But what was Hortense Rieppe coming to see for herself?
Many dark things had been made plain to me by my talk with the two
ladies; yet while disclosing so much, they had still left this important
matter in shadow. I was very glad, however, for what they had revealed.
They had showed me more of John Mayrant’s character, and more also of
the destiny which had shaped his ends, so that my esteem for him had
increased; for some of the words that they had exchanged shone like
bright lanterns down into his nature upon strength and beauty lying
quietly there--young strength and beauty, yet already tempered by manly
sacrifice. I saw how it came to pass through this, through renunciation
of his own desires, through performance of duties which had fallen upon
him not quite fairly, that the eye of his spirit had been turned away
from self; thus had it grown strong-sighted and able to look far and
deep, as his speech sometimes revealed, while still his flesh was of his
youthful age, and no saint’s flesh either. This had the ladies taught me
during the fluttered interchange of their reminders and opinions, and by
their eager agreements and disagreements, I was also grateful to them in
that I could once more correct Juno. The pleasure should be mine to
tell them in the public hearing of our table that Miss Rieppe was still
engaged to John Mayrant.
But what was this interesting girl coming to see for herself?
This little hole in my knowledge gave me discomfort as I walked along
toward the antiquity shop where I was to buy the other kettle-supporter.
The ladies, with all their freedom of comment and censure, had kept
something from me. I reviewed, I pieced together, their various remarks,
those oracles, especially, which they had let fall, but it all came back
to the same thing. I did not know, and they did, what Hortense Rieppe
was coming to see for herself. At all events, the engagement was not
broken, the chance to be instrumental in having it broken was still
mine; I might still save John Mayrant from his deplorable quixotism; and
as this reflection grew with me I took increasing comfort in it, and
I stepped onward toward my kettle-supporter, filled with that sense of
moral well-being which will steal over even the humblest of us when we
feel that we are beneficently minding somebody else’s business.
Whenever the arrangement did not take me too widely from my course, I so
mapped out my walks and errands in Kings Port that I might pass by the
churchyard and church at the corner of Court and Worship streets. Even
if I did not indulge myself by turning in to stroll and loiter among the
flowers, it was enough pleasure to walk by that brick-wall. If you are
willing to wander curiously in our old towns, you may still find in many
of them good brick walls standing undisturbed, and equal in their color
and simple excellence to those of Kings Port; but fashion has pushed
these others out of its sight, among back streets and all sorts of
forgotten purlieus and abandoned dignity, and takes its walks to-day
amid cold, expensive ugliness; while the old brick walls of Kings Port
continually frame your steps with charm. No one workman famous for his
skill built them so well proportioned, so true to comeliness; it was the
general hand of their age that could shape nothing wrong, as the hand of
to-day can shape nothing right, save by a rigid following of the old.
I gave myself the pleasure this afternoon of walking by the churchyard
wall; and when I reached the iron gate, there was Daddy Ben. So full was
I of my thoughts concerning John Mayrant, and the vicissitudes of his
heart, and the Custom House, that I was moved to have words with the old
man upon the general topic.
“Well,” I said, “and so Mr. John is going to be married.”
No attempt to start a chat ever failed more signally. He assented with
a manner of mingled civility and reserve that was perfection, and
after the two syllables of which his answer consisted, he remained as
impenetrably respectful as before. I felt rather high and dry, but I
tried it again:--
“And I’m sure, Daddy Ben, that you feel as sorry as any of the family
that the phosphates failed.”
Again he replied with his two syllables of assent, and again he stood
mute, respectful, a little bent with his great age; but now his good
manners--and better manners were never seen--impelled him to break
silence upon some subject, since he would not permit himself to speak
concerning the one which I had introduced. It was the phosphates which
inspired him.
“Dey is mighty fine prostrate wukks heah, sah.”
“Yes, I’ve been told so, Daddy Ben.”
“On dis side up de ribber an’ tudder side down de ribber ‘cross de new
bridge. Wuth visitin’ fo’ strangers, sah.”
I now felt entirely high and dry. I had attempted to enter into
conversation with him about the intimate affairs of a family to which he
felt that he belonged; and with perfect tact he had not only declined
to discuss them with me, but had delicately informed me that I was a
stranger and as such had better visit the phosphate works among the
other sights of Kings Port. No diplomat could have done it better; and
as I walled away from him I knew that he regarded me as an outsider, a
Northerner, belonging to a race hostile to his people; he had seen Mas’
John friendly with me, but that was Mas’ John’s affair. And so it
was that if the ladies had kept something from me, this cunning, old,
polite, coal-black African had kept everything from me.
