Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation
remains unchanged. Note in particular that the apostrophe is very
rarely used to indicate abbreviation.
Italics are represented thus _italic_.
Bring
the
Jubilee
By Ward Moore
_Breathe the Air Again_
_Greener Than You Think_
_Bring the Jubilee_
This is an original novel—not a reprint—published by FARRAR, STRAUS &
YOUNG, INC. The low price of $2.00 is made possible by large printings
of combined editions.
Bring
the
Jubilee
WARD
MOORE
FARRAR, STRAUS and YOUNG, Inc.
NEW YORK
Copyright 1952 Fantasy House, Inc.
Copyright 1953 Ward Moore
All rights reserved. Manufactured in the U. S. A.
Library of Congress catalog card number: 53-10417
BACK COVER MAP: BETTMANN ARCHIVE
_For
TONY BOUCHER and MICK McCOMAS
who liked this story_
What he will he does, and does so much
That proof is call’d impossibility
—_Troilus and Cressida_
It is always the puzzle of the nature of time that brings our thoughts
to a standstill. And if time is so fundamental that an understanding
of its true nature is for ever beyond our reach, then so also in
all probability is a decision in the age-long controversy between
determination and free will.
—_The Mysterious Universe_ by James Jeans
Contents
I _Life in the Twenty-Six States_ 1
II _Of Decisions, Minibiles, and Tinugraphs_ 12
III _A Member of the Grand Army_ 22
IV _Tyss_ 32
V _Of Whigs and Populists_ 42
VI _Enfandin_ 50
VII _Of Confederate Agents in 1942_ 61
VIII _In Violent Times_ 71
IX _Barbara_ 76
X _The Holdup_ 86
XI _Of Haggershaven_ 95
XII _More of Haggershaven_ 106
XIII _Time_ 116
XIV _Midbin’s Experiment_ 124
XV _Good Years_ 132
XVI _Of Varied Subjects_ 142
XVII _HX-1_ 156
XVIII _The Woman Tempted Me_ 166
XIX _Gettysburg_ 175
XX _Bring the Jubilee_ 181
XXI _For the Time Being_ 191
_1. LIFE IN THE TWENTY-SIX STATES_
Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921.
Neither the dates nor the tenses are error—let me explain:
I was born, as I say, in 1921, but it was not until the early 1930’s,
when I was about ten, that I began to understand what a peculiarly
frustrate and disinherited world was about me. Perhaps my approach to
realization was through the crayon portrait of Granpa Hodgins which
hung, very solemnly, over the mantel.
Granpa Hodgins after whom I was named, perhaps a little
grandiloquently, Hodgins McCormick Backmaker, had been a veteran of
the War of Southron Independence. Like so many young men he had put on
a shapeless blue uniform in response to the call of the ill-advised
and headstrong—or martyred—Mr Lincoln. Depending on which of my lives’
viewpoints you take.
Granpa lost an arm on the Great Retreat to Philadelphia after the fall
of Washington to General Lee’s victorious Army of Northern Virginia, so
his war ended some six months before the capitulation at Reading and
the acknowledgment of the independence of the Confederate States on
July 4, 1864. One-armed and embittered, Granpa came home to Wappinger
Falls and, like his fellow veterans, tried to remake his life in a
different and increasingly hopeless world.
On its face the Peace of Richmond was a just and even generous
disposition of a defeated foe by the victor. (Both sides—for different
reasons—remembered the mutiny of the Unreconstructed Federals in
the Armies of the Cumberland and the Tennessee who, despite defeat
at Chattanooga, could not forget Vicksburg or Port Hudson and fought
bloodily against the order to surrender.) The South could easily have
carved the country up to suit its most fiery patriots, even to the
point of detaching the West and making a protectorate of it. Instead
the chivalrous Southrons contented themselves with drawing the new
boundary along traditional lines. The Mason-Dixon gave them Delaware
and Maryland, but they generously returned the panhandle of western
Virginia jutting above it. Missouri was naturally included in the
Confederacy, but of the disputed territory Colorado and Deseret were
conceded to the old Union; only Kansas and California as well as—for
obvious defensive reasons—Nevada’s tip went to the South.
But the Peace of Richmond had also laid the cost of the war on the
beaten North and this was what crippled Granpa Hodgins more than the
loss of his arm. The postwar inflation entered the galloping stage
during the Vallandigham Administration, became dizzying in the time
of President Seymour and precipitated the food riots of 1873 and ’74.
It was only after the election of President Butler by the Whigs in
1876 and the reorganization and drastic deflation following that money
and property became stable, but by this time all normal values were
destroyed. Meanwhile the indemnities had to be paid regularly in gold.
Granpa and hundreds of thousands like him just never seemed to get back
on their feet.
How well I remember, as a small boy in the 1920’s and ’30s, my mother
and father talking bitterly of how the War had ruined everything. They
were not speaking of the then fairly recent Emperors’ War of 1914-16,
but of the War of Southron Independence which still, nearly seventy
years later, blighted what was left of the United States.
Nor were they unique or peculiar in this. Men who slouched in the
smithy while Father shod their horses, or gathered every month around
the postoffice waiting for the notice of the winning lottery numbers
to be put up, as often cursed the Confederates or discussed what might
have been if Meade had been a better general or Lee a worse one, as
they did the new-type bicycles with clockwork auxiliaries to make
pedaling uphill easier, or the latest scandal about the French Emperor,
Napoleon VI.
