Madam Black had a French mother and a Russian father, an education
partly French, partly English, and an English husband who brought her
with him to America on a hunt for Fortune, to be found, presumably,
on a tract of Virginia land bought, without seeing it, from an agent.
The land proved a heinous disappointment. Mr. Black died. His wife
was left with admirable powers and education, but with no money, and
in what to her was a foreign country. She must sell, if she could,
her poor piece of land. Needing lawyer's advice, she came to the
nearest small town to her disastrous, stony mountain-side, and to
Major Dallas's office under the court-house oaks. He gave her
counsel; she sold the land, though for a tiny sum, and presently
moved into the town, to a small, small white house behind syringa and
althea bushes. The towns-folks discussed her, her foreign ways, her
gestures, her peculiar, stripped, efficient housekeeping. She was a
big woman, somewhat gaunt, but supple and powerful, with iron-gray
hair, with a beak of a nose, and a mouth beneath, wide and wise and
humorous. She spoke in Virginia a beautiful, pure, book English, but
thought in three languages.
My aunt Kate, at Major Dallas's instigation, went to see her, liked
her, went again, brought her to Flowerfield for two or three days.
The children liked her. She had a great store of folk tales of all
lands and she told them with the vivid distinction of a good witch.
She was capable, as all her friends soon found out, as she herself
with honesty acknowledged, of explosions of anger quite alarming to
the uninitiated. But these never occurred oftener than once a week.
Moreover, they were generously abstract. The individual was only
chastised in the whole. The storm cleared the air, and until the
next thunder-clap she was as good as sugar--brown sugar, maple sugar.
She was a pianist of no mean ability, she had a wide knowledge of
letters, she read and spoke English, French, Russian, and German--and
she got along well with children.
Major Dallas and Aunt Kate had the same thought. In six months after
she had taken the little white house, Madam Black closed it and came
to Flowerfield as governess. I don't think anybody ever regretted
it. The Dallases and she flowed together with a certain natural
grace and strength.
I was nine years old. My mother's life from morn till night was
filled with activities. She had a fair Southern education, and a
beautiful, strong, lucid mind and heart that made the best of what
she had. But she said that she saw that I was going ahead of her.
(I could never go ahead of her in the things of truest value.) She
taught me for two hours each day, but then things waited for her at
the door. I see her now, sitting in a low chair in the flickering
green light from the window, reading a letter from Aunt Kate, and
then, the letter in her lap, looking at me drawing pictures on my
slate. I was copying a ship out of my geography.
Two or three days later she and I took the old red stage at
Whitechurch and went for a short visit to Flowerfield. Madam Black
was there. My mother liked her, too. In less than a week we were
back at Restwell.
I couldn't go to sleep that night. I sat up in my bed and stared at
the starry squares that were windows. Then I took it into my head
that there were giants in the room and that I had better go
down-stairs. Mammy no longer had her bed in the corner, and I made
sure through the open door that my mother was not in her room. I
stole out of bed and over the cool, dark floor, out of the room and
across the landing to the stair and half-way down it. Thence I could
see in my grandfather's room, for that door, too, was open.
Grandfather and mother and Aunt Sarah were sitting there, talking. I
could not hear what they said--only the murmur of one voice, now of
another. They looked so earnest! They all sat near the table, where
were grandfather's books and papers, where he and my mother went over
accounts together. The lamp that stood here made a kind of pale
sunlight about them. Grandfather, with his white beard, looked
like--like--like King David! This brought forth another imagination.
We had a book of fine, tinted prints--_The Women of the Bible_.
Mother and Aunt Sarah were sitting there out of this book. I had a
curious feeling. The giants were forgotten. I sat on the stairs,
holding my feet in my hands. The sensation was of being somewhere
outside, looking in upon the world. After a time I started to
speak--but they looked so earnest. I turned and without noise went
up-stairs and across the upper hall and into bed. Anyhow, the giants
were gone. I faced a square of branchy stars. One of them caught
and held me ... and then I went to sleep.
