Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [91]
“That’s from a song you people sing.”
Henri looked away from him, shaking his head. Gaps had begun to open in the mist and through them he could see that the bloodstained water was now beginning to recede. On the long shelves of limestone emerging from the flood, there appeared to be etched events from either the past or the future: Fort Pillow, Parker’s Crossroads, Chickamauga … Was it the future that hadn’t happened yet? Or was that the past?
Henri said, “I didn’t know you people knew about Toussaint.”
“Ah well,” said Kelley. “We didn’t really want to know about him, but some of us did. I believe he may have been the most remarkable nigger to have ever lived, as a matter of fact. But it wouldn’t do to talk too much about him here—only get our niggers all stirred up.”
Kelley did not seem much perturbed by the look Henri was burning on him now. “Let’s say it’s true you were with John Brown,” he said. “What would have happened if he had succeeded? Do you suppose a pack of Africans can make a nation? No, they must revert to savagery, and you will have nothing but war and destruction. As you described it under your chieftain—the one who rules Haiti today.”
Henri shaded his eyes with one hand, squinting at reflections from the receding water below the knoll. “Pardon me, Mister Kelley,” he said, “But what exactly do you think you’ve got here and now?”
“A judgment on us, possibly,” Kelley said. “I have considered that.” He regarded Henri with his eyes pale blue behind the speckled lenses. “But what about you?” he said. “Monty has a point, don’t he? I mean, the Yankees are fielding black regiments now. Why aren’t you leading one of them?”
“Because that’s not what happened,” Henri said.
A white owl flew in out of the mist and settled on a limb of the dead tree. It preened its yellowish feathers and shrugged. Henri turned away when the owl’s large black eyes fell upon him.
“The Romans believed it meant death,” Kelley said. “An owl looking at you, I mean.”
“That’s nothing to me.” Henri swallowed a laugh. “Are you sure he’s not looking at you?” He knew Kelley would survive the war but more than likely Kelley didn’t know that.
“And the owl, and the nighthawk, and the cuckoo and the hawk after his kind, and the little owl and the cormorant and the great owl, and the swan, and the pelican, and the gyre eagle. All abominations,” Kelley said. “According to Leviticus, eleven sixteen.”
“He only meant you’re not supposed to eat them,” Henri said. When he looked at the owl again its eyes were closed.
“Bedford Forrest is a man I can follow,” he said. “I don’t know if I can really tell you why that is.”
“But maybe I know what you mean,” Kelley said. “He takes whoever comes his way one at a time.”
“It could be I’m not meant to lead but to follow,” Henri said. “That might be why I couldn’t get the slaves to rise.”
“Or it could be that God’s design is for black people to be ruled and governed by white,” Kelley said. “Mister Jefferson said so in his book, or rather he suspected so. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in endowments both of body and mind. A great many others have thought so too.”
“Do you really believe all that horseshit?” Henri said.
“I don’t know,” Kelley said. “I think probably I believed it before I ever thought much about it, but the more I think about it the less sense it makes.”
The owl poked up its tail feathers and crapped out a small dry pellet of mouse hair and bone. The pellet made no sound when it struck the dirt beneath the tree.
“And you?” Kelley said. “You think we’re all niggers under the skin, didn’t you just say so?”
“We’re all blood and bone under the skin,” Henry said. “And a little gristle. You’ve seen as much of that these last few years as anyone.”
“That notion has been growing in me, though,” Kelley said, in no way derailed from the track of his previous thought. “I’m beginning to doubt that a soul has a color, in God’s eye.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX