The House Behind the Cedars Read online

  “Archie, I’m coming in to have you draw my will. There are some children for whom I would like to make ample provision. I can’t give them anything else, but money will make them free of the world.”

  The judge’s friend had died suddenly before carrying out this good intention. The judge had taken occasion to suggest the existence of these children, and their father’s intentions concerning them, to the distant relatives who had inherited his friend’s large estate. They had chosen to take offense at the suggestion. One had thought it in shocking bad taste; another considered any mention of such a subject an insult to his cousin’s memory. A third had said, with flashing eyes, that the woman and her children had already robbed the estate of enough; that it was a pity the little niggers were not slaves—that they would have added measurably to the value of the property. Judge Straight’s manner indicated some disapproval of their attitude, and the settlement of the estate was placed in other hands than his. Now, this son, with his father’s face and his father’s voice, stood before his father’s friend, demanding entrance to the golden gate of opportunity, which society barred to all who bore the blood of the despised race.

  As he kept on looking at the boy, who began at length to grow somewhat embarrassed under this keen scrutiny, the judge’s mind reverted to certain laws and judicial decisions that he had looked up once or twice in his lifetime. Even the law, the instrument by which tyranny riveted the chains upon its victims, had revolted now and then against the senseless and unnatural prejudice by which a race ascribing its superiority to right of blood permitted a mere suspicion of servile blood to outweigh a vast preponderance of its own.

  “Why, indeed, should he not be a lawyer, or anything else that a man might be, if it be in him?” asked the judge, speaking rather to himself than to the boy. “Sit down,” he ordered, pointing to a chair on the other side of the room. That he should ask a colored lad to be seated in his presence was of itself enough to stamp the judge as eccentric. “You want to be a lawyer,” he went on, adjusting his spectacles. “You are aware, of course, that you are a negro?”

  “I am white,” replied the lad, turning back his sleeve and holding out his arm, “and I am free, as all my people were before me.”

  The old lawyer shook his head, and fixed his eyes upon the lad with a slightly quizzical smile. “You are black,” he said, “and you are not free. You cannot travel without your papers; you cannot secure accommodations at an inn; you could not vote, if you were of age; you cannot be out after nine o’clock without a permit. If a white man struck you, you could not return the blow, and you could not testify against him in a court of justice. You are black, my lad, and you are not free. Did you ever hear of the Dred Scott decision, delivered by the great, wise, and learned Judge Taney?”

  “No, sir,” answered the boy.

  “It is too long to read,” rejoined the judge, taking up the pamphlet he had laid down upon the lad’s entrance, “but it says in substance, as quoted by this author, that negroes are beings ‘of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; in fact, so inferior that they have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, and that the negro may justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.’ That is the law of this nation, and that is the reason why you cannot be a lawyer.”

  “It may all be true,” replied the boy, “but it don’t apply to me. It says ‘the negro.’ A negro is black; I am white, and not black.”

  “Black as ink, my lad,” returned the lawyer, shaking his head.

  “ ‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,’ says the poet. Somewhere, sometime, you had a black ancestor. One drop of black blood makes the whole man black.”

  “Why shouldn’t it be the other way, if the white blood is so much superior?” inquired the lad.

  “Because it is more convenient as it is—and more profitable.”

  “It is not right,” maintained the lad.

  “God bless me!” exclaimed the old gentleman, “he is invading the field of ethics! He will be questioning the righteousness of slavery next! I’m afraid you wouldn’t make a good lawyer, in any event. Lawyers go by the laws—they abide by the accomplished fact; to them, whatever is, is right. The laws do not permit men of color to practice law, and public sentiment would not allow one of them to study it.”

  “I had thought,” said the lad, “that I might pass for white. There are white people darker than I am.”

  “Ah, well, that is another matter; but”—

  The judge stopped for a moment, struck by the absurdity of his arguing such a question with a mulatto boy. He really must be falling into premature dotage. The proper thing would be to rebuke the lad for his presumption and advise him to learn to take care of horses, or make boots, or lay bricks. But again he saw his old friend in the lad’s face, and again he looked in vain for any sign of negro blood. The least earmark would have turned the scale, but he could not find it.

  “That is another matter,” he repeated. “Here you have started as black, and must remain so. But if you wish to move away, and sink your past into oblivion, the case might be different. Let us see what the law is; you might not need it if you went far enough, but it is well enough to be within it—liberty is sweeter when founded securely on the law.”

  He took down a volume bound in legal calf and glanced through it. “The color line is drawn in North Carolina at four generations removed from the negro; there have been judicial decisions to that effect. I imagine that would cover your case. But let us see what South Carolina may say about it,” he continued, taking another book. “I think the law is even more liberal there. Ah, this is the place:—

  “ ‘The term mulatto,’ ” he read, “ ‘is not invariably applicable to every admixture of African blood with the European, nor is one having all the features of a white to be ranked with the degraded class designated by the laws of this State as persons of color, because of some remote taint of the negro race. Juries would probably be justified in holding a person to be white in whom the admixture of African blood did not exceed one eighth. And even where color or feature are doubtful, it is a question for the jury to decide by reputation, by reception into society, and by their exercise of the privileges of the white man, as well as by admixture of blood.’ ”

  “Then I need not be black?” the boy cried, with sparkling eyes.

