Link Appleyard (Andy Devine), beams his approval. The next question is addressed to the
class’s token Negro, Pompey (Woody Strode, here looking as Uncle Remusy as Ford could
make him), and he stands up so that his face shares the frame with the likeness of the Great
Emancipator himself. The sequence is just unsettling enough that when Tom Doniphon (John
Wayne), Pompey’s master/employer/companion, bursts into the classroom and sends Pompey
back to work, our response is curiously ambivalent. The overt content of the civics lesson,
expressing faith in universal education, law and egalitarian democracy, makes it reprehensible
to deny a black man access to education. But Pompey’s actual position in the classroom,
where he is more completely servile, more truly a ‘boy’ in demeanor and circumstance than
anywhere else in the film, complicates our response. Of course, in the early Shinbone Pompey
cannot eat in a restaurant, drink in a saloon, or vote in a town meeting’’ (Coursen). This scene,
with Pompey struggling and yearning for education and equality, only to be sent back to the
field—and his place as servant—by Doniphon, exposes the hypocrisy of white patriarchy.
Ironically, it is Pompey who later saves Doniphon’s life, when the former, in a drunken fit
of despondency over losing Hallie, the woman he thought was his, tries to commit suicide by
burning down his own house, with himself in it. And, how is Pompey repaid by Doniphon? He
is re-enslaved by Tom. Within this film, Tom is a representation of the heroic ideal white
male— he who purportedly tamed the West—yet he is also represents the flaws of the heroic
ideal. In fact, viewing these two films in comparison, one sees that Ford is pointing to an
alternate vision, one which suggests that the white male did not “tame”’ the West alone, and
also that the ideal was painfully flawed. It is the pain suffered by Pompey which points this out.
Pompey is the most loyal to Tom in the film yet the least appreciated. Pompey is Braxton
Rutledge. These scenes with Pompey go to the heart of what Ford is trying to say a bout race
within both films. Clearly, within both films, the law is seen as unjust: it is the law which first
enslaved noble men like Braxton Rutledge and Pompey. It is the law which seeks to hang
Rutledge, mainly because he is black. There is of course, circumstantial evidence linking him
to the rape and murders, but the greatest circumstance, Ford’s film says, is Braxton’s black
skin. Moreover, it is the law which prohibits Pompey from taking part in the Shinbone elections,
or taking a drink at the town saloon, even though he is clearly, the “man” —the manly equal to
any other man in Shinbone, including his boss.
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