I tried to imagine what it must have been like in Granpa Hodgins’ day,
to visualize the lost past—that strange bright era when, if it could
be believed, folk like ourselves and our neighbors had owned their
farms outright and didnt pay rent to the bank or give half the crop to
a landlord. I searched the wiggling crayon lines that composed Granpa
Hodgins’ face for some sign that set him apart from his descendants.
“But what did he _do_ to lose the farm?” I used to ask my mother.
“Do? Didnt do anything. Couldnt help himself. Go along now and do your
chores; Ive a terrible batch of work to get out.”
How could Granpa’s not doing anything result so disastrously? I could
not understand this any more than I could the bygone time when a man
could nearly always get a job for wages which would support himself
and a family, before the system of indenture became so common that
practically the only alternative to pauperism was to sell oneself to a
company.
Indenting I understood all right, for there was a mill in Wappinger
Falls which wove a shoddy cloth very different from the goods my mother
produced on her handloom. Mother, even in her late forties, could have
indented there for a good price, and she admitted that the work would
be easier than weaving homespun to compete with their product. But, as
she used to say with an obstinate shake of her head, “Free I was born
and free I’ll die.”
In Granpa Hodgins’ day, if one could believe the folktales or family
legends, men and women married young and had large families; there
might have been five generations between him and me instead of two. And
many uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters. Now late marriages
and only children were the rule.
If it hadnt been for the War—This was the basic theme stated with
variations suited to the particular circumstance. If it hadnt been
for the War the most energetic young men and women would not turn
to emigration; visiting foreigners would not come as to a slum; and
the great powers would think twice before sending troops to restore
order every time one of their citizens was molested. If it hadnt been
for the War the detestable buyer from Boston—detestable to my mother,
but rather fascinating to me with his brightly colored vest and smell
of soap and hair tonic—would not have come regularly to offer her a
miserable price for her weaving.
“Foreigner!” she would always exclaim after he left; “sending good
cloth out of the country.”
Once my father ventured, “He’s only doing what he’s paid for.”
“Trust a Backmaker to stand up for foreigners. Like father, like son;
suppose you’d let the whole thieving crew in if you had your way.”
So was first hinted the scandal of Grandfather Backmaker. No enlarged
portrait of him hung anywhere, much less over the mantel. I got the
impression my father’s father had been not only a foreigner by birth,
but a shady character in his own right, a man who kept on believing
in the things for which Granpa Hodgins fought after they were proved
wrong. I don’t know how I learned that Grandfather Backmaker had made
speeches advocating equal rights for Negroes or protesting the mass
lynchings so popular in the North, in contrast to the humane treatment
accorded these non-citizens in the Confederacy. Nor do I remember where
I heard he had been run out of several places before finally settling
in Wappinger Falls or that all his life people had muttered darkly
at his back, “Dirty Abolitionist!”—a very deep imprecation indeed.
I only know that as a consequence of this taint my father, a meek,
hardworking, worried little man, was completely dominated by my mother
who never let him forget that a Hodgins or a McCormick was worth dozens
of Backmakers.
I must have been a sore trial to her for I showed no sign of proper
Hodgins gumption, such as she displayed herself and which surely kept
us all—though precariously—free. For one thing I was remarkably unhandy
and awkward, of little use in the hundred necessary chores around our
dilapidated house. I could not pick up a hammer at her command to do
something about fixing the loose weatherboards on the east side without
mashing my thumb or splitting the aged, unpainted wood. I could not hoe
the kitchen garden without damaging precious vegetables and leaving
weeds intact. I could shovel snow in the winter at a tremendous rate
for I was strong and had endurance, but work requiring manual dexterity
baffled me. I fumbled in harnessing Bessie, our mare, or hitching her
to the cart for my father’s trips to Poughkeepsie, and as for helping
him on the farm or in his smithy I’m afraid my efforts drove that mild
man nearest to a temper he ever came. He would lay the reins on the
plowhorse’s back or his hammer down on the anvil and say mournfully:
“Better see if you can help your mother, Hodge. Youre only in my way
here.”
On only one score did I come near pleasing Mother: I learned to read
and write early, and exhibited some proficiency. But even here there
was a flaw; she looked upon literacy as something which distinguished
Hodginses and McCormicks from the ruck who had to make their mark, as
an accomplishment which might somehow and unspecifiedly lead away from
poverty. I found reading an end in itself, which probably reminded her
of my father’s laxity or Grandfather Backmaker’s subversion.
“Make something of yourself, Hodge,” she admonished me often.
“You can’t change the world”—an obvious allusion to Grandfather
Backmaker—“but you can do something with it as it is if you try hard
enough. There’s always some way out.”
Yet she did not approve of the postoffice lottery, on which so many
pinned their hopes of escape from poverty or indenture. In this she and
my father were agreed; both believed in hard work rather than chance.
