All our virtues—of piety, honesty, abstinence, and so on, of cleanliness and orderliness, of devotion to work and industry, of love of learning and of neighborliness—were the products and expressions of struggle. This was not much understood by those who observed us and later wrote about our life and character. Remember, Father, first and perhaps foremost among us, and every other member of the family as well, even including the women, pious Mary, sweet Ruth, and my younger sisters, Annie and Sarah—all of us were
normal
people. Which is to say, there was not a one of us who was not tempted by impiety. And we were intelligently skeptical about so much—Father, after all, encouraged it in us practically from infancy—that it was difficult not to apply that same skepticism to our entire way of life. Many was the time when we wanted to give ourselves over to another way. What
was
this crackbrained obsession with slavery and Negroes anyhow? one might well ask, and sometimes we did ask it as, exhausted and exasperated by another of Father’s plans to move us to a new place or to start a school for Negro children or to drop everything and ride off in search of escaped slaves who, without us, would have made their own way to Canada safely just the same, we would look at one another and roll our eyes upward and trudge out to the barn in the dark of night and harness up the horses yet again.
At bottom, then, we were ordinary people and were tempted, not just by impiety, but by typical American dishonesty as well—and not so much to lie or cheat or steal, but simply to push an advantage on occasion, to charge for a service or good whatever the buyer was willing to pay, for instance, instead of charging only what was fair. That is, instead of asking no more than the cost of that same service or good to us. Which was Father’s monetary policy’s ethical base. We were all obliged to stand upon it firmly, yet here we were, always in deep debt, scrambling for ways to avoid foreclosure, bankruptcy, imprisonment. Honesty in these matters, especially considering our dire circumstances, was thus always the result of struggle, and was all the more virtuous therefore—even as our financial circumstances worsened, and Father tumbled towards out-and-out bankruptcy, and all around us others prospered.
Likewise, our abstinence was achieved only through struggle against constant temptation, for we did not remove ourselves, as Shakers and Mennonites do, from ordinary, daily contact with people who rationalized the indulgence of every sensual appetite. On the contrary, we befriended and moved freely amongst them all—drunkards, boisterers, brawlers, and sensualists of every stripe and type. They were everywhere in those days, especially out at the edges of civilized society, which is, after all, where we most often resided ourselves, and many of them were our strongest allies in the work. We associated with such folks as much on principle as convenience and as a consequence of our natural sociability. We thought it necessary and right and believed that it helped in the work, for there were many radical abolitionists whose genteel fastidiousness rendered them wholly ineffective, and Father enjoyed pointing them out to us. “Boston ladies,” he called them, although most of them were men.
No, we Browns maintained our virtue in the face of daily temptation, willfully, elaborately contriving it, as if the virtue were not worth much without it. And though it may have sometimes encouraged in us a feeling of superiority to other “normal” people, that, too, was a temptation to be met, struggled with, and overcome, in public and in private, just as I am doing here, even now. Just as Father himself did throughout his life.
Always, Father taught by example and instruction: the two were deliberately interwoven; he made of our childhood understandings a fabric that could not be unraveled or torn. For instance, with regard to our well-known love of learning, had we not watched since earliest childhood the Old Man every evening turn to his bookcase and draw out from it a treasured, much-thumbed tome and commence to read from it and comment on what he read there, we would not have believed, due to our lack of formal education, that there was anything of great value to be obtained from books, especially such books as Father, no matter how unsettled or hectic the circumstances, loved and studied all his life. Like most of our neighbors and friends, we would normally have thought that books of philosophy and history and natural science were better left to the learned and were not proper fields of study for such rough country types as we. Father’s sustained example, however, led us to the experience itself. And by imitating his hard-earned love of learning, we were gradually filled with a love of learning ourselves, and thus we came to possess it as if it were a gift to be treasured for life and not a dour, burdensome consequence of blind obedience, cast off as soon as darkness fell.
We all saw our father, Mary saw her husband, struggle with temptation—he made us see it, he spoke of it constantly: his sensuality, his slothfulness, his vain desire for wealth and fame, his pridefulness—and we saw him daily overcome each and every one of those temptations. How could we not go forward, then, and do likewise? We who were no more and no less sensual, slothful, vain, and proud than he? It was his weakness as much as his strength that guided and instructed us; his pitiful, simple, common humanity that inspired us. Those who later wrote that Father was like an infallible god to us were wrong.
