Queen by Alex Haley
curious chant, coming from this curious man, educated, literate, and
completely secretive about his background, struck a responsive chord in
Cap'n Jack. He did not remember Africa, although it had meaning for him,
just as Ireland had meaning for James's children.
He staredat the wooden carving, and it gave him strength. He drifted to
sleep again, and it was a good sleep, a deep sleep, because although he was
shattered by loneliness, he knew he was not alone.
Parson Dick put the carving on a shelf, and tiptoed out into the evening,
to serve the Massa's family.
BLOODLINES 193
Cap'n Jack woke up a little later, because someone was prodding his arm.
He tried to shake the sleep and the drug from his eyes, and saw a small,
worried face, inches from his, staring at him, and asking what was wrong.
It was Jass.
Jass was bored. He'd been kept in bed for two days because he was sick,
and his mamma and papa were away. He hadn't seen Cap'n Jack or Annie or
Easter for ages, and he missed them. He ate the dinner that Tiara gave
him, and then toddled on his own, as he had often done, out of the
kitchen, and made his way to his friends.
He came into the weaving house, and he couldn't find Annie or Easter, but
he saw Cap'n Jack lying on the bed, and his back was all covered in
blood, He got scared, because somebody must have hurt his friend, who
wouldn't wake up. He'd seen them do it to some of the other black people,
and they'd screamed so loudly he got scared and ran away.
When Cap'n Jack opened his eyes, Jass was so relieved that he started to
cry.
Cap'n Jack put his arm around the boy, and held him close, told him not
to cry, everything would be all right.
"Have you been bad?" Jass asked.
"No," Cap'n Jack assured him.
"Then why did they hurt you, and make you bleed?"
Cap'n Jack struggled for words to explain the unexplainable, but couldn't
find them. He tried to sit up, but he gasped at the pain of it, and Jass
started crying again.
Cap'n Jack tried to hush him, and even hummed a little lullaby, and
stowly Jass calmed down, and snuggled into his friend's arm.
Having calmed the boy, he tried to find a way to calm himself. He saw the
African carving sitting on the shelf.
"You love me?" he asked Jass.
Jass assured him that he did.
"You ain't gwine ever hurt me, not in all yo' days?"
Jass said not.
"Promise? '
Jass nodded his head.
Cap'n Jack picked him up under his arms, and held the toddler up to the
carving.
194 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
"Say promise," he told Jass.
Jass did.
Cap'n Jack wasn't quite sure what he was doing, but he had to find some way
to ease his aching heart, and this odd ceremony, before a pagan god, had
some meaning for him, for in it was an unbreakable vow.
"Promise you ain't gwine ever do what yo' pappy done?"
Jass didn't know what his pappy had done, but promised anyway. He would
promise Cap'n Jack anything.
"Promise you ain't gwine ever be yo' father's son?" Jass laughed.
"Promise," Cap'n Jack said sharply.
So Jass promised that he would never be his father's son, and Cap'n Jack
was satisfied. In some small, unexplainable way, his revenge had begun.
He heard the shouts in the distance, Tiara and Angel, Parson Dick and some
others, all running through the night, calling for Jass. They thought him
lost.
Cap'n Jack struggled from his bed, his back screaming in pain, and carried
Jass to the door.
He called to Tiara.
"The chile," he said, "is found."
PART TWO
MERGING
The weariness of'wholly.f6rgotten nations I cannot castfirom mly eyelids.
Nor keepfi-om my.frightened soul The silentfalling of'distant stars.
--HUGO VON HOFMANNSTAHL
25
"Nigger lover," they chanted, just as always. "Nigger lover! Nigger lover!
Nigger lover!"
Jass stood there, fists up, waiting for the blow. He never threw the
first punch because he had not picked the fight, but waited, heart
racing, for what he knew would happen.
When it came, it hurt, just as always. Wesley, his opponent, was only a
year older, but that year represented to Jass a seeming ton weight of
muscle, and he sprawled back against some of his school friends. The
slaves, watching impassively in a group near the fence, sighed a
collective regret, for they had been hoping for another outcome they knew
to be unlikely. Just as always.
