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Modern Migrations,
Black Interrogations
In the series Studies in Transgression, edited by David Brotherton

ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

Robert D. Weide, Divide & Conquer: Race, Gangs, Identity, and Conflict
John C. Quicker and Akil S. Batani-Khalfani, Before Crips: Fussin’, Cussin’,
and Discussin’ among South Los Angeles Juvenile Gangs
John M. Hagedorn, Gangs on Trial: Challenging Stereotypes and Demonization in
the Courts

Series previously published by Columbia University Press

Edited by Philip Kretsedemas
and Jamella N. Gow

Modern Migrations,
Black Interrogations
Revisioning Migrants and Mobilities
through the Critique of Antiblackness

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PR ESS

Philadelphia  •   Rome  •  Tokyo
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
tupress.temple.edu

Copyright © 2024 by Temple University—Of The Commonwealth System

of Higher Education
All rights reserved
Published 2024

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kretsedemas, Philip, 1967– editor. | Gow, Jamella N., editor.
Title: Modern migrations, Black interrogations : revisioning migrants and
mobilities through the critique of antiblackness / edited by Philip
Kretsedemas and Jamella N. Gow.
Other titles: Studies in transgression.
Description: Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2024. | Series:
Studies in transgression | Includes bibliographical references and
index. | Summary: “This edited collection applies theories and lessons
from the study of antiblack racism to the study of migration and
movement. It locates often hidden legacies, resonances, and influences
of antiblackness in contemporary migratory regimes”— Provided by
publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023025390 (print) | LCCN 2023025391 (ebook) | ISBN
9781439922705 (cloth) | ISBN 9781439922712 (paperback) | ISBN
9781439922729 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Black people—Migrations. | Immigrants—Social conditions.
| Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. | Racism against Black
people.
Classification: LCC JV6225 .M64 2024 (print) | LCC JV6225 (ebook) | DDC
305.896—dc23/eng/20230909
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023025390
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023025391

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992

Printed in the United States of America

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Black Interrogations: An Introduction /

Jamella N. Gow and Philip Kretsedemas 1
1. Ex Aqua in the Mediterranean: Excavating Black
Power in the Migrant Question /
P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods 29
2. The Immigrant’s Other / Philip Kretsedemas 63
3. Not Just about Being Haitian, [but] Being
Black in America: Race, Gender, and Blackness
within the Haitian Diaspora in Miami’s “Little Haiti” /
Jamella N. Gow 87
4. Migration and Lived Experiences of Antiblack Racism:
The Case of African Immigrants in Queensland, Australia /
Hyacinth Udah 116
5. Afropessimistic Justice in New York v. Strauss-Kahn and
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah / Maya Hislop 143
6. Slavery, Migration, and the Genealogies of
Blackness in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing / Paula von Gleich 170

Contributors 195
Index 197
Modern Migrations,
Black Interrogations
 Black Interrogations
An Introduction

Jamella N. Gow and Philip Kretsedemas

T
his book recounts the experiences of Black people who have migrated,
sometimes across national borders and sometimes not, but it is not a
book about Black migration. To be more specific, this is not a book that
takes the fact of migration for granted and goes about examining the ways
that Black people migrate. For this same reason, this is not a book about Black
refugees, even though some of its chapters recount the experiences of Black
people who have fled for their lives.
This book uses reflections on the Black experience to trouble and prog-
ress the habits of thought that have accreted around the concept of “migra-
tion” as it’s been defined for us by researchers and policymakers and by the
pundits of the public spheres of the global North. The legacies of the trans-
atlantic slave trade, the centrality of black morphology to the social ontolo-
gies of the modern world, and regimes of racialized violence that operate out-
side of the law (as well as the “social contracts” presumed by the law) will figure
into all of our interrogations. The goals and aims of this book are also informed
by Fred Moten’s reflections on blackness as “the unasked question.”1 Our aim,
as it concerns the field of migration studies, is to break the silence that has
stifled the posing of this question, with the understanding that these silences,
on the question of blackness, are part and parcel of the antiblack violence
that they have enabled and obfuscated. It also bears emphasizing that Moten
is not alone in raising this concern. Many scholars have called attention to
the long history of silences surrounding the question of blackness in the mod-
ern intellectual canon.
2 / Jamella N. Gow and Philip Kretsedemas

This silence can be viewed in light of what Gayatri Spivak has described
as the sanctioned ignorance about the relationship between migration and
histories of colonial predation that pervade not only migration studies but
almost every major subject area of the social sciences and the humanities.2
As Lucy Mablin and Joe Turner have pointed out, the idea of modernity con-
tributes to these silences, by feeding into the belief that European societies,
and their colonial offshoots, are products of a developmental process that is
intrinsic to themselves, rather than growing out of their unequal and code-
pendent relationships with the parts of the world that we now call the glob-
al South.3
This investment in the intrinsically different (and superior) qualities of
European societies shares purpose with the rational and rugged individual-
ism that has been romanticized by the Western canon. But in this case, we
are dealing with a national character rather than an aggregate of private in-
dividuals. These ideas have catered to a gendered paternalism, with Western,
industrialized nations playing the role of the benevolent, patriarchal adult
that is committed to mentoring the more childlike (and implicitly effemi-
nized) nations of the global South.4
It is also important to recognize how the racialized and gendered body
comes to be read through the individual as both citizen and nation. Even as
masculinity comes to embody the nation in the West, it is frequently women—
whether as heteronormative “producers” of citizens or symbolic carriers of
national culture—whose bodies become sites for reproducing the nation.
While it is white, elite women who are valorized as such, it is Black women and
women of color more generally whose presence and ability to reproduce, un-
less for the purposes of labor, is depicted as a threat to the racialized, gendered,
national body.5 The Western national character, then, must also be read as
white, male, and heterosexual—a process that removes BIPOC, women, queer,
and trans from beyond the borders of citizenship and national belonging.6
When you bring this subtext into view, Spivak’s meditations on sanctioned
ignorance should also be read in light of one her most provocative statements
about colonial-era power relations, that of “white men saving brown women
from brown men.”7 To unpack this quote a little, Spivak is calling attention
to a gender politics that is advanced in the name of women’s rights, but that
also reinforces a racial and civilizational hierarchy that was foundational to
colonial rule. European colonial powers evidence their cultural superiority
by rescuing brown women from their oppressive home cultures. Like Rud-
yard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” and the bucolic depictions
of plantation life that were endorsed by the slave-owning classes (and me-
morialized in films like D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation), we are
presented with narratives that justify racial domination as being in the best
interests of dominated populations.8
 Black Interrogations / 3

These kinds of narratives are still with us, but they take a more nuanced
form in the present day. Instead of white men, rescuing brown and black wom-
en, as benign patriarchs, this role is played by coalitions of activists, often in
consort with state agencies, who leverage feminist and human rights discourse
to legitimate their interventions.9 It is important to note that these campaigns
are often responding to urgent humanitarian crises and they protect vulner-
able people who would otherwise receive no help at all. But they also con-
tribute to a phenomenon that Kelly Oliver has coined “carceral humanitari-
anism,”10 in which relief efforts become reliant on enforcement solutions that
overcriminalize the problems they are trying to correct. As Chandra Mo-
hanty has pointed out, the activists and intellectuals of the global North also
have a tendency to conceptualize the oppression of Third World women in
ways that affirm the primacy of a white, Western experience of feminism.11
As a result, they fail to see how histories of colonial domination and the con-
temporary dynamics of North-South economic dependency and military in-
terventions are also women’s issues that require a feminist analysis.
Western feminists’ calls for solidarity around reproductive rights and ac-
cess to birth control provide a compelling example of where Black feminism
and Third World feminism diverge. As Black feminists have insisted, Black
women have never consistently retained the right to either give birth or keep
their own children, even as white feminist politics frame reproductive rights
around access to birth control. The right to reproduce and care for children
while Black has been shaped by both “controlling images” that serve to vil-
lainize Black sexuality and police Black motherhood.12 Similar narratives
around family planning in the global South as a positive feature of develop-
ment echo this rhetoric around the criminality of Black motherhood in the
West.13 Calls for revoking birthright citizenship in the United States derives
from fears of Black sexuality and childbirth, which is then reframed as fear of
the nonwhite immigrant seeking citizenship and welfare for their U.S.-born
children. Grace Chang explains: “Just as black women have babies in order
to suck up welfare, we are told, immigrant women come to the United States
to have babies and consume all of the natural resources in sight.”14 Appre-
hensions of Black and Third World reproduction are thus tightly interwoven
with both the logics of development and the racialized and gendered embodi-
ment of the nation as masculine, patriarchal, and white.
We’ve just described another feature of the sanctioned ignorance that
Spivak has written about, which has more to do with the unacknowledged
connections between colonization, patriarchal power dynamics, and racism.
But it is important, nonetheless, to be mindful about how the silences around
these issues dovetail with the silence pertaining to the colonial prehistory of
modern migration. Migration scholars have been calling attention to the
feminization of international migration for well over two decades.15 Mean-
4 / Jamella N. Gow and Philip Kretsedemas

