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Who Speaks for the Negro?
This page intentionally left blank
WHO SPEAKS
FOR THE NEGRO?
Robert Penn Warren

With an Introduction by David W. Blight
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Haven and London
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of James Wesley
Cooper of the Class of 1865, Yale College.
1965 edition published by Random House. 1993 copyright renewed, Eleanor Clark Warren.
Reprinted by Yale University 2014.
Introduction copyright © 2014 by David W. Blight.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or
promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@yale.edu (U.S. office) or
sales@yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office).
The author and publisher wish to thank the following for permission to use material quoted:
DIAL PRESS, INC. Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin, Copyright © 1961 by James
Baldwin; and "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind" from The Fire Next
Time by James Baldwin, which appeared in The New Yorker, November 17, 1962.
FIDES PUBLISHERS, INC. The New Negro, edited by M. H. Ahmann.
GROVE PRESS, INC. The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac. Copyright © 1958 by Jack Kerouac.
OXFORD UNIVERSITYPRESS LTD. Race and Colour in the Carribean by G. R. Coulthard.
STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE The Graham letter, originally published in
the Student Voice publication.
THE CONDE NAST PUBLICATIONS INC. "Disturbers of the Peace: James Baldwin" by Eve
Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch Handy (Mademoiselle, May '63). Copyright © 1963 by The
Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
THE VILLAGE VOICE "View of the Back of the Bus" by Marlene Nadie. Copyright 1963 by
The Village Voice, Inc.
WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY The Mark of Oppression by Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ove-
sey. A Meridian Book.
Design by Tere LoPrete. Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014932435
ISBN 978-0-300-20510-7 (pbk.)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
With thanks to all those who speak here
I believe that the future will be merciful to us all. Revolutionist and
reactionary, victim and executioner, betrayer and betrayed, they shall
all be pitied together when the light breaks . . .
A character in Under Western Eyes,

by JOSEPH CONRAD
Contents
Note on thé Digital Archive, by Mona Frederick IX
Introduction, by David W. Blight xi

Foreword xxxiii
Chapterl THE C L E F T S T I C K 3
Chapterll A MISSISSIPPI JOURNAL 44
ChapterlII THE BIG B R A S S 132
ChapterlV LEADERSHIP FROM
THE PERIPHERY 268
ChapterV THE Y O U N G 355
ChapterVI C O N V E R S A T I O N PIECE 405
Index 445
Note on the Digital Archive
The original audiotapes and other research materials related to Robert

Perm Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro? are held by the University of
Kentucky and the Yale University Libraries. In cooperation with these
institutions, the Robert Perm Warren Center for the Humanities and the
Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries at Vanderbilt University created a
complete digital archive, which is fully searchable and available to the
public at http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/.
The Who Speaks for the Negro ? Digital Archive consists of the original
reel-to-reel recordings that Warren compiled for each of his interviewees.
In addition, it incorporates all print materials—transcripts, letters, book
reviews, and more—related to the project. The archive also includes inter-
views that are not in the book (for example, a conversation with Séptima
Clark). Readers of Who Speaks for the Negro? are invited to listen to the
original interviews and peruse the related documents in order to deepen
their understanding of the project, its characters, and the historical period
from which it emerged.
Mona Frederick, Executive Director

Robert Perm Warren Center for the Humanities
Vanderbilt University
Introduction
Jack Burden Goes on the Road
and Learns His History
DAVID W. BLIGHT
Knowing is, Maybe, a kind of being, and if you know, Can really know,
a thing in all its fullness, Then you are different, and if you are different,
Then everything is different, somehow too.
—Robert Perm Warren, Brother to Dragons, 1953
The will to power, grisly as it appears in certain lights, can mate, if uneas-
ily, with love of justice and dedicated self-interest.
—Robert Perm Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro ?, 1965
Robert Perm Warren loved the philosophy and practice of pragmatism,

considered imagination perhaps the greatest human capacity, hated sen-
timentality and piety, breathed irony in and out as though it were air
itself, believed human nature to be a largely dark and evil realm, and
contended that no human could live effectively without a deep and abid-
ing sense of history. And he thought history itself an essentially tragic
story, with humans constantly struggling against their fate however they
could know it. Still, in 1965 at a triumphal juncture of the Civil Rights
Movement in America, a time when irony and circumspection about race
were not in vogue, Warren, at age sixty, published an extraordinarily
Introduction : : x ii
unusual and hopeful book about race relations, leadership, power, and
ultimately, about himself.
There is no other book quite like Who Speaks for the Negro? Pub-
lished on May 27, 1965, by Random House, Who Speaks is a very per-
sonal and hugely ambitious creation by a then mature and accomplished
white, Southern, American man of letters. Warren is the only American
writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and poetry (twice in po-
etry). Few American writers of the mid-twentieth century worked in so
many genres with such distinction as did Warren. A novelist, poet, critic,
and nonfiction essayist, he was also in his own way a self-styled histori-
an, deeply committed in all forms of writing to probing the very nature of
the past, the ways it is known, narrated, and felt across time and in daily
life. Few American writers have written with such imagination about the
relationship of past and present, about the ancient connections of myth
and history. That Warren would set out in 1964 on such a remarkable
journey, tape recorder in his arms, to interview every major "leader" of
the civil rights "revolution," as well as many students and unknown ac-
tivists, is both astonishing and an unsurprising piece of this writer's long
personal trajectory. From the grandson of a Confederate veteran steeped
in the mores of the Jim Crow South to a world-class writer and white
racial liberal (although he disliked such labels) of the 1960s, Warren
traveled great ideological and imaginative distances. But he was always,
in part, where he was from, and in Who Speaks, as he strove to uncover
the thoughts and emotions of his subjects, he sought equally to know his
own. This is no mere oral history; it is a personal testament. At times he
simply lets his subjects speak, but often Warren imposes his own voice
and personality onto the text, with results that some have admired and
others have not.1
Warren was a prodigy. Born in 1905 and raised in Guthrie, Ken-
tucky, a small railroad junction town, he skipped two grades and grad-
uated from high school at sixteen, just across the border in Clarksville,
Tennessee. His boyhood dream was to go to the U.S. Naval Academy
at Annapolis, and he was already accepted when, in a freak accident,
his younger brother, Thomas, threw a baseball-size piece of coal over a
hedge, hit Robert Perm in the face, and blinded him in his left eye. The
injury badly affected the young Warren psychologically for a while, but
he soon entered Vanderbilt University as a mere teenager. There he came
xiii :: Introduction
under the influence of, and joined, the group of Southern writers known
as the Fugitives. With the tutelage and admiration of some of its mem-
bers—Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom—Warren
became a poet. The seminars and discussions of this group of post-New
South white poets and writers became what Warren called his "real uni-
versity." They were modernists determined to overturn the Lost Cause
tradition, as they also held firm to segregation and their own brands of
racism.2
Warren majored in English, minored in philosophy, studied Greek
and German, and graduated from Vanderbilt at age twenty in 1925.
Ventures into graduate school at the University of California, Berke-
ley, and Yale University ended quickly and unsuccessfully; Warren felt
like a fish out of water. Then he went to Oxford University in England
on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he wrote his first two works of nonfic-
tion. John Brown: The Making of a Martyr and "Briar Patch," Warren's
contribution to the Fugitives' manifesto /'// Take My Stand, were both
published in 1929. Warren's John Brown is primarily an overwrought
diatribe against the abolitionist beliefs and the radical ideology Brown
represented in 1920s America. The book was well researched, a win-
dow into a young white Southerner's worldview, and ironically, signaled
several enduring elements of his vision that survive in Who Speaks and
other works, even as Warren's racial attitudes greatly changed over the
decades: his lifelong absorption in the legacies of slavery and race in
America; his contempt for absolutes; his deep interest in the drama of the
Civil War as a mirror of any American present; his sense of how mythic
figures are both irresistible and dangerous; his fascination with an irre-
pressible, tragic innocence in American consciousness; his attraction to
the leader (sometimes heroic) who exposes the human condition by risk-
ing his humanity; and his desire to understand the violence in the human
heart. The essay, "Briar Patch," however, written with ambivalence and
at the behest of Ransom and Davidson, was a lean, poorly argued defense
of segregation, contending that the "Southern negro" should remain a
"creature of the small town and farm" that properly fit his "temperament
and capacity." The short piece haunted Warren for the rest of his life; it
cropped up in some reviews of Who Speaks. Some commentators still
cannot uncouple Warren from that essay well after his death; it is likely
the only writing he ever lived to regret, and he said so endlessly.3
Introduction : : xiv
When Warren returned to the United States, he rejected a fellowship
to study for a Ph.D. in English at Yale. Instead he took teaching jobs, first
at Southwestern College in Memphis, then at Vanderbilt, and he moved
to Louisiana State University in 1934. In 1942 he moved north to the
University of Minnesota and finally in 1950 on to Yale, where he resided
and taught for the rest of his career until he died in 1989. Thus, for nearly
half a century, Warren lived and worked in Northern climes, while the
South remained the bone and marrow source of his imagination.
In the 1930s and 1940s Warren emerged as a prominent poet and the
coeditor with Cleanth Brooks of two books, An Approach to Literature
and Understanding Poetry, through which he left a lasting mark as a
critic and especially on the teaching of literature. He also began to write
and publish novels, and in his third, All the King's Men (1946), he pro-
duced his masterpiece. Warren lived in Louisiana during the years of the
Huey Long dictatorship in that state, where he taught at LSU and helped
to found and edit the Southern Review. The book, one of the greatest
probings in fiction of the dark arts of politics, especially Southern class
politics in America, is also a profound reflection on the meaning of his-
tory, on human nature, and on humanity's individual and collective com-
plicity with evil. In the character of Jack Burden, Warren gave to modern
literature a kind of brooding Hamlet, and although the book is laced with
bitter and fated tragedies, the author allows Jack a path to redemption
out of guilt and the layered abyss he had fallen into, first as a direction-
less drifter and graduate school dropout who could never quite finish
his dissertation on his Confederate ancestor, and finally as the political
operative doing the dirtiest work for Governor Willie Stark.4 Warren's
perfect pitch with voices and scenes in All the King's Men may come to
his loyal readers' minds as they encounter his detailed physical and char-
acter descriptions of some of the interviewees in Who Speaks. Such was
a writerly technique Warren could never resist, sometimes exquisitely
and sometimes to excess.
Race, and the intertwined relationships between white and black
Southerners especially, had always been at the heart of Warren's fic-
tional and historical imagination. But, from the passage of the Brown v.
Board of Education Supreme Court desegregation decision of 1954 until
he assembled Who Speaks in 1965, his writing became preoccupied with
America's greatest unfinished crisis. In all genres, Warren stepped into
xv : : Introduction
this fray with great energy. His African American literary counterparts
in the 1950s and 1960s were primarily Ralph Ellison and James Bald-
win. And as we shall see, both play prominent roles in Who Speaks, as
interviewees and characters, but also as sources of ideas and provocative
questions for other characters.
The issues were old in Warren's writing, but if Who Speaks provides
one bookend for this period, his book Segregation: The Inner Conflict
in the South (1956) stands as the other. A thin volume of only sixty-six
pages, Segregation is based on travels and conversations Warren con-
ducted in Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana,
the states he knew best and in which he had previously lived. He allowed
his subjects, white and black, to remain anonymous, but in the course of
his travel he seemed to encounter the full spectrum of racial views, from
hard-line virulent racists, leaders of White Citizens Councils and other
pro-segregationist organizations, to moderate whites who expected inte-
gration to come even as they imagined it with anxiety. Among blacks he
spoke with were the guardedly optimistic and the sullen and downtrod-
den; from them he also heard a great deal about the stunted opportunity
and utter humiliation of Jim Crow. On both sides of the color line he
met the educated and uneducated, those who could simply not abide any
social change and those who could not wait for it. Everywhere, he asked
people, the sharecropper and the rich businessman, the taxi driver and
the young student, "what's coming" in the wake of the Brown decision.
And although Warren may have found in part what he sought, he heard
a huge variety of personal struggles and psychological divisions within
the souls of individual people, as well as a catalogue of ideas about the
relationships of law and morality, of time and human change.5 Segrega-
tion was a limited first effort, his prototype for what he set out to do in
Who Speaks a decade later in a profoundly different historical context.
