E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

Then I heard him coming up the basement stairs and there was a knock on the dark door from the basement and then he shook the door. I turned the key and opened it and ran back to the table. He appeared in the doorway. I was frightened. He reached almost to the ceiling. He stood there looking at us with his murderous anger. He brought with him his menacing whiskey smell. His eyes were red. “Tour momma leave you here alone?”

“No, she left us with Mrs. Bittelman. But she went home to cook supper.”

“Ain’t no one told you?”

“What?”

“Dear Jesus. It on the radio.”

At that moment the phone began to ring.

DIDN’T MY LORD DELIVER DANIEL? — Paul Robeson

Knouting . Knouting was the primary means of punishment for capital offenses in Czarist Russia until the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was applied exclusively to serfs. Before the entire community assembled in an open field, the serf designated for this punishment was stripped of his shirt and bound to a wooden block by his arms and neck and knees. The knout was a leather thonged whip which, in the hands of a stout executioner, tore away flesh down to the bone. Sir Robert Porter, in TRAVELING SKETCHES IN SWEDEN AND RUSSIA (London, 1809), witnesses the knouting of a serf coachman accused of killing his master. Speaks of the “bloody splash of the knout” on the senseless body of the victim. In this case over two hundred strokes were applied. Afterwards the victim unaccountably not yet dead was ceremoniously disfigured in the event he managed to live on, pincers being driven up his nose and then manipulated in a sudden manner so as to tear his nostrils from his face. A law passed in 1807 specified that minors were to receive no more than thirty blows of the knout. Shall we call this an enlightened law? But in the famous case of the murder of the mistress of Count Arakcheev, Minister of War in the reign of Alexander, a brother and a sister, each under eighteen, died after seventy blows of the knout. According to Michael Jenkins, author of ARAKCHEEV, GRAND VIZIER OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE (Dial Press), the entire system of serfdom turned on the principle of savage corporal punishment, especially after the peasant uprising of 1774 during Catherine’s reign. Shackles, knouts, stocks, birches, cages, were common equipment, like horse collars, on Russian estates. The serf had little or no recourse to justice, his master having virtually unrestrained privilege over his life. In this he was brother to servitors in the English merchant fleets and English military institutions who were commonly flogged and for the same class principles and with the same barbarity, and with equally unlikely chance of redress. Cf. the American Negro slaves.

Burning at the Stake. A practice known to all European nations until the 19th century. Clerical fondness for. Known also to Indians of North America. Used into 20th century only in the American South, often with castration. Performed on lower classes. No accident that Joan of Arc, burned at the stake, was a peasant.

Explore the history of corporal punishment as a class distinction. There is always exemption for the designated upper class of a society. In England, highborn nobles were never drawn and quartered. In Russia only serfs were flogged. For the same or similar crime, the upper class received relatively painless and non-humiliating punishment. If death, swift death. Never desecration. Where it is necessary for one reason or another to apply the torturous practice to the upper-class victim, certain rituals of transvaluation are performed which expel him from his class before he is executed. Religious excommunication, tribal excommunication. An infidel or an enemy, like a slave, can be executed with abandon.

In the French Revolution for the first time the class of the offender did not determine the kind of punishment he received. Everyone, from the King to Danton, got the guillotine.

We may say that the basis of all class distinctions in society is corporal punishment. Classes are created by corporal punishment, and maintained by corporal punishment. The authoritarian head of a society derives his power from the support not of the masses but of the upper classes or privileged bureaucracy which funds his government and divides its rewards. By contrast the loyalty of the masses is maintained only by constant physical intimidation. As societies endure in history they symbolize complex systems of corporal punishment in economic terms. That is why Marx used the word “slavery” to define the role of the working class under capitalism. Slavery is the state of absolute submission to corporal punishment. In times of challenge, however, the ruling classes restore their literal, un-symbolized right of corporal punishment upon the lower classes, usually in the name of law and order. The crime of someone in the lower class is never against another human being but always against the order and authority of the state.

I have put down everything I can remember of their actions and conversations in this period prior to their arrests. Or I think I have. Sifted it through my hands. I find no clues either to their guilt or innocence. Perhaps they are neither guilty nor innocent. Of course, there is a slight oddness in the way they reacted to the knock on the door — as if they knew what was coming. But they did know what was coming. And so did everyone else who lived with some awareness into that time. There were certain convictions that American democracy would no longer permit you to hold. If you were a Jewish Communist, anti-Fascist; if you cried Peace! and cheered Vito Marcantonio at the Progressive Party rally in Yankee Stadium; if you were poor; if you were all of these things, you knew what was coming. You might even have been relieved not to have to wait any longer. You might even have demanded of society that you not be forced to wait any longer.

A TOUR OF THE CITY

Riverside Park. It was a Saturday morning, already September, very hot, and Phyllis asked me not to go to the library but to take a break, just this once, and walk down to Riverside Park with her and the baby and maybe find a river breeze. All through this bad heat, riots on the tube every night, and people burning, we had been coming out of the Memorial Day separation a little stronger, with more understanding between us, and we both wore that New York summer draggedout look, and we were tight. In the park I threw Paul in the air and caught him, and he laughed. Phyllis smiled and out of the corner of my eye I could see an old lady with a cane stopping for a moment in her walk to smile at the attractive young family. I threw my son in the air a little higher and he screeched a little louder as I caught him. We were walking in the park. I tossed my son higher and higher, and now he laughed no longer but cried out. Still I did not stop and I threw him higher and caught him closer to the ground. Then Phyllis was begging me to stop. The baby now shut his mouth, concentrating on his fear, his small face, my Isaacson face, locked in absolute dumb dread of the breath-taking flight into the sky and the even more terrifying fall toward earth. I can’t bear to think about this murderous feeling. Phyllis was pulling at my arm and trying to keep me from throwing my son high in the air and daring us all with the failure of missing him on the way down. I can’t remember my thoughts. I think his weight, the heft of his little body, freaked me. I enjoyed the moment it left my hands and hated the moment it returned, with a shock to all the muscles in my arms. I enjoyed the fear in his mother. When I finally stopped she grabbed Paul and sat down on a bench and hugged him and sat hugging him. He was white. I looked around and saw some people across the street staring at me. I took off.