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Voices in the Walls 21

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Chapter Four

I woke to the smell of coffee. The room was cold; the chimney to the kitchen fireplace passed up my wall on its way to the open air, but no one made a fire in it any more. The water in the basin by my bed was like ice. I splashed my face and dressed hurriedly in the darkness, determined to be up and about. I did not intend my Aunt to think I lay in bed all day.

When I got downstairs, she was nowhere in sight, but I could hear her speaking softly to her chickens outside. I joined her; she was feeding them by the light of a coal oil lamp. The sun was just beginning to stain the eastern sky with faint pink. We spoke softly in the pre-dawn darkness and our breaths boiled like smoke in the chilly air. When she moved to the barn, I offered to milk her cow, but she said the old girl would give more milk to a familiar pair of hands.

Sarah was sitting at the table when we came back in, but I couldn’t really say she was awake. She was staring at the wall with her chin in her cupped palms. Aunt Rachel put her to frying bacon, and this time she watched over her shoulder and caught her before she burned it.

Breakfast was a quiet meal. Sarah was in a bad mood. Aunt Rachel’s thoughts were far away, and I felt like an intruder in her home.

We were clearing the table when I heard the sound of slow hooves outside the kitchen window. It was a negro leading a mule. Aunt Rachel went to the back door and invited him in. He paused in the doorway when he saw Sarah and me, and Aunt Rachel told him who we were, then said, “This is Benjamin Sayer. He lives down the road south of here.”

She told him to have a seat and set a cup of coffee in front of him. It gave me a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. For the first time since I had met Aunt Rachel, the North seemed like a foreign country to me. I knew that there were free blacks in the North – in fact, there were a lot of free blacks in the South as well – but to see one sitting down at the table like this, and to see Aunt Rachel serving him coffee just like he was white . . .; well, it just did not seem natural.

Since I was a guest in Aunt Rachel’s house, I tried to hide my feelings. The negro seemed pretty uncomfortable himself.

Aunt Rachel fell into a conversation with Sayer about a barn he was building for her on an outlying piece of property. She noticed that I had taken an interest in what they were saying, and asked, “How much do you know about building barns?”

“Father had me spend a week with the overseer one summer watching one go up. I know how it is done.”

“But you couldn’t swing an axe or adz yourself?”

“I didn’t say that. Father put me to work in our shipyard for a couple of months one time. He said I needed to know ships from the keel up. I wasn’t there long enough to become very skillful, but I swung axe and adz long enough to develop some callouses.”

*****

And so we begin Matt’s education into new ways of thinking.

102. Mud 1

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Here are the first two of six installments of the novel Mud.

1

They call me Mud, but don’t be fooled. It is a greater insult than it seems.

The word is Wauk and its symbol is embossed on one of the counters of the runeboard. As it is from the Godtongue, it has entered every language. In the Inner Kingdom, so a traveler once told me, it means the basic stuff from which all the world is made. Not so in my city.

In Renth, mud is that stuff into which all foul things come to rest. Blood and feces, urine and menses, all come back to the earth at last. A Renthian merchant will not say the words for those things – he hardly admits that his body produces them – and so he says wauk, thus staining a good word.

My people are Renthian, but outcasts. We are the Chamarana, who live in the swamp, and carry away those unpleasant things that the nobles will not speak of. I was born in the mud and of the mud. The smell of the mud was the first thing in my nostrils. My mother smelled of mud; most of my siblings died of the mud’s contagion.

The Chamarana breed freely and die early. It is a joke to the merchants. But those of us who survive, grow strong. And angry.

——————–

2

The river Renal curves sharply just as it nears the Inner Sea. Renth is built on the high right bank between the river and the sea. Overflowing waters in spring cover the lowlands off the left bank, forming a vast inland swamp. We Chamarana live at the edge of the swamp, and enter Renth only to do our work.

Every morning the tichan are driven out of their pens down the main avenue of the town to the swamp to graze. Every night they return to the safety of the pens, and twice a day we Chamarana with our crusted buckets and wooden scoops go out to clean the road after their passing. Dumped onto the fields at the edge of the swamp, and composted carefully into the stronger waste from the merchants cesspools, it fertilizes the crops we raise to feed Chamrana and merchant alike.

When I was five years old, I was given a scooop and put to work alongside my mother. When I was eight, and could lift a bucket, I began to work alone. But no one works the day round, not even a Chamarana. My mother had only enough energy for her work and to care for my little sister. She had none left for me, so I was free when my work ended to head for the common.

