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Title: Dust Tracks on a Road. An Autobiography.
Author: Hurston, Zora Neale (1891-1960)
Date of first publication: 1942
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1942
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 22 December 2017
Date last updated: 22 December 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1490

This ebook was produced by
Al Haines, Cindy Beyer, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

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DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

by Zora Neale Hurston





To Katharane Edson Mershon and John M. Mershon

With faithful feelings,

_Zora Neale Hurston_





CONTENTS

  I. My Birthplace
  II. My Folks
  III. I Get Born
  IV. The Inside Search
  V. Figure and Fancy
  VI. Wandering
  VII. Jacksonville and After
  VIII. Backstage and the Railroad
  IX. School Again
  X. Research
  XI. Books and Things
  XII. My People! My People!
  XIII. Two Women in Particular
  XIV. Love
  XV. Religion
  XVI. Looking Things Over





DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD




I. My Birthplace


Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out
of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.

So you will have to know something about the time and place where I came
from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my
life.

I was born in a Negro town. I do not mean by that the black back-side of
an average town. Eatonville, Florida, is, and was at the time of my
birth, a pure Negro town--charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all.
It was not the first Negro community in America, but it was the first to
be incorporated, the first attempt at organized self-government on the
part of Negroes in America.

Eatonville is what you might call hitting a straight lick with a crooked
stick. The town was not in the original plan. It is a by-product of
something else.

It all started with three white men on a ship off the coast of Brazil.
They had been officers in the Union Army. When the bitter war had ended
in victory for their side, they had set out for South America. Perhaps
the post-war distress made their native homes depressing. Perhaps it was
just that they were young, and it was hard for them to return to the
monotony of everyday being after the excitement of military life, and
they, like numerous other young men, set out to find new frontiers.

But they never landed in Brazil. Talking together on the ship, these
three decided to return to the United States and try their fortunes in
the unsettled country of South Florida. No doubt the same thing which
had moved them to go to Brazil caused them to choose South Florida.

This had been dark and bloody country since the mid-1700's. Spanish,
French, English, Indian, and American blood had been bountifully shed.

The last great struggle was between the resentful Indians and the white
planters of Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. The strong and
powerful Cherokees, aided by the conglomerate Seminoles, raided the
plantations and carried off Negro slaves into Spanish-held Florida.
Ostensibly they were carried off to be slaves to the Indians, but in
reality the Negro men were used to swell the ranks of the Indian
fighters against the white plantation owners. During lulls in the long
struggle, treaties were signed, but invariably broken. The sore point of
returning escaped Negroes could not be settled satisfactorily to either
side. Who was an Indian and who was a Negro? The whites contended all
who had Negro blood. The Indians contended all who spoke their language
belonged to the tribe. Since it was an easy matter to teach a slave to
speak enough of the language to pass in a short time, the question could
never be settled. So the wars went on.

The names of Oglethorpe, Clinch and Andrew Jackson are well known on the
white side of the struggle. For the Indians, Miccanopy, Billy Bow-legs
and Osceola. The noble Osceola was only a sub-chief, but he came to be
recognized by both sides as the ablest of them all. Had he not been
captured by treachery, the struggle would have lasted much longer than
it did. With an offer of friendship, and a new rifle (some say a
beautiful sword) he was lured to the fort seven miles outside of St.
Augustine, and captured. He was confined in sombre Fort Marion that
still stands in that city, escaped, was recaptured, and died miserably
in the prison of a fort in Beaufort, South Carolina. Without his
leadership, the Indian cause collapsed. The Cherokees and most of the
Seminoles, with their Negro adherents, were moved west. The beaten
Indians were moved to what is now Oklahoma. It was far from the then
settlements of the whites. And then too, there seemed to be nothing
there that white people wanted, so it was a good place for Indians. The
wilds of Florida heard no more clash of battle among men.

The sensuous world whirled on in the arms of ether for a generation or
so. Time made and marred some men. So into this original hush came the
three frontier-seekers who had been so intrigued by its prospects that
they had turned back after actually arriving at the coast of Brazil
without landing. These young men were no poor, refuge-seeking,
wayfarers. They were educated men of family and wealth.

