Orphan of Creation Read Online Free Page A

(though of course not in any way alleviating the situation of the Slaves already imported, or born here). Many thousands more slaves were of course smuggled into the South from Africa since ’08. Still, the trade was illegal and risky—and that cuts into the profits. These Creatures were a stratagem to get ‘round the slavery importation law. Since these Creatures were patently not Human beings, therefore, in a lawyer’s logic, they were not Slaves, and therefore they were legal to import.
The slaver who imported the Creatures, and the men (including Colonel Gowrie) who purchased the beasts, made a d**ning but unknowing admission by taking part in this effort to circumvent the law, for behind the transaction’s claimed legality, based on the assumption that importing non-human Slaves was legal, hid the backhanded admission that Negro Slaves were true men and women, not animals. In spite of all their protestations otherwise, as they bought up the Creatures, the Masters were discarding their sheltering sham belief that the Negro was not a Man. Perhaps that is why I recall the incident so clearly.
Yet it would be impossible to forget the day Colonel Gowrie brought home his new charges. Stranger creatures I have not seen before or since.
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    Creatures? Barbara hesitated over the page as the lightning flickered outside the parlor wall. She skipped ahead to find if Zebulon had described his “creatures,” and quickly found the passage.
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They were much of the same form as men and women, their similarities to humans accentuating rather than disguising the vast difference between our kind and theirs.
They stood erect, and had well-shaped hands (which were not so graceful or clever as those of a man, however). Their heads were quite misshapen, and they were weak-chinned, with such bulging jaws and large fierce teeth that they offered an altogether ferocious aspect that was in marked contrast to their timid behavior. Until they became used to us, the smallest child could startle them quite out of their wits.
They could not speak, but they could convey their wants and desires with astonishing clarity, by means of pantomime, hoots and grunts, grimaces and faces.
As I have observed, their heads were most strangely misshapen, with a large shelf of bone above the brow, and a sort of crest along the center of the skull, running from the highest point of the skull toward the back.
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    Barbara read further, fascinated. It sounded very much like some of the local gentry had taken to importing gorillas, or perhaps chimps, as farm labor! Zebulon must have revised their appearance in his memory, made them seem to look and act more like humans. None of the great African apes were well known before the 1800s, and the gorilla wasn’t described until 1847. They would not be well known on a sleepy Southern plantation, especially to an uneducated slave.
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Their bodies were dark-skinned, and covered rather sparsely with coarse black hair. They wore no clothes willingly, and when the White men would try to force them to cover themselves decently, they would tear the rude shirts to shreds and insist upon their lewd nakedness.
These were the Creatures, the animals, that the latter-day slave traders would present to Gowrie and his friends as the equal of the Negro in all things—intelligence, ability, skill. I have said that the importation of animals to circumvent the slave import laws was a tacit admission that the Negro Slave was indeed human. How doubly d**ning then, how hypocritical and two-faced, for those same White men to expect us to live with and accept these Beasts as our equals, in huts next to our own, as if it was nothing more than housing a donkey alongside a horse. And how foolish. The Negro Slaves, needless to say, were, all of us, every man, woman and child, disgusted and horrified by these unnatural creatures, beasts in the form of men. I remember well the first time I saw them. I worked as a stableboy then, and it was as the