RANDOM RICHMOND NOTES
Richmond may again be likened to Boston as a literary center. In an
article published some years ago in "Book News" Alice M. Tyler refers to
Colonel William Byrd, who founded Richmond in 1733, as the sprightliest
and most genial native American writer before Franklin. In the time of
Chief Justice Marshall, Richmond had a considerable group of novelists,
historians and essayists, but the great literary name connected with the
place is that of Edgar Allan Poe, who spent much of his boyhood in the
city and later edited the "Southern Literary Messenger." Matthew
Fontaine Maury, the great scientist, mentioned in an earlier chapter,
was, at another time, editor of the same periodical, as was also John
Reuben Thompson, "Poet of the Confederacy," who wrote, among other
poems, "Music in Camp," and who translated Gustave Nadaud's familiar
poem, "Carcassonne."
Thomas Nelson Page made his home in Richmond for thirty years; Amélie
Rives was born there and still maintains her residence in Albemarle
County, Virginia, while among other writers of the present time
connected with the city either by birth or long association are, Henry
Sydnor Harrison, Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, Marion Harland, Kate
Langley Bosher, James Branch Cabell, Edward Peple, dramatist, J.H.
Whitty, biographer of Poe, and Colonel W. Gordon McCabe, soldier,
historian, essayist, and local character--a gentleman upon whose
shoulders such imported expressions as _littérateur_, _bon viveur_, and
_raconteur_ alight as naturally as doves on friendly shoulders.
Colonel McCabe is a link between present-day Richmond and the traditions
and associations of England. He was the friend of Lord Roberts, he
introduced Lord Tennyson to Bull Durham tobacco, and, as is fitting
under the circumstances, he speaks and writes of a hotel as "_an_
hotel."
Henry Sydnor Harrison did his first writing as book reviewer on the
Richmond "Times-Dispatch," of which paper he later became paragrapher
and daily poet, and still later editor in chief. It is commonly reported
in Richmond that the characters in his novel "Queed," the scenes of
which are laid in Richmond, were "drawn from life." I asked Mr. Harrison
about this.
"When the book appeared," he said, "I was much embarrassed by the
disposition of Richmond people--human and natural, I suppose, when you
'know the author'--to identify all the imaginary persons with various
local characters. Some characteristics of the political boss in my story
were in a degree suggested by a local celebrity; Stewart Bryan is
indicated, in passing, as Stewart Byrd; and the bare bones of a historic
case, altered at will, were employed in another connection. But I think
I am stating the literal truth when I say that no figure in the book is
borrowed from life."
* * * * *
The recent residential development in Richmond has been to the west of
the city in the neighborhood of Monument Avenue, a fine double drive,
with a parked center, lined with substantial new homes, and having at
intervals monuments to southern heroes: Lee, Davis, and J.E.B. Stuart.
The parks are on the outskirts of the city and, as in most other cities,
it is in these outlying regions that new homes are springing up, thanks
in no small degree to the automobile. The Country Club of Virginia is
out to the west of the town, in what is known as Westhampton, and is one
of the most charming clubs of its kind in the South or, indeed, in the
country.
Richmond has one of the most beautiful and several of the most curious
cemeteries I have ever seen. Hollywood Cemetery stands upon rolling
bluffs overlooking the James, and under its majestic trees are the tombs
of many famous men, including James Monroe, John Tyler, Jefferson Davis
and Fitzhugh Lee. An inscription on the Davis monument, which was
erected by the widow and daughter of the President of the Confederacy,
describes him as "an American soldier and defender of the Constitution."
At the back of the pedestal is another inscription:
PRESIDENT OF THE CONFEDERATE
STATES OF AMERICA 1861-1865.
FAITHFUL TO ALL TRUSTS, A MARTYR
TO PRINCIPLE.
HE LIVED AND DIED THE MOST
CONSISTENT OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS
AND STATESMEN.
It occasionally happens that, instead of having monuments because in
life they were famous, men are made famous after death, by the
inscriptions placed upon their tombstones. Such is the case with James
E. Valentine, a locomotive engineer killed in a collision many years
ago. The Valentine monument in Hollywood Cemetery is almost as well
known as the monuments erected in memory of the great, the reason for
this being embodied in the following verse adorning the stone:
Until the brakes are turned on Time,
Life's throttle valve shut down,
He wakes to pilot in the crew
That wear the martyr's crown.
On schedule time on upper grade
Along the homeward section,
He lands his train at God's roundhouse
The morn of resurrection.
His time all full, no wages docked;
His name on God's pay roll.
And transportation through to Heaven,
A free pass for his soul.
In the burial ground of old St. John's Church--the building in which
Patrick Henry delivered his "Give me Liberty or give me Death"
oration--are a number of old gravestones bearing strange inscriptions
which appeal to the imagination, and also, alas! elicit sad thoughts
concerning those who wrote the old-time gravestone doggerel.
