How could a human being have the strength to take his life by battering his own head against a wall? Will you tell me that? How could he stay conscious long enough to get to the fatal blow that ended it? And to do it silently! How in the name of God could you do that and stay silent?
Matthias did. I could not have done it, but he did. I swear to you, as I shall swear to the judges that come to question me. I will close my eyes three times, signifying NO, when they ask me if Matthias Darrow cried out at the last. His family has no shame coming, for he died without so much as a gasp. And the town we came from, he and I, all those people who were so blazing proud to have two of us choose to be Silents, there’s no shame coming to them, either. We took our vows together, Matthias and I, both of us just seventeen; and now he is gone.
We were expecting that he would do something. All of us had seen it coming. He had taken to chewing at his lips, so that they were always cracked and bloody. His fingers were forever twitching; he’d notice, and he’d shove them out of sight into the pockets of his robe. We watched him day by day as the tension drew his skin tight to his skull, till the bones strained to shove through the flesh and the whole head gleamed like polished ebony. When he started wearing the leather gag even in the daytime, that foul gag that stands witness to our frailty and guards us from the word spoken in sleep, we knew that he was going to break. If there had been anything we could have done to help him, we would have done it, but there was nothing to do. When the lust for language consumes a man, you can only watch him burn and dedicate your prayers to him.
We were on our guard on his behalf; we were not just praying. We had taken to being wary around him. When we walked along the balconies of the shelterhouse, one of us would walk at his side next the rail, and two others ahead and behind him, so that he could not throw himself into the courtyard. The elders had begun tasting his food and drink at the table openly, so that if he were so mad as to poison either he would have to take one of them with him into death. We watched what he picked up and what he put down; we went with him when he walked out of the building. At least one of us stayed close by no matter what he was engaged in; we were watchful of our brother. Except in the privacy of his room, where we could not follow.
I am sure I’m not the only one who wishes we had been more careless. If Matthias had been able to slip poison into his soup in the dining room, it would have been easier for him, and I would not now be hearing in my soul the wet thud of his skull against brick.
Still. It must be noted that Matthias Darrow did not give in. For his family there will not be the shame of a failed Silent with broken vows, sent home from the shelterhouse in disgrace. He spared them that. He spared all his vast family, spared them the scandal that shames the line down to the cousins many times removed, that is the end of respect and the beginning of a courteous pity that is like a stone hung round the neck. Matthias saw to it that his people did not have that shame to endure. The Lord God help me be as brave if I come to such a pass. The Lord God grant I never come to such a pass, and let my never-ending silent dialogue with my own foolish self be my worst failing.
All of this, we will be reminded, was born of the sin of pride, beside which murder and debauchery are no more than childish foibles. First the white man’s pride; and that not being foul enough, the black man’s pride to cap it off. Pride, that is not called the worst of all the sins for idle reasons. When the preacher comes this Sunday, that will be his sermon, and his text will be “Pride goeth before a fall”. There is no room in this house where that text is not burned into a beam or painted over a window. Because of what pride has brought us to.
If the Union Army had let us serve with them in the Civil War, the North would have won; no one disputes that. President Lincoln himself said it was so — they would have won! But they wouldn’t allow it. Not them. No black man was going to put on the uniform of a Union soldier, or ride a horse of the Union Cavalry, or march in the least last straggling row of the Union infantry. They were told we’d serve in our own clothes, or serve naked, if they felt that would be sufficient to keep us from being mistaken for their comrades at arms. But they were stiff-necked; it made no difference. No black — Negroes, they called us then — no Negro was going to be able to say he had served in the Union Army. We were not fit even to die beside them; that was their position on the matter, and they would not budge from it.
You’d have thought the Confederates would have had better sense. White and black, we’d played together as children and suckled at the same black breasts as infants and gotten blind drunk together as young men. But the Confederate Army followed the Yankees’ lead, bound they’d outdo them. If a Negro was not good enough to soldier for the Union, well then by god he was twice that not good enough to soldier for the South! Damn fools they were, too, for we would have fought to the death beside them and no quarter given, after the way the Union spurned us.
Abraham Lincoln, standing there for all to hear in Washington, and then the words spread across the newspapers for all to read, he said: “We shall not send our women into battle; we shall not send our children. And we shall surely not send our Negroes, who are as children, to shed their blood in a war they are not even able to understand.” He said that, and we heard it, and I suppose it was nothing we hadn’t heard before. But somehow his saying it made it official. He made it the official public policy of the Disunited States of America, that the blacks had not even the wisdom of children. After that, we would willingly have fought for the South, even if it meant fighting beside a man who’d ordered us whipped by the cruellest black driver in the worst slave state there ever was.
They wouldn’t have it. And later, when it got to be obvious that the war could not be won without us, they still would not, for neither side was willing to be the first to say, “Well, we were wrong; I guess the blood of a black man is good enough to spill for this country.”
Pride! Thus it was that nobody won that awful war, that dragged on eight terrible years. Oh, the South claimed the victory, in the strict sense of the word; there being so many blacks at home to see to the work of the plantations and the farms and the Southern towns, the South lasted longer. It was the North that first proposed to stop fighting. But there was no victory. The time came when there was nobody left with the will to fight any more, that’s all. They just laid down their weapons and went home. What was left of them. To what was left of home.
They didn’t last very long. Smallpox and cholera took most of them that didn’t die of their battle wounds. A handful came stumbling back to the burned-out ruins that had been the glorious South; and they were ruins, themselves.
We had been prepared to kill every last one of them; with our bare hands if need be. My grandfather swears to that, and I believe him. We had been ready to kill them all. We were four million strong; even half-starved we had more strength than those ragtag men that lived through the Civil War to come home. Our women were ready, and our children, too, to do whatsoever had to be done.
But when it came right down to it we had to kill very few of them. The young men, and the older ones that had gone in when the young men were mostly dead and maimed, they brought their diseases home with them. And they went to sleep and eat with their wives and their children and their old people. The sicknesses went through those families like wildfire through a piney woods.