To My SisterL. R. B.
My Heart and My FleshPROLOGUE
Asa child, Luce was running to the store to get a small can of oil, for it was growing dark and she had the lamp to fill. Across the street the lamp-lighter was lifting a burning swab of waste to the street-lamp, a gasoline lamp on the top of a high post. The lamp-lighter stood on a ladder to lift the brand, and when the lamp was lit he would take the ladder on his shoulder and walk away at an even step, the same yesterday and the same tomorrow. When he had new shoes the step was marked with crying leather. She ran past the lamp-lighter hardly giving a moment to look at him, for she knew all his ways and all his motions, all the rhythms of his feet. The street-lamp made a thin, feeble light when there was any day left in the air, but the lighter had to start on his rounds early to have all the lamps ready by the time the dark came to the last one at the end of Hill Street. The lamp flickered dimly in the light of day that was left in the air, but after a little a passer would be glad for the glow; it showed the way to the pump and helped one over the well-curb and over the stones at the crossing. On dark nights when there was a wind the mules in the livery stable cried out with great cries. There wouldbe a wind that night making little wells of feeling pool up in one’s chest, and a thought of Mome, the city, came to her mind.
There, in Mome, all the lights were electric, and there was one great light over all the place, a high great light like a sun. It shone down on the streets and on the tall house where Mr. Preston, the richest man in the world, kept his money—the money house—and on the fountains in the square. It made a great sheet of light that spread over Mome as a sunset would spread over a hill. But there were dark alleyways for all that, and dark doorways, and at the thought deep wells of feeling would pool up in one’s chest, dark roadways and deep doorways and dark lanes where wheels had cut deep tracks. There would be houses standing high above lanes and late wagons going down into the dark. There would be a little light at the corner, electric but very little, blinking in the fog. A thief would be slipping down a dark lane with—what? one could never think what—in his hand.
In the store the boy with thin arms took her oil can and said, “A dime’s worth?” and set the can aside to wait until the man came with the key to the oil house. She stood beside the old black man who was buying a nickel’s worth of meal and a dime’s worth of bacon, her eyes on the hurrying clerk whose arms reached here and there above the barrels and weighed the sugar as it poured in a stream into a sack. She enjoyed the crowding of the store and the pageant ofbuying. A heroic freedom surrounded the man, old Anthony Bell, who bought lavishly, never asking the price, calling over the heads of the others, “A hundred pounds of sugar. Send it up tomorrow.” He had stepped lightly in at the doorway, a lifted head, the large gesture of shouting and the lifted cane, “Send it up tomorrow,” and then his exit while the piece went forward, the play enhanced.
Moll Peters, the negress, came heavily in at the door and stood beyond Luce, waiting her turn. She was large and fat and the belt of her apron sank into the rolls of her body and was lost from sight. She would buy freely as long as her money lasted, buying for her children on Hill Street; she cooked at the hotel and had no need to buy food for herself. “Ol’ Hog Mouth, what-all you a-buyen?” she said to a tall man who stood beyond her, a tall yellow man whose clothes were white with plaster. “You ain’t treated Moll this whole enduren year.” Her voice came from her mouth with a clatter of low half-musical squawks and softly blurred vowels delicately stressed.
“Aw, go on,” the man said. He kept in a good humor.
“It’s a God’s truth, now. Whenever did you-all ever treat Moll? Pocket full o’ money. Ol’ Stingy! Buy Moll some candy.”
“Aw go on. Buy your own candy.”
“It’s a God’s own truth, now. Whenever did you ever buy Moll any candy? Go and buy me some candy.”
“I ain’t got no money. I swear I’m got to ask credit till Sat’day for a little meal and lard. I swear.”
“Aw, buy me some candy.”
Moll was trying to make up with the yellow man. The grocer’s clerk came back with the can of oil and Luce dumped the money, a nickel and five coppers, into his large hand and turned quickly toward the door, remembering now that she must fill the lamp. She ran home through the twilight. The lamp-lighter had gone from the street now and all the lights glimmered faintly, broadly, because they had not yet been concentrated into points by the dark. They marched unevenly up the street, far past the Baptist Church, past the Seminary gate.
Inthe lecture room of the church Miss Charlotte Bell played the march for the children. There was to be a pageant. The girls walked to the time of the music, spreading over the platform and returning, opening the lines and making fans or closing together into a design. Theodosia Bell, Miss Charlotte’s daughter, walked first, leading, and the music of the piano said the words of the song as Miss Charlotte drummed the keys with her fingers. Miss Charlotte hardly looked at the piano as she played. She looked at the girls who were walking up and down, her head turned about, her lips bending into smiles or her head nodding. MissPatty Thomas ran up and down before the platform telling how the march should be done. “Now, all together. Up front, Theodosia. Now down center back.” Her tongue clicked over the words and she was important beating her hands. Theodosia walked tossing her body with the up-and-down toss of the music, to the words which the girls would sing after a little, “To the tap of the drum here we come come come.” There was a stop to rearrange some of the girls.