Jass was not unpopular at school; many of the boys liked him, some were
his friends, and all respected his father's position, but they all
enjoyed a fight, and the high ethics of boxing demanded not just a victim
but also a valid cause. Jass had a good and supple physique for his age
and was always prepared, however unwillingly, to defend himself with his
fists, so picking on him could never be called bullying. Wesley would
start discussing the economics of the Southern states, Jass would suggest
ideas of diversification away from slavebased agriculture, and before
long the others would be calling him an abolitionist and a nigger lover,
and the fight would begin.
It was sport as much as anything, but it also confirmed Wesley's physical
preeminence and reinforced certain concepts that most of them preferred
not to question. These beliefs were reflected in the education given at
the Reverend Sloss Preparatory Academy for Young Gentlemen, outside
Florence. The North, their teachers told them, was another country, how-
ever nominally part of the United States, whence the flowing
197
198 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
tide of abolition might one day swamp the triumphant sand castle of the
South.
The South, they were taught, was a unique, essentially pastoral, society of
unlimited potential, whose survival depended on an endless supply of cheap
labor. It didn't matter how closely the governance of the South was linked
to that of the North, or how passionately devoted a few of their teachers
might be to the federal cause. It didn't matter that the present president,
Andrew Jackson, now into his second term, was one of their own, a
slaveholder dedicated to limiting federal power over the sovereignty of the
states. It didn't matter that the president frequently insisted that the
Union must be preserved, because the very fact that he said it only
confirmed what most of them already believed: The Union was under
considerable strain, with states' rights as the separating issue, and
slavery as the separating fact.
Only recently, South Carolina had come to the very brink of civil war. The
industrial North had successfully demanded high tariffs on imported
manufactured goods, cloth and clothing, to protect its own industries.
South
Carolina claimed this was destroying the slave-based cotton economy,
and had threatened to nullify the tariffs. Secession had only been averted
by the adroit actions of the great president.
In Southampton County, Virginia, an insurrection had occurred, led by Nat
Turner, a black preacher, in which fiftyseven whites, including several
women and children, were killed. It brought back vivid memories of the
rebellious plot by the free black, Denmark Vesey, ten years earlier, and
was the Southern nightmare come to bloody life. A sensational manhunt
followed. Over a hundred of Turner's followers were slaughtered, and the
ringleader himself was caught, tried, and executed, along with twenty of
his henchmen. But at the subsequent Virginia Convention, several proposals
for the emancipation of slaves were only narrowly defeated, and the recent
foundation of the American Anti-Slavery Society only added to the fortress
mentality of the South.
Jass was no revolutionary thinker; he had no great moral argument against
slavery. He had been brought up with it, had lived with it all his life,
and every element of his education, except one, contributed to his belief
in its present necessity.
MERGING 199
The exception to Jass's otherwise conventional upbringing as a young
Southern gentleman was his considerable friendship with Cap'n Jack. Such
friendships were not, in themselves, unusual. All white boys of his class
had black nurses, several had been suckled by slave women when their own
mother's milk went dry, and they had all grown up with varying degrees
of contact between themselves and the black populations of their
plantations, farms, or houses. A reasonably energetic white boy, growing
up secure in his authority, might have a range of friendships that
covered the complete social strata-until he crossed the limiting
threshold of puberty.
A boy can go where a man cannot, and at puberty, several unseen doors
were closed to him. He had been raised to the concept of the sanctity of
white women, and now his education began to include, by subtle inference
rather than outright lecture, the baseness of carnal desire, and the
profound evils of miscegenation.
They all had some knowledge of procreation-they saw it in the rutting
animals on their farms-and now they were taught the sinfulness of giving
way to these base desires, with women of any class or station but most
especially with black women, since the resulting offspring would
eventually defile and dilute the sacred white blood.
What puzzled Jass was that Wesley's conscience never seemed to bother
him. He swore he had had intercourse with a slave girt, but no visitation
was ever made upon him by a wrathful God, nor on any of the others who
claimed to have followed his braggart path.
