Cat's Pajamas (21 page)

In their characteristic arrogance Scott and his Negro-loving confreres had refused to quit, and eventually they found a way to make a federal case of the matter. For it so happened that the legal administrator of Irene Emerson's property—her brother, J.F.A. Sanford—was a resident of New York, not Missouri, which meant that technically the whole affair lay beyond the jurisdiction of either state. After losing in a U.S. District Court, Scott appealed to the highest court in the land, whose Chief Justice was only too happy to set the plaintiff straight concerning the nature of chattel slavery in America—the plaintiff, the black race, the infernal abolitionists, the troubled republic, and, indeed, the whole world.

In
Scott v. Sanford,
Roger and six other justices ruled that any entity whose ancestors had ever been sold as slaves could never enjoy the rights of a federal citizen, most especially the right to bring a suit in court. Dred Scott and his kind were in fact pieces of property, as befitting the “inferior order” to which they belonged. Negroes, Roger averred, were “altogether unfit to associate with the white race.” As for the nefarious practice of chopping up the republic into slave zones and free zones, the Taney Court concluded that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. The Missouri Compromise was, in a word, unconstitutional.

If Roger had been forced to make a choice, he would have guessed that future generations would venerate him more for his opinion in
Scott v. Sanford
than for the Charles River Bridge decision. But the issue of the bridge mattered too. It was one thing to earn an honest profit, and quite another to stifle the freedom of a competing corporation.

How strange, this darkness. As usual he'd gone to bed at ten o'clock. Now he was fully awake, ready to hear the arguments in
Torrance v. Ashton
—and yet not a single ray of light pierced his room. Could it be that he'd slept for an entire day? Was his characteristic vigor finally failing? Perhaps he should take his nephew's advice and step down from the bench before the year was out.

He dropped his head back on the pillow and brooded. An insect chorus reached his ears, a noise that made even less sense than the darkness. He had shut all his windows before retiring and, besides, since when had Delaware Avenue become a gathering-place for cicadas and crickets?

His attempt to rise from the mattress perplexed him even more than either the darkness or the insects. Manacles encircled his wrists and ankles, the concomitant chains snaking across his body and disappearing beneath the bed. Whenever he moved, the links of rusted iron gave forth a sound suggesting a bullfrog in pain.

A door swung open. A flickering light filled the bedchamber. The red monk entered, holding aloft a torch, followed by Knock the Dwarf.

“How long has it been?” the red monk said. “A quarter century? No, longer. Twenty-eight years.”

Roger glanced in all directions. Dame Themis's broadsword lay in the corner. Her balance-scales rested on the window ledge, although the daisy-chain and the garland of lilies had long since disintegrated and blown away.

“Good friar, you must set me free,” he gasped.

“The Brotherhood has been following your career with great interest,” the red monk said. “Alas, I'm afraid we are disappointed with your performance on the bench.”

“I've done nothing to deserve these chains,” Roger said, straining against the shackles.

“My employers disagree,” the dwarf chimed in.

“Did I bring an unconsidered populism to the Charles River Bridge decision?” Roger asked. “Is that it?”

The dwarf snickered. The red monk smirked.

“Perhaps I committed an error or two whilst serving on the bench,” Roger continued, “but I always held fast to my principles.”

“Dozens of errors,” the red monk said. “The first occurred the very week you were sworn in, when you decided that a greater good might come from ravishing Dame Themis.”

Anger and indignation boiled up in Roger's blood. “That was your decision, not mine!”

“No, Judge Taney—yours.”

“You forced me to ravish her!” Roger cried.

“Shut up!” the dwarf demanded, and then, as if he doubted Roger's ability to carry out the directive, he pulled a silk kerchief from his trousers and used it to render the Chief Justice mute.

Lantern in hand, the white monk strode into the bedchamber, accompanied by a middle-aged man dressed far too foppishly for his years: blue velvet dressing gown embroidered with golden peacocks, red calfskin slippers, pomaded curls.

The white monk pointed toward Roger and said, “Behold Apollo, avatar of wisdom and probity.”

“I was expecting someone younger,” the coxcomb said.