“Whose little girl is this? What’s her name?”
“Luce. She’s Luce Jarvis.”
“She lives down the street a way.”
It was Miss Charlotte who had answered the last. Luce walked near the end of the line and they were off again to the tap of the music, some of them lilting to the time, some heavily laboring, unaware of the beat. If Miss Charlotte nodded her head to the patter of feet she smiled the next instant, but when the song was done, while Miss Patty talked to the children about what they should do, Miss Charlotte sat as if she did not hear, and then her lips were without life and a darkness seemed to have come over her. She looked then at the piano keys, her hands in her lap, or her younger child, Annie, would creep up beside her and push her little face into her broad shoulder.
A boy was taken to the platform to say a piece, Miss Patty showing him how, and the other children went to the seats or they spread about on the floor. “To the tap of the drum here we come come come” had beenset aside now, and a girl said, “I like that song.” “It’s a Faust march,” Miss Charlotte said. The word “Faust” fitted to Miss Charlotte’s mouth after it had been said and remained hers entirely, whatever it meant. The Bells lived a little way up the street past the well from which Luce drank, past the street-light, the house standing under a great tree and near two other trees. Looking at Miss Charlotte after she had grown dark, the music ended, her face heavy, Luce thought of the word Anthony, Anthony Bell, the old man, father to Horace Bell who was Miss Charlotte’s husband. Anthony Bell, as words, made a sort of singing in her thought if they came forward as tone, or if they lay quiet they were reminiscent of the faint kindness offered by drama, by enriched being. He was an old man and a scholar, as was said. Luce remembered their house with Miss Charlotte walking on the lower gallery and saw the planes of her pale dress as she stood a moment before one of the large square pillars. Anthony Bell came and went behind her, stepping along the gallery in his easy slippers, taking a morning walk. Now the voice of the boy tattled endlessly over the piece he was learning to say and the little girls lolled together, teasing one another slyly. Luce went into Miss Patty’s feet as they twinkled about and she felt the flutter of the skirt as it swept her ankles, and she knew what it was to be two slim little shoes buckled over two insteps that rested on pointed toes and hour-glass heels, and to walk in harmony with someone’sthinking, up and down, objecting, agreeing, complaining, repeating. Near at hand the piano was a large black box holding an infinity of tunes somehow in its sides. She looked at Charlotte Bell where she sat waiting. The eyes were dark, averted, and the mouth had no smile. Her large shoulders were erect and her rich dress crumpled about her feet.
Charlotte Bell’s hands could fly easily over the piano if she were minded to make a tune. Sometimes in the evening old Anthony played his fiddle standing beside her as she played. Her rich white dress had many yards of small lace sewed into it in designs and her hat was off. Her dark hair was laid softly over her head and knotted at the back in a large coil. Luce looked at her and felt her presence reach past the white dress as if there were some large thing inside. Then she laid her bare. She tore away the clothes from around her shoulders and opened her body. She emptied the heart out of it and flung out the entrails, for she had seen men butcher a hog. She went searching down through blood and veins, liver and lights, smelt and kidney. Out came the fat, the guts, the ribs. She was looking for something. Then on beyond, past the flesh, to the bone, she was searching. Past the brains, past the skull bone. She flung everything aside as she took it out and went deeper, eager to find. Past the bones she came to the skin again, on the other side, and finally to the red of the yarn carpet, everything rejected, nothing found, nothing left. Quickly she reassembled Miss Charlotte.She brought back the bone, the flesh, the organs. She hooked the right arm onto its shoulder and hooked on the left. She set her head on her shoulders and fitted her back into her dress. Put together again, Miss Charlotte suggested something within, hinted of it with her turning mouth and with the slight movement of her limbs under the pretty dress, gave a brief warning of it in the way the lace was sewed into the dress and the way the two large pins were placed to hold up her hair.
All the while the red of the carpet and the smell of the carpet gave a flavor of Sunday and the catechism. There was a question then, she thought, for every answer. The little girls were weary of the boy’s speech and his dull gestures and weary of Miss Patty’s efforts to arouse his voice to eloquence. Luce looked from one to another, letting her self enter the arrogance of one, the humility of one, the stupidity of one. She saw what it would be not to know a rhythm, to march as Esther marched, on dull feet. The tone of the Sunday questioning pervaded the place, question and answer, final and done, well said. All that was asked had a reply, curt and certain. She looked at Miss Charlotte where she sat behind the piano, her eyes on the keys, and the questions took possession of the event.
Who made you, Miss Charlotte?God.Why did God make Miss Charlotte?For His own glory.
