AS A WOMAN THINKS
[Illustration: THERE IS A SPEECH IN THE WIND THAT WE DO NOT KNOW, A
HEROISM IN NATURE THAT WE DO NOT COMPREHEND]
AS A
WOMAN THINKS
BY
CORRA HARRIS
_Author of “My Book and Heart”_
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY CORRA HARRIS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTORY 3
II. WHEN I WAS A CHILD 10
III. CHILDREN FROM THE CABIN 17
IV. FEARSOME THOUGHTS 20
V. GREEN-GROWING SCRIPTURES 25
VI. FATHER AND MOTHER 31
VII. MY MOTHER’S GOD 38
VIII. BOOK LEARNING 41
IX. SCHOOL DAYS 47
X. WHAT I READ 52
XI. THE TEACHER I HAD 56
XII. THE ‘REBEL’S’ CHILD 60
XIII. NEW ENGLAND AND THE SOUTH 64
XIV. CERTAIN LIES 68
XV. REPUTATION 72
XVI. ‘BEAUTIFUL AND PRECIOUS’ 75
XVII. THE WORKING OF LOVE 78
XVIII. VENTURES IN SCRIPTURES 82
XIX. THE WISDOM OF THE WORD 90
XX. CONFESSION AND THE CHURCH 96
XXI. LUNDY AND I WALK AND TALK 99
XXII. WE CONSIDER GREEK CULTURE 105
XXIII. THE YEAR IN OXFORD 110
XXIV. HOMELY PLEASURE 118
XXV. LOVE AND AUTHORSHIP 122
XXVI. THE MIND OF THE WRITER 126
XXVII. DO YOU WANT TO WRITE? 132
XXVIII. EXPRESSING ONE’S SELF 138
XXIX. SITTING IN THE PUBLIC EYE 142
XXX. ON LAYING DOWN YOUR LIFE 149
XXXI. YOU MAKE YOURSELF 156
XXXII. THE LADY POLITICIAN 166
XXXIII. LIVING IN A BOOK 172
XXXIV. HAPPINESS 178
XXXV. THE LATTER DAYS 186
XXXVI. WHY WORSHIP EUROPE? 198
XXXVII. THE COUNTRY AND THE TOWN 202
XXXVIII. GARDEN HAPPINESS 207
XXXIX. WAR 220
XL. WIDOWHOOD 228
XLI. ALL SORTS OF MEN 237
XLII. VARIOUS TYPES OF WOMEN 247
XLIII. MERE MIND 256
XLIV. ISN’T LIFE EXCITING ENOUGH? 263
XLV. AS WE SEEM TO OTHERS 270
XLVI. FITTING INTO LIFE 284
XLVII. FACTS AND TRUTHS 290
XLVIII. BOOKS: MY OWN AND OTHERS 294
XLIX. CHANGE AND CONFUSION 304
L. CAN WE BE HAPPY? 309
AS A WOMAN THINKS
I
INTRODUCTORY
This is not a mystical tale, nor a literary interpretation of
addled-egg metaphysics. The mind I have has always been laid off
sensibly according to the latitudes and longitudes of actual
experiences in this present world. I never had an aura, nor the least
confidence in the existence of an oversoul. This phrase is the name of
a subliminal hysteria, pardonable in poets, but not in prose people
with ordinary midget souls. The one I have is no part of the common
spiritual vestment. On the contrary, it is an astounding fact too
intimately connected with my private consciousness to be exploited in
a book, or a street car, or any other public conveyance. I may draw
rings around it at a respectful distance before this record ends; I
may speculate prudently on souls in general, as one does in futures
sometimes; but I shall not risk the presumption of phonographing our
immortal part. It is offensive.
The mind is different. This is something no man will deny having,
although he may deny his soul. Even if he is pathetically limited
mentally, he is the enthusiastic autobiographer of what he thinks. If
he has no character, and no energy to achieve, he is the more likely
to be the historian, the dramatist, poet and prophet of his mind. He
cannot retain it. I have sometimes thought this explains how we came by
that safety valve called language. If we should suffer a total aphasia
of words, I suppose the human species would explode. The mind develops
so much more power in thinking than we can possibly achieve in action.
And to the last, the minds of other men, their secret thoughts, the
motives from which their actions spring remain the most interesting
things we can find out.
What follows is such a biography; not an analysis, nor a confession,
but the drama I have lived in thinking and believing; how the mind I
have, determined my conduct, courage, cowardice, and literally created
the life I have lived in spite of everything.
This is no vast undertaking like following the trail of a great
intellect. I am incapable of measuring the convolutions of such a
brain, say, as Herbert Spencer’s. In any case the record would be
scientific, not interesting. These people are born bright, but drab,
humanly speaking. I am not opposed to them, you understand; they have
their place somewhere over our heads, but not in the common life we
lead. My justification in choosing a simpler mind to exploit is that
most of us have this kind. We have actual experience in living our
thoughts; and the way we do it tears mere philosophy to shreds, no
matter how well and logically it has been thought out.
