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upstate New York, or the olive-skinned Italian youths whose nude photographs were smuggled through customs by his friend Theodore Dwight for Stoddard's delectation. Dwight, who was working at the time as librarian to the State Department, offered a special enticement for Stoddard to visit him in Washington: "Coffee in thin porcelain shall be served to you at your bedside by the African Sphinx, James the black and speechless, called by some the 'Mind Reader.'" 24 The combination here of racial darkness with devoted service and knowing silence was the ideal for Stoddard in his Island lovers.
The preferred color was "not black . . . not even brown" but "olive-tinted"and not just any "olive," but the "tenderest olive . . . that has a shade of gold in it." 25 Such was Kána-aná, Stoddard's companion in "Chumming with a Savage," with whom he played out a "Crusoe life":
We had fitful spells of conversation upon some trivial theme, after long intervals of intense silence. We began to develop symptoms of imbecility. There was laughter at the least occurrence, though quite barren of humor; also, eating and drinking to pass the time; bathing to make one's self cool, after the heat and drowsiness of the day. . . . Again and again he would come with a delicious banana to the bed where I was lying, and insist upon my gorging myself, when I had but barely recovered from a late orgie of fruit, flesh, or fowl. He would mesmerize me into a most refreshing sleep with a prolonged and pleasing manipulation. It was a reminiscence of the baths of Stamboul not to be withstood. From this sleep I would presently be awakened by Kána-aná's performance upon a rude sort of harp, that gave out a weird and eccentric music. The mouth being applied to the instrument, words were pronounced in a guttural voice, while the fingers twanged the strings in measure. It was a flow of monotones, shaped into legends and lyrics. I liked it amazingly; all the better, perhaps, that it was as good as Greek to me, for I understood it as little as I understood the strange and persuasive silence of that beloved place, which seemed slowly but surely weaving a spell of enchantment about me. (CSS 41-42)

 

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Essential to this enchantment is not only Kána-aná's assiduous attention to Stoddard's physical pleasure but also his linguistic otherness, which precludes the possibility of nontrivial conversation and his articulation of anything more than a desire to please. Innocent of civilization and its call, the native is bewildered when Stoddard suddenly abandons him. Rushing in the nude after the departing canoe, he "ran after us like one gone daft, and plunged into the cold sea, calling my name over and over as he fought the breakers." Stoddard knows that "if he overtook us I should never be able to escape again" (CSS 44).
In the account of this poignant parting, the emphasis falls primarily on the narrator's, not the native's, loss. The narrative silence about Kána-aná's thoughts and feelingshe has no fictive inner lifematches the "persuasive silence" of the enchanting Islands. Too primitive for complex human emotions, it is implied, Kána-aná is also too docile to feel anger at being exploited; he is a Good Man Friday to the last. Back home, now playing the prodigal son rather than Robinson Crusoe, Stoddard has no appetite for the fatted calf:" 'I don't deserve it; for I'd give more this minute to see that dear little velvet-skinned, coffee-colored Kána-aná than anything else in the wide worldbecause he hates business, and so do I'" (CSS 44-45). As the prodigal who identifies himself with the natives, Stoddard can distance himself from the America of commercial enterprise without recognizing his own importation of ''business" to the Islands in his assumption of Crusoe-like mastery over Kána-aná/Friday.
"I'd rather be a south sea islander sitting naked in the sun before my grass hut than be the Pope of Rome," Stoddard once quipped, defining the