"It was in the year of 1933 and Grace and her father were heading southward with their army of gangsters" "After leaving Dogville they had returned to Denver only to find that the mice had been well and truly playing while the cat was away and new forces had taken over their former possessions" "The result was a particularly unappealing retreat that had brought them through the state ofalabama this spring in search of new hunting grounds" "No, they will not admit it!" "But it's a fact!" "Deep down inside there isn't a woman alive who doesn't nurture these fantasies whether they involve harems or being hunted through the jungle by torch-bearing natives however much they go on and on about civilization and democracy sexy it ain't!" "Grace and her father had resumed their legendary discord even as they pulled out of Dogville and although Grace had been employing the technique of letting things go in one ear and out the other for a pretty long time now" "she was, to be frank, somewhat weary of her unbearably overweening daddy who still believed any nagging woman could be pacified with the good old bouquet of carnations" "I bet you wouldn't have had the guts to talk like that if mother had been alive" "No, you are right, my girl, I would not!" "we're going, boss" "Miss, Lady, can I talk to you?" "Can I talk to you?" "Yes?" "They going whip him!" "I knew they would!" "Itjust ain't true!" "He ain't stole nothing!" "They put that Rhenish wine from Mam's bedside table in his cabin just to give 'em somethin' to whip him for!" "That's the Iaw" "One bottle and it's a whippin', that's "Mam's Law!"" "what are you talking about?" "who... who are they going to whip?" " Timothy!" " why?" "That's how they do us slaves..." " slaves?" " Yes, Ma'am" "Surely you've heard of slaves?" "That's what we is at Manderlay this godforsaken place!" "That's how I got out, when a whippin's in the offing' they take out a section of the fence" "Listen, Grace!" "It's a local matter and it's not for us to poke our noses in why should we not "poke our noses in", just because it's a local matter?" "It's certainly not our responsibility" "You think the Negroes wanted to leave their homes in Africa?" "!" "wasn't it us who brought them to America?" "we have done them a great wrong, it's our abuse that has made them what they are" "Untie him!" "Stop!" "'Fraid not, lady!" "slavery was abolished seventy years ago" "Ifyou won't obey that law ofyour own accord, we will compel you to do so!" "Mam!" "Help me get her inside!" "water for Mam!" "Quickly" "Spare me your hypocrisy, you dumb old slave!" "Get out, leave us alone!" "Ifyou're looking for sympathy, don't expect any from me" "Listen, I'm very old and unfortunately, dying" "I should like to ask you for a favor" "If it involves allowing you to go on exploiting these people like slaves" "I'm sorry, I'II just have to say no" " No matter how "dying" you are" " slavery is over now, I can see that" "It had to come one day" "All right, I'II probably refuse you, but you might as well ask" "There's a book, it's under my mattress" "I should like you to retrieve it and burn it for me" " It would be best for everyone" " I'm sure you think so!" "But it's my view that anything no matter what, is best served by being brought out into the open" "I beg you, one woman to another woman to woman, makes no difference to me" "the sins of the past are sins I cannot and do not wish to help you erase" "And now I must leave you, I believe my father's men have unlocked the gate so now everybody can come and go as they please" "please let everyone else know on the plantation that from now on they can all enjoy the same freedoms as any other citizen of this country" "And the Constitution can be found at any courthouse" "And here's a tip for when you sue the family there's a weighty written evidence concealed in this very room" "She's dead" "The old devil!" "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, Missy!" "No, no, if any of us deserves an apology it's not me!" "I'm afraid" "There's nothing to be afraid of!" "we've taken all the family's weapons!" "No" "I'm afraid ofwhat will happen now" "I fear we ain't ready for a completely new way of Iife" "At Manderlay, we slaves took supper at 7 when do people take supper when they are free?" "we don't know these things" "Free men eat when they're hungry" "free women, as welI" "Considering the times and the situation" "Grace's words in the dead woman's room on meal times for free citizens might have seemed a trifle over-spirited we should not believe that there lay any contempt in these words for the wretched and starving people ofAmerica" "Grace rejoined the gangsters who had indeed concluded their disarmament of the plantation's powers-that-had-been though their findings were meager:" "the shot gun, and an old toy pistol" "All right, we can go" "No, Iet's just wait a moment!" "what are you waiting for?" "For them to come and thank you?" "Or for them to burn the whole place down and dance some tribal dance on the ruins by the glow of the torchlight?" "You are a bigot, daddy and you always have been we owe these people we brought them here, we abused them" " we made them what they are!" " I admit, I don't do deals with the Japs" "You can't trust them when there's big money at stake, but a bigot?" " why don't they come out?" " That's exactly what you said last time!" " Last time?" " Remember when you were six you thought it was so sad that your beloved Tweety was all shut up in a cage and nobody could persuade you not to let him out" "Tweety was a proud little bird well, his dignified exit didn't do Tweety a hell of a Iot of good we found him the next morning underneath your window" " Frozen to death" " I know he'd been bred as an indoor bird, he really didn't have a chance" "And what do you think those Negroes in there are?" "How many generations do you think those families made their homes behind that fence?" "I bet you most of them have taken up employment in their former jobs with the family contracts and all" "Of course now they'II get a few dollars for their efforts, but they'II soon drink that up and maybe they'II borrow a bit more from their employers who have, no doubt, opened a Iittle store full of colorful wares just for them" "And of course they'II never be able to pay back the money and they'II be trapped yet again what you did was all very noble, my girl, but... when push comes to shove you've just made everything far worse, just as you did with Tweety" "So all we can do is hope there's no frost" "what you said about contracts and loans" " That's fraud!" " Fraud?" " See, I've read that freed slaves" " Yes" " Are given a mule and a plot of land" " Yes" " So that they can establish themselves" " Yes" "Yep, that's true, but when it came down to it the fellow who owned the mule and the land had rather keep it all for himself so nothing really ever happened with it" "Anyhow, it may take them a while to gather the evidence against the plantation for when the family goes on trial..." "Trial?" "There are times when you seem even less with it than your dear mother!" "No, I seem to have underestimated 'em we've at Ieast one man with a genuine thirst for freedom" "And he's gettin' out, and he's in a hurry" "Yeah, he's high tailing' it, all right" "Yeah, it's Gramps!" "Pardon me" "Not a Iot of dignity there..." "he's scared out of his wits!" "would it be possible to have a word with the young lady?" "Yes, yes" "Don't mean to inconvenience you" "That's exactly what you're doing" "You're not inconveniencing anyone, this is a grave day for everyone, I know that!" "I just thought we must have seemed a might bit ungrateful we should like to thank you properly for what you've done" " It'II only take a moment" " Yes of course" "Ten minutes and then I'm going, not a second longer!" "Grace was conducted through the wretched living quarters bestowed upon the slaves with their pitiful, Ieaky cabins" "Her actions would comprise an unconditional enrichment of these people's lives" "There was no doubt about that... or was there?" "Actually, Grace did not see so much of the glow she had hoped for" "The glow that could have convinced her that no one would end up like the little pale yellow canary" "These were human beings but of the kind on whom pain had been inflicted, Grace thought as she was suddenly interrupted by a strangely exotic accent when we were slaves we were not required to offer thanks for our supper" "and for the water we drank and the air we breathed" "Nobody needs to say thank-you, but..." "But what?" "You mean there's somethin' we ought to be thankful for?" "I didn't mean "but" I meant "and"!" "And, there's no reason to be grateful for anything as natural as your freedom" "I'm the first to apologize for everything you and your people have