Jass regarded such talk as foul, but his blood ran hot when Wesley first
announced his ability to bring himself to private climax. Jass felt that
powerful urge, but tried to resist it. It was wrong, they were taught,
it was sinful, it was a sign of weakness of personality and sickness of
the mind, and led to physical deformity. If their need got too desperate,
Mother Nature herself would provide any necessary release in sweet,
nocturnal dreams, to which Wesley snickered that sometimes Nature needed
a helping hand. But the prohibition only intensified the desire, and
occasionally Jass had succumbed, to be racked with guilt afterward. He
longed to confide his confusion to someone, but since the death of his
brother A.J., whose
200 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
neck had been broken in a riding accident at Princeton two years earlier,
Jass's only confidants were his classmates, his cousins, whose knowledge was
as limited as his own, and Cap'n Jack.
Jass had grown up in the carefree country of reduced expectation that is
the province of second sons. A.J., heir to the family estate, had given him
scraps of guidance on matters of the world, but now he was gone, and Jass
sorely missed him. His cheerful younger brothers, William, Alexander, and
George, an inseparable trio, were at school in Nashville, and even when
they came home to The Forks, Jass found it difficult to break into their
tight-knit group. Three of his older sisters, Mary, Martha, and Mary Ellen,
were married. Sassy was still at home, but was more interested in potential
husbands than familiar brothers, and baby Jane, whom Jass adored, was a
sickly child, and no companion to a teenage boy.
So Jass's most constant company had been the slaves, with Cap'n Jack as his
surrogate father, and his tutors in the mysteries of life had been those
same slaves, his friends at the Academy, and his stem, unyielding
schoolmasters, who seemed almost to condone the hypocrisy of what they
taught. While physical contact with black women, any women, was publicly
condemned, the more secular teachers also hinted that real men, unable to
restrain their natural urges, should take their relief with whatever slave
women were at their disposal. Jass found this half world of puberty
confounding, confused by what he felt, by what he was taught, and by what
he was experiencing.
Nor was his father much help to him. James liked Jass but still mourned
A.J., and found it difficult to communicate with his second son. Cap'n Jack
wasn't interested in Jass's adolescent problems because he had other,
unrealistic, ambitions for him. Jass would now inherit The Forks, he would
own property and slaves, and, determined to raise the young man to be the
Massa he wanted, Cap'n Jack relentlessly, if amiably, exploited the
rational side of Jass's nature by divorcing the idea of slavery from race.
Rather than protesting that the enslaving of blacks was wrong, Cap'n Jack
cultivated in Jass instead the economic necessity of a move away from the
reliance on la-
MERGING 201
bor-intensive cotton, and thus slavery, until slavery itself became
unnecessary. This put Jass desperately at odds with his peers.
Which is why, just as always, young Jass was defending himself, or his
ideas, when actually he was well aware of the basic flaw in his own--and
Cap'n Jack's-position. Economic survival would always depend on manual
labor, whether it be field hands picking cotton or weavers at the spinning
jennies in the industrial North, and what did it matter if that labor was
white, which was unthinkable, or black, which was the status quo?
Cap'n Jack, a dreamer, not a thinker, had no ready answer for this, and
Jass found himself caught in another dilemma. He was obstinate rather than
passionate. He fought hard and well, not to protect a strongly held ideal
but to protect himself from too much physical injury. Wesley, having a
cause to defend, was able to inflict severe superficial damage on his only
slightly smaller opponent. It was a short, sharp fight, which ended with
Jas
s on the ground, hand to his bleeding nose, while Wesley towered in
habitual triumph over him.
"Won't you ever learn, Jackson?" he crowed. "That's how it is for nigger
lovers."
He walked away to the cheers and backslapping of his gang, their slaves
following them.
Cap'n Jack sighed and went to comfort his man's wounded pride and tend his
bloody nose.
"I nearly had him that time," Jass gasped.
"Sho' thing, Massa Jass, yo' nearly did," Cap'n Jack agreed with the lie.
He hauled the young man to his feet, sat him on a log, and held a cloth to
the bloody nose. School friends cantered away on horses, calling greetings
to Jass. No rancor was held; they had enjoyed the fight, and Jackson was
always such a damned good sport about it. The reluctant worthy waved an
aching arm in response, and called as cheery farewells. Then he turned away
and looked at the river.
"Wesley bigger'n yo'," Cap'n Jack said, although he knew it to be scant
comfort. "He be gone in a year or two, Up South, to college."
It didn't help. "It doesn't make any difference. There'll
202 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
always be another Wesley, somewhere." Jass stared at the river. "I'd like
to beat him once. Just once, that's all."
