Emma K. Meacham Collection

Transcribed by Virginia Battle Edited by Gina Cordell and Laura Cunningham 2012

Memphis and Shelby County Room Memphis Public Library and Information Center 3030 Poplar Ave Memphis, TN 38111

Scope and Content

The Emma K. Meacham Collection consists of one box spanning one linear foot. The collection contains Mrs. Meacham’s “Sketches,” stories she shared with her granddaughter as she reminisced about her life. These sketches were transcribed by longtime Library volunteer, Virginia Battle.

In this collection, Emma Koen Meacham, 1869-1952, described the early history of Memphis, with notable mentions of the Lee Line of Steamers, the Kate Adams, and President Grover Cleveland’s 1887 visit to Memphis. Memphians Sara Beaumont Kennedy and Robert Looney are also mentioned. Outside of Memphis, she recalled her time as one of the first students to attend Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi. She also described in vivid detail the 1897 flooding and levee breech of Laconia Circle in Desha County, Arkansas.

Mrs. Meacham was the wife of William Walker Meacham, a planter in Laconia Circle, Arkansas. Together they had two children, Chlotilda Louise Meacham Rechenburg and William Earl Meacham.

Single photocopies or scans of unpublished writings in these papers may be made for purposes of scholarly research.

While the Memphis Public Library & Information Center may house an item, it does not necessarily hold the copyright on the item, nor may it be able to determine if the item is still protected under current copyright law. Users are solely responsible for determining the existence of such instances and for obtaining any other permissions and paying associated fees that may be necessary for the intended use. Any image from the library’s collection published in any form must cite as the source: Memphis and Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Library & Information Center. For all requests, please contact the History Department at 901.415.2742 or [email protected]

Container List

One Box 1880s – 1945 13 Folders

Folder 1: Sketch 1 – Youth, History

Folder 2: Sketch 2 – Poetry, Reconstruction, Childhood

Folder 3: Sketch 3 – Seasons, History, Phases of Life

Folder 4: Sketch 4 – Belhaven College

Folder 5: Sketch 5 – Christmas and the New Year

Folder 6: Sketch 6 – Reflections and Memories

Folder 7: Sketch 7 – Marriage, River Steamers

Folder 8: Sketch 8 – Devastation, Arkansas River Flooding

Folder 9: Sketch 9 – Religion, Home on the River

Folder 10: Sketch 10 – Literature, Religion

Folder 11: Sketch 11 – Looking Backward

Folder 12: Sketch 13 – Summer, Reflections

Folder 13: Sketch 14 – The River

Sketch 12 Was Not Included in the Donated Sketches

Emma K. Meacham

To Mary Crenshaw – who has taken so much interest in what I write, and has listened so sweetly to me read.

(I want her to have this book of sketches it embraces – memories and tales – so---- To Mary – who appreciates Emma Meacham “Mrs. W.”)

Sketch No. 1

Grandmother told me all about it Told me so I couldn’t doubt it How she danced—my grandma danced long ago. How she held her pretty head, How her dainty skirts she spread, How she slowly leaned and rose – long ago

Grandmother’s hair was bright and sunny Dimpled cheeks too—oh how funny, Really quite a pretty girl – long ago. Bless her – why she wears a cap, Grandma does – and takes a nap Every single day – and yet Grandma danced the minuet long ago

Modern days are quite alarming Grandma says—‘but boys were charming’ Girls and boys she means – of course ‘long ago’ ‘Brave, but modest, grandly shy –‘ She would like to have us try Just to feel like those who met In the graceful minuet – long ago -

Mary Mapes Doge

I heard my grandmother’s voice repeating these stanzas and knew she was in a mood for telling tales, I clapped my hands and called “Bravo! Grandmother, are you alone?” She looked up at me with smiling eyes--She was sitting by a window and the spring sunshine all about her.

“Come in my dear,” she said. “I was away in Elysian Fields of youth, and was not alone. There was a goodly company all around me. Sit down with me.”

“They must have been enjoying themselves, for this sunny room is very conducive to good cheer,” I told her. My grandmother was well past her three score years and ten, but there was no nostalgia in her meditations.

She had lived through a part of four generations and was now vitally interested in the modern lives of her grandchildren. So there were many mirages of memory for her to rest on as she journeyed through life’s handicaps. “I have just read the newspaper,” she told me and was thinking of many things, making many comparisons--Thinking of my young life and remembering the facilities we had for living – now and then – and also of the frame of mind of people in those days, as to the use of them, and of our reaction today.”

“I should like to know about your young life, Grandmother – I am young, I should like to compare your youth and mine.”

“I cannot imagine your generation being interested in simple things, and I spent my young life very simply--”

“Not your life exclusively--” I said, “but of the times into which you were born. In our world now, it seems that every interest in any country touches somewhat other interests in every part of our world.”

“That is due,” she said, “or rather we are more familiar with the doings of our world now, because we have so many more facilities for hearing about its many parts.”

“Radio has brought us in speaking distance of many lands. We have airplanes that fly hundreds of miles an hour to send or bring messages. Telephones, and when we can sit and see those to whom we talk, then will science have accomplished much.”

“Oh, Grandmother, if somebody would or could stop wars!”

“My dear, that is one of the fundamental rules for our preservation--We were given the impulse for defense when the world was new and people and beasts of the forest lived in close contact--As we have grown into groups-- away from animals and the enemy who wanted our cave--and used his club to get it-- we have come through primitive reactions, class consciousness—suppression—revolutions--political intrigue for gain, to gain freedom in our right to live--until today we are in the throes of the most brutal conflict the world has ever known.”

“These descendants of the savage Huns are so filled with egotistic bombast that they want to control the whole scheme of things as they are. Their minds have been filled with the iron thought of supremacy since baby hood--in each generation. As time moves on and more implements of science can be converted into munition--and war craft, the more barbarous will be the wars.”

“To read history-- we are almost forced to believe that war is only a phase of living-- not the survival of the fit--as we once thought--for the best is taken now and the survival of broken bodies and minds does not build temples for the future-- This conflagration of earth and sea and sky that is battering our world, searing our youth and bringing untold agony to the mothers, fathers, and sweethearts of men, and immeasurable hate to the peoples of the earth, will not leave a unity of purpose, to build more stately mansions for our souls.”

“There will be much to consider, the old order will change to make way for the new as it happens after each upheaval of conflict.”

“Not what we would, but what we must, makes up the sum of living.”

I was silent not knowing what to say. My youth had been so care free and youth wants what it should, not what it must.

Grandmother rocked awhile in silence and a breeze blew the curtains, fluttering out into the room. I watched her and was thinking of what she had traveled through in all her seventy five years.

“I was thinking my dear,” she said, “of the beginning of freedom in our own country, of our shackles as Colonists, under the rule of a land across the sea, whose ruler was then of the same blood as the usurpers who are now boastingly sure of owning the earth. In 1776, we, in this our America bound ourselves into a Union of States at the tragic cost of many lives and the stark terror of ‘those who only stand and wait.’ They too served. The mothers, wives, children, as armies of marching, shivering, starving, ragged men fought to be free. Today in this holocaust, we are fighting to keep that freedom, the jewel in every man’s soul.”

“Freedom, my dear and license are two entirely different things, and a Democratic people, some times, do not discriminate. Then came mistakes. There came another time when we had to push England off our shores. On January 8, 1815, when 12,000 British Regulars, came before the cotton bale, breastworks at New Orleans, behind which Andrew Jackson, a long, thin, Indian fighter waited with 6,000 marksmen, who with their rifles could shoot a squirrel in the head from the top of the tallest tree. This motley army of volunteer, backwoodsmen cradled their rifles in the crook of their arms, while line after line of them stood, some knee deep in the ooze and mire of the swamps, watching the Red Coats advance, as they came forward in range of their arms. The English soldiers, we are told, looked like moving parts of a machine, ‘till the American rifles blazed away and then the columns fell, like a line of icicles, broken off and cast aside. That was England’s Waterloo in our country. Andrew Jackson, who later became president of our United States, was a mold of man to accomplish things. He was a man of action’ hard headed and domineering, but determined and forceful.”

“In June of that same year of 1815, another battle was fought in Belgium that was the Waterloo of Napoleon Bonaparte. The main difference in the policies of these two men were, one fought and lived to defend his country, the other to gain glory by furthering his own interests. Today, the Allied planes of England and America zoom together overt the war torn European countries that a demon incarnate is trying with his outlining satellites to bring under the domination of his devilish mind. Please God, he won’t be spared much longer to ply his demoniacal art.”

“A double amen to that, Grandmother,” I said. “How human beings can devise and perpetrate such cruelties as he has is quite beyond all human thought.” “Yes my dear” she said. The Spanish Inquisition will pale before this.”

“Grandmother, our growth or replenishment of the earth seems to have been sandwiched in between wars.”

“Somebody has said, my dear, that to read the history of the world is to read of its wars.”

“And now, I come to the war of disunion of our states. In 1861, the God of Battles tipped the scales again and our country was torn asunder, and two contending forces struggled for what, to each one of them, was as sacred as their home fires. We were a divided nation, with divided families, under two flags. One side sang Yankee Doodle and one sang Dixie.”

“We were also in the midst of the great financial panic of 1837, left over by Jackson, the last President. Slavery was brought into party politics in 1839. William Lloyd Garrison had formed anti-slavery societies as far back as 1823. John Brown conceived the idea of becoming a slave liberator in 1859 and caused the incident of Harper’s Ferry. The Mason and Dixon line, which had been called the ‘invisible but terrible fissure of demarcation’ became a real fixture.”

“Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a drama of political issue. That became the torch that touched off a great fire. It was translated in several languages. Buchanan became president in 1806. ‘All honorable gentlemen, as Christians and a scholar, but the less said about the better,’ Is a quotation from history. His soul yearned for peace and he did not know how to handle strife.”

“In 1859 came the divided house. Young men formed circles, not the healthy wanderlust of youth, but the tense tightening of belts and minds turned to the flash of fire arms. Lincoln was elected president in May, 1860. South Carolina seceded in December, 1860. In April of that year, Major Anderson was bottled up at Fort Sumter. He was expecting aid in four days and for four days the country held its breath. On April 12, demands went to Anderson to surrender. It was not done. The Charleston clock struck 4:30 - and the first gun was fired. The South had lit the flame. She had flung the torch!”

“The call came for volunteers to fight the war. By thousands to the enlisting booths came the Southern Cavaliers. Robert E. Lee was made Commander in Chief. A provisional government was set up, called ‘Confederate States of America.’ Jefferson Davis was made president, with his capitol at Richmond, Virginia. War clouds thundered to the accompaniment of the Rebel yell!”

“Into this maelstrom, my dear, my father went out in 1861 from Memphis as Lieutenant of the Davis Grays. At the end of the first year, the regiment was reorganized. Robert Looney of Memphis became Colonel. The command in full, after reorganization, was Company D, 38th Tennessee Donaldson’s brigade, Cheatam’s Division, Hardee’s Corps, Army of Tennessee. My father was promoted to Captain at Shiloh, for bravery in action. General Cheatam noted this in his history of the battle.”

“On 1863, he was in the battle of Murfreesboro where the Northern loss of men was 13,000, that of the South, 12,000. This battle was fought near Cumberland Gap, in the East Tennessee highlands. I went over this field of combat nearly sixty years later, and was told that Minnie balls were still found there.”

“I mention these places, my dear, but my father went in all places where his regiment was in action, and had pneumonia twice during his service.”

“Grandmother, was he married during that time?”

“No, not till 1864. He was twenty-four years old then.”

My grandmother paused a while and I waited. Then she said, “We had Bull Run, so called by the Northern soldiers, or Manassas, as the South named it. We had Gettysburg, which was an epic contest in the greatest drama in all American folklore, or Civil War Annals. It not only made history, but literature as well. We had Grant at Vicksburg, Sherman in Atlanta, Lee at Appomattox, and Jefferson Davis in prison. We had carpet baggers and our Negroes, who were contrabands of war and we had our indomitable courage to go back to ruined homes and lands to beggared families, and undernourished children, who were the potential citizens of the future. We built as best we could.”

“We did not have magnanimous foes. They rode us down, rough shod and forced on us a low class breed of trash that had not had the training or decent attributes that Negroes had. There was no peace for the fallen people. Lee rode gallantly and quickly out of the public eye, with no word of bitterness, only trying to promote harmony.”

“Salmon P.Chase, who was called Attorney General for runaway Negroes, and who was Chief Justice of the United States, made his political journey among the smoking ruins. Thaddeus Stevens crossed swords with Andrew Johnson and put a tax on cotton. Negro suffrage, which William Cullen Brian, a poet born in Massachusetts, thought would be a good thing, was being served to us. Frederick Douglas, a Negro high up in politics and who had married a white woman, demanded it.”

“The idea was to treat the South as a conquered Territory. Political sides became a bitter drama of bitter personalities. Remembering the almost Baronial South, this was more than war. The Ku Klux Clan was organized in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee with Nathan Bedford Forrest as its head. Its object was to check this reign of terror, to keep the freed slaves from too much ego, and also to subdue unscrupulous carpet baggers and scalawags who were too much in evidence. From 1865 to 1876, these elements sought to control the Southern states. In those years of reconstruction, everything in the way of degradation was put upon us, a helpless people who had lost all but honor. So the Ku Klux Clan in its intention was a saving grace. It has been criticized and perhaps justly so in some instances where hot heads overcame the law of the Clansman. It was an honorable organization, gotten together by honorable men.”

“In this section of our country, called the Old South, that disunion caused a complete collapse. It was reduced to utter poverty. Its structure, ideas, form of daily life, its code of honor, even its sense of integrity, have become only archaic memories. The Old South, ah, my dear, there comes to me like strains of organ music, thoughts of that old time Eden. It is a place not laid down on any concrete map. It needs only be said that it is cradled somewhere in that vague region in some of the Old Southern States and somewhere in the vague region of memory.”

“It was a goodly land in those old times, a rolling country lying at the foot of blue mountain spurs, or winding under willows to where the hills melted away in the low alluvial land where the sea once washed, and still left its memory and its name. The people in that section shone in prosperity and even more so in adversity. With their family seats, their dignity became grandeur. In their humiliation, they re-conquered their section and preserved the civilization of the Anglo Saxon.”

“ Those who know the Old South remember the moonlight was always brighter there, the mocking bird’s song was sweeter, and the sunshine more golden among the rose flowers. And the people! What air comes in with the mere mention of their names! Of old courts and polished halls, where men bowed low to all women and wore swords to defend their honor, it was a realm where sincerity ruled, the realm of old world courtesy and high breeding. All honor to the Old South, which no other section in the world can recall such fine traditions that come to us from their spirits enthroned there. They link our heart strings of today across the backward span of years and recapture the ghosts of our linage, to see again the tapestry whose threads have faded, but whose woven memories stand out sublime! Reason wonders why any vandal could have torn it to shreds and patches.”

My grandmother raised her eyes and looked far away beyond the tree tops. “Grandmother, are you tired?” I said. “Shouldn’t you rest awhile?”

“Oh no, my dear, these things I am seeing are like etchings, clear cut, there are broad rivers all sun lit, sounds like a Wagnerian symphony grand, majestic cadences like the Lost Chord, tones that swell into the music of the Lord’s prayer. There are untold incidents that are in the fair days of history that have woven much of themselves into the fabric of my being. ‘I am a part of all that has been.’ Somebody has said. How much of the blood strain that I was finally evolved into being from, has flowered through generations of ancestors, and imprinted on each some attribute or sense that came at last to be me, and after me. Your generation, sheer mixtures, some of us, but souls turned to the music of the spheres, have always a train that carries life’s journey straight through the tide of ebb and flow.”

“I only paused a while, because I am rather loath to begin in this era of ‘Hearts bowed down.’ Whatever the outcome of any thing is my dear, the cause goes back to the reactions of minds to certain circumstances. Small incidents have resulted in conflagrations, one accident of speech or manner have caused duels between men, who had no other cause for dislikes. So it was with this, two sections of different thought, outlook, and temperament. The New Englander, of Puritanical ancestry bred and born into families of stern, hard beginnings, a place for everything and everything in its place. People who came over here to escape tyranny, to find freedom of speech and action, became narrower, more puritanical in their outlook. No other star to look to, besides their own hard won needs. The cares of life at the heart out of their enjoyment, pedantry

10 educated, there were those who were over learned, and as you know, too much learning confuses the mind to ordinary living. A great many early settlers did not dilute their harsh philosophy to their capacity, and were so straight laced that their spirits became stiffer than their back bones.”

“The question of what was agreeable, or otherwise, scarcely entered their heads. Burning witches in Salem was a sort of stirring up to them, all excitement like political rallies or big fires or religious revivals. We are supposed to believe that their zeal was to destroy evil through suffering, but they relegated to themselves the right to sit in judgment. It was easier for them to cut a heretic’s head off than to argue with him. They had no delusions in their own minds that ‘all work and no play’ made Jack a dull boy. You know Daniel Webster said, ‘The Puritan had every virtue except charity.’ So, from that ancestry came the industrial North to sit in judgment upon the agricultural South in 1861. While the Southerner glorified in the hotness of his blood and pride of ancestry, and the Northern aristocrat in the thinness of his blood and the thickness of his linens, handed down through ancestry, we became two sections with opposite views on most subjects regarding interests. Climatic conditions, so entirely different, modes of living, thinking and in diversions, aliens from one another.”

“This was no sudden impulsive outcome. For fifty years, there had been differences of opinion politically and socially. The Southerner read and wrote romantically, the Northerner, entrenched in his pedantry, went to Harvard, read philosophy and jurisprudence. And so, in greater numbers, the conscience of the North claimed the right to sit in judgment. They consistently objected to slavery and that made a good basis for what was done. History tells us, by the way, that Mrs. Grant had her own slaves when she came south.”

“You have often heard that no society can exist without its supporting frame and a minuet must have elegance, charm of dress and manner, a cultivated society. Valor in men, romance and charm in women - before this war had become, in the South, the symbol of everything that was priceless in life.”

“Romance has been described as a ‘complete agreement between reality and desire.’ The leaders here were supremely that. They shone with valor on the battlefield and in snatched moments at home. Fortunate women in the South lived in great privacy, both because of connection and distance that separated homes. It was essentially then, a society of men. After the war, the Empire of charm departed and necessity drove women into the economic world and to acknowledge of that world. So many bereft women, sad eyed and unsmiling, who wore black clothes in mourning for the sweetheart who never came back, who lived more than often in loveless homes in abject dependence. Some of them cared for orphaned children in brother’s homes and so became white columns of dependability. Others taught little neighborhood schools, and the ‘Widows might’ was no less than the pittance they received, always with straining hearts for the ‘might have beens.”

“And there were young mothers, who in their blind devotion to a lost father, would bring their sons up tied selfishly to an apron string. There were women who in spite of tender care and easy living took the reins of government as ‘to the manner born.’ They carried on their plantation lives as best they could with the help of disrupted free labor and old servants who refused to leave them. Many a woman, having had her home burned, with all the beauties of travel and treasures that so many homes held, went to a cabin or outhouse barn and made a home for her family with what was left.

They learned to domesticate themselves and bring up fatherless children to be independent men and women. Many a Southern mother has built an empire in her heart watching her children play among the ruins of her loved treasures, built an empire for them of truth and honor, of pride and love, of unselfish motives and intelligent outlook. The women of the South, during the long time of war and reconstruction, left a goodly heritage to those who came after them.”

“Men of the South went out to fight to the accompaniment of music, moonlight, and joy. But the sound of the cannon drowned the music, the heat of the firing guns wilted the roses that they wore, a woman’s favor, and vibrations of joy were stopped by the grim business of war!”

“This sort of living that the South gave should not be condemned. It was a land almost totally foreign to the rest of America. In the beginning, settlers found their levels and divided. All sorts came, drifters dropped lower or passed on; those who wished to make homes founded a society for their families in which they could live. Here and there would be a special class of educated cultivated people, of English, French, and Spanish ancestry. These came to the great planter class. This war broke a civilization, the uniqueness of which has never been equaled in history. To the people who dominated it, it was paradise and they gave their all to keep it. But what they had left was a land stripped of its richness, deserted houses, toppled chimneys, fields of weeds, piles of ashes where some mansions had stood. The past riches that served so lavishly, gone in complete disaster. Men, harassed and hungry, who had fought with fanatical zeal, returned to see what had been a time of bravery and grace, now a broken column. Soldiers came back vermin ridden, ragged, emaciated, shadows of men who went out full of gay bravery and grim determination.”

“The fidelity they gave was all in vain for what they struggled for, but their courage ran true. Someone has said that ‘courage is of the soul,’ and you know, my dear, that souls are immortal things. These men and boys, whose experiences had made them men, some of whom had never done an hour’s manual labor in their lives, stepped from their marching orders into the furrows of their wasted fields. Horses that had led charges against Federal guns, walked before the plow, in these same fields over which, a few months before had run red with human blood. ‘The path of progress is ever strewn with wreckage of the past.’”

“Oh, Grandmother, it comes so vividly to me to hear you tell it.”

“Yes, my dear, we went through degradation to do it. With the indomitable flexibility of minds turned to the music of living, we struggled, slipped, persevered, but never on our knees. From the ashes that were left us in 1865, we of the South have built a temple, full rounded and complete that stands equal among the peoples of the earth. It was made so because her purpose in war was an honest one, to keep what we had striven for, and not for added territory, or ruthlessness of thought.”

“At the end of it all there are not many left now, to hold the memories. I am proud that I am of that ancestry, that the old system of Southern living came into my being and has guided many a mile of travel in my life. My soul responds even now, in all these modern times, to the music of that civilization. There were two or more definite sections of people, as always, in the South, the rich planter class and the poor who tilled the land for a price, and lived in endless toil.”

“The rich rode away to watering places, to Europe, and travel among plantations. The poor did not go at all, except to migrate to new lands. In the reaction of war, the singing contingent and minor tragedies of the black slave were stopped. The slave, you know my dear, was not the reason for this war. He was merely a symbol. The cause lay primarily in the fact that we wanted liberty of states and individuals. Liberty, of course, is an ideal in whose name many crimes have been committed, as Madam Roland said, as she went to the guillotine.”

“The god of war is on the side of the most numbers and guns or other instruments of death, and after Sherman’s march to the sea, there was nothing left here to fight for. Northern soldiers had been augmented by hired German fighters and so had more resistance to offer. Sherman gave a good definition of what war is, ‘It doesn’t vary in its workings, except in the drama played in each man’s soul.’”

“Courage, now, is crossed with political cunning. Perfect democracy like perfect Christianity has been only a dream, but the old, classic, romantic, pastoral South, was a reality. There was a deal of old fashioned loveliness in those by gone years. That now only exist in the imagination, and in the reading of books, do we go back for a season to the simpler things of life, than we live in now. So we do not cover up the path of memory, but learn a gap through which we can hear the strains of the minuet which were changed to a dirge.”

“The fields fell southward, abrupt and broken, to the low cast edge of the long lone land. If a step should sound or a word be spoken, would a ghost not rise at the strange guest’s hand? So long have the gray bare walls laid guestless. Through branches and briars, if a man makes his way, we would find no life, but the South winds restless, restless, night and day.”

Finished August 20, 1942

Sketch No. 2

One day in Leafy June, I went again to hear Grandmother tell of happenings in her life that helped her to live or took from her vitality of life. She told me the first story last spring, in March “When visitors were blue, and overhead, the robins flew.” Now, it was June.

She was not in her room when I arrived and a book open face down lay on the table. I picked it up and read I stood there.

Plagne if there ain’t sompen in work as kinder goes agin My convictions, long about Here in June specially. Under some old apple tree Jest arestin through and through. I could git erlong without nothing else at all ter do. Only jest awishin you Wuz here like me. And June was all eternity.

She came in and found me there. “Grandmother,” I said “you have chosen such a beautiful day to read poetry.”

“Yes, my dear, all days are beautiful in which to read poetry, for there are lives to fit every mood. Sit down, I was rocking here in the sunshine and Riley is such a philosopher of home things.”

“You love home things, don’t you, Grandmother.”

“Every true woman’s heart does my dear, in varying degrees. I am an incurable romanticist. A soft sunset, calm moonlight, the humanity of people, a neatly turned phrase in a reading, the flag of stars and stripes, a helpless baby, and young lovers, all thrill me to my soul’s depth.”

“And now, with more than three score and ten years behind me, I am glad that this is true. There is no flogging interest in life and its environs, but I have a more peaceful tolerance for life as it is. I hold intact the grinding lives that I have driven over so many years of thought contact and association in many times of work and pleasure, many phases of endearment.”

Days come to me where life is perfect. Not stagnant ‘like a locked lagoon,’ but placid, warm, and glowing. It is a pity, my dear, that there are under days, oppression, and so many lines of thought that are labeled and better than thou. I hold with Tennyson, in this thought. ‘I hold it truth with him who sings. To one, clear harp in divers tones that men may rise of stepping stones. Of their dead selves to higher things.’”

“Tennyson had a good philosophy,” I said.

“Yes, although his poetry has been, and is, perfect mechanical technique, which, as is specified, shows too plainly the tools he works with.”

“But Grandmother, if the tools make a perfect finish that satisfies, why should that be objected to?”

“Analytical minds, my dear, pedagogy. What he writes satisfies my soul, so I do not criticize. Poetry is soul embodied in thought, whether it is carved like an intaglio or flows like a murmuring stream - music, art, literature, sculpture or the changing of the seasons can be poetry. Like storms and sunshine, it does not depend on mere mold of meter or technique.”

“My thoughts about a great many things my dear, are evolved from an attribute that lies deep inside me, noiseless and true to a certain inner knowledge that is sometimes called intuition. But I am content that poetry should fill a need, as it is supposed to and I do not judge or dissect what seems beautiful thought to me. Poetry has always stood out as a key note to its people, and Tennyson expressed England of the time she wrote about. I can’t imagine a part of this generation writing “The May June” or mastering the Arthurian tales. I read his poems in my early youth and they made a lasting impression on me. Even now, they sing to me, not with the aching loveliness of a soft sunset, but as something vital that helped me to make the symphony that has sounded all through my life. I think Tennyson and Longfellow did more to farther my imagination and love for rhythm and beauty of thought, than any other writers.”

“I confess I lived among a people who lived and thought along the lives those gracious poets wrote. Longfellow, too as you know is under a ban. He, the critics tell you, has cut all his cloth by an English pattern, and also that there are no depths of feeling in his writings because his life was one of ease and peace.”

“Well, Grandmother, that would seem an advantage to me. We need peace in our reading, too.

“What critics object to is that he uses a pattern, which to my mind is not adequate for adverse mention. We would have some very foolish things in life if there was no raw helter-skelter, which I think is proven by the output of some modern writers. In re-crossing the trails of life, these two men stand side by side as aristocrats at the entrance gate of my political spirit.”

“Were there many poets in the South?” I asked. “It seems to me that atmosphere you have spoken of would be quite conducive to produce poetic minds.”

“There were many nationally recognized, but a few wrote heart songs and bird notes, quite out of place now, in this hubbub world, but belong in an old fashioned garden.”

“In the rush of new books of today, my dear, we lose sight of the ones which move threads of gold into the joys and sorrows of an older generation. Their radiance is sometimes lost from view in the electric flash of the present day, but their luster is not dimmed nor their beauty tarnished. Among the many beautiful thoughts that have been born of gifted minds, none stand out more clearly than the writers of our Southland. Their fires still glow upon the hearthstone as in those olden days when they gave us friendly welcome.”

“These have passed from the world of men and women, but the fires they kindled are a faceless light. In many of our lives they planted flowers of poetry, of fable and romance. With the changing of the years, these flowers have become old-fashioned but the blended perfume makes an exquisite whole, a garden where memories are moonlight, honeysuckle and roses, and rosemary and rue were also there. There are flowers of the night and of the sunrise, of the flame and the flag, of tenderness and heartbreak.”

“Oh, Grandmother, even in book land you make it a gracious garden. What a land it must have been! How well you know of all its blended qualities.”

“It was a land to love, my dear, no tone whose stony soil only produced necessities, our South was production in its fulfillment of soil and men and women. It was an atmosphere conducive to the written poems that her artists wrought.”

“Steven Foster was not to the manor born, but his songs will sing, with their typical melodies and memories when newer things are gone. They are named familiar as exemplifying one thing and Poe’s name always brings to me the setting of a room where the raven perched upon the bust of Phallos. Phallos, as you know, my dear, was the Greek Goddess of wisdom. When I was a child, I often wondered what or who that bust represented, but I just placed it as something nobody knew about.”

“Poe’s genius was of a peculiar musical quality that enthralls his readers, in poetry or prose. Such poems of beauty and melody as ‘The Bells,’ ‘The Haunted Palace,’ ‘Timberlane,’ ‘The City in the Sea,’ and the ‘Raven’ are a delight to any reader in this enchanted domain that he built. It has been said of him that his mind indeed was a haunted “Palace,” echoing the footsteps of Angels and Demons.”

“Sidney Lanier wrote ‘Sunrise.’ It is said to be one of the great poems that had been written, up to that time, in this country. Paul Hamilton Hayne was a Carolinian and was called the ‘Poet of the Pines.’ He wrote ‘Face to Face’ and ‘The River’ and a great many sonnets. He was a very sensitive soul, surrounded by the influence of his life in old Charleston, he had many incentives to harmonious expression. His was a gentle, sensitive, poetic, disposition with an insight and appreciation of all beauty.”

“Father Ryan has been called the historian of the human soul, also the ‘Poet Priest of the South.’ Associated with him, always in my mind, are ‘The Rosary of my Years’ and ‘The Conquered Banner.’”

“There are so many whose names suggest one thing who have written other things of lasting beauty. We think of Francis Scott Key and hear the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ which has become our National Anthem. It was at Fort Henry (1812) he saw it the last thing before he slept, when he looked next morning it was still there and called forth his patriotic heart song. Read ‘My Maryland’ and see James Randall’s heartbreak. Theodora O’Hara’s drums beat time to the ‘Bivouac of the dead.’ We hear of the ‘Tichnors’ and ‘Little Giffin’ of Tennessee. Spaulding is known by his immortal sonnet ‘At the Ninth Hour.’”

“Henry Thompson wrote the ‘High Tide at Gettysburg,’ Charles Dana and Oliver Wendell Holmes both said that this was the most remarkable battle poem ever written, up to that time. It is a most powerful war lyric. It has been said that ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ and ‘Hohenlinden’ are second to it. It may be so, but no other thing was ever such an inspiration to me as an example of disciplined bravery as that ‘Light Brigade’ charge. I read it for the martial beat and rhythm, long before I got the full significance of what it meant.”

“Frank Stanton wrote much in dialect. His ‘Goodbye’ is a wonderful bit of philosophy. Irvin Russell was the first to see literary value in the Negro folk songs. Nothing is truer in this view, it has been said, than ‘Origin of the Banjo’ and ‘A Blessing on the dance.’ George D. Prentice, one time editor of the Louisville Courier Journal, was not born in the South, but did more, possibly, to encourage authorship here, than any other man. His own poem ‘the Closing Year,’ is a reflective writing in blank verse, of a most majestic movement.”

So many of these I mention have gone from my memory, except the name that I remember, headed one that pleased me ‘The Conquered Banner’ was quite a favorite reading in my school days.”

“Could you repeat it now, Grandmother”?

“Part of it, I’m sure. I have it in an old scrapbook. You must read it all some time.”

Furl That Banner True its glory, yet ‘tis wreathed around with glory and ‘twill live in song and story Though its folds are in the dust

Fold that banner, softly, slowly. Treat it gently, it is holy. For it droops before the dead. Touch it not , unfold it never. Let it droop, there furled forever. For its people and its dead.

“Oh, Grandmother, what a desolate thought.”

“Yes, my dear, after many years and much water running under all our bridges, it seems rather hopeless. But you know after all, ‘hope springs eternal in the human breast,’ and now we can view many things with experienced eyes, and still keep a rendezvous with the sacred memory.”

“What memories you must have! What varied things you have seen and done, and if burdens can be lightened by the grace of a friendly Spirit, you have fulfilled and justified your own life, Grandmother.”

“That was very kind, my dear, and well said. I thank you. Interest is the best spur to endeavor and my interest has never flagged, in life and living. Books that I have read, great music I have heard, theatrical performances of note, aside from people I have been associated with have kept unlocked my mental gates, and now the season of memory swings the thoughts of ‘Langsyne’ days and doings, more often than the reaction to modern things. Memories are all that are left of those Raven days of reconstruction. Restless ghosts wandering; ghosts wandering in the treasure house of by gone glory. A confused harmony of guns and music, of dancing feet and filled eyes, smoke of cannon against a crimson sunset, or a silhouette of armed men against silver birches in the moonlight. When the actual fighting was all over, our withered leaves of industry lay all about us, and we became pall bearers of a lost cause. You know, my dear, armed conflict is not the worst part of war, but the aftermath, and the tangled insecurity of what we have done. The absence of arms and the end of fighting does not mean peace. Peace is a virtue in men’s minds against the static of discord, jealousy, greed, suspicions and hate. The ghosts of reminisces that gather in empty cobwebbed rooms, are now what is left of us, that many years away.”

“Grandmother, would you have rather lived your life in that old-time atmosphere?”

“All things work together for good,” we are told. You know, change is necessary to growth. And wars, it seems, are episodes to foster change. I have found the world I have lived in very good, and my vision now of the South’s past grandeur is like a ‘painted ship upon a painted ocean.’ An expression of our Southland was written in 1865 on his return from war, by Major Jonas (S. A.), a newspaper man. It was written on the back of a Confederate note.”

Representing nothing on God’s earth now, and naught in the waters below it. As a pledge of a nation that’s dead and gone. Keep it dear friend and show it. Show it to those who will lend an ear to the tale that this trifle can tell. Of a liberty born of a patriot’s dream. Of a storm cradled nation that fell.

“There is a story connected with it, of how and why it was written. A group of Confederate soldiers, going back home, in passing through Richmond were asked to write their sentiments on the state of things. Major Jonas wrote the ones I have repeated. There were other stanzas but I cannot recall them now. I have heard my father repeat them many times.”

As all things end, some time, Came the dying days of this war between our states. Wounds were healing slowly, states were being re-admitted in to the Union. The distant guns could still be heard in the ebb tide, not with physical ears, of course, but in the cross the people had to carry, which was almost too heavy for human hearts to bear. Sometimes now, in the rat a tat tat of memory, I can sense the tenseness of things as they were long after the guns were stilled.

“Grandmother, how can people stand such things? It seems that our human mechanism would fall to pieces and leave us mentally incapable of taking up the burdens.”

“A steel cable, my dear, is made up of enumerable tiny steel wires, each wire is delicate, but woven into a strand, it holds. That might illustrate it. Our brains are evidently, of a caliber of cable rope. Horror does craze us, even so, sometimes. Our foes heaped indignities upon us long after Appomattox, long after the two leaders, one North, one South, had shaken hands with one another and had gone, each his separate way, of life, long after the President of the United States had said ‘with malice toward none, with charity for all,’ long after Jefferson Davis, who had been president of the Confederacy had spent two years in prison, after the fall of Richmond, unscrupulous politicians in the North strove to bring us under the rule of the ‘carpet bagger.’”

“These were vultures, following the spoils in our broken country, flapping their wings in uncouth joy. Offices were created for them and everything was tried to grind us into submission to such laws as they chose to put on their statute books. You know my dear, even in a Republic a majority can force a power as oppressive as a kingdom ruler. Our Negroes were given liberties they did not know what to do with, by these second- rate pushers, who did not have the same standard of principles that our slaves had been taught. We had also, what were called ‘scalawags.’ These were renegade turncoats here, who, for a price, joined the contingent sent here to rule over us. They joined the Republican Party in politics with the usurpers. To be a Republican here at that time was to be in the Negro party. Even after I came to years of knowledge, it was considered very common and ill-bred to belong to that party.”

Grandmother laughed, “Even yet, my dear there are those among we older ones who still have doubts concerning the status of Republican in the Deep South.”

“I’ve noticed that, Grandmother, in older families.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it” she answered. “Some minds not only do not forget, but the ghost of a loved one or a lost home, peeps over the shoulders of a lot of us at the very mention of a word that hits like a club.”

“After life had become unsafe,” she went on with her story, “and well-nigh unbearable, the Ku Klux Klan was formed, with Nathan Bedford Forrest as its leader. Its intent was right, as an unmilitary band to preserve order, but young blood runs high and later the name became a synonym for force, unapplied to the original purpose. Bedford Forrest, as you know, my dear, was the foremost Confederate leader in the West. It is told of a similar raid in Tennessee, that he rode his horse in the lobby of the Gayoso Hotel at Memphis for reasons he had for capture.” A twinkle came in Grandmother’s eyes and she laughed.

“I have always suspected, my dear, she said, “That a great bit of the animosity toward us was because of jealousy and envy, for these people of the South, with their superior culture, held themselves aloof and apart, even when most of them did not have enough to eat and made their clothes from linen table cloths, and window curtains and draperies, that some had salvaged from the relentless usurpers.”

“Was that true, Grandmother? I read Gone with the Wind, of course”

“My dear, Margaret Mitchell knew of what she wrote, but I have seen that done, even after I was old enough to hold the remembrance of it even now.”

“Oh, Grandmother! What a shame for a conquered people!”

“Conquered, did you say, my dear? Being conquered and being poor are alike, to be either you must be poor in spirit and that we never were; beaten by overpowering numbers, but we have never yet been subdued or conquered. There are Confederate War chapters now that keep alive the spirit and history of our beloved Southland. But all things pass. Rancor and strife went slowly and we live in some semblance of peace, eking out a bare existence in many instances.”

“How grateful people must have been,” I said. How precious it must have been to live normally again.”

“Yes, peace is a priceless heritage, my dear, in homes and of nations to hand down to generations who came after. Peace is also, as you know, only a rare interlude between wars. Today, men in this united country march side by side to keep a tyrant’s yoke off our shoulders; to keep our security so that our flag of stars and stripes may forever wave over a free land, the grandest symbol in all the world. In this great crucible of ours, liberty loving people from all parts of the world have come to make the amalgamation, out of which has been so evolved.”

“A race whose moral fiber is not surpassed anywhere else in the world, and also because no human system of living is perfect, so there have been those with adverse minds who have poisoned our laws and our living. That is the norm in the bud, but a good gardener can eradicate to save the rose of liberty. Please God it will be done now.”

“My father was a Southern soldier. He went out with other young men from his city and became Captain of a Regiment. As a little child, I wove dream stories around the gray uniform. My busy hands were forever folding and unfolding the coat, and putting the cap reverently on my head, with joy in my heart. I knew very little about the worth of money, for I seldom saw it. My father taught me to think independently and I read what I could and he read to me all through my childhood. My mother’s busy hands were always those of help and healing and like Dorcas, looked well to the ways of her household.”

“We lived very crudely compared with the living of the day. Our land torn up, livestock confiscated, the mothers and fathers of that generation had to begin at the broken end of their rainbow. Tallow candles were the first illumination for homes, in fact for anything in my first remembrance. We had our own molds and made what we used. One of my childish delights was seeing the raw tallow melted and poured into the round molds. I had a very vivid imagination and my world was peopled with most fantastic things, and candles came to be ladies and gentlemen of note, and I read the Mother Goose rhyme of, what was that rhyme, my dear?”

“Grandmother, I’m so sorry but Mother Goose is not at all familiar to me.”

“Oh, you poor dear. What you have missed. Anyway, it was about the older she grew or the longer she stood, the shorter she got. Dear, dear, what memories candles bring. I had a sense of possession. The lane where the cows came through to be milked,

20 they were belongings. The stable where the two mules, all we had, lived, the shed where the wagon was kept out of the weather. That stable in my imagination was filled with horses of all colors and rank, from stories my father read to me. The wagon was turned into a stagecoach, a chariot, a modern buggy, according to the trend of mind I had that day. The field of cotton that lay beyond the barn would make money, finally when it was baled and sold. The Negro tenant house beyond, that was a possession, too. It burned one night and I felt poor indeed, deprived of something that was mine. The little branch of water that ran through the woods became a river, and the chips of wood I put on the water were ships carrying stones of conquest to smuggle into the home lairs. You see I read pirate stories, too.”

“That sounds so free from all inessentials, Grandmother - sincerity and simplicity.”

“Yes, somebody wrote once of where he had been, what he had seen, at the end said, ‘I feel that I am farther away from heaven than when I was a boy.’ Then James Russell Lowell says that ‘heaven with all its splendors lies around our infancy.’ Life adds responsibility and the days of our youth are merged into the realities. The evaluation is gradual but sure, like the will of God.”

“Let’s go back, Grandmother, our candles will have all burned out.”

“Well, they did finally and today we deck our homes in twilight flow with varicolored ones, after we have snapped off the electric light. Cool oil lamps came next in my time of remembering. They gave more light, but were more trouble. All sorts of insects would come through our unscreened windows and find a death trap in the oozing dampness of oil on them. The lamp chimneys would get a smudge of lamp black that would require extra cleaning and polishing. You will find, my dear, all down the road, that for every facility we have added responsibility for, someone, even though small, for a tax that grows even heavier. For every added right or possession is a duty, and we take these responsibilities according to our will to meet them and our capacity for putting them into working order.”

“People then were not unhappy as a whole. You always find a few disgruntled individuals in any community, all commodities were high, to a greater ratio than any war since, but this crisis put our backs to the wall, and made us a provident people. Where we had spenders, everything was raised at home, in gardens or orchards, poultry, bees, and hogs. We had few clothes, but children were very appreciative of what they had. There was no big city near us. The closest being twenty miles away and a day’s journey to go to and get home again. We had no paved highways or cars, just old Dobbin and rut scarred roads. We did not have rubber tires at this period, just iron rims on our wagon wheels. We did not have children pushed for time to ‘get in’ a dancing lesson, or art, or to rush here and there to be on time for various activities. We learned to dance from the fluttering leaves, the moving tree branches, our art lessons were sunshine and sunset, the changing seasons.”

“Grandmother, I am learning to feel that beauty is only an art, as you see it. How carefree you were. Maybe that is why you had capacity to live and enjoy age, in the twilight.”

“I think the reason Christ was so compassionate, my dear, was because he was poor in the world’s estimate, and could read humanity in its pulsing heart, as He walked with the lonely. He was only misunderstood by those in power who were afraid of Him or those who wished Him ill, for money or any worldly gain.”

“I often laugh, my dear, at the appalled and puzzled attitude of some people now who have heard that we will be deprived of luxuries, to most minds of great importance, here after this war. The youth of today are not to blame for that outlook, for they know very little of any privation and the history of my young life is as vague and far away to them as the founding of Rome. It really was a long time ago, you know, with all my memories.”

“Aside from family outings in our iron wheel tire buggies, we rode horse back. I was quite an adept rider. I was also what was called a tomboy. I ran faster, jumped farther, climbed higher, walked the iron rails on the train track longer without falling off. There were so many gay things to do. I shall not forget my first trip over the gabled roof of the house, to the main slope on which I could play. Excitement, fear, and determination took me across.”

“Another bold feat I accomplished was to walk across on a fallen log over a river near us. I was afraid of water and had a fear of it under me, but, I could not tend ridicule and the others went, so half paralyzed, I got across. I used to think of that so much when later on in life I sat in my deck chair and made steamboat trips on the Mississippi river, entirely unafraid.”

“There were a great many people, too, in my early days who were still unconvinced that the world was round. Children discussed this matter among themselves and we often wondered what was over the rim. How nice it would be to dangle our feet over, and were much afraid on long rides that we might come too near the edge and fall over. Science had not penetrated very deeply then, especially in country places.”

“To have musical instruments in the church, stringed I mean, was looked on as a desecration. Women did not wear jewelry to church, it was considered a bit from the devil’s workshop. Compared now to the full-toned orchestra and the diamonds that flash in the preacher’s eyes, that seems ridiculous.”

“Why, Grandmother, was it not done? It seems so natural to me to wear what I have to church.”

“On the same principle that a Puritan man did not kiss his wife on Sunday and killed women in Salem if a man looked at her beauty at any time, because she must be a witch to have any beauty. So it was with people here. Somebody had a Puritan that left her impress on generations or was aghast of one who looked over her shoulder at times. The children of people that came from the North to settle here were not of a very high quality then, and their singing Harriett Beecher Stowe’s ‘hullabaloo’ and parody ‘Hang Jeff Davis on the Sour Apple Tree’ were to say the least, the acme of insult and our excuse for them was, ‘Oh they are just ‘damn Yankees.’’”

“That was a long time ago, too, my dear, but I remember how gleefully we paid that penalty. There was a closer family life in that olden time. They were knit together by the same interests, there were not comparisons with people who had more, for all were possessed of about the same amount of world’s goods. Of course, there were some people of means, as always. So very few of us ran ourselves ragged keeping up with the Joneses.”

“There were no extroverts or introverts by those names, some of us put over a showmanship and some were timid and clung to Mother’s voluminous skirts. Today a little one would scarcely reach up to the hem of grandma’s skimpy skirts.” (1944)

“We ate with no knowledge of vitamins. We ate everything that grew in the garden in garden time; and in winter, things that had been canned at home. There was no sophisticated knowledge about Santa Claus. In our minds, God the Father came first then God the son, then Santa Claus. Those were our three in one. There were very few toys. Our stockings were hung with great anticipation and some fear for we were taught that we must be good to receive gifts and most of us remembered sundry little selfish things, or lapses that we tried hard to make up for before Christmas.”

“Eugene Field wrote the child’s reaction to it all.”

Father calls me William, Sister calls me Will, Mother calls me Willie, but the fellows call me Bill! I love to chawnk green apples an’ go swimming in the lake. Hate to take the castor oil they give for belly ache! Most all the time the whole year round, There ain’t no flies on me, But jist fore Christmas, I’m as good as I can be!

“We had no lighted streets, no casual Santa Clauses, no ringing of bells, or horns to herald the day. But, with awe we watched, as the wise men did, for the star. We saw many but never one we thought was big enough. To wake in the cold early dawn and wait ‘till somebody was stirring was torture. We meant to stay awake and see Santa Claus and talked in low whispers about it, but we always slept.”

The great joy at seeing the stocking hanging there, all bulgy, was almost too intense. And now, when I see the gorgeous trees, the tables set to receive presents, the lights of all colors gleaming down on the simulated snow, the sureness of children to get what they have asked for, I feel the child spirit in me wandering about like a ghost in strange country.”

“You make life a symphony of joy, Grandmother, in those tense times. I had always felt that your life was bereft of so many things.”

“The universe changes, my dear, our lives are what our thoughts make it. The scar goes deep that is left of tragedy and it took many long, hard years of economy to get a foot hold again in our South. We read much more of war, and its horrors, than of peace, for history makes war more renowned. The ways of peace are not the ways of fame, but peace has its victories now over the fanfare of war, after all.”

“So of my youth, I love to remember it. I like to link the heartstrings of today across the backward space of years to the lilt of youth’s music. For youth is the time of experimentals and age has it patterns.”

“I grew up with brothers, sisters, and playmates from other families that gave me a foundation of unselfishness, toleration and a capacity for understanding. Economy was the key note of the time and I learned a lesson there that has been a post of guidance all my life. As you know, ‘the mind grows by what it feeds on.’ Even as a child, nature intrigued me. The seasons with spring’s bursting buds and pale greens of trees, my busy fingers would push sway the dead leaves to find the tiny shoots that betokened resurrection, the fresh warm velvet grass and moss that made a carpet over winter’s dead earth. Aladdin never had such adventures as I, the unfolding of times work. The heat of summer with slimmer wigwams of growing grain, the gardens with ripening vegetation…”

“Autumn’s change to harvest time and nature pouring out her cornucopia of ripening stores, the patter of autumn rain was never dreary to me, but only an accompaniment to all sounds that blended with cooling air and subdued sunshine. The homeless, drifting smoke, and crimson sunsets that lowered behind the horizon, sending brilliant beams through all the sky. I peopled this entire glowing world with thoughts that were immortal. Then winter, driving all creatures indoors to snug corners, cozy fire light, books and pictures. Snow making arabesques outside the window panes and more after a snow ball fight and wet dripping children by the drying fire. The pale sun fading without a scintillation now like turning down the wick of a lighted lamp. These make a picture of morning time and places that my childish mind reveled in. Right fundamentals, my dear, mean everything to a child and when we have become like little children, you know, we are told that we can inherit the kingdom.”

“I am very thankful for my golden childhood, and the lessons I learned of wholesome living. And to think of it now is not ‘as one who treads alone, some banquet hall, deserted.’ But as some Eden ‘where beauty has no ebb, decay no flow, when joy was wisdom, time an endless song.’”

September 10, 1942

Sketch No. 3

On a cool morning in October, with the soft wind blowing in little gusts that sent fallen leaves adrift that lay in sheltered corners, I went again to hear another story of a section of her life by my Grandmother.

Up and down the walk were zinnias flaming their brilliant colors in the air. In rows under her windows were gorgeous chrysanthemums, from lovely pastel shades to crimson hues. Everywhere a clinging vine could grasp a holding space, were morning glories. Late roses on the South side around the corner, made a picture that the frost king would hesitate to spoil. I could see through the library window my Grandmother, rocking with her knitting bag on the arm of her chair. She did not knit socks for her men to wear, oh no, she made bedspreads, lace table cloths, hooked rugs and other items of household accessories. On a table beside her were books. There were always books somewhere near her, and the book cases around the room were filled from the readings of her girlhood to, say Louis Broomfield’s modern outbursts. She read them all. “How else”, she asked me one day, “Can I keep up with you young people? I must understand your reactions to live among you.” And I had said, “To live with us you mean, Grandmother? For we are all going over a road of age-years that you have already traveled and have come to us with no prejudice and so much understanding.”

I went in the room and said, “Are you in a talk mood? You know it has been some time since I heard a story and I’m so interested.”

“I wonder why” she said. “(It’s) Just a conglomeration of philosophies, reactions and memories. My life has not been unusual but in a span of seventy five years there would naturally be many upheavals of humanity; time to learn many lessons in living and to see many long stretches of building and of corresponding tearing down.”

“It was June wasn’t it, when we talked last?”

“Yes, she answered, it was June; from grant dewy June the bride of the seasons, the budding time of earth’s beauty. July came with its withering heat to human beings and in our section of the country, bringing out the luxuriant growth and beauty of the cotton fields. You know, my dear, this cotton ranks among the most important fiber in the world. It and the holly hock belong to the same family. They are called the Mallon Family. Cotton cloth has been made in India and Egypt for many centuries. It is of world- wide importance and the United States raises about four fifths of it. Acres of it in full bloom is a sight to remember.”

“You lived once, where it was grown in large quantities, didn’t you, Grandmother?”

“Yes for many years on the lower Mississippi River. Now, July passed and August brought the blooms to the tops of the cotton plants - the shrill call of locusts and dry flies; the chirps of the crickets at twilight; the late roses all aflame as though they sensed finality. Butter cups nodded and said goodbye, clover and daisy went off together. But the fragrant water lilies yet, mooned in August weather. Then September swings the pendulum of the summer sun out and ticked in Autumn’s breath. The drooping leaves, the fall flowers, the morning glories…”

“You love them don’t you, Grandmother?”

“To me, my dear, they are the glory of the sun and earth and dawning day. Bearing their purple colors of royalty, the pink of day break skies, the blue of the noon day heavens, and white of the pure things of earth. I read some verses once that gave an insight into the frail things. It was called ‘To a morning Glory.’”

Was it worthwhile to paint so fair Thy every leaf - - - - To bring thy beauty into perfect flower Then like a passing fragrance or a smile Vanish away beyond recovery’s power Was its frail bloom worthwhile “Life was mine!” And I, who pass without regret or grief Have cared the more to make my moment fine Because it was so brief. In its first radiance I have seen the sun Why tarry then till comes the night? I go my way content, content that I have seen the morning light!

“Oh, Grandmother, what a beautiful thought’

“Not only a beautiful omen, my dear, but one of benefits, a thought that bespeaks the glory of the South. Something that gives us food for thinking.”

“I’ll never see another morning glory without seeing its soul, Grandmother.”

“There is a soul in everything that grows. We only see what our eyes are taught to look upon and our inner consciousness is often left untutored.” She went on, “and so September went and the golden glow of summer in its beautiful prime went with it, and the memory that we hold like a tolling bell comes the wistful refrain of Tosti’s ‘Goodbye Summer, Goodbye, Goodbye.’” She paused a little while.

But when October comes, And poplars drift their leafage down in flakes Of gold below, And beaches burn like twilight flowers, that used To tell of snow, And maples bursting into flame, set all the Hills afire, And summer, from the evergreens sees paradise draw nigh. A thousand sunsets, all at once, distill like Herman’s dew. And lingers in the wiling woods and stains them Through and through. As if all earth had blossomed out one grand Corinthian flower. To crown times graceful capitol for just one gorgeous hour. They strike their colors to the king of all The stately throng. He comes in pomp, October! To him all times belong. The frost is on his sandals, but the flush is on his cheek.

The sun puts on a human look, behind the hazy fold. The mid-year noon of silver is struck a new in gold. In honor of the very day that Moses saw of old. For in the burning bush that blazed As quenchless as a sword were, The old Lieutenant first, October and the Lord.

“Bravo! Grandmother,” I said, “the very words sound grandly rounded.”

“Yes,” she said, “those lines to me are filled with the sonorous quality of words that filled my child’s mind when my father read the old Puritanical stories to me from the Old Testament, or the sounds that have filtered down through my mind, of Jupiter on Mount Olympus. I’ve always loved the Old Testament, with its nomadic tent dwellers, its war drives, its poetry and songs, its laws, and it prophets. There is something about it that is like a robust singer’s bass voice, thunderous and musical.”

“And so it is now October, and it brings with it the wonderful promise of full filament and stirs us with intangible feelings of things to come, tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” I echoed, “Grandmother, what is tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death,” she quoted from Macbeth.

“It is a luring light, my dear, that we follow through the span of years and never catch. We crowd the shadows behind us, reaching out for the first rose dawn, to find it is not tomorrow, but today, and the will-o-the-wisp beckons us from some dim shadow land, as far out of our reach as when we starter. Tomorrow also is the promised land of hope. We close our eyes on the night watches, telling ourselves that tomorrow will clear the mists ad lift our burdens, and when the sun comes, it is today.”

“We ask, where is tomorrow? The day of achievement, and we hear the answer ‘There are no tomorrows, only yesterdays for memories and todays for work.’ The days that have been marred by sin and selfishness become the yesterdays that hold the ghosts of sorrow and regret that haunt us forever.”

“For the moving finger writes; and Omar Khayam having writ, moves on: ‘nor all our piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line nor all your tears wash out a word of it.’ We should therefore make life careful how she wields her pen, so there will be no ghosts, but benign spirits to bless the memories of our passing days and learn a trail to ease the travel of those who follow after us. For thus, we round out our human lives in the tireless search for Manana, the ‘ignis fature’s’ of time. We shall never reach tomorrow, my dear, till we lay down the Pilgrim’s pack and staff in the lone Valley of the silent spaces.”

“Yes, Grandmother, I can see that,” I told her. “I can realize that youth’s flying feet have tried to overtake this ‘ignis fature’s.’ Translated, literally what does that mean, Grandmother?”

“It is Latin, meaning ‘foolish fire.’ We use it to express a delusion, a Will of the Wisp or mirages we see in fancy but which we never arrive at. So you see we must live today. In this October season it seems easy to live by day for each one brings it mend of beauty. To some, the autumn season gives a thought of melancholy, of finality. To me, it is the time of gathering up of the things which we have wrought. The shepherds call to his flocks, for their winter haven, the binding of the sheaves.”

“I love to watch the migrating flight of the birds to warmer climates, hear the honk of the wild geese on their homing trek. Even sounds are muted in the cooling air. After a long, hot summer, I welcome the season, as a traveler who sees the ‘hills o’ home.’”

“The everlasting hills, how firm they stand. Their mighty summits braced, a Titan’s band. When Indian summer’s golden glow is past. Oh, hills of home, the hills of home. Personally, I love the long evenings with my books. You know, my dear there are two distinct worlds in many people’s lives, one of living breathing people and the world of books. Living people satisfy a need for contact and from books the whole pageantry of the world’s history passes by. The conflicts of the world are not all fought on tented fields or from ships or aircraft, but minds are measured, spirits shrived, facts are faced and much matter of import is adjusted in the reading of books. Reading men’s progress and books are the only way for some of us to know the world. I think the best part of education is in reading after our school routine is done. Sometimes a man’s best education is what he gives himself. In the beginning of book making were ideas coming from an awakened world intellect, that were to strengthen and illuminate all time. They were in reality, like light houses in the sea of time, or like a depository of thought and ideas.”

“You know, the Alexandrian Library was founded by one of the Ptolemys, three hundred years before Christ. It was enlarged by succeeding rulers until it became the most famous of all ancient time. At one time there were 700,000 volumes in it. When Caesar invaded Alexandria, most of these books were burned, and in their narrow fanaticism the early Christians burned the rest. That was about four hundred years after Christ. That library was named for Alexander the Great. The story of him and his father Phillip, made a very vivid impression on my mind. I read about them first in my Peter Parley’s history and all sorts of stories around them. I could sense the vivid enthusiasms of what Alexander must have felt when he wept when there were no more worlds to conquer. I imagine Hitler would be glad to have him today to help him get rid of some of the burdens he didn’t expect to shoulder.”

“No doubt he does, Grandmother, I’m sure he, I mean Hitler, wouldn’t weep for any more to conquer. I have an idea he and Mussolini both feel less like Caesar than when they started.”

“Yes” she said, I imagine they both are pretty well fed up on what they have already tackled. Caesar’s exploits also intrigued me. Now I can see the difference in the outlook of Alexander and Caesar. Alexander mastered for the love of mastery as any pagan would. He was an educated creature with a barbarous instinct. Caesar was a reformer. He was of noble birth and about three hundred years younger than Alexander. Of course he was ambitious, as Cassius told Brutus, but who wouldn’t have been in his position, even down to the day? But it was not that attribute that ended his life. It was the jealousy of men who fawned on him for favors. History tells us he was a very charming and courteous man. Politically as you know, though, a man can ‘assume a

28 virtue if he has it not’ to gain a place in the sun. We have Caesar’s own Latin writings to tell of his times and exploits. I wasn’t so enthusiastic over those histories after I struggled in my school days to find out what it was all about. I lost the sense, more than not, in trying to place verb and a noun in the right place.”

“I think Mussolini’s idea was to be a modern Caesar, in this conflict. It’s great that we do have records to know of our world’s growth,” I said.

“Yes”, she laughed. “Marco Polo’s travels were all jotted down and when he came home, he was classed as the greatest liar since Arinias. But we have found he was really telling of what he saw. My initiative has been fired to high heat over his tales, in my child’s mind of reading. We have knowledge now of the entire globe through the medium of books, of travel, research and history. Into remote places, into realms of science, art, music, literature, philosophy and all world history. Experiences of men and women are all garnered up for us. From our books we can separate the wheat from the chaff, select our own companions; those who will not criticize, abuse, or lie to us; who will not desert us when we need companionship, friends who will never change.”

“I can reach out my hand and bring before me, Acadia or the Inferno. We read the Iliad and see Helen ‘whose face launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium.’ We can also know when this epic was being written, King Solomon was ruler in Judea. Rome was founded while the Greeks were celebrating their first Olympian Games.”

“It is nice to know the parallels too, Grandmother.” I said.

She laughed, “Yes and more satisfaction to me now as I had everything classed as ‘ancient’ in my mind, which meant everything at the same time, when my mind was beginning to absorb without discretion. I mingled Abraham and Isaac, Rome, William of Normandy, and Athens all in one sentence and time, also Romulus and Remus. I was fired with a super natural idea of them, for seventy-five years ago there was much superstition and the wolf mother was just as real as the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. Then nearly or maybe more, as we count time. Four thousand years before Christ we can read of Chalden, and the old city of Ur, the home of Abraham, Babylon the Phoenicians, who gave us our alphabet; Judea, the center of this Jewish Empire. Five hundred years before Christ, Egypt was highly developed with its capital city of Memphis, and Lycurgus, the law maker, lived 900 years before Christ. About 600 years BC, Solon revised the harsh laws of the Greeks, which freed debtors and gave a certain amount of land to each citizen - somewhat a democratic idea. We can read of Cyrus who founded the Persian Empire and of Darius who organized it, of Carthage and old Macedonia which finally became Roman provinces. We can read about Rome which became mistress of the world for nearly 400 years and attained 100,900,000 people under her rule, at peace.”

“My father read all these things to me and my mind, with its vivid imagination, peopled it accordingly. Later on came the Goths and Vandals, Attila and his Huns. A German general whose name was Odoacer (I had to look that name up, my dear, I only knew him as a German) as a conqueror brought an end to the Roman Empire. We can read of the institution or slavery in the Dark Ages, about 400 years of it, in which we see the beginning of the modern civilization. The Roman church made much of their law to react on the people. Many centuries passed before a new race and influence developed.”

Right here, with my books, I can read all that the background of the world. And then we have England. My dear, I’m afraid you are bored with all these bygone things that have so interested me and have been a part of my development and pleasure ever since my father voiced them to me till I could understand. I’ve built many a grand world of each episode I learned as realities. For the gods on Olympus were as real to me as the emperors of Rome. I became a part of it all, except, at that early time, Carthage, I couldn’t understand why black people could be Generals and do great things. To my Southern bred mind they, the black people, were cooks who fixed what we wanted to eat, and black Mammies who loved and cared for us, and the men who plowed the fields, and waited on us at the table.”

“Oh, Grandmother don’t leave out a single item of what books have meant and done for you. Tell it all.”

