A FAMILY of five boys and two girls--a mother who is to die, outworn
and done for at thirty--
A father, whose blood and whose temperament I am to carry to the end of
my days. How futile he was--in his physical life as a man in America in
his time--what dreams he must have had!
There was a dream he had of something magnificent--a lone rider on a
horse, dressed in shining armor and riding in a city before a vast
multitude of people--the beating of drums.... “The man--he comes!
Hurra!” People who live their lives by facts can never understand
such a fellow. “He comes! All hail!” What has he done? Well, never
mind--something grand, you may be sure of that. The dream that never
can become a fact in life can become a fact in fancy. “There he
goes.... ‘Teddy the magnificent’!” One both laughs and cries over the
memory of him.
The showman was there, in him--it flowered within him--and it is in me
too. When Carl Sandburg, the poet, long after said to me--speaking of
his lecturing and reading his poetry aloud, to make a living--“I give
’em a good show,” I understood what he meant and I understood the pride
in his voice when he said it. And then, later still, when I was writing
my own novel, “Poor White”; and when my boyhood friend, John Emerson,
gave me a job--doing publicity for movie people, in order that I might
have some income to write at my leisure--and for a time I saw a good
deal of that strange perverted band, I could understand them also. They
were people like my own father, robbed of their inheritance. In an odd
way they were my own people too.
John Emerson, a boyhood friend from my own village, had given me the
movie job, knowing I would be no good at it. He was a successful man,
a moneymaker, and was always planning out schemes for giving me money
and leisure. I went often to the movie studios and watched the men and
the women at work. Children, playing with dreams--dreams of an heroic
kind of desperado cowboy, doing good deeds at the business end of a
gun--dreams of an ever-virtuous womanhood walking amid vice--American
dreams--Anglo-Saxon dreams. How they wanted to be the things they were
always playing, and how impossible it all was!
My father lived in a land and in a time when what one later begins to
understand a little as the artist in man could not by any possibility
be understood by his fellows. Dreams then were to be expressed in
building railroads and factories, in boring gas wells, stringing
telegraph poles. There was room for no other dream and since father
could not do any of these things he was an outlaw in his community. The
community tolerated him. His own sons tolerated him.
As for the movie people I saw, they worked in a strange land of
fragments of dreams. The parts they were to play were given them in
fragments. Everything was fragmentary and unfinished. A kind of
insanity reigned. A “set” having been made, at a certain cost in
dollars and cents, half a dozen little bits of the dream they were to
enact were gone through--sometimes a dozen times--and the very piece
the actors were supposed to play they often did not know. A strange
greenish light fell down over them, and when they were not playing,
they sat stupidly hour after hour arrayed in their motley, often pawing
one another over listlessly with their hands and seeking outside the
studios--in drink, in dope, in futile love-making, in trying to carry
on an absurd pretense to being ladies and gentlemen of parts--seeking
in all these things to compensate themselves for being robbed of their
inheritance as artists--the right to pour their emotional energies into
their work.
The result of all this perversion of workmanship and of emotional
energy in the movie world seemed to me to reduce human beings to a
state that most of all suggested to my mind angleworms squirming in
a boy’s bait-can; and why any human being, under the conditions in
which they must work and with the materials with which they must work,
should want to be a movie actor or a writer for the movies is beyond my
comprehension.
But to return to my father. At least, there was little of the dull
listlessness of the angleworm in him. He created his own, “dope,”
inside himself, most of the time.
Once he actually set up as a showman. With a man of our town, named
Aldrich, who owned a broken-down horse and a spring wagon he went forth
to strut his own little hour upon the boards.
It was winter and there was no work for father to be had in our
town and I presume Aldrich also had no work. I remember him as
a quiet-looking middle-aged man with a red face. He also was a
house-painter, during the summer months, and he and father had by some
chance got hold of a secondhand magic-lantern outfit.
They were to show at country schoolhouses in the farming districts of
northern Ohio. There was to be a sheet hung across the end of the room,
near the place where the teacher’s desk would sit, and on this would be
thrown certain pictures Aldrich had got hold of.
Those of you who have lived in the farming sections of mid-America,
in the days before the movies, will understand that show. There would
be a picture of Niagara Falls--taken in the winter--Niagara Falls
frozen into a series of ice bridges and with small black figures of men
running over the bridges.
These, you are to understand, however, would not be moving men. They
would be frozen still and still--petrified men with legs upraised to
take a step, and holding them there--to the end of time--forever.
Then there would be a picture of President McKinley and one of Abe
Lincoln and Grover Cleveland--one of an emigrant wagon going across the
Western plains to California, with Indians on ponies circling in the
middle distance--a picture of the driving of the last railroad spike,
when the railroad builders coming from the West had met the railroad
builders coming from the East--somewhere out on the plains. The spike
would be a golden one, as everyone in the audience would know, but in
the picture it would be black. Several men with silk hats on their
heads stood about while a workman drove the spike. The hammer was
upraised. It stayed there. In the background was an engine, and several
Indians wrapped in blankets and looking sad, as though to say: “This
cooks our bacon.”
Most of the pictures would be in dead blacks and whites, but there
would be, at the very end, in colors, the old flag floating--that last
of all. It was as good for a hand then as it was later when George
Cohan got rich and became famous with it, and father and Aldrich
evidently knew it would “go.”
The admission charge would be ten cents.
As I have said, Aldrich was a red-faced mild middle-aged appearing man.
What things will not such quiet-looking fellows sometimes do? No one in
the world would ever be understood at all if your mild quiet-looking
man did not have, buried away in him somewhere, the possibility of
being almost any known sort of a fool.
In the arrangement that had been made father was to be the actor--a
comedian. He was to sing certain songs.
First, a few pictures from the magic lantern; then a song by father,
with a little dance. Then more pictures and another song; and at last
the colored pictures, ending with the flag flying. The inference might
be that the flag, at any rate, had survived the ordeal.
And a dream of a harvest of dimes too. As for expense--well, let
us say, a dollar for the use of the country schoolhouse and enough
firewood to heat it for the evening. A boy would build the fire for the
chance to be admitted free; and the horse and the two men would be
fed at the bounty of some farmer. Father would have promised that--he
would have been very sure of being able to accomplish that--would
have depended upon his personal charm. I can fancy him explaining to
Aldrich, or rather not explaining. He would smile and throw out his
hands in a peculiar way. “You leave that to me, just you leave that to
me.”
And his hopes would not be unjustified either. What a boon for a quiet,
dull, farming family in the winter, to have such a one light down upon
it! He and his companion would have to stay in the one school district
for two or three days. Arrangements would have to be made about getting
the schoolhouse, and he and Aldrich would have to drive around the
neighborhood and distribute the play bills:
AT THE SCHOOLHOUSE
FRIDAY EVENING
MAJOR IRWIN ANDERSON
THE ACTOR
IN SONG AND DANCE
MARVELOUS MAGIC-LANTERN SHOW
A VISIT TO ALL THE WONDERS
OF THE WORLD
10 CENTS
And then the evenings in the farmhouses! Aldrich would sit like an
Indian in his corner by the farmhouse stove; and he must have been
saying to himself constantly: “Now, how did I get into this? How did I
get into this?”
The farmer’s wife, the hired man and perhaps a grown daughter would be
there and there would be a maiden of uncertain age--the farm woman’s
sister, who had never married and so just stayed about and worked for
her board--and, in a corner, two or three towheaded boys who would
presently have to go off to bed.
All the others silent, but father talking and talking. An actor in the
house! It was wonderful, like having Charlie Chaplin to dinner with you
nowadays!
Father was in his element now. This was pie for him. No hungry sons
about, no sick wife, no grocery bills or rent to be paid. This the
golden age--timeless; there was no past, no future--the quiet,
unsophisticated people in the room were putty to his hands.
Surely there was something magnificent in my father’s utter disregard
for the facts of life. In the picture I have of him--that is to say in
my fancy--in the picture I have of him during his pilgrimages of that
winter I always see his partner in the affair, Aldrich, fast asleep in
a chair.
But the farmer and his wife, and the wife’s sister--they are not
asleep. The unmarried woman in the house is, let us say, thirty-eight.
She is tall and gaunt and has several teeth missing and her name is
Tilly. It would be bound to be Tilly.
And when father has been in the house two hours he is calling her
“Tilly,” and the farmer he is addressing familiarly as “Ed.”
After the evening meal the farmer has had to go to his stable to look
at his stock, to bed the stock down for the night, and father has gone
with him. Father runs about the stable holding the lantern. He boasts
about the horses and cattle in his father’s stables when he was a boy.
Whether that early home of his ever existed anywhere but in his fancy
is doubtful.
What a fellow, wanting to be loved, was my father!
