Oh! But I had nothing to mourn, and certainly no business mourning whatever it was I thought I’d had. I squeezed my eyes shut, made my thoughts go black, waiting for sleep.

If she had seen those things, I told myself, she’d have seen my terrible shame, for they went hand in hand. She’d have borne witness to the very things I wanted to hide.

From the journals of George Benham

(Marked by George Benham as: NOT INTENDED FOR PUBLICATION)

Langton’s mulatta. Her eyes have the green cast of ageing metal. A feline slant. She is tall for a woman. Forehead high, and nose sharp. Features (and a cranium) that would not be misplaced on a European. Her skin is not black as such, but burnished to copper. There is a cat’s stillness about her also, disturbed only when she clutches her hands suddenly together, as if staying herself from some dread impulse.

That she’s comely is no surprise. Some men herald the beauty of the mulatto race and I can see why there might be something of a fashion for them, in certain circles. But it is her mind that surprises! Or should I say excites?

Langton contended that it’s not intelligence. Nothing more than a facility for following instructions. ‘Black will not become white,’ he wrote, ‘no more than white will become black. The purification of the Negro is not an object that can be attained.’ Though he conceded, when challenged, the possibility of a higher intellect resulting from the mixing of white into black; the kind of racial bleaching first described by de Pauw. Whites being the stem of all men, to quote Bomare, but also the stern.

White lymph mixing with black, like a cow’s milk into coffee!

What he seems blind to is that the girl’s very existence contradicts his two principal arguments: firstly, that blacks are a separate species, and secondly, that the purification of the Negro is impossible. When I pointed this out, he asserted that black is purified only by becoming white, and never pure itself.

He is as pig-headed as most colonists, and stores each of his thoughts in separate boxes. Trust him, to spawn his own counter-argument!

I’ve told her I want the whole truth about his experiments. The very mention of his name spins her backwards. Langton won’t have spared her. I know him. No friendship can be closer than that of boys who’ve boarded together at school. Langton’s trouble has always been that he forgets the Earth is a divine creation. Nothing in it, above or below, is amenable to man, for man is bound by skin. To him, Ego and all that Ego does is interesting, as Cowper wrote to Lady Hesketh, but it is also in vain.

Her response: ‘There is no such thing as truth.’

Delightful!

‘You’d have it as Plato would,’ I replied.

She asked me why I wanted to know about Paradise, and what I proposed to do with her answers. Her lips crimped up at the corners. A glimmer of that mulishness Langton wrote about: All of a mulatta’s lewd charms, but instead of their pallor and weakness, a nigger’s stubborn streak. A deuced strange way for a man to speak about his own by-blow, but John Langton is a strange man.