The land which stood above the highest floods was packed tight with warehouses, dwellings, barracks, and shops belonging to the merchants. On the land which flooded yearly, we planted our crops. Above the fields, we built our temporary huts, and rebuilt them every time the Renal rose higher than ususal. Between merchant’s houses and Chamarana huts lay the common.
more tomorrow

Voices in the Walls 20

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Chapter three, continued

I held in my hands a piece of family history. My great grandfather had fought in the Revolutionary War on board a privateer out of Charleston, and his part of the prize money had made him wealthy. Afterward, he had never quite trusted the ability of the new American government to keep order, so he had had this pistol made by a Williamsburg gunsmith as a wedding present for his bride. It was .36 caliber, small for the day, and he had required that it be compact enough for a lady to conceal in a purse or in the folds of her skirts. It had been built as a flintlock, with twin, side-by-side barrels.

When their son, my grandfather, entered the Navy, Great-grandmother Williams gave it to him to carry. It was two carefully aimed shots from this pistol that had stopped a charge by Tripolian pirates during a small boat action off North Africa, saving my grandfather’s life and the lives of his crew.

After Grandfather married and retired to Waterside, he gave the pistol to my grandmother. She had carried it with her whenever she went riding in the countryside, and when her son, my father, had gone out in the coasting schooner Eva, she had had it converted to percussion caps and had given it to him.

It had gone from husband to wife to son for three generations until my mother, with her Quaker repugnance for guns, had refused to take it from Father. He had taught me to shoot using this gun, and now he was passing it on to me for the protection of my sister. It was more than a weapon. It was a touch of my father’s hand across the miles, and a trust passed now into the fourth generation.

With reverence, I took the pistol out of its place in the box and examined it. As always, it was in perfect condition. I took the horn and filled the measuring cup with powder, poured it down the right barrel, then again down the left one. Two bullets wrapped in greased patches of cloth went into the barrels and were rammed carefully home. Two percussion caps went onto the nipples and I lowered the hammers carefully to half-cock.

I closed the case and put it into the bottom of my carpetbag, then hid the pistol at the back of a small drawer of my dresser, behind paper and pens where Aunt Rachel was unlikely to look.

I was asleep within thirty seconds of hitting the bed.

*****

My interest in all things maritime led me to read the Hornblower books when I was young. My interest was captured by the sailing of the ships, the strategies, and issues of leadership, but I also had to put up with sea battles and all the unpleasantness that makes up the reality of war at sea. I never cared for that part of the books, although if it had not been there, they would have sounded quite hollow.

In Lord Hornblower (as I remember; I don’t have a copy handy), Hornblower’s new wife gave him a pair of double barreled pistols fitted with then-new percussion caps. As he examined them in his cabin, he realized that that they might mean life itself in the coming conflict.

I was intrigued by the idea of the gift of a firearm as a gift of life. Later, when I was writing Voices, I dredged it up and placed in into this multigenerational context.

Voices in the Walls 19

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Chapter three, continued

“Oh,” she said, “you do have your Father’s temper after all! No, Matt, I don’t feel that way any more. I hate slavery as much as I ever did, but not slave owners.”

“Father has always been a moderate. He would see the slaves returned to Africa, if there were a way to do it. His attitude has almost cost him his seat in Congress several times.”

“I know that. I know and respect your father, but he still holds human beings in bondage and I don’t hesitate to tell him that he is wrong. So we fight, whenever we see each other. So we avoid seeing each other, because we don’t want to fight.”

Aunt Rachel broke off the conversation, and suggested that I look around a bit outside. I took the hint. Her home had been invaded almost without warning by two strangers, and she wanted to think things over in private.

I wandered around for a few minutes, peeking into the chicken coop, locating where she kept her tools, and finally paying a visit to the two horses she kept in a small corral beside the house. Then I returned to the barn, pulled the handcart up to the back stoop, and began the task of taking Sarah’s trunks up to her room. She lay under a quilt, snoring softly, and did not wake though I made four trips.

*****

Sarah was still sleeping at supper time. I had to shake her awake, and she went right back to bed after the meal. I think the tension of being moved to a new home once again, right after she had gotten used to Mrs. Davison’s school, had hit her as hard as the ride north.

The second story of Aunt Rachel’s house was split by a hallway, with two bedrooms on each side. Aunt Rachel slept at the front of the house and used the room opposite hers to store blankets and out-of-season clothing. The remaining two rooms were given to Sarah and me.