Who made you, Miss Charlotte?
God.
Why did God make Miss Charlotte?
For His own glory.
Old Mr. Bell had a collection of Indian arrow-points and stone hatchets mounted and displayed in cabinets that were strung through the halls and passages of the house. Luce had once stood wondering at the door of a hallway while Theodosia called to her to come and play. “Oh, come on, come on,” she had called. “Leave those old rubbishes. What’s any good beside a game? You’re It. Come on.” But a child had told of a wonder. Old Mr. Bell had once opened the cabinet of Indian relics and had shown the children the arrow-flints, had let them take some of them into their hands. They were hard stone weapons from the stone age of the country before the time of the white men. Luce had not been present and the cabinets had never been opened for her. Miss Charlotte sat now turning the pages of a music book, her eyes busy with the songs in the book. Once, in a game, when she was not It, and when she was so well hidden that no one could find her, so well that she was forgotten, Luce had slipped into the hallway of the largest of the cabinets, a rear enclosed gallery, and had looked her fill at the wonders inside. She knew that these wonders had been picked up from an old Indian battlefield not far from the town. Horace Bell was a tall man, standing above most of the people of the street. He had a great voice that sometimes burst from the court-room whenhe made a speech there. He had a pride in his voice and he liked to roll out long sayings that gave it a chance to flow and turn and recede. One day he had boomed at some pigeons that took flight and swept across the street by the pump with a low thunder of wings, and he had made a saying quickly to run with them in their going, his eyes full of his laughter. He had then run his hand through his upstanding yellow hair with a great gesture and had taken a remembered delight in the pigeons and his voice that could match their rumble of wings. Miss Tennie Burden, Tennessee, lived out another street. The Sunday questioning passed into the region of Miss Charlotte’s darkly averted, sad face.
How can I glorify God?By loving Him and doing His holy will.Can you see God?No, but He can always see me.Does Charlotte Bell know about Tennie Burden?She knows.Does she care because Horace Bell goes to sit in Miss Tennie’s doorway?Ask somebody else.Why would she care?A big girl said she would care. A big girl knew why.What do Horace Bell and Miss Tennie talk about?About old times.Who is Miss Tennie’s husband?Mr. Joe Burden.How many children has Miss Tennie got?Two. Joyce and Evaline.Any boys?No boys.How do you know that you have a soul?Because I can think about God and the world to come.I can’t think about God and the world to come.Try.I tried.Who made Theodosia Bell?God, I reckon.Is God a smell or something?Whose little girl is this?Luce. Luce Jarvis.She lives down the street a way.
How can I glorify God?
By loving Him and doing His holy will.
Can you see God?
No, but He can always see me.
Does Charlotte Bell know about Tennie Burden?
She knows.
Does she care because Horace Bell goes to sit in Miss Tennie’s doorway?
Ask somebody else.
Why would she care?
A big girl said she would care. A big girl knew why.
What do Horace Bell and Miss Tennie talk about?
About old times.
Who is Miss Tennie’s husband?
Mr. Joe Burden.
How many children has Miss Tennie got?
Two. Joyce and Evaline.
Any boys?
No boys.
How do you know that you have a soul?
Because I can think about God and the world to come.
I can’t think about God and the world to come.
Try.
I tried.
Who made Theodosia Bell?
God, I reckon.
Is God a smell or something?
Whose little girl is this?
Luce. Luce Jarvis.
She lives down the street a way.
Her own look had looked back at her out of Charlotte Bell’s look when Charlotte had spoken to give the answer. To see Charlotte then was to remember Tennessee Burden and to pluck in mind at the strange fair vapor that gathered before Charlotte’s darkness and over her sadness, Tennie Burden, her bright hair easily curled over her head. She would sit in her door all day, the gallery with its high pillars running close to the roadway, and she would stop any who passed totalk a little. The cushions at her feet were soft and warm. She would stop any who passed, even Moll Peters, even Uncle Nelse, even Stiggins, the small yellow boy who lived in the livery stable.
Questioning the question, the hour passed and was eaten away entirely when the march began again. “To the tap of the drum here we come come come” spread through the entire air now. Luce looked at Theodosia as she marched and looked into her pride in walking first and her pride again in the feel of the drumming of the music, her feet set down rightly upon the rhythm. She looked at her. She was the daughter of Charlotte Bell and Horace. Her hair was brown with an over-tint of red that showed at the sides where the rolls were turned up to the light and showed again where the ends of the braid sprayed out beyond the ribbon below her shoulders and down her back. She spread a trail of herself down the platform as she went proudly first, the other girls walking on her steps, setting feet down where she guided, she leaving a comet-train of herself behind to be entered, walked into, known by the knower, the chronicler.
