Birthright - T.S. Stribling
"The trouble is, Peter, we are out of our _milieu_." Some portion
of Peter's brain that was not basking in the warmth and invitation of
the girl answered quite logically:
"Yes, but if I could help these people, Cissie, reconstruct our life
here culturally--"
Cissie shook her head. "Not culturally."
This opposition shunted more of Peter's thought to the topic in hand. He
paused interrogatively.
"Racially," said Cissie.
"Racially?" repeated the man, quite lost.
Cissie nodded, looking straight into his eyes. "You know very well,
Peter, that you and I are not--are not anything near full bloods. You
know that racially we don't belong in--Niggertown."
Peter never knew exactly how this extraordinary sentence had come about,
but in a kind of breath he realized that he and this almost white girl
were not of Niggertown. No doubt she had been arguing that he, Peter,
who was one sort of man, was trying to lead quite another sort of men
moved by different racial impulses, and such leading could only come to
confusion. He saw the implications at once.
It was an extraordinary idea, an explosive idea, such as Cissie seemed
to have the faculty of touching off. He sat staring at her.
It was the white blood in his own veins that had sent him struggling up
North, that had brought him back with this flame in his heart for his
own people. It was the white blood in Cissie that kept her struggling to
stand up, to speak an unbroken tongue, to gather around her the delicate
atmosphere and charm of a gentlewoman. It was the Caucasian in them
buried here in Niggertown. It was their part of the tragedy of millions
of mixed blood in the South. Their common problem, a feeling of their
joint isolation, brought Peter to a sense of keen and tingling nearness
to the girl.
She was talking again, very earnestly, almost tremulously:
"Why don't you go North, Peter? I think and think about you staying
here. You simply can't grow up and develop here. And now, especially,
when everybody doubts you. If you'd go North--"
"What about you, Cissie? You say we're together--"
"Oh, I'm a woman. We haven't the chance to do as we will."
A kind of titillation went over Peter's scalp and body.
"Then you are going to stay here and marry--Tump?" He uttered the name
in a queer voice.
Tears started in Cissie's eyes; her bosom lifted to her quick breathing.
"I--I don't know what I'm going to do," she stammered miserably.
Peter leaned over her with a drumming heart; he heard her catch her
breath.
"You don't care for Tump?" he asked with a dry mouth.
She gasped out something, and the next moment Peter felt her body sink
limply in his groping arms. They clung together closely, quiveringly.
Three nights of vigil, each thinking miserably and wistfully of the
other, had worn the nerves of both man and girl until they were ready to
melt together at a touch. Her soft body clinging to his own, the little
nervous pressures of her arms, her eased breathing at his neck, wiped
away Siner's long sense of strain. Strength and peace seemed to pour
from her being into his by a sort of spiritual osmosis. She resigned her
head to his palm in order that he might lift her lips to his when he
pleased. After all, there is no way for a man to rest without a woman.
All he can do is to stop work.
For a long time they sat transported amid the dusty honeysuckles and
withered blooms, but after a while they began talking a little at a time
of the future, their future. They felt so indissolubly joined that they
could not imagine the future finding them apart. There was no need for
any more trouble with Tump Pack. They would marry quietly, and go away
North to live. Peter thought of his friend Farquhar. He wondered if
Farquhar's attitude would be just the same toward Cissie as it was
toward him.
"North," was the burden of the octoroon's dreams. They would go North to
Chicago. There were two hundred and fifty thousand negroes in Chicago, a
city within itself three times the size of Nashville. Up North she and
Peter could go to theaters, art galleries, could enter any church, could
ride in street-cars, railroad-trains, could sleep and eat at any hotel,
live authentic lives.
It was Cissie planning her emancipation, planning to escape her lifelong
disabilities.
"Oh, I'll be so glad! so glad! so glad!" she sobbed, and drew Peter's
head passionately down to her deep bosom.
CHAPTER V
Peter Siner walked home from the Dildine cabin that night rather
dreading to meet his mother, for it was late. Cissie had served
sandwiches and coffee on a little table in the arbor, and then had kept
Peter hours afterward. Around him still hung the glamour of Cissie's
little supper. He could still see her rounded elbows that bent softly
backward when she extended an arm, and the glimpses of her bosom when
she leaned to hand him cream or sugar. She had accomplished the whole
supper in the white manner, with all poise and daintiness. In fact, no
one is more exquisitely polite than an octoroon woman when she desires
to be polite, when she elevates the subserviency of her race into
graciousness.
