For several minutes after the departure of Lissa and Mamba, Hagar stood
in the road. Her eyes, still resting on the spot where the car had
stood when Lissa had embraced her, were wide and intent, like those of
a sleep-walker, and a faint, fixed smile was upon her lips.
In a scrawny cedar close by there sounded a drowsy flapping of wings,
then Maum Vina’s big rooster stood erect on a limb, arched his neck
eastward, and flung a ringing challenge into the teeth of the advancing
day.
With a start Hagar recovered herself and looked about her. She was
quite alone now, and there was something to be faced there in the dark
without Mamba, without any one; all by herself now she must make plans
and carry them out. She thought of Bluton lying in the shack, but
with neither regret nor terror at what she had done. Only out of that
thought there seemed to grow a blackness that menaced Lissa and that
was unendurable.
She turned and entered the cabin, and with a clumsy meticulousness,
as though every simple movement was the result of an elaborate mental
process, she made her preparations for departure. In the faint glow
of the lowered kerosene lamp that stood beside Maum Vina’s bed, she
dressed herself and made up a small package of cornbread and cold meat
that she found in a closet. For a moment she stood looking down at the
old woman who had been first her guide, then her charge for so many
years; then she slipped quietly out and closed the door behind her.
The fowls had quieted down again after the first cock-crow, and she
saw them, misty blobs of darkness, ranged along a limb against the
sky--that meant a good hour of darkness ahead of her. She drew her
skirt up and tucked it high like a field hand’s, leaving her long legs
bare to the knees and unimpeded. Then she set off with a free stride in
the direction of Bluton’s shack.
The moon had set, withdrawing its diffused radiance from the misty
west, so that now even the solid mass of the swamp toward which she
journeyed was invisible against the horizon. But the tides of life had
definitely set toward the new day, faint as yet, but stirring along the
earth in little exhilarating waves, filling the air with those subtle
vibrations that are the precursors of light. Through the gloom the big
free-striding figure of the woman advanced. The movement about her
quickened. She threw a glance behind her, and, high in the east, she
saw a finger of light touch the mist. Then suddenly she was upon that
hour of the twenty-four when Earth recapitulates her creation, when in
a brief cosmic atavism she slips back to her wild beginnings.
The void through which Hagar moved no longer hung poised in inertia.
Free-running tides of life set it swinging and pulsing. The mist lifted
and divided itself into vast slow-moving bodies that hung close to the
ground and hesitated until some unseen force seized them and whirled
them together in silent chaos. The woman stopped in the road, touched
by the magic of it, and stood gazing about her. She saw vague inchoate
masses heaped upon the dim earth. She saw these masses obliterated by
the mist, and when she looked again, the curtains were withdrawn and
the young day had modelled them into forests, fields, and cabins. The
light gathered speed. It poured along the ground, dividing tree from
tree. It lifted into the branches that still clutched at retreating
mists and peopled them with separate leaves. Then, as at a given
signal, the world burst into sound. Birds shrilled from the casena
bushes, and like an ominous call Hagar heard the teeming life of the
swamp awake and lift its composite voice. She had been tricked by
beauty, and day had taken her unawares.
She broke into a dog trot. It was imperative that she reach the shack
before people were up and about. The voice of the swamp grew louder,
and now, against its gloom, she saw the squat ugly bulk of the shack.
Bluton was lying where she had left him. Quickly she bent over,
gathered him up and flung him upon her shoulder. Then, casting a hasty
glance around, she went out and closed the door. She had only a hundred
yards to travel for cover, and this was fortunate, for, as she left
the shack, the sun pierced the mist and drenched the clearing with
light. It outlined the huge figure of the woman with fire, and cast a
gargantuan shadow before her as she laboured forward beneath her rigid
and grotesquely posturing burden.
She extended an arm and parted a curtain of vines, then she passed
through into welcoming gloom. Black ooze squirted between her toes and
covered her feet. She heaved a deep sigh of relief and paused to take
her bearings.
First she must dispose of the body, and to do this most effectively she
must penetrate to the heart of the swamp where no one would be likely
to find it. She bent forward and shifted the burden from her shoulder
to her arched back. Then she set off as briskly as possible, tearing a
way through the matted growth with her right hand while she steadied
the body with her left. But this position caused her to advance with
lowered head, and eyes fixed on the pools of shallow water through
which she waded. At first this pleased her, for the little mirrors
flung back pictures of sky seen through swaying cypresses, with small
white clouds tangled in their branches. But presently she became aware
of the reflection of an object that projected over her shoulder and
looked down into the water, as she was doing. She paused, and the
reflection did likewise. Then she recognised its cause as the head of
the corpse which hung over her shoulder close to her own.
With the first sense of uneasiness that her deed had brought to her
she shifted her load so that it would no longer gaze downward and
started forward again. But with an almost animate persistence the body
moved with each stride, and gradually the round, blank silhouette
again eclipsed the miniature skies through which she waded. Now her
anger rose, and she splashed heavily through the water, shattering and
dispersing its reflections.
An hour passed, and the sun, now well over the treetops, commenced to
draw a thin steam out of the swamp. The din of voices that had heralded
day commenced to abate, settling in drowsy diminuendo into an almost
complete silence. Then, as Hagar reached the dense growth that clogged
the central area of the morass and made progress difficult, the air
about her broke into a shrill ominous whine, and a black cloud of
mosquitoes enveloped her, settling like dust on head, shoulders, and
legs. Involuntarily she struck out with both hands. With a heavy splash
her burden fell from her back and commenced to settle slowly into the
semi-fluid ooze. Slapping wildly at the maddening cloud, and with
her skin on fire from the poison, Hagar turned her back on the body
and broke savagely through the tangle in search of one of the little
islands that rise through the water of the swamp and offer a slight
harbourage from the pest.
At last she found it, a knoll of high ground, lifting out of the
cypress knees, and having above it an irregular circle of opaque
blue-grey sky. Crouched over almost on all fours, with prehensile hands
tearing her way through the undergrowth, the great woman emerged like
a prehistoric creature quitting its primal slime, and climbed out upon
the knoll.
For a moment she sat panting heavily, her face and arms streaming with
sweat and blood from stings and thorn lacerations. Then from her pocket
she drew a bandana handkerchief, a clay pipe, tobacco, and matches. She
mopped her face, filled the pipe and lighted it, then sat gulping the
acrid smoke in great draughts and blowing it in a cloud about her. The
last of the mosquitoes took reluctant flight, and with a long sigh she
lay back on the tough swamp grass to think things out.
She realised with relief that there was no occasion for speed. Beyond
the swamp lay a broad belt of open and populous land planted in truck
farms, and this must be crossed at night if she would escape detection.
She need not resume her journey, then, for several hours, and this was
the best place to wait.
She ate breakfast from her package of provisions, and refilled her
pipe. Already her fatigue was passing, and her mind commenced to turn
over her problem, dwelling upon its various aspects. Usually, when
Mamba had told her what to do, that ended it, and she gave the matter
no further thought. But now, with the realisation that the guiding
genius of that intelligence had gone from her, perhaps forever, a sense
of individual responsibility bore down upon her and forced her to study
and reason on her own account. Mamba had had to think mighty quickly
there in the dark with Lissa waiting to hurry away to safety. And Mamba
did not know this country as she did. Did not know Proc Baggart, for
one thing. Mamba’s plan depended for success entirely upon her escape;
her ability to traverse the mainland and reach one of the Sea Islands
where there were almost no white folks, and where the negroes would
hide that big clumsy body of hers from the police so that she could not
be caught and questioned.
Her train of thought broke off, and for a moment her mind was a clean
blank; then vividly the image of Bluton intruded itself. She saw
his limbs jutting woodenly from the water, and black ooze creeping
toward his open eyes. Poor Gilly--she couldn’t hate him now. Then she
wondered if he would hate her. If he would forget that she had saved
him once and remember only that she had strangled him and left him to
rot in the black mud of the swamp.
Well, what was done was done, and there was no use to worry about it.