Theboy who lived in the livery stable was named Stiggins, a yellow boy who slept somewhere in the stable in the straw. If travelers came long after night they were obliged to pound on the door and cry outfor admittance for their horses, and then the night man would send Stiggins down to open the door. The men who worked at the stable gave Stiggins bits of money from time to time. When there was not much to do the hostlers would tease Stiggins by locking him into the loft or the old harness closet or by holding him under the spout of the pump. Or they would crack a whip under his knees to make him jump up high to avoid the keen sting of the whip-snapper. Sometimes when the proprietor was gone all day this sport went on for hours until Stiggins would cry, but if he cried he was unfailingly locked into the loft or the harness closet. He seemed happiest on court day when there was a great crowd in town and many horses to care for. Everybody was busy then, calling him to do this or to do that, speaking quickly, even cheerily. “Here, Stig, take this filly and hurry back with fifty-four. Twenty-two wants feed, but sixteen just a hitch.”
Stiggins was not, in fact, a name; some of the men had given it to him one day when he was leaping to escape the whip. His mother was Dolly Brown, a half-witted negress who lived in the alley behind the jail, and his father had been some white man. Luce saw him going about, a small boy, as small as herself; and he belonged to the stable. He was not, she assumed, a real being, and it did not matter what one did to him. Push him into the stall where the horse manure was thrown, make him pump all morning at the broken pump, tear a bigger hole in his old ragged breeches, ormake him leap to avoid the whip, it was no matter. He was a half-wit; he could never learn; he was not real. But Luce was often sorry for Stig. She had inferred that he was not a real creature, and this pity which she had was, then, sentimental. Even she felt that it must be somehow false and unnecessary, pretty in some way, as if one would be sorry for a hog because it lay in the mire. His mouth was loose and easy to drip. He would do anything anyone told him to do, or once in a while, reversed, he would do nothing anyone told him to do. He was not real, was scarcely there at all, was not a being; but often when he was tormented until he cried, or when he was locked into the filthy dark of the old harness closet, or when his clothes were torn anew until he cringed under some sort of shame that, curiously enough, he seemed to have about him, Luce would feel the approach of her own tears and a hurt would gather in her breast and spread as a fog through her members, through the substance of the earth and the air. She would wander about, unable to discover the cause, unable to discern the result or resolve it to any meanings. At the end of her confusion she would think again of Mome with richer ecstasy.
The streets of Mome were the streets of Anneville, running right and left, in and out, as she knew and saw, but over these—Hill Street, Main Street, Jackson Street, Simon Street, Tucker Lane, Crabtree Lane—lay the great city of Mome, reaching out for milesand adding other streets and avenues, Chester, Dover, Cowslip, Bangor, Elm, Pine, Walnut, Vine, and many more, running out among fair parks and lovely gardens. Instead of the low shops on Main Street there arose great office buildings and spires and towers where people fluttered by, quick in their steps, beautiful, alert. On Jackson Street in Anneville grew great poplar trees under which men sat all day telling slow stories they had told over and over before, old men grown epic with age and fatalism. Their refrains recurring were, “Ain’t that always the way!... No sooner you get ... but along comes a place to spend it.... Looks like as soon as a man gets on his feet.... Always the way....” They spoke without malice, interspersing their wisdom with long slow happenings. “Did ever you know hit to fail?... Would a man ever strike hit on his corn and his wheat in one and the same year?... But of course it had to happen that way.... About the time Luke got outen that-there fix here a note he owed at the bank fell due, but it so happened that corn turned out right good that year and he tided over....” These were the leisured and the old setting a summary on the town. In the square the prisoners from the jail worked on the rock pile and thus gave a meager drama to the slow scene. But over this lay Jackson Street in Mome, as one might read in a book, tall offices and great palaces where courts were held, where the great went about the great business of the world, the great businessof men. Over the cobbler’s shop stood a palace where some unguessed thing transpired. Coincident with Rusty Fuller’s harness shop, having its same contours enhanced and made splendid in size, stood a white tower with a top that shone high in the sunlight and here some important deed not yet realized or named had befallen and would continue to befall. Beyond stood the library, pillars of marble and cupola of gold, and inside one could have all the books of the world for the asking. Great tiers of books, bound in brown or gold or blue, stood on shelves, the wonders of all ages and the knowledge of all time, future and past. One had only to go inside the wide marble doors and nothing would be denied, the reason for this or that and the time of all things being there set down in books and explained, and there were all beautiful stories and songs.
