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

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
and Byron—it may be, something like the hypochondriac Benito Cereno—took to
their hearts, almost to the exclusion of the entire white race, their serving men,
the negroes, Barber and Fletcher. But if there be that in the negro which exempts
him from the inicted sourness of the morbid or cynical mind, how, in his most
prepossessing aspects, must he appear to a benevolent one? When at ease with
respect to exterior things, Captain Delano’s nature was not only benign, but
familiarly and humorously so. At home, he had often taken rare satisfaction in
sitting in his door, watching some free man of color at his work or play. If on a
voyage he chanced to have a black sailor, invariably he was on chatty and halfgamesome
terms with him. In fact, like most men of a good, blithe heart, Captain
Delano took to negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to
Newfoundland dogs.
Hitherto, the circumstances in which he found the San Dominick had repressed
the tendency. But in the cuddy, relieved from his former uneasiness, and, for various
reasons, more sociably inclined than at any previous period of the day, and seeing
the colored servant, napkin on arm, so debonair about his master, in a business so
familiar as that of shaving, too, all his old weakness for negroes returned.
Among other things, he was amused with an odd instance of the African love of
bright colors and ne shows, in the black’s informally taking from the ag-locker
a great piece of bunting of all hues, and lavishly tucking it under his master’s chin
for an apron.
The mode of shaving among the Spaniards is a little dierent from what it is
with other nations. They have a basin, specically called a barber’s basin, which
on one side is scooped out, so as accurately to receive the chin, against which it is
closely held in lathering; which is done, not with a brush, but with soap dipped in
the water of the basin and rubbed on the face.
In the present instance salt-water was used for lack of better; and the parts
lathered were only the upper lip, and low down under the throat, all the rest being
cultivated beard.
The preliminaries being somewhat novel to Captain Delano, he sat curiously
eying them, so that no conversation took place, nor, for the present, did Don Benito
appear disposed to renew any.
Setting down his basin, the negro searched among the razors, as for the
sharpest, and having found it, gave it an additional edge by expertly strapping it
on the rm, smooth, oily skin of his open palm; he then made a gesture as if to
begin, but midway stood suspended for an instant, one hand elevating the razor,
the other professionally dabbling among the bubbling suds on the Spaniard’s
lank neck. Not unaected by the close sight of the gleaming steel, Don Benito
nervously shuddered; his usual ghastliness was heightened by the lather, which
lather, again, was intensied in its hue by the contrasting sootiness of the negro’s
body. Altogether the scene was somewhat peculiar, at least to Captain Delano, nor,
as he saw the two thus postured, could he resist the vagary, that in the black he
saw a headsman, and in the white a man at the block. But this was one of those
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