Birthright - T.S. Stribling
They were a queer people. They were a people who would never get on well
and do well. They lacked the steel-like edge that the white man
achieves. By virtue of his hardness, a white man makes his very laws and
virtues instruments to crush and mulct his fellow-man; but negroes are
so softened by untoward streaks of sympathy that they lose the very uses
of their crimes.
The depression of the whole day settled upon Peter with the deepening
night. He held his poor light above his head and picked his way to his
own room. After the magnificence of the Renfrew manor, it had contracted
to a grimy little box lined with yellowed papers. His books were still
intact, but Henry Hooker would get them as part payment on the Dillihay
place, which Henry owned. On his little table still lay the pile of old
examination papers, lists of incoherent questions which somebody
somewhere imagined formed a test of human ability to meet and answer the
mysterious searchings of life.
Peter was familiar with the books; many of the questions he had learned
by rote, but the night and the crescent, and the thought of a pregnant
girl caged in the blackness of a jail filled his soul with a great
melancholy query to which he could find no answer.
CHAPTER XIX
Two voices talking, interrupting each other with ejaculations, after the
fashion of negroes under excitement, aroused Peter Siner from his sleep.
He caught the words: "He did! Tump did! The jailer did! 'Fo' God! black
man, whut's Cissie doin'?"
Overtones of shock, even of horror, in the two voices brought Peter wide
awake the moment he opened his eyes. He sat up suddenly in his bed,
remained perfectly still, listening with his mouth open. The voices,
however, were passing. The words became indistinct, then relapsed into
that bubbling monotone of human voices at a distance, and presently
ceased.
These fragmentary phrases, however, feathered with consternation, filled
Peter with vague premonitions. He whirled his legs out of bed and began
drawing on his clothes. When he was up and into the crescent, however,
nobody was in sight. He stood breathing the chill, damp air, blinking
his eyes. Lack of his cold bath made him feel chilly and lethargic. He
wriggled his shoulders and considered going back, after all, and having
his splash. Just then he saw the Persimmon coming around the crescent.
Peter called to the roustabout and asked about Tump Pack.
The Persimmon looked at Peter with his half-asleep, protruding eyeballs.
"Don' you know 'bout Tump Pack already, Mister Siner?"
"No." Peter was astonished at the formality of the "Mr. Siner."
"Then is you 'spectin' somp'n 'bout him?"
"Why, no, but I was asleep in there a moment ago, and somebody came
along talking about Tump and Cissie. They--they aren't married, are
they?"
"Oh, no-o, no-o-o, no-o-o-o-o." The Persimmon waggled his bullet head
slowly from side to side. "I heared Tump got into a lil trouble wid de
jailer las' night."
"Serious?"
"I dunno." The Persimmon closed one of his protruding yellow eyes.
"Owin' to whut you call se'ius; maybe whut I call se'ius wouldn't be
se'ius to you at all; 'n 'en maybe whut you call se'ius would be ve'y
insince'ius to Tump." The roustabout's philosophy, which consisted in a
monotonous recasting of a given proposition, trickled on and on in the
cold wind. After a while it fizzled out to nothing at all, and the
Persimmon asked in a queer manner: "Did you give Tump some women's
clo'es, Peter?"
It was such an odd question that at first Peter was at loss; then he
recalled Nan Berry's despatching Cissie some underwear. He explained
this to the Persimmon, and tacked on a curious, "Why?"
"Oh, nothin'; nothin' 'tall. Ever'body say you a mighty long-haided
nigger. Jim Pink he tell us 'bout Tump Pack marchin' you 'roun' wid a
gun. I sho don' want you ever git mad at me, Mister Siner. Man wid a gun
an' you turn yo' long haid on him an' blow him away wid a wad o' women's
clo'es. I sho don' want you ever cross yo' fingers at me, Mister Siner."
Peter stared at the grotesque, bullet-headed roustabout. "Persimmon," he
said uneasily, "what in the world are you talking about?"
The Persimmon smiled a sickly, white-toothed smile. "Jim Pink say yo'
aidjucation is a flivver. I say, 'Jim Pink, no nigger don' go off an'
study fo' yeahs in college whut 'n he comes back an' kin throw some kin'
uv a hoodoo over us fool niggers whut ain't got no brains. Now, Tump wid
a gun, an' you wid jes ordina'y women's clo'es! 'Fo' Gawd, aidjucation
is a great thing; sho is a great thing." The Persimmon gave Peter an
apprehensive wink and moved on.