If you are writing the life of a prime minister, you begin by laying
the scenes in the times in which he lived. You must set down the kind
of king he served, discuss the people and problems that engaged
his attention and made him a great man. I am recording the history
of a mind as far removed as possible from the grandeur of kings and
the policies of prime ministers. But like these more pretentious
biographers, I am drawing my scenes in the right place, giving you a
glimpse of the summer-minded, slipshod gentlemen who traveled this
road, mismanaged their bankrupt fortunes with such humor and courage,
because these are my people. There is a fine rich pigment in the
quality of these people which imparts that first clear color to the
mind, and may account for the bright loom of thought upon which I spun
the days of my life with some wit, a certain dexterous sweetness and an
awful strength of hope never justified by the facts.
I do not know how it may be with others who have outgrown themselves
and become merely the residents of culture and learning, but I
experience a sensation of uneasiness when conversing with a man who
evades his own personal pronoun. I always change my seat as soon as
possible, because he is concealing some one who should be present and
apparent if he is talking.
He will never say ‘I think,’ ‘I believe,’ or ‘I know,’ but he will
begin with ‘It is said.’ This may be a scholarly affectation of
self-effacement, for all I know, but it is neither natural nor sincere.
We are every one born in the first person singular. We live and die
feeling that way. Therefore the pronoun ‘I’ is the most honest and
revealing word in the English language. It is our obligatory oral
signature. It is not an egotistical part of speech, unless you are an
egotist, but the born-and-bred name by which every man calls himself.
Without this provision, you may say, of nature in him, we should never
be able to identify him or know whether he is talking his own truth or
his own lies or quoting them from some one else.
This is the reason why certain of my books are written in the first
person. They must be. It is my way of writing as other people feel,
interpretative. I am being confidential, not boastful, except possibly
where we may boast together. I am telling experience common to us as
human beings and giving the reader the advantage of keeping his own
silence.
The method works. It encourages many to give tongue to their lives and
feelings, which is a relief if they have held them in for a long time
and never expected to see them said anywhere. Just write the truth of
your own heart and you will find out how many men and women have lived
that same truth more valiantly than you have without emitting it into
copy! I have had to make that humbling revision of my attributes since
the publication of ‘My Book and Heart.’ These silent ones who write
letters not for publication have found in this volume the witness of
their own hearts, a record more intimate and personal to them than if
it had been written in the third person, or of one already dead and
subject in the very nature of the case to biographical speculations.
The record I am now writing will have no such effect, though it may
be equally veracious, because we are further apart in our thoughts
than we ever are in our feelings. We may talk much or little, but
most of our thinking is done and kept in silence. The human mind is a
queer thing. It has more ways of the wild creatures than we have. It
never ceases to circle either upon the wing or to prowl in that secret
darkness which conceals every man’s mind. It goes off and comes back
laden with strange thoughts while you sit gazing with candid eyes
into the candid eyes of your companion, whose mind has also been out
scouting around and has returned without ever meeting your mind on the
way.
I suppose many a man, seated in the possessive case beside some woman,
who has a Spencerian countenance and speaks to him in pale blue
language of sweetness, would leap for his life if he could see so much
as the flash of the thought she is whetting in her neat little head
against his peace and happiness. And sometimes if a woman had a look
into the mind of her hero she might become an idol breaker in the
twinkling of an eye.
But we are not to be judged by what goes on in our minds. One never
gets cut in a word or a deed. If all the tools of vengeance forged
there were used, this world would be a terrible place. If all the dark
thoughts we have were spoken, no man or woman would trust us. But these
are the mental vaporings of our lower and meaner natures, conquered in
most of us by the moral sense we have acquired which has established
better standards.
A wise man can record all he knows of life in one book; but the
scriptures of the common man require two books, and maybe a few
gospels, as a sort of quotient in the long division of living. For us
there would be the book of the heart, where we keep memories, the hopes
that failed, our loves and hates, and whatever Beatitude we needed to
comfort or praise us, whether it is a friend, a woman, or a bit of the
Word. Your wise man takes no account of this copy. In his analysis of
the phenomenon of man, the heart is a figure of speech which refers
to the reflex action of the emotions. Then there is for us the other
record of the mind, quite distinct. It is the place where we keep the
law, or break it; the motives which stimulate and control us, and
determine our relations to other men--and to God, who we think made us.
This last notion, in my opinion, is a gross exaggeration of the
functions of the Almighty. He made what we call mind and we use
it to create ourselves. It works one way in this generation and
another way in the next generation. Sometimes it is war; then it
is religion, art, one kind of science or another; or it may be a
magnificent covetousness, practiced under such terms as industrialism,
commercialism, or even the League of Nations--always filled with
eleemosynary impulses, for conscience’ sake, according to that very
shrewd mind he is developing. It is really the sand-pile where the
ostrich of him hides its head. It is at last that thing in us which is
as easily degraded by a false belief as by the meanest vice. It can
exalt a heathen and trap a Christian saint. It is the way of life we
choose, right or wrong.
