Introduction

“Ultimately the reason to read The Rib King is not its timeliness or its insight into politics or Black culture, but because it accomplishes what the best fiction sets out to do: It drops you into a world you could not otherwise visit and makes you care deeply about what happens there.”--BookPage (starred review)

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Excerpt

1

The Current Orphans

Mr. Sitwell had finished work and was passing through the garden on his way to Prescott Avenue when he happened to look up at the house and see something he shouldn’t have. One of the Barclays’ current orphans was standing in the main hall. Dressed in a gray shirt and dark blue knee pants, black stockings sagging above his brown shoes. The boy had his hands on his hips and head cocked to one side as he stared, transfixed by the antique starter pistol on the third shelf of Mrs. Barclay’s cabinet d’objets.

Mr. Sitwell frowned. The child had arrived from the asylum with two others five months before and Miss Mamie, the cook who was in charge of their apprenticeship, told them the very first day that scullery boys were forbidden from loitering in the front of the house. Yet there the child was, just inside the window, for all the world to see. Mr. Sitwell watched him reach into the cabinet and pull the pistol out. He peeked inside the chamber, then spun around and pointed it three times: left toward the velvet drapes, right toward the side table, and straight above him toward the chandelier. Then he smiled and mimicked the gesture of sliding the gun into an imaginary holster. When his game was finished he put the pistol back and then turned and continued walking down the hall. But instead of heading toward the kitchen where he belonged he moved farther away from it, toward the conservatory.

Mr. Sitwell cocked his head and looked around the hall, trying to find the other two. The Barclays always brought orphans home in batches of three and, following the example of the industrial college, always between the ages of fourteen and fifteen, making them old enough to work but not so old that, in Mr. Barclay’s view, “the clay had so far hardened that it could not be reformed.” For the past twenty years they had been brought in at regular intervals to learn a trade under the supervision of the cook. Mostly they washed dishes but by doing so fulfilled Mrs. Barclay’s sense of charitable obligation. The current orphans were extremely close and Mr. Sitwell knew that if he saw one the other two were sure to be nearby. They did everything together and in fact so favored one another that the first time he saw them, standing in a row on the kitchen porch with their hands clasped behind their backs for Miss Mamie’s inspection, he’d had a hard time telling them apart.

He’d soon realized that the easiest way to distinguish between them was to look for their scars. Frederick was the one with the three nasty welts running in parallel lines down his left cheek, a memento of a frantic fork slashing from a south side butcher with whom he’d had an unfortunate run-in when he was seven. Mac was the one who’d lost part of his right ear to a stockyard dog when he was eight. The one loitering in the hall now was Bart; Mr. Sitwell knew it as soon as he started walking. Bart had a peculiar way of moving, a staggered hop-step caused by the fact that, due to circumstances he claimed he no longer remembered, he was missing the toes of his right foot.

Bart hopped down the hall for a few moments and then stopped when he reached the door to the conservatory. Something, it seemed, was amiss with his trousers, and he reached down to make some adjustment to his buttons. When he was satisfied he swung his arm behind him, grabbed a fistful of fabric from his rear, and lifted his right foot to shake out his pant leg. He set his foot down again and, after a couple more hops, disappeared through the conservatory door.

Bart seemed awfully foolish. Mr. Sitwell’s first thought was relief that he was not responsible for him, that all three boys were, technically, Miss Mamie’s problem. But of course, Mr. Sitwell was the one who’d seen Bart and, having seen him, realized he had to make a choice. Either he would continue walking toward his streetcar stop as planned or he would go back inside and drag Bart to the safety of the kitchen before any of the Barclays saw him too, in which case he would no doubt be sent packing.

Then the door to Mr. Barclay’s study opened, unleashing a wide swath of light just inside the window where Mr. Sitwell stood. He ducked down as a woman’s voice called out, “Fine, Herbert. But remember this is not the Monte Carlo. We have not been to the Monte Carlo in a very long time.” Mrs. Barclay appeared in the window, skirt swishing and heels clicking as she moved down the hall toward the stairs and the upper chambers. Without thinking, Mr. Sitwell found himself jogging along the side of the house, headed for the kitchen.