He brushed aside regret and took Cap'n Jack's arm for assistance. "Don't
tell my parents," he ordered mildly, as they walked to the horses.
"I never do, Massa Jass," the slave replied.
The afternoon was flawless, warm and lovely, the last of the dogwood
blossoms dappling the countryside like wayward snowflakes. Although the
school was on the outskirts of town and they had no need to pass through
Florence on their way home, Jass always enjoyed the long detour, trotting
on Morgan, his chestnut gelding, through the main street to catch a sense
of its bustle and purpose. The construction of a new building or some
improvement in the town's infrastructure gave him a tremendous sense of
pride.
My father made this, he thought to himself. If it were not for him this
would not be here.
It wasn't strictly true-he knew that his father was only a shareholder
in the development company that had created the town-but it encouraged
his sense of the frontier tamed, and of the enormous potential of the
country. Sometimes he wondered what country he meant, for often he felt
completely alien from the Northern states, could not conceive of himself
as a citizen of these United States, and took refuge in the more
romantic, and possibly then more truthful, America.
America seemed to him to be without borders or boundaries, except those
of the mind and the great oceans, and somehow the appendage "United
States" limited this. He wondered if a fellow from New York or Boston
could understand the call of the enormous, empty continent that lay just
at the edges of their known world, and of the adventure that unlimited
horizon promised. He yearned to see the wild Mexican province of Texas,
the almost uncrossable Rocky Mountains, and the distant, legendary land
beyond that the Spanish called California.
Part of him, too, longed to visit the Northern cities, for however much
they were disparaged as dens of Yankee liberalism, they were always
spoken of with excitement. He tried to imagine Florence a hundred, two
hundred, times bigger, but then he could not imagine how a world without
slaves functioned in any practical sense, and itched to understand what
it
MERGING 203
was about slavery that seemed to make so many Yankees so very cross.
Torn between the desire to build or to explore, to settle as eventual
master of a successful plantation or travel thousands of miles to a
distant place and create his own empire as his father had done, he would
spur Morgan at the edge of town and gallop home, Cap'n Jack beside him,
through the lovely, fertile country.
The wind laved his aching body and bruised spirit, and the sense of the
power of his horse, which he was controlling, inspired his blossoming
completely secretive about his background, struck a responsive chord in
Cap'n Jack. He did not remember Africa, although it had meaning for him,
just as Ireland had meaning for James's children.
He staredat the wooden carving, and it gave him strength. He drifted to
sleep again, and it was a good sleep, a deep sleep, because although he was
shattered by loneliness, he knew he was not alone.
Parson Dick put the carving on a shelf, and tiptoed out into the evening,
to serve the Massa's family.
BLOODLINES 193
Cap'n Jack woke up a little later, because someone was prodding his arm.
He tried to shake the sleep and the drug from his eyes, and saw a small,
worried face, inches from his, staring at him, and asking what was wrong.
It was Jass.
Jass was bored. He'd been kept in bed for two days because he was sick,
and his mamma and papa were away. He hadn't seen Cap'n Jack or Annie or
Easter for ages, and he missed them. He ate the dinner that Tiara gave
him, and then toddled on his own, as he had often done, out of the
kitchen, and made his way to his friends.
He came into the weaving house, and he couldn't find Annie or Easter, but
he saw Cap'n Jack lying on the bed, and his back was all covered in
blood, He got scared, because somebody must have hurt his friend, who
wouldn't wake up. He'd seen them do it to some of the other black people,
and they'd screamed so loudly he got scared and ran away.
When Cap'n Jack opened his eyes, Jass was so relieved that he started to
cry.
Cap'n Jack put his arm around the boy, and held him close, told him not
to cry, everything would be all right.
"Have you been bad?" Jass asked.
"No," Cap'n Jack assured him.
"Then why did they hurt you, and make you bleed?"
Cap'n Jack struggled for words to explain the unexplainable, but couldn't
find them. He tried to sit up, but he gasped at the pain of it, and Jass
started crying again.
Cap'n Jack tried to hush him, and even hummed a little lullaby, and
stowly Jass calmed down, and snuggled into his friend's arm.
Having calmed the boy, he tried to find a way to calm himself. He saw the
African carving sitting on the shelf.
"You love me?" he asked Jass.
