“Quarrels? Opposition? I hold no opposition to your father’s views! I agree with them, each and every one. Slavery, Starbuck, is a menace to our society. I simply disagree with your father’s contemptible logic! It is not enough to pray for an end to the peculiar institution, we have to propose practical arrangements for its abolition. Are the slaveholders to be recompensed for their pecuniary loss? And if so, by whom? By the federal government? By a sale of bonds? And what of the Negroes themselves? Are we to repatriate them to Africa? Settle them in South America? Or are we to breed the darkness out of them by forcible miscegenation, a process, I might say, which has been well begun by our slave owners. Your father made no mention of these matters, but merely had recourse to indignation and prayer, as if prayer has ever settled anything!”

“You do not believe in prayer, sir?”

“Believe in prayer!” The thin man was scandalized by the very thought of such a belief. “If prayer solved anything there’d be no unhappiness in this world, would there? All the moaning women would be smiling! There would be no more disease, no more hunger, no more appalling children picking their snot-filled nostrils in our schoolrooms, no more sniveling infants brought for my admiration. Why should I admire their mewling, puking, whimpering, filthy-faced offspring? I do not like children! I have been telling Washington Faulconer that simple fact for fourteen years now! Fourteen years! Yet my brother-in-law seems incapable of understanding the simplest sentence of plain-spoken English and insists I run his schoolroom. Yet I do not like children, I have never liked children and I hope that I never shall like children. Is that so very hard to understand?” The man still clung to his awkward burdens, even as he waited for Starbuck’s response.

Starbuck suddenly understood who this bad-tempered disorganized man was. This was the he-biddy, the poor relation, Faulconer’s brother-in-law. “You’re Mister Thaddeus Bird,” he said.

“Of course I’m Thaddeus Bird!” Bird seemed angry that his identity needed confirmation. He glared bright-eyed and bristling at Starbuck. “Have you heard a word I said?”

“You were telling me you do not like children.”

“Filthy little beasts. In the North, mark you, you raise children differently. There you are not afraid to discipline them. Or beat them, indeed! But here, in the South, we need differentiate our children from our slaves and so we beat the latter and destroy the former with kindness.”

“Mister Faulconer beats neither, I believe?”