Raintree County (65 page)

So also Johnny noticed the slurred indolence of Southern speech, which was in some measure the result of long verbal contact between White and Black. The tongues of lost generations of slaves
murmured in the speech of the South's most beautiful ladies.

Trained in disputation at the Pedee Academy and himself a staunch advocate of Republican principles in the press and elsewhere, Johnny Shawnessy made a tactful effort to present Northern views during his sojourn in the South. Now and then the book
Uncle Tom's Cabin
came up for mention. Without exception, Johnny Shawnessy's new friends cursed it for a tissue of monstrous lies, foully misrepresenting the institution upon which the South was founded. They justified slavery in a hundred ingenious ways.

Whether slavery was right in the beginning, they maintained, it was unavoidable now. The slave was described as shiftless, ignorant, immoral, dishonest, incapable of taking care of himself. In slavery he found security and protection against disease and poverty. He was happy and satisfied with his lot if only the abolitionists would let him be. The whole thing was justified from the same immortal documents which were the Scriptures of Raintree County. The Constitution didn't forbid black slavery and on the contrary protected the slaveowner in his property. The Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, but the Negro wasn't a man. The Bible justified slavery, as any Southern minister could show by countless quotations.

In these discussions, Johnny Shawnessy remained uniformly good-natured, but his antagonists did not always manage to do so. On the subject of their peculiar institution they were likely to lose all detachment, amiability, humor. If pushed hard, the most cultivated, like Cousin Bobby Drake, would gently chide the young man from Raintree County for his lack of information about the real relationship between Negroes and whites in the South. They would appeal to the obvious workability of the present state of affairs, the danger of upsetting it. If there was a crime here, none now living was guilty of it. Let the Northerners explain their own institution of wage slavery, whose workwrung victims lived in greater misery than the Southern Negro.

Less gentle Southerners became dangerous on the subject. A light like lust or fear crept into their eyes. They appealed to the brute fact of force and
status quo.
That was the way the South was, and no goddamyankee had better try to tell them how to run it.

As for the question of Union, Southerners everywhere openly
expressed their belief that before they would endure any restrictions on the practice or extension of their peculiar institution, they would withdraw from the Union. If the existing government couldn't or wouldn't protect their rights, then they had a sacred right to form a government of their own.

When Johnny attempted to reason with his new friends on this subject, he had the feeling that he was plunging into a great dismal swamp of human prejudice and error, in which there was no path for reason to follow. Slavery had been enthroned through so many generations of complete acquiescence on the one hand and complete mastery on the other that nothing conceivable would ever unseat it. What he saw made him deeply suspicious of some Northern claims that slavery was doomed to extinction and would die of its own weight in a score of years.

Indeed, there was evidence that exactly the contrary was true. Southerners everywhere in newspapers, at public meetings, on long verandahs, were talking openly of a revival of the slave trade. Cotton was a landkilling, mankilling crop. It had already ravaged its way from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi and beyond, crowding out all other crops, leaving a trail of exhaustion behind. It had to push on, get more soil, more slaves. Territories not yet admitted to the Union must be open to this dynamic, self-devouring economy.

—What's it all leading to? Johnny sometimes asked the more intelligent people of his acquaintance. Where will it stop?

He never received a satisfactory answer to this question. Here he touched one of those blind, earthen walls that Southern life had been slowly building for a hundred years to keep the great yellow river of slavery within bounds.

Nevertheless, there was a goal toward which this proud race tended. The masters of the South had dreamed an enchanting dream. They had dreamed of a Greek republic on the soil of America. In its pillared homes would dwell the most beautiful women and the most distinguished men in the world, women with honey voices, glowing eyes, voluptuous bodies, men like jolly modern gods. The ports of the world would be open to this new republic and her imperial crop. Controlling the mouth of the Mississippi, Cotton Diplomacy would control the continent of North America and in time the world. This culture of power, wealth, and leisurely democratic traditions would
be erected on the toil of ten million slaves. From the inexhaustible human mines of Africa, they would be imported once again. South and West, by the brilliance of her diplomacy or the might of her sword, the new State would expand, and the cotton would go with her, and the black man, and the pillared mansions. Let men beware how they placed any further barrier against the South! For this dream was dreamed with the religious consecration of proud spirits; into it they wove the poetry of names more beloved to them than the concept of Union. Those names were the long, the sibilant, the river-murmurous names of the Southern earth—Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Georgia, Carolina, Florida, Virginia. Let all beware how they spattered the sovereign beauty of those names!

