Birthright - T.S. Stribling
Peter Siner walked back into the kitchen with the fixed smile of a man
who is thinking of a pretty girl. The black dowager in the kitchen
received him in silence, with her thick lips pouted. When Peter observed
it, he felt slightly amused at his mother's resentment.
"Well, you sho had a lot o' chatter over signin' a lil ole paper."
"She signed for ten dollars," said Peter, smiling.
"Huh! she'll never pay it."
"Said Tump Pack would pay it."
"Huh!" The old negress dropped the subject, and nodded at a huge double
pan on the table. "Dat's whut she brung you." She grunted
disapprovingly.
"And it's for you, too, Mother."
"Ya-as, I 'magine she brung somp'n fuh me."
Peter walked across to the double pans, and saw they held a complete
dinner--chicken, hot biscuits, cake, pickle, even ice-cream.
The sight of the food brought Peter a realization that he was keenly
hungry. As a matter of fact, he had not eaten a palatable meal since he
had been evicted from the white dining-car at Cairo, Illinois. Siner
served his own and his mother's plate.
The old woman sniffed again.
"Seems to me lak you is mighty onobsarvin' fuh a nigger whut's been off
to college."
"Anything else?" Peter looked into the pans again.
"Ain't you see whut it's all in?"
"What it's in?"
"Yeah; whut it's in. You heared whut I said."
"What is it in?"
"Why, it's in Miss Arkwright's tukky roaster, dat's whut it's in." The
old negress drove her point home with an acid accent.
Peter Siner was too loyal to his new friendship with Cissie Dildine to
allow his mother's jealous suspicions to affect him; nevertheless the
old woman's observations about the turkey roaster did prevent a complete
and care-free enjoyment of the meal. Certainly there were other turkey
roasters in Hooker's Bend than Mrs. Arkwright's. Cissie might very well
own a roaster. It was absurd to think that Cissie, in the midst of her
almost pathetic struggle to break away from the uncouthness of
Niggertown, would stoop to--Even in his thoughts Peter avoided
nominating the charge.
And then, somehow, his memory fished up the fact that years ago Ida May,
according to village rumor, was "light-fingered." At that time in
Peter's life "light-fingeredness" carried with it no opprobrium
whatever. It was simply a fact about Ida May, as were her sloe eyes and
curling black hair. His reflections renewed his perpetual sense of
queerness and strangeness that hall-marked every phase of Niggertown
life since his return from the North.
* * * * *
Cissie Dildine's contribution tailed out the one hundred dollars that
Peter needed, and after he had finished his meal, the mulatto set out
across the Big Hill for the white section of the village, to complete
his trade.
It was Peter's program to go to the Planter's Bank, pay down his
hundred, and receive a deed from one Elias Tomwit, which the bank held
in escrow. Two or three days before Peter had tried to borrow the
initial hundred from the bank, but the cashier, Henry Hooker, after
going into the transaction, had declined the loan, and therefore Siner
had been forced to await a meeting of the Sons and Daughters of
Benevolence. At this meeting the subscription had gone through promptly.
The land the negroes purposed to purchase for an industrial school was a
timbered tract tying southeast of Hooker's Bend on the head-waters of
Ross Creek. A purchase price of eight hundred dollars had been agreed
upon. The timber on the tract, sold on the stump, would bring almost
that amount. It was Siner's plan to commandeer free labor in Niggertown,
work off the timber, and have enough money to build the first unit of
his school. A number of negro men already had subscribed a certain
number of days' work in the timber. It was a modest and entirely
practical program, and Peter felt set up over it.
The brown man turned briskly out into the hot afternoon sunshine, down
the mean semicircular street, where piccaninnies were kicking up clouds
of dust. He hurried through the dusty area, and presently turned off a
by-path that led over the hill, through a glade of cedars, to the white
village.
The glade was gloomy, but warm, for the shade of cedars somehow seems to
hold heat. A carpet of needles hushed Siner's footfalls and spread a
Sabbatical silence through the grove. The upward path was not smooth,
but was broken with outcrops of the same reddish limestone that marks
the whole stretch of the Tennessee River. Here and there in the grove
were circles eight or ten feet in diameter, brushed perfectly clean of
all needles and pebbles and twigs. These places were crap-shooters'
circles, where black and white men squatted to shoot dice.
Under the big stones on the hillside, Peter knew, was cached illicit
whisky, and at night the boot-leggers carried on a brisk trade among the
gamblers. More than that, the glade on the Big Hill was used for still
more demoralizing ends. It became a squalid grove of Ashtoreth; but now,
in the autumn evening, all the petty obscenities of white and black
sloughed away amid the religious implications of the dark-green aisles.
