The House Behind the Cedars/XVIII
XVIII
UNDER THE OLD REGIME
For many years before the civil war there had
lived, in the old house behind the cedars, a free
colored woman who went by the name of Molly
Walden--her rightful name, for her parents
were free-born and legally married. She was a tall
woman, straight as an arrow. Her complexion in
youth was of an old ivory tint, which at the period
of this story, time had darkened measurably. Her
black eyes, now faded, had once sparkled with the
fire of youth. High cheek-bones, straight black
hair, and a certain dignified reposefulness of manner
pointed to an aboriginal descent. Tradition
gave her to the negro race. Doubtless she had a
strain of each, with white blood very visibly
predominating over both. In Louisiana or the West
Indies she would have been called a quadroon, or
more loosely, a creole; in North Carolina, where
fine distinctions were not the rule in matters
of color, she was sufficiently differentiated when
described as a bright mulatto.
Molly's free birth carried with it certain
advantages, even in the South before the war. Though
degraded from its high estate, and shorn of its
choicest attributes, the word "freedom" had
nevertheless a cheerful sound, and described a
condition that left even to colored people who could
claim it some liberty of movement and some control
of their own persons. They were not citizens,
yet they were not slaves. No negro, save in books,
ever refused freedom; many of them ran frightful
risks to achieve it. Molly's parents were of the
class, more numerous in North Carolina than elsewhere,
known as "old issue free negroes," which
took its rise in the misty colonial period, when race
lines were not so closely drawn, and the population
of North Carolina comprised many Indians, runaway
negroes, and indentured white servants from
the seaboard plantations, who mingled their blood
with great freedom and small formality. Free
colored people in North Carolina exercised the
right of suffrage as late as 1835, and some of them,
in spite of galling restrictions, attained to a
considerable degree of prosperity, and dreamed of a
still brighter future, when the growing tyranny of
the slave power crushed their hopes and crowded
the free people back upon the black mass just
beneath them. Mis' Molly's father had been at
one time a man of some means. In an evil hour,
with an overweening confidence in his fellow men,
he indorsed a note for a white man who, in a
moment of financial hardship, clapped his colored
neighbor on the back and called him brother. Not
poverty, but wealth, is the most potent leveler.
In due time the indorser was called upon to meet
the maturing obligation. This was the beginning
of a series of financial difficulties which speedily
involved him in ruin. He died prematurely, a
disappointed and disheartened man, leaving his family
in dire poverty.
His widow and surviving children lived on for
a little while at the house he had owned, just
outside of the town, on one of the main traveled roads.
By the wayside, near the house, there was a famous
deep well. The slim, barefoot girl, with sparkling
eyes and voluminous hair, who played about the
yard and sometimes handed water in a gourd to
travelers, did not long escape critical observation.
A gentleman drove by one day, stopped at the
well, smiled upon the girl, and said kind words. He
came again, more than once, and soon, while
scarcely more than a child in years, Molly was
living in her own house, hers by deed of gift, for
her protector was rich and liberal. Her mother
nevermore knew want. Her poor relations could
always find a meal in Molly's kitchen. She did
not flaunt her prosperity in the world's face; she
hid it discreetly behind the cedar screen. Those
who wished could know of it, for there were few
secrets in Patesville; those who chose could as
easily ignore it. There were few to trouble
themselves about the secluded life of an obscure woman
of a class which had no recognized place in the
social economy. She worshiped the ground upon
which her lord walked, was humbly grateful for
his protection, and quite as faithful as the forbidden
marriage vow could possibly have made her. She
led her life in material peace and comfort, and
with a certain amount of dignity. Of her false
relation to society she was not without some
vague conception; but the moral point involved
was so confused with other questions growing out
--of slavery and caste as to cause her, as a rule, but
little uneasiness; and only now and then, in the
moments of deeper feeling that come sometimes to
all who live and love, did there break through the
mists of ignorance and prejudice surrounding her
a flash of light by which she saw, so far as she
was capable of seeing, her true position, which in
the clear light of truth no special pleading could
entirely justify. For she was free, she had not
the slave's excuse. With every inducement to do
evil and few incentives to do well, and hence
entitled to charitable judgment, she yet had
freedom of choice, and therefore could not wholly
escape blame. Let it be said, in further extenuation,
that no other woman lived in neglect or sorrow
because of her. She robbed no one else. For
what life gave her she returned an equivalent; and
what she did not pay, her children settled to the
last farthing.
