Jack: Book One in the Trilogy, the Battle Begins

Master's Slavery Lesson Part 38

"Good morning girls and boys. Well let's see what do we have here? Look at this why don't you, I see that Jeremy is with us today as is Jimmy, Jack, and Mr. Brooks! What do you know? Well boys, I hope you had a nice little vacation - I hear you all did such a marvelous job on the church grounds. I can't say as though I'm particularly charmed to see any of you, especially after last weekend, but we'll address that later. Perhaps some of you at least can start with a clean slate. I sincerely hope you've all learned the error of your ways and will make a considerable effort to abide by our school rules from now on and that you will lend your mind to the exalted lessons I have prepared for you this day. One of them involves our most cherished traditions and values which have made Charleston the great center of the south and, indeed, which has established Southern gentry at the great height of advanced civilization making it the envy of the world.

"Do you know what I am referring to Mr. Stone?"

"Well Masta Whittemore, sir, I think I do. You're referrin' to what you always to talk about - the darkies - and how their sufferin' and misery is a good thing cuz it is necessary for the good of us all."

"Hmm," master said, walking one way, turning and walking backwards, his hands clasping one another behind his back. His long pointed nose seemed to move up a little, then down like a chicken pecking in a barnyard. He seemed to peck, peck, peck with each step he took with his long skinny legs attired with high leather boots which made the floorboards creak.

"Very good, Mister Stone. Very nicely put. I don't think I'd have put it quite that way myself but the principle is the same.

"I'm surprised at your sudden attention, Mr. Stone, but do admit that I'm glad - quite glad - to have your participation and, uh, cooperation, in this most important lesson which is so essential to the development of the character of our youth.

"Class, it is easy for the Northern abolitionists who are a vicious lot and a scourge and even a disease in our land to advocate doing away with slavery. These selfish agitators are only interested in profiteering and at our expense and are jealous of our economic and social system. They want to tear down all that's good. They don't care a twit about the black man. What galls them is that they hate that we have more liberty than they do. They are led by their misguided politicians in Washington, D.C., and the equally misguided newspaper editors in many of the northern cities like that high-faluttin', bombastic know-nothing, Mr. Horace Greeley, of the New York Tribune. The man should be tarred and feathered and dragged through the streets by his toes by a team of wild asses for agitating the people of this good land toward calling for the Negroes to rise up against their masters. They talk about us as being against the union when it is they who are attempting to break up the union. This great country of ours was built and unified upon the proud principle and sound institution of slavery and the Constitution has protected it for more than fifty years. These northern good-for-nothing abolitionists want to make the African equal to the American to the Englishman, the Frenchman, the Scot and the Spaniard, the German. This is clearly preposterous. No Negro was ever the equal of a white man or woman. God made the world this way. He made the black man to serve the white man, this is the natural way of things. Color is the great division, not poverty and wealth - for every white man is already wealthy compared to any black man. Even the poorest white man is an aristocrat compared with the Negro and so he feels himself to be part of the upper class. And it'd be unnatural to mix them up and give the Negro the same rights which he would little know what to do with anyway. The white man is wealthy by nature, which God created, endowed with beauty, endowed with white skin, with superior intelligence and, not least, with great ability in architecture, art and science, with a natural power over the primitive black man who so obviously lacks natural wealth because the aristocratic impulse does not exist in the black man who is a low breed who is more like the apes than the humans. The black man is fit for the lowest work, he being of lowest endowment, and he is far happier in this natural state than in trying to be something he cannot be."