Cloudsplitter Book Review - Lunchtime Lit with Mel Carriere

When I was in the fifth grade, to our great mirth my friends and I used to sing a little schoolyard ditty, when we thought the teacher wasn't listening. It went something like this:

Glory Glory Hallelujah

Teacher hit me with a ruler

Met her at the door

With a loaded 44

And she ain't our teacher no more

Oh how the times have changed. Nowadays they are handcuffing kindergarteners for even whispering about guns in school, but back then we were just kids being kids, fooling around, powerless to enforce our self-determination, letting out our frustration in song.

You might recognize the Glory Glory Hallelujah part as coming from a popular 1860s folk song called John Brown's Body, attributed to Greenleaf, Marsh, Hall and others. The tune originated as a Civil War marching air that celebrated abolitionist John Brown's legacy, honoring how he ignited the spark that flamed into the conflict to free the slaves. The chorus became a rallying cry as stirring as Remember The Alamo is to Texans.

Through the years the powerful melody lived on, often with the John Brown lines suppressed, as post-Reconstruction historians gave unfavorable reviews to the fire-breathing zealot who gave his life at Harper's Ferry. Finally, 115 years after Union soldiers tramping through the mud first sang it, the anthem had morphed into the bawdy ballad me and my schoolyard buddies horsed around with, the one whose opening stanzas -

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school

We have tortured every teacher, we have broken every rule

- pretty much summarized our opinion of the American educational experience. John Brown had become our liberator too, without us knowing it.

When I reached my 20s, John Brown's body was exhumed from the grave to haunt me again, this time on the cover of the debut, eponymous LP of the rock group Kansas, a band I was very fond of. of. The name of John Brown was familiar background noise to me by that point, but still I knew or cared little about the subject, thinking only that Tragic Prelude (above), the album's cover art, is a powerful work of terrible beauty. The mural's centerpiece is John Brown, and as of now I add seeing it up close in the Kansas State Capitol to my already crowded bucket list.

I finally got to the point in life where I learned a little about history and actually cared. By then I had read dozens of books on the stadium-shaking Civil War main event, but knew next to nothing about its opening act - John Brown and his backup band, Bleeding Kansas.

Then I recently discovered Cloudsplitter, by Russel Banks, laying lonely on a Goodwill shelf. I went in there looking for a new lunch time read, not seeking anything in particular, and this one waved at me almost as soon as I walked in. I read the back and realized it was time to fill in certain gaps in my education. Throwing down three dollars, I lugged the 768 page heavyweight off to work, intending never again to take my history lessons from the rhymes of ribald grade-school carols.

Lunchtime Lit reviewer Mel Carriere has grown much older since he first sang rebellious verses under his breath to the tune of John Brown's Body, but his taste in music has not matured much with his aging body. However, he does maintain impeccably high standards for his Lunchtime Lit reviews, which incorporate books read only on his half hour Postal lunch break.

**Word counts are estimated by hand-counting a statistically significant 23 pages, then extrapolating this average page count across the entire book. When the book is available on a word count website, I rely on that total.

*Seventeen other titles, with a total estimated word count of 3,649,830 and 502 lunchtimes consumed, have been reviewed under the guidelines of this series.

To be perfectly clear, Cloudsplitter is not a history book. It is historical fiction, so my history lesson here was filtered through the poetic license of its novelist. This is why being a novelist is fun, because we are allowed to gloss over the gaps in our lazy research with cute but meaningless words. Cloudsplitter is written from the first person perspective of John Brown's son, Owen Brown, and in fairness seems to be much more meticulously researched than anything I would have the attention span to carry out.

The drawback with the book is not that the author didn't do his homework, but with the pace of its storytelling. It meanders sluggishly past the first five hundred pages of buildup, then races through the good parts. It's as if the editor is hovering in the background, saying "Really Russel, 800 pages? Come on pinch it off." Cloudsplitter is very informative, but in terms of entertainment value, standing side by side with the 25 or so other titles I have read in my leisurely lunchtime shade, I would rank this somewhere among the bottom feeders.

The real value of Cloudsplitter is that it opened my eyes to the important, dare I say essential role of John Brown in ending the entrenched institution of slavery. Although the novel does not portray him this way, John Brown's archetype of wild-eyed murderous prophet may have been the only storm strong enough to uproot the status quo of legalized bondage.

