there, and he said, ‘Remember this. Your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race before your grandfather or your brother or me or you were even thought of. A race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever a part of the white race’s doom and curse for its sins. Remember that. His doom and his curse. Forever and ever. Mine. Your mother’s. Yours, even though you are a child. The curse of every white child that ever was born and that ever will be born. None can escape it.’ And I said, ‘Not even me?’ And he said, ‘Not even you. Least of all, you.’ I had seen and known negroes since I could remember. I just looked at them as I did at rain, or furniture, or food or sleep. But after that I seemed to see them for the first time not as people, but as a thing, a shadow in which I lived, we lived, all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with the black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath. And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of a cross. And it seemed like the white babies were struggling, even before they drew breath, to escape from the shadow that was not only upon them but beneath them too, flung out like their arms were flung out, as if they were nailed to the cross. I saw all the little babies that would ever be in the world, the ones not yet even born—a long line of them with their arms spread, on the black crosses. I couldn’t tell then whether I saw it or dreamed it. But it was terrible to me. I cried at night. At last I told father, tried to tell him. What I wanted to tell him was that I must escape, get away from under the shadow, or I would die. ‘You cannot,’ he said. ‘You must struggle, rise. But in order to rise, you must raise the shadow with you. But you can never lift it to your level. I see that now, which I did not see until I came down here. But escape it you cannot. The curse of the black race is God’s curse. But the curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God’s chosen own because He once cursed Him.’ ” Her voice ceased. Across the vague oblong of open door fireflies drifted. At last Christmas said:
“There was something I was going to ask you. But I guess I know the answer myself now.”
She did not stir. Her voice was quiet. “What?”
“Why your father never killed that fellow—what’s his name? Sartoris.”
“Oh,” she said. Then there was silence again. Across the door the fireflies drifted and drifted. “You would have. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, at once, immediately. Then he knew that she was looking toward his voice almost as if she could see him. Her voice was almost gentle now, it was so quiet, so still.
“You don’t have any idea who your parents were?”
If she could have seen his face she would have found it sullen, brooding. “Except that one of them was part nigger. Like I told you before.”
She was still looking at him; her voice told him that. It was quiet, impersonal, interested without being curious. “How do you know that?”
He didn’t answer for some time. Then he said: “I don’t know it.” Again his voice ceased; by its sound she knew that he was looking away, toward the door. His face was sullen, quite still. Then he spoke again, moving; his voice now had an overtone, unmirthful yet quizzical, at once humorless and sardonic: “If I’m not, damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time.”
She in turn seemed to muse now, quiet, scarcebreathing, yet still with nothing of selfpity or retrospect: “I had thought of that. Why father didn’t shoot Colonel Sartoris. I think that it was because of his French blood.”
“French blood?” Christmas said. “Don’t even Frenchmen get mad when a man kills his father and his son on the same day? I guess your father must have got religion. Turned preacher, maybe.”
She did not answer for a time. The fireflies drifted; somewhere a dog barked, mellow, sad, faraway. “I thought about that,” she said. “It was all over then. The killing in uniform and with flags, and the killing without uniforms