Now, if she reached the outer edge of the swamp by sundown and waited
an hour, then set out to the southward---- _But Gilly hated the dark._
“_Bright lights_,” he would say, “_gimme de bright lights_.” Yes,
to the southward, that was what she must think about--thirty miles
to Edisto Island. By fast travel she could do that by sunrise. Her
thoughts came slowly, they made short rushes, stumbled, brought up
against obstacles, like a child learning to walk. By sunrise.... She’d
not risk the bridge--but swim across below it.... _Perhaps if Gilly
hated the dark so he wouldn’t stay where she had left him._ “Saint
Helena Island,” she said suddenly, out loud. She had heard lots of talk
about Saint Helena--two nights farther away--maybe three--thousands
of niggers there--lodge members--if she could get there and tell a
lodge sister that she was a “Vestal Virgin” they’d hide her sure. The
“Virgins” always stood together--even their own men couldn’t find
out their secrets.... _When dark came on and Gilly couldn’t see the
stars--only black water--what then...._ Yes, the “Virgins” always stuck
up for each other. She remembered once when--_He’d be so frightened
maybe he’d break loose._ In the hot sunlight Hagar’s blood was suddenly
chill. She mopped her face with the bandana. Then she refilled and
lighted her pipe. The Reverend Grayson knew what he was talking about.
He had said right out in church that spirits couldn’t walk. Even old
Maum Vina believed that--and she had been almost a conjure woman
herself with her herbs, and her money in the road. She would think
about the Reverend awhile.... He always wore that shroud.... _Yes,
Gilly would forget that she had saved his life once.... He’d only
remember that she had strangled him and left him with his eyes full of
black water._
The Reverend--the Reverend---- Hagar made a desperate effort to
visualise him, but his face eluded her--he was only a column of
whiteness against a wall that had a cross painted on it. What had he
said that day when he took Maum Vina’s hope away from her?... Spirits
only lived in heaven or hell.... That was it. The terror that had been
pressing in upon her was suddenly dissipated. Again her mind was a
clean blank. She got to her feet and moved about the island, stretched
her limbs, and again became conscious of the hazy sunlight that beat
down upon her.
She saw that the sun was directly overhead, and she realised that she
was hungry. Opening her lunch she ate heartily of her cornbread and
cold meat, then lay on her belly and drank a few swallows from the
side of the island where the water was clearest. A sense of well-being
pervaded her body. Why worry? She’d be on Edisto by to-morrow morning.
Likely as not they would never find Bluton and think he had gone away.
Then Lissa would always be safe. Some day, a long time off, she might
even get back and see Mamba again and hear all about Lissa from her.
She stretched her length on the grass, and presently, in the steamy
narcotic noon heat, she dropped into sleep.
_She saw Bluton turn slowly over in the mud. She saw the rigid knee and
elbow joints give and the man stand upright. Then she saw him following
her path through the swamp, but without effort, and this was strange,
for his eyes were blind with swamp ooze. Briers that had impeded her
did not detain him. He parted the vines and thrust his face into the
clearing._ She opened her eyes in a stare. _And there he was._ After
the passage of an indeterminable space of time, the apparition faded.
Hagar was terrified, but she knew what she would have to do before
she proceeded on her way. Fighting mosquitoes with tobacco smoke and
flailing arms, she retraced her steps and with incredible labour of
body and agony of spirit dragged the corpse to the island. Rigor mortis
was passing, and Hagar composed the limbs decently, and bathed the face
and eyes with her handkerchief. Then, leaving it gazing up into the
open sky, she set off for the outer edge of the swamp.
* * * * *
Her spirit soared, her step became light and sure. It seemed that only
now was she free of the actual physical incubus. She stretched her arms
wide and straightened her broad shoulders. Gilly would rest easy now
with the sun in his face all day and the stars keeping him company at
night. She was shed of him at last--free.
She made surprisingly good time, and it was still afternoon when she
noticed that the trees before her were no longer a solid wall but
showed thin places where the light filtered through from the open
fields beyond. She was in splendid trim for the journey, her senses
keen, her muscles vigorous. In contrast to the depression of the
morning she waited in excited anticipation for the coming of night.
Out beyond the trees, where the sun still lay heavy and warm, an
abominable mongrel hound rolled over in a broom-straw field, yawned,
lifted a fretful hind leg and scratched his mangy ribs. Twenty feet
away a cottontail took alarm, hoisted its white ensign astern, and
sailed silently away toward the cover of the swamp. A vagrant air
caught the scent of the rabbit and trailed it past the nostrils of
the somnolent cur. The animal raised its muzzle and tongued, long and
quaveringly. From a neighbouring hamlet half a dozen answers sounded,
bell-like in the heavy silence, and the broom straw commenced to sway
to the threshing of excited tails.
With her confidence at its height, Hagar heard them coming. An icy
hand seized her heart, contracted about it, and her blood crawled
frozen through her veins. _Dogs!_ A primal terror that was proof
against argument and reason silenced both and paralysed her brain.
The clear, high unceasing rhythm of the tonguing shook along her
nerves in waves of exquisite terror. A strange guiding force broke
the inertia of her body and worked a subtle change in her appearance.
Her nostrils quivered. Her hearing became more acute. She faced the
sound and commenced to retreat silently, warily. Her back touched the
trunk of a great live oak. She spun around. Then she found herself
climbing, reaching always for higher limbs, swinging herself up,
panting--trembling. When she reached the top branches she crouched in
the heavy foliage and peered down through the leaves and moss.
They were nearer now, and the cry had accelerated until it was a taut
rope of sound that had one end in her body and that shortened with
every second.
_The dogs had gotten Ned. He had been loose for two weeks after he had
cut Bluton. He would have got clean away but for the dogs._
The pack passed almost directly beneath her perch. She could scarce
retain her hold upon the branches as she peered down. Then she saw it
for what it was: the flash of a small tawny body with a bobbing white
spot, and the parcel of yelping mongrels.
Slowly reason returned. They could not have found Gilly yet. Nobody
knew he had been killed. She took herself in hand and fought the
weakness of fear. She became conscious of sunlight about her, sky
above, and, just below, the plateau of treetops.
A shadow swept over her, and she raised her eyes. Scarcely twenty
feet away she saw a buzzard, the rondure of his belly--the blue-black
wings--the baleful, questing eyes. He was not sailing idly, but winging
purposefully eastward. Then another and another flashed past with a
soft purring sound of wings against air.
A black premonition caused her to turn her head and follow their
flight to its destination. She knew in that moment that she had lost.
To the eastward, over the spot where the island lay among the trees,
the air was black with flying shapes. They sailed in the formation of a
waterspout, wide and slow moving at the top, but narrowing and whirling
faster and faster as it descended until the base disappeared among the
treetops like a pointing finger. She looked westward again and saw the
air lanes dotted with still other shapes winging steadily down from the
rookery at the western extremity of the swamp.
_So Gilly had won. He hadn’t been afraid of the dark after all. What he
had in his mind was that she must bring him out into the open where the
buzzards could find him and tell Proc Baggart._
Now she knew that it was useless to proceed. The strength of her
muscles that could carry her through a race with the living would be
unavailing against the cunning of the dead. Gilly had proved that
Grayson was wrong.
Her gaze was drawn back to the eastern skyline and the whirling column
of wings. In the great emptiness of sky it would be visible for miles.
Perhaps already Gilly had been missed and searching parties were
hurrying along the trail that she had broken that morning.
Suddenly, there, in the moment of acceptance of the inevitable, a
miracle occurred. Somewhere in the inner depths of the woman’s soul,
in some remote and secret abiding place, a bolt snapped back, a door
opened, and a new courage flooded her being. This was not merely the
old force that had always fortified her against physical suffering. It
was something radiant that shook through her body in a swift, clean
ecstasy. It made her suddenly and astonishingly glad to be there; to
wait expectant for a supreme moment of revelation that she knew was
coming. All feeling of urgency left her. No need for speed now. No
need even for Mamba. She herself would be sufficient for the event.
A strange and beautiful sanity lay across her mind like a shaft of
light. She turned it this way and that, and many dark and obscure
things were made plain to her. She knew that Mamba had been right
about Lissa all the time, that she did not matter of herself, except
that now, at last, she was going to give her child something of value;
something that she could always remember.
Squatting on her limb, with only sky above her and treetops below, her
mind turned on Mamba’s plan for her, and she saw its great flaw. The
white men would take her, and they would want to know everything in her
mind. She might try to hide Lissa away in some dark corner where they
could not find her, but she knew that would not avail. She had seen
other negroes try concealment, but Baggart and the others had so many
ways. Their minds could dig and dance and circle until, at last, out
it came. Then suddenly she was upon the answer. Her mind seized upon
the idea, turned it over, discarded nonessentials, built logically,
beautifully, completely. The moment had come. She was ready.
