The Marrow of Tradition

“‘I beg your pardon, major,’ observed old Mr. Delamere […] . ‘Sandy is as honest as any man in Wellington.’

‘You mean, sir,’ replied Carteret, with a smile, ‘as honest as any negro in Wellington.’”

Mr. Delamere and Major Carteret debate Sandy’s honesty. While Mr. Delamere unhesitatingly calls his manservant a man, Carteret corrects him, stating that because Sandy is Black, he cannot possibly be as honest as a white man. Here, Major Carteret also implies that Black men are subhuman.

“These old-time negroes, she said to herself, made her sick with their slavering over the white folks, who she supposed favored them and made much of them because they had once belonged to them,—much the same reasons why they fondled their cats and dogs.”

An unnamed servant in the Carteret home is disgusted by Mammy Jane’s behavior. Mammy Jane admonishes her to care for Dodie as if he were her own son. Having grown up free, this servant knows that she is not a mother-by-proxy but merely an employee. She realizes that Mammy Jane is so favored by the Carterets because they see her more as a pet than as a human being. This relates to the motif of dogs and pets.

“‘I warn you, sir,’ rejoined the conductor, hardening again, ‘that the law will be enforced. The beauty of the system lies in its strict impartiality—it replied to both races alike.’”

The train conductor’s explanation that Dr. Burns cannot join Dr. Miller in the Black car develops the theme of The “Poetry” of Racism Versus the Reality of Racism. He calls the system of racism both beautiful and impartial in that its goal is to divide the races, giving neither the freedom to intermingle. His statement is less than factual in several respects: McBane does enter the Black car, and a system that relegates one race to a dusty, dingy car while claiming to be “impartial” is surely not “beautiful.”

“‘White people,’ said Miller to himself […] ‘do not object to the negro as a servant. As the traditional negro—the servant,—he is welcomed; as an equal, he is repudiated.’

Miller was something of a philosopher. He had long ago had the conclusion forced upon him that an educated man of his race […] must be either a philosopher or a fool.’”

Sitting in the Black car, Dr. Miller ponders his fate. He knows he would have been welcome to sit with his friend Dr. Price were he a servant rather than an accomplished physician. Anti-Black sentiment is thus not an absolute hatred of Black Americans but hatred of the idea that they are equal. This thinking-through helps him to cope with everyday animosity and connects to the motif of the philosopher and the fool.

“He had meant to state the situation with Miller frankly, but now that the moment had come he wavered. He was a fine physician, but he shrank from strenuous responsibilities. It has been easy to theorize about the negro; it was more difficult to look this man in the eyes—whom at this moment he felt to be as essentially a gentleman as himself—and tell him the humiliating truth.”

Dr. Price has promised Dr. Burns that he will inform Dr. Miller of the reasons for his exclusion from Dodie’s surgery. However, when it comes down to it, he realizes that his task is to tell his friend and equal that because of simple prejudice, he cannot attend to the duties of his profession. He finds the truth “humiliating,” but it is unclear who should feel humiliated—Dr. Miller, the object of racism, or Dr. Price, who has allowed racism to govern the situation.

“There were thoughtful men, willing to let well enough alone […] There were timid men, who shrank from civic strife. There were busy men, who had something else to do. There were a few fair men, prepared to admit, privately that a class constituting half to two thirds of the population were fairly entitled to some representation […] Perhaps there might have been found, somewhere in the state, a single white man ready to concede that all men were entitled to equal rights before the law.”

The narrator describes the reasons why Major Carteret’s campaign in favor of white supremacy is slow to take off. The reasons given are not flattering: He suggests that while there may perhaps be one white person who fundamentally agrees that Black people have equal rights under the law, the vast majority are simply too timid or busy to fight against white supremacy.

“McBane had always grated upon his aristocratic sensibilities […] the example of such men was a strong incentive to Carteret in his campaign against the negro. It was distasteful enough to rub elbows with an illiterate and vulgar white man of no ancestry,—the risk of similar contact with negroes was to be avoided at any cost.”

Major Carteret laments his partnership with McBane. As an aristocrat, he finds socializing with anyone below his social position distasteful. However, changes in the economy of his state have elevated McBane to a position of wealth. Major Carteret’s mission, then, is in part to keep Black men from accumulating wealth so that he need not associate with them too.

