The two Indians crossed the plantation toward the slave quarters. Neat with whitewash, of baked soft brick, the two rows of houses in which lived the slaves belonging to the clan, faced one another across the mild shade of the lane marked and scored with naked feet and with a few homemade toys mute in the dust. There was no sign of life.
“I know what we will find,” the first Indian said.
“What we will not find,” the second said. Although it was noon, the lane was vacant, the doors of the cabins empty and quiet; no cooking smoke rose from any of the chinked and plastered chimneys.
“Yes. It happened like this when the father of him who is now the Man, died.”
“You mean, of him who was the Man.”
“Yao.”
The first Indian’s name was Three Basket. He was perhaps sixty. They were both squat men, a little solid, burgherlike; paunchy, with big heads, big, broad, dust-colored faces of a certain blurred serenity like carved heads on a ruined wall in Siam or Sumatra, looming out of a mist. The sun had done it, the violent sun, the violent shade. Their hair looked like sedge grass on burnt-over land. Clamped through one ear Three Basket wore an enameled snuffbox.
“I have said all the time that this is not the good way. In the old days there were no quarters, no Negroes. A man’s time was his own then. He had time. Now he must spend most of it finding work for them who prefer sweating to do!”
“They are like horses and dogs.”
“They are like nothing in this sensible world. Nothing contents them save sweat. They are worse than the white people.”
“It is not as though the Man himself had to find work for them to do.”
“You said it. I do not like slavery. It is not the good way. In the old days, there was the good way. But not now.”
“You do not remember the old way either.”
“I have listened to them who do. And I have tried this way. Man was not made to sweat.”
“That’s so. See what it has done to their flesh.”
“Yes. Black. It has a bitter taste, too.”
“You have eaten of it?”
“Once. I was young then, and more hardy in the appetite than now. Now it is different with me.”
“Yes. They are too valuable to eat now.”
“There is a bitter taste to the flesh which I do not like.”
“They are too valuable to eat, anyway, when the white men will give horses for them.”
They entered the lane. The mute, meager toys, the fetish-shaped objects made of wood and rags and feathers lay in the dust about the patinaed doorsteps, among bones and broken gourd dishes. But there was no sound from any cabin, no face in any door; had not been since yesterday, when Issetibbeha died. But they already knew what they would find.
