Benito Cereno

By Herman Melville QUOTATION: the negro Babo took by succession each Spaniard forward, and asked him whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white’s.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. “Benito Cereno” (1855), The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 9, eds. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1987).

QUOTATION: “what has cast such a shadow upon you” “The negro.”
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. “Benito Cereno” (1855), The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 9, eds. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1987).

QUOTATION: “you were with me all day; stood with me, sat with me, talked with me, looked at me, ate with me, drank with me; and yet, your last act was to clutch for a monster, not only an innocent man, but the most pitiable of all men. So far may even the best man err, in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose condition he is not acquainted.”
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. “Benito Cereno” (1855), The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 9, eds. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1987).