Several years before the war, when Mis' Molly's
daughter Rena was a few years old, death had
suddenly removed the source of their prosperity.
The household was not left entirely destitute.
Mis' Molly owned her home, and had a store of
gold pieces in the chest beneath her bed. A small
piece of real estate stood in the name of each of
the children, the income from which contributed to
their maintenance. Larger expectations were
dependent upon the discovery of a promised will,
which never came to light. Mis' Molly wore black
for several years after this bereavement, until the
teacher and the preacher, following close upon the
heels of military occupation, suggested to the
colored people new standards of life and character, in
the light of which Mis' Molly laid her mourning
sadly and shamefacedly aside. She had eaten of
the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. After the war
she formed the habit of church-going, and might
have been seen now and then, with her daughter, in
a retired corner of the gallery of the white Episcopal
church. Upon the ground floor was a certain
pew which could be seen from her seat, where once
had sat a gentleman whose pleasures had not interfered
with the practice of his religion. She might
have had a better seat in a church where a Northern
missionary would have preached a sermon better
suited to her comprehension and her moral needs,
but she preferred the other. She was not white,
alas! she was shut out from this seeming paradise;
but she liked to see the distant glow of the celestial
city, and to recall the days when she had basked in
its radiance. She did not sympathize greatly with
the new era opened up for the emancipated slaves;
she had no ideal love of liberty; she was no broader
and no more altruistic than the white people around
her, to whom she had always looked up; and she
sighed for the old days, because to her they had
been the good days. Now, not only was her king
dead, but the shield of his memory protected her
no longer.
Molly had lost one child, and his grave was
visible from the kitchen window, under a small
clump of cedars in the rear of the two-acre lot.
For even in the towns many a household had its
private cemetery in those old days when the living
were close to the dead, and ghosts were not the
mere chimeras of a sick imagination, but real
though unsubstantial entities, of which it was
almost disgraceful not to have seen one or two.
Had not the Witch of Endor called up the shade
of Samuel the prophet? Had not the spirit of
Mis' Molly's dead son appeared to her, as well
as the ghostly presence of another she had loved?
In 1855, Mis' Molly's remaining son had grown
into a tall, slender lad of fifteen, with his father's
patrician features and his mother's Indian hair,
and no external sign to mark him off from the
white boys on the street. He soon came to know,
however, that there was a difference. He was
informed one day that he was black. He denied the
proposition and thrashed the child who made it.
The scene was repeated the next day, with a
variation,--he was himself thrashed by a larger boy.
When he had been beaten five or six times, he
ceased to argue the point, though to himself he
never admitted the charge. His playmates might
call him black; the mirror proved that God, the
Father of all, had made him white; and God, he
had been taught, made no mistakes,--having
made him white, He must have meant him to be
white.