The custodian of the church is glad to indicate the interesting stones,
but is much more taken up with his own gift of oratory, as displayed
when, on getting visitors inside the church, he takes his place on the
spot where Patrick Henry stood, and delivers the famous oration. Having
done this to us--or perhaps it would seem more generous to say _for_
us--the caretaker told us that many persons who had heard him had
declared that Patrick Henry himself would have had a hard time doing it
better. But when he threatened, for contrast, to deliver the oration as
a less gifted elocutionist might speak it, my companion, in whom I had
already observed signs of restlessness, interrupted with the statement
that we were late for an engagement, and fled from the place, followed
by me.
* * * * *
In certain parts of the city, often at a considerable distance from the
warehouse and factory sections, one may occasionally catch upon the
breeze the faint, spicy fragrance of tobacco; and should one trace these
pleasant scents to their sources, one would come to a region of
factories in which rich brown leaves are transformed into pipe tobacco,
plug tobacco, or cigarettes. In the simpler processes of this work,
negro men and women are employed, and these with their natural
picturesqueness of pose and costume, and their singing, in the setting
of an old shadowy loft, make a tobacco factory a fascinating place. In
one loft you will see negro men and boys handling the tobacco leaves
with pitchforks, much as farm hands handle hay; in another, negro women
squatting upon boxes, stemming the leaves, or "pulling up ends," their
black faces blending mysteriously with the dark shadows of beams and
rafters. Here the air is laden not only with the sweet tobacco smell,
mixed with a faint scent of licorice and of fruit, but is freighted also
with a fine brown dust which is revealed where bars of sunlight strike
in through the windows, and which seems, as it shifts and sparkles, to
be a visible expression of the smell.
In the busy season "street niggers" are generally used for stemming,
which is, perhaps, the leading part of the tobacco industry in Richmond,
and these "street niggers," a wild yet childlike lot, who lead a
hand-to-mouth existence all year round, bring to the tobacco trade a
wealth of semi-barbaric color. To give us an idea of the character of a
Richmond "street nigger" the gentleman who took my companion and me
through the factory told us of having wanted a piece of light work done,
and having asked one of these negroes: "Want to earn a quarter?"
To which the latter replied without moving from his comfortable place
beside a sun-baked brick wall: "No, boss, Ah _got_ a quahtah."
The singing of the negroes is a great feature of the stemming department
in a tobacco factory. Some of the singers become locally famous; also, I
was told by the superintendent, they become independent, and for that
reason have frequently to be dismissed. The wonderful part of this
singing, aside from the fascinating harmonies made by the sweet,
untrained negro voices, is the utter lack of prearrangement that there
is about it. Now there will be silence in the loft; then there will come
a strange, half-savage cry from some dark corner, musical, yet seemingly
meaningless; soon a faint humming will begin, and will be taken up by
men and women all over the loft; the humming will swell into a chant to
which the workers rock as their black hands travel swiftly among the
brown leaves; then, presently, it will die away, and there will be
silence until they are again moved to song.
From shadowy room to shadowy room, past great dark bins filled with the
leaves, past big black steaming vats, oozing sweet-smelling substances,
past moist fragrant barrels, always among the almost spectral forms of
negroes, treading out leaves with bare feet, working over great wicker
baskets stained to tobacco color, piling up wooden frames, or operating
the powerful hydraulic presses which convert the soft tobacco into plugs
of concrete hardness--so one goes on through the factory. The browns and
blacks of these interiors are the browns and blacks of etchings; the
color of the leaves, the old dark timbers, the black faces and hands,
and the ragged clothing, combined with the humming of negro voices, the
tobacco fragrance, and the golden dust upon the air, make an
indescribably complete harmony of shade, sound, and scent.
The department in which the pipe tobacco is packed in tins is a very
different sort of place; here white labor is employed: a great many
girls seated side by side at benches working with great digital
dexterity: measuring out the tobacco, folding wax paper cartons, filling
them, and slipping them into the narrow tins, all at a rate of speed so
great as to defy the sight, giving a sense of fingers flickering above
the bench with a strange, almost supernatural sureness, like the fingers
of a magician who makes things disappear before your eyes; or like the
pictures in which post-impressionist and cubist painters attempt to
express motion.
"May I speak to one of them?" I asked the superintendent.
"Sure," said he.
I went up to a young woman who was working, if anything, more rapidly
than the other girls at the same bench.
"Can you think, while you are doing this?" I asked.
"Yes," she replied, without looking up, while her fingers flashed on
ceaselessly.
"About other things?"
"Certainly."
"How many cans do you fill in a day?"
"About thirty-four to thirty-five hundred on the average."
"May I ask your name?" She gave it.
I took up one of the small identification slips which she put into each
package, and wrote her name upon the back of it. The number on the
slip--for the purpose of identifying the girl who packed the tin--was
220. Let the reader, therefore, be informed that if he smokes Edgeworth
Ready Rubbed, and finds in a tin a slip bearing that number, he has been
served by no less a person than Miss Katie Wise, of the astonishingly
speedy fingers.