Birthright - T.S. Stribling
But now that he had arrived at the actual composition of his defense, he
sat biting his penholder, with all the arguments he meant to advance
slipped from his mind. He could not recall the points of the proof. He
could not recall them with Peter Siner moving restlessly about the room,
glancing through the window, unsettled, nervous, on the verge of eloping
with a negress.
His secretary's tragedy smote the old man. The necessity of doing
something for Peter put his thoughts to rout. A wild idea occurred to
the Captain that if he should write the exact truth, perhaps his memoirs
might serve Peter as a signal against a futile, empty journey.
But the thought no sooner appeared than it was rejected. In the Anglo-
Saxon, especially the Anglo-Saxon of the Southern United States, abides
no such Gallic frankness as moved a Jean-Jacques. Southern memoirs
always sound like the conversation between two maiden ladies,--nothing
intimate, simply a few general remarks designed to show from what nice
families they came.
So the Captain wrote nothing. During all the afternoon he sat at his
desk with a leaden heart, watching Peter move about the room. The old
man maintained more or less the posture of writing, but his thoughts
were occupied in pitying himself and pitying Peter. Half a dozen times
he looked up, on the verge of making some plea, some remonstrance,
against the madness of this brown man. But the sight of Peter sitting in
the window-seat staring out into the street silenced him. He was a weak
old man, and Peter's nerves were strung with the desire of youth.
At last the two men heard old Rose clashing in the kitchen. A few
minutes later the secretary excused himself from the library, to go to
his own room. As Peter was about to pass through the door, the Captain
was suddenly galvanized into action by the thought that this perhaps was
the last time he would ever see him. He got up from his chair and called
shakenly to Peter. The negro paused. The Captain moistened his lips and
controlled his voice.
"I want to have a word with you, Peter, about a--a little matter. I--
I've mentioned it before."
"Yes, sir." The negro's tone and attitude reminded the Captain that the
supper gong would soon sound and they would best separate at once.
"It--it's about Cissie Dildine," the old lawyer hurried on.
Peter nodded slightly.
"Yes, you mentioned that before."
The old man lifted a thin hand as if to touch Peter's arm, but he did
not. A sort of desperation seized him.
"But listen, Peter, you don't want to do--what's in your mind!"
"What is in my mind, Captain?"
"I mean marry a negress. You don't want to marry a negress!"
The brown man stared, utterly blank.
"Not marry a negress!"
"No, Peter; no," quavered the old man. "For yourself it may make no
difference, but your children--think of your children, your son growing
up under a brown veil! You can't tear it off. God himself can't tear it
off! You can never reach him through it. Your children, your children's
children, a terrible procession that stretches out and out, marching
under a black shroud, unknowing, unknown! All you can see are their sad
forms beneath the shroud, marching away--marching away. God knows where!
And yet it's your own flesh and blood!"
Suddenly the old lawyer's face broke into the hard, tearless contortions
of the aged. His terrible emotion communicated itself to the sensitive
brown man.
"But, Captain, I myself am a negro. Whom should I marry?"
"No one; no one! Let your seed wither in your loins! It's better to do
that; it's better--" At that moment the clashing of the supper gong fell
on the old man's naked nerves. He straightened up by some reflex
mechanism, turned away from what he thought was his last interview with
his secretary, and proceeded down the piazza into the great empty
dining-room.
CHAPTER XIII
With overwrought nerves Peter Siner entered his room. At five o'clock
that afternoon he had seen Cissie Dildine go up the street to the
Arkwright home to cook one of those occasional suppers. He had been
watching for her return, and in the midst of it the Captain's
extraordinary outburst had stirred him up.
Once in his room, the negro placed the broken Hepplewhite in such a
position that he could rake the street with a glance. Then he tried to
compose himself and await the coming of his supper and the passage of
Cissie. There was something almost pathetic in Peter's endless watching,
all for a mere glimpse or two of the girl in yellow. He himself had no
idea how his nerves and thoughts had woven themselves around the young
woman. He had no idea what a passion this continual doling out of
glimpses had begotten. He did not dream how much he was, as folk naively
put it, in love with her.