been subjected to..." "See, those gates should have been unlocked seventy years ago" "Only seventy years ago but before that, of course, they were completely justified?" "No no, no, you misunderstand me" "what can I say?" "You need to say nothing at alI we've heard ofyour kind" "A society lady, who spends her time rescuing' wretched nigras" "I should like to say thank you!" "Missy done give her time and effort to helping' us time I bet she could've spent on all kinds of different things" "'Cause, t'was perfectjustice when God made some of us slaves and not others" "A nigra is vile by nature" "Oh, I know it ain't popular to say so!" "And it ain't 'cause of Burt that I say so" "No, Victoria did not base her perception exclusively on her experience of her husband though God knows it weighed heavily" "Burt was a useless eejit whose character Victoria, regrettably so far in vain had done her best to improve by hitting him with any implement to hand on any given occasion no matter how much he had threatened to take his own life" "by throwing himself into Manderlay's deep well" "Grace looked at wilhelm the old house slave and understood:" "He had not brought her here for anybody to thank her he just wanted her to see them all!" "The unfortunate flock that he very rightly feared would have few chances beyond the perimeter fence" "living proof of the devastating power of oppression" "Listen up, it's all been put on paper we just needed to check the wording' first, bein' as these things are legal and binding'!" "Bingo!" "what are these?" "They're the contracts, Ma'am!" "The family has been so considerate to offer us all employment" "Grace was not a lawyer and unqualified to assess the validity of the contract she held in her hand" "But she feared that unfortunately any judge in the county would deem it fair and proper it appeared to Grace that instead of "employee"" "they mightjust as well have retained the old term of "slave"" "A body would only sign it if he or she was utterly ignorant of Iife in a liberal society or if he or she really had no choice!" "Folks, I suppose that you're in urgent need of cash, Mark?" "Cash?" "I once knew this fella' from a Iittle township nobody'd know the name of so there ain't no grounds to mention what t'was called" "he had cash, not piles of it we are prepared to lend you some money as covered by this other piece of paper and we also can set up a Iittle store here, ifyou like after all, it's a Iong way to town" "And ifyou buy enough for all of us, I betcha liable to get a real nice bulk discount and the goods'II be cheaper than in town!" "Ain't that right, Miss Grace?" "I have no idea" "please sign, everybody!" "Sign here" "All right, Iet's go!" " No, turn it off" " Damn it!" "Daddy!" "You said that I didn't have the power to help Tweety and you were right" "I was a child then..." "So, what is it this time?" "!" "This time I have the power to act!" "You said so back in Dogville" "That your power would be mine, too!" "And that I could use it in my own way!" "That power was to carry on the family firm that I was open to new ideas" "The power you ask for now will undoubtedly be applied to something that's foolish at best and..." "Daddy!" "You promised!" "You were a bastard to mother, but when you promised her something, she got it!" "Ok, you've been given what I promised you" "Maybe things haven't been split right down the middle but this is as far as I am prepared to go!" "I want nothing to do with your plans" "And you won't be able to get in touch with me if anything goes wrong and you need me as usual, to get you out of trouble, because fortunately, my dear you'II have no idea where I am" " Daddy, I'd Iike to take Joseph, as well" " No" "I need a lawyer to sort out some paperwork!" "No, no, never, never" "I'd never let Joseph go" "He's the only man I know who can draw up a contract so there's only one possible interpretation and though I haven't needed that talent as ofyet" "I still might need it one day!" "I'II give you Viggo and Bruno for him!" "Never!" "I've given you my best associates and you know it!" "Daddy!" "I was meant to have been given half!" " If mother had been alive" " Oh, damn it, Grace!" "So, that very day and into the early hours Joseph employed the celebrated unambiguous phrases his previous employer and given him so wretchedly little opportunity to practice" "New contracts needed drawing up and old ones needed nullifying all with the astonishing goodwill that parties always evince in the company of rapid-firing machine pistols" "These are the deeds of gift, you transfer the property to the former slaves in joint ownership" "The last document is your contract of employment by this community" "Employment?" "I don't quite get what you mean by that..." "It'II be without pay and the right of termination is rather one-sidedly in the hands of the employer, but nevertheless" "Manual labor... for you and your family and Mr. Mays!" "Hard labor" "Say something, Bingo!" "My father's back ain't so strong, he climbed up to reach the chandelier, one Christmas day" "And he fell off the banister and struck a table well, that's what happens when you've got chandeliers" "when I consider that your understanding of the worth of other human beings has reached the desirable stage you and Mr. Mays and your family will be allowed to go" "Go?" "And leave our home?" "Yes and I assure you that even starting from scratch your prospects will be a Iot better than your former labor's would have been!" "with regards to the presence of me and my men we'II only act as your counselors" "The guns are merely a precaution in case of any threats to the new community we intend to stay here, but only until the first harvest is home after which any of the new shareholders who wishes to do so" "may cash in his or her deed of gift and receive a dividend" "All right, will you collect your deeds, Mark...?" "Nobody was particularly enthusiastic or confident about these late night legal formalities" "But Grace could see beyond this" "And if she saw little else than fear and disquiet in all these eyes at Ieast she saw gratitude in one single pair namely in wilhelm's mild, old gaze" "Burt!" "I got a deed of gift here that ain't been accepted will Mr. Burt approach forthwith and take delivery of his deed of gift?" "Mr. Burt?" "Mr. Burt?" "Burt had actually prepared his escape from his ferocious wife" "Despite her lack offaith in his abilities" "Burt had succeeded in meeting a woman through the fence and she had agreed to help him to abscond and there he was waiting at the agreed place at the agreed time" ""A helping hand", the woman had said what a peculiar coincidence that two women should come to the aid of the Manderlay slaves at the same time:" "Grace; and Burt's "helping hand"" "and the similarities between them were also peculiar:" "young; beautiful; white in male company actually male company in alarming numbers where's the nigger?" "Grace had moved into the freed plantation: among its new shareholders" "She was there as a guard, no more" "But no one could stop her from using this beautiful spring to make her own little observations on the people of Manderlay" "In the hope of spotting the burgeoning change in character that freedom ought to bring" "But unfortunately she saw little ofjust that:" "She saw Victoria for the third time, looking down the well in hope of a glimpse of the body of Burt" "She saw flora and elizabeth swooning for Timothy as ever" "She saw the men spending their time on card games playing for tufts of blue cotton under their leaking roof" "And she saw how everybody would ignore the eager Mark whenever he opened his mouth not knowing that he was notorious for never being able to give an intelligible answer to anything we called him Putting head, but his real name wasn't Putting head" "Grace saw Victoria beating her eldest son, for stealing a moldy cookie" "And she saw the unstoppable, irrevocable hierarchy of the beatings" "Victoria beating Ed, Ed beating Milton, and Milton, willie who finally vented his frustration further down the food chain on claire who far too rarely managed to make use of the window with the outside handle that her loving father Jack had installed as an emergency entrance" "which also allowed her to fall asleep every night to her favorite view of the twinkling stars" "Every noontide Grace witnessed with pity how the former slaves were arrayed on the parade ground with its mysterious numbers and marks beneath Mam's balcony as if nothing at Manderlay had changed" "However, one of them did not submit to this all-too-soothing power of habit" "Timothy of course" "In a flash his exotic pride almost took Grace's breath away" "This day Grace walked on past the old "Peach House" where the whites were now detained put to work on sundry