Dignity and Racism Theme Analysis

At-mun, the young prince, was tall and powerfully built, though he had seen no more than fifteen summers. He carried his head high and his eyes flashed. Ath-mun, the twelve year old princess, smiled shyly at her tribespeople, then turned to whisper in her father’s ear. She leaned against him, hoping to hide the deformed leg that—but for her father’s love—would have caused her to have been drowned as an infant. Only the sacrifice of the imperfect to the God of Life could assure protection for the perfect. But the chief had gone against his tribal code and sacrificed his favorite dog to keep his infant daughter and thus far the God of Life had wreaked no vengeance on him. The At-mun-shi were as pagan as all the tribes in Africa, but they were peaceable and they were, as well, intense in their love of freedom.

But they did not wait alone. From time to time, as more raids were made into the interior, more captives were brought back and thrown into the pits. Some were from tribes the At-mun-shi had known as friendly neighbors. Others were ones against whom they had often defended themselves. Still others were unknown. But differences or similarities mattered little in the pits and even language made small bond. Frightened and angry, the captives milled around in their confinement. They fought for food thrown down to them and had neither hate nor friendship in common, only an animal instinct to survive, though for what no one knew.

One thing he knew, that he looked upon his land for the last time. He called to his people in the At-mun-shi tongue. There were twenty or more in the space near him, yet not one of them answered him. They had been made to forget—not just that they were At-mun-shi but that they were men. They made sounds to each other in the darkness of the hold, but they were only sounds, they had no meaning. All through the night, after the ship had unfurled her sails and caught the wind that would bear her on her course, At-mun stayed awake. He compelled himself to remember as far back as he could in the past that he might have something more than his body to carry into the future.

At-mun was hailed by the auctioneer and his chains were removed. For the first time in more than four months he could walk freely, yet not freely. He had been given a pair of trousers to wear before coming off the ship and he found them even more restrictive than chains. The people on the wharf shouted with laughter at the curious way the black youth walked. At-mun mounted the block. Above him, gulls were dipping and soaring, coming to rest in the tall masts of the White Falcon, filling the air with their raucous cries. At-mun kept his eyes on them.

Amos knew many a slave who had been freed, given his article of manumission by a grateful master in return for years of faithful service, and given the tools of a trade so he might set himself up and be on the way to a self-respecting life. But Amos had deep within him the inheritance of the At-mun-shi, of looking up to someone older and wiser as a protector. The white man, in the person of Caleb Copeland, had become such a protector to Amos. Amos looked to him with reverence and loyalty. He did not want his life to be apart from Caleb’s in any way. As the working member of the Copeland family, Amos had his own dignity. Apart, he would endure the separateness he knew many of his African friends endured because of their lack of status in the white man’s world.

It puzzled Amos that the white people put so much stress on Sunday. Yet it seemed somehow similar to the stress they put on the color of a man’s skin. To Amos, once he understood the Lord, every day was lived with Him. It was not in the Meeting House alone but in the tan yard that he took delight in being a Christian. It was not with his own people that he felt at his best but with all men. He was to go to the end of his days without fully understanding the white man’s attitude to the color of a man’s skin. But it did not trouble or vex him the way it did some of the other slaves with whom he met and talked. It puzzled him. But then, there were many things to puzzle a man.

“Perhaps he thought he was white until he looked in the mirror.”

Mrs. Richardson shook her head. “Perhaps, but it’s more than that. There’s a yearning in him that has its roots in the land from which he came. Oh, it’ s a terrible thing we’ve done, Mr. Richardson, to bring these black people to our land and treat them as we do.”

“Their lot’s not too hard,” he remonstrated.

“Ah, but until they’re given their freedom they count no more than cattle.”

Ichabod Richardson sighed deeply. “They’re not the only ones to be thinking about freedom. Before many more years have passed we’ll be thinking about it too, and not as people but as a nation.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Richardson?”

“I mean that we’ve made others slaves readily enough but we’ll be slaves ourselves if we don’t keep watch.”

Amos had no other thought than to pay the full price. He would not bargain over human flesh nor was it for him to question Mr. Bowers’ decision. When the day came that he could call for Lydia in the cart, he presented himself first to Mr. Bowers. In the presence of witnesses,—one who was a friend of Josiah Bowers, and one of the household servants who was Amos Fortune’s friend, the money was carefully counted out. Mr. Bowers set it aside, then he handed to Amos the necessary confirmation of the transaction. It was another bit of paper that Amos would treasure all the days of his life.

“What he wants all those fine clothes is hard to see,” he said aloud to himself. “They caught his fancy like a child’s. But that’s what they are, those black people, nothing but children. It’s a good think for them the whites took them over.”

In retracing his way, Amos […] faced the mountain he was leaving behind and he talked to it as a man might to a friend.

“I’ll be back,” he said. “Just you wait there, you old mountain, and we’ll soon be talking together every day.” Then he lifted his gaze a little higher and looked skyward. “Thank You kindly, Lord, for the sign You gave me back there in Keene, and thank You for all my fine clothes. Violet’s going to be mighty proud when she sees me in them, but I’ll keep them for our wedding day—her freedom day, so help me Lord.”

Violet would not trust in the back of the cart her treasured plants—the root of lilac, the japonica seedling, the lily-of-the-valley pips, her yellow tea rose. She had heard stories of people going off to live wilderness lives in the great country that had one edge on the Atlantic and reached no one knew how far. And she had been fearful until Amos read to hear from the Bible that the wilderness would blossom like the rose; then she had felt less fearful. But Violet had her own feeling about the Bible words. Though she could not read them for herself she knew that there must be a willingness in the heart of man to work with them. So she saw to it that she had with her a bit of loveliness that she might help in the blossoming of their wilderness.

Always [Violet] thought of him as climbing some mountain in his mind, like that great one to the west on which his eyes would dwell so often and from which he seemed to derive something that was even more than strength.

“Monadnock says it will be good weather today,” Amos would announce on a morning when the mountain stood clear against the sky.

“Monadnock says we’d best not leave any leather out for there’ll be a storm before night,” he would say when a veil of cloud like the thinnest gauze capped the mountain’s crest.

He knew its moods and he talked to it as a friend, and the mountain never failed him.

“That’s a long name […],” Celyndia said one day. “What does it mean, Papa Amos […]?”

“[…] they say in the Indian language it means ‘the Mountain that stands alone.’”

But Amos would not go home while hate burned within him, so he sat on a boulder by the roadside and faced his mountain.

That was the day the men of Marlborough and Dublin had set fire raging on Monadnock to drive out the wolves and bears that had been doing damage among the herds pastured on the slopes. Amos watched the fire climb slowly at first, starting from a dozen different places; then like a wall of destruction it moved up the steep sides until the flames met and linked in a vast pyramid of fire at the summit, consuming everything that could be consumed and leaving the mountain smoldering.

Hate could do that to a man, Amos thought, consume him and leave him smoldering. But he was a free man, and free at great cost, and he would not put himself in bondage again.

Amos unwrapped a handkerchief in which he had put the rest of the money in the stone crock—two hundred and forty-three dollars in all […]. Deacon Spofford noted the among and wrote after it “for the school.” Then, quill poised in hand, he looked across the table at Amos. “And will you say what should be done with it?” he asked.

Amos answered, “The town shall use the money in any way it sees fit to educate its sons and daughters.”

“I have heard that those in your care have not always fared well at the school,” Deacon Spofford said as if he were asking for forgiveness of Amos Fortune.

“That is why I give the money to the school,” Amos replied as he rose to leave.