And now he is in the farmhouse sitting room and it is late evening and
the towheaded children have gone regretfully to bed. There is something
in the air of the room, a kind of suspense, a feeling that something
is about to happen. Father has so carefully worked that up. He would
do it by silences, by sudden breakings out into suppressed laughter,
and then by quickly looking sad. I have seen him do the thing, oh, many
times. “My dear people--you wait! There is something inside me that is
wonderful, and if you will only be patient you will presently see or
hear it come forth,” he seemed to be saying.
He is by the fire with his legs spread out and his hands are in his
trousers pockets. He stares at the floor. He is smoking a cigar. In
some ways he always managed to keep himself supplied with the little
comforts of life.
And he has so placed his chair that he can look at Tilly, who has
retired into her corner, without anyone else in the room seeing the
look. Now she is sitting in deep shadows, far away from the kerosene
lamp with which the room is lighted and as she sits there, half lost in
the darkness, there is suddenly something--a haunting kind of beauty
hangs over her.
She is a little excited by something father has managed in some
indescribable way to do to the very air of the room. Tilly also was
once young and must at some time have had her grand moment in life.
Her moment was not very prolonged. Once, when she was a young woman,
she went to a country dance and a man, who dealt in horses, took a
fancy to her and carried her home after the dance in his buggy. He
was a tall man with a heavy mustache and she--it was a moonlight
night in October--she grew sad and wistful. The horse dealer half
intended--well, he had been buying horses for a trucking company
at Toledo, Ohio, had secured all he wanted and was leaving the
neighborhood on the next day--the thing he felt during that evening
later quite went out of his mind.
As for father he is, at the moment perhaps thinking of mother, when
she was young and lovely and was a bound girl in just such another
farmhouse, and surely he wanted something lovely for mother then as
he does for Tilly now. I have no doubt at all that father always
wanted lovely things for people--to happen to people--and that he had
also an absurd and never-dying faith in himself--that he was, in some
inscrutable way, appointed to be the bearer of lovely things to obscure
people.
However, there is something else in his mind also. Is he not the fellow
who, by his personal charm, is to earn for himself, Aldrich and the
horse, board, a bed, a welcome--without pay--until the show is pulled
off at the schoolhouse? That is his business now and this is his hour.
In fancy I can hear the tale he would now begin telling. There was that
one about his escape from the guards when he was a Union soldier in the
Civil War and was being marched off to a Southern prison camp. He would
no doubt use that. It was a bull’s-eye story and always hit the mark!
Oh, how often and under what varying circumstances has not my father
escaped from prisons! Benvenuto Cellini or the Count of Monte Cristo
had nothing on him.
Yes, the story he would now tell would be that once when it rained and
the Union prisoners, father among them--some forty men in all--were
being marched off along a road in the deep mud--
That was indeed a night of adventure! It was a tale he loved telling,
and what realistic touches he could put into it: the rain that wet
the prisoners to the skin--the cold--the chattering teeth--the groans
of weary men--the closeness of the dark forest on either hand--the
steady weary chug-chug of the feet of the prisoners in the mud--the
line of guards at either side of the road, with the guns over their
shoulders--the curses of the Rebel guards when they stumbled in the
darkness.
What a night of weary anguish on the part of the prisoners! When they
stopped to rest the guards went into a house and left the prisoners to
stand outside in the rain, or lie on the bare ground, guarded by part
of the company. If any died of exposure--well, there would be that many
less men to feed when they were got into the Southern prison camp.
And now, after many days and nights, marching thus, the souls of the
prisoners were sick with weariness. A dreary desolated look would come
upon father’s face as he spoke of it.
They marched steadily along in the deep mud and the rain. How cold
the rain was! Now and then, in the darkness, a dog barked, far away
somewhere. There was a break in the solid line of timber along the road
and the men marched across the crest of a low hill. There are lights
to be seen now, in distant farmhouses, far away across a valley--a few
lights like stars shining.
The story-teller has got his audience leaning forward in their chairs.
Outside the farmhouse in which they sit a wind begins to blow and a
broken branch from a near-by tree is blown against the side of the
house. The farmer, a heavy, stolid-looking man, starts a little and his
wife shivers as with cold and Tilly is absorbed--she does not want to
miss a word of the tale.
And now father is describing the darkness of the valley below the
hill and the lights seen, far off. Will any of the little company of
prisoners ever see their own homes again, their wives, their children,
their sweethearts? The lights of the farmhouses in the valley are like
stars in the sky of a world turned upside down.
The Rebel commander of the guard has issued a warning and a command:
“It’s pretty dark here, and if any of the Yanks make a stir to move out
of the centre of the road fire straight into the mass of them. Kill
them like dogs.”