However, the pleasure and charm of Cissie were fading under the
approaching abuse that Caroline was sure to pour upon the girl. Peter
dreaded it. He walked slowly down the dark semicircle, planning how he
could best break to his mother the news of his engagement. Peter knew
she would begin a long bill of complaints,--how badly she was treated,
how she had sacrificed herself, her comfort, how she had washed and
scrubbed. She would surely charge Cissie with being a thief and a drab,
and all the announcements of engagements that Peter could make would
never induce the old woman to soften her abuse. Indeed, they would make
her worse.
So Peter walked on slowly, smelling the haze of dust that hung in the
blackness. Out on the Big Hill, in the glade, Peter caught an occasional
glimmer of light where crap-shooters and boot-leggers were beginning
their nightly carousal.
These evidences of illicit trades brought Peter a thrill of disgust. In
a sort of clear moment he saw that he could not keep Cissie in such a
sty as this. He could not rear in such a place as this any children that
might come to him and Cissie. His thoughts drifted back to his mother,
and his dread of her tongue.
The Siner cabin was dark and tightly shut when Peter let himself in at
the gate and walked to the door. He stood a moment listening, and then
gently pressed open the shutter. A faint light burned on the inside, a
night-lamp with an old-fashioned brass bowl. It sat on the floor, turned
low, at the foot of his mother's bed. The mean room was mainly in
shadow. The old-style four-poster in which Caroline slept was an
indistinct mound. The air was close and foul with the bad ventilation of
all negro sleeping-rooms. The brass lamp, turned low, added smoke and
gas to the tight quarters.
The odor caught Peter in the nose and throat, and once more stirred up
his impatience with his mother's disregard of hygiene. He tiptoed into
the room and decided to remove the lamp and open the high, small window
to admit a little air. He moved noiselessly and had stooped for the lamp
when there came a creaking and a heavy sigh from the bed, and the old
negress asked:
"Is dat you, son?"
Peter was tempted to stand perfectly still and wait till his mother
dozed again, thus putting off her inevitable tirade against Cissie; but
he answered in a low tone that it was he.
"Whut you gwine do wid dat lamp, son?"
"Go to bed by it, Mother."
"Well, bring hit back." She breathed heavily, and moved restlessly in
the old four-poster. As Peter stood up he saw that the patched quilts
were all askew over her shapeless bulk. Evidently, she had not been
resting well.
Peter's conscience smote him again for worrying his mother with his
courtship of Cissie, yet what could he do? If he had wooed any other
girl in the world, she would have been equally jealous and grieved. It
was inevitable that she should be disappointed and bitter; it was bound
up in the very part and parcel of her sacrifice. A great sadness came
over Peter. He almost wished his mother would berate him, but she
continued to lie there, breathing heavily under her disarranged covers.
As Peter passed into his room, the old negress called after him to
remind him to bring the light back when he was through with it.
This time something in her tone alarmed Peter. He paused in the
doorway.
"Are you sick, Mother?" he asked.
The old woman gave a yawn that changed to a groan.
"I--I ain't feelin' so good."
"What's the matter, Mother?"
"My stomach, my--" But at that moment her sentence changed to an
inarticulate sound, and she doubled up in bed as if caught in a spasm of
acute agony.
Peter hurried to her, thoroughly frightened, and saw sweat streaming
down her face. He stared down at her.
"Mother, you are sick! What can I do?" he cried, with a man's
helplessness.
She opened her eyes with an effort, panting now as the edge of the agony
passed. There was a movement under the quilts, and she thrust out a
rubber hot-water bottle.
"Fill it--fum de kittle," she wheezed out, then relaxed into groans, and
wiped clumsily at the sweat on her shining black face.
Peter seized the bottle and ran into the kitchen. There he found a brisk
fire popping in the stove and a kettle of water boiling. It showed him,
to his further alarm, that his mother had been trying to minister to
herself until forced to bed.
The man scalded a finger and thumb pouring water into the flared mouth,
but after a moment twisted on the top and hurried into the sick-room.
He reached the old negress just as another knife of pain set her
writhing and sweating. She seized the hot-water bottle, pushed it under
the quilts, and pressed it to her stomach, then lay with eyes and teeth
clenched tight, and her thick lips curled in a grin of agony.
Peter set the lamp on the table, said he was going for the doctor, and
started.
The old woman hunched up in bed. With the penuriousness of her station
and sacrifices, she begged Peter not to go; then groaned out, "Go tell
Mars' Renfrew," but the next moment did not want Peter to leave her.
Peter said he would get Nan Berry to stay while he was gone. The Berry
cabin lay diagonally across the street. Peter ran over, thumped on the
door, and shouted his mother's needs. As soon as he received an answer,
he started on over the Big Hill toward the white town.
Peter was seriously frightened. His run to Dr. Jallup's, across the Big
Hill, was a series of renewed strivings for speed. Every segment of his
journey seemed to seize him and pin him down in the midst of the night
like a bug caught in a black jelly. He seemed to progress not at all.
Now he was in the cedar glade. His muffled flight drove in the sentries
of the crap-shooters, and gamesters blinked out their lights and
listened to his feet stumbling on through the darkness.
After an endless run in the glade, Peter found himself on top of the
hill, amid boulders and outcrops limestone and cedar-shrubs. His flash-
light picked out these objects, limned them sharply against the
blackness, then dropped them into obscurity again.
He tried to run faster. His impatience subdivided the distance into
yards and feet. Now he was approaching that boulder, now he was passing
it; now he was ten feet beyond, twenty, thirty. Perhaps his mother was
dying, alone save for stupid Nan Berry.
Now he was going down the hill past the white church. All that was
visible was its black spire set against a web of stars. He was making no
speed at all. He panted on. His heart hammered. His legs drummed with
Lilliputian paces. Now he was among the village stores, all utterly
black. At one point the echo of his feet chattered back at him, as if
some other futile runner strained amid vast spaces of blackness.
After a long time he found himself running up a residential street, and
presently, far ahead, he saw the glow of Dr. Jallup's porch light. Its
beam had the appearance of coming from a vast distance. When he reached
the place, he flung his breast against the top panel of the doctor's
fence and held on, exhausted. He drew in his breath, and began shouting,
"Hello, Doctor!"
Peter called persistently, and as he commanded more breath, he called
louder and louder, "Hello, Doctor! Hello, Doctor! Hello, Doctor!" in
tones edging on panic.
The doctor's house might have been dead. Somewhere a dog began barking.
High in the Southern sky a star looked down remotely on Peter's frantic
haste. The black man stood in the black night with cries: "Hello,
Doctor! Hello, Doctor! Hello, Doctor!"
At last, in despair, he tried to think of other doctors. He thought of
telephoning to Jonesboro. Just as he decided he must turn away there
came a stirring in the dead house, a flicker of light appeared on the
inside now here, now there; it steadied into a tiny beam and approached
the door. The door opened, and Dr. Jallup's head and breast appeared,
illuminated against the black interior.
"My mother's sick, Doctor," began Peter, in immense relief.
"Who is it?" inquired the half-clad man, impassively.
"Caroline Siner; she's been taken with a--"
The physician lifted his light a trifle in an effort to see Peter.
"Lemme see: she's that fat nigger woman that lives in a three-roomed
house--"
"I'll show you the way," said Peter. "She's very ill."
The half-dressed man shook his head.
"No, Ca'line Siner owes me a five-dollar doctor's bill already. Our
county medical association made a rule that no niggers should--"
With a drying mouth, Peter Siner stared at the man of medicine.
"But, my God, Doctor," gasped the son, "I'll pay you--"
"Have you got the money there in your pocket?" asked Jallup,
impassively.
A sort of chill traveled deliberately over Peter's body and shook his
voice.
"N-no, but I can get it--"
"Yes, you can all get it," stated the physician in dull irritation. "I'm
tired of you niggers running up doctors' bills nobody can collect. You
never have more than the law allows; your wages never get big enough to
garnishee." His voice grew querulous as he related his wrongs. "No, I'm
not going to see Ca'line Siner. If she wants me to visit her, let her
send ten dollars to cover that and back debts, and I'll--" The end of
his sentence was lost in the closing of his door. The light he carried
declined from a beam to a twinkling here and there, and then vanished in
blackness. Dr. Jallup's house became dead again. The little porch light
in its glass box might have been a candle burning before a tomb.
Peter Siner stood at the fence, licking his dry lips, with nerves
vibrating like a struck bell. He pushed himself slowly away from the top
plank and found his legs so weak that he could hardly walk. He moved
slowly, back down the unseen street. The dog he had disturbed gave a few
last growls and settled into silence.
Peter moved along, wetting his dry lips, and stirring feebly among his
dazed thoughts, hunting some other plan of action. There was a tiny
burning spot on the left side of his occiput. It felt like a heated
cambric needle which had been slipped into his scalp. Then he realized
that he must go home, get ten dollars, and bring them back to Dr.
Jallup. He started to run, but almost toppled over on his leaden legs.
He plodded through the darkness, retracing the endless trail to
Niggertown. As he passed a dark mass of shrubbery and trees, he recalled
his mother's advice to ask aid of Captain Renfrew. It was the old
Renfrew place that Peter was passing.
The negro hesitated, then turned in at the gate in the bare hope of
obtaining the ten dollars at once. Inside the gate Peter's feet
encountered the scattered bricks of an old walk. The negro stood and
called Captain Renfrew's name in a guarded voice. He was not at all sure
of his action.
Peter had called twice and was just about to go when a lamp appeared
around the side of the house on a long portico that extended clear
around the building. Bathed in the light of the lamp which he held over
his head, there appeared an old man wearing a worn dressing gown.
"Who is it?" he asked in a wavery voice.
Peter told his name and mission.
The old Captain continued holding up his light.
"Oh, Peter Siner; Caroline Siner's sick? All right I'll have Jallup run
over; I'll phone him."
Peter was beginning his thanks preparatory to going, when the old man
interrupted.
"No, just stay here until Jallup comes by in his or He'll pick us both
up. It'll save time. Come on inside. What's the matter with old
Caroline?"
The old dressing-gown led the way around the continuous piazza, to a
room that stood open and brightly lighted on the north face of the old
house.
A great relief came to Peter at this unexpected succor. He followed
around the piazza, trying to describe Caroline's symptoms. The room
Peter entered was a library, a rather stately old room, lined with books
all around the walls to about as high as a man could reach. Spaces for
doors and windows were let in among the book-cases. The volumes
themselves seemed composed mainly of histories and old-fashioned
scientific books, if Peter could judge from a certain severity of their
bindings. On a big library table burned a gasolene-lamp, which threw a
brilliant whiteness all over the room. The table was piled with books
and periodicals. Books and papers were heaped on every chair in the
study except a deep Morris chair in which the old Captain had been
sitting. A big meridional globe, about two and a half feet in diameter,
gleamed through a film of dust in the embrasure of a window. The whole
room had the womanless look of a bachelor's quarters, and was flavored
with tobacco and just a hint of whisky.
Old Captain Renfrew evidently had been reading when Peter called from
the gate. Now the old man went to a telephone and rang long and briskly
to awaken the boy who slept in the central office. Peter fidgeted as the
old Captain stood with receiver to ear.
"Hard to wake." The old gentleman spoke into the transmitter, but was
talking to Peter. "Don't be so uneasy, Peter. Human beings are harder to
kill than you think."
There was a kindliness, even a fellowship, in Captain Renfrew's tones
that spread like oil over Peter's raw nerves. It occurred to the negro
that this was the first time he had been addressed as an authentic human
being since his conversation with the two Northern men on the Pullman,
up in Illinois. It surprised him. It was sufficient to take his mind
momentarily from his mother. He looked a little closely at the old man
at the telephone. The Captain wore few indices of kindness. Lines of
settled sarcasm netted his eyes and drooped away from his old mouth. The
very swell of his full temples and their crinkly veins marked a sardonic
old man.
At last he roused central over the wire, and impressed upon him the
necessity of creating a stridor in Dr. Jallup's dead house, and a moment
later a continued buzzing in the receiver betokened the operator's
efforts to do so.
The old gentleman turned around at last, holding the receiver a little
distance from his ear.
"I understand you went to Harvard, Peter."
"Yes, sir." Peter took his eyes momentarily from the telephone. The old
Southerner in the dressing-gown scrutinized the brown man. He cleared
his throat.
"You know, Peter, it gives me a--a certain satisfaction to see a Harvard
man in Hooker's Bend. I'm a Harvard man myself."
Peter stood in the brilliant light, astonished, not at Captain Renfrew's
being a Harvard man,--he had known that,--but that this old gentleman
was telling the fact to him, Peter Siner, a negro graduate of Harvard.
It was extraordinary; it was tantamount to an offer of friendship, not
patronage. Such an offer in the South disturbed Peter's poise; it
touched him queerly. And it seemed to explain why Captain Renfrew had
received Peter so graciously and was now arranging for Dr. Jallup to
visit Caroline.
Peter was moved to the conventional query, asking in what class the
Captain had been graduated. But while his very voice was asking it,
Peter thought what a strange thing it was that he, Peter Siner, a negro,
and this lonely old gentleman, his benefactor, were spiritual brothers,
both sprung from the loins of Harvard, that ancient mother of souls.
