The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell

“The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell” is a short story written by famed Argentine essayist, poet, and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) and published in his first story collection, A Universal History of Infamy (1935, reissued in 1954 with three new pieces added). The story constitutes a light fictionalization of the career of outlaw John Andrews Murrell, who operated along the Mississippi River. (The story’s title, “El atroz redentor Lazarus Morell,” has also been translated as “The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell.”)

In the preface to the 1935 edition, Borges described the stories as “exercises in narrative prose” that were derived, from among other sources, “my readings of [Robert Louis] Stevenson and [G. K.] Chesterton.” However, in the preface to the 1954 edition, he described these stories as “the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories, and so amused himself by changing and distorting (sometimes without æsthetic justification) the stories of other men.”

The “story,” such as it is, is presented in several sections with little narrative drama. The first, “The Remote Cause,” briefly lays out the history of the African slave trade in the Americas. Next, “The Place” describes the Mississippi River, “the grandest river in the world,” and the Delta region “where gigantic swamp cypresses grow from the slough of a continent in perpetual dissolution,” while the Arkansas and Ohio river basins are described as being “populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water.” After noting the condition of Black slaves in this land (“The Men”), Borges describes Lorenzo Morell (“The Man”) as a “Southern gentleman of the old school, in spite of his impoverished childhood and his shameful life,” who once preached a sermon of one hour and twenty minutes while his associates “rounded up all the folks’ horses and made off with them” to sell in the state of Arkansas.

Morell then moves on (as described in “The Method”) to conspiring with slaves to steal them, sell them to a different plantation, and then “give him a share of the money and help them escape a second time.” But, as relayed in “The Final Freedom,” the second-time runaway would typically be killed rather than offered his freedom: “A bullet, a low thrust with a blade, a knock on the head, and the turtles and catfish of the Mississippi would be left to keep the secret among themselves.” Soon enough, however, Morell is betrayed (“The Catastrophe”) by one Virgil Stewart of Arkansas, a member of his gang who denounces him. On the run, Morell plans to foster “a general uprising of the Negroes,…a response of continental proportions,” but instead he robs a man of his clothes, horse, and money and takes off, dying (“The Interruption”) in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1835 of pulmonary congestion under the name Silas Buckley.

The narrative presented by Borges hews less to the documented facts of Murrell’s life and more to the 1836 book by the real Virgil A. Stewart, A History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and Designs of John A. Murel [sic], The Great Western Land Pirate, which built Murrell’s reputation and invented the story of the slave rebellion he planned for Christmas Day 1835.

For additional information:
Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. New York: 1998.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas