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Among the Swamp People
Life in Alabama’s Mobile-Tensaw River Delta

WATT KEY
illustrations by KELAN MERCER

The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed

to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala Pro

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover illustration: Kelan Mercer © 2014; courtesy of the artist
Design: Michele Myatt Quinn
Interior illustrations: Kelan Mercer © 2014; courtesy of the artist

∞
The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum require-
ments of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Perma-
nence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1885-7
E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-8890-4
 For
Bart, Tracy, Pye, Kenny, George, Sharon, Raymond, Glenda, Randy, Jim,
Dorris, Peter, Murray, Bradford, Russell, and all the rest of my swamp friends
 Contents

Preface ix
Introduction 1
Discovery—Spring 1996 5
First Night 11
Camp Man 16
Crazy Dan 19
City People 22
Cloverleaf 31
Swamp Writer 37
Hurricane Georges 40
Man Tools 43
Water Hunter 46
Swamp Camp 50
The White Car 54
Carson 60
Homesick 63
Risks and Changes 67
Butch 70
The Trailer Park 73
Man Talk 78
Catching Alligators 81
Kitchen Music 85
Football 90
Late-Night Visitors 94
Chuckfee Revival 100
Neighbors 105
Deltona 500 108
Boats on the Loose 112
The Slough 116
The Boat Slip 120
Mayhall 122
Delta Heckler 125
Camp Names 130
Red 132
Horace 136
Bottle Creek 139
No-Name 144
Random Proud 147
Best Friends 150
Big Generator 153
The Dark Ages 159
Airboat 163
The Phone Call 168
Back to the Mud 171
The Deal 176
More Hurricanes 179
Stepping Out 182
Big Generator 2 185
Famous 188
Christmas Gift 192
End of an Era 196
 Preface

Even though this is a work of nonfiction, almost all of the names in

this collection have been changed. I want to protect the identities of
those involved, but also, some of the real names are so stereotypical
that they come across as cliché. For example, Bubba is the real name
of one of my friends in this collection. I couldn’t use that without los-
ing credibility.
Many of these stories were originally published in Mobile Bay Mag-
azine, condensed to fit the format of that publication. Inspired by the
interest in these articles, I decided to present an unabridged version
of my journal kept during my years among the swamp people of the
Mobile-Tensaw Delta.
 Introduction

The air was still cool with the tailings of spring and the sky was deep
blue. The river sparkled and flowed deep and healthy in its channel
through the marsh. I lay on my back on a raft of lashed telephone
pilings connected to a small jon boat. I wore nothing but some cutoffs
and a baseball cap pulled over my eyes while my friends pulled me
up the river. Sometimes, I’d roll over and hold up my hand. Someone
would drop a beer over the side of the boat and I’d pull it from the wa-
ter as it floated past. I don’t remember many times being more satis-
fied with who and where I was than at that moment on that raft. I was
going to build my swamp camp, stay there, and write about it.

The Mobile-Tensaw Delta, or “the swamp,” consists of almost two hun-

dred and sixty thousand acres of wetlands located just north of Mobile
Bay, formed by the confluence of the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers.
It is second only to the Mississippi River Delta in size. It’s been nearly
twenty years since I first discovered the “delta” and made it my retreat.
There have been few weekends since that I have not spent time there.
There is no way into this place except by small boat. And once you get
in, there’s nothing fancy about it. To most it would appear as a maze
of rivers and creeks between stunted swamp trees and marsh grass
and mud. There are few places where a man can step out of his boat
without sinking to his knees in muck the consistency of axle grease.

