“You have eaten of it?”
“Once. I was young then, and more hardy in the appetite than now. Now it is different with me.”
“Yes. They are too valuable to eat now.”
“There is a bitter taste to the flesh which I do not like.”
“They are too valuable to eat, anyway, when the white men will give horses for them.”
They entered the lane. The mute, meager toys — the fetish-shaped objects made of wood and rags and feathers — lay in the dust about the patinaed doorsteps, among bones and broken gourd dishes. But there was no sound from any cabin, no face in any door; had not been since yesterday, when Issetibbeha died. But they already knew what they would find.
It was in the central cabin, a house a little larger than the others, where at certain phases of the moon the Negroes would gather to begin their ceremonies before removing after nightfall to the creek bottom, where they kept the drums. In this room they kept the minor accessories, the cryptic ornaments, the ceremonial records which consisted of sticks daubed with red clay in symbols.
It had a hearth in the center of the floor, beneath a hole in the roof, with a few cold wood ashes and a suspended iron pot. The window shutters were closed; when the two Indians entered, after the abashless sunlight they could distinguish nothing with the eyes save a movement, shadow, out of which eyeballs rolled, so that the place appeared to be full of Negroes. The two Indians stood in the doorway.
“Yao,” Basket said. “I said this is not the good way.”
“I don’t think I want to be here,” the second said.
“That is black man’s fear which you smell. It does not smell as ours does.”
“I don’t think I want to be here.”
“Your fear has an odor too.”
“Maybe it is Issetibbeha which we smell.”
“Yao. He knows. He knows what we will find here. He knew when he died what we should find here today.” Out of the rank twilight of the room the eyes, the smell, of Negroes rolled about them. “I am Three Basket, whom you know,” Basket said into the room. “We are come from the Man. He whom we seek is gone?” The Negroes said nothing. The smell of them, of their bodies, seemed to ebb and flux in the still hot air.
They seemed to be musing as one upon something remote, inscrutable. They were like a single octopus. They were like the roots of a huge tree uncovered, the earth broken momentarily upon the writhen, thick, fetid tangle of its lightless and outraged life. “Come,” Basket said. “You know our errand. Is he whom we seek gone?”
“They are thinking something,” the second said. “I do not want to be here.”
“They are knowing something,” Basket said.
“They are hiding him, you think?”
“No. He is gone. He has been gone since last night. It happened like this before, when the grandfather of him who is now the Man died. It took us three days to catch him. For three days Doom lay above the ground, saying ‘I see my horse and my dog. But I do not see my slave. What have you done with him that you will not permit me to lie quiet?’”
“They do not like to die.”
“Yao. They cling. It makes trouble for us, always. A people without honor and without decorum. Always a trouble.”
“I do not like it here.”
“Nor do I. But then, they are savages; they cannot be expected to regard usage. That is why I say that this way is a bad way.”
“Yao. They cling. They would even rather work in the sun than to enter the earth with a chief. But he is gone.”
The Negroes had said nothing, made no sound. The white eyeballs rolled, wild, subdued; the smell was rank, violent. “Yes, they fear,” the second said. “What shall we do now?”
“Let us go and talk with the Man.”
“Will Moketubbe listen?”
“What can he do? He will not like to. But he is the Man now.”
“Yao. He is the Man. He can wear the shoes with the red heels all the time now.” They turned and went out. There was no door in the door frame. There were no doors in any of the cabins.
“He did that anyway,” Basket said.
“Behind Issetibbeha’s back. But now they are his shoes, since he is the Man.”
“Yao. Issetibbeha did not like it. I have heard. I know that he said to Moketubbe: ‘When you are the Man, the shoes will be yours. But until then, they are my shoes.’ But now Moketubbe is the Man; he can wear them.”
“Yao,” the second said. “He is the Man now. He used to wear the shoes behind Issetibbeha’s back, and it was not known if Issetibbeha knew this or not. And then Issetibbeha became dead, who was not old, and the shoes are Moketubbe’s, since he is the Man now. What do you think of that?”
