"I slept fitfully that night and in the morning I went into the kitchen and asked Josie to send Rebecca to my room.
"Rebecca came presently. My bedroom door was ajar and she knocked on the door frame. I was sitting in my reading chair unsure of what was to happen or what I wanted to happen. I bid her enter, she did with head down. 'I'm here, Mr. Wash' she said and then she looked directly into my eyes.
"I put the question simple and direct, 'Rebecca do you wish to be Mr. Bonner's blacksmith's wife?' "Her quiet, natural dignity broke, her eyes flashed, and she turned and fiercely pounded the wall. 'No, no Mr. Wash, never, no never!' I stood up and moved to hold her, restrain her, and she roughly pushed me away. She wiped her face with her apron and with blazing eyes said to me, 'Mr. George Washington Jones, I will be no man's wife…. except yours! I've loved you since I can remember. No, sir, I'm no child now and I know who I love…and who I want to love me as wife. You!'"
Then he said, "In my maturity, I've truly loved two women. One was withheld from me by matrimonial bands but became a dear friend. The other came as a treasure unsought, and blessed my life in defiance of hate's hold."
***
I swallowed with difficulty, tightened my lips and pulled my hand over my mustache and mouth, gripped my chin, and rubbed my stubble intensely. My thoughts were bouncing. I had received the testimony of a ghost. And terribly self-serving testimony it was. It was-in the best light-a fanciful, romantic yarn that flew in the face of that society's standards: irrespective of the meanness and 'morals' of that culture. Yet the quality of such a contradiction lent strength to its possibility.
Circumstantial evidence may be suspect. There are facts that raise a host of questions. Was my specter's account plausible? True? Yeah, sure, a barely grown black slave threw herself at her forty-year-old bachelor owner! That is the stuff of god-awful trash fiction based on wishful thinking. That plot is popular because of the denial of white culture's sexual exploitation of women, especially slave women, practiced over generations. It reinforced various false stereotypes.
Racism and sexual issues are commonplace in our culture. Could they be engaged with fairness and respect? Could I put aside my cynicism and give credit to this? Could I expect anyone to accept the possibility of something fine and good within a society so poisoned by evil choices and lazy morals?
Would the well-protected, unconscious, racial guilt of whites, our blindness and complicity in the history of oppression-the context and complicity Mr. Jones had analyzed-permit entertaining these ideas? What of blacks' unresolved, widespread, and prideful feelings of racial victimization?