Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

But they were there for days after, and she soon forgot her anger—her strange night terror—and set about answering her own question.

§

When Aunt Germaine was quite a bit younger and Mr. Frost was still of this world, she took a hungry interest in the foundling science of biology—“Like medicine,” she said, “but with an interest in all living things.”

“I thought you were a doctor, or a nurse or some such thing, all you know about germs,” said Jason. “Didn’t you say you were a nurse?”

“We are getting ahead of ourselves,” said Germaine.

Mr. Frost was a doting husband and so indulged his wife’s passion as much as his pocketbook would permit. He purchased her a microscope and kit for making slides—allowing her to view the most minute specks of life—and a small library of volumes which included: Herbert Spencer’s Social Statistics; Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species; and of course, Charles Galton’s seminal tome Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development.

“What about Bulfinch’s Mythology?”

“That is not a biology book,” said Aunt Germaine.

In addition to her reading and her microscopy, Mr. Frost’s fortune enabled Aunt Germaine to attend summer lectures at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York. That was where she first heard Dr. Charles Davenport speak.

“Looking at him, one could see the divinely inspired brilliance,” said Aunt Germaine. A native New Yorker who had completed his studies at Harvard University, Charles Davenport was engaged with the Institute at their biological research station at Cold Spring Harbor in Long Island. He was a tall man, stooped, in his early middle years then but with a goatee going to white on a chin and an expression of sheer intellectual vigour in his eye.

“Sheer intellectual vigour,” repeated Jason. “Now what’s that look like?”

“Studious. Serious,” said Aunt Germaine.

Charles Davenport was a zoologist—which is to say that he studied the ins and outs of the animal kingdom. The first lectures that Aunt Germaine encountered were discussions of studies he had made of lower life forms such as he might dredge from the harbour: pill bugs and molluscs and primitive fish.

It was clear to Aunt Germaine, however, that he was most interested in the study and improvement of the kingdom’s greatest achievement.

“What was that?” asked Jason.

“Man,” said Aunt Germaine.

Dr. Davenport even then had very clear ideas about the way that man might be bettered. In the course of his lecture, Aunt Germaine recalled, he stopped and asked the room:

“Why do we study these lowly, wet creatures? These things that cling to the bottom of rocks and suck up algae? Is it because we have a direct application for them in our lives? Surely not. Then why?”

Aunt Germaine’s hand shot up, and when he called upon her, she answered:

“Toward the betterment of all mankind?”

“Excellent, Madame,” said the doctor. “Precisely. For we are all made from the same protoplasm. And in understanding these creatures—how they live and eat and, forgive me Madame, how they breed—we can better understand how we might live, might eat, might breed. To our race’s betterment, of course.”

This occasioned, said Aunt Germaine, some controversy in the lecture hall, as some wondered whether the doctor was comparing humanity to common garden slugs by some blasphemous design. But Dr. Davenport was not deterred.

“Our ignorance,” he said, “is appalling, when it comes to the understanding of the effect of interbreeding on the races and the children they beget. And the consequences might be severe, should we not move swiftly to eradicate that ignorance.”

Jason wasn’t sure that he would have been any less put off than the others who were there. “I know I ain’t a garden slug,” he said. “Or descended from one either.”

“Do not be so certain, Jason.”

“And what did he mean about interbreeding?” asked Jason. “What consequences are those?”

Aunt Germaine sat back.

“You and your mother raised swine,” she said. “Perhaps I can explain it that way. How is it that you get a prize pig? Do you pray for one? Do you purchase two inferior pigs and mate them? No. You feed and keep a good sow. And from time to time you bring in a prize boar.”

“If there’s one around,” said Jason.

“All right,” said Aunt Germaine. “If there’s one around. If there is not—and you mate your beautiful sow with some—oh, some stringy, undersized, sickly little pig… what sort of offspring would you expect?”

“Not so fine,” he said. “I expect.”

“There is a saying that Dr. Davenport coined some time after that. Breed a white woman with a Negro—the baby’s a Negro. A German with an Italian: Italian. A white fellow with an Indian squaw?”

Jason guessed: “A baby squaw?”

Aunt Germaine clapped.

“You mean to tell me Dr. Davenport was talking about breeding people the way farmers breed pigs.”

Aunt Germaine beamed. “It is a science,” she said. “A new science.”

“A new science.” Jason shook his head. “That’s something.”