more or less needless little repairs on her way to the barn housing her gangsters" "So, how's everyone doing?" "I'm afraid the men got nothing to do" "And it's not so good for the moral" "In situations like that your father always came up with something!" "I bet he did!" "But it's patience that's required" "But not this much patience, Niels says, Niels's grandpa was a cotton grower" "And he says the cotton should've been sown ages ago!" "The soil doesn't look ready" "Might be because nobody's ploughed it!" "Maybe things are different here from where your grandpa lives?" "No ma'am, don't reckon so well, if it should've been sown, surely the people here would be the first to know" "As she did not want to impose" "Grace's intercourse with the former slaves had been limited to brief greetings and the like" "But now it was time for a talk with some meat to it" "Excuse me, sir?" "Mark?" "May I ask you something?" "It's about planting the cotton" "I've been around for sowin' and harvesting' and birth and death" "Right, so when should the cotton be planted?" "There're strict rules for that... you can't mess around with that sort of thing" "Manderlay's always been renowned for the precision of its harvest the swallows always migrate right afterwards they settle here for the night on their way across the marshes" "But the planting?" "It's a science, my dear lady" "And the weather, what you might've expected, plays a fear-some role" "Yes, yes, and when will it be time this year?" "Not too soon and not too late" "Yes, but when?" "Should the cotton have already been planted?" "I'm not the sorta fella' to pass on information unless I'm damn sure of it" "less the facts of the matter are one hundred percent, in other words... the facts need be beyond dispute" "Do you know when to plant?" "No" "I'd better ask wilhelm, is he in his cabin?" "This morning he went down to the bath house he'd gotten a Iittle frayed around the edges, as they say, it's a funny thing" "I'm sorry..." "I'II go find him myself" "Excuse me wilhelm, I've come about the fields" "The fields should've been ploughed and harrowed three weeks ago and the cotton planted two weeks ago" "But does everybody know that?" "Oh yes, but I reckon they thinkin' somebody else oughta go out into the fields first" "In the old days Overseer Mays would've driven us out there" "Maybe it's because nobody really trust you, Missy" "Yeah, but wilhelm, they could be doing something else instead repairs to their homes they badly need it" "The cabins have always been a sore spot" "But Mam said we ain't got no material to fix 'em up" "But we're going to need what we make on the cotton, how else will people survive on their own?" "Yeah iffolks felt they was given something" "Something brought out by this, these new times" "That made their lives better in a convincing way, right here and now" "I don't know what that might be, but..." "But we don't have time for that we've been forced to sow late before" "The harvest might be improved ifwe planted it a bit late, even says that in Mam's Law" "Mam's Law?" "Oh, yes, Mam's law" "It's all the rules for running the plantation" "But we weren't allowed to read it, it was just for Mam and the family" "Only for Mam and the family, Grace thought..." "Certainly no more..." "And there on Mam's bed skimming through the old book well filled with bizarre and vicious regulations she came upon a page that looked strangely familiar!" "A table with numbers from one to seven" "Somewhere Grace had seen something similar, for sure" "Mam's law revealed it all" "The Manderlay plantation with its glamorous front mansion and pitiful rear where the slaves had their quarters had been kept in an iron grip by these very numbers!" "They represented the psychological division of the Manderlay slaves" "Sammy was a Group 5:" "a CIownin' nigger" "The formidable Victoria was of course a Number Four: a Hittin' nigger" "No wonder her husband Burt had found it necessary to accept "a helping hand"" "even if it was another color from his own wilma and Mark were Losin' niggers wilhelm was a Two: a Talkin' nigger" "flora was a weepin' nigger, et cetera et cetera there were pleasing' niggers and crazy niggers by the dozen" "The final category, Number One proudy niggers consisted nowadays ofTimothy as expected who was of course not there, and elizabeth?" "No, it said seven, not one she was a pleasing' nigger, also known as a chameleon" "A person of the kind who could transform herself into exactly the type the beholder wanted to see" "This was how the slave system had been kept alive for so long at Manderlay" "Bondage even through psychology!" "As Grace in deep thoughts gazed across the fields of Manderlay she recalled another page in Mam's law dealing exclusively with the weeding of the paths in the romantic "old Lady's Garden"" "The name of the narrow band ofwoodland that skirted the plantation" ""Trees and tree trunks!" Grace thought" "So there were materials at Manderlay after all!" "Excuse me, may I ask you all something?" "Isn't it true that somebody who's even poor and colored can still take the trouble to maintain their home?" "How dare you?" "Do you think colored folks prefer holes in their roofs and wallowing in mud?" "well then, all you need to do is to mend those holes!" "But I told you, there ain't never been the materials for that kind of thing at Manderlay" "No materials?" "That's not true when I'm in the fields I see timber wherever I Iook just waiting to be turned into boards for a roof or an extension or maybe even a whole new cabin!" "That be Mam's Garden, you can't cut that down" "And why can't we cut down the old Lady's Garden?" "Have you really spent that many happy hours up there on your knees weeding her romantic paths?" "That's true, there's loads of timber we ain't seen it as anything but the old Lady's Garden" "I don't know what you think, but to me it sounds like a splendid idea" "And at a stroke these seated, reclining, resting people had turned into people going full tilt walking, running, working people without anyone having to threaten them in the slightest with "The Lady's hand"" "as Grace had been told the great whip was called" "And Grace had won a kind of victory a small beginning of something that would one day erase all the negative inherited behavior patterns at Manderlay" "But, as Grace had suspected, the appetite for improving the living quarters unfortunately exceeded that for preparing the fields" "But a few of the former slaves had volunteered" "And with the white family and Grace herself they made up a sort of gang to prepare the soil for the seeds" "Under the gaze of a demonstratively hostile Timothy with his mysterious white handkerchief" "He wasn't born here?" "He's a Munsi" "It's a line ofafrican royalty, it's a very proud line" "He don't drink, either, or gamble like the others be doing with their little blue tufts of cotton money?" "T'was Mam's Law we weren't allowed no real money" "Grace knew about the clever system of currency in Mam's Law" "Not real money you could use in the outside world" "The Munsi don't gamble 'cause don't believe in winnings" "They believe you have to be humble to your crops and only take what's absolutely necessary" "I've never heard of these Munsi before, but I do believe I once heard of the Mansi?" "They different, they was slaves ofafrican kings, they gamble they is true mischief, Timothy say" " So Timothy has prejudices as well?" " what?" "Oh, nothing, I was just thinking aloud" "Oh, so you've find company, flora?" "No, no, I was on my way out anyway" "Timothy, Iet me tell you one thing" "I know you don't like me and don't trust me, and I can see why" "Although our ideals differ, you have a pride within you that I believe will one day be the salvation of everybody at Manderlay" "Let me tell you one thing, too!" "You got fine words, a posse of gangsters and your white skin, somethin' folks here seem fall for" "But I ain't fooled" "You're not interested in us" "Not as human beings" "After all, it's tough telling people apart when they're from another race we whites have committed an irreparable crime against an entire people" "Manderlay is a moral obligation because we made you!" "Luckily, I'm just a nigger who don't understand such words and now, ifyou'II excuse me, I've come here for the company of my girl and that ain't nothing for you to see black hides meetin'" "and if I were you I'd leave now before things get too nasty" "Grace regarded Timothy's hostility as a challenge" "And the very next day she took a step to dispel his claim that as a white she was incapable of caring for blacks as individuals" "She had had a chat to Venus, about her somewhat maladjusted son Jim" "And Venus had revealed that Jim's behaviour was merely that of a budding but frustrated