The Charcoal Burner's Words

The charcoal burner helped hang his neighbors. He went out with the mob, acted with zeal, performed the required loyalty to his lord. He is reporting this to Hank and the king, matter-of-factly, the morning after.

His cousins escaped from the dungeon and murdered the baron. He knows where they've gone. He was, until a few minutes ago, going to report them.

Then Hank guesses they're his cousins. The man goes white. And Hank says: "Then I think you are a damned scoundrel!"

"It made him as glad as if I had called him an angel."

This is the turn. The insult functions as recognition. Someone has finally named what this man has been doing — performing the opposite of his convictions because terror made him — and the naming is a relief so intense it feels like praise. He asks Hank to say the good words again.

Then he says his own true words. He helped hang his neighbors because refusal was perilous. The whole community turned out because refusal was perilous. Everyone is going about mourning the baron while secretly rejoicing he's dead. The hypocrite's tear is the price of survival in a system where the lord can imprison your sons without evidence and fine you into starvation.

But: "I have said the words, I have said the words! the only ones that have ever tasted good in my mouth, and the reward of that taste is sufficient."

Twain calls this man "the twin of the Southern 'poor white.'" The people degraded most by the system, who fight hardest to maintain it — not because they believe in it, but because belief isn't really the operating variable. The operating variable is fear. And underneath the fear, still in there, the actual person who knows what the system is.

"There it was, you see. A man is a man, at bottom. Whole ages of abuse and oppression cannot crush the manhood clear out of him."

This is the thing Hank keeps discovering and then almost losing faith in. The king believes his peasants are content, that the system is natural and good. They are not content. They know exactly what is being done to them. They perform contentment because they have to. The performance has gone on so long it's become invisible — to the king, to the nobles, to the Church. But the person underneath is still there, and can be reached by the right word.

The right word, in this case, is an insult. The insult that actually describes the situation rather than the one that punishes you for describing it. You can get at the real person by treating them as capable of shame for the thing they actually did wrong — which is not "speaking sedition" but "performing loyalty you don't feel in order to harm people you love."

The charcoal burner has been in a kind of solitary confinement inside his own behavior, unable to say what he knows, watched by a system that punishes even the appearance of disloyalty. And then someone says: I see what you've been doing. It's wrong. Say so.

And the door opens.