At the time, Johnny had little leisure or inclination to subject these views to the cold process of dialectic. He was exploring this life built on the Great Swamp, and he found that it had terrifying depths.

There was the time, back in New Orleans, when several of Susanna's male cousins invited Johnny to go on a stag dinner at the Gem, perhaps the City's most fashionable drinking house. The dinner slowly turned into a prolonged drinking bout, from which Johnny abstained, the better to hear what went on. At first the talk revolved largely on horses. Slowly, however, it turned from horses to women—and not white women but colored. In response to a hesitantly worded question about the famous octoroons, Johnny was drenched in a torrent of sensual detail. The stories grew richer, the epithets more brutal. Faces became flushed, eyes glowed, white teeth clenched in hard bursts of laughter. These young white men were banded in a collective verbal rape on the women of another race.

A little while after midnight someone stood up and suggested that they take young Johnny Shawnessy, that goddam no-account Yankee, and show him a little of the real South. Johnny looked inquiringly at Cousin Bobby Drake, who had smiled affably during the talk, contributing sometimes a gentle observation but always keeping the tactful, gentlemanly air that Johnny admired him for.

—Come along, Johnny, he said. I'll protect you. It's something to see, son. Downright educatin'.

They started out at a
bal masque
in the Ponchartrain Ballroom, where the masqued women were all quadroons.

—Lots more men here on the nigger nights, one of the cousins explained.

There was some dancing and one or two of the cousins dropped off, but several robust characters had taken their place, and there was nothing for it but they must plunge deeper.

—How about takin' Johnny to the Swamp? one of the men said.

Through murky old streets the cabs plunged, spiralling deeper into the nocturnal muck of New Orleans as if to reach its lowest circle of depravity, which—the name was peculiarly right—was called the Swamp.

—They don't call it that much any more, Cousin Bobby explained to Johnny. They've cleaned it up a lot since the old days. But it's still the hottest part of town. You can hardly get a white woman there.

Not long after, Johnny followed the mob into a decayed hotel called Madame Gobert's, on whose name, pronounced
à la française,
indelicate puns were made. The interior main room of the building, which they reached through a tunnel with leaking walls, was under street level. Yellow light blazed shamelessly on walls once ornamented with gilt statues and scarlet scarves but now befouled by time, like the rouged old white woman who met them at the door.

She was the only white woman in the place.

The night was far advanced at Madame Gobert's. The place seemed alive with women of all shades from obsidian black to light olive, and costumes in all degrees from full ballroom attire to stark nudity. White men chased giggling Negresses up a broad stair carpeted with filth fading into a murk of upper rooms. In this hell of decayed magnificence, it seemed to Johnny that the whole paradox of the South had come to detestable flower. He sat there, defended on one side by Bobby Drake and on the other by a wall oozing sweat, and watched. Here the white masters came as if to hurl themselves back into the morass from which they had reared their City. They talked the vilest words they could summon up, clenching their teeth and excreting drunken epithets with savage zest. These obscenities, devoid of imagination, were brutally repeated like the blows of a whip. The women for their part giggled fatuously and called the men Mister Jack and Mister Jim and Mister Bob.

—You mustn't get the idea, Johnny, Cousin Bobby said, that all
Southerners are like this. Of course, a lot of the planters will have a Nigro concubine or two. But these boys are kind of wild.

—Hello, Mister Bob, one of the girls said.

—Hello, Jewel, Bobby said. Well, I see the other boys have snaked upstairs on us. S'pose we get out of here, Johnny, and get a little fresh air.

