A Different Flesh (24 page)

The lawyer's face revealed nothing of his machinations. “—gifted with intelligence,” he repeated, “though of a lesser sort than our own. Its existence is not to be denied; in the wild, sims craft crude tools of stone, and attempt to imitate ours, in a fashion no brute beast could match.

“But as most of you know, they have no language of their own, and most fail to master the English tongue. Can you speak, Rob?” Douglas asked, turning to the sim.

Its previously placid face grew tense as it struggled against its own slow wits and balky muscles. “Y-y-y-yess,” it got out at last, and sat back, proud and relieved.
Speak good
, it added with signs.

“So you do,” Douglas acknowledged. He concentrated on the judges again. “Had I bid the sim read to us from the simplest children's primer, of course, it would have been helpless, as it would have been to write its name. No man has yet succeeded in teaching sims their letters.”

“And no man yet has taught a turtle to waltz,” Zachary Hayes broke in. “What of it? The issue here is niggers, not sims. Perhaps my distinguished opponent needs reminding of it.”

“Yes, Mr. Douglas, we have been patient for some time now,” Judge Kemble said. “We shall not be pleased if this course of yours leads nowhere.”

“It leads to the very heart of the issue, your excellency,” Douglas assured him. “For consider: in the slavery of ancients, what was their chiefest concern? Why, just as the learned Mr. Hayes has demonstrated—to define who might rightfully be a slave, and who was properly free. The great Aristotle developed the concept my opponent discussed so well, that of the slave by nature. Here, in the person of Rob and in his kind, we see exactly what the Greek sage intended: a being with a body strong enough for the tasks we set, yet without wit enough to set against our will.

“Aristotle admitted that in his day, the most difficult thing to determine was the quality of mind that defined the natural slave. And no wonder, for he was trying to distinguish among groups of men, and all men far more resemble each other than they differ from sims. In these modern times, we have a true standard of comparison.

“Mr. Hayes put forth the proposition that the physical appearance of niggers brands them as slaves. That is the same as saying painted plaster will satisfy the stomach because it looks so good. In this court, should we not examine essence rather than exterior? To do so, I should like to summon my client Jeremiah to the witness-box.”

While Douglas was signing to Rob that it could go, Hayes sprang up, exclaiming, “I protest this—this charade!”

“On what grounds, sir?” Judge Kemble said.

“On the grounds that it is obviously a trick, rehearsed well in advance, intended to make this nigger out to be Aristotle, Charlemagne, and the Twelve Apostles all rolled into one!”

“Aye, there's a stink of collusion in the air,” Judge Scott rumbled.

“How say you, Mr. Douglas?” Kemble asked.

Douglas's smile was beatific, the smile of a man whose enemy has delivered himself into his hands. “Your excellency, I say that even if I were to admit that charge—and I do not; I deny it—it would only help my own case. How could I conspire with Jeremiah unless he had the brains to plot along with me?”

Hayes opened his mouth, closed it again. His eyes were wide and staring. Judge Hardesty let out a most unjudicial snort, then tried to pretend he hadn't. Judge Scott looked grim, which meant his expression changed not at all. Stifled whoops and cheers came from the blacks at the back of the courtroom. Judge Kemble gaveled them down.

“You may proceed, sir,” was all he said to Douglas. The lawyer dipped his head, waved Jeremiah forward to take the oath. As Jeremiah raised his hand, he thought Douglas might remind the judges that he, unlike a sim, was able to do so. But Douglas knew when to be subtle. The fact itself spoke louder than anything he could say about it.

Facing the courtroom was harder than Jeremiah had expected. Except for those of the few blacks, he was hard pressed to find a friendly face. The whites in the audience regarded him with looks ranging from stony disapproval to out-and-out hatred. Harry Stowe was part of the latter group.

Next to him sat the two people Jeremiah knew best here, Charles and Caleb Gillen. The habits of years died hard; it hurt Jeremiah to see the contempt on the face of the man who had owned him, and to see his master's son scowling at him as at Iscariot. He started to smile, then let his face freeze. They would re-enslave him without a qualm if the judges said they could. That made them no friends of his.