while, other migration scholars have called attention to how racialized, non-
citizen males are disproportionately targeted for deportation.16 These gender
disparities, in which racialized women become the prototypical face of ex-
ploitable, low-wage migrant labor and racialized migrant men are cast in the
role of dangerous, disposable others, can be read in light of a history of race–
gender power dynamics, traceable to the colonial era, which is normally kept
at arm’s length from migration studies.
The unasked question of blackness belongs to this same species of silenc-
es, though as many scholars have noted, it is not exactly the same thing as
the (post)colonial question.17 For example, the (post)colonial gender troubles
raised by Spivak do not apply to black women in quite the same way. As So-
journer Truth made very clear in her poem “Ain’t I A Woman,” the white
males of the colonial era were not inclined to view black women as deserving
of being “rescued.” Black women were, more typically, excluded from the
culture of male chivalry (with all of the patriarchal and paternalist under-
tones that went along with it).18 As Saidiya Hartman has explained, this is
also why, under antebellum law, it was impossible for a white man to be con-
victed of raping a black woman, especially an enslaved black woman.19 Hart-
man also goes on to reflect on a condition of radical depersonalization that
situates the enslaved black body outside of European gender norms. In this
era, it was common for white intellectuals to describe black gender relations
as a perverse inversion of “normal” (aka white, European) gender norms.20
But Hartman also describes a more absolute kind of otherness, which leads
blackness to become the sign of the subhuman.21 Bodies that suffered under
this sign did not have to be treated like “people.” The pleasures that the mas-
ter derived from the control they exerted over these bodies can be under-
stood as an intoxicating sadism: acting on their desires with no regard for
social convention, and with full confidence that they would never be sanc-
tioned for their behavior. This abusive treatment can be reinforced by the
objectifying male gaze, but when it comes to black oppression—especially
in the antebellum and Jim Crow eras—it is a power that white people of all
genders have exerted over black bodies of all genders. Nonetheless, it was en-
slaved Black women’s positionality as object of labor and sexual violence that
also led to her vital role in the Black resistance tradition.22 For Black women,
sites of gendered violence also became sites of intersectional struggle in ways
that reveal the important perspectives gained from gendered Black theoriz-
ing.23 Once again, race functions as a hidden transcript that transforms the
meaning of gender. We also find it important to emphasize that the imbrica-
tions of race and gender can unfold in ways that are more or less unique to
the black condition.
Another distinguishing feature of (anti)blackness is its chronology, which
does not align neatly with the history of European colonization. Several schol-
 Black Interrogations / 5

ars observe, for example, that antiblackness was a feature of the European
imagination prior to the colonization of the Americas.24 Even more impor-
tant, antiblackness is a problem that continues to unfold in ways that are qual-
itatively distinct from the histories of colonization, decolonization, and the
postcolonial melancholia that followed in their wake. Antiblackness, in its
adaptive fluidity, can be used to explain the habitus and social hierarchies
of European settler colonies, but it is also very much alive and well in the mul-
ticultural liberal-democratic societies of the present day. Joy James, for ex-
ample, has shown how Black candidates seeking political office in the mul-
ticultural democracies of the global North appeal to antiblack tropes in an
attempt to appeal to “mainstream” sentiments.25 Similar observations have
been made of the political culture of predominantly Black nation-states,
which have undergone their own postcolonial transitions.26 There are also a
number of studies showing how racialized immigrants (including Black im-
migrants) from postcolonial nations integrate into the societies of the glob-
al North in ways that keep their social identities at arm’s length from the
stigma of blackness.27 This is not to say that blackness and antiblackness are
not historically situated and thus immutable across time and space. Adapt-
ability is an important function of how both race and racism persist.28 How-
ever, we emphasize that within these versions of race, blackness—wherever
it emerges—retains a distinctive character apart from generalized Otherness
and other specific forms of racialization.
Keeping these examples in mind, antiblackness is better understood as
a constantly regenerating and mutating feature of the present-day organiza-
tion of social relations rather than as a problem that can be uniquely identified
with the “transition” from a colonial to a postcolonial or neocolonial social
order. In the United States, in particular, the modern silence on the question
of blackness seems to have become more entrenched as challenges to the racial
order increased in intensity, and as the mechanisms of racial stratification
became more complex. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s theory of color-blind racism,
which has been used to explain the racial ideologies of the post–civil rights
era, is one of the most influential attempts to explain this process.29 It bears
noting, however, that before color-blind racism came on the scene, there was
already a well-established culture of silence on the question of antiblackness
and the experiences of Black people.
Although the concept of racism dates to the early twentieth century, it
was not originally used to examine the problems faced by Black people.30 Most
of the intellectual currents that laid the foundations for the critical study of
race and racism today have an even more recent history, which can be traced
to the 1980s.31 Moreover, as Aldon Morris has shown, most of the justifications
about the “inferiority” of Black populations that were advanced by White intel-
lectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not based
6 / Jamella N. Gow and Philip Kretsedemas

on empirical research.32 Black populations have been understudied for most

of U.S. history despite the fact that late-nineteenth-century treatises on eu-
genics, which had a pervasive influence on federal and local laws and poli-
cies, were anchored by ideas about black inferiority.33 Morris goes on to show
that Black scholars attempted to correct this dearth of data by creating their
own schools of research that played an instrumental role in getting the social
sciences to take empirics more seriously, but they were also excluded from
the new research paradigm that they helped to create.34
Morris’s historiography is centered on the life and times of W. E. B Du-
bois, and it brings to mind Dubois’s fateful observation that the defining prob-
lem of the twentieth century was that of the color line.35 Dubois’s prognosis
on race and the modern world order is a fitting entry point into the critical
intellectual tradition that informs this book. Although Dubois was a disci-
plined empirical researcher, he understood that blackness posed a problem
for the racist imagination that could not be described in practical, measur-
able terms.36 Blackness is subjected to a metaphysical judgment that is in a
constant state of tension with the state of “race relations” as it actually exists.
No matter how intimately entangled the black body is in the lives of White
persons, it has no place in an idealized future that is anchored in the aspira-
tion to whiteness. Societal progress is a movement toward a world expunged
of blackness, which is why—as Dubois observed—Black people who were
deemed a “credit to their race” had to be described as exceptional types who
were distanced from the existential problem that blackness posed for White
society.37
This process, whereby some Black people are provisionally exempted from
the excesses of antiblack racism, underscores our earlier observations about
the unsettling effect that (anti)blackness can have on gender roles. The Black
person who is deemed a “credit to their race” is granted some measure of social
status in the eyes of White person. In these assessments there is an objecti-
fying gaze at work that is unique to the terrors of (anti)blackness, but which
goes beyond the mere scrutiny of the body.38 A black body that, under dif-
ferent conditions, could be radically excluded and disposed of, and ultimate-
ly killed, is treated—within certain limited set of social parameters—as if
they are the legitimate bearers of an occupational status (whether a teacher,
a lawyer, a domestic worker, or a groundskeeper), a political status (a citizen),
or a socioeconomic status (as middle class, working class, or even upper mid-
dle class). Black embodiment is further interwoven with gender through the
attribution of certain bodies as morally upright and bodily pure through link-
ages between color, body size, and Western beauty.39 The attribution of these
qualities to the black body—these qualities of personhood—also allow it to
be inducted into the field of “normal” gender roles (the dutiful mother, the
respected family patriarch, the bachelor or debutante). Put another way, these
 Black Interrogations / 7

