He shouted with overweening triumph:"The translation of that is South Carolina nigger.Notice well this so egcellent specimen.Prognathous,megadont,platyrrhine.""Ha!Platyrrhine!"I saluted the one word I recognized as I drowned.
"You have said it yourself!"was his extraordinary answer;--for what had I said?Almost as if he were going to break into a dance for joy,he took the Caucasian skull and the other two,and set the three together by themselves,away from the rest of the collection.The picture which they thus made spoke more than all the measurements and statistics which he now chattered out upon me,reading from his book as I contemplated the skulls.There was a similarity of shape,a kinship there between the three,which stared you in the face;but in the contours of vaulted skull,the projecting jaws,and the great molar teeth--what was to be seen?Why,in every respect that the African departed from the Caucasian,he departed in the direction of the ape!Here was zoology mutely but eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius,no Moses,no Napoleon,upon that black stem;why no Iliad,no Parthenon,no Sistine Madonna,had ever risen from that tropic mud.
The collector touched my sleeve."Have you now learned someding about skulls,my friend?Will you invite those Boston philanthropists to stay home?They will get better results in civilization by giving votes to monkeys than teaching Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to riggers."Retaliation rose in me."Haven't you learned to call them negroes?"Iremarked.But this was lost upon the Teuton.I was tempted to tell him that I was no philanthropist,and no Bostonian,and that he need not shout so loud,but my more dignified instincts restrained me.I withdrew my sleeve from his touch (it was this act of his,I think,that had most to do with my displeasure),and merely bidding him observe that the enormous price of the kettle-supporter had been reduced for me by his exhibition to a bagatelle,I left the shop of the screaming anatomist--or Afropath,or whatever it may seem most fitting that he should be called.
I bore the kettle-supporter with me,tied up objectionably in newspaper,and knotted with ungainly string;and it was this bundle which prevented my joining the girl behind the counter,and ending by a walk with a young lady the afternoon that had begun by a walk with two old ones.I should have liked to make my confession to her.She was evidently out for the sake of taking the air,and had with her no companion save the big curly white dog;confession would have been very agreeable;but I looked again at my ugly newspaper bundle,and turned in a direction that she was not herself pursuing.
Twice,as I went,I broke into laughter over my interview in the shop,which I fear has lost its comical quality in the relating.To enter a door and come serenely in among dingy mahogany and glass objects,to bargain haughtily for a brass bauble with the shopkeeper,and to have a few exchanged remarks suddenly turn the whole place into a sort of bedlam with a gibbering scientist dashing skulls at me to prove his fixed idea,and myself quite furious--I laughed more than twice;but,by the time Ihad approached the neighborhood of the carpenter's shop,another side of it had brought reflection to my mind.Here was a foreigner to whom slavery and the Lost Cause were nothing,whose whole association with the South had begun but five years ago;and the race question had brought his feelings to this pitch!He had seen the Kings Port negro with the eyes of the flesh,and not with the eyes of theory,and as a result the reddest rag for him was pale beside a Boston philanthropist!
Nevertheless,I have said already that I am no lover of superlatives,and in doctrine especially is this true.We need not expect a Confucius from the negro,nor yet a Chesterfield;but I am an enemy also of that blind and base hate against him,which conducts nowhere save to the de-civilizing of white and black alike.Who brought him here?Did he invite himself?Then let us make the best of it and teach him,lead him,compel him to live self-respecting,not as statesman,poet,or financier,but by the honorable toil of his hand and sweat of his brow.Because "the door of hope"was once opened too suddenly for him is no reason for slamming it now forever in his face.
