Birthright - T.S. Stribling
[Illustration: "Yes, Cissie, I understand now"]
BIRTHRIGHT
A NOVEL
BY T.S. STRIBLING
Illustrated by
F. Luis Mora
1922
TO MY MOTHER
AMELIA WAITS STRIBLING
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"Yes, Cissie, I understand now"
Peter recognized the white aprons and the swords and spears of the
Knights and Ladies of Tabor
Up and down its street flows the slow negro life of the village
In the Siner cabin old Caroline Siner berated her boy
The old gentleman turned around at last
"You-you mean you want m-me--to go with you, Cissie?" he stammered
"Naw yuh don't," he warned sharply. "You turn roun' an' march on to
Niggertown"
The bridal couple embarked for Cairo
BIRTHRIGHT
CHAPTER I
At Cairo, Illinois, the Pullman-car conductor asked Peter Siner to take
his suitcase and traveling-bag and pass forward into the Jim Crow car.
The request came as a sort of surprise to the negro. During Peter
Siner's four years in Harvard the segregation of black folk on Southern
railroads had become blurred and reminiscent in his mind; now it was
fetched back into the sharp distinction of the present instant. With a
certain sense of strangeness, Siner picked up his bags, and saw his own
form, in the car mirrors, walking down the length of the sleeper. He
moved on through the dining-car, where a few hours before he had had
dinner and talked with two white men, one an Oregon apple-grower, the
other a Wisconsin paper-manufacturer. The Wisconsin man had furnished
cigars, and the three had sat and smoked in the drawing-room, indeed,
had discussed this very point; and now it was upon him.
At the door of the dining-car stood the porter of his Pullman, a negro
like himself, and Peter mechanically gave him fifty cents. The porter
accepted it silently, without offering the amenities of his whisk-broom
and shoe-brush, and Peter passed on forward.
Beyond the dining-car and Pullmans stretched twelve day-coaches filled
with less-opulent white travelers in all degrees of sleepiness and
dishabille from having sat up all night. The thirteenth coach was the
Jim Crow car. Framed in a conspicuous place beside the entrance of the
car was a copy of the Kentucky state ordinance setting this coach apart
from the remainder of the train for the purposes therein provided.
The Jim Crow car was not exactly shabby, but it was unkept. It was half
filled with travelers of Peter's own color, and these passengers were
rather more noisy than those in the white coaches. Conversation was not
restrained to the undertones one heard in the other day-coaches or the
Pullmans. Near the entrance of the car two negroes in soldiers' uniforms
had turned a seat over to face the door, and now they sat talking loudly
and laughing the loose laugh of the half intoxicated as they watched the
inflow of negro passengers coming out of the white cars.
The windows of the Jim Crow car were shut, and already it had become
noisome. The close air was faintly barbed with the peculiar, penetrating
odor of dark, sweating skins. For four years Peter Siner had not known
that odor. Now it came to him not so much offensively as with a queer
quality of intimacy and reminiscence. The tall, carefully tailored negro
spread his wide nostrils, vacillating whether to sniff it out with
disfavor or to admit it for the sudden mental associations it evoked.
It was a faint, pungent smell that played in the back of his nose and
somehow reminded him of his mother, Caroline Siner, a thick-bodied black
woman whom he remembered as always bending over a wash-tub. This was
only one unit of a complex. The odor was also connected with negro
protracted meetings in Hooker's Bend, and the Harvard man remembered a
lanky black preacher waving long arms and wailing of hell-fire, to the
chanted groans of his dark congregation; and he, Peter Siner, had
groaned with the others. Peter had known this odor in the press-room of
Tennessee cotton-gins, over a river packet's boilers, where he and other
roustabouts were bedded, in bunk-houses in the woods. It also recalled a
certain octoroon girl named Ida May, and an intimacy with her which it
still moved and saddened Peter to think of. Indeed, it resurrected
innumerable vignettes of his life in the negro village in Hooker's Bend;
it was linked with innumerable emotions, this pungent, unforgetable odor
that filled the Jim Crow car.
Somehow the odor had a queer effect of appearing to push his
conversation with the two white Northern men in the drawing-room back to
a distance, an indefinable distance of both space and time.
The negro put his suitcase under the seat, hung his overcoat on the
hook, and placed his hand-bag in the rack overhead; then with some
difficulty he opened a window and sat down by it.