people are “credits to their race” only insofar as they model white, middle-
class norms of social conduct and comportment for other, less enlightened
members of their race. And the special treatment according to these credit-
able people also, effectively, legitimizes the radical exclusion of the larger ma-
jority of blacks who do not meet this standard.
We want to caution the reader that we are describing a cultural subtext
for Dubois’s writing that does not hold true today, the same way it did when
he put his thoughts to paper in the early 1900s. We understand that Black-
ness is an historically mutable field of symbolic meanings that has been con-
tested and negotiated over time, even as the logics of antiblack racism remain.
It also bears noting that critical analyses of (anti)Blackness have called
attention to these mutable qualities, perhaps the best example being Hart-
man’s writing on black fungibility. Hartman uses the concept of fungibility
to reflect on the existential condition of radical otherness that haunts these
fragile constructions of black personhood.40 According to Hartman, the fun-
gible body is a radically depersonalized object that can be used for any va-
riety of purposes—as a commodity, as an instrument of physical or emotion-
al labor, or a canvas for sadomasochistic desires. These bodies can be useful
or desirable, but they have no meaning intrinsic to themselves, and they pose
a “problem” the moment they begin to behave in ways that complicate the
ontological primacy of the persons whose lives (and societies) they are being
used to enhance.
The puzzling thing about this situation, which makes antiblack racism
so difficult to diagnose, is that blackness takes on the quality of a thing that
“is not”—a thing that is being perpetually erased, in concept or person, by
a tactic that rarely addresses its target by name. Laws that target Black pop-
ulations can be informed by quasi-scientific treatises on black inferiority that
are not directly named by the laws themselves.41 Extralegal measures can be
used to exclude and control black bodies that do not show up in the public
record, and if a record is made, it can be retroactively expunged to suit the
sensibilities of the times.42 But these maneuvers do not eliminate the black
presence from day-to-day social relations. Black people appear “everywhere”
despite being excluded. In the next section we elaborate further on this strange
relationship between blackness and White society with some examples from
the history of U.S. immigration law.

Seditious Aliens and Slave Rebellions

In the summer of 1798, a French vessel entered the Delaware Bay containing
a crew that included a number of men who were identified by the American
colonists as “mulattos,” as well as other people of African descent.43 Prior to
this incident there had been mounting hostilities between France and the
8 / Jamella N. Gow and Philip Kretsedemas

recently established U.S. government, which mainly involved altercations at

sea.44 Concerns about the suspicious vessel had more to do with its ties to
the French government than with the racial composition of its crew. But there
were also concerns that these incursions by the French might encourage thou-
sands of Black troops from nearby Haiti to invade the United States and at-
tempt to foment a revolution among the U.S. slave population.45 Although
these fears were a little farfetched, the Haitian revolution, which was under-
way at the time, provided incontrovertible proof that it was possible for en-
slaved populations to launch a self-organized military campaign. U.S. elites
also were aware that there was support for the revolution among the Black
enslaved population and that some slaves had even managed to escape to
Haiti to fight in the war.46
Suffice it to say, the U.S. government was on edge about the possibility
of insurrection from a variety of sources. The appearance of the French ves-
sel was the tipping point that has been credited with spurring President John
Adams to enact the first of several Alien and Sedition Acts.47 These acts be-
came infamous for being the U.S. government’s first crackdown on civil lib-
erties and immigrant rights, which included an expansion of the govern-
ment’s deportation powers.48
The Alien and Sedition Acts also became a staging ground for the first
major debate in U.S. history over national security versus civil liberties.49 Pres-
ident Adams stood for the Federalist position, in favor of national security
and a strong centralized government. The primary spokesperson for the civil
liberties position was Thomas Jefferson, who was affiliated with the Demo-
cratic-Republican Party and was serving as Adams’s vice president at the time.50
Jefferson was a slave owner. He was also an antislavery moralist, mean-
ing that he was critical of the institution of slavery but was opposed to “rad-
ical” proposals for its abolition.51 Like many U.S. slaveholders, he held to a
racist double standard, being an avid supporter of the French Revolution and
an equally avid opponent of the Haitian revolutionary cause.52
Several years later, Jefferson used popular resentment about the govern-
ment crackdown on civil liberties as the rallying cry for his presidential cam-
paign. Jefferson won the election and established a Democratic-Republican
dynasty that controlled the Executive Office for the next three decades. It
also bears noting that Jefferson’s electoral victory was aided by the “votes”
of enslaved Black people, votes that, according to the laws of the time, were
his to cast as suited his interests—along with the interests of all the other slave
owners who supported his presidency. These votes were tallied in such a way
that every three “slave votes” counted as one vote.53
Jefferson’s distaste for the deportation powers that were expanded by the
Alien and Sedition Acts was rooted in another double standard. What Jef-
ferson mainly opposed was the emergence of a deportation apparatus that
 Black Interrogations / 9

would become a permanent feature of a centralized government. But he was

not opposed, in principle, to deportation, and privately he endorsed orga-
nized schemes that were geared toward the mass removal of Black people
from the United States. The American Colonization Society (ACS) was the
main vehicle for this agenda, which used the language of “voluntary depor-
tation” and “mass deportation” to describe its plans for creating utopian colo-
nies in the Caribbean or Africa, to which Blacks could be transported in order
to form their own self-governing societies.54 Although these deportation pro-
posals were framed as being in the best interests of the U.S. Black popula-
tion, they never garnered the support of the Black masses, and historians who
have studied the ACS have concluded that the common thread that bound
the society’s politically diverse membership was its investment in white su-
premacy.55 Jefferson was a founding member of the ACS, and the two Dem-
ocratic-Republican presidents who succeeded him also served as presidents
of the ACS.56
The details we have just shared draw attention to an antiblack subtext that
usually is left out of the story of the Alien and Sedition Acts. When these acts
are referenced today, it is usually to recycle a narrative that is not very dif-
ferent from the civil liberties arguments that Jefferson used to rail against the
Federalist government in his 1800 election campaign.57 The social ills of xe-
nophobia and intolerance are pinned on the Federalist position, which initi-
ated the crackdown on immigrant rights. Meanwhile, the antiblack racism
that was latent to the pro-immigrant position is concealed by a veil of silence.58
This silence is further complicated by the topsy-turvy relationship be-
tween the political issues that were at stake in the national security versus
civil liberties debate, and the question of Black freedom. For example, al-
though Jefferson was critical of the government’s deportation powers, he was
not an ally of the Black crew on the French vessel that triggered the expan-
sion of these powers, and he would never have tolerated the extension of civil
liberties or U.S. citizenship to these men. And although Adams was swift to
respond to the threat of insurrection posed by this vessel containing these
“French Blacks,” he was not as intransigently opposed to the Black freedom
movement as was Jefferson. Like Jefferson, Adams was an antislavery moral-
ist, but unlike Jefferson he did not hold slaves and he was opposed to the ex-
pansion of slavery in the United States.59 During his presidential term, Ad-
ams also sent U.S. war vessels to defend the newly formed Haitian Republic
from attacks by the French and the British.60 Adams’s interest in keeping a
liberated Haiti from falling into the hands of European powers may have been
primarily strategic, but whatever the reason, he ended up being a better ally
of Haitian democracy than Jefferson.
Instead of concluding that race was irrelevant to all of these maneuvers,
it would be more accurate to say that the interests of Black people were ir-
10 / Jamella N. Gow and Philip Kretsedemas

relevant to the debate over civil liberties versus national security, and that this
irrelevance was part and parcel of the dehumanization that typifies antiblack
racism. The Black population was going to be subject to terror and displace-
ment within the territory of the United States and be threatened with expul-
sion from the United States, regardless of how this debate was resolved. Black
people factored into the debate only by way of the “slave votes” that were
conscripted by their owners to defend a system of rights from which they
were excluded. This is a practical example of what Black studies scholars mean
when they write about the fungibility and deontological status of blackness.