* * * * *
It was past ten o’clock, and Davy wanted to shut up shop and go home.
He was the commissary manager now and he frequently kept open until
late hours, especially in fever season, when there were no white folks
around and the negroes would gather and talk. Wentworth had agreed to
the plan, and Davy had showed with pride that, like most of his ideas,
it had a sound commercial value, the sales on “bounce” and candy during
the social hour amounting to a tidy sum.
Now the commissary manager commenced to clear his premises by the
simple process of moving among the boxes, stools, and barrels upon
which his customers were seated and dislodging them forcibly from their
perches.
“Git on home, yo’ lazy niggers,” he ordered. “What yo’ t’inks dis is,
anyhow--a white gentlemen club?” He called to a negro who was standing
in the doorway: “Hang up dem outside shutters, Ben, den come an’ gib me
a han’ wid dese no’ ’count niggers.”
But some one was about to enter, and Ben stepped aside to allow her to
pass. With one accord the negroes looked up, and there stood Baxter,
very dishevelled and appallingly muddy, with bare legs and her skirts
tucked up above the knees.
Keen observers all, they were immediately aware of a change in the
woman. They had known her as a rather silent person who upon occasions,
such as lodge meetings, passed suddenly to the other extreme of
temperament and indulged in almost violent bursts of animal spirits.
Now, looking into her face, they sensed something new and disturbing.
Her heavy features were in repose, but she conveyed an impression of
smiling down upon them from a height. Her eyes were wide and unusually
bright, and as she crossed the room toward Davy there was immediately
evident a new co-ordination of movement that invested her great bulk
with a sort of massive dignity and made her appear almost majestic to
the mystified onlookers.
When she reached the high counter, she turned her back to it, rested
her elbows on it, and stood looking out over the heads of the negroes,
who had resumed their seats and were regarding her in watchful silence.
For a long moment she stood so. She did not seem to realise that it was
time to shut up the store and go home. She seemed to think that she had
all the time in the world. Finally, as though she were not speaking
to them at all but to some one who stood at their backs, she put her
first, inexplicable question:
“Any ob yo’ folks eber hear ob a nigger killin’ heself by what de white
folks calls committin’ suicide?”
Before her, eyes showed white glints here and there. Heads turned as by
a common impulse, then faced her quickly again.
A woman’s voice said, “Fuh Gawd’ sake, Baxter, don’t talk dat talk!”
Silence.
Then a man said, “Everybody know nigger nebber kill heself.”
“Why dat is?” Baxter persisted in her strangely impersonal catechism.
“’Cause nigger ain’t worry heself dat much,” came the answer.
“’Tain’t always goin’ be like dat,” Baxter said in a slow musing voice,
as though she were thinking aloud. “Time comin’ when nigger goin’ worry
jes like white folks, an’ den Gawd goin’ show ’em what to do when he
trouble get too deep fur he to wade t’rough.”
The fixed attention of the group broke before a wave of uneasiness.
Bodies shifted, and some one started to speak. But now Baxter looked
down, and her glance travelled from face to face.
“Anybody seen anyt’ing ob Gilly to-day?” she asked in a matter-of-fact
voice.
The tension broke. Several of the negroes laughed nervously. A number
of voices were raised in negative answers. But her next question
alarmed them again by its irrelevance.
“Anybody seen any buzzard roun’ here to-day?”
Yes, they had all noticed buzzards over the swamp. Somebody had lost a
hog, no doubt, or maybe a dead mule had been dragged out there.
Hagar stood apparently debating the matter, her gaze again fixed upon
the air over the heads of the negroes. Then with a faint smile she
turned to Davy and motioned to a shelf where several dusty account
books lay.
“Get down dat oldes’ book, Davy, an’ bring um here.”
The man obeyed and placed it on the counter before her, studying her
the while with his bright disturbed eyes.
“Now turn back twelve year ’til yo’ comes to a man by de name Baxter.
Ah gots a promise to keep.”
Davy spun the yellow pages, found what he sought, then raised his eyes
interrogatively.
“How much he owe when he done get drownded?”
The man peered at the fading pencil scrawl. It was a dollar and a
quarter, he informed her.
Hagar drew a ten-dollar bill from her pocket. The yellow-back was an
unusual sight in the commissary, and the negroes, their curiosity
getting the better of their alarm, crowded forward to see.
Still holding the money, she indicated the large glass jar of
“jaw-breakers” on the counter. “An’ how much for dat bottle ob candy?”
“De whole t’ing?” he asked in amazement.
“Sure, de whole t’ing.”
“Well, dere mus’ be two hundred in dere. Dat’ll be two dollar.”
With a broad gesture Hagar lifted the jar, withdrew the stopper, and
poured the contents in a cataract of red and white out over the counter.
“Help yo’selves,” she invited.
“An’ now dat keg ob bounce. How much dat?”
Davy, in an incredulous voice, opined that three dollars would pay for
it.
“You niggers get to dat keg and fill yo’selves up,” she commanded. “Ah
all de time been wanting to gib yo’ a party, but Ah ain’t had no free
money till now.”
Slowly they withdrew in the direction of the keg, and Hagar stood
looking after them with something of her old childlike wonder in her
smile.
She turned back toward Davy. “Poor ole Baxter,” she mused. “Ah done
keep yo’ waitin’ a long time, but we’s quits now. An’ Ah ain’t done so
bad by yo’ name.” Then she spoke directly to Davy: “What he all come
to, Son?”
He computed the account at six dollars and a quarter.
She handed him the bill, and, as he took it, she said with a spurt of
fierce and uncontrollable exultation in her voice: “Don’t gimme de
change, Son. Take um to de do’ an’ t’row um far an’ high. Ah’s done wid
money. Ah’s free now,” then after an almost imperceptible hesitation,
added, “free as Gawd.”
The amazed youth looked up, but already the mood had passed. It was as
though the Baxter whom he had known, and even the strange creature who
had been there a moment before, had gone quietly out and another woman
had entered.
She said in an incisive tone of command, “Now get a pen ’n’ paper, an’
take down what Ah say. Time’s passin’, an’ Ah got to be gettin’ along
soon.” She raised her voice and called, “Come here, all yo’ niggers. Ah
want yo’ to swear to dis writin’ Ah’s goin’ to gib Davy.”
When he was ready she dictated in a clear steady voice, never
hesitating for a word, retarded only by the deliberation of the writer.
“Las’ night Ah strangle Gilly Bluton to deat’ wid my two han’. Ah kill
um ’cause he use’ always tuh be my man, an’ he git sick ob me an’ t’row
me ’way. Dere ain’t nobody dere but me when Ah kill um. Dere ain’t
nobody know nuttin’ ’bout um ’cep’ me. Dat’s all. Now sign um Baxter
an’ gimme de pen so’s Ah can make de mark.”
The negroes stood goggling at her, petrified into attitudes of
incredulity, horror, fear. Davy leaned over the paper like an automaton
that had run down, its motive power ceasing while the pen point hovered
over the sheet.
Hagar stamped her foot impatiently. “Get on and sign um,” she
commanded. “De time’s close now, an’ Ah got to go.”
A woman broke through the circle, pushing the paralysed negroes to
right and left. It was old Vina. She was as frightened as any one, but
she had courage. She laid hold upon Baxter’s arm and pulled her around.
“Wake up, gal, wake up an’ talk de trut’,” she pleaded. “Dere ain’t
been a night sence yo’ come here dat yo’ ain’t slep’ all night in my
room.” She turned to the gaping crowd. “Don’t yo’ b’liebe she. Yo’
niggers--ain’t yo’ see she ain’t right in she head?”
Baxter brushed the old woman away like a fly. She was shaken by a storm
of passion that flung the circle from her like physical force. They
backed away, knowing at last that their first impression when she had
entered was right. Baxter had lost her wits. She glared at them and
stamped thunderously upon the floor.
“Ah’s talkin’ trut’,” she shouted, “an’ ef any pusson in dis shop say
Ah ain’t, Ah’s goin’ make um sorry ’til he done dead.”