In the "hall" or parlor of his mother's house
stood a quaintly carved black walnut bookcase,
containing a small but remarkable collection of
books, which had at one time been used, in his
hours of retreat and relaxation from business and
politics, by the distinguished gentleman who did
not give his name to Mis' Molly's children,--to
whom it would have been a valuable heritage, could
they have had the right to bear it. Among the
books were a volume of Fielding's complete works,
in fine print, set in double columns; a set of
Bulwer's novels; a collection of everything that Walter
Scott--the literary idol of the South--had ever
written; Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, cheek by
jowl with the history of the virtuous Clarissa
Harlowe; the Spectator and Tristram Shandy, Robinson
Crusoe and the Arabian Nights. On these secluded
shelves Roderick Random, Don Quixote, and Gil
Blas for a long time ceased their wanderings, the
Pilgrim's Progress was suspended, Milton's mighty
harmonies were dumb, and Shakespeare reigned
over a silent kingdom. An illustrated Bible, with a
wonderful Apocrypha, was flanked on one side by
Volney's Ruins of Empire and on the other by
Paine's Age of Reason, for the collector of the
books had been a man of catholic taste as well as
of inquiring mind, and no one who could have
criticised his reading ever penetrated behind the
cedar hedge. A history of the French Revolution
consorted amiably with a homespun chronicle of
North Carolina, rich in biographical notices of
distinguished citizens and inscriptions from their
tombstones, upon reading which one might well
wonder why North Carolina had not long ago
eclipsed the rest of the world in wealth, wisdom,
glory, and renown. On almost every page of this
monumental work could be found the most ardent
panegyrics of liberty, side by side with the slavery
statistics of the State,--an incongruity of which
the learned author was deliciously unconscious.
When John Walden was yet a small boy, he
had learned all that could be taught by the faded
mulatto teacher in the long, shiny black frock
coat, whom local public opinion permitted to teach
a handful of free colored children for a pittance
barely enough to keep soul and body together.
When the boy had learned to read, he discovered
the library, which for several years had been
without a reader, and found in it the portal of a new
world, peopled with strange and marvelous beings.
Lying prone upon the floor of the shaded front
piazza, behind the fragrant garden, he followed
the fortunes of Tom Jones and Sophia; he wept
over the fate of Eugene Aram; he penetrated with
Richard the Lion-heart into Saladin's tent, with
Gil Blas into the robbers' cave; he flew through
the air on the magic carpet or the enchanted horse,
or tied with Sindbad to the roc's leg. Sometimes
he read or repeated the simpler stories to his little
sister, sitting wide-eyed by his side. When he had
read all the books,--indeed, long before he had
read them all,--he too had tasted of the fruit of
the Tree of Knowledge: contentment took its flight,
and happiness lay far beyond the sphere where
he was born. The blood of his white fathers, the
heirs of the ages, cried out for its own, and after
the manner of that blood set about getting the
object of its desire.
Near the corner of Mackenzie Street, just one
block north of the Patesville market-house, there
had stood for many years before the war, on the
verge of the steep bank of Beaver Creek, a small
frame office building, the front of which was level
with the street, while the rear rested on long brick
pillars founded on the solid rock at the edge of the
brawling stream below. Here, for nearly half a
century, Archibald Straight had transacted legal
business for the best people of Northumberland
County. Full many a lawsuit had he won, lost, or
settled; many a spendthrift had he saved from
ruin, and not a few families from disgrace. Several
times honored by election to the bench, he
had so dispensed justice tempered with mercy as
to win the hearts of all good citizens, and
especially those of the poor, the oppressed, and the
socially disinherited. The rights of the humblest
negro, few as they might be, were as sacred to
him as those of the proudest aristocrat, and he
had sentenced a man to be hanged for the murder
of his own slave. An old-fashioned man, tall and
spare of figure and bowed somewhat with age, he
was always correctly clad in a long frock coat of
broadcloth, with a high collar and a black stock.
Courtly in address to his social equals (superiors
he had none), he was kind and considerate to
those beneath him. He owned a few domestic
servants, no one of whom had ever felt the weight
of his hand, and for whose ultimate freedom he
had provided in his will. In the long-drawn-out
slavery agitation he had taken a keen interest,
rather as observer than as participant. As the heat
of controversy increased, his lack of zeal for the
peculiar institution led to his defeat for the bench
by a more active partisan. His was too just a
mind not to perceive the arguments on both sides;
but, on the whole, he had stood by the ancient
landmarks, content to let events drift to a conclusion
he did not expect to see; the institutions of
his fathers would probably last his lifetime.