Black Mobility as a Reckoning and Resistance

We have just described a problem that calls attention to the antiblack com-
mon sense that has kept the question of Black freedom separate from that of
immigrant rights. These antiblack sentiments also help to explain why Black
populations have, historically, been singled out for exclusions and controls
that have not been applied to (nonblack) immigrants. But we also want to
emphasize that Black populations have been targeted by these controls pre-
cisely because they have been persistently mobile, and that this mobility can
be viewed both in light of, and despite, the inexplicably cruel system of forced
removal that was the transatlantic slave trade.
Fugitive Slave Acts and laws targeting free Blacks are testament to the
persistence of Black mobilities in the antebellum era.61 After the abolishment
of slavery in the Americas, exslaves and their descendants migrated through-
out the United States, the Caribbean, and other parts of the Americas seek-
ing better fortunes and refuge and creating new communities.62 Most cur-
rents of radical Black politics—including Pan-Africanism, Black Marxism,
and other currents of Black postcolonial and anticolonial thought—owe their
development to the migrations of Black intellectuals, especially from the Ca-
ribbean.63 Many of the Black intellectuals who challenged White Europeans
to confront their colonial histories were also migrants.64
The Black experience has to be viewed in light of these interwoven his-
tories of free and forced movement, which is also why Black mobility should
be understood as a site of reckoning and resistance. Although Black mobil-
ity originates under a regimen of constant surveillance, the historical record
shows that Black people thwarted attempts to control their movements at
every turn. In the antebellum era, Black people used unauthorized movements
as a way to resist enslavement, and in the postbellum era they engaged in
similar movements to flee the Jim Crow South and forge transnational alli-
ances.65 This transgressive history of mobility raised issues, many centuries
ago, that prefigure the contemporary movement for open borders but that also
raise deeper questions about the racial organization of social life.
 Black Interrogations / 11

Immigrant rights coalitions have attempted to make amends for their

silence about this history. Efforts have been made to include the Black im-
migrant experience, in a more deliberate way, in reports on the struggles of
undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, and to call attention to migra-
tion and adjustment challenges that are experienced by Black people.66 Well-
meaning as they may be, these inclusive overtures do not interrogate the
antiblack beginnings of the U.S. immigration regime. We insist, on the other
hand, that it is more important to consider how antiblackness can be used
to explain the present-day migration regime, rather than figuring out how
to better include Black people in discourses on immigration that take the non-
black migrant as their default starting point.

Rethinking Sovereignty, Borders, and

Displacement through Antiblackness
The agonies of Black mobility are also reflected in the complicated relationship
between blackness, borders, and displacement. Many voices in the contem-
porary immigrant rights movement have called for the abolition of borders,
borrowing from the language that is famously associated with the nineteenth-
century movement to end slavery and, more recently, with the movement for
prison abolition.67 This is yet another example of an overture that posits an
analogous relationship between the cause of immigrant rights and Black free-
dom, but without coming to terms with the qualities that are most singular
to the Black condition.
If you accept that the transatlantic slave trade is a defining feature of the
Black experience in the West, it should be apparent why the call for open
borders (or border abolition) does not get to the bottom of Black oppression.
The enslaved Africans’ main problem was not that the borders of the West-
ern world were not sufficiently “open” to them. Their problem is that they
were ripped out of their home cultures and forcibly transported to another
world, where they were incorporated into the total institution of chattel slav-
ery. Furthermore, when it came to the slave trade, the U.S. government’s at-
tempts at border control were a benign intervention—at least, that is, from
an antislavery perspective—since the goal of these operations was to put an
end to the international transport and sale of enslaved people.68
After slavery in the United States was abolished, Black people relied on
migration as a survival strategy. Black Americans moved north in the Great
Migration. Black Caribbean people moved within and outside the Ameri-
cas.69 The transnational networks established by these migrations laid the
foundations for the remittances that most nations in the global South, in-
cluding most predominantly Black nations, rely on to keep their economies
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Wyoming and Nebraska, where northern bunch grass merged into
the arid desert of the southwest.
But Robin had imagination, without which indeed few men
functioned long on the range, and he could sometimes see this bit of
rich black soil about his cabin blooming with color and tender green
of grass and shrubs, a bit of the wilderness taking on the
atmosphere of a home where beauty was something more than a
casual word.
That was why he had claimed and homesteaded this—a half-mile
square of creek bottom—in a day when America had millions of
acres to bestow on her sons for the asking. Title to it had been
issued Robin only a month since. He had proved up. It was his own.
The first definite stirrings of the pride of ownership moved in him
now. He didn’t see it so much as it was, but as it would be; and Ivy
Mayne loomed in the forefront of the picture.
“She’ll be a ranch some day,” he said to Red Mike. “And we won’t
have to steal nobody’s calves to get up a herd, either.”
Then he shook up the red horse, fell in behind the others and
stirred them to a jog trot that carried him rapidly across the rolling
land under the shoulder of the Bear Paw Mountains, toward the
Block S camp.
 CHAPTER III
MACHIAVELLI?

From the Bar M Bar to Shadow Butte, where the Sutherland riders
lay ready to start the fall work, was a matter of three hours’ riding.
The round-up was camped under the Butte itself on a natural
meadow in Little Eagle, a lovely spot ringed about by groves of
poplars and clumps of willows, just where the foothills lifted sharply
to the timbered slopes of the Bear Paw Mountains.
Robin’s string, heads up and ears erect at sight of the saddle
bunch scattered on the flat, went downhill on the run. Robin himself
drew up on the edge of the high bank to have a look. He had seen
round-ups sweeping the plains, trail herds coming up from one
horizon and vanishing below another ever since he could remember.
Wild horses and wild cattle and wild riding had never grown old,
commonplace, to Robin. He always thrilled a little to the sights and
sounds of range work. Perhaps because he was and had always
been a part of it, dimly conscious of its dramatic significance as the
greatest pastoral movement in the history of the world, of himself as
a minor figure playing a part in a spectacle bigger than any of its
actors.
He had risen in his stirrups many a time on last guard to sniff the
morning air, to stare at the sun’s brilliant upper segment thrusting
above the eastern sky line, shooting yellow fingers across grassland
that waved and shimmered like silken crêpe. At such a moment a
queer glowing gladness in simply being alive, in being there on the
fringe of a sleepy herd with a good horse under him, would give
Robin an odd sensation. He got the same feeling when they went
thundering down a long ridge, twenty riders abreast, elbows out,
reins swinging loose, to the music of jingling bits and spurs, the
creak of saddle leather. He had a touch of that strange uplift now, for
a moment. An artist with an analytical turn might have defined it as a
dumb response to beauty. Robin didn’t attempt to define his feelings.
He only knew that when he looked down into Eagle Creek the sight
pleased him in a way he could not describe.
The white tents gleamed like snowflakes against the poplar green.
The yellow grass spread like a carpet under the feet of two hundred
grazing horses, sleek-bodied brutes well broken to range use. Bells
on the leaders tinkled as they moved their heads in feeding. The
horse wrangler sat on the opposite bank, a lone horseman
silhouetted like a statue against the evening sky. Figures moved
about the chuck wagon. The smell of coffee and frying beef floated
up to Robin’s nostrils. In dry, thin air that doubled the range of the
human eye over a sea-level atmosphere and lent an uncanny
resonance to sounds, the voices of the cowboys had a mellow ring.
Some one was singing a ribald trail song. Half a dozen voices joined
lustily in the chorus:

“Comin’ up the Chisholm Trail

I tell you what you’ll get,
A little chunk of bread and a little chunk of meat
Little black coffee with sugar on the sly,
Dust in your throat boys, and gravel in your eye!”