Douglas produced a small, thick book and presented it to Zachary Hayes, “Would you care to open the Bible at random, sir, so Jeremiah may read the passage you select?”

The older lawyer drew back from the book as if it had come from the devil, “You'll not make me part of your trickery, sir! Like as not, you've had him memorize Scripture for the sake of looking good here.”

“Again you prove what you'd sooner oppose,” Douglas said. “If Jeremiah were stupid as a sim, he wouldn't be able to memorize the Good Book. You'll make a man of him in spite of yourself.”

He turned to the bench. “Would one of you care to make the selection, your excellencies? I don't want any possibility of deceit in this, for such as Mr. Hayes to tax me with.”

To Jeremiah's surprise, Judge Scott took the Bible from Douglas. The lawyer's face fell when he saw that Scott did not open the book just anywhere, as he had suggested, but went hunting for a specific passage. “Here,” the judge said. “Let him read
this
.” He stabbed at the section he wanted with his thumb, adding for the record, “This is the seventh chapter of First Chronicles.”

Jeremiah certainly had not memorized it; he had no idea what was in the passage. But when Douglas handed him the Bible, he understood why the lawyer had gone expressionless. The chapter was one of those collections of begats that crop up every now and then, and full of names more obscure than most.

Having no choice, he gulped and plunged in, “‘And of the sons of Issachar, Tola, and Puah, Jashub, and Shimron, four. And the sons of Tola: Uzzi, and Rephaiah, and Jeriel, and Jahmai, and Ibsam, and Shemuel.…'” He read slowly and carefully, often pausing to sound out an unfamiliar name. He knew he sometimes stumbled, and hated himself for it, but Judge Scott had set too wicked a trap for him to escape unscathed.

He fought his way through the sons of Bilhan (Jeush, Benjamin, Ehud, Chenanah, Zethan, Tarshish, and Ahishahar), the sons of Shemida (Ahian, Shechem, Likhi, and Aniam), and the sons of Asher (Imnah, Ishvah, Ishvi, and Beriah, to say nothing of their sister, Serah). He almost broke down on Pasach, Bimhal, and Asvath (the sons of Japhlet). But his voice rose in triumph as he came at last to the sons of Ulla—Arah, and Hanniel, and Rizia.

“‘All these,'” he finished, “‘were the children of Asher, heads of the fathers' houses, choice and mighty men of valour, chiefs of princes. And the number of them reckoned by genealogy for service in war was twenty and six thousand men.'”

He closed the Bible. The courtroom was very quiet. Douglas walked up and took the book from him. Judge Scott looked down at his hands, up to the plaster of the ceiling, anywhere but at Jeremiah.

“I think you can go back to our table now, Jeremiah,” Douglas murmured.

Jeremiah's feet hardly seemed to touch the ground as he returned to his place. He heard Caleb Gillen whisper to his father, “I'm so sorry, sir. It's my fault he can read at all. I went and put ideas in his head, and see the thanks we get.”

There was enough truth in that to sting, a little. Yes, Caleb had taught Jeremiah to read, but he was forgetting, in the way that was so easy for someone used to thinking of people as belongings, that Jeremiah had wanted to be free long before he could pick out the word “liberty” on the printed page. Caleb had been willing enough to help last summer, when Jeremiah's goal seemed indefinitely far away. Now that it was here, Caleb was finding he did not like it so well.

“Mr. Hayes?” Judge Kemble said, and then again, more sharply, “Mr. Hayes?”

Jeremiah had thought Hayes would have to give in—despite having worked so long for Douglas, he was still naive about lawyers. Hayes slowly rose, long and angular. He made a production out of stretching.

“Begging your excellency's pardon,” he said, perfectly self-possessed. “I was woolgathering there. In considering this case, you must remember that it bears on not a single individual but, by the census of '98, close to a million persons of African descent. What of their masters' property rights? Further, assuming that by some mischance they should become free, how are they to provide for themselves? And how will they take their place in a society of free men? Freedom bestowed as a gift will mean nothing to them, as they will have done nothing to earn it.”

Judge Hardesty nodded thoughtfully. That frightened Jeremiah, who had come to think of the quiet judge as being on his side. “What are we going to do?” he asked harshly.

