Iola Leroy - Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (suggested reading txt) 📗

could have possessed you to do such a foolish thing? Where did she come from.”

“Right here, on this plantation. But I have educated and manumitted her, and I intend marrying her.”

“Why, Eugene, it is impossible that you can have an idea of marrying one of your slaves. Why, man, she is your property, to have and to hold to all intents and purposes. Are you not satisfied with the power and possession the law gives you?”

“No. Although the law makes her helpless in my hands, to me her defenselessness is her best defense.”

“Eugene, we have known each other all of our lives, and, although I have always regarded you as eccentric, I never saw you so completely off your balance before. The idea of you, with your proud family name, your vast wealth in land and negroes, intending to marry one of them, is a mystery I cannot solve. Do explain to me why you are going to take this extremely strange and foolish step.”

“You never saw Marie?”

“No; and I don’t want to.”

“She is very beautiful. In the North no one would suspect that she has one drop of negro blood in her veins, but here, where I am known, to marry her is to lose caste. I could live with her, and not incur much if any social opprobrium. Society would wink at the transgression, even if after she had become the mother of my children I should cast her off and send her and them to the auction block.”

“Men,” replied Lorraine, “would merely shrug their shoulders; women would say you had been sowing your wild oats. Your money, like charity, would cover a multitude of faults.”

“But if I make her my lawful wife and recognize her children as my legitimate heirs, I subject myself to social ostracism and a senseless persecution. We Americans boast of freedom, and yet here is a woman whom I love as I never loved any other human being, but both law and public opinion debar me from following the inclination of my heart. She is beautiful, faithful, and pure, and yet all that society will tolerate is what I would scorn to do.”

“But has not society the right to guard the purity of its blood by the rigid exclusion of an alien race?”

“Excluding it! How?” asked Eugene.

“By debarring it from social intercourse.”

“Perhaps it has,” continued Eugene, “but should not society have a greater ban for those who, by consorting with an alien race, rob their offspring of a right to their names and to an inheritance in their property, and who fix their social status among an enslaved and outcast race? Don’t eye me so curiously; I am not losing my senses.”

“I think you have done that already,” said Lorraine. “Don’t you know that if she is as fair as a lily, beautiful as a houri, and chaste as ice, that still she is a negro?”

“Oh, come now; she isn’t much of a negro.”

“It doesn’t matter, however. One drop of negro blood in her veins curses all the rest.”

“I know it,” said Eugene, sadly, “but I have weighed the consequences, and am prepared to take them.”

“Well, Eugene, your course is so singular! I do wish that you would tell me why you take this unprecedented step?”

Eugene laid aside his cigar, looked thoughtfully at Lorraine, and said, “Well, Alfred, as we are kinsmen and lifelong friends, I will not resent your asking my reason for doing that which seems to you the climax of absurdity, and if you will have the patience to listen I will tell you.”

“Proceed, I am all attention.”

“My father died,” said Eugene, “as you know, when I was too young to know his loss or feel his care and, being an only child, I was petted and spoiled. I grew up to be wayward, self-indulgent, proud, and imperious. I went from home and made many friends both at college and in foreign lands. I was well supplied with money and, never having been forced to earn it, was ignorant of its value and careless of its use. My lavish expenditures and liberal benefactions attracted to me a number of parasites, and men older than myself led me into the paths of vice, and taught me how to gather the flowers of sin which blossom around the borders of hell. In a word, I left my home unwarned and unarmed against the seductions of vice. I returned an initiated devotee to debasing pleasures. Years of my life were passed in foreign lands; years in which my soul slumbered and seemed pervaded with a moral paralysis; years, the memory of which fills my soul with sorrow and shame. I went to the capitals of the old world to see life, but in seeing life I became acquainted with death, the death of true manliness and self-respect. You look astonished; but I tell you, Alf, there is many a poor clodhopper, on whom are the dust and grime of unremitting toil, who feels more self-respect and true manliness than many of us with our family prestige, social position, and proud ancestral halls. After I had lived abroad for years, I returned a broken-down young man, prematurely old, my constitution a perfect wreck. A life of folly and dissipation was telling fearfully upon me. My friends shrank from me in dismay. I was sick nigh unto death, and had it not been for Marie’s care I am certain that I should have died. She followed me down to the borders of the grave, and won me back to life and health. I was slow in recovering and, during the time, I had ample space for reflection, and the past unrolled itself before me. I resolved, over the wreck and ruin of my past life, to build a better and brighter future. Marie had a voice of remarkable sweetness, although it lacked culture. Often when I was nervous and restless I would have her sing some of those weird and plaintive melodies which she had