Robin whooped once, long and loud, and jumped Red Mike down
the hill. He loosed his reata and slung a noose. Fifty yards short of
the wagons he swept like a whirlwind upon the heels of his string,
shot the rawhide full length to encircle the head of the horse packing
his bed.
Five minutes later his riding gear was stacked under his saddle
blanket, and Robin was squatting on his heels by the bed wagon
swapping repartee with a dozen riders he knew.
Shortly the cook sounded an alarm. He did not approach these
youths where they lounged and say in a softly modulated tone,
“Gentlemen, dinner is served.” He seized a dishpan, hammered it
vigorously with an iron spoon, shouted raucously, “Grub pi-i-ile!” And
the crew swooped down on the chuck wagon like a flock of chickens
gathering about the mother hen when she clucked discovery of fat
worms.
 The riders ate. A couple volunteered to help the cook wash up.
The rest withdrew. They sat about the bed wagon, in the bed tent,
sprawled on the earth, swapping yarns. They had no cares. Without
capital or herds they worked on terms of perfect equality for those
who had both in abundance. Their life called for courage, resource,
initiative, endurance at divers times and in strange places. Cold, rain,
sleet, driving snow, burning sun and buffeting winds, night watches
on sleeping herds, rivers in flood, wild horses, lip-cracking thirst
allayed by alkali water, days when they rode from sun to sun and
slept with their boots on wherever they could lie down—it was all
one. They took it as it came. Untrammeled space, action swift and
purposeful toward a clearly seen end, work that was always tinged
with the excitement of the unexpected, barred monotony from the
range. Saving injury, the mishaps incident to what often was
necessarily wild riding, the cow-puncher worked or sought diversion
in uniformly high spirits. If he had no clear sense of being a unit in
Homeric episodes enacted against a spacious and colorful
background, he had a rude dignity of his own as well as a sense of
humor which frequently took a Rabelaisian twist, so that his
phraseology often needed expurgating before it would pass current
in polite society. The tales circulating and the cross-fire of talk among
the Block S riders needs no repeating, since it had no more to do
with Robin Tyler than to make him chuckle now and then as he lay
on his unrolled bed.
He had at once noted Mark Steele’s absence. Later some one
remarked that Shining was due to eat a cold supper. Then in the
dusk Mark Steele and Tommy Thatcher, a lean Texan, noted for his
uncanny skill with a rope, rode in and unsaddled. The cook fed them.
Mark remained in the chuck-tent, where, with the privilege of the
wagon boss, he slept in comparative privacy. Tommy joined his
fellows.
“Well, we hit her for Big Sandy in the morning,” he announced.
“Heigh-ho,” one stretched his arms wide. “Me for the high pillow
then. Once we hit Lonesome Prairie us and bed’ll be strangers.”
Which was an oblique way of anticipating days in the saddle and
nights on guard while the Block S combed the range for marketable
beeves.
 In twenty minutes silence fell on the camp. The men were in their
blankets. The nighthawk relieved the day wrangler and moved his
horse herd away from about the tents. A moon swam up and
Shadow Butte cast a long black cone toward the northwest. Bells
tinkled with distant sweetness where the ponies grazed. Midnight
passed. When the few hours of darkness began to wane a lantern
broke out yellow in the cook tent. As the first paleness showed in the
east the cook lifted his call.
In less than an hour, with the sun heaving up above the sky line
the outfit was under way, all their equipment, tents, cooking layout,
beds, extra ropes and gear piled high and lashed on two wagons
drawn by four-horse teams.
There were few trails and those dim ones over that sparsely
settled land. One rider acted as pilot across country. In his wake the
chuck wagon led the van. Behind this rattled the bed wagon driven
by the nighthawk. Behind these came the saddle herd, urged on by
the horse wrangler with a trailing rope. Last of all the riders mounted,
shook the kinks out of their fractious horses and broke into a gallop.
Some passed the remuda and the wagons. Some jogged leisurely.
They rode as they pleased, in pairs, in clusters, at a walk or a gallop.
Robin found himself riding elbow to elbow with Mark Steele,
“Shining” Steele. Appropriate name, apart from the beaten silver
ornaments with which he adorned his gear, even to a row of conchos
down the outer seam of his leathern chaps, for the man himself was
like a steel blade, tall, lithe, thin-faced, a rider born and a cowman
from his heels up. Mark Steele had come into the Bear Paws
unheralded and unsung, and in two years had become range boss of
the Block S over the heads of older hands.
He jogged beside Robin, hat pushed back, swaying to the gait of
his horse, humming a little tune, his eyes roving over what spread
before them as they topped each little rise.
“Mayne give you a good mount, kid?” he asked presently.
“Thirteen head. And I brought along a ridge runner of my own,”
Robin answered.
“Uh-huh. You won’t be afoot, then, half the time, like you was with
the Pool last spring.”
 Mark said it with a smile but there was a sting in the remark, an
implied sneer. Robin had joined the general round-up with the Bear
Paw Pool that spring, having only ten horses in his mount. Of these
one had gone crazy with loco weed, another grew lame. He rode the
remaining eight to a standstill trying to hold up his end with men far
better mounted. It was neither his fault nor Dan Mayne’s—just ill
luck. Saddle horses had vanished, others had got crippled. There
was no time to break colts. But both Robin and the Bar M Bar had
lost a modicum of prestige. He didn’t thank Steele for reminding him.
He knew that with his present string he could take the outside circle
and come into camp with the best of the Block S. So he kept silent.
“I was down to Mayne’s night before last,” Steele observed. “You
weren’t in sight.”
“Hunting horses,” Robin explained. He knew Mayne, or Ivy, or
both, had told Steele that. What business of Mark’s was it, anyway?
“Where’d you ride?” Shining asked quite casually.
“So that’s it,” Robin thought—recalling the dead cows and the rifle
shot that put him on the run out of Birch Creek bottom. Aloud he
said: “Sand Coulee, Boggy Spring, west side of Chase Hill.”
“Much stock in sight?”
“Quite a lot.”
They rode two hundred yards in silence.
“There’s thieves workin’ on this range,” Shining Mark broke out
suddenly.
“The hell you say!” Robin’s surprise was not simulated, but it was
surprise at information coming to him from this source.
“I been ridin’ myself some lately,” Mark went on in his crisp tone.
“I’ve seen things.”
“What you been drinkin’?” Robin tried raillery.
Steele frowned.
“I seen some pretty fishy lookin’ work,” he growled. “Pretty raw.
There’ll be a necktie party when I get it figured out.”
“Well, they can’t steal no cows of mine,” Robin said lightly. “’Cause
I don’t own ary a split hoof. You don’t surprise me much. I guess
there’s no range in Montana, nor any place where cows run, that
there isn’t somebody packin’ a runnin’ iron and draggin’ the long
rope now and then.”
“Ain’t you seen nothin’—no big calves with a fresh brand and no
mother handy?” Steele persisted.
Robin shook his head.
“If I’d come across stuff like that anywhere in Bar M Bar territory I
guess old Dan Mayne would be ridin’ the pinnacles with a
Winchester and frothin’ at the mouth,” he drawled. “What’s the
brand?”
“I ain’t talkin’,” Steele said darkly. “An’ you keep this to yourself
what I say. Sabe? They’re workin’ on the Block S mostly, I expect.
But they might not overlook the Bar M Bar. So keep your eyes open,
kid, an’ let me know if you spot anything that looks queer.”
Three or four riders behind broke their horses into a lope, came
abreast, laughing, elbows flopping like limp-winged birds. Steele and
Robin fell into their pace. In a row, bobbing uniformly, hoofs beating
out a steady rhythm on the dry turf, they passed the saddle herd, the
wagons. The night hawk driving the bed wagon popped his whiplash
as they went by. The cook, acting Jehu, braced himself by the four-
horse reins, a cigarette in his lips. Far ahead of the wagons they
overtook and joined the other riders.
At noon they camped two hours on a creek bottom, ate, caught
fresh horses and moved on. Mid-afternoon saw the cavalcade top a
rise below which, in the middle of a great gray stretch of sagebrush,
the town of Big Sandy lifted a huddle of unpainted buildings. There
the chuck wagon would take on a month’s grub, the cowboys would
drink Bourbon whisky and play poker overnight, and at dawn the
Block S would depart into the wide waste of Lonesome Prairie, to
return again in due time with a herd of prime beef cattle two
thousand strong.
And all the way to town Robin wondered what Shining Mark was
getting at; what was his real object in that conversation. Was he
craftily seeking to discover if Robin had been the rider on the sorrel
horse who turned over the dead cow to read her brand?
Or was he shooting straight when he promised a necktie party for
cow thieves unknown? When Robin gazed at Steele’s easy
erectness in the saddle, the flashy ornamentation of his riding rig, he
was troubled by a promise of trouble. He was sure, yet not so sure.
More than ever he wished he had been able to see what brand
went on those calves that day.
Coupled with uncertainty went the firm conviction that if Shining
Mark once linked him with a knowledge of those dead cows and
stolen calves, he, Robin Tyler, would need eyes in the back of his
head whenever he rode alone.
 CHAPTER IV
ONE STEP AT A TIME