With a swift effort she could take the whole library with all its wisdom into her heart, a swift ecstasy. She would think of Mome as she worked indoors, a consolation. Or she would think of Mome again as she hurried across the pasture among the low weeds, going to gather blackberries on the hill. The sudden appearance of a tender little sickle moon up in the western sky—and Mome. A report of a thief, an adventurer, a disaster, a bold deed, a shame, a carnival, and, enhanced, it enriched itself in Mome, it grew there to heroic proportions. Turning swiftly in at the small gate, returning from the well, the day being slow, a duplicateof days past, when the street was hot and fly-ridden and the trash from the stores littered the roadway, she could hang her head far to one side and look down the street toward the court-house and the jail and see a street in Mome where marble causeways ran up to marble stairs and tall white walls gave out onto high balconies, cool and fresh in a sweet wind, the people eager and exact and clear, intent with being.
In Mome there was nothing commonplace and dreary. There time never waited upon a fly-blown afternoon. Quick sayings flashed on the lips of men there, true finalities or bright quips—jests with the sudden tilt of quicksilver.
Thepeople came to the church on Sundays wearing rustling clothes, some of them riding in carriages that were harnessed to plow horses or to driving nags or gay well-bred roadsters. In the church the ladies taught lessons of the regeneration of the elect and the death in Adam, all men born in a state of sin, of Eve who had eaten the fruit and had given of it to Adam, that what God did foreknow that he did ordain. The words would be confused with drowsiness and weariness, and the foreknowledge of God would settle to the odors of the yarn carpet and the dry melancholy of the village Sabbath, sin being any want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God. A savory wooden tray wouldbe passed about for the collection, a tray smelling of rich cedar wood and varnish. The savor of the tray being passed and done, the lady would draw the mind back again to the hard matter of Eden and sin, to the fearful definition which was heavy with meaningless wordings. Was it for this, these laborings with odorless words and long unregenerated sayings, that she, Luce Jarvis, that she, Theodosia Bell, had put on her new white dress and her silk sash? It was an impenetrable matter. The foreknowledge arose from the carpet in an aromatic stench, but the desire to cough would not follow. There was no relief. Want-of-conformity-to took Transgression-of into a great stale book and closed flat the covers, and in Adam all men were born in a state of sin. Eve was a woman and a terrible instigator of Want-of-conformity-to. The lady teacher was severe upon Eve. But Adam, said the lady, was equal with her in guilt.
Each Sunday came the gayety of putting on the favored dress, the best muslin. There would be the tying of the sash, an anxious ceremony, a flutter of petticoats brushing at the knees, the happiness of the Sunday hat. There would be the sprig of honeysuckle to wear at the breast, or a rosebud brought in from the garden for Theodosia, brought by her grandfather and presented, “A morning gift to a little lady, a posy to set off her pretties.” Then, in the church, the clatter of greetings and pleasure in one’s coming. “Here’s a seat. Sit here. Glad you came.... How sweet she looks....How sweet we all look, all the little folks. This bright Sabbath morning....”
Then the business of getting settled, the text asked all around. The hour grew long and time was suppressed. Time lost all elasticity and became a fixed substance. The seat turned hard like the impenetrable words; the seat pressed with infinite woodenness at her flattened thighs and her pointed spine. Adam was equal. Moses had been given the law. Holy Men taught by the Holy Ghost had written the book. They were all undiscernible with age, older than the earth, Adam, Eve the woman. Would she be Mrs. Eve? Or Miss Eve? Who ever heard of a woman named Eve? She was rejected entirely. The whole hour was sunk, Adam, Moses, Eve, God, Want-of-conformity, Holy Men, sunk into unyielding time. Men far across the church were shaking hands, curious persons, playing at living, but in earnest about it. The foreknowledge continued to arise with Adam, who was in all equal, and through him we are all born in sin. Once into the hour flashed a meaning, a clear thought, a sum toward which all was momentarily moved, the relation never clear but the summary comprehended: To do good, to act right.
All the little girls were dressed in muslins and some of them were perfumed. The lady teacher wore tight kid gloves and smelled of some sweet stuff, her shining shoe just peeping from the edge of her dress. One little girl would tell of a sin she knew of. Somebody shewould not name had said a book was hers when it was really her sister’s.
“That was very wrong,” the lady said. “That was a lie, and God looks into our hearts and knows when we lie. You can deceive another person but you cannot deceive God, for God knows all things.”
“And I knew a boy,” another child said, “and he found a ball and kept it for his own because he found it.”
“That was wrong too,” the lady said, a hard voice, “for he might have found the owner of the ball if he had tried. You cannot escape the eye of God. He sees all we do and looks into every heart. We can never deceive God, for He knows our inmost thoughts.”
Moll Peterswas a friendly person, always kind to a child. She worked in a house where boarders were kept and where there were two other servants, a dark thin girl and a man named Berry. Other negroes would come to the kitchen, two or three men often, for Moll would slip them a bite of something to eat, a fresh hot pie or a cookie or a piece of bread dripping with rich hot gravy. They would laugh loud over their stories and carry forward their jokes from day to day. Or having been reticent because of the presence of a child, speaking in half-syllables and signs, they would suddenly flash quick fearful stories they knew.
