CLOUDSPLITTER

By Russell Banks
New York: HarperPerennial, 1998
ISBN # 0-06-093086-1 (paper)
758 pages

Comments by Bob Corbett
June 2008

Russell Banks presents a gripping account of the life of radical abolitionist John Brown (1800-1859). This account is narrated by Brown’s son Owen, the chief “officer” in Brown’s army. While ostensibly Owen is writing the account in 1899, 40 years after the raid on Harper’s Ferry, to aid some scholars who are writing a sympathetic biography of his father, the novel is also a touching exploration of an extremely difficult father/son relationship, sort of Owen’s last confession before his own death.

We follow the Brown family from shortly after Owen’s birth in 1825 to the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 with a few details of Owen’s life after Harper’s Ferry.

While Banks himself in his introduction emphases that this is a novel and that he has collapsed various events into one another for dramatic effect, and not been fully accurate to some historical characters, it is nonetheless clear that he has done enormous research into Brown’s life, and given the power of Banks’s storytelling, I would expect the novel will hold its own in the historical corpus not only on the life of John Brown, but on the half century of American life leading toward the Civil War.

John Brown was a radical abolitionist believing that only violent action, sort of a Biblical purging, could destroy the morally evil institution of slavery. Brown was convinced that not only was God on his side, but that he personally communed with God and was doing God’s bidding in his work. He worked with non-violent abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, but believed their well-intentioned tactics would never end slavery.

Banks seems to capture the driving forces of Brown’s confidence and courage when he has him say: “You must not obey a majority, no matter how large, if it oppose your principles and opinions…”

Much of Banks’s portrait of John Brown is familiar to us from standard historical accounts – at least the basic factual data. But not so of Owen’s relationship to his father. It is this sub-plot – if indeed it is really “sub,” -- that pains and grips the reader. John Brown was a true believer, God was God, and had set firm rules of life and conduct and provided that data to humans in The Bible. The greatest sin John Brown could imagine was the enslaving of other humans and he, John Brown, was called and commissioned by God to use the tools of deadly force to lead to the end of this evil social institution. Owen was to be his chief aide in this work.

Owen compares his father’s relationship to God as like Job’s to God – the faithful servant whom God could treat as he wished, even unfairly, yet Brown would still know he was God and be the obedient servant.

Owen was different. He did not even believe in God, but found himself much in the same relationship to his father as Job had been to God. John Brown could and did dominate Owen’s life, treated him badly many times, but it didn’t matter. John Brown was Abraham to Owen’s Issac. At God’s bidding Abraham was willing to kill Issac as commanded.

On Owen’s own view, when he looked at himself in his mid-twenties, he had accomplished virtually nothing of his own, yet at that age his father was already an important national figure in the anti-slavery movement.

Owen even had doubts about the use of violence, but the power of his father silenced his doubts. He reveals:

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 country-men, 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.

In the end the assignment Owen was given by his father at Harper’s

Ferry spares Owen the fate of death. But he seems to have internalized this fact as somehow his own betrayal of his father and fellow troops. Thus in these last days of his own life in 1899 he is “confessing” his lingering doubts and guilt for not being the son he thought his father wanted and perhaps even deserved.

Along the way of telling his story Russell Banks raises a number of fascinating discussions. Without, I hope, any plot spoiling, I want to comment on a few of these themes.

• Owen was only 8 years old when his mother died, but in reflecting on her death in later years he reveals a view of God (a God in whose existence he professes not to believe) that runs through the novel.

  Her essential goodness and her love of me compensated for everything that was not good and in an unpredictable, unstable world, where babies died before children and children died before adults, where without warning twisters and droughts and hard freezes descended on us like Biblical plagues and ruined a year’s husbandry of crops and livestock, a world in which the God whom everyone prayed for mercy and justice seemed not to care one way or the other, in such a precarious incomprehensible world, my mother’s love was the only kindly constant, her gentle smiled my sole comfort, her soft shy voice the music that pacified my tortured mind.

• At one point in the novel John Brown is working with the foreman of an iron mine who treats his Irish immigrant workers horribly. Brown is disgusted by this behavior of the foreman, a man who professes great concern for the slaves, and he challenges the man on his contradiction between his concern for slave and his treatment of the Irish. Slavery, the foreman argues, is an overall evil in which people taken by forced and held against their will, are deposed of their humanness. Further, he claims, this represents an unfair labor practice against non-slave holding business people.
  
  On the foreman’s views the situation of the Irish is quite different. They indentured themselves freely as the best economic outcome they could see within the bad situation of oppression in which they lived. Once they endured those years they contracted for they could once again be free.
  