The Block S outfit, far into that night, staged a good-natured minor
riot in a town whose population of something less than a hundred
souls was eighty per cent dependent on Block S activities for its
existence. There were half a dozen small ranches within a ten mile
radius, men who owned from three to five hundred head of stock. A
few sheep-masters with flocks and herders and camp tenders helped
put money in circulation there and lent a color—and odor—of their
own to the region. Brooklyn-born fiction to the contrary, the cattleman
and the sheep owner were not always at each others’ throats. The
man on horseback tended to look down on the shepherd who
guarded his flocks afoot. In all history the man on horseback has
done that. But physical clashes between the two groups only
occurred when one encroached too arrogantly on what the other
deemed his inalienable rights and privileges.
And all these folk lived under the tolerant shadow of Adam
Sutherland, whose Block S marked the ribs of thirty thousand cattle.
Sutherland owned the town site of Big Sandy. He owned the general
store and operated the post office. If he didn’t own the hotel and the
three saloons and the blacksmith shop it was simply because he
didn’t care to bother about petty details of commerce. So Big Sandy
supported a number of people and activities that were like mistletoe
on the parent oak, some ornamental, some possibly useful, but a
secondary growth as far as the Block S was concerned.
Sutherland had come into Montana with a beef herd for a military
post. He had remained to grow up with the country. He had become
big financially. He had been a big man physically. Now that he was
no longer young his flesh was becoming a burden. He liked to jog
around the home ranch on Little Eagle in the summer, to ride out and
watch his men handle stock when the round-up worked near home.
He liked to be in Big Sandy when his beef herds were marshaled into
the stockyards in a cloud of dust and see the fat steers go rolling
east in trainloads. He liked to see his riders have their fling in town.
His rule over all that lay under his ægis was beneficent, almost
paternal. Adam Sutherland had never heard of such a thing as an
efficiency system, but he had its equivalent at his service, functioning
smoothly, ungrudgingly. A vision of the future was a phrase he might
not have fully comprehended, but he had that too, or he would not
have owned thousands of acres of meadow land, the headwaters of
mountain streams, a score of unfenced pastures in a country where
grass and water were as yet free to all men, in a period when most
cattlemen still believed that the great plains must remain a cow
pasture for all time to come. The Sutherland holdings dotted the
foothills of the Bear Paws in a semicircle fifty miles south and east.
He sat on the counter in the big store now, and greeted his riders
as they passed in and out making sundry small purchases. Later in
the evening he made the round of the saloons and hotel bar, the
Silver Dollar, Monty’s Place, the Exchange, bought a round of drinks
for “the house” in each place. Then he went away to his house set
off on a knoll to one side of the town, a white, sprawling cottage with
a green patch of lawn about it, surrounded by a picket fence to keep
out the wandering stock that sometimes strayed wide-eyed into the
single street of this frontier hamlet. The fence served also the
secondary purpose of keeping out over-hilarious cow-punchers who
might mistake the place for something else and in high spirits—both
literally and figuratively—undertake to ride their horses up the front
steps and along the porch, crying a jovial challenge to those within to
come out and “whoop ’er up.”
Mark Steele’s outfit went north into the flat waste of Lonesome
Prairie next morning. The Block S cowboys struck town again in
something less than three weeks. They had sent a trainload of cattle
east from Galata on the high line of the Great Northern. Now they
drew up to Big Sandy with a herd seventeen hundred strong, sleek,
fat, long-horned beasts moving like an army without banners but
armed with spears that glinted in the sun, the slender wide-curving
horns inherited from bulls of Andulasian blood.
 The outfit camped where the level of the Prairie pitched down to
the sagebrush flats. Robin went on first guard with the lights of Big
Sandy glimmering two miles distant and five hundred feet below.
East, west, north, Lonesome Prairie spread its night-shrouded
breadth, an enormous, uninhabited triangle of grassland a hundred
miles on each side, with a railway crossing its middle and scarcely a
dwelling in all those miles except the dull red section houses where
the railroad laborers lived.
Robin jogged his two hours and a half, meeting and passing the
other rider, around and around the outer edge of a herd that slept as
peacefully as a babe in the cradle, a vast amorphous blot on the
shrouded plain. They crooned chanty songs as they rode, not
because they loved singing well enough to drone interminable ditties
for their hours on watch, but because a rider moving silently in the
dark might sneeze, flap a slicker, his horse might stumble—and at a
strange noise breaking the night silence that herd would jump the
bed-ground as one, in a panic, making the earth shake with the
thunder of their flight. So they sang, crooned rather. And the relief
coming on at eleven o’clock came droning or whistling to the herd.
“All right. You got ’em. See that you keep ’em.” Robin and his
mate jocularly greeted the relief, and departed.
Robin was paired for night work with Tex Matthews, a middle-aged
Texan, a quiet, soft-voiced man whose gentle ways were a
serviceable mask for a rider who had seen a good deal of wild west
in his time. They turned toward camp. Matthews rode a little way,
turned to look into the flat below. In the dark and the silence a night
breeze sighed, as if the range breathed audibly. The Texan stared at
the town lights. Half the Block S crew had ridden in when first guard
was set. Sometime before dawn they would come galloping back.
“They’ll be gettin’ action down there, I expect,” he murmured.
“Let’s ride in,” Robin suggested. “I don’t want to sleep, nohow.”
They swung their horses about. In fifteen minutes they were
dismounting before the Silver Dollar. That particular house was the
favorite resort of the Block S. They patronized all saloons without
favor, as a rule, but the Silver Dollar was roomy, clean, it had a
billiard table and comfortable chairs. More important, it was
conducted by a genial soul who, having been a range-rider himself,
knew and welcomed cow-punchers regardless of whether or not they
had money to spend over his bar.
Now Robin and Matthews had neither expectation nor purpose
beyond a natural hankering for the glow of bright lights, a drink or
two—a little diversion, so to speak. They would ordinarily have found
some of the outfit, perhaps have played stud poker an hour or two,
taken a stirrup cup and departed.
But once inside the door Robin Tyler had a strange intuition of
something in the air. Mark Steele leaned on one end of the bar.
Three or four Block S men stood or lounged about. A couple of
strangers were present. And slumped in a chair against the farther
wall sat Dan Mayne. His chin was sunk on his breast. His dispirited
mustache drooped more dispiritedly than ever. But he was neither
asleep nor in a stupor. Mark Steele regarded him with a smile that
was a mixture of contempt and calculation.
“Hello cowboys,” Steele greeted the two. “Couldn’t resist
temptation eh? C’mon. Have a drink. Ho, Dan!”
He called Mayne.
“Line up, old-timer. Have a shot.”
“I ain’t drinkin’,” Mayne snarled.
Robin, who had started toward him, and so stood between the
two, heard Mayne add a rider to the sentence under his breath—“not
with you, damn your soul!”
“No, you don’t drink, do you?” Mark laughed unpleasantly. “You
just pour it down, that’s all. Come on, kid,” he spoke to Robin, “line
up here. The old man’s on the prod, but the rest of us are sociable.”
Robin hesitated a moment. There was something in the air. There
was a subtle shade of the peremptory in that “line up here.” The tone
nettled him out of all reason. And he didn’t like the conjunction of
Dan Mayne drunk and resentful in the same room with Shining Mark
Steele.
“Leave me out this time,” he said casually. “Looks like I better put
my boss to bed. I generally have to when he goes on a bust.”
“Suit yourself,” Steele replied tartly. “All the same to me.”
That muttered sentence of Mayne’s was apparently the last
coherent speech he was capable of making. Robin got him out of the
chair, steadied his uncertain progress across the way to the hotel
and half-carried him up to a bedroom.
He sat down beside him, and piled a wet towel on Mayne’s head.
In the course of half an hour the thickness of tongue and brain
partially cleared.
“You been squabblin’ with Mark to-night?” Robin asked then. He
wanted to know. If Mayne had jumped Steele, he, Robin, would be in
a difficult situation, working under Steele. Somehow Mark’s attitude
promised trouble.
“Naw, not about that.” Mayne understood his meaning at once. “I
ain’t a damn fool altogether. But I don’t like that hombre. And I am
drunk. When I’m drunk I ain’t got as much sense as I should have
about some things. Ivy’s in town with me. Mark he comes ridin’ in
about supper time and gets her corraled in the parlor an’ sets there
talkin’ the kid black in the face. So I tell him to lay off, that I don’t
want no flashy, silver-spangled wagon bosses in my family. I wanted
to say cow thief instead uh wagon boss, but I didn’t. Least I don’t
think I did.”
“You are a damn fool,” Robin said angrily. “Ivy’s a blamed sight
abler to stand off Mark Steele than you are. I’m a darned sight more
interested in who she talks to than you are, an’ I sure wouldn’t jump
any man for settin’ talkin’ to her in a hotel parlor. Darn it, he comes to
the ranch, and you make him welcome.”
“No more,” Mayne asserted with drunken emphasis. “’F he ever
jingles his spurs on my porch again I’ll ventilate him.”
After a minute he said thickly:
“I found them dead cows below Cold Spring. I rode a week steady
before I located the calves. I found ’em fresh marked. I can’t prove
nothin’. But I found ’em.”
“S-sh,” Robin warned. “Not so loud. What brand’s on the calves?”
“T Bar S.”
“Huh! I’ve seen a few around.” Robin wrinkled his brows. “Little
bunch was thrown in on the Block S range a year ago. Supposed to
belong to some Helena man.”
“Yeah,” Mayne snorted. “I looked into that, too. Helena hell! The T
Bar S is registered in Jim Bond’s name. I’ve known him a long time.
He keeps a two-by-four saloon in Helena. Never owned a cow in his
life. Them T Bar S’s was throwed in here last year, a hundred and
fifty head mixed stock. I bet you Mark Steele put up the money. But I
can’t prove it. I can’t prove nothin’—yet.”
“Well, if you can’t prove nothing, you can’t, that’s all,” Robin said.
“You just got to lay low, and see which way the cat hops.”
“I’m goin’ to ask old Adam to-morrow if he’s got any idea what’s
goin’ on around here,” Mayne growled. “An’ I’m goin’ to ride an’
watch. Ride an’ watch,” he repeated darkly. “Ride an’ watch!”
 CHAPTER V
WATCHFUL WAITING

