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The Color Gray
Benito Cereno opens with the following description: “Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.” The passage contains four uses of the color gray and one use of the word “lead,” which is gray in color. It is fitting that gray is the dominant color, since Benito Cereno defies a breakdown into black-and-white components. Gray, of course, is also the color between black and white, and in a story so concerned with race, a motif of grayness cannot be ignored as Black and white men mingle on the deck of the San Dominick, creating a kind of human grayness. The color gray also matches the tone of the text. Nothing is clear in Benito Cereno, and the more he moves through the story, the more confused Delano becomes. It is not until the very end that this foggy grayness parts and Delano understands the true situation. By introducing grayness so early in the story, Melville places his readers in familiar territory: there will be no easy answers and nothing will be as it seems.
The Phrase “Follow Your Leader”
The phrase “follow your leader” is used four times throughout Benito Cereno. The first occurs when Delano arrives on the San Dominick and he notices the phrase painted on the side of the pedestal attached to the ship’s covered figure-head. The painted words are referenced again when the canvas covering the figurehead is removed to reveal Alexandro Aranda’s skeleton. The phrase is also spoken aloud twice: once during the battle between the San Dominick and the Bachelor’s Delight, and once during Cereno’s testimony when he recalls that Babo told all of the white sailors that the could either do what he says or “follow [their] leader”—at which point he gestured to Aranda’s skeleton. The concept of following one's leader returns one last time in the novella’s final line when the narrator notes that Cereno “follow[ed] his leader” because he died shortly after Babo was executed.
The notion of following one’s leader is a motif throughout Benito Cereno because the novella is largely about power and control. The captains seek to control their crew, the white people seek to control the Black people they have enslaved, and Babo and the rest of the Black men and women seek to regain control after being captured and forced into slavery. Even the testimonies at the end of the novella invoke the notion of authority and control because the testimonies imply the existence of a judge whose job it is to control a courtroom. In all of these examples, a person, or in some cases a group of people, attempts to exert their dominance over others. The phrase “follow your leader” insinuates that, in the end, there can only be one person in charge. Given the racial hierarchy of the time period, one might be tempted to assume that this title would ultimately be awarded to one of the white characters, but this is not the case. In the novella’s final line, Melville implies that Babo is the real leader of the text, as he maintained his power and control over Cereno even after death.
