Birthright - T.S. Stribling
A sudden gasp and twist of her body told Nan that the old woman was
again seized with a spasm. The neighbor woman took swift control, and
waved out Peter and old Mr. Renfrew, while she and the doctor aided the
huge negress.
The two evicted men went into Peter's room and shut the door. Peter,
unnerved, groped, and presently found and lighted a lamp. He put it down
on his little table among his primary papers and examination papers. He
indicated to Captain Renfrew the single chair in the room.
But the old gentleman stood motionless in the mean room, with its head-
line streaked walls. Sounds of the heavy lifting of Peter's mother came
through the thin door and partition with painful clearness. Peter opened
his own small window, for the air in his room was foul.
Captain Renfrew stood in silence, with a remote sarcasm in his wrinkled
eyes. What was in his heart, why he had subjected himself to the
noisomeness of failing flesh, Peter had not the faintest idea. Once, out
of studently habit, he glanced at Peter's philosophic books, but
apparently he read the titles without really observing them. Once he
looked at Peter.
"Peter," he said colorlessly, "I hope you'll be careful of Caroline's
feelings if she ever gets up again. She has been very faithful to you,
Peter."
Peter's eyes dampened. A great desire mounted in him to explain himself
to this strange old gentleman, to show him how inevitable had been the
breach. For some reason a veritable passion to reveal his heart to this
his sole benefactor surged through the youth.
"Mr. Renfrew," he stammered, "Mr. Renfrew--I--I--" His throat abruptly
ached and choked. He felt his face distort in a spasm of uncontrollable
grief. He turned quickly from this strange old man with a remote sarcasm
in his eyes and a remote affection in his tones. Peter clenched his
jaws, his nostrils spread in his effort stoically to bottle up his grief
and remorse, like a white man; in an effort to keep from howling his
agony aloud, like a negro. He stood with aching throat and blurred eyes,
trembling, swallowing, and silent.
Presently Nan Berry opened the door. She held a half-burned paper in her
hand; Dr. Jallup stood near the bed, portioning out some calomel and
quinine. The prevalent disease in Hooker's Bend is malaria; Dr. Jallup
always physicked for malaria. On this occasion he diagnosed it must be a
very severe attack of malaria indeed, so he measured out enormous doses.
He took a glass of the water that Viny had brought, held up old
Caroline's head, and washed down two big capsules into the already
poisoned stomach of the old negress. His simple face was quite
inscrutable as he did this. He left other capsules for Nan to administer
at regular intervals. Then he and Captain Renfrew motored out of
Niggertown, out of its dust and filth and stench.
At four o'clock in the morning Caroline Siner died.
CHAPTER VI
When Nan Berry saw that Caroline was dead, the black woman dropped a
glass of water and a capsule of calomel and stared. A queer terror
seized her. She began such a wailing that it aroused others in
Niggertown. At the sound they got out of their beds and came to the
Siner cabin, their eyes big with mystery and fear. At the sight of old
Caroline's motionless body they lifted their voices through the night.
The lamentation carried far beyond the confines of Niggertown. The last
gamblers in the cedar glade heard it, and it broke up their gaming and
drinking. White persons living near the black crescent were waked out of
their sleep and listened to the eerie sound. It rose and fell in the
darkness like a melancholy organ chord. The wailing of the women
quivered against the heavy grief of the men. The half-asleep listeners
were moved by its weirdness to vague and sinister fancies. The dolor
veered away from what the Anglo-Saxon knows as grief and was shot
through with the uncanny and the terrible. White children crawled out of
their small beds and groped their way to their parents. The women
shivered and asked of the darkness, "_What_ makes the negroes howl
so?"
Nobody knew,--least of all, the negroes. Nobody suspected that the
bedlam harked back to the jungle, to black folk in African kraals
beating tom-toms and howling, not in grief, but in an ecstasy of terror
lest the souls of their dead might come back in the form of tigers or
pythons or devils and work woe to the tribe. Through the night the
negroes wailed on, performing through custom an ancient rite of which
they knew nothing. They supposed themselves heartbroken over the death
of Caroline Siner.
Amid this din Peter Siner sat in his room, stunned by the sudden taking
off of his mother. The reproaches that she had expressed to old Captain
Renfrew clung in Peter's brain. The brown man had never before realized
the faint amusement and condescension that had flavored all his
relations with his mother since his return home. But he knew now that
she had felt his disapproval of her lifelong habits; that she saw he
never explained or attempted to explain his thoughts to her, assuming
her to be too ignorant; as she put it, "a fool."
The pathos of his mother's last days, what she had expected, what she
had received, came to Peter with the bitterness of what is finished and
irrevocable. She had been dead only a few minutes, yet she could never
know his grief and remorse; she could never forgive him. She was utterly
removed in a few minutes, in a moment in the failing of a breath. The
finality of death overpowered him.
Into his room, through the thin wall, came the catch of numberless sobs,
the long-drawn open wails, and the spasms of sobbing. Blurred voices
called, "O Gawd! Gawd hab mercy! Hab mercy!" Now words were lost in the
midst of confusion. The clamor boomed through the thin partition as if
it would shake down his newspapered walls. With wet cheeks and an aching
throat, Peter sat by his table, staring at his book-case in silence,
like a white man.
The dim light of his lamp fell over his psychologies and philosophies.
These were the books that had given him precedence over the old
washwoman who kept him in college. It was reading these books that had
made him so wise that the old negress could not even follow his
thoughts. Now in the hour of his mother's death the backs of his
metaphysics blinked at him emptily. What signified their endless pages
about dualism and monism, about phenomenon and noumenon? His mother was
dead. And she had died embittered against him because he had read and
had been bewildered by these empty, wordy volumes.
A sense of profound defeat, of being ultimately fooled and cozened by
the subtleties of white men, filled Peter Siner. He had eaten at their
table, but their meat was not his meat. The uproar continued. Standing
out of the din arose the burden of negro voices "Hab mercy! Gawd hab
mercy!"
In the morning the Ladies of Tabor came and washed and dressed Caroline
Siner's body and made it ready for burial. For twenty years the old
negress had paid ten cents a month to her society to insure her burial,
and now the lodge made ready to fulfil its pledge. After many comings
and goings, the black women called Peter to see their work, as if for
his approval.
The huge dead woman lay on the four-poster with a sheet spread over the
lower part of her body. The ministrants had clothed it in the old black-
silk dress, with its spreading seams and panels of different materials.
It reminded Peter of the new dress he had meant to get his mother, and
of the modish suit which at that moment molded his own shoulders and
waist. The pitifulness of her sacrifices trembled in Peter's throat. He
pressed his lips together, and nodded silently to the black Ladies of
Tabor.
Presently the white undertaker, a silent little man with a brisk yet
sympathetic air, came and made some measurements. He talked to Peter in
undertones about the finishing of the casket, how much the Knights of
Tabor would pay, what Peter wanted. Then he spoke of the hour of burial,
and mentioned a somewhat early hour because some of the negroes wanted
to ship as roustabouts on the up-river packet, which was due at any
moment.
These decisions, asked of Peter, kept pricking him and breaking through
the stupefaction of this sudden tragedy. He kept nodding a mechanical
agreement until the undertaker had arranged all the details. Then the
little man moved softly out of the cabin and went stepping away through
the dust of Niggertown with professional briskness. A little later two
black grave-diggers set out with picks and shovels for the negro
graveyard.
Numberless preparations for the funeral were going on all over
Niggertown. The Knights of Tabor were putting on their regalia. Negro
women were sending out hurry notices to white mistresses that they would
be unable to cook the noonday meal. Dozens of negro girls flocked to the
hair-dressing establishment of Miss Mallylou Speers. All were bent on
having their wool straightened for the obsequies, and as only a few of
them could be accommodated, the little room was packed. A smell of
burning hair pervaded it. The girls sat around waiting their turn. Most
of them already had their hair down,--or, rather loose, for it stood out
in thick mats. The hair-dresser had a small oil stove on which lay
heating half a dozen iron combs. With a hot comb she teased each strand
of wool into perfect straightness and then plastered it down with a
greasy pomade. The result was a stiff effect, something like the hair of
the Japanese. It required about three hours to straighten the hair of
one negress. The price was a dollar and a half.
By half-past nine o'clock a crowd of negro men, in lodge aprons and with
spears, and negro women, with sashes of ribbon over their shoulders and
across the breasts, assembled about the Siner cabin. In the dusty
curving street were ranged half a dozen battered vehicles,--a hearse, a
delivery wagon, some rickety buggies, and a hack. Presently the
undertaker arrived with a dilapidated black hearse which he used
especially for negroes. He jumped down, got out his straps and coffin
stands, directed some negro men to bring in the coffin, then hurried
into the cabin with his air of brisk precision.
He placed the coffin on the stands near the bed; then a number of men
slipped the huge black body into it. The undertaker settled old
Caroline's head against the cotton pillows, running his hand down beside
her cheek and tipping her face just so. Then he put on the cover, which
left a little oval opening just above her dead face. The sight of old
Caroline's face seen through the little oval pane moved some of the
women to renewed sobs. Eight black men took up the coffin and carried it
out with the slow, wide-legged steps of roustabouts. Parson Ranson, in a
rusty Prince Albert coat, took Peter's arm and led him to the first
vehicle after the hearse. It was a delivery wagon, but it was the best
vehicle in the procession.
As Peter followed the coffin out, he saw the Knights and Ladies of Tabor
lined up in marching order behind the van. The men held their spears and
swords at attention; the women carried flowers. Behind the marchers came
other old vehicles, a sorry procession.
At fifteen minutes to ten the bell in the steeple of the colored church
tolled a single stroke. The sound quivered through the sunshine over
Niggertown. At its signal the poor procession moved away through the
dust. At intervals the bell tolled after the vanishing train.
As the negroes passed through the white town the merchants, lolling in
their doors, asked passers-by what negro had died. The idlers under the
mulberry in front of the livery-stable nodded at the old negro preacher
in his long greenish-black coat, and Dawson Bobbs remarked:
"Well, old Parson Ranson's going to tell 'em about it to-day," and he
shifted his toothpick with a certain effect of humor.
Old Mr. Tomwit asked if his companions had ever heard how Newt Bodler, a
wit famous in Wayne County, once broke up a negro funeral with a
hornets' nest. The idlers nodded a smiling affirmative as they watched
the cortege go past. They had all heard it. But Mr. Tomwit would not be
denied. He sallied forth into humorous reminiscence. Another loafer
contributed an anecdote of how he had tied ropes to a dead negro so as
to make the corpse sit up in bed and frighten the mourners.
All their tales were of the vintage of the years immediately succeeding
the Civil War,--pioneer humor, such as convulsed the readers of Peck's
Bad Boy, Mr. Bowser, Sut Lovingood. The favorite dramatic properties of
such writers were the hornets' nest, the falling ladder, the banana
peel. They cultivated the humor of contusions, the wit of impact. This
style still holds the stage of Hooker's Bend.
In telling these tales the white villagers meant no special disrespect
to the negro funeral. It simply reminded them of humorous things; so
they told their jokes, like the naive children of the soil that they
were.
At last the poor procession passed beyond the white church, around a
bend in the road, and so vanished. Presently the bell in Niggertown
ceased tolling.
* * * * *
Peter always remembered his mother's funeral in fragments of intolerable
pathos,--the lifting of old Parson Ranson's hands toward heaven, the
songs of the black folk, the murmur of the first shovelful of dirt as it
was lowered to the coffin, and the final raw mound of earth littered
with a few dying flowers. With that his mother--who had been so near to,
and so disappointed in, her son--was blotted from his life. The other
events of the funeral flowed by in a sort of dream: he moved about; the
negroes were speaking to him in the queer overtones one uses to the
bereaved; he was being driven back to Niggertown; he reentered the Siner
cabin. One or two of his friends stayed in the room with him for a while
and said vague things, but there was nothing to say.
Later in the afternoon Cissie Dildine and her mother brought his dinner
to him. Vannie Dildine, a thin yellow woman, uttered a few disjointed
words about Sister Ca'line being a good woman, and stopped amid
sentence. There was nothing to say. Death had cut a wound across Peter
Siner's life. Not for days, nor weeks, nor months, would his existence
knit solidly back together. The poison of his ingratitude to his
faithful old black mother would for a long, long day prevent the
healing.
CHAPTER VII
During a period following his mother's death Peter Siner's life drifted
emptily and without purpose. He had the feeling of one convalescing in a
hospital. His days passed unconnected by any thread of purpose; they
were like cards scattered on a table, meaning nothing.
At times he struggled against his lethargy. When he awoke in the morning
and found the sun shining on his dusty primers and examination papers,
he would think that he ought to go back to his old task; but he never
did. In his heart grew a conviction that he would never teach school at
Hooker's Bend.
He would rise and dress slowly in the still cabin, thinking he must soon
make new plans and take up some work. He never decided precisely what
work; his thoughts trailed on in vague, idle designs.
In fact, during Peter's reaction to his shock there began to assert
itself in him that capacity for profound indolence inherent in his negro
blood. To a white man time is a cumulative excitant. Continuous and
absolute idleness is impossible; he must work, hunt, fish, play, gamble,
or dissipate,--do something to burn up the accumulating sugar in his
muscles. But to a negro idleness is an increasing balm; it is a
stretching of his legs in the sunshine, a cat-like purring of his
nerves; while his thoughts spread here and there in inconsequences, like
water without a channel, making little humorous eddies, winding this way
and that into oddities and fantasies without ever feeling that
constraint of sequence which continually operates in a white brain. And
it is this quality that makes negroes the entertainers of children
_par excellence_.
Peter Siner's mental slackening made him understandable, and gave him a
certain popularity in Nigger-town. Black men fell into the habit of
dropping in at the Siner cabin, where they would sit outdoors, with
chairs propped against the wall, and philosophize on the desultory life
of the crescent. Sometimes they would relate their adventures on the
river packets and around the docks at Paducah, Cairo, St. Joe, and St.
Louis; usually a recountal of drunkenness, gaming, fighting, venery,
arrests, jail sentences, petty peculations, and escapes. Through these
Iliads of vagabondage ran an irresponsible gaiety, a non-morality, and a
kind of unbrave zest for adventure. They told of their defeats and
flights with as much relish and humor as of their charges and victories.
And while the spirit was thoroughly pagan, these accounts were full of
the cliches of religion. A roustabout whom every one called the
Persimmon confided to Peter that he meant to cut loose some logs in a
raft up the river, float them down a little way, tie them up again, and
claim the prize-money for salvaging them, God willing.
The Persimmon was so called from a scar on his long slanting head. A
steamboat mate had once found him asleep in the passageway of a lumber
pile which the boat was lading, and he waked the negro by hitting him in
the head with a persimmon bolt. In this there was nothing unusual or
worthy of a nickname. The point was, the mate had been mistaken: the
Persimmon was not working on his boat at all. In time this became one of
the stock anecdotes which pilots and captains told to passengers
traveling up and down the river.
The Persimmon was a queer-looking negro; his head was a long diagonal
from its peak down to his pendent lower lip, for he had no chin. The
salient points on this black slope were the Persimmon's sad, protruding
yellow eyeballs, over which the lids always drooped about half closed.
An habitual tipping of this melancholy head to one side gave the
Persimmon the look of one pondering and deploring the amount of sin
there was in the world. This saintly impression the Persimmon's conduct
and language never bore out.
At the time of the Persimmon's remarks about the raft two of Peter's
callers, Jim Pink Staggs and Parson Ranson, took the roustabout to task.
Jim Pink based his objection on the grounds of glutting the labor
market.
"Ef us niggers keeps turnin' too many raf's loose fuh de prize-money,"
he warned, "somebody's goin' to git 'spicious, an' you'll ruin a good
thing."
The Persimmon absorbed this with a far-away look in his half-closed
eyes.
"It's a ticklish job," argued Parson Ranson, "an' I wouldn't want to
wuck at de debbil's task aroun' de ribber, ca'se you mout fall in,
Persimmon, an' git drownded."
"I wouldn't do sich a thing a-tall," admitted the Persimmon, "but I jes'
natchelly got to git ten dollars to he'p pay on my divo'ce."
"I kain't see whut you want wid a divo'ce," said Jim Pink, yawning,
"when you been ma'ied three times widout any."
"It's fuh a Christmas present," explained the Persimmon, carelessly,
"fuh th' woman I'm libin' wid now. Mahaly's a great woman fuh style. I'm
goin' to divo'ce my other wives, one at a time lak my lawyer say."
"On what grounds?" asked Peter, curiously.
"Desuhtion."
"Desertion?"
"Uh huh; I desuhted 'em."
Jim Pink shook his head, picked up a pebble, and began idly juggling it,
making it appear double, single, treble, then single again.
"Too many divo'ces in dis country now, Persimmon," he moralized.
"Well, whut's de cause uv 'em?" asked the Persimmon, suddenly bringing
his protruding yellow eyes around on the sleight-of-hand performer.
Jim Pink was slightly taken aback; then he said:
"'Spicion; nothin' but 'spicion."
"Yeah, 'spicion," growled the Persimmon; "'spicion an' de husban'
leadin' a irreg'lar life."
Jim Pink looked at his companion, curiously.
"The husban'--leadin' a irreg'lar life?"
"Yeah,"--the Persimmon nodded grimly,--"the husban' comin' home at
onexpected hours. You know whut I means, Jim Pink."
Jim Pink let his pebble fall and lowered the fore legs of his chair
softly to the ground.
"Now, look heah, Persimmon, you don' want to be draggin' no foreign
disco'se into yo' talk heah befo' Mr. Siner an' Parson Ranson."
The Persimmon rose deliberately.
"All I want to say is, I drapped off'n de matrimonial tree three times
a'ready, Jim Pink, an' I think I feels somebody shakin' de limb ag'in."
The old negro preacher rose, too, a little behind Jim Pink.
"Now, boys! boys!" he placated. "You jes think dat, Persimmon."
"Yeah," admitted Persimmon, "I jes think it; but ef I b'lieve ever'thing
is so whut I think is so, I'd part Jim Pink's wool wid a brickbat."
Parson Ranson tried to make peace, but the Persimmon spread his hands in
a gesture that included the three men. "Now, I ain't sayin' nothin'," he
stated solemnly, "an' I ain't makin' no threats; but ef anything
happens, you-all kain't say that nobody didn' tell nobody about
nothin'."
With this the Persimmon walked to the gate, let himself out, still
looking back at Jim Pink, and then started down the dusty street.
Mr. Staggs seemed uncomfortable under the Persimmon's protruding yellow
stare, but finally, when the roustabout was gone, he shrugged, regained
his aplomb, and remarked that some niggers spent their time in studyin'
'bout things they hadn't no info'mation on whatever. Then he strolled
off up the crescent in the other direction.
All this would have made fair minstrel patter if Peter Siner had shared
the white conviction that every emotion expressed in a negro's patois is
humorous. Unfortunately, Peter was too close to the negroes to hold such
a tenet. He knew this quarrel was none the less rancorous for having
been couched in the queer circumlocution of black folk. And behind it
all shone the background of racial promiscuity out of which it sprang.
It was like looking at an open sore that touched all of Niggertown, men
and boys, young girls and women. It caused tragedies, murders, fights,
and desertions in the black village as regularly as the rotation of the
calendar; yet there was no public sentiment against it. Peter wondered
how this attitude of his whole people could possibly be.
With the query the memory of Ida May came back to him, with its sense of
dim pathos. It seemed to Peter now as if their young and uninstructed
hands had destroyed a safety-vault to filch a penny.
The reflex of a thought of Ida May always brought Peter to Cissie; it
always stirred up in him a desire to make this young girl's path gentle
and smooth. There was a fineness, a delicacy about Cissie, that, it
seemed to Peter, Ida May had never possessed. Then, too, Cissie was
moved by a passion for self-betterment. She deserved a cleaner field
than the Niggertown of Hooker's Bend.
Peter took Parson Ranson's arm, and the two moved to the gate by common
consent. It was no longer pleasant to sit here. The quarrel they had
heard somehow had flavored their surroundings.
Peter turned his steps mechanically northward up the crescent toward the
Dildine cabin. Nothing now restrained him from calling on Cissie; he
would keep no dinner waiting; he would not be warned and berated on his
return home. The nagging, jealous love of his mother had ended.
As the two men walked along, it was borne in upon Peter that his
mother's death definitely ended one period of his life. There was no
reason why he should continue his present unsettled existence. It seemed
best to marry Cissie at once and go North. Further time in this place
would not be good for the girl. Even if he could not lift all
Niggertown, he could at least help Cissie. He had had no idea, when he
first planned his work, what a tremendous task he was essaying. The
white village had looked upon the negroes so long as non-moral and non-
human that the negroes, with the flexibility of their race, had
assimilated that point of view. The whites tried to regulate the negroes
by endless laws. The negroes had come to accept this, and it seemed that
they verily believed that anything not discovered by the constable was
permissible. Mr. Dawson Bobbs was Niggertown's conscience. It was best
for Peter to take from this atmosphere what was dearest to him, and go
at once.
The brown man's thoughts came trailing back to the old negro parson
hobbling at his side. He looked at the old man, hesitated a moment, then
told him what was in his mind.
Parson Ranson's face wrinkled into a grin.
"You's gwine to git ma'ied?"
"And I thought I'd have you perform the ceremony."
This suggestion threw the old negro into excitement.
"Me, Mr. Peter?"
"Yes. Why not?"
"Why, Mr. Peter, I kain't jine you an' Miss Cissie Dildine."
Peter looked at him, astonished.
"Why can't you?"
"Whyn't you git a white preacher?"
"Well," deliberated Peter, gravely, "it's a matter of principle with me,
Parson Ranson. I think we colored people ought to be more self-reliant,
more self-serving. We ought to lead our own lives instead of being mere
echoes of white thought." He made a swift gesture, moved by this passion
of his life. "I don't mean racial equality. To my mind racial equality
is an empty term. One might as well ask whether pink and violet are
equal. But what I do insist on is autonomous development."