“My dear, do you remember Browning’s ‘Oh to be in England, now that April’s here’ and Rupert Brooke’s, ‘Somewhere in a foreign land, there is forever England.’ I have always felt a kinship with England. It is something I can’t very well describe, but her history and her literature have intrigued me all my life. I always laid the burden of the American Revolution on Old George III, but the country that stood for was to me a thing apart. I’m my heart has always been her steadfastness.”

“I never quite understood France. You know, morality was very real in my young life and any infringement meant almost a boycott. I was not allowed to read French literature, and the historical glimpses I got of Kings and Queens did not react favorably. Germany always wanted to rule things, but my mind held to its music, of which they were masters. Profoundly, I have always loved music. I don’t suppose, every again will Germany be thought of in terms of music.”

“We can read of Spain and her grandeur, and the fall of Poland, still striving to hold her place among powers, the buffet of Germany and once comprising a large part of central Europe, of old Russia and Genghis Khan, who was king of Asia and ruled Russia, and later Catherine the Great, who was a German woman.”

“They are all here in my library and in all my years have been, to me, the procession of fiction and fact of all ages. Marco Polo traveled extensively and wrote a book on these travels. It was the first account of extensive travel in strange places, and all the customs that he wrote about were so unlike those that were known, that his book was considered untrue, but for centuries it was the only account of Oriental civilization that was to be had. For an eon of time though, Marco Polo was considered the world’s greatest liar. I think I spoke of him before while we talked, but I feel that he must have felt so chagrined to have seen all the things that the people back home refused to believe because they were pessimistic and only believed in what they saw. Then we can read of the two great English Queens, Elizabeth and Victoria.”

“I won’t speak of the fictional characters that have become in my thoughts as real as the ones who really lived because some time I am going to tell you of some books that I have read and their influence in my life. Of course Shakespeare, as you know, has been my constant source of intelligent information. He fostered my love of good literature and my interest in human nature. I’ve seen many of his plays on the stage and thrill to them, even in this anti-stilted age. It is a grand thing my dear, to delve and find new things. Youth has such zest to know, and it gives one a reposeful atmosphere of culling over what the world has wrought. Much poetry has given me the artistry of

30 thought that serves me now, since time has taken away from my everyday life, its close family ties.”

“In later years, trash in literature has become very common. But even so, trash only shows the reaction of minds to certain conditions. We have unsightly gullies in our fertile fields and gnarled, twisted trees on the banks of beautiful streams of water.”

“We have our individual minds and free range to reason and judge. We can walk in the beautiful valleys and keep away from the troubles. We can also lay aside convention and be equally at home with king or serf in our books. We can give honor to whom honor is due, and leave the worthless to themselves. I have always loved history and literature most of all my school studies. I still have some of my early school books; a blue back speller, Webster’s, and a primary history, that my father read to me before I was six, a first reader that was a delight. I had my first arithmetic for a long time, not that I had any affection for it, but it just didn’t get lost. My love of study did not include figures. I have an English literature in which I reveled in my first years away from home, a Quackenbos rhetoric, and a McGuffy’s fifth reader. I find them all interesting yet and give me much pleasure.”

“I always loved to go to school. My first tryouts were the neighborhood ones, taught by anybody who had the urge or who would take the pittance offered. We read Mother Goose along with the lesson work. Many a lesson we learned from those old time classics: Miss Muffet, Tom Tucker, Jack and Jill. The old woman who had her petticoats cut off. How real they were! They are somewhat in the discard now but there was a philosophy in many of them.”

“In those first years we read poetry and recited. It was memory training that stood me in good stead for many years. These poems were very typical of the time. One, I remember was, ‘The Little Match Seller.’ She wore a ragged shawl and sold matches to feed her mother, who was desolate, because of a husband who drank. ‘Father dear father, came home with me now’ was another one read so frequently. In those years, in most sections, women sat at home and eked out a living. So inane were their lives while the gay saloons kept up interest for men. This was particularly true of isolated families on farms. There were no gatherings, no clubs for women and no Rotarians or Elks for men. So each had to do the thing at hand. Women didn’t know so much about personality and if God made them with features or figures far be it for them to change it. I remember the first bustle I ever wore. Somebody’s grandmother said to me, ‘if the Lord wanted you to have a hump on your back, he would have put it there.’”

“Women endured then. Men were literally masters. As for divorce, no more shameful thing could take place. A divorced woman was looked on as a Jezebel. We sang hymns continuously. One I remember, ‘I want to be an angel and with the angels stand.’ We were all prepared to die, rather than live here and risk being unhappy. Our parents and teachers read from the Old Testament this, ‘As for man, his days are as grass, as a flower of the field. The wind passeth over, and it is gone and the place there of shall know it no more.’ And from the New Testament this, ‘For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.’ James gave that version and the other was found in the C111 Psalm.”

“Isn’t it great, Grandmother, that we take a different view of life? We live so much happier and our interpretation is so different.”

“You know, my dear, we can live too close to anything to get a good perspective. The lights and shades of a beautiful picture, a sun lit valley or shadowed forest must be seen correctly to be perfect. Our parents had been taught the narrow perspective of the strict letter of the law. No allowance was made for figures of speech, poetic license, allegory or parable. It was written down there in the Bible book and no matter what you read, it was an inspired truth. We are nonetheless religious for having gotten a right perspective and a broader vision. We came to see that people that old were human beings, as we, and their reactions were human like ours, that they wrote history, tales, poetry, had visions and dreams, just as we do, and knowing that we can understand how and where their human minds could react, just as ours do.”

“Some writers of a newer time have given us very lovely thoughts about life, some are still pessimistic and others tell us, as of old, to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow ye die. Shakespeare made Hamlet afraid to kill himself for the dreams he might have afterward. Robert Browning wrote, ‘I count life just a stuff to try life’s strength on.’ Horace, the Latin poet, puts it this way, ‘Happy the man and happy he alone. He who can call today his own; He who secure within can say, Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.’ And old Omar Khayyam who believed that ‘dust to dust’ meant the end of ‘thee and me.’ Ah, make the most of what we get may spend Before we too into the dust descend. Dust unto dust and under dust to lie, Sans wine, sans song, sans singer and sans end.

“Eugene O’Neil called life, ‘A strange interlude.’ Lizzette Roese wrote that life was ‘a wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun.’ Shelley said that life was ‘like a dome of many colored glass that stained the white radiance of eternity.’”

“On and on I could go, giving the reactions of minds all down the centuries concerning life here and what hereafter means, from a stand point of philosophers, students, the cynics and the layman with his simple life. We have come a long way and made a troubled journey since our innocent minds wanted to go to heaven to be happy and feared Sunday as we would the day of wrath. John Wesley, the father of Methodism was responsible for a lot of tense living.”

“He wrote hymns, Grandmother, didn’t he? I’ve heard tales about his father punishing him for doing so much of it and he answering him with another impromptu one.”

Grandmother laughed, “It was said that he had more zeal than discretion, but I imagine your Sundays were cold and colorless. Strict sermons were of fire and brimstone. My irrepressibleness was afraid of the day, for fear some kind of sin would creep in to me be seen on Sunday. No play, no noise, get set and know the catechism to be said every Sunday. There were so many don’ts and bars. I was very eager to get into heaven, for it was pictured with the fidelity of old Calvanistic truisms. I knew too, if I could get there and get wings I could fly to, too.

“I have dreamed all my life, my dear, that I was flying. The sensation is one of a swimmer in water. I always awake so disappointed. I’ve always wanted to fly and never have my feet left the ground except to climb up steps. I had my chance in November 1865. John Knox had also contributed his quota of anti-sin to the world and the glories of

32 heaven and hearing and singing hymns made the heavenly mansions something to be desired.”

“That sort of teaching molded plastic minds into what made the Puritans a narrow, hard, sectarian people, and which had sifted down to the gateway of the 19th Century. A great many old people now have the same thoughts that permeated the minds of their grandparents’ time. To the present generation those ideas are merely ‘parasitic pretentions.’ A Dr. Henry Livingston went out to explore Africa when I was a very young child. It was indeed darkest Africa up to that time, with no civilization since that of the Egyptians. About the first thing I ever read, exclusive of my school books was the book he wrote about his life and travels out there. I will never forget the thrill of it. It was a black fairy tale of wild African life. The peculiar sounds, and music of those strange barbaric names, the description of palm fringed Sahara and the fierce wild natives, had an uncanny charm. Livingston died out there and was brought back to England in 1873 and was buried in West Minister Abbey. When I was twelve years old, my father gave me four of Walter Scott’s Waverly novels. Without, in the least understanding the historical significance of them, I reveled in the grandeur of the words, scenes, characters and story plots. How many times I have read them, each time feeling a little surer of my ground, till when I had learned the head waters of their history, and I understand it all.” “I learned too of the wild beauty of Scotland, the patriotism of the people, the rugged Cotter and the wild Highlander. Burns gives us the simple lives of the people in his ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night.’”

How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood, When fond recollection recalls them to view The orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wildwood. And every loved spot that my fancy knows.

Sketch No. 4

“In September of 1882, I went away from home to Bellevue College (Belhaven College on Bellevue Street) and spent four happy years there. It was altogether a new experience for me. I remember how carefully my mother packed my trunk and when I left she cried. I was so elated at the thought of going, and the fact that I had a new trunk was cause for great joy to me. A trunk was a treasured possession. So many keepsakes in them, so many trays to hold different things, little compartments set apart from the main space and to see it put on the train was so important. My father drove me in the buggy, it wasn’t many miles. You know, my dear, there comes to us at times cross currents of thoughts like strains of distant music, that bring memories so realistic that it is almost like physical impact. It is almost an actual transport of feeling, place, and times.”

“Then at last I stood before the teachers, taking a test that would delight a modern student of this day. They only found out my age and what I had read, my general ability, my disposition, social qualities, and my reacting to being taught, and teachers. They found out that as I went along, my father’s system of reading, had made me far ahead of many my age. I imagine, my dear, if arithmetic had been eliminated, I would have been happy. I remember how aptly I applied Longfellow’s ‘Rainy Day’ to my reaction to that. ‘Into each life some rain must fall, some days be dark and dreary.’ I was a very temperamental sort of person (the neighbors called it flighty) and I imagine I applied that more than often. Women in that period were very prone to emotion and temperament as was the tempo of the Nineteenth Century or the ‘Mauve Decade’ as it had been called.”

“It has been said that you react according to your personality, but I think rather more often you react to your environment. For to many of us the aspect of a fact depends to you on how you see it. And also, en masse people follow a thought ‘till it becomes a plan of living ‘till some meteoric force of thought swings downward to earth and with it the old order changes. Then we say ‘times have changed.’ Time stands minutely but our minds change. So my entrance into a world away from home created a new life for me. That was a transition that would have been tragic if I had not loved my work.”

“I was home loving and my years there had been filled with careful attention from my parents, and I had a care free life for having been sheltered sensibly. But to stand alone, as a person, was what I had to do now. So I remembered all my father’s teachings and the song he would sing for us. I was the oldest one of the children and there seemed always to be a little one. So we each took advantage of the songs that went down the line. He couldn’t sing, but his one outlet was a sort of chant, or hymn but ‘Captain Jenks of the Horse Marines’ and ‘Dixie’ sounded very dissimilar to us then, instead of entertainment. Even now, my dear, my pulses quicken and tears fill up, when I hear it played. All the old familiar things stood out sharply to me and in later years, I realized how home life had been grounded in me.”

“I missed my mother’s tender hands. She ministered to all our needs or wants. Her motherhood crowned her like a jeweled coronet. My father was our playmate and companion, but my mother was our refuge, our rock of ages.”

“Those early weeks at school were a revelation to me; to do or say or put forward things I had been taught; to stand on my own two feet in the midst of other girls with no more sober thought than I had. Many of us lived in the dormitory. No boys admitted, of course, during the term and only by dint of circumstance or cupidity did we see one, except in vacation time or in the term endings, when they were needed for theatricals we put on. But you know, ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage,’ so there were times when strings were let down from windows, after lights out, and brought up notes, or candy, peppermint mostly, or possibly apples, etc. How funny that all seems now. My dear, I wonder if you know what a striped stick of peppermint candy looks like.”

“Why, yes Grandmother, but I don’t believe I ever had a gift of one.”

“I remember distinctly getting a half pound once, packed in a cigar box. That was ridiculously funny, even in that age. But we grow up, my dear, and see our youth so tolerantly, way back down the line. Of course, at fourteen, boys were beginning to be parts of the great scheme of things and not mere worms.”

“Being a freshman carried its humiliations, but we managed to pass through happily, and begin our sophomore year in a spirit commensurate with our position.”

“You spoke of theatricals, Grandmother, you mean plays that all of you took part in?”

“Just that. Sometimes we spent as much as six weeks with study and rehearsals. So far removed now I cannot remember many of them, but I do recall ‘East Lynne’ in which I was the lost wife who came back. We also had tableaux; impersonating so many things, holding positions as statue, and groups representing many art pieces. In all these things we had boys to take parts and of course, there were nooks and alcoves that served for many a little love scene that was not put on the stage. Youth, with its flying feet seems so far away now, my dear. But time, the wonder worker, gives us memory.”

“My love of reading was fostered by the age, which included elocution, speech making and theatricals. The tempo of the time was very typical of the gay nineties, into which we were moving. I was called on to recite at various times and many places. We learned what we read ‘by heart,’ we called it then, which gave ample room to display our talents. We made gestures, knelt, rolled our eyes in tragic fashion over the ‘Maniac,’ ‘The norm of the still,’ and ‘Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine.’ Being emotional, I chose the tragic things. One I remember was David’s lament over Absalom. Even now, in this hurley burley world, that poem is, to me, like a chant of organ music.”

“I don’t know that poem, Grandmother. Who wrote it?”

“It was written by N. P. Willis, a native of Maine, born in 1806. He died in 1867, a year before I was born. The first few line of this poem are perfect, rhythmic music. ‘The waters slept. Night’s silvery veil hung low. On Jordan’s bosom, and the eddies curled their glassy rings beneath it, like the still unbroken beating of the sleeper’s pulse.’ Many times I have read those lines to catch the spirit of music in the glowing ‘verses.’”

“What was the story, Grandmother?”

“Absalom had been killed and David, his father, had come to mourn over him. The whole poem is filled with a quiet feeling. I have read audiences in the intense

35 silence, giving it as a reading. If I had not been born an actress, all this kind of work would have made me one. I loved impersonation, and was well able to do most phases of it. Natural, I was called. That meant innately. That one talent has never left me and sometimes yet, I astonish people.”

“My favorite hymn at fourteen was ‘Come all ye Disconsolate.’ I pictured in my mind, crowds of grief filled people marching toward a light of hallowed beauty, to be shriven and made glad. In those school days, too, I read a poem called ‘The Blue and The Grey.’ It came out as a magazine story in 1867 and was a tribute to a group of women in Mississippi, who decorated equally well, the graves of the Northern and Southern soldier. One stanza is this:

From the silence of sorrowful hours The desolate mourners go Lovingly ladened with flowers. Alike for the friend and the foe. Under the sod and the dew. Waiting the judgment day, Under the roses the blue, Under the lilies the gray.

“’The soldier of the Rhine,’ by Caroline Norton was another that was very popular then. It began: A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers; Telling of his thoughts as he lay there. Rock me to sleep was another one I tore my heart out with. Backward, turn backward O time in your flight Make me a child again, just for tonight.

“Elizabeth Akers Allen wrote that. She lost her mother when she was a young child. ‘Burial of Sir John Moore’ was another plaintive poem of which Byron said he would rather have written than any he had ever done. Charles Wolfe wrote it. He was an Irish poet and clergyman. ‘Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note, as his corpse to the rampart we hurried,’ it began. The burial took place at night. Sir John Moore was a British general in charge of British forces in Spain, in the war against Napoleon, and was killed in that capacity. There is a monument to him in St. Paul’s Cathedral, England. Tennyson’s ‘Break, Break, Break’ was also a great favorite of mine, and Longfellow’s ‘Resignation.’”

“Speaking of Longfellow, at my age of fifteen there was a boy not much older, who gave me Longfellow’s poems. I have it yet and highly treasure it. It is a complete work. That boy loved me as a man later on, but he married after I did and has been dead some years.”

“’Spartacus to the Gladiators’ was also one my recitations. It was in prose and was an impassioned speech to his fellow gladiators which ended, ‘Thracians! If we must fight, let us fight for ourselves. If we must die, let it be under the clear sky in noble, honorable battle.’”

“So many things I learned I cannot remember; Byron’s ‘Prisoner of Chillon,’ ‘The Black Horse and His Rider,’ a story of Benedict Arnold. We sang ‘Silver Threads Among

36 the Gold,’ ‘When You and I Were Young,’ ‘The Last Rose of Summer,’ ‘Old Folks at Home,’ ‘Sewanee River,’ ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ ‘Juanita,’ and others of like quality.”

“Some time passed, examinations came and went, studies changed, clientele of girls and teachers came and went and my graduation day came and went. My diploma gave me an AB degree, of which I have always been most proud. I have studied through the years the various things that were taught then. I finally staggered into trigonometry, had two years of Latin, some philosophy, much ancient, a fair amount of modern history. But when I was graduated at eighteen years of age, the history of the United States was a blank from Harper’s Ferry down. No version of the country’s life was taught in the schools for they were all written from a Northern standpoint and we Southerners thought they were unjust and children should not learn a biased account of the Civil War.”

“Overall, my aura was, I could say is, a rhythmic one. I reveled in music and poetry. I know nothing of the mechanics of music, but my soul was all rhythm. I was given piano lessons, but it conflicted with my appreciation. I knew what it meant to me, but my elders never understood. Most girls could ‘play a little’ and naturally I must do likewise. Music was so deeply embedded in my soul, it seemed a sacrilege to mechanize it. I’ve never regretted not being able to play, for my rhythmic being is filled with it. I do not like indifferent performances on any instrument and so many have now shuffled around to the blare of horns, the rattle of the trap drum, with noise that is almost pandemonium. I cannot call it music or rhythm. To me, it is a throwback to barbarism and the antics of savage wild things.”

“Grandmother, we don’t feel it that way. We enjoy it.”

“Most things are comparative, my dear, and one age becomes an antique to what prevails at the moment. But what you young people call music is only blaring noise to me. Who can compare the two eras? Naturally that was my heritage and remains with me, from a time when heart songs, more flowers along all pathways, and dancing rhythm swayed to rhythmic music. I think, my dear, in ‘In Coming Oe’r’ the bygone days, I miss the dancing most.”

“Isn’t it a pity, Grandmother? The times change so that you really lose what seems always best.”

“It isn’t lost, my dear, the crowds, the lilt of laughter, are what we older ones do not see.” But she smiled again, “my radio and I can tell many a tale of the dance, not in progress of the program. I love it yet, and am thankful that time has only stiffened my fingers slightly, my toes not at all, nor even my knee joints.”

“How do you remember, Grandmother?”

“The human mind, my dear, has room to stow away many things and find them again after long years and what comes between. You can retain happiness through all the years of loss and change, for happiness is within yourself, your disposition, your own reactions.”

“Of course, none of us are super beings and there are many crossroads of trouble, many bridges of doubtful strength you must cross, but to have happiness you must put the attributes into your own heart and soul, and cultivate them. We fall, but I

37 think it was Josh Billings who said, ‘It ain’t no disgrace fur a man ter fall, but it for him to lay there.’[The quote is It ain’t no disgrace for a man to fall, but to lie there and grunt is.} Life is always ahead of you, and does not stand still. We ourselves must exercise that God-given quality that is within us all to stand square to the world. Happiness is a byproduct of our thoughts and reactions that come to rise or fall. ‘As a man thinketh, so is he.’ Some people only know the narrow path they tread, and that trail will give them narrow thoughts. They will only catch glimpses of rays of the sunlight of living. To ‘Know Thyself’ is the greatest lesson we have to learn.”

“There are minds of sinister import. Those are filled with avarice, greed, selfishness. Those are minds that make wars, undermine good and sow evil. So you see, to know your self means to live without detriment to your neighbor, not to judge him by what makes a standard for you, but by understanding him. You know somebody said, ‘What is one man’s meat is another man’s poison,’ so it applies that one man’s Eden could be another man’s Inferno. So you can see that happiness is a growth of soul and no one rule applies specifically to every soul. Very often we are accounted wrong by those who object to our pet obsessions, and you know reason cannot judge sentiment. In one analysis comes duty and responsibility, which are not identical. A duty you can shirk, but responsibility never leaves us, no matter how we plan and plot.”

“Grandmother,” I said. “Why do we employ so many complexities when life could be lived simply?”

“My father used to day, ‘There are many birds of many kinds and many men of many minds.’ No bird sings the identical notes and men’s minds have never become habituated to the thought of life being a lover. By love, of course, you mean charity, not a gift of material, worth alone, but of tenderness of living of understanding, bearing one another’s burdens, all of which, we do not do. Minds are perverse in many things, so many of us, are traveling the road to the slough of Despondence and fail to grasp the golden rays of happiness.”

“It is a pity, Grandmother, that it takes age to see all the things clearly that we need to know when we are young,” I said. “We have to do so many things, make so many important decisions, before we know what is best to do.”

“Yes, but to know what is best to do is not always worked out, no matter what your age. Youth is an era of ego. The young are prone to think of themselves as the eager minded birds, who know they can fly from tree to tree. The young have not many years back of them to prove any experience by and the future is their’s to command. The road we older ones traveled, is as a tale that is told to youth. They are busy clearing their own trails and byways. That is as it should be, for every soul must make its own music, each one of us must play our own part. Heredity, which is only a tendency toward certain traits and environment has its lasting influence, we clash many times and many times make chaos of lives; that we are responsible for, or those to whom we owe allegiance. But those things have to be worked out and there are those of us who are intuitively made to follow and cannot learn to lead, but more than often a leader can make his way through handicaps to his objective.

“You know, my dear, I have heard people say ‘I never stop when I start out on an objective.’ That sounds very efficient and a sort of bravery is there. When you start, it is well to wonder first if your objection is worthwhile. If it is worth your struggle or the way of ruthless pushing away obstacles or sustaining loss that may come in your never ending

38 push. And when you gain your objective, pause to note if it brings you to loneliness of spirit or human contact. Will you be on a mountain top to look down on the hates of those below? In short, an objective is something every one of us should have, but not to gain by pushing other people out of focus.”

“I can see that very plainly, Grandmother. To put it tritely, to keep up with the Joneses means striving to reach a social house top by climbing up a ladder, you have to push other people off it.”

“Yes that is a very good way of putting it. Have your objective and strive to reach it, but not to the detriment of your comrades who must make contact with you. You can glorify your objective by the benign spirit you take there, or you can make it a devil’s workshop, if you spread devastation along the way.”

“On the other hand, taking life as we find it is a hazard, for life isn’t very logical and there is no exact formula to work it out. We have to have a vision of what we are trying to do, and an appreciation of that vision. The power of education has taken away from us the instinct that made our forbearers sense the essence of things that we sometimes fail to see when it is set before us. Now that doesn’t mean that fundamentals have changed or human nature, or morals. Mannerisms change as to character and codes change as to morals but the fundamentally innate thing that was created in us does not. Now, as to morals, a woman can wear a dress up to her knees, shoes with cut out toes and practically no volume of clothing and still have the heart of Cornelia with her jewels. Laws cannot create character or morality.”

“In the decades up to the time I was eighteen years old, women wore hoop skirts, bustles, heavy petticoats, boned corsets, heavy cotton stockings, high shoes buttoned or laced up, flannel night gowns, rats or puffs in their hair and what you call panties, we called drawers, made of heavy cotton that reached knee lengths and ruffled on legends. They did most of the house work, raised big families and were usually too busy to lie sick or ill all the time, for respite. Men wore whiskers, flannel underwear (long,) big watches and chains , rode bicycles, went in for politics, worked twelve hours a day and lived to old age.”

“Oh, Grandmother, how funny that sounds today, when we wear almost nothing and have an eight hour work day.”

“Yes, I have read somewhere that the ‘moralities of one age become the immoralities of another.’ Now we can’t do without a maid, men work fewer hours, play harder than they work, develop high blood pressure, and die young with heart failure. Women work outside the home which the maid keeps, rush in to eat, rush out for recreation. There are no more big families. Those are only changes. I am not judging, only presenting facts.”

“So many facilities for making work easy have turned the minds of the people to easy ways and often idle ways and you know, my dear, the ‘devil builds his workshop in idle brains.’ I know I sound a note of what might be called ‘growing old.’ And sometimes age is really like some old mansion piece, but to me age is not hardening of the arteries but a hardening of the mental processes, and age is sometimes riper in knowledge than broken by senility. After all, my dear, we get what we give, according to the ratio of our spirit of giving and taking. My prayer of life is now.

Let me grow lovely, growing old, So many fine things do; There is healing in old trees, Old streets a glamour hold, Why may not I, as well as these, Grow lovely, growing old.

Sketch No. 5

Of Christmas and the New Year

It had snowed last night and now the sleet was coming chatteringly against the window panes. It was truly a wild world outside, but in my grandmother’s sitting room a bright fire burned in the grate, making most delightfully dancing shadows behind her, or us, for I had spent last night with her. Christmas had gone, ‘the tumult and the shouting was over.’ The stockings were empty, the tinsel trappings of the tree were put away and tonight we moved to watch the old year go. She looked very lovely in the fire light, wearing her ‘stiff brocade’ that my mind had visioned her in, when I looked at the portrait of her mother on the wall. She also wore a blue jeweled comb in her soft white hair. A little black kitten, who had been rolling a ball about came to her mewing. She picked it up and smoothed its satin fur and held it in her lap.

“My dear” she said finally,

“When all the tinsel has been laid away, The tree is stripped, the fevered rush is past - You still have trees, a hill, a child at play, And love and prayer and fadeless things that last. Wear your proud purple underneath your load, Touch hands with one who travels lone, afar, Brave your dark night and walk the Three Kings Road. To find your Christ beneath the lovely star.

He loves, I know, our pretty baubled trees, Our busy shops, our laughter young and gay, Our ribboned gifts. Have we no gift but these? No bright red wreaths except for Christmas day? Though broken is some toy beneath your feet, Some dear illusion shattered or grown dim. The “Three Kings Road” goes by your dusty street, That leads up to a star and Him!”

“This time of Christmas always takes me back to the Christmas times when I was a child. We measured time by it, so long before, and so long after it had gone. Everything possible, was put in order for its coming. It was an epoch time of pause before we went into another year. As a child I used to wonder about the gap that I knew was there between them. Many a night I have lain awake during the holiday week wondering if the world would pause too long before the bells rang out the New Year, and we would all fall in. I felt so safe on each New Year’s Day to know we had jumped the hurdle again. My brain seethed with queer quirks and notions. But all notions faded into realities when the preparations for the great Christ was an event nearing. All year we waited, watched and hoped, how they flit by so fast, that they go like lost illusions. After waiting, when the time did finally arrive, we were in an ecstatic round of doing. There had to be hogs killed, sausage made, lard cooked, hams and shoulders trimmed and hung in the smoke house to be smoked later. Back bones and spare ribs salted and packed away, and of course, always divided with the neighbors.”

“The turkey we meant for Christmas dinner had been penned and fed for weeks. Everybody helped or hindered as we were reminded when excitement got the better of us. There were so many errands to run, so many things to see to. The cracklings must be stirred so they would not burn. They would be used to make crackling bread to be eaten with sausage and after the lard was all rendered, that was the word used. The hogs head and feet had to be cooked enough to easily strip from the bones all meat which was seasoned, mashed to a pulp and molded to “set” and stow away as ‘souse’ or as the easterners called it, ‘hog’s head cheese.’”

“Holly and mistletoe must be hung. We all went to the woods to get that, we were a country family as you know, my dear. Nobody could climb as high as I. Wood must be piled on the back porch for we stayed out so much we must have fires within, and nobody would want to cut wood in Christmas week. And if it snowed! How much joy was added. It seems to me, then more than now, we had our dream of a “White Christmas” or maybe it is just the thrill of being a child that makes dreams come true. Stockings must be hung, and with what gleeful anticipations, time came at last to go to bed and wait. We tried not to sleep, but not once did we ever see Santa Claus. Christmas morning came at last and the gay opening of what had been put in our stockings. We believed in Santa Clause, as we did in life and my knowledge of the unreality of him as a personage, almost uprooted my faith in anything.”

“Had you no idea that Santa was only a myth or an impersonation? No child now is innocent about it, Grandmother.”

“No, we were told he came down the chimney and our minds never questioned it. We read Christmas stories like Clement Moore’s ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.’ We knew he would come with his ‘eight tiny reindeer.’ We lived within our own realms of fancy, among children with the same sort of lives, and our ignorance of what or who Santa Claus was, was most certainly bliss.”

“Christmas day was one never to be forgotten. My mother had, for days before, baked cakes, made mince pies, made loaves of bread and rolls, ambrosia, and cranberry jelly. Cucumbers had been put in brine in the early fall, and now were taken out and pickled; watermelon rind had been treated in the same way. The table could hardly hold the feast that was put on it. Of course, we had our chickens for eggs and cows for milk and butter.”

“After that, the week was one of fun and adventure. Drying shoes by the open fire, sore throats to bind in turpentine, too full stomachs to rub and then it was gone. In this generation, for weeks we feverishly haunt the shops for presents for family and friends. We get jumpy for fear someone will be forgotten. Nervous for fear that what we have purchased will not be suitable. Crowds pack the stores till the last minute has gone before time to sound tocsin of good night.”

“Our trees are trimmed and glittering with gilt and silver ornaments, be-ribboned presents and simulated snow, with the star of Bethlehem shining on the topmost limb. The week is filled with parties, dances, hayrides (think of our generation going hayriding during Christmas week,) but it is done. Our sons and daughters come home for the holidays from school. Our dinners are divided, some away to other invitations, others to hotels, and there are some family gatherings.”

“Today at the end of week, we put away our tinsel and holly wreaths, all our pretty ornaments and the star from the top of the tree. We sweep the crumbs from under the table, from the last dinner of the old year. For us, did they fall no farther than our door step? Was there no crumb of comfort or sympathy, no bit of joy, no sip of our wine of life that went out into the world to cause a quickening of life to some un-shriven soul? No cheer to the shut in, we are told you think to feed my sheep. That means food for lost spirits, my dear.”

“Grandmother, why do lives get so complicated? Simple things lived simply would be free from so much push and strain.”

“There are two contending forces in us, my dear, the Divine and the Satanic. Satan’s workshop is a busy place when there are idle hands and minds to work there. We must fight evil by doing good. But the evil tendency runs along the primrose path and our Christmas experiences leave us with very little uplift and no sensation now, but to be glad it is over. The world is too much with us, late and soon. Getting and spending, we lay waste our poor. Little we see in nature that is ours. For this, for everything we are out of time. It moves us not.”

“Grandmother, we have come to the last day of the old year and while we wait on the threshold till the ‘bells ring out the old and in the new’ tell me of the origin of celebrating Christmas.”