But before they left, some of the other men rejoined them, and when Johnny finally did get out and gulped gratefully at the stinking, warm dawn of New Orleans, his friends swarmed around him with an account of their erotic achievements.

—Johnny, one of them said, trying to give him a true-blue look from drunken eyes, I like you, son, and I wanna do you favor. Now, I got lil mulatto gal shacked up right here on Girod Street. I'm rentin' her to another fella for twenty-five dollars month, which is damn high, boy, but she's worth it, ever' cent of it. She's a good clean girl, came right off my own pappy's plantation, and the old man had a lot of it himself. She ain't any blacker than that wall there, and son, she kin git a wiggle on. If you'll come with me, I'll take you in there right now.

Johnny thanked him a lot and managed with difficulty to get away. He tried to understand the significance of what he had seen. It wasn't ordinary prostitution. The white master was doing a thing so obscene and yet, for some reason, so desirable that he had to defend himself from conscience by an extra brutality. Here in a Black Mass of sensuality, he acknowledged the forbidden secret—his equality with the slave. But this acknowledgment was such that it was a baser indignity than the whip and served more than the bloodhound to keep a race in subjection.

Such was the darker side of that gentle whoredom called slavery, by which a whole race had to prostrate itself for the pleasure of another.

As for the more openly published aspects of the Southern trade in human flesh, Johnny saw that too. He went to the Arcade, where the best slaves were auctioned. They were treated with great care, for a good black would bring fifteen hundred dollars on the block. Slavery was getting more expensive all the time, and a cheaper source of supply was getting more imperative every year.

Johnny saw almost nothing of the beating and murder of slaves,
so vividly depicted by Mrs. Stowe. In fact, all the time he was there, he saw only one instance in which a slave was struck.

It happened one afternoon when he and Susanna had driven out to the Drake plantation upriver with Bobby. As they got out of the buggy, Susanna dropped her bonnet and bending quickly over, picked it up. Her pretty breasts tipped against the rim of her blouse and the scarlet scar darkened suddenly. The Negro holding the horses, a boy of fourteen, watched in fascination. Susanna quickly caught up with Johnny, who took her arm and started up the lawn to the verandah.

Just then there was a thud of fist on flesh. Johnny turned around to see the Negro boy sprawling on his back, hands up, and Cousin Bobby Drake standing over him. Cousin Bobby ran his eyes around the yard; then, coldly purposeful, stepped over to a woodpile and picked up a broadaxe leaning against the logs. His shoulder muscles hardened under his loose coat and his long white hands bulged on the axe handle.

The Negro boy licked his lips but didn't move.

Without a thought, Johnny sprang forward and grabbed the axe handle. Cousin Bobby's lean, pleasant face, which had been entirely calm before, turned suddenly white, his eyes burned, and he exerted all his strength to tear the axe loose from Johnny's grip. The two men struggled furiously in a dead silence.

—Now stop that right now! Susanna said in a querulous voice from the porch. I'm downright ashamed of both of you!

Instantly, Cousin Bobby laughed and let go of the axe, which dropped between them. He adjusted his soft tie.

—Take it easy, son, he said. Can't a man scare the liver out of his own nigger? I wasn't going to hit 'im. I never in my life killed a nigger, and I wouldn't start before a lady.

He smiled and took Johnny's arm. He was breathing heavily, and his hands trembled.

—I'm sorry, Johnny said.

—Anyone else would've killed that nigger, Cousin Bobby said, his voice gently chiding, though his face muscles worked. I only aimed to teach 'im a lesson. He's lucky to be alive.

He hadn't even looked back at the Negro boy, who still lay where
he had fallen as the two men and the girl walked up the verandah to the door.

As soon as they were inside, Susanna put her hands on her hips.

—Johnny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, shaming Bobby that way in front of his own Nigro. Don't you know Bobby's the best master on the river! His slaves love him.

—Take it easy, Sue, Bobby said, smiling.