Still, chance could help even the steadiest toiler. I remember the
time a minibile—one of the small, trackless locomotives—broke down
not a quarter of a mile from Father’s smithy. This was a golden,
unparalleled, unbelievable opportunity. Minibiles, like any other
luxury, were rare in the United States though they were common enough
in prosperous countries like the German Union or the Confederacy. We
had to rely for our transportation on the never-failing horse or on the
railroads, wornout and broken down as they were. For decades the great
issue in Congress was the never completed Pacific transcontinental
line, though British America had one and the Confederate States seven.
(Sailing balloons, economical and fairly common, were still looked
upon with some suspicion.) Only a rare millionaire with connections in
Frankfurt, Washington-Baltimore or Leesburg could afford to indulge
in a costly and complicated minibile requiring a trained driver to
bounce it over the rutted and chuckholed roads. Only an extraordinarily
adventurous spirit would leave the tar-surfaced streets of New York or
its sister city of Brooklyn, where the minibiles’ solid rubber tires
could at worst find traction on the horse or cable-car rails, for the
morasses or washboard roads which were the only highways north of the
Harlem River.
When one did, the jolting, jouncing and shaking inevitably broke or
disconnected one of the delicate parts in its complex mechanism. Then
the only recourse—apart from telegraphing back to the city if the
traveler broke down near an instrument—was to the closest blacksmith.
Smiths rarely knew much of the principles of the minibiles, but with
the broken part before them they could fabricate a passable duplicate
and, unless the machine had suffered severe damage, put it back in
place. It was customary for such a craftsman to compensate himself
for the time taken away from horseshoeing or spring-fitting—or just
absently chewing on an oatstraw—by demanding exorbitant remuneration,
amounting to perhaps twenty-five or thirty cents an hour, thus avenging
his rural poverty and self-sufficiency upon the effete wealth and
helplessness of the urban excursionist.
Such a golden opportunity befell my father, as I said, during the fall
of 1933, when I was twelve. The driver had made his way to the smithy,
leaving the owner of the minibile marooned and fuming in the enclosed
passenger seat. A hasty visit convinced Father, who could repair a
clock or broken rake with equal dexterity, that his only course was
to bring the machine to the forge where he could heat and straighten
a part not easy to disassemble. (The driver, the owner, and Father
all repeated the name of the part often enough, but so inept have I
been with “practical” things all my life that I couldnt recall it ten
minutes, much less thirty years later.)
“Hodge, run and get the mare and ride over to Jones’s. Don’t try to
saddle her—go bareback. Ask Mr Jones to kindly lend me his team.”
“I’ll give the boy a quarter dollar for himself if he’s back with the
team in twenty minutes,” added the owner of the minibile, sticking his
head out of the window.
I won’t say I was off like the wind, for my life’s work has given me a
distaste for exaggeration or hyperbole, but I moved faster than I ever
had before. A quarter, a whole shining silver quarter, a day’s full
wage for the boy who could find odd jobs, half the day’s pay of a grown
man who wasnt indented or worked extra hours—all for myself, to spend
as I wished!
I ran all the way back to the barn, led Bessie out by her halter and
jumped on her broad back, my enthralling daydream growing and deepening
each moment. With my quarter safely got I could perhaps persuade my
father to take me along on his next trip to Poughkeepsie; in the shops
there I could find some yards of figured cotton for Mother, or a box of
cigars to which Father was partial but rarely bought for himself, or an
unimagined something for Mary McCutcheon, some three years older than
I, with whom it had so recently become disturbing as well as imperative
to wrestle—in secret of course so as not to show oneself unmanly in
sporting with a weak girl instead of another boy.
It never even occurred to me, as it would have to most, to invest in an
eighth of a lottery ticket. Not only were my parents sternly against
this popular gamble, but I myself felt a strangely puritanical aversion
to meddling with my fortune.
Or I could take the entire quarter into Newman’s Book and Clock Store.
Here I could not afford one of the latest English or Confederate
books—even the novels I disdained cost fifty cents in their original
and thirty in the pirated United States’ edition—but what treasures
there were in the twelve-and-a-half cent reprints and the dime classics!
With Bessie’s legs moving steadily beneath me I pored over in my
imagination Mr Newman’s entire stock, which I knew by heart from
examinations lulled by the steady ticking of his other, and no doubt
more salable, merchandise. My quarter would buy two reprints, but I
would read them in as many evenings and be no better off than before
until their memory faded and I could read them again. Better to invest
in paperbacked adventure stories giving sharp, breathless pictures
of life in the West or rekindling the glories of the War. True, they
were written almost entirely by Confederate authors and I was, perhaps
thanks to Granpa Hodgins and my mother, a devout partisan of the lost
cause of Sheridan and Sherman and Thomas. But patriotism couldnt steel
me against the excitement of the Confederate paperbacks; literature
simply ignored the boundary stretching to the Pacific.
I had finally determined to invest all my twenty-five cents, not
in five paperbound volumes but in ten of the same in secondhand or
shopworn condition, when I suddenly realized that I had been riding
Bessie for some considerable time. I looked around, rather dazed by
the abrupt translation from the dark and slightly musty interior of
Newman’s store to the bright countryside, to find with dismay that
Bessie hadnt taken me to the Jones farm after all but on some private
tour of her own in the opposite direction.
I’m afraid this little anecdote is pointless—it was momentarily pointed
enough for me that evening, for in addition to the loss of the promised
quarter I received a thorough whacking with a willow switch from my
mother after my father had, as usual, dolefully refused his parental
duty—except perhaps that it shows how in pursuing the dream I could
lose the reality.