As the Civil War Centennial years arrived (1961-65), Warren entered
that commercialized, sentimentalized, and often neo-Confederate com-
memoration with a distinctive, critical, and highly imaginative voice. His
Legacy of the Civil War (1961), a brilliant 109-page meditation on the
meaning and memory of the epoch of the war, first published in an early
form in Life magazine, still stands as one of the most important pieces of
writing ever attempted on such a vast topic. And in his novel Wilderness
(also 1961), Warren crafted a fascinating, tragic tale, modeled in part
Introduction : : xv i
on Homer's Odyssey, of a young German Jewish immigrant hell-bent to
participate in the American Civil War—the war for 'Die Freiheit"—only
to discover in entangled and brutal ways just how much that bloodletting
was indeed about slavery, as well as the even deeper terrors of racism
and hatred in the human spirit. By the time Warren decided in 1963 to
pursue an oral history of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, he
had been thinking deeply about how and why race had torn Americans
apart from one another, and from themselves, for a long time. As is also
clear from a reading of Who Speaks, Warren had spent the years of the
late 1950s and early 1960s reading widely in social science about race
relations, the history of slavery, and black protest movements, as well as
a good deal of African American literary culture itself. He did not go on
the road in 1964 unprepared.6
By letter, by telephone, and by personal references and introductions
from others, Warren connected with and formally interviewed approxi-
mately fifty people for his oral history project. Usually with tape recorder,
he went to their offices, organization headquarters, churches, or homes,
or to rendezvous in bars or restaurants. Wherever someone would agree
to meet, Warren would show up, hoping for a good piece of a stressed
or preoccupied activist's time. Some interviews lasted many hours and
multiple sessions, and others only a short time. Most of his subjects gave
him cordial, if guarded, attention as the aging white Kentucky poet and
professor from a famous Ivy League university, with thinning red hair,
distinctive large nose, and thick Southern drawl, sat down and began
asking very direct questions. Some of his interviewees were very experi-
enced at talking to journalists, and some were not. Few had encountered
personal conversations across the color line quite this forthrightly, as the
white Southern writer probed for their innermost ideas, struggles, and
aspirations. Those from the artistic or academic worlds (a minority of the
whole) often seemed to enjoy the give-and-take, while the wide variety
of leaders of the Movement were much more politically circumspect. A
few, especially Malcolm X, responded with contempt, all but defying the
legitimacy of Warren's attempt to interview them. In his Foreword, War-
ren recalls a friend asking, "What makes you think that Negroes will tell
you the truth?" Undeterred, he answered: "Even a lie is a kind of truth. '^
In the end, he believed he uncovered many kinds of truths.
Warren devised a method for doing this oral history that, more or
xv ii : : Introduction
less, he adhered to with all of his subjects, except young, often unnamed
students. He tended to ask all of his primary subjects about their back-
grounds, although he did his own research into their personal biog-
raphies. Large parts of the book consist of verbatim transcriptions of
questions and answers, but there are also a great deal of Warren's own
descriptions of settings, people, and historical context, as well as many
pages of personal commentary. Warren insisted that Who Speaks was not
intended as "a history, a sociological analysis, an anthropological study,
or a Who's Who of the Negro Revolution." In reality, however, it is a
little bit of all of those things. Warren said he merely wanted his reader
to "see, hear, and feel as immediately as possible what I saw, heard and
felt."8 A novelist with Warren's eye and ear for detail and skill with nar-
rative could hardly have done otherwise, and the result is a feast of imag-
es and expressions from within the Civil Rights Movement, which when
read sensitively today is both a historical artifact and a living document.
His method also included asking virtually every interviewee a similar
set of questions, often derived from quotations from at least four key
writers—W. E. B. Du Bois, Kenneth Clark, Gunnar Myrdal, and James
Baldwin. From Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) he drew on
the famous metaphor of "double consciousness," the "sense" that as a
black American, "one ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro;
two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals
in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder." In one way or another Warren asked each interviewee his or
her (although they are almost all men) own understanding of what he
constantly called the "split psyche" of African Americans.9 As readers
will see, the responses to this question in the hothouse of race relations
in the mid-1960s are many and varied.
From Kenneth Clark, the prominent African American psychologist
whose work about the detrimental effects of segregation on children had
been famously used by the Warren Court in its Brown v. Board decision
outlawing Jim Crow schools, Warren borrowed a critique of the phi-
losophy of nonviolence advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr. From a
Clark essay, "The New Negro in the North," Warren plucked a passage
where the Columbia University professor argued that "King's doctrine"
was "unrealistic" in the face of the "oppression and humiliation" and
the "corrosion of the human spirit" caused by segregation. Asking the
Introduction : : x v i ii
"victims" of such a system "to love those who oppress them places an
additional and probably intolerable psychological burden upon those
victims," argued Clark.10 Warren pushed this idea into the conversations
with virtually all of his subjects, including King himself. The character,
power, and strategic value of nonviolence became one of Warren's par-
ticular preoccupations in Who Speaks. And it was surely on the minds of
most of his subjects before they ever met the Kentucky poet.
In Gunnar MyrdaT s vast sociological study of race in America, The
American Dilemma (1940), with its countless observations and interpre-
tations, Warren found one historical point that he could not get out of his
craw. He queried many of his subjects about whether they agreed with
MyrdaT s suggestion that "there should have been compensation for the
slaves emancipated, that an adequate amount of land should have been
expropriated to accommodate the freedmen, but with compensation to
the Southern owners." This idea that slaveholders should have been paid
for their loss of slaves in 1865, while blacks were securely provided
with land, solicited a surprising number of positive responses, as well as
many that were at least conditional and ambivalent, if not hostile. Such
a prescription about Reconstruction seems odd and out of time from the
perspective of the twenty-first century, but many black leaders of the
mid-1960s took MyrdaT s compensation idea seriously.11 It was as if on
all sides of the color and ideological lines, there was still a yearning in
historical consciousness that the "failure" of Reconstruction might have
somehow been prevented.
In various interviews, Warren used passages or ideas from James
Baldwin's writings to provoke his interviewees. He was especially fond
of Baldwin's statement in his 1960 collection of essays, Nobody Knows
My Name, that "the Southern mobs are not an expression of the South-
ern majority will. . . . These mobs fill, so to speak, a moral vacuum,
and . . . the people who form these mobs would be very happy to be
released from their pain, their ignorance, if somebody would show them
the way." Some witnesses disagreed with Baldwin's idea, while others
thought it relatively accurate depending on region. Warren seemed to
love the provocative, often aggressive rhetoric of Baldwin, and he used
the New York-born writer's extraordinary fame and literary militancy,
built especially on his 1963 bestseller The Fire Next Time, to prompt
his subjects. He would sometimes ask if they agreed with Baldwin's
x ix : : Introduction
contention that the South could not change racially until the North did.
Baldwin's ideas on "white guilt" as both a useful tool and a stultifying
problem also provided grist for the mill. Or, even more bluntly, he would
ask their opinions of Baldwin's notion that the only real difference be-
tween North and South in America is that they have "different ways of
castrating you."12 At times in reading Who Speaks, it may seem as though
Warren is carrying Baldwin's essays around in his pocket, as a kind of
perverse as well as respectful ammunition.
Warren's papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale contain a long box of
3x5 index cards (at least 300) with which Warren prepared for his inter-
views. Almost all are in red ink, and most are quotations from Du Bois,
Clark, Myrdal, Baldwin, Ellison, and numerous historians and social sci-
entists. Some are simply lists of questions he had prepared for individ-
ual subjects. Warren also consulted with and read works by numerous
psychiatrists, including Dr. Albert Rothenberg of the Yale Psychiatric
Institute; a Bridgeport, Connecticut, psychiatrist, Dr. Earl Biassey; and a
Howard University psychiatry instructor, Dr. Frederic Solomon. In that
era of the ascendency of psychology and the influence of the social sci-
ences on the humanities, Warren employed ideas not only from Myrdal
and Clark but from the many spin-offs of their work. Readers familiar
with the early post-World War II scholarship on slavery, especially the
controversial book by Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American
Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), will see these elements all over
Warren's extended discussion of what he called the "the funeral service
for Sambo" (the old stereotypical racist image of the obsequious, loyal,
childlike slave).13
To some, Warren's take on this sensitive topic may seem awkwardly
out of date, and in most ways it is, but in 1965 it was at the center of a
broadening academic and public debate over slavery, race, and history.
His own rendering of that debate is a serious summary, based on deep
reading, and anticipatory of a richer, greater explosion of scholarship
on slavery's legacies, black culture, and black personality in the de-
cade to follow. He did not swallow Elkins whole, although he certainly
got caught up in the web of social and personality psychology swirling
around discussions of race. To openly address the potential "emotional
maiming" that slavery had left in African American life was hardly out
of line in the mid-1960s, at least in print. Warren sought the complexity
Introduction : : xx
of this issue. For those with their eyes open, he maintained, the Move-
ment was killing any imagined remnants of "Sambo." As Americans
"stare into history," he wrote, "or about them now," they "see millions
of Nat Turners and Frederick Douglasses." But he also could add that
reasonable observers knew there had been "many shadings along the
psychological spectrum in between . . . Nat Turner and Sambo."14
Yet another, and somewhat odd or less successful, element of War-
ren' s method was to ask most of his subjects their quick personal opin-
ions about a short list of great American figures—especially Abraham
Lincoln, but also Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, John
Brown, and Robert E. Lee, among others. It was one of Warren's ways
of probing for the historical sensibilities and perhaps even notions of
American identity (a term frequently used in the book) in his interview-
ees. These questions about historical reputations did not often solicit
very substantive replies, however, with one great exception. Warren and
Kenneth Clark enjoyed an extended debate about the meaning and mem-
ory of John Brown that, paired with any of the many recent volumes
on the radical abolitionist martyr, would make a good starting point for
understanding Brown's primary legacies in our post-9/11 society. The
Clark-Warren exchange on Brown became a fascinating, even testy,
give-and-take about ambivalence over myth and history, over violence
and morality, and over heroes. Clark admitted that he deplored Brown's
violence and would never have supported or joined him but, in retro-
spect, was very glad he had lived and acted in history. How many stu-
dents, teachers, and scholars have lived or spoken that paradox about
their views on John Brown? And Warren turned his commentary into an
updating of his very old book on Brown from back in the 1920s, admit-
ting that "mythic Brown figures" had recurred "again and again in my
fiction." Warren still did not like people who strove for absolutes, but he
did use the moment to ask a very hard question that the 1960s increas-
ingly had to face: "What do we make of a poet who, out of the ruck of a
confused and obsessed life, creates the beautiful poem?"15 Some of the
interviews clearly fomented deep and mutual stimulation.
The range of people Warren visited on his journey through the Civil
Rights Movement is at first glance very impressive. There were, how-
ever, very few women and some notable missing figures, at least in ret-
rospect. Among King's famous lieutenants in the Southern Christian
xx i : : Introduction
Leadership Conference (SCLC), Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and
Fred Shuttlesworth were not interviewed, although they are at times part
of the narrative. Among the young leaders of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC, what Warren calls Snick), John Lewis,
Diane Nash, and Julian Bond, among others, were also not interviewed,
although Lewis and Nash (from her published writings) are parts of the
story. A seemingly glaring absence is Fanny Lou Hamer, the former
Mississippi sharecropper, inspiration for SNCC, and heroic leader of the
voting rights crusade in her state. For close students of the Civil Rights
era, there are other conspicuously missing persons; Warren could not
visit everyone, time and resources may have been a factor, and when
the author set out on his travels in early 1964, Hamer may indeed have
been either in jail or consumed by her work for the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party. Among the women actually interviewed was Mrs.