Robin rode to camp alone. The Block S riders were all gathered in
the Silver Dollar when he came back to where his night horse stood
with the others in a row by the hitching rack. Through the windows
he could see that a poker game had started. Tex Matthews was
playing. Robin didn’t want to drink. With his mind fully occupied he
somehow didn’t care to talk. He was aware of a faint reluctance to
facing Mark Steele while Mark was in that hair-trigger mood—a
trouble-breeding temper, certainly quickened by a few drinks, that
might or might not have been generated by something Mayne had
said in his cups.
Steele was not rated a quarrelsome man. He could be arbitrary,
high-handed, and he had never been known to give way an inch for
any one. Even his ordinary genial manner could easily take on an
edge. He had no known notches on his gun handle. But whatever
obscure inner force it is, that makes some men positive, and others
negative, in their human contracts, it resided in Mark Steele, and
exacted a certain deference among men who were lightning-quick to
resent any form of aggression.
So Robin, deep in his own reflections, swung into his saddle and
rode away to camp. If Ivy had not been asleep in her room he would
have tarried longer. But he would see her to-morrow. He fell asleep,
in a bed unrolled on the grass, with his face turned to the stars. He
wakened once when the riders came pattering into camp and got
quietly into their beds. A cloudless sky brilliant with specks of silver
arched over him, a luminous inverted bowl. Crickets chirped in the
grass. Night horses tied to the bed wagon, on picket, made their
usual noises. The bells on the remuda tinkled distantly. Small sounds
in a deep hush overlying a lonely land. Robin turned over and slept
again.
 At daybreak the outfit mounted. There was a herd to trim. While
the bulk of that seventeen hundred bore the Block S there were
strays of half a dozen other brands to be shipped, and these cattle
were not jammed indiscriminately into cars to be sorted in Chicago.
The cattleman unscrambled his own eggs.
From dawn to noon the flat a mile outside the stockyards was a
scurry of dust, flying riders, steers and cows being shot out of the
main herd into little bunches held separate. Once sorted by brand
and sex each group moved into the shipping pens. By four o’clock
the last longhorn was on his way, two trainloads of him.
The riders were free until the following morning, when the Block S
would pull south. Thirty miles beyond Birch Creek, beyond the Bar M
Bar, Steele would throw his riders on circle again to comb the range
for beef. The camp would move day by day toward the railroad as
the riders gathered a herd.
But now, as the last door clanged shut on the last animal, the
cowboys flung themselves on their horses and charged down on the
Silver Dollar. For ten hours they had worked in heat and dust. They
were hot and thirsty. Cold beer was nectar to their parched mouths.
Robin stayed with the crowd for one round of elbow-crooking.
Then he crossed to the hotel. The Maynes were still in town. He
sought the store. As he clanked up the steps he passed Dan Mayne
and Adam Sutherland perched on the planking, Mayne talking with
emphatic motions of his hands and head, Sutherland big, fat, good-
natured, placidly listening, chewing on a cigar. Robin nodded and
went on in, looking for Ivy. But in that semi-public place he couldn’t
talk to her nor she to him even if she had not been deep in
purchases of dry goods aided and abetted by the blacksmith’s wife
and the hotel keeper’s daughter. Out of their natural habitat both
Robin and Ivy were shy, self-conscious. They exchanged greetings.
Robin bought a pound of Bull Durham and took himself off.
Sutherland rose as he came out and ambled away toward his
house. Robin sat down beside Mayne. The old man’s eyes were
slightly reddened. Otherwise he showed no sign of his overnight
tussle with John Barleycorn. His mind was still occupied with cows
and cow thieves.
 “Sutherland don’t take no stock in any rustlin’,” he complained.
“He’s so gol darned sure nobody’s got the nerve to rustle stock on
the Block S range. ’Course I couldn’t blat it all. I only told him what I
seen myself, an’ not all that either. He just laughed. Said if some of
my cows got shot it wasn’t because somebody was stealin’ their
calves, but more likely some poison mean galoot had it in for me.”
“How’d he figure calves with no mothers and a T Bar S on their
ribs?” Robin inquired.
“I didn’t go that far.” Mayne’s normal caution was to the fore,
evidently. “I don’t want to start nothin’ I can’t finish. I got to know
more before I go hollerin’ names and brands.”
“I guess that’s good policy,” Robin agreed. “Still, I don’t sabe the
play. If it was Mark— Why’d he steal calves for a man in Helena?”
“Bond’s probably a stall. Mark’s either got an interest in that brand
or owns it. Naturally he keeps that dark,” Mayne replied sourly. “If
them calves had had a Block S on ’em I’d think my chances were
slim to make any money in the cow business around here. I thought
at first he was workin’ on me to make a good showin’ for the Block S.
I never seen a big cow outfit yet that wouldn’t back a wagon boss in
anything he did if he could show a good increase from year to year.
But when I see that T Bar S I know he’s out for himself.”
“Maybe it ain’t Mark, after all,” Robin murmured. “I’m not dead
sure, you know. I went mostly on the flash of silver.”
Robin didn’t say that he had been confirmed in his first impression
largely by Mark’s behavior since.
Mayne looked at him peevishly.
“Who’d you think it might be, then?” he inquired. “Or has Mark got
you buffaloed so’s you dassent think out loud to me? ’S he been
puttin’ the fear uh God into you? You ’fraid of him?”
“I don’t know,” Robin answered truthfully. “He’s done some pretty
high-handed things in this country and made ’em stick, hasn’t he?
He’d be a bad man to tangle with. He’s never made a gun play that I
know of. Still, everybody seems to take him for walkin’ dynamite.”
“He is, too,” Mayne agreed moodily. “He looks it, acts it once in a
while. I sized him up as dangerous the first time I ever saw him.
Some men are that way. Soon as you look ’em in the eye, you know
they’ll be poison if you go up against ’em. Same time, nobody, if he
was deadly as a Gila monster, is goin’ to keep stealin’ my stock and