My feeling that books were a part of life, and the most important part,
was no passing phase. Other boys in their early teens dreamed of going
to the wilds of Dakotah, Montana or Wyoming, indenting to a company
run by a young and beautiful woman—this was also a favorite paperback
theme—discovering the loot hidden by a gang, or emigrating to Australia
or the South African Republic. Or else they faced the reality of
indenture, carrying on the family farm, or petty trade. I only wanted
to be allowed to read.
I knew this ambition, if that is the proper word, to be outrageous and
unheard of. It was also practically impossible. The school at Wappinger
Falls, a survival from the days of compulsory attendance and an object
of doubt in the eyes of the taxpayers, taught as little as possible
as quickly as possible. Parents needed the help of their children to
survive or to build up a small reserve in the illusory hope of buying
free of indenture. Both my mother and my teachers looked askance at
my longing to persist past an age when my contemporaries were making
themselves economically useful.
Nor, even supposing I had the fees, could the shabby, fusty Academy
at Poughkeepsie—originally designed for the education of the
well-to-do—provide what I wanted. Not that I was clear at all as to
just what this was; I only knew that commercial arithmetic, surveying,
or any of the other subjects taught there, were not the answer to my
desires.
There was certainly no money for any college. Our position had grown
slowly worse; my father talked of selling the smithy and indenting.
My dreams of Harvard or Yale were as idle as Father’s of making a
good crop and getting out of debt. Nor did I know then, as I was to
find out later, that the colleges were increasingly provincialized
and decayed, contrasting painfully with the flourishing universities
of the Confederacy and Europe. The average man asked what the United
States needed colleges for anyway; those who attended them only
learned discontent and to question time-honored institutions. Constant
scrutiny of the faculties, summary firing of all instructors suspected
of abnormal ideas, did not seem to improve the situation or raise the
standards of teaching.
My mother, now that I was getting beyond the switching age, lectured
me firmly and at length on idleness and self-indulgence. “It’s a hard
world, Hodge, and no one’s going to give you anything you don’t earn.
Your father’s an easy-going man; too easy-going for his own good, but
he always knows where his duty lies.”
“Yes, maam,” I responded politely, not quite seeing what she was
driving at.
“Hard, honest work—that’s the only thing. Not hoping or wishing or
thinking miracles will happen to you. Work hard and keep yourself free.
Don’t depend on circumstances or other people, and don’t blame them for
your own shortcomings. Be your own man. That’s the only way you’ll ever
be where you want to.”
She spoke of responsibility and duty as though they were measurable
quantities, but the gentler parts of such equations, the factors of
affection and pity, were never mentioned. I don’t want to give the
impression that ours was a particularly puritanical family; I know
our neighbors had of necessity much the same grim outlook. But I felt
guiltily vulnerable, not merely on the score of wanting more schooling,
but because of something else which would have shocked my mother beyond
forgiveness.
My early tussles with Mary McCutcheon had the natural consequences, but
she had found me a too-youthful partner and had taken her interests
elsewhere. For my part I now turned to Agnes Jones, a suddenly alluring
young woman grown from the skinny kid I’d always brushed away. Agnes
sympathized with my aspirations and encouraged me most pleasantly.
However her specific plans for my future were limited to marrying her
and helping her father on his farm, which seemed no great advance over
what I could look forward to at home.
And there I was certainly no asset; I ate three hearty meals a day and
occupied a bed. I was conscious of the looks and smiles which followed
me. A great lout of seventeen, too lazy to do a stroke of work, always
wandering around with his head in the clouds or lying with his nose
stuck in a book. Too bad; and the Backmakers such industrious folks
too. I could feel what the shock of my behavior with Agnes added to my
idleness would be to my mother.
Yet I was neither depraved nor very different from the other youths of
Wappinger Falls, who not only took their pleasures where they found
them, but often more forcibly than persuasively. I did not analyze
it fully or clearly, but I was at least to some extent aware of the
essentially loveless atmosphere around me. The rigid convention
of late marriages bred an exaggerated respect for chastity which
had two sides: sisters’ and daughters’ honor was sternly avenged
with no protest from society, and undiscovered seduction produced
that much more gratification. But both retribution and venery
were somewhat mechanical; they were the expected rather than the
inescapable passions. Revivalists—and we country people had a vast
fondness for those itinerants who came periodically to castigate us
for our sins—denounced our laxity and pointed to the virtues of our
grandparents and greatgrandparents. We accepted their advice with such
modifications as suited us, which was not at all what they intended.
And this was how I took my mother’s admonition to be my own man. What
debts I owed her and my father seemed best discharged by relieving them
of the burden of my keep, since I was clearly not fitting myself to
reverse the balance. The notion that there was an emotional obligation
on either side hardly occurred to me; I doubt if it did to them. Toward
Agnes Jones I felt no debt at all.
A few months after my seventeenth birthday I packed my three most
cherished books in my good white cotton shirt, and having bade a most
romantic goodbye to Agnes, one which would certainly have consummated
her hopes had her father come upon us, I left Wappinger Falls and set
out for New York.
