Horizon

Don't know about the facts. But the segregation makes sense, from a black point of view, if the whites are going to view their services as a scene from Hell ("the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet").

Ben, Melville's experience would have been in New England/New York, wouldn't it? There were African American congregations in that area, as well as the urban South, as early as the 1790s. Characteristically, they might be named something like "First African Baptist Church" or "The Free African Society." In the ante-bellum North, African Americans might attend or belong to predominately white churches, but characteristically they were seated in segregated galleries.

He works so hard to be antiracist by his own lights and then he backs into it in spite of himself, and then he tumbles back to broad-mindedness again. Things like the "Knights and Squires" description of the three English-descended Yankee mates, described according to looks plus personality, and then their three physically impressive exotic harpooners, two out of three described according to looks... except that of course we've met Queequeg previously as a fully developed and sympathetically presented character... and it's acute of Melville to notice that when Ishmael and Queequeg walk around town, people stare not because one or the other of them is unusual, but because they're walking together as friends.

Thanks, guys, for sending me back to Melville. It's such rich writing -- things like, yes, the "two orchard thieves," and that shivery "mariners, renagades and castaways" phrase that Mr. James took for his title. So much more to see on the return visit.