If some one laid his mind on the table, so to speak, not as a
confession, nor even as a defense, but as a certified human document,
it might cast a flicker of light upon dark corners to be turned in the
lives of other people. So if I show what a dim thing it was in the
beginning, how a child divines peace and happiness without thinking,
what a terror thinking became afterwards, how bravely and adventurously
my mind guided me, how cunningly it misguided me, what burdensome
rewards it earned for me, and what dividends in peace I have lost by
following the best Scriptures according to my mind--some of you who
read this record may get a hint to watch the thing and control it more
wisely than I have controlled mine.
What I shall write will be sown with errors from the point of view
of a psychologist, which will be proof to you that it is a veracious
record. There may be laws governing mind; but if so, they are like
so many other laws we cannot keep and survive. A logical sentence in
thinking according to the exigencies of living is bound to be a very
short sentence. The longer ones that last through the days of our
years contradict much wisdom and a good many Scriptures. But we do
get through, and looking back we do see the Word still standing, not
changed.
II
WHEN I WAS A CHILD
In the year 1874 there was a road which crossed the State of Georgia.
It has disappeared long since, changed by the will of some memory in
the hearts of the people. But you may trace it still when the daisies
bloom in May. These flowers are not indigenous to this section. Their
first seed fell here from the provender fed to Sherman’s cavalry. So,
in May, that month of Decoration Days, they bloom again like a long,
narrow memorial wreath laid upon the grave of a dead and glorious past.
They wind and turn and tumble down many a steep hillside in North
Georgia, as this road made its tortuous way among these hills. But
when it slipped into the lower, smoother land, it straightened out and
lay like a broad red-and-golden ribbon between the great plantations.
Farther and farther it stretched until it slid into the city of Augusta
and became Green Street--so named, I suppose, because the road that
made it came down into the white old town through such a fair and
verdant country.
Other roads entered this highway, as smaller streams flow into a
broader, swifter river. There were signposts to guide the traveler. I
remember one in particular at the entrance of the old Petersburg road,
because as a child it seemed to me like a very old man who had been
pointing the way a long time and now leaned wearily in the direction
indicated. Above a huge fist, rudely drawn, with the forefinger
raised, appeared the legend:
‘This is the way to Mill or Ferry,
Go, it, Traveler, Sad or Merry.’
We had sentiment in those days with a lilt to it, and a signpost was as
good a place as any to publish it. We were not seeking fame. We were
famous enough already. We were surfeited with the terrible distinction
of having just concluded a cruel war in glorious defeat. We were some
kind of magnificently irresponsible truth but lately crushed to earth,
and we were rising again after the grandiloquent manner of our kind,
with a beam in our eye and a song on our lips--but not prosperous!
It requires more than a century for the phœnix of man to rise above
the ashes of war in material things. We arose by a sort of rhythm of
the spirit, unencumbered by wealth. The ascent is quicker and less
expensive.
Gentlemen in rags traveled this road upon their old raw-boned
horses--Don Quixotes, every one, still tilting against the windmills of
a graver, saner civilization that had been thrust upon them. They were
rumpled, ruddy men who bore themselves with an air and never complained
of their poverty after the manner of ignoble men when misfortune
overtakes them. They held onto their leisure for a long time as the
last asset of a lost fortune, and visited a great deal from one old
ramshackle mansion to another. Their laughter was a joyous eruption.
They were pedantic with a flourish. They could drop you a long
quotation from Faust or Shakespeare without seeming absurd or causing
their victims the least embarrassment, such as we feel when a meaner
man quotes a Promethean passage. They required these luminous vestments
woven by great poets to adorn the qualities they had. Any one of them
would have been admired as a character in a book or as the subject of a
funeral oration.
The women of this period were strangely lyrical. Never again shall we
see so many fine ladies rise with such grace above the inconvenience of
poverty. Dressed in a chignon, a curl, and a cotton frock, they ignored
all styles and remained the last word in the poetry of fashion. They
had swishing silken virtues and conducted themselves after the manner
of the heroine in the last chapter of Proverbs.
Eighty miles above Augusta there stood two huge gate-posts, topped with
roughly hewed balls. Between them hung the old gray gate of a famous
plantation. When the sun was low in the west it shone through these
palings like bars of gold as if there might be nothing beyond but space
and silence and brightness. Inside, there was a long avenue stretching
away through the trees. Far down, there was a high green terrace; above
the terrace, an ancient flower garden, bordered with boxwood and spired
with the tops of juniper trees. Blossoming boughs waved like flags
in the summer wind. All the spaces inside were filled with humbler
flowers; phlox and lilies, violets and hyacinths made misty blue veils
in the shadows. Long-soled cactus spread like green footprints upon the
dark earth--the whole lonely place a wilderness of bloom left to govern
itself.
Somewhere behind this garden in those days stood a little house, left
over like a poor relation in adversity.
I was born there.
My recollection now is that it was a good little house, with a busy
mind and a kind heart inside, where a female child would be taught the
Lord’s Prayer at an early age, and how to sew and knit; but it was not,
you would have concluded at a glance, the cradle of genius. Very few
people make provision beforehand for geniuses in their families. They
are like the seed that birds scatter--liable to spring up anywhere, but
never to be anticipated. For my part, I doubt if they are born at all,
but produce themselves by some chance of circumstances; almost any man
or woman is remotely liable to become one.