It wasn’t until he’d reached the back porch that it occurred to him why he was doing it. He liked these boys, cared about them, wanted them to do well. In the twenty years he’d worked for the Barclays he’d seen dozens of orphans come and go and always thought it a shame that Miss Mamie’s predecessor, Mr. Boudreaux, never did much to help them. He wasn’t certain if it was something about these particular children or simply the fact that Miss Mamie handled her orphans so differently than Mr. Boudreaux had handled his that had made such an impression on him. He’d noticed how careful they were not to tramp on his flowers when they walked through the garden and he liked that they asked a lot of questions about herbs; he also liked that, when they did ask questions, instead of scolding them for slacking the way Mr. Boudreaux would have done, Miss Mamie seemed pleased they took an interest in something she considered useful. She was determined to actually teach them something and wanted them to leave the house knowing more than they had when they arrived. It was clear that she cared for them and, because of that, Mr. Sitwell found he couldn’t help but care for them too.

He stepped inside the house. Also, of course, there was the fact that he had started out like them: waterfront orphan, beneficiary of the peculiar mingling of the Barclays’ need for cheap labor and their relatively liberal views on children’s reform. Mr. Sitwell was only fourteen when he was plucked from the yard of the asylum. He’d started in the kitchen and, while other orphans came and went, had managed to stay on, gaining more and more of the Barclays’ confidence through a combination of talent, wit, and fealty.

He passed through the pantry, pushed into the dark kitchen, then stopped when he saw Jennie, the new chambermaid, standing by the window next to a large stack of napkins set out on the worktable, all tucked into three corner folds. She had her back to him and was looking out at the yard, a cigarette in her hand. When she heard him come in she turned around and smiled.

“Evening.”

Mr. Sitwell nodded. He could feel the muscles in his face tighten and was glad the room was dark. He’d been practicing talking to Jennie in his mirror at the rooming house where he lived; he knew he had an unfortunate habit of frowning at pretty women and also that he looked ugly when he did. “You’re here late.”

“Had to finish these.” She nodded to the stack.

Mr. Sitwell struggled to fit his face into a smile as calm and cool as hers. “Miss Mamie making you stay to do all that?”

“Honestly? She told me to do it this morning. I forgot,” Jennie said, one arm wrapped in front of her waist, the other hand holding the cigarette. “Don’t tell her.”

Mr. Sitwell arched his eyebrows in an effort to keep his brow from furrowing over.

“How you getting home, Jennie?”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“I just mean it’s late.”

“Is it?” She glanced at the clock on the counter near the stove. “Nine? Well, I guess it depends who you ask.”

She was still smiling. Mr. Sitwell had noticed that about her. She smiled a lot, had a way of talking to people as if what she really wanted to do was laugh at them. When she first started working there two months before it had hurt his feelings a couple of times before he realized she talked to everybody like that, even Miss Mamie. That it was just her way.

“I could walk you to the streetcar. If you’d like. Make sure you get there safe.” He looked away from her, toward the sink, and was disappointed when he saw the stack of dirty pots still piled there.

“Well, aren’t you sweet,” Jennie said. “That’s real nice, Sitwell. Honestly, I can’t imagine a girl needs much protection in this neighborhood, never mind the hour. But I certainly would appreciate the company.”

Mr. Sitwell nodded and looked back at the pots. If the Barclays didn’t send those boys back to the asylum for wandering the halls at night, Miss Mamie just might, if they were stupid enough to leave a mess like that.

“Could you wait a few minutes? I’ve got to take care of something right quick.”

“Alright, Sitwell. I don’t mind waiting. Gives me a chance to put these napkins away.” She flicked her cigarette out the window.

Mr. Sitwell reached down to straighten his tie, then pushed through the swinging door that led to the front of the house.

As he passed through the dining room his heart was beating fast, but he had to figure that hadn’t gone so bad. He’d been trying to think of questions to ask Jennie since she’d started working there, but that was the first time they’d been alone. Jennie, he decided, was a nice person, and looking back on their conversation, not scary at all. A lot of people on staff didn’t know what to make of her, in part because of the smiling, but also because they were still adjusting to the fact that Petunia, the woman she’d replaced, was indeed gone. Petunia’s termination had been a shock, not because she’d been good at her job but because she’d been there doing her job badly for so long. When Mamie got promoted and took charge of the kitchen, it seemed like the first thing she did was send Petunia home.