If all the negroes in Kings Port were like Daddy Ben, Mrs. Gregory St.
Michael would not have spoken of having them “to deal with,” and the
girl behind the counter would not have been thrown into such indignation
when she alluded to their conceit and ignorance. Daddy Ben had, so far
from being puffed up by the appointment in the Custom House, disapproved
of this. I had heard enough about the difference between the old and new
generations of the negro of Kings Port to believe it to be true, and I
had come to discern how evidently it lay at the bottom of many things
here: John Mayrant and his kind were a band united by a number of strong
ties, but by nothing so much as by their hatred of the modern negro
in their town. Yes, I was obliged to believe that the young Kings Port
African left to freedom and the ballot, was a worse African than his
slave parents; but this afternoon brought me a taste of it more pungent
than all the assurances in the world.
I bought my kettle-supporter, and learned from the robber who sold it
to me (Kings Port prices for “old things” are the most exorbitant that
I know anywhere) that a carpenter lived not far from Mrs. Trevise’s
boarding-house, and that he would make for me the box in which I could
pack my various purchases.
“That is, if he’s working this week,” added the robber.
“What else would he be doing?”
“It may be his week for getting drunk on what he earned the week
before.” And upon this he announced with as much bitterness as if he had
been John Mayrant or any of his aunts, “That’s what Boston philanthropy
has done for him.”
I dared up at this. “I suppose that’s a Southern argument for
reestablishing slavery.”
“I am not Southern; Breslau is my native town, and I came from New York
here to live five years ago. I’ve seen what your emancipation has done
for the black, and I say to you, my friend, honest I don’t know a fool
from a philanthropist any longer.”
He had much right upon his side; and it can be seen daily that
philanthropy does not always walk hand-in-hand with wisdom. Does
anything or anybody always walk so? Moreover, I am a friend to not many
superlatives, and have perceived no saying to be more true than the one
that extremes meet: they meet indeed, and folly is their meeting-place.
Nor could I say in the case of the negro which folly were the more
ridiculous;--that which expects a race which has lived no one knows
how many thousand years in mental nakedness while Confucius, Moses,
and Napoleon were flowering upon adjacent human stems, should put
on suddenly the white man’s intelligence, or that other folly which
declares we can do nothing for the African, as if Hampton had not
already wrought excellent things for him. I had no mind to enter
into all the inextricable error with this Teuton, and it was he who
continued:--
“Oh, these Boston philanthropists; oh, these know-it-alls! Why don’t
they stay home? Why do they come down here to worry us with their
ignorance? See here, my friend, let me show you!”
He rushed about his shop in a search of distraught eagerness, and with
a multitude of small exclamations, until, screeching jubilantly once,
he pounced upon a shabby and learned-looking volume. This he brought me,
thrusting it with his trembling fingers between my own, and shuffling
the open pages. But when the apparently right one was found, he
exclaimed, “No, I have better! and dashed away to a pile of pamphlets
on the floor, where he began to plough and harrow. Wondering if I was
closeted with a maniac, I looked at the book in my passive hand, and saw
diagrams of various bones to me unknown, and men’s names of which I
was equally ignorant--Mivart, Topinard, and more,--but at last that
of Huxley. But this agreeable sight was spoiled at once by the quite
horrible words Nycticebidoe, platyrrhine, catarrhine, from which I
raised my eyes to see him coming at me with two pamphlets, and scolding
as he came.
“Are you educated, yes? Have been to college, yes? Then perhaps you will
understand.”
Certainly I understood immediately that he and his pamphlets were as bad
as the book, or worse, in their use of a vocabulary designed to cause
almost any listener the gravest inconvenience. Common Eocene ancestors
occurred at the beginning of his lecture; and I believed that if it
got no stronger than this, I could at least preserve the appearance of
comprehending him; but it got stronger, and at sacro-iliac notch I may
say, without using any grossly exaggerated expression, that I became
unconscious. At least, all intelligence left me. When it returned, he
was saying.--
“But this is only the beginning. Come in here to my crania and jaws.”
