James Courtney Goes Home
By Jamie Grimes
The personal effects of the late Mr. James Courtney found their way to me some months after his passing, once the stipulations of his will had been addressed and the remainder of his belongings had been picked over by his friends and family. He had made a promise to me long ago, and I to him, and now, some decades after he’d done his part, the rest was mine to fulfill.
His steamer trunk was left like a flag staked in the yard, the ghosts of a former life reminding me of the claim they had on my soul. Inside were a pile of well-worn journals, some wadded papers cushioning a couple of chipped dinner plates, and a few books. In with all of this was a letter addressed simply “To Thomas.” In it, Courtney recounted the better part of the last two decades of his life, during which time he never married, made but a few close friends, most of whom helped him put his meager fortune into “charities benefiting the advancement of our peoples.” He wished me great health and lamented that he could never bring himself to come back to the island no matter how he longed for it.
Underneath the letter, next to the plain brass urn containing Courtney’s earthly remains, lay a troublesome volume I’d hoped never to have the ill fortune to see. I’d heard tell of Henry Barksdale’s Statements and Observations Concerning the American Negro Species. What colored person in learned circles hadn’t? So obnoxious it was in its assertions, in its blanket characterizations of a whole people as nothing more than savages tamed to the brink of enlightenment by their enslavers. I had more than half a mind to burn it on sight, but with that urge came an appalling curiosity, and I found myself thumbing through its overwrought suppositions, its “there can be no doubts” and its “undeniable facts” about “the primitive American Negro.” No wonder the world is as divided as it is. If this is the thinking of one of the South’s allegedly preeminent minds, what hope is there in finding our common humanity?
I cursed Courtney for bequeathing me this nonsense, but I was quick to apologize. Never get on the wrong side of the dead. With Barksdale so fresh on my mind—with his feverish rantings about his last days on Ediwander Island in my hands—I ought to have known better. (Continue Reading…)