CORRA HARRIS
They rise before dawn, gentle souls who find peace in the labor of their
hands and in their astonishing faith. They are the silent companions of
their husbands. People do not talk much in the valley because there is
not much to say. They know the weather, a few psalms, a few golden texts
and a few hymns by heart. They also know each other the same way, which
is a good deal more than husbands and wives can always claim in this
place.
“I do not know a single lazy woman in the valley nor one who is
unhappily married. They worry some over the bees when they swarm
inopportunely and over the chickens when they take the roup, and over
the children when they have a bad cold or do not learn their Sunday
school lessons, but they do not worry over their husbands. They are not
angry with mankind. As near as I can make out they want better schools
and they long for a closer walk with God. But I never knew one to want a
limousine or a servant to do her work or a nurse for her baby.
“And you could not put one of these fashionable split corkscrew skirts
upon any of them. Call it what you please, evil-mindedness or modesty,
but they are as far removed from the fashionable clothes one sees upon
women in New York as these women would appear to them removed from
decency and thrift.
“I do not know how long such a state of sweetness and homely goodness
will last there. The feet of youth take hold upon the ways of the world.
When I return this spring I may see some girl at the singing school on
Sunday afternoon wearing a tight skirt. But I am thankful I have seen
what I have of the simple, direct living of these men and women in the
valley, whose only problem is to perform the day’s work well, to love
one another and to believe in God and His mercies.”
Thus Corra Harris in the spring of 1914 in New York. It is almost
superfluous to say that. No other man or woman of the writers of this
country could have uttered the words, because no other American writer
has that homely vigor and Biblical phraseology, nor that peculiar
directness of uttered thought which can express in one breath the
longing for better schools and a closer walk with God, which can
contrast the things of the flesh and the things of the spirit in the
same sentence. From the day when the first installment of _A Circuit
Rider’s Wife_ appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_ it was manifest
that America had a new writer of distinction.
The distinction is not so much “literary” as national. Corra Harris’s
work could be nothing but American. It is racy of the soil, and crusted
with unusual and deep personal experience of life. The experience was
externally of a rare sort but spiritually of a wide and common and very
profound sort. It was an intensive cultivation of the soul that she
shared with us and we who had had a taste of that experience were able
to understand and rejoice in it. For the depths of life are spiritual
depths. They are not gained by travel be it ever so wide, nor by
exciting worldly adventures. They are plumbed at home, by the fireside,
at the supper table, in bed on sleepless nights, in the snatched
intervals of exhausting and ordinary toil, in the room where a father
lies dying, in the room where two young people are confessing love, in
the room where a child is being born.
Corra Harris was born on a typical Southern cotton plantation owned by
her father, Tinsley Tucker White, at Farm Hill, Elbert county, Georgia.
Her mother had been Mary Elizabeth Matthews. The girl spent her early
years on the plantation and was educated at home. Occasionally she made
trips to town behind two white mules. When she was 14 she was sent to a
local seminary. A few years there joined to the desultory teaching at
home gave her what was considered in the South of the late ’70s and
early ’80s (she was born March 17, 1869) a very respectable
education--for a girl.
At 17 she was married to Lundy Howard Harris, a young minister. It was
his first few years on a Methodist circuit which gave Mrs. Harris the
material from which she was able later to construct _A Circuit Rider’s
Wife_. After two or three years of preaching Mr. Harris became professor
of Greek in Emory College, Oxford, Georgia. Then for the first time his
wife began to write, using the pen name of Sidney Erskine. She met with
no success until she was 25. Then Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta
_Constitution_, published in the _Sunny South_ (owned by the
_Constitution_) a story of hers called _Darwinkle’s Dream_. It was a
gruesome story and Mr. Howell made Mrs. Harris rewrite some of it to
“give the poor fellow [the hero] a better chance.” Gruesome, yes;
nevertheless Mrs. Harris’s friend, Joel Chandler Harris, creator of
Uncle Remus, laughed over what he called the humor of it!
In 1899 Mrs. Harris had a series of articles on the South’s problems
accepted by the _Independent_ magazine. Steady progress, thereafter; she
became a contributor to the _Saturday Evening Post_ and with the
publication of _A Circuit Rider’s Wife_ reached her deserved place. Her
husband died on September 18, 1910. They had been married since 1887.
Mrs. Harris’s home is in the “valley” we have heard her describe, not so
far from Atlanta and near Pine Log, in Bartow county, Georgia. It is a
long, low log cabin with a forest of cathedral palms in front of it.
From the west you look down slopes to the crops Mrs. Harris grows, for
she is a farmer. The living room around which the house is built was an
Indian cabin over a hundred years old. The dining room is in back of the
living room and is decorated in yellow browns. Isma Dooley, writing an
article which appeared in a number of Southern newspapers, completes the
picture:
“The marigolds on the table are a harmonious touch and, as I write, the
whole cabin is gold-lighted by the afterglow of the wonderful sunset.