1
2 WAT T KEY

My great-great-grandfather had swamp in his blood. He moved

into the Mississippi Delta two years after the Civil War was over and
hacked a farm from one of the most inhospitable pieces of land in the
country. Malaria and bears and snakes were such in this place that a
man would have to leave his family in the hills and commute until a
suitable settlement was established. Maybe I am afflicted with what-
ever he had. I’ve never seen the swamp as dirty, wet, and unpleasant.
To me it is a frontier. It is the only place I know where gloom and
beauty can coexist at such extremes.
I grew up on the coast not twenty miles south of the delta. Eventu-
ally the rivers and creeks come together, empty into Mobile Bay, and
flow out past the old Fort Morgan and finally into the Gulf of Mexico.
I lived about halfway down the eastern shore of the bay and grew up
learning skills conducive to these waters.
The man that made our boats lived on the causeway, the road
that crosses the head of the bay and connects the eastern and west-
ern shores. This man’s name was Stauter, and his wood boats carry
the same name. He was a good boat maker and a wise businessman.
He launched his shallow-sided, flat-bottom skiffs on one side of the
causeway for delta customers and sent his higher-sided, v-bottom
models into the bay for his customers to the south. On the eastern
shore we faced open water and needed our boats equipped with high
sides, stern rod holders, and reinforced bottoms. The boats he sent
into the delta were rigged with trolling motors and designed to be
light for pulling out of shallows.
People on the bay build for hurricanes and the wood-eating crea-
tures that live in saltwater. The thought of catching a largemouth
bass or a bream or a freshwater catfish never entered our mind. It was
speckled trout and redfish and tarpon and jack cavalla. In the delta,
the swamp people are prepared to catch all things, depending on the
season. The water is brackish, and especially in the fall, saltwater fish
 AMONG THE SWAMP PEOPLE 3

ebb into the lower swamp. The rest of the time, they catch crappie and
bass and freshwater catfish and rarer species like the spoonbill.
Growing up I never thought of exploring that land north of the
causeway. To me it all turned to rivers at that point and I’d seen plenty
of rivers. Besides, I had enough water in front of me to go as far as
my little Stauter would travel. And it never occurred to me that a land
seemingly so bleak could hide such beauty and adventure.
The second adventure, woven into this narrative, is one of a nov-
elist. I started writing stories when I was a child. By the time I grad-
uated college I was determined to publish a novel with a traditional
publishing house, if not to become a full-time author. I had little
training, little encouragement, and little reason to believe it would
ever happen. Nonetheless, I set about it with a persistence and pace
that almost ruined me.
When this book opens I’m a twenty-five-year-old computer pro-
grammer living in Mobile, Alabama. I’ve already written four novels
and will write six more before the book closes. All of them unpub-
lished. The stereotypical scene of a frustrated novelist, rushing home
to the mailbox every day to collect rejection letters, describes much
of my life. I saw New York as a cold, hard wall, beyond which was
the mysterious world of publishing. For fifteen years I threw my writ-
ing at that wall, hoping to get something over. And hoping someone
would see it and find value in my creations. Until one day I had to
accept that life doesn’t always turn out like you imagined.
I certainly never imagined myself obsessed with constructing
a crude camp of driftwood, accessible only by small boat, five miles
deep into swamps of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.
Other documents randomly have
different content
of Holland should, by the powere of certain strange whirle-winds be
loosed from their ankers and transported in a moment to all the
desolat ports and havens throughout the world wherever the
dispersion was, to convey their breathren and tribes to the Holy Citty;
with other such like stuff. He was a merry drunken fellow.” It was the
age of Messianic dreams. Oppression had kindled the longing for
deliverance, and the Jews all over Europe were eagerly looking to
the advent of the Redeemer: an expectation which in the minds of
the untutored and the enthusiastic took strange shapes. But even
then there were Jews affected by other than Messianic chimeras.
In the Dutch synagogue which Evelyn visited on that Saturday in
August 1641, he may perhaps have seen a boy; a wide-eyed,
thoughtful little Hebrew of some nine years of age. Evelyn would
have fixed his intelligent gaze upon that child’s face, had he had any
means of divining that the diminutive Hebrew body before him