  Brown never really counters this argument. In fact he too embraces the argument that the evil of slavery was both a fundamental issue of human rights and one of fair labor practices toward the rest of society.
  During the Vietnam War days I was vehemently opposed to the war, protested constantly, even did civil disobedience often. Yet I was strongly committed to non-violence for many of the same reasons as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass in the novel. Moral and practical reasons alike.
  
  I came to develop a significant distrust and dislike for dissenters who used violent means to advance their cause.
  
  Yet the portrait of John Brown as presented by Banks challenged this strong negative view I had of violent resistors. Brown’s view of slavery was that it was a clear and objective evil. A systemic action of government and society which violated an objective concept of goodness and decency. When the Southern pro- slavery politicians gained great ascendancy in Washington and non-violent resistance seemed doomed to failure, Brown’s active and violent resistance seemed more attractive to many, both participants and non-participants. Banks has Owen write:

  We were enraged by this, [general slave situation], to be sure, and howled at it, but when the slavery-loving, Negro- hating mobs gathered legitimacy in Washington and in the Southern press, when the Border Ruffians were portrayed as legitimate settlers and the overseers of human chattel as statesmen, when our leaders, like Senators Douglass and Webster, sold us out for a handful of silver coins and our heroes, like Senator Sumner, were clubbed down in the Capitol building itself, our rage turned suddenly to cold desperation. We who early on had been merely anti-slavery activist and who, slowly over the years in defense of our own rights of protest, had evolved, almost unbeknownst to ourselves, into guerilla fighters and militiamen – we now became terrorists. And having become terrorists, we found ourselves almost overnight made emblematic to those remaining white activists who mostly sat in their parlors or at their desks grieving over the loss of their nation. We inspired them, and they encouraged us. And so we waged their war for them. Unwilling to do more to regain their nation than write a poem or a cheque to help arm, clothe, and feed us, they were often objects of scorn and derision to us, although we were, of course, grateful for their poems and monies and used both to solicit still more monies and, with our purses thus fattened, purchased more Sharps rifles, more horses and supplies, more of the terrorizing broadswords and pikes.

  
  
  So did many dissidents of the 1960s view the war in Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. Brown’s beliefs were rooted both in his Christian beliefs and in moral principles which transcended religion. This seemed true of many violent anti-war protestors as well, though many substituted a Marxist-Leninist view of the world for the Christian one, but that never seemed to make much difference to me. While I was more sympathetic to the Marxist- Leninist view than the Christian one, neither was the key motivation to me.
  
  Yet somehow, the portrait of Brown as painted by Banks, is one where I found his decision to use violence more palatable than I did the violence of protestors of my own time. Perhaps BEING THERE, not just reading about the violence makes some difference. I’m not comfortable with this realization nor quite sure why I feel this way. I worry I’m just moved by Banks’s deeply sympathetic account of John Brown, while I just experienced a much less sympathetic group of violent resistors. This puzzles and troubles me and I suspect will be fertile ground for more reflection as time goes on.
  
  I do have a vivid memory, however, of a John Brown-like figure whom I encountered in 1967 which even then challenged my own principles of non-violence. This was not connected with the anti- Vietnam struggles, but with the Civil Rights Movement.
  
  There was a meeting / demonstration / rally at a small inner-city Black church in my home town of St. Louis. I went to join the action. I arrived early enough to get a seat in the old wooden church which had a narrow second-story balcony surrounding the two sides and rear of the church. While I sat watching others enter the church, seeing many folks I knew from the movement, all of a sudden a cadre of heavily armed young black men arrived, carrying what seemed to be especially huge automatic rifles. It was a troop of Civil Rights soldiers under the leadership of the white Roman Catholic priest, Father James Groppi of Milwaukee, the evening’s main speaker. The church became still and quiet with only the boots of the soldiers to be heard as they marched up the steps into the balcony lining the overlook shoulder to shoulder, rifles across their breasts. It was a disturbing but tremendously powerful display. Perhaps not too surprisingly I have no other memories of what went on that evening, though I know Father Groppi gave a rousing speech. I just don’t recall what he said. The presence of his “troops” drowned out all other memories. Nonetheless, I recognized the powerful impact of this impressive show of force.
  
  Nonetheless, I can’t get out of my mind what Banks has Owen say on the eve of Harper’s Ferry about their own army: “…Americans coming in under cover of darkness one by one from all over the continent – well-armed young men with anti-slavery principles in their minds and bloody murder in their hearts….”

Overall I relished reading the novel, and read this huge 758 page book in just a few sittings, gripped by it. Banks’s research and command of the period is very impressive. Nonetheless I do find it excessively indulgent and too long. Banks has the tendency when making a point about John Brown’s life to go on too long using too many examples. The book needed serious editing and I think it would have made a much better 500 page book than it does a 758 page one.

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