His love was strong enough to make him forget for a while the old
lawyer's outbreak. However, as the dusk thickened in the shrubbery and
under the trees, certain of the old gentleman's phrases revisited the
mulatto's mind: "A terrible procession ... marching under a black
shroud.... Your children, your children's children, a terrible
procession,... marching away, God knows where.... And yet--it's your own
flesh and blood!" They were terrific sentences, as if the old man had
been trying to tear from his vision some sport of nature, some
deformity. As the implications spread before Peter, he became more and
more astonished at its content. Even to Captain Renfrew black men were
dehumanized,--shrouded, untouchable creatures.
It delivered to Peter a slow but a profound shock. He glanced about at
the faded magnificence of the room with a queer feeling that he had been
introduced into it under a sort of misrepresentation. He had taken up
his abode with the Captain, at least on the basis of belonging to the
human family, but this passionate outbreak, this puzzling explosion, cut
that ground from under his feet.
The more Peter thought about it, the stranger grew his sensation. Not
even to be classed as a human being by this old gentleman who in a weak,
helpless fashion had crept somewhat into Peter's affections,--not to be
considered a man! The mulatto drew a long, troubled breath, and by the
mere mechanics of his desire kept staring through the gloom for Cissie.
Peter Siner had known all along that the unread whites of Hooker's Bend
--and that included nearly every white person in the village--considered
black men as simple animals; but he had supposed that the more thoughtful
men, of whom Captain Renfrew was a type, at least admitted the Afro-
American to the common brotherhood of humanity. But they did not.
As Peter sat staring into the darkness the whole effect of the
dehumanizing of the black folk of the South began to unfold itself
before his imagination. It explained to him the tragedies of his race,
their sufferings at the hand of mob violence; the casualness, even the
levity with which black men were murdered: the chronic dishonesty with
which negroes were treated: the constant enactment of adverse
legislation against them; the cynical use of negro women. They were all
vermin, animals; they were one with the sheep and the swine; a little
nearer the human in form, perhaps, and, oddly enough, one that could be
bred to a human being, as testified a multitude of brown and yellow and
cream-colored folk, but all marching away, as the Captain had so
passionately said, marching away, their forms hidden from human
intercourse under a shroud of black, an endless procession marching
away, God knew whither! And yet they were the South's own flesh and
blood.
The horror of such a complex swelled in Peter's mind to monstrous
proportions. As night thickened at his window, the negro sat dazed and
wondering at the mightiness of his vision. His thoughts went groping,
trying to solve some obscure problem it posed. He thought of the
Arkwright boy; he thought of the white men smiling as his mother's
funeral went past the livery-stable; he thought of Captain Renfrew's
manuscript that he was transcribing. Through all the old man's memoirs
ran a certain lack of sincerity. Peter always felt amid his labors that
the old Captain was making an attorney's plea rather than a candid
exposition. At this point in his thoughts there gradually limned itself
in the brown man's mind the answer to that enigma which he almost had
unraveled on the day he first saw Cissie Dildine pass his window. With
it came the answer to the puzzle contained in the old Captain's library.
The library was not an ordinary compilation of the world's thought; it,
too, was an attorney's special pleading against the equality of man. Any
book or theory that upheld the equality of man was carefully excluded
from the shelves. Darwin's great hypothesis, and every development
springing from it, had been banned, because the moment that a theory was
propounded of the great biologic relationship of all flesh, from worms
to vertebrates, there instantly followed a corollary of the brotherhood
of man.
What Christ did for theology, Darwin did for biology,--he democratized
it. The One descended to man's brotherhood from the Trinity; the other
climbed up to it from the worms.
The old Captain's library lacked sincerity. Southern orthodoxy, which
persists in pouring its religious thought into the outworn molds of
special creation, lacks sincerity. Scarcely a department of Southern
life escapes this fundamental attitude of special pleader and
disingenuousness. It explains the Southern fondness for legal
subtleties. All attempts at Southern poetry, belles-lettres, painting,
novels, bear the stamp of the special plea, of authors whose exposition
is careful.
Peter perceived what every one must perceive, that when letters turn
into a sort of glorified prospectus of a country, all value as
literature ceases. The very breath of art and interpretation is an eager
and sincere searching of the heart. This sincerity the South lacks. Her
single talent will always be forensic, because she is a lawyer with a
cause to defend. And such is the curse that arises from lynchings and
venery and extortions and dehumanizings,--sterility; a dumbness of soul.
Peter Siner's thoughts lifted him with the tremendous buoyancy of
inspiration. He swung out of his chair and began tramping his dark room.
