Worthy Brown's Daughter (5 page)

CHAPTER 9

W
hile Matthew was working on the bishop’s miter, Sharon Hill was sitting on the edge of her bed in the Evergreen Hotel, engaged in futile attempts to move the air in her bedroom with a folded newspaper. Her dress was rolled over her knees, and her bare legs were spread apart to catch any breeze that fortune sent through her open window.

Benjamin Gillette had been a perfect gentleman during the trip from Phoenix and had not questioned the lies she’d fed him about her past. For her part, Hill had plied the older man with subtle questions. Among other things, she’d learned that Gillette was a widower with a daughter who had just returned home from several years of schooling in the East.

When they arrived in town, Gillette had suggested that Hill stay at the Evergreen, Portland’s most elegant hotel. Hill told him that the hotel was too expensive for her. As she had hoped, Gillette offered to assist her with the cost of her lodging until she established her business. Hill had protested, but not too strongly. By the time she had said good night to Benjamin Gillette, she was ensconced in a suite with a sitting room, a large bedroom, and a spacious bathroom with a deep, claw-foot tub.

Gillette had not tried to take advantage of her that first night, but he had since come calling for his quid pro quo. Hill had no illusions. She knew she would have to share her bed with Benjamin Gillette in exchange for the luxury of the Evergreen. And sleeping with Gillette was not much trouble. He treated her like a lady. More important, he was quick in bed and usually did not have the staying power for more than one ride.

Trading sex for money was something Hill had done for a long time to survive, but it was not something she had ever enjoyed. She smiled as she remembered the relief she’d felt when she’d closed the door to Warren Quimby’s room on her way out of the seedy San Francisco boardinghouse that had been her home for so many years. There was a hundred dollars in her purse, which she’d taken from the metal lockbox Quimby hid in a secret compartment under the floorboards. Her pimp did not mind. He was dead, his leaden pallor testimony to the effectiveness of the poison Hill had used to dispatch him. She’d earned most of the hundred dollars by faking hours of pleasure under the sweaty bodies of the men who had used her. Quimby’s only contribution to her labors had been the deft application of painful blows that left no marks and spurred her to greater exertion when the evening’s take was too small.

A knock on Hill’s door made her jump. “Who is it?” she called as she searched the room for her handbag, which contained the derringer she had carried for protection ever since the night a sadistic customer had beaten her unconscious.

“Francis Gibney, ma’am,” boomed a deep voice. “I have a message from Benjamin Gillette.”

Hill’s heart jumped. “I’ll be with you in a minute, Mr. Gibney.”

Hill rushed to the mirror that hung above her dresser and hastily applied makeup. Then she did the best she could with her hair, which had been ruined by the soggy heat. When she had salvaged as much as possible, Hill straightened her dress, slipped on her shoes, and opened the door.

Benjamin Gillette’s massive bodyguard was forty-five years old, well over six feet tall, and gave the impression that he was hewn from oak that had been seasoned in the woods he’d trapped in during his youth. His face was scarred, and part of his left ear had been chewed off in a fight. His easy grin could not disguise the fact that violence had always been a part of his life.

“Miss Hill,” Gibney said, “Mr. Gillette requests the pleasure of your company this Friday evening at a reception at Gillette House to celebrate the arrival of the Oregon Pony.”

“I believe I’ll be able to attend,” Hill answered.

As she spoke, Gibney’s eyes roamed over her. There was nothing sexual in the appraisal, and Hill sensed a shrewd intelligence behind the brawler’s exterior.

“I’ll send a buggy at seven,” Gibney said. Then he touched his fingertips to the bill of his navy blue cap before leaving.

He knows, damn him
, Hill thought.
But would he tell?
That was the question. She thought that he would not. Gibney was from the world of the rough and tumble. That breed lived and let live. His insolent grin was the tip-off. He wanted her to know that he could spot a whore the same way a connoisseur can discern a fine wine.

Hill was excited by Gillette’s invitation. This was the first time he had asked her to join him in society, a sign that her plan to get more from Gillette than temporary lodging was working. The old man was incredibly rich. Hill’s scheme involving Benjamin Gillette ended with marriage, but snaring him would require a lot of work. She opened her closet and examined its contents. She had stolen two exquisite frocks from Quimby’s wardrobe and all of the jewelry in the lockbox. She chose a low-cut silk gown of emerald green and a diamond necklace. They’d been snatched in a second-story job at some nob’s mansion. Hill had worn them on a few occasions when she’d entertained upscale trade. She knew that she would look stunning, and she prayed that they would help to introduce her to a life of ease.

CHAPTER 10

R
oxanne Brown served refreshments to the men seated in Caleb Barbour’s parlor the way Mrs. Barbour had trained her to serve in Georgia, quietly and deferentially. Most of the men knew Roxanne from previous visits and ignored her, even though the topic of conversation was the Negro race. The Reverend Dr. Arthur Fuller, a visitor to Portland, cast an interested glance at Roxanne the first time she entered the room, but Roxanne was plain, so the reverend paid no more attention to her after his first inspection than he did to the table on which Roxanne set down his lemonade.

It was true that Roxanne’s brown skin lacked luster; her close-cropped, kinky hair was indistinguishable from a boy’s; her nose was broad and flat; and she hadn’t much of a figure. But a person is more than the sum of her physical attributes. If the reverend had taken the time to study Roxanne more closely, he might have noticed that the serving girl was paying close attention to the men’s conversation, and he might have discerned the keen intelligence hidden behind Roxanne’s large brown eyes. There was, however, little chance that a man like Reverend Fuller would suspect the presence of intellect in a colored serving girl. Men like the reverend know everything and see only what they want to see.