But my first memories are not of this house, nor even of my father and
mother. I had that faint impression of them which grown people have of
Providence, to be depended upon, but too far off in consciousness to
be cultivated. My measure of relationship at this time was that father
was very tall, and mother was much shorter and very slender. I was some
kind of a little pinwheel of life revolving away from them.
In these earliest years I must have belonged more particularly to the
vegetable kingdom. My first vivid impressions are of being in the open,
not doing anything, certainly not thinking. I seem to have grown like
the grass on the rim of the green terrace beyond the flower garden for
a long time. Father and mother are very sketchy. They appear now in my
memory of this period at rare intervals.
I was not sufficiently acquainted with them then to be aware of their
anxieties. They belonged to another world. I can barely remember
father’s blue gaze following me about, usually with the light of
laughter in it. Mother was always busy. She had large gray eyes that
caught me up with a glance, washed me like a saucer, set me down again
and went on to her next deed with the swiftness of one who wore wings
on her feet. This excessive energy may account for the fact that I
formed no apron-string attachment to her.
The reputation I had, however, was that of being an extremely
affectionate child. This only proves that any record written from
memory must be incomplete. I suppose Homer omitted many important
historical facts which did not rhyme with those he sang so lustily in
his Iliad. Love anchored me so completely later in life, I am rather
glad to think that in these first years my affections must have been
like those of a busy man for his family, usually latent, but practiced
with convincing charm at odd moments. I do not remember ever crying for
my mother as other young children do, because I so completely believed
in her. She could not forget me or forsake me. So far as I knew then,
she would last forever. There was nothing, literally nothing, in my
world to worry about. I was already living by faith.
This is the earliest faculty we develop. It is an enduring illusion
at which the world and all the vicissitudes of life tear in vain.
We replace every hope that fails with another one. We change our
standards and our creeds, but we live and die believing in something.
It is a medicine we use to ease the mind. I have had so many letters
lately from men and women who no longer believe in God. They have
fallen over the precipice of rationalism into an awful pit of darkness.
But it is perfectly apparent that any one of them would be quick to
believe in a man or woman. They are the same old barnacles of faith we
all are, who have lost their hold upon the good bottom, raked off by
the lives they have lived or the thinking they have practiced. They are
the most credulous people in the world. I never knew one who would not
trust a convincing rascal. Or he will take to occultism, some spiritual
nostrum, as a certain class of people prefer patent medicine for their
physical ailments. What I mean is that the power to believe is born in
us, and we must exercise it one way or the other, as we breathe to live.
I have a vivid recollection of the child I was then, as one might
remember the person he used to be in another life, sitting on the green
crown of my world, very pudgy, back hunched, fingers curled in the
grass, the hair on my head sticking up like a fine bright fringe, eyes
wide and quiet, fixed upon nothing in particular, the groggy little
somnambulist of a bright dream.
I remember one of the illusions I had. The big gate at the end of
the avenue was the end of my world. I accompanied father and mother
through it at rare intervals, but my understanding was that we passed
immediately into another world. I shall experience no more tremendous
anticipations rising from my dust in the last day than I did then,
seated in the bottom of the rickety old buggy, being drawn through the
black weather-beaten portals of that gate.
Once in so often I made the journey up there alone to peep through
the palings at this neighboring world. My fear was that it might have
fallen off or been blown away in a high wind. Being very young and
unacquainted with the other stars, I dreaded the possibility of being
stuck up against one just outside our big gate; or worse still, finding
nothing at all beyond it but emptiness.
There is a grandeur about total ignorance, winged with imagination.
Children alone have it. They endure terrors and visions that would
drive a sane person mad. They are little Saturns revolving in the
incandescent rings of fancy, no substance to their thoughts, no
realities in the secret world where they move and believe everything.
III
CHILDREN FROM THE CABIN
The activities of a great plantation went on about me, but I recall
none of the clamor of this business; only the ringing of the
blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil in the shop under the mulberry trees.
The long procession of negroes sitting sidewise on their mules coming
up from the fields through the deepening dusk of the evening were a
part of the day I lived, like the lengthening shadows of the trees on
the grass. The thin curls of smoke that began to hurry out of the tops
of the chimneys from the cabins below the avenue used to hang like long
lavender scarfs in the air. I remember that from the top of the terrace
I could see the negro children milling and playing before these cabin
doors. But I never joined them.
There was an invisible mark between me and these little black ones that
must not be crossed. The intimate association between white children
and negro children has been greatly exaggerated by the sentimental
literature of the South written since the Civil War, to appeal, I have
always thought, to the imagination of the North, where most of the
reading in this country was done after that period. Southern white
children of the stock from which I sprang sustained a passionately
devoted relation to the old negroes, men and women, who remained
attached to our families. This attachment remains unbroken to this day.
