—As for those other things I said, Johnny, she remarked, angrily removing her veil and talking in a suddenly practical little voice as he stepped out of the carriage in a remote part of New Orleans, I was overwrought and no doubt jealous. I ought to hate you. But I don’t. Good-by.
Whatever it was of value she had intended to impart, he never got it.
There was also the time he and Susanna went on a privately chartered steamboat excursion. In the middle of a night of wild festivity and much going about in other people’s cabins, Johnny finally went to bed in what he took to be his own room. The room was unlighted, and when he started to climb into his bunk, a lady in the dark rose up and enveloped him.
—O, dear, Johnny! she whispered. My God!
—My God! Johnny whispered. I’m in the wrong place.
He stumbled out and wandered around all over the boat trying to find his stateroom and Susanna. Later he became convinced that he had been in the right room after all. Next day, the lady in the dark (whose voice he knew perfectly well and who had always seemed very sedate in his presence) was exceptionally noisy at the dinner table.
But the worst shock of all came just a few days before they left New Orleans. Susanna made an overnight visit downriver with Cousin Bobby to attend to some legal matters involving an estate in which she had a part interest. Johnny stayed in New Orleans and along with Bobby’s wife, Cousin Dody, represented the family at a lustrous soirée which he and Susanna had earlier agreed to attend. Sometime during the night, Johnny woke up suddenly in the huge bed which Dody had lovingly draped for the bridal couple. A woman was standing beside the bed with her arms at her sides, her eyes staring straight ahead.
It was Dody in a silk nightdress.
—Dody! Johnny said. What’s the matter, dear?
Dody said nothing but looked at him with her large dark eyes somberly blazing. She slowly collapsed on the bed where she lay on her back, inert. Johnny picked her up and carried her to the door. He looked up and down the hall. It was empty. He carried her to her own room and put her on her bed, which was made.
—Dody.
She said nothing, but her arms clung around his neck.
—Dody, are you awake?
She said nothing but pulled gently at his neck.
—Go to sleep now, dear, Johnny said.
She appeared to be in a trance, and in fact he recalled something that she had said the day before about sleepwalking being a failing in the family.
The following morning at breakfast, she said,
—I think I must have walked in my sleep last night, Johnny. I didn’t disturb you, did I, dear?
—Not at all, dear, Johnny said. I sleep like a log.
The Drakes and related families had large holdings upriver in the cotton and sugar plantations. The most enjoyable part of the honeymoon for Johnny was his visit to some of these great homes, which represented the finest flower of Southern life. Here in the loamy earth behind the levees was the South he had fashioned from all the romantic books he had read and the old nostalgic songs. It was all there—the everblooming summer; the levees holding back the milebroad river; the cottonfields; the pillared mansions; the Negro quarters, shacks and cabins clustering close to the river; the fine manners; a way of living gentle and proud.
This earth had a kind of voice for him which seemed to say: Young man, you were mistaken. Forget your rigorous square of Raintree County. We give you your archaic dream, perennial summer and the lenient gods. Child of a vigorous northern parentage, stay with us here, and listen to our homeremembering songs. ’Tis summer and the days are long. Listen to the husky music of the darkies singing on the levees. Fondly we embrace you. We are not angry with you for your wrong contempt. White arms will cling about your shoulders, and you will press your lips to scarlet blossoms and delicious fruits. Have we not builded you the republic of your dreams? See how it stretches over slow lawns through gardens of cypress and magnolia to tranquil columns. We waited for you here with soft arms and voices a long time. Stay with us, wandering child and restless seeker. Fondly, fondly we embrace you.
He saw also the black people. In all Raintree County there had been hardly a dozen Negroes; but on the Lower Mississippi there were more black faces than white. In a way, he knew that he had come South to see this nameless swarm. And now he saw them—everywhere—streets, docks, levees, boats, houses, fields. He heard their mutilated tongue, English tainted with the jungle. He heard their music sung in darkness by the river where they lived in little cabins. Their songs were sometimes frenzied like the dances in which they whirled to syncopated rhythms, but more often muffled and sad with the inenarrable misery of their bondage. Few could remember the jungle home. Most had been born to cotton and the river.