clothed a soul destined to open new doors of light to Christian
Europe. The boy was Baruch Spinoza, born on the 24th of
November, 1632, of parents who, for their faith, had given up wealth
and a happy home in sunny Spain, and had sought freedom on the
foggy shores of the North Sea. Rabbinical lore was young Spinoza’s
first study; mediaeval Hebrew wisdom, largely made up of Messianic
and Cabbalistic mists, his next; to be followed by the profane
philosophy of Descartes: altogether a singular blend of mental
nutriment, yet all assimilated and transformed by young Baruch’s
brain; a multitude of diverse guides, yet all leading the original mind
the same way—not quite their way. Study bred independent thought,
and independent thought translated itself into independent action.
Baruch ceased to frequent the synagogue; for the synagogue had
ceased to supply him with the food for which his soul craved. A bribe
of 1,000 florins a year was offered by the Rabbis, but
1656
was firmly rejected; excommunication followed, and
curses many and minute, not unaccompanied by an attempt at
assassination; but they were serenely disregarded. Baruch was not
Uriel. For answer he translated himself into Benedictus, and the
name was not a misnomer; for he was soon to become known as
one of the kindliest of men, as well as one of the deepest and
boldest of thinkers that our modern world has seen.
 When the two goddesses appeared to Spinoza, as they do to
every one of us once in our lives: the one plump and proud and
persuasively fair, the other modest of look, reverent, and unadorned;
and they offered to the young Jew of Amsterdam the momentous
option of paths, he did not long hesitate in his choice. Turning his
back upon the world, and a deaf ear to its Siren songs of success,
he chose to earn a modest livelihood by making lenses. Too honest
to accept the Synagogue’s price for hypocrisy, he was too proud
even to accept the gifts of disinterested friendship and admiration,
and too fond of his freedom to accept even a professorial chair of
Philosophy. Like his great contemporary and compatriot Rembrandt,
Spinoza was incapable of complying with the world’s behests or of
adapting himself to its standards. The public did not inspire him, and
its applause left him profoundly unmoved. He scorned the smiles as
much as the frowns of Fortune, and calmly pursued his own path,
undaunted by obloquy, unseduced by temptation: a veritable
Socrates of a man, voluntarily and wholly devoted to the humble
service of Truth. In meditation he found his heart’s delight, and, while
grinding glasses for optical instruments in his solitary attic, he
excogitated other aids for the eye of man. A quiet pipe of tobacco, a
friendly chat with his landlord or his fellow-lodgers and their children,
and, when bent on more violent dissipation, a single-combat
between two spiders, or the antics of a foolish fly entangled in their
toils, furnished the cheerful ascetic with abundant diversion. On
those last occasions, his biographer tells us, “he would sometimes
break into laughter.” And having lived his own life,
1677
Spinoza died as those die whom the Olympians love:
in the meridian of manhood and intellectual vigour, leaving behind
him the memory of a blameless character to his friends, and the
fruits of a mighty genius to the world at large. For the goddess to
whom he had dedicated his whole life did not despise the sacrifice.
Every man who is born into this world is either a Greek or a Jew.
Spinoza was both. His teaching may be described as a recapitulation
of the world’s thought. Hellenic rationalism and Hebrew mysticism
found in his work an organic union. Briefly stated, the lesson which
the Jewish sage taught the Western mind, like all great lessons, was
a very simple one: that man is not the centre of creation; that the
universe is a bigger affair than the earth; and that man holds an
exceedingly small place even on this small atom of a planet. Old
Europe was gradually growing to the suspicion that one book did not
contain the whole of God’s truth between its covers—that it did not
constitute a final manifestation of the will of God. She was now to
hear, much to her astonishment and indignation, that the human race
did not engross the whole attention of Providence. It was an
elementary lesson enough; but it came as a revelation even to minds
like Lessing’s and Goethe’s. It was a salutary lesson, too; but it was
too new to be recognised as such. Man is a creature of conceit; the
Tractatus would teach him humility. Therefore, the Synagogue
anathematized it, Synodical wisdom condemned it, the States-
general interdicted it, the Catholic Church placed it upon the Index:
they all execrated it; none of them understood it. Posterity has
embraced it. To-day who would be a thinker must in mental attitude,
125
if not in doctrine, be a Spinozist.
 CHAPTER XVII