The shores of Lake Maitland were beautiful, probably one reason they
decided to settle there, on the northern end where one of the old
forts--built against the Indians, had stood. It had been commanded by
Colonel Maitland, so the lake and the community took their names in
memory of him. It was Mosquito County then and the name was just. It is
Orange County now for equally good reason. The men persuaded other
friends in the north to join them, and the town of Maitland began to be
in a great rush.

Negroes were found to do the clearing. There was the continuous roar of
the crashing of ancient giants of the lush woods, of axes, saws and
hammers. And there on the shores of Lake Maitland rose stately houses,
surrounded by beautiful grounds. Other settlers flocked in from upper
New York State, Minnesota and Michigan, and Maitland became a center of
wealth and fashion. In less than ten years, the Plant System, later
absorbed into the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, had been persuaded to
extend a line south through Maitland, and the private coaches of
millionaires and other dignitaries from North and South became a common
sight on the siding. Even a president of the United States visited his
friends at Maitland.

These wealthy homes, glittering carriages behind blooded horses and
occupied by well-dressed folk, presented a curious spectacle in the
swampy forests so dense that they are dark at high noon. The terrain
swarmed with the deadly diamond-back rattlesnake, and huge, decades-old
bull alligators bellowed their challenge from the uninhabited shores of
lakes. It was necessary to carry a lantern when one walked out at night,
to avoid stumbling over these immense reptiles in the streets of
Maitland.

Roads were made by the simple expedient of driving buggies and wagons
back and forth over the foot trail, which ran for seven miles between
Maitland and Orlando. The terrain was as flat as a table and totally
devoid of rocks. All the roadmakers had to do was to curve around the
numerous big pine trees and oaks. It seems it was too much trouble to
cut them down. Therefore, the road looked as if it had been laid out by
a playful snake. Now and then somebody would chop down a troublesome
tree. Way late, the number of tree stumps along the route began to be
annoying. Buggy wheels bumped and jolted over them and took away the
pleasure of driving. So a man was hired to improve the road. His
instructions were to round off the tops of all stumps so that the
wheels, if and when they struck stumps, would slide off gently instead
of jolting the teeth out of riders as before. This was done, and the
spanking rigs of the bloods whisked along with more assurance.

Now, the Negro population of Maitland settled simultaneously with the
white. They had been needed, and found profitable employment. The best
of relations existed between employer and employee. While the white
estates flourished on the three-mile length of Lake Maitland, the
Negroes set up their hastily built shacks around St. John's Hole, a lake
as round as a dollar, and less than a half-mile wide. It is now a beauty
spot in the heart of Maitland, hard by United States Highway Number 17.
They call it Lake Lily.

The Negro women could be seen every day but Sunday squatting around St.
John's Hole on their haunches, primitive style, washing clothes and
fishing, while their men went forth and made their support in cutting
new ground, building, and planting orange groves. Things were moving so
swiftly that there was plenty to do, with good pay. Other Negroes in
Georgia and West Florida heard of the boom in South Florida from
Crescent City to Cocoa and they came. No more back-bending over rows of
cotton; no more fear of the fury of the Reconstruction. Good pay,
sympathetic white folks and cheap land, soft to the touch of a plow.
Relatives and friends were sent for.

Two years after the three adventurers entered the primeval forests of
Mosquito County, Maitland had grown big enough, and simmered down
enough, to consider a formal city government.

Now, these founders were, to a man, people who had risked their lives
and fortunes that Negroes might be free. Those who had fought in the
ranks had thrown their weight behind the cause of Emancipation. So when
it was decided to hold an election, the Eatons, Lawrences, Vanderpools,
Hurds, Halls, the Hills, Yateses and Galloways, and all the rest
including Bishop Whipple, head of the Minnesota diocese, never for a
moment considered excluding the Negroes from participation. The whites
nominated a candidate, and the Negroes, under the aggressive lead of Joe
Clarke, a muscular, dynamic Georgia Negro, put up Tony Taylor as their
standard-bearer.

I do not know whether it was the numerical superiority of the Negroes,
or whether some of the whites, out of deep feeling, threw their votes to
the Negro side. At any rate, Tony Taylor became the first mayor of
Maitland with Joe Clarke winning out as town marshal. This was a wholly
unexpected turn, but nobody voiced any open objections. The Negro mayor
and marshal and the white city council took office peacefully and served
their year without incident.