A feeling creeps over father. He is, you see, a southern man himself,
a man of the Georgia hills and plains. There is no law that shall
prevent his having been born in Georgia, although to-morrow night it
may be North Carolina or Kentucky. But to-night his birthplace shall be
Georgia. He is a man who lives by his fancy and to-night it shall suit
his fancy and the drift of his tale to be a Georgian.
And so he, a prisoner of the Rebels, is being marched over the low
hill, with the lights from distant farmhouses shining like stars in
the darkness below, and suddenly a feeling comes to him, a feeling such
as one sometimes has when one is alone in one’s own house at night.
You have had the feeling. You are alone in the house and there are no
lights and it is cold and dark. Everything you touch--feel with your
hands in the darkness--is strange and at the same time familiar. You
know how it is.
The farmer is nodding his head and his wife has her hands gripped,
lying in her lap. Even Aldrich is awake now. The devil! Father has
given this particular tale a new turn since he told it last. “This is
something like.” Aldrich leans forward to listen.
And there is the woman Tilly, in the half darkness. See, she is quite
lovely now, quite as she was on that evening when she rode with the
horse dealer in the buggy! Something has happened to soften the long,
harsh lines of her face and she might be a princess sitting there now
in the half-light.
Father would have thought of that. It would be something worth while
now to be a tale-teller to a princess. He stops talking to consider for
a moment the possibilities of the notion, and then with a sigh gives it
up.
It is a sweet notion but it won’t do. Tale-teller to a princess, eh!
Evenings in a castle and the prince has come in from hunting in a
forest. The tale-teller is dressed in flashy clothes and with a crowd
of courtiers, ladies in waiting--whatever hangers-on a princess has--is
sitting by an open fire. There are great, magnificent dogs lying about
too.
Father is considering whether or not it is worth trying sometime--the
telling of a tale of himself in just that rôle. An idea crosses his
mind. The princess has a lover who creeps one night into the castle and
the prince has become aware of his presence, is told of his presence
by a trusty varlet. Taking his sword in hand the prince creeps through
the dark hallways to kill his rival, but father has warned the lovers
and they have fled. It afterward comes to the ears of the prince that
father has protected the lovers and he--that is to say, father--is
compelled to flee for his life. He comes to America and lives the life
of an exile, far from the splendor to which he has been accustomed.
Father is thinking whether it would be worth trying--the telling of
such a fable of his former existence, some evening at some farmhouse
where he and Aldrich are staying; and for a moment a sort of George
Barr McCutcheon light comes into his eyes, but with a sigh he gives it
up.
It wouldn’t go over--not in a farmhouse in northern Ohio, he concludes.
He returns to the tale, that so evidently is going over; but, before he
resumes, casts another glance at Tilly. “Oh, Tilly, thou dear lovely
one,” he sighs inwardly.
The farmhouse is in the North and he has set himself forth as a
southerner enlisted in the northern army. An explanation is in order,
and he makes it, with a flourish.
Born a southerner, the son of a proud southern family, he was sent to
school, to a college in the North. In college he had a roommate, a dear
fellow from the state of Illinois. The “roommate’s father was owner and
editor of the _Chicago Tribune_” he explains.
And during one summer, a few years before the breaking out of the war,
he went on a visit to the home of his Illinois friend, and while he
was there he, with his friend, went to hear the famous Lincoln-Douglas
debates. It was odd, but the facts were that the young fellow from
Illinois became enamored of the brilliant Douglas while he--well, to
tell the truth, his own heart was wrung by the simplicity and nobility
of the rail-splitter, Lincoln. “Never shall I forget the nobility of
that countenance,” he says in speaking of it. He appears about to cry
and does in fact take a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his eyes.
“Oh, the noble, the indescribable effect upon my boyhood heart of the
stirring words of that man. There he stood like a mighty oak of the
forest breasting the storms. ‘A nation cannot exist half slave and half
free. A house divided against itself cannot stand,’ he said, and his
words thrilled me to the very marrow of my being.”
And then father would have described his homecoming after that terrific
experience. War was coming on and all the South was aflame.
One day at table in his southern home, with his brothers, his father
and mother and his beautiful and innocent young sister sitting with
him, he dared to say something in defense of Lincoln.