Moll was trying to win over the young man, Berry, from the dark girl. He would eat her hot sops and pies and kiss her fat jaws, but in the end he would go when the dark girl called him, and the dark girl was not afraid. She would look at Berry with hard gathering eyes or hold out toward him briefly one dark thin hand whose palm was pale yellow-white, and she would treat Moll with friendly indifference, bragging on her pies and her sauces.
Berry would sing a song, throwing into the words an infinity of soft gliding modulations and quickly-breathed grace-notes, looking meltingly at Moll as he sang. His song,
I cannot stand to see my baby lose,I love her from her head down to her shoes,
I cannot stand to see my baby lose,I love her from her head down to her shoes,
I cannot stand to see my baby lose,I love her from her head down to her shoes,
I cannot stand to see my baby lose,
I love her from her head down to her shoes,
would burst through the great laughter when he came down from the dining-room with a tray. The kitchen knew that Horace Bell was the father of Miss Tennie’s unborn infant. This fact was well known to the pans in the scullery closet under the sink, to the pans and skillets that were put away into the secret and ill-odored dark but would come clattering out in the hurry of their wanting.
“Ol’ big-mouthed devil!” Moll said once with a great laugh, after a great roll of laughter and a whispered comment. “Him and Miss Tennie! God knows!”
Known, these, to the pans and pots and skillets, to the spoons and dippers and colanders, but not to thesauces and syrups and gravies and roasts that went up to the boarders’ dining-room. A gravy could roll discreetly out from a skillet and leave all knowledge behind to flavor the rich scrapings which Moll spooned upon a bit of bread for her own mouth or for the mouth of some chosen friend.
Miss Nannie Poll and Mr. Trout flavored one of Moll’s sops, a sauce which was sweet with the grease of knowledge. A white man was the father of Letty’s youngone, and old Mr. Preacher Benton was, God knew, a feisty old cuss, after Mag. She, Moll, had nursed old Mrs. Putty in her deliriums and listened to her talk all night, and the men that woman had had in her time would fill a prayer-meeting, God knew, if half she said in her ravings was true. Old Jonas Beatty smelled like a billygoat, and Miss Jodie Whippleton tried to hide her dead brat in the calf lot but the hogs got in and rooted it up for her.
Coming down across the kitchen yard with a tilted tray and a burst of song, Berry would cast a melting, joyful glimmer of eyes toward Moll. Her poor fat would quiver with pleasure and pain. His lilted words,
I’m proud o’ my black Venus,No coon can come between us ...
I’m proud o’ my black Venus,No coon can come between us ...
I’m proud o’ my black Venus,No coon can come between us ...
I’m proud o’ my black Venus,
No coon can come between us ...
would accent his quick coming steps and he would clatter the dishes from the tray with cunning small gestures.
“Aw Be’y,” Moll would plead, ready to cry.
My gal, she’s a high-born lady,She’s dark but not too shady.Down the line, oh, there we shine,Me an’ that high-born gal o’ mine....
My gal, she’s a high-born lady,She’s dark but not too shady.Down the line, oh, there we shine,Me an’ that high-born gal o’ mine....
My gal, she’s a high-born lady,She’s dark but not too shady.Down the line, oh, there we shine,Me an’ that high-born gal o’ mine....
My gal, she’s a high-born lady,
She’s dark but not too shady.
Down the line, oh, there we shine,
Me an’ that high-born gal o’ mine....
“Aw, Be’y, go on,” a softly pled distress.
“I just likes to sing,” Berry said, “and someways I’m partial to that old song.”
“Oh, God knows, if I ain’t let Mr. Preacher Benton’s soft-boiled egg get as hard as a rock. God knows! Hard as nails!” A wail from a voice that was near its tears.
“Aw, put a little water in it and stir it up. The preacher, he’ll not never know the difference,” the dark girl said.
“I’ll not do so. I’m a fool, I am. I won’t send up no such egg to nobody. I’ll make another one. Poor old Moll. Hand me a egg outen the icebox, Be’y, whilst I make the water boil again. Poor old Moll.” She was weeping now.
From the icebox to the stove with the egg shuffled in his hand. The handsome yellow boy with his melting quiver of eyes and already broken promise, broken in its borning.
I’ll telegraph my baby,She’ll send ten or twenty maybe....
I’ll telegraph my baby,She’ll send ten or twenty maybe....
I’ll telegraph my baby,She’ll send ten or twenty maybe....
I’ll telegraph my baby,
She’ll send ten or twenty maybe....
“Aw Be’y, go on,” Moll was pleading again, won again and rejected. “Aw, Be’y.”