She spun around again on Davy and shocked him into action. “Write
Baxter.” The pen descended upon the paper and the letters fell from
its point in jerky succession: “B A X T E R.” Hagar took the pen from
Davy’s fingers and made a firm black cross.
“Now,” she said, “to-morrow yo’ take dat to Proc Baggart an’ tell him
Ah sen’ it.”
She dropped the pen, and in the dead silence of the room, it rang a
sharp clear note as it struck the counter. Then she turned, and the
watchers saw that her passion had passed and she again wore the odd
aloofness of expression with which she had entered. She turned her gaze
to the door with its square of misty, moonlit night.
“De time’s come,” she said. “So long, eberybody.”
For a moment they saw her, a huge black silhouette set on frosted
silver; then she was gone.
Maum Vina’s scream cut the silence and loosed the negroes from their
trance. “For Gawd’ sake, stop dat gal,” she shrilled. “She out she
head, an’ she goin’ do sheself hahm.”
They jammed through the doorway and scattered out on the piazza.
Only the night was out there; vast and tranquil it lay upon the square
of white sand, the pine forests. Above them it was an infinitude of
moonstruck mist, its utter silence not even broken by the far whisper
of a star. They waited bewildered, not knowing what to do next.
Suddenly from the river came the loud bark of a dog, a single shout,
then a confused babel of voices. The negroes broke into a run, and
presently they crowded out on the narrow wharf.
Beside the pier, seeming to strain its spars upward, lay a schooner
that had been moored there the day before. Its crew were already at the
pier head gesticulating and pointing downward.
All afternoon the September spring tide had been pumping its vast
burden of water into the low flat river lands, saturating porous
marshes and setting the grass tops awash, piling incalculable tons of
brine into salt creeks, brimming secret lagoons. Now the great heart
that lay somewhere out beyond the moon turned from systole to diastole
and called its tide home.
On the pier head the negroes stood in silence and looked down. There
was nothing to do--nothing to say. Below them, so close they could
have reached down and touched it, the river drummed against the piles.
Beneath its surface sleekness the currents writhed and turned like
giant muscles under a velvet skin. So fast it sped. An hour, and its
crest would be free of the little rivers and out again into the open
sea.
* * * * *
Above the metallic roar of the subway a brassy voice shouted “One
Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street,” and, like a succession of enormous
exclamation points flung for emphasis after the words, a series of
posts flickered across Lissa’s vision. Gradually the perpendicular bars
lessened their speed until finally each exhibited the numerals 125 in
black against glaring white. Behind the girl the hurtling darkness fell
away. The train shot out into a pool of light and came to rest with a
jerk that precipitated her through a newspaper and against a hostile
breast. Doors sprang open with mechanical precision, and with a sigh of
relief packed white and black broke their enforced common imprisonment,
the negroes pouring out on the platform, the whites appropriating
their places and regarding their retreating backs with resentment and
relief. On the platform the dark mass hesitated for a moment, drew
deep breaths, stretched limbs, then, like a breaker that has found the
shore, it lifted, caught Lissa up on its crest, hurled her before it
up the stairway, and deposited her breathless, but triumphant, on the
pavement. Saturday afternoon--her first thrilling week of study under
Salinski behind her--his grudging word of praise singing in her ears.
The day was warm, but the sun lacked the torrid pressure that had
enervated Lissa during the Southern summers. Over her head the sky
was no longer the throbbing cobalt of a Charleston noon, but a thin
ultramarine that seemed to lessen the power of gravitation and lift her
along with a new buoyance. She swung east in the direction of her home.
In her new liberating environment an inherent elegance in her carriage
and manner that had impressed her Charleston neighbours as merely
amusing lent her distinction and gave her that air of self-assurance
which in Harlem differentiates the cosmopolite from the newly arrived
provincial. She was clad briefly in dark blue tailored silk. The colour
was a concession to Mamba, the brevity to Harlem. A scarf of flamingo
red was knotted loosely about her throat, and a small jaunty hat of
the same shade fitted closely about her head. Below the dress a rather
astonishing length of champagne silk stocking was evident, and,
symbolic of her complete emancipation, these terminated in a pair of
red high-heeled pumps. She carried a modish vanity case, and a small
umbrella in the accenting colour was pendent from one elbow.
With that power to evoke memory which contrast possesses to an even
greater extent than similarity, the alien setting switched the girl’s
thoughts back to her last eventful night in Charleston. She had been
a member of the Grayson family for ten days, and with her faculty for
expelling from her mind all that caused her discomfort, the tragedy of
Bluton’s death and her hurried departure were already as completely
dissociated from her life as a printed story in a book that has been
replaced upon its shelf. Out of the experience only one impression
remained sharp and actual--Hagar, who in that hour had suddenly
materialised out of the characterless parent that it had pleased her
to imagine, had taken matters into her own hands, and at the last
had surprised her into that overwhelming surrender to maternal love.
It was strange that she could feel no horror over her mother’s act.
On the contrary, a latent savagery in her own nature caused her to
feel a curious pride, a deep sense of sympathy with her mother, and a
realisation of a kinship closer even than that which existed between
Mamba and herself. Out of the sheltered life that Mamba had provided
for her with its dependence upon the protection that civilisation
throws about the weaker individual, she had crashed suddenly into
conflict with life in the raw, and she had been helpless. During that
hour when Bluton had held her captive, and behind the shack the swamp
voices had shrilled and wailed in implacable nocturnal conflict, she
had had it in her heart to kill, and only the man’s preponderance of
strength had kept her fingers from tearing at his throat. Then Hagar
had come, terrible in her direct and unfettered simplicity, and had
put Bluton beyond the power ever to harm her again. After the years of
separation Hagar had stood forth in that one illuminating hour more
real, more vividly alive, than Mamba, for all of the old woman’s shrewd
planning and untiring devotion. Then, in the moment of parting, had
come the climax when the big, inarticulate woman had kissed her hand
and she had found herself in her arms. Her reason told her that here
was a specific act for which she should be ashamed of her mother, yet
by some strange paradox the thought of her was a swift infusion of
warmth--a feeling of completeness where before there had been a sense
of want--a sudden and inexplicable pride of birth. For the first time
in her life she quickened to the realisation of all that Hagar had
done for her--the money that she had sent each week for her music--her
clothes. And she had never even gone to see her. It made her feel
ashamed. “Well,” she told herself, “I’ll be able to make it up to her
before long.” Now that Salinski had undertaken her training, and with
the money that could be made in New York.
She took the brownstone steps of her new home two at a time. In a vivid
flash she saw Mamba’s face wearing its mask of ferocious disapproval.
Do you call that being a lady? What the hell! Now she was free--neither
a lady of the Broaden set nor a waterfront nigger. Lissa Atkinson with
at last a will of her own--nothing behind her, and everything that she
wanted from life waiting for her around the next corner.
She let herself into the dim coolness of the hall. In the drawing room
a song stopped in the middle of a bar, and Ada Grayson parted the
portières and kissed the girl affectionately. With her glasses, her
slow, kind smile, she was ridiculously like her husband in appearance.
Lissa had liked her from the moment when the three of them had sat
together after Saint had left her in the drawing room, and Ada had
watched her husband’s face with divining intensity; then, realising
that under his words he had really wanted the girl to stay and was not
merely submitting to a command of conscience, had taken her into her
affections without reservation.
“Now, I sha’n’t detain you, my dear,” Ada told her smilingly. “You’ll
find a letter from home on your dresser, and I know you’re anxious for
news.”
Her new buoyance lifted Lissa up the stairs with the effortless spring
that had brought her down the street and up the front steps. It shot
her breezily into the room and across to the dresser, where the letter
lay with her name staring boldly up into her face. Then her mood went
slack. The air of the room seemed suddenly chill, inhospitable. She
picked the letter up gingerly between a slender thumb and index finger.
Whose was the bold, disjointed handwriting? It startled her like the
shouting of her name by an unfamiliar voice. Slowly, reluctantly, a
slender flexible index finger slid beneath the flap. She paused and
examined her hand with an impersonal admiration, deliberately putting
off the opening of the letter. The colour, neither black nor white, had
never before interested her. Now, in contrast with the dead white of
the paper against which it lay, it seemed rather lovely to her with its
warm bronze tint, its pointed and polished nails that glittered like
little blades in the light. Finally she rolled her finger beneath the
flap and pried it gently open. She turned the envelope over and shook
out a number of newspaper cuttings and a brief note. Her gaze focussed
on the signature: Saint Julien de C. Wentworth. It was a moment before
she identified the august name with Mamba’s Mr. Saint. Then she read:
“These clippings will pain you, but you ought to know what they say.