IN ENGLAND AFTER THE EXPULSION

The banishment of the Jews from England by Edward I., in 1290,

was not quite so thorough as is popularly supposed to have been. A
small section of the community remained behind, or returned, under
the disguise of Lombards. This remnant, according to Jewish
tradition, was finally driven out in 1358; but there is on record a
petition to the Good Parliament which shows that, even after that
date, some of them continued to lead a masked kind of existence in
England. The same inference is to be drawn from the fact that the
House for Jewish Converts, built by Henry III. in the thirteenth
century, continued in existence till the seventeenth. Broadly
speaking, however, Edward’s expulsion cleared England of Jews.
But, while removing the objects of Christian hatred, it did not
diminish the hatred itself. Although the “unclean and perfidious” race
had, to all intents and purposes, vanished from men’s eyes, the
legend of their wickedness and misanthropy lingered in tradition and
was consecrated by literature. In the middle of the ensuing century
we find Gower, the poet, representing a Jew as saying:

“I am a Jewe, and by my lawe

I shal to no man be felawe
126
To keepe him trouth in word ne dede.”

A few years afterwards Chaucer, in his Prioresses Tale,

immortalised the monkish fiction of child-murder, which had already
done yeoman’s service in justifying the persecution of the Jews.
Chaucer’s child, to judge from the scene of its murder being laid in
Asia, seems to be the eldest member of the large family of
massacred Innocents, representatives of which are to be met with in
nearly every European country.

“Heere bigynneth the Prioresses tale:

“There was in Asie, in a gret citee,

Amonges Cristen folk a Jewerye,
Sustened by a lord of that contree,
For foule usure and lucre of vilanye,
Hateful to Crist and to his companye;
And thurgh the strete men myght ryde or wende,
For it was free, and open at eyther ende.”

At the further end of this Jewish quarter stood a little school for
Christian children, who learnt in it “swich maner doctrine as men
used there,” that is, “to singen and to rede.” Among these youthful
scholars was a widow’s son, “a litel clergeon, seven year of age,”
whom his mother had taught to kneel and pray before the Virgin’s
image. Day by day on his way to and from school, as he passed
through the Jewry, this Innocent used full merrily to sing “Alma
Redemptoris”:

“The swetnes hath his herte perced so

Of Cristes mooder, that, to hir to preye,
He can not stinte of singing by the weye.”

But

“Our firste foo, the serpent Sathanas,

That hath in Jewes herte his waspes nest,”
was sorely vexed at the child’s piety, and stirred up the inmates of
the Jewry with such words:

“O Hebraik peple, allas!

Is this to yow a thing that is honest,
That swich a boy shal walken as him lest
In your despyt, and singe of swich sentence,
Which is again your lawes reverence?”

The Jews took the hint, and conspired to chase this Innocent out
of the world. They hired a homicide, and, as the boy went by, this
cursed Jew seized him, cut his throat, and cast him into a pit.
The poor widow waited all night for her little child in vain, and as
soon as it was daylight she hastened to the school and elsewhere,
seeking it, until she heard that it had last been seen in the Jewry.
Half distracted with anguish and fear, she continued her search
among the accursed Jews, now calling on Christ’s mother for help,
now imploring every Jew she met to tell her if her child had passed
that way. They all answered and said no!
But Jesus, who loves to hear his praises sung by the mouth of
Innocence, directed her steps to the pit, and there, wondrous to
relate, she heard her child, with its throat cut from ear to ear, singing
lustily “Alma Redemptoris.”
“So loude, that al the place gan to ringe.”
The Christian folk, awestruck, sent for the Provost. The boy was
taken out of the pit, amid piteous lamentations, “singing his song
alway,” and was carried in procession to the Abbey, his mother
swooning by the bier. The Jews were punished for their crime “with
torment and with shameful death”; they were first drawn by wild
horses and afterwards hanged.
Meanwhile, this Innocent was borne to his grave, and when
sprinkled with holy water spoke and sang, “O Alma Redemptoris
mater!” The abbot, “who was a holy man as monks are, or else ought
to be,” began to adjure the child by the holy Trinity to tell him what
was the cause of its singing, “sith that thy throte is cut, to my
seminge?” The child answers: “‘My throte is cut unto my nekkeboon,’
and I should have died long ago. But Jesus Christ wills that his glory
last and be remembered. So I am permitted to sing ‘O Alma’ loud
and clear.”
He relates how Christ’s mother sweet, whom he had always
loved, came to him and, laying a grain upon his tongue, bade him
sing this anthem. Thereupon the holy monk, drawing out the boy’s
tongue, removed the grain, and forthwith the boy gave up the ghost
softly. The martyr’s “litel body sweet” was laid in a tomb of clear
marble.
The Prioresses Tale ends with an apostrophe to young Hugh of
Lincoln “sleyn also with cursed Jewes, as it is notable,” and a
request that he should pray for us “sinful folk unstable.” Amen.
Bishop Percy, in his Reliques of Ancient Poetry, has preserved
the Scottish ballad of The Jew’s Daughter, which turns on an
incident bearing a close resemblance to Chaucer’s tale, although it
seems to be based on the alleged murder at Trent, in 1475, of a boy
127
called Simon. The name of the victim, on the legend reaching
England, may quite easily have been changed into the familiar Hugh.
The Scottish version is as follows:

“The rain rins doune through Mirry-land toune,

Sae dois it doune the Pa:
Sae dois the lads of Mirry-land toune,
Quhan they play at the ba’.

