C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

Henry knew the rule: no one disturbed his father. But this evening he fretted pensively along the front hall, end to end, his weight distressing the old heartwood planks until the record screeched suddenly and his father called out, “Stop that incessant pacing right now!”

Henry peered swiftly around the doorway to the parlor. His father stood there in his black socks in front of the davenport, the newspaper wrenched up in one hand.

“I knew it wasn’t your mother. She never makes a sound,” he said. To Henry’s surprise, there was a hint of smile in his father’s eyes.

“May I speak with you, Father?” Careful, discreet, he glanced both ways down the hall.

The smile vanished. “Henry, we will not be discussing horses again.”

“No, sir, I know. It’s not about that.”

“Come in, then. I was meaning to speak with you anyway. I wanted to tell you that I found a tutor for you. He may not look like much, but his credentials are impeccable.”

Henry stepped into the room and closed the door as his father regarded him. In his stocking feet, the man was six feet but had grown somewhat thicker through the waist and redder, like the sun was turning him, his freckles now mixed with age spots. The cupreous, stalwart bulk of him was lessened somehow, and his son arrived at the fact of it without sentimentality, with eagerness even.

John Henry said, “I’ll give you five minutes, and then I would prefer to return to my reading.” He seated himself again on the davenport with the paper, his eyes peering directly over it at his son. Waiting.

“Father,” began Henry, and though his body urged him to sit in the wing chair opposite his father, he forced himself to sit cross-legged at his feet like a servant, beside his emptied and stinking shoes. Quietly, he said, “Father, why is everyone so upset?”

“Upset?” His father’s large head reared back, consternation on his brow.

“I mean, in the news. There’s so much happening. It seems like there’s more unrest every day.”

“Ah. Yes, that’s right,” John Henry said, nodding. “It’s a distressing time in many ways, an embarrassing time. It will only get worse, I imagine. No one — absolutely no one — remembers their place anymore, and we will all pay the price for this kind of national amnesia.”

Careful, steady, his face full of concern. “Is it true that they plan to desegregate the schools? What will happen after that?”

“After that?” his father said, and laughed. “After that, there will be social chaos and a breakdown in the educational system, and the Negro will be the first in line asking us to come back and fix it all. He never hesitates to implore others to come in and clean up the mess that results from his demands. His children, of course, will end up suffering the most. That’s what always happens. He is simply incapable of predicting the consequences of his actions. There is potential in some of them, but as your grandfather used to say, the Negro is our Socratic shadow. I think the allusion is apt.”

John Henry lowered his paper and folded it. “You see, in the end, Henry, de jure segregation may be stripped in some segments of the society — in fact, it appears almost inevitable now — but de facto divisions will always remain. Segregation is inherent, natural, and inevitable, no matter what the dreamers would like to think, no matter what the town of Berea would have us believe. Bring twenty white men and twenty colored into a new town and within a week, the white men will be successful landowners and the colored will be tenants. Good tenants, perhaps, but tenants nonetheless. Nothing wrong with that. The world always needs good tenants.”

“I heard they’ll send in the military to force the schools open if they have to.”

John Henry shook his head. “If it actually comes to that, there will be decent, God-fearing citizens to block the way. Men like Byrd. There’s certainly nothing to be afraid of.”

Henry sat up straight, indignant. “Oh, I’m not afraid. Did you hear what Senator Darby—”

“Darby!” snorted John Henry. “Darby’s a fool. He makes the Southerner appear the blubbering idiot, which is precisely what Northerners want in order to vilify the South — a vision of the South as mindless cracker. It makes them feel virtuous, when in fact they know absolutely nothing of the Southern situation. Darby!” He snorted again.

“The North—”

“The North is far more segregated than we could be, given the fact that half of our population is colored and we interact with one another constantly — daily. The Negro lives in our very homes and always has. The North can’t even fathom. The North doesn’t even know what a Negro is.

“You see, Henry, for them the race problem is either a mental abstraction or a romance. For us, as perhaps you’re beginning to understand, it is a problem of practice and the everyday frustration of dealing with the colored appetite and intellect, which is entirely different from our own. It is quite easy to imagine the equality of all men when you sit on a high horse and don’t have to walk among them in the fields. Indeed, everyone appears the same height from that view. But demount the horse and it soon becomes apparent that there are not merely masters and slaves by happenstance, or overseers and laborers by happenstance, but that these divisions are inherent and unavoidable. God save the mark — there were slaves in the Republic, and these liberals would imagine themselves greater minds!”

Now his voice was rising, the color bloomed in his cheeks. “The problem, Henry, as I have always seen it, is that the Negro is fundamentally a child, and children are incapable of understanding their own inferiority. Indeed, they generally err on the side of grandiose delusion. Mind you, the Negro is naturally playful, with a great capacity for joy, and I can appreciate that. But he’s as self-pitying as he is playful, and like a child, he can despise you with as much passion in the evening as he loved and admired you with in the morning. Look at Filip—”

Henry leaned forward eagerly. “Yes, I wanted to talk to you about Filip.”

“Filip is, I believe, only five years my junior, but has lived his life in a state of perpetual adolescence. You know him as a quiet and sober man, but that’s only because I demand he stay sober in this house — and even then I sometimes have my doubts. My father always said Filip was weaned with a bottle of whiskey. You can’t imagine the scrapes your grandfather saved him from time and time again, because the man has the aptitude of a child. He simply cannot fathom consequence. Each bottle of liquor is his first adventure in drinking. Each hangover a fresh surprise. Dealing with the man has been an uphill struggle, but my father was unreasonably fond of him, and my father was not a kind man. That says something, and so here he remains.”

John Henry settled back into the curve of the davenport. With one hand, he held his ankle where it rested on the opposite knee. He looked over Henry’s head. With his other hand, he rotated his tumbler.

“I once heard a Northerner refer to the South as ‘that perplexing place,’ and I can’t say I disagree with him. Look at you — you’re distinctly privileged to be among the planter class, yet you’ve been surrounded your entire life by Negroes of all manner of quality, and also by your common white redneck. Or, rather, rednecks recently of the hill class, which is to say of no class at all, and saddled with a character so low it can’t claim the term. A sensible man would prefer the company of a hundred temperate Negroes to the prattling of one hillbilly. I know I certainly would.”

John Henry appeared on the verge of saying more, but then he cocked his head to one side, cleared his throat, and said, “White trash as your grandfather always called them. They have their uses. Their passions have their uses.”