They were all slaves, human beings whose dark skins made it legal for other men to rule them. They were also all Christians.
There was nothing South that wasn’t impregnated with their presence. Black had builded this republic. Black had bled and labored for White and borne the casual lust of White so that this republic might lift its Doric columns from the Great Swamp. Black had planted and picked the white cotton that made White wealthy. Black had dressed the pampered bodies of White in satin gowns. Black had built the levees that held the dreaded river at bay. Black had bred and trained the swift horses with which White won the stakes at New Orleans. Black had distilled the fine whiskeys and the syrup rums that White sipped on long verandahs. Black had picked and dried and rolled tobacco leaf for White’s long smokes. Black had dug the ditches and tied the bales, had reared the houses and built the roads. Black had erected the court houses and the state houses. Black had made White strong and proud and warlike, leaders of men, statesmen who shaped the course of empire South and West. Black had done it all, nameless and unrewarded, and would go on doing it, nameless and unrewarded.
So the secret of this culture, white and proud, was that it had all been built over the stinking marsh of human slavery. Often when Johnny was driving through New Orleans, in a maze of old streets, he would notice green scum in the gutters bubbling with gas. And when he had gone a little way beyond the City, he would see, heaving up to the very rims of the negrobuilded roads, the swamp from which the City had been rescued. The delicate iron festoons and romantic walls of New Orleans had in a few miles given way to Spanish moss swinging in soft scarves from the trees. Roots of twisted willows bulged from the unreclaimeble, unredaimable muck.
Yes, it was there always, a dark secret. When he lay in bed at night, it throbbed in the warm dark that settled like a mist, scented, miasmal, on the City. Here, in the American Republic, men openly committed the darkest of all crimes. The bought flesh lay forever beneath whiteblossoming summer.
From this old harlotry came the stained beauty of the South. This was the South’s peculiar essence, this was what Susanna had meant, without knowing it, when she had said in her husky voice,
—You’ll love it, honey.
He understood dimly why the songs most beloved by the white culture of the South were all simulated darkie songs. Through them all, a nameless darkie toted a weary load and longed for the old plantation. He was the South’s primitive, simple hero, laden with his chains. White and Black seemed to find artistic satisfaction in this image of a human being sold downriver into exile and slavery, growing old in a land that was not his own, wandering on the earth and hunting for a lost Eden of peace and security. Thus the master race found its supreme symbol in the beautiful patience of its slaves.
So also Johnny noticed the slurred indolence of Southern speech, which was in some measure the result of long verbal contact between White and Black. The tongues of lost generations of slaves murmured in the speech of the South’s most beautiful ladies.
Trained in disputation at the Pedee Academy and himself a staunch advocate of Republican principles in the press and elsewhere, Johnny Shawnessy made a tactful effort to present Northern views during his sojourn in the South. Now and then the book Uncle To
m’s Cabin came up for mention. Without exception, Johnny Shawnessy’s new friends cursed it for a tissue of monstrous lies, foully misrepresenting the institution upon which the South was founded. They justified slavery in a hundred ingenious ways.
Whether slavery was right in the beginning, they maintained, it was unavoidable now. The slave was described as shiftless, ignorant, immoral, dishonest, incapable of taking care of himself. In slavery he found security and protection against disease and poverty. He was happy and satisfied with his lot if only the abolitionists would let him be. The whole thing was justified from the same immortal documents which were the Scriptures of Raintree County. The Constitution didn’t forbid black slavery and on the contrary protected the slaveowner in his property. The Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, but the Negro wasn’t a man. The Bible justified slavery, as any Southern minister could show by countless quotations.