Than out and cam the Jewis dochter,

Said, Will ye cum in and dine?
‘I winnae cum in, I cannae cum in,
Without my play-feres mine.’”
 However, the boy is enticed with an apple “reid and white” and
stabbed in the heart with a little pen-knife by the Jew’s daughter, who
then laughingly lays him out on a dressing board, dresses him like a
swine, puts him in “a cake of lead” and casts him into a filthy draw-
well. Lady Helen, the boy’s mother, misses him in the evening and
runs to the “Jewis castel,” calling upon her “bonny Sir Hew.” He
answers from the bottom of the well.
And so one century religiously handed down to the next its
fictions and its prejudices.
Yet, the Jew is as hard to keep out as Nature herself: Expellas
furca tamen usque recurret. In 1410 we hear of a Jewish physician
named Elias Sabot who came from Bologna with permission to settle
and practise in any part of the realm. There is also reason to believe
that the Jewish remnant left in England after Edward’s expulsion was
strongly reinforced by the immigration of refugees from Spain
towards the end of the fifteenth century. The reign of Queen
Elizabeth was also distinguished by the influx of many foreigners—
128
merchants, miners, and physicians—and it is highly probable that
there were Jews amongst them. But how perilous such a venture
was can be seen from the following episode. In the year 1581 a
certain Jeochim Gaunz, or Gaunse, came over with a proposal to
furnish to the English Government some new information concerning
the methods of smelting and manufacturing copper and lead ores,
and conducted experiments in the mining districts of Cumberland.
For some nine years the enterprising stranger lived in London
unmolested, because unsuspected. But on an evil day, in September
1589, he went to Bristol, and there fell in with the Rev. Richard
Crawley, a clergyman interested in Hebrew. On finding that Gaunz
knew that language, Mr. Crawley cultivated his acquaintance, and in
the course of one of their learned discussions Gaunz betrayed his
Judaism. The discovery led to his arrest. Cross-examined by the
local magistrates, he boldly confessed that he was a Bohemian Jew,
born and bred, unbaptized and absolutely unable to accept the
claims of Christianity to a divine origin. He was sent before the Privy
Council at Whitehall, where all traces of him are lost.
 But the unpopularity of the race in Elizabethan England, apart
from Gaunse’s case, is abundantly attested by the Elizabethan
drama. A few authors made occasional attempts to whitewash the
stage Jew; but these attempts, somewhat dubious at the best, were
certainly not successful. That the general opinion of the Jew
continued to be anything but a favourable one, is implied by casual
references in various plays, and is manifestly proved by the
delineation of the Jewish character in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and in
Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Marlowe’s Barabas and
Shakespeare’s Shylock are both replicas of the Jew as conceived by
mediaeval imagination: a money-monger fabulously rich, ineffably
tender to his own people, incredibly cruel to the Christian. It is a
portrait drawn by prejudice and coloured by ignorance. The two great
dramatists adopted the popular lay-figure and breathed into it the
spirit of life. The result is a gruesome monstrosity, animated by
genius.
Barabas in the first scene of the play “is discovered in his
counting-house, with heaps of gold before him.” This wealth is the
fruit of extensive trade with the lands of the East. Every wind that
blows brings to the Jew of Malta

“argosies
Laden with riches, and exceeding store
Of Persian silks, of gold, and oriental pearl.”

In all this prosperity Barabas sees a fulfilment of the ancient

blessing bestowed by Jehovah on the sons of Israel; a proof and a
pledge of the Lord’s continued favour to His chosen people:

“Thus trowls our fortune in by land and sea,

And thus are we on every side enriched:
These are the blessings promised to the Jews,
And herein was old Abram’s happiness:
What more may Heaven do for earthly man
 Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps,
Ripping the bowels of the earth for them,
Making the seas their servants and the winds
To drive their substance with successful blasts?”

He does not envy the Christian his fruitless faith, nor does he
see any virtue in poverty:

“They say we are a scattered nation:

I cannot tell, but we have scrambled up
More wealth by far than those that brag of faith.”

He mentions wealthy Jews in various lands, “wealthier far than

any Christian,” and the opulence of the race consoles him for its
political humiliation:

“Give us a peaceful rule, make Christian Kings,

That thirst so much for principality.”

Thus this practical idealist soliloquises, spiritualising the realities

of filthy lucre, materialising spiritual prophecies, and, in the midst of
national disgrace, retaining his racial pride intact—a living Jew. Nor
is he devoid of human affections:

“I have no charge, nor many children,

But one sole daughter, whom I hold as dear
As Agamemnon did his Iphigen:
And all I have is hers.”

