by Owen Wister
XI: Daddy Ben and His Seed
But what was Hortense Rieppe coming to see for herself?
Many dark things had been made plain to me by my talk with the twoladies; yet while disclosing so much, they had still left this importantmatter 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 ofthe destiny which had shaped his ends, so that my esteem for him hadincreased; for some of the words that they had exchanged shone likebright lanterns down into his nature upon strength and beauty lyingquietly there--young strength and beauty, yet already tempered by manlysacrifice. I saw how it came to pass through this, through renunciationof his own desires, through performance of duties which had fallen uponhim not quite fairly, that the eye of his spirit had been turned awayfrom self; thus had it grown strong-sighted and able to look far anddeep, as his speech sometimes revealed, while still his flesh was of hisyouthful age, and no saint's flesh either. This had the ladies taught meduring the fluttered interchange of their reminders and opinions, and bytheir eager agreements and disagreements, I was also grateful to them inthat I could once more correct Juno. The pleasure should be mine totell them in the public hearing of our table that Miss Rieppe was stillengaged 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 alongtoward the antiquity shop where I was to buy the other kettle-supporter.The ladies, with all their freedom of comment and censure, had keptsomething from me. I reviewed, I pieced together, their various remarks,those oracles, especially, which they had let fall, but it all came backto the same thing. I did not know, and they did, what Hortense Rieppewas coming to see for herself. At all events, the engagement was notbroken, the chance to be instrumental in having it broken was stillmine; I might still save John Mayrant from his deplorable quixotism; andas this reflection grew with me I took increasing comfort in it, andI stepped onward toward my kettle-supporter, filled with that sense ofmoral well-being which will steal over even the humblest of us when wefeel that we are beneficently minding somebody else's business.
Whenever the arrangement did not take me too widely from my course, I somapped out my walks and errands in Kings Port that I might pass by thechurchyard and church at the corner of Court and Worship streets. Evenif I did not indulge myself by turning in to stroll and loiter among theflowers, it was enough pleasure to walk by that brick-wall. If you arewilling to wander curiously in our old towns, you may still find in manyof them good brick walls standing undisturbed, and equal in their colorand simple excellence to those of Kings Port; but fashion has pushedthese others out of its sight, among back streets and all sorts offorgotten purlieus and abandoned dignity, and takes its walks to-dayamid cold, expensive ugliness; while the old brick walls of Kings Portcontinually frame your steps with charm. No one workman famous for hisskill built them so well proportioned, so true to comeliness; it was thegeneral hand of their age that could shape nothing wrong, as the hand ofto-day can shape nothing right, save by a rigid following of the old.
I gave myself the pleasure this afternoon of walking by the churchyardwall; and when I reached the iron gate, there was Daddy Ben. So full wasI of my thoughts concerning John Mayrant, and the vicissitudes of hisheart, and the Custom House, that I was moved to have words with the oldman 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 witha manner of mingled civility and reserve that was perfection, andafter the two syllables of which his answer consisted, he remained asimpenetrably respectful as before. I felt rather high and dry, but Itried it again:--
"And I'm sure, Daddy Ben, that you feel as sorry as any of the familythat the phosphates failed."
Again he replied with his two syllables of assent, and again he stoodmute, respectful, a little bent with his great age; but now his goodmanners--and better manners were never seen--impelled him to breaksilence upon some subject, since he would not permit himself to speakconcerning the one which I had introduced. It was the phosphates whichinspired 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 newbridge. Wuth visitin' fo' strangers, sah."
I now felt entirely high and dry. I had attempted to enter intoconversation with him about the intimate affairs of a family to which hefelt that he belonged; and with perfect tact he had not only declinedto discuss them with me, but had delicately informed me that I was astranger and as such had better visit the phosphate works among theother sights of Kings Port. No diplomat could have done it better; andas I walled away from him I knew that he regarded me as an outsider, aNortherner, 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 itwas 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 thegirl behind the counter would not have been thrown into such indignationwhen she alluded to their conceit and ignorance. Daddy Ben had, so farfrom being puffed up by the appointment in the Custom House, disapprovedof this. I had heard enough about the difference between the old and newgenerations of the negro of Kings Port to believe it to be true, and Ihad come to discern how evidently it lay at the bottom of many thingshere: John Mayrant and his kind were a band united by a number of strongties, but by nothing so much as by their hatred of the modern negroin their town. Yes, I was obliged to believe that the young Kings PortAfrican left to freedom and the ballot, was a worse African than hisslave parents; but this afternoon brought me a taste of it more pungentthan all the assurances in the world.
I bought my kettle-supporter, and learned from the robber who sold itto me (Kings Port prices for "old things" are the most exorbitant thatI know anywhere) that a carpenter lived not far from Mrs. Trevise'sboarding-house, and that he would make for me the box in which I couldpack 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 weekbefore." And upon this he announced with as much bitterness as if he hadbeen John Mayrant or any of his aunts, "That's what Boston philanthropyhas done for him."