We were much misunderstood always. That, I suppose, is yet another of the many ways in which we Browns paid for our virtues. Poverty is one, too. We were hard-working, a large and highly skilled family of workers, and yet, because of our devotion to our Negro neighbors and their cause, all our enterprises failed. Father was regarded by some, rightly, as a genius when it came to livestock. And he was a self-taught surveyor of great skill and understood all the ways in which a piece of land was valuable or poor. He was a tanner capable at the age of twenty of organizing and operating a large tannery on his own. He was a businessman who understood the subtle connections between the producer of wool, the wholesale purveyor of wool, the manipulation by the purveyor of the market price for wool, and the consequent exploitation of the producer, and he was able to conceive and put into place a complex scheme to block that exploitation. And yet we ourselves remained poor, in permanent debt, living on the kindness and philanthropy of men like Mr. Gerrit Smith and Mr. Simon Perkins. For while in many ways we may well have been self-sufficient, growing all our own food and manufacturing all our clothing and tools, we were obliged to do it on land that, in the end, belonged to others.
Even in North Elba, where Mr. Smith had deeded Father two hundred forty acres of first-rate tableland at one dollar per acre. Father died owing for most of it. The Old Man raised money, many thousands of dollars, for the Negroes from white strangers all over the United States, but when he died, his widow had not a dollar to her name. I remember hunger; I remember cold; I remember public humiliation—these were the hard prices we paid for our much-admired devotion to principle. And I did not think it would ever end, despite Father’s schemes and his permanent willingness to launch every year a new enterprise for raising money: gathering wool all over Ohio and Pennsylvania and warehousing it for Mr. Perkins in Springfield until the prices rose; buying and selling purebred cattle; speculating on land where canals were rumored to be going in any day now; and on and on, his face bright with the vision of all his debts at last being paid off, of finally owning his own farm outright, of being able to provide for his large, ever-growing family against the rigors that he believed would characterize the long years ahead. For he was sure that Mary would survive him—she was so much younger than he—and believed that she would be left with young children to care for. He did not want to die without having provided for his widow and children.
To all appearances, though, and compared with our neighbors, especially our Negro neighbors in North Elba, we did prosper. Our farm was a thriving operation. This was mainly due to hard work and Father’s great organizational skills. Although I was, in a sense, the foreman, Father was the executive and every day laid out the tasks that we each would attend to. Much of farm life, of course, is a round, and the work is organized merely by the turning of the year and by the slow, regular rhythms of animal life, and it needs no executive, but we were a large family with diverse skills and abilities, children at different stages of growth, from the youngest, who was then Sarah, to the eldest in residence, me, a full-grown adult. And there were the other adults as well-Mary, our mother and stepmother, and sister Ruth, and Lyman and Susan Epps, who had come to seem like permanent members of the household, like in-laws.
We were close, interlocked, like the gears and wheels, cogs and belts, of an elaborate machine. Whatever one of us thought, said, or did had an immediate, felt effect on everyone else. It may be that our family in its closeness was sometimes thought by us to be suffocating and too much controlling of our daily lives, and it must have seemed that way often to outsiders; but we were never lonely, never without a sense of being useful and even necessary to the rest, and never without support and encouragement, even in our moments of greatest despair. For we each took strength, not from Father alone, but from the family as a whole. Father, of course, was the family’s mainstay; he provided us with example, instruction, understanding, and strength. As a result, when he himself weakened or fell into despair, it was very difficult for the rest of us not to do likewise. And whenever Father’s belief in the rightness and necessity of his path wavered, as from time to time it did, or when his faith in his God was threatened, as happened at least twice that I know of, his forward motion would instantly stop. And when he stopped, the rest of us would slow and wobble on our respective pivots and would soon find ourselves stopped and lying on our sides as well.