Round these two objects, “his girl and his gold,” all the emotions
of Barabas centre, and he is happy.
 But, alas! Fortune is fickle. At the very moment when Barabas is
congratulating himself on his prosperity, calamity is at the door. A
Turkish fleet has arrived in the harbour to demand from the Knights
of Malta “the ten years’ tribute that remains unpaid.” At this
emergency the Knights hurriedly hold a consultation among
themselves, and, of course, decide that the Jews shall pay the debts
of their Christian masters. The scapegoats are summoned to the
senate-house, and the decision is announced to them, by one of the
Knights, who candidly tells Barabas:

“Thou art a merchant and a moneyed man

And ’tis thy money, Barabas, we seek.
Barabas. How, my lord! my money?
Ferneze, Governor of Malta: Thine and the rest.”

It is in vain that the Hebrews plead poverty. They are told that
they must contribute their share to the welfare of the land in which
they are allowed to get their wealth. Nor will their share be the same
as that of the faithful. The Christians, in suffering them to live in their
country, commit a sin against their God, and the present distress is a
punishment for it:

“For through our sufferance of your hateful lives,

Who stand accursed in the sight of Heaven,
These taxes and afflictions are befallen,
And therefore thus we are determined:

“First, the tribute money of the Turks shall all be levied

amongst the Jews, and each of them to pay one-half of his
estate.
“Secondly, he that denies to pay shall straight become a
Christian.
“Lastly, he that denies this shall absolutely lose all he
has.”
 How truly mediaeval the whole scene is!
The other Jews consent to give up one-half of their estates.
Barabas upbraids them for their cowardice, and stoutly refuses to
comply. But his refusal of half only leads to the confiscation of the
whole of his property. In return for this sacrifice Barabas is cheerfully
told that he will be suffered to live in Malta, and, “if he can,” make
another fortune. The Hebrew argues: “How can I multiply? of naught
is nothing made.” But the Christian retorts: “From naught at first thou
com’st to little wealth, from little unto more, from more to most.”
But what need have we of argument?

“If your first curse fall heavy on thy head,

And make thee poor and scorned of all the world,
’Tis not our fault, but thy inherent sin.”

Thus the poor millionaire is preached out of his possessions.

What if he individually be blameless? He is one of the accursed race,
and must pay the penalty for the collective sins of his forefathers. All
that he obtains by his vigorous protests is the comfortless saw:

“Excess of wealth is cause of covetousness,

And covetousness, O, ’tis a monstrous sin.”

He is stripped of all he had, his goods, his money, his ships, his
stores; and his mansion is converted into a nunnery. Nothing
remains to him but his life, and he is left to bewail his misery and to
curse its authors to his heart’s content. This he proceeds to do in the
following terms:

“The Plagues of Egypt, and the curse of Heaven,

Earth’s barrenness, and all men’s hatred
Inflict upon them, thou great Primus Motor!
And here upon my knees, striking the earth,
 I ban their souls to everlasting pains
And extreme tortures of the fiery deep,
That thus have dealt with me in my distress.”

His brethren, too timid to second Barabas in his struggle, now

gather round him and strive to console him in his sorrow. But
Barabas is not to be comforted, any more than Job was under like
circumstances. Indeed, he compares his lot with Job’s, and finds it
immeasurably harder:

“He had seven thousand sheep,

Three thousand camels, and two hundred yoke
Of labouring oxen, and five hundred
She-asses; but for every one of those,
Had they been valued at indifferent rate,
I had at home, and in mine argosy,
And other ships that came from Egypt last,
As much as would have bought his beasts and him,
And yet have kept enough to live upon.”

What is there left to him to live for or upon? He likens himself to

a general

“That in a field amidst his enemies

Doth see his soldiers slain, himself disarmed,
And knows no means of his recovery:
Ay, let me sorrow for this sudden chance.”

However, Barabas lies. He is not quite so destitute as he would

make us believe. He hints that his genius had foreseen the
possibility of such a mishap and provided against it. While he is
mourning his misery in loneliness, there enters his lovely daughter
Abigail, just turned out of her home by the nuns, lamenting her
father’s misfortunes. He tries to calm her:

“Be silent, daughter, sufferance breeds ease,

And time may yield us an occasion
Which on the sudden cannot serve the turn.
Besides, my girl, think me not all so fond
As negligently to forego so much
Without provision for thyself and me:
Ten thousand portagues, besides great pearls,
Rich costly jewels, and stones infinite,
Fearing the worst of this before it fell,
I closely hid.”