There was no use trying to extract information from the Persimmon unless
he was minded to give it. His talk would merely become vaguer and
vaguer. Peter watched him go, then turned and attempted to throw the
whole matter off his mind by assuming a certain brisk Northern mood. He
must pack, get ready for the down-river gasolene launch. The doings of
Tump Pack and Cissie Dildine were, after all, nothing to him.
He started inside, when the levy notice on the door again met his eyes.
He paused, read it over once more, and decided that he must go over the
hill to the Planter's Bank and get Henry Hooker's permission to remove
certain small personal belongings that he wanted to take with him.
The mere clear-cut decision to go invigorated Peter.
Some of the energy that always filled him during his college days in
Boston seemed to come to him now from the mere thought of the North.
Soon he would be in the midst of it, moving briskly, talking to wide-
awake men to whom a slightly unusual English word would not form a
stumbling-block to conversation. He set out down the crescent and across
the Big Hill at a swinging stride. He was glad to get away.
Beyond the white church on the other side of the hill he heard a motor
coming in on the Jonesboro road. Presently he saw a battered car moving
around the long swing of the pike, spewing a trail of dust down the
wind. Its clacking became prodigious.
The mulatto was just entering that indefinite stretch of thoroughfare
where a country road becomes a village street when there came a wail of
brakes behind him and he looked around.
It was Dawson Bobbs's car. The fat man now slowed up not far from the
mulatto and called to him.
"Yes, sir," said Peter.
Dawson bobbed his fat head backward and upward in a signal for Peter to
approach. It held the casualness of one certain to be obeyed.
Although Peter had done no crime, nor had even harbored a criminal
intention, a trickle of apprehension went through him at Bobbs's nod. He
recalled Jim Pink's saying that it was bad luck to see the constable. He
walked up to the shuddering motor and stood about three feet from the
running-board.
The officer bit on a sliver of toothpick that he held in his thin lips.
"Accident up Jonesboro las' night, Peter."
"What was it, Mr. Bobbs?"
"Tump Pack got killed."
Peter continued looking fixedly at Mr. Bobbs's broad red face. The dusty
road beneath him seemed to give a little dip. He repeated the
information emptily, trying to orient himself to this sudden change in
his whole mental horizon.
The officer was looking at Peter fixedly with his chill slits of eyes.
"Yeah; trying to make a jail delivery."
The two men continued looking at each other, one from the road, the
other from the motor. The flow of Peter's thoughts seemed to divide. The
greater part was occupied with Tump Pack. Peter could vision the
formidable ex-soldier lying dead in Jonesboro jail, with his little
congressional medal on his breast. Some lighter portion of his mind
nickered about here and there on trivial things. He observed a little
hole rusted in the running-board of the motor. He noticed that the
officer's eyes were just the same chill, washed blue as the winter sky
above his head. He remembered a tale that, before electrocution became a
law in Tennessee the county sheriff's nerve had failed him at a hanging,
and the constable Dawson Bobbs had sprung the drop. There was something
terrible about the fat man. He would do anything, absolutely anything,
that came to his hands in the way of legal sewage.
In the midst of these thoughts Peter heard himself saying.
"He--was trying to get Cissie out?"
"Yep."
"He--must have been drunk."
"Oh, yeah."
Mr. Bobbs sat studying the mulatto. As he studied him he said slowly:
"Some of 'em say he was disguised as a woman. Others say he had some
women's clothes along, ready to put on. Now, me and the sheriff knowed
Tump Pack purty well, Peter, and we knowed that nigger never in the
worl' would 'a' thought up sich a plan by hisself."
He sat looking at Peter so interrogatively that the mulatto began, in a
strained, earnest voice, telling the constable precisely what had
happened in regard to the clothes.
Mr. Bobbs sat listening impassively, moving his toothpick up and down
from one side to the other of his small, thin-lipped mouth. At last he
nodded.
"Well, I guess that's about the way of it. I didn't exactly understand
the women's clothes business,--damn' fool disguise,--but we figgered it
might pop into the head of a' edjucated nigger." He sucked his teeth,
reflectively. "Peter," he said at last, "seems to me, if I was you, I'd
drift on away from this town. The niggers around here ain't strong for
you now; some say you're a hoodoo; some say this an' some that. The
white folks don't exactly like you trying to get up a cook's union. It's
your right to do that if you want to, of course, but this is a mighty
small city to have unions and things. The fact is, it ain't a big enough
place for a nigger of yore ability, Peter. I b'lieve, if I was you, I'd
jes drift on some'eres else."