What a storm was then raised! The father getting up from his place
at table pointed a trembling finger at his son. All eyes, except
only those of his younger sister, were turned on him in wrath and
disapproval. “Mention that hated name again in this house and I will
shoot you like a dog, though you are my son,” his father said, and the
son got up from the table and went away, filled with the sense of
filial duty that would not let a born southerner answer his own father,
but nevertheless determined to stick to the faith aroused in him by the
words of the noble Lincoln.
And so he had ridden away from his southern home in the night and had
finally joined the Union forces.
What a night--riding away from his father’s house in the darkness,
leaving his mother behind, leaving all tradition behind, condemning
himself to be an outlaw in the hearts of those he had always loved--for
the sake of duty!
One can imagine Aldrich blinking a little and rubbing his hands
together. “Teddy is laying it on rather thick,” he no doubt says to
himself; but he must nevertheless have been filled with admiration.
However, let us, who are together revisiting the scene of my father’s
triumph on that evening in the farmhouse long ago, be not too much in
fear for the heart of the woman Tilly. At any rate her physical self,
if not her heart, was safe.
Although there can be little doubt that the presence of the virgin
Tilly, sitting in the half darkness, and the kindliness of the shadows
that had temporarily enhanced her failing beauty, may have had a good
deal to do with father’s talent on that evening, I am sure nothing else
ever came of it. Father, in his own way, was devoted to mother.
And he had his own way of treasuring her. Did he not treasure always
the lovelier moments of her?
He had found her in a farmhouse when he was by way of being something
of a young swell himself and she was a bound girl; and she was then
beautiful--beautiful without the aid of shadows cast by a kerosene
lamp.
In reality she was the aristocrat of the two, as the beautiful
one is always the aristocrat; and oh, how little beauty in woman
is understood! The popular magazine covers and the moving-picture
actresses have raised the very devil with our American conception of
womanly beauty.
But father had delicacy, of a sort, of that you may be quite sure; and
do you not suppose that Tilly, in the Ohio farmhouse, sensed something
of his attitude toward what fragment of beauty was left in her, and
that she loved him for that attitude--as I am sure my own mother also
did?
My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms, into the
arms of the others, over the top of the wall.
And now the weary prisoners with their escort have come down off the
hillside to a valley and are approaching a large old southern mansion,
standing back from the road they have been traveling, and the officers
in charge of the prisoners--there were two of them--command the guards
to turn in at a gate that leads to the house.
There is an open space before the house where the prisoners are
gathered and the ground--covered with firm turf during most of the
year--has, under the continuous rains, become soft and yielding. Where
each prisoner stands a puddle gathers about his feet.
The house is dark, but for a single light at the back, and one of the
officers begins shouting. A large pack of hunting dogs have come from a
shed, hidden away in the darkness somewhere, and are gathered growling
and barking in a half circle about the prisoners.
One of the dogs rushes through the mass of prisoners and with a glad
cry leaps upon father, and all the others follow so that guards are
compelled to drive the dogs off, kicking them and using the butts of
their guns. Lights are lit inside the house. The people are astir.
You will understand what a moment this was for father. By one of those
strange streaks of fate--which he is very careful to explain to his
audience happen much more frequently in life than one imagines--he had
been led, as a prisoner on his way to a southern prison pen, right to
the door of his own father’s house.
What a moment indeed! Being a prisoner he has of course no idea how
long he will be kept there. Thank God, he has grown a thick, bushy
beard since he left home.
As to his fate--if the prisoners are kept in the yard until daylight
comes--well, he knows his own mother.
His own father, old man though he is, has gone off to the war and
all his brothers have gone; and his mother has come from a proud old
southern family, one of the oldest and proudest. Had she known he was
there among the prisoners she would have seen him hanged without a
protest and would herself have lent a hand at pulling the rope.
* * * * *
Ah, what had not my father given for his country! Where will his equal
be found, even among the whole world’s heroes? In the eyes of his
own mother and father, in his brother’s eyes, in the eyes of all the
branches and ramifications of his southern family, in the eyes of
all--except only one unsophisticated and innocent girl--he had brought
everlasting disgrace on one of the proudest names of the South.
Indeed it was just because he, the son, had gone off to fight with the
northern army that his father, a proud old man of sixty, had insisted
on being taken into the southern army. “I have a strong old frame and I
insist,” he had said. “I must make good the loss to my Southland for my
own son, who has proven himself a dog and a renegade.”
And so the old man had marched off with a gun on his shoulder,
insisting on being taken as a common soldier and put where he could
face constant and terrible danger, and the seeds of an undying hatred
against the son had been planted deep in the hearts of the whole family.
