The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories

SUZETTE HADEN ELGIN Hush My Mouth

First time ever I saw a Silent, I was no more than a tiny child; I might have been five years old. And it meant nothing to me. It was just a woman, and not a very pretty one to look at, with her head shaved. I remember her skull; it had a lumpy look to it that bothered me. I had never before seen a bald woman, nor very many bald men. I wasn’t eager to see this one, either, because my sisters had been pushing me on the swing that hung from our black walnut tree, and I had complained bitterly at being made to leave that and go look at this woman passing by.

But my father paid no mind to my fuss, hauling me up onto his shoulder and almost running out to the edge of the street, the other children hurrying along behind us. He stopped at the curb and he shook me a little bit to be sure he had my attention, and he said to me, “Now you remember that, boy! You put it away in your heart, and you remember it, that there was a morning a Silent walked by your house so close you could’ve touched her if you’d had a mind to!” The woman turned to look at us as she passed, and her smile was the only thing about her not black as the inside of our water well, and Daddy squeezed my thighs where he had me braced on his shoulder and added, “And you remember she smiled at you, child! See you remember that, forevermore!” And I have remembered it, as he told me to do, all these years.

She smiled at Matthias Darrow, too, him standing down on the corner of our street with his father and his grandmother and his two big brothers. I suppose his mother was busy with her everlasting tending of the sick and with someone she couldn’t leave, even for this occasion. Matthias was there, and all my other friends and their parents, lining both sides of the street to watch a Silent go by on her way to somewhere. I don’t know where she could have been going; nobody told me to concern myself with that. But we all stood and watched her walk to the end of the street, tall and straight and stake-thin in her long black dress. We watched her turn the corner and go on down the side street. Not until she was out of sight did anybody move to leave the curbs and go back to what they had been doing. I remember there was a little bit of a breeze, and it stirred the branches of the pink mimosa and spread their perfume all around; I remember that smell, mimosa and hot dust and the several smells of sluggish summer river, mixed. I can smell it now, as strong as I smelled it that day.

And I remember Matthias, watching the Silent and shouting out, “Morning, ma’am!” as she went by, and his father clapping a swift hand over his mouth and bending down to tell him that he’d appreciate it if he’d behave like he had good sense, whether he did or not. And Matthias, looking up over Mr Darrow’s huge hand with eyes wide and round and scared, wondering what he’d done.

Matthias broke this morning. I heard it happen. The Lord God help me, please, I’ll hear it forever, the sound of his head — the sound his head made as he smashed it against the wall of his room. Bare flesh, not a strand of hair to cushion it, smacking against white-washed brick. Seven blows, it took. Seven times, that sound. That unspeakable sound.

How could a human being have the strength to take his life by battering his own head against a wall? Will you tell me that? How could he stay conscious long enough to get to the fatal blow that ended it? And to do it silently! How in the name of God could you do that and stay silent?

Matthias did. I could not have done it, but he did. I swear to you, as I shall swear to the judges that come to question me. I will close my eyes three times, signifying NO, when they ask me if Matthias Darrow cried out at the last. His family has no shame coming, for he died without so much as a gasp. And the town we came from, he and I, all those people who were so blazing proud to have two of us choose to be Silents, there’s no shame coming to them, either. We took our vows together, Matthias and I, both of us just seventeen; and now he is gone.

We were expecting that he would do something. All of us had seen it coming. He had taken to chewing at his lips, so that they were always cracked and bloody. His fingers were forever twitching; he’d notice, and he’d shove them out of sight into the pockets of his robe. We watched him day by day as the tension drew his skin tight to his skull, till the bones strained to shove through the flesh and the whole head gleamed like polished ebony. When he started wearing the leather gag even in the daytime, that foul gag that stands witness to our frailty and guards us from the word spoken in sleep, we knew that he was going to break. If there had been anything we could have done to help him, we would have done it, but there was nothing to do. When the lust for language consumes a man, you can only watch him burn and dedicate your prayers to him.