“Well, as far back as we find any record of the human race, we find customs of decorating houses and temples with evergreens on any occasion of rejoicing. Primitive and civilized nations are alike in this. Holly was dedicated to Saturn by the Romans who held a festival called Saturnalia in December. The early Christians used it during the celebration of the birth of Christ to avoid persecution. You see, they kept their decorating in line with what the Romans used, and it came to be celebrated, or rather associated with Christmas as an emblem.”

“The mistletoe is a mystical plant. It was held in veneration by the Greeks. Virgil gave it to Aeneas, as the golden bough to guide him to the underworld. The Scandinavian people dedicated it to their Goddess of love. It is more closely related to the Druids, who were an order of priest of a religion in Ancient Gaul and Briton, than any other peoples. They never let it touch the ground. At New Year, they marched in solemn procession into the forest, the High Priest climbing the oak, and with a golden sickle, cut the mistletoe, letting it drop into a white cloth, held by other priests. They then dipped it in water and distributed it among the people, to whom it was supposed to bring good luck. The Roman church somehow did not sanction the mistletoe, but no edict could keep it from the decorations of the house. It is not known when the hanging of the mistletoe was started. More than likely kissing under the mistletoe had something to do with the Scandinavian Goddess of love.”

“Most of the English mistletoe comes from the Herefordshire apple orchards. The poplar, linden and white thorn trees are most likely to have the seed left on them. In the United States, it grows on hardwood trees, from as far north as New Jersey down.”

“Germany is the original home of the Christmas tree. It was brought to America by German immigrants. It was practically unknown in England until Queen Victoria married a German man. He was Albert of Saxe-Coberg-Gotha and brought the Christmas tree custom into the Royal English household.”

“This idea of a tree hung with gifts was known to the Hindus back to the beginning of history. Probably back to the ancient tree worshipers. The church had everything cleared away from the Christmas pageant by Candlemas day, which was on February 2nd. If a leaf or a berry chanced to be left, some member of the family in whose pen it was found, would die within a year. This same superstition held good in private homes. Every leaf and twig must be cleared away by Candlemas, that being the Feast of the Purification, or the Presentation of Christ in the Temple.”

“The personality of Saint Nicholas is our American gift to poetry and folk lore of the Christmas time. In 1822, Clement Moore wrote his poem about St. Nick and changed the austere Dutch St. Nicholas into the lovable creature who comes with his ‘eight tiny reindeer’ and a ‘miniature sleigh,’ to come down the chimney and bring gifts to all. Our St. Nick needs not nor keeps a recording angel. Beloved now for more than a century, he is the personification of the spirit of love. He comes to the poor and lowly, the unfortunate, the rich – all classes know and love him. We hang our stockings for him to find. Some children in other countries place their little shoes by the chimney to be found and filled.”

“Our Christmas trappings go back into Paganism, but what rites or ceremonies do not? And to at last we come to the eve of the last day of the old year. We pause on the threshold to stand and wait till the ‘bells ring out the old and in the new.’ Day by day we have checked off the dates on the calendar until one more year is gone.”

“Listen, Grandmother, the clock is beginning to strike twelve! There are the bells, what do they say, what do they bring into the New Year?” I turned toward her, the kitten, roused by the noise stood up, yawned and went to sleep again, “Happy New Year Grandmother, with all my heart!”

“Happy New Year to you, my dear, and a hope for peace out of all this chaos.” I remained in my grandmother’s home that night. The next morning we stood together to watch the sun rise over the white snow and make a prismatic world New Year’s day. “Grandmother, the old year is behind us.” I said. She moved over to her chair and sat down. “Sit down, my dear, she said. “Yes, one more year has gone. We say it lies behind us, but does it? Did nothing of the dying year creep through the gates with us, to clutter up our lives to another open gate? We cry our “Happy New Years”, and sing hosannas to the King. Then pulling at the straps across our shoulders, we begin again the pull to go over the hill to where another New Year beckons us.”

“We sing ‘Joy to the World, the Lord has come’ but did we bring you, happiness cooperation, good will to men into this new day? Did we leave animosities, fear disloyalty and petty strife behind us? Did we give to the world the best we had so the best would come back to us? Did we do those things which we ought not to have done and left undone, and left undone the things we should have done? In this world of carnage, men are at each other’s throats. Hearts are breaking under the unusual strain. Humanity is in a turmoil with no future and look of any stamina. There will always be those who will carry on; those whose faith is as a candle in the wilderness, to sustain and uphold in this world of ‘Hearts bowed down.’ Many have made clearing houses of life with a pistol shot, and many trudge the old paths that are crisscrossed with briars that cling or gullies too wide to jump across.”

“There are always those who are the oil that keeps the clock from running down, the hinges from rusting out and the latch on the gate that is never allowed to catch too tight for us to open. My dear, the way to run a race is to run it, and not sit in worthless vanity and cry of what might have been. So in all sincerity, I wish you a Happy New Year.

Sketch No. 6

Reflections – Memories 1944

I visited my grandmother a day in late spring. The lovely green tracery was adoring all things of nature. I found her in a meditative mood. Somewhat a probing of her inner consciousness, and connected with many of her memories. She greeted me, smiling, as always.

“Come in, my dear” she called, “I need a bit of modern youth right now to break the nostalgic frame of mind I was verging into.”

“Not nostalgic, Grandmother. You do not pine for what you love to think about, it’s only the fallow time of life, you bring to fertilize the present, which to you, is so different. But you wouldn’t want it back to stay.”

“Oh no” she said. “Far from it. But sometimes, I long to catch one jot of the self- importance, the optimism, the clear vision of being eighteen years old – having no obstacles, as yet before, no regrets behind me, and gaily step out on ‘Life’s Ship of State’ to youth’s lilting music, with just enough of learning to ‘misquote’ as Lord Byron put it.”

“Today, my dear, I am seventy-five years old. Fifty-six years ago, I stood in my graduation class and read my essay on ambition. My theme was this stanza from Byron: ‘We who ascends to mountain tops shall find the loftiest peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow. He who surpasses or subdues mankind must look down on the hates of those below.’ My subject was ambition, a cross current of egotism, no doubt, but who can measure the assurance of eighteen years? Today, my dear, my theme would run:

‘Tis sweet to hear the watch-dog’s honest bark Bay deep-mouthed welcome as I draw near home; ‘Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark My coming and look brighter when I come.

“The years back are like crossing a bridge, the magnolia gardens, comrades hip, the long, long thoughts of youth, the courtesy of men, the modes of women at one end, and the smoke, steam, bustle, greed and confusion of the twentieth century at the other. Or mentally, like emerging from Emma D. E. N. Southworth, and Mary J. Holmes, to the ideas of Louis Beanfield and Earnest Hemmingway. I stand today on the abutment of that bridge and view the world. It is no gracious sight; war, carnage, death, homes broken up, men and women in uniform, tense living with no rift of sunlight to foretell what or when the end will be.”

“’Thou shall not kill’ has ceased to be a verified commandment as also has ‘Thou shall not commit adultery.’ Marriages are made with no thought of what tragedy may follow in this holocaust of living in a world and time where tragedy stalks rampant. We do not stop to reason, although we have a very clear idea of cause and effect. We live day by day not daring to boast ourselves of tomorrow. The whirligig of time makes many changes and we follow many false gods. We walk in ways of dubious meandering and it is very true that those who walk in the mire will get besmirched.”

“’Man, dressed in a little brief authority, plays such fantastic tricks as make the angels weep.’ The implacable march of war goes on with the destruction of men’s bodies and leaving a trail of bruised and lost souls. We turn the past’s mirror backward and the shadows crowd the dim confused mass of wars. Since Abraham wandered with his flocks from grazing ground to grazing ground, since Moses led the Israeli people out of bondage, since Joshua marched around the walls of Jericho, Since Saul and David, Herod and Pilate down to the advent of Jesus Christ. In that interval there was peace. The gates of James were closed for the first time according to the mythical story of the Two-Headed Keeper of the Gates of Heaven which indicated that nowhere on earth was there war for any reason.”

“Since then, in the memory of man there have been many wars fought for freedom of many trammels that have enslaved the people of the earth. Today we are still crying ‘How long oh! Lord, how long’ and we pray ‘Oh, Lord before hope has fled, let there be freedom ahead.’ After a while, the echoes ring, ‘Oh, these endless after-a- whiles.’ League on League and miles on miles In the distance far withdrawn stretching on and on and on, to far glimmering worlds and wings, to mystic smiles and becomings. On we go, through the shadowy aisles Into a maize of the after-a-whiles.

“In the meantime, in the eternal verities of life, men will storm the heights with shot and shell, mothers will bear the anguish of loss and heartbreak, children will be orphaned, the peace and security of home life be interrupted. ‘Til the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumbles. Here now in his triumph when all things falter, stretched out on the spoil that his own hand spread, as a god, self-slain on his own strange alter, Death lies.’”

“That’s a thought, Grandmother, “Death lies dead!”

“A symbolic thought, my dear. Death only lies dead when life goes out in peace and ends naturally. But when life and death fight for supremacy, then life is cut short, because death, so much alive, wields the Satanic power that makes wrecks of matter and the crash of worlds. Life seems more of shadow than of light to some of us, but there stands beside us the law of compensation, we are told.”

Is there then, in this creation of miracles. Light and shadow, shadow and light ------That were born at the birth of the sun?

One of the secrets of all things bright The secrets of all things somber one, One for the glory, one for the gloom One to show forth and one to shroud One for the birth and one for the tomb One for the clear sky and one for the cloud Light which without shadow, shines not Shadow that shows not unless by light? Is this the parable? This the ending That nothing lives, except with a foil?

That all thing show by contrast and blending Pleasure by pain and rest by toil

Strength by weakness and gladness by sorrow Hope by despair and peace by strife. Good by the evil, the day by the morrow Love by hatred and Death by Life?

“Emerson thought all things were double as pro and con, tit for tat, an eye for an eye, measure for measure. So who can say what is wisdom is the peace of the cloisters better than the strife of the world?”

“Personally, my dear, I don’t believe in burying your talents, and it seems to me to ensure your soul away from the world is just that. I think to give of yourself enriches you. We make mistakes, of course, out in the world. Just between you and me, my dear, I feel that to live a life of austere seclusion is a sort of moral cowardice. Even though we stumble and make blunders in the busy world, it is often caused from our disability to understand. Could we judge all deeds by motives that surround each other’s lives? See the naked heart and spirit, know what spur each action gives. Often we would find it better, just to judge all actions good. We should love each other better, if we only understood.”

“That is very true, Grandmother,” I said. The lack of understanding does cause many a sore heart.”

“Yes” she said, “and sometimes the wise forget themselves for wisdom does not encompass all things but the acme of wisdom is understanding. We call our fellow man a failure for not having reached excellence but if we understand, we would often see the struggle, the strenuous effort he made to get where he did. So many men are discouraged for lack of being understood.”

The test of a man is the fight he makes. The grit that he daily shows. The way he stands on his feet And takes life’s numerous bumps and blows.

A coward can smile when there’s naught to fear. When nothing his progress bars. But it takes a man to stand up and cheer While some other fellow stars.

It isn’t the victory after all, But a fight that a brother makes. The man who is driven against the wall still stands up erect And takes the blows of fate with his head held high. Bleeding and bruised and pale, Is the one who will win in the bye and bye. For he isn’t afraid to fail.

It’s the bumps you get, and the jolts you get And the shocks that your courage stands The hours of sorrow and vain regret

The prize that escapes your hands That test your mettle and prove your worth. It isn’t the blows you deal, But the blows that you take on this good old earth. That shows if your stuff is real.

“You can always compute what is done, my dear, but you can never know what is resisted in the struggle a man makes, ‘To walk with Kings nor lose the common touch.’”

My grandmother laughed. “Really I didn’t intend to go wandering around in devious paths,” she said.

“I’ve listened to every word of it, Grandmother, with much profit and pleasure. Thank you for wandering.”

“Well she said, “In all this confusion and world upheaval, we can see that our boasted civilization has not sunk in very far. There is a loss of security in the shifting scenes of circumstance. We have found that hordes of barbarians, with the cruelest attributes, are running amuck into a treasured peace of the rest of the world, who will have to be exterminated before the lives of upright people can again put their hands to their own plow shares and feel a sense of possessive peace. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are running a swift race over the seared acres of their passing.”

“It seems such folly, Grandmother, that one nation can run wild and involve so many peoples who have no desire or inclination to kill and destroy. But, when you think it over there is always something learned after each tearing down.”

“It is the law, my dear, that minds are quickened by conflict. It takes a grindstone to sharpen a blunt axe and we find root matters as our minds progress. As it takes friction to emit the spark from a lump of steel which we only see first as a piece of dead metal, it has been written, too, that history is a record of events, but events are only brought about through the psychology of men’s minds.”

“The history of a country is the history of its wars, but it is not only chronicles of battles fought and men slain, it is an upheaval of thought, research and a newer knowledge of things that are brought to light, scientific findings that of necessity were involved. It is a natural change, through an emergency of stress, the materials we have with which we build our new thought and evolve new inventions. In a sane, even existence, with no drastic change to challenge us, we could never know the unclassified things that ultimately become almost necessities of our daily lives. We would be smothered in our own commonplace existence. Probably that is the compensation.”

“So many differences in the times of life come out of differences in the adjustment of human beings to events. The mere fact of living doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things. It’s what we put in it. We sacrifice our nearest and dearest on the altar of strange gods and the snake from the incense soaks into our brains to evolve a living in a changed world.” “So, looking back to the years after my graduation, I see my Southland striving to hold her head high in the still embittered controversy of war. We had Henry Grady, down in Georgia, striving to put amity in the hearts of his people though the medium of the Atlanta Constitution, of which he was editor. We had Henry Watterson, up in Kentucky and editor of the Louisville Courier Journal, still rebellious ‘waving the red shirt’

49 of his unsubdued mind in the political situation, and my father, walking up and down, shouting anathemas after the reading of each paper. My father had been a Southern soldier, my dear. He was promoted to a captaincy for bravery in action at Shiloh.”

“You say it proudly, Grandmother.”

“Yes our pride was great, even in the life of dire necessity, we had to live.”

“Grandmother, what became or the poor class, the illiterates of the South, in all this reconstruction time?”

“Of course, my dear, people are classed according to their background, ability, and I’m sorry to say that money plays a very important part in placing the ability. There have been giants in the earth though who have come up from meager cabin homes, because of some attribute of a long ago time in some ancestor, whose head sank under the privation of some un-worthwhile living. We knew this class of people here, poor whites, they were called and more often ‘trash’ was added. But that class is not wholly Southern. New England had her quota, too. History has recorded it and Eugene O’Neil has used it in many of his plays. The writing of ‘Tobacco Road’ in late years has convinced many a Northern section of our country that the characters in that play were the prevailing class down here. The difference in grade in North and South was due to the ways of life, as in every clime and country. The poor New Englander drained his mind of all cultivation by hard living among the stones and thin soil of his particular part of the land.”

“In the South, the climatic conditions are not conducive to hard struggles and in this lush land it is easier to slide down than to climb, at hard work. There are other sides to everything, my dear, contrasts of thought of living, of reaction, to what we find ourselves surrounded by, and no maelstrom is more unrelenting in its grasp than society or public opinion – you sink or swim.

“We have had books written by Southerners who have paraded the lazy attributes of low culture in the South, and there is a reading public who avidly attribute these qualities to the South generally, forgetting the superiority of more. There are two Faulkner brothers in Mississippi who have done this to a very unnecessary degree. My mind was taught from a more esthetic stand point and I see the beauty of spirit instead of sordidness. I knew of the ‘other side,’ but my living was far removed from that strata and what youth is taught, age remembers.”

“I was also taught that appearances are often deceitful and in many people, whose outward mien was uncouth, might by chance become cognizant of their lack by contact with those of cultivated minds and understanding hearts. We were taught in my family that unkindness and rudeness were only forms of arrogance, and were not to be tolerated in contacts with poor whites or our Negroes. So you will find, my dear, there are degrees.

In man, fishes, animals, and trees, In lowest up to highest throughout space. The strongest e’er have ruled in every race.

And will rule on despite what bramlers say, Until men face the final judgment day.

“Grandmother, do you believe in might being right? If so, why? And if the power of might prevails, what then becomes of the effort of resistance of the ‘other side?’”

“Who can fathom the mysteries of might and right, for it is very true that one man’s meat can become another man’s poison. So right could become a panacea for one and might could be right for another. It’s a matter of interpretation for individual needs, except of course, the fundamental laws. They are impersonal and apply to all people. Might is a power for preservation of your strongholds and becomes right when those strongholds stand for the peace of everyday living.”

“It’s only for their intentions that men can be held responsible. The effect of what they do is quite beyond their control, whether might or right. Might can be defined as force or as power, right as equity or fairness. ‘So you see as a man thinketh.’”

“I can see very plainly there are two sides to that, Grandmother.”

“Yes, and to make it plainer, it is right for an unmathmatical mind to study arithmetic in school, but the might of injustice is the controlling thing in an arrogant teacher, who makes an issue of exposing the child’s lack. This same teacher is right when she uses her power or might to shoot a rabid dog to save that child’s life.”

“Speaking of schools, Grandmother, “Do you ever see any of your graduating class? Know anything of what their lives have been?”

Grandmother smiled, “Of course” she said, “As youth will, especially mates at school, we pledged eternal fealty, lasting friendship on the threshold of our advent into the world, where we were eager to get to the open door. Looking back now, I can know that ‘some of us answered the call of the hills and some the call of the sea, and some of us followed the road o’er the plains to the shade of the old home tree.’ The years have taken their toll in the hurly burly of time, and family ties that came on separated us. Death’s hand was busy too, and now the dusty files in the pigeon hole archives of life are memories. Standing on the apex now, of many years, there are four remaining, whose lives are going on in the same lines as mine and in whose contacts I can still sense the relationship of gay girlhood. With three of us, there are grandchildren and great-grandchildren. One did not marry, but taught other children all through these years.”

“I have grieved for, in the years gone, for the touch of a vanished hand and longed for a voice that was still. My feet have been clogged in the mire of the many trials that life holds, and my heart has also sung the songs of joy that savor every life. The memory of those school days are blended with years of anxiety and peace all down the much traveled road of life. Sometime in thinking of that hazy background it seems almost as far away as Caesar’s Gallic wars.”

“To think back to the political era too, seems just a little deferred from Valley Forge, Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, and Daniel Boone. Grover Cleveland was first elected president of the United States in 1884. He was the 22nd president and was born in New Jersey in 1837. It was the first election of a Democratic leader since Buchanan in

1856. James E. Blaine was his Republican opponent. Mr. Blaine had a habit of running for president and finally had to give up, never having achieved it.”

“Ex-president Grant died in 1885. I was then seventeen years old. Mr. Cleveland had been governor of New York, and his reputation was that of an able and fearless man of marked ability and courage. There was still a rancor in the country of divided opinion between North and South, and to have shirked a war duty, in any way, was practically disgraceful. So in this section it was remembered that Mr. Cleveland had hired a man to do his fighting. That was done to quite a degree among the Northern troops. Germans were sent over here to substitute for men who were able to pay and had no mind to fight. So, very naturally, at first there was a distinct distaste in the South for Mr. Cleveland, but he proved his worth.”

“He came to Memphis in 1887, the year after I was graduated. He had married the daughter of his law partner a short time before. She was eighteen years old and he the age of her father. That was a great event for Memphis, at that time. The grand stand in Court Square where he made his speech was enclosed by an iron railing and I found a place directly in front of him holding on to this railing. Judge Ellett, father of one of our honored citizens here now, made the presentation speech and while the President spoke the Judge collapsed and was removed from the grand stand and was thought to have fainted. Mr. Cleveland was not told until after a reception in the Cotton Exchange that he had died.”

“I saw hordes of others, passed in review at this reception, and spoke to him and his wife. She was very beautiful and quite charming. The streets were decorated with arches made of cotton bales and streamers of red, white, and blue bunting. That was a great day in my life, my dear. To have seen and spoken to a President was prestige, I assure you, even though I was only one of hundreds in that milling crowd that day. In that same crowd I met Sara Beaumont Kennedy, who was about my age then and who became my very dear friend for years after, until her death. She was a poet of some note, and wrote many things during the First World War that touched and tore the heart strings. This she says,

They call it well, for human heart No rood of it would claim, The devils of Inferno hold The fief in blood and shame, And hell is but another name For “No man’s Land”

And this They trod the hot plowshares of torture Their sons went down to the dust. Their children were led through the shambles. To the Pagan altars of lust. And so when the council shall gather To sentence the foe men then Tis they who will speak in the judgment They, the mothers of men!

She loved the open road and wrote often of its travelers.

Oh, hither the travelers go, Together or else alone/drifting away to haunts unknown Like lives in a tempest blown. Meeting and passing as shadows cross Or clouds assail in the sun. Some with the tryst of life far spent. Some with it just begun.

“She put much of beauty and harmony into my life. In those years, too, Mark Twain’s writings were uppermost in the mind. He was still a young man and the humorist of the time. His humor was very real, but he had no scintillating wit. His Innocents Abroad created mirth for thousands. I remember comparing, not long ago, his writings with others of later date, and felt the tameness of even that classic. But he was the exponent of humor of his generation. Aside from its humor though, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn will live, a typical delineation of boys in that age and environment, their capers are still recognized by many mothers and aunts, and Becky Thatcher will also live as the childhood sweetheart of other Tom’s in other ages.”

“But like our frontiers, that type is rarely found now. Bill Arp was writing articles for the Atlanta Constitution, we say columns now. But, his line was one of homely philosophy. He was widely read and enjoyed, but only of local prominence, as time has proved. Betsey Hamilton also wrote a column for the Constitution from the standpoint of a backwoods’ house wife. We had backwoods environment in that generation, my dear, and those things of hers were very real and laughable. Although today, ‘how quaint’ we say with lifted eye brows.”

“Artemus Ward, another humorist in that time, whose real name was Charles Farrow Brown, wrote much fun in a quaint, absent-minded way, that today we would call dumb. But his ‘Travels among the Mormons’ was the ruling fun of my young generation. We also had Bill Nye (Edgar Wilson Nye)the funny man who caricatured himself in pictures. He said he could have waltzed more easily, if had not required such changed of position. A tale is told about him as having resigned from his position as postmaster in some little town, in a note to President Arthur, in which he told him ‘that everything would be found in good order, and the key would be under the doormat.’

“This droll document got into the newspapers and magazines and placed his name in the list of fun making artists. Three literary women were in the public eye, in those years. Virginia Terhune, who was called Marian Harland, was one. She lived in Virginia and wrote stories, sketches, and had published a cook book, in which she wrote in a preface, ‘The young lady who will powder on these words and act upon them will be in no danger of making bread heavy enough to bombard a man of war.’”

“Elizabeth Stoddard was a writer of stories. She was the wife of a poet, Richard Henry Stoddard, whose life and writings are found in the annals of encyclopedic data, but she was, a woman, and at that time a woman who wrote for the public was called a ‘Blue Stocking’ meaning one who exhibits feminine pedantry. Emma D. E. N. Southworth was a very prolific writer of stories. It seems almost an echo of my life, to be remembering these names and times.” “It is another time to me, Grandmother, another world almost.”

“Youth of today would be annoyed at the simplicity of my young life, my dear, but knowledge acquired there was of the fundamentals and much of it remains. Classic literature and art were taught pretty thoroughly and the social arts and graces were considered worthy of much attention. Many other names come to me out of those years that formed a great part of my love for love.”

“James Whitcomb Riley, who was called the Hoosier poet, wrote ‘That Old Sweetheart of Mine,’ ‘Out to Old Aunt Mary’s,’ ‘The Old Swimming Hole’ and so many other lovely things. Robert Louis Stevenson, too, was being read and loved. Ill health took him to Samoa, where he died, down in the South Seas.” The Samoan people lovingly called him TUSITALA, meaning ‘Teller of Tales.’”

“Poems of the South and the war there stressed the far away drum beats of war. ‘Dixie’ stirred even sluggish blood to action. There was some talk of changing the words of the song but it caused such a riot of opposition, it was dropped. We in the South were still trying to bide our frayed seams of gentility. In my school years, long crepe veils were worn and even children were put in black clothes on the death of a relative, even to cousins of second and third degree. There were two years of a conventional period for a widow to wear black. It was at times a long suffering delight for you, for it always brought a sense of individual priority. You might say, to appear in all black, gave some distinction. We sang ‘Sweet Alice Ben Bolt,’ ‘Juanita,’ ‘Silver Threads,’ ‘Loves Old Sweet Song,’ ‘Kitty Wells,’ ‘After the Ball’ and others of love and memory. It was rather a sentimental time, my dear.”

That was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight To me did seem Appareled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream.

Sketch No. 7

Marriage – River Steamers

It was a day when ‘chill November’s surely blast made field and forest bare.’ There was a mist that enveloped, for a time and then rolled away, leaving dampness to drip from the eaves only to come again, like a thick, cold blanket. Snowflakes scuttled in between and no sun was visible.

If you think of days like that as time of gloom, then you may say it was a gloomy day. But my grandmother has told me often that gloom dwells only in your consciousness, and it is only your reaction to any thing that makes it gloomy or pleasant to you. So, the outside weather this day viewed from my grandmother’s cozy fire-lit sitting room could be lived with a spirit of thankfulness for a blessed haven of safety and to fill your heart with an anxious prayer, for the unfortunate wayfarer.

I found my grandmother in a thoughtful mood this afternoon, and it suddenly occurred to me that I often found her so. Why not indeed? A long life has much to remember, looking back. Then just when her need for a family Citadel rose, where she could look down from her bastioned windows and see what she had wrought, she lost her only son. And almost at the same time, an adored grandson, who had lived all his life in her home, went into the armed service, in the Global War, as it came to be called. (1943)

Her seventy-five years weighed lightly upon her body, but her spirit sometimes grew weary of world upheaval and yearned for what she had left behind her. She had measured her life by deeds not years, but even so ‘the heart can break, yet brokenly live on.’ And now the springtime flowers, summer fruits and autumn’s harvests have become a picture pageant for her inner consciousness to view, and with the snows of winter coiled in her white hair, she could calmly look back on the vintage of her life, in this the evening twilight of her heart throbs. Her mind is like a dome of many colored glass, that in her journey through the years has spread to make a canopy for those she loved. She has never striven for the pomp of homage, but has stood rather as an individual to give of herself from the cornucopia of her collected treasury mentally and materially.”

She has often told me “to give a cup of water is a little thing, but at times, it is more sustaining and pleasurable giving than a cup of nectar.” She has not become, in any way pessimistic, does not feel a burden greater than others, for she knows,

There is no flock, how so ever watched and tended But one dead lamb is there There is no fireside how so ever defended But has one vacant chair

This also has been her steadfast opinion. “Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted, it enriches not the heart of another, its waters, returning back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment.” She is never intolerant and has told me often, “When you are sure of yourself and your position, you will have no need to sneer.”

“Grandmother?” I said to her now. “What are you dreaming of? You know dreams have been called the ‘children of an idle brain.’”

She smiled. “There are dreams and dreams,” she said. “Those of unrealities and the substantial ones, that build what they dream of. Also” she added, “come backward dreams of passing years. Hope is a dream for souls awake, memories of faded dreams haunt the restless souls. There is a poem I found somewhere.” Memories of dreams that have faded, Of faces grown withered and old, Memories of love, lightly stated, Forgotten in times endless fold.

Dreams that were once great in splendor Faces truthful, false, or bold Loves that were sweet in surrender Forgotten in time’s endless fold

Dreams for the weak and the foolish Faces and masks, hard and cold. Loves – there’s but one everlasting That of life that lies deep in the soul

“It was of life I was dreaming, my dear, life in all its phases, of youth that walks swiftly, breeding their twigs on trees alive with sunlight, of the past again, do they stumble lingeringly looking back. We are like ‘ships that pass in the night, and speak to each other in passing.’ With only a signal shown, a distant voice in the darkness, then silence again. These contacts are woven into the dreamland tapestry that hangs on the walls of memory. I am very thankful that my dreams are not of an open rose who would be a bud again and thankful that time has laid his hand upon my heart, not smiting it, but as a harpist lays his open palm upon his harp to deaden its vibrations.”

“Dreams should come very readily on a day like this,” I said, “for the melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year.”

“I was thinking as you said that, my dear, of a ride I had on a November day once, like this in a white mist of rain, over long, stretched-out, white concrete roads – rounding curves, over bridges, spanning muddy waters, through narrow passes, out into the open country, with wide stretches of field, ready in some places for gaming, and in some already stripped of the garnerings of the earth. The rain blurred the car windows and dimmed the landscape but from the mist-laden soggy ground I could sense the storing away of what the seed time and harvest had wrought.”

“The autumn leaves were tiny splashes of color, mixed with the brown crumpled heaps that huddled in corners. It gave me a sense of security and a vision came to me of well-stored barns and wood piled high by the stove in the big kitchen, as I had seen it so often in my childhood country home, with its rafters hung with gay strings of drying food. I could even sense the odor of gingerbread, hot from the oven, in that same kitchen, and almost felt a childish impulse to open the oven door for one more aromatic whiff.”

“My reaction to this season of gathering in is one which I imagine the Pilgrim sojourners in the new strange land must have felt on the occasion of their first Thanksgiving. I remember another November day of drizzle, mist and snow. That was fifty years ago today, the day I was married, in my girlhood home where I had spent my young life. I was twenty-one years old and had about as much sense as the usual run of brides of my generation, about life’s duties and responsibilities. Those were days of… what shall I say? I believe in sentiment, but marriage should be spoken of as something more than lovers meeting. In the mating of a man and woman, there is one basic fundamental – then as well as now - and that is love. Not sentimentality, but love that understands and is kind, love that is cooperative and not selfish, love that knows the difference between frailties and faults, love that pulls in double harness with equal steps, love that binds like the golden circlet that has no end, love that is loyal, understanding and tender; a comradeship.”

“Without understanding, nobody’s Eden is without its serpent. Love does not grow stale, when that happens, love is gone. But we never attain perfection or reach the ideal, because, in spite of the fact that -

In everybody’s garden Is a red rose tree With crimson blossoms on it And honey for the bee.

For in every body’s garden There is a bush of rue And you will find one, too.

In everybody’s garden Some rain must fall, Else the crimson roses Would not bloom at all

In everybody’s garden Sometime the skies are blue But in every body’s garden There is a bush of rue

“Some of that rue, my dear, is an ungovernable fault; some of it is a crucified frailty. I was about to tell you of my own marriage and went all the way round the world.”

“That’s all right, Grandmother, you have certainly put up a splendid background for team work. It’s a pity so many fail in understanding it.”

“Yes, it is a pity that the adaptable qualities in our sense of fitness refuse to apply to our needs. But after all, a human being is just a bundle of hopes, habits and memories, all of them depending on our reaction to what we think. And no knowledge of anything does any good unless we use it.”

“I imagine a bride of today would be tolerantly smiling at the description of my trousseau. My wedding garments were all made at home. My dress, of white Nun’s veiling was made with a very short, tight basque, which was lined with fine-woven cotton domestic and boned in every seam.”