Jass assured him that he did.
"You ain't gwine ever hurt me, not in all yo' days?"
Jass said not.
"Promise? '
Jass nodded his head.
Cap'n Jack picked him up under his arms, and held the toddler up to the
carving.
194 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
"Say promise," he told Jass.
Jass did.
Cap'n Jack wasn't quite sure what he was doing, but he had to find some way
to ease his aching heart, and this odd ceremony, before a pagan god, had
some meaning for him, for in it was an unbreakable vow.
"Promise you ain't gwine ever do what yo' pappy done?"
Jass didn't know what his pappy had done, but promised anyway. He would
promise Cap'n Jack anything.
"Promise you ain't gwine ever be yo' father's son?" Jass laughed.
"Promise," Cap'n Jack said sharply.
So Jass promised that he would never be his father's son, and Cap'n Jack
was satisfied. In some small, unexplainable way, his revenge had begun.
He heard the shouts in the distance, Tiara and Angel, Parson Dick and some
others, all running through the night, calling for Jass. They thought him
lost.
Cap'n Jack struggled from his bed, his back screaming in pain, and carried
Jass to the door.
He called to Tiara.
"The chile," he said, "is found."
PART TWO
MERGING
The weariness of'wholly.f6rgotten nations I cannot castfirom mly eyelids.
Nor keepfi-om my.frightened soul The silentfalling of'distant stars.
--HUGO VON HOFMANNSTAHL
25
"Nigger lover," they chanted, just as always. "Nigger lover! Nigger lover!
Nigger lover!"
Jass stood there, fists up, waiting for the blow. He never threw the
first punch because he had not picked the fight, but waited, heart
racing, for what he knew would happen.
When it came, it hurt, just as always. Wesley, his opponent, was only a
year older, but that year represented to Jass a seeming ton weight of
muscle, and he sprawled back against some of his school friends. The
slaves, watching impassively in a group near the fence, sighed a
collective regret, for they had been hoping for another outcome they knew
to be unlikely. Just as always.
Jass was not unpopular at school; many of the boys liked him, some were
his friends, and all respected his father's position, but they all
enjoyed a fight, and the high ethics of boxing demanded not just a victim
but also a valid cause. Jass had a good and supple physique for his age
and was always prepared, however unwillingly, to defend himself with his
fists, so picking on him could never be called bullying. Wesley would
start discussing the economics of the Southern states, Jass would suggest
ideas of diversification away from slavebased agriculture, and before
long the others would be calling him an abolitionist and a nigger lover,
and the fight would begin.
It was sport as much as anything, but it also confirmed Wesley's physical
preeminence and reinforced certain concepts that most of them preferred
not to question. These beliefs were reflected in the education given at
the Reverend Sloss Preparatory Academy for Young Gentlemen, outside
Florence. The North, their teachers told them, was another country, how-
ever nominally part of the United States, whence the flowing
197
198 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
tide of abolition might one day swamp the triumphant sand castle of the
South.
The South, they were taught, was a unique, essentially pastoral, society of
unlimited potential, whose survival depended on an endless supply of cheap
labor. It didn't matter how closely the governance of the South was linked
to that of the North, or how passionately devoted a few of their teachers
might be to the federal cause. It didn't matter that the present president,
Andrew Jackson, now into his second term, was one of their own, a
slaveholder dedicated to limiting federal power over the sovereignty of the
states. It didn't matter that the president frequently insisted that the
Union must be preserved, because the very fact that he said it only
confirmed what most of them already believed: The Union was under
considerable strain, with states' rights as the separating issue, and
slavery as the separating fact.
Only recently, South Carolina had come to the very brink of civil war. The
industrial North had successfully demanded high tariffs on imported
manufactured goods, cloth and clothing, to protect its own industries.
South
and had threatened to nullify the tariffs. Secession had only been averted
by the adroit actions of the great president.
In Southampton County, Virginia, an insurrection had occurred, led by Nat
Turner, a black preacher, in which fiftyseven whites, including several
women and children, were killed. It brought back vivid memories of the
rebellious plot by the free black, Denmark Vesey, ten years earlier, and
was the Southern nightmare come to bloody life. A sensational manhunt
followed. Over a hundred of Turner's followers were slaughtered, and the
ringleader himself was caught, tried, and executed, along with twenty of
his henchmen. But at the subsequent Virginia Convention, several proposals
for the emancipation of slaves were only narrowly defeated, and the recent
foundation of the American Anti-Slavery Society only added to the fortress
mentality of the South.
