Jack: Book One in the Trilogy, the Battle Begins

Repentance Part 45

When Master Whittemore went home that night, he got onto his knees and asked God for forgiveness for the "great sin" that he carried in his breast, that he was never proud of revealing to anyone, resulting in his having kept his own confidence, but that now he would finally let out. He wrote in his diary that he was somehow glad that the escaped slave had made it to freedom. This feeling at first irritated him but later made him happy, then nearly ecstatic.

He recalled hating Jack so intensely as I read about the poor slave's life yet at the same time found himself cheering inwardly for the Negro to make it to freedom. Now he wondered about the fate of all the other black men, women and children that were transported in the slave ships he had embarked on in younger days and who had been stolen from places like Senegal, Guinea and Hispaniola and brought to southern states; and how he had advocated for slavery and a white aristocracy before children who laughed at him and refused to believe him and respected him not as a teacher.

"Forgiveness cannot be a matter of a simple word, nor a question, nor a simple 'I'm sorry'. No, it must be followed by righteous action calculated to balance the evil already done," Whittemore wrote. "Some sacrifice of self, to the opposite cause is in order."

This he resolved to do. Thus Master Whittemore decided to quit teaching and go back to the sea to sing a different tune. He sat in his rocking chair in his little white-walled study, staring at the lone lamp burning whale oil, at the flame from the wick flickering erratically due to the breeze from the cracked window.

"No the flame won't go out yet," he thought. "Not before I walk into the jaws of the great fish!"

Master Whittemore sipped from a brandy tumbler and wrote in his diary that the sea was the only place he could truly feel happy and free even though he only felt that way in the beginning, before working on slave ships, when he first became a sailor on merchant vessels, and before he felt the stain of slavery on his conscience. Even then he was not happy. He was young, lonely, and looking to find a place in the world. As a young boy he dreamed of life on the sea, seeing foreign lands where few people visit, and penetrating the mysteries it contained. He was looking for a nobility of existence that he had read about and been told about in English churches but which he had never found. Now as he wrote he realized he had never found it because he had never tried to create it.

"Man must rise above his own mediocrity, greed, selfishness, and his callousness to see his natural nobility," he wrote.

Master recalled the dark, balmy, lonely Atlantic nights walking the deck pondering the great, moonless, starlit sky and having his thoughts interrupted by a cough or a sneeze or a groan from below deck. It was never a perfect harmony. Grim facts always held him in their grip. He would stay up late to watch the ocean by night, alone on the deck except for the night watchman and the helmsman. He enjoyed watching the ship tossing and slicing through the white foam. Sometimes he had the watch. The crews on the various ships that master sailed generally tolerated him but maintained a distance. Few knew him. He was aloof and had a forbidden aspect.

What this crew liked about master was that each Sunday in his sermons on the open deck with the slaves below in chains, master absolved them of any sin in being slavers and in fact he relegated them and the institution of slavery to a high status; told them that they were performing a higher calling; that indeed they were God's maritime soldiers who were building a higher civilization that would be dominated by the natural superiority of the Englishman, and their northern European brothers and sisters with their "great American experiment."

Slaves were born to be slaves and the crew was not responsible for them in any way, master told them. Most of them believed him and they were able to do their duty with more conviction and fewer scruples after each sermon.