“What do you mean by boned, Grandmother?”

“The seams of the garment were pressed open and a strip of whale bone was fastened securely down the length of them. The skirt was long, of course, the toes of my black shoes just showing. Everybody wore black shoes then. There was no choice, a pair of shoes meant black ones, for grownups. Children had colored ones, at times. My second day’s dress was - - - ”

“Your what!” I said, not really knowing what she meant.

“That was the best dress, next to the one you were married in. Sounds funny now, doesn’t it? But it was a very real attribute to a trousseau and that was what it was called, and was worn, usually, on the day after the wedding. Mine was golden brown cashmere, trimmed in brocade in shades of pale yellow and brown. I made my winter hat, we had one hat a season. We could get shapes then and make them with a little ingenuity. Being country dwellers, we had few social duties and did not need a surplus of anything. I had house dresses galore; I had aprons, white and frilly and checked ones for kitchen and house work. My under things were all of cambric which we starched. Petticoats were three yards wide, tucked and ruffled around the bottom, and we always wore two at once. There was insertion and lace beading with ribbon run through on everything that would hold it.”

“My nightgowns all had long sleeves with tight cuffs at the wrists and high collars which were also starched. Some of the fronts were entirely of tucks and insertion from collar to hems. We wore chemises then, something like our slips now, but with no thought of fit. These were puffed and ruffled at the top. Then we had corset covers. These were puffed and ruffled at the top, too. They were tight fitting garments worn over the corset, which was boned heavily with steel. What we call panties now, we called drawers. There were knee length and ruffled around the bottom.”

“I had a tea gown. Those garments finally evolved into the loose fitting negligee of today. Mine was made of white cashmere – over a fitted foundation, and the back of the garment was form fitting. The front hung loose from the shoulders and tied with a wide satin ribbon at the waist. It had a short train and I felt rather superior when I wore it. We wore white or black cotton stockings. We had worn colored striped ones at school, some ran up and down and some around, but I was grown up now, as everybody took such pains to tell me. I was rather irrepressible, and I’m afraid my elders had small hope of me subsiding.”

“My mother-in-law told me she did hope marriage would sober me down some. She was a blue stocking Presbyterian. I was intuitively aware that I had to know the rules of behavior, even though at intervals, I transgressed. She was not at all pleased with me as a daughter-in-law, but had selected a cousin of mine, the one you remember, my dear, I told you about once, as being somewhat slow. If I had been young in this generation, I would have said, so what. But then, I skirted round the danger line and made my way successfully. She told me years afterward that I had made myself indispensable to her. So that is what came of a little self-discipline and a lot of understanding.”

My grandmother smiled, “Of course,” she said, “I did not live my life out in her home. We were there two years.”

“And what then?” I asked.

My grandmother was quiet for a while, then she said, “I faced a new life. I, who had never had a frustrated desire, in whose veins ran the red blood of adventure, emotional as a well-starred actress, whose love of life was wholesome and vivacious, and whose heart strings had never felt a bruised beat, was transported from my world to the strange, lonely existence of a big cotton plantation, on the lower Mississippi River. (Laconia Circle, Desha County, Arkansas) Having never felt the almost tropical heat, I was reduced to an almost dumb cinder. Men could go out in these comparatively lonely places to their work, filled with the sureness of success, in the watch of cultivation of their broad acres, but a woman must, of necessity, at that time and place make of her mind a constant companion. There was no lack of servants and unlike Martha, who was busy with many things in their service; my lack of occupation became more apparent.”

“And you will find, my dear, that there is nothing so dire as lack of occupation. Neighbors were there, on adjoining plantations, miles apart. This especial location was particularly isolated. No railroad, and naturally no daily mails, or even facilities for sending telegrams. When we wanted to get out quickly or send a message, we had to ferry across the Mississippi River in a skiff. There was no official ferry man. The Missouri Pacific railroad in Mississippi was what we had to depend on, except for the twice a week steam boat. This place was in a basin that lay between the foothills of Crowley’s Ridge, which is as you know the petering out of the Ozark Mountains to the south and the entrance of the Arkansas River into the Mississippi. Just twelve miles to the south of us and west about forty miles to the hills, as we always said. Inundations from the over-full river were our most gigantic menace. Our section was a bowl of some twenty thousand acres levied all around and presided over by a levee board of planters whose interest lay in the enclosure.”

“In that time of levees on the river, some were high and some low. When we first went there they had just graduated from the wheel barrow and the Irishman stage. Remember, my dear, this was a little more than fifty years ago. As time passed and the restless river regarded them as slight obstacles in its raging pathway, they were made higher and higher till at last a water came that broke all records, broke financially, all who lived there, tore up everything, made a mockery of man’s work in all the years of levee building. But that was many years after I came away and the US Government took charge of the whole system. Bigger and better had been our levee slogan, as if bigger and better were synonymous. We did not have the people or the means of the

59 eternal vigilance that would have taken. We went there just after the ‘Water of 1890,’ it was always called and which, up to that time had been the worst ever.”

“But Grandmother, how did you get there? You said there were no railroads.”

“No, my dear, no railroad, cars or trucks. We went by steamboats. At that time, river travel was about the only thing left of what was called the ‘mauve decade’ of the 19th Century. It was a gracious climax before the old order changed and strictly modern methods came to the fore.”

“It seems to me, Grandmother, to be a waste of time to travel so slowly. How did you manage to get everything done on that sort of life?” I asked.

My grandmother laughed. “Our mental habits, my dear, were not quickened to the pace of your generation. We took time to think and most of us remembered to provide a margin for emergencies. In fact, in those early years of my life, generation followed generation, children grew up like father, mother, grandparents. Antique ways were like a badge of honor. Business passed from father to son with no thought of aptness; the fact that he was there when needed seemed apt enough. Upstarts were people who tried to introduce new ideas, and new thought was radical. Any bull- headed, obstinate person was believed to have strength of character.”

“So we had lived somewhat in our own groves, till almost overnight a change was wrought and people become individuals in their own right and the pace of life quickened. But steamboat travel was a last serene gesture to a fading tapestry. Some of the boat travel, even then, had fallen off to a great degree, but many a white collar anchor line carried passengers from St. Louis to New Orleans even at that late day. There were many packets that went out of Memphis for way landings. There were a line of Lee boats that served this section from Memphis to Helena. Our own packet was the Kate Adams, which in our community became a household institution. She made the trips out of Memphis twice a week on Monday and Thursday at 5 PM to Arkansas City.”

“She was a very beautiful side-wheeled steamer. There were three steamers who bore this name. The first one came out in 1882 and burned in December 1888, a few miles below Memphis. Legend has it that she was named for the first captain’s wife. I’m not sure if that is correct as history. The second Kate Adams came out on Thanksgiving Day in 1889, that was the year I was married. She landed in Memphis on that day and that boat two years later carried us as passengers to our Arkansas home. The landing then was a low flat bar on which scattered switches of cottonwood grew. This boat was sold some years later to a New Orleans Company and later she operated in the Memphis - Vicksburg trade under the name of Dewey. Again she was sold, and under the name of Lotus Simms, her trade was from Memphis to St. Louis. She had served us many years. Finally she burned, and it was the third Kate Adams that then became our ‘Floating Palace.’”

“On the first trip this boat made down, my daughter was six years old and my son four weeks. We had been invited to come aboard and make the trip to Arkansas City and back. We and the Captain had become quite good friends. We went and were shown every nick and corner of it, even the room down in the hull which had been made for the crap shooting rousters. On the way down to Arkansas City we landed near a lonely stretch of country to try out the bell tone. The old one had a flaw and this one must be perfect.”

“Captain Reese, owner of the boat, authorized Captain Agnew, who was master, to put two thousand silver dollars into the molding metal to give it tone. Also they wanted to time the signal whistle to the exact shade of sound of the other, and I often wondered what those isolated settlers must have thought when they heard peal after peal of the perfect organ tones of the mellow sounds of that powerful music. The bell that we toned that day is now in the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, Virginia, (1944) and holds a prominent place there.”

“We were very proud of our grand packet. Sometimes now, my dear, in my heart there is a very definite longing to make one more trip down that old muddy river on the aristocrat of steam boats; to hear once more the deep resonant sound of her signal blow for landings, one long, two shorts and another long sound was her call. I should like to stand on the guards to note the hurley burley of moseying into the banks, the crowding to the rails of the passengers, the conglomerate mass of freight to be taken off and more brought on, the rousters, in their running gait, up and down the gang plank, singing as they went, and calling out to other Negroes on the bank. People on the landings coming on board, some for business reasons, some for casual chats with officers and friends, and just as often to have their jugs refilled to get a bottle for the hip pocket. Men from the back country on the lower river would come in with a pistol strapped on his hip. We had no ‘Pistol packing Mammas’ then my dear, even the backwoods’ woman left that to her man, also the dirk he carried in his boot. For in those early days we were there, the bottoms, as that Delta land was called, was feared for its malaria, feuds and run away Negroes.”

“Of course, these things did not obtain in all river communities, but only in places like ours, where facilities for contact were yet undeveloped, and every man had to take care of himself. This ‘Circle,’ as it was called, was no recent place of habitation. In the 1820s, families from Kentucky came in there and made the settlement somewhat a family affair. Some of the men of that time made names for themselves in the outer world. One became a state senator, one a well-known physician, and one a distinguished lawyer. Some of the descendants of those families were there when we went. In their old homesteads, which finally were totally destroyed from over flows, or damaged too much for further living. But the steamboats had been their mode of travel, in all those years till at this time, they had become enured to the slowly moving life, and this Adams of ours was the last steamer in that trade, and so to go back to her, she became as much a part of our lives as all boats had been to former livers there, and has been a nostalgic part of my life.”

“I often long for the dancing in the long salon. A big band was always aboard and at many landings would come out on the guards to play while the boat was being loaded. Parties from Memphis and way landings would make the round trip. Many of these we have joined. How many times have I danced from the time we left our landing until our return at two or three o’clock next morning! I remember the long dining tables and the service of the white-jacketed waiters, always accompanied by the music. How many times I have sat in a deck chair to watch the boat’s prow push through the valley of waters of its own making, the mighty engines purring softly, and the big side wheels making whirlpools of the foaming water. Also, I have sat there watching the moonlight make a silver track directly to my chair, and make the dark tangled woods on the bank look like resplendent architecture.”

“On dark nights, I have seen that same black line of trees, with beacon lights, like fireflies, twinkling their safety signal, to the boat crew. Then the stars in the skies would

61 come out and reflect themselves in the muddy waters below, some times to see a lantern wave out of the darkness, calling for a landing. Of course, a stop was always made at mail landings, but often they would get hails for an unusual one. These calls were sometimes from logging outfits. Oxen were still used for hauling in many of these camps, and to see these surly creatures persuaded up the gang plank, was itself, a visit to the circus. The rousters pulled and pushed, twisted the animal’s tails and sometimes bodily pushed or dragged the scared, stubborn things to the lower deck.”

“I remember once, just a few miles below Memphis, going south, we took on a camp to put off further down. There were twenty oxen in this outfit, and one huge animal refused to go aboard. After wearing out everybody that tried to move him and the Captain had shouted himself hoarse with orders, he jumped overboard off the gang plank, and swam a quarter of a mile downstream before he climbed back on the bank. Rousters had been sent quickly on land to head him off, and in skiffs to get around him, finally he was lassoed, and tired out, no doubt he allowed himself to be brought back, where he walked down that gang plank as any gentleman should.”

“In the confusion of getting all this aboard, the tonnage was enormous, it was distributed unevenly, as to weight, and at dinner that night we had to hold to a dish while we ate from it, and water glasses danced and splashed, the boat shook and heaved about so. It was almost morning before we could lie safely in our beds and not be rolled out.”

“Honestly, Grandmother, that sounds like the Pilgrim Fathers and the Mayflower. I had no idea so much of your life went so slowly.”

My grandmother looked at me and laughed. “It would be a very wise thing if some force could slow the whole world down. We need rest.” she said. “That was a very restful time. We took time to have friends and a neighbor was a real thing, not just somebody who lived next door. The officers on that boat became our close friends. The captain came off for midday dinner with us often, a mate taking his place on the boat. The pilots also, stayed on long enough to make close friends all along the river. That was where we had grand times, too. In the pilot house, many times up there I watched that big vessel being steered through narrow chutes, round bends, out in the open water, would remember Mark Twain’s story of the river listening to the soundings being taken. ‘Quarter twain,’ ‘half twain,’ ‘Mark twain’ on the lower deck, repeated on the passenger deck and relayed to the man on the Texas, next to the pilot, who had to know the depth of the water.”

“What is a twain, Grandmother?”

“Mark twain is twelve feet. You can gauge the others by that. Mark twain meant ‘go ahead.’”

“And what is a Texas?” I wanted to know.

“That is the upper floor on which the pilot house is built, and a grand place on a hot day. You get the full sweep of wind in your face and hear all sounds in a muted way. The tinkle of bells in the pilot house, the answering ones below, the water underneath awash against the gunnels. The mast pole kept in line with the steering path, cutting the wind.”

“The erosion from the river was very great. It would eat inshore at one place and pile up silt against another bank, making a jut out, so the channel was constantly changing. When I came away to live here, the place where we landed eighteen years before was a dense forest of cotton wood trees extending out about three or four hundred feet from where the landing was. Later, when railroads came and the world found a pathway to our door, boat travel became part and parcel of a decaying gentility of passenger travel on the river.”

“In the meantime, our Kate Adams had been the meeting place of many couples where marriage followed, had been the means of welding friendships between people who lived in different sections of the country. Finally, this great side wheeled steamer, which had been the pride of the Mississippi River’s lower bends, was brought here to Memphis and put into some petty local work. Later, as a last bad usage, she was used to make a film of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, much to my disgust. Just after that, in the spring of 1927, she burned while at her wharf boat. The steel hull was used then as a sort of tow barge and it sank at the mouth of the Wolf River loaded with a cargo of cotton. It was raised and floated, between two empty barges to the head of President’s Island and left to bury itself under the water it had so proudly sailed over so many glorious days. ‘Sic, Gloria, mundi,’ as has been said so many times of lost and reassured things of life.”

Sketch No. 8

Devastation

The radio announcer was telling, with a sparkling animation, of a quartet of Negro singers, who would, in a few moments, give a group of old Southern melodies. Grandmother raised her hand, “Listen to that, my dear, she said. Nothing on earth can translate those old songs as the Negro voice can. Whether he knows it or not, his whole life’s background is steeped in Southern lore, and his voice is sympathetically tuned to the wail of his ancient forbears. The beats of the savage tone was tuned to the heartthrobs of the old slave, and their voices today carry the same haunting quality of melody and heart break. Listen!”

“Carry me back to ole Virginny, There’s where the cotton and the corn and ‘taters grow.” Again they took up the home theme,

Weep no more, my lady and weep no more today For I sing one song of my old Kentucky home. Of my old Kentucky home, far away. Dars whar my heart am turning ebber, Dar whar de ole folks stay.” Almost as if angels wings swept by came, Swing low, sweet chariot, coming’ fer to carry me home.

They had marvelous voices, and the blending was truly in accordance with the themes. And lastly they sang “Down where the cotton blossoms grow.” The program ended.

“Shut it off, my dear” my Grandmother said, and repeated, more to herself than to me – When the fields are white with cotton And the moon’s ‘er shining bright An it’s all so quiet, peaceful An you feel so fer from harm, That you wonder if the angels aint A restin’ in the calm.

When you walk out in the night And the fields are white with cotton And the moon’s er shining bright I have seen men ride horse back Down the rows of grown cottonplants Whose tops reached up their outstretched arms

I have seen those green seas filled with pink and white blossoms And then the full green bolls, Whose pods opened later When frost had withered the leaves, Like balls of snowflakes.

“I have heard the solacing voices of the Negros going out in the morning, dragging long cotton bags down the rows to hold the white lint, and heard their coming home at night chanting their idiomatic songs.”

“Grandmother,” I said. “Were you happy in that lonely life? I can’t picture you living apart. You have always seemed so vital to me, a person of contacts.”

“Happiness is comparative, my dear. We carry the germ of our own capacity for it, and are responsible more or less for our reactions. Sometimes we cry for the moon, when its reflection here is all we need or should have. We often feel beaten or low because the sparkle of the diamond is just out of our reach, forgetting that a ‘diamond is only a chunk of coal, that stuck to its job, you know.’ Our thoughts of youth are positive ones and life’s mirror is polished and glistening with glowing pictures. While if we knew, the polish is only on the surface and youth sees through the glass darkly. What we feel in our young lives is the effervescence of the froth on top the goblet of life, not knowing of the sustaining quality of the wine down inside. But, also naturally, any change that challenges our high spirits and outlook, gives us antipathy, at times, for what we have to meet. It was a lonely life in a lonely section of country. I missed many things that up to this time had been an essential part of my life. There was little social life, for people lived far apart and winter roads were impossible.”

“It was a beautiful country though the land lay level as far as the eye could reach. When the cotton and corn covered the earth, it was a veritable artist’s dream. But many times I have yearned for hills and valleys, thicket and highway, the stir of people, going and coming to give this dead monotony of daily routine something besides its seasons of planting and reaping. Nearly all my life had been spent on a farm but small places and neighbors was the rule, and those thousands of acres there in that bowl we lived in made quite a difference in outlook and I often dreamed of the ‘lanes where chestnuts fell down on the old home farm.’”

“Grandmother, how did you get around anywhere?”

“There were roads all through the fields, but the character of the soil made it hard to keep them passable. There isn’t a pebble in all that country so the roads were good or bad according to whether it was wet or dry. Most of the land was buckshot and consequently stuck like glue when wet, and when dry, hardened to almost concrete proportions. I’ve seen chickens with balls of mud on their feet that would have to be pounded with a hammer enough to crack and get off. Pigs would also get ‘balled up’as we would say. We rode horseback much of the time. I enjoyed that. I would ride for hours over the fields, out to the post office or village store with your grandfather. We often went fishing and there were church services, when the river was not out of its banks, but the church was on the river side of the levee, all the neighbors would meet then and it was the custom to invite friends to Sunday dinner. We took our share of that and it proved somewhat diverting. Speaking of the church reminds me of the organist. She could play some hymns and not much of a variety. She was no musician, just mother of a family who was willing to do what she could. Her favorite was “Pass me not, o’ Gentle Savior.” We had it every service. Easter arrived one year after we had been there a while and for Easter Sunday we had “Pass me not o’ Gentle Savior” with no frills.”

“Dear me, how funny that sounds now. Youth seems to have been in another age and all those first years there a sort of by play accompaniment, to the business of living. I was speaking of the soil there, and the heavy buck shot land. When the levees would break and waters pour in, there would be left sediment of silt or acres of sand. The closer to the break, the more the land was filled in. This, of course, was basic foundation that built that land and sifting through would lighten the texture. Long years after we had lived there a break came near us and left two or three feet of sand over the yard and land around us.”

“You know, my dear, that whole lowland country was supposed to have been an arm of the sea, and the silt and sand from the river built it up when there were no levees. When they were first built, they were only small mounds and in passing time were washed away and in being built higher and higher the silt was kept in between the banks and no spread over the land except when a break came and that fertilization was lost. This section where we had gone was levied all around, irrespective of the Mississippi River. West of us was the White River, with no levee, west of it and almost parallel was the Arkansas, also without levees. They emptied into the Arkansas when it turned towards the Mississippi and the Arkansas went into the Mississippi just twelve miles south of us. So we were in a bowl, you might say. It was twenty-two miles around the rim and when the water came up to the top of that levee, which it often did, with no break, you can imagine what a battle human beings put up in their fight against those rivers. It was like being on a sunken island.”

“The most thunderous and melodious music, in the heyday of the Grand Opera House, could not compare with, in times of high water, to the deep mellow boom of the Kate Adams signal blow. We knew on board that boat, were men who would stand by us to help in any capacity.”

“Grandmother, I can’t imagine anybody wanting to live like that! Seems to me you would be crazed with fear.”

“People had lived there long years before we went, my dear, and were at home on heredity lands, and old customs. Men don’t mind having to fight and ‘as unto the bow, the cord is, so unto the man is woman, though she bends him, she obeys him, though the draws him yet she follows.’ My man was a born fighter, he would have been unhappy living peacefully. He like to fight for what he got to know he had conquered, gave him zest to fight again and so far as those waters were concerned he knew everyone would be the last. His faith in bigger and better levees was supreme and he lived long enough to lose his last fight. Our first home there was a little house, that the winds constantly blew around and sung long whistling sounds and low muted sounds of south winds everywhere. I called it ‘Shamandasse,’ the name that Hiawatha gave the south wind.”

“For six years we lived there, planning and looking forward, planted trees around the house and shrubs. I had a flower garden. We had cows, work stock, saddle horses and a horse for me to drive. I had chickens. Life was good and we felt so satisfied and happy. Our respective mothers had made us visits and our first child was four years old. Then came the spring of 1896 (1897) and rising water, it had come before. We lived one mile from the nearest neighbor, south of us. Reports were coming from the upper reaches of the river of danger and warnings were sent out to the low lands. Not having had any experience, we did not know what the danger would be. We were told that even if the levee broke there would be no immediate danger. The water would come in

66 slowly and spread over the ground before filling up. That sounded pretty plausible and we rested easy. Spring had come in bright with promise. The birds sang, the sun shone, the mellow earth was being turned into furrows to receive the seed for growth and harvest. Men had been watching the levee, but thought they could hold it, and master the waters. We rode out often to watch it. We would leave our horses out and walk to the levee top where we could see the vast flow of the sullen, muddy waters, filled with drift, showing that some caving bank up stream had been eaten into and had crumpled into the giant pull of the waters. Logs, uprooted trees, snags, clumps of sod, bobbed along, whirling slowly, relentlessly being carries on down to some where they would catch and hold, or finally drift ‘til the weight of waters would sink them. It was always an awe inspiring sight to us, although each spring it would come higher. When the water was halfway up on the levee, guards were put out and men watched for boils. Those were sipping places in the levee caused by crawfish burrowing or perhaps a stretch of softer earth, where the water pressure would push through.”

“The higher the water came, the more men were watching and riding to feel a sense of safety. My dear, not one man in that country ever gave up hope or lost courage. They went without sleep, ate when food was taken to them. Walking sentinels watching every passing boat or even skiff to keep a wave wash from coming against the levee. In their faith of ultimately holding it intact, they fought like savages with the water lapping the top and sometime going over. Sacks were sent out by the Government and these were filled with dirt and piled on these places. My husband’s answer to all my frantic questions was, ‘It won’t break, even if it does, there will be no danger and the land will be richer than ever.’”

“He did not see the present tragedy in his outlook for recompense. As long as he lived in that often devastated country, he never believed there would be another broken levee. His faith would have removed mountains, if there had been substance in his faith, but this one mountain finally proved to be a volcano in whose eruption he saw at last, for he lived to through the most destructive overflow in the history of the river and he lost all he had striven for, for many years. But that was long years after this spring of 1896, which came in with promise.”

“I was alone one afternoon. I had a pistol and if any harm came I was to ring the big farm bell. That bell on any place, that sounded out of time meant danger of some kind and help came immediately. In the late afternoon of an early March day, I opened a door to the north through which I could see a straight stretch of road through hundreds of acres of land where Negroes were plowing and with my sewing sat down facing almost two miles to where the levee made a sharp bend west. My little daughter sat beside me with her gray cat, Billy, in her arms. Her disposition was quite domestic and having no playmates, tried to do whatever I did. She would make clothes for her cat, some of them fashioned quite fantastically, which he wore with the gravity of a staid judge.”

“Out on the levee I knew men walked with shotguns, all the way round to see that nothing came near enough to cause damage. Boats eased up, almost ceasing to float, near enough to put out the gang plank on a part that seemed safe. There was uneasiness, that from across the river, some renegade might be sent to cut the line to let the water in on the Arkansas side to ease the pressure there. Once a shovel and pick had been found and a man suspected, who finally left the country.”

“I thought of this as I sat there and watched the road and fallow fields with the sun shine on them. I somehow felt a sense of safety and was humming a song of home and love, when suddenly a faint sound came to my ears, a sound not tuned to the time or place. I looked up and could see in the distance a rider coming like mad down the road. I could see mules being unhitched from plows, then I could clearly see a rider bending over a horse’s neck and hear the pounding hoofs of a galloping horse. The voice came clear now, a black man, riding like Collin Graves, to warn the people. ‘De levee done broke! De levee done broke!’”

“Oh! Grandmother” I said “what a shock that was and you alone.”

“My dear, long after my hair was snow white, long after I had lived away from that section of country that sound would come to me in my sleep, even now, in telling you about it, there are little prickles of nerves, in remembering the call of that man and what came after.”

“The horse and rider galloped on, the man’s voice growing fainter to me, as he spread his message. At first I went panicky. Thought seemed frozen, as I stood scarcely breathing. Seeing the hurry of men leaving the fields made me forget what I had been told to do, and about there being no danger. Then I remembered. I ran to the big bell and pulled with all my strength. Bells on all plantations began to ring; I could see men running in all directions, every man to his niche. The battle cry of ‘Suave - - - .‘ In less time than you could think, somebody had hitched mules to a wagon and it was standing by the door. I remember I warned them not to break down the little tree I had planted near the door. They looked at one another and smiled. They had seen high water before.”

“Our household goods were put on the wagon to be taken to a neighbor about a mile away, whose house had a second story. Men had mounted the work stock to go to a mound nearby, or to the front levee. Down the stretch of road I had watched that afternoon, I could see the water coming, filling in the furrows and the low places. By the time the wagon was ready to start, the mules feet splashed in puddles of water. Your grandfather, on his horse, called back to me that he would be back in thirty minutes to get the cows. They had been fastened in the barn.”

“I turned and went inside. The sun was setting and its rasps sent long scintillating beams out over those fields as if no tragedy of stark proportions was taking place. A volume of water was coming down the road now and I could distinctly hear the roar of the loosened flood pouring through the gateway it had made. Our house was directly in the path of the break and nearly two miles away, but it had so much land to spread over I wasn’t afraid then. The men would come back and get the cows. The chickens were roosting high, so I busied myself with getting things that were left put away and fixed some coffee. The sun went down, it got dusk, a cool damp feeling came over like dusk brings to that land. I heard the waters rippling under the house, and went out to see if anybody was in sight yet. There was no land anywhere, water all over the earth, and no human being in any direction. The water was making whirlpools around posts and trees. I went back in the house not knowing what to do and knowing I was helpless, trapped, my little daughter asking questions I couldn’t answer and the cat purring contently in her arms. There were no telephones or radios then, so to wait was all that was left to do. It got dark and no sound but that of gurgling water.”

“Oh, Grandmother, how did you stand it?”

“My dear, when a prison door closes and locks behind you, you know you are powerless and in that sea of water, with no way to call for help was terrifying. But you know life has a terrific pull and hope springs eternal in the human breast. Even in a prison cell you must think. That is one thing that life imposes, in any condition or circumstance, and now I wondered how the hills of Tennessee looked. The trees just turning green and that earth all covered with sod, getting green, the white washed fences and the place I had brought here with me, now a mother cow, out in that barn where water was rising higher all the time. I thought of my swing at home in the back yard, my mother and father.”

“I could not stand it. Action was what I needed. I got up and went out on the porch. It was dark now and I couldn’t tell how much water was under me. Not a sound of a human being. I got a fishing pole we had in the house and let it down to the ground. I found it wet three feet up, when I drew it out. I was almost frozen with fear by that time. A horse couldn’t come back in that much water. We had no skiff and at this time all others were in use. A horse would stumble with the heavy current coming against it and lose its way. Maybe that had happened.”

“My mind went round in circles. Oh! I prayed ‘be merciful and keep me from thinking.’ I fixed the bed that was left, put my baby on it and lay down beside her. The clock ticked away measuring time as usual and time to me had ceased to be a measured product. A thought came to me, the swift current might wash the house off the pillars it was built on. I went back on the porch, stooped and put my arm over. My fingers touched the water, not more than eighteen inches from the floor. My mind went blank; I felt that to die at once could be no worse than this torture of suspense. Time passed somehow.”

“I laid down by my little child, there was nothing. I could fight and her cat whose outstretched paw was lying on her hand. I was going into a daze. That wouldn’t do. I went out again, nothing to see but an infinity of stars and water. I could see one light in a faraway cabin. It was now after 8 o’clock. I stood out there and sang my swan song, as I thought, one that we had sung together, back in the hills of Tennessee.

In the gloaming, oh, my darling Where the lights are dim and low Softly come and softly go.

“I heard a sound, faint, far away but distinctly human. I screamed and heard it again. I listened with my heart beating like a tom tom. Again I heard, faintly, ‘coming.’ I could not recognize the voice, but somebody was out there in that water, trying to find a haven. Again I heard “coming.” My brain cleared. I sat a table on the porch and put a lighted lamp on it.”

“The voice came clearly now. It was my husband, but why was he out in that direction, in the woods? I went to the attic and got an old suit of clothes. The cows had been bellowing and thrashing around in the water and now it was worse. They were like mad things. I could hear then plunging about, and the constant lap of waters under the house.”

“The clock on the mantel struck nine. I went outside. I could hear no skiff. How was he coming? I called and he answered, cheering me, telling me he was nearly home, almost to the yard fence. I could hear him moving in the water. The moon was rising now and would soon send a long wavering silver reflection over the water, a ghost moon riding high over a submerged land. How they got in the house, I never knew. A friend of his was with him and they told me later when I was conscious again that they started back at 6 o’clock and knowing there was no place here for a horse decided to come on foot. The current was too swift over the road, so they went to the woods where the water would be still and they could have the fence to guide them. The water was not rising now the bowl was filling up, but it was as high as his arm pits. All night we watched. Before day there was no noise in the barn lot and the water ran ceaselessly under the house, almost to the floors. Dawn came, that strange, weird time when a ghostly breath chills the earth before Phoebus drives his chariot into the daylight.”

“Daylight came silently, slowly with the utmost precision to unfold a sight which the morning before had not seen. Far over the water came the sound of our locks being used and we knew help was coming. The current was not running so swiftly now and the water around lay quiet. We could see the skiff now. A neighbor was coming to our aid and no sound on earth could have given us more joy. While we stood to watch, the water lapped over the edge of the porch and lying like a muddy blanket as far as you could see.”

“Drift of all sorts went floating by, swollen animals rolling on the surface or swimming franticly to the port nowhere. A baby’s bed, a chair from where some house had toppled. A plank sailed by with a rooster on board, who crowed his salute to the sunrise. A small outhouse had fallen over backwards and had stopped going, bottom end against the porch, and its two round holes, like staring eyes, gazing out over it all, a kitchen table came by, struck a tree, whirled slowly and passed on. Children’s toys from cabins that had crashed, bobbed along, as if in a new found game.”