“I don’t think about it,” Basket said. “Do you?”
“No,” the second said.
“Good,” Basket said. “You are wise.”
II
The house sat on a knoll, surrounded by oak trees. The front of it was one story in height, composed of the deck house of a steamboat which had gone ashore and which Doom, Issetibbeha’s father, had dismantled with his slaves and hauled on cypress rollers twelve miles home overland. It took them five months. His house consisted at the time of one brick wall.
He set the steamboat broadside on to the wall, where now the chipped and flaked gilding of the rococo cornices arched in faint splendor above the gilt lettering of the stateroom names above the jalousied doors.
Doom had been born merely a subchief, a Mingo, one of three children on the mother’s side of the family. He made a journey — he was a young man then and New Orleans was a European city — from north Mississippi to New Orleans by keel boat, where he met the Chevalier Sœur Blonde de Vitry, a man whose social position, on its face, was as equivocal as Doom’s own.
In New Orleans, among the gamblers and cutthroats of the river front, Doom, under the tutelage of his patron, passed as the chief, the Man, the hereditary owner of that land which belonged to the male side of the family; it was the Chevalier de Vitry who called him du homme, and hence Doom.
They were seen everywhere together — the Indian, the squat man with a bold, inscrutable, underbred face, and the Parisian, the expatriate, the friend, it was said, of Carondelet and the intimate of General Wilkinson.
Then they disappeared, the two of them, vanishing from their old equivocal haunts and leaving behind them the legend of the sums which Doom was believed to have won, and some tale about a young woman, daughter of a fairly well-to-do West Indian family, the son and brother of whom sought Doom with a pistol about his old haunts for some time after his disappearance.
Six months later the young woman herself disappeared, boarding the St. Louis packet, which put in one night at a wood landing on the north Mississippi side, where the woman, accompanied by a Negro maid, got off. Four Indians met her with a horse and wagon, and they traveled for three days, slowly, since she was already big with child, to the plantation, where she found that Doom was now chief. He never told her how he accomplished it, save that his uncle and his cousin had died suddenly.
At that time the house consisted of a brick wall built by shiftless slaves, against which was propped a thatched lean-to divided into rooms and littered with bones and refuse, set in the center of ten thousand acres of matchless parklike forest where deer grazed like domestic cattle.
Doom and the woman were married there a short time before Issetibbeha was born, by a combination itinerant minister and slave trader who arrived on a mule, to the saddle of which was lashed a cotton umbrella and a three-gallon demijohn of whisky. After that. Doom began to acquire more slaves and to cultivate some of his land, as the white people did.
But he never had enough for them to do. In utter idleness the majority of them led lives transplanted whole out of African jungles, save on the occasions when, entertaining guests, Doom coursed them with dogs.
When Doom died, Issetibbeha, his son, was nineteen. He became proprietor of the land and of the quintupled herd of blacks for which he had no use at all. Though the title of Man rested with him, there was a hierarchy of cousins and uncles who ruled the clan and who finally gathered in squatting conclave over the Negro question, squatting profoundly beneath the golden names above the doors of the steamboat.
“We cannot eat them,” one said.
“Why not?”
“There are too many of them.”
“That’s true,” a third said. “Once we started, we should have to eat them all. And that much flesh diet is not good for man.”
“Perhaps they will be like deer flesh. That cannot hurt you.”
“We might kill a few of them and not eat them,” Issetibbeha said.
They looked at him for a while. “What for?” one said.
“That is true,” a second said. “We cannot do that. They are too valuable; remember all the bother they have caused us, finding things for them to do. We must do as the white men do.”
“How is that?” Issetibbeha said.
“Raise more Negroes by clearing more land to make corn to feed them, then sell them. We will clear the land and plant it with food and raise Negroes