artist" "Tell me, have you seen Venus?" "Nobody here wants your charity!" "I have something for Jim!" "I've had a really good look at his face, since our little chat" "And you're right, it does possess an artist's sensitivity" "This is far too much" "No, no, no, go on, call him!" "This is for him" "Jim, come on out here with me and Miss Grace, baby" "These are for you, because we believe in you" "Now run along, and paint your fantastic pictures and never mind those closed minded folks who think they know what art is meant to look like give them hell from me Jim!" "Excuse me, but I ain't Jim, I'm Jack, that's Jim!" "It is tricky, as a matter offact I've never been able to tell them apart either" "They're both colored and they both got curly hair why look any deeper than that?" "To be honest Grace had never been quite sure which was Jim and which was Jack" "A blunder that would, in her former life among her fellow whites merely have occasioned a Iittle laughter in her life at Manderlay it was disastrous" "But like her father, she did not take long to transform a defeat into anger energy and a counterattack" "This is what has created all this resistance" "Even you regard it as almost sacred, don't you?" "I must admit it's played a right important part of my Iife" "And that will be my next move!" "They should be allowed to see it and to understand that it can't do them any more harm" "I wouldn't advise it, Missy" "Presenting it to them would be like showing a child the rod with which it's been beaten" "I agree, it must be made public, but we ain't all ripe for it" "All right, then we shall have to see about ripening you, and quickly!" "And I'm not talking about the couple of cozy meetings I've organized to which hardly anybody turned up" "I mean teaching with a timetable, old fashioned hands on schooling" "All right, I've got something for you to do at last, and it even involves bossing people about..." "At noon tomorrow I'm going to give my first lesson to all of the former slaves of Manderlay" "And it'II be your job to make sure that they're there" "No excuse for not showing up!" "And the family?" "No, they're pretty well teaching themselves" "Are you listening to me?" "It's 'cause Niels just got a great hand!" "what?" "who are you?" "My name is Doctor Hector" "Do excuse me a moment, I'II have to pay my way out of this round" "God knows, I don't believe you possess any cards of real significance" "You have a poker player's face" "You see here my entire enterprise" "I'd never gained access to Manderlay before so when I drove by today, I saw the gates were open" "I took it as a sign of new times what exactly do you do?" "I entertain, party games, card games and the like well, nowadays mainly the latter" "You play for money?" "Oh, but I do more than play" "I cheat!" "And you have no objections to revealing this business secret ofyours?" "Oh, to some people, but not to you" "No, you see, ifyou and I establish the business relationship I am anticipating you'II be happen to know exactly what to expect" "And what can I expect?" "Eighty per cent" "Now, you certainly know all the problems that arose when our beloved new deal was imposed in '65 the plantation owners had plenty of land but nobody to work it" "So they contracted with their former slaves" "But they just didn't have the same hold on the rascals as they had in the old days" "Of course, they lend them money" "Then quite a few of the nigras actually saved up and paid off their debts so the plantation owners got worried" " I bet they did!" " Oh, yes" "See, that is where my idea came in" "I went from plantation to plantation with the full backing of the plantation owners to entertain their employees, and they were sorely in need of diversion, Iet me tell you we just had a Iittle game of cards" "And if anyone was close to repaying his debt" "I would take their shirt off their back!" "And I'm prepared to offer you that very same service today, Mam!" "You are not convinced" "Let me give you another token of my profound loyalty" "I have here a letter from a man by the name of Stanley" "He asked me to smuggle it out" "I thought perhaps you would Iike to see it before it is mailed" "Listen, Mr. Hector, Iet me just say that I've never met a man whom I have instantly despised so wholeheartedly both for his personality and his occupation" "Does that mean you are turning down my offer?" "I never want to see you here again!" "All right, well, I am disappointed" "I shall nevertheless bestow upon you my thought for the day" "I indulge in word games" "I Iike to give my clients something to laugh or think about when I leave" "The best technique for a card sharp is "dealing from the bottom"" "Look as ifyou're dealing from the top of the deck but instead you just take the bottom card, one that you know" ""Take from the bottom" means something else entirely in social terms but it is what I do, I "take from the bottom"" "won't be hard to find me ifyou change your mind" "The letter was aimed at a Mr. Miller, one of the truckers who picked up cotton from Manderlay and the plantation's only real contact with the outside world, it was short and to the point" ""we are being held prisoner by gangsters and coloreds at Manderlay"" ""inform the police and please come to our aid with all due dispatch"" "Indignation is a rare emotion for a gangster but a state ofjust that was what Grace's men experienced while they herded the colored people in for their lesson that day as Grace had reported on Doctor Hector's cheap trick of "taking from the bottom"" "And it was hardly the sophisticated ambiguity of the term that had affected them so dramatically welcome to our lesson" "yes, I call it a lesson as the term "meeting" seems to have scared some people out of attending" "I was coming, but I was late!" "Very late, you hadn't made it by the time we finished" "In the old days we could hear the bell from the old clock in the hall" "T'was easier to keep up with time, but we never hear it no more" "Probably because nobody winds it up" "But, now for the topic of this lesson: working together" "Only four people from your wing helped to prepare the fields and only five helped to plant" "I'm not a shareholder in this enterprise but if I had been and if I had also been one of the five" "I would've felt cheated" "Democracy means government by the people" "But as it's not practical for everyone to sit in congress a method by which people may express their views is required this method is called a ballot" "All right, so let's try it out we should choose a problem, anything anyone can't decide on?" "If I may suggest a small matter?" "please do" "I reckon the little broken rake is mine, but flora reckons it's hers" "That's an excellent suggestion, it's a great example" "I assume you all know of this dispute and all feel able to have an opinion on it, right?" "who does the community think owns the rake?" "It could turn out to belong to both parties equally now that would correspond nicely with the subject of this lesson!" "working together, sharing together, all right?" "So, who thinks it's elizabeth's rake?" "Sammy?" "I think it's EIisabeth's rake" "All right!" "slowly the point of Grace's edifying discourse dawned on the majority" "Most of them thought the rake was definitely elizabeth's a few that it was flora's and nobody that it could be shared" "I still remain undecided whether the rake is elizabeth's or flora's" "Right, so, not too surprisingly, neither party receives Mark's vote!" "From now on a Iittle broken rake belongs to elizabeth" "That's what ballots are like, there are winners and there are losers" "But the community has spoken" "And now Grace embarked on a protracted explanation of flora's difficulties raking without a rake and that owning things together could have its advantages" "To make sure that everyone understood the democratic principle the meeting carried out another ballot at Jim's suggestion" "I wanna talk about the fact that Sammy being laughing so loud of his own jokes and they ain't funny and I been tryin' to get some sleep, and I can't get no sleep, cause he laughs so loud" "Maybe perhaps there can a be a time when he can stop his joke and stop laughing, so we can get some sleep" "You can't vote on a man's laughter, you can't vote on a man's laughter surely" "I'm hearing that it's at sundown at sundown" "That's what I'm hearing, so let's do a vote" "All right, so that's settled" "That's democracy?" "Finally wilhelm proposed that it would be practical if somebody was responsible for winding up the clock with its small but penetrating chimes" "And for mysterious reasons the probing though fairly passive artist, Jim, was appointed despite the song and dance his mother kicked up" "Grace wound up the lesson by announcing that the topic for the next day