But no such ties ever existed between us and the young ones. The basis
of mutual affection and confidence had been destroyed before I was
born and the doom of the negro sealed, not by the Civil War, but by
propaganda that followed it for fifty years. Where enmity is created,
justice will never be done. But hate and distrust beget the sense of
injustice, which produces every abomination possible between a strong
race and a weaker one.
I have not one recollection of having played with a negro child. My
only memory lasts because it was striped in with a switch. Susan, a
little negro girl, came to the house one day for a pitcher of milk.
I took her aside and examined her black kinky wool wrapped in white
cotton thread. I did not think much of it and said so.
Mother punished me severely for this. I do not recall the words she
used. They were undoubtedly stern and simple, for she had that kind of
a vocabulary; but the gist of it was that the quality of a superior
was that he never took advantage of an inferior, and that it was
ignoble to humiliate one by referring to his natural defects, whether
of hair or color. This doctrine steadfastly kept also by my father,
in the end cost him a two-thousand-acre cotton plantation. For there
were a hundred negroes on the place, and they took every advantage
that inferiors can take of a generous superior. The only reason why it
has not been equally expensive to me is that I never had so much as a
plantation to lose and have dealt with fewer people of this class.
But the impression I received that day concerning my obligations to
those less fortunate by nature, as I stood tearfully diminished before
mother and still stinging from the duty of her switch, has never left
me. And it is now a fact, which I have proved by experience, that it
is more enhancing to keep one’s self-respect than to get the advantage
of an inferior person in any kind of transaction. After so many years
of this kind of noble prancing morally, it produces a certain insolent
sense of quality, not justified, of course, by the person you really
are, all told. Still, it is a grand feeling and a part of the mind I
have finally rounded up out of life.
IV
FEARSOME THOUGHTS
Poetry and superstition were atmospheric conditions of the mind. As
a child, I believed in ghosts, spirits, and signs. Knowledge has
delivered me, but my instincts never will. I can think of no other
reason why I still pass the seventh day of March warily and more
innocently than I do my other days. This has been regarded as an
ominous day in my family for generations, although I do not recall a
single disaster that overtook any of us on this day. I am also at some
pains not to see a new moon for the first time through the branches of
trees, because mammy often warned me when I was a child that such an
indiscretion would be followed by bad luck.
I received constant instructions from the negro servants in the
primitive occult sciences, duly proved and illustrated.
There was a tiny sunken grave outlined with white flint stones on the
edge of the forest behind the house. Aunt Parthenia, the old black
woman who milked the cows, told me that a child had been murdered and
buried there. She said the face was very pale, the hair white like
wool. It was a small child about my age, and wore a long white gown.
Just at dark she said it often climbed a tree and wailed piteously on
account of having been murdered. Hidden in the plum bushes near the
house, I used to see this thing clinging and swinging in the top of a
poplar tree that grew beside the grave. I cannot recall the features of
any living person I knew then so vividly as I do the pale, pinched face
of that forlorn little ghost. The hair on its head did stand out and
glisten in the darkness. And my own hair stood up in delicious fright,
listening to its shuddering cries. Years passed before I could believe
this was a screech owl screaming.
Somewhere in this same period I met a ghost in the flower garden when
I was expecting no such encounter--a crooked woman wrapped in a black
shawl. I remember how stiff and ghostly white her hands were. She
looked at me and I could not move. After a while mother came and led me
back to the house. My legs were trembling with excitement, but I did
not tell her what I had seen. I never confided any of my experiences
with ghosts to her, feeling somehow that she might disapprove of them.
She was particular about the company I kept.
Mother belonged to the old order of saints. She was the kind of
Christian who would have died at the stake for a doctrine. She believed
in infant baptism because this was one of the doctrines of her church,
and made haste to have me baptized before I could hold up my head. She
not only believed you must be born again, spiritually speaking, but she
had her doubts about your conversion if you did not suffer the birth
pangs of repentance at least with groanings and tears. I was too young
to think a doubt when she instructed me in the doctrine of damnation.
Hell was a very literal pit of fire and brimstone, where the wicked
burned forever and the worm never dieth. If she had not included the
worm in this picture, I might not have received the reptilian idea of
the place, which was particularly abhorrent. One day I met a turtle in
the flower garden. The eyes were red. There were red gills under its
neck. I fled shrieking, believing it to be some kind of infernal insect
that had crawled out of the pit, still hot and malevolent.
At this age I must have been like those birds in the far places that do
not fear or fly at the sight of man. I was never afraid of the dark,
nor of the considerable number of ghosts I collected under the guidance
of Aunt Parthenia.
I also believed in certain animals. The marvelous things I heard about
the doings of rabbits, cats, and foxes surpass anything recorded in
Æsop’s Fables. There was a donkey on the plantation. I was shy of this
beast, not because I was afraid of him, but because he might speak
to me. Some native delicacy I had, forbade conversation with an ass.
But if our old dog wagged his tail, I understood him. I have always
been able to interpret dogs. They have no souls, no minds of their
own; but if they associate intimately with human beings, and not with
other dogs, they develop a telepathic relation to us that amounts to
divination. They understand us and act according to our will and mood,
however secret, because they worship us.
