Birthright: A Novel

by T. S. Stribling

"'Pears lak you don' haf to ma'y her—comin' to yo' room."

A queer sinking came over the mulatto. "Listen, Tump, I—we—in my room —we simply talked, that's all. She came to tell me she was goin away. I—I didn't harm her, Tump." Peter swallowed. He despaired of being believed.

But his defense only infuriated the soldier. He suddenly broke into violent profanity.

"Hot damn you! shut yo black mouf! Whut I keer whut-chu done! You weaned her away fum me. She won't speak to me! She won't look at me!" A sudden insanity of rage seized Tump. He poured on his victim every oath and obscenity he had raked out of the whole army.

Strangely enough, the gunman's outbreak brought a kind of relief to Peter Siner. It exonerated him. He was not suspected of wronging Cissie; or, rather, whether he had or had not wronged her made no difference to Tump. Peter's crime consisted in mere being, in existing where Cissie could see him and desire him rather than Tump. Why it calmed Peter to know that Tump held no dishonorable charge against him the mulatto himself could not have told. Tump's violence showed Peter the certainty of his own death, and somehow it washed away the hope and the thought of escape.

Half-way down the hill they entered the edge of Niggertown. The smell of sties and stables came to them. Peter's thoughts moved here and there, like the eyes of a little child glancing about as it is forced to leave a pleasure-ground.

Peter knew that Jim Pink, who now made a sorry figure in their rear, would one day give a buffoon's mimicry of this his walk to death. He thought of Tump, who would have to serve a year or two in the Nashville Penitentiary, for the murder of negroes is seldom severely punished. He thought of Cissie. He was being murdered because Cissie desired him.

And then Peter remembered the single bit of wisdom that his whole life had taught him. It was this: no people can become civilized until the woman has the power of choice among the males that sue for her hand. The history of the white race shows the gradual increase of the woman's power of choice. Among the yellow races, where this power is curtailed, civilization is curtailed. It was this principle that exalted chivalry. Upon it the white man has reared all his social fabric.

So deeply ingrained is it that almost every novel written by white men revolves about some woman's choice of her mate being thwarted by power or pride or wealth, but in every instance the rightness of the woman's choice is finally justified. The burden of every song is love, true love, enduring love, a woman's true and enduring love.

And in his moment of clairvoyance Peter saw that these songs and stories were profoundly true. Against a woman's selectiveness no other social force may count.