The short stories described so far have all pivoted on a rupturing of expectations. From the plot twists that define O. Henry’s “Friends in San Rosario” and White’s “The Two-Gun Man” to the changing roles inhabited by Albert Gordon in Richard Harding Davis’ “The Reporter Who Made Himself King,” these tales have always taken a turn. John Russell’s “The Fourth Man” follows this trend, twisting faux-scientific expectations that have been predicated on political-social systems in the service of an anti-racist story.
The question of honor among thieves also undergirds Russell’s narrative. Eventually adapted into a popular radio drama for CBS, “The Fourth Man” tracks the attempted escape of three white convicts from a prison in the Pacific island of New Caledonia. The award-winning Dr. Dubosc, the roguish Fenayrou and the many sobriquet’d killer “The Parrot” have broken out of the prison. The three men have taken a nameless black native of New Caledonia captive with the plan of using him to guide a raft down the river where they will escape to a ship and their own freedom.
This nameless figure, to which the title refers, becomes the object of racist antagonism. Though they constantly scheme and attempt to one-up one another, the white men are united in their hatred of the New Caledonian.
All three men hold virulently and explicitly racist positions. Dr. Dubosc turns to the bogus but at one point respected twin sciences of Phrenology and Craniometry to assure the others that the sailor is less human while The Parrot regards him as a “brute” and Fenayrou believes him to be a cannibal.
In brief exchanges among the white supremacists, Russell lays his critique of racism. The idea that external appearance signifies humanity or capacity is first dismissed in Russell’s sarcastic narrative editorializing: "there is perhaps a tribute to the practical spirit of penal administration in the fact that while Dubosc was the most dangerous of these three and Fenayrou the most depraved, The Parrot was the one with the official reputation, whose escape would be signaled first among the ‘wanted.’" To judge on appearance, for Russell, is to misjudge.
As the original plan begins to deteriorate, Dubosc, Fenayrou and the Parrot fight over the little bit of water left over. Though they split the water three ways, thinking it will physically sustain them, that rationing comes with a mental cost. To need water is to acknowledge the limits of your status as a human. Over time the men are confounded by the New Caledonian: he sleeps easily at night and he never seems thirsty.
Unrest grows between the three men and the ability to even try to work together becomes tethered only to their shared anti-blackness. This, Russell is clear about: “only two effective ties still bound their confederacy. One was the flask [of water] which Dubosc had slung at his side…the other bond, as it had come to be by strange mutation, was the presence of the black Canaque.” Racism is as essential to their health as water.
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| March 8, 1956 New York Times Obituary |
For Dubosc survival becomes a significant moment to reassert racial dominance. As he sees it, their death signals more than individual inequity, it exposes a fundamental falsity that he can’t comprehend. If they don’t survive, the racial order of the world will be upset. For Dubosc it is truly a game: “To beat him [the New Caledonian sailor] at the game—that’s what I want! For our own sakes, for our racial pride, we must, we must. To outlast him, to prove ourselves his masters.”
This growing feeling of bodily and societal alienation for white men speaks volumes at this moment in time, just as it has throughout the history of America. The limitation of resources has often been made to be the reason for racist violence. The psychological stability of these men, after all, depends on their own understanding of the game of life being a hierarchical one of racial castes. To continue in their lives they must insist on and enact an anti-black ordering of the world.
And so, as water soon depletes the three men begin to fight one another. When the story ends, and the raft is discovered Dubosc, Fenayrou and The Parrot are dead or captured and the black sailor is left alone by Captain Jean Guibert of the Petite Suzanne. These government officials, these colonialists, echo the anti-blackness of the three convicts as they leave the nameless fourth man, taking aboard only the three white men.
The titular figure is left is guide the raft back to his home. His ingenuity becomes clear as Stevenson reveals that all along the native New Caledonian had been hiding “storage bladders” of “sweet water,” that he discretely drank during the trip. The world was wrong, the figure only named for his race and ethnicity is figured as the smartest of them all.
Of the stories read so far this appears to be the most outwardly didactic. Like many of the other authors in the collection, Russell was at one point a journalist and the conclusion re-frames the story as the work of a muckraker.
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| Many of Russell's stories were adapted for the screen; this 1929 MGM film, directed by W.S. Van Dyke, may have been the most celebrated at the time. |
Where humor was mobilized by Davis in his cool critique of imperialism, Russel’s somber tone reflects a debt to horror. There are also echoes of Joseph Conrad’s writing in “The Fourth Man.” I hope that I haven’t painted this as an especially radical story. Russell, like so many others, relies on a fetishization of blackness that reduces “the fourth man” to one who, like White’s Native Americans, lives as an extension of nature. Still, Russell’s story points to the structuring anti-blackness which has binded certain European and American institutions together for centuries.
You can read “The Fourth Man,” included in the collection Where the Pavement Ends, at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32946
You can listen to a radio dramatization of the story here: https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/thriller/escape/the-fourth-man-1947-08-18
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