“What do you think about the question?” Roxanne heard Caleb Barbour ask Fuller during one of her forays into the room. The Baptist clergyman was in town to lecture on the benefits of slavery at a rally in support of John C. Breckinridge, the presidential candidate of the pro-slavery Democrats. Many Oregonians had an interest in Breckinridge’s candidacy because his running mate for vice president was Joe Lane, the former United States senator from Oregon.

Fuller smiled confidently at the men who had come to Barbour’s home to meet him. A sturdy gentleman with sandy blond hair, blue eyes, and a ruddy complexion, he looked more like a healthy farmer than a man of the cloth.

“The answer is simple,” Roxanne heard Fuller say. “Throughout history, slavery has been almost universal, and it is expressly and continuously justified by Holy Writ. If slavery is morally wrong, then the Bible can’t be true, for the right of holding slaves is clearly established by the Holy Scriptures.

“In the Old Testament, the Israelites were directed to purchase their bondsmen from the heathen nations, except if they were Canaanites, who were to be destroyed. And it’s declared that the persons purchased were to be their bondsmen forever and an inheritance for them and their children.

“The New Testament presents a view consistent with that of the Old. Both the Greek and Roman Empires were full of slaves. Many Greek and Roman masters and their slaves converted to Christianity while the Church was still under the ministry of the apostles. In matters purely spiritual, they appear to have enjoyed equal privileges, but their relationship as master and slave was not dissolved. The ‘servants under the yoke’ mentioned by Paul to Timothy as having ‘believing masters’ are not authorized by him to demand their emancipation or use violent means to obtain it. Instead, they’re directed to ‘account their masters worthy of all honor’ and ‘not to despise them, because they were brethren’ in religion; ‘but rather to do them service, because they were faithful and beloved partakers of the Christian benefit.’ Similar directions are given by Paul and other apostles in other places.” Fuller shrugged. “Had the holding of slaves been a moral evil, it cannot be supposed that the apostles would have tolerated it for a moment.”

“But what about the Golden Rule, Reverend?” asked Jedidiah Tyler, who thought that Fuller was a pompous ass. Tyler had asked the question not because he disagreed with the minister’s conclusion but because no one else in the room was willing to put forward a contrary view.

Fuller smiled tolerantly at the judge. “Good sir, the abolitionists have urged the Golden Rule as an unanswerable argument against holding slaves. But surely this rule is never to be urged against the order of things, which the divine government has established. A father may very naturally desire that his son should be obedient to his orders. Is he, therefore, to obey the orders of his son?”

“And what would a Negro do with freedom, if he received it?” asked Morris Goodfellow, a wealthy merchant who also fancied himself a scientist. “It’s an established fact that Negroes lack the intellectual wherewithal to achieve any status above that of a simple laborer. Recently, I have read a scientific article that proves that Negroes are clearly less than fully human. You must only regard the features of the typical Negro’s face to see the truth of this conclusion.”

Goodfellow pointed at Roxanne but addressed his host. “May I, Caleb?”

“Certainly. Roxanne, go to Mr. Goodfellow.”

Roxanne cast down her eyes and walked over to the merchant, who began pointing at several of her facial features.

“Notice her zygomatic muscles are large and full. Now, this is important because—as Lavater points out—these muscles are always in action during laughter, and the extreme enlargement of them causes a low mind. Too, the Negress’s jaw is large and projecting, her chin retreating, her forehead low, flat, and slanting; as a consequence, her eyeballs are very prominent and larger than those of a white man. All of these peculiarities contribute to the reduction of her facial angle almost to the level of a brute.”

“I’m not certain I 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 the rare newspaper that found its way into Mr. Barbour’s house.

There were some lawbooks in the house, and one other type of book that Barbour kept under lock and key in a cabinet in his bedroom. On one occasion, Roxanne had found the cabinet unlocked and had looked inside. At first, she had been excited to discover a cache of books, but her excitement had turned to unease when she saw that the books contained illustrations of men and women engaged in activities that she had seen practiced in the dark in the slave quarters of Barbour’s plantation before she’d been moved to the house. Some of the activities also reminded her of the goings-on of barnyard animals.

Roxanne’s perusal of these pictures had aroused her. She found these new feelings confusing and frightening. Did looking at the illustrations arouse similar stirrings in Mr. Barbour? Since her breasts had begun to grow and her body had started to change shape, there had been times when her master had looked at her strangely. On one occasion, Mr. Barbour had surprised her while she was bathing and had stood overly long at the door, eyeing her queerly. On another occasion, she had turned suddenly before leaving the parlor and had caught Barbour staring at her, then flushing red and glancing away quickly. There was something unhealthy in the way he looked at her.

Roxanne shifted in the heat. Remembering the illustrations made her start to feel the way she felt while looking at them in Mr. Barbour’s bedroom. Her hand strayed between her legs, and her fingertips touched her thigh. A current shot through her body, and she moaned. It was an animal moan, and it made her think again of what Mr. Goodfellow had said. Was it true? Was she somehow closer to the animal than the human? Did these feelings prove Goodfellow’s point? Roxanne closed her eyes and fought the urge to let her fingers creep upward. She was not an animal; she was a human being, no matter what Caleb Barbour might think.