The Great Institution

“This one will never be suitable.” … The fire keeps feeling and the white men put out with themselves at not being prepared for this emergency. They came to capture, not kill… He [Sixo] laughs… Sixo interrupts his laughter to call out, “Seven-O! Seven-O!” (266)

This passage takes place right after Paul D’s attempted escape from Sweet home, which led to his capture and Sixo’s death. For the escapees, this was a once in a lifetime chance for them to be able to get away from their owners and be able to make it into free territory. When Paul D. and the others made it to the dry creek where they had stored all of their resources for the journey, School teacher and his “pupils” were waiting for them. Sixo’s lover and another slave Paul A. ran one direction, while Sixo and Paul D. ran the opposite. It is unknown what happened to Paul A. or the Thirty-Mile Woman, but  when Sixo and Paul D. are captured they are tied up and beaten brutally. Sixo quickly grabs one pupil’s gun and begins to sing until he is knocked down by another pupil. The schoolteacher then decides that Sixo is too wild and  must be put down.

This an unsurprising punishment for a slave who is caught trying to escape, but in this case, it wasn't the running that caused Sixo to be put to death. In this case, it was Sixo’s rebellious move of rejecting his situation and actually singing. In the schoolteacher’s mind, Sixo and Paul D. are farm property, equal in value to a few cows. Therefore, much like a lame horse who cannot be fixed, Sixo, who cannot become “suitable”, must be put down for the sake of the farm. This fits in with the Southern mindset in this time period, where the institution of slavery was in place to allow for whites to their holy and unspoken duty to help save the slaves from themselves. In history it was viewed as “the White Man's Burden” to take in those who did not have the same “culture” or who they viewed would not be competent to lead themselves, and to enslave them. Their logic being that the more time that they spent in the presence of people who were more cultured the more they would learn what it means to be a “real person”. The other aspect of their mindset was that if the slaves were not out free in the world, it meant that they could not perpetuate their “savage cultures”, instead they would have the opportunity to learn to live properly.

This passage provides a window into the mindset of the great institution as a whole, and into the mind of a typical slave owner. Whose duty it was not to see his slaves as people, but a natural resource that needed to be exploited for the survival of the entire “Southern way of life”.