WRECKING A GENERATION
The afternoon's heat was intense; it was reflecting in shimmering
waves from everything motionless, this breathless September day in
Donaldsville, Texas. Main Street is a half-mile long, unpainted "box-
houses" fringe either end and cluster unkemptly to the west, forming
the "city's" thickly populated "darky town." Near the station stands
the new three-story brick hotel, the pride of the metropolis. Not even
the Court House at the county seat is as imposing. Main Street is
flanked by parallel rows of one and two story, brick store-buildings,
from the fronts of which, and covering the wide, board-sidewalks,
extend permanent, wooden awnings; these are bordered by long racks
used for the ponies and mules of the Saturday crowds of "bottom
niggers" and "post oak farmers." The higher ground east of Main Street
is preempted by the comfortable residences of Donaldsville proper and
culminates in Quality Hill, where the two bankers and a select group
of wealthy bottom-planters lived in aristocratic supremacy. On this
particular afternoon, the town's only business street was about
deserted. On its shady side were hitched a few Texas ponies whose
drooping heads and wilted ears bespoke the heat--so hot it was that
the flies, even, did not molest them. Scattered groups of lounging,
idle men indicated the enervating influence of the sizzling 108
degrees in the shade.
But Donaldsville was not dead--perspiring certainly, but still
possessing one lively evidence of animation. From time to time peals
of boisterous laughter, boisterous but refreshing as the breath of a
breeze, a congenial, almost contagious laughter would roll up and down
Main Street even to its box-house fringes. Each peal would call forth
from some dusky denizen of the suburbs the proud recognition: "Dar's
Doctor Jim laughin' some mo'." Doctor Jim's laughter was one of
Donaldsville's attractive features. His friends living a mile away
claimed they often heard it--and everybody was Doctor Jim's friend. No
more genial, generous gentleman of the early post-bellum Texas South
could be found. His was an unfathomed well of good nature, good humor
and good stories. He knew all comers whether he had met them before or
not. For him, it was never "Stranger," it was always "Friend."
Let us take his proffered hand and feel the heartiness of its
greeting, feel its friendly shake, even to our shoe-soles. His good
humor beams from his deep-blue eyes; his shock of gray hair, which
knows no comb but his fingers, is pushed back from a brow which might
have been a scholar's, were it not so florid. A soft, white linen
shirt rolls deeply open, exposing a grizzled expanse of powerful
chest. Roomy, baggy, spotless, linen trousers do homage to the heat,
as does his broad, palm-fiber hat, used chiefly as a fan. Doctor Jim
McDonald, six feet in his socks, weighing 180 pounds, erect and manly
in bearing in spite of his negligee, is a remarkable specimen of
physical manhood at sixty-five. Even with the Saturday afternoon
crowds of the cotton-picking season, Main Street seems deserted if his
resounding laughter is not heard; but it takes something as serious as
a funeral to keep him away from his accustomed bench in front of
Doctor Will's drug-store, centrally located on the shady side of the
street. Doctor Will is Doctor Jim's brother, and is, according to the
negroes, a "sho-nuff" doctor.
Doctor Jim's life is comfortably monotonous. He had put up the first
windmill in the region roundabout and his was the first real bath-tub
in the county, and long before Donaldsville thought of water-works,
Doctor Jim's windmill was keeping the big cistern on stilts filled
from his deep artesian well. He started each day with a stimulating
plunge in his big tub, and never tired proclaiming that with this and
enough good whiskey he would live to be a hundred--and then Main
Street would stop and listen to the generous reverberations of his
deep-chested laugh. Three good meals, the best old Aunt Sue could cook
and Aunt Sue came from Mississippi with them after the war--were eaten
with an unflagging relish by this man whose digestion had never
discovered itself. Two mornings a week Doctor Jim drove leisurely out
to his big Trinity River plantation, a two-thousand-acre plantation,
where he was the beloved overlord of sixty negro families. This rich,
river-bottom farm, when cotton was at a good price, brought in so much
that Doctor Jim, with another of his big laughs, would say he was
"mighty lucky in having those rascally twins to throw some of it
away." One night a week he could always be found at the Lodge, and
once a day he covered each way the half-mile separating his generous,
rambling home on Quality Hill and Doctor Will's office. His only real
recreation was funerals. He would desert his shady seat and drive
miles to help lay away friend or foe--if foes he had. On such
occasions only, would he pass the threshold of a church. He
contributed generously to each of the town's five denominations and
showed considerable restraint in the presence of the cloth in his
choice of reminiscences, but it was always the occasion of a good-
natured uproar for him to proclaim, "The Missus has enough religion
for us both." Still the silence of his charity could have said truly
that his donation had constructed one-fifth of each church-building in
the town; in fact, it was his pride to double the Biblical one-tenth
in his giving.