Atthe Seminary, chapel service was held each morning in the chief assembly hall, the great and the little being required in attendance. The small children sat on the front seats, huddled together, fearful that some impossible thing might be demanded of them. On some mornings there were opening songs, or now and then a girl would walk to the platform and say a piece in a light, pretty voice, or a large boy would pronounce an oration. The song, all singing together, would roll out in a great shaking throb of noise and pain that beat upon sensitive ears and passed inward to become a pleasure, under the noise running the music.
Land where our fathers died,Land where the Pilgrims pried....
Land where our fathers died,Land where the Pilgrims pried....
Land where our fathers died,Land where the Pilgrims pried....
Land where our fathers died,
Land where the Pilgrims pried....
On the blackboard were the algebraic emblems and geometric designs belonging to the great boys and girls. Small children who had labored to keep their efforts at learnings distinct, who had used letters for spelling words and numbers for making sums, read upon the board of the assembly hall such dissipated and trivial statements asa-b= 6.
Beyond the lessons of the books and the precepts of the teachers the young moved in the great flow of the body of human knowledge, learning slowly from one another. The fruit of knowledge passed downward perpetually from the older groups, becoming more grotesque as it descended beyond the reach of its accompanyingemotions. The bulging piano legs on the chapel platform were with child, pregnant. The Pilgrims were thought of as a prying lot; they were heard of around Thanksgiving Day. A child had once designated his navel as his birthplace. A small child in an upper back room, dressing for a pageant, whispered to another child, “That’s my birthplace.” Word of it was passed about in a whisper; it was doubtless true; there was such a word; it could be found in the spelling book. In the assembly a child looked hard at the pregnant piano leg, trying to distinguish a mark upon it. Another day, and the mark was there, the birthplace.
Luce had learned to read and was passing well into the body of knowledge. The games were a delight, and so too were the calisthenics when one marched on light toes, Theodosia walking first. One day a group gathered on the playground around a crying child that had fallen on the gravel. The teacher assured him that the mishap had not hurt him, that it was but a light scratch, nothing to cry for. The crowd began to spread about.
“What was the matter?” was asked.
“Fell down and scratched his cuticle a little,” the teacher said.
Did she have a cuticle? she wondered. She had never heard anyone say that she had scratched or bruised or torn or maimed her cuticle. She dared not ask.
Numbers became rich designs when they passed beyond the commonplace literalness of addition. A multiplication table was a poem and a song. The numbers, written and viewed, kept personalities within their shapes and evoked colors even after they became parts of tables, the number songs. One, written 1, was whimsical and comical, unserious, too easy to learn and to write. No child could ever take it heavily, for anyone could have invented it. 2 was beyond knowing in its infinity of curves and arcs that melted into an angle and stiffened into a straight line. It had caused tears in the beginning, and even after it became routine its forbidding resistance was not forgotten; it was a cruelty. Nine, uttered, was the cry of a bird. Written 9, it rolled easily from the hand and was a maker of joy. It was the consummation of numbers, the last of its kind, the end of the series. After it the numbers were patched together of those already learned, a poverty of ideas. Its multiplication table was the most beautiful in song with its receding scheme of backward-counting adornments that played through the forward-going lilt of rising quantities.
One day in the assembly the chief professor asked questions, preparing for a day of patriotism. Only the little children might answer.
“Where was the birthplace of Christopher Columbus?”
Momeis disposed now, it is not a place now, is anactual substance as it was in the beginning, is become entirely what it always was. It has lost its delusion. No one ever called it now by a name.
It is the four-arc’d clock of the seasons ticking its tick-tock around the year, and it is the mid-winter spring song of the joree bird, the Carolina wren, when he tee-teedle tee-teedle tee-deets on a high bare bough on a bright morning in January, spring not being here, not being there, not being anywhere.
It is the will to say, the power never being sufficient, the reach toward the last word—less than word, half-word, quarter-word, minimum of a word—that shrinks more inwardly and farthest toward its center when it is supplicated, that cries back, “Come,” or “Here, here I am,” when it is unsought. It is the act of looking when the mirror of the earth looks back into a creature, back into quickened nerves and raw sensitive feelers that run to the ends of a town, gray and white threads, living threads, knotted into a net and contrived to catch and to hold pleasure and pain, chiefly to hold pain.
It is the beauty of the thing itself welling up within itself continually in a constant rebirth, a resurrection. At any point it partakes of the whole nature of itself—like an onion.
It is nobody’s useless old cat, having been stoned three times to death and left by boys in a tin-can heap at the bottom of a gully in Dee Young’s pasture, arising, one eye hanging by a thread, to cry “meauw”on a woman’s kitchen doorstep and to drink warm milk from a brown saucer.