get away with it, make me think I like it. I seen plenty wild west
before Mark Steele was born. You watch he don’t keep cuttin’ back
unbranded stuff on you when the outfit works south of the
mountains, Robin. The time to keep cases on him is all the time. If
he drags the long rope on my territory after round-up’s over, I bet you
I get him before the grass comes up in the spring.”
“Suppose you were dead sure, but had no evidence a stock
inspector could make an arrest on, what’ you do?” Robin asked
curiously.
“More’n one way of killin’ a cat besides chokin’ it to death with
butter,” Mayne drawled cryptically.
As the Block S wagons, saddle bunch and riders traveled south
the next forenoon they passed one equipage and were themselves
passed by another on the trail that ran to the Sutherland ranch on
Little Eagle.
The first was Dan Mayne and Ivy rolling home with a team and
wagon. Robin jogged beside them for a mile or so bantering Ivy.
Then Mark Steele detached himself from the other riders and joined
him, and somehow the light-hearted chaffering between Ivy and
Robin ceased. Mark did the talking. He was as genial as the sun.
Even old Mayne had to grin. But Robin didn’t. He kept pace and was
casual, but he wasn’t happy. And when Mark said: “Well, kid, the
outfit’s leavin’ us behind,” Robin lifted his hat and rode on with
Steele, in spite of the fact that it was his privilege to join the outfit
when he chose. He wasn’t a Block S man. He was a “rep.” But he
went.
Steele tightened up as soon as they were clear of the Maynes. It
wasn’t anything he said because he didn’t open his mouth. It was his
manner, a subtle something Robin could feel. Mark looked back at
the team and wagon once. Then he looked searchingly at Robin and
smiled—without a word. The mocking flicker in his eyes made Robin
uneasy. It was not the first time Steele had manifested an interest in
Ivy Mayne, although everybody within fifty miles knew she was
Robin’s girl.
 “Maybe,” thought Robin, “he thinks he can get her the way he’s
gettin’ the old man’s calves.”
They joined the other riders. As they paced along the trail some
one noticed a little banner of dust far behind.
“Somebody’s foggin’ it on our track,” Tommy Thatcher remarked.
The “somebody” turned out to be Adam Sutherland, in a fancy
buggy, holding taut reins over a pair of standard-bred bays kicking
the dust out from under them as if they were hitched to a racing
sulky.
The buggy passed like a rider at the gallop. Sutherland nodded.
The cowboys lifted their hats when they saw a girl in the seat beside
Sutherland. The shiny top was up and all they had was a glimpse.
But that was sufficient, for some of them.
“May’s back, eh?” one commented.
Robin had a flash of a pale face, fair hair, bright blue eyes. He
knew about Sutherland’s only daughter although he had never seen
her until now. She was getting a formal education in the State
capital, where Sutherland lived in the winter, and sometimes she
came to the home ranch a few weeks in summer. She had been born
on Little Eagle when the Block S cattle numbered hundreds instead
of thousands. She was good-looking, the cowboys said, and she had
been very pleasant to crippled riders laid up at the home ranch, but
none of them knew her well. She rode about in the hills a little with
her father, and a great deal more alone. The Sutherland riders
discussed her freely as the buggy grew small on the trail ahead and
disappeared at last over a rise.
“She used to love a good rider,” Amby Phillips said reflectively. “So
you bronco fighters can have hope. One time she was half-stuck on
a kid that broke horses on Little Eagle—about four years ago, if I
remember right. I seen her sit on the fence and clap her hands when
he topped off a colt that jumped high, wide an’ handsome. She used
to run around with him a lot. An’ one day a bronc went over
backward on this kid an’ killed him. She went all to pieces over it,
they say. She ain’t been here much since. You know her, Mark?”
Steele nodded. “Met her two or three times,” he drawled. “I was
over to the house last night. Nice lookin’, all right. Kinda acts as if
she was proud as hell about something, though.”
Old Tex Matthews snickered audibly and Steele flashed a cold
glance at him.
“What you say, Tex?” he inquired with exaggerated politeness.
“I didn’t say. But I was thinkin’ that if it don’t rain soon and soften
up this ground I’ll have to shoe a couple of horses.”
Steele made no comment. There was a funny little quirk about the
Texan’s mouth when he made that answer, and he looked straight at
Shining Mark. For some reason there was a brief silence, and after
that there was no more mention of May Sutherland. Presently they
stirred up their horses and tore down into a creek bottom where the
wagons were to stop for noon.
That night they camped under Shadow Butte again. The following
day took them far east of Birch Creek, east of the Bar M Bar. The
Little Rockies loomed blue on the horizon beyond the broad reach of
the Gros Ventre Reservation. On their first ride they picked up a fair
sprinkling of beef cattle and Robin cut a score of Bar M Bars into the
day herd to throw back on his home range. After that the routine of
each day followed its usual order of saddling at dawn, riding circle,
bunching the gathered cattle in a compact mass near the camp while
they cut out the prime beef and branded such calves as had been
missed on the spring round-up. Each day they moved a few miles
back toward Big Sandy, working the range on either side of the
wagons as far as they could reach in one ride.
Robin noted a T Bar S here and there. Some of the riders knew a
Helena man owned that brand. None of them cared about the
question of ownership. They were not owners. There were other
brands on the range with absentee owners. Somehow, because a
generous honesty was the accepted range standard the calves of
such got branded with the mark their mothers bore, and the steers
got shipped to market. If no special arrangement was made for
looking after such cattle the big outfits looked after them anyhow. It
kept the range in order. Unbranded stock at large was a temptation
to men anxious to build up a big herd off a shoestring foundation. If a
rustler could get away with stuff from a little owner he soon extended
his operations to the big outfit. To the big cattleman a cow thief was
an affront to his jealous sense of property rights—to the man with