A stir of travelers in the Cairo station drifted into the car. Against a
broad murmur of hurrying feet, moving trucks, and talking there stood
out the thin, flat voice of a Southern white girl calling good-by to
some one on the train. Peter could see her waving a bright parasol and
tiptoeing. A sandwich boy hurried past, shrilling his wares. Siner
leaned out, with fifteen cents, and signaled to him. The urchin
hesitated, and was about to reach up one of his wrapped parcels, when a
peremptory voice shouted at him from a lower car. With a sort of start
the lad deserted Siner and went trotting down to his white customer. A
moment later the train bell began ringing, and the Dixie Flier puffed
deliberately out of the Cairo station and moved across the Ohio bridge
into the South.
Half an hour later the blue-grass fields of Kentucky were spinning
outside of the window in a vast green whirlpool. The distant trees and
houses moved forward with the train, while the foreground, with its
telegraph poles, its culverts, section-houses, and shrubbery, rushed
backward in a blur. Now and then into the Jim Crow window whipped a
blast of coal smoke and hot cinders, for the engine was only two cars
ahead.
Peter Siner looked out at the interminable spin of the landscape with a
certain wistfulness. He was coming back into the South, into his own
country. Here for generations his forebears had toiled endlessly and
fruitlessly, yet the fat green fields hurtling past him told with what
skill and patience their black hands had labored.
The negro shrugged away such thoughts, and with a certain effort
replaced them with the constructive idea that was bringing him South
once more. It was a very simple idea. Siner was returning to his native
village in Tennessee to teach school. He planned to begin his work with
the ordinary public school at Hooker's Bend, but, in the back of his
head, he hoped eventually to develop an institution after the plan of
Tuskeegee or the Hampton Institute in Virginia.
To do what he had in mind, he must obtain aid from white sources, and
now, as he traveled southward, he began conning in his mind the white
men and white women he knew in Hooker's Bend. He wanted first of all to
secure possession of a small tract of land which he knew adjoined the
negro school-house over on the east side of the village.
Before the negro's mind the different villagers passed in review with
that peculiar intimacy of vision that servants always have of their
masters. Indeed, no white Southerner knows his own village so minutely
as does any member of its colored population. The colored villagers see
the whites off their guard and just as they are, and that is an attitude
in which no one looks his best. The negroes might be called the black
recording angels of the South. If what they know should be shouted aloud
in any Southern town, its social life would disintegrate. Yet it is a
strange fact that gossip seldom penetrates from the one race to the
other.
So Peter Siner sat in the Jim Crow car musing over half a dozen
villagers in Hooker's Bend. He thought of them in a curious way.
Although he was now a B.A. of Harvard University, and although he knew
that not a soul in the little river village, unless it was old Captain
Renfrew, could construe a line of Greek and that scarcely two had ever
traveled farther north than Cincinnati, still, as Peter recalled their
names and foibles, he involuntarily felt that he was telling over a roll
of the mighty. The white villagers came marching through his mind as
beings austere, and the very cranks and quirks of their characters
somehow held that austerity. There were the Brownell sisters, two old
maids, Molly and Patti, who lived in a big brick house on the hill.
Peter remembered that Miss Molly Brownell always doled out to his
mother, at Monday's washday dinner, exactly one biscuit less than the
old negress wanted to eat, and she always paid her in old clothes. Peter
remembered, a dozen times in his life, his mother coming home and
wondering in an impersonal way how it was that Miss Molly Brownell could
skimp every meal she ate at the big house by exactly one biscuit. It was
Miss Brownell's thin-lipped boast that she understood negroes. She had
told Peter so several times when, as a lad, he went up to the big house
on errands. Peter Siner considered this remembrance without the faintest
feeling of humor, and mentally removed Miss Molly Brownell from his list
of possible subscribers. Yet, he recalled, the whole Brownell estate had
been reared on negro labor.
Then there was Henry Hooker, cashier of the village bank. Peter knew
that the banker subscribed liberally to foreign missions; indeed, at the
cashier's behest, the white church of Hooker's Bend kept a paid
missionary on the upper Congo. But the banker had sold some village lots
to the negroes, and in two instances, where a streak of commercial
phosphate had been discovered on the properties, the lots had reverted
to the Hooker estate. There had been in the deed something concerning a
mineral reservation that the negro purchasers knew nothing about until
the phosphate was discovered. The whole matter had been perfectly legal.