He walked up a short flight of stairs and entered the main hall, the chandelier above him shining a harsh light on the objects in Mrs. Barclay’s cabinet. He looked at the pistol that had so entranced Bart and noticed at once that the gilt was peeling on the handle; several other items on the shelves were chipped or otherwise damaged. Electric lighting, which seemed necessary only because everyone else on the block now had it, had not been kind to this house. There was a reason for the care Mrs. Lawson, the parlor maid, took to ensure each lamp was covered with a cloth of a particular weight when company came to dinner. Some of the rugs in the halls were worn down and frayed from overuse, there were water stains on the side tables in the parlor, and the velvet cushions of the couch in the conservatory were sun-bleached in places. All these flaws had been there for years but were made disturbingly visible in the new glare.

He continued down the hall. He still remembered when he was a boy like the three he was looking for now, how fine that house had seemed to him, the glitz and glitter of the various curios in Mrs. Barclay’s cabinet sparkling in the warm glow of the gaslights. There’d been a time when he’d been convinced this was not simply the finest house he’d ever seen but perhaps the finest there ever was. Then, one day when he was fifteen, he was standing in the front yard and happened to look beyond the Barclays’ fence. For the first time it occurred to him that most of the houses on the Avenue were twice the size of the one where he worked, that the Barclays had neighbors who, if they wanted to, could have bought and sold both his employers and everything they owned several times over. He must have looked over that fence a thousand times before this actually occurred to him. Before that the house had always been just another part of the block, an extension of the world it belonged to, and therefore, extremely precious.

He moved past the stairs. Perhaps the Barclays weren’t as rich and important as they once were, but it was still a good house. The boys had a good thing there, whether they realized it or not. What they’d been given wasn’t exactly charity but it was better than the industrial college where scores of boys and girls shivered on cold factory room floors fourteen hours a day. Here they worked hard but they slept on warm cots at night and Miss Mamie made sure they were always well-fed. The Barclays were not crazy enough to be unmanageable and, miraculously for the times, still maintained an entirely colored staff. The Barclays had come to the city from Missouri thirty-five years before with their cook, Mr. Boudreaux; they did not believe in race mixing in the kitchen, rightly thought it caused too many problems. Because Mr. Boudreaux had been colored the rest of the staff, out of necessity, had to be colored too. When he finally left, Miss Mamie, his former assistant, had been the obvious choice to take his place. This meant that so long as she continued to cook and maintain order to the Barclays’ satisfaction, the opportunity to be reformed in the kitchen would remain the exclusive preserve of three colored orphans between the ages of fourteen and fifteen.

When he reached the conservatory he heard a loud, “Oooooohhhh!” followed by a series of childish giggles. He pushed the door open and found the three boys huddled together on the floor near the piano with Frederick at the center. From the halting sound of Frederick’s voice, Mr. Sitwell could tell he was reading.

“Now that Cherokee knew that Wash Talbot, his former deputy, had been arrested, he had to make a choice: keep his vow to never again set foot in Seminole County, or let the last remaining member of his gang fall into the hands of an angry mob.”

“What are you boys doing?”

They spun around in unison and blinked at him with enormous brown eyes. They were handsome children with bright round faces, thick eyebrows, full lips, and skin the dark red color of cedar wood. Their features were so similar that anybody would have mistaken them for actual brothers. In truth they were not blood relatives at all; their strong bond was formed in the interest of survival, on the waterfront.

“Nothing, sir.” Mac smiled, eyes all innocent. “Just sitting here reading.”

“In the front of the house?”

“Oh, nobody saw us. We made sure them folks was long gone before we came in here,” Frederick said. He lifted his arms and rocked back and forth, in imitation of someone else’s waltz. “We waited until they finished dancing.”

Mr. Sitwell frowned. “Somebody saw you. I did. Saw Bart playing in the hall when I was on my way out. Then come to find you haven’t even finished cleaning the kitchen.”

“Not true, sir. Kitchen’s all done,” Bart said. “Well, except for the pots. But remember last time, how Miss Mamie told us not to disturb Mr. Barclay’s guests with a lot of banging while folks were eating dinner? Figured this time we’d just wait until the dinner was over, so as not to bother nobody.”

The boy looked very proud of himself.

“It’s alright, sir. We don’t mind working late.”

“The last guest left over an hour ago,” Mr. Sitwell said.

“Really? Dang. It didn’t feel like we’d been in here but five minutes. . . .”

The boys stared at one another, as if there were something wondrous about their shared trance.

“You mean to say we’ve been sitting here reading all that time?”

Mr. Sitwell held out his hand. “Give it to me.”

Frederick gave him the book. On the cover was a picture of a tall, thin, white man with green eyes and a long red beard, clutching a pistol in each hand.

“What is this?”

