SELECTION FROM AN ABANDONED NOVEL

      “I have an opening statement,” he announced, his tone deep and steady.

      “You not on trial here.” Boots waited a few seconds, then resigned himself. It was Smith’s show. “Great, go ahead.”

      “The Europeans abolished slavery a century before the first African was taken from his home and carried off on European slave ships. This abolition was not the work of a single man, an Emperor or a Pope. Region by region, country by country, culture by culture the Europeans came to believe that the ownership of one man by another was sinful in the eyes of the God they worshipped. In 1102, the church in London denounced slavery. In 1315, Louis X decreed that any slave who set foot on French soil would be instantly emancipated.”

      Smith’s eyes came fully open for the first time. “Should we pity these Europeans, trapped as they were in their own morality? They needed labor to suck out the wealth of the new world and Africa was the only place that labor could be found. Thus a justification for slavery had to be created, a fig leaf to cover Europe’s moral rot. Was there ever a possibility other than racial inferiority? Other than declaring Africans to be a sub-human species with, as Supreme Court Judge Roger Taney so delicately put it, `no rights which the white man is bound to respect’?

      “And so it was passed on, from generation to generation, from century to century. Before the Civil War, the planters predict that the Africans, if freed, will slaughter all the white men and rape the white women. The same planters, after the Civil War, declare that unless Africans are suppressed, they will slaughter all the white men and rape all the white women. Fifty years later, D.W. Griffith dramatizes the myth in Birth of a Nation. A hundred years further on, a defense attorney tells a jury that a helpless white man named George Zimmerman had no option when attacked by a black savage named Trayvon Martin except to kill in self-defense.”

      Boots’s hands tightened into fists. He didn’t begrudge Smith his opinions. But he didn’t appreciate being dragged seventy-five miles to hear them, either. Meanwhile, the prick wasn’t finished.

      “Were the Pequot invited to live in that City on the Hill the Pilgrims wished to construct? Or the African slaves who would do the actual constructing? Or the Mexicans caught on the wrong side of the border after the Texas rebellion and the Mexican war? Or the Chinese who were excluded? Or the Japanese who were interned? The answer is no, of course. Racial inferiors could not be allowed to dwell in that holy city….”

      Boots could stand it no longer. “C’mon, man, gimme a fuckin’ break.”

      Kaven Smith rose to his feet, the rattle of his chains and cuffs sounding almost like applause. He raised his chin even further and his mouth curled into a sneer. “The Honorable Elijah Mohammed was right,” he finally announced. “The white man is the devil.”