraham; we were to be his little Isaacs. We were supposed to know ahead of time, however, the happy outcome of the story—we were supposed to know that it was a story, not about us and our willingness to lie on a rock on Mount Moriah and be sacrificed under his knife, but about our father and his willingness to obey his terrible God. That was the difference between us and our father. We had him for a father, and he had someone else.

His father, like ours, had taught his son John to be independent of all men, but Grandfather had included himself, the teacher, amongst them. He, too, like Father, had told the story of Abraham and Isaac to his eldest son, but he had told it in such a way that it was not about the nature of obedience or sacrifice; it was about the nature of God. Grandfather Brown was a gentle, rational man whose greatest difficulty was in accommodating his character to a cruel and inexplicable universe, and unlike his son, he was not bound by a lifelong struggle to overcome his own willfulness and vanity. It’s their own secret struggles that shape the stories people tell their children. And had I been blessed with a son of my own, the story would have been told yet a third way. The central figure in it would have been neither Abraham nor God. It would have been Isaac, and the questions my story asked and answered would have been Isaac’s alone.

I would have told my son that Isaac’s father, Abraham, rose up early in the morning and led Isaac up into the mountain of Moriah, claiming that he had been directed to do this by God, in order there to make a sacrifice unto Him. And Isaac believed his father, for he loved him and had never known him to lie. And when they had reached the mountaintop and Isaac’s father had clave the wood for the burnt offering and Isaac saw no lamb there, the boy spoke unto Abraham, his father, saying, “Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” And his father said unto Isaac, “God will provide a lamb.” But when Isaac saw his father come forward with a rope and a knife in his hands to bind and slay him upon the altar they had built together, he understood that he himself was to be the lamb. He was afraid and asked himself, Did he love his father so greatly that he could not flee from Moriah back into Canaan, where lay his aged mother, Sarah, or that he could not follow his father’s bondswoman Hagar and her son, Ishmael, who was his brother, into the wilderness of Beersheba? He said to his father, “I heard not this command from God. It comes to me only from thee, and thou art not the Lord, nor canst thou speak for Him. For thou hast taught me that, and I have believed it, and therefore now I must flee from this place, or else abandon all that thou hast taught me.” Whereupon his father fell down upon the ground and said that an angel of the Lord was calling to him out of heaven, saying, “Abraham, Abraham, lay not thine hand upon the lad, for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son from me.” And Isaac showed his father where behind him a ram had been caught in a thicket by his horns, and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of Isaac, and father and son prayed together, giving thanks unto the Lord, and descended together from the mountain feeling wise and greatly blessed by the Lord. That is the story I would tell.

In the evening, after supper, Father bade me give him my views regarding Lyman’s decision to live away from us. I knew that he had already spoken with Lyman himself that same afternoon in Timbuctoo and had heard his version, and that he had obtained Mary’s view of the matter as well. The former I knew nothing about, for I had not spoken with Lyman myself since the day he departed from us; the latter I knew to be one of placid, unquestioning acceptance: as far as Mary was concerned, Lyman had decided that he and Susan could live more naturally on their own land among their own people, that was all. “And perfectly understandable, too,” Mary said, when Father raised the subject. “Especially after the disappointment of the baby.” We were all gathered in the parlor, where Father was preparing to lead us in prayer.

“Yes. The baby” he said, closing his eyes and looking down as if to pray for its soul. We stood in silence for a moment, and the soul of the infant born dead did seem to flit through the room and then swiftly disappear. That was how it was whenever Father was present—the entire spirit world was strangely enlivened. Then Father said, “I urged them today to come here and retrieve its body and re-bury it properly in the Negro burying ground over there. I assume they’ll do it tomorrow. But before they do, I want to know how it goes between you, Owen, and Mister Epps in particular. And with all the Negroes, too, not just him. I perceive a point of strain, a serious weakness in our relations with them, son. And I believe that you are the fault,” he said. “Give me simply your views on why they’ve separated from us and, a thing which distresses me much more, why the Underground Railroad no longer runs through this valley. The two are obviously connected.”

Everyone in the family looked at me, except for Father, who had opened his Bible and appeared to be studying tonight’s reading from the Scriptures. “Yes, probably they are connected,” I said. “No other whites in the settlement are willing to carry fugitives north. They are as cowardly as ever. More so, of course, since the Fugitive Act. And the Negroes themselves dare not try it, either. Except for Lyman. But Lyman chooses not to enlist our aid anymore, and he has no wagon, not even a single horse or mule. So there it is. No one goes north anymore, unless on foot, and that apparently has discouraged the conductors below from sending fugitives on to North Elba. Instead, they take the greater risk of sending folks by way of the Lake Champlain route and the Rochester-to-Niagara route.”

“Well, that’s been taken care of Father said. “I’ve today written to Mister Douglass and a person in Utica whom I cannot name. Service will resume shortly. But you still haven’t told me your view of Mister Epps’s departure from us.”

“What did he tell you himself?”

“He would say nothing on the subject.”

“Nothing?”

“No, nothing, Owen.”

“Then I can say nothing, either.”

He looked up and studied my face for a long moment. I remember the sound of Grandfather’s clock ticking. Then he said, “Very well, Owen. It shall remain between you and Mister Epps. Let us pray, children.” And in his usual manner, he began to pray.