“The Life and Times of Cherokee Red, Wild Man of the Reconstruction,” Frederick said. “You ever read it?”

“No.”

“But you heard about him, right? Started out during the war, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. Now his gang’s all busted up. He and his ladylove moved out west to put the past behind them and he’s been trying his hand at being a farmer. But, just when it seems like his gunslinging days are over, he finds out Wash Talbot, last surviving member of his gang, was caught stealing hogs and got himself locked up back in Florida—”

“What?”

“He stole a hog.”

“Who did?”

“Wash Talbot.”

Mr. Sitwell squinted at the cover. He’d never heard of Cherokee Red but he knew the name Wash Talbot. From when he was a boy back in Florida. Just like in the book.

He handed it to Frederick. “Where does it say that name? Show me. Wash Talbot.”

Frederick opened the book and started flipping pages. After a while he set his finger down and read.

“Another infamous member of the gang was Wash Talbot, who never would renounce his lawless ways. For years after the gang disbanded he was still hiding out in the swamps of Seminole County, a terror to the neighboring towns—”

“That’s enough,” Mr. Sitwell said. “Pernicious lies.”

“Sir?”

“I knew that man.”

“Who? Cherokee Red?”

“Wash Talbot. He was a simple farmer.”

The boys looked disappointed.

“Probably not the same man then,” Mac said. “Was your Wash from Seminole too?”

Mr. Sitwell shook his head. “I don’t recall.”

He was lying, compelled by a childhood admonishment to say nothing about where he came from, even though he realized there was no cause for it any longer. It was the same reason he’d refused to give his real name when, lured by the promise of food, he’d voluntarily entered the doors of the asylum twenty years before. And then again, a few months after that, when he found himself standing on the Barclays’ back porch, hands clasped behind his back and wedged between those other two boys.

“Where did you get this?”

“One of Mr. Barclay’s guests gave it to us after Tuesday’s party.”

Mr. Sitwell frowned.

“It’s the truth, sir,” Frederick said. “We didn’t steal it, Mr. Sitwell.”

“I’m going to have to ask Mr. Barclay about that.”

“That’s fine but . . . can we finish it first? We were just getting to the best part.”

“What part is that?”

“It’s the beginning of the end.”

Mr. Sitwell sighed. Despite the lives they’d led and the work they did, they were still such children. Yet he knew if they did not learn certain lessons they would not last long in the Barclay house, to say nothing of the world outside it.

“You boys are going to have to be more careful. You’ve got to remember who you are, you’ve got to remember where. You shouldn’t be in the front of the house. You shouldn’t be talking to Mr. Barclay’s guests, much less, as you say, accepting gifts from them.”

“I didn’t lie.” Frederick pouted. “I tell you he said we could have it.”

“That’s not the point. What if you misunderstood the man’s meaning? Or what if the man simply changed his mind? Don’t you realize that an accusation of theft can be just as bad as a theft itself? Sometimes it’s even worse.”

“No, sir, I suppose we didn’t think about those things.” Frederick nodded. “I understand.”

Mr. Sitwell frowned. He could tell from the boy’s expression that Frederick thought he understood but also that, in truth, he did not.

“Best get back there and finish that kitchen before Miss Mamie sees it.”

“Yes, sir.”

They scrambled to their feet and sprinted down the hall. Mr. Sitwell stood for a moment with the book in his hands, trying to decide what to do with it.

He looked at the cover. Mr. Sitwell was only nine when he left Florida, and there were many things about those early days he no longer recalled—the name Wash Talbot, however, was not one of them. The man had been a neighbor-friend of his mother’s and, as he’d told the boys, came from a family of subsistence farmers much like his own family had been. It certainly seemed more than mere coincidence that, as was true of the outlaw in the book, the Wash he remembered had come to his end over conflicting claims with a man from the neighboring town over livestock. Except—and this too Mr. Sitwell remembered with perfect clarity—the Wash he’d known hadn’t been jailed over a hog. It was a mule. And he hadn’t stolen it.

He’d shot it.

He watched the boys push through the swinging door to the dining room. You had to be careful in this world. Had to take precautions, always be prepared, even if you were telling the truth. That was the thing he remembered when he thought about Wash Talbot. One thing at least. If he didn’t want the boys getting in trouble it was best to take care of this now, make sure there was no misunderstanding. He reached the door to the dining room then walked past it, headed toward Mr. Barclay’s study.