The sight of a white boy sitting on an outcrop of limestone with a strap
of school-books dropped at his feet rather surprised Peter. The negro
looked at the hobbledehoy for several seconds before he recognized in
the lanky youth a little Arkwright boy whom he had known and played with
in his pre-college days. Now there was such an exaggerated wistfulness
in young Arkwright's attitude that Peter was amused.
"Hello, Sam," he called. "What you doing out here?"
The Arkwright boy turned with a start.
"Aw, is that you, Siner?" Before the negro could reply, he added: "Was
you on the Harvard football team, Siner? Guess the white fellers have a
pretty gay time in Harvard, don't they, Siner? Geemenettie! but I git
tired o' this dern town! D' reckon I could make the football team? Looks
like I could if a nigger like you could, Siner."
None of this juvenile outbreak of questions required answers. Peter
stood looking at the hobbledehoy without smiling.
"Aren't you going to school?" he asked.
Arkwright shrugged.
"Aw, hell!" he said self-consciously. "We got marched down to the
protracted meetin' while ago--whole school did. My seat happened to be
close to a window. When they all stood up to sing, I crawled out and
skipped. Don't mention that, Siner."
"I won't."
"When a fellow goes to college he don't git marched to preachin', does
he, Siner?"
"I never did."
"We-e-ll," mused young Sam, doubtfully, "you're a nigger."
"I never saw any white men marched in, either."
"Oh, hell! I wish I was in college."
"What are you sitting out here thinking about?" inquired Peter of the
ingenuous youngster.
"Oh--football and--women and God and--how to stack cards. You think
about ever'thing, in the woods. Damn it! I got to git out o' this little
jay town. D' reckon I could git in the navy, Siner?"
"Don't see why you couldn't, Sam. Have you seen Tump Pack anywhere?"
"Yeah; on Hobbett's corner. Say, is Cissie Dildine at home?"
"I believe she is."
"She cooks for us," explained young Arkwright, "and Mammy wants her to
come and git supper, too."
The phrase "get supper, too," referred to the custom in the white homes
of Hooker's Bend of having only two meals cooked a day, breakfast and
the twelve-o'clock dinner, with a hot supper optional with the mistress.
Peter nodded, and passed on up the path, leaving young Arkwright seated
on the ledge of rock, a prey to all the boiling, erratic impulses of
adolescence. The negro sensed some of the innumerable difficulties of
this white boy's life, and once, as he walked on over the silent
needles, he felt an impulse to turn back and talk to young Sam
Arkwright, to sit down and try to explain to the youth what he could of
this hazardous adventure called Life. But then, he reflected, very
likely the boy would be offended at a serious talk from a negro. Also,
he thought that young Arkwright, being white, was really not within the
sphere of his ministry. He, Peter Siner, was a worker in the black world
of the South. He was part of the black world which the white South was
so meticulous to hide away, to keep out of sight and out of thought.
A certain vague sense of triumph trickled through some obscure corner of
Peter's mind. It was so subtle that Peter himself would have been the
first, in all good faith, to deny it and to affirm that all his motives
were altruistic. Once he looked back through the cedars. He could still
see the boy hunched over, chin in fist, staring at the mat of needles.
As Peter turned the brow of the Big Hill, he saw at its eastern foot the
village church, a plain brick building with a decaying spire. Its side
was perforated by four tall arched windows. Each was a memorial window
of stained glass, which gave the building a black look from the outside.
As Peter walked down the hill toward the church he heard the and
somewhat nasal singing of uncultivated voices mingled with the snoring
of a reed organ.
When he reached Main Street, Peter found the whole business portion
virtually deserted. All the stores were closed, and in every show-window
stood a printed notice that no business would be transacted between the
hours of two and three o'clock in the afternoon during the two weeks of
revival then in progress. Beside this notice stood another card, giving
the minister's text for the current day. On this particular day it read:
GO YE INTO ALL THE WORLD
Come hear Rev. E.B. Blackwater's great
Missionary Address on
CHRISTIANIZING AFRICA
ELOQUENT, PROFOUND, HEART-SEARCHING.
ILLUSTRATED WITH SLIDES.
Half a dozen negroes lounged in the sunshine on Hobbett's corner as
Peter came up. They were amusing themselves after the fashion of blacks,
with mock fights, feints, sudden wrestlings. They would seize one
another by the head and grind their knuckles into one another's wool.
Occasionally, one would leap up and fall into one of those grotesque
shuffles called "breakdowns." It all held a certain rawness, an
irrepressible juvenility.