We were on our guard on his behalf; we were not just praying. We had taken to being wary around him. When we walked along the balconies of the shelterhouse, one of us would walk at his side next the rail, and two others ahead and behind him, so that he could not throw himself into the courtyard. The elders had begun tasting his food and drink at the table openly, so that if he were so mad as to poison either he would have to take one of them with him into death. We watched what he picked up and what he put down; we went with him when he walked out of the building. At least one of us stayed close by no matter what he was engaged in; we were watchful of our brother. Except in the privacy of his room, where we could not follow.

I am sure I’m not the only one who wishes we had been more careless. If Matthias had been able to slip poison into his soup in the dining room, it would have been easier for him, and I would not now be hearing in my soul the wet thud of his skull against brick.

Still. It must be noted that Matthias Darrow did not give in. For his family there will not be the shame of a failed Silent with broken vows, sent home from the shelterhouse in disgrace. He spared them that. He spared all his vast family, spared them the scandal that shames the line down to the cousins many times removed, that is the end of respect and the beginning of a courteous pity that is like a stone hung round the neck. Matthias saw to it that his people did not have that shame to endure. The Lord God help me be as brave if I come to such a pass. The Lord God grant I never come to such a pass, and let my never-ending silent dialogue with my own foolish self be my worst failing.

All of this, we will be reminded, was born of the sin of pride, beside which murder and debauchery are no more than childish foibles. First the white man’s pride; and that not being foul enough, the black man’s pride to cap it off. Pride, that is not called the worst of all the sins for idle reasons. When the preacher comes this Sunday, that will be his sermon, and his text will be “Pride goeth before a fall”. There is no room in this house where that text is not burned into a beam or painted over a window. Because of what pride has brought us to.

If the Union Army had let us serve with them in the Civil War, the North would have won; no one disputes that. President Lincoln himself said it was so — they would have won! But they wouldn’t allow it. Not them. No black man was going to put on the uniform of a Union soldier, or ride a horse of the Union Cavalry, or march in the least last straggling row of the Union infantry. They were told we’d serve in our own clothes, or serve naked, if they felt that would be sufficient to keep us from being mistaken for their comrades at arms. But they were stiff-necked; it made no difference. No black — Negroes, they called us then — no Negro was going to be able to say he had served in the Union Army. We were not fit even to die beside them; that was their position on the matter, and they would not budge from it.

You’d have thought the Confederates would have had better sense. White and black, we’d played together as children and suckled at the same black breasts as infants and gotten blind drunk together as young men. But the Confederate Army followed the Yankees’ lead, bound they’d outdo them. If a Negro was not good enough to soldier for the Union, well then by god he was twice that not good enough to soldier for the South! Damn fools they were, too, for we would have fought to the death beside them and no quarter given, after the way the Union spurned us.

Abraham Lincoln, standing there for all to hear in Washington, and then the words spread across the newspapers for all to read, he said: “We shall not send our women into battle; we shall not send our children. And we shall surely not send our Negroes, who are as children, to shed their blood in a war they are not even able to understand.” He said that, and we heard it, and I suppose it was nothing we hadn’t heard before. But somehow his saying it made it official. He made it the official public policy of the Disunited States of America, that the blacks had not even the wisdom of children. After that, we would willingly have fought for the South, even if it meant fighting beside a man who’d ordered us whipped by the cruellest black driver in the worst slave state there ever was.

They wouldn’t have it. And later, when it got to be obvious that the war could not be won without us, they still would not, for neither side was willing to be the first to say, “Well, we were wrong; I guess the blood of a black man is good enough to spill for this country.”

Pride! Thus it was that nobody won that awful war, that dragged on eight terrible years. Oh, the South claimed the victory, in the strict sense of the word; there being so many blacks at home to see to the work of the plantations and the farms and the Southern towns, the South lasted longer. It was the North that first proposed to stop fighting. But there was no victory. The time came when there was nobody left with the will to fight any more, that’s all. They just laid down their weapons and went home. What was left of them. To what was left of home.

They didn’t last very long. Smallpox and cholera took most of them that didn’t die of their battle wounds. A handful came stumbling back to the burned-out ruins that had been the glorious South; and they were ruins, themselves.