The officer tipped up his toothpick so that it lifted his upper lip in a
little v-shaped opening and exposed a strong, yellowish tooth. At the
moment his machine started slowly forward. It gave him the appearance of
accidentally rolling off while immersed in deep thought.
* * * * *
The death of Tump Pack moved Peter with a sense of strange pathos. He
always remembered Tump tramping away through the night to carry Cissie
some underclothes and, if possible, to take her place in jail. At the
foundation of Tump's being lay a faithfulness and devotion to Cissie
that reached the heights of a dog's. And yet, he might have deserted
her, he would probably have beaten her, and he most certainly would have
betrayed her many, many times. It was inexplicable.
Now that Tump was dead, the mantle of his fidelity somehow seemed to
fall on Peter. For some reason Peter felt that he should assume Tump's
place as Cissie Dildine's husband and protector. Had Tump lived, Peter
might have gone North in peace, if not in happiness. Now such a journey,
without Cissie, had become impossible. He had a feeling that it would
not be right.
As for the disgrace of marrying such a woman as Cissie Dildine, Peter
slowly gave that idea up. The "worthinesses" and "disgraces" implicit in
Harvard atmosphere, which Peter had spent four years of his life
imbibing, slowly melted away in the air of Niggertown. What was
honorable there, what was disgraceful there, somehow changed its color
here.
By virtue of this change Peter felt intuitively that Cissie Dildine was
neither disgraced by her arrest nor soiled by her physical condition.
Somehow she seemed just as "nice" a girl, just as "good" a girl, as ever
she was before. Moreover, every other darky in Niggertown held these
same instinctive beliefs. Had it not been for that, Peter would have
thought it was his passion pleading for the girl, justifying itself by a
grotesque morality, as passions often do. But this was not the correct
solution. The sentiment was enigmatic. Peter puzzled over it time and
time again as he waited in Hooker's Bend for the outcome of Cissie's
trial.
The octoroon's imprisonment came to an end on the third day after Tump's
death. Sam Arkwright's parents had not known of their son's legal
proceedings, and Mr. Arkwright immediately quashed the warrant, and
hushed up the unfortunate matter as best he could. Young Sam was
suddenly sent away from home to college, as the best step in the
circumstances. And so the wishes of the adolescent in the cedar-glade
came queerly to pass, even if Peter did withhold any grave, mature
advice on the subject which he may have possessed.
Naturally, there was much mirth among the men of Hooker's Bend and much
virulence among the women over the peculiar conditions under which young
Sam made his pilgrimage in pursuit of wisdom and morals and the right
conduct of life. And life being problematic and uncertain as it is, and
prone to wind about in the strangest way, no one may say with certitude
that young Sam did not make a promising start.
Certainly, over the affair the Knights of the Round Table launched many
a quip and jest, but that simply proved the fineness of their sentiments
toward a certain delicate human relation which forms mankind's single
awful approach to the creative and the holy.
Tump Pack became almost a mythical figure in Niggertown. Jim Pink Staggs
composed a saga relating the soldier's exploits in France, his assault
on the jail to liberate Cissie, and his death.
In his songs--and Jim Pink had composed a good many--the minstrel
instinctively avoided humor. He always improvised them to the sobbing of
a guitar, and they were as invariably sad as the poetry of adolescents.
It was called "Tump Pack's Lament." The negroes of Hooker's Bend learned
it from Jim Pink, and with them it drifted up and down the three great
American rivers, and now it is sung by the roustabouts, stevedores, and
underlings of our strange black American world.
This song commemorating Tump Pack's bravery and faithfulness to his love
may very well take the place of the Congressional medal which,
unfortunately, was lost on the night the soldier was killed. Between the
two, there is little doubt that the accolade of fame bestowed in the
buffoon's simple melody is more vital and enduring than that accorded by
special act of the Congress of the United States of America.
When Cissie Dildine returned from jail, she and her mother arranged the
Dildine-Siner wedding as nearly according to white standards in similar
circumstances as they could conceive. They agreed that it should be a
simple, quiet home wedding. However, as every soul in Niggertown, a
number of colored friends in Jonesboro, and a contingent from up-river
villages meant to attend, it became necessary to hold the service in the
church.