But during that year, a yeast was working. Joe Clarke had asked himself,
why not a Negro town? Few of the Negroes were interested. It was too
vaulting for their comprehension. A pure Negro town! If nothing but
their own kind was in it, who was going to run it? With no white folks
to command them, how would they know what to do? Joe Clarke had plenty
of confidence in himself to do the job, but few others could conceive of
it.

But one day by chance or purpose, Joe Clarke was telling of his
ambitions to Captain Eaton, who thought it a workable plan. He talked it
over with Captain Lawrence and others. By the end of the year, all
arrangements had been made. Lawrence and Eaton bought a tract of land a
mile west of Maitland for a town site. The backing of the whites helped
Joe Clarke to convince the other Negroes, and things were settled.

Captain Lawrence at his own expense erected a well-built church on the
new site, and Captain Eaton built a hall for general assembly and
presented it to the new settlement. A little later, the wife of Bishop
Whipple had the first church rolled across the street and built a larger
church on the same spot, and the first building was to become a library,
stocked with books donated by the white community.

So on August 18, 1886, the Negro town, called Eatonville, after Captain
Eaton, received its charter of incorporation from the state capital,
Tallahassee, and made history by becoming the first of its kind in
America, and perhaps in the world. So, in a raw, bustling frontier, the
experiment of self-government for Negroes was tried. White Maitland and
Negro Eatonville have lived side by side for fifty-six years without a
single instance of enmity. The spirit of the founders has reached beyond
the grave.

The whole lake country of Florida sprouted with life--mostly
Northerners, and prosperity was everywhere. It was in the late eighties
that the stars fell, and many of the original settlers date their coming
"just before, or just after the stars fell."




II. My Folks


Into this burly, boiling, hard-hitting, rugged-individualistic setting
walked one day a tall, heavy-muscled mulatto who resolved to put down
roots.

John Hurston, in his late twenties, had left Macon County, Alabama,
because the ordeal of share-cropping on a southern Alabama cotton
plantation was crushing to his ambition. There was no rise to the thing.

He had been born near Notasulga, Alabama, in an outlying district of
landless Negroes, and whites not too much better off. It was "over the
creek," which was just like saying on the wrong side of the railroad
tracks. John Hurston had learned to read and write somehow between
cotton-choppings and cotton-picking, and it might have satisfied him in
a way. But somehow he took to going to Macedonia Baptist Church on the
right side of the creek. He went one time, and met up with dark-brown
Lucy Ann Potts, of the land-owning Richard Potts, which might have given
him the going habit.

He was nearly twenty years old then, and she was fourteen. My mother
used to claim with a smile that she saw him looking and looking at her
up there in the choir and wondered what he was looking at her for. She
wasn't studying about _him_. However, when the service was over and he
kept standing around, never far from her, she asked somebody, "Who is
dat bee-stung yaller nigger?"

"Oh, dat's one of dem niggers from over de creek, one of dem
Hurstons--call him John I believe."

That was supposed to settle that. Over-the-creek niggers lived from one
white man's plantation to the other. Regular hand-to-mouth folks. Didn't
own pots to pee in, nor beds to push 'em under. Didn't have no more
pride than to let themselves be hired by poor-white trash. No more to
'em than the stuffings out of a zero. The inference was that Lucy Ann
Potts had asked about nothing and had been told.

Mama thought no more about him, she said. Of course, she couldn't help
noticing that his gray-green eyes and light skin stood out sharply from
the black-skinned, black-eyed crowd he was in. Then, too, he had a build
on him that made you look. A stud-looking buck like that would have
brought a big price in slavery time. Then, if he had not kept on hanging
around where she couldn't help from seeing him, she would never have
remembered that she had seen him two or three times before around the
cotton-gin in Notasulga, and once in a store. She had wondered then who
he was, handling bales of cotton like suitcases.

