And instead, _this_ was what we were for, till all of us have earned the
right to something better. This was what we could help to do. It was
like the sky had turned into a skylight, and let me look up through....
My seat was on the side corner of the platform, nearest to her. She had
spoken last, and everybody was rustling to go. I didn't wait a minute. I
went down close beside the footlights and the blue hydrangeas, and held
out my letter. And I says:
"Oh! Come to Friendship Village. You must come. We were going to get the
blankets in the calaboose washed oftener--and--we--oh, you come, and
make us see that life is the kind of thing you say it is, and show us
that we belong!"
She took the letter that Mis' Fire Chief Merriman had composed for me,
and right while forty folks were waiting for her, she stood and read it.
She had a wonderful kind of tender smile, and she smiled with that. And
then all she says to me was all I wanted:
"I'll come. When do you want me?"
Never, not if I live till after my dying day, will I forget the day that
I got back to Friendship Village. When it came in sight through the car
window, I saw it--not sitting down on its green cushions now, but
standing tip-toe on its heaven-kissing hills--waiting to see what we
could do to it. When you come home from a big convention like that, if
you don't step your foot on your own depot platform with a new sense of
consecration to your town, and to all living things, then you didn't
deserve your badge, nor your seat, nor your privilege. And as I rode
into the town, thinking this, and thinking more than I had words to
think with, I wanted to chant a chant, like Deborah (but pronounced
Déborah when it's a relative). And I wanted to say:
"Oh, Lord. Here we live in a town five thousand strong, and we been
acting like we were five thousand weak--and we never knew it.
"And because we had learned to sweep up a few feet beyond our own
door-yard, and had found out the names of a few things we had never
heard of before, we thought we were civic. We even thought we were
social.
"Civic. Social. We thought these were new names for new things. And here
they are only bringing in the kingdom of God, that we've known about all
along.
"Oh, it isn't going to be brought in by women working along alone. Nor
by men working along alone. It's going to come in by whole towns rising
up together men and women, shoulder to shoulder, and nobody left out,
organized and conscious and working like one folk. Like one folk."
Mis' Amanda Toplady and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss were at the
depot to meet me. I remember how they looked, coming down the platform,
with an orange and lemon and water-melon sunset idling down the sky.
And then Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss says to me, with her eye-brows
all pleased and happy:
"Oh, Calliope, we've got the new seats for the County House Yard.
They're iron, painted green, with a leaf design on the back."
"And," chimes in the other one, "we've got them to say they'll wash the
blankets in the calaboose every quarter."
I wanted to begin right then. But I didn't. I just walked down the
street with them, a-carrying my bag and my umbrella, and when one of
them says, "Well, I'm sure your dress don't look so very much wore after
all, Calliope," I answered back, casual enough, just as if I was
thinking about what she said: "Well, I give you my word, I haven't once
thought about myself in con-nection with that dress."
Together we went down Daphne Street in the afternoon sun. And they
didn't know, nor Friendship Village didn't know, that walking right
along with us three was the tramp and the tramp of the feet of a great
convention that had come home with me, right there to our village. Oh, I
mean the tramp and the tramp of the feet of the folks in the whole
world.