sneaky sneaky

Yesterday I read the 1850s novella version of that riddle where the kid and his dad get in a car accident and the surgeon says I can't operate this is my son and you're like well gosh i dunno maybe it's his stepdad or something and then later you find out that the kid's mom is the surgeon and are accused in front of the whole dinner table of being a sexist because that possibility simply did not occur to you. It was called Benito Cereno and it's by the same guy who wrote Moby Dick. Basically there's this ship where there has been a slave revolt and the black people are now in charge, but they are pretending like the spanish guys are still in charge, because this american captain has boarded the ship. They go through a lot of elaborate stuff to keep him believing this until the moment is right, and it's all quite brilliant, really. The whole time he's on the ship he knows that something is off and the whole thing is pretty much freaking him out, but he can't for the life of him solve the mystery. Most of the time he is either suspecting the spanish captain of being a pirate or telling himself to not be so silly. Never once does it occur to him, never does it so much as cross his mind, that these silly black people could be running the show. And, as the reader, you are for the most part carried along in this tricky tide of racism and prejudice, and it doesn't occur to you till almost the very end, or at least it didn't for me, that oooooooooh the slaaaaaves are controling the white peoplllllleeeeee. And at the end when the american captain has his moment of epiphany and your shamefully recently concieved suspicions are confirmed and the epic battles ensues, you're left there like damn you, guy who also wrote moby dick, damn you, I am a racist.

Or maybe I just don't read enough mysteries?