But she tells him that his house has been taken possession of by
nuns, and therefore he cannot get at his hidden treasure. On hearing
of this crowning calamity poor Barabas cries:
“My gold! my gold, and all my wealth is gone!”
accusing Heaven and the stars of their exceeding cruelty. But his
courage and cunning do not fail him even then. He rises to the height
of his misfortune and instructs his daughter to go to the Abbess of
the nunnery, and, by pretending that she wishes to be converted, to
obtain access to the treasure. Abigail, after much hesitation,
consents to play the part of hypocrite, and she plays it with
consummate skill and success. “The hopeless daughter of a hapless
Jew” goes to the holy lady and declares that, fearing that her father’s
afflictions proceed from sin or want of faith, she desires to pass away
her life in penitence. She is admitted to the sisterhood as a novice.
Barabas rails at her in simulated wrath, while secretly he gives her
some final instructions concerning the treasure, and parts with her
on the understanding that at midnight she will join him with the
hoard.
Vexed and tormented by the memories of his lost wealth, the
wretched Barabas roams the livelong night, sleepless and homeless,
haunting, like the ghost of a departed miser, the place where his
treasure is hid; and beseeching the God of Israel to direct Abigail’s
hand. At last she appears at a window aloft, and lets the bags fall.
Whereupon the Jew bursts forth into an ecstasy of joy:

“O my girl!
My gold, my fortune, my felicity.
O girl! O gold! O beauty! O my bliss!”

Two young Christian gentlemen, Mathias and Lodowick, are

enamoured of the Jew’s daughter. Barabas, in the bitterness of his
soul, resolves to have both youths murdered: Lodowick as the son of
the Governor who bereft him of his fortune, Mathias simply as a
Christian. In pursuance of this dark design, he makes use of his
beloved daughter. He promises her hand to each of the youths in
turn; he incenses the one against the other; and he instructs his
daughter to receive them both, and entertain them “with all the
courtesy she can afford.” “Use them as if they were Philistines,” he
says to her, “dissemble, swear, protest, vow love” to each. No
considerations of maidenly modesty need restrain her, for neither
youth is “of the seed of Abraham.” She obeys, not knowing her
father’s real purpose. A mock betrothal to Lodowick takes place.
Abigail plights her troth to the youth; for “it’s no sin to deceive a
Christian”—one

“That never tasted of the Passover,

Nor e’er shall see the land of Canaan
Nor our Messias that is yet to come.
For they themselves hold it a principle,
Faith is not to be held with heretics;
But all are heretics that are not Jews.”

No sooner has the deluded Lodowick departed, than his rival

appears on the scene, and is treated likewise. But Barabas is
counting without his daughter. Abigail, though indifferent to
Lodowick, reciprocates Mathias’ affection. Besides, the double part
she is induced to play for her father’s sake is abhorrent to her
nature.
In the meantime Barabas, by foul lies and forged letters, brings
about a mortal duel between the two rivals. Abigail, on hearing of her
lover’s death and of her father’s villainy, indignant at having been
made the instrument of his crime, revolted and sick of life, resolves
to return to the nunnery and take the veil in earnest.
Barabas is exasperated by this last blow. He curses his daughter
for her desertion, adopts for his heir a rascally Mohammedan slave,
who had been his accomplice throughout, and makes use of him to
poison all the nuns, his own daughter included.
Barabas is rejoicing at the success of his plot. On hearing the
bells ring for the funeral of his victims, he breaks into fiendish
exultation:

“There is no music to a Christian’s knell.

How sweet the bells ring now the nuns are dead!”