I dared up at this. "I suppose that's a Southern argument forreestablishing slavery."
"I am not Southern; Breslau is my native town, and I came from New Yorkhere to live five years ago. I've seen what your emancipation has donefor the black, and I say to you, my friend, honest I don't know a foolfrom a philanthropist any longer."
He had much right upon his side; and it can be seen daily thatphilanthropy does not always walk hand-in-hand with wisdom. Doesanything or anybody always walk so? Moreover, I am a friend to not manysuperlatives, and have perceived no saying to be more true than the onethat 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 moreridiculous;--that which expects a race which has lived no one knowshow many thousand years in mental nakedness while Confucius, Moses,and Napoleon were flowering upon adjacent human stems, should puton suddenly the white man's intelligence, or that other folly whichdeclares we can do nothing for the African, as if Hampton had notalready wrought excellent things for him. I had no mind to enterinto all the inextricable error with this Teuton, and it was he whocontinued:--
"Oh, these Boston philanthropists; oh, these know-it-alls! Why don'tthey stay home? Why do they come down here to worry us with theirignorance? See here, my friend, let me show you!"
He rushed about his shop in a search of distraught eagerness, and witha 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 shufflingthe open pages. But when the apparently right one was found, heexclaimed, "No, I have better! and dashed away to a pile of pamphletson the floor, where he began to plough and harrow. Wondering if I wascloseted with a maniac, I looked at the book in my passive hand, and sawdiagrams of various bones to me unknown, and men's names of which Iwas equally ignorant--Mivart, Topinard, and more,--but at last thatof Huxley. But this agreeable sight was spoiled at once by the quitehorrible words Nycticebidoe, platyrrhine, catarrhine, from which Iraised my eyes to see him coming at me with two pamphlets, and scoldingas he came.
"Are you educated, yes? Have been to college, yes? Then perhaps you willunderstand."
Certainly I understood immediately that he and his pamphlets were as badas the book, or worse, in their use of a vocabulary designed to causealmost any listener the gravest inconvenience. Common Eocene ancestorsoccurred at the beginning of his lecture; and I believed that if itgot no stronger than this, I could at least preserve the appearance ofcomprehending him; but it got stronger, and at sacro-iliac notch I maysay, without using any grossly exaggerated expression, that I becameunconscious. At least, all intelligence left me. When it returned, hewas 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 unresistingthrough a back door into a dark little where he turned up the gas, and Isaw shelves as in a museum, to one of which he led me. I suppose thatit was curiosity that rendered me thus sheep-like. Upon the shelf were anumber of skulls and jaws in admirable condition and graded arrangement,beginning to the left with that flat kind of skull which one associateswith gorillas. He resumed his scolding harangue, and for a few briefmoments I understood him. Here, told by themselves, was as much of thestory of the skulls as we know, from manlike apes through glacial manto the modern senator or railroad president. But my intelligence wasdestined soon to die away again.
"That is the Caucasian skull: your skull," he said, touching a specimenat the right.
"Interesting," I murmured. "I'm afraid I know nothing about skulls."
"But you shall know someding before you leave," he retorted, wagging hishead at me; and this time it was not the book, but a specimen, that hepushed into my grasp. He gave it a name, not as bad as platyrrhine, butI feared worse was coming; then he took it away from me, gave me anotherskull, and while I obediently held it, pronounced something quite beyondme.
"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 SouthCarolina 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 whathad I said? Almost as if he were going to break into a dance for joy, hetook the Caucasian skull and the other two, and set the three togetherby themselves, away from the rest of the collection. The picture whichthey thus made spoke more than all the measurements and statistics whichhe now chattered out upon me, reading from his book as I contemplatedthe skulls. There was a similarity of shape, a kinship there betweenthe three, which stared you in the face; but in the contours of vaultedskull, the projecting jaws, and the great molar teeth--what was tobe seen? Why, in every respect that the African departed from theCaucasian, he departed in the direction of the ape! Here was zoologymutely 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 aboutskulls, my friend? Will you invite those Boston philanthropists to stayhome? They will get better results in civilization by giving votes tomonkeys than teaching Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to riggers."
