Black Ajax. George Fraser MacDonald
pleasure of your society here for as long as you wish, dear Richard, and by all means take your primitive to New Orleans to do battle, but do not ask me to be present. To a man of sensibility the spectacle of two gross aborigines mauling each other (to death no doubt) would be painful in the extreme. I wish to oblige you in all things, as you know, but I cannot expose myself to that.”
“Why, how you talk!” cries he, red-faced, and perspiring in my drawing-room. “Since when you tender o’ niggers gittin’ hurt, or kilt? I collect you kilt a fair few right here on yore own plantation –”
“Only under the painful necessity of discipline.”
“Painful necessity, yore French ass! Yo’ glad of an excuse to string ’em up!” cries he. He is of inexpressible coarseness, this Molineaux, being American of the English. It is true that I also am in the narrow legal sense American, but of France, which I need not tell you is a vastly different thing. We remain what we have always been, Frenchmen. The English, having no heritage of civilisation, become American without difficulty.
“An’ ’tain’t no necessary discipline that makes you git yo’self a front seat at the whippin’-house whenevah they’s a comely yeller wench to be lashed!” bawls he, leering, and stamping his boots without regard for my Louis Seize carpet. “You jes’ admires to see ’em a-squealin’ an’ a-squirmin’ – oh, Ah knows you, Lucie! You got real dee-praved tastes, cousin!”
I invite him to sit, marvelling that my great-aunt should have married the grandfather of such a creature. “The necessary execution, occasionally, of one of my own slaves for disciplinary reasons, is something I deplore, since it is both expensive and inconvenient. The correction of personable young slave wenches at the whipping-house, artistically administered, is an aesthetic experience,” I inform him. “But I do not expect you to appreciate the distinction. Be that as it may, my Richard, the privilege of watching your ‘fighting nigra’ display his disgusting talents is one which I shall be happy to forgo.”
“Whut you talkin’ ’bout? Ah thought you liked boxin’? Least, you never tire tellin’ ’bout all the great champeens you seen in Englan’. Well, Ah got me a champeen, a nigra champeen, so now! An’ he can whip any man ’twixt heah an’ Texis, ye heah?”
If I shudder, do you wonder? How to explain to this oafish Richard, disdaining the aperitif I offer him and calling for his detestable “corn”, that to compare his black barbarian to the English masters of la boxe is to compare … what? A plough-horse to an Arab blood, a drab to La Dubarry, a Dahomey idol to a Donatello? How to convey that beside the speed, the science, yes, the beauty of an English prize-fight, the spectacle of his brawling brutes would be the crude beastliness of swine in a sty? An impossible task, so I do not attempt it.
If it should seem remarkable that I, an aristocrat of Louisiana, should not only know but admire to excess the pugilistic art, I must digress to tell you how this came about. During the late unpleasantness between France and England which ended so deplorably with the unnecessary catastrophe of Mont Saint Jean,* I had felt it my duty to unsheath the sword in my true country’s service. After all, France is France, a Guise is a Guise, and mere accident of birth on the unfortunate side of the Atlantic cannot alter allegiance, or excuse a gentleman from discharging the obligations which blood and breeding impose. If I hesitated at all, it was at the thought of attaching myself to revolutionary upstarts, but I consoled myself with the reflection that others with lineage hardly inferior to my own had condescended to enlist in the armies which they commanded. In brief, we put the honour of France first, and the likes of Corporal Bonaparte nowhere.
Very well. Of my service I choose to say only that it ended with my being taken prisoner in ’98, thanks to the mismanagement of our Irish expedition by a general who in civil life had been a vendor of rabbit-fur. C’est la revolution. Thereafter I passed some years in captivity in England. No need to speak of that curious country and its inhabitants, save to concede that they know at least how to behave to an enemy nobly born, and, my parole being taken for granted, I found myself a guest rather than a prisoner. And since their polite society is devoted to sport, I became acquainted with, and, I confess, fell under the spell of that great national pastime which they properly call the Noble Art.
At first, to be sure, the notion of watching the lower orders pummelling each other with their bare fists was repugnant. How could it be otherwise, to one whose training in personal combat had been confined to the epee, the sabre and the pistol, and whose whole being and temperament inclined to all that was refined and elegant, and recoiled from the vulgar and brutal? But it chanced that I had my first view of pugilism when I was conducted by Guards officers to an exhibition by the magnificent Mendoza, then past his prime but a master still, and was ensnared forever.
I saw, in the person of that amazing Jewish athlete, the embodiment of graceful motion allied to power, intelligence, and skill, and realised that here was the ultimate expression of the human body in action. Here was the beauty of the ballet wedded to the violence of the battle, the destructive force, unaided by any weapon, of Man the Animal, trained and controlled to complete harmony, terrible and sublime. I came, I saw, I marvelled at craft so complete that it seemed elevated to art.
This was mere demonstration, of course, sport without danger in which the Hebrew master and his partner displayed the shifts and feints and counters and bewildering nimbleness of foot which are the prime-to-octave of the prize ring. It was intoxication of the soul to behold. Only later, when I saw pugilists engage in deadly earnest, did I realise that it was something more, that here was Truth, the unleashing of man’s deepest primordial instinct to destroy, to inflict pain, to wound, and to kill – but with a finesse whose delicacy would become the finest surgeon, and a dispassionate detachment worthy of the classic philosophers. In what other sphere, I ask, can the connoisseur witness and savour at length the slow torture, exquisitely inflicted, of one human creature by another, and experience the thrilling feral joy of the expert tormentor and the helpless protracted suffering and shame of the victim? Let no one deny to the English their share, however modest, of genius, for they have devised the purest form of cruelty, beyond the imaginings of clumsy Inquisitors or the pathetic de Sade, whereby man inflicts punishment, mutilation, agony, and humiliation on his own kind, gradually and deliberately, with the most subtle refinement, and calls it a game.
I do not box myself. I have aptitude enough for manly sport, and fence, shoot, and ride with more than ordinary address, but while I have indulged myself with dreams in which I possessed the prowess of a Belcher or a Mendoza, practising my art on impotent opponents, I recognise that this is beyond my power. I could not achieve “the best” – and even the best in the prize ring, where the difference between champions is a hair’s breadth, must endure their portion of suffering. I do not share the peculiar English satisfaction of experiencing pain while inflicting it. Sufficient for me to enjoy the art and the agony as a spectator.
To speak of this to my boorish Richard Molineaux would have been to expound Epicurus to a Hottentot. He had no thought beyond his “fightin’ nigra” and his forthcoming triumph over another savage, the Black Ghost, the reigning monarch of what passed for prize-fighting in our southern states, a revolting parody of boxing more akin to the ancient pankration, in which the contesting slaves battered, kicked, gouged, tore, bit, and wrestled each other in murderous frenzy, frequently with fatal results. This Black Ghost, I was informed, had killed four opponents and maimed a dozen others, and was accounted invincible by the patrons of this loathsome butchery.
“Say, but jes’ wait till ma Tom sets ’bout him!” exults my gross companion. “Why, that Tom, he the meanest, strongest, fightin’est buck in the country! He goin’ chaw up this Black Ghost an’ spit him all over the bayous, yessir! Ah tell yuh, Lucie, he licked ev’y fightin’ nigra in Virginny, an’ he tear the ears an’ bollix offa that ole Ghost an’ mash his face in like ’twas a rotten melon! He got fists like steel balls, and yuh couldn’t fell him with a ten-pound sledge, no suh …”
And more, and more of the same in praise of his prodigy, until to quiet him I consent to view this behemoth in the slave quarters. I expect, from Richard’s description, to see