As Peter came up, Tump Pack detached himself from the group and gave a
pantomime of thrusting. He was clearly reproducing the action which had
won for him his military medal. Then suddenly he fell down in the dust
and writhed. He was mimicking with a ghastly realism the death-throes of
his four victims. His audience howled with mirth at this dumb show of
the bayonet-fight and of killing four men. Tump himself got up out of
the dust with tears of laughter in his eyes. Peter caught the end of his
sentence, "Sho put it to 'em, black boy. Fo' white men--"
His audience roared again, swayed around, and pounded one another in an
excess of mirth.
Siner shouted from across the street two or three times before he caught
Tump's attention. The ex-soldier looked around, sobered abruptly.
"Whut-chu want, nigger?" His inquiry was not over-cordial.
Peter nodded him across the street.
The heavily built black in khaki hesitated a moment, then started across
the street with the dragging feet of a reluctant negro. Peter looked at
him as he came up.
"What's the matter, Tump?" he asked playfully.
"Ain't nothin' matter wid me, nigger." Peter made a guess at Tump's
surliness.
"Look here, are you puffed up because Cissie Dildine struck you for a
ten?"
Tump's expression changed.
"Is she struck me fuh a ten?"
"Yes; on that school subscription."
"Is dat whut you two niggers wuz a-talkin' 'bout over thaiuh in yo'
house?"
"Exactly." Peter showed the list, with Cissie's name on it. "She told me
to collect from you."
Tump brightened up.
"So dat wuz whut you two niggers wuz a-talkin' 'bout over at yo' house."
He ran a fist down into his khaki, and drew out three or four one-dollar
bills and about a pint of small change. It was the usual crap-shooter's
offering. The two negroes sat down on the ramshackle porch of an old
jeweler's shop, and Tump began a complicated tally of ten dollars.
By the time he had his dimes, quarters, and nickels in separate stacks,
services in the village church were finished, and the congregation came
filing up the street. First came the school-children, running and
chattering and swinging their books by the straps; then the business men
of the hamlet, rather uncomfortable in coats and collars, hurrying back
to their stores; finally came the women, surrounding the preacher.
Tump and Peter walked on up to the entrance of the Planter's Bank and
there awaited Mr. Henry Hooker, the cashier. Presently a skinny man
detached himself from the church crowd and came angling across the dirty
street toward the bank. Mr. Hooker wore somewhat shabby clothes for a
banker; in fact, he never could recover from certain personal habits
formed during a penurious boyhood. He had a thin hatchet face which just
at this moment was shining though from some inward glow. Although he was
an unhandsome little man, his expression was that of one at peace with
man and God and was pleasant to see. He had been so excited by the
minister that he was constrained to say something even to two negroes.
So as he unlocked the little one-story bank, he told Tump and Peter that
he had been listening to a man who was truly a man of God. He said
Blackwater could touch the hardest heart, and, sure enough, Mr. Hooker's
rather popped and narrow-set eyes looked as though he had been crying.
All this encomium was given in a high, cracked voice as the cashier
opened the door and turned the negroes into the bank. Tump, who stood
with his hat off, listening to all the cashier had to say, said he
thought so, too.
The shabby interior of the little bank, the shabby little banker,
renewed that sense of disillusion that pervaded Peter's home-coming. In
Boston the mulatto had done his slight banking business in a white
marble structure with tellers of machine-like briskness and neatness.
Mr. Hooker strolled around into his grill-cage; when he was thoroughly
ensconced he began business in his high voice:
"You came to see me about that land, Peter?"
Yes, sir."
"Sorry to tell you, Peter, you are not back in time to get the Tomwit
place."
Peter came out of his musing over the Boston banks with a sense of
bewilderment.
"How's that? why, I bought that land--"
"But you paid nothing for your option, Siner."
"I had a clear-cut understanding with Mr. Tomwit--"
Mr. Hooker smiled a smile that brought out sharp wrinkles around the
thin nose on his thin face.
"You should have paid him an earnest, Siner, if you wanted to bind your
trade. You colored folks are always stumbling over the law."
Peter stared through the grating, not knowing what to do.
"I'll go see Mr. Tomwit," he said, and started uncertainly for the door.
The cashier's falsetto stopped him:
"No use, Peter. Mr. Tomwit surprised me, too, but no use talking about
it. I didn't like to see such an important thing as the education of our
colored people held up, myself. I've been thinking about it."
"Especially when I had made a fair square trade," put in Peter, warmly.
"Exactly," squeaked the cashier. "And rather than let your project be
delayed, I'm going to offer you the old Dillihay place at exactly the
same price, Peter--eight hundred."