Mrs. Harris’s own room and sleeping porch are on the first floor. The
guest rooms are up a granite rustic stairway--cozy apartments done all
in blue. A rustic passageway leads to the kitchen and servants’
quarters, all of log construction. Mrs. Harris’s little study is another
adjunct of the cabin and is in the shade of stately pine trees. There
are no neighbors within a mile, but Mrs. Harris has a large acquaintance
in the county and is devoted to the people and their interests. She told
me many things about them as we took a long drive this afternoon behind
her stout mule team Blythe and Cobb and driven by Hicks, a colored
retainer. [The mules are apparently named in honor of fellow
contributors to the _Saturday Evening Post_.]
“‘Good evening, Mrs. Pliney,’ said Mrs. Harris, as she greeted an old
woman sitting out in front of a typical little country house.
“The woman smiled and responded. ‘When I passed here the other day,’
said Mrs. Harris, ‘and commented on the cosmos blossoms in her yard, she
remarked, “Neighbor, you should see them when the Wind blows the
blossoms; they look like butterflies.”
“‘The next morning I heard she had shot that day at one of her
neighbors! It shows that a poetic soul and desperation often go
together.’
“Here Hicks interrupted in apologetic tones: ‘But, Miss Corra, the man
she shot at was all the time a-teasin’ her dog.’”
At the time of Miss Dooley’s visit Mrs. Harris had been for some weeks
endeavoring to buy a saddle horse. The author had looked at about
twenty-five animals and was contemplating the purchase of a young and
beautiful creature having every virtue and grace a horse can have.
“But,” Mrs. Harris remarked, “when I asked the man the price of this
paragon he said $100!”
We could wish there were space in this book for the reproduction of some
of the letters Mrs. Harris has received since she began writing. They
are touching and amusing and altogether extraordinary. Her book _In
Search of a Husband_, for instance, brought her an epistle from a young
man of 27 who was in search of a wife. Though he had entered the
Presbyterian ministry at 15 and had worked his way through college and
the theological seminary he was “full of fun” and liked “good shows,
music and baseball. I suppose the worst habit I have is smoking.” He
explained naïvely: “I have visited every place of interest in North
America.... With all my experience, all my studies and all my theories I
ask myself again and again: Do I know what love is?”
Mrs. Harris endeavors to make some answer to all such letters but it
must have been a baffling task to frame a reply to a reader whose letter
began:
“Often I have noticed that in your metaphers you employ terms used in
techical grammer, for instance, in your Circuit Rider’s Widow:--‘He has
never risen above haveing his virtue conjugated in the subjunctive
mood.’ I naturally inferred that what he did or said was contrary to
fact, as that conveyed the substance of the definition of the
subjunctive mood. But, you follow up with may, can, must, etc., signs of
the Potential mood.”
This perplexed and perplexing inquirer went on to praise Mrs. Harris’s
character drawing.
It is not her character drawing, penetrative and uncanny as that is--a
man once growled: “This woman knows too much!”--that most distinguishes
Mrs. Harris but her irony, her corrosive sanity! Take her plain talk on
eugenics.
“During the last ten years that I have been coming to New York I have
heard one subject discussed more than any other, more than art,
literature, science, politics, society, religion, industry or commerce.
This is ‘sex,’ and the people whom I meet are not decadent. They all
harrow it, dissect it with an openness, a Tristram Shandy frankness that
would imply they have no personal sense of gender, male or female.
“One very distinguished man who is interested in the problem of sex, not
for, but I should say out of the working girls, said this to me:
“‘We want to give these girls the right start sexually.’ (It is what
nature always gives them, by the way!) ‘We are trying to inform them of
everything concerning sex. Of everything--destroy their curiosity, you
know.’
“‘How will you do it?’ I asked.
“‘Why with lectures upon it, with plays dramatizing its dangers, and
these moving pictures of the white slave traffic. These are some of the
means we are employing.’
“‘I suppose you never thought of marriage,’ I suggested. ‘That is
nature’s method.’
“‘Oh, marriage, but you see they can’t marry. Men won’t have them; not
enough men anyhow. Besides a great many of them ought not to marry the
kind of men they can and do marry. These very unions breed most of our
criminals.’
“There you have a sample of the intelligence of this place. It is so
wrong from beginning to end that no problem of living in it can be
solved right. Everybody must therefore beg the question. These girls are
not fit to become wives, these men are not fit to become husbands, so
they are to be saved by informing them of what they miss in marriage. I
doubt if it saves them.