Clarie Harvey, a black businesswoman in Jackson, Mississippi, daughter
of the man who founded the NAACP in her state, and founder herself of
Woman Power Unlimited. Harvey gave Warren a poignant conversation
about black religion in the deep South, about the potential of violence,
and about the place of deep "love" in the practice of nonviolence. An-
other woman Warren sat down with was Ruth Turner, a highly educat-
ed (Oberlin, Harvard) activist in Cleveland for the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE). With Turner, Warren had a wide-ranging, out-on-the-
table exchange about many issues—urban segregation in the North, po-
lice violence, whether King's leadership could ever transfer to big cities,
idealism and practical strategies, black female beauty, and her view that
slaves should never have been treated as "property" in any compensation
plans. Warren sought out Gloria Richardson, a Cambridge, Maryland,
activist with whom he had a brief, tense, and moving discussion of how
to control demonstrations. He also interviewed Séptima Clark in Atlan-
ta, although he did not write about her in the book. Among the students
with whom he held conversations at both Tougaloo College and Jackson
State College were several young women who are named and quoted
at length about their ideas on revolution, taking risks, going to jail, and
the meaning of violence. These young activists included Lucy Thornton,
Jean Wheeler, Sylvia Davis, and Betty Ann Poole.16
The long list of people Warren did interview is what gives this book
staying power. In his opening chapter, "The Cleft Stick," Warren found
Introduction : : xx i i
five men in New Orleans—three lawyers, a black college president, and
one down-home preacher—who helped him develop a profound vision
of the sacred significance of the right to vote for people who had never
known it. Fifty years on from the Voting Rights Act of 1965, all those
Americans who may not be troubled by, or who indeed may support,
the Republican Party's efforts in many states (especially in the South)
to require voter IDs or otherwise restrict access to registration and polls,
should just listen to the voice of Rev. Joe Carter. Perhaps his recitation
of his arrest, jailing, and brutal humiliation for attempting to "red-ish" to
vote in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, a mere fifty years ago should
be required reading for all U.S. Supreme Court justices, all members of
Congress, and any state legislators who believe that restricting access
to voting, rather than expanding it, is good for democracy. Better yet,
perhaps those legislators might be put through a role-playing exercise,
where they too are handcuffed, clamped in chains, and stripped naked in
a solitary jail cell for asking if they could sign up to vote. Who Speaks
is full of these moments when readers can realize that history is never
over. And Warren avoids no opportunity to explore the "cleft sticks" in
the lives of activists—their crosses to bear, their "tragic dilemma of op-
posing goods," the horrible and dangerous choices faced in overcoming
fear and police power as they try to crack open and destroy the evils of
Jim Crow.17
In the "Mississippi Journal" chapter Warren achieved especially ef-
fective interviews with Charles Evers, Mississippi NAACP leader and
brother of the just recently assassinated Medgar Evers; Robert Moses,
the young Harvard philosophy graduate student who was leading the
voting crusade for SNCC in the same state; and Aaron Henry, the veteran
NAACP operative in Clarksdale in the Delta. Like his martyred younger
brother, Evers was a combat veteran of World War II and had come
back to build the democracy at home that he had risked his life for in the
Pacific. Apart from Evers's riveting remembrance of a lynching from his
youth, Warren found many of his answers too "officialized." With the
brilliant Moses, on the other hand, Warren seems to have really connect-
ed. They discussed everything from Moses's reading of Albert Camus
while in jail, to the character of human hatreds, to why poor rural blacks
experience social fear due to lack of education as they seek to vote, to
one of the most thoughtful responses Warren received to the question
xx iii :: Introduction
about identity and double consciousness. With the older Henry, Warren
had a frank conversation and a forthright response about the legacies
of Reconstruction. To a direct question about what the "Negro wants,"
Henry simply replied, "what you got."18
At the heart of the book is a chapter entitled 'The Big Brass," which
includes extensive talks with and commentaries about eight of the most
prominent leaders of the Movement and one politician, Adam Clayton
Powell, Jr. The eight include Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, James For-
man, James L. Farmer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Wyatt Tee Walker, Ba-
yard Rustin, and Malcolm X. Some interviews are more penetrating or
lengthy than others, but all are memorable, and each on its own serves as
a document in the historical understanding of these men who, from quite
differing and competing organizations and strategies, changed America
forever. Among the most valuable moments are Wilkins's deep sense of
historical consciousness and his take on the problem of just how much
the "Negro history movement" ought to instill "pride." Wilkins's brief
description of the white South' s tradition of the Lost Cause is priceless:
"I don't believe that Negro history, as it's taught, is on a par with the
playhouse that the Southern white people have constructed for them-
selves in order to rationalize their position in American life after 1865."19
With Whitney Young, Warren addressed the Urban League presi-
dent' s idea of a "Marshall Plan" for blacks, especially in the cities, as
they also conversed widely about the nature of Baldwin's rhetoric and
militancy itself among all the leaders. From the brooding James Forman,
Warren received an education on the roots and goals of SNCC. The au-
thor was critical of Forman but deeply intrigued, as though he had met
one of his own fictional characters, who struggled with his ulcers with
a "mixture of pessimism and grim humor" and a "streak of tragic abso-
luteness." At James Farmer's office in New York, the founder and head
of CORE gave Warren some nuanced opinions about the real nature of
integration whenever it arrives, as well as about just who were real "lead-
ers" in the streets, and who managed to merely "verbalize" or "chirp" as
orators (Malcolm X and Baldwin, in his view).20
The King interview, among the longest in the book, provides a
thoughtful biographical background and certainly gives one a sense of
just how the minister's "charisma" played so powerfully on people, even
in a sterile office in Atlanta. Some of King's responses are a bit vague,
Introduction : : xxiv
or at least careful and controlled. The man had learned how to be cir-
cumspect with the press (the FBI might be anywhere and in any tape
recorder) and even with sympathetic writers. But Warren and King had
a remarkable conversation about the nature of revolution, and the white
author believed he had met a deeply reflective man, even a genuine prag-
matist, one who, when asked interesting questions, could be seen "with-
drawing inward" with "a slight veiling of the face," in order to "test the
truth that has already been tested." King might have been exhausted the
day he sat with Warren, but the author was so impressed that the sixty-
year-old thought he had met a character in his mid-thirties determined
to "affirm and absorb the polarities of life."21 Those interested in finding
mere dichotomies of heroes versus scoundrels or only good or evil in
their civil rights leaders will find Who Speaks disappointing.
In Walker, the executive director of SCLC, Warren discovered a
smart, "voluble and eloquent" man who talked candidly about the nature
of demonstrations, about the need for "self-scrutiny" among Movement
leaders, about the future possibility of black-white reconciliation in the
South, and about the special meaning of King's leadership. In Rustin,
Warren found a unique figure, a man devoted to universal reform and
rooted in pacifism, a thoughtful and creative organizer of people. Rus-
tin's conversation has the character of a personal history of the Move-
ment, being written by a man who also plots and strategizes it. And War-
ren's talks with Malcolm X in a suite at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem
are as captivating as they are contentious. The author did not hide his
disdain for Malcolm's alleged contention that consequence outweighed
morality in human affairs, nor for his apparent claim of a kind of uni-
versal white guilt. But Warren was deeply intrigued by what he believed
was Malcolm's sense of "a logic of history . . . of history conceived of
as doom." Warren got nowhere with some of his questions for Malcolm
X, especially about whether America had any redemptive qualities, or
about whether the activist believed in assassinations. Malcolm's recent
biographer, Manning Marable, captures how the host toyed with, while
rebuking, his guest.22 The interview ended in dismissive short answers
and competing parables, but it does demonstrate Warren's quest to un-
derstand his subjects as thinkers before they were organizers.
The final nearly 180 pages of Who Speaks consists of three robust
chapters. "Leadership from the Periphery" involves interviews with six
xxv : : Introduction
men Warren considers success stories, including especially important
sittings with both James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. A chapter on 'The
Young" includes numerous students from Jackson State College and
Tougaloo College in Mississippi, as well as Izell Blair, Ruth Turner, and
especially Stokely Carmichael of SNCC. And finally, in "Conversation
Piece," Warren leaves us with his own quite personal interpretations and
sense of meaning he drew from his many months of conducting such an
oral history.23
Warren's conversations with the two writers, Ellison and Baldwin,
are in many ways the most penetrating in the volume. This is hardly
surprising; these were writers testing each other's wits and assumptions.
In Ellison, Warren seems to have met an ideological and imaginative
soul mate. Their discussion of Du Bois's notion of double consciousness
and identity is the best in the book. Their conversations turned on the
fundamentals about the "basic unity of the human experience," about the
nature of history and why Americans evade it, about cultural pluralism,
and of course, about the character and uses of tragedy. Warren found
Baldwin captivating in their interview in a New York restaurant. But
Baldwin, twenty years younger than the Yale professor, bothered War-
ren with his self-absorption, with his quest to boil all stories down to his
own "interior life," standing in as the "voice" for the whole of black ex-
perience. But Warren also greatly admired that writerly voice, Baldwin's
all-but-unparalleled genius for finding the meanings in America's racial
condition. With Baldwin, Warren put all the psychologists aside for the
moment and celebrated the black writer's rhetorical power, even as he
found contradictions. With Baldwin, Warren wrote, "we are to think of
the blaze of light that rends the roof and knocks us all—all America and
all American institutions—flat on the floor. " Warren had carefully read
Ellison and Baldwin, their fiction and their nonfiction essays; he wrote
about them and his interviews as a respectful literary critic. In this sense,
his long sections on the two great writers are lasting pieces of art as well
as reporting.24
Who Speaks was widely reviewed, with some notices stiffly critical
and some quite favorable. But the book was not a commercial success,
much to Warren's personal disappointment. "I am stung by the irony of
such a press winding up so grimly," Warren wrote to his editor in July
1965 after receiving a batch of reviews. "I guess we were just about eight
Introduction : : xxv i
25
or ten months late, God damn it." News about the Civil Rights Move-
ment, according to Warren, had mostly vanished from the front pages in
the wake of the spring success of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. A
flood of books had hit the literary markets on the broad subject of civil
rights, and Who Speaks washed ashore among too many other titles, or
so it seemed at the time.
Warren received a "fan letter" from the great theologian Reinhold
Niebuhr, who thought the interviews "masterpieces of fair journalism,"
especially as the author managed to usher his subjects through "vari-
ous shades of hope, despair, self-pity or self-knowledge." Niebuhr was
very taken by the overall spirit of the book. "You know the human heart
in all its variations," he told Warren. At the other end of the spectrum,
Warren received vicious hate mail about the book. A Mrs. A. Russell
wrote accusing the author of Communist "PROPAGANDA," advocacy of
"RACIAL MIXING," and "A NATION RULED BY NIGGERS AND POPULATED SOLELY
BY THEM."26
The book received very positive reviews in the New York Herald Tri-
bune, the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, the Chicago Tribune,
the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and a psychiatry journal, The Journal of
Nervous and Mental Disease. But in Dissent, the historian August Meier
rather detested the book, finding it "repetitive and distracting." Writing
for fellow scholars or Movement activists, Meier claimed, rather unfair-
ly, that "knowledgeable readers" would find "nothing new." Newsweek
gave Who Speaks a particularly harsh treatment, complaining about War-
ren's "pervasive presence" and calling him a "troubled moderate whose
basic attitude is still paternalistic." Warren responded with great anger
in a letter to the editor of Newsweek. He resented being called either
"moderate" or "paternalistic" and reminded Newsweek's staff that he had
made the achievement of "power" by black leaders and organizations,
not "philanthropy" handed down, a central theme of the book. He ac-
cused Newsweek's reviewer of not actually reading the book.27
The most thorough and thoughtful review was written by the black
cultural historian and critic Albert Murray. Murray captured the book's
flaws and its brilliance. Acknowledging Warren's segregationist past,
Murray nevertheless called Who Speaks the "very best inside report on
the Negro civil rights movement by anyone so far." He appreciated the
author's "frankness" as well as a "unique lack of condescension." Mur-
xxv ii : : Introduction
ray was a big fan of All the King's Men, and he tellingly remarked that
"it is as if Jack Burden, the self-searching Southern reporter-press agent
. . . had finally gone back into the newspaper business. " Murray more
than implied that Warren had always been, in part, Jack Burden himself,
with a "very special urge to come to terms with the past." Warren, like
his most famous character, learned that "his destiny had always been
inextricably entangled with that of the Negroes all around him." With
keen precision, Murray observed that Who Speaks possessed many qual-
ities of "good fiction," especially the "enigmatic complexity of human
motives" and the "texture of human life itself." The major problem, Mur-
ray contended with good reason, was that Warren allowed himself to be
"sucked in by the all too neat theories of this or that social science," and
therefore at times sounded "like a reading room intellectual" or "cocktail
party theorists." Murray really liked the interview with Ellison, and he
commended Warren, "still the professional Southerner," for the "great
distance" he had traveled in his racial and historical views. This big oral
history, Murray concluded, "is . . . another installment of his [Warren's]
report on the progress of one noteworthy Southerner toward reconstruc-
tion 100 years after Appomattox." He thought the Kentuckian "still had
a long way to go," but saw him as "much farther along than many damn-
yankees, including some black ones who think they are there already."28
Warren could only have been pleased with the depth of Murray's read-
ing, and his sympathetic sense of irony.
The final chapter of Who Speaks is a tour de force of personal re-
flection, a writer's bluntly honest suggestions to his country, whites and
blacks alike, about how to face their history, their current crisis, and
themselves. It is vintage Warren, untrammeled by doubt, even as he de-
mands change of his society and of himself. Above all, based on his
many interviews as well as his lifetime of traveling behind, across, and
through the color lines, Warren attacked sentimentality and pleaded for
a serious, open-eyed sense of history. He had uncovered great hope, in-
deed inspiration, in his encounters with the leaders of the Movement, a
crusade he believed had the potential to change everyone. He discovered
the obvious—that there was no single "Negro leader," and that neither
black nor white people were an undifferentiated "lump."29
Warren's claims that the struggle in the South was everyone's dilem-
ma together, a common challenge and fate, did not sit well with some
Introduction : : xxv i i i
black readers and critics. But he insisted that they were all undergoing
a historical "shock" out of which they would be changed, maybe even
redeemed. In his view, however, such an outcome was possible only if
achieved without sentimentality. He wanted a change of minds, of intel-
lect, of understanding, and not of "feeling." White guilt could never be
enough; indeed, it stood in the way. "A deeply disturbing awareness of
one's sins," Warren asserted, "does not have to be the same thing as the
masochistic self-indulgence not infrequently associated with the white
man's . . . sense of a communal white guilt." Blacks benefited nothing,
he maintained, when whites indulged themselves "in a nice warm bubble
bath of emotion, no matter how sweet [a white man] feels while in the
suds." Real change would come from knowledge, self-awareness, and
choices to take "action."30
And neither awareness nor action was possible, in Warren's universe,
without historical understanding. He especially lectured white Southern-
ers on how to overcome all their "alibis," how to face their past and
thereby reject their own bigotry as well as "Yankee Phariseeism." And
above all, from a "short course in history" they might learn that to know
and defend their "identity," they did not "have to humiliate Negroes —
nor have to condone such humiliation." In Who Speaks, Warren record-
ed, as he also made and wrote some history. And to him history was
always "tragic," if also sometimes "noble."31 He learned as he then also
preached. This book more than deserves a reprinting—as a window into
the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-1960s, as well as into our own
souls as Americans still struggling with a history that both defeats and
revives racism.
