Chapter 10

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.”

XII: From the Bedside

Next morning when I saw the weltering sky I resigned myself to a day of dullness; yet before its end I had caught a bright new glimpse of John Mayrant’s abilities, and also had come, through tribulation, to a further understanding of the South; so that I do not, to-day, regret the tribulation. As the rain disappointed me of two outdoor expeditions, to which I had been for some little while looking forward, I dedicated most of my long morning to a sadly neglected correspondence, and trusted that the expeditions, as soon as the next fine weather visited Kings Port, would still be in store for me. Not only everybody in town here, but Aunt Carola, up in the North also, had assured me that to miss the sight of Live Oaks when the azaleas in the gardens of that country seat were in flower would be to lose one of the rarest and most beautiful things which could be seen anywhere; and so I looked out of my window at the furious storm, hoping that it might not strip the bushes at Live Oaks of their bloom, which recent tourists at Mrs. Trevise’s had described as drawing near the zenith of its luxuriance. The other excursion to Udolpho with John Mayrant was not so likely to fall through. Udolpho was a sort of hunting lodge or country club near Tern Creek and an old colonial church, so old that it bore the royal arms upon a shield still preserved as a sign of its colonial origin. A note from Mayrant, received at breakfast, informed me that the rain would take all pleasure from such an excursion, and that he should seize the earliest opportunity the weather might afford to hold me to my promise. The wet gale, even as I sat writing, was beating down some of the full-blown flowers in the garden next Mrs. Trevise’s house, and as the morning wore on I watched the paths grow more strewn with broken twigs and leaves.

I filled my correspondence with accounts of Daddy Ben and his grandson, the carpenter, doubtless from some pride in my part in that, but also because it had become, through thinking it over, even more interesting to-day than it had been at the moment of its occurrence; and in replying to a sort of postscript of Aunt Carola’s in which she hurriedly wrote that she had forgotten to say she had heard the La Heu family in South Carolina was related to the Bombos, and should be obliged to me if I would make inquiries about this, I told her that it would be easy, and then described to her the Teuton, plying his “antiquity” trade externally while internally cherishing his collected skulls and nursing his scientific rage. All my letters were the more abundant concerning these adventures of mine from my having kept entirely silent upon them at Mrs. Trevise’s tea-table. I dreaded Juno when let loose upon the negro question; and the fact that I was beginning to understand her feelings did not at all make me wish to be deafened by them. Neither Juno, therefore, nor any of them learned a word from me about the kettle-supporter incident. What I did take pains to inform the assembled company was my gratification that the report of Mr. Mayrant’s engagement being broken was unfounded; and this caused Juno to observe that in that case Miss Rieppe must have the most imperative reasons for uniting herself to such a young man.

Unintimidated by the rain, this formidable creature had taken herself off to her nephew’s bedside almost immediately after breakfast; and later in the day I, too, risked a drenching for the sake of ordering the packing-box that I needed. When I returned, it was close on tea-time; I had seen Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael send out the hot coffee to the conductor, and I had found a negro carpenter whose week it happily was to stay sober; and now I learned that, when tea should be finished, the poetess had in store for us, as a treat, her ode.

Our evening meal was not plain sailing, even for the veteran navigation of Mrs. Trevise; Juno had returned from the bedside very plainly displeased (she was always candid even when silent) by something which had happened there; and before the joyful moment came when we all learned what this was, a very gouty Boston lady who had arrived with her husband from Florida on her way North--and whose nature you will readily grasp when I tell you that we found ourselves speaking of the man as Mrs. Braintree’s husband and never as Mr. Braintree--this crippled lady, who was of a candor equal to Juno’s, embarked upon a conversation with Juno that compelled Mrs. Trevise to tinkle her bell for Daphne after only two remarks had been exchanged.

I had been sorry at first that here in this Southern boarding-house Boston should be represented only by a lady who appeared to unite in herself all the stony products of that city, and none of the others; for she was as convivial as a statue and as well-informed as a spelling-book; she stood no more for the whole of Boston than did Juno for the whole of Kings Port. But my sorrow grew less when I found that in Mrs. Braintree we had indeed a capable match for her Southern counterpart. Juno, according to her custom, had remembered something objectionable that had been perpetrated in 1865 by the Northern vandals.

“Edward,” said Mrs. Braintree to her husband, in a frightfully clear voice, “it was at Chambersburg, was it not, that the Southern vandals burned the house in which were your father’s title-deeds?”

Edward, who, it appeared, had fought through the whole Civil War, and was in consequence perfectly good-humored and peaceable in his feelings upon that subject, replied hastily and amiably: “Oh, yes, yes! Why, I believe it was!”

But this availed nothing; Juno bent her great height forward, and addressed Mrs. Braintree. “This is the first time I have been told Southerners were vandals.”

“You will never be able to say that again!” replied Mrs. Braintree.

After the bell and Daphne had stopped, the invaluable Briton addressed a genial generalization to us all: “I often think how truly awful your war would have been if the women had fought it, y’know, instead of the men.”

“Quite so!” said the easy-going Edward “Squaws! Mutilation! Yes!” and he laughed at his little joke, but he laughed alone.

I turned to Juno. “Speaking of mutilation, I trust your nephew is better this evening.”

I was rejoiced by receiving a glare in response. But still more joy was to come.

“An apology ought to help cure him a lot,” observed the Briton.

Juno employed her policy of not hearing him.

“Indeed, I trust that your nephew is in less pain,” said the poetess.

Juno was willing to answer this. “The injuries, thank you, are the merest trifles--all that such a light-weight could inflict.” And she shrugged her shoulders to indicate the futility of young John’s pugilism.

“But,” the surprised Briton interposed, “I thought you said your nephew was too feeble to eat steak or hear poetry.”

Juno could always stem the eddy of her own contradictions--but she did raise her voice a little. “I fancy, sir, that Doctor Beaugarcon knows what he is talking about.”

“Have they apologized yet?” inquired the male honeymooner from the up-country.

“My nephew, sir, nobly consented to shake hands this afternoon. He did it entirely out of respect for Mr. Mayrant’s family, who coerced him into this tardy reparation, and who feel unable to recognize him since his treasonable attitude in the Custom House.”

“Must be fairly hard to coerce a chap you can’t recognize,” said the Briton.

An et cetera now spoke to the honeymoon bride from the up-country: “I heard Doctor Beaugarcon say he was coming to visit you this evening.”

“Yais,” assented the bride. “Doctor Beaugarcon is my mother’s fourth cousin.”

Juno now took--most unwisely, as it proved--a vindictive turn at me. “I knew that your friend, Mr. Mayrant, was intemperate,” she began.

I don’t think that Mrs. Trevise had any intention to ring for Daphne at this point--her curiosity was too lively; but Juno was going to risk no such intervention, and I saw her lay a precautionary hand heavily down over the bell. “But,” she continued, “I did not know that Mr. Mayrant was a gambler.”

“Have you ever seen him intemperate?” I asked.