The dullest mind surely will comprehend now what a position father was
in when, in answer to the shouts of the officer, lights began to appear
all through the house. Was it not a situation to wring tears from the
heart of a man of stone! As for a woman’s heart--one can scarcely speak
of the matter.
And in the house, before father’s eyes, there was one--a pure
and innocent southern girl of rare beauty--a pearl of womanhood
in fact--rarest example of the famed spotless womanhood of the
Southland--his younger sister--the only woman child of the family.
You see, as father would so carefully have explained that evening in
the farmhouse, he did not care so much for his own life. That had
already been given to his country, he would have said proudly.
But, as you will understand quickly enough, had his presence among the
prisoners been discovered, his proud mother--eager to wipe out the only
stain on the family escutcheon--would at once have insisted that he
be hanged to the doorpost of the very house in which he was born, her
own hand pulling at the rope that was to jerk him up, into the arms of
death--to make white again the family escutcheon, you understand.
Could a proud southern woman do less?
And in the event of such an outcome to the adventures of the night, see
how that younger sister--the love of his life at that time--see how she
would have suffered.
There she was, the pure and innocent girl, the one who understood
nothing, to be sure, of the import of his decision to stick to the old
flag and fight for the land of Washington and Lincoln, and who, in her
innocent way, just loved him. On that day at his father’s table, when
he--so deeply affected by the Lincoln-Douglas debates--had dared say
a word for the cause of the North, it had been her eyes and her eyes
alone that had looked at him with love, when all the other eyes of his
family had looked at him with hatred and loathing.
And she would just be bursting into womanhood now. The aroma of
awakening womanhood would be lying over her as perfume over the opening
rosebud.
Think of it! There she, the pure and innocent one, would have to stand
and see him hanged. A blight would be brought down upon her young life
and her head would, ever after that night, be bowed in lonely and
silent sorrow. That brave pure and just girl made old before her time.
Ah; well might it be that in one night the mass of golden locks, that
now covered her head like a cloud just kissed by the evening sun--that
very golden hair might be turned as white as snow!
I can, in fancy, hear my father saying the words I have set down here
and coming very near to crying himself as he said them. At the moment
he would have believed without question the story he himself was
telling.
* * * * *
And now the front door to the old southern mansion is thrown open
and there, in the doorway facing the prisoners in the rain, stands a
gigantic young negro--my father’s own body servant before he left home.
(Father stops the flow of his talk long enough to explain how he and
the negro boy, as lads together, had fought, wrestled, hunted, fished
and lived together like two brothers. I will not go into that, however.
Any professional southerner will tell you all about it, if you care
to hear. It would have been the most trite part of father’s evening’s
effort.)
Anyway, there the gigantic young negro stands in the doorway and he is
holding in his hand a candle. Back of him stands my grandmother and
back of her the young and innocent sister.
The figure of father’s mother is erect. She is old but she is yet tall
and strong. One of the officers explains to her that he and his men
have been on an all-night march, taking the crowd of Yankee prisoners
to a prison camp, and asks for the hospitality of the house. Being a
southerner himself he knows that southern hospitality can never fail,
even at midnight. “A bite to eat and a cup of hot coffee in the name of
our Southland,” he asks.
It is granted, of course. The proud woman beckons him and his brother
officer into the house and herself steps out into the cold, drizzling
rain.
She has ordered the young negro to stand on the porch, holding the
candle aloof, and now, marching across the wet lawn, approaches the
prisoners. The southern guards have stepped aside, bowing low before
southern womanhood, and she goes near the prisoners and looks at them,
as well as one may in the uncertain light. “I have a curiosity to see
some of the unmannerly dogs of Yanks,” she says, leaning forward and
staring at them. She is very near her own son now but he has turned his
face away and is looking at the ground. Something however causes him to
raise his head just as she, to express more fully her contempt, spits
at the men.
A little speck of her white spittle lands upon father’s thick, tawny
beard.
And now his mother has gone back into the house and it is again dark on
the lawn in front. The Rebel guards are relieved--two at a time--to go
to the kitchen door, where they are given hot coffee and sandwiches.
And once his young sister, she of the tender heart, tries to creep to
where the prisoners stand in the darkness. She is accompanied by an old
negro woman and has planned to give food aid and comfort to the weary
men but is prevented. Her mother has missed her inside the house and
coming to the door calls to her. “I know your tender heart,” she says,
“but it shall not be. The teeth of no Yankee dog shall ever bite into
food raised on the land of your father. It shall not happen, at least
while your mother is alive to prevent.”