“Tonight you will learn exactly how it feels to violate Apollo,” the white monk informed the coxcomb, “that you might avoid such a lapse in your coming career.”

Roger made every effort to accuse the monks of deception, but the intervening kerchief turned his sentences into absurdities.

“How can a god be so elderly?” the coxcomb asked.

“Metaphysics rarely follows a predictable course.” The white monk installed his lantern on the nightstand and headed for the open door. “Cleave to the ritual, and all will be well,” he added, marching through the jamb.

“Apollo is
a young
man,” the coxcomb protested.

“Don't be deceived by appearances,” the red monk said. “Your job is not to estimate Apollo's age but to abuse his flesh as emphatically as possible.”

Roger tried to scream,
You have no right!

The red monk pivoted ninety degrees and marched out of the room, taking his torch with him.

“As emphatically as possible,” echoed the coxcomb in a tone of consternation.

Roger wanted to shout, You must show pity!

“Might I make a suggestion?” the dwarf inquired.

“Indeed,” the coxcomb said.

Knock approached Dame Themis's broadsword and, seizing the handle, brought it before the coxcomb. “What better way to violate Apollo than to excise his virility?”

Have mercy!

“To become a great judge, I shall do whatever is required of me,” the coxcomb told the dwarf.

Hear me, sir! I am not a god! I am a citizen of the United States! I am a human being!

The coxcomb went to work, and when he was done the balance-scales of Dame Themis had achieved Platonic equipoise, both loads of equal weight and identical mass, each carriage in perfect harmony with the other.

In 1857, one year after Roger Taney wrote the majority opinion in Scott
v.
Sanford, Irene Emerson of Missouri remarried. Her new husband, Calvin Chaffee, was a devout abolitionist, and so the former Mrs. Emerson sold Dred Scott, his wife Harriet, and their two daughters to the sons of the late Peter Blow, Scott's first owner.

The Blow brothers, childhood friends of Scott's who had paid his legal fees over the years, immediately manumitted the African and his family. For nine months, the interval of a human gestation, Dred Scott lived a free man in the city of St. Louis, succumbing to tuberculosis at the age of fifty-nine.

Initially Scott's remains were laid to rest in Wesleyan Cemetery, but in 1867 the burial ground was closed and his body placed beneath a blank slab in Section 1, Lot No. 177 of Calvary Cemetery. A commemorative marker was added in 1957, giving the facts in the case, and the grave now bears an inscription: “In memory of a simple man who wanted to be free.”

T
O YOU, DON CRISTóBAL COLóN,
our Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Viceroy and Governor of all the Islands to be found by you on your Great Voyage of Discovery, greetings and grace …

What a beautiful and welcome sight was your albatross messenger, swooping out of the skies like a new soul arriving in Heaven! How your letter raised my failing hopes and lifted my sagging spirits! O brave mariner, I am confident that the seagoing gardens of which you spoke, those vast floating mats of sargasso weed, signify that your fleet has at last drawn near the Indies. By the time these words appear before your eyes, you will have walked the bejeweled streets of Cathay and toured the golden temples of Cipangu.

Dearest friend, I should like to know your opinion about a troublesome matter. Do you have any views on the Jewish Question? Predictably enough, my Edict of General Expulsion has proven controversial here at Court. Our Keeper of the Privy Purse—I speak now of Santángel, perhaps the loudest of all those voices championing your expedition—became distressed to the point of tears, though as a
converso
he is doubtless biased by his Hebrew heritage. The clergy was divided. Whereas Friar Deza called the measure vital to the future of the Church, Friar Perez began quoting the Sermon on the Mount. But it was my old confessor Father Torquemada who used the strongest words. As long as unbelievers live among us, the Inquisitor explained, there can be no blood purity, no
limpieza de sangre,
in Spain.

And yet, three nights ago, a disquieting dream came to me. I no longer wore the Crown of Castile but the war helmet of Rameses II. Am I the new Pharaoh? In banishing Spain's Jews, have I called divine disfavor upon my head? O Cristóbal, my heart feels like one of the great iron anchors you will soon drop into the waters off Asia.

Written in the City of Sante Fe on this 27th day of August, in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ 1492.