The skin of his scalp tickled as if a ghost had risen before him. The
nerves in his thighs and back vibrated. He felt light, and tingled with
energy.
Unaware of what he was doing, he set about lighting the gasolene-lamp.
He worked with nervous quickness, as if he were in a great hurry.
Presently a brilliant light flooded the room. It turned the gray
illumination of the windows to blackness.
Joy enveloped Peter. His own future developed under his eyes with the
same swift clairvoyance that marked his vision of the ills of his
country. He saw himself remedying those ills. He would go about showing
white men and black men the simple truth, the spiritual necessity for
justice and fairness. It was not a question of social equality; it was a
question of clearing a road for the development of Southern life. He
would show white men that to weaken, to debase, to dehumanize the negro,
inflicted a more terrible wound on the South than would any strength the
black man might develop. He would show black men that to hate the
whites, constantly to suspect, constantly to pilfer from them, only
riveted heavier shackles on their limbs.
It was all so clear and so simple! The white South must humanize the
black not for the sake of the negro, but for the sake of itself. No one
could resist logic so fundamental.
Peter's heart sang with the solemn joy of a man who had found his work.
All through his youth he had felt blind yearnings and gropings for he
knew not what. It had driven him with endless travail out of Niggertown,
through school and college, and back to Niggertown,--this untiring Hound
of Heaven. But at last he had reached his work. He, Peter Siner, a
mulatto, with the blood of both white and black in his veins, would come
as an evangel of liberty to both white and black. The brown man's eyes
grew moist from Joy. His body seemed possessed of tremendous energy.
As he paced his room there came into the glory of Peter's thoughts the
memory of the Arkwright boy as he sat in the cedar glade brooding on the
fallen needles Peter recalled the hobbledehoy's disjointed words as he
wrestled with the moral and physical problems of adolescence. Peter
recalled his impulse to sit down by young Sam Arkwright, and, as best he
might, give him some clue to the critical and feverish period through
which he was passing.
He had not done so, but Peter remembered the instance down to the very
desperation in the face of the brooding youngster. And it seemed to
Peter that this rejected impulse had been a sign that he was destined to
be an evangel to the whites as well as to the blacks.
The joy of Peter's mission bore him aloft on vast wings. His room seemed
to fall away from him, and he was moving about his country, releasing
the two races from their bonds of suspicion and cruelty.
* * * * *
Slowly the old manor formed about Peter again, and he perceived that a
tapping on the door had summoned him back. He walked to the door with
his heart full of kindness for old Rose. She was bringing him his
supper. He felt as if he could take the old woman in his arms, and out
of the mere hugeness of his love sweeten her bitter life. The mulatto
opened the door as eagerly as if he were admitting some long-desired
friend; but when the shutter swung back, the old crone and her salver
were not there. All he could discern in the darkness were the white
pillars marking the night into panels. There was no light in the outer
kitchen. The whole manor was silent.
As he stood listening, the knocking was repeated, this time more
faintly. He fixed the sound at the window. He closed the door, walked
across the brilliant room, and opened the shutters.
For several moments he saw nothing more than the tall quadrangle of
blackness which the window framed; then a star or two pierced it; then
something moved. He saw a woman's figure standing close to the casement,
and out of the darkness Cissie Dildine's voice asked in its careful
English:
"Peter, may I come in?"
CHAPTER XIV
For a full thirty seconds Peter Siner stared at the girl at the window
before, even with her prompting, he thought of the amenity of asking her
to come inside. As a further delayed courtesy, he drew the Heppelwhite
chair toward her.
Cissie's face looked bloodless in the blanched light of the gasolene-
lamp. She forced a faint, doubtful smile.
"You don't seem very glad to see me, Peter."
"I am," he assured her, mechanically, but he really felt nothing but
astonishment and dismay. They filled his voice. He was afraid some one
would see Cissie in his room. His thoughts went flitting about the
premises, calculating the positions of the various trees and shrubs in
relation to the windows, trying to determine whether, and just where, in
his brilliantly lighted chamber the girl could be seen from the street.
The octoroon made no further comment on his confusion. Her eyes wandered
from him over the stately furniture and up to the stuccoed ceiling.
"They told me you lived in a wonderful room," she remarked absently.