I have had fearful thoughts along this line. What if we sustain
a similar relation to the Almighty? What if we are simply the
tail-wagging medium of infinite mind? Such speculations are no doubt
of the devil, but if you have a mind you cannot resist now and then
taking an intellectual whiff at your powers and principalities of
darkness.
Negroes do not include fairies among their superstitions; so I was
deprived of the lighter, happier comradeship of these gossamer-winged
beings. My impression is that they do not last so long, nor are they
so sternly stimulating to the imagination as the illusions we have of
spirits and ghosts. Even a child discards his fairies at an early age,
but mankind never quite escapes the prescience of the supernatural.
Wise men as well as fools have been haunted by these uneasy figments.
All literature from beginning to end is populated with ghosts and
apparitions of the dead. This is testimony accumulated, not about
the supernatural, but about what we are. The Lord knew us. This is
the reason why heavenly messengers were seen by the naked eye in the
Scriptures. Something imprisoned in us responds to that ‘cloud of
witnesses,’ and to the Holy Ghost of Jesus Christ. We require such
symbolism because we are forever and inalienably kin to spirits. But we
never see them.
During the whole of my life I have been subject to these visions. I
have had a curious consciousness of not being alone when I was really
alone. I have seen a whiteness take shape in impenetrable darkness,
heard sounds, had a sense of wings and motion about me in silence
and stillness. Maybe this is merely the blind stirring of immortal
instinct; but my suspicion is that these ‘presences’ we feel, or think
we see, are freaks of memory, subconsciously aroused by the loves or
hates we used to have, and that any one with a lively imagination can
get himself haunted or blessed by these illusions. I think it is an
exercise in supernatural lying which never fully convinces a rational
person; therefore, a dangerous diversion to indulge, and bad for the
soul. The practice of spiritualism seems to me gross and strangely
repulsive, like some kind of abnormal vulgarity. Compare the noble
significance of that ‘cloud of witnesses’ mentioned in the Scriptures
with the ‘spirit’ conjured up at a psychic séance. The first is
designed to inspire faith and courage; the latter merely gratifies your
human anxiety or curiosity by informing you that your maiden aunt who
died last spring is well and happy!
We must learn; it is inevitable. The time comes when we can no longer
avoid the facts accumulated by human experience. I would not go so far
as to call this wisdom; much of it is based upon errors of judgment,
weakness, and prejudice, but we must master as much of it as possible
in order to live sensibly in an erroneous world.
I come now to this momentous period in my own life when the amorphous
but still entrancingly immortal faculties I had must be adjusted,
according to the mortal mind, to God and man. This is a flighty
business when you consider the strange contradictions involved.
V
GREEN-GROWING SCRIPTURES
Father was sensitive to the sublime. The calm mind of the heavens
on a clear starlit night could move him to the noblest flights of
imagination. He must stretch himself mentally and let out a spark of
eloquence or prophecy; it made no difference so long as he relieved the
pressure of infinities upon his strident soul.
He had a habit, when I was this very small child, of pacing back and
forth in the warm moonlit darkness of summer evenings. I recall myself
like a caterpillar sticking to him there. With one bare foot placed
upon the toe of each of his dusty boots and my arms clasped about his
long legs, I rode backwards; still, the stride was exciting.
One night when we were traveling in this fashion beneath a particularly
clear starlit sky, he halted, swung a grand gesture, peered down at me
as from a great height.
‘You will live to see airships up there flying like a flock of birds!’
he said.
‘Corra,’ mother interrupted hastily from the porch, ‘come in, wash your
feet and go to bed!’
I obeyed, too young to suspect that she was guarding me from what was
supposed to be a streak of insanity in father’s family.
It seems that one of his remote ancestors had conceived this same idea
of flying through the heavens on his own wing power. He was humored in
this hobby until the day he ascended to the roof of his mansion geared
up in two huge wings of his own devising and hopped off. He survived
only because they did break the force of his fall, but he spent the
remaining years of his life in close confinement.
From this time forth some one in each succeeding generation of father’s
people had been born with this predilection for flying. Mother was
determined it should not be her child in this generation. She was a
sensible woman, who had a legitimate imagination and conceived only of
incandescent angels being properly endowed with wings.
On the other hand, father had his anxieties. Mother’s Uncle John
was an intensely religious man in an age when only preachers were
distinguished for their piety in this section, and he was not a
preacher. His mind was fixed on the Bible and he read no other book.
Father believed he was quite mad on this subject.
I had a rather unusual memory long before I had any of the other
intellectual ingredients that go to the making of a mind. When mother
began to read Genesis aloud to me, my ear caught the tune of that
genealogical chapter which records the generations of Adam with so many
repetitions of the word begat.
One day I climbed upon father’s knee and recited too many verses from
this chapter to him. I should have let him have them all but for the
fact that he interrupted. He exchanged a look with mother.
‘Stop reading that book aloud to her. Remember your Uncle John!’ he
said.