NOTES
1. Suzanne Baskin to Warren, March 24, 1965, Robert Penn Warren Papers,
Beinecke Library, Yale University, box 213, folder 3720. Baskin was the as-
sistant for Albert Erskine, Warren's longtime, distinguished editor at Random
House in New York. Warren employs the word "revolution" throughout the
book, and sometimes debates its meaning with his subjects. See Robert Penn
Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965; reprint, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2014), 151-52, 273. A fascinating, recent, and quite critical treatment of
xx ix : : Introduction
Who Speaks is in Michael Kreyling, "Robert Penn Warren: The Real Southerner
and the 'Hypothetical Negro,'" in Kreyling, The South That Wasn't There: Post-
southern Memory and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2010), 49-75. Kreyling is especially effective at showing how much W. E. B. Du
Bois's ideas about identity hover over and lace through Who Speaks, as well as
how Warren imposes himself onto the interviews and therefore onto the analysis
in the book. Other works of similar form (oral history) that Who Speaks may
be compared to, among others, are Harold R. Isaacs, The New World of Negro
Americans (London: Phoenix House, 1964); Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested:
Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York: Putnam, 1977);
and Juan Williams, My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil Rights
Experience (New York: AARP/Sterling, 2004).
2. Joseph Blotner, Robert Penn Warren: A Biography (New York: Random
House, 1997), 11-15, 29-30, 40^13; John Burt, "Robert Penn Warren," in The
Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, vol. 7, Prose
Writing, 1940-1990 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
320-22.
3. Robert Penn Warren, John Brawn: The Making of a Martyr (New York:
Payson and Clarke, 1929); Warren, "Briar Patch," in Twelve Southerners, /'//
Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930; reprint, New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1962), 246-64. On the influence of Ransom and Davidson
and the Agrarians, see Paul K. Conkin, The Southern Agrarians (Knoxville: Uni-
versity of Tennessee Press, 1988), 57-88.
4. See Cleanth Brooks, John Thibout Purser, and Robert Penn Warren, An
Approach to Literature: A Collection of Prose and Verse, with Analyses and
Discussions (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1939); Cleanth Brooks and
Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students
(New York: H. Holt, 1939); Warren, All the King's Men (1946; reprint, New
York: Harcourt, 2001). On All the King's Men, much is written, but see John
Burt, Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1988), 150-90; Burt, "Robert Penn Warren," Cambridge History of
American Literature, 329-36; and David W. Blight, American Oracle: The Civil
War in the Civil Rights Era (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2011),
41^46.
5. Robert Penn Warren, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (New
York: Random House, 1956), 44-52.
6. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (1961; reprint, Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Warren, Wilderness: A Tale of
Introduction : : xxx
the Civil War (New York: Random House, 1961). See Blight, American Oracle,
46-51, 59-78.
7. Warren, Who Speaks, Foreword, 249-67.
8. Ibid., Foreword.
9. Warren first uses the passage in Who Speaks, 19, and many times thereaf-
ter, often in much shorter versions and often just by referring to the "split psy-
che," as though he expected the term to be commonly understood.
10. Warren first uses the Clark passage in Who Speaks, 23. The quote comes
from Kenneth Clark, "The New Negro in the North," The New Negro, éd. M. H.
Ahmann (Notre Dame, Ind.: Fides Publishers, 1961).
11. See Warren's first use of the Myrdal idea in Who Speaks, 86-87, and then
many times thereafter. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., for example, called it "very
sound." Who Speaks, 168.
12. Ibid., 30, 58, 285, 423. The passage about Southern mobs is in James
Baldwin, "In Search of a Majority: An Address," in Nobody Knows My Name:
More Notes of a Native Son (1960), in James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New
York: Library of America, 1998), 215.
13. Albert Rothenberg, MD, to Warren, Jan. 16, 1964. Rothenberg was as-
sistant medical director at the Yale Psychiatric Institute, and he put Warren in
touch with Dr. Earl Biassey. Dr. Frederic Solomon, MD, Howard University, to
Warren, Nov. 18, 1963, Warren Papers, box 213, folder 3720. For note cards, see
Warren Papers, box 207. Warren, Who Speaks, 52; and see Stanley M. Elkins,
Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1959).
14. Warren, Who Speaks, 52-59. Among the works of social psychology
Warren quotes or cites in his text and footnotes are Abram Kardiner and Lionel
Ovesey, The Mark of Oppression: A Psychosocial Study of the American Negro
(New York: Norton, 1951); Thomas F. Pettigrew, A Profile of the Negro Ameri-
can (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1964); and the various works of Gordon Allport
on prejudice and bigotry. He also makes repeated references to Kenneth Clark,
Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965).
15. Warren, Who Speaks, 317-22.
16. Ibid., 59-66, 136, 139, 336, 369-71, 378-90, 404, 414-15. On Nash, see
58, 248.
17. Ibid., 3-43. Quote about "tragic dilemma," 27. The other people inter-
viewed here are Lolis Elie, Robert Collins, Niles Douglas, and Felton Clark,
president of Southern University in Baton Rouge, La.
18. Ibid., 102-9, 89-100, 74-87.
xxx i :: Introduction
19. Ibid., 149-51.
20. Ibid., 160-70, 188-89, 196-97.
21. Ibid., 206-21.
22. Ibid., 222-32, 235^44, 245-62; Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life
of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 352-53. On the Malcolm X inter-
view, see Kreyling, "Robert Penn Warren," 70-72. Kreyling calls the interview
a "wrestling match." Indeed it was.
23. The other subjects in "Leadership on the Periphery" are William Hastie,
John Harvey Wheeler, Carl Rowen, and Kenneth Clark. The chapter on "The
Young" also includes an interview with Stephen A. Wright, president of Fisk
University in Nashville.
24. Warren, Who Speaks, 277-98, 326-53.
25. Warren to Albert Erskine, July 29, 1965, and Erskine to Warren, July 27,
Warren Papers, box 213, folder 3720.
26. Reinhold Niebuhr to Warren, July 10, 1965, and Mrs. A. Russell to War-
ren, n.d., Warren Papers, box 213, folder 3720.
27. Review by Maurice Dolbier, New York Herald Tribune, May 28, 1965;
Charles Poore, New York Times, June 1, 1965; Atlantic Monthly, July 1965; Fran-
cis Coughlin, Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1965; Lawrence Kubie, The Journal of
Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. 141, no. 2, 1965; Newsweek, June 7, 1965;
Warren to editor of Newsweek, June 12, 1965; Joseph Nicholson, Fort Worth
Star-Telegram, June 13, 1965; August Meier, "The Question Is Not Answered,"
Dissent, Autumn, 1965, in Warren Papers, box 213, folder 3720. It is in Nichol-
son's review that I first encountered the quotation from Brother to Dragons that
I use in the epigraph. And I thank John Burt, in his email of September 19, 2013,
for helping to enhance my understanding of the literary context of the quotation.
28. Albert Murray, New Leader, June 21, 1965, Warren Papers, box 213,
folder 3720.
29. Warren, Who Speaks, 405, 423.
30. Ibid., 423-24, 431-34.
31. Ibid., 428, 441-42.
Foreword
I have written this book because I wanted to find out something,
first hand, about the people, some of them anyway, who are making
the Negro Revolution what it is—one of the dramatic events of the
American story.
This book is not a history, a sociological analysis, an anthropo-
logical study, or a Who's Who of the Negro Revolution. It is a
record of my attempt to find out what I could find out. It is primarily
a transcript of conversations, with settings and commentaries. That
is, I want to make my reader see, hear, and feel as immediately as
possible what I saw, heard, and felt.
No doubt the reader, were he more than the silent spectator
which he must here be, would put more probing questions than
mine, and would have other, and more significant reactions. But my
questions may provide some continuity from interview to interview,
and my reactions may give the sense of an involved audience.
Along the way Dr. Anna Hedgeman said to me: "What makes
you think that Negroes will tell you the truth?"
I replied: "Even a he is a kind of truth."
But that is not the only kind that we have here.
The interviews were recorded on tape. In almost all instances

the person interviewed checked the transcript for errors. Many of
the interviews were long, sometimes several hours, and in a few
cases there was more than one conversation. It would have been
impossible, and undesirable, to publish all the transcripts. I have
chosen the sections which seem to me most significant and exciting,
and within these sections have sometimes omitted repetitions and
irrelevancies. I have not indicated such omissions. But except for a
rare conjunction, transition, or explanatory phrase, I have made no
verbal changes.
Robert Penn Warren
February, 1965.
Who Speaks for the Negro?
1 The Clejt Stick
•• JL
7 ••
West Feliciana Parish is some twenty-five miles north of Baton

Rouge, Louisiana. Before the Civil War it was a region of great
plantations and beautiful houses. Even now some of the houses yet
stand, and you can pay a dollar and enter to inspect the dusty or
tarnished or mellowed grandeur.
The Reverend Joe Carter lives in West Feliciana Parish. He is
the first Negro there to be registered to vote:
Well, I met the CORE—Ruby Livermore, that's his name.

And Ronnie Moore. And I met them on a Thursday in
August. They explained to me concernen the red-ishen and I
told them that I had tried and that I couldn't get none of my
neighbors to go with me.
I knew that I was a citizen of the United States and not
only our own little parish, because I was fifty-five years old
and I had never done anything to go to jail, to be disenfran-
chised, but the state or the parish laws, and through these I
did not get to red-ish, and I could hear over the air and on the
television they wanted ever citizen to vote. Well, after they
explained to me concernen of the vote, you know, which
I wanted to do it anyway, and I was glad to lead the people
here out of their ig-rance and enlighten them about how to
go about it. So I made an agreemint with them how I would
go down and ask the Redg-strar, but I tell them that I didn't
just want to go by myself. I would like to have somebody to
go with me. Well, at that time there was only just me—one—
from the West Feliciana Parish. He [Ronnie Moore] said,
"Well, Reverend Davis, he wants to red-ish."
Who Speaks for the Negro? :: 4
So we made an appointmint with him to see Reverend
Davis that day, and Reverend Davis sent me word that we
would go to Harmon and ask to red-ish, which we did, he
made arrangemints for nine o'clock. He was there. Well, a
few minutes after because they had a flat, but it wasn't far
enough behind the appointmint for me to get disgusted and
ignore him. So we went down to the Redg-strar's office, which
Ruby and Ronnie wanted to go with us. I told them, no. I
would rather to go by myself, you know, go before my people
without haven the strangers with us. And they says, "Well,
if you-all go down and have any trouble, let us know." Well,
they told us where the car would be, which we didn't see the
car as they had turned. They were walken. But they told us
what type of car they would drive, which was a white car.
When we went in the courthouse we didn't see nobody,
we didn't hear nobody. Well, they didn't have any signs you
know—"Right," "Left," "Redg-strar's office." Well, we seen
the Sher'ff's office, we seen the jury room, and we seen the
Circuit office. We had to inquire where was the office, which
was with no name on it. We walked around a little and we
couldn't find the place and it was some laborers, which were
from Boyd, Kirby and from some parish town, and they did
some little somethen there and had them in the parish jail
and had them worken, on the courthouse there. And Rev-
erend Davis asked the boys, "We looken for the Redg-strar's
office." And one of the boys said, "Over yonder." Well, we
had already been over there, so that was surely false, and
where do our people red-ish to vote—so they couldn't say no
more.
Well, there was a white man there. We said, "White folks,
can you tell us where the Redg-strar is, please?" He said,
"In there." Well, it was two doors, but he just say, "In there"
—he didn't tell us no special door. So we turned round and
Reverend Davis went back to the Assessor's office and asked
him, so he just say, "Up there."
Well, we went on up and I said, "It must be in this hall."
The Reverend Davis say to me, he said, "Well, we both can't
talk at the same time. And now you just listen and let me
talk." Well, we agreed on the outside to do so.
5 :. The Cleft Stick
Well, we still didn't see nobody, so when we went down
in the little hall to see the Redg-strar's office, I imagine from
about here to that wall there—from the main hall—by time
we got to the door, just before we got to the door, the Redg-
strar, he walked out the door and pulled it behind him and
stood in front of the door. Said, "Good mornen, boys, what
can I do for you-all?" Well, we spoke to him, "Mornen." So
Reverend Davis said, "Well, we come to see if we could red-
ish to vote." He said, "Well, I can't appear you now, but you
got to bring somethen. You got to show somethen. You got to
carry somethen."
Well, Reverend Davis turns, he says, "I really don't know
what you mean—by that. You tell me what you mean, prob-
ably I can produce what it takes." He said, "Well, you got to
go back home and get your two redg-stered voters out of the
ward where you live."
Well, at that time the High Sher'ff had come down the hall
and standen facen this small hall, that one right there. So Rev-
erend Davis said, "Well, the High Sher'ff knows me, and not
only that—all of you knows me here." He says, "Yes, I know
they call you Rudolph Davis, but I couldn't swear to it. I
couldn't tell it was you upstairs." As I turned, he said then,
"Here boy, here boy, you boy." Well, I was looken at the
Redg-strar, you see, and I turned around and I said, "You
speaken to me?" He said, "Yeah, you come here." So, I
turned round and went on back out to him, and when I got
out to just about to where he was he walked off down the hall,
like he was goen back to the Sher'ff's office, and he had a
pencil and a card in his hand. He said, "What's your name?"
I said, "Reverend Joe Carter." He attempted to write, but he
made one mark. He said, "What's the matter with you fel-
lows? You not satisfied?" I said, "Not exactly." He said,
"Well, if you ain't, from now on you will be—you hear?"
I said, "Yes sir." He said, "Go back where you come." I
turned to go back.
He said, "I ought to lock you up." Well, I didn't say any-
then. I just kept walken. Just before I got to the hall, anyway,
he said, "I really ought to lock you up." I didn't make him any
answer. Then he hollered to the Deppity, "Grab him, Dan,
don't you hear him raisen his voice at me? Consider you're
under arrest."