“So powerful a combination of bigot, self-seeking demagogue, and astute politician was fraught with grave menace to the peace of the state and the liberties of the people,—by which is meant the whole people, and not any one class, sought to be built up at the expense of another.”

The narrator gives McBane, Major Carteret, and Belmont three epithets. It is clear that McBane is the bigot, and the implication is that Major Carteret is the “self-seeking demagogue.” The narrator states that this combination threatens not just Black people but the “whole” people: Society suffers whenever one class seeks power by oppressing another.

“To Ellis […] Tom Delamere was a type of the degenerate aristocrat. If, as he had often heard, it took three or four generations to make a gentleman, and as many more to complete the curve and return to the base from which it started, Tom Delamere belonged somewhere on the downward slant, with large possibilities of further decline.”

Ellis considers his romantic rival. While old Mr. Delamere is the peak of the Southern gentleman—someone who not only has good breeding but also true ideals—his grandson has fallen from that elevation. Tom’s downfall suggests that a surplus of wealth and power leads to moral decay.

“This man, too, had a purpose in life, and was willing to die that he might accomplish it. Miller was willing to give up his life to a cause. Would he be equally willing, he asked himself, to die for it?”

Dr. Miller considers Josh’s determination to kill McBane. Dr. Miller knows he is willing to “give up his life”—to wholly dedicate himself to the betterment of the community, even if it means facing racism. However, he is not sure he would be willing to die. He confronts this very test later in the novel, so this passage functions as foreshadowing.

“ […] [S]urely these courteous, soft-spoken ladies and gentlemen, entirely familiar with local conditions […] must know more about it than people in the distant north […] The negroes who waited on them at the hotel seemed happy enough, and the teachers whom they had met at the mission school had been well-dressed, well-mannered, and apparently content with their position in life. Surely a people who made no complaints could not be very much oppressed.”

A group of Northern visitors trusts their white hosts to show them the true living conditions of their Black neighbors. However, they do not go to the trouble to speak to these Black Americans. Those who have the power to shape the visit and its message have the power to shape perception.

“I could have killed her, Olivia! She had been my father’s slave; if it had been before the war, I would have had her whipped to death.”

Mrs. Ochiltree reveals her actions to Olivia. She banishes Julia from her own home, taking her marriage certificate, her money, and her husband’s will. However, Mrs. Ochiltree tells Olivia that she would have done far worse had she still been able to, revealing the violence that underpins even more “genteel” racism.

“Membership in the Clarendon […] was conditional upon two of three things,—birth, wealth, and breeding. […] Delamere was a young man of superficially amiable disposition, vicious instincts, lax principles, and a weak will, and, which was quite as much to the purpose, a member […] “

McBane schemes to achieve admission to the Clarendon Club. He has only wealth, but plenty of it, and if he can find a sponsor, he might succeed in his quest. Tom is a perfect target because he has these three qualities. “Birth, wealth, and breeding” are all superficial traits and not much at odds with Tom’s darker characteristics. McBane plans to take advantage of him.

“The spontaneous activity of the whites was accompanied by a visible shrinkage of the colored population. This could not be taken as any individual indication of guilt, but was merely a recognition of the palpable fact that the American habit of lynching had so whetted the thirst for black blood that a negro suspected of a crime had to face at least the possibility of a short shrift and a long rope.”

The narrator explains that, when the Black populace goes into hiding, it is not because of their guilt but because of their knowledge they may be lynched despite their innocence. This passage describes lynching as a pervasive problem that does not carry out justice but rather creates a spectacle of violence that makes white Americans hungry for more.

“If an outraged people, justifiably infuriated, and impatient of the slow processes of the courts, should assert their inherent sovereignty, which the law after all was merely intended to embody, and should choose, in obedience to the higher law, to set aside, temporarily, the ordinary judicial procedure, it would serve as a warning and an example to the vicious elements of the community, of the swift and terrible punishment which would fall, like the judgment of God, upon any one who laid sacrilegious hands upon white womanhood.”

This passage describes Major Carteret’s campaign, but in highly ironic terms. The description of an “outraged people” abandoned by the legal system more closely resembles the plight of Black Americans, particularly under enslavement, than anything else. Here, though, Carteret thinks of white people as subject to an intolerable wait for justice. By this logic, he rationalizes a violent uprising that he justifies with reference to the imagined specter of Black violence.

