The double oaken doors, proudly lacquered so as to preserve the hay fork and musket ball scars of yore, swung open before him as the Color Sergeant Major tolled like a towering, meaty bell, “Out of the Way,” an egress announcement repeated for 220 years now, in honor of “Wolf-Hound” Grant’s command to the risen Revolutionaries of the Restoration in 1804. The revolt of the Freemen of Baltimore, 172 strong, had been put down by one better man with sword in hand. The story went that some hillbilly among them so admired the Old Barrett that he turned sergeant for his erstwhile enemy then and there. The fellow's name had been Browning—just Browning—a runaway of some stripe that then and there selected for himself a proper Master. Ever since, it had been axiomatic among the Patriarchs of Dark Hall to act, and indeed BE, the very best Master to his servants, to cultivate loyalty in these treacherous American soils. [1]
Dusk was gathering. It was a tradition among the eccentric Barretts to never leave Wife, Mum, Sister, Daughter or Niece, bereft of comfort and protection, knavishly at dawn, callously at midday, or in any other way then to plunge into the night. Mother had often told him that this was not for her or her kind, but a metaphoric trope employed by the, in actual fact, callous, Barrett men to build and maintain their air of mystique and menace among the swarming “Baddies,” of revolting stripe and even among the cowed staff of Dark Hall.
The Negro doorman and the Colored lantern boy, he knew, each of them, were hiding behind the great door they had pulled open. After Old Grant had faced down those vile English, Dutch, Scotch and Irish ruffians, who later came to him hat in hand for this and for that and for the unspoken, Wolf-Hound, forever towering in Richard’s mind’s eye, had insisted that the doors to Dark Hall would only be maintained, opened and closed by free Negroes and Coloreds. [2]
This ethnic affront now, for over 200 years, held the power of hallowed tradition, to the point that Richard’s otherwise cowardly African Americans would fight to the grim end any white fellow who might move to crack the door—and lo to some Hindoo chamber servant who might ply his hand upon that portal in imitation of an Africa!
It was a very strict arrangement:
-Hindoos, Chinamen and colored women inhabited the house and saw to its many needs, Chinese preferred for librarians, coloreds for cooks, etc.,
-Negroes, Mulattoes and even Quadroons and Octoroons were employed as gardeners, gateboy, doorman, lawn boys, kennel hands and stable boys, lanternboys and spies…
“Ambrose!, Jubal,” Richard addressed the unseen doorman and lantern boy, “keep a keen eye until I return.”
“Yez, Massa Rich!” they declared from behind the great hate-pocked portals.
-Huntsmen, footmen, coachmen and colliers, the servants reserved for training, companionable conversation of the low sort that a leader of fighting men must engage in, for card playing, fencing, shooting and the like, were to be drawn from the dregs of American Humanity, a show of Barrett dominance: Anglo, Scottish, French… and God help us, Irish were to be employed in mixed company, never in an ethnic block.
-German and Dutch were employed exclusively in management of the manor.
Behind him towered his hideous one-eyed nanny, a cipher of stentorian humanity. The effect of that man’s steely gaze could be read differently upon the four figures before Richard, all at attention according to their various ken.
At far left, Dark Hall’s Marshal, Sergeant Jan von Husen, a mongrel Dutch-Bohemian bastard had for a song due to the indiscretion of his dissipated Bohemian sire, stood loyally at attention in paunchy middle years. His clean shaven face, button nose, and blue and gray uniform, was nicely offset by his sash, worn so proudly in Barrett black with white ivory buttons across the heart from right to left. His baton rode on the left, his holstered, .50 Caliber, 1891 Model, broomhandled, Springfield revolver, a monster of its kind, was tied down at the knee and holstered at the right hip.
‘Poor Jan, forever trying to live up to Color Sergeant Major, and falling a foot short among other considerations, his homeland under the Russian Heel, his ancestry defamed.’
A softness poured out of Richard on his account, as he saluted the prime defender of his Mother and siblings, arrayed to the far right. These would be nodded to, not saluted, and not engaged in any sentimental farewell. Such would mar the centuries of cultivated mystique.