It was only a matter of days before the Old Man had the farm up and running again—which pleased me, of course, but alloyed my pleasure at the same time with a measure of guilt. A few days more, and he had resumed service on the Underground Railroad between Timbuctoo and Canada, an activity which of necessity I joined. But sullenly at first, I confess, for its resumption was based on Father’s having re-established his old close and trusting relations with Lyman and the other Negroes of the settlement. Within a few short weeks, it was as if the Old Man had never left. He returned to preaching every second or third Sabbath at the Congregational Church in North Elba, a church he nonetheless would not formally join, and he undertook once again to conduct his weekly class on the Bible, which was attended by sometimes as many as a dozen men and women of the village, white and black. He happily approved of young Henry Thompson’s wish to marry Ruth and used it as an opportunity to bridge the distance that had marred relations between our two families, bringing the Thompsons into the abohtionist fold once again, and where the Thompsons went, many other local families went as well.

Father’s physical presence could inspire people, could instill in them a quantity of courage even to the point of recklessness, which, when he was not himself physically present to argue, chide, and explain, seemed to dissipate as fast as it had arisen. It was not so much his oratory that did it, although to be sure he spoke well and preached with conviction and imagination on any number of subjects, from abolitionism to animal husbandry, from the Bible, which he knew better than any trained and ordained preacher I had ever met, to the United States Constitution, which he knew like a Washington lawyer. But it was not his oratory that swayed people. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Instead, folks were impressed and then, perhaps to their surprise, led by his stubborn refusal to rely on common oratorical devices and embellishments, by his evident disdain for the tricks of voice and gesture that most public speakers relied on in those days. As if he were a Channing or a Parker or a white Frederick Douglass, he made people feel empowered by having come in contact with him, so that they felt larger, stronger, more righteous, clearer of purpose and more sure of victory than they ever had before. But unlike those exemplary speakers, Channing, Parker, Douglass, and so on, Father never lifted his voice, never shouted, never pointed to the heavens, never quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson—he never quoted any writer, except for those who wrote the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the United States Constitution.

The effect of Father’s speech and personal presence on otherwise rational and even skeptical men and women was uncanny and never failed to amaze me. No matter the audience—a hall filled with illustrious New England abolitionists or a convention of hundreds of distinguished Negroes, his country congregation at church on the Sabbath or a gathering of Negro farmers at a barn-raising in Timbuctoo, a meeting of his fallen-away white neighbors in North Elba or his own family gathered around the fire at home—Father always spoke simply and directly, his hands at his sides or merely clasped in front of him, an ordinary man in a plain brown suit who happened to possess the truth. Some of it was his sense of timing: he had an instinct for knowing when to remain silent so as to gather everyone’s attention and when to speak so that it would sound most impressive; thus, when he was expected to speak up, he often held his peace and stood against the furthest wall, and when he was expected to go silent and withdraw, he suddenly came forward and gave sharp utterance to his thoughts.

His voice was in no way stentorian or authoritative: it was pitched at not quite the level of a tenor’s. Most people who wrote about him afterwards regarded him as tall and well-built, a man of heroic proportions, but Father was of average height, tanned and sinewy, strong but not bulky or broad, and he walked like a soldier on parade, straight-backed and a little stiff-legged, with his arms swinging. His face was essentially that of a Yankee farmer: sharp-nosed, with tight lips and a jutting chin and a rough-hewn maris large ears sticking out beneath his coarse, reddish-gray hair, which he wore cropped short and spikey, like a stevedore’s. The visible center of his face was in his eyes, pale gray and fierce and steady. When the Old Man locked his gaze onto yours, it was very difficult not to give way before it, as if he’d seen your secret shame. Like an owl or a hawk, a powerful bird of prey, he rarely blinked. He could hold your gaze with his as if with physical force, as if he had reached out and clamped onto your chin and cheeks with both hands and had drawn your face up to his so that he could stare directly into it; and look into it he did, deeply, with curiosity and undisguised self-interest, as if he were examining, not a human soul, but a complex, unfamiliar piece of machinery, which, if properly understood, might save him a lifetime’s labor.

In early June, as Mary came close to her time, we were conducting to Canada an elderly couple whose sons had gone before them the previous year and a young boy accompanied by his gentle, bespectacled uncle. All four had escaped off the same Maryland plantation, which had become notorious along the Railroad, due to the cruelty of its master, a Dutchman named Hammlicher, and to the particular viciousness of his white overseer, a man named Camden, and due to the fact that Harriet Tubman herself had taken a special interest in facilitating the escape of the Hammlicher slaves. Mysterious, elusive, and yet seemingly everywhere at once, Miss Tubman was thought to have had a family connection among the Hammlicher slaves, through one of her own lost children, perhaps, and thus had lent it her special attention. Already at least fifteen of the several hundred human beings owned by this man had been spirited up along the Chesapeake Bay to Philadelphia and New York and thence on up the Hudson to Troy and freedom. But now, because of the increase in the number of slave-catchers in those cities along the old route, Miss Tubman had decided to send her charges north across the Adirondacks by way of Timbuctoo.

When Father had met her in Hartford that winter, he had convinced her of the good use to which she might put this previously obscure route, and his personal connection with her, when he revealed it to the Timbuctoo Negroes, had instantly won them back. Father’s reputation for honesty was such that no one questioned his claim; it was sufficient unto itself. How could they have refused to ally themselves with John Brown, when he came to them with the endorsement of the famous Harriet Tubman? The great Harriet! The General! None of them had ever met her or even seen her at a distance—she was all legend to them, one of the great African women, like Sojourner Truth, who seemed less a modern American saboteur of slavery than an ancient spirit-leader, an invincible, sometimes invisible, female warrior protected by the old African gods. Father’s having met and, at the instigation of Frederick Douglass, having spoken privately with Miss Tubman gave him an authority that at once renewed Lyman’s commitment to running fugitives with us Browns and drew with him more of the others in the settlement than we would need. It made our Timbuctoo stop on the Underground Railroad suddenly important in the only world that mattered to the Negroes and to Father, and once again, increasingly as the summer wore on, the only one that mattered to me.