In the terrible winter of ’43,1 remember, when the four children died—the first Sarah, Charles, Peter, and the baby, Austin—Father fell into such a prolonged numbness that, before he recovered his feelings, we ourselves had descended into deepest despond, and he was obliged to nurse us, every one, back to health again. It was as if the sickness that took the children one after the other that bleak winter first invaded his spirit and from him spread like a pestilence to Mary and thence to John and Jason and me and on to Ruth and the younger children, even to poor Salmon, who was only a small boy at the time, seven years old, the youngest child not to be taken from us. It was an unsupportable burden. The fires dwindled and flickered out, and the ashes grew cold, and we walked about the house with our arms wrapped around ourselves and silently cursed the day of our birth. No one of us could rouse the other from his despair.
Father took to his Bible, and for the first time he did not read aloud or instruct us from it. He sat on a stool in the corner, muttering the words to himself, as if seeking, but not finding there, some explanation of why God had done this to us. Poverty he could endure with good spirits, and every setback and disappointment he regarded as temporary. And he had lost a child before, the first Frederick, who had died at the age of five and for whom he had grieved, and after a normal period of mourning he had resumed his life—he even named his next male child Frederick, as I have already described. But this disaster, this terrible loss, was beyond all his worst expectations, beyond all his understanding. His faith was sorely tested by it—that fact alone humiliated him and beat him down. To have four of his beloved children taken from him, each of them in its pitiful turn dying in his arms, this defeated him utterly. There was no one amongst us who could console or uplift him, for all of us, even Mary, had grown so accustomed to relying on him for consolation and uplift that if he was emptied of force, then we were, too.
This was the other, the darker side of our family’s strength. When the Old Man went down, we all went down. Happily, almost nothing ever discouraged or defeated Father, except the death of children, which, by the time of his own death, he had endured so many times that his heart must have been nearly covered over with a skein of thick gray scars.
Knowing his terrible, long suffering, one can forgive him anything, I suppose. It rarely happened, he was so strong and so right, but there were times, certainly, when I felt called to forgive Father. Not by him—he seldom asked for my forgiveness, and when he did ask, it was for some trivial transgression, some slight oversight—but called upon by myself alone. In order to save me from him.
Forgive the Old Man, I would say to myself. Come on, now, grow large, Owen, and be generous with understanding and compassion. Yes, understanding, especially that—for when one understands a human being, no matter how oppressive he has been, compassion inevitably follows. Yet there was so much that I could not understand about this man, my father, and the life we led because of him—my thoughts, my questions, were blocked, occluded: by the absolute tightness of his cause, which none of us could question, ever; and by the sheer power of Father’s personality, the relentlessness of it, how it wore us down, until we seemed to have no personalities of our own, even to each other. Certainly we spoke like him, but we could not hear it ourselves. We had to be told of it first by strangers.
The Old Man seemed to burn us out: whenever he rode off on one of his journeys to raise money for the work or on business of his own, he left us behind him, glad to have him gone. Yes, thrilled to have him gone—but dry and cold and light, like pieces of char or bits of cinder, like ash. When the Old Man left, we did not speak much, not to one another, not to strangers.
I meant here to write about how we spoke and why our speech was so strangely mannered. I see that I have done something else. I close now, as ash, again... or still: I do not know which.
It’s as if I’m actually living there, in North Elba, and in those olden times when I was young. As if, weeks ago, when I first began speaking of it, I went tumbling down some twisting, narrow shaft that emerged there. And now, still clambering along a descending maze of tunnels and caves, I am unable to find my way back again to the surface of the earth, to my cabin in Altadena and daylight. The only light down inside these cold, rock-walled chambers is the light of memory flaring up, illuminating rough pictures and writings overhead, like those the Indians drew in ages past to invoke and placate their pagan gods. I stand below, gazing in wonder at the pictures, and the figures begin to move and speak, and my wonder, as you have seen so many times in these pages, turns first to warmth of recognition, then to gladness, and then, as the story told by the figures grows violent or somber, turns fearful and sad, I stumble backwards away from the pictures and into the darkness of the cave again. Soon I am falling, scrambling, clawing my way along yet another shaft in this warren, until the floor beneath my feet finally levels out, and once more I stop and stand, and when the light of memory spreads from my face, I see in its glow that I have arrived in a new chamber... and there, up on the walls—a mingling of shadow and light—it moves and dances ... and another, different event in my long-ago, half-forgotten life commences to unfold before me!