Jass was no revolutionary thinker; he had no great moral argument against
slavery. He had been brought up with it, had lived with it all his life,
and every element of his education, except one, contributed to his belief
in its present necessity.
MERGING 199
The exception to Jass's otherwise conventional upbringing as a young
Southern gentleman was his considerable friendship with Cap'n Jack. Such
friendships were not, in themselves, unusual. All white boys of his class
had black nurses, several had been suckled by slave women when their own
mother's milk went dry, and they had all grown up with varying degrees
of contact between themselves and the black populations of their
plantations, farms, or houses. A reasonably energetic white boy, growing
up secure in his authority, might have a range of friendships that
covered the complete social strata-until he crossed the limiting
threshold of puberty.
A boy can go where a man cannot, and at puberty, several unseen doors
were closed to him. He had been raised to the concept of the sanctity of
white women, and now his education began to include, by subtle inference
rather than outright lecture, the baseness of carnal desire, and the
profound evils of miscegenation.
They all had some knowledge of procreation-they saw it in the rutting
animals on their farms-and now they were taught the sinfulness of giving
way to these base desires, with women of any class or station but most
especially with black women, since the resulting offspring would
eventually defile and dilute the sacred white blood.
What puzzled Jass was that Wesley's conscience never seemed to bother
him. He swore he had had intercourse with a slave girt, but no visitation
was ever made upon him by a wrathful God, nor on any of the others who
claimed to have followed his braggart path.
Jass regarded such talk as foul, but his blood ran hot when Wesley first
announced his ability to bring himself to private climax. Jass felt that
powerful urge, but tried to resist it. It was wrong, they were taught,
it was sinful, it was a sign of weakness of personality and sickness of
the mind, and led to physical deformity. If their need got too desperate,
Mother Nature herself would provide any necessary release in sweet,
nocturnal dreams, to which Wesley snickered that sometimes Nature needed
a helping hand. But the prohibition only intensified the desire, and
occasionally Jass had succumbed, to be racked with guilt afterward. He
longed to confide his confusion to someone, but since the death of his
brother A.J., whose
200 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
neck had been broken in a riding accident at Princeton two years earlier,
Jass's only confidants were his classmates, his cousins, whose knowledge was
as limited as his own, and Cap'n Jack.
Jass had grown up in the carefree country of reduced expectation that is
the province of second sons. A.J., heir to the family estate, had given him
scraps of guidance on matters of the world, but now he was gone, and Jass
sorely missed him. His cheerful younger brothers, William, Alexander, and
George, an inseparable trio, were at school in Nashville, and even when
they came home to The Forks, Jass found it difficult to break into their
tight-knit group. Three of his older sisters, Mary, Martha, and Mary Ellen,
were married. Sassy was still at home, but was more interested in potential
husbands than familiar brothers, and baby Jane, whom Jass adored, was a
sickly child, and no companion to a teenage boy.
So Jass's most constant company had been the slaves, with Cap'n Jack as his
surrogate father, and his tutors in the mysteries of life had been those
same slaves, his friends at the Academy, and his stem, unyielding
schoolmasters, who seemed almost to condone the hypocrisy of what they
taught. While physical contact with black women, any women, was publicly
condemned, the more secular teachers also hinted that real men, unable to
restrain their natural urges, should take their relief with whatever slave
women were at their disposal. Jass found this half world of puberty
confounding, confused by what he felt, by what he was taught, and by what
he was experiencing.
Nor was his father much help to him. James liked Jass but still mourned
A.J., and found it difficult to communicate with his second son. Cap'n Jack
wasn't interested in Jass's adolescent problems because he had other,
unrealistic, ambitions for him. Jass would now inherit The Forks, he would
own property and slaves, and, determined to raise the young man to be the
Massa he wanted, Cap'n Jack relentlessly, if amiably, exploited the
rational side of Jass's nature by divorcing the idea of slavery from race.