The room, as expected, was still lit. Mr. Barclay did most of his work at night; the dinner parties that preceded these long evenings were just a part of how the man conducted his business. Through the half-opened door he saw his employer seated behind his desk, hunched over a stack of papers. A man in his sixties now, he’d gotten fat and lost most of his hair in the twenty years Mr. Sitwell had worked for him. He had bushy eyebrows and small, pale eyes that reminded Mr. Sitwell of glass beads.

“Is that you, Sitwell? What on earth are you doing in my house, lurking about in the dark, at this time of night?”

Mr. Sitwell nodded and tried to smile. He was already in the room before he recalled the foul mood his employer had been in lately. Mr. Barclay was a speculator by trade, which, so far as Mr. Sitwell could tell, meant he bought and sold properties he hadn’t the least amount of knowledge about or interest in. Somehow he managed to make a good living this way, but it was a bit like musical chairs. As had happened a few times in the past, following the recent financial panic he’d found himself sitting atop ownership shares of several food manufacturing plants, charged with the sudden and somehow unexpected task of actually trying to make them profitable.

“Yes, sir. Hope I didn’t startle you. I was just on my way out when I come across the kitchen boys with this.”

He held up the book.

Mr. Barclay squinted. “What is it?”

“A book, sir. It looks like a book.”

“What are you showing it to me for?”

“Kitchen boys had it. Told me one of your guests gave it to them after Tuesday’s party. Sounded unusual is all. I just wanted to make sure it was alright for them to have it.”

“Last Tuesday?” Mr. Barclay blinked. “Who was that? The Southerners? That doesn’t make sense. Southerners don’t give books to colored children. Hand it over.”

He took the book. Mr. Sitwell watched him strain his mind to recall the events of the Tuesday before, the effort making him seem very old. After a while he set it back down on his desk.

“Alright, yes, I do remember. One of those Florida jokers was passing these out like party favors. I forget why. Might have been claiming some relation to the protagonist.”

“Yeah? From Florida?”

“The two I’m after, yes. Had a whole group of them in here, trying to make them feel at home. Got a concern I’m after down there. They’ll be back on Friday. I’m still trying to unload some of this junk. . . .”

Mr. Sitwell nodded. He was aware of Mr. Barclay’s current negotiations, at least so far as they affected the kitchen. After accepting that there was no way to divest himself from the food business without taking a substantial loss, Mr. Barclay had discovered an urgent need to shift production at one of his plants to the South where labor was cheaper. There was a functional plant on the market that Mr. Barclay was interested in purchasing but could not afford to do so until he sold one of his current ones. This meant he was negotiating two deals at once: one with a group of New Englanders he hoped to sell to and the other with a group of Southerners he hoped to buy from. Because of the particular way Mr. Barclay conducted his business, this also meant a lot of entertaining. Mr. Barclay was convinced that contracts were best negotiated on his home turf, preferably after a good meal, and Miss Mamie had been complaining all week about the difficulty of trying to come up with menus for two such divergent palates on the tight budget she’d been allotted for it.

Mr. Sitwell nodded to the book. “You say these Florida men claim some relation to this man on the cover?”

“I don’t know, Sitwell. I don’t listen to all the nonsense coming from the mouths of fools. I’ve got other things on my mind.”

“But the ones you’re dealing with . . . there’s two of them?”

“That’s right. Cousins.”

“They tell you their names?”

“Well, of course, they . . .” Mr. Barclay sighed. “Look here, Sitwell. What is this? Why are you bothering me with all these questions? Are you saying the boys are thieves? You come here to tell me you suspect they stole this book?” view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

-How do Mr. Sitwell and the cast of characters in this novel exercise agency under threats of violence, both physical and symbolic? / What differences can you see in the way these characters respond, adapt, and cope with interpersonal and systemic violence?

-Compare and contrast the two sections of The Rib King. In what ways does Jennie’s story in part two respond to Mr. Sitwell’s story in part one? How are these two sections differ from each other structurally?

-How did you respond to Mr. Sitwell’s reaction while reading the fictional retelling of his upbringing? How did it make you reflect on your own reading experiences, or the experience of reading this very novel (The Rib King)?

-What images did you grow up with that trafficked in stereotypes and otherwise harmful archetypes? What images do you see that persist today, in marketing and advertisements, in the media, etc.? How similar (or different) are they to those depicted in The Rib King?

Reflect on the two epigraphs of this novel, from George W. Walker and Aida Overton Walker.

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