"Yes, it's very nice," agreed Peter in the same tone, wondering what
might be the object of her hazardous visit. A flicker of suspicion
suggested that she was trying to compromise him out of revenge for his
renouncement of her, but the next instant he rejected this.
The girl accepted the chair Peter offered and continued to look about.
"I hope you don't mind my staring, Peter," she said.
"I stared when I first came here to stay," assisted Peter, who was
getting a little more like himself, even if a little uneasier at the
consequences of this visit.
"Is that a highboy?" She nodded nervously at the piece of furniture.
"I've seen pictures of them."
"Uh huh. Revolutionary, I believe. The night wind is a little raw." He
moved across the room and closed the jalousies, and thus cut off the
night wind and also the west view from the street. He glanced at the
heavy curtains parted over his front windows, with a keen desire to
swing them together. Some fragment of his mind continued the surface
conversation with Cissie.
"Is it post-Revolutionary or pre-Revolutionary?" she asked with a
preoccupied air.
"Post, I believe. No, pre. I always meant to examine closely."
"To have such things would almost teach one history," Cissie said.
"Yeah; very nice." Peter had decided that the girl was in direct line
with the left front window and an opening between the trees to the
street.
The girl's eyes followed his.
"Are those curtains velour, Peter?"
"I--I believe so," agreed the man, unhappily.
"I--I wonder how they look spread."
Peter seized on this flimsy excuse with a wave of relief and
thankfulness to Cissie. He had to restrain himself as he strode across
the room and swung together the two halves of the somber curtains in
order to preserve an appearance of an exhibit. His fingers were so
nervous that he bungled a moment at the heavy cords, but finally the two
draperies swung together, loosing a little cloud of dust. He drew
together a small aperture where the hangings stood apart, and then
turned away in sincere relief.
Cissie's own interest in historic furniture and textiles came to an
abrupt conclusion. She gave a deep sigh and settled back into her chair.
She sat looking at Peter seriously, almost distressfully, as he came
toward her.
With the closing of the curtains and the establishment of a real privacy
Peter became aware once again of the sweetness and charm Cissie always
held for him. He still wondered what had brought her, but he was no
longer uneasy.
"Perhaps I'd better build a fire," he suggested, quite willing now to
make her visit seem not unusual.
"Oh, no,"--she spoke with polite haste,--"I'm just going to stay a
minute. I don't know what you'll think of me." She looked intently at
him.
"I think it lovely of you to come." He was disgusted with the triteness
of this remark, but he could think of nothing else.
"I don't know," demurred the octoroon, with her faint doubtful smile.
"Persons don't welcome beggars very cordially."
"If all beggars were so charming--" Apparently he couldn't escape
banalities.
But Cissie interrupted whatever speech he meant to make, with a return
of her almost painful seriousness.
"I really came to ask you to help me, Peter."
"Then your need has brought me a pleasure, at least." Some impulse kept
the secretary making those foolish complimentary speeches which keep a
conversation empty and insincere.
"Oh, Peter, I didn't come here for you to talk like that! Will you do
what I want?"
"What do you want, Cissie?" he asked, sobered by her voice and manner.
"I want you to help me, Peter."
"All right, I will." He spaced his words with his speculations about the
nature of her request. "What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to help me go away."
Peter looked at her in surprise. He hardly knew what he had been
expecting, but it was not this.
Some repressed emotion crept into the girl's voice.
"Peter, I--I can't stay here in Hooker's Bend any longer. I want to go
away. I--I've got to go away."
Peter stood regarding her curiously and at the same time
sympathetically.
"Where do you want to go, Cissie?"
The girl drew a long breath; her bosom lifted and dropped abruptly.
"I don't know; that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about."
"You don't know where you want to go?" He smiled faintly. "How do you
know you want to go at all?"
"Oh, Peter, all I know is I must leave Hooker's Bend!" She gave a little
shiver. "I'm tired of it, sick of it--sick." She exhaled a breath, as if
she were indeed physically ill. Her face suggested it; her eyes were
shadowed. "Some Northern city, I suppose," she added.
"And you want me to help you?" inquired Peter, puzzled.
She nodded silently, with a woman's instinct to make a man guess the
favor she is seeking.
Then it occurred to Peter just what sort of assistance the girl did
want. It gave him a faint shock that a girl could come to a man to beg
or to borrow money. It was a white man's shock, a notion he had picked
up in Boston, because it happens frequently among village negroes, and
among them it holds as little significance as children begging one
another for bites of apples.
