The Wish House and Other Stories Read Online Free

Eurasians, who shall write so that men shall be pleased to read a story of Eurasian life; then outsiders will be interested in the People of India, and will admit that the race has possibilities.”
    It could almost be George Eliot, who believed the novel’s moral purpose was to extend our moral sympathies, who wrote of those hidden lives and “that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
N EGROES
    Margaret Peller Feeley in “The
Kim
that Nobody Reads” has shown how Kipling altered the drafts of his novel to tone down the glamour of the English and eliminate casual racist remarks. Of course, there will always be criminographers for whom the most damning interpretation of evidence is the truth—here, that Kipling’s first thoughts were his true thoughts. Casual racist remarks, then, are what came naturally to Kipling.
    But it is surely the case that what is considered—those alterations, those tonings down—should itself be taken into consideration.
    The letters yield a further example. On January 11, 1904, Kipling composes an inscription for the Shanghai Memorial and sends it to Sir Lewis Mitchell. Mitchell objected to the phrase “in fight against savages,” “as likely to hurt Native feeling a century hence. Kipling at once agreed to my substituted words ‘the Matabele.’”
    If this is evidence of Kipling’s insensitivity, it is equally evidence of his sensitivity.
    But consider this difficult, unpleasant passage in
From Sea to Sea
(vol. 2, p. 9 ff): “Now let me draw breath and curse the negro waiter and through him the negro in service generally. He has been made a citizen with a vote; consequently both political parties play with him. But that is neither here nor there. He will commit in one meal every
bétise
that a scullion fresh from the plough-tail is capable of, and he will continue to repeat those faults.”
    Kipling’s target here isn’t simply “the negro in service,” though he continues in this irritated-diner vein for a few more sentences, until he is flagrantly, unforgivably racist: “Now God and his father’s Kismet made him intellectually inferior to the oriental.”
    And here Kipling has no excuse.
    He cannot hide behind the persona of the brash globe-trotter, as he does successfully elsewhere. The person opining is unmistakably Kipling himself, in
propria persona.
And if he isn’t asserting
white
racial superiority, but
oriental
racial superiority, he
is
insisting on black racial inferiority.
    “He is a big, black, vain baby and a man rolled into one. A coloured gentleman who insisted on getting me pie when I wanted something else, demanded information about India. I gave him some facts about wages. ‘Oh hell,’ said he cheerfully, ‘that wouldn’t keep me in cigars for a month.’ Then he fawned on me for a ten-cent piece. Later he took it on himself to pity the natives of India—‘heathen’ he called them, this Woolly One whose race has been the butt of every comedy on the Asiatic stage since the beginning.”
    It doesn’t help that Kipling is offended on behalf of the Indian, nor that he shares an Indian race prejudice.
    He identifies the Negro’s head as Yoruba: “He did his thinking in English, but he was a Yoruba negro, and the race type had remained the same throughout his generations. And the room was full of other races—some that looked exactly like Gallas (but the trade was never recruited from that side of Africa), some duplicates of Cameroon heads, and some Kroomen, if ever Kroomen wore evening dress.”
    So what is Kipling’s message here? It is this. The persistence of racial type will survive evening dress and “thinking in English.” That is the message.
    And the type is inferior in perpetuity: “The American does not consider little matters of descent, though by this time he ought to know all about ‘damnable heredity.’ As a general rule he keeps himself pretty far from the negro and says unpretty things about him. There are six million