_2._ _OF DECISIONS, MINIBILES, AND TINUGRAPHS_
I thought I could do the walk of some eighty miles in four days,
allowing time to swap work for food, supposing I found farmers or
housewives agreeable to the exchange. June made it no hardship to sleep
outdoors, and the old post road ran close enough to the Hudson for any
bathing I might want to do.
The dangers of the trip were part erf the pattern of life in the United
States in 1938. I didnt particularly fear being robbed by a roving
gang for I was sure organized predators would disdain so obviously
unprofitable a prey, and individual thieves I felt I could take care
of, but I was not anxious to be picked up as a vagrant by any of the
three police forces, national, state, or local. As a freeman I was
more exposed to this chance than an indent would be, with a work-card
on his person and a company behind him. A freeman was fair game for
the constables, state troopers, or revenuers to recruit, after a
perfunctory trial, into one of the chain gangs upon whom the roads,
canals and other public works were dependent.
Some wondered why the roads were so bad in spite of all this apparent
surplus of labor and were dubious of the explanation that surfacing
was expensive and it was impossible to maintain unsurfaced highways
in good condition. Only the hint that prisoners had been seen working
around the estates of the great Whig families or had been lent to some
enterprise operated by foreign capital brought knowing nods.
At seventeen possible disasters are not brooded over. I resolved
to be wary, and then dismissed thoughts of police, gangs and all
unpleasantness. The future was mine to make as my mother had insisted,
and I was taking the first steps in shaping it.
I started off briskly, passing at first through villages long familiar;
then, getting beyond the territory I had known all my life, I slowed
down often enough to gaze at something new and strange, or to wander
into wood or pasture for wild strawberries or early blueberries.
I covered less ground than I had intended by the time I found a
farmhouse, after inquiring at several others, where the woman was
willing to give me supper and even let me sleep in the barn in return
for splitting a sizable stack of logs into kindling and milking two
cows.
Exercise and hot food must have counteracted the excitement of the
day, for I fell asleep immediately and didnt waken till quite a while
after sunup. It was another warm, fine morning; soon the post road led,
not between shabby villages and towns or struggling farms, but past
the stone or brick walls of opulent estates. Now and then I caught a
glimpse between old, well-tended trees of magnificent houses either
a century old or built to resemble those dating from that prosperous
time. I could not but share the general dislike for the wealthy Whigs
who owned these places, their riches contrasting with the common
poverty and deriving from exploitation of the United States as a
colony, but I could not help enjoying the beauty of their surroundings.
The highway was better traveled here also; I passed other walkers,
quite a few wagons, a carriage or two, several peddlers and a number
of ladies and gentlemen on horseback. This was the first time I’d seen
women riding astride, a practice shocking to the sensitivities of
Wappinger Falls which also condemned the fashion, imported from the
Chinese Empire by way of England, of feminine trousers. Having learned
that women were bipedal, both customs seemed sensible to me.
I had the post road to myself for some miles between turns when I heard
a commotion beyond the stone wall to my left. This was followed by an
angry shout and shrill words impossible to distinguish. My progress
halted, I instinctively shifted my bundle to my left hand as though to
leave my right free for defence, but against what I had no idea.
The shouts came closer; a boy of about my own age scrambled frantically
over the wall, dislodging some of the smaller lichen-covered rocks on
top and sending them rolling into the ditch. He looked at me, startled,
then paused for a long instant at the road’s edge, undecided which way
to run.
He was barefoot and wore a jute sack as a shirt, with holes cut for his
arms, and ragged cotton pants. His face was little browner than my own
had often been at the end of a summer’s work under a burning sun.
He came to the end of indecision and started across the highway, legs
pumping high, head turned watchfully. A splendid tawny stallion cleared
the wall in a soaring jump, his rider bellowing, “There you are, you
damned black coon!”
He rode straight for the fugitive, quirt upraised, lips thickened and
eyes rolling in rage. The victim dodged and turned; in no more doubt
than I that the horseman meant to ride him down. He darted by me, so
close I heard the labored rasp of breathing.
The rider swerved, and he too twisted around me as though I were the
post at the far turn of a racecourse. Reflexively I put out my hand to
grab at the reins and stop the assault. Indeed, my fingers actually
touched the leather and grasped it for a fraction of a second before
they fell away.
Then I was alone in the road again as both pursued and pursuer vaulted
back over the fence. The whole scene of anger and terror could not have
lasted two minutes; I strained my ears to hear the shouts coming from
farther and farther away. Quiet fell again; a squirrel flirted his tail
and sped down one tree trunk and up another. The episode might never
have happened.
I shifted my bundle back and began walking again—less briskly now. My
legs felt heavy and there was an involuntary twitch in the muscles of
my arm.
Why hadnt I held on to the rein and delayed the hunter, at least long
enough to give his quarry a fair start? What had made me draw back?
It had not been fear, at least in the usual sense, for I knew I wasnt
timorous of the horseman. I was sure I could have dragged him down if
he had taken his quirt to me.
Yet I had been afraid. Afraid of interfering, of meddling in affairs
which were no concern of mine, of risking action on quick judgment.
I had been immobilized by the fear of asserting my sympathies, my
presumptions, against events.
Walking slowly down the road I experienced deep shame. I might, I could
have saved someone from hurt; I had perhaps had the power for a brief
instant to change the course of a whole life. I had been guilty of a
cowardice far worse than mere fear for my skin. I could have wept with
mortification—done anything, in fact, but turn back and try to rectify
my failure.