Evidently he held me hypnotized, for he now hurried me unresisting
through a back door into a dark little where he turned up the gas, and I
saw shelves as in a museum, to one of which he led me. I suppose that
it was curiosity that rendered me thus sheep-like. Upon the shelf were a
number of skulls and jaws in admirable condition and graded arrangement,
beginning to the left with that flat kind of skull which one associates
with gorillas. He resumed his scolding harangue, and for a few brief
moments I understood him. Here, told by themselves, was as much of the
story of the skulls as we know, from manlike apes through glacial man
to the modern senator or railroad president. But my intelligence was
destined soon to die away again.
“That is the Caucasian skull: your skull,” he said, touching a specimen
at the right.
“Interesting,” I murmured. “I’m afraid I know nothing about skulls.”
“But you shall know someding before you leave,” he retorted, wagging his
head at me; and this time it was not the book, but a specimen, that he
pushed into my grasp. He gave it a name, not as bad as platyrrhine, but
I feared worse was coming; then he took it away from me, gave me another
skull, and while I obediently held it, pronounced something quite beyond
me.
“And what is the translation of that?” he demanded excitedly.
“Tell me,” I feebly answered.
He shouted with overweening triumph: “The translation of that is South
Carolina nigger. Notice well this so egcellent specimen. Prognathous,
megadont, platyrrhine.”
“Ha! Platyrrhine!” I saluted the one word I recognized as I drowned.
“You have said it yourself!” was his extraordinary answer;--for what
had I said? Almost as if he were going to break into a dance for joy, he
took the Caucasian skull and the other two, and set the three together
by themselves, away from the rest of the collection. The picture which
they thus made spoke more than all the measurements and statistics which
he now chattered out upon me, reading from his book as I contemplated
the skulls. There was a similarity of shape, a kinship there between
the three, which stared you in the face; but in the contours of vaulted
skull, the projecting jaws, and the great molar teeth--what was to
be seen? Why, in every respect that the African departed from the
Caucasian, he departed in the direction of the ape! Here was zoology
mutely but eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius,
no Moses, no Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon,
no Sistine Madonna, had ever risen from that tropic mud.
The collector touched my sleeve. “Have you now learned someding about
skulls, my friend? Will you invite those Boston philanthropists to stay
home? They will get better results in civilization by giving votes to
monkeys than teaching Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to riggers.”
Retaliation rose in me. “Haven’t you learned to call them negroes?” I
remarked. But this was lost upon the Teuton. I was tempted to tell him
that I was no philanthropist, and no Bostonian, and that he need not
shout so loud, but my more dignified instincts restrained me. I withdrew
my sleeve from his touch (it was this act of his, I think, that had
most to do with my displeasure), and merely bidding him observe that the
enormous price of the kettle-supporter had been reduced for me by
his exhibition to a bagatelle, I left the shop of the screaming
anatomist--or Afropath, or whatever it may seem most fitting that he
should be called.
I bore the kettle-supporter with me, tied up objectionably in newspaper,
and knotted with ungainly string; and it was this bundle which prevented
my joining the girl behind the counter, and ending by a walk with a
young lady the afternoon that had begun by a walk with two old ones. I
should have liked to make my confession to her. She was evidently out
for the sake of taking the air, and had with her no companion save the
big curly white dog; confession would have been very agreeable; but I
looked again at my ugly newspaper bundle, and turned in a direction that
she was not herself pursuing.
Twice, as I went, I broke into laughter over my interview in the shop,
which I fear has lost its comical quality in the relating. To enter a
door and come serenely in among dingy mahogany and glass objects, to
bargain haughtily for a brass bauble with the shopkeeper, and to have
a few exchanged remarks suddenly turn the whole place into a sort of
bedlam with a gibbering scientist dashing skulls at me to prove his
fixed idea, and myself quite furious--I laughed more than twice; but,
by the time I had approached the neighborhood of the carpenter’s
shop, another side of it had brought reflection to my mind. Here was a
foreigner to whom slavery and the Lost Cause were nothing, whose whole
association with the South had begun but five years ago; and the race
question had brought his feelings to this pitch! He had seen the Kings
Port negro with the eyes of the flesh, and not with the eyes of theory,
and as a result the reddest rag for him was pale beside a Boston
philanthropist!