In no other way can you realise the sacrifice that Hagar has made
for you. To the few of us who know the whole story, she has revealed
herself as heroic, a mother of whom you should be proud as long as
you live. The body has not been recovered and was probably carried
far out to sea. It took Hagar’s death to show us what she really was,
and I for one am proud to have known her.”
The body--sacrifice--the awful clippings with their sharp and
uncompromising black type.... The room where she stood had gone chill
with warning. Mr. Saint shouldn’t have done that to her. Mamba wouldn’t
have let him if she had known. She wasn’t used to pain. _Hagar dead._
She felt the warmth that had infused her being from her mother’s last
kiss slowly ebbing, while a strange numbness took its place. She had a
premonition that if she read the clippings she would find herself to
blame--would have to accept the responsibility--be answerable for the
event. Why not simply accept the facts--death--loss--and destroy the
papers that lay defenceless before her, yet which menaced her peace of
mind? She should save herself for the sake of her art--Mamba had wanted
that--Hagar herself. How could she be expected to sing and be gay with
her mind full of trouble?
Still undecided, she lifted the printed strips. One of them dropped
face up on the dresser. NEGRESS MURDERS LOVER THEN TAKES OWN LIFE. But
that wasn’t so. Her mother had never loved Prince. Now she was impelled
to proceed. She commenced to read, her eyes taking in the words and
transmitting them to her brain, and all the while her old self in utter
panic, flinging the words of a silly song at her, trying to distract
her, to get her away to the old protected plane of consciousness. “If
you lika me lik I lika you an’ we lika both the same.... _Unusual case.
A search of old files reveals no other case of suicide in a local
negro--had saved Bluton’s life ten years before_--I’d like to say,
this very day, I’d like to change your name-- _Evidently the result
of a jealous rage followed by remorse...._ Under the bamboo tree. A
great night that, when she had first realised that she could take an
audience--knock them cold--smash of the band--the air full of paper
streamers--and, far away, stars out of the open door--Prince!! _Las’
night I strangle Gilly Bluton to deat’ wid my two han’. I kill um
’cause he use’ always tuh be my man, an’ he git sick ob me an’ t’row
me away. Dere ain’t nobody dere but me when I kill um. Dere ain’t
nobody know nuttin’ ’bout um ’cep’ me._ (_Signed_) _Baxter._ I’d lika
to say....”
In a sudden violent synthesis the story before her rushed to
completion--assumed form--unity--silencing the indecent irrelevance
of the song, confronting her with its tremendous implication: if it
hadn’t been for her, Hagar would be alive to-day. After a while, with
a conscious physical effort she wrenched her gaze from the words of
the confession; then, with deliberate thoroughness, read the clippings
one by one and piled them with mechanical exactness before her. The
papers had given an unusual amount of space to the commonplace of a
negro murder. In spite of its colour, it held the elements of excellent
copy--human interest--passion--jealousy--and the culminating touch of
the confession, superb in its stark simplicity.
Lissa folded the last strip, placed it upon the others, and stood
gazing out over them at nothing that the room contained. Her brain,
busy in estimating the cost to herself, told her that she was safe,
that so beautifully had Hagar built her plan that at no point could
danger touch her. Her mother was known only as Baxter, a vagrant
negress who had come to the mines ten years before, had once saved
Bluton’s life, and had later, presumably in a fit of jealous rage,
destroyed him. But while her mind assimilated these facts, coolly
felicitating her upon her escape, upon the final complete erasure
of the record of her own origin, an inexplicable tremor seized upon
her body, shaking her so that she fell into a chair, seized the arms
with her sallow expressive hands, and gripped desperately while the
tremor possessed her like the sustained tension of a galvanic current.
Presently the seizure abated. Then came weakness as from a protracted
illness, and a pang of loneliness and longing that swelled, mounted,
and overwhelmed her, flinging her head down upon her arms, and blinding
her with a gush of tears.
With every one there is some picture etched into the child mind by the
bite of some early and penetrating emotion. It stands there always,
isolated, marking the beginning of memory, obscuring lesser subsequent
impressions. Up now from under the drifted years this picture flashed
into Lissa’s consciousness--a great bruised figure standing in a
doorway with a policeman beside it--a strange salty taste upon her
child lips where her mother had pressed a farewell kiss. The girl sat
waiting. Her tranced gaze had found the window and had escaped the
confines of the room into an infinity of sky. Then another picture
began to brighten, assume colour, form--a gigantic black woman kneeling
in the dirt of the public road, patting her with great clumsy hands,
while her body mingled a tang of sweat and phosphate dust with the
druggy perfume of roadside honeysuckle. This memory held a poison
that she could not at once identify. Then it came--the beginning
of a fastidiousness in herself that had turned her away from the
great creature who might soil her dress to the cleanness of Mamba’s
arms. A gap. A time of things wanted because of a strange loneliness
that needed assuaging--a fire in her blood that had driven her in
a half-desperate search for the unattainable to the Broadens--the
roadhouse dances--the last night with Prince. Her last picture of
Hagar, the dominant figure of that insane night looming like destiny
over the body of Bluton, taking her in her arms and giving her for one
brief moment a sense of refuge, of sudden arrival at some remote and
illusory goal. It was strange now that she could not remember a word
that her mother had ever said. She imagined her as vast inarticulate
power--encompassing love, possessing her all the more now because of
her silence.
She saw now with agonising clarity all that Hagar had given, and now
that she had gone there would never be anything that she could offer
in return. She felt an impulse to wound herself in some way, believing
vaguely that pain would expiate her thoughtlessness, her indifference.
She closed her hands in a muscular spasm that drove the nails into her
tender palms, and imagined a slackening of the grip upon her heart.
Now she was fiercely glad that she was alone. For the first time in her
life she was glad to be free of Mamba and her indomitable will. The
old woman would tell her to look ahead and forget what had happened.
Now her only comfort came from sending her thoughts back to the three
impressions of her mother, and in a blind search for some way in which
she could punish herself for her selfish neglect.
Beyond the window the shortening September day dwindled into twilight.
In the street the cooling pavements called the dark children from the
serried houses. They swarmed down, noisy as blackbirds, and flung a gay
chattering sound up to Lissa’s room. From the two adjacent Elevated
lines sounded roar and answering roar as the trains hurtled with
mechanical punctuality over the darkening streets. To Lissa they seemed
like the tick-tock of a titanic clock dividing the present into minute
segments and hurling it into the limbo of the past. On the Avenue the
windows of an apartment house lost the red of the sunset, stared blank
for a moment, then winked to life again, restless in the blue dusk.
But these things that Lissa had loved as symbols of her new life had
lost their magic. She sat staring through them into the Carolina Low
Country. Once she rose from her chair, got from a bureau drawer the
prayer book that Hagar had given her, opened it at the flyleaf with its
inscription, then sat again with the volume in her hands.
* * * * *
It was not until after breakfast the following morning that Lissa left
her room. She wore the clothes that she had had on when she came from
her music lesson the preceding afternoon, and she went directly to the
study of Thomas Grayson, opened the door without knocking, and entered.
He sat at a large square desk in the middle of the room looking over
the notes for the sermon that he would deliver at the morning service.
The massive severity of the desk made a fitting base for the bust and
head of the man who sat there.
Lissa closed the door behind her, and stood with her back against it as
though taking refuge from some pursuer. Grayson looked up and saw her
face. The live bronze had gone a lustreless brown, except where it had
darkened to violet under the eyes. From swollen lids the eyes looked
with a hard brilliance. The hint of tragedy that had been latent in
her expression was suddenly all that he saw there, rendering the face
drawn and haggard. Her hair was dishevelled, her dress looked as though
it had been slept in. There was a shocking incongruity in the pair of
frivolous red pumps on her feet.
His response was characteristic. He said in a deliberately
matter-of-fact voice: “Don’t be afraid, Lissa. Come here and tell me
your trouble.”