The next morning my mother told me that when, in October, I went with
Aunt Sarah to Flowerfield, I was not coming back when Aunt Sarah
came. I was going to stay with Aunt Kate and Uncle John and go to
school to Madam Black, with John and Miriam and Catherine and Lewis.
At Christmas I should come home for a week, and in May I should come
for the whole summer. And grandfather would see me sometimes at
Flowerfield, and mother was certainly coming in the winter. And I
was to be her Michael still, and learn, and grow--"grow always more
good, more wise, my Treasure, my Blessing--"
It awed me to be leaving home. There was awe, too, in the thought of
living at Flowerfield. I moved about, exalted. Space seemed to have
enlarged between me and the sky, between me and the horizon. I
experienced a desire for solitude. I achieved this on the side porch
that gave on the lilac walk, and where there was nothing more
disturbing than a procession of young turkeys, in and out of the
light and shadow upon the grass. I sat here with my chin on my
knees. Really to live--live half the time--at Flowerfield! Restwell
was dear--Flowerfield was dear. I figured it out that, after all, a
half to each wasn't a bad thing. Everybody at Restwell was going to
write to me, and I was going to write to them. My, mother would
write every week, and I was to draw pictures for her and send them.
I dug out something else. "Every time I think of them I can see
them." I shut my eyes. "Now I am thinking of grandfather. I see
him. Now I am thinking of mother--"
I tried this with other persons. I was the experimenter, full swing.
The going from home fell into the background. Persons and things in
Richmond--at Whitechurch--at Flowerfield--I could see them, hear
them! The train to Richmond--I could make that so real that I felt
the velvet, smelled the coal smoke, found in my body the swaying and
jolting, turned a little dizzy.... I left that and sat in Capitol
Square, above me, against the blue sky, bronze General Washington.
Consciously, with desire and forethought, I walked into the past.
There had been a broken bench that we could not use, under the
greatest tree, whence one might see General Washington to best
advantage. I now mended the bench and sat there. I was on the road
to discovery that where there's a will there's a way--to alter
anything!
In October I went to Flowerfield. For the next four years I spent
the major part of each year at Flowerfield. I learned there, I grew
there, as in a spring season, as in south-by-west zephyrs.
Madam Black taught us in a bare, sunny room, in an ell of Flowerfield
house. Outside were turf and a tremendous tulip-tree. Catherine and
Lewis had their lessons early, were out and gone by eleven o'clock.
John and Miriam and I were her real scholars.
I think that she was a born teacher. Madam Black--Madam Black, I
find you in me at many turns--a welcome inflowing!
She had a cosmopolitan mind. She dwelt among ideas, hunted
relations, pounced upon likenesses. She was as daring an explorer as
ever sailed for the pole. Many a notion that I have watched emerge,
in these later days, tentatively, slowly, even now weighed most
doubtfully in the general hand, was hers in the 'seventies. She had
a way of saying, "I fancy--" and then, from under her eagle nose out
of her wide mouth, in her deep, positive voice came "fancies" of an
extraordinary viability.
She was a geographer of the first water. With her for cicerone, we
saw our earth throughout its structure, as pupils of our age, I am
sure, very rarely see it. She had a genius for relating things, for
continuities and correspondence, for the stroke of the eye. She
ranged like an eagle, swooped and rose like one. The same traits
appeared when she taught us history. We got out of "favored" lands
and times and "chosen" people--chosen, at least, in any orthodox
sense. The cells called Kings and Queens and Important Events and
Great Battles ceased to protrude monstrously from the cellular
tissue. The emphatic note, "Height of Mount Everest," became but an
orderly detail in the passage, "Himalayas," as the Himalayas
subordinated themselves to "mountains," and mountains remembered
valleys, and both that they were of the lithosphere. When, for
reasons, we came to majesties of form and height, to the pictured
off, she could well make us see Mount Everest and the Himalayas. She
herself knew Alp and Apennine and Caucasus. Remembering, I feel
again snowy and deep-chasmed grandeur!