“Sandy is absolutely incapable of such a crime as robbery, to say nothing of murder […] I’d as soon believe such a thing of my own grandson as of Sandy!”

Mr. Delamere speaks to Dr. Miller and affirms Sandy’s innocence in the killing of Mrs. Ochiltree. He states that his manservant is equal in his esteem to his own grandson. This is another instance of irony: Mr. Delamere will soon discover it was his grandson who committed the murder.

“A white family raised him. Like all negroes, he has been clay in the hands of white people […] we enslaved these people for our greed, and sought to escape the manstealer’s curse by laying to our souls the flattering unction that we were making of barbarous negroes civilized and Christian men.”

After Major Carteret tells Mr. Delamere that a Black servant’s actions cannot possibly reflect badly on a white family, Mr. Delamere explains his error. He characterizes slavery as the fault of a white man and as a choice that created a “curse.” When white men justified their unchristian action by claiming to be on a civilizing mission, they made themselves responsible for the success of their efforts.

“The white people of the city had raised the issue of their own superior morality, and had themselves made this crime a race question. The success of the impending ‘revolution,’ for which he and his confreres had labored so long, depended in large measure upon the maintenance of their race prestige, which would be injured in the eyes of the world by such a fiasco.”

Major Carteret realizes that if Tom is revealed as Mrs. Ochiltree’s murderer, it will make Major Carteret look like a hypocrite. He made the murder about race, and if it turns out a white man was capable of a brutal assault on a white woman, it will be absurd to continue to claim racial superiority. Major Carteret therefore decides to lie.

“These grotesque advertisements had their tragic side. They were proof that the negroes had read the handwriting on the wall. These pitiful attempts to change their physical characteristics were an acknowledgement […] that the negro was doomed, and that the white man was to inherit the earth and hold all other races under his heel.”

When Jerry bleaches his skin and attempts to straighten his hair, Major Carteret feels some pity for him. However, rather than interpreting Jerry’s efforts as an attempt to pass for white and thus receive the benefits of whiteness, he is convinced that they represent envy of whiteness for its own sake.

“‘What’s the use of hypocrisy, gentleman?’ sneered McBane. […] ‘This is a white man’s country […] ‘ Carteret frowned darkly at this brutal characterization of their motives. It robbed the entire enterprise of all its poetry, and put a solemn act of revolution upon a plane of a mere vulgar theft of power.”

Carteret thinks of his race riot as “poetic” and is upset when McBane states that their motives are simply to grind the Black population down under their heels. If Carteret were to take on McBane’s perspective, he would have to acknowledge their actions as a “theft of power.” He is unwilling to do this and is thus, just as McBane says, a hypocrite.

“Surely, God had put his curse not alone upon the slave, but upon the stealer of men! With other good people she had thanked Him that slavery was no more, and that those who had once borne its burden upon their consciences could stand erect and feel that they themselves were free.”

Olivia thinks of slavery as a “curse” that affects not only the enslaved person but the enslaver. She does not examine the racist assumptions underpinning her formulation of this idea—e.g., why God would have cursed Black people with slavery—nor does she consider the economic motivations that might have led white people to bear a “burden” of their own choosing for so long. However, unlike McBane and some of the other characters of the novel, she at least celebrates the end of slavery.

“Dese gentleman may have somethin’ ter live fer; but ez fer my pa’t, I’d ruther be a dead n***** any day dan a live dog!”

Josh tells his friends that even if Dr. Miller and Watson refuse to fight, he will. He is sick of being treated like a dog and prefers to die as a Black man. This connects to the motif of dogs and pets.

“The petty annoyances which the whites had felt at the spectacle of a few negroes in office […] he realized full well were no sort of justification for the wholesale murder or other horrors which might well ensue before the day was done. He could not approve the acts of his own people; neither could he, to a negro, condemn them. Hence he was silent.”

Ellis gives Dr. Miller a ride during the massacre. More progressive than most of the white characters, Ellis characterizes their motivation as “petty annoyance,” underscoring the disconnect between the situation and the response. However, he fails to grasp how deeply rooted the belief in white supremacy is, and he proves unable to share his thoughts with his Black friend—details that illustrate the limits of white allyship.