‘You err most tellingly in failing to distinguish between my silences and the silences of a being such as Friday. Friday has no command of words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes ia cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman. What is the truth of Friday? You ‘will respond: he is neither cannibal nor laundryman, these are mere names, they do not touch his essence, he is a substantial body, he is himself, Friday is Friday. But that is not so. No matter what he is to himself (is he anything to himself? — how can he tell us?), what he is to the world is what
make of him. Therefore the silence of Friday is a helpless silence. He is the child of his silence, a child unborn, a child waiting to be born that cannot be born. Whereas the silence I keep regarding Bahia and other matters is chosen and purposefuclass="underline" it is my own silence. Bahia, I assert, is a world in itself, and Brazil an even greater world. Bahia and Brazil do not belong within an island story, they cannot be cramped into its confines. For instance: In the streets of Bahia you will see Negro women bearing trays of confections for sale. Let me name some few of these confections. There are pamonhas or Indian corn-cakes; quimados, made of sugar, called in French bon-bons; pão de milho, spongecake made with corn, and pão de arroz, made with rice; also rolete de cana or sugar-cane roll. These are the names that come to me; but there are many others, both sweet and savoury, and all to be found on a single confectioner’s tray on the corner of any street. Think how much more there is of the strange and new in this vigorous city, where throngs of people surge through the streets day and night, naked Indians from the forests and ebony Dahomeyans and proud Lusitanians and half-breeds of every hue, where fat merchants are borne in litters by their slaves amid processions of ftagellants and whirling dancers and food-vendors and crowds on their way to cock-fights. How can you ever close Bahia between the covers of a book? It is only small and thinly peopled places that can be subjugated and held down in words, such as desert islands and lonely houses. Besides, my daughter is no longer in Bahia but is gone into the interior, into a world so vast and strange I can hardly conceive it, a world of plains and plantations such as the one Cruso left behind, where the ant is emperor and everything is turned on its head.
‘I am not, do you see, one of those thieves or highwaymen of yours who gabble a confession and are then whipped off to Tyburn and eternal silence, leaving you to make of their stories whatever you fancy. It is still in my power to guide and amend. Above all, to withhold. By such means do I still endeavour to be father to my story.”
Foe spoke. ‘There is a story I would have you hear, Susan, from my days as visitor to Newgate. A woman, a convicted thief, as she was about to be led to the cart that would take her to Tyburn, asked for a minister to whom to make her true confession; for the confession she had made before, she said, was false. So the ordinary was summoned. To him she confessed again the thefts for which she had stood accused, and more besides; she confessed numerous impurities and blasphemies; she confessed to abandoning two children and stifling a third in the cot. She confessed a husband in Ireland and a husband transported to the Carolinas and a husband with her in Newgate, all alive. She detailed crimes of her young womanhood and crimes of her childhood, till at last, with the sun high in the heavens and the turnkey pounding at the door, the chaplain stilled her. “It is hard for me to believe, Mrs — ,” he said, “that a single lifetime can have sufficed for the commission of all these crimes. Are you truly as great a sinner as you would have me believe?” “If I do not speak the truth, reverend father,” replied the woman (who was Irish, I may say), “then am I not abusing the sacrament, and is that not a sin worse even than those l have confessed, calling for further confession and repentance? And if my repentance is not truly felt (and is it truly felt?-I look into my heart and cannot say, so dark is it there), then is my confession not false, and is that not sin redoubled?” And the woman would have gone ·on confessing and throwing her confession in doubt all day long, till the carter dozed and the pie-men and the crowds went home, had not the chaplain held .up his hands and in a loud voice shriven the woman, over all her protestations that her story was not done, and then hastened away.’
‘Why do you tell me this story?’ I asked. ‘Am I the woman whose time has come to be taken to the gallows, and are you the chaplain?’
‘You are free to give to the story what application you will,’ Foe replied. ‘To me the moral of the story is that there comes a time when we must give reckoning of ourselves to the world, and then forever after be content to hold our peace.’
‘To me the moral is that he has the last word who disposes over the greatest force. I mean the executioner and his assistants, both great and small. If I were the Irishwoman, I should rest most uneasy in my grave knowing to what interpreter the story of my last hours has been consigned.’
‘Then I will tell you a second story. A woman (another woman) was condemned to die-I forget the crime. As the fatal day approached she grew more and more despairing, for she could find no one to take charge of her infant daughter, who was with her in the cell. At last one of her gaolers, taking pity on her distress, spoke with his wife, and together they agreed they would adopt the child as their own. When this condemned woman saw her child safe in the arms of her foster-mother, she turned to her captors and said: “Now you may do with me as you wish. For I have escaped your prison; all you have here is the husk of me” (intending, I believe, the husk that the butterfly leaves behind when it is born). This is a story from the old days; we no longer handle mothers so barbarously. Nevertheless, it retains its application, and the application is: There are more ways than one of living eternally.
‘Mr Foe, I do not have the skill of bringing out parables one after another like roses from a conjurer’s sleeve. There was a time, I grant, when I hoped to be famous, to see heads turn in the street and hear folk whisper, “There goes Susan Barton the castaway.” But that was an idle ambition, long since discarded. Look at me. For two days I have not eaten. My clothes are in tatters, my hair is lank. I look like a~ old woman, a filthy old gipsy-woman. I sleep in doorways, in churchyards, under bridges. Can you believe this beggar’s life is what I desire? With a bath and new clothes and a letter of introduction from you I could tomorrow find myself a situation as a cook-maid, and a comfortable situation too, in a good house. I could return in every respect to the life of a substantial body, the life you recommend. But such a life is abject. It is the life of a thing. A whore used by men is used as a substantial body. The waves picked me up and cast me ashore on an island, and a year later the same waves brought a ship to rescue me, and of the true story of that year, the story as it should be seen in God’s great scheme of things, I remain as ignorant as a newborn babe. That is why I cannot rest, that is why I follow you to your hiding-place like a bad penny. Would I be here if I did not believe you to be my intended, the one alone intended to tell my true story?
‘Do you know the story of the Muse, Mr Foe? The Muse is a woman, a goddess, who visits poets in the night and begets stories upon them. In the accounts they give afterwards, the poets say that she comes in the hour of their deepest despair and touches them with sacred fire, after which their pens, that have been dry, flow. When I wrote my memoir for you, and saw how like the island it was, under my pen, dull and vacant and without life, I wished that there were such a being as a man-Muse, a youthful god who visited authoresses in the night and made their pens flow. But now I know better. The Muse is both goddess and begetter. I was intended not to be the mother of my story, but to beget it. It is not I who am the intended, but you. But why need I argue my case? When is it ever asked of a man who comes courting that he plead in syllogisms? Why should it be demanded of me?’