“The neighbor and his skiff were at the door. The bow of the boat reaching over onto the porch. What had remained in the house was put into it and we, lastly, the baby and her cat and the sun rose. Again the oars scraped in the locks, kerlop, kerlop and we were off, headed for the levee where tents were being put up for families who could not remain in their homes. I looked back but was not turned into a pillow of salt, I was more like a graven image. The break was from White River. We went to the Mississippi Levee which was bigger.”

“The US Government had sent tents to be put up in case of need and the big levee, the only available place, being the only land for a forty mile stretch, back to the Arkansas hills. Your grandfather wanted to send me home to Tennessee till we could go back in our house, I refused and told him I had promised ‘for better or for worse’ and while this was much more than I expected I would stick it out as long as he had to.”

“After a few days, he had a house boat which had been a landing store house anchored to some trees on the river side of the levee and lived very comfortable. We had a bed, chairs, rug, and other accessories. The only uneasiness was the wave wash of passing steamers, which jiggled us about a bit. We did community cooking in a tent on the levee. A number of families were housed out there.”

“The second day after we were settled, we went back to see about the house. The water had reached it now. That means level with the side water and our house was

70 under water halfway to the ceilings. The mantel pieces inside were covered. After a week of this, the green leaves began coming out on the trees. A peculiar sight, we went for a boat ride one day, and as we passed under some trees, a snake fell from the branches into the boat. It was too surprised to move and an oar finished its career. So many green things happened; and for a time it was rather a jolly, but a most colossal prank.”

“The Kate Adams came twice a week, bringing mail and supplies. Once we took a trip to Arkansas City and back. Cattle and stock had all been shipped out except those on a mound and a few cows staked on the levee, so we could have milk.”

“When was all this done, Grandmother?” I said.

“When that man’s call sounded like the trumpet of doom to those who had been through it before, and knew what had to be done. They were all driven to the levee to be shipped out. Government supplies were sent in for distribution and everybody was cared for.”

“I don’t see how you lived in tents, Grandmother.”

“There were tent dwellers many thousands of years before we had it to do, my dear. They can be made very comfortable. Some are made so there can be rooms apart, by making cross walls of canvas. Windows were square holes, with flaps so let down in case of cold or rain. Metal bound holes were in them to put stove pipes through or warmth or cooking. We used drift wood to make fires.”

“Was the levee wide on top? Was there room for everything?”

“Yes, barely at that time, but they are much wider now. In dry times, we rode horse back on the levee, but when water came against it, we did not dare go near it on a horse for fear of stepping in a seep hole down at the base. You know, that land is very porous and water will soak under and appear on the surface sometimes a mile from the levee and of course near it more often. The appear as damp, soggy places and some of them have the quality of quick sand.”

“When were the levees started, Grandmother?”

“On the Mississippi River, by monks down in lower Louisiana. At first they were only small mounds. This knowledge of the levee building was brought by these monks from Southern France. There have been levees on the Mississippi River since 1850.”

“The whole history of that river would be interesting, Grandmother, not just from school histories.”

“I have a sketch I wrote once. I will read it to you some time.”

“Oh do! How long did you live in that house boat, Grandmother?”

“I don’t remember the number of weeks, four or six perhaps. As soon as the water went down below the floors, we went to see what could be done. The mud left on the floors had to be scraped off with hoes. So we got workmen and cleaned up. Painted and scrubbed. Labor was not scarce then, and before the water got too

71 shallow to run a skiff we went back to find a devastating waste of miles of acres of mud and trash and ruin. Our houses were all gone and not one thing alive there but us, no weeds, no grass. Inconceivable things had caught and hung on wire fences. Some of the posts washed up and wire tangled into a ball. Trees in the woods were all living green and that was all of life. The little trees I had planted were dead, as was everything on the wide expanse of that flat low land acreage of mud.”

“Cotton planted in the mud by men wearing rubber boots came up almost overnight. The sun dried a surface crust and we all wished for rain. I remember an old Negro woman who made remarks that amused us all. She said now, ‘Rain, rain, whut does we want wid rain when we jist been mighty nigh drowned.’ Again she said, ‘Soons I kin git outer here I’m gwine up back er Helena whar dey never heard er Arkansas.’ It was ridiculously funny to us. ‘Back er Helena,’ was what we called ‘Nigger heaven,’ a settlement of Negroes on the river, but to her, the river only overflowed where she lived. It was in this place that all the runaway Negroes went, ‘Back er Helena.’”

“Who were they, Grandmother?”

“They were those who would get into debt and wouldn’t want to work it out, so ran away. The planters couldn’t afford to lose the debt, so went there to get them, and usually did. That was more than fifty years ago, my dear, and that country being isolated was rather primitive in spite of the fact that people had lived there for many decades.”

“By June the birds circled and sang, the fields were green with rank cotton and waving corn, the outlaw river was in its banks again. Stars came out and the moon sent its silver light to beautify it, and men walked free. I tried to enter into the enthusiasm of living, but something had been smothered in me, some attribute blunted, and I was, of necessity left so much alone, am afraid I grew too introspective. I could never lose the thought of what that river could do, Springs when waters came and no breaks in the levee, all that old agonizing anxiety would come over me. I did not have a feeling of safety. It was being in a land of beginning again, for there was nothing staple, with no certainty of any time limit to build and no certainty that what you built would not be torn away.”

“How did you stand it, Grandmother?”

“You do not choose the part you are to play here, my dear, but only play the part assigned to you, and I learned in my role that disillusions often come as the price paid for success. It isn’t given to human beings with super sensitivity to accept equably all phases of life. Nerves that are tensed like fiddle strings and brains that are turned to play upon these strings make chords of music jangled, out of time. Two years more we lived in this house. I felt that maybe we would leave this place. We had talked about it. We had lived here eight years and in 1899 my son was born. When he was a few months old, your grandfather came back from a trip to Memphis with the news that he had entered into a partnership with the men who owned this place and an adjoining plantation had been bought to add to it. Then the harbor lights went out and I realized that I was trying to carve cameos in a wooden post, for I had hoped that he would bring news that he had bought a home here.”

Sketch No. 9

Home On The River

“There are, many interpretations of the spiritual thought that we call religion, my dear” my grandmother said. We had just come home from the Easter service and my grandmother, in her favorite rocking chair, had repeated these lines and made that charismatic remark. “Are you thinking of the sermon you heard today?” I asked.

“Yes, in a way. That of course is an old theme. It’s only when we dress it up with theological learning that it differs, somewhat from year to year. Theology, my dear, is not religion. Anybody can study theology, pagan or infidel. Theology is taught as a conception of God, religion is how a man lives every day, his reaction and understanding of his God. So, that makes various forms of worship and you are not necessarily wrong, because you do not agree to other opinions. But men have been burned at the stake for a difference in a creed or doctrine. The Puritans carried out the letter of the law with no justice for human nature. In this thought, there are fundamental rules of right, with the antithesis, wrong all else is comparative.”

“The religion of Jesus Christ is one of compensation, ‘Though ye die you shall live again.’ Mohamed founded a religion in the 6th Century. It is called Islam and means ‘entire submission to God,’ to one God, which is Allah. He preached against idolatry worship and wrote the Koran, which is the substance of his faith. This religion has more followers today than any other, except the Christian, and claims to have made more progress and improvement than the Christian religion. Mohammed was an epileptic and lived almost alone in a cave until he was forty years old. At that time, Christianity and Judaism were fomenting the world and he proclaimed that he had a Devine revelation, from the angel Gabriel. His religion stresses chastity, honesty, truthfulness and total abstinence. In fact, that is required.”

“It seems to me, Grandmother, that about covers the ground for right living.”

“Yes, there is justice and truth in it. He also had a thought that a man’s soul was more important than a woman’s. Of course, in that time in the world’s history, women were not regarded in any sort of equality with men.”

“That sounds funny now, don’t you think?”

“Yes, women certainly are proving what they can do.”

“What about other religions?”

“Well, Confucius, you know, was born some five hundred years or more before Christ. The name, in Chinese, means ‘teacher.’ His teachings were the duties of man in relation to his fellow man, and his influence on the Chinese people was very great. He taught practical morality as the golden rule, rather than a relation to Higher Power.”

“Brahmanism is a religion of high caste in India, in the 6th Century before Christ. Their beliefs were written on scrolls, and were called Vedas, and are regarded as sacred revelations. Their theistic ideas are very interesting to read about. They became almost pantheistic in their belief.”

“Buddhism is a reformed system of the Brahman religion. Theirs is a doctrine of transmigration. You must go through four stages of life to reach Nirvana, or as we say, Heaven. They were urged to become monks or nuns, get away from the world. After having passed these stages, if you have not freedom from all personal relations, passions and desires at death, then your soul passes into some other form of life, plants, animals, insects, any gradation of animal or plant life. For thousands of years, if need be, until your purification is complete and you reach Nirvana.”

“The religion of Jesus Christ is the fulfilling law of love. The Pagan revered his idols. Some men live ethically instead of with a formal religion. The American Indian’s thought was of the happy hunting grounds of the Great Father, who waited for them after death. Christ did not speak of codes. He laid out a plan, gave us a pattern, and our individual minds made different concepts of that pattern. Some broke our religion up into sections, and called them creeds.”

“The Methodist was named for an attribute of the founder of this creed, John Wesley, by the Oxford students, because he seemed to guide their lives by ‘Method.’ It was founded in the university, followers became Methodists.”

“In New Testament times, a Presbyter was one of the Elders of the church. A Presbyterian believes in a government of the church by Presbyters. For the most part they are Calvanistic in doctrine.”

“The Baptist church was founded by Roger Williams, at Providence Rhode Island in 1639. Their tenet or interpretation is that the only valid way for a believer is by emersion. They are a branch of English separatists, who insisted on emersion. This church holds a leading place in educational work. There are about 9 millions of them now. (1944)”

“The word Episcopal means having a government invested in Bishops, but this church recognizes no supreme Pope.”

“The Campbellites are Disciples of Christ and the sect was founded by Thomas and Alexander Campbell. Their churches, for many years have been called “Christian.”

“In the Roman Catholic apostolic church, the Pope is supreme head. The Greek Orthodox is somewhat on the same ruling, except they reject the supremacy of the Pope. The word Catholic means ‘universal,’ as you know.”

“There are Lutherans, who are followers of Martin Luther, who was a German monk. Justification by faith is their central doctrine. There are about three hundred million communicants in the church in the United States today.”

“Also, there are Christian Scientists who are versed in the scientific knowledge of a working Christianity, with Mary Baker Eddy as interpreter. She wrote a book called Science and Health with Key to Scriptures.”

“The first church of Christ was founded in 1879, with Mrs. Eddy as pastor. She felt that to ‘injure no man but to bless all mankind’ was her gift to the world.”

“Then we have our missionaries. Excuse me while I smile, and remember what Japanese students are saying about how they learned our weak spots and frail barriers from their time spent here in our universities. And with what sneers they speak of men and women we have sent from our churches out among them. We have made our churches as much marts of trade as the trade centers are. We try to give something to a people who do not even care to understand and whose type of religion is not understandable to us.”

“It does not matter what you call yourself or rather by what name, religion is tolerance, understanding, and love, which gives peace and harmony. Above all things which I dislike in churches is the cheap vulgarity of pulpit evangelists. I saw two men stand before the altar of Calvary Church, once, who were converted bums. They came from a city’s slums, somewhere in the North, and came to speak their language in revival fashion, in this old church, giving me the incongruous thought of a white bearded patriarch being bespattered with mud.”

(They were) “Singing revival songs almost as effective as Negro spirituals, in that old sanctuary that had the same effect on the emotionally religious, as jazz does on the physical emotions. I don’t want to sit under any man’s voice in my house of prayer, that can and does, without the flick of an eyelash, tell how nasty he has been and of the filth he has wallowed in.”

“St. Paul was sorry for his faults as he saw them, but he did not enlarge on them in his sermons or letters later.”

“The festival of Easter was not commemorated in all churches in my childhood days, nor were vestments worn in any except Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches. There was an aversion to the Roman church that was almost bigotry, and anything pertaining to it was taboo, by most people I knew. I have wondered why. But you know, there was war beginning in 1618 and lasting thirty years between Catholics and Protestants. It began in Germany, but later spread all over Europe. But time makes changes, and now most churches have vest choirs and recognize the Easter celebration.”

My grandmother rocked awhile, in silence and I pondered on what she had been saying. She had traveled a long way in her mind.

“My dear,” she said, at last, “Today as I sat in the dim church, with its flower covered altar, I longed for the out of doors, the sun and wind, and these lives came into my mind.”

“To worship God in Temples made with hands, with crowds about, aloof, remote or prim, it seemed to me to shut His spirit out. There’s something comes between my soul and them. But give me fields beneath an open sky. With singing birds or streams, mid shady trees and I can feel His presence nearer then than if in cloistered pew upon my knees and then I heard the organ pour forth its thunderous music of victory, of the spirit’s victory over death. ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ I came out of the crowded church in the day light, the sun shone brilliantly and its warmth touched the faces of the men and women. Spring’s life aroma floated up from the earth. Birds sang and the wind

75 laughed through the trees, rocking the limbs they sat on. A dream of Peace. My mind spanned the distance across the sea, sun nor sky nor singing birds for these men of ours, drawn up in line of battle.”

“Out there, in that understudy of Purgatory in Europe, for them it was for the enemy they waited, and death perhaps, this Easter Day.”

“What a crowd of spirit travelers will meet today at the Gate of Resurrection. St. Peter will open them wide to let in legions of war shriven souls who left their hurt bodies on the battle ground or under the waters of an ocean, that separated them from wives and babies, born and unborn, sweethearts who left the only girl to yearn and hope for the time he would come back.”

“While today, as I shriven spirits, they are waiting at the last everlasting portals of the house not made with hands. Just yesterday, many of them were school boys in a nation at peace. Only yesterday we dreamed of hopes for them to be realized today. Plans for them were thought out with loving care, only to be rent asunder by the cruel intrusion of war. But all this was yesterday. Today, ‘The gay will laugh though they are gone. The solemn brood of care plods on, and each one, as before, will choose his favorite phantom.’”

“How can God send such things, Grandmother?” I said.

“God does not send wickedness, my dear. He made rules for us to live by and if we break those rules, we invite the consequences. And as for war, if it were not for the potential profits, there would be no war. War is a human thought and as I have often told you ‘There are many birds of many kinds and many men of many minds.’ And politicians must carry on their trade, under the guise of whatever name they bear. Be it in the business world or to just play the game.”

“Forty-six years ago we had a war with Spain. It was her last gesture of defiance, weak though it was, to hold a fraction of what had been a stronghold, in all her turbulent career. In February, 1898, an American steamship, the Maine, was blown up in Havana harbor, thought by us to be premeditated. The terrible condition of the Cuban people under Spain’s rule, had worked up a great sympathy for them and the destruction of this ship was the last straw. We decided that Cuba should be free, and set about to get it done and over 100,000 men volunteered for service, following the President’s call. It was for humanity, not greed, pity, not revenge for injury.”

“Over in the Pacific waters, Commodore Dewey received orders to capture or destroy the Spanish fleet stationed at Manila. On the morning of the first day of May 1898, which was Sunday, he steamed into Manila Bay. To his fleet went the message ‘Keep cool and obey orders.’ And to the master of the flagship he said ‘You may fire when ready, Gridley.’”

“Six hours later, no Spanish warship lived to tell the tale, and American lost. Then came the blockade in Havana Harbor. Cervera’s fleet had run around from haven to haven ‘til finally they went by Moro Castle into the Harbor. It had come to be called the ‘Phantom Squadron,’ but now Cervera was in the last haven he would ever know, and the greatest expedition that had ever left the United States held him in there by the thrilling exploit of Richmond Hobson who with S. men blew up an American ship in the harbor opening, blocking it. I remember a remark that was attributed to the Spainards, that the Americans were peculiar in that, ‘When they were attacked they advanced instead of retreating.’”

“Hobson’s exploit was the talk of the world for a while, and for years the women went wild over him, somewhat after the way Frank Sinatra is today.” She smiled.

“I also remember the name of the first man killed in that war. He was just a boy, Ensign North Bagley of North Carolina. For a long time that name was reverenced. This war made famous, and commensurated many names.”

“Theodore Roosevelt, who made a name in war annals, and who was responsible for the Panama Canal being in operation. Also, later he became President of the United States. Leonard Wood, who became governor General of the freed islands. Commodore Dewey, who was made Rear Admiral of the U. S. Navy, and many of lesser note.”

“This war was not long in duration but it left its list of dead and wounded to count with mothers, wives, and sweethearts. Reaction here was bitter. I remember how we hated old, how we bought and avidly read illustrated magazines to see and read of starving Cubans. There was fear in hearts, too. And war is no respecter of homes and families, and at times each wife or mother would feel that her one man was worth all the Cuban Islands. But all things pass, and Spain’s once mighty name in this new world had passed out and her flay furled forever over the land where Desoto, Balboa, Ponce de Leon and many more Spanish names rang through the land, and which she had striven so hard to hold. In that time of my life, the most stupendous feat of engineering was the building of the Panama Canal, called the 8th wonder of the world by George Washington Goethals, born in New York City. Later, he was made a Brigadier General and appointed governor of the Canal Zone.”

“As I talk to you, my dear, all that time of achievement comes, so vividly, that it is hard to realize that I was thirty years old when this war began and that has been 46 years ago.”

“And another name stands out, too, in that time, William Gorgas. He was born in Alabama and educated in the South. He was appointed Chief Sanitary Officer in Panama during the canal work and eradicated yellow fever in less than a year. That was an achievement that startled the whole world and put an end to the horrible epidemics that ravaged so many cities and country sides. Memphis had more than her share when in 1878-9 the city was virtually a place of ruin and grass grew in the streets.”

“Do you remember that, Grandmother?”

“I was only ten years old the first year but my impression is as vivid today as if there had only been a year since. I wrote a story once and embodied those two tragic years as part of it.”

“I would like to hear it, Grandmother.”

“Some time we will talk about it my dear.”

“Leonard Wood’s name and fame were much honored, too. He was military Governor of Cuba in her first years of freedom and later he was made Governor General of the Philippines. There is a fort in Missouri now where troops for the present conflict are sent for training named for him. My grandson is there as a Corporal and instructor. We were living on the river during that war with Spain. Our house by some irony of fate was built in a clump of trees that bordered on the lake that was made when the levee broke in 1896.”

“What do you mean, Grandmother, a lake being made.”

“When the impact of water comes through the levee it is like a whirlpool, and digs out great craters that become lakes after it is all over. This one was a very beautiful sheet of water, fringed with willows and a grand place to fish. They came in with the water and remained when it receded. This lake was of a depth that was never reached although it was plumbed to a most astounding one.”

“It’s hard to explain the levee situation, with necessary bends and angles but this home of ours was in a triangle that doubled itself. Over on the second triangle, on top of the levee, the cotton gin was built. I always remember that gin at work. From the house, I could hear the whir of machinery and on days when the wind blew softly, the sound came and went with the twist of the wind. A whistle would sound the start, the noon stop and start, and the closing of the day.”

“I have watched many a bale of cotton turned out on a platform, from the time the seed cotton went into the hopper to the finish. I’ve watched the pressers work packing the lint into the box, which had had been lined with the bagging, or wrapping, and the steel ties slipped in their place, to be fastened when the box was packed, usually five hundred pounds of lint went into a bale.”

“A big percentage of the cotton was stamped with my name, “Emma, ” on one end of the bale and all up and down the river that name became a synonym for a fine brand and an excellently neat and well tied bale of cotton. Your grandfather specialized in the seed to grow the “Emma” cotton. I used to hear the Negroes call, ‘Boss, what cotton does you want us to take to de landing dis time, de Mss Emma?’ They always called it Miss Emma.”

“Our house was built up nine feet from the ground to the floor. It was latticed all around, from the floor down. The plantation store was across the yard and there was kept every necessary thing a farm would need. And there on Saturday nights the Negroes brought their banjoes and their gals to dance on the porch, or cut pigeon wings solo, inside. One old Negro, who could speak French fluently was called ‘Pap,’ and was a dancer and one night one yelled, ‘Look at Pap, dat nigger kin dance lac a tode kin turn roun on er dime.’”

“Sometimes a pistol shot would sound. Somebody’s gal had played up once too often to some other fellow. The Lord never created a more happy-go-lucky race of people than the Southern Negro. Even sixty years ago he was still in his embryo state of happy dependence on the white man, his boss. I lived with them, you might say, for about twenty years, and not a one out of the forty families who lived and worked for us but would have stood by in an emergency. During overflows they were housed in the gin, in tents on the levee, and in the barn’s upper story. There were certain ones in these times that would row me about in the skiff to visit or just for recreation.”

“They would hold services on Sunday where most of them were. Shoot craps all night, sing, play their banjos and anytime we called for any kind of help in any way, we got it. In growing crop time, it was a beautiful place, with long acres of cotton and corn, hay grasses, all green. Wide pastures, where in summer work stock would graze and rest, bringing always to mind, ‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, He leadith me beside still waters.’ A little brook or branch ran through this pasture.”

My grandmother laughed, “That reminds me of a funny thing. A hen with a brood of young yellow babies was on the wrong side of this water, about four feet wide. I was trying to shoo them around the end where there was a crossing. Suddenly, the mother walked in the water and began to swim across. Every one of those fifteen yellow fluffy chicks went in after her and swam across as well as any duck could have done. I had never, nor have since seen that sort of performance, a swimming chicken.”

“When we first went to live in this home, I did not know that there would ever be another anywhere else. I made my pleasures of necessity. I built a barrier across the path behind me, and began anew. It became evident that my life would be very lonely and contact within that country few. So I went about the task of developing my inner resources. I learned to trust myself in mental habits. I learned to give to the world the best you have, you must live in the line of life that destiny fashioned you for, and I found before I came away to live that my life there was a toll I paid on a legacy of inheritance that somebody had left me of very doubtful worth. You cannot cope equably with a super sensitivity to many phases of life and when nerves, tensed like fiddle strings and brains, tuned to play on them, meet many discords, which make ‘jangled music, out of tune.’”

“But even a spider spins his web from what is inside of him. My cross there was the savage summer heat, the water menace and my lack of occupation. I had always been so busy minded, I had my children to care for and my hands were forever busy with some task of creation, which was of no particular value, but which served as past time. My man was all and entirely a business man. It absorbed his life. He had his hands pretty full at that. We had pleasures in spots you might say. We made trips out and so much steamboat travel which never palled for me. We met people and made friends of people from all parts of the country. So many episodes I remember. We had a race with the Steamer James Lee once, that was very thrilling. The Adams and the Lee boats were rivals in distinction only, for each had its own trade. One trip, we were coming in to Memphis and arrived at Friars Point, as the Jim Lee was pulling out. The Adams gave the passing signal blow and the Lee answered and the Adams followed it, by a challenge blow to race. Both boats had a free river, and no landings to Memphis. The Lee came out into the river channel and the Adams pulled in beside her, and from there to Memphis those two steam boats pushed their engines to the limit. The passengers on both boats crowded to the rails and yelled defiance at each other. The rousters were dancing with glee, clapping, shouting, jeering one another. The noise of engines, the

79 wheels thrashing through the water and the added voices made a terrific pandemonium. We were all nearly exhausted with excitement, the engineers were about to ‘throw in another nigger’ when the bridge at Memphis came faintly into view, and the Adams a boat length in the lead. Then we were two lengths, seeing the Memphis sky line, she made an almost super effort and came into the harbor here and docked at her wharf boat, by the time the Jim Lee was ready to round in. Word had reached here that we were coming and the wharf was crowded with people. And such waving and shouting, you never saw or heard. The passengers were in a wild state of proud excitement. The question of crossing the gang plank to disembark was perilous and I went across escorted by the Adam’s captain, my two children holding on to me.”

“My husband had stopped in the office where the business had been overlooked in the stress of action. On the wharf, the two captains met and shook hands. I will never forget that long resonant blow of the Kate Adams as she came into the home landing. Many times after I had come here to live, sometimes at night I could hear that deep, long drawn out musical resonance that heralded her coming in and that day it brought crowds to the wharf. That was excitement to the nth degree. We had the captain out to dinner with us on the trip back to our Arkansas home.”

“What did you mean by ‘throwing in a nigger,’ Grandmother?” I wanted to know. My grandmother laughed. “That was a phrase attributed to the master of the Robert E. Lee on her famous race with the Natchez. The fireman called up to say the wood was giving out, they used wood then to fire the engines, and the captain answered, ‘Throw in another nigger.’ Another very different experience came to us another time.”

“The Adams had been laid up for repairs and the Joe Peters took her place. The Peters was small and compared to the Adams was rather uncomfortable. Also, she was old, and had to be handled carefully. We had to make a trip in the meantime, so we gingerly went on board. During the night, a storm came up. Passengers had not gone to bed. It was during high water time and the river banks all overflowed. It was a rather intimidating sight in a slight breeze, but in a high wind, it was very upsetting. The boat began twisting and turning, so Captain Danah decided to run her into the bank and tie up. Trees grew all along the edge of the bank. The rousters pulled out a cable and tied us to a tree. The water covered the bank, but not deep yet. The storm shook and howled, the boat shivered and jerked. Life belts were brought out and scared passengers put them on. Finally came a lurch and somebody screamed. The water was lashed and churned as the boat slid back into the channel. We had pulled the tree over, but the pilot kept her facing the wind and held her while a crew cut the cable and tied us up again. That was a lonely, forced tryst. The wind moaned like the tones of the Miserere. Scared faces crossed and re-crossed in the dim blur of lamp light, but everybody was trying to help, and rushed to the rescue. The captain stood on the lower deck, in his oil coat and cap, bawling his orders. And there we waited, like a storm- scared ghost for the blow to cease, which if finally did when we untied ourselves and limped on into Memphis.”

“We went to St. Louis to the World’s Fair. That was quite an occasion. We took two trunks and various suitcases and hand bags.”

“What did you do with the children?” I wanted to know.

“We took them with us. We didn’t have anybody to leave them with, and they enjoyed it. The boy was about three years old, I don’t remember. Their father wouldn’t have even thought of not taking them. They were never beyond the reach of my voice ‘til we came to Memphis and they started to school.” “We had a bath tub in this river home, too. It was zinc but served. We had a huge iron tank put up on a tall tower and ran pipes down grade to the bath tub, turned the rain from gutters into it.”

“The appearance of the first automobile in our community was an occasion. It was a Franklin. The commotion it caused was funny. All live stock was afraid of it, and when we saw mules tearing down the road, cows galloping ahead, pigs racing along squealing, and even chickens flying, squawking, to cover, we would say, ‘There comes the Franklin.’

“We came up here to Memphis for opera or theatrical performances of note. We always went to the Gaston Hotel. It was on Court Street, facing the Square. The head waiter was a black actor and was called ‘Pink,’ why I do not know, but he gave us special attention and was especially nice to the children. That old hotel has gone the way of old things that lose a leader. Mr. Gaston died. His wife moved some of the furnishings and the big gilt framed mirrors into their home, a big colonial one out in South Memphis. Our city hospital here is named for him. They were French people. My father and Mr. Gaston were quite good friends.”

“After we had lived in this river house for two or three years, the levee broke again and the water came higher than ever before. We felt safe to stay in our own house this time. We had the barns and gin for the Negro families. One barn was on a mound and one had a second story. Skiffs, of course, were tied at convenient places, to go to necessary work or visit us. We chose, or use of a time of danger came. At its highest the water came, this time to the edge of the porch.”

“Gracious, Grandmother and that was nine feet?” I asked.

“Yes, but in all that time, I never knew a person to be drowned, not even among the little black children. Intuitively, they all seemed to know danger and keep out of it. You know, my dear, we have lost much of intuition about most things, from education, that the black race still has.”

“After the water began to fall, came a wind storm, and for three days and nights blew a gale without ceasing. Twelve cabins were blown entirely down and washed into the bend of the levee. Most of the others were toppled over and often the chimney would crumple up into a pile of bricks. The waves were so high, at times, that the water would be sent down the long hall through the house. For weeks we lived in this sea of water, then the wind bucked up floors, muddy water stains and wrack and ruin everywhere. We lived in this house for nine years. I was always dreading the spring time and the battle against these waters, with no permanency to look forward to and my longing for something that I could build around me to stay were only mirages of my soul. In my inaction there, I longed for the world of men, of action, contact which over shadowed a great many things that I over looked. Since living by the waters of Babylon I have found ‘the world is too much with us, getting and spending we lay waste our powers.’ I have realized that no garden is without its serpent, found that if ‘wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’ Found that your inner consciousness guides your thoughts and pushing against anything to no purpose, stultifies your equilibrium to such an extent,

81 that in trying to climb to the stars, you fail to see the violets and green grass at your feet. In trying to climb the long ladder to Heaven’s gate, we fail to realize that Heaven is all around us, is any phase of spiritual harmony is in any fulfilled desires.”

My grandmother rocked awhile and then repeated, “Even now, I have no wings and I must walk the length contented not to crawl, as serpents do, superior to this green bug in the grass, who finds a hurdle in each drop of dew. This red chameleon perched upon a rose, watches my movements with a roving eye. To him, I may be God, for all I know and yet, I envy sparrows as they fly.”

Sketch No. 10

“Good morning, Grandmother, what are you thinking about this time? What is behind you or the mosquitoes and heat you have with you? You have had another birthday too, since I saw you last. These mosquitoes are worse than I ever remember. You can’t sit outside the screen protection. What makes so many?”

“Sit down, my dear. Mosquitoes are quite a topic of conversation at this time but they are only a byproduct of a natural sequence. This invasion is what we call ‘high water.’ In early spring, they congregate in low places, damp of course, to get their families ready on their trek among people. The river rises and pushes its waters in these shelters and out they come to fly helter skelter everywhere. These early ones are not the poisonous kind though. I’m more concerned about this unusual heat. It is very rare for May. Yes, I also had a birthday, which passed as usual. All my family remembering and making me feel important and necessary.”

“I wasn’t really interested about mosquitoes or the heat today. The whole world has gone topsy turvy, so I guess the weatherman thinks he must get out of line, too. I was thinking about my family this morning and some phases of character in individuals. I am very thankful for all members of my coterie. Families are a great institution in many respects. Mine is a growth of beauty and joy that puts meaning into my life. Like the old woman of ebony hue, I knew once, who was always telling how her sun bonnet was such a condition to ‘Newralgy,’ which meant to her, a wellbeing of a source of ease, a barrier from possible pain. That is the way I feel about my family. They are my compensation for living. I think of that so much in comparison with different modes of living. There are those whose lives are knit together in bonds of cooperation. There are those of low grade minds who become vicious in their attitude to one another. There are drifting families of ne’er do wells who never have a fixed habitation or any objectives.”

“This element we used to see so much in the roving shanty boats along the Mississippi River. Idle, sallow, unwashed, underfed, outlawed, so far as the general public knew, constant companions to mosquitoes and malaria. Not being strong enough to make circumstances serve them, they become creatures of their environment, stagnant pools of life’s highways or like static snags in life’s river. Very seldom do children of such apotheosis drifters rise above their environment always remaining a salvage of some life wreck, with their own moral thought of right and wrong. After all, my dear, right and wrong can often be judged by the individual from his moral code of conscience. Your interpretation of anything is in your own view point.”