The officiating minister was not Parson Ranson after all, but a Reverend
Cleotus Haidus, the presiding elder of that circuit of the Afro-American
Methodist Church, whose duties happened to call him to Hooker's Bend
that day. So, notwithstanding Cissie's efforts at simplicity, the
wedding, after all, was resolved into an affair.
Once, in one of her moments of clairvoyance, Cissie said to Peter:
"Our trouble is, Peter, we are trying to mix what I have learned in
Nashville and what you have learned in Boston with what we both feel in
Hooker's Bend. I--I'm almost ashamed to say it, but I don't really feel
sad and plaintive at all, Peter. I feel glad, gloriously glad. Oh, my
dear, dear Peter!" and she flung her arms around Peter's neck and held
him with all her might against her ripening bosom.
To Cissie her theft, her jail sentence, her pregnancy, were nothing more
than if she had taken a sip of water. However, with the imitativeness of
her race and the histrionic ability of her sex, she appeared pensive and
subdued during the elaborate double-ring ceremony performed by the
Reverend Cleotus Haidus. Nobody in the packed church knew how
tremendously Cissie's heart was beating except Peter, who held her hand.
The ethical engine that Peter had patiently builded in Harvard almost
ceased to function in this weird morality of Niggertown. Whether he were
doing right or doing wrong, Peter could not determine. He lost all his
moorings. At times he felt himself walking according to the ethnological
law, which is the Harvard way of saying walking according to the will of
God; but at other times he felt party to some unpardonable obscenity. So
deeply was he disturbed that out of the dregs of his mind floated up old
bits of the Scriptures that he was unaware of possessing: "There is a
way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of
death." And Peter wondered if he were not in that way.
[Illustration: The bridal couple embarked for Cairo]
The bridal couple embarked for Cairo on the _Red Cloud_, a packet
in the Dubuque, Ohio, and Tennessee River trade. Peter and Cissie were
not allowed to walk up the main stairway into the passengers' cabin, but
were required to pick their way along the boiler-deck, through the
stench of freight, lumber, live stock and sleeping roustabouts. Then
they went through the heat and steam of the engine-room up a small
companionway that led through the toilet, on to the rear guard of the
main deck, and thence back to a little cuddy behind the main saloon
called the chambermaid's cabin.
The chambermaid's cabin was filled with the perpetual odor of hot soap-
suds, soiled laundry, and the broader smell of steam and the boat's
machinery. The little place trembled night and day, for the steamer's
engines were just beneath them, and immediately behind them thundered
the great stern-wheel of the packet. A single square window in the end
of the chambermaid's cabin looked out on the wheel, but at all times,
except when the wind was blowing from just the right quarter, this
window was deluged with a veritable Niagara of water. The continual
shake of the cabin, the creak of the rudder-beam working to and fro, the
watery thunder of the wheel, and the solemn rumble of the engines made
conversation impossible until the travelers grew accustomed to the
noises. Still, Cissie found it pleasant. She liked to sit and look out
into the main saloon, with its interminable gilded scrolls extending
away up the long cabin, a suave perspective. She liked to watch the
white passengers dine--the white napery, the bouquets, the endless
tables all filled with diners; some swathed in napkins from chin to
waistband, others less completely protected. It gave Cissie a certain
tang of triumph to smile at the swathed ones and to think that she knew
better than that.
At night a negro string-band played for the white excursionists to
dance, and Cissie would sit, with glowing eyes, clenching Peter's hand,
every fiber of her asway to the music, and it seemed as if her heart
would go mad. All these inhibitions, all this spreading before her of
forbidden joys, did not daunt her delight. She reveled in them by
propinquity.
The chambermaid was a Mrs. Antolia Higgman, a strong, full-bodied
_cafe-au-lait_ negress. She was a very sensible woman, and during
her work on the boat she had picked up a Northern accent and a number of
little mannerisms from the Chicago and St. Louis excursionists, who made
ten-day round trips from Dubuque to Florence, Alabama, and return. When
Mrs. Higgman was not running errands for the women passengers, she was
working at her perpetual laundering.
At first Peter was a little uneasy as to how Mrs. Higgman would treat
Cissie, but she turned out a good-hearted woman, and did everything she
could to make the young wife comfortable. It soon became clear that Mrs.
Higgman knew the whole situation, for one day she said to Cissie in her
odd dialect, burred with Yankeeish "r's" and "ing's."
