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Jack London - "The Night Born"

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The House Behind The Cedars

C >> Charles W. Chesnutt >> The House Behind The Cedars




Dear Sir,--When I inform you, as you are
doubtless informed ere the receipt of this, that I
saw your sister in Patesville last week and learned
the nature of those antecedents of yours and hers
at which you hinted so obscurely in a recent
conversation, you will not be surprised to learn that
I take this opportunity of renouncing any pretensions
to Miss Warwick's hand, and request you to
convey this message to her, since it was through
you that I formed her acquaintance. I think
perhaps that few white men would deem it necessary
to make an explanation under the circumstances,
and I do not know that I need say more than
that no one, considering where and how I met your
sister, would have dreamed of even the possibility
of what I have learned. I might with justice
reproach you for trifling with the most sacred
feelings of a man's heart; but I realize the hardship
of your position and hers, and can make allowances.
I would never have sought to know this thing; I
would doubtless have been happier had I gone
through life without finding it out; but having the
knowledge, I cannot ignore it, as you must understand
perfectly well. I regret that she should be
distressed or disappointed,--she has not suffered
alone.

I need scarcely assure you that I shall say
nothing about this affair, and that I shall keep
your secret as though it were my own. Personally,
I shall never be able to think of you as other than
a white man, as you may gather from the tone of
this letter; and while I cannot marry your sister,
I wish her every happiness, and remain,
Yours very truly,
GEORGE TRYON.


Warwick could not know that this formal epistle
was the last of a dozen that Tryon had written and
destroyed during the week since the meeting in
Patesville,--hot, blistering letters, cold, cutting
letters, scornful, crushing letters. Though none of
them was sent, except this last, they had furnished
a safety-valve for his emotions, and had left him in
a state of mind that permitted him to write the
foregoing.

And now, while Rena is recovering from her
illness, and Tryon from his love, and while Fate is
shuffling the cards for another deal, a few words
may be said about the past life of the people who
lived in the rear of the flower garden, in the quaint
old house beyond the cedars, and how their lives
were mingled with those of the men and women
around them and others that were gone. For connected
with our kind we must be; if not by our
virtues, then by our vices,--if not by our services,
at least by our needs.



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."

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