OOP: A person is more than the worst thing they have done

[Dicentra spectabilis]

No: HPFGUIDX 63772

> > Wednesday, June 25, 2003, 10:38:19 AM, bluesqueak wrote:
> > 
> > > Sirius, who turned 
> > > away from the 'Black' side as a teenager, treats his house elf 
> > > in a contemptuous way that would make any DE proud.

::Dicentra plods in, wearing wrinkled Sirius Apologist robes, hair
dishevelled, eyes bleary and red::

I have to take, er, umbrage at this description of Sirius's treatment
of Kreacher.  We have a very vivid example of how DEs treat their
house-elves in how Lucius treated Dobby.  He was physically abusive,
kicking Dobby out of the way, issuing several death threats a day, and
in short making Dobby so miserable that he risked a horrible fate by
going to warn Harry behind Lucius's back.  

Dumbledore explicity said: "Sirius was not a cruel man, he was kind to
house-elves in general.  He had no love for Kreacher, because Kreacher
was a living reminder of the home Sirius had hated."

As Lisa said,

> I never got the sense that Sirius was unpleasant to 
> Kreacher because he was a House Elf, and therefore of inferior 
> status....  I thought that 
> he was unpleasant to Kreacher because *Kreacher* was unpleasant 
> himself, because he served Sirius' mother (even dead, a rather 
> horrid woman), because he went about muttering nastily at everyone 
> in the house, and because he was a terrible reminder of a painful 
> past that Sirius thought he'd long ago escaped. 

I heartily agree with this.  Sirius's attitude toward Kreacher was the
same as his attitude toward everything in that house.  Sirius was
trying to cleanse the house of its ugly past; unlike the trinkets and
the furniture, Kreacher couldn't be tossed in a box and disposed of. 
Given how Sirius hated his Black heritage, hated being confined to
That House, and tended towards hot-headedness, Kreacher is lucky
Sirius didn't drop-kick him into the fireplace or hand him a sock and
send him out into the world the way you might release a tank-bred
goldfish into a pond: without a snowball's chance in hell to survive. 

Suzanne said: 

> > Wasn't it Sirius, who told Ron ... that you should
> > look how a person treats their inferiors to get a real
> > measure of what that person is like?

Yeah, this is a huge irony.  Sirius condemns Crouch Sr. for his
treatment of Winky when she "betrays" him, and he is ultimately undone
by his own house-elf.  JKR was aware of this irony, so she made sure
that Dumbledore clarified that there *was* a difference between how
Sirius treated house-elves and how Lucius and Crouch Sr. did.

Sirius's mistake was that he underestimated Kreacher's attachment to
his former mistress.  He figured that since he was the last Black
alive, Kreacher had to be faithful to him, but he did not realize that
Kreacher would look for all the loopholes possible to betray him, just
as Lucius did not realize that Dobby would go behind his back to
undermine his plot to open the Chamber of Secrets.

It was a mistake in judgment.  He should have taken Dumbledore's
warning more seriously.  He should have tried to win Kreacher's
loyalty above whatever code house-elves are bound by.  But he didn't.
 Not because he was bad or cruel or a bully, but because he was (was!
::sob::) flawed, as are all the characters in the Potterverse.

As Pip said: people are more than the worst thing they have done. 
Including Sirius Black.

--Dicentra, smoothing her robes smartly before exiting stage right