"The Dillihay place?"
"Yes; that's west of town; it's bigger by twenty acres than old man
Tomwit's place."
Peter considered the proposition.
"I'll have to carry this before the Sons and Daughters of Benevolence,
Mr. Hooker."
The cashier repeated the smile that bracketed his thin nose in wrinkles.
"That's with you, but you know what you say goes with the niggers here
in town, and, besides, I won't promise how long I'll hold the Dillihay
place. Real estate is brisk around here now. I didn't want to delay a
good work on account of not having a location." Mr. Hooker turned away
to a big ledger on a breast-high desk, and apparently was about to
settle himself to the endless routine of bank work.
Peter knew the Dillihay place well. It lacked the timber of the other
tract; still, it was fairly desirable. He hesitated before the tarnished
grill.
"What do you think about it, Tump?"
"You won't make a mistake in buying," answered the high voice of Mr.
Hooker at his ledger.
"I don' think you'll make no mistake in buyin', Peter," repeated Tump's
bass.
Peter turned back a little uncertainly, and asked how long it would take
to fix the new deed. He had a notion of making a flying canvass of the
officers of the Sons and Daughters in the interim. He was surprised to
find that Mr. Hooker already had the deed and the notes ready to sign,
in anticipation of Peter's desires. Here the banker brought out the set
of papers.
"I'll take it," decided Peter; "and if the lodge doesn't want it, I'll
keep the place myself."
"I like to deal with a man of decision," piped the cashier, a wrinkled
smile on his sharp face.
Peter pushed in his bag of collections, then Mr. Hooker signed the deed,
and Peter signed the land notes. They exchanged the instruments. Peter
received the crisp deed, bound in blue manuscript cover. It rattled
unctuously. To Peter it was his first step toward a second Tuskegee.
The two negroes walked out of the Planter's Bank filled with a sense of
well-doing. Tump Pack was openly proud of having been connected, even in
a casual way, with the purchase. As he walked down the steps, he turned
to Peter.
"Don' reckon nobody could git a deed off on you wid stoppers in it, does
you?"
"We don't know any such word as 'stop,' Tump," declared Peter, gaily.
For Peter was gay. The whole incident at the bank was beginning to
please him. The meeting of a sudden difficulty, his quick decision--it
held the quality of leadership. Napoleon had it.
The two colored men stepped briskly through the afternoon sunshine along
the mean village street. Here and there in front of their doorways sat
the merchants yawning and talking, or watching pigs root in the piles of
waste.
In Peter's heart came a wonderful thought. He would make his industrial
institution such a model of neatness that the whole village of Hooker's
Bend would catch the spirit. The white people should see that something
clean and uplifting could come out of Niggertown. The two races ought to
live for a mutual benefit. It was a fine, generous thought. For some
reason, just then, there flickered through Peter's mind a picture of the
Arkwright boy sitting hunched over in the cedar glade, staring at the
needles.
All this musing was brushed away by the sight of old Mr. Tomwit crossing
the street from the east side to the livery-stable on the west. That
human desire of wanting the person who has wronged you to know that you
know your injury moved Peter to hurry his steps and to speak to the old
gentleman.
Mr. Tomwit had been a Confederate cavalryman in the Civil War, and there
was still a faint breeze and horsiness about him. He was a hammered-down
old gentleman, with hair thin but still jet-black, a seamed, sunburned
face, and a flattened nose. His voice was always a friendly roar. Now,
when he saw Peter turning across the street to meet him, he halted and
called out at once:
"Now Peter, I know what's the matter with you. I didn't do you right."
Peter went closer, not caring to take the whole village into his
confidence.
"How came you to turn down my proposition, Mr. Tomwit," he asked, "after
we had agreed and drawn up the papers?"
"We-e-ell, I had to do it, Peter," explained the old man, loudly.
"Why, Mr. Tomwit?"
"A white neighbor wanted me to, Peter," boomed the cavalryman.
"Who, Mr. Tomwit?"
"Henry Hooker talked me into it, Peter. It was a mean trick, Peter. I
done you wrong." He stood nodding his head and rubbing his flattened
nose in an impersonal manner. "Yes, I done you wrong, Peter," he
acknowledged loudly, and looked frankly into Peter's eyes.
The negro was immensely surprised that Henry Hooker had done such a
thing. A thought came that perhaps some other Henry Hooker had moved
into town in his absence.
"You don't mean the cashier of the bank?"