"These river-r towns, Mrs. Siner-r, are jest like one big village, with
the river-r for its Main Street. I know ever-r'thang that goes on,
through the cabin-boys an' cooks, an'--an'--you cerrtainly ar-re a dear-
r, Mrs. Siner-r," and thereupon, quite unexpectedly, she kissed Cissie.
So on about the second day down the river Cissie dropped her saddened
manner and became frankly, freely, and riotously happy. After the
fashion of village negresses, she insisted on helping Mrs. Higgman with
her work, and, incidentally, she cultivated Mrs. Higgman's Northern
accent. When the chambermaid was out on her errands and Cissie found a
moment alone with Peter, she would tweak his ear or pull his cheek and
provoke him to kiss her. Indeed, it was all the hot, shuddering little
laundry-room could do to contain the gay and bubbling Cissie.
Peter thought and thought, resignedly now, but persistently, how this
strange happiness that belonged to them both could be. He was content,
yet he felt he ought not to be content. He thought there must be
something base in himself, yet he felt that there was not. He drank the
wine of his honeymoon marveling.
On the morning before the _Red Cloud_ entered the port of Cairo
Mrs. Higgman was out of the cabin, and Peter stood at the little square
window, with his arm about Cissie's waist, looking out to the rear of
the steamer. A strong east wind blew the spray away from the glass, and
Peter could see the huge wheel covered with a waterfall thundering
beneath him. Back of the wheel stretched a long row of even waves and
troughs. Every seventh or eighth wave tumbled over on itself in a swash
of foam. These flashing stern waves strung far up the river. On each
side of the great waterway stretched the flat shores of Kentucky and
Ohio. Here and there over the broad clay-colored water moved other
boats--tow-boats, a string of government auto-barges, a snag-boat,
another packet.
Peter gave up his question. The curves of Cissie's form in his arm held
a sweetness and a restfulness that her maidenhood had never promised. He
felt so deeply sure of his happiness that it seemed strange to him that
he could not aline his emotions and his mind.
As Peter stood staring up the Ohio River, it occurred to him that
perhaps, in some queer way, the morals of black folk were not the morals
of white folk; perhaps the laws that bound one race were not the laws
that bound the other. It might be that white anathemas were black
blessings. Peter thought along this line peacefully for several minutes.
And finally he concluded that, after all, morals and conventions, right
and wrong, are merely those precepts that a race have practised and
found good in its evolution. Morals are the training rules that keep a
people fit. It might very well be that one moral regime is applicable to
one race, and quite another to another.
The single object of all morals is racial welfare, the racial integrity,
the breeding of strong children to perpetuate the species. If the black
race possess a more exuberant vitality than some other race, then the
black would not be forced to practise so severe a vital economy as some
less virile folk. Racial morals are simply a question of having and
spending within safety limits.
Peter knew that for years white men had held a prejudice against
marrying widows. This is utterly without grounds except for one reason:
the first born of a woman is the lustiest. Among the still weaker Aryans
of India the widows burn themselves. Among certain South Sea Islanders
only the first-born may live and mate; all other children are slain.
Among nearly every white race marriage lines are strictly drawn, and the
tendency is to have few children to a family, to conserve the precious
vital impulse. So strong is this feeling of birth control that to-day
nearly all American white women are ashamed of large families. This
shame is the beginning of a convention; the convention may harden into a
cult, a law, or a religion.
And here is the amazing part of morals. Morals are always directed
toward one particular race, but the individual members of that race
always feel that their brand of morals does and should apply to all the
peoples of the earth; so one has the spectacle of nations sending out
missionaries and battle-ships to teach and enforce their particular
folk-ways. Another queer thing is that whereas the end of morals is
designed solely for the betterment of the race, and is entirely
regardless of the person, to the conscience of the person morals are
always translated as something that binds him personally, that will
shame him or honor him personally not only for the brief span of this
worldly life, but through an eternity to come. To him, his particular
code, surrounded by all the sanctions of custom, law, and religion,
appears earth-embracing, hell-deep, and heaven-piercing, and any human
creature who follows any other code appears fatally wicked, utterly
shameless, and ineluctably lost.
And yet there is no such thing as absolute morals. Morals are as
transitory as the sheen on a blackbird's wing; they change perpetually
with the necessities of the race. Any people with an abounding vitality
will naturally practise customs which a less vital people must shun.
Morals are nothing more than the engines controlling the stream of
energy that propel a race on its course. All engines are not alike, nor
are all races bound for the same port.