I see that now, which I did not see until I came down here.
But escape it you cannot.
The curse of the black race is God’s curse.
But the curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God’s chosen own because He once cursed Him.’ ” Her voice ceased.
Across the vague oblong of open door fireflies drifted.
At last Christmas said:
“There was something I was going to ask you.
But I guess I know the answer myself now.”
She did not stir.
Her voice was quiet.
“What?”
“Why your father never killed that fellow—what’s his name? Sartoris.”
“Oh,” she said.
Then there was silence again.
Across the door the fireflies drifted and drifted. “You would have.
Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, at once, immediately.
Then he knew that she was looking toward his voice almost as if she could see him.
Her voice was almost gentle now, it was so quiet, so still.
“You don’t have any idea who your parents were?”
If she could have seen his face she would have found it sullen, brooding.
“Except that one of them was part nigger.
Like I told you before.”
She was still looking at him; her voice told him that.
It was quiet, impersonal, interested without being curious.
“How do you know that?”
He didn’t answer for some time.
Then he said:
“I don’t know it.” Again his voice ceased; by its sound she knew that he was looking away, toward the door.
His face was sullen, quite still.
Then he spoke again, moving; his voice now had an overtone, unmirthful yet quizzical, at once humorless and sardonic: “If I’m not, damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time.”
She in turn seemed to muse now, quiet, scarcebreathing, yet still with nothing of selfpity or retrospect:
“I had thought of that.
Why father didn’t shoot Colonel Sartoris.
I think that it was because of his French blood.”
“French blood?” Christmas said. “Don’t even Frenchmen get mad when a man kills his father and his son on the same day?
I guess your father must have got religion.
Turned preacher, maybe.”
She did not answer for a time.
The fireflies drifted; somewhere a dog barked, mellow, sad, faraway.
“I thought about that,” she said. “It was all over then.
The killing in uniform and with flags, and the killing without uniforms and flags.
And none of it doing or did any good.
None of it.
And we were foreigners, strangers, that thought, differently from the people whose country we had come into without being asked or wanted.
And he was French, half of him.
Enough French to respect anybody’s love for the land where he and his people were born and to understand that a man would have to act as the land where he was born had trained him to act.
I think that was it.” Chapter 12
IN this way the second phase began.
It was as though he had fallen into a sewer.