We had been prepared to kill every last one of them; with our bare hands if need be. My grandfather swears to that, and I believe him. We had been ready to kill them all. We were four million strong; even half-starved we had more strength than those ragtag men that lived through the Civil War to come home. Our women were ready, and our children, too, to do whatsoever had to be done.

But when it came right down to it we had to kill very few of them. The young men, and the older ones that had gone in when the young men were mostly dead and maimed, they brought their diseases home with them. And they went to sleep and eat with their wives and their children and their old people. The sicknesses went through those families like wildfire through a piney woods.

In another time, we would have nursed them. Some of them would have lived, and many of us would have died, and when it was over we would have been as mixed up as ever. But not this time. They hadn’t considered us fit to die with them in their filthy war; we were not willing to die with them in their filthy peace. We lifted no hand either to help or to harm them, we simply waited. And when it was over we rounded up the pitiful remnant that did not die, man or woman or child, and we sent them with all courtesy into the North, out of New Africa for ever, beyond the walls at the border.

They went docilely enough. As for the occasional damn Yankee fool that decided he’d ride South and see about bringing New Africa back into the United States, we tried to reason with him. And if he would not be reasonable we took him into our courts and tried him swiftly and carried out the sentence with sufficient dispatch to discourage others from any such hopeless lost notion.

So. There we were. A sovereign nation. Mexico to the south of us, the United States to the north of us, and the oceans at either side. All the land there for our taking, much of it burned over and scorched black and covered with destruction, but no damage done that we weren’t capable of setting to rights. We made the land clean again, and we cleared away the gutted buildings and put up new ones; we laid out farms and streets and set ourselves to live a decent life for the first time since we were torn out of the breast of Africa and flung like cattle onto this land.

We should have been all right. We had everything we wanted, and that one most precious thing of all — we were free. Free! The work of our hands was there to do, and the tools to do it with, and its fruits were for the first time to be ours. Hallelujah, it was the Promised Land; praise be to God, it was Eden.

And why, then, do we find ourselves, all these years later, with the work only half done, and half our strength and passions still devoted to squabbling? And the North once again eyeing our borders, thinking the time will come when we’ll be ripe for conquering?

Pride again. We will be reminded, come Sunday. Pride! We who thought ourselves so fine, watching the white man both Northern and Southern destroy himself and all his kin and all his substance for pride. More fools we, because we were just as human when the time came to test us.

We’d never given the problem any thought, my grandfather says. There’d been no time to think about it, and no reason. Scattered as we were, subjugated as we were, the matter of language had not come up; under the lash, any word will do to scream with.

But we’d brought many dozens of languages with us from Africa, each one of them the language of a proud people with a proud heritage. And when it came time to choose one, to decide which one we would speak now in this New Africa, there was no question in anybody’s mind. The only possible choice for the New African tongue was whatsoever language he spoke. “Why, my language, obviously!” And so said they all.

Bitter. Bitter, the fruit of pride, and harsh in the mouth. Oh God in Heaven, be you black or white or the colour of mimosa flowers, it was bitter! That it should come to this. our children free to go to school and learn, finally, and every forty or so in a different school learning a different language. You talk of segregation! And in our legislature, and in our churches and our colleges and our publishing houses and all our daily business of life, it is no African language we speak. Pride will not let us choose one. Only in the white man’s hated English are we able to govern this land, the very name of which is a white man’s name, because our pride would not and will not let us agree on a name in one of our own tongues.

And so there are Silents.

Sworn to use no language. Not spoken; not written; not language of the hands. Only that irreducible minimum of all signs that must be used if we are to survive. Four signs a day, we are allowed, if by no other means can we make our brother or our sister understand that the building is on fire or the piece of meat on the table is unsafe to eat or a baby is about to be born. And not even those four, unless we are forced to them.

Before we come into the shelterhouse, before we make our vows, those who serve as liaison between the Silents and the world explain this to us; they make it very certain that we understand, before they let us come.

We will be silent. That is the vow we take. Until death; or until our people can lay aside the pride that destroys them and choose a language that is not a white man’s language. Whichever comes first.

Matthias Darrow, the Lord God have mercy on his soul, could not wait any longer.