And then the awful symbol, in a story rife with symbols—puzzling rope knots, razors-at-throat—is uncovered. The ship’s figurehead is revealed to be a human skeleton, that of a partner in the slave ship. And we are warned by Melville that what seem to be only symbols may be representations of what’s actual, that language carries a cargo of the real, and that fiction is a matter of life and death.

The story slips without faltering into another convention, the “true” document that creates verisimilitude (as in the case of Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle,” or, closer to home, Hawthorne’s “discovery” of The Scarlet Letter manuscript). The statement by Benito Cereno, a seeming transcript, gives the European account of the slave rebellion, suggests to us how complicated and multifold any actuality is—how difficult to comprehend or relate—and serves to supply small, shuddery details. So we see, for example, that the original figurehead had been a wooden Christopher Columbus; the discoverer (as he was then thought to be, of course) of the New World is replaced by the Old World’s grinning corpse: slavery becomes the emblem of an inescapable fact—that we are haunted by our past, that the New Eden is not free of the old evils, that, as Melville complained to Hawthorne, “the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me.”

A brief third section follows Cereno’s testimony. It contains warnings inferred by Melville (and so many others) concerning the social conditions that will ignite the Civil War. It also offers another, a larger and historical, way of examining the events of the story. And it reminds us how, throughout the first part, we saw menace between the slave Babo and his master (then prisoner) Cereno, while Delano saw affection. Delano saw mastery, and we saw captivity. When Benito Cereno’s “symbol of despotic command” is examined, it is seen not to be a sword, “but ghost of one,” its scabbard “artificially stiffened.” Melville does not, I think, speak here only of command, but of men seen as joined by affection who are later revealed to be acting in reversal of their customary relationships (the more powerful obeys, the slave commands). Melville joins notions of political power and emotional liaison, and not only to warn us that slaves rise up. The metaphor works in reverse as well, I think, and we are instructed that lovers are slaves and masters, that men can be unmanned by love (the limp scabbard), and can, as in the case of wan Don Cereno, even die of it.

The warning note is sounded again as Delano points to a sky he names as “blue,” but which Cereno cannot acknowledge; to him, it is the gray, perhaps, of the story’s opening. The shadows of that early passage are pointed at again as Delano says, “You are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?” Cereno answers, “The negro,” and so warns a society of its sin and then its price—only then are we told of the empty scabbard—and points as well to Babo, who took Cereno’s soul in partial payment for his freedom. The shadow is national, cultural, and also particular: Cereno dies, as did his partner.

Babo is the genius of the story—compare his invention, his gift for creating a shipwide fiction, to Delano’s good dullness—and his head, “that hive of subtlety,” is taken from his body. It is his brain the white men fear. He is further reduced by this barbarism, and yet he becomes more of a threat. He stares at the white man from the post on which his head is impaled. He stares at the Old World and the New Eden, at unmanned Cereno, at church and monastery, storyteller and reader. And he stares them down. He began as a man and became a curse. And his message does get through.

And now we need to move ahead, through Melville’s writing and nonwriting lifetime. Hawthorne, whom Melville loved and lost, has risen. He is America’s second-most powerful diplomat, the consul in Liverpool. (He was also Franklin Pierce’s Bowdoin friend, and the author of his campaign biography.) Melville, failing at his novels and his efforts to achieve diplomatic appointment, suffering physically, his novel Israel Potter (1855) having been launched to sink, contracts for The Confidence Man having been signed, was sent in 1856, with his father-in-law’s money, on a sea voyage that might bring him back to health and ease. He went to Liverpool, where he visited Hawthorne, who noted that Melville said he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated.” It is possible that Melville meant that he was faithless and was reconciled to a death with no afterlife. It is also possible to read the statement as a premonition of death. And it is not difficult, given Melville’s state of mind, and his choked-off relationship with Hawthorne, to read the statement as a threat of suicide.

In 1866, Melville accepted a post at the Port of New York Custom-House at Gansevoort Street, not far from his birthplace. In Boston and Salem, Hawthorne had begun his career at such a place; Melville would conclude his here. But he wrote his Civil War poems, and he went on to write the long poem Clarel, and, probably between the time of his retirement as a customs inspector in 1855 and his death in 1891, he worked on a poem that became the ballad “Billy in the Darbies” (“Billy in Irons”) that sparked a short novel—it concludes with the ballad and began as a headnote to it—that we know as Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative).

We know a good deal about the composition of the novel because of the heroic work of Harrison Hayford and Merton M.