would be" ""our anger and how to communicate it"" "Maybe somebody would at Ieast tell me what the time is?" "Just ask Timothy, he always know what time it is he can tell by the sun, he always do that" "Or you can always ask wilhelm, he's so old" "He's from before the clock ever got here" "So wilhelm and Timothy, each made his own suggestion as to what the time was" "And they were astonishingly close wilhelm thought it was eight minutes to, Timothy thought it was five minutes to and Grace rejoiced quietly at this natural ability that they found so straightforward" "But rapidly two factions emerged one which insisted it was eight minutes to and the other would not hear of anything but five minutes to" "And they were thus able to draw on the day's learning and put it to the vote" "The result was five minutes to by a small majority and so it was decided:" "the official time at Manderlay was five minutes to two" "Grace's first lesson of the day took place in relative good humor but the second one, the one that had unfortunately proved unavoidable was severer in character" "Read!" "Daily ration offood for slaves from category 7 oh, no, 1 ... is, er..." "Six ounces of solid food, and they've always been given just that no matter how little there was in the stores" "That's a Iot less than category seven, for example why should a proudy "nigger" have less to eat than an eye-pleasin' one?" "How can the way your head seems to be arranged have anything to do whatsoever with the amount people are given to eat?" "I really don't know either, not precisely, do you, Mr. Mays?" "It could be just to punish them for their pride!" "No, I just did what it said" "It mattered a Iot to my mother that we follow these rules" "I know of many places where everybody got quite a bit less than 6 ounces and where they began to eat dirt" "It's a kind of custom coloreds have when food is scarce 'round here but it was forbidden under Mam's Law" "That's not what we're discussing here don't you see what an affront it is to divide people up like that?" "Folks is different oxen and rabbits don't need equal shares offodder neither both parties would come down with a belly ache!" "Stop!" "All right, I'm not at all satisfied with what I've heard here today" "You're all speaking up for this foolishness" "I'm going to have to penalize you, because so little effort has been made in these lessons" "That evening Grace thought that her idea of making the whites make up their faces which had seemed so just and edifying in her flash of anger that afternoon was perhaps a tad too much in the wrong direction" "Even though Philomena herself in her own childhood would not have dreamt of going to the toilet without the entertainment of her black nanny" "Look at your Uncle Jim, he's in the bathtub learning how to swim" "Can we clean our faces now?" "Yes, yes, of course!" "Ah well, here comes the dust so none of this will matter any more" "what do you mean?" "There's gonna be a dust storm and the plants have only just begun to grow" "it couldn't be worse!" "But Manderlay's fields have never been harmed by a dust storm" "'Cause the windbreak was still in place" "Grace was not inclined to go into what the former overseer meant by these mysterious words" "And soon she had convinced herself that they had no meaning at alI apart from spreading disquiet and despondency" "The next day's lesson on the importance of unleashing one's anger met little understanding from the assembly" "It was when they wound up with a series of ballots and the community had rapidly decided to use wilma's potatoes for seed as she was so old and did not have to eat that much that they heard the wind" "The dust had come at this time for as long as anybody could remember" "But every year from time immemorial it had spared the newly planted cotton as the plantation had been cleverly shielded by a narrow band of trees known in common parlance as "The old Lady's Garden"" "In the midst of the almost Biblical darkness that descended on Manderlay" "Grace knew all to well that even hand in hand with all the races of the world no army of gangsters could counter this" "Nature's extravagant demonstration of power" "All she could do was watch as row upon row of the seedlings she had so welcomed disappeared beneath the devastating dust" "Nobody could do a thing" "but apparently it did not mean that no one would try for now Grace discerned a rider out there" "He was riding like crazy" "As he progressed across the fields, wherever he spotted a pile of dust beginning to grow he would break it up with his horse's hooves" "whether it would make the slightest dent in the grand scale of things was hard to tell but it was a battle no matter how senseless it might be: heroic and dangerous!" "Timothy" "Come back!" "Come back!" "Timothy, Timothy!" "He's gonna be all right, he knows these storms" "Miss Grace, you's head over heels for him, you's a fool, Miss Grace" " where did you find him?" " He was behind the house" "Is he alive?" "I do believe I know what you mean by that question" "But what does it mean to be alive?" "I mean is he breathing?" "Forget it" "Is he dead?" "we colored folks can be awfully hard to kill ifwe want it that way" "That very afternoon strong Timothy was back on his feet surveying the buildings for damage caused by the storm" "The dust had struck a devastating blow:" "Unfortunately, hardest hit were the food stores in the dilapidated "Peach House"" "which had lost its roof" "Almost all of their provisions were now inedible" "On top of that the pneumonia brought by the dust was inevitable" "The dust had got in everywhere particularly where no new boards could have provided weatherproofing namely through the cracked glass in the window on the stars above claire's bed" ""Valuables", not to mention cash, were non-existent at Manderlay since the elegant clock miraculously still ticking merrily away on the mantelpiece turned out to be, not Swiss as Mam believed but a copy made quite locally and worth practically nothing" ""The freed Enterprise of Manderlay" was bust wilhelm and Grace were therefore under no illusions that anybody would attend class this day" "But then, one by one the Manderlay flock began to appear" "I'm happy you're all here" "But I don't really have a lecture for you today" "I'd just like to say" "how badly I feel about this hopeless situation" "But of course words aren't much use to you" "No, Missy has learnt that much at Ieast" "But as regards hopelessness, it is something we do know a bit about" "There are a million plants out there beneath the dust, ifwe can save but fifty of 'em perhaps we can grow a small quantity of great quality and get a better price for it" "I reckon we should make a move" "And that is how the greatest disaster turned into a stroke of luck for Grace and how the people, with a common foe, the dust, as their excuse suddenly found themselves working shoulder to shoulder with their deadliest enemy" "to achieve the common goal as free, grown-up Americans" "Stanley and Bertie had sown the fields with little sticks so that people could tell where to uncover the tender seedlings" "while flora ever so childishly kept teasing Grace with her digs at Grace's supposed romantic feelings towards Timothy" "Good night, old wilma" "Good night, child we can lie down and talk for a while 'fore we go to sleep" "No, thank you, wilma" "I'm not weary enough to go to bed yet" "A little walk helps" "A walk when a body ain't sleepy is a very good thing" "I do the same myself" "Good night!" "Good night!" "That everything seemed as moving along on its own could be nothing but welcomed by Grace" "But her lack of an active part to play had suddenly left her in a kind of a vacuum and allowed other things inside her to claim attention human things like instincts and emotions" "An ominous sense of homelessness and loneliness struck Grace this evening" "As she wondered about, Grace suddenly found herself outside the wooden rear of the bathhouse" "without warning the homelessness transferred into a strange desire to move up that rusty pipe against the flow of dirty water into where naked bodies were being washed in cheap soap" "black skin male and black manhood" "what Grace had felt at the bath house was undignified, shameful" "Her mind was meant to be devoted to policy at Manderlay a matter in which these thoughts had no business whatsoever" "Grace had forced herself to sleep to rid her thoughts of those black bodies an achievement that was actually possible thanks to the stubbornness that flourished in Grace's family" "But the cotton seedling in her Iove-starved body did not give up" "It manifested itself as a dream" "Grace was in southern climes" "There were women in exotic costumes and men in turbans" "Even in her sleep she hated with a passion any idea