THIl JAIL
505
Elizabethan pickpocket-until all that remained of the old days for
the jail to incarcerate was the runaway slave, for
his
little hour more,
his little minute yet while the time, the land, the nation, the Ameri–
can earth, whirled faster and faster toward the plunging precipice
of its destiny;
That fast, that rapid: a commodity in the land now which until
now had dealt first in Indians: then in acres and sections and bound–
aries:-an economy: Cotton: a king: omnipotent and omnipres–
ent: a destiny of which (obvious now) the plow and the axe had
been merely the tools; not plow and axe which had effaced the
wilderness, but Cotton: petty globules of Motion weightless and my–
riad even in the hand of a child, incapable even of wadding a rifle,
let alone of charging it, yet potent enough to sever the very taproots
of oak and hickory and gum, leaving the acre-shading tops to wither
and vanish in one single season beneath that fierce minted glare;
not the rifle nor the plow which drove at last the bear and deer and
panther into the last jungle fastnesses of the river bottoms, but Cot–
ton; not the soaring cupola of the courthouse drawing people into
the country, but that.same white tide sweeping them in: that ten–
der skim covering the winter's brown earth, burgeoning through spring
and summer into September's white surf crashing against the flanks
of gin and warehouse and ringing like bells on the marble counters
of th-e banks: altering not just the face of the land, but the com–
plexion of the town too, creating its own parasitic aristocracy not
only behind the columned porticoes of the plantation houses, but in
the counting-rooms of merchants and bankers and the sanctums of–
lawyers, and not only these last, but finally nadir complete: the
county offices too: of sheriff and tax-collector and bailiff and turn–
key and clerk: doing overnight to the old jail what Sutpen's archi–
tect with all his brick and iron smithwork, had not been able to ac–
complish-the old jail which had been unavoidable, a necessity,
like a public comfort-station, and which, like the public comfort–
station, was not ignored but simply by mutual concord, not seen,
not looked at, not named by its purpose and aim, yet which to the
older people of the town, in spite of Sutpen's architect's face-lifting,
was still the old jail-now translated into an integer, a moveable
pawn on the county's political board like the sheriff's star or the