“Different laws have governed different ages of thought. Many of years ago it was lawful for a brother to marry a sister. Cleopatra had been married to two of her brothers before she ever met Caesar. I don’t use Cleopatra as a model for honesty, but only to show the accepted law of that time. Different codes in different times of history. Our code of morals in this generation is not exactly in accord with those of Victorian era, for that matter. Our minds run in different channels too, and our schools should understand that it isn’t routine that educates but the fulfillment of certain characteristics that dominate the best or the microscopic atom, that does strive to overcome and see the interpretation of the best in that. Our schools are prone to standardize the minds of each to all. Sometimes that works havoc, and stunts a growth that might develop some individual ability and gives the mind a capacity for only inane thinking or break though in

a radical manner. We are judged, rightfully or wrongfully by what people see in us but we in no sense have the right to judge people’s motives, or to set standards for those of whom we do not approve. To be unnatural or below a fixed grade from our stand point, may be a natural thing for someone else. ‘There is one art, but many interpretations,’ as you know. The elephant is ugly and unwieldy and inspires no uplift of mind but no man has his sagacity or strength. So it is better to “give” a rose to the living” in our interpretation of character than to salve our conscience with ‘sumptuous wreathes for the dead.’ For there is a spark of good in every created being. That is the spark, which links us to our Divinity.”

“In Shakespeare’s play, “As You Like It,” one of the characters has this to say, ‘There are tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stone, and good in everything.’ That is one of my strong beliefs. Nothing, animate or in-animate in life is entirely without good. Else why were they created? The Devil does not create. The medical world now, is finding properties in the lowly weed with which to fight our battles against disease, and heal our hurts. The rattle snake gives the poison from his fangs to help. Every shrub, bush, tree, vegetable or flower has some healing element that investigators are finding out. So much of our world is fast becoming a scientific laboratory.”

“Grandmother, do you think the war has been responsible for some of this?”

“Stress of circumstance often finds a loop hole of escape, my dear. An upheaval of any kind brings to light many things that would argue that good came out of evil, but dross can be burned away and leave the jewel fine and clear. So, there really is good in everything. Also, there are tongues in trees, as the quotation points out. In the coy green leaves of early spring there are many lovers meetings and many whispered promises of full fruition. In the beautiful maturity of full growth they bow and wave their arms to one another and chatter the while - of sun and wind hold their shade over the head of weary travelers and children at play and ‘left their leafy arms to pray.’ In the gorgeous coloring of the Frost Kings ordering, they know that life is being compensated as it nears the harvest time, having provided food each from its own kind, for the little furry animals to live on during the time the earth sleeps. You know their thoughts are benign ones at this season. And when, as grey beards they stand erect, leafless, snow covered, gaunt, and blown with winter winds, they talk of time behind them of young days, of storms that shook them hard to try their strength; the filtering sunshine that built life into them, the listless dripping autumn rain when branches and leaves hung limp and tired. Now they stand entrenched in Mother Earth’s full breast ‘til time for the resurrection of all their faculties.”

“Also books are in running brooks. There one can read many a page of beauty and song, and hear many a care free jest in it rippling waters. We can read rare poems in a rhythmic flow, between the moist banks where wild violets and pussy willow grow. Where cardinals sing their love songs, the thrush calls to his mate and the cat birds call to his answering one, while reflecting their flitting shadows on the picture page of the brook and make one that would delight an artist’s soul.”

“Gracious, Grandmother, you are growing sentimental. How about the stone sermon?”

“No matter how the creed winds bow or the storms of life howl, or how the erosive sunshine beats upon them as stones they hold their vantage ground among immortal things, showing that if we paid less attention to dogmas and more to the Rock itself we could conserve in a larger degree, our immortality.”

“Before the world comes to be Arcadian, we will have to put aside the jealousies and envies, which do grow to be basic, and the snobbish idea of caste which is superficial. If the world, which means the people, were not bent on conquest, we who would like to stand, aside wound never have to cry ‘havoc, and let loose the dogs of war!’”

“Grandmother, what do you think of as “God’s chosen people?”

“My dear, God’s chosen people are those who cultivate every attribute within themselves to the fullest degree to use for peaceful living. Peace is the goal we are told to strive for. Humanity must be cleared from within. The individual for peace is only the orchestral harmony of men’s souls. It is not the denominational name you carry that sets you on a hill top. If you make and keep peace in your own corner, then all corners will be clean and we can look clearly eye to eye and stand face to face, fear having been cast out.”

“Peace in your own corner, Grandmother, would mean clean family units, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, and the family is the backbone of the world, and out of family life comes every phase of living.”

“I’ve thought a lot about those shanty boat dwellers, Grandmother. And I wish right now you would tell me more about the river, its story from the beginning. Tell, if you like, it has always interested me.”

“It is a river that moves silently, but wreaks devastation with powerful force when its wrath is roused. A creek in the hills makes a mighty roar after a rain storm; even an upland river goes swiftly and noisily, but this great Father of Waters moves silently, even in flood tide. Of the geographical and life and history of the river, you will have to know for so much of our history as a country border on it and follows its winding course form end to end, a slow moving monster that baffled man’s power to harness it. I have watched it many times when a piece of slow turning drift would be the only sign of movement.”

Sketch No. 11

Looking Backward (1944)

My grandmother was sitting out among her roses. It was the Fourth of July and the flag of stars and stripes was floating from her window. She was reading as usual. “Come out, my dear.” she called to me. “The garden is so beautiful, it’s a pity to have to sit in a house and I think too, on this day we should try to enjoy all our blessings. Sit here beside me. I have been reading the Declaration of Independence of our country. More and more, it seems to me that was the cost colossal thing in the spirit of freedom that mortal minds ever conceived. Thirteen little colonies of one of the greatest powers alive, to set themselves in opposition for liberty, to rule themselves, to act independently in forming their own government, to make laws consistent with the way of life they wished to live, as free men would choose. I stop in awe, as I read and try to capture some of the feeling they must have had. What bravery was there, what consecrated spirits must have lead them. It showed what men will do when goaded beyond endurance.”

“Listen, my dear. ‘When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station, to which the laws of nature and nature’s god, entitle them a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impelled them to the separation. A clearer, more concise piece of literature was never written. It is letter perfect in understanding, executiveness, and equally of rights. Of course, then the causes are given for such a determination ending with this and for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Devine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

“Those were words that built history, and made the grandest country in the world. After those memorial words they inscribed their objections as to treatment from the Ruler of the Mother Country. Of the slavery he had put upon them as a people for abolishing laws for our form of government, imposing taxes without our consent; so many things that were unimportant to them and so unjust to us. I feel that we should read those words on each Independence Anniversary, at least to change our batteries again, so to speak.”

“I have always wished that I might have been one of the men who signed that document. That was one hundred and sixty years ago (1944) and it took us eight years of fighting to gain the freedom we strove for. We were born fighting and have fought pretty continuously ever since, proving that freedom is not only lack of bondage, but also an everlasting watchfulness to keep it. It is like your house, it shelters you but you can live in it to suit your self only when you keep it clean of rats or infesting insects, wage war against vandals or burglars and the destruction of children of your neighbors. We have lived a tremendous life since we founded ourselves as free people. We have enlarged ourselves many times over. Taken our territory in Spain, France, Mexico, England, Denmark, Panama, Havana, Russia and in the South Sea Islands. Our orators, on this glorious day, tell us we are a peaceful people but we fought the Indians, steadily until a few years ago; had clashes with France and the people of North Africa. We fought England a second time; we also fought one another for four years, and finished up the 19th Century by fighting Spain. We have had bouts with countries of South America and Mexico, and got mixed up in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion. We nearly had a fight with Austria once, because of some political refugee on an American ship. We

have had armies of occupation in San Domingo and Haiti. We have spent more than twenty percent of our lives in big wars, so history tells us. We destroyed the Indians, as a rare entirely and replaced them with our civilization. Sometimes I wonder if our own way of life will destroy us.”

“Grandmother, what do you mean? How could it?”

“Don’t get me started on possibilities, my dear. I would talk on ‘til next week. Governments, nations and races have been born, lived, flourished and perished. Even the languages of two thousand years ago have passed into disuse, altogether. Rome lasted about one thousand years. They left us a legacy of good roads and a system of laws, but it took conquest to make Rome. Out of her system of laws, we created our own, proving that ‘I am a part of all that has been.’ Greece as a Republic, lasted about five hundred years, but left a great heritage. We have lived a pretty big life in 168 years. We are in the biggest mess now of any other world conflict, in this war that is really global. But we have become a nation to be reckoned with, in all phases of living. Morally, we are not what the “gay” nineties were, in our reactions, but we are an improvement over two hundred years ago, and as for political bickering, Washington had his share of that, after his war, to a greater extent than Pershing did. In our lifetime as a nation, we have absorbed our share of the best that had been developed by other nations. I mean in medicine, chemistry, musicians, artists, sculptors, old and modern sciences of every kind, also of war machines and explosives. To go on would be merely repeating history.”

“So on this Fourth of July, 1944, when the world all seems chaos, there are those who are forward looking and planning for a better America. In the meantime, we must remember that the battle that will be fought to cleanse humanity will have to be fought inside us. Instead of celebrating this anniversary of our liberty with gaiety and some our men and women, too, are engaged in greatest warfare the world has ever known, fighting, toiling, dying on every continent and all the seven seas, and we at home are doing our part, with fierce, grim pride, building the fiber of our minds to bear our burdens at home, and regret the tragic necessity.”

“Our compensation in all this, is that our men go into it and do their part as men should. They have been tested and tried, have proved their force without a doubt and have given to this nation stamina to be reckoned with.”

“It is a great thing to have grown into in 168 years, isn’t it, Grandmother?”

“It is indeed. I have lived seventy six years of them. Our country was only 92 years old when I came into it. A host out of the spirit world can look down on this earth that have traveled part-way with me, every president of the United States from Andrew Johnson down to Franklin Roosevelt, Queen Victoria of England and three rulers since and the great men who served with them down to Winston Churchill. Dickens lived three years of my lifetime and Disraeli, also. The three emperors of Germany, William 1st, Frederic the Great, and William 2nd who abdicated in 1918 down to Hitler, also. In France, from Franco Prussian War to the pitiful thing it is today.”

“Darwin, Sara Bernhart, Corot, Jefferson Davis, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Siamese twins, the James boys, these are only names that come at random into my mind. So many more of note to the world at large. I saw the beginnings of autos, telephones, radio, flying ships. Went through the age of the old country doctor, I

87 remember when an operation on a human body was almost a crime. I remember when Peary set out to find the North Pole. So many thought it was a foolish adventure, but Columbus adventured, you know. Later, Byrd went down to compass the opposite one South. Not until 1910 did we believe in airplanes. Somebody wrote after the first year of flying, ‘death took more than two score.’ So much history has been made in my space of life, while those who thought and government have long been a handful of dust. Ah, my dear, back to its beginnings, what marvels can lie in a handful of dust. If it could speak, it could tell us of everything that ever crawled or walked, lying there in your hand, the wild and fierce and free. From the lumbering giant beasts of brainless flesh and pathless wildernesses down or rather, I should say up to our present way of life. In that little handful of dust, we could hear the roaring, howling, hissing, aggregation of noises under the sun. Scientists have listened to that sound, and probing, thinking, building, bit by bit, and seeing with an inner eye have drawn out of these, from this handful of dust a plausible record of how life came to our earth, life that is an endless chain of links grinding the years into the grist of time,’til we too, shall have become, just a handful of dust.”

“The immensity of thought there, Grandmother, is too much for my mind, but it certainly is a thinking cap.”

“You should read Carlisle’s histories, my dear. He makes things so vivid, so dramatic. He makes dead things live. You could get a cultural understanding of our back ground from his interpretation and delineation.”

“What do you mean by culture, Grandmother?”

“Well, the dictionary definition is, in one sense, ‘to educate or refine” the training, improvement, and refinement of mind, morals or taste.” My ideas of it is at least not what the Germans think it is. To me, culture is not necessarily an accumulation of facts, but how you look at the world and life. By being able to answer all questions does not prove a cultivated mind, to me. There have been many patterns given to many minds as to its place. These minds have the power to see and the wish to understand. Facts and figures of history do not mean anything, unless it brings you a realization of how things came to be, as they are, to understand human nature. It is worth knowing about great artists, in all lines of their work, but a cultured mind gets what they teach us. Beauty is so we, through them, can see beauty all around us. To be able to recite great deeds is knowledge, but of no cultural importance unless we can apply the meaning in relation to time now, to help now, in the times we have t love, in understanding. All art treasures are beautiful but they are useless from a cultural stand point, unless the make you see beauty all about you and can apply it to your senses today. You may be able to recite the works of music masters, but unless you can place the harmony of them in your life, as you pass along, you miss the cultural sense. You cannot judge any art from a standpoint of dollars and cents. By art, I mean also, in the reading of books. To hear a book reviewed gives you a passing knowledge of the story told, and food for give and take in conversation, but a mind of culture goes deeper than that. To read and digest the ideas put forth, to delve to the root of the writer’s objective and motives for it.”

“The designers of the Taj Mahal had cultured minds. It has stood, for more than three hundred years, a shrine of beauty, for all people. Old Memphis, on the Nile, too, has left remnants of a cultured life. In its statues and palaces. It was a center of learning for ten centuries, longer perhaps than any other country that we know. Egypt with her flesh pots was finally her down fall. Our Memphis is named for this old city for the reasons

88 of its river location, old Memphis being on the Nile. I wonder sometimes, my dear, if at the end of everything, and things are made clear, whether all that old world history, or our modern times and acceptances, will be of more importance. I wonder if in years to come archeologists will find anything stable underneath the ground of what we call Memphis.”

“We have some very lovely buildings, Grandmother.”

“Yes, our classic court house, some churches, and public buildings; but bricks and mortar crumble. And they too, finally resolve themselves in to a handful of dust and mingle with the eternities that lie behind us, with the buried continents and people who have lived. Our structural work in this era of building is not put down for future valuation. Even our bluffs that have been the theme of song and story are being eroded gradually by the river’s onwash.”

“To view a sunset across the river from a vantage on those bluffs, can cause an aching loneliness, for something you cannot trash and rivaling at times the brilliance of Turner paintings. Speaking of those bluffs, a great many people claim that Desoto first saw the Mississippi river from this vantage ground. Today we have a beautiful park that stretches all directions back from the river on them. In the early days of Memphis, where now the riverside golf course is, was the Potter’s Field, the burial place of the city’s outcasts and indigents. Also some prominent and well to do people were put there during the epidemics of yellow fever, when no relative for the moment could be found and in that terror stricken time there could be no waiting.”

“There is another old cemetery, where some of Memphis’ best known early settlers are buried, old Winchester, which now has become a park. The first burial ground in old Memphis was on the site where the First Presbyterian church now stands, at the corner of Third and Poplar. Elmwood was established about 1853 and the bodies transferred there so that burial ground was discontinued as such, and the dead in those old places sleep to irreverent roar of commerce and forgotten in all of modern’s minds, except as a tradition, which we do not care enough for, nor reverence at all.”

“Grandmother, how old is our Memphis? Maybe when more thought and care about our early days and we will be cognizant of and care for what we have come through.”

“Yes, I know it takes time to burnish the gilding and to soften garish colors, but it also takes a reverence of past things, to hold them in remembrance. Our Memphis, in the beginning, was a village of Chickasaw Indians, in the year 1541. Sometime in the seventeenth century the French built a fort here, whose name, I cannot recall, right now, and which the United States took over in 1797. Later, the Chickasaws gave up their claim, too and Memphis was laid out in 1819, Tennessee having been a state for twent- three years, which was four years after the battle of Waterloo and the downfall of Napoleon. Memphis was incorporated in 1827 and for ten or twelve years was only a scar in the green wilderness. It became a city in 1849. That was twelve after my father was born.”

“Who gave it its name, Grandmother?”

“Andrew Jackson chose the name. There were others mentioned, his own name among them. Chickasaw also was proposed. These bluffs have always been called Chickasaw. The name itself, Memphis, means ‘Place of Good Abode.’”

“Tell me something of its start as a city, Grandmother.”

“Well, as you know, Memphis was born in the time of stagecoaches, sputtering oil lamps, and candlelight, in cabins built along rutted lanes, a frontier town. Shelby County was established by law in 1819 and Memphis was mapped out. It was incorporated in 1826, with a population of about five hundred. Its area was within the Mississippi River on the West, Union Street on the South, which finally came to be called Avenue, Fourth Street and Gayoso bayou on the East, and Wolf River on the North. In 1829, a stagecoach line passed Memphis. In 1837, vehicles for hire had a number and license, which read, ‘Driving faster than in a trot will be punished by a fine of ten dollars.’”

“Memphis became a city in 1840. In August 1841, the Mayor and aldermen sent resolution to the president, William Henry Harrison, to favor a Navy yard here. Commissioners came and selected the mouth of Wolf River as the best location from the mouth of the Ohio down. The tract of ground was sold for $25,000. An iron steamship, the Alleghany, was built and equipped there, costing the Government $500,000. When the break came between North and South, it was neglected until it ran down to such an extent that Congress passed a resolution to donate the property to the City authorities of Memphis. It was used for various things for a while and finally went into disuse, altogether. In 1852, Memphis was a port, second only to St. Louis and New Orleans. In 1855, there was a yellow fever epidemic. In 1862, it was occupied by Federal troops. I was 2 years old.”

“In 1870, the population was 40,226. In ’73, another yellow fever, and in ’78 and ’79 were major epidemics. The city became bankrupt, gave up her charter, and became a taxing district. A sanitary survey was made by the National Board of Health then. These two awful years was really the turning point in Memphis history, where modern times, outlook and methods began.”

“In 1896, Memphis took care of 6,000 refugees from overflowed lands across the river, and in 1937, she cared for 50,000. Our population in 1930 was 253,143. The year of 1937 was the first year the city lived within its budget, and no funds were borrowed. The first things locally might interest you, my dear.”

“Oh yes, please tell all you know, Grandmother.”

“I think unless we have some idea of our past conditions we have nothing with which to gage our present, or cut a pattern for future use. We need to know more of history than its outline. It is the people, their lives, reactions, and day by day doings that gives the common touch, with which we live, with our neighbors, our town, our world.”

“So like everything new born, Memphis had her first things and in a simple way. The first thing was land tax. In 1820, the tax on each one hundred acres of land was eighteen dollars and seventy five cents. The first marriage was on May 1, 1820. The participants were Overton Carr and Mary Hill. Jacob Tipton, justice of the peace, performing the ceremony. The first court house and jail were one building, a log house in Market Square. One hundred seventy five dollars were appropriated to build it. That was in 1820.”

“The first prisoner under indictment was August 3, 1820. He was jailed for selling whiskey and was fined one dollar. In August, 1830, there were three wards in the town. The population in 1835 was 1,239. My father was three years old.”

“In 1840, town lots were valued at $552,425 dollars. The first telegraph line was to New Orleans, in 1843. It was owned by a Memphis company and Thomas H. Allen was president. A system of free schools was established here in 1848. There were four of them. These schools were incorporated on May 4, 1856. St. Mary’s private school was established here in 1873, by three Sisters (nuns) of the Episcopal Church, who came from New York. In 1860, we had the first paid fire department. Of course, my dear, I could go on and on to the building of Memphis into what she has become.”

“Of late years, many tablets have been set up commemorating incidents and events pertaining to Civil War activities here. There is one in Confederate Park, on a bluff overlooking the river. That was unveiled by Louise, my daughter.

“Jefferson Davis’s home was on Court Street when he lived here and a marker was put on it. This house was torn down in 1934 and so far as I know there is no record of it as such. He bought a home and I came here to live in 1906. The little country school on the plantation had gone as far on erudition as the minds of the teachers we could get could encompass; so I lived here with the children in schools all winter and would go home to the plantation in summer, until Louise was married.”

“Steamboat travel was in its heyday then and many a guest we entertained on various trips and having a plantation band of music, we had entertainment for them at home. We happened in a homey neighborhood here and made staunch friends. We made many delightful trips out during the summer vacations, went to Chicago several times, staying at the Congress and Blackstone Hotels. Living a country life, we always went to cities for recreation. In Chicago, we went on several trips over Lake Michigan to Milwaukee. I think Chicago was very aptly spoken of when Carl Sandburg wrote of it.”

Hog butcher for the world Tool maker, stacker of wheat Player with railroads, Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the big shoulders

“It grew big too quickly, to carry refinement to a very great degree. We went to Detroit and saw Ty Cobb play ball. We went also, through the tunnel under Detroit River, to the Canadian country and on to Buffalo, New York. We also visited Niagara Falls and did the most foolish thing of going underground. I don’t know how many feet, on an elevator to get in behind the flow of water. We had to wear oil coats to keep from being soaked. Water oozed from the walls all the way down. We also went around the rapids on the regular tram car trips. That was terrifying, but now forgettable.”

“We went to Ashville one summer. That was a beautifully situated place, up in the mountains. Near here was the Vanderbilt estate. The beautiful lake and grounds that nobody was allowed on. The family was away and we got a drive all through it. Out in the mountains we went for a week or two and went up on Junaluska. We had lunch at the Inn on the summit and saw a storm raging below, while we stood above the clouds in the sunshine.”

“We went through the Gap where pigeons used to fly in such numbers as to obscure the sunlight. They are now extinct, they tell us. We saw all that beautiful country through which the French Broad River runs. It is crossed fourteen times by the railroad before it gets out of the mountains.”

“We went to Biloxi and saw the trees draped in Spanish moss. On down to the Gulf Port and saw a ship going overseas, being loaded. Went aboard and met the officers.”

“Down in New Orleans, we went to the wharves and saw a passenger liner leave for overseas. Went through the French Quarter and crossed the narrow, dirty streets elsewhere. There is always a tinge of language and of Creoles and intrigue about New Orleans.”

`”We went several times to French Lick Springs, West Baden Inn. That’s where the famed Pluto Water was bottled. There are boulders around that place that I know must have been there since the time when the world was ‘void and without form.’”

“We made many visits to Hot Springs. That is a phenomenon of nature that someday will rival Vesuvius. Little Rock was half home. My parents had their home there in their later years and both are buried there.”

“Here at home, in time the children finished school, Louise at St. Mary’s, Earle at Memphis University School.”

“In 1914, another shot was fired that was heard around the whole world and the continent of Europe was in a turmoil, all because of the criminal intentions of Germany to rule the world. And so, as we the United States included in that intention we made ready to take our place. Earle, at 18 years old enlisted and entered an officer’s training school, in 1917. The Gethsemane of the world, my dear, is Rachel weeping for her children and having no comfort. So it was then. Fathers and sons, under military rule and mothers striving to live brave.”

Sketch 12 Was Not Included in the Original Text.

Sketch 13

The long hot, dry summer had drawn to a close. This day had been damp and coolish. Clouds of fantastic shape had massed themselves like a magic city in the leaden sky. The early autumn wind wailed, round the corners like the cry of violin strings. Last night, a rolling mist made a wraith like blur of the street lights and vague outlines like a confused harmony.

There was a weird stillness, a forerunner of a storm. You could imagine a thunderous sea, a blinding wind dashing billows against the rocks and shoals, hurtling and rending and spray dashing inshore, in the magnificent struggle of a tropical tornado, to rend and tear. Storm warnings had gone out to all ports of contact South and West in the Gulf area. We learned from the radio.

Inside my grandmother’s home the quaint old clock ticked the hours away. A tiny fire burned in the grate and an exploding spark, now and then, lit up the corners like fire flies on a dark night. My grandmother sat in her big rocking chair, her hands folded in her lap. It was very seldom I saw her hands not busy, with something. We had been sitting quiet, the drip of fog, now and then falling on the porch roof, outside the window and traffic slowed down to almost silence. Finally, my grandmother said, “This kind of night, my dear, makes us thankful for many things, for safety in a world of turmoil, for the blessed boon of health if we have it. If not, then for the efficiency of medicine to relieve our suffering, for the gift of sleep that comes naturally, for our good intentions that are carried through, for youth, that makes us desire things, and for age, which gives a contentment without them and for the glory of knowing ourselves necessary to someone.”

“Thankful, that we are able to see the sun, to hear the moving wind, to smell the coming down, to feel the fire’s warmth and the cold of the snow, to taste the fruit of trees, to know and love home and all it means. Aside from this, we can always think of and appreciate our ‘great possessions.’ To me, they are not what we own in houses and lands, stock and bonds, but health, peace of mind, sympathy and love.”

“These you do not acquire through strife but through a right mental attitude, the attitude to face the world and keep your head. You will be stronger and better balanced. Simplicity, my dear, is what we need, to get away from conquest and carnage, and get a wholesome toleration for the world of people, get away from intolerance, fear and passion.”

“Let the amulet you wear, have within it, the magic healing tonic or a free spirit. Have goodwill towards yourself as well as your neighbor. If we could disentangle ourselves from our environment now, go up on a high mountain and look down on the world, what would we see? In a different guise, Dore’s painting of the biblical flood, the devastation of the world.”

“Twenty-seven years ago, my dear, when our untrained American soldiers, with their initiative and enthusiasms, free born, free to think and to act, headed by our General Pershing, went pouring into that European battleground, that miserere of

93 humanity, that place of worn out weary men and undernourished women and children, it must have been a sight for the gods of Olympus to look down on and remember.”

“They went to fight a foe who would cry ‘Kamerad,’ and when you turned, stick a knife in your back. They marched into that maelstrom to the salvos of the French people, who were standing, powerless, with their backs against the wall, screaming ‘Les Americaines.’”

“My dear, when there are no more frontiers to conquer and we are through growing in the orbit in which we move, we begin to wonder how we will start all over again to find space to reach out for room for growth and the furtherance of the laws of living. Being walled in, we beset ourselves to get what our neighbor has, and so that war, the most destructive that the world had known, up to that time, was foreboded by atrocities that seemed to be accidents for a time, but the greed minded rulers of Prussia had roused a force that they belittled in their own minds. No use going over what was done, history has proclaimed all that.”

“But what happened to start it, Grandmother?”

“In the summer of 1914, a pistol shot rang out in Austria. That was in a way comparable to the shot fired at Lexington, but the outcome was very different. For this shot, a war was declared on Serbia, a native Serbian having fired the shot. Always ready to fight something, that old world began mobilizing, Germany, Russia, France, Belgium, Great Britain. Those first August days the world was stunned. The earth that we had thought of as being safe and solid suddenly sank and the waves closed over all familiar things and the lights of the world went out.”

“Then we wondered why. Europe was too far away from us to cause fear, and alien races too and their reason was their own, not ours, and also our policy was to keep our hands off Europe.”

“We had left that continent and made our own way here. We fought for what we had and all we asked was to be let alone. We had asked no favor of them, although we had to struggle to build what we had which we finally succeeded in doing. Then it seemed that European hatreds were following us here. We, with our frontiers, had been looking forward, Europe in her beehive of hatred for one another finally erupted her volcano of spite when Germany challenged her right of way.”

“Still, we felt it was none of our business, although there had been notes written to Germany to keep hands off. Finally, the Lucitania was sunk through German connivance, with 114 Americans on board. Then our president had to say, ‘Right is more precious than peace.’ We had struggled against every provocation to remain at peace. But no, we must fight. Then America commenced to get ready. Thus it came about that our untrained, un-amalgamated mass of men went there in the name of humanity, and turned the tide of war. I was about to say victory, but it was, after all, only an armistice, a cessation. It was the first time our flag had ever gone to the old world and this time we fought with England.”

“We lived at home in a fool’s paradise, with a hysteria of loud patriotism, parades, bands of music, speeches, war loan drives, and songs to pep the situation up. For this was a holy crusade, a war to end all wars, we were told, and really believed it. While millions of young, eager Americans were caught and hurled into the conflagration ‘over there.’ The soldiers said ‘Good bye Broadway, Hello France,’ while they were being loaded into the transports. Lustily we all sang ‘Tipperary,’ ‘The Long Long Trail,’ ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning,’ ‘Over there’ and many others of patriotic import. We were told to buy bonds, ‘buy ‘til it hurts.’”

“A Red Cross nurse became ‘The Rose of No Man’s Land.’”

“In 1917, men were drafted from 18 to 45. It was the first time in all history that a nation did not depend on volunteers. That was a time when mothers went wild. It was bad enough to draft men, but unheard of to draft children. It was heartbreak, not selfishness. My son was eighteen, volunteered and went into an officer’s training camp, but he was saved from ‘going over.’ In that war, the English entry into Jerusalem, a city, set on the hills for thirty centuries, the name means ‘peace,’ but she has never had peace. The Turks ruled Palestine for four hundred years. And in four days, the British Army drove him out. Two months later, the English engineers had laid miles of pipes, erected a pumping station and the Holy City had water supply for the first time in 400 years.”

“That was a crusade that left peace and plenty where there had been neither for 500 years. Major Vivian Gilbert, an English actor turned soldier, wrote what he called ‘Romance of the Last Crusade,’ in which he tells of the march to and capture of Jerusalem. You should read it, my dear, if you never have.”

“I will read it, Grandmother, it must be interesting.”

“Yes, interesting, but harrowing and terrible, too. That was almost at the end of the war and he ended his book by saying ‘It was finished and at the time it seemed worthwhile.’ And then, with the cry of ‘Kamerad’ in our ears as we were about to invade Germany’s home land, and our General Pershing telling us to go on to the last surrender, we spread the news of an Armistice. This took place on November 11, 1918, and the guns ceased firing, perhaps the most dramatic event on record in this world. And we human beings are very real, so the world lost a chance for idealism in both instances.”

“Opportunity knocked without avail. Opportunity, as you know, was pictured by the ancients, as a fleet runner who passed each man but once. If he failed to hold her garments, she was forever lost to him.”

“Do you believe that, Grandmother?”

“No, today this idea has gone the way of myths and fairies, a superstition that belongs with ideas of lucky members, or howling dogs. That was a fatalism of the Oriental mind. We feel, in our Western interpretation, that we are the captains of our souls, to work out our own salvation and feel more of Walter Malone’s philosophy and opportunity.”

They do me wrong who say I come no more, When once I knock and fail to find you in For every day I stand outside your door, And bid you make and rise to flight and more.

“It is more comforting, at least, Grandmother.”

”Yes and it was at least, a humane gesture for a war ridden world that Mr. Wilson made. A League of Nations was tried out, in which we Americans saw no advantage and refused to enter into it. There are many roads to Gethsemane, my dear, and many stones are flung when we travel the road to Golgotha, and the stone that was flung at Mr. Wilson, martyrized him for all time.”

“From history, we learn that our Revolution gave us George Washington. The War of 1812 gave us Andrew Jackson. The Mexican War left us Taylor. Grant and Lee came out of the Civil War, and the Spanish-Cuban gave us Teddy Roosevelt.”