A hand shook Siner's shoulder and interrupted his review. Peter turned,
and caught an alcoholic breath over his shoulder, and the blurred voice
of a Southern negro called out above the rumble of the car and the roar
of the engine:
"'Fo' Gawd, ef dis ain't Peter Siner I's been lookin' at de las' twenty
miles, an' not knowin' him wid sich skeniptious clo'es on! Wha you fum,
nigger?"
Siner took the enthusiastic hand offered him and studied the heavily
set, powerful man bending over the seat. He was in a soldier's uniform,
and his broad nutmeg-colored face and hot black eyes brought Peter a
vague sense of familiarity; but he never would have identified his
impression had he not observed on the breast of the soldier's uniform
the Congressional military medal for bravery on the field of battle. Its
glint furnished Peter the necessary clew. He remembered his mother's
writing him something about Tump Pack going to France and getting
"crowned" before the army. He had puzzled a long time over what she
meant by "crowned" before he guessed her meaning. Now the medal aided
Peter in reconstructing out of this big umber-colored giant the rather
spindling Tump Pack he had known in Hooker's Bend.
Siner was greatly surprised, and his heart warmed at the sight of his
old playmate.
"What have you been doing to yourself, Tump?" he cried, laughing, and
shaking the big hand in sudden warmth. "You used to be the size of a
dime in a jewelry store."
"Been in 'e army, nigger, wha I's been fed," said the grinning brown
man, delightedly. "I sho is picked up, ain't I?"
"And what are you doing here in Cairo?"
"Tryin' to bridle a lil white mule." Mr. Pack winked a whisky-brightened
eye jovially and touched his coat to indicate that some of the "white
mule" was in his pocket and had not been drunk.
"How'd you get here?"
"Wucked my way down on de St. Louis packet an' got paid off at Padjo
[Paducah, Kentucky]; 'n 'en I thought I'd come on down heah an' roll
some bones. Been hittin' 'em two days now, an' I sho come putty nigh
bein' cleaned; but I put up lil Joe heah, an' won 'em all back, 'n 'en
some." He touched the medal on his coat, winked again, slapped Siner on
the leg, and burst into loud laughter.
Peter was momentarily shocked. He made a place on the seat for his
friend to sit. "You don't mean you put up your medal on a crap game,
Tump?"
"Sho do, black man." Pack became soberer. "Dat's one o' de great
benefits o' bein' dec'rated. Dey ain't a son uv a gun on de river whut
kin win lil Joe; dey all tried it."
A moment's reflection told Peter how simple and natural it was for Pack
to prize his military medal as a good-luck piece to be used as a last
resort in crap games. He watched Tump stroke the face of his medal with
his fingers.
"My mother wrote me; about your getting it, Tump. I was glad to hear
it."
The brown man nodded, and stared down at the bit of gold on his barrel-
like chest.
"Yas-suh, dat 'uz guv to me fuh bravery. You know whut a skeery lil
nigger I wuz roun' Hooker's Ben'; well, de sahgeant tuk me an' he drill
ever' bit o' dat right out 'n me. He gimme a baynit an' learned me to
stob dummies wid it over at Camp Oglethorpe, ontil he felt lak I had de
heart to stob anything; 'n' 'en he sont me acrost. I had to git a new
pair breeches ever' three weeks, I growed so fas'." Here he broke out
into his big loose laugh again, and renewed the alcoholic scent around
Peter.
"And you made good?"
"Sho did, black man, an', 'fo' Gawd, I 'serve a medal ef any man ever
did. Dey gimme dish-heah fuh stobbin fo' white men wid a baynit. 'Fo'
Gawd, nigger, I never felt so quare in all my born days as when I wuz a-
jobbin' de livers o' dem white men lak de sahgeant tol' me to." Tump
shook his head, bewildered, and after a moment added, "Yas-suh, I never
wuz mo' surprised in all my life dan when I got dis medal fuh stobbin'
fo' white men."
Peter Siner looked through the Jim Crow window at the vast rotation of
the Kentucky landscape on which his forebears had toiled; presently he
added soberly:
"You were fighting for your country, Tump. It was war then; you were
fighting for your country."
* * * * *
At Jackson, Tennessee, the two negroes were forced to spend the night
between trains. Tump Pack piloted Peter Siner to a negro cafe where they
could eat, and later they searched out a negro lodging-house on Gate
Street where they could sleep. It was a grimy, smelly place, with its
own odor spiked by a phosphate-reducing plant two blocks distant. The
paper on the wall of the room Peter slept in looked scrofulous. There
was no window, and Peter's four-years regime of open windows and fresh-
air sleep was broken. He arranged his clothing for the night so it would
come in contact with nothing in the room but a chair back. He felt dull
next morning, and could not bring himself either to shave or bathe in
the place, but got out and hunted up a negro barber-shop furnished with
one greasy red-plush barber-chair.