She did with watery surfaces as she did with the solid. No one who
went to school to Madam Black might ever, for instance, see Niagara
as a giant plunge out of nothing into nothing, nor a strait or
channel like a waste snippet of thread. What came before and after,
what flowed on the one side and on the other, what to any ranging
eagle would be simultaneous, contemporaneous, she saw herself and
made her pupil see. Niagara and Gibraltar Strait came into a water
symphony that sounded from pole to pole, that ran, like Alpheus,
underground, and flew in clouds in the air.
So with tribes, nations, races, species. Hers was a rich and large
realism in which abstractions and universals became, as it were,
tangible and visible, phenomena like other phenomena--to the born
eagle phenomena into which other phenomena were resolved.
She was a bold reader. She had a friend in New York--a man doing
some kind of research work--who sent her from time to time great
parcels of books, English, French, and German. She used to sink like
an eagle into these, to rise with meat in her talons.... These were
the years in which, certainly to the mass of the United States,
"Darwin" sounded mightily like "Antichrist," Huxley and Haeckel, and
all their company, like the Miltonic lesser fallen angels. They were
the years when throughout a wide swathe of society _Middlemarch_ was
slurred because its author was not married to Lewes; when all French
literature was called immoral, when the good died young in
Sunday-school books, when Browning was thought unintelligible, when
Ingersoll was certainly damned, when architecture and furniture went
into a senile doze. Up a long stair from this, it was the period of
Dickens and Thackeray, and Lord Tennyson was at his height of fame.
But Madam Black belonged to force-lines in the background--reserves
in the shadows of the future. She took from books hall-marked
"advanced" what suited her, and flew on over the landscape.
Because of her very scope, she had a passion for the single word.
Every word opened into the whole scope of things, as back of every
facet opens the whole diamond. She had a drill for us that I hold to
be a good drill for any. For half an hour each day she gave us
words, one at a time, never more than a dozen in the half-hour--nouns
and verbs and adjectives, later on, pronoun and adverb, conjunction
and preposition. There seemed no lesson about it--we did not then
repeat to her what we learned. We simply and quietly, in firelight
or sunlight and each for one's self, regarded the word that her deep
voice gave out and what it carried. The game was to see what volume
was there and what vistas would open.
Farmer--soldier--preacher--city--house--tree--sugar--salt--earth,
water, fire, and air--working, playing, moving, resting--truth,
wisdom, beauty, strength, and courage--moon, earth, and sun--hundreds
of words.... To our young strength and powers they expanded as they
might. We saw countries within countries. And we learned to pass
the first gate of contemplation.
Again, myths. She had here an extraordinary knowledge. I have since
learned that there was old scholarship in her blood. She told
world-imaginings, world-symbolizations of its own drama, as a woman
Homer might. Indian, Chaldean, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew,
Scandinavian--we knew the huge figures, localities, happenings.
Moreover, she compared them, linked them for us until there was a
great carcanet. It was not given to our years to see what was behind
them all. But she told us that there was something behind them all,
and that we would find it out for ourselves one day. In the mean
time there was huge entertainment! We sat, rapt, before a
Demeter-like woman.
She taught us arithmetic, put us into algebra, and the last year we
were with her, into geometry. The last named was another strength.
We learned to read French as we did English and to speak it fairly.
We read German. We had little formal "Science." She taught us the
constellations and the simpler sidereal wonders. And we had a clean,
straight, honest, lofty physiology with never an organ or function
blue-penciled. And here I praise the adult Forths and Dallases who,
in a half-century that thought otherwise, said, "Give it to them
thus."
Year after year at Flowerfield.... But at last there came letters
for Madam Black from Russia. An estate had been settled, there was
money--a brother in poor health, in the country near Moscow, longed
to see her. Madam Black thought a night, then the next day told us
she must go. Flowerfield grieved for that.... It was the
springtime. In two weeks she was gone to New York, whence she
sailed. For a long time letters from Russia came to Flowerfield.
But five years after her going she was killed in a railway accident.