Go Down, Moses / Bucher

 

"Go Down, Moses"


What is the significance of the lawyer Stevens decision to accept the responsibility for bringing Butch Beachamp home, lying to Ms. Worsham about the costs, raising the money (and likely paying for it split with the Editor), arranging for the body to be brought home by train, then picked up with a dramatic flourish (flowers, casket, hearse) and driven round the center square, then driven out to the Plantation?  What is he doing all this for?  How is this symbolic? 


It could be a favor to Ms. Worsham, an elderly white woman, who requested his help. However, it could be much more, however, a symbolic act of kindness and decency by a town leader to its long-time citizens of both colors, to bring home a town son, even one that has behaved so badly. (An act that actually costs $225, rather than the $25.00 he suggested to Ms. Worsham.) The recipients are not that appreciative directly to him, however, as they stay mired in their suffering and language of grief, “sold to the Pharaoh, a black spiritualism language still foreign and separate to the white community. 


I think it was actually an act (even unconscious?)  of retribution, on the part of Ms. Worham, Lawyer Stevens, and even the Editor and possibly, of breaking down the racial divide just a bit, in a very limited, uneven event. Even the town merchants who contributed may have felt some small duty to acknowledge the wishes of its elderly of both colors... Small, strange, generous, dutiful, curious, but without any true emotion (on the part of the white lawyer or townspeople) except perhaps a bit of amusement? Or is there some acknowledgement, finally, that Jefferson’s black community is not isolated from its white members, nor can it be ignored as irrelevant or objectified as was true 60 years earlier, before 1865.  In the decades since slavery was abolished, are the human-designed barriers between races starting to melt a little?  Is there some mutual affection for the different personalities and lives and generations that have made Jefferson home?  Human kindness and human compassion, chipping away at the walls of racism, in a town built on cotton and slavery, may be the start of a different world to come.


-- Ms. Bucher


Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshMay 12, 2021 at 2:48 PM

    I agree. Even if the elders of the town get together and a small symbolic act of reparation is made, with some humor, that would still have been impossible as little as twenty years before the story (which I think is set about a hundred years after the Civil War). On the other hand, the symbolic act of redemption might be a decoy from the real work at hand, the work of courageously facing the truth. The $225 might be burial money in more than one sense: burial of the past as well as the dead. How we wish we could simply get back to our desks!

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