After that Sunday, he got right worrisome. Slipping her notes between
the leaves of hymn-books and things like that. It got so bad that a few
months later she made up her mind to marry him just to get rid of him.
So she did, in spite of the most violent opposition of her family. She
put on the little silk dress which she had made with her own hands, out
of goods bought from egg-money she had saved. Her ninety pounds of
fortitude set out on her wedding night alone, since none of the family
except her brother Jim could bear the sight of her great come-down in
the world. She who was considered the prettiest and the smartest black
girl was throwing herself away and disgracing the Pottses by marrying an
over-the-creek nigger, and a bastard at that. Folks said he was a
certain white man's son. But here she was, setting out to walk two miles
at night by herself, to keep her pledge to him at the church. Her
father, more tolerant than her mother, decided that his daughter was not
going alone, nor was she going to walk to her wedding. So he hitched up
the buggy and went with her. Nobody much was there. Her brother Jim
slipped in just before she stood on the floor.

So she said her words and took her stand for life, and went off to a
cabin on a plantation with him. She never forgot how the late moon shone
that night as his two hundred pounds of bone and muscle shoved open the
door and lifted her in his arms over the doorsill.

That cabin on a white man's plantation had to be all for the present.
She had been pointedly made to know that the Potts plantation was
nothing to her any more. Her father soon softened and was satisfied to
an extent, but her mother, never. To her dying day her daughter's
husband was never John Hurston to her. He was always "dat yaller
bastard." Four years after my mother's marriage, and during her third
pregnancy, she got to thinking of the five acres of cling-stone peaches
on her father's place, and the yearning was so strong that she walked
three miles to get a few. She was holding the corners of her apron with
one hand and picking peaches with the other when her mother spied her,
and ordered her off the place.

It was after his marriage that my father began to want things.
Plantation life began to irk and bind him. His over-the-creek existence
was finished. What else was there for a man like him? He left his wife
and three children behind and went out to seek and see.

Months later he pitched into the hurly-burly of South Florida. So he
heard about folks building a town all out of colored people. It seemed
like a good place to go. Later on, he was to be elected Mayor of
Eatonville for three terms, and to write the local laws. The village of
Eatonville is still governed by the laws formulated by my father. The
town clerk still consults a copy of the original printing which seems to
be the only one in existence now. I have tried every way I know how to
get this copy for my library, but so far it has not been possible. I had
it once, but the town clerk came and took it back.

When my mother joined Papa a year after he had settled in Eatonville,
she brought some quilts, her featherbed and bedstead. That was all they
had in the house that night. Two burlap bags were stuffed with Spanish
moss for the two older children to sleep on. The youngest child was
taken into the bed with them.

So these two began their new life. Both of them swore that things were
going to be better, and it came to pass as they said. They bought land,
built a roomy house, planted their acres and reaped. Children kept
coming--more mouths to feed and more feet for shoes. But neither of them
seemed to have minded that. In fact, my father not only boasted among
other men about "his house full of young'uns" but he boasted that he had
never allowed his wife to go out and hit a lick of work for anybody a
day in her life. Of weaknesses, he had his share, and I know that my
mother was very unhappy at times, but neither of them ever made any move
to call the thing off. In fact, on two occasions, I heard my father
threaten to kill my mother if she ever started towards the gate to leave
him. He was outraged and angry one day when she said lightly that if he
did not want to do for her and his children, there was another man over
the fence waiting for his job. That expression is a folk-saying and Papa
had heard it used hundreds of times by other women, but he was outraged
at hearing it from Mama. She definitely understood, before he got
through carrying on, that the saying was not for her lips.

On another occasion Papa got the idea of escorting the wife of one of
his best friends, and having the friend escort Mama. But Mama seemed to
enjoy it more than Papa thought she ought to--though she had opposed the
idea when it was suggested--and it ended up with Papa leaving his
friend's wife at the reception and following Mama and his friend home,
and marching her into the house with the muzzle of his Winchester rifle
in her back. The friend's wife, left alone at the hall, gave both her
husband and Papa a good cussing out the next day. Mama dared not laugh,
even at that, for fear of stirring Papa up more. It was a month or so
before the two families thawed out again. Even after that, the subject
could never be mentioned before Papa or the friend's wife, though both
of them had been red-hot for the experiment.

My mother rode herd on one woman with a horse-whip about Papa, and
"spoke out" another one. This, instead of making Papa angry, seemed to
please him ever so much. The woman who got "spoken out" threatened to
whip my mother. Mama was very small and the other woman was husky. But
when Papa heard of the threats against Mama, he notified the outside
woman that if she could not whip him too, she had better not bring the
mess up. The woman left the county without ever breaking another breath
with Papa. Nobody around there knew what became of her.

