The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “What is’t you propose?” Ebenezer demanded. “Suicide? Methinks I’d gladly take my own life and have done with’t.”

  “We’ve no means to do the job ourselves,” the Captain said. “But it may be still in our hands to die fast or a piece at a time. If they carry us out bodily there’s no hope, but if they string us together by the neck and free our feet to walk, as they did before, we must make a run for’t, all together, and pray they’ll stop us with spears and arrows.”

  “ ’Twould never work,” McEvoy scoffed. “They’d simply overhaul us and fetch us back to their carving-knives.”

  Bertrand wailed.

  “Besides,” McEvoy added, “I am a Catholic, albeit no model parishioner, and I shan’t destroy myself in any case.”

  “Then here’s a better plan,” said the Captain, “that ye may help us in with no harm to your faith. Our hands and feet are bound, but we have still the movement of our knees: let Mr. Cooke’s man place his neck ’twixt his master’s legs, and me place my neck ’twixt yours, and we twain be throttled without delay to end our miseries. Then do ye the same for Mr. Cooke, when he hath done, and thou’rt left to be murthered as ye wish by the Indians. What say ye to that?”

  “I’God!” whispered Ebenezer; yet appalled though he was by the old man’s proposal, he could scarcely deny that being strangled was less painful than being emasculated and burnt alive.

  As it turned out, he was not obliged to choose; the celebration presently subsided, and day dawned to find the prisoners still unmolested. Too anxious to feel much relief, they regarded one another silently—McEvoy, Ebenezer observed, had lost a quarter of his weight and some of his teeth, and had of necessity grown a beard—nor were they ever again as talkative as they had been that first night. The days passed—two, seven, ten—and though the prisoners were never once permitted out of the hut, they could hear the daily-increasing activity in the town.

  “I’faith, ’tis like the Convocation o’ Cardinals!” McEvoy declared.

  No one mentioned the Captain’s proposal again, but it must have been on everyone’s mind as it was on Ebenezer’s, for when one early morning they heard their guard approached by some manner of delegation, as one man they sucked in their breaths and went rigid.

  “Make haste!” the Captain urged. “They’ve come to fetch us!”

  “Then fetch us they shall,” McEvoy grumbled. “I’m not a murtherer.”

  Just then the hide-flap door of the hut was thrown open: cold air rushed in, and the dancing light of the fire, and against the grey-white dawn they could see the stiff black shapes of men.

  “You, then, in the name o’ God!” The Captain twisted towards Ebenezer, and his voice grew shrill. “I beg ye, sir; throttle me now, this instant, ere they lay hands on usl Here, quickly, for the love o’ Christ!”

  He wrenched himself across Bertrand toward the poet’s trembling knees. Ebenezer had no voice to say him nay; he could only shake his head. But even had he been both willing and able, there was not time to do the deed: the black silhouettes closed in, bent over them; black hands laid hold of their ankles and legs; black voices chuckled and grunted. One by one the terrified white men were dragged outside by the heels.

  6

  His Future at Stake, the Poet Reflects on a Brace of Secular Mysteries

  THE COURTYARD OR COMMON enclosed by the Indian town was patchy with thin, wet snow, which had also whitened the tops of all the mound-shaped dwellings. The air was raw and saturated, but not bitter cold; in fact, a mass of temperate air had moved over the Bay, with the result that a great fog enveloped the island. Swirls of mist swept out of the marsh, given voice by invisible gulls, and were blown with a falling cry toward the straits.

  Despite the fog and the early hour, Ebenezer could see a great number of people all about, some in Scotch cloth and English woolens, but most in hides and furs and matchcoats. The women were making small fires near their huts and preparing food for the morning meal; the men, for the most part, were occupied with tobacco and conversation around several larger fires in the common itself, Negroes and Indians together: there was a rustle of general talk, as well as much parleying by signs and gestures. In the center of the court the little watch fire of the night had been so fueled with resinous pine that its blaze, flashing orange upon the fog, seemed more ceremonial than useful. The heat of it had melted the snow in a sizeable circle, about whose perimeter were ranged a solemn score of dignitaries, black and red; and just outside the quadrants of their circle, four separate parties of men were raising twelve-foot posts in hip-deep holes.

  When the prisoners were all on their feet, a grinning Negro from the deputation that had fetched them out stepped up to McEvoy and said in English, “No more nights in there, ha?” He rolled his eyes towards the prison-hut.

  “Thou’rt a black imp o’ Satan,” McEvoy grumbled. “I would ye’d jumped to the fishes with Dick Parker!”

  The Negro—whom Ebenezer took to be McEvoy’s erstwhile companion Bandy Lou—flashed his teeth in amusement and gave sharp orders to his men, who cut the thongs from the prisoners’ ankles and led them towards the posts. The poet’s knees began to fail; his jailers were obliged to support as well as direct him. The hum of conversation on every side changed to a murmur and died away; except for the crackling fires the common was silent, and dark faces regarded the white men coldly as they passed. The men at the central fire turned round at their approach, and a much-painted elder among them nodded towards the nearest of the posts just being tamped into position.