A few hours later the two negroes journeyed on down to Perryville,
Tennessee, a village on the Tennessee River where they took a gasolene
launch up to Hooker's Bend. The launch was about fifty feet long and had
two cabins, a colored cabin in front of, and a white cabin behind, the
engine-room.
This unremitting insistence on his color, this continual shunting him
into obscure and filthy ways, gradually gave Peter a loathly sensation.
It increased the unwashed feeling that followed his lack of a morning
bath. The impression grew upon him that he was being handled with tongs,
along back-alley routes; that he and his race were something to be kept
out of sight as much as possible, as careful housekeepers manoeuver
their slops.
At Perryville a number of passengers boarded the up-river boat; two or
three drummers; a yellowed old hill woman returning to her Wayne County
home; a red-headed peanut-buyer; a well-groomed white girl in a tailor
suit; a youngish man barely on the right side of middle age who seemed
to be attending her; and some negro girls with lunches. The passengers
trailed from the railroad station down the river bank through a slush of
mud, for the river had just fallen and had left a layer of liquid mud to
a height of about twenty feet all along the littoral. The passengers
picked their way down carefully, stepping into one another's tracks in
the effort not to ruin their shoes. The drummers grumbled. The youngish
man piloted the girl down, holding her hand, although both could have
managed better by themselves.
Following the passengers came the trunks and grips on a truck. A negro
deck-hand, the truck-driver, and the white master of the launch shoved
aboard the big sample trunks of the drummers with grunts, profanity, and
much stamping of mud. Presently, without the formality of bell or
whistle, the launch clacked away from the landing and stood up the wide,
muddy river.
The river itself was monotonous and depressing. It was perhaps half a
mile wide, with flat, willowed mud banks on one side and low shelves of
stratified limestone on the other.
Trading-points lay at ten- or fifteen-mile intervals along the great
waterway. The typical landing was a dilapidated shed of a store half
covered with tin tobacco signs and ancient circus posters. Usually, only
one man met the launch at each landing, the merchant, a democrat in his
shirt-sleeves and without a tie. His voice was always a flat, weary
drawl, but his eyes, wrinkled against the sun, usually held the
shrewdness of those who make their living out of two-penny trades.
At each place the red-headed peanut-buyer slogged up the muddy bank and
bargained for the merchant's peanuts, to be shipped on the down-river
trip of the first St. Louis packet. The loneliness of the scene embraced
the trading-points, the river, and the little gasolene launch struggling
against the muddy current. It permeated the passengers, and was a
finishing touch to Peter Siner's melancholy.
The launch clacked on and on interminably. Sometimes it seemed to make
no headway at all against the heavy, silty current. Tump Pack, the white
captain, and the negro engineer began a game of craps in the negro
cabin. Presently, two of the white drummers came in from the white cabin
and began betting on the throws. The game was listless. The master of
the launch pointed out places along the shores where wildcat stills were
located. The crap-shooters, negro and white, squatted in a circle on the
cabin floor, snapping their fingers and calling their points
monotonously. One of the negro girls in the negro cabin took an apple
out of her lunch sack and began eating it, holding it in her palm after
the fashion of negroes rather than in her fingers, as is the custom of
white women.
Both doors of the engine-room were open, and Peter Siner could see
through into the white cabin. The old hill woman was dozing in her
chair, her bonnet bobbing to each stroke of the engines. The youngish
man and the girl were engaged in some sort of intimate lovers' dispute.
When the engines stopped at one of the landings, Peter discovered she
was trying to pay him what he had spent on getting her baggage trucked
down at Perryville. The girl kept pressing a bill into the man's hand,
and he avoided receiving the money. They kept up the play for sake of
occasional contacts.
When the launch came in sight of Hooker's Bend toward the middle of the
afternoon, Peter Siner experienced one of the profoundest surprises of
his life. Somehow, all through his college days he had remembered
Hooker's Bend as a proud town with important stores and unapproachable
white residences. Now he saw a skum of negro cabins, high piles of
lumber, a sawmill, and an ice-factory. Behind that, on a little rise,
stood the old Brownell manor, maintaining a certain shabby dignity in a
grove of oaks. Behind and westward from the negro shacks and lumber-
piles ranged the village stores, their roofs just visible over the top
of the bank. Moored to the shore, lay the wharf-boat in weathered greens
and yellows. As a background for the whole scene rose the dark-green
height of what was called the "Big Hill," an eminence that separated the
negro village on the east from the white village on the west. The hill
itself held no houses, but appeared a solid green-black with cedars.