In these discussions, Johnny Shawnessy remained uniformly good-natured, but his antagonists did not always manage to do so. On the subject of their peculiar institution they were likely to lose all detachment, amiability, humor. If pushed hard, the most cultivated, like Cousin Bobby Drake, would gently chide the young man from Raintree County for his lack of information about the real relationship between Negroes and whites in the South. They would appeal to the obvious workability of the present state of affairs, the danger of upsetting it. If there was a crime here, none now living was guilty of it. Let the Northerners explain their own institution of wage slavery, whose workwrung victims lived in greater misery than the Southern Negro.
Less gentle Southerners became dangerous on the subject. A light like lust or fear crept into their eyes. They appealed to the brute fact of force and status quo. That was the way the South was, and no goddamyankee had better try to tell them how to run it.
As for the question of Union, Southerners everywhere openly expressed their belief that before they would endure any restrictions on the practice or extension of their peculiar institution, they would withdraw from the Union. If the existing government couldn’t or wouldn’t protect their rights, then they had a sacred right to form a government of their own.
When Johnny attempted to reason with his new friends on this subject, he had the feeling that he was plunging into a great dismal swamp of human prejudice and error, in which there was no path for reason to follow. Slavery had been enthroned through so many generations of complete acquiescence on the one hand and complete mastery on the other that nothing conceivable would ever unseat it. What he saw made him deeply suspicious of some Northern claims that slavery was doomed to extinction and would die of its own weight in a score of years.
Indeed, there was evidence that exactly the contrary was true. Southerners everywhere in newspapers, at public meetings, on long verandahs, were talking openly of a revival of the slave trade. Cotton was a landkilling, mankilling crop. It had already ravaged its way from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi and beyond, crowding out all other crops, leaving a trail of exhaustion behind. It had to push on, get more soil, more slaves. Territories not yet admitted to the Union must be open to this dynamic, self-devouring economy.
—What’s it all leading to? Johnny sometimes asked the more intelligent people of his acquaintance. Where will it stop?
He never received a satisfactory answer to this question. Here he touched one of those blind, earthen walls that Southern life had been slowly building for a hundred years to keep the great yellow river of slavery within bounds.
Nevertheless, there was a goal toward which this proud race tended. The masters of the South had dreamed an enchanting dream. They had dreamed of a Greek republic on the soil of America. In its pillared homes would dwell the most beautiful women and the most distinguished men in the world, women with honey voices, glowing eyes, voluptuous bodies, men like jolly modern gods. The ports of the world would be open to this new republic and her imperial crop. Controlling the mouth of the Mississippi, Cotton Diplomacy would control the continent of North America and in time the world. This culture of power, wealth, and leisurely democratic traditions would be erected on the toil of ten million slaves. From the inexhaustible human mines of Africa, they would be imported once again. South and West, by the brilliance of her diplomacy or the might of her sword, the new State would expand, and the cotton would go with her, and the black man, and the pillared mansions. Let men beware how they placed any further barrier against the South! For this dream was dreamed with the religious consecration of proud spirits; into it they wove the poetry of names more beloved to them than the concept of Union. Those names were the long, the sibilant, the river-murmurous names of the Southern earth—Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Georgia, Carolina, Florida, Virginia. Let all beware how they spattered the sovereign beauty of those names!
At the time, Johnny had little leisure or inclination to subject these views to the cold process of dialectic. He was exploring this life built on the Great Swamp, and he found that it had terrifying depths.
There was the time, back in New Orleans, when several of Susanna’s male cousins invited Johnny to go on a stag dinner at the Gem, perhaps the City’s most fashionable drinking house. The dinner slowly turned into a prolonged drinking bout, from which Johnny abstained, the better to hear what went on. At first the talk revolved largely on horses. Slowly, however, it turned from horses to women—and not white women but colored. In response to a hesitantly worded question about the famous octoroons, Johnny was drenched in a torrent of sensual detail. The stories grew richer, the epithets more brutal. Faces became flushed, eyes glowed, white teeth clenched in hard bursts of laughter. These young white men were banded in a collective verbal rape on the women of another race.