“However, they have got as far as naming the problem ‘eugenics.’ They
hold conventions around about this place to decide how a thoroughbred
human animal can be produced. Laws are being passed, or framed for
passing, which require a physician’s certificate of health from the
contracting parties in marriage. It sounds right. It would be right if
such laws could be enforced. But they cannot be. You might as well pass
a law that smoke shall not rise, that stones shall not fall. When two
people love one another that way they will marry whatever their physical
rating may be.”
When _A Circuit Rider’s Widow_ was published it was interpreted in some
quarters as an attack on Methodism or upon the Methodist Church, South;
there were also allegations that Mrs. Harris had been blasphemous in
certain passages. The charge of blasphemy was foolish and the conclusion
respecting Mrs. Harris’s attitude toward Methodism must be modified upon
reading her very direct statement:
“I believe in the Methodist church, its doctrines, the liberty and
breadth of its original purpose. I believe in Felix Wade [the central
figure in _A Circuit Rider’s Widow_] as the preacher to come who will
deliver this church from what is almost a military system of
government, menacing to its spiritual power. In short, I believe in the
democracy of the religion of Jesus Christ. Such spirituality cannot be
properly interpreted by an autocracy nor by a commercialized
civilization which we are very rapidly developing in this country.”
The reader will be mindful, reading the last sentence, that it was
uttered in 1916, a year before America’s entrance into the war against
Germany.
Mrs. Harris’s books require reading, not critical discussion. And having
read them the criticism ensuing will not be literary criticism but a
criticism of life--which literature is sometimes held to be. In the
valley she lives with her daughter Faith, now Mrs. Harry Leech. It
should be noted that the acknowledged original of Susan Walton in her
book, _The Co-Citizens_, was Mrs. William H. Felton, Georgia’s pioneer
suffragist, a woman much honored for her public spirit and for public
services rendered as a private person, notably the production at the
right moments of a scrapbook in which were pasted all sorts of bits of
information about officeholders and candidates. Mrs. Felton collected
these items for years. She was over 80 when Mrs. Harris wrote her into
_The Co-Citizens_ and although she lived in Cartersville, near “the
valley,” the two women did not meet until after the publication of the
novel.
No better close for this chapter than its opening--Mrs. Harris’s own
words! She is picturing her life--and quite as vividly herself--to Isma
Dooley. It is after her visit to the European battlefronts. She revives
not what she saw of horror and struggle there, but what she has known of
pettiness and greatness in her peaceful home:
“I was so worried over the feuds between the brethren and the choir and
my own fault-finding spirit that I used to go round behind the church
sometimes and sit down among the graves to comfort myself.
“We have buried our people there for sixty years. Men who never could
get on with each other in the church are lying side by side, like
brothers in the same bed. I say it encourages me to know that the time
will come when we, too, will finish our day’s work and the strife with
which we test each other’s spirits, and lie down out there like the lion
and the lamb, together. But we shall be dead, which, in my opinion, is
the only safe way for lions and lambs to lie down together.
“I’d sit there and watch the fallen autumn leaves come whirling and
tipping over the tombs like little brown spirits of the dust, blown in
the wind. I thought of what a good man old Amos Tell was, though nobody
could get on with him in the church. But his contrariness didn’t count
now in my thoughts. I only remembered how he bore the burdens of the
church; how cross, but generous he was with the poor; how he made the
coffin for Molly Brown’s husband and didn’t charge for it. Then I’d bend
down and pull a few weeds from among the violets that grew round his
monument, as I’d have dusted his coat for him after a long journey. And
I would walk over and look at John Elrod’s fine tomb--John, who didn’t
know whether he was willing to be a fool for Christ’s sake and who
surpassed the wise in the simplicity of his faith.
“I’d look down at Abbie Carmichael’s grave as I passed--such a dingy
little grave, with such a meek little monument over it. We used to think
she was a great trial in the missionary society, always wanting to turn
it into a spiritual meeting instead of attending to the business and
collecting dues. She was hungry for the bread of life from morning till
night. Now she was satisfied, with her dust lying so close to the roots
of the great trees.
“I always feel as if I can bear with the living more patiently after
I’ve spent an hour in this churchyard and seen how far removed the dead
are from their transgressions.”
BOOKS BY CORRA HARRIS
_A Circuit Rider’s Wife_, 1910.
_Eve’s Second Husband_, 1911.
_The Recording Angel_, 1912.
_In Search of a Husband_, 1913.
_The Co-Citizens_, 1915.
_A Circuit Rider’s Widow_, 1916.
_Making Her His Wife_, 1918.
_From Sunup to Sundown_, 1919. (_With Faith Harris Leech, her daughter._)
_Happily Married_, 1920.
_My Son_, 1921.
_The Eyes of Love_, 1922.
_First two published by Henry Altemus, Philadelphia; next six by
Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; last three by George H. Doran
Company._