Without rising, he motioned to a chair that faced him across the
polished mahogany with its piles of meticulously arranged papers. The
girl hesitated. He seemed unsympathetic--more rock-like than ever in
his unyielding power. Then she saw his face soften. He leaned forward
and extended a hand across the desk. “Sit down, daughter, and tell me,”
he urged. “Ada and I have been fearful that your letter brought bad
news.”
She sank into the chair, then she placed the letter, clippings, and
prayer book before him. “Read that letter and those papers please,” she
begged. “They’re about Ma.”
She watched him take the papers in his heavy, well-kept, hairless
hands, and read them through with his habitual thoroughness. Now that
she was close to him her feeling toward him changed. Out of his massive
silence strong emanations of sympathy flowed toward her. She felt his
power now, not as opposition, but as a sustaining force. She was glad
that he had not spent it in easy volubility.
He finished the last clipping, then folded them all carefully and
returned them. When he spoke his voice seemed stilted, inadequate in
contrast with his unspoken sympathy. “Your mother was a truly great
woman, Lissa. The just God who knows everything will forgive her. She
has given her life for you. You should be proud of your parentage--your
race.”
She did not comment upon this tribute. Her reply struck out at a
tangent, as though she had waited for him to finish speaking to say
what had long been on her mind. She leaned forward, swaying slightly in
her chair. Her speaking voice had caught the tragic timbre of her low
singing notes. Her short sentences were spoken in unconscious rhythm.
“I can’t stay here now. I can’t let it stand like that. See what she
says--that he was her lover. She despised him--it took me to put up
with his kind--I’ve got to go home and tell them the truth--I’ve got to
face the Broadens and their crowd with it--I’ve got to claim her now
before everybody. It’s all I can do.”
Grayson sat heavy, solid, his arms resting on the desk before him, his
eyes on her face. Without speaking he made Lissa feel his attitude as
it changed from the sympathetic to the coolly judicial.
“You’re emotionally upset to-day, Lissa,” he said at last. “You’re in
no condition to arrive at such an important decision. You must wait a
day or two.”
Her form stiffened. She eyed Grayson with distrust. Immediately she
was on the defensive. “I thought I could count on you,” she said. “I
thought you’d see it as my Christian duty and help me, or I wouldn’t
have told you. But you can’t stop me now--nobody can--not even Grandma.
I always did what other people thought. Now I am going to think for
myself, and I know I’m right. I’m going.”
Grayson made no reply; then Lissa realised that he had not been
listening to what she had said. He had not moved, but sat gazing past
her, his eyes intent behind their glasses, his brow deeply furrowed.
In one of her violent reversions she sprang to her feet.
“A hell of a lot you care for other people’s troubles!” she flung at
him; then she turned to go.
“Wait!”
She was arrested by the impact of the single word and faced him again,
her beautiful expressive body fixed in an attitude of fear like that of
an animal at bay.
“Now sit down and keep quiet,” he commanded.
For a moment longer her defiance lasted; then suddenly she bent her
head and commenced to cry softly into the crook of her arm in the
manner characteristic of Hagar when faced by overwhelming difficulties.
Then obediently she resumed her seat.
When Grayson broke his portentous silence his voice was compassionate
but firm. He said: “I’ve thought it all out now, daughter. Look at
it this way”: he picked up the clippings and selected the one which
contained Hagar’s confession. Lissa raised her tear-stained face, and
he pointed to the words. “That,” he said, “is your mother’s last will
and testament. In it she has left you something that she has conceived
to be of inestimable value. It was all that she had to give. You cannot
repudiate it. You must give her silence in return.”
“But it’s a lie. I can’t go on always living a lie. What am I to do?”
“You must carry on. Make your life worth the price that has been paid
for it. There’s no turning back now without breaking faith with your
mother. There’s nowhere for you to go but ahead; no way to praise her
but in your works.”
“I won’t go on,” she rebelled. “I hate music. If it hadn’t been
for that Ma’d be alive to-day. I didn’t know until that night how
much I was missing her. I was always lonely, and I didn’t know why.
Grandma never gave me time to think. Now she’s gone, an’ I’m sick of
everything. I’m the loneliest girl in the world.”
“I know,” said Grayson gently, “you think now that it is this great
loss that makes you so. It isn’t. Like Ishmael, you were born for
loneliness. But you have this to be thankful for--you were also born
for success. I had a talk with Salinski yesterday. He’s extravagant
in his praise of your voice. He has never taken a negro before, and
it took all of the influence that I could bring to bear to interest
him in giving you a trial. It’s a great chance for you. It’s more than
that. It’s a great chance for the negro race. If you drop it now, go
South and perhaps run the risk of being arrested as an accessory to
the murder, certainly, at the least, returning to start over again
handicapped by a scandal, you will have thrown that chance away. For
Hagar--Mamba--all of us--you’ve got to carry on.”
He picked up the little prayer book that he had given Hagar, opened it
at the flyleaf, and let his gaze rest upon the inscription. “Strange,”
he said, “that this should be here with us now. When I gave it to your
mother I was face to face with my great disillusionment. I had thought
that the fight should start at the bottom. I had put everything that
I had in me into it, and I had failed. I have learned since that the
battle is on here--not in the South. Not that we receive more kindness
here. There is a certain kind of cruelty that we meet in New York that
is not known in South Carolina. We have been taught to expect things
here, and then when we come we find these things denied us. But here
we find a market for our own peculiar gifts--talents that are our
heritage, and of these yours is the greatest--the gift of song. Nothing
can take that from you. You must put the past behind you as I did--as
all of our people must do. You must succeed.”
Lissa’s tears had ceased. She sat with her eyes fixed upon the desk
before her. The room bore inward upon her, exerting an invisible force
against her body--holding it powerless in the chair. Even Mamba had
never been so implacable as this will that had assumed magistracy over
her destinies. She knew that the moment when she met Grayson’s eyes
would see her complete and ultimate surrender. And yet through sheer
weakness she longed to turn to that power for support.
She knew that Grayson had risen. She heard him moving behind her, then
softly the door closed, leaving her alone. Through the open window
came stray notes from the complicated symphony of human existence--the
shrill ecstasy of a child--deep, careless negro laughter--a piano
lingering over a sentimental song in a neighbouring apartment--slow,
rambling talk in two women’s voices on the pavement--Harlem
obstinately opposing its lazy rhythms to the headlong theme of the
metropolis--flinging an alien syncopation of laughter and song against
the measured reiteration of the Elevated, the sustained monotone of
hurtling traffic on the avenues. Her own people about her everywhere.
But different. Singing for fun--just cutting loose--crying when they
wanted to--living up to the limit and never thinking about it. Why
couldn’t they let her be like that? Why couldn’t they let her alone?
* * * * *
Saint Julien de Chatigny Wentworth, up from Charleston with his wife
and his mother for a fortnight of music and the theatre, settled the
ladies of his party in the third orchestra row of the new Metropolitan
Opera House, and, appropriating the vacant seat between them, abandoned
himself to the mood of the unique performance. Individual as he
appeared in the heterogeneous audience, he yet had upon him the mark
of a type. Upon him a dinner jacket seemed a more formal garment than
it did when worn by the men who were seated near him, and his tie, too
wide for the prevailing mode, had about it the quaint suggestion of
a stock. Already, while only in the middle thirties, his figure was
commencing to show the comfortable outlines of one who appreciates
the pleasant things of life at their full value and who has learned to
meet the unpleasant ones with an amiable acquiescence. Yet the face,
with its high forehead and thoughtful slate-coloured eyes, showed
evidences of having passed through some spiritual conflict. The strong
line of the chin indicated sufficient courage for an individual course
of action, but the sensitive mouth suggested that when this course
violated the standard of good taste of his class its pursuit would be
at a cost that would amount to a minor heroism.
It was now seven years since his marriage. Seven years since he had
responded to Mamba’s summons and had placed Lissa in the care of Thomas
Grayson. That this should occur to him now was natural enough, for the
performance, which had already commenced, was the occasion of Lissa
Atkinson’s début. Presently, with that faculty of submergence of self
in the contemplation of a work of art, which is in itself an art, he
became a disembodied presence moving in a realm of illusion upon the
darkened stage, and, by the stage’s magical power of projection, beyond
that again into a pine barren of the coastal South.
