Whom still I hold but cannot see;
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with thee.
With thee all night I mean to stay
And wrestle till the break of day!
The fingers of both my hands tingled and buzzed, and I believed that the power of movement had returned to my long-dead arm, and I looked down and saw it move unbid, saw it bend at the elbow for the first time since boyhood, saw it rise and fall as easily as my right arm, until I was clapping my hands together and swinging both arms like the rest of the congregation and like Father beside me. The choir sang, and the preacher, a large, white-haired, full-faced man the color of mahogany, joined in at the second verse, and the rest of the people sang, too, including Father, who knew the words well, for it was one of his favorites.
I could not sing, however. I knew the hymn by heart, but it was as if I had been struck dumb. I opened my mouth, and no sound came. In silence, I made the words:
I need not tell thee who I am;
My sin and mis’ry declare;
Thyself has call’d me by my name;
Look on thy hands and read it there.
But who, I ask thee, who art thou?
Tell me thy name, and tell me now.
I did not believe in ghosts then, nor angels nor spirits of any kind, but it was as if I myself had become one, ghost, angel, or spirit, as if I had been lifted by the music and the clapping and swaying of the congregation and now hovered above them all, like a spot of reflected sunlight. Way down below, standing amongst the crowd of black and brown people, I saw clearly the two white men, my father and his large, red-haired son, swaying and clapping and singing with the others. For a few moments, I was split off from my body, entire and yet wholly invisible to the others, who sang with a mighty voice:
In vain thou strugglest to get free;
I never will unloose my hold;
Art thou the Man who died for me?
The secret of thy love unfold;
Wrestling, I will not let thee go,
Till I thy name, thy nature, know’.
All the universe seemed contained for those moments in that room, and the room was filled with music. I watched as my body below began to quake, and I saw my head snap back and my eyes roll in their sockets. I saw Father stare at me with alarm, and when my body stiffened and jerked about as if in a death-dance, I saw him place his arms around my shoulders to calm and comfort me, for he could not know that I was insensible of him and as much at peace as I had ever been in my life. I wished that I could reassure him of that, but I could not. The standing crowd, intent on its singing and in perfect unison swinging their arms and clapping their hands, appeared not to notice the grimly anxious white man in the snuff-colored suit and his large, flailing son.
What though my shrinking flesh complain
And murmur to contend so long?
I rise superior to my pain: When I am weak, then am I strong.!
And when my all of strength shall fail,
I shall with the God-man prevail.
Slowly, I descended and re-entered my body, and it seemed to soften somewhat and then to resume its former comportment, and Father eased me back down into my seat. When I opened my eyes, there he was, looking earnestly into my face. I smiled up at him.
“Son? Truthfully, now. Have you been brushed by an angel of the Lord?” was his whispered question.
I said, “Yes.”
He let a triumphant smile pass over his face and turned back to the front, where the members of the choir had now taken their seats and the preacher was moving towards the altar to begin his sermon. With a great barrel of a voice, large and round, he began. “My children. My brothers and sisters. Let me speak today on this question. Let me ask, let all of us ask, ‘Why should the children of a King go mourning all their days?’“
He continued, but I heard almost none of the sermon and little of what followed, for I was still be-dazzled; and would remain so for many days and even weeks afterwards: bedazzled by my new solidity and strength, and by my wonderful clarity of purpose.
Chapter 11
For Father, the long sea-voyage to England was a splendid occasion for his expectations of success to rise steadily. Leaps and bounds, in fact. Solitude, any kind of extended isolation from the everyday world of petty disappointments and frustrations, did that to him — released his fantasies from curtailment and got him feverish with mental dramas and schemes, which, with each new day’s dreaming, he built upon freshly. Dream upon dream he went, quickly constructing an immense tower of expectation too fragile to stand against the first opposing breeze and too brittle to bend before the press of mundane reality. But there was no holding him back beforehand, no way of warning him or of forcing him to remember what happened last time. On a ship at sea for nearly a fortnight, with no one but the captain and crew and a handful of other passengers and me to correct him, the Old Man was free to sail, as it were, inside his own thrilled mind. And so he did.
The captain of the Cumbria, Captain Ebediah Roote out of New Bedford, a small, trim cube of a man with Quaker chin-whiskers, wanted only to make his passengers comfortable and then to forget them and attend to his crew, craft, and cargo, which were worth so much more to his employers than the comfort of the passengers. For this reason, he gave Father permission to conduct daily prayers and services in the main cabin, hoping no doubt that Father, with his evident fervor and tirelessness, would organize and sufficiently distract the rest of the passengers to keep them out from under foot. And, indeed, Father did just that, and perhaps as a consequence, at least from the captain’s point of view, the crossing for the first eleven days went smoothly.
The Cumbria was a steam-assisted, two-masted packet of fifteen hundred tons, a small freighter built in the ’30s and renovated periodically since. She provided few of the sumptuous diversions and accommodations of the more typical and modern passenger ships that crossed between England and the United States then. People who chose to travel aboard a freighter like ours were usually supercargoes — small-businessmen or their agents accompanying their own cargo — or poor students and artists traveling on the cheap, or people who did not want to be seen by members of their own society. We, I suppose, were passengers of both the first two types, businessmen, but, like poor students, without cargo, for our shipment of wool had gone before us. Nearly two hundred thousand pounds of borrowed Ohio and Pennsylvania wool, it lay ready for auction to the English cloth manufacturers — seven hundred bales of it stacked to the roof and surrounded by hundreds of tons of Irish, Scottish, and Yorkshire wool in a warehouse in Liverpool.
I remember cringing at the thought of it, almost with embarrassment, certainly with dread. Father, on the other hand, contemplated the image with pride and heady anticipation of a great, hard-earned triumph. “When old John Bull sees the quality of our stock, the price of his will drop like a stone, and ours will rise,” he frequently declared, rubbing his hands together with glee. “And then, finally, our greedy New England merchants will find themselves competing instead of conspiring with one another. They’ll be up against non-collaborationists! Real money-men! After this, they’ll have to pay our price, or else we’ll just sell it abroad!”