As so often before Peggy marveled at the contradictions: People so tender with their children, so indulgent, so playful, and yet they thought nothing of raising those same children to order that slaves who annoyed them be stripped or whipped, or their families broken up and sold off.
Of course, here in the city few of the mansions had large enough grounds to allow a proper whipping on the premises. The offending slave would be taken to the market and whipped there, so the moaning and weeping wouldn't interfere with conversations in the sitting rooms and drawing rooms of the beautiful houses.
What was the truth of these people? Their love for their children, for king and country, for the classical education at which they excelled, all these were genuine. By every sign they were educated, tasteful, generous, broad-minded, hospitable– in a word, civilized. And yet just under the surface was a casual brutality and a deep shame that poisoned all their acts. It was as if two cities sat on this place. Camelot, the courtly city of the king-in-exile, was the land of dancing and music, education and discourse, light and beauty, love and laughter. But by coincidence, the old city of Charleston still existed here, with buildings that corresponded with Camelot wall for wall, door for door. Only the citizenry was different, for Charleston was the city of slave markets, half-White babies sold away from their own father's household, lashings and humiliations, and, as seed and root and leaf and blossom of this evil town, the hatred and fear of both Blacks and Whites who lived at war with each other, the one doomed to perpetual defeat, the other to perpetual fear of…
Of what? What did they fear?
Justice.
And it dawned on her for the first time what she had not seen in Fishy's heartfire: the desire for revenge.
And yet that was impossible. What human being could bear such constant injustice and not cry out, at least in the silence of the soul, for the power to set things to rights? Was Fishy so meek that she forgave all? No, her sullen resistance clearly had no piety in it. She was filled with hate. And yet not one thought or dream or plan for retribution, either personal or divine. Not even the hope of emancipation or escape.
As she walked along the streets under the noonday sun, it made her almost giddy to realize what must be going on, and not just with Fishy, but with every slave she had met here in Camelot. Peggy was not able to see everything in their heartfires. They were able to conceal a part of their feelings from her. For it was impossible to imagine that they had no such feelings, for they were human beings, and all the Blacks she met in Appalachee had yearnings for retribution, manumission, or escape. No, if she didn't see those passions among the slaves of Camelot, it wasn't because they didn't feel them, it was because they had somehow learned to lie a lie so deep that it existed even in their heartfires.
And that threw everything in doubt. For if there was one thing Peggy had always counted on, it was this: No one could lie to her without her knowing it. It had been that way with her almost since birth. It was one of the reasons people didn't usually like to spend much time around a torch– though few of them could see even a fraction of what Peggy saw. There was always the fear of their secret thoughts being known and exposed.
When Peggy was a child, she did not understand why adults became so upset when she responded to what was in their heartfire rather than the words they were saying to her. But what could she do? When a traveling salesman patted her on her head and said, “I got something for this little girl, I wager!” she hardly noticed his words, what with all that his heartfire was telling her, not to mention her father's heartfire and everybody else nearby. She just naturally had to answer, “My papa's not a fool! He knows you're cheating him!”
But everybody got so upset with her that she learned to keep silent about all lies and all secrets. Her response was to hold her tongue and say nothing at all. Fortunately, she learned silence before she was old enough to understand the truly dark secrets that would have destroyed her family. Silence served her well– so well that some visitors to her father's inn took her for a mute.
Still, she had to converse with local people, and with other children her age. And for a long time it made her angry, how people's words never matched up very well with their desires or memories, and sometimes were the flat opposite. Only gradually did she come to see that as often as not, the lies people told were designed to be kind or merciful or, at the very least, polite. If a mother thought her daughter was plain, was it bad that she lied to the child and told her that she loved how her face brightened up when she smiled? What good would it have done to give her true opinion? And the lie helped the child grow up more cheerful, and therefore more attractive.
Peggy began to understand that what made a statement good was rarely dependent on whether it was true. Very little human speech was truthful, as she knew better than anyone else. What mattered was whether the deception was kindly meant or designed to take advantage, whether it was meant to smooth a social situation or aggrandize the speaker in others' eyes.
Peggy became a connoisseur of lies. The good lies were motivated by love or kindness, to shield someone from pain, to protect the innocent, or to hide feelings that the speaker was ashamed of. The neutral lies were the fictions of courtesy that allowed conversations to proceed smoothly without unnecessary or unproductive conflict. How are you? Just fine.
The bad lies were not all equal, either. Ordinary hypocrisy was annoying but did little harm, unless the hypocrite went out of his way to attack others for sins that he himself committed but concealed. Careless liars seemed to have no regard for truth, and lied from habit or for sport. Cruel liars, though, sought out their target's worst fears and then lied to make them suffer or to put them at a disadvantage; or they gossiped to destroy people they resented, often accusing them falsely of the sins the gossips themselves most wished to commit. And then there were the professional liars, who said whatever was necessary to get others to do their will.
And despite Peggy's gifts as a torch– and no ordinary torch at that, able merely to catch a glimpse of a child inside the womb– even she often had trouble discerning the motive behind a lie, in part because there were often many motives in conflict. Fear, weakness, a desire to be liked– all could produce lies that in someone else might come from ruthlessness or cruelty; and within their heartfire, Peggy could not easily see the difference. It took time; she had to understand the pattern of their lives to find out what sort of soul they had, and where the lies all seemed to lead.
So many questions were posed by every lie she was told that she despaired of answering any but the most obvious. Even when she knew the truth that someone was lying to conceal, what was that truth? The mother who thought her daughter was ugly might be lying when she told the girl that her smile made her pretty– but in fact the mother might be wrong, and in fact her lie might be true in the eyes of another observer. Most “truths” that people believed in, and therefore which they contradicted with their lies, were not objectively true at all. The real truth– how things are or were or would become– was almost unknowable. That is, people often knew the truth, but they just as often “knew” things that were not true, and had no reliable way to tell the difference. So while Peggy could always see what the person believed was true while they told their lies, this did not mean that Peggy therefore knew the real truth.
After years of sorting out the lies and realizing that the lies often told more truth than the “truth” that the lies concealed, Peggy finally came to the conclusion that what she needed was not a better sense of truth, but simply the skill to hear a lie and react to it as if she knew nothing else.