Beyond the pines glimmered a faint red dawn that cast a vague radiance
over the bent or recumbent figures of a number of people. From the
figures came a chant, hypnotic in its interminable reiteration of a
single strongly syncopated phrase. A limpid mezzo-soprano drew upward
from the monotonous level of the chant. Instantly Wentworth recognised
the voice--Lissa’s--Hagar’s--Mamba’s. The song lifted and hovered above
the shadowed figures in a repressed agony of yearning and supplication.
Wentworth’s emotions attained that height at which delight and pain are
fused into one and become pure ecstasy. Then the curtain descended in a
swift obliterating rush and stilled the voice. But in the wide silence
of the auditorium its vibrations kept beating on like a pulse.
High in the dome constellations of incandescents commenced to glow
faintly. A stir went over the audience. Saint felt sudden anger. Why
couldn’t they leave him alone in the actuality of the music? Why drag
him back into the make-believe of people, walls, lights? The glow
brightened and flooded the auditorium, calling him back into full
possession of his faculties, and he became aware of the well-dressed
audience that seemed to be pressing in upon him. For a moment longer
they hung breathless, then shattered the silence with a spontaneous
thunder of applause.
From the people near Wentworth stray ejaculations and comments leaped
clear of the clamour and impinged upon his consciousness. “Good God,
where’d she come from?” some one queried. “What’s it anyway, a play--an
opera--a pageant?” And the rejoinder, “For Heaven’s sake, don’t label
it. That’s the trouble with us. What we can’t label we damn. Can’t you
see it’s new--different? Can’t you feel that it’s something of our
own--American--something that Stallings and Harley got a glimmer of
in ‘Deep River’--that the Theatre Guild caught the pictorial side of
in _Porgy_; that Gershwin actually got his hands on in spots of his
‘Rhapsody in Blue’? It’s epoch-making, I tell you.” Behind Wentworth
a man said in a tone of finality: “Well, they’ve done it. It’s native
from the dirt up--it’s art--and it’s ours.” “Ours?” a voice inquired.
“Do you mean negro?” “Negro, if you will, yes, but first, American.”
The auditorium was aglare now, and the fused single entity of the
audience had melted back into its component atoms. The ugly blur of
confused talk swelled suddenly and drowned individual voices. Wentworth
let himself go back into his chair. The experience had left him shaken.
He hoped that Valerie and his mother wouldn’t talk. Sometimes they
didn’t seem to understand that there were moments when silence can be
richer than speech. His emotion had broken his thoughts free from their
habitual moorings. Now he’d like just to let them drift. With relief he
saw that his companions remained silent, evidently lost in their own
thoughts; Valerie with a bright, forward look in her eyes; his mother’s
lost in reverie. He returned to himself: “God! What music!” he thought.
“Primitive?--Sophisticated?--Neither--both. Savage, tender, reckless.
Something saved whole from a race’s beginnings and raised to the _n_th
degree by Twentieth Century magic--a blues gone grand opera.... Not a
bad idea that. Make a note of it and use it when I start to write....
No, it’s too late now--Mother--Valerie--the _boy_.... By God, he’ll
have his chance--painting--music--literature--it’s up to him now....
Three generations to make a gentleman. Rot. Five. Ten. Then, war.
Two more generations to gather up the pieces--to carry on until the
tide turns. Well, those two can’t expect everything.... Lissa! What
a voice--power--beauty--everything, and that heart-breaking pure
negro quality--Hagar--Mamba. Rotten time of it, like as not, for
all the laughter and singing--climbing up out of the mud--making a
gallant fight of it.... Others too--back at home--different kinds with
different sorts of trouble. That banker Broaden, for instance--good
citizen--hoeing a hard row and not bellyaching about it--precious
little recognition.... What would he think if I addressed him as
Mister?... What would my white friends think? That’s easy: ‘Turn their
heads,’ ‘Black menace.’ Absurd, looking from this distance.... ‘Good
morning, _Mister Broaden_,’ saying it like that--meaning it.... Why
not?... Little enough, God knows!...”
* * * * *
And Kate Wentworth, sitting close to her son, where she could feel
the warmth of his arm touching her own, not understanding his mood,
but sensing its existence, feeling him asking to be let alone. “What
in the world is opera coming to!” she is thinking. “This mania to be
different is at the bottom of it, I suppose.... Verdi--now he gave
us music.... Or if one wants to be modern, there is Puccini. But
this--outlandish, I call it.... Libel on the South--nothing less than
plain libel.... Who, in pity’s name, from a section which is famous
for its aristocracy, elected to go and hunt up negroes to be sung
about?... Mamba’s Lissa! Hagar’s! Still more incredible. The girl’s air
of distinction--style--they must have come from somewhere.... I wonder
who could have been her--No, don’t say it--don’t _think_ it. Shame upon
you, Kate Wentworth. You are forgetting yourself. To a lady, the ----’s
of mulattoes do not exist.... But if it had to be negro music, why not,
at least, the beautiful old spirituals?... Lissa--what a remarkable
looking child she was, with her speaking eyes and that air of being at
ease in the drawing room when Mamba brought her in.... Now a famous
person.... ‘Practically born in my back yard.’... Well, then, ‘_raised_
in my back yard.’... Well, then, ‘the grandchild of _our_ dear old
Mamba.’... Now that song of hers at the end of the act--no, I wouldn’t
call that outlandish--strange and different.... Perhaps after all they
did suffer at times on the plantations.... But not at the hands of
the aristocracy--overseers--poor-whites--and, of course, traders....
Saint--how distinguished he is looking now--so like his father--a
Wentworth! Silly of me to sit here crying when I’m so happy--when the
fight is all over--when my children have won.... What a sensitive
profile he has--a thoroughbred--a success--a manager of the St. Cecilia
Society--youngest on the board.... Valerie--a fitting mate for my
boy--lovely now with that smile on her lips--living in the memory of
the music, no doubt--well, she’s of the new generation, perhaps she
gets more out of it than I do.... A good mother to my boy’s son--a good
daughter to me.... Shall I go behind the scenes with Saint afterward?
Shall I take Valerie instead right after the curtain and leave him to
follow?... These new negroes--so different--wouldn’t understand who I
am--something awkward might happen--expect to be addressed as Mr. and
Mrs. no doubt--No, I couldn’t manage that.... Now, Lissa, she would
understand with her Southern raising.... But the others! No, it would
not be wise to stay. Saint can wait if he wants to and join us later.
It is different, less complicated, with a man.”
And on Wentworth’s left, with the smooth ivory of her shoulder brushing
his broadcloth sleeve, sits Valerie, lost in her own reverie. “The
boy,” she is wondering. “Is Miss Jones taking proper care of him? He’s
such a restless sleeper--needs watching.... He’s so absurdly like
Saint.... It is good to know that once, at an important turning, you
thought straight, acted for the best, threw your weight on the right
side.... Good to know that your child will have every comfort--every
chance--that your husband is happy--respected--successful.... Lissa!
What a strange upside-down place the world is.... Mamba! That night
when she took Saint and me to her church.... I knew then that I had to
have him.... Funny old thing, Mamba--knew my heart before I did--wanted
to help us along.... The wedding.... The boy! Is he missing me? Wish I
knew more about Miss Jones--still she _was_ well recommended--looked
competent.... Will he sing, I wonder, or paint--or write?--It means so
much to his father.... But I’m not so sure.... Dad’s failure! Yes, but
money makes such a difference--gives talent its chance. We’re secure
now--Saint--_the boy_....”
* * * * *
Slowly the light in the big auditorium commenced to ebb, dimming the
modern decorations and endowing them with a mysterious beauty, then
plunging the audience into interstellar night. The slow throb of music
filled the dark, then the curtain of the final act drew up on a stage
of swirling mists and vague half lights. Instantly the mood of the
play was re-established, fixing the watchers in attitudes of rigid
expectancy.
Dawn again, but no longer the red of an old despair. A thin essential
radiance breathed upward behind the massed towers of a metropolis. It
gathered strength, spraying out like the corona of an aurora, gilding
the towers, then dominating them. The music caught the mood of the sky.