I, The Queen

TO YOU, ISABELLA,
by the Grace of God Queen of Castile, León, Aragón, Granada, Sicily, Sardinia, and the Balearics, greetings and increase of good fortune…

Alas, we passed through the Sargasso Sea without sighting the Indies, a situation that so dismayed my officers and men they begged me to turn back. I was comforting them as best I could, pointing out that we had not yet gone two thousand miles (though in truth we had gone twenty-eight hundred), when the Ocean Sea began suddenly to swell, its waves rising high as battlements—as watchtowers—as the Pyrenees themselves. We rode those rollers, my Queen, plummeting inexorably from crest to cavity and back again. Terror-struck at first, we soon realized that God Himself had sent this cataclysm to speed us toward the Moluccas. Such a miracle has not occurred since Egypt's chariots gave chase to the Children of Israel!

You spoke of Spain's own Jews. By curious coincidence, the same tide that bore the
Niña,
the
Pinta,
and the
Santa María
out of port also carried what I took to be a contingent of your General Expulsion. As we followed the Rio Saltés to the sea, our way was blocked by every sort of vessel imaginable, their holds jammed with refugees clutching kettles, crockery, toys, lanterns, and other meager possessions. Initially this scene aroused in your Admiral an unequivocal pity (the weeping, the wailing, the old ones jumping overboard and crawling onto the rocks to die, the rabbis beseeching Yahweh to part the waters of the Mediterranean and lead the people dry-shod to a new Promised Land), but then Father Hojeda invited me to see it in a different light. “By driving the infidels from its cities, towns, and fields,” Hojeda explained, “the Crown has made room for the pagan hordes we shall soon be ferrying to Spain from the Orient, thousands upon thousands of unbaptized souls yearning to embrace the Holy Faith.”

So do not despair, Sovereign Queen. Your edict has served a divine plan.

I must rest my pen. A cry of “Tierra!” has just gone up from the lookout stationed atop our mainmast.
Gloria in excelsis Deo
—the impossible is accomplished! We have sailed West and met the East!

Written aboard the caravel
Santa María
on this 2nd day of September, in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ 1492.

I, The Admiral

TO YOU, DON CRISTOBAL COLON
, our Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Viceroy and Governor of all the Islands to be found by you on your Great Voyage of Discovery, greetings and grace…

For five whole days I brooded upon the sobering news from North Africa—racking rumors of Jews cast naked into the sea by the captains we had hired to deport them, wrenching accounts of those very exiles starving on forgotten shores, grisly tales of these same refugees being eviscerated by Turkish mobs in quest of swallowed coins. Then came your letter of the 2nd.

O noble navigator, you have surely delivered your Queen from madness! I now see that the true and final purpose of our expedition is not to plot a new route to the Indies, nor is it to forge an alliance with the Great Khan, nor is it to build a bastion from which we might attack the Turkish rear and win back Constantinople (though these are all worthy aims). I now see that its true and final purpose is to lead all Asia to the Holy Faith. Not since my correspondence with Sixtus IV—through which he so kindly allayed my fears that in reducing the children of heretics to beggary the Inquisition overstepped its mandate—has my conscience known such release. Is it blasphemous for a Queen to compare her Admiral with her Pope? Then may God forgive me.

So, courageous conquistador, you have found the Moluccas at last. In your subsequent missives you may, if so inclined, make mention of the following matters: gold, silver, rubies, sapphires, diamonds, emeralds, precious silks, rare spices. But speak to me first and foremost of the spiritual condition of the Indian people. Do they seem well disposed to receive the Gospel? Does Father Hojeda wish to perform all the baptisms himself or shall I send a company of priests in your wake?

Written in our City of Sante Fe on this 7th day of September, in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ 1492.

I, The Queen

TO YOU, ISABELLA,
by the Grace of God Queen of Castile, Leon, Aragón, Granada, Sicily, Sardinia, and the Balearics, greetings and increase of good fortune…

How can mere words convey the miracle that is the Indies? How can I begin to describe the mysteries and marvels that have dazzled us in recent days? Vast glittering palaces! Mighty minarets belching smoke and fire! Ships that sail without benefit of wind! Coaches that move without a single horse in harness! Carriages that fly through the air on featherless wings!