Well, I turned my face to him, you know. And then he
searched me—started at my heels and come on up, searchen
me. Said, "Take him out there and put handcuffs on him.
Lock him up." Then he put my arm down and put it behind
me. He said, "Go on out, you." Well, I went on out—take
me on out to this car, facen my face across the top of the
car, and he reach in with his hands, got his handcuffs—but
he still held this left arm behind, and he shook it out of his
shackle—and he locked the hand. Well, when I heard the
handcuff lock, I just laid the other one back there. They
locked me and put me in—told me, "Git in there."
Well, I had pulled my hat off and laid it up on the car. He
took my hat and thowed it in the back of the car, where I
was, and there was another white man, which the other white
young man, when he told [the Deputy] to grab rne—they
both grabbed me.
Well, I had never been to the jail. I didn't know where the
jail-house door was, but I saw a hall and they said, "Go on in
there." So I went on up in there and [the Deputy] asked me
—he says, "Who's been talken to you?" I said, "Nobody."
He said, "You've been over in Clinton, and that damned
nigger—" I said, "I ain't been to no Clinton." "Who been
talken to you?" I said, "Nobody been talken to me. Don't
you know we got radios and television and I read the papers."
I said to him, "The Journal says it wants all citizens to red-ish
and vote."
So, we're goen on into the jail, and they unlock me, put
me in the cell. So they went on back down the hall. They
come back about ten minutes later, this young white man, he
—I didn't know him—he come back and unlocked the jail
cell and told me to come out. So, I come on out and they told
me to go on down the hall, so I went on down the hall where
there was the little office they had in the jail. When I got in
there the Deppity had set up his fixen what he had—so he
took my fingerprints first and then he—after he took my
fingerprints, then he stood me over side the wall and he take
my picture, and after he'd taken my picture, then put me on
7 :: The Cleft Stick
the scales, took my weight, took my height, and asked me
how old I was. So I told him I wasfifty-five,three months and
five days old today; so after that, he asked me did I have any
sisters. I told him yes. I told them I had two daughters—they
both live in Scotland, here. And, I had to give my oldest
daughter's house number, as far as street and 1740. My baby
girl had just moved and I hadn't been there to the new house
and I couldn't give them their number, but I told them she's in
Scotland.
They take me on back, but when they was unlocken the
cell—see, I had my clothes, my hat. Then the High Sher'ff,
Mr. Percy, he come in the hall. He said, "Take his hat from
him. He don't need nothen." So they took my hat. So he
said, "Search him agin." So they searched me over—said,
"Take all his clothes. He don't need nothen, nohow." So they
went back there and got a uniform and then they made me
pull all my clothes off. They given me the uniform. "Put him,"
he says to the Deppity, "put him under that shower." Says,
"Get him a shower—he's musty—stinks." So, I didn't say
anything. I didn't say anything to him. He says, "Who been
talken to you?" I said, "Nobody." He said, "You ain't goen to
tell me, huh?" I said, "Well, I ain't got nothen to tell you."
I put that coverall on and they went on in.
They sent me my dinner down, and no spoon to eat with.
They had a spoon up in the grates up there. I don't know how
long it had been up there. The man brought me my dinner,
he said, "Get that spoon up yonder and eat, you." So I say,
"I don't need it because I don't eat this." But I just expect
they don't own a garbage can. Well, I stayed in that jail from
about nine thirty till two thirty without water. Their faucet
was broke and you could get water out of it, but I didn't
know—you see, I had to put all my weight up on it to get the
water on—and then when I get it on I had to do the same
thing to get it off, but I thought it was broke all the time
because the threads were stripped on it. So anyway, the ward-
man, he told me how to get the water on and how to get it off.
About nine thirty or a quarter to ten that night, they came
back—somebody has got money from somewhere. I don't
know where they got it from, but they come in that night and
call me to get up, come on and get out of there. Well, I got up
and they give me my clothes and I pulled the coveralls off
and come back in the office—and had to sign a bond—and
had to sign that I had gotten my car back, with all my papers,
which I didn't get them all because I had a test paper there
that Ruby and Ronnie had give me, you see, before I went in
there to red-ish, I let them know that I did understand how to
fill out the redg-stration blank. Well, I had that up over my
sun glare—of my car—but I had signed a paper that I had my
car back in good standen, but I was still in jail. I didn't know
whether wheels was on my car, but I had to sign it because
they had me in jail and I couldn't get out to see the car.
Well, when I did get out I reached over there, before I got
in my car, and my paper was gone. So, I didn't say anything.
Well, Ruby, he got in the car with me and he asked me if I
got harmed. He said, "Well, check the car and see if you got
the paper." Well, I said, "No, I don't have my redg-stration
papers." But, you see, by being a minister, I always carry my
Bible, my Psalm Book, and my Pastor's Guide. I keeps that
in the car. Any time you see the car, you see that—with a
coat. Care how hot it is—I always carry the coat, because
lots of times I be caught up the road for—have to bury some
baby or somethen, and I keep those books with me.
Well, I went in the car and they didn't take nothen but
them test papers. That's all they took from me. So, after I got
home, well, I had a bunch of people there, waiten for me.
When I got home, my wife said, "Joe, you oughtn't have went
down there." She said, "Now, if you go back down, I'm going
to leave you." I said, "Well, you can get your clothes and start
now, because I'm going back." So I say, "I'm on my way
back tomorrow."
Well, we heard from the neighbors—they said, "Don't
go back, don't go back tomorrow. You let us study these
things and send somebody that's rich."
That did not settle it for good and all. A school was organized,
and when all was ready, in October, twenty-three Negroes went down
to the courthouse. As they waited outside, their instructor came out.
9 :: The Cleft Stick
"Well, he come out and tole us, so I was the first man who made the
attempt to red-ish, so I tole them I was goen to be the first man to
go back."
He was.
This narrative was spoken to me one afternoon in the office of

Mr. Lolis Elie, the legal representative for CORE in New Orleans.
The Reverend Joe Carter had been brought to New Orleans by
Ronnie Moore, who had been, not long before, a student at Southern
University, the Negro university in Baton Rouge, but was now a
worker in voter registration, in West Feliciana Parish, where he had
explained to Joe Carter "concernen the red-ishen," and more recently
in the town of Plaquemine.
Plaquemine was a dangerous place to be, with violence never far
below the surface, and at first glance, Mr. Moore seems a most
improbable "activist." He is quite young, rather tall but slightly built,
shoulders rather narrow, skull tall and narrow with a touch of the
Watusi elegance. The structure of his face from the eye sockets down
to the mouth, is somewhat concave, coming forward again at the
lips and set of the mouth. He wears horn-rimmed glasses, looks
sober and withdrawn, perhaps humorless; and that slight concavity
of face somehow accentuates the expression of studious withdrawn-
ness. But the jaws are strong.
The hands, I notice, are long and thin—elegant, again—and as
he sits listening to the narrative of Reverend Carter, with his face
still and masklike, the eyes focused at a downward angle behind
the horn-rimmed lenses, the fingers, for a time, keep moving ever so
slightly, then suddenly stop and lie close together, immobile, looking
carved. His color is medium brown.
The Reverend Carter is a black man, with something of a faint
dusty bloom on his blackness. He seems older than his fifty-five years
and is, according to my notebook:
rather short or just at medium height, looking shorter because of
breadth of shoulders, strong and looks muscle-bound, large, slow
work-hands, dry and rough to the handshake, palms prêter naturally
pale and pink when you get a glimpse, nails carefully cleaned, blue
suit clean and well-pressed, white oxford shirt, button-down collar
Who Speaks for the Negro? :: io
like a Madison Avenue type, blue knit tie a little bedraggled, a craggy
/ace, suggestive of the face of a black Robert Frost, same hewed-out,
weathered quality.
His speech is careful and slow. He is anxious to say things just as
they had been, now and then pausing to let the word come right in
his head. And there is always that careful use of detail or circum-
stance, that attention to things that the unlettered man achieves by
his very unletteredness, by his need to hang on to the specificity of
things; for the image in his head, not any written word or abstrac-
tion, is his fundamental contact with reality. With Reverend Carter
this habit of mind gives an impression of slow, groping, undistract-
able earnestness.
As he talks there is no self-consciousness. He is too involved in
trying to say what there is to say. Ronnie Moore has shepherded
him here to the city, but he shows no trace of being in the role of
an exhibit. Out of his massive slow-boned dignity that has survived
the years, he is kindly to Ronnie, if anything; with a sad, knowing,
fatherly kindness.
Reverend Carter went through the fifth grade—the fifth grade in
a Negro school in Louisiana, nearly half a century ago, and that
would have been even worse than the fifth grade of a white school
there. But he reads his Bible. He lives with his Bible. As for his idea
of "voten and rights," he says he got it "off the TV screen." He adds,
". . . for the gov'mint say for us to vote."
Later I think that I have seen this old man somewhere before. Of
course, I had seen aging Negro men like him, back in my boyhood
in Kentucky and Tennessee. And I had seen them in Louisiana, up in
West Feliciana, long ago, when I used to go there to stand in the
silence of the moss-draped oaks of the old graveyard at Saint Francis-
ville. That palpable silence, the never-violated shadow of the spread-
ing live oaks and the windless gray garlands of moss, had seemed
to absorb everything into a Platonic certainty—even human pain.
. o•
• J*
•
Back in the winter of 1929-30, when I was living in England, I had

written an essay on the Negro in the South. I never read that essay
after it was published, and the reason was, I presume, that reading
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content Scribd suggests to you:
“Thanks be to the saints that I have found you, madame,” I said
gravely, “though you were over ready to leave my house for this.”
She hung her head. “I am punished for it, monsieur,” she said, with
proud humility; “the whole world seemed to have forgotten me
here.”
“But not I,” I said.
She glanced up swiftly and then down. “But not you, sir,” she
repeated like a child, and seemed to smile, but I thought that it was
the flicker of the light on her face, or my eyes deceived me.
“Come,” I said, putting aside my emotion, “are you ready? We must
fly this place—now, at once, or all will be lost.”
“Am I ready?” she cried, with deep emotion. “Holy Virgin, have I not
prayed to go?” and she gathered up her mantle and hood.
“Come, then,” I replied, “we must depend again on the dwarf, but I
feel sure he will not fail us, and once out of this, all will be well.”
She had her cloak on now and, with trembling fingers, she tied her
hood over her head and concealed her features under its full folds.
Then she followed me into the hall, and I bade Maluta open the door
for us, while I extinguished the lanthorn. At the threshold I took her
hand in mine and felt it quiver and then lie still. Maluta crept out,
peering into the dusk, and beckoned to us, and we followed
cautiously, keeping close to the palace walls and avoiding the
portico. The soldiers were still playing on the staircase, and here and
there, in the great square, a torch streamed red fire. We gained the
parvis of the cathedral and there the dwarf and I consulted and
decided to go out by the gate at which we had entered, depending
on our bribes, and it was fortunate that we did so, for, at the other
gates, as I learned afterwards, the guards were doubled, and here
my money had bought liquor, and drunkenness—their besetting sin—
helped us. Two of the rogues slept at their posts, and three were
quarrelling over a flagon, and, of the other two, one was the soul
that Maluta had purchased, and the other I bought now for two
roubles. There was some grumbling, some coarse jests about the
ambassador returning with a lady, and there was need for
determination and the strong hand, and I used it. The only rogue
who would have plucked at Daria’s cloak and looked into her face I
struck over the head with the flat of my sword, and he fell with a
thud and lay so still that the others fell back, and our Streltsi crying:
“Way, way for the ambassador!” we pushed through, and turning to
the right, fled down the bank of the river. The cries of the guards
grew fainter, the spot was very dark and lonely, the damp air from
the water touched our faces softly, above us the stars shone in a
serene heaven. We sped on, skirting the ramparts of the Kremlin,
and presently we saw the yellow light streaming from the lamp
before the image at the Gate of the Redeemer; it shone like a star in
the darkness, this light that burned there night and day, year after
year, reddening the snow in winter, brightening the shorter nights of
summer. As we drew nearer the princess slipped her hand from mine
and knelt down, facing the image, and I paused; stern as the peril
was, and unsafe as the place could be, at any moment, I had not
the heart to disturb her. She prayed; offering a thanksgiving
doubtless, and a prayer, too, for deliverance from her danger and
perhaps from me. The thought made me stir sharply, and she rose
and we walked on in silence.
I had bethought me of a man in the German quarter, an honest
Bavarian, who would let me hire two horses, and I sent Maluta
running ahead to him with money in his hand for that purpose, and
with my drawn sword in my right hand, and my left on her shoulder,
we followed swiftly, avoiding every torch and every group of people,
and twice stumbling over corpses, for, as yet, the dead lay unburied.
We had left the Kremlin behind us and were nearing our destination,
when she spoke very softly, but distinctly.
“I wish to tell you, monsieur,” she said, “that I did not wilfully leave
your house. I was deceived—the men who came bore my father’s
signet.”
I started; then the prince might be dead or a prisoner—but she
divined my thoughts.
“My father is not dead,” she continued; “I know, from what I heard
in the palace, that the ring was stolen from him, but he escaped,
and is, I hope, at Troïtsa. But, sir, you wronged me—in thinking I
went, of my own will, to—to——”
“To Kurakin,” I said briefly.
She drew her hood closer, forgetting that the dusk veiled her
features.
“Or the czarevna,” she murmured.