The rest of the day was gloomy as I alternately taunted and feebly
excused myself. The fugitive might have been a trespasser or a servant;
his fault might have been slowness, rudeness, theft or attempted
murder. Whatever it was, any retaliation the white man chose could be
inflicted with impunity. He would not be punished or even tried for it.
Popular opinion was unanimous for Negro emigration to Africa, voluntary
or forced; those who went westward to join the unconquered Sioux or
Nez Perce were looked upon as depraved. Any Negro who didnt embark for
Liberia or Sierra Leone, regardless of whether he had the fare or not,
deserved anything that happened to him in the United States.
It was because I held, somewhat vaguely, a stubborn refusal to accept
this conventional view, a refusal never precisely reasoned and little
more, perhaps, than romantic rebellion against my mother in favor of
my disreputable Grandfather Backmaker, that I suffered. I couldnt
excuse my failure on the grounds that action would have been considered
outrageous. It would not have been considered outrageous by me.
I pushed self-contempt at my passivity aside as best I could and strove
to recapture the mood of yesterday, succeeding to some extent as the
memory of the scene came back less insistently. I even tried pretending
the episode had perhaps not been quite as serious as it seemed, or that
the pursued had somehow in the end evaded the pursuer. I could not
make what had happened not happen; the best I could do was minimize my
culpability.
That night I slept a little way from the road and in the morning
started off at dawn. Although I was now little more than twenty miles
from the metropolis the character of the country had hardly changed.
Perhaps the farms were smaller and closer together, their juxtaposition
to the estates more incongruous. But traffic was continual now, with no
empty stretches on the roads, and the small towns had horse-drawn cars
running on iron tracks embedded in the cobbles.
It was late afternoon when I crossed Spuyten Duyvil Creek to Manhattan.
Between me and the city now lay a wilderness of squatters’ shacks
made of old boards, barrel-staves and other discarded rubbish. Lean
goats and mangy cats nosed through rubble heaps of broken glass and
earthenware demijohns. Mounds of garbage lay beside aimless creeks
struggling blindly for the rivers. As clearly as though it had been
proclaimed on signposts this was an area of outcasts and fugitives, of
men and women ignored and tolerated by the law so long as they kept
within the confines of their horrible slum.
Strange and repugnant as the place was, I hesitated to keep on going
and arrive in the city at nightfall, but it seemed unlikely there was a
place to sleep among the shacks. Once away from the order and sobriety
of the post road one could be lost in the squalid maze; undefined
threats of vaguely dreadful fates seemed to rise from it like vapors.
Then the fading light revealed the anomaly of a venerable mansion
set far back from the highway, with grounds as yet unusurped by the
encroaching stews. The house was in ruins; the surrounding gardens
lost in brush and weeds. Evidently a watchman or caretaker guarded its
forlorn dignity or had very recently abandoned it; I could not imagine
its remaining long without being entirely overrun otherwise.
It was almost fully dark as I made my way cautiously toward the
remains of an old summerhouse. Its roof was fallen in and it was
densely enclosed by ancient rosebushes whose thorns, I thought, when
they pricked my fingers as I struggled through them, ought to give
warning of any intruder. For weatherworthiness this shelter had little
advantage over the hovels, yet somehow the fact that it had survived
seemed to make it a more secure retreat.
I stretched out on the dank boards and slept fitfully, disturbed by
dreams that the old mansion was filled with people from a past time
who begged me to save them from the slumdwellers and their house from
being further ravaged. Brokenly I protested I was helpless—in true
dream manner I then became helpless, unable to move—that I could not
interfere with what had to happen; they moaned and wrung their hands
and faded away. Still, I slept, and in the morning the cramps in my
muscles and the aches in my bones disappeared in the excitement of the
remaining miles to the city.
And how suddenly it grew up around me, not as though it was a fixed
collection of buildings which I approached, but as if I stood still
while the wood and stone, iron and brick, sprang into being all about.
New York, in 1938, had a population of nearly a million, having grown
very slowly since the close of the War of Southron Independence.
Together with the half million in the city of Brooklyn this represented
by far the largest concentration of people in the United States, though
of course it could not compare with the great Confederate centers
of Washington, now including Baltimore and Alexandria, St Louis, or
Leesburg (once Mexico City).
The change from the country and the dreadful slums through which I
had passed was startling. Cable-cars whizzed northward as far as
Fifty-ninth Street on the west side and all the way to Eighty-seventh
on the east, while horse-cars furnished convenient crosstown
transportation every few blocks. Express steam trains ran through
bridged cuts on Madison Avenue, an engineering achievement of which
New Yorkers were vastly proud.
Bicycles, rare around Wappinger Falls, were thick as flies, darting
ahead and alongside drayhorses pulling wallowing vans, carts or
wagons. Prancing trotters drew private carriages, buggies, broughams,
victorias, hansoms, dogcarts or sulkies; neither the cyclists, coachmen
nor horses seemed overawed or discommoded by occasional minibiles
chuffing their way swiftly and implacably over cobblestones or asphalt.