Nevertheless, I have said already that I am no lover of superlatives,
and in doctrine especially is this true. We need not expect a Confucius
from the negro, nor yet a Chesterfield; but I am an enemy also of that
blind and base hate against him, which conducts nowhere save to the
de-civilizing of white and black alike. Who brought him here? Did he
invite himself? Then let us make the best of it and teach him, lead
him, compel him to live self-respecting, not as statesman, poet, or
financier, but by the honorable toil of his hand and sweat of his brow.
Because “the door of hope” was once opened too suddenly for him is no
reason for slamming it now forever in his face.
Thus mentally I lectured back at the Teuton as I went through the
streets of Kings Port; and after a while I turned a corner which took me
abruptly, as with one magic step, out of the white man’s world into the
blackest Congo. Even the well-inhabited quarter of Kings Port (and I
had now come within this limited domain) holds narrow lanes and recesses
which teem and swarm with negroes. As cracks will run through fine
porcelain, so do these black rifts of Africa lurk almost invisible
among the gardens and the houses. The picture that these places offered,
tropic, squalid, and fecund, often caused me to walk through them and
watch the basking population; the intricate, broken wooden galleries,
the rickety outside stair cases, the red and yellow splashes of color on
the clothes lines, the agglomerate rags that stuffed holes in decaying
roofs or hung nakedly on human frames, the small, choked dwellings,
bursting open at doors and windows with black, round-eyed babies as an
overripe melon bursts with seeds, the children playing marbles in the
court, the parents playing cards in the room, the grandparents smoking
pipes on the porch, and the great-grandparents stairs gazing out at you
like creatures from the Old Testament or the jungle. From the jungle we
had stolen them, North and South had stolen them together, long ago, to
be slaves, not to be citizens, and now here they were, the fruits of
our theft; and for some reason (possibly the Teuton was the reason) that
passage from the Book of Exodus came into my head: “For I the Lord thy
God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the
children.”
These thoughts were interrupted by sounds as of altercation. I had
nearly reached the end of the lane, where I should again emerge into the
White man’s world, and where I was now walking the lane spread into a
broader space with ells and angles and rotting steps, and habitations
mostly too ruinous to be inhabited. It was from a sashless window in one
of these that the angry voices came. The first words which were distinct
aroused my interest quite beyond the scale of an ordinary altercation:--
“Calls you’self a reconstuckted niggah?”
This was said sharply and with prodigious scorn. The answer which it
brought was lengthy and of such a general sullen incoherence that I
could make out only a frequent repetition of “custom house,” and that
somebody was going to take care of somebody hereafter.
Into this the first voice broke with tones of highest contempt and
rapidity:--
“President gwine to gib brekfus’ an’ dinnah an suppah to de likes ob
you fo’ de whole remaindah oh youh wuthless nat’ral life? Get out ob my
sight, you reconstuckted niggah. I come out oh de St. Michael.”
There came through the window immediately upon this sounds of scuffling
and of a fall, and then cries for help which took me running into the
dilapidated building. Daddy Ben lay on the floor, and a thick, young
savage was kicking him. In some remarkable way I thought of the solidity
of their heads, and before the assailant even knew that he had a
witness, I sped forward, aiming my kettle-supporter, and with its sharp
brass edge I dealt him a crack over his shin with astonishing accuracy.
It was a dismal howl that he gave, and as he turned he got from me
another crack upon the other shin. I had no time to be alarmed at my
deed, or I think that I should have been very much so; I am a man above
all of peace, and physical encounters are peculiarly abhorrent to me;
but, so far from assailing me, the thick, young savage, with the single
muttered remark, “He hit me fuss,” got himself out of the house with the
most agreeable rapidity.
Daddy Ben sat up, and his first inquiry greatly reassured me as to his
state. He stared at my paper bundle. “You done make him hollah wid dat,
sah!”
I showed him the kettle-supporter through a rent in its wrapping, and
I assisted him to stand upright. His injuries proved fortunately to be
slight (although I may say here that the shock to his ancient body kept
him away for a few days from the churchyard), and when I began to talk
to him about the incident, he seemed unwilling to say much in answer to
my questions. And when I offered to accompany him to where he lived, he
declined altogether, assuring me that it was close, and that he could
walk there as well as if nothing had happened to him; but upon my asking
him if I was on the right way to the carpenter’s shop, he looked at me
curiously.
“No use you gwine dab, sah. Dat shop close up. He not wukkin, dis week,
and dat why fo’ I jaw him jus’ now when you come in an’ stop him. He de
cahpentah, my gran’son, Cha’s Coteswuth.”