The arresting dissonances, the sharp syncopations of the early acts,
were no longer individually evident but seemed to merge into a broader
irresistible current of sound. The rhythm, too, was no longer a thing
separate. It became a force as indistinguishable and pervasive as the
life current. It was a fundamental law that moved light, music, the
sway of the crowd, the passage of time, in a concerted and inevitable
progression. The artificial declamations of operatic convention were
gone. The cast was reduced to two elemental forces. The crowd with
its heavy mass rhythms and reiterated choruses was the body, and the
single transcendent mezzo-soprano that soared above it was the spirit,
aspiring, daring, despairing, lifting again. The movement became
faster. The voice commenced to lift the chorus from its inertia and
carry it along on short, daring flights. Then, in a final acceleration,
the scene soared toward its tremendous climax. The light, the movement,
the music, merged into a sweeping crescendo, the chorus sprang from its
lethargy, while the voice of the woman climbed triumphantly above it
until it shook the air like a storm of beating wings. Then the curtain
shot downward.
When Wentworth recovered from his trancelike absorption the house was
applauding; the large negro chorus was taking a curtain call. The
demands of the audience became deafening. Lissa’s great hour! She
advanced to the footlights and bowed. Now, in the full light she was
plainly visible for the first time, a mulatto, a little above medium
height, and of superb proportions. Wentworth noticed that she wore no
make-up except a slight darkening of the lips that made them seem
fuller, more deliberately negroid. This struck him as significant. From
the light bronze of her face her eyes looked out, large, expressive,
and extraordinarily brilliant--Mamba’s eyes--yes, and Hagar’s. Now, for
the first time, he noticed that she appeared self-conscious, anxious
to be away. She bowed for the second time, and without waiting for the
curtain, withdrew among the chorus.
But the audience would not let it rest at that. They got to their
feet and cheered. They kept the clamour going with a sort of mad
persistence. After five minutes of it the curtain was seen to move,
rising slowly on a bright vacant stage.
Lissa stepped from the wings, and the clamour plunged into silence. The
trace of embarrassed self-consciousness was gone. She seemed detached,
oblivious of both herself and her audience. The conductor rose and
looked up to her for his cue. Apparently she did not see him, for she
gave no sign. Instead she stopped where she was just out of the wings,
and unaccompanied commenced to sing the National Anthem of the American
Negro.
Apparently most of the audience had never heard of it. Wentworth never
had. From the first note he was aware of an absolutely new sensation.
Against his perception beat the words of James Weldon Johnson’s
inspiring poem swept forward in the marching rhythm of Rosamond
Johnson’s music:
“Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us:
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.”
Wentworth, listening, felt suddenly the impact of something
tremendously and self-consciously racial; something that had done with
apologies for being itself, done with imitations, reaching back into
its own origin, claiming its heritage of beauty from the past.
On the stage, as the song progressed toward its conclusion, the singer
commenced to sway--sway as Mamba always did toward the end of a
spiritual. Only in this young voice to which art had brought discipline
there was a difference. It wasted nothing in hysteria, but released the
full torrent of its pent emotion into the words and music. Now she was
singing the final stanza:
“God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us ever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land.”
The song ceased, and the curtain descended. In the auditorium the
audience paid it the tribute of a breathless silence. Then they rose
quietly and filed out into the street.
* * * * *
It is a Saturday in late May, and Mamba, happy in the gifts that the
gods have left her, sits upon the doorstep of her crumbling mansion
and lets the new and altogether mad world go hurtling past. Beneath
her feet the multi-coloured flagstones have given place to a cement
pavement. Before her eyes the old cobbles have been superseded by an
asphalt roadway from which the heat quivers visibly upward, shaking the
geometric perfection of lines that converge toward vanishing points
northward and southward. Upon the buildings to her right and left the
restorers have been at work. It is now several years since this army
of invasion appeared, determined and zealous, to restore the district
to its ancient high estate. Strangely enough, Mamba recognises among
the invaders faces of those who, earlier in the century, came to tear
the cobbles from their century-old beds, to smash the flagstones to
atoms and haul them away. But now they are bent upon a frenzied quest
for the antique, buying the ruined mansions, banishing the negroes, and
preparing the street for white occupancy. Only the great four-story
structure where Mamba sits and suns herself, and which is said to
contain some of the finest Georgian panelling and ironwork in the city,
is impregnable, for its title stands in the name of one Lissa Atkinson,
and Saint Julien Wentworth, who manages the property, states definitely
that it is not for sale.
Unmindful of the direct rays of the morning sun, Mamba is sitting, as
is her custom, to watch the New York steamer put to sea. As though in
mute protest against the invasion of law and order, she is attired
in an old wrapperlike garment, faded and far from immaculate. Her
legs, thrust straight out before her, are stockingless, and her feet
disappear into disreputable-looking men’s shoes. An old clay pipe
juts at a rakish angle from between her toothless jaws, and from it
smoke fumes in a lazy cloud about her face and drifts away to offend
the sensitive nostrils of the white passers-by, who are becoming more
and more numerous as the houses fall one by one into the hands of the
restorers. Her age is a matter for speculation, as it is a subject
upon which there is no one left to speak with authority. Her body
is shrunken with the actual physical contraction of age. Under the
tired flesh the bones are commencing to assume undue prominence,
foreshadowing their grim survival. Through gaps in the sparse gray hair
the skull shows in sharp outline, and the brows are ridges beneath
which the eyes are lost when the head is lowered. But this inevitable
physical mutation which in another would denote senility has, instead
of diminishing the force of her personality, in some strange way
intensified it, so that those who speak to the old woman as she sits
there feel it in the air about her like an aura. The negro children who
come and go sense it and grin delightedly at her word of affectionate
abuse. The cur now lying beneath her knees with only his muzzle showing
under the folds of the wrapper knows it, and has gone there for refuge
from a world that has no pity upon an unlicensed mongrel.
Mamba has at last accomplished what she believes to be her final
adjustment to the changing exigencies of life, and she has no complaint
with Fate. The old room one flight up where Lissa was born, and from
which Hagar was led to her banishment, is again her stronghold. But
now how different in appearance! Papered with pictures of Lissa--Lissa
at a steamer’s rail, off to Europe--Lissa smiling from the centre of a
rotogravure page in the costume of her latest opera--Lissa in a hundred
poses, a hundred settings.
But Mamba, scorner of limitations, has at last learned the necessity of
their acceptance, for only by so doing can she project her memory back
into a past shared by her daughters. Across the way, where the muddy
beach once lay, where the mosquito fleet was wont to dock, and where
the negroes would swarm and chaffer; where the smacks, when they were
sea-weary, would leave their bones awash in the warm tides, all is now
quiet--barren--orderly. If she moves her gaze ever so slightly to the
north it encounters the long line of a modern pier; to the south, and
her happiness is ambushed by the spectacle of a dozen gleaming yachts
belonging to rich Yankees who have invaded her familiar precincts. And
so she has schooled her eyes to span the distance and dwell unimpeded
upon a rectangle of sunny harbour. Beautiful, familiar, unchangeable,
it lies as always mirroring the first dim fires of dawn or sparkling
in the bright windy afternoons. And across it, as they used to do when
Lissa was a baby, the New York steamers come and go, bellowing their
deep hails and farewells.
Over the hot roofs come the measured tones of St. Michael’s chimes
announcing the hour of ten. From behind the pier sound shouts and
commands. Mamba sits forward, tense, expectant. Then, majestically,
across her rectangle of harbour moves the lofty cut-water of the New
York steamer, folding back the flat blue into a thin green line lipped
with white, drawing after it the steep, black wall of the hull, the
high, gleaming superstructure.
This is the moment for which Mamba has been waiting. Now that the
vessel has drawn its full length into her sphere of vision she sees
in it more than the form of a familiar friend out of a loved past. It
is no longer a great and mysterious adventurer putting forth from her
little world into a vast unknown. No. To-day she is watching a sure
voyager of that fabulous distance which lies between the wish and the
rainbow’s end--between her first fantastic dream for Lissa and the
consummation of that dream.
Now from the whistle a plume of steam is blown against the stark blue
of the sky, and a hoarse, baying note wakes the echoes along the
waterfront. Far below the crowded decks, the soaring funnel, on her
own private doorstep, Mamba draws herself together, and her eyes light
with a gleam of her old impudent spirit. “Git along, den,” she says
patronisingly. “Git along. Ah ain’t holdin’ yo’. An’ when yo’ get whar
yo’ is goin’, ’member what Ah tol’ you’ an’ gib my gal huddy fuh me.”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.