Parents are strangely suspicious of what Nature may have done to their
children. The first thing they do when one is born is to look him over
to be sure he is made up properly, not too long or too short anywhere,
and not one-sided. The mother’s travail is never over until she
calls out faintly, ‘Doctor, is my child all right?’ and receives the
assurance that he is. Then she lets go and fades away into the bliss
of motherhood. My parents received the best assurances about me then.
Still, as I grew, strangeness of one sort and another showed up in me;
then they would hark back, each behind the other, to account for it. It
was not the child I was; it was what they knew about themselves which
might crop out in me that disturbed them. I suppose all parents suffer
from this same sense of ancestral guilt toward their offsprings.
Somewhere in another book I have set down at length the impression made
upon me by the story of creation as related in Genesis. Here, following
the trail of my mind rather than the emotional effects created upon the
life of a child, I pass on with the bare statement that it fitted the
mind I had then. And I venture to add that it still spreads amazing and
veracious before the mind I have now. It is that book in the Bible most
like God. In the others the record is diminished to His dealings with
us. There is more room in this first one for seeing just God, is what I
mean. The more you live in the open, in remote and quiet places where
the evidences still show like green-growing scriptures, the easier it
is to believe. For me it will remain to the last my favorite gospel of
the goodness and wonders of the Almighty. I do not know why, unless, as
life, duty, and conscience pressed hard upon me, these first chapters
turned out to be less obligatory than, say, the Ten Commandments. Many
a time they have been like great visions in a dark place. It was like
seeing original things take shape. I suppose other people have had the
same experience; but in this mood the first herbs of the field have
been almost visible, in their fresh greenness, through the mists of the
first morning of time.
Long afterwards, when I began to write a few scriptures of my own,
and must accomplish some feat of imagination to reach what I know, I
used to read the first chapter of Genesis as devout Episcopalians read
prayers to God from a book. I never caught the rhythm of that great
moment when the light was divided from the darkness and the waters
from the lands, but hearing the roll and rumble of it has certainly
lengthened the stride of my mind.
I had a good deal of the Old Testament imparted to me before I received
my other mental training. As far down as I can reach now into the mind
I had then, I am a very small human, traveling by speculations through
Deuteronomy, Judges, and believing that Second Samuel was Samuel’s son.
I am keeping company with the major and minor prophets. I am the little
girl who knew Ruth and could see her in the wheat fields, gathering the
scattered heads that fell behind the reapers. I was very much attached
to her and to David in his youth. But never to the Song of Solomon.
Mother always skipped it as ‘unsuitable’ when she read from the Bible.
She had a certain look on her face when she would be turning the leaves
and came upon this Song, as if she had seen something indelicate, and
invariably flirted the page over it hastily as you would cover such a
thing. My impression is that she did not think very well of Solomon. To
this day I share her prejudices. Too much of his wisdom is derived from
the bad end of experience.
But imagine a child’s mind taking shape under these influences. I
was haunted by ghosts and fed on the stately Scriptures of the Old
Testament. Jerusalem and Nineveh are the first cities I remember
hearing about. I was particularly interested in the latter because of
the deep-sea disaster which overtook Jonah on his way there. I believed
everything, but not with the literal humble mind of the obedient
spirit. I have always reserved the right to believe in the Scriptures
intelligently. So far as I am able to judge, stupid faith is as
dangerous and belittling to the soul as a false doctrine.
This story of Jonah gagged me even at that early age. And to this
day I am still wondering if any one saw the whale swallow him, or if
it was a mere wave that vomited him upon the shore. Not that I doubt
the Scriptures, you understand, but Jonah. What I mean is that in
the horror of being cast overboard and drowned, he may honestly have
believed he was being swallowed by a great fish, when he was really
descending into the bowels of the sea.
The instruction I had from the Old Testament marked my first definite
formations mentally. They seemed, as I look back now, to have opened
the casements of my mind to more gallant illusions, verified by the
angels and prophets who appeared so constantly in these Scriptures. I
used to strain myself to see Elijah rising in a chariot of fire. A red
cloud in the sunset sky might have convinced me of the repetition of
this miracle. I was a small human drop in the eternity of summer days.
I had no sense of time. I felt very near the beginning of things. But
I was unaffected morally. I went about my business as usual, without a
scruple as to what was right or wrong.
VI
FATHER AND MOTHER
I felt a certain silent intimacy with my father. This was due to the
fact that we were both highly sensitized emotionally, but not morally.
I received the impression that there was more space in father for
the practices of a free spirit. It seems to me that we both avoided
the house because it was such a good place, ruled by order and
righteousness. Nothing could be changed in it, least of all mother,
who loved us with a consuming affection. I did not know the name of
the sensation at the time, but I always came into it feeling like a
prodigal son. I remember some such expression on father’s face shot
with humor. I cannot think what we had been doing; probably nothing
reprehensible; but I was full of secret stuff not to be exposed to her,
because I never could tell what she would approve. Father knew and was
silent for the same reason.
She was literally a religious woman. She believed in the Christian
religion without tears. She could perform her spiritual duties on a
cold collar and keep the Commandments without praying or fasting.