  “You be judged by three kings,” the smiling Negro repeated to McEvoy. “Others stay here.”

  None of the prisoners spoke. It appeared that the dread triumvirate was not at the fireside after all, for the Irishman was led toward a larger specimen of muskrat-house across the common. Ebenezer and Bertrand were bound each to a post by the ankles and wrists; the feel of his position brought the poet near to swooning, so clearly did it recall the legion of martyred men. How many millions had been similarly bound since the race began, and for how many reasons put to the unspeakable pain of fire? But he strove to put by the swoon, in hopes of resummoning it when he would need it more desperately.

  The Captain, meanwhile, had been obliged to stand by while the third and fourth posts were being raised and tamped. He stood quietly, head bowed, as though resigned to the horrors ahead his guards, absorbed in plumbing the massive posts, ignored him. Suddenly he leaped behind and away from them and struck out across the common. A shout went up; men scrambled to their feet, snatched their spears, and hurried after him. Ebenezer craned his neck to watch, expecting to see the old man run through, but the Indians held back. The Captain ran for a gap between two council-fires, and was faced with a wall of spears held at the ready, he hesitated, spun about, and was confronted with a similar wall. This time, as if abandoning some tenuous hope of escape and returning to his original purpose, he thrust out his chest and lunged straight for the spears; but their bearers drew back and merely blocked his way with their arms and shafts. He wheeled again, his arms still bound behind, and hopped in another direction, with the same result. The ranks closed now in a large circle around him. and it being quite clear that he could not escape even to the marsh, they began to laugh at his furious endeavor. Again and again the old man rushed at the spears, at length, unable to screw up his desperate resolve again, the Captain gave a cry and fell His tormentors dispersed, still chuckling, the guards returned him to the post, now ready to accommodate him, and began piling twigs and branches at the feet of all three.

  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!” McEvo
y 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.

  But he stopped in mid-sentence and rushed forward to turn Bertrand’s face towards his own. Ebenezer’s muscles tightened: since the Negro had retained his spear but let go the old chief’s arm most uncourteously, the poet rather expected to see Bertrand run through on the instant for the crime of averting his head. Nor were his fears allayed when the Negro gave a cry, snatched a bone knife from the belt of a nearby lieutenant, and leaped toward the valet with the weapon held back. His fellow chiefs frowned; the nearer spectators drew back in alarm, and their consternation mounted when, instead of ending the prisoner’s life or dismembering him where he hung, the black king sliced all the thongs and fetters, kicked away the knee-high faggots, and flung himself prostrate at the reeling prisoner’s feet!

  “Master Eben!” the valet bawled, drawing back against the post. The old ch
ief barked, and the younger made what appeared to be a sharp query, to which the Negro king replied in the Indian tongue, his voice heavy with emotion. The common had gone silent as a church. The Indian king frowned more severely, summoned lieutenants to support his ancient colleague, and strode as quickly as dignity permitted, not toward Bertrand but toward the much-distraught prisoner who had yet to be confronted with his judgment. He had advanced only a pace or two when Ebenezer recognized—under the war paint, regalia, and newly regained health—the ailing fugitive of the cliffside cave.

  “Dear Christ, now I see’t!” he cried. “Bertrand! ’Tis Quassapelagh and Drakepecker! Yon Dick Parker of McEvoy’s is your Drakepecker, and here’s Quassapelagh come to save me!”

  Indeed, when the Indian had looked well into Ebenezer’s face, his eyes lost their sternness, and at his command two guards stepped forward to release the poet’s bonds.

  “I set you free and beg your pardon,” Quassapelagh said gravely. “ ’Tis well no harm was done the man who saved my life.”

  Like Bertrand, Ebenezer was too overwhelmed to speak. His eyes welled with tears; he reeled and laughed hoarsely, shook his head, and looked to McEvoy as though in disbelief. The old chief, meanwhile, had not ceased to rail: he apparently understood no more of these marvels than did his subjects or the other two prisoners. Quassapelagh bowed slightly to Ebenezer, suggested that the poet remain where he was for a few minutes more, and returned to pacify the old man. The Negro king too, whom to everyone’s dismay Bertrand had embraced upon realizing his identity, now disengaged himself and joined the council. It was clear from the tenor of their discourse that the old chief objected strenuously to freeing the prisoners; after a few moments Quassapelagh summoned Ebenezer, snatched his left hand, and muttered, “You have the ring Quassapelagh gave you?”

  The poet fetched from his pocket the fishbone ring, thanking Providence and Joan Toast that he had exchanged his silver seal for it after all. Quassapelagh first showed the ring to the old chief and then, with some half-defiant proclamation, lifted it high for the crowd to view. At the same time Dick Parker, or Drakepecker, issued orders to Bandy Lou, who stood beaming nearby, and all the prisoners except the Captain were hustled back to the jail-hut before the old man had a chance to launch fresh protests.