Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
grimaces, returned to the poop, feeling a little strange at rst, he could hardly tell
why, but upon the whole with regained condence in Benito Cereno.
How plainly, thought he, did that old whiskerando yonder betray a consciousness
of ill desert. No doubt, when he saw me coming, he dreaded lest I, apprised by his
Captain of the crew’s general misbehavior, came with sharp words for him, and so
down with his head. And yet—and yet, now that I think of it, that very old fellow,
if I err not, was one of those who seemed so earnestly eying me here awhile since.
Ah, these currents spin one’s head round almost as much as they do the ship. Ha,
there now’s a pleasant sort of sunny sight; quite sociable, too.
His attention had been drawn to a slumbering negress, partly disclosed through
the lacework of some rigging, lying, with youthful limbs carelessly disposed, under
the lee of the bulwarks, like a doe in the shade of a woodland rock. Sprawling at
her lapped breasts, was her wide-awake fawn, stark naked, its black little body half
lifted from the deck, crosswise with its dam’s; its hands, like two paws, clambering
upon her; its mouth and nose ineectually rooting to get at the mark; and meantime
giving a vexatious half-grunt, blending with the composed snore of the negress.
The uncommon vigor of the child at length roused the mother. She started up,
at a distance facing Captain Delano. But as if not, at all concerned at the attitude
in which she had been caught, delightedly she caught the child up, with maternal
transports, covering it with kisses.
There’s naked nature, now; pure tenderness and love, thought Captain Delano,
well pleased.
This incident prompted him to remark the other negresses more particularly
than before. He was gratied with their manners: like most uncivilized women,
they seemed at once tender of heart and tough of constitution; equally ready to
die for their infants or ght for them. Unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as
doves. Ah! thought Captain Delano, these, perhaps, are some of the very women
whom Ledyard saw in Africa, and gave such a noble account of.
These natural sights somehow insensibly deepened his condence and ease. At
last he looked to see how his boat was getting on; but it was still pretty remote. He
turned to see if Don Benito had returned; but he had not.
To change the scene, as well as to please himself with a leisurely observation of
the coming boat, stepping over into the mizzen-chains, he clambered his way into
the starboard quarter-gallery—one of those abandoned Venetian-looking waterbalconies
previously mentioned—retreats cut o from the deck. As his foot pressed
the half-damp, half-dry sea-mosses matting the place, and a chance phantom catspaw—an
islet of breeze, unheralded unfollowed—as this ghostly cats-paw came
fanning his cheek; as his glance fell upon the row of small, round dead-lights—
all closed like coppered eyes of the coned—and the state-cabin door, once
connecting with the gallery, even as the dead-lights had once looked out upon it,
but now calked fast like a sarcophagus lid; and to a purple-black tarred-over, panel,
threshold, and post; and he bethought him of the time, when that state-cabin and
this state-balcony had heard the voices of the Spanish king’s ocers, and the forms
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