I stored my clothing in a battered chest-of-drawers and shoved my carpetbag under the bed. If I was going to stay here where I would have to do farm chores I would have to buy some rough clothing in Gettysburg. I had taken only a minimum of clothing to Mr. Harding’s house in Baltimore because I had expected to be in uniform within another month.

Finally I opened the paper wrapped package I had laid on the bed. Inside was a small mahogany box fastened with brass. I opened it and looked at the pistol in its velvet lined resting place.

I held in my hands a piece of family history.

*****

I have spent a lot of words describing Aunt Rachel’s farmhouse, many more than I normally would. The shape of the house and the placement of the rooms is of importance for events that will occur a few chapters from now, when Sarah hears voices in the night. They are the voices of escaping slaves, hidden in a secret room in the basement of the house, which is a station on the underground railroad.

Those voices are part of a double-barreled crisis that will catapult Matt into a new and massively changed life.

101. Mud, prolog

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“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don’t claim to be an Emerson, but I am going to shake things up. When I began this website, I intended Serial to be a presentation of my writings and A Writing Life to be mini-essays. This will be my largest deviation from that intention, because Serial is tied up with the fragment Voices in the Walls.

For five weeks I have been writing posts on issues that began with race in America and morphed into a consideration of world wide hierarchies based on race, gender and caste. I’ve written enough essays on that subject, but I have some more fiction to share.

I spent five years studying caste in India and overseas Indian colonies, and wrote my first master’s thesis on the subject. That is the kind of deep knowledge that informs everything I write, even when the subject seems to be something else. While writing a dragon short story (The Best of Lies), I needed a description of the city of Renth. Renth was part of the back-story of three novels I have written, but had never been fleshed out. This is what fell out of my keyboard.

As we went on up the mountain, I thought of Renth. I remembered how she spread out on both sides of River Renal from the crowded waterfront to the first fingers of the great inland swamp. I remembered how herdsmen drove in their herds of tichan every evening to keep them from the night predators. All of the sidewalk vendors would close up shop and congregate on the rooftops until the sound of passing-bells carried by the herdsmen proclaimed the streets safe again. Then the chamarana would come out with their crusted baskets to clean the streets and haul the manure to fertilize their rich gardens.

There are temples in Renth where Encaritremanta is still worshipped instead of the bloodless Septs, and where the ritual dancers proclaim to the world that the Fern of the Deep Forest is still fertile and ripe. There is Bread Street where the bakers from the whole city congregate and the smells are sweet beyond description.

In the morning, the sun falls slantwise on the whitewashed houses, catching the sleepy merchants in their rooftop boudoirs. The boys from the waterfront crowd onto the high roofed warehouses to look across the city at first light when the women take their baths. And some of them look back, insolent and insulated by their station, posturing and laughing and waving.

The chamarana in this bit were Chamars, borrowed whole from India. Later, when I needed a long story to flesh out a too-short novel, and needed it to be set in Renth, I began to consider writing from the viewpoint of one of these outcastes.

This was just before I began this website, when everything was fluid. I considered writing the story and publishing it in short segments as they were written, in Serial. It was a foolish idea, completely out of step with my writing style. I wrote the first six short segments, fell in love with the story, and decided to write it in a more normal fashion. It is on my short list of what-to-write-next.

Here are those segments, to be presented two per day for the rest of the week. It isn’t Black History, but you’ll find that it tastes a little like black history. The novel is tentatively titled Mud.

Voices in the Walls 18

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Chapter three, continued

Aunt Rachel put the coffee pot on the table and set out two cups. She settled in across from me and said, “Now, why don’t you tell me exactly what is going on.”

I told her of being called back from Baltimore and of Father’s fears. “He believes that if it comes to war, a lot of the fighting will be in Virginia, and that Washington City itself will be in great danger. There would be no safety there for Sarah, so he asked me to bring her here.”

“Please don’t misunderstand me, Matthew . . .”

“Aunt Rachel, people call me Matt.”

“All right, Matt. Don’t think you aren’t welcome here, but why didn’t Thomas send Sarah to live with his own sister. You must know that he and I don’t get along.”

“He said the North would be safer.”

“No, I don’t believe that. Southern Pennsylvania is right on the border between slave states and free ones.  We are more likely to have fighting here than in South Carolina where your Aunt Mary lives. There has to be another reason.”