Of his open-heartedness Doctor Jim rarely spoke but another pride was
his, to which he allowed no day to pass without some hilariously
expressed reference. He was proud of his whiskey-drinking. One quart
of Kentucky's best Bourbon from sun to sun, decade after decade! "I
have drunk enough whiskey to float a ship--and some ship too. Look at
me! Where will you find a healthier man at sixty-five? I haven't known
a sick minute since the war. If you drink whiskey right, with plenty
of water and plenty of eatin', it won't hurt anybody." This was the
law and the gospel to Doctor Jim; he never failed to proclaim it to
pale-faced youths or ailing mankind; and the Book of Judgment, alone,
will reveal the harvest of destruction which Time reaped through
Doctor Jim's influence in L---County. Yet, oddly, it was Doctor Jim's
principle and practice never to treat. He claimed he had never offered
a living soul a social drink.
"Drink whiskey right and it won't hurt anybody!" Did it hurt?
Doctor Jim and his two brothers spent their early life on a plantation
in Mississippi. The father wanted the boys to be educated. Two of them
took medical courses in New Orleans. Doctor Jim wished to see more of
the world, and literally did see much of it on a two-year cruise
around the Horn to the East Indies and China. He was thirty-five years
old in '60 when he married. Then he served as surgeon--"mighty poor
surgeon" he used to say, for a Mississippi regiment throughout the
four years of the Civil War. He and his two brothers passed through
this conflict and returned home to find their father dead, the negroes
scattered and the old plantation devastated. The three with their
families journeyed to Texas--the then Land of Promise! At twenty-five
cents an acre they bought river-bottom lands which are to-day
priceless, and the losses of the past were soon forgotten in the rapid
prosperity of the following years.
Mrs. McDonald represented all that high type of character which the
dark years of the war brought out in so many instances of Southern
womanhood. Patient, hopeful, uncomplaining she lived through the four
years of war-time separation, left her own people and journeyed to the
Southwest to begin life anew. She was particularly robust of physique,
domestic in a high sense, gentle and deeply kind. She passed through
hardship, privation and prosperity practically not knowing sickness.
Her children could not have had better mother-stock, and the scant
days were in the past, so they never knew the lack of plenty. There
were eight, from Edith, born in 1870, to Frank, in 1885, including the
twins.
Did whiskey-drinking hurt?
Edith grew into a slender, retiring girl, her paleness accentuated by
her black hair. She was quiet, read much, and took little interest in
out-of-door activities, entering into the play-life of the other
children but rarely. Her father insisted, later, on her riding, and
she became a fair horsewoman. She was refined in all her relations.
Edith went to New Orleans at seventeen. The spring after, she
developed a hacking cough and had one or two slight hemorrhages, but
at twenty was better and married an excellent young merchant. The
child was born when she was twenty-two; three weeks later the mother
died, leaving a pitiable, scrofulous baby, which medical and nursing
skill kept lingering eighteen months.
The first boy was named James, Jr., as we should expect, and, as we
should not expect, was never called "Jim." But James was not right. He
developed slowly, did not walk till over three, was talking poorly at
five; he was subject to convulsions and destructive outbreaks; he was
uncertain and clumsy in his movements, so provision was made that he
might always have some one with him. But even in the face of this
care, he stumbled and fell into the laundry-pot with its boiling
family-wash, was badly scalded and seriously blinded. James mercifully
died two years later in one of his convulsions.
Mabel was the flower of the family. Through her girlhood she was
lovable in every way, and beloved. She was blond like her father,
though not as robust as either father or mother, and in ideals and
character was truly the latter's daughter. She finished in a finishing
school, had musical ability and charm, and soon married and made a
happy home--an unusual home, until the birth of the first child. Since
then it has been a fight for health, with the pall of her family's
history smothering each rekindling hope. Operations and sanatoria,
health-resorts and specialists have not restored, and she lives, a
neurasthenic mother of two neurotic children. Happiness has long fled
the home where it so loved to bide those early days, before the strain
and stress of maternity had drained the mother's poor reserve of
vitality.
