Read Online Worthy Brown's Daughter by Phillip Margolin - Free Book Online
Authors: Phillip Margolin
Ads: Link
understand you,” said W. B. Thornton, the Multnomah County district attorney, who was muddle-headed under normal circumstances and had decreased his level of comprehension further this evening by imbibing more liquor than he should have.
“Ah, but the implications are clear,” Goodfellow replied. “Even the ancients were fully aware of this kind of mutual coincidence between the facial angle and the powers of the mind; consequently, in their statues of heroes and philosophers they usually extended the angle to ninety degrees, making that of the gods to be one hundred, beyond which it cannot be enlarged without deformity. Modern anatomists have fixed the average facial angle of the European at eighty, the Negro at seventy and orangutans at fifty-eight. All brutes are below seventy, with quadrupeds being about twenty.”
“Are you done with Roxanne?” Barbour asked Goodfellow.
“Quite,” Goodfellow answered with mild surprise, since he had forgotten that the girl was standing obediently in front of him.
“You may go,” Barbour said. Roxanne left the room but stood quietly behind the closed door to the parlor so she could hear her master speak.
“I have to concur with Morris,” Caleb Barbour said as soon as his servant was out of the room. The assemblage listened intently, as they usually deferred to his opinions on matters of the Negro because of his greater knowledge of them as a former slave owner. “I was in Atlanta when a traveling carnival came to town. One of the exhibits was an ape from Africa. The similarities between the ape and my Negroes were astonishing. Now, I am no scientist, so this is simply my uneducated opinion, but based on my observations, I would not disagree with a scientific paper that concluded that the Negro is somewhere between the ape and the white man and not quite a human being.”
“AM I A HUMAN BEING?” Roxanne Brown asked herself later that night as she lay in her room in the rear of Caleb Barbour’s house. Aside from her narrow bed, the only furnishings were a rickety wooden chair and a small chest of drawers. The tiny, windowless space had originally been a storeroom, and it was stiflingly hot because of the lack of ventilation. Roxanne would have gone out onto the porch if she could, but ever since Barbour and her father had quarreled, Mr. Barbour had taken to locking her in at night for fear that she would run away.
Mr. Barbour had given Roxanne a candle. Her room was pitch-black when she extinguished it. The darkness did not cool the room, but it was conducive to thought, and tonight she was thinking about what Mr. Barbour and his guests had said about her people and apes. Roxanne did not know what an ape was, but she suspected it was some kind of animal that resembled a Negro. Animals were less than human, and Mr. Goodfellow seemed to think that the way her face slanted indicated a closer relationship to the brute than the human. In her experience, most Negroes were treated more like animals than humans, but her father had assured her that the only difference between Negroes and whites was the color of their skin. He had seen the skeletons of dead white men and dead Negroes and the insides of injured white men and Negroes, and he had told her that there was no difference between the bones and guts of the races that he could see.
Was it the thoughts of white people and Negroes that made them different, then? Did white people have bigger thoughts? Whites had written all of the books she’d read in secret, and she knew of none that had been written by her own people. Was the capacity of blacks to think on things smaller? If so, how was she able to understand what she heard and read? It was all very confusing.
Roxanne would have liked to have some books around that could answer her questions, but, unlike Mrs. Barbour, her master had no use for books and preferred to spend his free time gambling, hunting, and drinking. Roxanne’s opportunities to read were limited to
“Ah, but the implications are clear,” Goodfellow replied. “Even the ancients were fully aware of this kind of mutual coincidence between the facial angle and the powers of the mind; consequently, in their statues of heroes and philosophers they usually extended the angle to ninety degrees, making that of the gods to be one hundred, beyond which it cannot be enlarged without deformity. Modern anatomists have fixed the average facial angle of the European at eighty, the Negro at seventy and orangutans at fifty-eight. All brutes are below seventy, with quadrupeds being about twenty.”
“Are you done with Roxanne?” Barbour asked Goodfellow.
“Quite,” Goodfellow answered with mild surprise, since he had forgotten that the girl was standing obediently in front of him.
“You may go,” Barbour said. Roxanne left the room but stood quietly behind the closed door to the parlor so she could hear her master speak.
“I have to concur with Morris,” Caleb Barbour said as soon as his servant was out of the room. The assemblage listened intently, as they usually deferred to his opinions on matters of the Negro because of his greater knowledge of them as a former slave owner. “I was in Atlanta when a traveling carnival came to town. One of the exhibits was an ape from Africa. The similarities between the ape and my Negroes were astonishing. Now, I am no scientist, so this is simply my uneducated opinion, but based on my observations, I would not disagree with a scientific paper that concluded that the Negro is somewhere between the ape and the white man and not quite a human being.”
“AM I A HUMAN BEING?” Roxanne Brown asked herself later that night as she lay in her room in the rear of Caleb Barbour’s house. Aside from her narrow bed, the only furnishings were a rickety wooden chair and a small chest of drawers. The tiny, windowless space had originally been a storeroom, and it was stiflingly hot because of the lack of ventilation. Roxanne would have gone out onto the porch if she could, but ever since Barbour and her father had quarreled, Mr. Barbour had taken to locking her in at night for fear that she would run away.
Mr. Barbour had given Roxanne a candle. Her room was pitch-black when she extinguished it. The darkness did not cool the room, but it was conducive to thought, and tonight she was thinking about what Mr. Barbour and his guests had said about her people and apes. Roxanne did not know what an ape was, but she suspected it was some kind of animal that resembled a Negro. Animals were less than human, and Mr. Goodfellow seemed to think that the way her face slanted indicated a closer relationship to the brute than the human. In her experience, most Negroes were treated more like animals than humans, but her father had assured her that the only difference between Negroes and whites was the color of their skin. He had seen the skeletons of dead white men and dead Negroes and the insides of injured white men and Negroes, and he had told her that there was no difference between the bones and guts of the races that he could see.
Was it the thoughts of white people and Negroes that made them different, then? Did white people have bigger thoughts? Whites had written all of the books she’d read in secret, and she knew of none that had been written by her own people. Was the capacity of blacks to think on things smaller? If so, how was she able to understand what she heard and read? It was all very confusing.
Roxanne would have liked to have some books around that could answer her questions, but, unlike Mrs. Barbour, her master had no use for books and preferred to spend his free time gambling, hunting, and drinking. Roxanne’s opportunities to read were limited to
Similar Books