Old Mr. Tomwit drew out a plug of Black Mule tobacco, set some gapped,
discolored teeth into corner, nodded at Peter silently, at the same time
utilizing the nod to tear off a large quid. He rolled tin about with his
tongue and after a few moments adjusted it so that he could speak.
"Yeah," he proceeded in a muffled tone, "they ain't but one Henry
Hooker; he is the one and only Henry. He said if I sold you my land,
you'd put up a nigger school and bring in so many blackbirds you'd run
me clean off my farm. He said it'd ruin the whole town, a nigger school
would."
Peter was astonished.
"Why, he didn't talk that way to me!"
"Natchelly, natchelly," agreed the old cavalryman, dryly.--"Henry has a
different way to talk to ever' man, Peter."
"In fact," proceeded Peter, "Mr. Hooker sold me the old Dillihay place
in lieu of the deal I missed with you."
Old Mr. Tomwit moved his quid in surprise.
"The hell he did!"
"That at least shows he doesn't think a negro school would ruin the
value of his land. He owns farms all around the Dillihay place."
Old Mr. Tomwit turned his quid over twice and spat thoughtfully.
"That your deed in your pocket?" With the air of a man certain of being
obeyed he held out his hand for the blue manuscript cover protruding
from the mulatto's pocket. Peter handed it over. The old gentleman
unfolded the deed, then moved it carefully to and from his eyes until
the typewriting was adjusted to his focus. He read it slowly, with a
movement of his lips and a drooling of tobacco-juice. Finally he
finished, remarked, "I be damned!" in a deliberate voice, returned the
deed, and proceeded across the street to the livery-stable, which was
fronted by an old mulberry-tree, with several chairs under it. In one of
these chairs he would sit for the remainder of the day, making an
occasional loud remark about the weather or the crops, and watching the
horses pass in and out of the stable.
Siner had vaguely enjoyed old Mr. Tomwit's discomfiture over the deed,
if it was discomfiture that had moved the old gentleman to his
sententious profanity. But the negro did not understand Henry Hooker's
action at all. The banker had abused his position of trust as holder of
a deed in escrow snapping up the sale himself; then he had sold Peter
the Dillihay place. It was a queer shift.
Tump Pack caught his principal's mood with that chameleon-like mental
quality all negroes possess.
"Dat Henry Hooker," criticized Tump, "allus was a lil ole dried-up snake
in de grass."
"He abused his position of trust," said Peter, gloomily; "I must say,
his motives seem very obscure to me."
"Dat sho am a fine way to put hit," said Tump, admiringly.
"Why do you suppose he bought in the Tomwit tract and sold me the
Dillihay place?"
Asked for an opinion, Tump began twiddling military medal and corrugated
the skin on his inch-high brow.
"Now you puts it to me lak dat, Peter," he answered with importance, "I
wonders ef dat gimlet-haided white man ain't put some stoppers in dat
deed he guv you. He mout of."
Such remarks as that from Tump always annoyed Peter. Tump's intellectual
method was to talk sense just long enough to gain his companion's ear,
and then produce something absurd and quash the tentative interest.
Siner turned away from him and said, "Piffle."
Tump was defensive at once.
"'T ain't piffle, either! I's talkin' sense, nigger."
Peter shrugged, and walked a little way in silence, but the soldier's
nonsense stuck in his brain and worried him. Finally he turned, rather
irritably.
"Stoppers--what do you mean by stoppers?"
Tump opened his jet eyes and their yellowish whites. "I means nigger-
stoppers," he reiterated, amazed in his turn.
"Negro-stoppers--" Peter began to laugh sardonically, and abruptly quit
the conversation.
Such rank superiority irritated the soldier to the nth power.
"Look heah, black man, I knows I _is_ right. Heah, lonme look at
dat-aiuh, deed. Maybe I can find 'em. I knows I suttinly is right."
Peter walked on, paying no attention to the request Until Tump caught
his arm and drew him up short.
"Look heah, nigger," said Tump, in a different tone, "I faded dad deed
fuh ten iron men, an' I reckon I got a once-over comin' fuh my money."
The soldier was plainly mobilized and ready to attack. To fight Tump, to
fight any negro at all, would be Peter's undoing; it would forfeit the
moral leadership he hoped to gain. Moreover, he had no valid grounds for
a disagreement with Tump. He passed over the deed, and the two negroes
moved on their way to Niggertown.
Tump trudged forward with eyes glued to paper, his face puckered in the
unaccustomed labor of reading.
His thick lips moved at the individual letters, and constructed them
bunglingly into syllables and words. He was trying to uncover the verbal
camouflage by which the astute white brushed away all rights of all
black men whatsoever.