He and his foster-brother rode the plantation horses and mules, they had a pack of small hounds to hunt with and promise of a gun in another year or so; they were sufficient, complete, wanting, as all children do, not to be understood, leaping in mutual embattlement before any threat to privacy, but only to love, to question and examine unchallenged, and to be let alone.
Then one day the old curse of his fathers, the old haughty ancestral pride based not on any value but on an accident of geography, stemmed not from courage and honour but from wrong and shame, descended to him. He did not recognise it then.
He and his foster-brother, Henry, were seven years old. They had finished supper at Henry’s house and Molly was just sending them to bed in the room across the hall where they slept when there, when suddenly he said, “I’m going home.”
“Les stay here,” Henry said. “I thought we was going to get up when pappy did and go hunting.”
“You can,” he said. He was already moving toward the door. “I’m going home.”
“All right,” Henry said, following him. And he remembered how they walked that half mile to his house in the first summer dark, himself walking just fast enough that the negro boy never quite came up beside him, entering the house in single file and up the stairs and into the room with the bed and the pallet on the floor which they slept on when they passed the night here, and how he undressed just slow enough for Henry to beat him to the pallet and lie down.
Then he went to the bed and lay down on it, rigid, staring up at the dark ceiling even after he heard Henry raise on to one elbow, looking toward the bed with slow and equable astonishment. “Are you going to sleep up there?” Henry said.
“Well, all right. This here pallet sleeps all right to me, but I reckon I just as lief to if you wants to,” and rose and approached the bed and stood over the white boy, waiting for him to move over and make room until the boy said, harsh and violent though not loud:
“No!”
Henry didn’t move. “You mean you dont want me to sleep in the bed?” Nor did the boy move. He didn’t answer, rigid on his back, staring upward. “All right,” Henry said quietly and went back to the pallet and lay down again. The boy heard him, listened to him; he couldn’t help it, lying clenched and rigid and open-eyed, hearing the slow equable voice: “I reckon on a hot night like tonight we will sleep cooler if we — —”
“Shut up!” the boy said. “How’m I or you neither going to sleep if you keep on talking?” Henry hushed then. But the boy didn’t sleep, long after Henry’s quiet and untroubled breathing had begun, lying in a rigid fury of the grief he could not explain, the shame he would not admit. Then he slept and it seemed to him he was still awake, waked and did not know he had slept until he saw in the grey of dawn the empty pallet on the floor.
They did not hunt that morning. They never slept in the same room again and never again ate at the same table because he admitted to himself it was shame now and he did not go to Henry’s house and for a month he only saw Henry at a distance, with Lucas in the field, walking beside his father and holding the reins of the team while Lucas ploughed. Then one day he knew it was grief and was ready to admit it was shame also, wanted to admit it only it was too late then, for ever and for ever too late. He went to Molly’s house.
It was already late afternoon; Henry and Lucas would be coming up from the field at any time now. Molly was there, looking at him from the kitchen door as he crossed the yard. There was nothing in her face; he said it the best he could for that moment, because later he would be able to say it all right, say it once and for ever so that it would be gone for ever, facing her before he entered her house yet, stopping, his feet slightly apart, trembling a little, lordly, peremptory: “I’m going to eat supper with you all to-night.”
It was all right. There was nothing in her face. He could say it almost any time now, when the time came. “Course you is,” she said. “I’ll cook you a chicken.”
Then it was as if it had never happened at all. Henry came almost at once; he must have seen him from the field, and he and Henry killed and dressed the chicken.
Then Lucas came and he went to the barn with Henry and Lucas while Henry milked. Then they were busy in the yard in the dusk, smelling the cooking chicken, until Molly called Henry and then a little later himself, the voice as it had always been, peaceful and steadfast: “Come and eat your supper.”
But it was too late. The table was set in the kitchen where it always was and Molly stood at the stove drawing the biscuit out as she always stood, but Lucas was not there and there was just one chair, one plate, his glass of milk beside it, the platter heaped with untouched chicken, and even as he sprang back, gasping, for an instant blind as the room rushed and swam, Henry was turning toward the door to go out of it.
“Are you ashamed to eat when I eat?” he cried.
Henry paused, turning his head a little to speak in the voice slow and without heat: “I aint shamed of nobody,” he said peacefully. “Not even me.”
So he entered his heritage. He ate its bitter fruit. He listened as Lucas referred to his father as Mr Edmonds, never as Mister Zack; he watched him avoid having to address the white man directly by any name at all with a calculation so coldly and constantly alert, a finesse so deliberate and unflagging, that for a time he could not tell if even his father knew that the negro was refusing to call him mister.
At last he spoke to his father about it. The other listened gravely, with something in his face which the boy could not read and which at the moment he paid little attention to since he was still young then, still a child; he had not yet divined that there was something between his father and Lucas, something more than difference in race could account for since it did not exist between Lucas and any other white man, something more than the white blood, even the McCaslin blood, could account for since it was not there between his uncle Isaac McCaslin and Lucas.
“You think that because Lucas is older than I am, old enough even to remember Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy a little, and is a descendant of the people who lived on this place where we Edmonds are usurpers, yesterday’s mushrooms, is not reason enough for him not to want to say mister to me?” his father said. “We grew up together, we ate and slept together and hunted and fished together, like you and Henry. We did it until we were grown men. Except that I always beat him shooting except one time. As it turned out, I even beat him then. You think that’s not reason enough?”
“We’re not usurpers,” the boy said, cried almost. “Our grandmother McCaslin was as much kin to old Carothers as Uncle Buck and Buddy. Uncle Isaac himself gave — Uncle Isaac himself says …” He ceased. His father watched him. “No, sir,” he said harshly. “That’s not enough.”
“Ah,” his father said. Then the boy could read what was in his face. He had seen it before, as all children had — that moment when, enveloped and surrounded still by the warmth and confidence, he discovers that the reserve which he had thought to have passed had merely retreated and set up a new barrier, still impregnable; — that instant when the child realises with both grief and outrage that the parent antedates it, has experienced things, shames and triumphs both, in which it can have no part. “I’ll make a trade with you. You let me and Lucas settle how he is to treat me, and I’ll let you and him settle how he is to treat you.”
Then, in adolescence, he knew what he had seen in his father’s face that morning, what shadow, what stain, what mark — something which had happened between Lucas and his father, which nobody but they knew and would ever know if the telling depended on them — something which had happened because they were themselves, men, not stemming from any difference of race nor because one blood strain ran in them both. Then, in his late teens, almost a man, he even knew what it had been.
It was a woman, he thought. My father and a nigger, over a woman. My father and a nigger man over a nigger woman, because he simply declined even to realise that he had even refused to think a white woman. He didn’t even think Molly’s name. That didn’t matter. And by God Lucas beat him, he thought.
Edmonds, he thought, harshly and viciously. Edmonds.