  “No,” replied the lawyer, “you need not be black, away from Patesville. You have the somewhat unusual privilege, it seems, of choosing between two races, and if you are a lad of spirit, as I think you are, it will not take you long to make your choice. As you have all the features of a white man, you would, at least in South Carolina, have simply to assume the place and exercise the privileges of a white man. You might, of course, do the same thing anywhere, as long as no one knew your origin. But the matter has been adjudicated there in several cases, and on the whole I think South Carolina is the place for you. They’re more liberal there, perhaps because they have many more blacks than whites, and would like to lessen the disproportion.”

  “From this time on,” said the boy, “I am white.”

  “Softly, softly, my Caucasian fellow citizen,” returned the judge, chuckling with quiet amusement. “You are white in the abstract, before the law. You may cherish the fact in secret, but I would not advise you to proclaim it openly just yet. You must wait until you go away—to South Carolina.”

  “And can I learn to be a lawyer, sir?” asked the lad.

  “It seems to me that you ought to be reasonably content for one day with what you have learned already. You cannot be a lawyer until you are white, in position as well as in theory, nor until you are twenty-one years old. I need an office boy. If you are willing to come into my office, sweep it, keep my books dusted, and stay here when I am out, I do not care. To the rest of the town you will be my servant, and still a negro. If you choose to read my books when no one is about and be white in your own priva
te opinion, I have no objection. When you have made up your mind to go away, perhaps what you have read may help you. But mum’s the word! If I hear a whisper of this from any other source, out you go, neck and crop! I am willing to help you make a man of yourself, but it can only be done under the rose.”

  For two years John Walden openly swept the office and surreptitiously read the law books of old Judge Straight. When he was eighteen, he asked his mother for a sum of money, kissed her good-by, and went out into the world. When his sister, then a pretty child of seven, cried because her big brother was going away, he took her up in his arms, gave her a silver dime with a hole in it for a keepsake, hugged her close, and kissed her.

  “Nev’ min’, sis,” he said soothingly. “Be a good little gal, an’ some o’ these days I’ll come back to see you and bring you somethin’ fine.”

  In after years, when Mis’ Molly was asked what had become of her son, she would reply with sad complacency,—

  “He’s gone over on the other side.”

  As we have seen, he came back ten years later.

  Many years before, when Mis’ Molly, then a very young woman, had taken up her residence in the house behind the cedars, the gentleman heretofore referred to had built a cabin on the opposite corner, in which he had installed a trusted slave by the name of Peter Fowler and his wife Nancy. Peter was a good mechanic, and hired his time from his master with the provision that Peter and his wife should do certain work for Mis’ Molly and serve as a sort of protection for her. In course of time Peter, who was industrious and thrifty, saved enough money to purchase his freedom and that of his wife and their one child, and to buy the little house across the street, with the cooper shop behind it. After they had acquired their freedom, Peter and Nancy did no work for Mis’ Molly save as they were paid for it, and as a rule preferred not to work at all for the woman who had been practically their mistress; it made them seem less free. Nevertheless, the two households had remained upon good terms, even after the death of the man whose will had brought them together, and who had remained Peter’s patron after he had ceased to be his master. There was no intimate association between the two families. Mis’ Molly felt herself infinitely superior to Peter and his wife,—scarcely less superior than her poor white neighbors felt themselves to Mis’ Molly. Mis’ Molly always meant to be kind, and treated Peter and Nancy with a certain good-natured condescension. They resented this, never openly or offensively, but always in a subconscious sort of way, even when they did not speak of it among themselves—much as they had resented her mistress-ship in the old days. For after all, they argued, in spite of her airs and graces, her white face and her fine clothes, was she not a negro, even as themselves? and since the slaves had been freed, was not one negro as good as another?

  Peter’s son Frank had grown up with little Rena. He was several years older than she, and when Rena was a small child Mis’ Molly had often confided her to his care, and he had watched over her and kept her from harm. When Frank became old enough to go to work in the cooper shop, Rena, then six or seven, had often gone across to play among the clean white shavings. Once Frank, while learning the trade, had let slip a sharp steel tool, which flying toward Rena had grazed her arm and sent the red blood coursing along the white flesh and soaking the muslin sleeve. He had rolled up the sleeve and stanched the blood and dried her tears. For a long time thereafter her mother kept her away from the shop and was very cold to Frank. One day the little girl wandered down to the bank of the old canal. It had been raining for several days, and the water was quite deep in the channel. The child slipped and fell into the stream. From the open window of the cooper shop Frank heard a scream. He ran down to the canal and pulled her out, and carried her all wet and dripping to the house. From that time he had been restored to favor. He had watched the girl grow up to womanhood in the years following the war, and had been sorry when she became too old to play about the shop.

  He never spoke to her of love,—indeed, he never thought of his passion in such a light. There would have been no legal barrier to their union; there would have been no frightful menace to white supremacy in the marriage of the negro and the octoroon: the drop of dark blood bridged the chasm. But Frank knew that she did not love him, and had not hoped that she might. His was one of those rare souls that can give with small hope of return. When he had made the scar upon her arm, by the same token she had branded him her slave forever; when he had saved her from a watery grave, he had given his life to her. There are depths of fidelity and devotion in the negro heart that have never been fathomed or fully appreciated. Now and then in the kindlier phases of slavery these qualities were brightly conspicuous, and in them, if wisely appealed to, lies the strongest hope of amity between the two races whose destiny seems bound up together in the Western world. Even a dumb brute can be won by kindness. Surely it were worth while to try some other weapon than scorn and contumely and hard words upon people of our common race,—the human race, which is bigger and broader than Celt or Saxon, barbarian or Greek, Jew or Gentile, black or white; for we are all children of a common Father, forget it as we may, and each one of us is in some measure his brother’s keeper.

  XIX

  God Made Us All

  Rena was convalescent from a two-weeks’ illness when her brother came to see her. He arrived at Patesville by an early morning train before the town was awake, and walked unnoticed from the station to his mother’s house. His meeting with his sister was not without emotion: he embraced her tenderly, and Rena became for a few minutes a very Niobe of grief.

  “Oh, it was cruel, cruel!” she sobbed. “I shall never get over it.”

  “I know it, my dear,” replied Warwick soothingly,—“I know it, and I’m to blame for it. If I had never taken you away from here, you would have escaped this painful experience. But do not despair; all is not lost. Tryon will not marry you, as I hoped he might, while I feared the contrary; but he is a gentleman, and will be silent. Come back and try again.”

  “No, John. I couldn’t go through it a second time. I managed very well before, when I thought our secret was unknown; but now I could never be sure. It would be borne on every wind, for aught I knew, and every rustling leaf might whisper it. The law, you said, made us white; but not the law, nor even love, can conquer prejudice. He spoke of my beauty, my grace, my sweetness! I looked into his eyes and believed him. And yet he left me without a word! What would I do in Clarence now? I came away engaged to be married, with even the day set; I should go back forsaken and discredited; even the servants would pity me.”

  “Little Albert is pining for you,” suggested Warwick. “We could make some explanation that would spare your feelings.”

  “Ah, do not tempt me, John! I love the child, and am grieved to leave him. I’m grateful, too, John, for what you have done for me. I am not sorry that I tried it. It opened my eyes, and I would rather die of knowledge than live in ignorance. But I could not go through it again, John; I am not strong enough. I could do you no good; I have made you trouble enough already. Get a mother for Albert—Mrs. Newberry would marry you, secret and all, and would be good to the child. Forget me, John, and take care of yourself. Your friend has found you out through me—he may have told a dozen people. You think he will be silent;—I thought he loved me, and he left me without a word, and with a look that told me how he hated and despised me. I would not have believed it—even of a white man.”

  “You do him an injustice,” said her brother, producing Tryon’s letter. “He did not get off unscathed. He sent you a message. ”

  She turned her face away, but listened while he read the letter. “He did not love me,” she cried angrily, when he had finished, “or he would not have cast me off—he would not have looked at me so. The law would have let him marry me. I seemed as white as he did. He might have gone anywhere with me, and no one would have stared at us curiously; no one need have known. The world is wide—there must be some place where a man could live happily with the woman he l
oved.”

  “Yes, Rena, there is; and the world is wide enough for you to get along without Tryon.”

  “For a day or two,” she went on, “I hoped he might come back. But his expression in that awful moment grew upon me, haunted me day and night, until I shuddered at the thought that I might ever see him again. He looked at me as though I were not even a human being. I do not love him any longer, John; I would not marry him if I were white, or he were as I am. He did not love me—or he would have acted differently. He might have loved me and have left me—he could not have loved me and have looked at me so!”

  She was weeping hysterically. There was little he could say to comfort her. Presently she dried her tears. Warwick was reluctant to leave her in Patesville. Her childish happiness had been that of ignorance; she could never be happy there again. She had flowered in the sunlight; she must not pine away in the shade.

  “If you won’t come back with me, Rena, I’ll send you to some school at the North, where you can acquire a liberal education, and prepare yourself for some career of usefulness. You may marry a better man than even Tryon.”

  “No,” she replied firmly, “I shall never marry any man, and I’ll not leave mother again. God is against it; I’ll stay with my own people.”

  “God has nothing to do with it,” retorted Warwick. “God is too often a convenient stalking-horse for human selfishness. If there is anything to be done, so unjust, so despicable, so wicked that human reason revolts at it, there is always some smug hypocrite to exclaim, ‘It is the will of God.’ ”

  “God made us all,” continued Rena dreamily, “and for some good purpose, though we may not always see it. He made some people white, and strong, and masterful, and—heartless. He made others black and homely, and poor and weak”—