It is the wide-opened jaw of a hound blowing hot breath on a little field beast and crying a howled curse on the perfidy of escape. It is a wave of hard shadows running over dried grass and winter stubble under a vast warted sky, the rabbit having taken to the brush heap at the field’s end. It embraces the new food and the new hunger. It is in part a man, a farmer, walking across his pasture in mid-summer singing a song he himself is making as he goes kicking his work shoes through the grass, singing, “Loo loo lo lo hum bang fi oo,” singing “Old Whosoever Will is walken on the top of the meadow,” a cattle farmer, a breeder of Shorthorns, ten years hence or now, singing a mediæval altarpiece over the heads of his cows and tramping through a field of a here unnamed community of flowers out of which the great bee eats. It is a farmer, the same, Caleb Burns, a farmer of fine cattle, a cattle husbandman, walking among his barns or over his pastures making the beginnings of songs or butchering a young beef for food: he would, with his men to help, stab the young beast at the throat and hang it to bleed, one of his men catching the blood in a bucket, a bucket of blood running out of a young beef, warm stuff, sickening to the smell, stuff that nice people fear. Caleb Burns, son of George Burns and Rose Hamilton, an experienced husbandman knowing foolishness and loss,or a young man beginning his way, Caleb Burns singing a song.
Ofthe curbs and the streets, the lamp-posts and the street crossings, the drama of the court day, all the people kept a sense that these had been there a very long time, that these were the eternal marks of the earth and the ways by which man recognized himself in life. The town was but a little over a hundred years old, and back of that lay the wilderness; but few of the people knew how recently the town had begun. “Out of Virginia,” “Away back long ago,” were sayings in their vague accounts of themselves. The marks they had put upon the wilderness were older than any of the people could tell or the race remember and had been brought whole from some other life.
The roads ran out from the town toward other towns, roads known now as hard streamers of yellow earth and broken stones, inviting going, winding among the rolling farms and lost in remote regions where unfamiliar hills came down toward alien fences and gathered here and there a curious tree or made off toward a distant unmeasured horizon. In the farms Jersey cattle or Shorthorns grazed, the last the red of the old Patton stock, brought from Virginia. The farmers came to town and thus brought the roads back to the streetsand the lanes, came driving wagons laden with tobacco or hay or wheat or corn, and the cattle-men brought steers along the roads or the traders drove in the sheep, the spring lambs crying all June through the streets as they were flocked from day to day at the commons around the shipping pens.
For the people of Hill Street, there was only one season and that was summer, warm, seasonable, lush with rain, the season of easy living and song. Against this was set an anti-season, a not-existence, negative, cruel, hard with poverty and cold and insufficient food—winter. Life then was suspended. Begetting and bearing went forward through this negative period because the law was established by which they progressed, but life which sustained these waited, dull, suffering, and monotonous.
One spring the negroes began to dig long trenches through the streets to lay water pipes through the town. The white people were having water hydrants put into their gardens and houses, the water to be pumped from a reservoir which was being made between two hills far up in the farms above the town. In the houses bathrooms were erected at the ends of back porches or upper hallways. There was work for every black laborer in the building of the dam and the digging of the trenches through the streets and roads. The negroes at the picks would sing now and then, not in unison, but each one would cry out his song, a phrase or a rhyme, timed to the regular throbof the body as it hammered with the tool upon the beaten earth, the song falling an instant behind the blow of the arm in half-humorous comment.
Whe-en I me-a-rry the-en I willMa-ake my ho-ome in E-evansville....
Whe-en I me-a-rry the-en I willMa-ake my ho-ome in E-evansville....
Whe-en I me-a-rry the-en I willMa-ake my ho-ome in E-evansville....
Whe-en I me-a-rry the-en I will
Ma-ake my ho-ome in E-evansville....
The song was always heard to the steady fall of the pick or the rise of the shovel, syncopated so that it set the shovel apart from itself and but half-owned its rhythms, or rather as if it accepted its confines and then escaped from them by the witty loophole of a quarter-beat. The men who worked were the strong men of the town, brown men or yellow, men who worked as teamsters, handlers of stone, lumber, coal, brick. They were named Wade Spalding, Ben MacVeigh, Ross, Tom Rusty, and there was a man called Gluco. Joe Davis was among them, a man prodigious of strength. Ross was a large man, young at that time, brown-skinned and broad in shoulders. All of them were willing, if they were paid well and well watched, to do a day’s work. A song would cry out from beneath the throb of the picks, escaped from the hard rhythm of the labor.
Chicken in the treeNobody there but me....
Chicken in the treeNobody there but me....
Chicken in the treeNobody there but me....
Chicken in the tree
Nobody there but me....
A wailing minor slurred through infinite intervals from tone to tone, sliding on the word “there” down four semitones of the scale by gradations unknown to establishedsong. As a sequel to this some other voice would offer, after a space with the thud of the picks, the deeply intoned fatalism, swifter than the last, major, without wailing.