One day Judge Straight was sitting in his
office reading a recently published pamphlet,--
presenting an elaborate pro-slavery argument, based
upon the hopeless intellectual inferiority of the
negro, and the physical and moral degeneration
of mulattoes, who combined the worst qualities of
their two ancestral races,--when a barefooted boy
walked into the office, straw hat in hand, came
boldly up to the desk at which the old judge was
sitting, and said as the judge looked up through
his gold-rimmed glasses,--
"Sir, I want to be a lawyer!"
"God bless me!" exclaimed the judge. "It is
a singular desire, from a singular source, and
expressed in a singular way. Who the devil are
you, sir, that wish so strange a thing as to become
a lawyer--everybody's servant?"
"And everybody's master, sir," replied the lad
stoutly.
"That is a matter of opinion, and open to
argument," rejoined the judge, amused and secretly
flattered by this tribute to his profession, "though
there may be a grain of truth in what you say.
But what is your name, Mr. Would-be-lawyer?"
"John Walden, sir," answered the lad.
"John Walden?--Walden?" mused the judge.
"What Walden can that be? Do you belong in
town?"
"Yes, sir."
"Humph! I can't imagine who you are. It's
plain that you are a lad of good blood, and yet I
don't know whose son you can be. What is your
father's name?"
The lad hesitated, and flushed crimson.
The old gentleman noted his hesitation. "It
is a wise son," he thought, "that knows his own
father. He is a bright lad, and will have this
question put to him more than once. I'll see
how he will answer it."
The boy maintained an awkward silence, while
the old judge eyed him keenly.
"My father's dead," he said at length, in a low
voice. "I'm Mis' Molly Walden's son." He
had expected, of course, to tell who he was, if
asked, but had not foreseen just the form of the
inquiry; and while he had thought more of his
race than of his illegitimate birth, he realized at
this moment as never before that this question too
would be always with him. As put now by Judge
Straight, it made him wince. He had not read his
father's books for nothing.
"God bless my soul!" exclaimed the judge in
genuine surprise at this answer; "and you want
to be a lawyer!" The situation was so much
worse than he had suspected that even an old
practitioner, case-hardened by years of life at the
trial table and on the bench, was startled for a
moment into a comical sort of consternation, so
apparent that a lad less stout-hearted would have
weakened and fled at the sight of it.
"Yes, sir. Why not?" responded the boy,
trembling a little at the knees, but stoutly holding
his ground.
"He wants to be a lawyer, and he asks me why
not!" muttered the judge, speaking apparently to
himself. He rose from his chair, walked across
the room, and threw open a window. The cool
morning air brought with it the babbling of the
stream below and the murmur of the mill near by.
He glanced across the creek to the ruined foundation
of an old house on the low ground beyond the
creek. Turning from the window, he looked back
at the boy, who had remained standing between
him and the door. At that moment another lad
came along the street and stopped opposite the
open doorway. The presence of the two boys in
connection with the book he had been reading
suggested a comparison. The judge knew the lad
outside as the son of a leading merchant of the
town. The merchant and his wife were both of
old families which had lived in the community
for several generations, and whose blood was
presumably of the purest strain; yet the boy
was sallow, with amorphous features, thin shanks,
and stooping shoulders. The youth standing in
the judge's office, on the contrary, was straight,
shapely, and well-grown. His eye was clear, and
he kept it fixed on the old gentleman with a look
in which there was nothing of cringing. He was
no darker than many a white boy bronzed by the
Southern sun; his hair and eyes were black, and
his features of the high-bred, clean-cut order that
marks the patrician type the world over. What
struck the judge most forcibly, however, was the
lad's resemblance to an old friend and companion
and client. He recalled a certain conversation
with this old friend, who had said to him one day:
"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 private
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.