[Illustration: The old gentleman turned around at last]
From the darkness outside, Dr. Jallup's horn summmoned the two men.
Captain Renfrew got out of his gown and into his coat and turned off his
gasolene light. They walked around the piazza to the front of the house.
In the street the head-lights of the roadster shot divergent rays
through the darkness. They went out. The old Captain took a seat in the
car beside the physician, while Peter stood on the running-board. A
moment later, the clutch snarled, and the machine puttered down the
street. Peter clung to the standards of the auto top, peering ahead.
The men remained almost silent. Once Dr. Jallup, watching the dust that
lay modeled in sharp lights and shadows under the head-lights, mentioned
lack of rain. Their route did not lead over the Big Hill. They turned
north at Hobbett's corner, drove around by River Street, and presently
entered the northern end of the semicircle.
The speed of the car was reduced to a crawl in the bottomless dust of
the crescent. The head-lights swept slowly around the cabins on the
concave side of the street, bringing them one by one into stark
brilliance and dropping them into obscurity. The smell of refuse, of
uncleaned stables and sties and outhouses hung in the darkness. Peter
bent down under the top of the motor and pointed out his place. A minute
later the machine came to a noisy halt and was choked into silence. At
that moment, in the sweep of the head-light, Peter saw Viny Berry, one
of Nan's younger sisters, coming up from Niggertown's public well,
carrying two buckets of water.
Viny was hurrying, plashing the water over the sides of her buckets. The
importance of her mission was written in her black face.
"She's awful thirsty," she called to Peter in guarded tones. "Nan called
me to fetch some fraish water fum de well."
Peter took the water that had been brought from the semi-cesspool at the
end of the street. Viny hurried across the street to home and to bed.
With the habitual twinge of his sanitary conscience, Peter considered
the water in the buckets.
"We'll have to boil this," he said to the doctor.
"Boil it?" repeated Jallup, blankly. Then, he added: "Oh, yes--boil.
Certainly."
* * * * *
A repellent odor of burned paper, breathed air, and smoky lights filled
the close room. Nan had lighted another lamp and now the place was
discernible in a dull yellow glow. In the corner lay a half-burned wisp
of paper. Nan herself stood by the mound on the bed, putting straight
the quilts that her patient had twisted awry.
"She sho am bad, Doctor," said the colored woman, with big eyes.
Seen in the light, Dr. Jallup was a little sandy-bearded man with a
round, simple face, oddly overlaid with that inscrutability carefully
cultivated by country doctors. With professional cheeriness, he
approached the mound of bedclothes.
"A little under the weather, Aunt Ca'line?" He slipped his fingers
alongside her throat to test her temperature, at the same time drawing a
thermometer from his waistcoat pocket.
The old negress stirred, and looked up out of sick eyes.
"Doctor," she gasped, "I sho got a misery heah." She indicated her
stomach.
"How do you feel?" he asked hopefully.
The woman panted, then whispered:
"Lak a knife was a-cuttin' an' a-tearin' out my innards." She rested,
then added, "Not so bad now; feels mo' lak somp'n's tearin' in de nex'
room."
"Like something tearing in the next room?" repeated Jallup, emptily.
"Yes, suh," she whispered. "I jes can feel hit--away off, lak."
The doctor attempted to take her temperature, but the thermometer in her
mouth immediately nauseated her, so he slipped the instrument under her
arm.
Old Caroline groaned at the slightest exertion, then, as she tossed her
black head, she caught a glimpse of old Captain Renfrew.
She halted abruptly in her restlessness, stared at the old gentleman,
wet her dry lips with a queer brown-furred tongue.
"Is dat you, Mars' Milt?" she gasped in feeble astonishment. A moment
later she guessed the truth. "I s'pose you had to bring de doctor. 'Fo'
Gawd, Mars' Milt--" She lay staring, with the covers rising and falling
as she gasped for breath. Her feverish eyes shifted back and forth
between the grim old gentleman and the tall, broad-shouldered brown man
at the foot of her bed. She drew a baggy black arm from under the cover.
"Da' 's Peter, Mars' Milt," she pointed. "Da' 's Peter, my son. He--he
use' to be my son 'fo' he went off to school; but sence he come home, he
been a-laughin' at me." Tears came to her eyes; she panted for a moment,
then added: "Yeah, he done marked his mammy down fuh a nigger, Mars'
Milt. Whut I thought wuz gwine be sweet lays bitter in my mouf." She
worked her thick lips as if the rank taste of her sickness were the very
flavor of her son's ingratitude.