Mason & Dixon & the ampersand

Each of these lines can be read as Zhang reads the visto, as conduits for evil. The line between black and white is first examined during Mason and Dixon's stay in the Cape Town home of the Vrooms, where Mason is recruited to impregnate one of the family's slaves to help produce light-skinned stock. It reappears most plainly for them in America, prompting Dixon at one point to say:

--and now here we are again, in another Colony, this time having drawn them a line between their Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom'd to re-encounter thro' the World this public Secret, this shameftul Core.... Christ Mason ... Where does it end? No matter where in it we go, shall we find all the World Tyrants and Slaves? America was the one place we should not have found them. (692-93)

Finding all the world tyrants and slaves means uncovering a shameful secret, a concealed truth of the Enlightenment world, namely that freedom is reserved only for some. Even an incipient America, a land soon to proclaim all men equal, hides this truth, and not very well. Near the end of their time in America, Dixon tears the whip from the hand of a slave driver busy beating his property; whom Dixon frees. The act is clearly heroic, and a judgment of the place in which it occurs. This line between black and white is most clearly represented by one significance of the visto that, because of chronology, can never be made quite explicit within the novel: as the popularly designated divider of Union from Rebel states in the Civil War. The absence from the novel of the name by which the line came to be known underscores this implicit knowledge.

The ill effects of the line drawn between Native Americans and colonists become clear as Mason and Dixon and their party progress westward. But it is not just a phenomenon of the frontier. Long before they stop the line rather than cross the Great Warrior Path--the crossing of which, their new Mohawk companions inform them (through a translator), "would be like putting an earthen Dam across a River"--the presence of natives and the effects of contact are clear. The division of Indian from settler was enforced from the moment of settlement, a fact to which Mason and Dixon's visit to Lancaster alludes (647). They are there to inspect the site on which an Indian massacre occurred the year before; however, as Cherrycoke mentions when explaining why Mason did not go alone as originally intended, Lancaster, the location of more than one Indian fight, is "a Town notorious for Atrocity" (341). Among the more notorious is the 1676 Indian attack on Lancaster, which took place during Metacom's or King Philip's War. Whil e the hanging of three Indians for the murder of another, converted Indian was the proximate cause of the war (still the most devastating, in terms of fatalities as percentage of population, in American history), the real cause was the encroachment of the settlers. The attack gained fame in America and especially in Britain from a book published as The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (in England, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson). A first-person narrative of Rowlandson's captivity, it provides a historical record of Puritan attitudes toward the Indians, including both the missionaries' desire to convert them and the belief of Rowlandson and others that the natives were a race of unredeemable savages. Rowlandson's book helped win the day, and many subsequent years of American history, for her racial attitudes.