“You mistake me,” I replied cruelly. “I did not think that or the other.
It would seem more likely that another would deliver you.”
“Who, sir?” she asked coldly, stopping short.
“The noble Prince Galitsyn, madame,” I retorted. I heard her draw
her breath so sharply that it seemed like a sob, but she turned her
back on me and walked on swiftly—so swiftly that I had to hasten
my steps to keep up with hers, nor would she speak to me again,
even in answer to a question. And, in this mood, I placed her, at
last, upon a horse I had hired for her, and mounting myself, I bade
Maluta go to Le Bastien and await my return, or news from me.
Then the princess and I rode on, by lanes and byways, through the
Zemlianui-gorod, and, at last, into the open country beyond the
town, turning our faces northeast, toward the sacred monastery of
Troïtsa, where I was certain of a safe asylum for her, for a time, at
least.
XXXIII: THE HUT ON THE ROAD
WE had left the city and its turbulence and bloodshed behind us,
and we rode, side by side, along the quiet country highway, in the
soft darkness of a May evening, the stars above us, and a sweet
freshness in the air. It was impossible not to feel relief and almost
joy at our deliverance and our freedom. My spirits rose rapidly, I
breathed deeply, and held my head high; the quiet, the serene
atmosphere, the even hoof-beats, were all so many blessings, and I
thought she shared my exhilaration, for—at the moment—she sat
erect and kept her horse at a smart pace; yet she did not speak to
me, and I could only discern her outline in the darkness. At first I
had almost dreaded pursuit, but after we had traversed a league in
safety I cast even this anxiety from me and went on with a light
heart.
The curtain of the night hung low, for there was no moon, yet I
could discern the vast sweep of the steppe, as we ascended, for the
ground rose steadily toward the northeast, and I was watchful to
keep to the road, a lonely one at best, save for the pilgrims
travelling from Moscow to worship at the famous shrine of Saint
Sergius. At another time I should have felt the risk of travelling with
a woman upon this highway, without armed attendants, but now I
cast care to the four winds. After the horrors of the city, the perils of
the night and the lonesome road seemed small and trifling; for a few
hours, at least, she was mine, she rode at my side, so close that I
could have laid my hand upon her shoulder, and once or twice I
thought she looked toward me. A fool’s paradise, I knew, for she
was going to her father, or her father’s friends, and I was a
gentleman and could not—and would not—force my claim upon her,
if she loved me not. Yet I was happy, and once, for some pretext—
guiding her horse, I think—I touched her hand and felt the soft,
slender fingers, no longer cold, but warm and firm. At least, she
feared me not, and if she trusted me!—but this was a perilous line of
reflection.
Three leagues, and we had scarce exchanged three words; certainly,
the signs were not propitious, yet, looking at that dark outline beside
me, I found nothing to say; I was as tongue-tied as a lad before his
first love. Then, making up my mind to break the ice, to speak and
make her speak, I blundered.
“I must tell you, madame, that Prince Galitsyn did not know of your
——”
I was going to say “marriage,” when she interrupted me.
“If you have nothing better to say, sir,” she cried impatiently, “I pray
you say nothing!”
I gasped, taken aback by her sharpness, and felt myself a fool, and
yet I had made her speak. But if she felt so deeply for Galitsyn, was
I not a fool for my pains? A curse upon these princes! It was the
same in France; let a fop with a drop of royal blood in him make love
to a woman, and away with the plain gentleman, and even with the
marquis!
I bit my lip and relapsed into sullen silence, and our horses plodded
steadily on; I had spared their speed purposely, in case we should
have need of it before we gained the monastery. Again the silence of
the brooding night gathered us under its shadowy wings and
enfolded us softly, so softly that I thought I heard her even
breathing, and once there was a sharp, shuddering sigh. She did not
share my joy at escape, then, or my presence chilled it. Resolutely
silent now, I kept my gaze averted and saw presently the flicker of a
light to the left, a few yards ahead. I peered at it, trying to make out
whether it was advancing, or burned before some wayside shrine,
and I saw that it was stationary. I was for turning out to avoid it,
suspicious of unknown dangers, when I became suddenly aware that
the figure beside me was drooping in the saddle, and I heard a soft,
suppressed sound—a woman’s weeping. I started and drew rein;
was it possible that this imperious creature wept? I could not be
mistaken, for I heard a smothered sob, and she reeled forward,
clinging to her saddle-bow. I bent over and caught hold of her
bridle.
“I pray you, madame, not to give way,” I said gravely, “even if my
presence does offend you. I——”
“You mistake, monsieur,” she cried tremulously; “I cannot go on—’tis
sheer weakness. I have not slept and I have not eaten—since the
bread you gave me yesternight.”
“Saint Denis!” I exclaimed sharply; “did they try to starve you, my
——”
I bit my tongue to stay an endearing word.
“They gave me nothing,” she replied; “nor did I greatly care, but
now my head swims, I cannot keep in the saddle—I should have told
you!”
I did not know what to do, and looked again at that stationary light,
which seemed now to burn brighter.
“Do you know what that is?” I asked her. “Is there a house near
where I can get you food?”
She turned her head and looked in the direction I indicated.
“Yes,” she said listlessly. “I meant to tell you; it is a hut, and I know
the old peasants who live in it; they will have rice bread and I will try
to eat it. I am sorry,” she added, “I am very sorry to hinder you,
monsieur, for my weakness.”
My heart smote me; had I not both eaten and slept, and I was a
strong man and she, delicate and bred in luxury, had endured so
much without complaint and ridden until she reeled in the saddle.
“If I can have a bit of bread and a cup of water, I can go on,” she
said faintly. “I must go on!”
“Yes,” I replied, “when you have rested and broken your fast. Fear
not, madame, they do not pursue us; and if you are certain of this
house we will go forward.”
“I am certain,” she said.
I kept her horse’s bridle and led the beast beside mine, as we
advanced some twenty yards, and then, not daring to take her to
the house without first reconnoitering, I dismounted, and, with some
misgivings lest her strength should altogether fail, I hurried forward.
I came first upon a shrine, where a little lamp burned feebly, fed, no
doubt, by the occupant of the khatka or hut that I now plainly
discerned standing a little way from the road. I approached it swiftly,
but cautiously, and examined it with care. It was one of the little
mud houses, thatched with straw, commonly used by the moujiks,
and through the unglazed window I saw an old woman cooking
something over a fire of fagots, while in another corner a man, quite
as old and more feeble, slept in his chair. The hut contained but one
room, and only these two persons were in it. Reassured, I went back
for the princess, confident that she would make her way with these
people more quickly than I, for when the Russ became a patois I
could not clearly understand it. I led our horses to the door of this
humble dwelling and was about to knock when the old woman
herself came to peep out at us, aroused by the tread of the animals.
She opened the door cautiously, and only peered through the crack
with an evident absence of hospitality.
“I will go to her,” Daria said quietly; “I know her—and I will speak
with her.”
I helped her to dismount and would have supported her, but she
slipped away from me and went to the door.
“’Tis I, Mother Vera,” she said gently; “I, Daria Kirilovna, and I pray
you let me in to rest and give me bread—for I am hungry. The great
city yonder, our holy mother, Moscow, is torn with riot and murder
and robbery; the Streltsi have risen, and I have barely escaped with
my life.”
As soon as she spoke the old woman opened the door and fell on
her knees, kissing Daria’s hand and pressing it to her forehead, and
when the princess ceased speaking, she rose and beckoned to her to
enter.
“Now is my house honoured, O dear lady,” she said, in a thin old
voice; “now is my roof lighted as with daylight, by the eyes of Daria
Kirilovna. Enter, O my princess, all that is there is thine.”
She spoke with a strong accent of the north country, but more
clearly than I had expected, and she showed every evidence of joy
at the sight of Daria.
I watched her usher in the princess, and then I took the precaution
of leading the horses to the rear of the cabin, and tethering them
where they were least likely to be observed from the highroad.
Having seen to their comfort and security, I returned to the hut and
was admitted by the old woman, who courtesied profoundly, and
called me “excellency.” I found that she had spread a simple meal
before the princess of rice bread and milk, and though the place was
bare and poor in aspect, and the food coarse, it was clean, no
common thing in the house of a moujik. In the corner the old man
nodded, only stirring at my entrance, to murmur something about
the oil for the lamp at the shrine, and then falling asleep again. His
wife, seeing my glance at him, touched her forehead significantly,
and shook her head.
“He’s not all here any more, your excellency,” she said, casting a
melancholy glance at her ancient spouse, “and his arm is weak, too;
he is not even able to beat me,” and she wiped her eyes at the
thought.
The princess, who had laid aside her hood, looked up at me shyly,
and coloured deeply, signing to me to sit down at the table, which
was only a board laid upon two trestles.
“You also must be hungry,” she said, in a very low voice.
And I, for the sake of eating with her, sat down and broke some of
the old wife’s rice bread, all the while watching the soft colour come
and go in Daria’s cheek, and the persistent droop of her eyelashes.
The old woman waited upon us humbly, but with an air that made
me think she had once been a servant in a great house, which I
found to be true, for she told me afterwards that she had been in
the household of Prince Voronin before her marriage.
Although she had fasted long, the princess seemed to me to eat but
little, and that listlessly, as the very weary often do. But as soon as
she had finished she told me that she was ready to ride on;
however, I had no thought of taking her farther without, at least, an
hour’s rest, and told her so. She protested weakly, at first, and then,
meeting my eyes, fell silent and sat with her head drooping and her
hands clasped in her lap. There was a wooden settle in the corner,
and I took my cloak and, folding it over the high back, made a soft
place for her to rest against.
“Now, madame,” I said, assuming the tone of command, “you will
rest there an hour, so that we may ride on to Troïtsa.”
She hesitated, glancing at my cloak and turning her face aside.
“I can rest here,” she said, I thought sullenly.
“Upon a stool that has no back?” I asked ironically. “You would rest
better in the saddle. Nay, madame, you make the task of rescuing
you no light one. I pray you, do as I ask.”
She bit her lip and kept her eyes averted, but she rose slowly and
walked over to the settle. The old woman, being heartily of my
opinion, also urged her to rest, and made much ado in arranging her
upon my cloak, while Daria turned her face away and sat bolt
upright, as if she feared contagion from it. I smiled grimly, and bided
my time; I knew her strength was almost exhausted, and the sequel
justified my expectations. I fell to talking with the crone and, in half
an hour, I saw the princess sink gently back upon the settle, and
then the proud head drooped upon the folds of my cloak and she
slept, gently and soundly as a child, utterly worn out by the strain of
the last two days and nights.
Meanwhile the old woman chatted garrulously, of her past, of her
children,—all long dead, though there had been fifteen,—of her
husband, of their life in the hut. And she had many questions to ask
me; she had heard a rumour of the revolution in Moscow, and
scarcely believed it, and was, indeed, too dull to fully comprehend
my answers. She told me also of Prince Voronin’s household; he had
been twice married already, she said, and would soon wed again.
Daria’s mother had been shaved, a convenient way to be rid of a
wife; for when a Russian wanted a divorce he sent his wife to a
convent, and as soon as her head was shaved she was forced to
remain there. However, death had released Daria’s mother, and the
prince’s second wife was now shaved, so he would soon wed again.
All this time Daria slept, and I watched the shadows play on her
downcast face and long black lashes. She looked very young and
delicate as she sat there, and helpless and appealing; the princess
had vanished and the young girl predominated, and she was very
lovely. I watched her with many thoughts, and with an ever-growing
affection, and the old woman, tired at last, fell asleep, too, and
snored, and the hours went on, and still I had not the heart to rouse
the princess. Once in the night the old man woke and hobbled out to
replenish the oil in the lamp before the shrine, a thing he seemed to
do mechanically, for he hobbled back, stared at me vacantly, and
then fell asleep again.
I kept the vigil, tending the fire, that we might not be left in
darkness, and the night passed thus. Daria never stirred; she slept
the deep sleep of exhaustion, and I watched and thought of her, of
all that she had said and done, and saw nothing—in a word or action
—but indifference, save that one cry when I came to her cell door,
“Is it thou?” and it pleased me to think of the thrill in her voice, as it
pleased me to look at her beautiful face in its slumber, at the
graceful droop of her young figure, which was slender and virginal in
aspect. Yet, all the while, there was an undercurrent of anxiety; time
was precious, and I listened, ever and anon, for a hoof-beat on the
road, and once I thought someone walked near the hut.
At last the night wore to a close; I heard a cock crow in the little
yard without, and knew that morning was at hand. I flung a new
fagot on the fire, and as it crackled and blazed up, illuminating the
dreary room, the princess awoke. There was a moment of surprise,
of suspended recollection, and then she sprang up.
“Oh, monsieur,” she cried softly, “have I slept long? Why did you
permit it?”
I smiled, rising too, and laying some money gently in the lap of the
sleeping crone.
“Come,” I whispered, “let us go—if they know not whither, it will be
best, if they are questioned.”
“I would thank them though,” she said regretfully, and then
unclasping her bracelet, she laid it beside my coins, and followed me
on tip-toe to the door.
XXIX: A DUEL WITH SWORDS
THERE is nothing in the world more beautiful than the dawn—the
birth of a new day—the resurrection of the light. Darkness rolling
away like a vapour, lying low on the earth, dropping away into its
valleys; above, the firmament is radiant, an arch of glory, of tender
colour, of soft white clouds, transcendently lovely, and the very air is
sweeter, fresher, full of musical sounds—life stirring gently out of
silence and sleep.