of allowing that her father might be right" "But it was a harem!" "A group of black slaves appeared, bearing a huge charger piled with dates" "And in a twinkling Grace lay among the dates, trembling with pleasure as a flock of Bedouin satisfied her one by one with their noses!" "And it was even more confusing when Timothy appeared and was both the slave bearing wine, hands shaking, and the Sheik himself whose authoritative hands tested the size of Grace's most intimate orifices" "I must have overslept" "I'm sorry, claire has had another turn!" "Yeah, she's running a bad fever again, she had anything to eat?" "Oh, sure, pork chops and baked chicken" "She's taken a Iittle oatmeal but it's hard to get it into her she had this trouble with her lungs last year when the dust come, too but there was far more dust this year" "Honestly Missy, you oughta go back home to the clean air and Iarders full offood we're all in this together, no matter how hard it gets" "And hard it will get" "I've seen what's left around here though some folks are still filling' their bellies" "You're right, we've got to talk about that" "Come on, it'II be all right, Rose!" "I propose that we ration what we have left and spread our provisions over a month until we can harvest more from the vegetable gardens" "And as I hear there are so very few beans and potatoes left" "I think we should give them to Rose who needs them for claire what's left will be shared out equally among the rest of us!" "Excuse me, the rest of us?" " That goes for us too?" " Yes, of course it does we've already eaten things your father would ever have put up with" "Joseph swears they couldn't been described as food at alI" "legally speaking'!" "Your father used to let us obtain stuffwhen the coffers were empty" "Surely we could steal something from somewhere but I suppose that's no good either, Miss Grace?" "I'm afraid you're one tough cookie" "Maybe I am" "Sadly the most nourishing fare the estate could still provide had not improved claire's condition much but she needed meat, and Timothy knew it and so henceforth they would have to do without the loyal old donkey on the treadmill" "It was not a good portent of the level of morale that the gangsters were now trying hard to fix the car from the ravages of the dust" "But luckily Joseph, a legal expert with the ability to interpret the most incomprehensible of texts had met his match in the 1923 Ford owner's manual" "As time went by the scattered cotton plants at Manderlay grew side by side with its denizens' hunger now that the little that was left of the donkey meat was reserved for claire" "And Grace found herself in the peculiar situation ofjoining wilma and the other women in what had been completely forbidden under Mam's law namely the southern tradition of eating dirt" "Having given up on the automobile manuals Joseph had found a quaint turn of phrase in the agreement into which he had originally entered with Grace's father regarding his employment" "The wording could with a Iittle good will be interpreted to mean that certain circumstances obliged an employee to obey a higher authority than his boss the authority in this case being his stomach" "The good news was that although the drought had been hard on the fields" "Stanley and Timothy had invented a weapon to deploy against it wait, wait, it's coming, it's coming" "But the best news of all was claire who had miraculously gained so much strength that she could empty her plate of good food" "always in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep and nobody was looking, but even so" "If Grace had thought hunger would put paid to her forbidden sensual fantasies actually the opposite was more the case!" "flora, what's goin' on with the chickens?" "Are they fighting?" "You mean the four whites after the black?" "You want I should open the door and have a peek?" "No" "Mind you, that little black hen real proud wouldn't surprise me if them others took the chance to give her the odd peck" "Now don't you tease me, flora" "Goodnight then" "Goodnight" "flora had teased Grace before with the little black hen" "But they were hurting it in there!" "No doubt about it!" "And to make everything far worse, that heat in her loins seemed to come back in spite of that poor chicken's cry for help" "Or even intensified by it?" "Devastated, humiliated and overcome by fear for her sanity, she fled" "And in a fit of madness or what others would simply call "horniness" she threw herself onto her bed on her tummy and for a moment forgot all about shame and political correctness and did what she had not done since her childhood" "when she had not yet known it was so infinitely wrong:" "she pressed herself onto the knot she had rapidly and instinctively formed by bunching her quilt" "whether it was pleasurable or painful is hard to tell but she kept at it, it was beyond her control with no regard for the sleep of the women around her or common decency in general the pulsating explosions in her nether regions took over her world" "And who knows how it would have concluded had there not appeared at that very moment fortunately for Grace a person shaking her back to a reasonable state of self defense" "Miss Grace!" "You gotta come quick, Miss Grace what?" "She's dead" "I took such care of her" "I fed her the good meat" "But she'd been eatin'" "she's dead!" "Dead" "But she'd been eatin'" "No!" "She hadn't been eatin', this 'un had!" "Are ya gonna tell 'em, wilma?" "I was so hungry, I get so dizzy" "and my legs hurt when I'm hungry" "Our good friend and claire's beloved old wilma been visiting in the window so while we slept" "She emptied claire's plate every single night" "T'was as easy as pie, considering' that there window could be opened from the outside" "I've eaten so much dirt in my time, my teeth can't take it no more" "She killed our little girl" "Jack, she was sick" " Miss Grace" " She was sick, Jack" "Rose didn't worry to much about feeding her during the day, 'cause she ate so much at night" "I want wilma punished for killin' my little girl" "I want this matter put to the vote" "I want wilma punished for killin' my little girl, I wantjustice or I'II kill her myself, right now" "Let me go" "Stop it, Jack!" " Stop we'II talk about it tomorrow...!" " She killed my little girl!" "Stop it" "And so, the very next evening a gathering took place under the magnificent clear, twinkling, starry sky of Manderlay" "Now we've heard 'em all, wilhelm wilma showed no mercy to our claire so no mercy oughta be shown to her, she must die!" "Jack, killing old wilma won't bring claire back" "All we want is justice, you've said so many times, that we're entitled to it!" "I propose that she be banished from Manderlay for stealing food in an emergency" "she probably won't survive that anyway, as old as she is" "after all, we don't know if the matter of the food made any difference at all in claire's fate wilma can't have known whether it would kill her" "but she didn't care a bit when it came to risking' somebody else's life that of our little girl!" "All wilma saw was a plate nobody was touching, she was hungry" "And what do you think the rest of us was?" "All of us here ate what we had agreed?" "And whatcha think little claire was?" "we're all hungry, and that just makes it far, far worse!" "All right, I'd Iike to ask y'all to vote on Jack and Rose's motion" "All those who believe that wilma deserves to die, raise your hands!" "Thank you, thank y'alI" "Stop!" "Grace, I thought we were the ones who made the decisions here that's what you've always told us?" "Or maybe it's only sometimes?" "No, of course not, it's always" "And they's the decisions you're here to defend, ain't they?" "So let me go across and do it!" "No if anybody is going to do it, it's going to be me" "it must not be an act of vengeance" "That's all right by me as long as she suffers as much as claire" "That will be up to me" "I'II let you know when it's over" "Grace" "be so kind as to tell me what did they decide?" "Am I gonna die?" "No, wilma, you're not going to die" "whatcha mean?" "I mean the ballot did not go Jack's way, you're not gonna die!" "See, they didn't think that claire would've eaten the food on her plate anyway and anyhow she'd certainly have died from pneumonia from the dust" "Did they really say that?" "Yes, they really said that" "Ifyou knew how terrible the waiting' was..." "I'm just so weary" "I know, I know you are, but now you can sleep easy" "Yes, I can" "Lie down and get some sleep" "You are the daughter I might had" "Lie down will you stay 'till I sleep?" "I'II do that, wilma" "Here" "Lie down" "wilma?" "Harvest-time finally did arrive and the cotton went safe into the sacks" "Despite the fewer bushes the harvest was splendid" "It was as if all the trials and tribulations