Incredibly intricate traceries of telegraph wires swarmed overhead,
crossing and recrossing at all angles, slanting upward into offices
and flats or downward to stores, a reminder that no urban family with
pretensions to gentility would be without the clacking instrument in
the parlor, that every child learned the Morse code before he could
read. Thousands of sparrows considered the wires properly their own;
they perched and swung, quarreled and scolded on them, leaving only to
satisfy their voracity upon the steaming mounds of horsedung below.
The country boy who had never seen anything more metropolitan than
Poughkeepsie was tremendously impressed. Buildings of eight or ten
storeys were common, and there were many of fourteen or fifteen,
serviced by pneumatic English lifts, that same marvelous invention
which permitted the erection of veritable skyscrapers in Washington and
Leesburg.
Above them balloons moved gracefully through the air, guided and
controlled as skillfully as old-time sailing vessels. These were not
entirely novel to me; I had seen more of them than I had minibiles,
but never so many as here. In a single hour, gawking upward, I counted
seven, admiring how nicely calculated their courses were, for they
seldom came so low as to endanger lives beneath by having to throw out
sandbags in order to rise. That they could so maneuver over buildings
of greatly uneven height showed this to be the air age indeed.
Most exciting of all was the great number of people who walked, rode,
or merely stood around on the streets. It seemed hardly believable
so many humans could crowd themselves so closely. Beggars pleaded,
touts wheedled, peddlers hawked, newsboys shouted, bootblacks chanted.
Messengers pushed their way, loafers yawned, ladies shopped, drunks
staggered. For long moments I paused, standing stock still, not
thinking of going on, merely watching the spectacle.
How far I walked, how many different parts of the city I explored that
day, I have no idea. I felt I had hardly begun to fondle the sharp edge
of wonder when it was twilight and the gas lamps, lit simultaneously by
telegraph sparks, gleamed and shone on nearly every corner. Whatever
had been drab and dingy in daylight—and even my eyes had not been
blind to the dirt and decay—became in an instant magically enchanting,
softened and shadowed into mysterious beauty. I breathed the dusty air
with a relish I had never known in the country and felt I was inhaling
some elixir for the spirit.
But spiritual sustenance is not quite enough for a seventeen-year-old,
especially one who is beginning to be hungry and tired. I was
desperately anxious to hoard the three precious dollars in my pocket,
for I had little idea how to go about replacing them, once they were
spent. I could not do without eating, however, so I stopped in at the
first gaslit bakery, buying, after some consideration, a penny loaf,
and walked on through the entrancing streets, munching at it and
feeling like an historical character.
Now the fronts of the tinugraph lyceums were lit up by porters with
long tapers, so that they glowed yellow and inviting, each heralded
with a boldly lettered broadside or dashingly drawn cartoon advertising
the amusement to be found within. I was tempted to see for myself this
magical entertainment of pictures taken so close together they gave
the illusion of motion, but the lowest admission price was five cents.
Some of the more garish theaters, which specialized in the incredible
phonotos—tinugraphs ingeniously combined with a sound-producing machine
operated by compressed air, so that the pictures seemed not only to
move but to talk—actually charged ten or even fifteen cents for an
hour’s spectacle.
By this time I ached with tiredness; the insignificant bundle of shirt
and books had become a burden. I was pressed by the question of where
to sleep and began thinking more kindly than I would have believed
possible of last night’s slum. I didnt connect my need with the glass
transparencies behind which gaslight shone through the unpainted
letters of BEDS, ROOMS, or HOTEL, for my mind was hazily fixed on
some urban version of the inn at Wappinger Falls or the Poughkeepsie
Commercial House.
I became more and more confused as fatigue blurred impressions of still
newer marvels, so that I am not entirely sure whether it was one or a
succession of girls who offered delights for a quarter. I know I was
solicited by crimps for the Confederate Legion who operated openly in
defiance of United States law, and an incredible number of beggars
accosted me.
At last I thought of asking directions. But without realizing it I had
wandered from the thronged wooden or granite sidewalks of the brightly
lit avenues into an unpeopled, darkened area where the buildings were
low and frowning, where the flicker of a candle or the yellow of a
kerosene lamp in windows far apart were uncontested by any streetlights.
All day my ears had been pressed by the clop of hooves, the rattling
of iron tires or the puffing of minibiles; now the empty street was
unnaturally still. The suddenly looming figure of another walker seemed
the luckiest of chances.
“Excuse me, friend,” I said. “Can you tell me where’s the nearest inn,
or anywhere I can get a bed for the night cheap?”
I felt him peering at me. “Rube, huh? Much money you got?”
“Th—Not very much. That’s why I want to find cheap lodging.”
“OK, Reuben. Come along.”
“Oh, don’t trouble to show me. Just give me an idea how to get there.”
He grunted. “No trouble, Reuben. No trouble at all.”
Taking my arm just above the elbow in a firm grip be steered me along.
For the first time I began to feel alarm. However, before I could
attempt to shrug free he had shoved me into the mouth of an alley,
discernible only because its absolute blackness contrasted with the
relative darkness of the street.
“Wait—” I began.
“In here, Reuben. Soundest night’s sleep youve had in a long time. And
cheap—it’s free.”
I started to break loose and was surprised to find he no longer held
me. Before I could even begin to think, a terrific blow fell on the
right side of my head and I traded the blackness of the alley for the
blackness of insensibility.