Retaliation rose in me. "Haven't you learned to call them negroes?" Iremarked. But this was lost upon the Teuton. I was tempted to tell himthat I was no philanthropist, and no Bostonian, and that he need notshout so loud, but my more dignified instincts restrained me. I withdrewmy sleeve from his touch (it was this act of his, I think, that hadmost to do with my displeasure), and merely bidding him observe that theenormous price of the kettle-supporter had been reduced for me byhis exhibition to a bagatelle, I left the shop of the screaminganatomist--or Afropath, or whatever it may seem most fitting that heshould 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 preventedmy joining the girl behind the counter, and ending by a walk with ayoung lady the afternoon that had begun by a walk with two old ones. Ishould have liked to make my confession to her. She was evidently outfor the sake of taking the air, and had with her no companion save thebig curly white dog; confession would have been very agreeable; but Ilooked again at my ugly newspaper bundle, and turned in a direction thatshe 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 adoor and come serenely in among dingy mahogany and glass objects, tobargain haughtily for a brass bauble with the shopkeeper, and to havea few exchanged remarks suddenly turn the whole place into a sort ofbedlam with a gibbering scientist dashing skulls at me to prove hisfixed idea, and myself quite furious--I laughed more than twice; but,by the time I had approached the neighborhood of the carpenter'sshop, another side of it had brought reflection to my mind. Here was aforeigner to whom slavery and the Lost Cause were nothing, whose wholeassociation with the South had begun but five years ago; and the racequestion had brought his feelings to this pitch! He had seen the KingsPort 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 Bostonphilanthropist!
Nevertheless, I have said already that I am no lover of superlatives,and in doctrine especially is this true. We need not expect a Confuciusfrom the negro, nor yet a Chesterfield; but I am an enemy also of thatblind and base hate against him, which conducts nowhere save to thede-civilizing of white and black alike. Who brought him here? Did heinvite himself? Then let us make the best of it and teach him, leadhim, compel him to live self-respecting, not as statesman, poet, orfinancier, 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 noreason for slamming it now forever in his face.
Thus mentally I lectured back at the Teuton as I went through thestreets of Kings Port; and after a while I turned a corner which took meabruptly, as with one magic step, out of the white man's world into theblackest Congo. Even the well-inhabited quarter of Kings Port (and Ihad now come within this limited domain) holds narrow lanes and recesseswhich teem and swarm with negroes. As cracks will run through fineporcelain, so do these black rifts of Africa lurk almost invisibleamong the gardens and the houses. The picture that these places offered,tropic, squalid, and fecund, often caused me to walk through them andwatch the basking population; the intricate, broken wooden galleries,the rickety outside stair cases, the red and yellow splashes of color onthe clothes lines, the agglomerate rags that stuffed holes in decayingroofs or hung nakedly on human frames, the small, choked dwellings,bursting open at doors and windows with black, round-eyed babies as anoverripe melon bursts with seeds, the children playing marbles in thecourt, the parents playing cards in the room, the grandparents smokingpipes on the porch, and the great-grandparents stairs gazing out at youlike creatures from the Old Testament or the jungle. From the jungle wehad stolen them, North and South had stolen them together, long ago, tobe slaves, not to be citizens, and now here they were, the fruits ofour theft; and for some reason (possibly the Teuton was the reason) thatpassage from the Book of Exodus came into
my head: "For I the Lord thyGod am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon thechildren."
These thoughts were interrupted by sounds as of altercation. I hadnearly reached the end of the lane, where I should again emerge into theWhite man's world, and where I was now walking the lane spread into abroader space with ells and angles and rotting steps, and habitationsmostly too ruinous to be inhabited. It was from a sashless window in oneof these that the angry voices came. The first words which were distinctaroused 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 itbrought was lengthy and of such a general sullen incoherence that Icould make out only a frequent repetition of "custom house," and thatsomebody was going to take care of somebody hereafter.
Into this the first voice broke with tones of highest contempt andrapidity:--
"President gwine to gib brekfus' an' dinnah an suppah to de likes obyou fo' de whole remaindah oh youh wuthless nat'ral life? Get out ob mysight, you reconstuckted niggah. I come out oh de St. Michael."
There came through the window immediately upon this sounds of scufflingand of a fall, and then cries for help which took me running into thedilapidated building. Daddy Ben lay on the floor, and a thick, youngsavage was kicking him. In some remarkable way I thought of the solidityof their heads, and before the assailant even knew that he had awitness, I sped forward, aiming my kettle-supporter, and with its sharpbrass 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 meanother crack upon the other shin. I had no time to be alarmed at mydeed, or I think that I should have been very much so; I am a man aboveall of peace, and physical encounters are peculiarly abhorrent to me;but, so far from assailing me, the thick, young savage, with the singlemuttered remark, "He hit me fuss," got himself out of the house with themost agreeable rapidity.
Daddy Ben sat up, and his first inquiry greatly reassured me as to hisstate. 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, andI assisted him to stand upright. His injuries proved fortunately to beslight (although I may say here that the shock to his ancient body kepthim away for a few days from the churchyard), and when I began to talkto him about the incident, he seemed unwilling to say much in answer tomy questions. And when I offered to accompany him to where he lived, hedeclined altogether, assuring me that it was close, and that he couldwalk there as well as if nothing had happened to him; but upon my askinghim if I was on the right way to the carpenter's shop, he looked at mecuriously.
"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 decahpentah, my gran'son, Cha's Coteswuth."