So, looking back, I take it that Papa and Mama, in spite of his
meanderings, were really in love. Maybe he was just born before his
time.

                            *      *      *

We lived on a big piece of ground with two big chinaberry trees shading
the front gate and Cape jasmine bushes with hundreds of blooms on either
side of the walks. I loved the fleshy, white, fragrant blooms as a child
but did not make too much of them. They were too common in my
neighborhood. When I got to New York and found out that the people
called them gardenias, and that the flowers cost a dollar each, I was
impressed. The home folks laughed when I went back down there and told
them. Some of the folks did not want to believe me. A dollar for a Cape
jasmine bloom! Folks up north there must be crazy.

There were plenty of orange, grapefruit, tangerine, guavas and other
fruits in our yard. We had a five-acre garden with things to eat growing
in it, and so we were never hungry. We had chicken on the table often;
home-cured meat, and all the eggs we wanted. It was a common thing for
us smaller children to fill the iron tea-kettle full of eggs and boil
them, and lay around in the yard and eat them until we were full. Any
left-over boiled eggs could always be used for missiles. There was
plenty of fish in the lakes around the town, and so we had all that we
wanted. But beef stew was something rare. We were all very happy
whenever Papa went to Orlando and brought back something delicious like
stew-beef. Chicken and fish were too common with us. In the same way, we
treasured an apple. We had oranges, tangerines and grapefruit to use as
hand-grenades on the neighbors' children. But apples were something
rare. They came from way up north.

Our house had eight rooms, and we called it a two-story house; but later
on I learned it was really one story and a jump. The big boys all slept
up there, and it was a good place to hide and shirk from sweeping off
the front porch or raking up the backyard.

Downstairs in the dining-room there was an old "safe," a punched design
in its tin doors. Glasses of guava jelly, quart jars of pear, peach and
other kinds of preserves. The left-over cooked foods were on the lower
shelves.

There were eight children in the family, and our house was noisy from
the time school turned out until bedtime. After supper we gathered in
Mama's room, and everybody had to get their lessons for the next day.
Mama carried us all past long division in arithmetic, and parsing
sentences in grammar, by diagrams on the blackboard. That was as far as
she had gone. Then the younger ones were turned over to my oldest
brother, Bob, and Mama sat and saw to it that we paid attention. You had
to keep on going over things until you did know. How I hated the
multiplication tables--especially the sevens!

We had a big barn, and a stretch of ground well covered with Bermuda
grass. So on moonlight nights, two-thirds of the village children from
seven to eighteen would be playing hide and whoop, chick-mah-chick, hide
and seek, and other boisterous games in our yard. Once or twice a year
we might get permission to go and play at some other house. But that was
most unusual. Mama contended that we had plenty of space to play in;
plenty of things to play with; and, furthermore, plenty of us to keep
each other's company. If she had her way, she meant to raise her
children to stay at home. She said that there was no need for us to live
like no-count Negroes and poor-white trash--too poor to sit in the
house--had to come outdoors for any pleasure, or hang around somebody
else's house. Any of her children who had any tendencies like that must
have got it from the Hurston side. It certainly did not come from the
Pottses. Things like that gave me my first glimmering of the universal
female gospel that all good traits and leanings come from the mother's
side.

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to "jump at de sun." We
might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.
Papa did not feel so hopeful. Let well enough alone. It did not do for
Negroes to have too much spirit. He was always threatening to break mine
or kill me in the attempt. My mother was always standing between us. She
conceded that I was impudent and given to talking back, but she didn't
want to "squinch my spirit" too much for fear that I would turn out to
be a mealy-mouthed rag doll by the time I got grown. Papa always flew
hot when Mama said that. I do not know whether he feared for my future,
with the tendency I had to stand and give battle, or that he felt a
personal reference in Mama's observation. He predicted dire things for
me. The white folks were not going to stand for it. I was going to be
hung before I got grown. Somebody was going to blow me down for my sassy
tongue. Mama was going to suck sorrow for not beating my temper out of
me before it was too late. Posses with ropes and guns were going to drag
me out sooner or later on account of that stiff neck I toted. I was
going to tote a hungry belly by reason of my forward ways. My older
sister was meek and mild. She would always get along. Why couldn't I be
like her? Mama would keep right on with whatever she was doing and
remark, "Zora is my young'un, and Sarah is yours. I'll be bound mine
will come out more than conquer. You leave her alone. I'll tend to her
when I figger she needs it." She meant by that that Sarah had a
disposition like Papa's, while mine was like hers.

