Sophie's Choice by William Styron Read Free Book Online Page A

joy, then, when going through fading packets of his mother's letters he should discover one written to her from my great-grandfather describing not only the exact location of the cellar cache but also the details of the sale of the young slave Artiste. And so now two letters intertwine. The following communication from my father in Virginia, which I received just as I was packing up to leave the University Residence Club, tells much notonly about several Southern generations but about the great events that were close on the modern horizon.
    June 4, 1947

My dearest son, I have at hand your letter of the 26th inst., telling of the termination of your employment. On the one hand, Stingo, I am sorry about this since it puts you in financial straits and I am in no position to be of much help, beset as I am already by the seemingly endless troubles and debts of your two aunts down in N.C. who I fear are prematurely senile and in a pathetic way. I hope to be better situated fiscally in some months, however, and would like to think I might then be able to contribute in a modest way to your ambitions to become a writer. On the other hand, I think you may be well shut of your employment at McGraw-Hill, which by your own account sounded fairly grim, the firm anyway being notoriously little else but the mouthpiece and the propaganda outlet for the commercial robber barons who have preyed on the American people for a hundred years and more. Ever since your great-grandfather came back half-blind and mutilated from the Civil War and together with my father tried to set up a humble trade manufacturing snuff and chewing tobacco down in Beaufort County--only to have their dreams shattered when they were forced out of business by those piratical devils, Washington Duke and his son, "Buck" Duke--ever since my knowledge of that tragedy I have had an undying hatred for the vicious monopoly capitalism that tramples the little man. (I deem it an irony that your education should have been received at an institution founded upon the ill-gotten lucre of the Dukes, though that's hardly a fault of yours.) You doubtless remember Frank Hobbs, with whom I have driven to work at the shipyard for so many years. He is a good solid man in many ways, born in a peanut patch over in Southampton County, but as you may recall a man of such simon-pure reactionary beliefs that he often sounds rabid even by Virginia standards. Therefore we do not often talk ideology or politics. After the recent revelation of the horrors of Nazi Germany he is still an anti-semite and insists that it is the international jewish financiers who have a stranglehold on the wealth. Which of course would send me into hoots of laughter were it not so benighted a viewpoint, so that even though I concede to Hobbs that Rothschild and Warburg are certainly Hebraic names I attempt to tell him that greed is not a racial but a human predilection and then I proceed to tick off such names as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Frick, Mellon, Harriman, Huntington, Whitney, Duke, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. This scarcely makes a denton Hobbs, who in any event is able to direct his bile upon a much easier and more ubiquitous target, especially in this part of Va., i.e., and I do not have to tell you--the negro. This we simply do not talk about much or often, for at aet .59 I am too old to engage in a fist fight. Son, the handwriting is on the wall. If the negro is as he is so often said to be "inferior," whatever that means, it is plainly because he has been so disadvantaged and deprived by us the master race that the only face he can present to the world is the hangdog face of inferiority. But the negro cannot stay down forever. No force on earth is going to keep a people of whatever color in the squalor and the poverty I see hereabouts, city and countryside. I do not know if the negro will ever begin to be re-enfranchised in my lifetime, I am not that optimistic, but he certainly will be in yours, and I would give