I liked the way she went right to he heart of the problem, and I liked the way her face looked. She was alive to reality and ready to embrace the world as it really was. Aunt Mary, on the other hand, was the kind of woman Mrs. Davison would have been if she could have managed it.

I said, “I think Father considers my Aunt Mary rather empty-headed.”

She smiled briefly at some private memory, and said, “I haven’t met your Aunt Mary. What do you think of her?”

I thought back to when I had last seen her, three years ago during one of the times we were staying at Waterside. I remembered her grating voice and her endless conversations about nothing at all. I said, “I agree with Father.”

“Then perhaps she would not be the one to go to for safety.”

We drank our coffee in silence while Aunt Rachel thought it over. 

I get along well with people, mostly because Father trained me early how to put people at ease and give no offense. But that was just a thing I had learned to do. It was rare for me to feel truly at ease, but Aunt Rachel made me feel as if I had known her for years.

Out of the blue, she said, “You look like your father, but you remind me more of my sister – your mother. You have her calm. Your father was always restless; full of some kind of nervous energy. I teased him about it once. I told him he sat still at a full gallop. He didn’t like that very much.”

Aunt Rachel looked so much like my mother that everything she said took me back to childhood. I thought about how others treated Father and said, “I never knew anyone to tease Father.”

“I’m sure he would not allow it. He had too much pride for that.”

“Why don’t the two of you get along?”

She smiled sadly. “Personality and politics. We were both born stubborn, and we disagreed about slavery. My family has been of the Society of Friends since Pennsylvania was a colony, and we have always opposed slavery. You father was a slave owner. When I was younger, I thought all slave owners were sub-human beasts.”

That was hitting pretty close to home. “I hope you don’t still feel that way,” I said stiffly.

“Oh,” she said, “you do have your Father’s temper after all! No, Matt, I don’t feel that way any more. I hate slavery as much as I ever did, but not slave owners.”

100. We Hold These Truths (post 2)

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.  .  .   that all men are created equal  .  .  .

I studied Indian culture for five years and wrote my first master’s thesis on caste based economics. Five years wasn’t enough time to scratch the surface of the complexity of the subject, so anything I say here is a tweet when an encyclopedia is needed.

During the time of my studies, the 60s and 70s, academics were calling black-white relations here at home an American caste system. To see how the differences outweigh the similarities, let’s look as some of the characteristics of caste (jati) in India:

  • Jati groups are exclusive. You can’t join them and you can’t leave them.
  • Jati groups are arranged in a hierarchy.
  • You enter your group at birth and exit it at death. An individual cannot move from one group to another.
  • Upper groups are pure, lower groups are polluted (ritually, don’t look for germ theory in a millennia old culture)

You can see that the first two characteristics fit pre-Civil Rights America. The third fits America except for passing, which was seen as an aberration. We will never know how much it was a norm.

The last characteristic is hugely different between the two cultures, but not absent in America. When I was young, I was told, “If you are ever in a swimming pool and a n—– gets in, get out immediately because they all have V.D..” I didn’t believe it, even then, but you can see how the idea that they are dirty and shouldn’t be touched would reinforce the idea of segregation.

Dirty Jew would have fit well into the two race system of Nazi Germany, as well.

Nevertheless, the caste system in India is overwhelmingly complex. Once you get past the surface, similarities to race are swamped in a myriad of differences. Caste is a bad metaphor for the American situation.

*****

I want to share one caste-race sidelight. There was a massive immigration of Indian workers from the Calcutta and Madras areas to Trinidad, ironically to replace recently freed black slaves who refused to go back the the cane fields as paid workers. When the immigrants were removed from local scrutiny in India, everybody passed for a higher jati; at least that was the belief of the immigrants after they arrived in Trinidad. It was while studying this phenomenon I came across the folk caution:   Beware of the black Brahmin and the pale Chamar.

Two points: When the control from above was removed, hierarchy collapsed. And, even though the racial component of caste is highly attenuated, light-is-good and dark-is-bad still retains a toehold in the conversation.

*****

And now we have come full circle. I began this series of posts by explaining why a white science fiction and fantasy author has an interest in race. Now we return to my novels, which is the original reason for this website. In Serial, the fragment Voices in the Walls is still underway, portraying a young white southerner’s struggle against his own racism. Elsewhere, I am working on the fourth novel in the Menhir series, tentatively titled Mud, which tells the story of a young outcaste fighting to escape his lowly status in the fantasy city of Renth.

Everything that ever happens to a writer is grist for the mill.

I’ll leave you with a riddle:

Question: How many painters does it take to make a masterpiece?
Answer: Two. One to paint, and one to tell him when to quit.

These last five weeks of posts won’t constitute a masterpiece, but it is time to quit. Except for this:  next week I will post here the opening of the novel Mud.

Voices in the Walls 17

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Chapter Three

After Sarah had chosen a small trunk and Aunt Rachel had hustled it and Sarah upstairs, I rolled the cart into a barn and returned to the house.

The kitchen made up one back quarter of the lower floor.  Most of one wall was taken up by a huge fieldstone fireplace.  Aunt Rachel had an new iron wood-burning cook stove, but she had put it to one side of the fireplace so that a friendly fire could still be built on cold winter days. The sideboards and bin tables were scrubbed and fresh. Feed sack towels hung on the stove drying, but they were neatly hemmed, and had been patched where they had worn through. Even over Sarah’s burnt bacon, I could smell the faint odor of spices.

I had just decided to go and fetch an armload of wood to make myself useful, when she returned. She asked if I drank coffee and I said that I did. She asked me if I wanted to rest, but I had no intention of taking an afternoon nap, no matter how little sleep I had gotten.

While she talked, she worked around the kitchen, making up a fresh pot of coffee and putting right the damage Sarah’s cooking had done. As I studied her, it stirred up memories that I had thought were lost. Rachel Darby Pike. My mother had been Amanda Darby Williams.  Aunt Rachel was the younger sister, and she looked much as I remembered my mother.

I wondered why I had not seen her for all these years. I knew that she and Father did not get along, but now that I had met her, I couldn’t imagine why not. 

Thinking back, I could remember a great deal about Mother, although some of the memories were probably not my own. During those times we spent at Waterside, Father would have sudden spells of eloquence when he would talk for hours about her. He called it keeping her memory alive for me, but I am sure that he was keeping it alive for himself as well.

Mother had been a plain woman like Aunt Rachel. She was a Pennsylvania Quaker whose family had opposed slavery for over a hundred years. How she had come to marry a southern plantation owner was something even Father had never explained. Mother had not fitted in at Waterside. None of the neighbors would associate with her. It was not that she pushed her views on them; rather, her whole quiet way of living was an affront to southern society.

I suppose that I owe much of what I am to her. When I helped Mr. Dreyfus load his wagon, and called him Mr. Dreyfus, it was what Mother would have done if she had been in my place.

Aunt Rachel put the coffee pot on the table and set out two cups. She settled in across from me and said, “Now, why don’t you tell me exactly what is going on.”

*****

Since I have set Matt up for major changes in outlook, it should be apparent that this bit about his mother is a beginning of the process of making those changes believable. To change the son of a fire-breathing, slave whipping plantation owner into someone modern readers could accept would be too much of a stretch. Matt’s father is a southerner and slave owner by accident of birth, and a moderate by the standards of his day. Matt has to face major changes, but not such major changes that the reader is likely to doubt that they could happen.

99. We Hold These Truths (post 1)

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Thomas Jefferson said it, but he didn’t believe it. Ask Sally Hemmings, if you think he did.

Jefferson was ahead of his time, but not far enough ahead to resist the pressures to retain his slaves. The French Revolution was so far ahead of history that it ended in dictatorship under Bonaparte. Lincoln was certainly ahead of his time; he freed the slaves, but he could not give them lasting equality.

Throughout human history, human culture has been a repudiation of the idea of equality.

*****

If I were black, my whole approach to life would be different. As a sympathetic white guy, I am angry at the stupidities of race in America. If I were a young black man, I would be pissed. My viewpoint and priorities would different. After all, its hard to remember that you’re trying to drain the swamp when you’re up to your ass in alligators.

As a white guy, the alligators aren’t trying to eat me, so I can see beyond them. But all I see is swamp.

*****

Hierarchy. It was invented by winners to keep the losers losing. It means “I’m better than you are.” No one ever said, “You’re better than I am”, and meant it.

Race is a handy way of keeping track of who’s supposed to be better than whom. It’s helpful it there is a strong physical dissimilarity between the winners and those who are forced to lose, but it isn’t necessary. In America, a white-looking black is still a black. In Japan, the situation is even worse.

There is a “race” of people in Japan which used to be called the Eta. Now that word has fallen into disrepute and they are called Burakumin. They are utterly indistinguishable from “normal” Japanese, yet they were, and often still are, considered untouchables and subject to powerful discrimination.