The fanatical anti-slavery views of this upstate New York farmer drew him to Kansas, where pro-slavery and abolitionist forces struggled to bring the state into the Union under their respective banners. When Brown sensed the foul odor of compromise in the wind, he and his disciples carried out an utterly horrible act, one that ensured that shady back room deal making, the very thing that had kept a race in chains throughout American history, would no longer be possible.

On the night of May 24, 1856, John Brown and adherents of his bloody gospel massacred 5 pro-slavery men along Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. It wasn't the killing itself that rendered further compromise impossible in the embattled territory, but the manner it was carried out. John Brown's company was armed with very good rifles, but they didn't use them. Instead of dispatching their foes with quick and merciful gunshots to the head, they hacked them to death with swords. This Messiah of mayhem viewed himself as an avenging angel, an instrument of divine wrath that God actually spoke to, but this bloody act was not the hallucinatory rampage of a madman. Just as we vow today never to compromise with terrorists, John Brown knew his foes would never compromise with the perpetrators of such a heinous deed.

Bible in one hand, Sharps rifle in the other, the radical abolitionist next stormed the Federal armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, intending to arm a slave insurrection. The attack petered out in dismal failure, Brown and his co-conspirators were strung up on the gallows, but again the attempt accomplished what it intended to. To Southern slave owners, the age-old paranoia of being murdered in bed by their chattels now seemed legitimate. Dixie's old guard could not allow themselves to be governed by a Republican party chock full of abolitionists, even though the President-elect was not one. When Abraham Lincoln took office secession was well underway, and Civil War was inevitable.

If not for Bleeding Kansas and Harper's Ferry, I opine that slavery may have endured for decades more. Sympathetic Northern politicians like Buchanan and Fillmore had been pandering to Southern interests for years, continually compromising to prevent Southern states from pulling out of the Union. There is no reason to believe the parlor room, anti-slavery outrage of wealthy New Englanders would not have continued in its vociferous ineffectiveness. John Brown's audacious acts overturned that, he single-handedly forced the hand of the people sitting on the fence. Without him, who knows what the ultimate fate of our nation's peculiar institution would have been?

Being reviewed on Lunchtime Lit is worse for authors than the Sports Illustrated jinx is for athletes - it can actually be the kiss of death. A frightening high percentage of Lunchtime Lit authors have either met untimely ends, or died either in poverty or obscurity.

Fortunately, Cloudsplitter author Russel Banks is alive and well, working on wife number 4 and writing heavy novels that have been nominated for, but not awarded Pullitzer Prizes. Unlike his personal life, which has involved a lot of brides, his books so far have only been bridesmaids. As is the case with Cloudsplitter, his stories deal with well-intentioned white folks trying to interact with people of color, often awkwardly.

Enough said. Banks' books are being turned into movies and he seems to be living the dream, unlike so many other Lunchtime Lit wordsmiths, flopping restlessly in the tomb as their family members squander the posthumous windfall of their work.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. That is not a popular thing to say post 9-11, so I guess I might as well be the one to say it, since I've already ruffled a feather or two in my time.

Cloudsplitter awakened this reader to the validity of such an idea through its principal character, John Brown, a man who was hailed as a hero in the North - having songs sung about him which were later perverted by naughty grade school hooligans. South of Mason-Dixon, however, Brown was absolutely reviled. I am betting you won't find his statue standing in any Dixieland courthouse square.

At Pottawatomie and again at Harper's Ferry, John Brown committed audacious atrocities deliberately designed to strike terror into the heart of his enemies, carried out with the view of escalating the slavery issue from political gum-flapping to full scale war. In this he ultimately succeeded, just as one could say the 9-11 terrorists succeeded in broadening the conflict with the west, culminating in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

No, you will never find an Osama Bin Laden memorial erected in some sleepy burg in upstate New York, but you can visit John Brown's farm in North Elba, a state Historic site. You may call that an extreme statement, comparing the two, but the analogy wouldn't be much of a reach for a rank and file pro-slavery type in the antebellum South. Continue your Cloudsplitter tour from there swinging by the remains of his tannery in Pennsylvania, an archaeological monument and museum. Closer to my home, the faithful son of the fiery-eyed provocateur, Cloudsplitter protagonist Owen Brown, has his grave carefully preserved in Altadena, California. Hence we see that mere lines in the dirt can change the perception of a man from demon to angel.

Although Cloudsplitter doesn't crack the top ten of my favorite Lunchtime Lit reads, it does renew the debate - is John Brown's memory to be reviled or revered? I guess the answer depends on geography, that depicted on a physical map of the Earth, but also upon the political and ethical landscape of one's soul.