The history of Will and John, named for the two uncles, would prove
racy reading through many chapters. "The Twins" were the father's text
for spicy stories galore many years before their death. From the
first, they were "two young sinners." They both had active minds--
overactive in devising deviltry. Mischievous as little fellows, never
punished, practically never corrected by their father, humored by
sisters, house-servants, and the plantation-hands, feared and admired
by other boys, they seemed proof against any helpful influence from
the earnest, pained, prayerful mother. As boys of ten, they had become
"town talk" and were held responsible for all pranks and practical
jokes perpetrated in Donaldsville or thereabout, unless other guilty
ones were captured red-handed. Multiply your conception of a "bad boy"
by two and you will have Will at twelve; repeat the process and you
will have John. They possessed one quality--dare we call it virtue?--
which kept them dear to Doctor Jim's heart through their very worst.
They never lied to him, no matter what their misdeeds. They could lie
as veritable troopers, but from him the truth in its rankest boldness
was never withheld. As the years passed, they made many and deep
excursions into the old doctor's pocket. But he paid the bills
cheerfully and sent his reverberating laugh chasing the speedy
dollars, as soon as he got with some of his Main Street cronies. The
boys planned and worked together, protecting each other most cleverly.
Still they were expelled from every school they attended after they
were thirteen. A military academy noted for its ability to handle hard
cases found them quite too mature in their wild ways, and sent them
home. They may, for reasons best known to themselves, have been
"square with the old man," but they were a pair of thoroughgoing
toughs by twenty, not only fast but cruel, even brutal, in their evil-
doing.
Will was the first to show the strain of the pace. When twenty-two,
the warning cough sobered him a bit, and in John's faithful and
congenial company, he went first to Denver, then to New Mexico.
Doctors' orders were irksome, whiskey and cards the only available
recreation for the boys, and so they tried to follow their father's
example in developing a powerful physique on Kentucky Bourbon
("best"). John suddenly quit drinking. "Acute nephritis" was on the
shipping paster. Delirium tremens was the truth. Will was too frail to
accompany his brother's remains home. He was pretty lonely and
anxious, and miserable without John, but for several weeks behaved
quite to the doctor's satisfaction. It didn't last long, and within
the year tuberculosis and Bourbon laid him beside his brother.
May was a promising girl, "almost a hoiden," the neighbors said. She
rode the ponies bareback; she played boys' games, and at twelve looked
as though the problem of health could never complicate her glad, young
life. But cough and hemorrhage, twin specters, stalked in at sixteen
and the poor child fairly melted away and was gone in a year.
Annabel, the youngest girl, was a quiet child and thoughtful. Some
called her dull, but rather, it seems, she early sensed her fate. When
but a child she was sent to "San Antone" and operated on by a throat
specialist. After May's death she went to the mountains each summer
and spent two winters in South Texas. But she grew more and more thin,
and in the end it was tuberculosis.
Frank, the last child, was different from all the others. He seemed
bright of mind and active of body. He attended school as had none of
the other boys; he even went to Sunday-school. Physically and
mentally, he gave promise of prolonging the family line--but he proved
his father's only admitted regret. He lied and he stole. The money
which his father would have given him freely he preferred to get by
cunning. Doctor Jim could not tolerate what he called dishonesty, and
from time to time they would have words and Frank would be gone for
months. His cleverness made him a fairly successful gambler; that he
played the game "crooked" is probably evidenced by his being shot in a
gambling-joint before he was thirty.
We have thus scanned the-wreckage of a generation bred in alcohol.
Children they were of unusual physical and mental parentage, parents
who never knowingly offended their consciences, children reared in
most healthful surroundings with every comfort and opportunity for
normal development. Four of them showed their physical inferiority
through the early infection and unusually poor resistance to
tuberculosis; one was born an imbecile; one died directly from the
effects of drink; the only girl who survived early maturity, the best
of them all, spent twenty years a nervous sufferer, mothering two
nervously defective children; the physically best was the morally
worst and died a criminal.
Doctor Jim lived on with his habits unchanged, his laugh, only, losing
something in volume and more in infectiousness. Still proud of his
health he preached the gospel of good whiskey well drunk, never
sensing his part in the tragedy of his own fireside. He was nearly
eighty when the stroke came which bereft him of any possibility of
understanding, or of knowing remorse. He had laid his wife away some
years previously and for months he lingered on paralyzed, demented, in
the big, empty house, cared for by an old negro couple, hardly
recognizing Mabel when she came twice a year, but never forgetting
that, "Whiskey won't hurt anybody."