As the Princess Daria and I rode from the hut by the wayside, such a
dawn was breaking; the sky was faintly luminous, the earth dark and
level, and we could see, across the wide sweep of the plain, the river
of light begin to flow, wider and wider, between earth and sky,
rippling and radiating, as it spread, until the shadows fled away from
the face of the steppe and we saw the ground green and fragrant
and in the distance a herd of cattle grazing, for it was spring and
there was pasturage. It was still and peaceful and lonely, as a vast
plain is ever lonely.
The horses had rested too, and were fresh, travelling briskly along
the highroad; not a habitation was in sight before us, no sign of
man, but here and there, a shrine; for the Russian loves to pray, and
his saint is ever close at hand.
The princess, repentant for the loss of time, was in a softer mood,
and rode beside me quietly. She had not muffled her face, and the
air brought a freshness to her aspect. I noticed, too, again that she
rode like a Frenchwoman, and not as the Russians commonly did,
astride like men.
“You ride like my countrywomen, madame,” I said, “and you speak
French well.”
She could not hear “madame” from my lips without changing
countenance, and she blushed divinely now.
“My mother was a Pole, monsieur,” she replied simply, “and hers a
Frenchwoman; I am not all Russian.”
“Ah,” I said softly; “I thought there was a tie of sympathy between
us. After all—you are a little French.”
She cast a shy look at me, from under her long lashes, and would
not answer me. A conversation in one voice goes but lamely, as I
found, yet something in her manner elated me. A long pause
ensued, and I fell to wondering in what light she regarded me—as
her husband or her groom?
Of one thing, however, I felt certain; she no longer feared me;
indeed, I thought she began to trust me; but as Maître le Bastien
quoted the proverb, “Souvent femme varie,” and I was to find it so.
There were few trees in the landscape, but some twenty or thirty
paces ahead of us, in an elbow of the road, was a clump of
sycamores, and behind the land dropped into a hollow, where water
lay in a reedy pool and some cattle stood there, knee-deep, drinking.
Away off, beyond the plain, the river of light was a molten sea of
gold, where the sun was rising before us, for we rode northeast from
Moscow.
“Madame, do you know of what this scene reminds me?” I asked her
quietly.
We had been so long silent that she started at the sound of my voice
—flushing as she always did.
“Nay, monsieur, I know not,” she replied.
I pointed at the steppe, and at the far east, where the sun shone in
a narrow rim above the world, like the broken half of a lover’s gold
piece.
“Of my life, madame, level and barren as this, until the sun rose on
it,” I said softly, “the sun of my love for you.”
She met my eyes fully for an instant, a look of wonder in hers, and
then she turned her face proudly away, but I saw her hands tremble.
“Believe me,” I continued gently, “I would not have forced myself
upon you, save to keep you from a fate you hated.”
She dropped the horse’s bridle on his neck, and covered her face
with her hands.
“Do not speak of it!” she cried passionately; “do you think I am less
than other women? that I do not feel it? That cruel czarevna! How
dared you, sir?”
I bit my lip; to her I was the goldsmith’s apprentice. So be it, I
thought; if she despised the man, she may also despise the marquis.
I had meant to tell her, but now I would not.
“Are Russian men then cowards, madame?” I asked drily.
She did not reply; she had no time, for we had come to the clump of
trees, and as we turned them, a horseman suddenly barred our way
with a drawn sword. She recognised him first, with a little cry of
horror, and then I, too, looked into the flushed face of the Boyar
Kurakin. My first impulse was to draw my pistol and shoot him down,
and then I saw that the man had no weapon but his sword, and was
alone. He looked at her, more than at me, and I knew then how near
akin such love as his is to hatred.
“Well met!” he cried savagely; “well met, Daria Kirilovna; you ride
early with your lover, but you ride no further—by Saint Nikolas of
Mojaïsk!”
He meant to say more, and to insult her, but I forced my horse
between and he found my sword-point at his throat.
“Back, monsieur,” I said pleasantly, and smiled; “back, or you will
drink blood for your breakfast!”
But he was no coward, and rode like a Cossack.
“To the devil with you, you French smith!” he cried contemptuously,
and our swords crossed, the sparks flying as the steel ground. His
horse, a fiery beast, plunged and I missed giving him a thrust over
his guard, as I had given M. d’Argenson, on the Place Royale. Then
he wheeled quickly, and tried to stab me in the side, and I parried,
my beast answering the bit well, but I saw I had my match, not
trained in a Parisian school, but a born swordsmen, as I think some
men are. Moreover, the thought of his humiliation in the painted
gallery, of his stolen bride, stung him to fury: he would have torn me
to pieces with the joy of a savage. We fought desperately, therefore,
and the horses, plunging and backing, kept us whirling in a circle,
thrusting here and missing there, and then clashing fiercely; once he
drew blood on my arm and once I touched his throat.
The Princess Daria’s horse had carried her a few yards away, and
there she held him, looking back, rooted, as it seemed, to the spot,
though I shouted to her to ride on. The swords whirled and ground
together, and in a flash I saw the whole scene and remembered it;
the glory of the sky, the wide sweep of land, the shadows of the
sycamores, and the sharp outline of her figure and her face, white
as a pearl. But, all the while, I had much ado to keep his steel from
my heart, and verily, I think the man fought more like a fiend than a
human. The sun had risen and sometimes it shone in my eyes,
sometimes in his, as our beasts moved to and fro, and sometimes
the flash and sparkle of it on our blades was blinding and once—
when he almost thrust me in the breast—I heard the princess cry
out sharply.
Then I rose in my stirrups and he in his, and for a moment our
steels ground out fire. I saw his bloodshot eyes and heard his
laboured breathing; the man was tired and so was I, and yet I must
wear him out or give her up to him, and he—the barbarian devil—he
knew that he must kill me or give her up to me!
I had the longer sword, and once I thought I had him, but he
parried and well-nigh caught me under the arm-pit, and then I
wheeled my horse quickly and lunged at him, our swords clashed,
and at the sound, his beast plunged widely from me, reared up and
pawed the air, while I saw Kurakin’s face turn pale as ashes, and
then the beast fell over backward and rolled on his rider. My own
horse careered wildly, and the other brute turned over and got to his
feet and was running with an empty saddle, before I could approach
his master. Kurakin lay in a heap on the ground, and I leaped down
and turned him over; his neck was broken and he lay there, in the
mire, stone-dead.
I turned and saw the princess holding in her horse, for he, too, was
restive, and her face was perfectly colourless.
Without a word I mounted and rode forward, and she sat looking
back with dilated eyes.
“Will you leave him so?” she cried; “is he dead?”
“Quite dead, madame,” I answered.
She made the sign of the cross, and I laid my hand upon her bridle,
guiding her frightened horse.
“We must ride,” I said. “We can send others back from Troïtsa for
the body—if it is safe to do so.”
For ten minutes we galloped on and then she spoke.
“Why did you not use your pistol?” she asked.
“In France a gentleman takes no advantage of his adversary in
weapons,” I replied courteously.
She bit her lip, and then, “But if he had killed you!” she cried.
Then I had my revenge. “Then, madame, instead of the goldsmith
you would have had a boyar,” I said coldly.
She looked at me a moment in sheer amazement, and then she
turned crimson, and rode on ahead of me without a word.
XXX: THE PRINCE VORONIN
IN this fashion, riding hard, we came in sight of Troïtsa. In the clear
sunshine the cupolas and turrets of the beautiful building rose
clearly outlined against the sky. The great monastery, with its
chapels and its shrines and its glebe, was a princely territory, and
close under the protection of its walls clung a village, grown there,
doubtless, through the constant stream of pilgrims, whose wants
could not be altogether satisfied at the refectory. Herds of cattle
moved placidly along the slopes to the south, the herds of the
brotherhood, for there was wealth there and power. From among
these monks were chosen the great dignitaries of the church, for the
priests, compelled to marry and to work in the parishes, could never
receive high offices, and a bitter jealousy raged between the two
orders. The sunshine on the golden crosses, and the white walls,
and over the green slopes, the peaceful atmosphere, the sweet
chimes of the church bells, greeted us and made the scene on the
road seem like a nightmare. We slackened our pace and went more
slowly up the road which led to the gates, and as we approached, I
observed a cortège leaving them and coming toward us. Such a
cortège as I had seen commonly in Moscow, the serfs running ahead
of an open carriage drawn by three horses, the marten-tails floating
in the breeze, and in the vehicle a noble in his rich and gaudy dress,
and behind again, the serfs, bare-foot, but sparkling in broad collars
and belts of gold on their white caftans. As they appeared the
princess drew rein with a sharp exclamation, and I looked around at
her, divining the cause of her discomfiture.
“My father!” she gasped, and looked at me strangely.
“Yes, madame,” I said, smiling grimly, “his excellency, the prince;
have I not redeemed my pledge?”
“But,” she began, and stammered, “but my father—I must tell him—
and you—what can you do?”
My face burned.
“Madame,” I said coldly, “do you think I am afraid to tell your father
that I married you?”
It was her turn to blush, and her eyes shone strangely.
“You do not know him,” she replied simply. “He will not listen. I know
the customs of your country are different; here, sir, a girl is given in
marriage by her parents, as they will. Sometimes she never sees her
bridegroom’s face until the hour of the ceremony. My father——” She
stopped, bit her lip, and sat looking down at her horse’s ears, and
the animal, with his bridle hanging loose, put his head down and
cropped the grass.
“And your father intended you to marry Prince Galitsyn,” I suggested
coldly, and then—because the pain in my heart was sharp—I added;
“and you, madame; do you love him?”
Then I thought a smile quivered about her lips, her head drooped
prettily, she would not look up, and the prince’s carriage came
swiftly on.
“Do I love him?” she repeated innocently; “who, sir—my father?”
“No, no!” I cried, in fierce haste, my heart beating wildly, “your
lover.”
Then she cast a bewildering glance at me. “Which?” she asked, and
this time I saw a dimple come and go in her cheek.
I urged my horse closer, and had my hand on her bridle when the
prince’s runners came panting up to us, and the three horses were
halted before us. He had recognised his daughter and beckoned to
her. Every vestige of colour and of life faded out of her face, a
moment before rosy and inscrutable, and she would have obeyed,
but I rode forward instead, and halting beside his excellency’s
carriage, I uncovered and greeted him with the courtesy I would
show my equals in France. I told him that I had brought his
daughter to him, and he eyed me coldly from head to foot. He was a
handsome, dignified man, with white hair and a ruddy skin and clear
blue eyes. Nothing, however, could exceed his hauteur; he could
have matched the Grand Monarque himself in manner, and, in his
own domain, he was as great an autocrat. His whole glance at me
said, more plainly than words, “and who are you?” but he
acknowledged my information with a stately gesture, at once
dignified and courteous. Then he spoke a word in Russ to the slave
at his feet, who rose and, opening a long bag, or pouch, began to
gather up a handful of roubles, I looking on in some amazement
while the slave counted them. Then Voronin spoke again, and this
time audibly.
“Nay, twenty roubles more, Vasali,” he said; “would you stint the pay
of a man who rescued my daughter?”
Saint Denis! did he take me for a lackey? My wrath well-nigh choked
me.
“You mistake, M. le Prince,” I said, in a low voice, that the serfs in
attendance might not hear; “I have brought back your daughter—as
my wife!”
The slave at his feet, who heard me, dropped the bag of gold and
fell on his knees gaping, while the prince merely stared at me, as if
he thought me mad. Very briefly, therefore, I told him the story of
Sophia and the painted gallery and the marriage, and as I did so,
the Princess Daria rode up and drew rein beside me. Many emotions
had played across the prince’s strong face as I spoke, but at the end
it was inscrutable. He turned his stern eyes on his daughter.
“Is this true?” he asked, in a deep voice.
“It is true,” she replied, very low, “and he saved my life!”
I held up my hand. “Nay,” I said, “there is no virtue in that plea; I do
not make it. I am your husband, madame!”
She gave me a strange look.
The prince turned to her again. “You have ever spoken the truth,” he
said, in a hard voice. “I acquit you of fault in this; but has he
guarded you, and treated you as becomes a princess, and my
daughter?” His tone was terrible.
“I have been safe as with you, my father,” she replied, and her voice
broke a little.
The prince called a serf. “Take the horse of the princess and lead her
ahead of me back to Troïtsa,” he said, and then to me: “Sir, if she
had testified against you, I would have had you hanged!”
“M. le Prince,” I replied coldly, “I am a Frenchman and a man of
honour. Try me not too far, monsieur; even though you are her
father, there are some things you may not say to me. Neither can
you compel her to leave her husband—unless she wills it.”
He looked at me with disdain and laughed.
“Her husband!” he repeated. “As little her husband, Sir Frenchman,
as that moujik in the field yonder,” and he signalled to his serfs to
turn back to Troïtsa.
But I rode beside the carriage and looked into his face, and proud as
he was, I saw him colour darkly.
“M. le Prince,” I said, “I am not the man to be thus lightly dealt with.
If she wishes to be free—I will free her. No woman is my wife
against her will; but if she chooses me of her free will, mine she is,
and shall be, against the world.”
“And think you that the Princess Daria will choose you?” he asked
contemptuously.