The ensemble was merely another lonely spot on the south bank of the
great somnolent river. It looked dead, deserted, a typical river town,
unprodded even by the hoot of a jerk-water railroad.
As the launch chortled toward the wharf, Peter Siner stood trying to
orient himself to this unexpected and amazing minifying of Hooker's
Bend. He had left a metropolis; he was coming back to a tumble-down
village. Yet nothing was changed. Even the two scraggly locust-trees
that clung perilously to the brink of the river bank still held their
toe-hold among the strata of limestone.
The negro deck-hand came out and pumped the hand-power whistle in three
long discordant blasts. Then a queer thing happened. The whistle was
answered by a faint strain of music. A little later the passengers saw a
line of negroes come marching down the river bank to the wharf-boat.
They marched in military order, and from afar Peter recognized the white
aprons and the swords and spears of the Knights and Ladies of Tabor, a
colored burial association.
Siner wondered what had brought out the Knights and Ladies of Tabor. The
singing and the drumming gradually grew upon the air. The passengers in
the white cabin, came out on the guards at this unexpected fanfare. As
soon as the white travelers saw the marching negroes, they began joking
about what caused the demonstration. The captain of the launch thought
he knew, and began an oath, but stopped it out of deference to the girl
in the tailor suit. He said it was a dead nigger the society was going
to ship up to Savannah.
The girl in the tailor suit was much amused. She said the darkies looked
like a string of caricatures marching down the river bank. Peter noticed
her Northern accent, and fancied she was coming to Hooker's Bend to
teach school.
One of the drummers turned to another.
"Did you ever hear Bob Taylor's yarn about Uncle 'Rastus's funeral?
Funniest thing Bob ever got off." He proceeded to tell it.
Every one on the launch was laughing except the captain, who was
swearing quietly; but the line of negroes marched on down to the wharf-
boat with the unshakable dignity of black folk in an important position.
They came singing an old negro spiritual. The women's sopranos thrilled
up in high, weird phrasing against an organ-like background of male
voices.
But the black men carried no coffin, and suddenly it occurred to Peter
Siner that perhaps this celebration was given in honor of his own home-
coming. The mulatto's heart beat a trifle faster as he began planning a
suitable response to this ovation.
Sure enough, the singing ranks disappeared behind the wharf-boat, and a
minute later came marching around the stern and lined up on the outer
guard of the vessel. The skinny, grizzly-headed negro commander held up
his sword, and the Knights and Ladies of Tabor fell silent.
The master of the launch tossed his head-line to the wharf-boat, and
yelled for one of the negroes to make it fast. One did. Then the
commandant with the sword began his address, but it was not directed to
Peter. He said:
[Illustration: Peter recognized the white aprons and the swords and
spears of the Knights and Ladies of Tabor]
"Brudder Tump Pack, we, de Hooker's Ben' lodge uv de Knights an' Ladies
uv Tabor, welcome you back to yo' native town. We is proud uv you, a
colored man, who brings back de highes' crown uv bravery dis Newnighted
States has in its power to bestow.
"Two yeahs ago, Brudder Tump, we seen you marchin' away fum Hooker's
Ben' wid thirteen udder boys, white an' colored, all marchin' away
togedder. Fo' uv them boys is already back home; three, we heah, is on
de way back, but six uv yo' brave comrades, Brudder Pack, is sleepin'
now in France, an' ain't never goin' to come home no mo'. When we honors
you, we honors them all, de libin' an' de daid, de white an' de black,
who fought togedder fuh one country, fuh one flag."
Gasps, sobs from the line of black folk, interrupted the speaker. Just
then a shriveled old negress gave a scream, and came running and half
stumbling out of the line, holding out her arms to the barrel-chested
soldier on the gang-plank. She seized him and began shrieking:
"Bless Gawd! my son's done come home! Praise de Lawd! Bless His holy
name!" Here her laudation broke into sobbing and choking and laughing,
and she squeezed herself to her son.
Tump patted her bony black form.
"I's heah, Mammy," he stammered uncertainly. "I's come back, Mammy."