Rather than protesting that the enslaving of blacks was wrong, Cap'n Jack
cultivated in Jass instead the economic necessity of a move away from the
reliance on la-
MERGING 201
bor-intensive cotton, and thus slavery, until slavery itself became
unnecessary. This put Jass desperately at odds with his peers.
Which is why, just as always, young Jass was defending himself, or his
ideas, when actually he was well aware of the basic flaw in his own--and
Cap'n Jack's-position. Economic survival would always depend on manual
labor, whether it be field hands picking cotton or weavers at the spinning
jennies in the industrial North, and what did it matter if that labor was
white, which was unthinkable, or black, which was the status quo?
Cap'n Jack, a dreamer, not a thinker, had no ready answer for this, and
Jass found himself caught in another dilemma. He was obstinate rather than
passionate. He fought hard and well, not to protect a strongly held ideal
but to protect himself from too much physical injury. Wesley, having a
cause to defend, was able to inflict severe superficial damage on his only
slightly smaller opponent. It was a short, sharp fight, which ended with
Jas
habitual triumph over him.
"Won't you ever learn, Jackson?" he crowed. "That's how it is for nigger
lovers."
He walked away to the cheers and backslapping of his gang, their slaves
following them.
Cap'n Jack sighed and went to comfort his man's wounded pride and tend his
bloody nose.
"I nearly had him that time," Jass gasped.
"Sho' thing, Massa Jass, yo' nearly did," Cap'n Jack agreed with the lie.
He hauled the young man to his feet, sat him on a log, and held a cloth to
the bloody nose. School friends cantered away on horses, calling greetings
to Jass. No rancor was held; they had enjoyed the fight, and Jackson was
always such a damned good sport about it. The reluctant worthy waved an
aching arm in response, and called as cheery farewells. Then he turned away
and looked at the river.
"Wesley bigger'n yo'," Cap'n Jack said, although he knew it to be scant
comfort. "He be gone in a year or two, Up South, to college."
It didn't help. "It doesn't make any difference. There'll
202 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
always be another Wesley, somewhere." Jass stared at the river. "I'd like
to beat him once. Just once, that's all."
He brushed aside regret and took Cap'n Jack's arm for assistance. "Don't
tell my parents," he ordered mildly, as they walked to the horses.
"I never do, Massa Jass," the slave replied.
The afternoon was flawless, warm and lovely, the last of the dogwood
blossoms dappling the countryside like wayward snowflakes. Although the
school was on the outskirts of town and they had no need to pass through
Florence on their way home, Jass always enjoyed the long detour, trotting
on Morgan, his chestnut gelding, through the main street to catch a sense
of its bustle and purpose. The construction of a new building or some
improvement in the town's infrastructure gave him a tremendous sense of
pride.
My father made this, he thought to himself. If it were not for him this
would not be here.
It wasn't strictly true-he knew that his father was only a shareholder
in the development company that had created the town-but it encouraged
his sense of the frontier tamed, and of the enormous potential of the
country. Sometimes he wondered what country he meant, for often he felt
completely alien from the Northern states, could not conceive of himself
as a citizen of these United States, and took refuge in the more
romantic, and possibly then more truthful, America.
America seemed to him to be without borders or boundaries, except those
of the mind and the great oceans, and somehow the appendage "United
States" limited this. He wondered if a fellow from New York or Boston
could understand the call of the enormous, empty continent that lay just
at the edges of their known world, and of the adventure that unlimited
horizon promised. He yearned to see the wild Mexican province of Texas,
the almost uncrossable Rocky Mountains, and the distant, legendary land
beyond that the Spanish called California.
Part of him, too, longed to visit the Northern cities, for however much
they were disparaged as dens of Yankee liberalism, they were always
spoken of with excitement. He tried to imagine Florence a hundred, two
hundred, times bigger, but then he could not imagine how a world without
slaves functioned in any practical sense, and itched to understand what
it
MERGING 203
was about slavery that seemed to make so many Yankees so very cross.
Torn between the desire to build or to explore, to settle as eventual
master of a successful plantation or travel thousands of miles to a
distant place and create his own empire as his father had done, he would
spur Morgan at the edge of town and gallop home, Cap'n Jack beside him,
through the lovely, fertile country.
The wind laved his aching body and bruised spirit, and the sense of the
power of his horse, which he was controlling, inspired his blossoming