MIXED MESSAGES // TWO CONVERSATIONS // BILLY // A PROFESSOR AND A LOVER // THE END OF FRIENDSHIPS // CRED // IMPORTANT MEN
The message the natives, with hand signs, conveyed was: LEAVE OUR CROPS BE, AND WE WILL GIVE YOU OUR DAUGHTERS.
We hadn’t any interest in their crops or their daughters: not their daughters till we realized they were so undervalued, not their crops till we saw that by torching their crops we might teach them to value their daughters more highly.
That our actions could be taken by the natives to mean EVEN TO THE LIKES OF US SEAFARING MEN, THOSE DAUGHTERS OF YOURS ARE OF SO LITTLE VALUE THAT THE PLEASURE WE DERIVE FROM DESTROYING YOUR HARVEST IS PREFERABLE TO THAT WE’D DERIVE FROM THEIR POSSESSION, or perhaps WE WILL TORCH YOUR CROPS AND THEN HAVE YOUR DAUGHTERS did not occur to us—these sorts of possibilities simply refuse, in the heat of the moment, to occur with the facility they occur to you later, in your well-appointed quarters, sipping from a magnum of pupu-tree liquor, reviewing the day’s events in your log—but such misunderstanding on the part of the natives might in fact provide the correct explanation for why they elected, in the glow of the fires we had put to their crops, to pulp all their daughters’ skulls with clubs.
At the time we assumed they were offering us a sacrifice.