“But after this war there was not a job for all ex-generals. Our men of America went out back home and some of our men sold apples on the street to get sustenance to live. All our patriotism of a year and a half ago was now merged into an inflation of world products and we went into wild orgies of spending, speculation, boot legging, for the reason some delayed Puritan mind started the idea of alcoholic prohibition. We had the bewilderment of youth and their made whirl beached on the tragic shoals of chaos. Somebody said of their behavior that it was ‘jovial nothingness, done with whirl and enthusiasm.’ It was strong wine for young heads and morality felt the impact. Brats of former years became problem children, and psychology became and over worked word.”

“Books were written and went out as literature that added flotsam cast up on the beach of confusion. Calvin Coolidge, the last Puritan, came to bat in the presidential chair, with his idea of prudence and prosperity after Mr. Harding (the court Jester) had tried out ‘Normalcy’ with no success.”

“Mr. Hoover, the master mind engineer, then took charge in the big chair and got so befuddled he nearly wrecked the listing ship of state, and the ‘high standard of living’ had clutched the garments of the country and made snobs of those who erstwhile, had had very good sense.”

“Franklin D. Roosevelt then came to the fore in 1933, with 13,000,000 people unemployed in this country and has occupied the White House ever since. I doubt if any president ever had duties as onerous and as complex. He has been nominated by his party for election to a fourth term, a precedent of breaking a tacit understanding that no president should serve more than two. But somehow, he has held on, into that conflict with the honest idea of saving humanity.”

“When it was all over they learned that it had been a greedy struggle for gain among two sections of European peoples and we, gullible patriots, became the pawn between the upper and the lower millstone. They came home disillusioned, crippled, weary, heart sick and some whose minds had snapped in a strain that was too heavy for sensitive souls to stand. In all this to do of unemployment and general misery, for after the tide of inflation got too far on shore the breakers receded, or as a saying, the bubble burst, and the whole country went berserk. We had community chest drives here.”

“What was that for, Grandmother?”

“Instead of having a lot of charity centers, there was a consolidated chest from which money was given out to the needy and organizations that attended to such. But as is ever, ne’er-do-wells, indigents, with ten or more children came in for their yearly hand out for food and clothing.”

“I didn’t know people ever had that many children now, Grandmother.”

“I think it was very wrong economic time to have them. But there they were, underfed, hookworms, tentative criminals.”

“But Grandmother, our pioneers had a lot, too.”

“Pioneer days were different, my dear. There was honest hard work then from which evolved men and women, conditions aided them. They had their rude home, but were taught the honesty that America built herself on.”

“But these foreigners and alley rat homesteaders taught or teach rated their children to pilfer and pick, simulate illness, bewail fate that won’t let them rise in the world. I am in favor of physicians stopping the bringing into the world this quality of human beings, in the name of charity, to them. In this war that is going on now, they are not the ones to stand ready. No, it took our best, that indigent was left here, to bring more like him into the world. I believe in helping people help themselves when need calls, but I do not believe in drives, hysteria, and the humiliation of people who are forced to make a pledge, they know they cannot pay. Employees of establishments, especially whole quota, must be reached. It worked a hardship on many a poor young fellow who was striving to care for his own, and very often only child, because he had the manhood to refrain from bringing others in the world, when he wasn’t able to care for them. But he had to come across to put his hard earned money in a pool to pay for banquets for the workers, team leaders, secretaries and what not, beside the horde that waited from year to year for their ‘hand out,’ adding children as time passed. Even for the well to do, it was a form of coercion, for an overdraft that worked its way down. I read once begin at - but vanity heals.”

“Some types would always wait to receive, receive rather than exert themselves to get. It’s easier for him, but I think great many times we lack discretion in giving and then, like ‘dumb driven cattle’ we turned to prohibition.”

“My dear, you can’t not law a man into morality. In all the world’s history, there have been conservatives and radicals, wise men and fools, drunkenness and sanity. ‘A wild colt will always jump the bars and an old horse has his antic moments.’ Any man or woman either in the last generation who has the intoxicating idea will get drunk, for like the poor, whiskey is always with us. I know, too, there are always those who lose

97 themselves in other emotional ways, and work, or rather tend to work, havoc in unborn generations. But, the weakness of the drunkard has served as a theme song of the narrow minded orator. Who, no doubt, has a bootlegger on the side and whose camp is of wives and washtubs and barefoot children. In that orgy of emancipation from war, we bootlegged our sons and daughters to the brink of the River Styx. Prohibition! A curious application of the word in this time.”

“We speak of drys, wets, we drowned ourselves in the muck of the under tow, with the banner of dry waving over us. Nobody was dry except those whose lives were too narrow to see that no amount of so called prohibition of this caliber could be dry. I would risk an open saloon rather than this bootlegger that taught lawlessness and degeneration. We spent more money in combatting this bootlegging than would have taken care of all the drunkard’s families, saloons ever made. Don’t think I am advocating getting drunk, I am only speaking of comparative values, of lawlessness and good citizenship”

“Grandmother, what is good citizenship?”

“They are those that give peace activities, fair play in business, cooperation in families, and an understanding in all contacts.”

“That sounds like an ideal also, Grandmother.”

“That goes back to my contention of a cultivated mind, for that is the key note of all attributes.”

“Tell me about the time when the armistice was signed.”

“That can be summed up in a few words. Never will there be another demonstration like it ‘til the Lord God and the angels dance and sing together at the millennium. After the last trumpet has sounded taps here on earth and the glorious reunion takes place at the entrance of the pearly gates.’ I have a poem that was written for years later. I think I can give you a part of it.”

Through Belleau Woods, where the ghost lights gleam And the grisly shadows fall By shattered forest and stagnant stream, By the Argonne drifts we hold one dream, The last dream of all, Of a land gray league on league away Over the starless foam, Where few remember our names today, For the trench is deep where the dead men lay Four years away from home.

Four years ago, when the last shell Crashed in the tangled wire, And over the hills, as silence fell, The last charge stopped at the edge of hell, Deep in the bloody mire –

For you – back home and the peace of God, Where ancient altars burn; For us – to sleep in a foreign sod, Part of the loam and the broken clod The next plowshare may turn.

When snows drift in or the spring sun shines Where old camps used to be, We’re still on guard, though we make no sign; Doughboy and engineer, staff and line, And field artillery.

Though the sergeant calls “Fall in” no more, Leading some midnight hunt, Through No Man’s Land where the field guns roar, The line still waits on a foreign shore, Holding the Western Front.

“Their souls are somewhere in the upper ether, hovering over the little white crosses where their bodies lay. And so, my dear, lets learn that tragic time that tore up traditions, blighted lives, and caused such a world upheaval as was never known before. We were just beginning to settle ourselves to new conditions when we began to scream ‘Remember Pearl Harbor.’ That was nearly five years ago, (1939) and no man can tell when the end will be. You know as much about this second world upheaval as I do. There is not enough retrospect to retell in any sequence so the background of my life and a few things connected with it have been told. Now the future is what we look to. What that will be, of comfort and peace or disturbances and controversies of who did what or to what victor the spoils belong, we do not know.”

“I have a grandson, who is now a sergeant, in a camp here in this country. (He went overseas later.) I often wonder what effect all this will have on his mind and life. A young plastic life is easily molded, one way or another.”

“The war lords tell us this time it will be unconditional surrender. I hope they mean it, for the whole gamut of human life is on the stage today and surely we have tried out every device to kill, and human life has become the cheapest thing in the world. This is a hard age for reconstruction for it is an age of science and of steel, hard and in an environment like that, souls that are tired of noise and glitter of fired bombs of clash of steel on steel, hermit souls that crave rest, will have none of it.”

“No poet lover would ever try to write a ‘sonnet to my lady’s eyebrows,’ while he stood riveting bolts beside her. No peace will come in the heart of war-weary men to find their women wearing male attire and speaking a man’s language. They will need feminine softness, soft smooth hands to comfort tired hearts and nerves. They will have had enough of uniforms and its reminder. It will be a long time before we can truly realize that decency is an inward attitude and not an outward covering, humanity being what it is. I am not advocating ‘back to the gay 90s’ of fainting women, hoops and bustles, but only sanity. The pendulum should not swing too far towards the glittering veil of dewdrops in the sunshine for it might materialize into a spider’s web.”

“I hope we will not be a divided house. I hope we will let criticism rest, while we apply remedies, for every wound carries its own scar. Our literature today is not a standard to think from, nor an antidote for frayed nerves. We have ‘best sellers’ read for a while and then, ‘what next’ we want to know. Our stability will have to be bolstered up. We talk about times being different, but we make what is called ‘the times.’ We are given 24 hours of changeless time from sun to sun; we put in it all that fills it up.”

“We dream dreams and see visions, make some of them realities and pass on into the silence. But time never falters, no matter what becomes of us. The sun is secure and steadfast, as the planets we inhabit roll around it, now and in the eternity that lies back of our yesterdays, time does not change. We change. My life has changed very materially since 1914 when the first tocsin of war sounded. My daughter married that year. I have always been literary minded and in that era, I became a well-known club woman, rising to an executive position in all the many clubs to which I belonged. My life was very full of spices that make variety of life, besides being a source of a greater intelligence. I have three grandchildren who are top mothers, and have been all joy to me.”

“In 1929, being sensitive to discordant notes of life, I had a heart attack followed by a nerve break and some years of incapacitation. The doctor said to me, ‘No medicine will do you any permanent good. Your nerves have always dominated your body, they are even imbedded in your brain and a mental upset disarranges all your physical make up.’ I wrote then what I called “The Verdict.” I’ll read that for you some time.”

“Oh, Grandmother, why not now?”

“I did not go back into intensive club work, after I grew stronger because I would rather have been a meteor and flashed my light across the arc of my endeavor, than to have crashed of my own weight. People who think of me now will remember that illumination and in the thought that follows me, there will be no pitying smiles for one who remained too long a fixed light that dimmed to paleness.”

“In 1930, death rode in on the wings of the night watch and took my man and a giant in the earth had fallen. A mighty Job had fought his last battle. I never think of him as in a state of quiet, but always grasping the reins that guide the thunder footed horses across the Heavenly highways.”

“In 1939, my daughter and her family went to Dallas, Texas, to live and so far as they are concerned it might well be the New Jerusalem. To them it is ideal, and any slur on the state is resented by them as if they were native Texans.”

“Somewhat like the Pilgrim Fathers in their New England, I imagine, Grandmother.”

“There is a difference in the quality of thought. A New Englander would have the same sort of feeling for his section of country, as would the Texan for his, only, the New Englander turned his pioneering into education in a pedantic way of being ‘better than thou.’ The Texan says ‘come in and welcome if you can be a good fellow on our grounds – or else.’ The New Englander knows he fought for National freedom, the Texan knows he fought for everything that stood in front of him, ‘til he came to the Lone Star Flag.”

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“New England had a set pattern when cowboys rustled cattle and brow beat the tenderfoot in Texas, with no pattern at all and got into the United States. After New England had antiques. So New England naturally thinks Texas, raw and rough, but the Texan takes care of his own, and my children have been very happy out there.”

“Life has a way of shutting its doors sometimes and we have to go out from association that we love and lay aside the actual for the pictorial tapestry of many beautiful memories. Death has many openings to let life out and life goes out like waning stars before the day break. In 1942, my only son laid his hand upon the latch of the gate, nay of escape, and moved in silence through the opening which closed behind him. His son had just gone away from home to UT to take a course in engineering. After six months of that, he was inducted into the army. Then I was left to ‘tread alone, my banquet hall, deserted,’ my immediate family all gone.” I now live alone, except for my son’s wife, who is employed in the business world.”

“Thus we are moved, like puppets on a chess board, and a time comes when we can only see through the fire, the beauty of the embers. But I have found that every experience is serviceable to us. You get what you pay for and you pay a price for everything you get. Measure for measure. Give and you will receive. You will find a tax on every benefit and also remember that you cannot recall the spoken word. ‘The gay will laugh when thou art gone. The solemn brood of care plod on and each one as before will choose his favorite phantom.’”

“Down all the ages there have been fragments of broken faith, shattered ideals, lost hopes, and wrecked creeds. And sometimes we stay in the valley with our grief so long that we come out warped and sensitive to contacts. It isn’t what you do, but your reaction to what you have to do that counts. Living in a proscribed atmosphere so long, sometimes blunts our perceptions and I am glad that my heart lives along with the human tide and not dead to everything but memory, not feeling that life’s dream is over, despite my more than seventy-six years, having no present, nor future, only a past. I do not want to be an old fashioned casualty in the vanguard of life, nor lost on the lone trails of life’s highway. I want to live as long as I breathe.”

To sing a song is a little thing With a lilt to the very end. When you know the echo is coming back, Straight from the heart of a friend, So in this my tribal scrap book, I have put some of the heirlooms of my life.

“You have been a patient listener, my dear, and always remember the best prayers you can pray are the kindly deeds you do. And so, the tales are ended.”

“Grandmother, may you be here to tell many more” I said. My grandmother smiled and said “I love the beauty of the scene would roam again o’er fields so green, But, since I may not, let me spend my strength for others, to the end. For those who tread on rock and stone and bear their burdens all alone, who loiter not in leafy bowers, nor hear the birds nor pluck the flowers, a larger kindness give to me, a deeper love and sympathy. Then one day, may someone say, remembering a lessened pain ‘Would that she could pass this way again.’”

1945

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For Mary Crenshaw – for love and appreciation, E. K. M.

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Sketch No. 14

The River

“The length of the main stream of the river is about 2,500 miles. It is considered navigable to the Falls of St. Anthony, 2160 miles from the mouth. But usually, for river steamers, the stopping place is St. Paul, which is about thirteen miles below the Falls. It is estimated to have 100,000 tributaries, 240 of which are large enough to be shown on a map. Forty-five are navigable. Their combined mileage for navigation is in aggregation, about 150,000 miles.”

“The area of land drained by the River and its tributaries is about 2,257,000 square miles, more than two thirds of the area of the United States. Below, at St. Paul, it forms a broad expanse of water, known as Lake Pepin. Below the Missouri, it is broad and its waters muddy. The average velocity of the current is less than three miles an hour. It forms a boundary line between ten states, Minnesota and Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois, Missouri and Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi.”

“Of all the rivers on earth, none has a more romantic setting than the Magnificent Mississippi. From its uttermost source to the final extent of its Delta, a big tumbling, swirling stream with its four great tributaries: the Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, and the Red, its basin spreads East and West like the outstretched wings of an eagle.”

“On the east, it includes Lake Chautauqua, which is only seven miles from Lake Erie; on the west, the source of the Marias River on the Western continental divide; to the south, it narrows ‘til The Delta stretches into the Gulf, like the talons of this eagle. It has every variety of shore, from the flat coast of the gulf and the flood lands of the lower reaches to the upland recesses of the Alleghany Mountains, the wide divide of the borders of the Saskatchewan, the fourteen foot peaks of the Rockies and the desolate plains of the upper Red River Valley. Through the middle of this great basin, the cradle of the mighty race of Red Men, flows the river that they called the Mississippi. The river of song and story that has been a boundary between nations; the southern, a theater of war, and the main artery of a vast commerce.”

“There is an old map in Spain’s possession, original in 1502, and retraced sometime before 1508 showing its three tongued mouth and a tradition that Americus Vespucci very probably was responsible for it being there. It is thought the old map is a record of the voyage of Pinson and Solis, Vespucci having gone with them as pilot and astronomer.”

“The honor of the first explanation is a given to Pinido, but he told so many wild tales of what he found you either doubt his veracity or doubt the three tongued mouth of the river being on the old map. His tales of the golden ornaments of the Indians on the Espiritu Santo, was the ignis fatuus that lured many a ship to wreck and death. The history of the river comes into clear daylight with that fanatical seeker of El Dorado, Hernando Desoto. He was the first European to reach it. After he had gone on in his quest for treasure he was not destined to find, in his haggard desperation he came back to it to die on its banks and be buried beneath its waters. He is supposed to have first seen the river, and crossed it about 30 miles below Memphis. He called it Rio Grande. During the next century and a half, the river relapsed into its old Indian name and its mystery. The huge drift, at its mouth, piled in fantastic heaps. Which in time, under the action of the wind, sun, and salt from the sea waters, took on the semblance of weird

103 stone formations. ‘Los Pallisados,’ the Spanish Buccaneers called them, and avoided them with superstitious terror. In 1682, LaSalle, thinking he had found a new route to China, took possession of the river in the name of the King of France, called it St. Louis and surrounding country, Louisiana.”

“This story of Robert Cavelier LaSalle, the ‘Don Quixote’ of pioneer stories, was a great epic of early Colonial literature. Later, he christened the river Colbert. French discoverers struck the upper river and we can recall Champlain, Nicolet, Radisson, Joliet and Marquette, who started out to discover the great sea which was called, the Mississippi. The English, in their war with the French in 176-, gained possession of the eastern bank. Spain was allowed the west bank, thus stretching her Empire from the frozen north through two continents to Chile. The Spaniards made New Orleans the capitol of their province of Louisiana.”

“It was a short lived possession, for a new nation, calling itself the United States of America, took hold of the Eastern Valley in 1783, finding Spanish control somewhat inconvenient, and in 1803, taking advantage of Napoleon’s change of mind, secured the whole Western expanse. For almost 150 years, every square mile of the river’s watershed has lain within the broad expanse of these United States.”

“The Spaniards called it Rio Grande, Es Condito, and Espiritu. Frenchmen called it St. Louis, Concepcion, and Colbert. But the English Americans, including Indians, called it by a name that came to stick all the way down. First it was Miche Sebe, then Mische Cebe, next Missipi and lastly Mississippi, meaning ‘Big Water’ in Indian lore, or poetically, “Father of Waters.” The river of romance and poetry, beloved, feared and hated. Many men set out to find the cradle of the Hercules. Many places were found and called the beginning.”

“In 1832, a man named Schoolcraft worked his way up to Lac La Biche which he named Itaska, a word contracted from ‘Veritas Caput’ which means primarily, ‘True Source.’ Other places were designated as such later. In 1836 and 1872 and as late as 1891, we were still finding its starting point.”

“Anyway, the upper river threads its way 532 miles through a region of a thousand lakes. Starting from a level of 1,457 feet above the sea at Itasca, it winds through woods and rapids ‘til it plunges over the falls of St. Anthony just below the City of St. Paul, which is 800 feet above sea level, and 1,934 miles from the ocean. Then, ever wandering, a region redolent of adventures and bends of the French explorers. With Henipen to the mouth of the Illinois, LaSalle below the mouth of the Ohio, past the mouth of the Missouri, below the Ohio the river flows through bottom lands which for ages have been built up by the silt that it carried from Cairo to the Gulf and is about one thousand miles of crooked, uncertain changeful channel of yellow water.”

“For more than sixty years, this serpent river was the nation’s highway from north to south and no journeys were ever more delightfully taken. Steamboats wound from side to side seeking the deepest channel. They landed anywhere for wood, freight or passengers. The black rousters, always pictured trotting up and down the gang plank, singing or chanting their own peculiar idiomatic reactions, carrying their loads. They passed many quaint old towns, New Madrid, Napoleon, at the mouth of the Arkansas River, lost years ago except in the minds of the oldest inhabitant, Natchez, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, the Crescent City.”

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“The Mississippi River in its incessant travail of building and destroying having here New Orleans shaped its bank into the concave and convex edges of the moon in its first quarter. Beyond the Crescent City the Eades jetties narrows the stream so that it scours out a channel to the sea, whose salt waters LaSalle tasted in 1683, when he claimed the valley for his King.”

“This lower Mississippi is a treacherous stream and commerce has paid a terrible price (toll) in the sinking of vessels, from skiffs and flat boats to palatial steamers. By 1910, the river was perilled by railroads, which did not suffer from high waters, and the river’s traffic gradually fell away and the great ‘Father of Waters’ finally lost the romance and charm of glorious steamboat travel.”

“The Federal Government, as well as the tax payers, along the way has paid out millions of dollars in an effort to subdue the rivers to a space between levees and slopes of concrete. They stand at last to the last round up of the mooted question, thinking that bigger and better are synonyms with levees. There have been years of high water when levees have been held for a thousand miles, and then a ripple would find a place of weakness, ply its strength against it ‘til the earth works crumbled. Showing the truth of the trite saying that a ‘chain is so stronger than its weakest link.’”

“The levee system, first in a small way to protect the back country from overflow, was begun about two centuries ago, but has never been perfected, or I suppose, never being made efficient, would express it best, for the river in flood cunningly hunts out the weakest place and when it finds it we might as well try to choke Vesuvius in eruption.”

“For a long time, the advancing wave of settlement rolled toward the river. By 1810, it was being crossed into the present state of Missouri. Twenty years later, the frontier had gone halfway between the Mississippi and the Missouri. The Missouri and its western branches were a well-traveled road into the wilderness.”

“Clay, Jackson, Benton, and Douglas were all filled with the spirit of the Mississippi River. Abraham Lincoln made a famous flat boat journey down its flow. The lower Mississippi is forever dramatically associated with scenes of the Civil War. Grant won his first victory at Belmont, just below Cairo. In 1861, at New Madrid and Island Number 10, the fresh water Navies of North and South, measured their strength. There were naval battles here, at Memphis.”

“Through the Delta mouth in 1862 the Union fleet came up the river, destroyed the forts and took New Orleans. Around Vicksburg raged Grant’s campaign with the capture of the Confederate Army in 1863. Then came the occupation of the river, one of the final successes of the war.”

“Some of the older cities on the river still contain 18th and even 17th century buildings, in Vicksburg especially.”

“The canoe, the pirogue, or dugout, propelled by oars, the Macinaw and Keelboat, the house boat the “Broadhorn” or produce boat, were the primitive means of transport on the river. Barges, carrying up to 100 tons descended with the current, and were propelled up stream by poles or animal power. The time then consumed in going up from New Orleans to Louisville, Kentucky, on the Ohio, was four months. Downstream from Pittsburg to New Orleans, took about a month. In September 1811, the first steamboat in Western waters, the New Orleans left Pittsburg for the city of New Orleans.

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The strange vessel, which was said to be ‘propelled by a power undiscoverable,’ stopped on the way to receive congratulations, and to turn, retrace its path up the river a few miles to demonstrate, to an incredulous public, that it could be done. In 1817, a regular service had been established between Louisville and New Orleans by the Washington and later the Virginia.”

“There were steamboat races in the 19th century between rival captains. In 1815, the Enterprise made the run from New Orleans to Louisville, 1,486 miles, in twenty-five days. In 1844, the J. M. White ran from New Orleans to St. Louis, 1,200 miles, in four days. In June 1870, the famous contest between Robert E. Lee and Natchez occurred, “The greatest steamboat race ever run.” The whole country watched the race with breathless interest and the time of passing was cabled to Europe. Fifty-thousand people welcomed the Lee at St. Louis, on her arrival from New Orleans in three days and eighteen hours; six hours ahead of the Natchez. More than $1,000,000 was said to have changed hands.”

“Gone today are those floating palaces, taking with them a glamorous romance that will not come again. Because of the constant changing of the channel and being the dumping ground for the Missouri, continual dredging goes on. Each year, it carries 400,000,000 tons of sand and silt into the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Three flags have flown over the river from St. Louis, the mid-most metropolis, that of France, Spain, and America. About fifty bridges cross the river between St. Paul and Memphis. Journeying to the Kingdom of the West Wind, Hiawatha crossed the mighty Mississippi. “Where the Falls of Minnehaha Flash and gleam among the oak trees Laugh and leap into the valley.” This epic that Longfellow wrote in 1853, of Indian life was the first contribution to American letters that mentioned the Mississippi river. The Minnehaha falls drop forty feet from the West bank of the river, near Minneapolis. Twenty years later, from this poem of Longfellow’s “Mark Twain” gave to literature, “Life on the Mississippi.” He acquired his pen name from the river term for two fathoms, a fathom being six feet. He was a pilot on river steamers and one night while keeping watch under the stars of The Solemen, “stupendous flood, league of leagues and still league after league it pours its chocolate tide along, between the solid forest walls and its almost untenanted shores, and so the day goes, the night comes and then the day, a majestic unchanging sameness of serenity, repose, tranquility, lethergy and vacancy, a symbol of eternity.”

“A poem of a river pilot called “Jim Bludsoe”, by John Hay, is one of finest gems in the English language. Winston Churchill laid the scene of his “Crisis” in St. Louis, and Elefelit Hopper, born in Massachusetts “looked with nameless disquiet on the chocolate waters of the Mississippi.” George Cable, in his “Cavierliers” gives the exploits of Farragut on the river. Charles Egbert Craddock, Emerson, Hough, Harris, Dickson, and Hamlin Garland have given no romances of historic days on the river.”

“Lafcadino Hern, in his “Legends of Lost Islands,” tells of strange lands in the strange sea in a hundred mile journey south from New Orleans to the Islands, He wrote “The woods dwindle away behind you in thin bluish lines, land and water take on a luminous color, bayous open into broad passes and lakes link themselves with sea bays.” Many theories have been put forth as to a means to harness the river, The Outlet, Reservoir, levees, but its problem is, the effort of one water way to carry drainage of half a continent from the Alleghenies to the Rockies, and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. To straighten it would make a mill race.”

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“Our other Roosevelt had an idea that “fourteen feet through the valley” would solve it, but it refuses to stay put, and ‘Ole Man River’ keeps rollin’ along.”

“With an inflexibility of purpose and a persistence that might be almost human, this great inland water power fights its way to the South. Ever farther it throws its turbid stream into the green depths of the Mexican Gulf and ever the puny banks of dirt have failed as a system to stem the rushing, raging, curling breakers at flood tide, and ever like some clumsy, burley monster with lowered head, push its way year by year fixing its three tongued mouth with deadly grip at the end of its long miles of winding.”

“The first people to build levees along the Mississippi River were the Monks of lower Louisiana. They brought their knowledge from Southern France. From 1850, there were levees in Mississippi and Arkansas. The first were put up were washed away. There have been many theories of harnessing it, but it has gone its way making a vast inland water power, changing its channels, cutting in and building out of the mainland, in its cutoffs and bends, and man’s effort to restrain it, is as old as America’s civilization.”

“Virgin forests fell before the explorer’s ax and with wooden spades he built the first levees. In his attempt to reclaim, he cut off all natural outlets. In doing this, it meant higher levees. In the last 115 years, we have had twenty-four major floods. It takes a lot of water to start it climbing. But with all its big tributaries and added rain storms, it can make the valley an almost continuous sea. It can break levees, and make lakes miles long when it breaks in over the wide, flat surface of the low land country.”

“Except for a few bluffs on the east side of the river, the land is level and flat, the slope through the valley is less than two feet every five miles. The lowest point here in Memphis is 195 feet above sea level and we are a little more than 500 miles above the river mouth. Through this valley, the only mountain scenery is the long line of levees which curve and bend with the river.”

“At flood stage, the waters climb to the tops of these, while men pit their puny strength against a monster whose brute force is almost illimitable, when it does break through, and comes like thunder in a stream. After the water gets out into the open, it creeps and its speed can be measured by inches. It comes to your yard, leaves rustle then lie still. Little sticks and stones are pushed forward and are covered. Inch by inch it comes, up the walk to the lower step, softly undulating in its movement. Another step is covered, the little flower bed in the yard is under, another step, and the shrub in the corner of the yard only shows a few green leaves above the yellow tide. One more step and the whole face of the earth is an unconquerable, slow devastation. It comes onto the porch edge, over your door sill, an unwelcome visitor, into your rooms, it climbs your walls, still inch by inch and pauses only when the water over the land stands the same gauge of inches as the river in its bed. After some weeks, its recession leaves stained walls and a foot or two of mud on the floors and the ground as bare as the first sunrise ever saw a barren earth waiting for the creator’s hand to devise a pattern for living.”

“Where does all this water go, Grandmother?”

“Back into the river, pushed through the opening made by the levee break. When the water gets low enough there to cause an outlet. This river discharges 3 times as much water as the St. Lawrence, 25 times as much as the Rhine in Germany, 338 times as much as the Thames in England, 406 million tons of mud a year is carried by it to the Gulf. The extension out to sea is about one-third of a mile in two hundred years.”

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“It is believed that Baton Rouge was the original mouth. After the great flood of 1937, the whole drainage basin went into action. They, at last, realized that this flood menace was an ever present one. The optimistic ideas of ‘there won’t be another’ or ‘no water can go higher’ were all drowned in this flood and men knew the futility of thought without strenuous action.”

“They had to see it as if they were waging war, and all tactics should be under military rule as a problem of the U. S. Government and men trained to such work should take charge to defend the land and the people. When water began to come against the levees, in this water of 1927, 810 square miles of land were under water and 500 people homeless. Memphis took care of refugees in every available space, the school buildings; even the whole state of Arkansas covers 53,335 square miles.”

“There were many beautiful farms and homes, after that water that never could be reclaimed, ripped by the raging torrents they were channels of water or modern Saharas. One place especially, I remember. The family left, never to see their home again. It was washed entirely away and every acre on it was covered from one to three feet of sand, and a river they claimed that was forty feet deep, flowed over the place where the house had stood.”

“After we came to Memphis to live, I think it was about 1912, water left three feet of sand on our yard and surrounding premises of our river home. Finally after much talk and consideration, President Coolidge signed the flood control bill. That was one of the greatest pieces of legislation that had ever been enacted, up to that time, in this nation’s history. So the control of the river became a national problem, and the sum of $325,000,000 dollars was authorized for work on it, with $25,000,000 available.”

“Mr. Coolidge put a feather in his cap there, didn’t he, Grandmother.”

“Yes, it was a big thing to do. But Mr. Coolidge wasn’t vain. It was said of him once that he was the last Puritan, struggling for a modern viewpoint. He only spoke forty- four words in his inaugural address, as president. Still we Americans with utter ‘sangfroid,’ called him Cal.”

“Has there been another water since 1927, Grandmother?”

“Yes, in 1929, one almost as disastrous, but not so long drawn out. There has been no levee break since the Government took charge, but in 1939 they had a hard long fight to hold the levees and this spring of 1944, the water went above the flood stage gauge, but the levees held in the lower bends.”

“Couldn’t that old river tell tales, Grandmother, of what lies beneath its surface?”

“It could indeed. If all that lies beneath its surface, could, by some necromancy come to be sentiment things, the palatial steamer with its human freight on board the drifting houseboats, lying democratically alongside the smaller craft down to the birch canoe, that once lived on its surface, would be there. Treasures that would rival Sinbad’s own, lying buried in the slimy mud. There are those, who in desperation leapt into its muddy waters for surcease from life who could rise and tell us why. What fragments of life we would find there!”

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“I wish Hernando Desoto could rise up and tell where he was buried, Grandmother, it would clear up a lot of talk about him.”

“Yes, and all of it ceaseless chatter of overdone chapters of Women’s Clubs. What difference does it make, if he is near here or not. It was the river, not the place that is supposed to have him. In the meantime, generation after generation will pass, eons, of time will merge into eternity and that old river will carry its burden of water, silt and human traffic, till the last trumpet sounds, till the sea gives up its dead and the waters disappears from the face of the earth.”

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