Carter, and Other People

by Don Marquis

I.-Carter

Carter was not exactly a negro, but he was a “nigger.” Seven drops of his blood out of every eight were Caucasian. The eighth, being African, classified him. The white part of him despised and pitied the black part. The black part hated the white part. Consequently, wherever Carter went he carried his own hell along inside of him.

Carter began to learn that he was a nigger very early in life. Nigger children are not left long in doubt anywhere, and especially in the South. Carter first saw the light—and the shadows—of day in Atlanta. The color line itself, about which one hears so much talk, seemed to run along one end of the alley in which he was born. It was an alley with a gutter and a great deal of mud in it. At the corner, where it gave into a little narrow street not much better than an alley itself, the mud was the thickest, deepest, and best adapted to sculptural purposes. But in the little street lived a number of white families. They were most of them mill hands, and a numerous spawn of skinny children, little “crackers,” with faces white and sad even from babyhood, disputed the mud with the nigger children. Nigger babies of five, four, three, and even two, understood quite well that this most desirable mud, even though it was in the nigger alley, was claimed by the white babies as their mud. It was in every way a more attractive sort of mud than any in the little street proper; and juvenile race riots were of almost hourly occurrence—skirmishes in which the very dogs took part. For the dogs grasped the situation as clearly as did the children; a “nigger” dog, even though he may have started in life as a white man's dog, soon gets a certain look about him.

So there was no chance for Carter to escape the knowledge that he was a nigger. But it was with a thrill that he perceived in his youthful excursions from the home alley, that he was sometimes mistaken for a white child. He was so white in color that one could not tell he was a nigger at a casual glance.

As he grew up, he made another discovery that elated and embittered him still more. He found out who his father was—or rather, who his father had been, since he never saw that gentleman. The white blood in Carter's veins was no common ichor. Because white people seldom speak of these things it does not follow that they are not known pretty generally among the negroes. They are, in fact, discussed.

Carter went to school; he made the further discovery that he had brains—“white man's brains” is the way he put it to himself. Given the opportunity, he told himself, he could go as far as the average white man—perhaps further than the average. The white man's standard, nigger though he was, was still the standard by which he must measure himself. But the opportunity! Even as the youth prepared himself for it he perceived, hopelessly, that it would be denied him.

As he matured he began to feel a strange, secret pride in that white family whose blood he shared. He familiarized himself with its genealogy. There is many a courtier who cannot trace his ancestry as far back as Carter could. One of his forebears had signed Magna Charta; several had fought in the Revolutionary War. There had been a United States Senator in the family, and a Confederate General. At times, feeling the vigorous impulse of hereditary instinct and ambitions, Carter looked upon himself as all white man, but never for long, nor to any purpose. The consciousness of his negro blood pulled him down again.

But, as he grew up, he ceased to herd with black negroes; he scorned them. He crept about the world cursing it and himself—an unfortunate and bitter creature that had no place; unfortunate and bitter, cursed with an intellect, denied that mitigation that might have come with a full share of the negro jovialty of disposition, forever unreconciled.

There was one member of that white family from which he drew so much of his blood whom Carter particularly admired. Willoughby Howard was about Carter's own age, and he was Carter's half-brother. Howard did not distinguish Carter from any other mulatto; probably did not know of his existence. But as Howard reached manhood, and, through virtue of his wealth and standing and parts, began to attain an excellent place in the world, his rise was watched by Carter with a strange intensity of emotion. Carter in some occult way identified himself with the career of Willoughby Howard—sometimes he almost worshiped Willoughby Howard, and then he hated him; he envied him and raged over him with the same breath.

But mostly, as the isolation of his own condition, ate into his soul, he raged over himself; he pitied himself; he hated himself. Out of the turmoil of his spirit arose the one despairing cry, Oh, to be white, white, white!