I returned his glance with equal pride. “And why not, monsieur?” I
said quietly. “I am her husband.”
He laughed at that, as I have seen men laugh before they engage a
deadly enemy.
“There are such things as divorces,” he said suavely, “and other—
ways of removal.”
“Assassination, M. le Prince,” I suggested. “It has been tried. In
France I am accounted wise enough to save my head.”
“It is well, sir,” he said; “I would advise you to use that wisdom
now.” He pointed southward. “The road to Moscow lies there,” he
added courteously, “and fifty roubles for your expenses—as a profit
for the rescue of the princess.”
“You insult me, sir,” I said scornfully; “yonder is my wife, and yonder
will I go,” and I rode forward, in defiance, to her side.
All this while we had been progressing slowly on the road to Troïtsa,
and as I went forward the whole procession quickened its pace. As
my horse came alongside of hers, the princess turned a pale face
toward me.
“Monsieur, I pray you be advised,” she said, very low, “and anger
him not. He seems a smooth man and courteous, but he has a
violent spirit, and look you—you are one against all these, his slaves.
’Tis useless—’tis worse than useless!”
“And you?” I said, “and you—obey him through fear?”
Her lips quivered, she averted her eyes.
“Half an hour ago, you were not thus,” I murmured, “tell me if——”
She looked up and her eyes were full of pain.
“Hush!” she cried, “hush! I will not listen. Yonder is the gate—and I
go to my cousin—I will obey my father, I——”
“Do you—will you repudiate your husband?” I asked firmly.
Her hands shook; she gave me an imploring look. “If you love me,
monsieur,” she faltered, “I beseech you—retire now and leave us. To-
morrow you can speak to him—the mad mood will pass if you——”
I leaned over and touched her hand.
“For your sake,” I said, and drew aside and let the cortège pass me
and enter the domain of Troïtsa.
And yet, twelve hours later, I counted this act of gallantry as one of
arrant folly, but who can lift the veil of destiny unless it be the
astrologer?
XXXI: VASSALISSA
WHEN the Princess Daria rode out of my sight that day she vanished
so completely that I could neither see her nor communicate with her
again. Prince Voronin understood the art of concealing his women-
folk even more thoroughly than the other Muscovites, and he was
determined to disregard the marriage of his daughter with a
foreigner. He told me so himself, standing on the great steps of the
monastery, with old Piotr bearing his sword behind him, and two
slaves preceding him with torches. For it was that same night that I
met him face to face on the steps, and demanded an interview in
which the matter of my marriage should be fully discussed. The man
was naturally above the average in height and bore himself with a
dignity that was at once fine and disdainful. I thought him then—
with the torchlight upon him, in his magnificent dress of dark green
and crimson, with his snow-white hair and his falcon eye—one of the
handsomest and the proudest men that I had ever seen, and I saw
too, that—finding that he could neither buy me nor intimidate me—
he hated me cordially, yet he was a smooth man and rarely violent in
speech.
I had told him very briefly, but circumstantially, the story of the
marriage, and he knew as well as I that it was legal, but not the
quiver of an eyelash betrayed the least emotion.
“It rests with the Princess Daria,” I said; “she is my wife—and she
must choose. If she is still unwilling—I will not force my claim upon
her; but if she respects the bond between us, there is no power on
earth that can take her from me.”
The prince was so far unmoved that he smiled.
“In Russia it is the father, and not the daughter, who chooses, sir,” he
said coolly, “and so little does her will rule it that I tell you plainly
that, if I chose, I would give her to a moujik to-morrow—and she
should not disobey me.”
“She is your daughter,” I replied steadily, “but she is also my wife,
and you will not separate us, Prince Voronin. I demand to see her—
there is no law, in any land, that can keep a husband from seeing his
own wife.”
He eyed me coolly, but I saw the throbbing at the temples that
comes in anger, and the torchlight falling full on his face stained it
with crimson.
“There is no law, sir,” he replied suavely, “but there is my will.”
“Do you intend to prevent an interview?” I demanded sternly; “to
take a wife from her husband by force?”
“My dear sir,” he said pleasantly, “I would as lief fling you in the
Moskva, as not. Think you that I intend to permit Sophia Alexeievna
to marry my daughter at her will—to whom she will? Pshaw, sir, you
are a meddlesome foreigner! If Kurakin had married her, I would
have flung him from the top of Ivan Veliki; there was no need of
your interference to save the daughter of Prince Voronin.”
Looking in his eye, no one could doubt that he would be as good as
his word, but my blood was up, and but for the absolute folly of such
a course, on the steps of the monastery, I would have engaged him
then and there, and forgotten that he was my father-in-law, but as it
was I kept my hand off my sword, lest I should yield to temptation,
for my fingers itched to draw it.
“You are pleased to threaten me, monsieur,” I said coolly, “but you
mistake your opponent. I care naught for your threats or your
power. I have married the Princess Daria, and, by Saint Denis, she
alone can choose! I will give her up to none, and I will see her,
monsieur, if you and fifty of your slaves bar the way with drawn
swords. Au revoir, M. le Prince, I will delay you no longer; we
understand each other, as I think.”
He smiled fiercely, fingering his dagger.
“We do, sir, and we will,” he said, and bowed formally in reply to my
grave salute.
Then he went down, the torches streaming fire before him, and the
great figure of Piotr walking solemnly behind, and I stood on the
steps, gnawing my lips with suppressed fury, and watching them
proceed to a small chapel where they were singing mass.
After that I set about finding the princess. Somewhere, under the
wing of these cloisters, the high-born women were sheltered, but
where? I knew not, and again and again regretted my stupidity in
not bringing Maluta. Either the prince had corrupted the people of
the monastery with bribes, or they were reticent to foreigners, for,
though I spent the greater part of the night in making inquiries and
offering money, I heard nothing, and morning found me as ignorant
as ever of Daria’s fate. That she was still there, I could not doubt;
the place was full of fugitives from Moscow as well as the usual army
of pilgrims, and the country was not in a state for travellers unless in
large parties, and the prince’s serfs were still in force at Troïtsa, for I
saw his liveries everywhere. Morning found me watching the
processions of the devout, going from shrine to shrine with many
genuflexions and prostrations, the sinner and the unabsolved
penitent kneeling in the porticos. Among these numerous
worshippers were many women, and I searched each group eagerly
for one figure and searched in vain, and once or twice I thought I
was followed, which would not have surprised me, knowing Voronin’s
bitter enmity. Yet I could not be certain, though once I came upon
two men who were watching me, by the corner of the chapel. Two
burly fellows, wearing the dress of well-to-do merchants, but looking
the part of ruffians to the life, and one had a deep purple mark upon
his forehead that seemed to me familiar. But it was just after this
chance encounter that something occurred that put the pair entirely
out of my mind. I had left their neighbourhood and was walking in a
quiet angle of the great cloister, listening to the sweet chime of the
bells, when I heard my name called softly, and wheeling about, saw
a veiled female figure standing in the shadow of the wall. For one
wild moment I thought it the princess, and then I saw that the figure
was shorter and rounder, and even before she partly lifted her fata I
recognised Vassalissa, and blessed my good fortune. I was so
overjoyed to see her that I could have embraced her, but she was
poised lightly as a bird, ready to fly and in breathless haste.
“Hush—yes, monsieur, it is I,” she whispered, laughing, and
retreating a little at my eagerness; “I am away from the dragon—
but, in an instant, I must go back—she is at the chapel—no, no, not
Daria!” She laughed at my excitement. “Only old Yekaterina.”
“But where is the Princess Daria?” I demanded; “has she hidden
herself from me—or is it the prince’s doing?”
“A little of both, monsieur,” replied the girl roguishly; “she is afraid of
you, I believe; you know husbands so often beat their wives and
——”
“Sapristi!” I exclaimed; “do you imagine—does she dream that I
would strike a woman?”
Lissa’s blue eyes opened wide. “Would you not?” she asked blankly.
“Do not your men beat their wives?”
“The saints forbid!” I said piously. “A French gentleman beat his
wife? Nay, mademoiselle, never!”
She looked at me with curiosity, and then clapped her hands
gleefully.
“Look you, monsieur, I will marry a Frenchman!” she cried. “Why, my
uncle beat his wife six times a week—and thought it too little.”
I bit my lip. “Perhaps, he also beats his daughter,” I said furiously.
“He used to,” Vassalissa replied, and turned pale. “He is a dreadful
man, monsieur, when he is angry, but you know we women must
obey.”
I choked down my anger. “Tell me no more,” I said harshly, “or I
may kill him—even if he is her father. But where is she? I must see
my wife!”
A roguish look came back into the child’s face.
“She is safe, monsieur,” she said, “and she may see you, if we can
manage it without his knowledge, but if he catches us,” she nodded
her head at me like a little bird, “he will kill us all—everyone!”
“I will risk it,” I said joyfully; “but where and when?”
She looked at me with her head on one side, as mischievous a little
vixen as ever lived.
“I will tell you next week,” she said wickedly.
I caught her round young arm and held her, in spite of her struggles.
“When, child, when?” I demanded savagely; “do not trifle!”
“To-morrow,” she drawled mischievously, “I will tell you.”
I gave her a little shake. “When?” I said, “and where? ’Tis no jest,
mademoiselle, but life and death!”
She looked up at me with wondering blue eyes.
“Do you really love her so?” she whispered.
“Better than life,” I answered solemnly.
She sighed deeply and smiled. “I think she——” The minx broke off,
looking at me sideways.
“Does she?” I cried in a fever, “does she love me?”
She slipped out of my hands and danced off, laughing gleefully.
“I do not know,” she cried, “she is a princess, sir, and no one knows
her mind.”
I could have shaken the provoking little witch.
“Ah, perhaps she loves Prince Galitsyn,” I suggested coldly; “he had
her miniature.”
The girl’s face sobered. “I gave it to him,” she said, “to plague Daria;
she did not mean to do it. We changed the pictures to tease Sophia,
and I gave it to Galitsyn; I was wrong, for all this ill came of it,
but”—she stopped and rubbed her shoulder comically—“I got a
beating for it!” she said, pouting.
“But when can I see her?” I cried passionately. “I will follow you and
find her.”
“No, no,” she retorted, like a flash, “you would not find her, but old
Yekaterina,” and she laughed like a chime of bells.
Then she listened and held up her finger.
“She calls and I must go,” she said, “and Daria will see you here,
monsieur, to-night—at sundown—if all goes well—adieu,” and she
fled from me, perhaps three yards, and then:
“Surely, I shall marry a Frenchman,” she cried to me, her blue eyes
shining; “they do not beat their wives,” and away she ran.
Strangely elated—not only by the thought that the princess had
made an appointment with me, but by her cousin’s manner, which
seemed to imply Daria’s friendliness also—I walked toward the
straggling village, where I could see knots of pilgrims gathered in
conversation, and here and there, on the road, one approached
slowly, on his knees at every five paces, to utter a penitential prayer.
It was broad noonday; the beautiful domes and minarets of the
monastery loomed against a sky as blue as turquoise; in the fields
the moujiks had left their ploughing and knelt, facing the cloister, for
the bells were ringing the call to prayers. A long line of bowed brown
figures trailed slowly up the road to the gate, and the chant of a
psalm came softly to me.
My heart was full of mingled emotions; the thought of her, of the cry
of joy in her cell in the palace, of her manner just before we met her
father, of a look I had surprised once when her eyes dwelt on me. All
these things, that lovers dwell upon and hug to their bosoms, filled
my mind and deafened my ears. I was far away from the pilgrims
now and the houses; I had turned into a path that led across the
fields and was walking slowly—the sunshine golden about me—when
suddenly a stunning blow fell on the back of my head and there was
thick blackness before my eyes, as I reeled and fell, face
downwards, and knew no more.
XXXII: THE MAN WITH THE PURPLE
SCAR
WHEN I came to myself my first thought was of the tryst: was it the
hour to meet the Princess Daria? and then my mind trailed off into
confused recollections; I was conscious of a sharp pain in my head
and my nostrils were assailed by the ill-smelling smoke from a fire of
dried dung and straw. Fuel not being over-plentiful on the wide
steppes of Russia, the moujik commonly resorted to these unsavoury
materials. I opened my eyes slowly, as we do after a heavy sleep or
a swoon, and perceived that I was lying on the ground in a hovel.
The door—too low for a man to stand in upright—was open, and the
draught from it made the fire smoke, while two men were squatted
at the threshold, throwing dice. I tried to turn over to gain a better
view of these ruffians, but I found that I was bound, hand and foot,
and, determined to learn something of my surroundings before they
discovered my revival, I lay still, looking askance at them and little
reassured by my observations. They were as pretty a pair of knaves
as any man would care to see, and a closer inspection showed me
the purple mark on the forehead of one, that I had seen on the man
at Troïtsa, and now, at closer quarters, it seemed even more familiar.
At last, I recognised him; it was my Streltsi of the Zemlianui-gorod,
the dispenser of roubles, Martemian, son of Stenko. Was it possible
that the rogue had pursued me even to Troïtsa, that this was the
fruit of the steward’s revenge? I could not think so, but I did think
that these ruffians were hired by the Prince Voronin to remove me,
and why they had not killed me I could not divine, but reflected that
they might think they had, and it behoved one to lie still and await
developments. Meanwhile, however, the two rogues were deeply
engaged in their game and helping themselves to frequent potations
from a large jug that stood between them. As I watched from under
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