I have always thought she might have been a trifle short on the
Beatitudes, because she practiced them with less emotion than any
other person I have ever known. She had resignation and endurance to
a remarkable degree, but she was sublimely deficient in humility. My
memory of her, revived by the wit of a mature mind, is that she was
admirably conscious of her own worth and standing before the Lord,
though I never heard her testify in an experience meeting, which was
one of the pious diversions of saints in those days.
Father was spiritually minded, but only intermittently religious,
during which periods he far outstripped mother in the bloom and beauty
of his virtues. But he frequently fell back into original sin, where
he seemed to belong; but was never comfortable, poor soul. He would
invariably rise by the means of the most spectacular repentance. I have
observed that these acrobatic souls belong to men with more histrionic
talent than ordinary saints have. This is the reason why they are more
beloved even if they are less dependable. I am certain mother loved
father more than she could have loved a better man. It is the quality
of goodness in women, not a weakness.
Mother used to pass into silence sometimes. She became inaccessible. No
tears, going about her duties with a certain sweet quietness as if she
was walking more softly before the Lord than usual and hoped this would
do some good.
I still think I was right in my impressions of these periods. My
feeling was that something grand was going on. I distinctly felt the
presence of God everywhere. My lid came off in this mysteriously
electric atmosphere. I suppose it is the same sensation formerly
enjoyed by emotional people when they shouted during divine services.
I hoped for some change in the methodical routine of things, and did
not get it. When the hero of the house fell from grace he disappeared.
He was not. But I was quarantined by the tightening of the ligaments
of all mother’s virtues and obliged to practice my rectitudes more
scrupulously than usual. No escape to the terrace outside. And the
house felt like a church--terribly hallowed.
But when father emerged from the dark pit of his transgression,
haggard with that look of noble repentance remorse imparts to the male
countenance, I beheld him with awe and speechless admiration, having no
knowledge of the cause of this moral grandeur or that so much eloquence
covered delinquency.
I have a dim candle-lit memory of one of these scenes which took place
in mother’s room when I was a very small child. Glowing logs upon
the hearth that cast a red radiance over the bare white boards of
the floor. A candle lighted upon the candle-stand like the faintest
flickering flame in this darkness. Stiff blue calico curtains drawn
back from the windows and primly tied. A clear cold night outside and
stars shining through the symmetrical angle of these curtains. Mother
sitting in her corner, pale as peace and righteousness, hair black and
smoothly coiled, skirts arranged just so. Hands folded, her large gray
eyes slightly raised, very peaceful, as if she gazed upon her cross and
knew she could bear it. I sat in my small split-bottomed chair, hands
clasped around the arms of this chair, elbows sticking out, fair hair
glowing like the fringe of innocence in this rich darkness, copper-toed
shoes shining, head barely high enough above the window-sill to see
the stars.
But I was not looking at the stars. I was wearing my church manners and
watching mother’s face as one consults the clock when it is time for
services to begin. I had been in these family altar services before
and knew that one was at hand now because the big Bible lay upon the
candle-stand. This Book was never opened except upon great spiritual
occasions or when the pastor called. Mother dispensed her daily
Scriptures from a smaller, well-worn volume.
There was a step outside, coming with a long crunching stride. The
stars twinkled with that giggling sense of humor they may have acquired
from watching the doings of men for so many ages. The door was thrust
open. A blast of icy wind entered. The flame of the candle flickered,
as if this was no place for a good little candle. I vibrated. My dear
father, whom I had not seen for days, strode in, you may say, upon
this blast. But I restrained my natural affections, as one does when a
solemn ceremony is about to begin. Why this ceremony I did not know,
but once in so often it had to be performed, because it seemed to
greatly enhance father and to refresh and gladden mother.
Father was a pallid and noble figure, somewhat disheveled, like a
long-legged eagle that has recently weathered a high wind. He took one
sweeping glance around, caught my adoring eyes upturned, and discarded
them as a bagatelle in this momentous situation. Mother merely ceased
to bat her eyes, gaze still fixed upon her cross. Let the mountains
fall upon her, let the waters of all the seas roll over her, she would
not be moved except by decent repentance!
Well, he must go through with it as usual, is what I know now father
decided after that momentary survey, and kept his pace to the big
rickety chair beside the candle-stand. He let himself down into it like
a god overtaken in a fault, glanced distastefully at the Bible and
emitted the sigh of a bellows. My breast heaved in suspense. I knew
that my father would presently become a man of the Lord and open the
Book. These were the only occasions when he was associated in my mind
with our God. I coveted the experience. What I did not know was that he
dreaded the blasphemy demanded of him. He had his feelings and Adam’s
modesty when his sin would be dying hard in him. Then some emotion
would overcome him; maybe a man’s grateful memories of this invincibly
good woman who could not be made to forsake him. What was God’s opinion
of him compared to her dear wishes? Such a foolish little she demanded
in exchange for all she gave. Something like this I know passed through
his mind. Then he would open the Book, turn to the Psalms, taste a few
until he struck one with the right note, not too revealing, something
vague and nobly sung. That night he read this one:
‘Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to my supplications: in thy
faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness. And enter not into
judgment with thy servant.’