“Marshal!”
“Sir!” stiffened wan Jan.
Next from left, before his mighty, belching charge, was O’Neal, his straight-punching coachman, most loyal of his two personal attendants. This man was taken hostage as a servant from the O’Neal cider liquor clan up in West Virginia by Grandpa Blake Barrett. Old Blake had always felt pale next to his nephew Rod, of about the same age. His one great action was the defeat of the O’Neal-MacCoy Clan above Romney, West Virginia—while he was on vacation for his tuberculosis, taking in the fresh Mountain Airs. Yet “duty calls in strange ways,” his dear Grandfather had told him before departing on another foray into the Appalachian Range on a conscription mission for the Queen's Own Rifles, having found the sharp shooter he sought in the terminal way.
O’Neal had been raised up loyal as a post, tall, strong and properly dressed in tweed cap, jacket and sweater over and above canvas trousers. Richard, recalling Old Blake, saluted hard and sharp, like the rifle shot that had taken his Dear Pap, “O’Neal!”
“Stoked and ready, Sir!”
‘Good God,’ he thought, ‘all of my men are twice my age or more!’
Richard then looked straight ahead at the half salute of LaFono, a godless, mongrel son of a French hooker who had fallen in love with an Irish highwayman and housebreaker and had given up his spry and perpetually active spawn to Mum, who declared him the very demon of boyhood and had him raised up by the Negresses. It was said that by age 15 he was ruling the Negroes of Dark Hall like their very king, from an egg crate throne in the barn. He would serve old Blake well, carrying his body back to Harper’s Ferry upon his wee back. LaFono was not much taller than Richard and thence made his favorite sparring partner. The mongrel saved his ring and cudgel ire for O’Neal, who was too solid and big for him to best with fists.
Richard—comically he thought—gave a salute so lazy and dissolute that young brother Donald barked a short laugh and was hushed by his older sister, who fairly hated LaFono, “LaFono?”
“Yez Boss,” drawled he, as enthusiastic as this brute could be for anything but a bottle, broad or brawl, fairly overplaying the Irish half of his heredity, as much negro as any of the true-bred ones. He was short, wiry, bald, wore a pointy China beard and a waxed curl of Irish mustache, moved like a lad of twenty, and grinned like as if Satan writing a review of Milton. Mother had groaned in dismay the first time Young Richard had been escorted to cards with the local gentlemen by LaFono while O’Neal was laid up with a lame ankle, “You right Irish beast! If my eldest son returns a drunk or venereal I shall shoot you myself!”
“Ma’am,” drawled he with a salacious wink that nearly had him shot on the instant.
LaFono, was dressed all in black in loose, rogue threads of fluff and canvas, no doubt to conceal various dishonorable device upon his person.
‘And so, the servant of my lesser nature stands well and ready too.’
With a sigh of reproach and a kind, thou stiff salute, Richard saluted the last of them, Blackie Pimpton, the collier, another old fellow, nearing fifty, who coughed perpetually, dressed all in gray and the darkest of the Negroes, due, so he claimed, to his trade. He held his coal shovel like a lifer in the Queen's Own Rifles and saluted like a saint in blackface at the very instant as his Master, who he read so well, “Sah! Stoked en ready, Sah!”
“Coal Master, Pimpton!”
‘So here we go,’ he thought, as Color Sergeant Major, bawled, “Sir Captain Richard Barrett, ON HIS WAY!’
And they all clapped, despite his duty not to acknowledge their appreciation.
Old Blake had ever said, “Richard, there is a power in mystique."
…
Notes
-1. Not “souls.” Americans of the Lower Orders do not have souls, but soils, a soul that is only elevated by toils in service to the better class of people, less it amount to nothing but a social stain.
-2. Negroes are 3 ¼s or more African. Coloreds are people of half [mulatto], a quarter [quadroon] or an 8th [octoroon]. A person who is less than 1 8th African is categorized based on nationality, Dutch, etc. The Crown does not recognize a mixed American Race of European descent, all such being designated according to native tribal or ancestral European national identity.