Douglas might as well not have heard him. He waited till he was sure Hayes had finished, then heaved his bulk upright. “When a man shifts his argument from principle to expediency,” he remarked, “trust neither. My learned opponent is looking to sow panic where none need exist; he speaks as if we were on the point of civil war. Why do we have courts, if not to treat our abuses before we need the medicine solders give?”

“Very pretty,” Hayes said. “You answer none of the points I raised, but very pretty nonetheless.”

“Had you not interrupted me, I would have answered,” Douglas replied sweetly. “I don't presume to make the law, but I can offer some suggestions. You quoted the ancients when it suited your purpose. They had their ways of dealing with freed men, and of easing them into the life of the state. Perhaps some of the first generation would remain as clients to their one-time masters, working for a wage for some length of time before severing all obligations. Given a few years and good will, the thing can be done painlessly.”

Hearing Douglas propose curtailing his freedom made Jeremiah scowl. He hated the thought of going back to work for the Gillens, even as a free man. But a moment's reflection reminded him that before he had been willing enough to stay on as a slave, so long as he was treated well and had some hope of buying his liberty one day. He had run away from maltreatment, not slavery.

And, he realized, other blacks would not face the problem of ex-owners with grudges as deep-seated as the Gillens' against him. Or would they?…

Zachary Hayes might have picked the thought from his brain. “Painlessly, eh?” he sneered, turning Douglas's word against him. “You can make all the laws you like, sir, but how do you propose making the good white men who built the Federated Commonwealths accept their niggers as their equals?” There was the heart of things, dragged out naked and bleeding.

Before Douglas could get up to respond, Jeremiah found himself on his feet. “Your excellencies, can I say something?”

Judge Kemble glanced toward Douglas, who looked startled but shrugged. “Is it germane?” the judge asked sternly.

“Sir?”

“Does it apply? Has it a bearing on the case here?”

“Oh. Yes, sir, that it does. Indeed it does.”

“Very well. Be brief.”

“Thank you, sir.” Jeremiah took a deep breath. “Seems to me, sir, a lot of white folks needs to look down at niggers on account of they need to feel they're better'n somebody. But even if you did free every nigger tomorrow, made 'em just the same as whites to the law, those whites would still know they were higher in the scheme of things than sims.

“Your excellencies, one of the things helped me get by so long as a slave was knowing the sims were there below me. Truth to tell,” he went on, drawing on his thoughts of a few minutes before, “I didn't leave the Gillen farm till they stopped treating me like I was a man and worked me like a sim in the fields. That's purely not right, sirs, making a man into a sim, and if slavery lets one man do that to another, why, it's not right either. That's all.”

He sat as abruptly as he had risen. Douglas leaned over and patted him on the back, murmuring, “Out to steal my job? You just might do it.”

“Huh,” Jeremiah said, but the praise warmed him.

The arguments went on; Hayes was not one to leave a case so long as he had breath to talk. But he and Douglas were hammering away at smaller points now, thrashing round the edges of things. Douglas got in only one shot he thought telling, a reminder of the historic nature of the case.

“That's for Kemble's sake,” he told Jeremiah during a recess. “Letting him think people will remember his name forever for the sake of what he does here can't hurt.”

Jeremiah thought about that, and contrasted it to Caleb Gillen's picture of the law as a vast impersonal force poised over the heads of miscreants. He preferred Douglas's way of looking at things. People were easier to deal with than vast impersonal forces.

Jeremiah Gillen walked down Granby Pike toward the Benjamin and Levi Bank of Portsmouth. Money jingled in his pocket. Even if the Conscript Fathers of Virginia decided to set up a clientage system like the one Alfred Douglas had outlined the year before, by now he had enough money to buy himself out of any further service to the family that had once owned him.

Hayes was still appealing his case, of course, sending up writ after writ based on Judge Scott's narrow interpretation of the law. But Judge Hardesty had been as narrowly for Jeremiah as Scott was against him, and Judge Kemble's ringing condemnation of human slavery would be hard to overturn. Douglas had been dead right about him, Jeremiah thought—he must have decided the eyes of history were on him.

A sim struggling along with a very fat knapsack bumped into Jeremiah. “Watch where you're going, you brainless flathead,” he snapped.