But his joy is short-lived. Before her death Abigail confessed the part
which she had unwillingly taken in the conspiracy that brought about
the mutual murder of the two young gentlemen. The friar who
received Abigail’s confession taxes Barabas with the crime. The Jew,
frightened, tries to save his life by feigned conversion. He promises
to do penance:

“To fast, to pray, and wear a shirt of hair,

And on my knees creep to Jerusalem,”

and to give an immense sum to the friar’s monastery. The friar

accepts the offer joyously, and is inveigled by the Jew into his house,
where he is strangled. But the Mohammedan slave, in a moment of
merry and amorous expansiveness, betrays his own and his
master’s secrets to his boon companions, who immediately inform
the Governor. Barabas and the slave are arrested and sentenced to
death. The former drugs himself, and, under the impression that he
is dead, is thrown outside the city walls. On recovering from the
draught, he determines to avenge his wrongs by delivering the city
up to the Turks. The Governor and the Knights of Malta are taken
prisoners, and the Jew is made Governor. But, knowing that he will
never be safe in a place and amongst people that had so much
cause to hate him, he purchases peace and more wealth by a
second treachery. He offers to invite the Turkish general and his
comrades to a banquet and to murder them, while their soldiers are
entrapped in a monastery and blown up. The Christians accept the
offer, and Barabas felicitates himself on his cunning:

“Why, is not this

A Kingly kind of trade, to purchase towns
By treachery and sell ’em by deceit?”

But though they hate the Turk, the Christians hate the Jew more
heartily still. They apprise the doomed general of Barabas’ plan, and
the latter is, literally, made to fall into the pit which he had dug for the
Turk. In his fury and despair the wretch confesses all his sins,
boasting of the stratagems by which he had meant to bring confusion
on them all, “damned Christian dogs and Turkish infidels” alike, and,
having cursed his fill, dies. The Knights exact reparation from the
Turks for the sack of the city, and thus the play ends in a triumph for
the Cross.
The Jew, as has been seen, does not become the villain of the
piece, until after he has been made the victim. But the audience is
supposed to execrate his villainy and laugh at his sufferings. The
author takes good care to disarm pity by painting the Jew in the
blackest and most ludicrous colours that he can find on his palette.
He endows him with a colossal nose and all the crimes under the
sun. Barabas’ cruelty to the poor is only equalled by his insolence to
the powerful. He is made to say that he “would for lucre’s sake have
sold his soul.” His contempt and hatred towards the Christians is
dwelt upon with reiterated emphasis:

“’tis a custom held with us

That when we speak with Gentiles like you,
We turn into the air to purge ourselves;
For unto us the promise doth belong.”

He instructs his Mohammedan slave:

“First be thou void of these affections,

Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear,
Be moved at nothing, see thou pity none,
But to thyself smile when the Christians moan.”

He brags that he himself has always acted on those precepts:

“As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights,

And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells:
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See ’em go pinioned along by my door.”

He gives a lurid account of his past life:

“Being young, I studied physic, and began

To practise first upon the Italian;
There I enriched the priests with burials,
And always kept the sextons’ arms in ure
 With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells.”

After a career of treachery as a military engineer, he became a

usurer:

“And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,

And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I filled the jails with bankrupts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals,
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.”

And when the Turk had related some of his own exploits in the
fields of murder, deceit, and torture of Christians, the Jew sees in
him a brother:

“We are villains both:

Both circumcised, we hate Christians both.”

Thus all the anti-Jewish prejudices of the Middle Ages are

embodied in Barabas, who, lest the list should be incomplete, is also
accused of fornication and of having crucified a child. His daughter
with all her charm and loveliness seems to be created partly as a foil
to the Jew’s grotesque personality, partly as a means of wounding
him through the one weak spot in his anti-Christian cuirass—his
affection for her.
The Merchant of Venice has its twin brother in the ballad of
Gernutus, the Jew of Venice, preserved in Percy’s Reliques:

“In Venice towne not long agoe

 A cruel Jew did dwell,
Which lived all on usurie,
As Italian writers tell.”

Both stories seem to be derived from an Italian novel by

Giovanni Fiorentino, written about 1378, and first printed at Milan in
1554.
Shakespeare’s Shylock is cast in the same mould as Marlowe’s
Barabas. He loathes the Christian and his manners, his masques,
and merriments and foppery. He will not dine with him, lest he should
“smell pork, eat of the habitation which your prophet, the Nazarite,
conjured the devils into. I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with
you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink
with you, nor pray with you.” His covetousness intensifies his
superstitious hatred of the Gentile:

“I hate him for he is a Christian;

But more for that, in low simplicity,
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance.”

The Christian’s scorn exasperates the Jew still further:

“If I can catch him once upon the hip,

I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.
He hates our sacred nation; and he rails
On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift,
Which he calls interest. Cursed be my tribe
If I forgive him!”

But, while abhorring the Christian in his heart, he outwardly

fawns upon him, awaiting an opportunity of gratifying his hunger for
vengeance. This soon presents itself. Antonio, the upright and proud