Peter thought over his bank balance, then started toward a chest of
drawers where he kept his checkbook.
"Cissie, if I can he of any service to you in a substantial way, I'll be
more than glad to--"
She put out a hand and stopped him; then talked on in justification of
her determination to go away.
"I just can't endure it any longer, Peter." She shuddered again. "I
can't stand Niggertown, or this side of town--any of it. They--they have
no _feeling_ for a colored girl, Peter, not--not a speck!" She rave
a gasp, and after a moment plunged on into her wrongs: "When--when one
of us even walks past on the street, they--they whistle and say a-all
kinds of things out loud, j-just as if w-we weren't there at all. Th-
they don't c-care; we're just n-nigger w-women." Cissie suddenly began
sobbing with a faint catching noise, her full bosom shaken by the
spasms; her tears slowly welling over. She drew out a handkerchief with
a part of its lace edge gone, and wiped her eyes and cheeks, holding the
bit of cambric in a ball in her palm, like a negress, instead of in her
fingers, like a white woman, as she had been taught. Then she drew a
deep breath, swallowed, and became more composed.
Peter stood looking in helpless anger at this representative of all
women of his race.
"Cissie, that's street-corner scum--the dirty sewage--"
"They make you feel naked," went on Cissie in the monotone that succeeds
a fit of weeping, "and ashamed--and afraid." She blinked her eyes to
press out the undue moisture, and looked at Peter as if asking what else
she could do about it than to go away from the village.
"Will it be any better away from here?" suggested Peter, doubtfully.
Cissie shook her head.
"I--I suppose not, if--if I go alone."
"I shouldn't think so," agreed Peter, somberly. He started to hearten
her by saying white women also underwent such trials, if that would be a
consolation; but he knew very well that a white woman's hardships were
as nothing compared to those of a colored woman who was endowed with any
grace whatever.
"And besides, Cissie," went on Peter, who somehow found himself arguing
against the notion of her going, "I hardly see how a decent colored
woman gets around at all. Colored boarding-houses are wretched places. I
ate and slept in one or two, coming home. Rotten." The possibility of
Cissie finding herself in such a place moved Peter.
The girl nodded submissively to his judgment, and said in a queer voice:
"That's why I--I didn't want to travel alone, Peter."
"No, it's a bad idea--" and then Peter perceived that a queer quality
was creeping into the tete-a-tete.
She returned his look unsteadily, but with a curious persistence.
[Illustration: "You-you mean you want m-me--to go with you, Cissie?" he
stammered]
"I--I d-don't want to travel a-alone, Peter," she gasped.
Her look, her voice suddenly brought home to the an the amazing
connotation of her words. He stared at her, felt his face grow warm with
a sharp, peculiar embarrassment. He hardly knew what to say or do before
her intent and piteous eyes.
"You--you mean you want m-me--to go with you, Cissie?" he stammered.
The girl suddenly began trembling, now that her last reserve of
indirection had been torn away.
"Listen, Peter," she began breathlessly. "I'm not the sort of woman you
think. If I hadn't accused myself, we'd be married now. I--I wanted you
more than anything in the world, Peter, but I did tell you. Surely,
surely, Peter, that shows I am a good woman--th-the real I. Dear, dear
Peter, there is a difference between a woman and her acts. Peter, you're
the first man in all my life, in a-all my life who ever came to me k-
kindly and gently; so I had to l-love you and t-tell you, Peter."
The girl's wavering voice broke down completely; her face twisted with
grief. She groped for her chair, sat down, buried her face in her arms
on the table, and broke into a chattering outbreak of sobs that sounded
like some sort of laughter.
Her shoulders shook; the light gleamed on her soft, black Caucasian
hair. There was a little rent in one of the seams in her cheap jacket,
at one of the curves where her side molded into her shoulder. The
customer made garment had found Cissie's body of richer mold than it had
been designed to shield. And yet in Peter's distress and tenderness and
embarrassment, this little rent held his attention and somehow misprized
the wearer.
It seemed symbolic in the searching white light. He could see the very
break in the thread and the widened stitches at the ends of the rip. Her
coat had given way because she was modeled more nearly like the Venus de
Milo than the run of womankind. He felt the little irony of the thing,
and yet was quite unable to resist the comparison.