Of course things are better among native peoples who have not been damaged by civilization, right? Try reading The Tiwi of North Australia if you think that, or let me tell you about them. Women are controlled by men through arranged marriages. The old men have power, which translates as first choice. Young women are married to old men. Young men are pretty well restricted to marrying old women who have become widows. They will get young women later, when they have grown old and powerful. Does that sound like a fun way to live, for men or women?

In many traditional Muslim countries, the rights of men are many and the rights of women are few. For late breaking examples, see any television, any day.

Nothing is further from equality than a caste system.

If you seek the origin of the word caste, you will find that it is Portuguese, not Sanskrit. Roughly, it means color; the Portuguese who founded a colony at Goa on India’s west coast used their word to apply to the Indian notion of varna, and gave us all a word with new connotations.

In the 60s and 70s, some academics were calling black-white relations here at home an American caste system. There are similarities, but the Indian situation is far more complex.          We’ll look more closely at that idea tomorrow.

98. Black, White, Aryan, Jew

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Race. In America, it means black and white. I have spent the last few weeks arguing that race in America is a construct. We all partake of the same gene pool, varying only in the amount of various genes we possess. Take the whitest non-albino; put him on one end of the line. Take the blackest black and put him on the other. Assemble the millions of us who are not recent immigrants from elsewhere and put us in between. There would be no break in the gradation.

Nevertheless, race is still here, so embedded in our national consciousness that the truth of our unity is swamped by the voice in our heads screaming, “I don’t care. Blacks are still blacks, and whites are still whites!”

This kind of confusion about basic reality leads to tragedy, and not only in America. Try this sentence:

In the days of the Third Reich, Germans persecuted Jews.

If this sentence sounds accurate, you are missing a few points. The Jews who were sent to the death camps were largely Germans. I am sure that was no comfort to them, and it isn’t the most salient fact about the situation. But it is important. If we put a wrong label on something, it makes it hard to think clearly about that thing. This process is still going on, as today’s politicians turn complexities into sound bites.

Hitler offered simplified and false solutions to real problems, based on the idea that there was a German race and a Jewish race. Jewish is not a race. It is a religion, and sometimes an ethnic group.

German is not a race. It is a language, and it is shared by several countries other than Germany. Germanism is also an attempt by the late-formed country of Germany to find national unity in a semi-mythical past.

Aryan is not a race. If you say Aryan in today’s world, it will evoke Hitler’s movement to elevate his blonde, blue-eyed “super race” to world supremacy. That super race is a myth made up of equal parts hatred and scientific misunderstanding.

The term Aryan originates in northern India, 3500 years ago. It refers to the “light skinned” conquerors who drove out or enslaved the dark skinned native population. The word Iranian is a modern variant of the word Aryan. As for the “light skinned” conquerors, think Koothrappali from the Big Bang Theory. They were light skinned only compared to the people they conquered.

Hitler should be rolling over in his grave at the thought, but he got his information third hand.

It started with Max Muller, a German born-scholar who spent his career at Oxford. Linguists of his day discovered the link between the languages of Europe and South Asia, and developed the notion of an Indo-European language family. They believed this family of languages originated in the southwestern steppes of Russia, and was introduced into South Asia through the Aryan invaders. Muller was a strong proponent of Aryan culture, considering it one of the greatest developments of mankind. By Aryan, he meant the culture of India. After others had misrepresented his ideas, he clarified that Aryan culture did not imply an Aryan race.

As time passed, proponents of European superiority such as Arthur de Gobineau moved the origin place of the Indo-European language family to northern Europe, confused current notions of race (such as Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean) with the linguistic and cultural classification Aryan. They “invented” the Aryan race, which they considered to be light skinned in the European sense, the originators of civilization, and superior to all others. The caramel skinned invaders of India had been thoroughly whitewashed.

The last member of this trio is Huston Stewart Chamberlain, born in England, raised in France, and ending his life in Germany, converted to German superiority by Wagner’s music. He wrote the Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, in which he saw the history of the world entirely in terms of conflict between the Aryan and Jewish races. It became a bible of Nazism, and Chamberlain became a mentor to Hitler.

Labels like Jew and Aryan matter, just as labels like black and white matter in America. A “Jew” in Nazi Germany might be a Zionist extremist who believed that God chose his people and would smite all his enemies, or a modernistic atheist who had repudiated his Jewish ancestors, or some poor schmuck who just got misidentified. It would all be the same in Auschwitz.

And the Aryans that Hitler believed in, didn’t exist at all.