A little while after midnight someone stood up and suggested that they take young Johnny Shawnessy, that goddam no-account Yankee, and show him a little of the real South. Johnny looked inquiringly at Cousin Bobby Drake, who had smiled affably during the talk, contributing sometimes a gentle observation but always keeping the tactful, gentlemanly air that Johnny admired him for.
—Come along, Johnny, he said. I’ll protect you. It’s something to see, son. Downright educatin’.
They started out at a bal masque in the Ponchartrain Ballroom, where the masqued women were all quadroons.
—Lots more men here on the nigger nights, one of the cousins explained.
There was some dancing and one or two of the cousins dropped off, but several robust characters had taken their place, and there was nothing for it but they must plunge deeper.
—How about takin’ Johnny to the Swamp? one of the men said.
Through murky old streets the cabs plunged, spiralling deeper into the nocturnal muck of New Orleans as if to reach its lowest circle of depravity, which—the name was peculiarly right—was called the Swamp.
—They don’t call it that much any more, Cousin Bobby explained to Johnny. They’ve cleaned it up a lot since the old days. But it’s still the hottest part of town. You can hardly get a white woman there.
Not long after, Johnny followed the mob into a decayed hotel called Madame Gobert’s, on whose name, pronounced à la française, indelicate puns were made. The interior main room of the building, which they reached through a tunnel with leaking walls, was under street level. Yellow light blazed shamelessly on walls once ornamented with gilt statues and scarlet scarves but now befouled by time, like the rouged old white woman who met them at the door.
She was the only white woman in the place.
The night was far advanced at Madame Gobert’s. The place seemed alive with women of all shades from obsidian black to light olive, and costumes in all degrees from full ballroom attire to stark nudity. White men chased giggling Negresses up a broad stair carpeted with filth fading into a murk of upper rooms. In this hell of decayed magnificence, it seemed to Johnny that the whole paradox of the South had come to detestable flower. He sat there, defended on one side by Bobby Drake and on
the other by a wall oozing sweat, and watched. Here the white masters came as if to hurl themselves back into the morass from which they had reared their City. They talked the vilest words they could summon up, clenching their teeth and excreting drunken epithets with savage zest. These obscenities, devoid of imagination, were brutally repeated like the blows of a whip. The women for their part giggled fatuously and called the men Mister Jack and Mister Jim and Mister Bob.
—You mustn’t get the idea, Johnny, Cousin Bobby said, that all Southerners are like this. Of course, a lot of the planters will have a Nigro concubine or two. But these boys are kind of wild.
—Hello, Mister Bob, one of the girls said.
—Hello, Jewel, Bobby said. Well, I see the other boys have snaked upstairs on us. S’pose we get out of here, Johnny, and get a little fresh air.
But before they left, some of the other men rejoined them, and when Johnny finally did get out and gulped gratefully at the stinking, warm dawn of New Orleans, his friends swarmed around him with an account of their erotic achievements.
—Johnny, one of them said, trying to give him a true-blue look from drunken eyes, I like you, son, and I wanna do you favor. Now, I got lil mulatto gal shacked up right here on Girod Street. I’m rentin’ her to another fella for twenty-five dollars month, which is damn high, boy, but she’s worth it, ever’ cent of it. She’s a good clean girl, came right off my own pappy’s plantation, and the old man had a lot of it himself. She ain’t any blacker than that wall there, and son, she kin git a wiggle on. If you’ll come with me, I’ll take you in there right now.
Johnny thanked him a lot and managed with difficulty to get away. He tried to understand the significance of what he had seen. It wasn’t ordinary prostitution. The white master was doing a thing so obscene and yet, for some reason, so desirable that he had to defend himself from conscience by an extra brutality. Here in a Black Mass of sensuality, he acknowledged the forbidden secret—his equality with the slave. But this acknowledgment was such that it was a baser indignity than the whip and served more than the bloodhound to keep a race in subjection.
Raintree County Page 49