had made the cotton extra white and the fibers extra strong, and even at current prices it would bring in a record sum" "And although nothing was the way it had ever been the harvest was as precise as always at Manderlay" "The moment the Iast tuft of cotton was in the sack, the swallows arrived dropping from the skies towards the marshes" "Everyone observed the sight in awe and for a moment it was greater than all the words and politics in the world" "The old gin was as ready as ever, it had been for a week, greased and stripped down and reassembled by Sammy, who had teamed up with Niels" "They worked well in harness, Niels had never found a joke funny in his life so Sammy, the clowning' nigger, had given up, not unrelieved, trying to entertain him with his somewhat weak material" "Miss Grace?" "Miss Grace?" "Edward?" "!" "God, I hardly recognized you!" "You've certainly changed the way you dress!" "Yes, your father thought it was time for a change, he's on his way into a new area of business" " Is daddy here?" " No, he just sent me on ahead to give you a message" "Your father says he will be by a week Monday at eight o'clock in the evening" "He told me to tell you that he will wait in the car outside the gates for a quarter of an hour and not a second longer, the way he did in Dogville, he says and the way he did with your mother, I think it was..." " when he asked her to marry him" " Yes, something like that" "But ifyou want to go with him, you better be there, 'cause he says he'II just push on" "I know, I get the message" "All right, I'm on my way, take care, Miss Grace!" "You too, Edward" "Edward!" "just tell dad that new times have come to Manderlay" "But no, Grace had no intention of going with her father when he arrived she had her own life to lead now and it suited her just fine, but she'd be at the gates anyhow" "She just had to show him what she had achieved, a new and better Manderlay" "It was examination day for Stanley and the family because even though things had been going well recently when Stanley partook of his traditional beer with Mr. Miller nobody would be able to prevent him from revealing what had happened on the plantation" "and thereby ruin it all wilhelm had been highly skeptical about letting the whites talk to the drivers at alI but Grace had insisted, she trusted them" "Eejit nigger!" "Are you totally useless?" "Sorry, Mr. Mays!" "I'm joking" "Stanley Mays and the family passed" "That very evening Grace pronounced them graduate Americans" "And although they were free to go they had elected to stay as there was talk of hiring the family and Stanley Mays on a permanent basis" "And before anybody knew it the days had passed and the money was in the bank from where it had been picked up by proud Timothy on horseback" "Niels and Sammy had fixed the car, wisely without reference to the manual" " Thank you, for everything" " Thank you" " what are you gonna do now?" " I don't know" "You could always go back to gangstering" "where is Mr. Robinsson?" "He's been down the cabins shakin' hands" "Grace was touched by Mr. Robinson's sudden social interest in the former slaves" "But it felt right when the car left, it was time for Grace to say goodbye to power" "Brave and strong thy men and women" "Better this than corn and wine, make us worthy God in heaven of this goodly land ofThine" "Hearts as open as our doorway" "Liberal hands and spirits free" "Alabama, Alabama we will aye be true to thee" "He's watching you" " No, he's not!" " He's watching you" "No he's not!" "I reckon it have somethin' to do with them gangsters Ieavin'" "See, honey, when you was boss, he has visiting' your kingdom" "Now, you're visiting' his" "I reckon he wants you now" "He should have some dinner, I'm gonna go get him" "You gotta come and get some dinner" "Quiet, woman!" "In Mam's bedroom Grace recalled flora's worrying, intimate little details" "Sexual intercourse amongst the Munsi was determined by ancient traditions" "It would not appeal to Grace, flora had said not with Grace's modern ideas of equality of people and the sexes" "but Grace seemed to have left her progressive attitudes at the table" "Now actually in the situation she had dreamed of... it was all more bizarre than erotic anyway Grace decided to hang on to this opinion" "Timothy, wake up!" "Timothy's horse had got out of the staple when fires had been lit around the Manderlay slave quarters while Grace was asleep" "what happened?" "I can't tell you, ifyou want a clear answer you gonna have to ask somebody else" " The gangsters took the money!" " what?" "!" "The gangsters took the money!" "That's the answer!" "And I reckon it's a pretty clear answer, too!" "It certainly is very clear, but what makes you think so?" "when the party ended we all left the table to go and take a look at the money" "Timothy had hid it behind the red slope" "Timothy was meant to be keepin' an eye on the place, but he wasn't there" "And the box had been pulled up, it was empty" "One of the gangsters dug up the money when he was pretending' to say goodbye" "But he couldn't have done it alone" "Someone must've told 'em where the box was" "And Sammy refused to admit it was him although he'd spent a whole load of time with Niels" "And then everybody started yellin' and screamin' and folks is angry and no one's Iistenin'" "Stanley Mays and the family got away I believe although Philomena and Bertie got cut up real bad" "elizabeth is dead too, although that was mostly by accident" "It was too soon to send the guns away, we weren't quite ready yet" "For once Grace had nothing to say" "She could but reproach herself in silence for her tasteless joke to the gangsters about resorting to their former occupations if things got tight wilhelm, I can't rouse Timothy" "No, I bet you can't he drank three bottles of hooch before we ate" "The Munsi don't drink!" "Oh, well, maybe they do on special occasions" "well!" "It certainly is lively 'round here!" "Didn't I tell you I didn't want to see you here again?" "Yes, but I haven't come to do a deal, I have come to conclude one and in the hope of course that you'II see that I am an honest man" "Cause, I needn't have come back to settle up at alI" "This is your 80 per cent, quite amounts to a tidy bit too, as you can see" "It's the money from our harvest?" "I expect so, it's that time ofyear" "See, I had a Iittle game with a young man who came to see me and I knew he come from here so I've made my humble return" "Don't you think that you've just might have been wrong about me?" "who did you play for all this money?" "It was a day ago now" "See, I would have come sooner but I pass this black car with some gentlemen in dark coats they began to follow me, shouting the whole time, that I was going to die and that I was a con man who dealt from the bottom, what an accusation!" "well itjust took me a while to get away from them who was it?" "The Nigra fellow and he arrived on horseback, what was his name?" "Timothy?" "Yeah, that was it, Timothy, yeah, that was his name" "He's a Munsi!" "They don't gamble!" "well, I know, Munsi don't gamble, I'm a bit of an expert in this field" "You'II have a devil time gettin' them to the gamin' table!" "but he's no Munsi, in fact he's what I'd call a splendid fella at the card table and he just stayed being' splendid no matter how much he lost" "But he told everyone he was a Munsi" "Of course, see, the girls were wild about the tales that he told" "All the Munsi tales, the proud African, the royal line, all that old-fashioned morality and the accent of course, and on account of that the girls was easy to bed" "There!" "I'm not even going to avail myself ofyour gratitude" "That's just the kinda' fella I am, hey ho!" "bless me if I can't come up with a motto for today they say the Mansi are better hung than the Munsi or "The Munsi are so up-stuck but the Mansi, how they fuck!"" "well then, I'II be seein' you!" "we can talk business another day" "Grace went straight to the Iast pages with the tables of personal details on the slaves at Manderlay where was Timothy, now?" "Yes, his name had a 1 beside it" "A proudy slave, as she'd read earlier or did it?" "She looked more closely at the handwritten number" "She compared it to the seven next to elizabeth's name" "The pleasing' nigger of the chameleon type an expert in changing character according to whatever was opportune and what would titillate and enthrall the other person, and then Grace could see it" "Timothy's number was not a one but a seven" "She had only wanted to read it as a one" "There was even a note beside Timothy's name: "Caution, diabolically clever"" "Grace had called a final meeting for everybody at Manderlay for that evening she had decided to leave the place forever with her father when he arrived" "Oh, you're all