John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

His skin awash, Ebenezer looked away and saw McEvoy reappear from the royal palace with his smiling escort. The Irishman's face was winced up in a curious expression — whether anger, abhorrence, or fear, Ebenezer could not tell, but he assumed when he saw his companion made fast to the one remaining post that the curious "judgment" had not been a pardon.

However, he was mistaken. " 'Tis the Devil's own wonder of a happenstance!" McEvoy cried over to him. in a voice as strange and twisted as his expression. "They fetched me before their three kings for sentencing, and two of 'em were scurfy salvages, but the third was my friend Dick Parker, the wight I was chained in the hold with! I thought he was drowned and forgot, but i'faith, he's the king o' these black heathen! This scoundrel Bandy Lou hath known it these many days and said naught of't; he was Dick Parker's chief lieutenant back in Africa!"

Ebenezer was unable to marvel at this coincidence; indeed, he wondered whether McEvoy had not been deranged by fear. Could a sane man relate such trifles while his pyre was a-building round his feet?

Only then did he observe that though his own pyre was completed, as were those of Bertrand and the senseless Captain, not a twig had been laid at McEvoy's post, nor did the guards seem about to fetch any.

"God help me, Eben!" the Irishman shouted. "They mean to turn me loose! Dick Parker hath spared me!" His eyes ran with tears. "As God is my witness," McEvoy cried on, "I begged and pled for ye, Eben, by whate'er friendship had been 'twixt Dick Parker and myself. Ye was my brother, I told him, and dear as life to me; but the others were for burning the four of us, and 'twas all Dick Parker could manage to spare me. As't is I must watch ye suffer there all this day and tomorrow, till their council's done, and then see ye burnt!"

"The pimp hath bartered our skins to save his own!" Bertrand yelled from his post across the way.

"Nay, I swear't!" McEvoy protested. "Whate'er hath been betwixt us in the past, 'tis all behind us; ye mustn't believe I hold aught against ye, or biased your case with Dick Parker!"

"I believe you," Ebenezer said. He had in fact felt a moment of wrath at McEvoy's news; would he, after all, have left London in the first place had not McEvoy betrayed him? But he soon overcame his anger, for despite the extremity of his position, or perhaps because of it, he was able to see that McEvoy had only been following his principles honestly, as had Ebenezer his own; one could as easily blame old Andrew for reacting so strongly, Joan Toast for occasioning the wager, Ben Oliver for proposing it, Anna for crossing alone to Maryland, Burlingame for — among other things — persuading him to disembark in St. Mary's, or Ebenezer himself, who by any of a hundred thousand acts might have altered the direction of his life. The whole history of his twenty-eight years it was that had brought him to the present place at the present time; and had not this history taken its particular pattern, in large measure, from the influence of all the people with whom he'd ever dealt, and whose lives in turn had been shaped by the influence of countless others? Was he not, in short, bound to his post not merely by the sum of human history, but even by the history of the entire universe, as by a chain of numberless links no one of which was more culpable than any other? It seemed to Ebenezer that he was, and that McEvoy was not more nor less to blame than was Lord Baltimore, for example, who had colonized Maryland, or the Genoese adventurer who had discovered the New World to the Old.

This conclusion, which the poet reached more by insight than by speculation, was followed by another, whose logic ran thus: The point in space and time whereto the history of the world had brought him would be nothing perilous were it not for the hostility of the Indians and Negroes. But it was their exploitation by the English colonists that had rendered them hostile; that is to say, by a people to whom the accidents of history had given the advantage — Ebenezer did not doubt that his captors, if circumstances were reversed, would do just what the English were doing. To the extent, then, that historical movements are expressions of the will of the people engaged in them, Ebenezer was a just object for his captors' wrath, for he belonged, in a deeper sense than McEvoy had intended in his remark of some nights past, to the class of the exploiters; as an educated gentleman of the western world he had shared in the fruits of his culture's power and must therefore share what guilt that power incurred. Nor was this the end of his responsibility: for if it was the accidents of power and position that made the difference between exploiters and exploited, and not some mysterious specialization of each group's spirit, then it was as "human" for the white man to enslave and dispossess as it was "human" for the black and red to slaughter on the basis of color alone; the savage who would put him to the torch anon was no less his brother than was the trader who had once enslaved that savage. In sum, the poet observed, for his secular Original Sin, though he was to atone for it in person, he would exact a kind of Vicarious Retribution; he had committed a grievous crime against himself, and it was himself who soon would punish the malefactor.

Grasping the pair of insights was the labor of but as many seconds, and though they moved him as had few moments in his spiritual autobiography, all he said to Bertrand and McEvoy was, "In any case, 'tis too late to split the hairs of responsibility. Look yonder."

He indicated with his brows the direction of the hut from which McEvoy had been lately escorted. The eyes of the assemblage had turned that way as well, and their conversation dwindled. The three kings had issued forth to render judgment: as best Ebenezer could distinguish through the mists, one was a strapping Negro, one an equally robust red man, and the third, also an Indian, an aged, decrepit fellow who moved with a great deal of difficulty on the arms of his younger colleagues. All three were dressed elaborately by comparison with their subjects: their garments were fringed, tasseled, and colorfully worked with shell-beads; their faces were striped and circled with puccoon; their necks hung with bear's teeth and cowries; the Indians wore headdresses of beadwork and turkey feathers, while the Negro's was wrought of two bull's horns mounted in fur. The two stalwarts held each in his free hand a bone-tipped javelin; the ancient one bore in his right a sort of scepter or ceremonial staff topped with the pelt of a muskrat, and in his left a sputtering pitch-pine torch.

The pace made their approach more somber. McEvoy regarded them wide-eyed over his shoulder; Bertrand began to make moan. Ebenezer blushed with fear; he pressed his lips fast, but the rest of his features ticked and twitched.

Closest to the triumvirate was McEvoy: they confronted him sternly; the Negro raised his spear and made some sort of pronouncement, which his subjects received with an uncertain murmur, and then the younger of the Indian chiefs apparently repeated it in his tongue, for his statement met with a like response. Ebenezer remarked some displeasure in the old chief's face, and great satisfaction in the countenance of McEvoy's companion Bandy Lou, who stood nearby. The party moved next to the bearded Captain, who had just begun to stir and roll his head. Again some sentence was rendered in two languages with upraised spears: the old chief's smile and the assemblage's shouted approval made its meaning clear, and the poet shuddered.

Next came Bertrand, who turned his head away and squinted shut his eyes. The younger of the Indian kings regarded him coldly; the older with malevolent pleasure as he nodded to something the Negro was leaning to whisper in his ear. All eyes were on the great black king, who in both of the previous instances had passed sentence first; he ended his colloquy with the old man, lifted his javelin, and began his pronouncement even as he raised his eyes to the prisoner's face.