_3._ _A MEMBER OF THE GRAND ARMY_
I was recalled to consciousness by a smell. More accurately a cacophony
of smells. I opened my eyes and shut them against the unbearable pain
of light; I groaned at the equally unbearable pain in my skullbones.
Feverishly and against my will I tried to identify the walloping odors
around me.
The stink of death and rottenness was thick. I knew there was an
outhouse—many outhouses—nearby. The ground I lay on, where it was not
stony, was damp with the water of endless dishwashings and launderings.
The noisomeness of offal suggested that the garbage of many families
had never been buried, but left to rot in the alley or near it. In
addition there was the smell of death, not the sweetish effluvium of
blood, such as any country boy who has helped butcher a bull-calf or
hog knows, but the unmistakable stench of corrupt, maggotty flesh.
Besides all this there was the spoor of humanity.
A new discomfort at last forced my eyes open for the second time. A
hard surface was pressing painful knobs into my exposed skin. I looked
and felt around me.
The knobs were the scattered cobbles of a fetid alley; not a foot away
was the cadaver of a dog, thoroughly putrescent; beyond him a drunk
retched and groaned. A trickle of liquid swill wound its way delicately
over the moldy earth between the stones. My coat, shirt, and shoes were
gone, so was the bundle with my books. There was no use searching my
pocket for the three dollars. I knew I was lucky the robber had left me
my pants and my life.
A middleaged man, at least he looked middleaged to my youthful
eye, regarded me speculatively over the head of the drunk. A pale,
elliptical scar interrupted the wrinkles on his forehead, its upper
point making a permanent part in his thin hair. Tiny red veins marked
his nose; his eyes were bloodshot.
“Pretty well cleaned yuh out, huh boy?”
I nodded—and then was sorry for the motion.
“Reward of virtue. Assuming you was virtuous, which I assume. Come to
the same end as me, stinking drunk. Only I still got my shirt. Couldnt
hock it no matter how thirsty I got.”
I groaned.
“Where yuh from boy? What rural—see, sober now—precincts miss you?”
“Wappinger Falls, near Poughkeepsie. My name’s Hodge Backmaker.”
“Well now, that’s friendly of you, Hodge. I’m George Pondible.
Periodic. Just tapering off.”
I hadnt an idea what Pondible was talking about. Trying to understand
made my head worse.
“Took everything, I suppose? Havent a nickel left to help a hangover?”
“My head,” I mumbled, quite superfluously.
He staggered to his feet. I slowly sat up, tenderly touching the lump
over my ear with my fingertips.
“Best thing—souse it in the river. Take more to fix mine.”
“But ... can I go through the streets like this?”
“Right,” he said. “Quite right.”
He stooped down and put one hand beneath the drunk, who murmured
unintelligibly. With the other he removed the jacket, a maneuver
betraying practice, for it elicited no protest from the victim. He
then performed the still more delicate operation of depriving him of
his shirt and shoes, tossing them all to me. They were a loathsome
collection of rags not fit to clean a manurespreader. The jacket was
torn and greasy, the pockets hanging like the ears of a dog; the shirt
was a filthy tatter, the shoes shapeless fragments of leather with
great gapes in the soles.
“It’s stealing,” I protested.
“Right. Put them on and let’s get out of here.”
The short walk to the river was through streets lacking the glamour of
those of the day before. The tenements were smokestreaked, with steps
between the parting bricks where mortar had fallen out; great hunks
of wall were kept in place only by the support of equally crazy ones
abutting. The wretched things I wore were better suited than Pondible’s
to this neighborhood, though his would have marked him tramp and
vagrant in Wappinger Falls.
The Hudson too was soiled, with an oily scum and debris, so that I
hesitated to dip even the purloined shirt, much less my aching head.
But urged on by Pondible I climbed down the slimy stones between two
docks and pushing the flotsam aside, ducked myself in the unappetizing
water.
“Fixes your head,” said Pondible with more assurance than accuracy.
“Now for mine.”
The sun was hot and the shirt dried on my back as we walked away from
the river, the jacket over my arm. Now that my mind was clearing my
despair grew rapidly; for a moment I wished I had waded farther into
the Hudson and drowned.
Admitting any plans I’d had were nebulous and impractical, they had
yet been plans of a kind, something in which I could put, or force,
my hopes. My appearance had been presentable, I had the means to keep
myself fed and sheltered for a few weeks at least. Now everything was
changed, any future was gone, literally knocked out of existence and I
had nothing to look forward to, nothing on which to exert my energies
and dreams. To go back to Wappinger Falls was out of the question, not
simply to dodge the bitterness of admitting defeat so quickly, but
because I knew how relieved my mother and father must have been to be
freed of my uselessness. Yet I had nothing to expect in the city except
starvation or a life of petty crime.
Pondible guided me into a saloon, a dark, secretive place, gaslit even
this early, with a steam piano tinkling the popular, mournful tune,
_Mormon Girl_:
There’s a girl in the state of Deseret
I love and I’m trying to for-get.
Forget her for my tired feet’s sake
Don’t wanna walk to the Great Salt Lake.
They ever build that railroad toooo the ocean
I’d return my Mormon girl’s devotion.
But the tracks stop short in Ioway....