here" "I persuaded the community to assemble, extraordinarily, for two ballots whatever they involved, they can scarcely have anything to do with me any more" "Don't be too certain of that, Miss Grace well, I am certain, I've come to say goodbye!" "And ifyou've had two ballots today well, oddly enough that coincides with the two presents I have brought farewell presents, ifyou like, the first is this..." "It's the money from our harvest well, actually it's 80 percent of it, a cardsharp kept the other 20 per cent as commission" "He scammed the money off of somebody from Manderlay in a game of cards" "So the gangsters didn't take it?" "No, no they didn't and I won't prolong the tension it was the treasurer who did it the man charged with looking after the money" "He was overcome by his eagerness to play, probably because he isn't a Munsi at alI but a Mansi, however unimportant that may sound" "which brings me to my second present, this one, painful to you or not, it has to come out" "In this book, which I still regard as the most abominable, contemptible document ever written" "Timothy is listed as a pleasing' nigger a person who can change his appearance to please the beholder, as he has done" "let me find the page" "It's on page 104!" "How do you know?" "I thought no slave had ever seen this book" "How do you know what's on page 104 of Mam's Law?" "'Cause I wrote it!" "It's all in my meticulous hand" "Mam and I were very young when the war suddenly ended and this new statute terrified us" "Terrified you?" "we tried to imagine what kind ofworld were these slaves let out into were they ready for it?" "Or more correctly, was it ready for them?" "The legislators promised all kinds of things but we didn't believe 'em" "And that was then Mam urged me to commit to paper the way I thought things should be done here if everyone stayed on at Manderlay" "But it's the prolongation of slavery" "You might call it that, you might also call it the lesser of two evils" "But did the others know that you wrote this book?" "Groups 2, 3 and 5, always knew" "A few members of the other groups were better off not knowing" "But everyone knows now, I wrote Mam's Law for the good of everyone!" "For the good of everyone!" "For the good of everyone?" "How dare you?" "It's a recipe for oppression and humiliation from start to finish" "I think you've been reading it through the wrong spectacles, Miss Grace if I may take the liberty of saying so" "And then wilhelm initiated Grace into the humane qualities, of the lesser of two evils" "Mam's law!" "How it guaranteed food and shelter and allowed anybody the privilege of complaining about their masters instead of having to blame themselves for the life of no hope that they would surely have to lead in the outside world?" "How the noonday parade was a blessing since the parade ground was the only place with shade at the warmest time of day?" "How the numbered groups were determined according to the patterns of behavior that human beings resort to in order to survive in an oppressive community?" "so that life could be made easier for each of them, since a proudy' nigger not that Manderlay had seen many, if any, of these, survives by perceiving himself as proud and could be helped by this system to believe that he was a bit more persecuted" "and punished than the others" "Since a clowning nigger would benefit greatly from the laughter that Mam's Law strictly demanded of its master just as any other groups benefited from similar obligations" "How cash was forbidden so that gambling had to be done with cotton money to prevent ruination and misery for the families, etc. etc." "Until Graces head felt fair ready to explode" "Damn it, wilhelm, they're not free!" "That's what matters!" "I'd call that a philosophical argument, which neatly brings me to the two ballots I just mentioned was Mam's Law still relevant?" "And we agreed that unfortunately it was as relevant now as it ever was..." "America was not ready to welcome us Negroes as equals seventy years ago and it still ain't, and the way things are goin' it won't be in a hundred years from now!" "So we agreed we'd Iike to take one step backwards at Manderlay and reimpose the old law!" "Excuse me, but I'm going" "As for your going, well, I'd better tell you about the second of our ballots as you know sadly we lost Mam and unfortunately we've good and well frightened off her descendants" "In short: we lack a Mam!" "No!" "I needn't tell you that you received every single vote" "Never!" "with all your idealism, I think you'd enjoy being the guardian of a kind of menagerie for creatures who have no chance in the wild" "Just as you thought the notion of a community would be good for us" "You were so sure that you permitted yourself to use force to convince us" "I'II be sorry ifwe have to do likewise what do you mean?" "Do you intend to keep me prisoner?" "Only 'til you understand the way you wanted us to understand" "The gate has been repaired and is closed" "The fences are in good shape but of course they ain't particularly high" "Those fences, come on two men with a rusty shot gun and a toy pistol" "How dumb do you really think we are?" "Too dumb to build a ladder ifwe'd really wanted to get away?" "Grace had spent a great deal of time on this meeting which from her point of view didn't seem to be getting anywhere" "Her father and his car would be at the gate at eight" "That was in half an hour, she had no ladder" "And she was on her own and guarded by many" "Just how was she to get out of Manderlay?" "when was a section of the fence always down?" "Grace would have to change her tactics rapidly if she was to make the rendez-vous" "All right, I'II do as you want not from my heart, though surely none ofyou could expect that but as my only option, and you needn't be scared, I'II obey your beloved law" "So we'd better start by dealing with the present matter:" "Timothy, a slave from group seven has committed a theft that almost ruined us all" "As I've determined that Mam's Law does not prescribe any punishment for stealing money" "I shall have to be creative what was it you once said, flora, something about planting a bottle of Rhenish wine?" "I do believe there is a bottle of Rhenish wine under Timothy's saddle, don't you?" "So that's what I seen when I went there yesterday, if it wasn't a bottle of Rhenish wine!" "There was still ten minutes until her slavishly punctual father would arrive outside to wait for his 15 minutes and not a second longer" "Just enough time for a verbal farewell salute" "Timothy, you can stop being proud and silent" "Cry and shout and beg for mercy like the Mansi you are the Mansi who you despise so much" "And it's that hatred Timothy and the rest ofyou bear towards yourselves that you'II never make me accept, you are a cheat of the lowest kind, and wilhelm and all ofyou who follow him, are nothing but a bunch of traitors to your race" "I hope that your fellow Negroes one day uncover your betrayal and punish you for it" "You make me sick" "I'm sure you're quite right, Miss Grace, most likely it's impossible to revile us niggers enough but what I don't get is why it makes you so angry?" "what do you mean?" "Aren't you forgetting something?" "You made us!" "Probably the only thing that could have stopped the lady with the whip from carrying on forever was the cheerful tinkle that announced her father's presence" "She needed his support now, Manderlay, too really was a place the world would be better offwithout..." "Grace recognized her father's hand writing, "dear girl", it said" "Dear girl, so you tricked your father yet again" "I waited the fifteen minutes first but I am too kind hearted" "So I popped over to the fence behind the bushes and peeked inside to check that you were ok to my great surprise it really did look as ifyou had a good grip on things for once" "I am proud ofyou, my girl" "I hope we meet up someday so you can tell me what you actually meant by "new times at Manderlay"" "Love, your dumb old dad" "Ballots could be unrivalled, but determining the time by public debate was rarely feasible" "That was quite apparent" "Grace had but a few seconds to choose the direction in which to flee away from her swarthy pursuers who, as her father had to teasingly predicted, were carrying torches" "Grace was in a hurry and did not notice Burt the former fugitive with a liberal attitude to other races, who never did make it far" "Grace was angry:" "Manderlay had fossilized in a picture of this country that was far, far too negative" "America was a many-facetted place, no doubt about it" "But "not ready" to accept black people?" "You really could not say that America had proffered its hand, discreetly perhaps but if anybody refused to see a helping hand, he really only had himself to blame!"