Behind Mama's rocking-chair was a good place to be in times like that.
Papa was not going to hit Mama. He was two hundred pounds of bone and
muscle and Mama weighed somewhere in the nineties. When people teased
him about Mama being the boss, he would say he could break her of her
headstrong ways if he wanted to, but she was so little that he couldn't
find any place to hit her. My Uncle Jim, Mama's brother, used to always
take exception to that. He maintained that if a woman had anything big
enough to sit on, she had something big enough to hit on. That was his
firm conviction, and he meant to hold on to it as long as the bottom end
of his backbone pointed towards the ground--don't care who the woman was
or what she looked like, or where she came from. Men like Papa who held
to any other notion were just beating around the bush, dodging the
issue, and otherwise looking like a fool at a funeral.

Papa used to shake his head at this and say, "What's de use of me taking
my fist to a poor weakly thing like a woman? Anyhow, you got to submit
yourself to 'em, so there ain't no use in beating on 'em and then have
to go back and beg 'em pardon."

But perhaps the real reason that Papa did not take Uncle Jim's advice
too seriously was because he saw how it worked out in Uncle Jim's own
house. He could tackle Aunt Caroline, all right, but he had his hands
full to really beat her. A knockdown didn't convince her that the fight
was over at all. She would get up and come right on in, and she was
nobody's weakling. It was generally conceded that he might get the edge
on her in physical combat if he took a hammer or a trace-chain to her,
but in other ways she always won. She would watch his various
philandering episodes just so long, and then she would go into action.
One time she saw all, and said nothing. But one Saturday afternoon, she
watched him rush in with a new shoe-box which he thought that she did
not see him take out to the barn and hide until he was ready to go out.
Just as the sun went down, he went out, got his box, cut across the
orange grove and went on down to the store.

He stopped long enough there to buy a quart of peanuts, two stalks of
sugarcane, and then tripped on off to the little house in the woods
where lived a certain transient light of love. Aunt Caroline kept right
on ironing until he had gotten as far as the store. Then she slipped on
her shoes, went out in the yard and got the axe, slung it across her
shoulder and went walking very slowly behind him.

The men on the store porch had given Uncle Jim a laughing sendoff. They
all knew where he was going and why. The shoes had been bought right
there at the store. Now here came "dat Cal'line" with her axe on her
shoulder. No chance to warn Uncle Jim at all. Nobody expected murder,
but they knew that plenty of trouble was on the way. So they just sat
and waited. Cal'line had done so many side-splitting things to Jim's
lights of love--all without a single comment from her--that they were on
pins to see what happened next.

About an hour later, when it was almost black dark, they saw a furtive
figure in white dodging from tree to tree until it hopped over Clark's
strawberry-patch fence and headed towards Uncle Jim's house until it
disappeared.

"Looked mightily like a man in long drawers and nothing else," Walter
Thomas observed. Everybody agreed that it did, but who and what could it
be?

By the time the town lamp which stood in front of the store was lighted,
Aunt Caroline emerged from the blackness that hid the woods and passed
the store. The axe was still over her shoulder, but now it was draped
with Uncle Jim's pants, shirt and coat. A new pair of women's oxfords
were dangling from the handle by their strings. Two stalks of sugarcane
were over her other shoulder. All she said was, "Good-evening,
gentlemen," and kept right on walking towards home.

The porch rocked with laughter. They had the answer to everything. Later
on when they asked Uncle Jim how Cal'line managed to get into the lady's
house, he smiled sourly and said, "Dat axe was her key." When they kept
on teasing him, he said, "Oh, dat old stubborn woman I married, you
can't teach her nothing. I can't teach her no city ways at all."

On another occasion, she caused another lady who couldn't give the
community anything but love, baby, to fall off of the high, steep church
steps on her head. Aunt Cal'line might have done that just to satisfy
her curiosity, since it was said that the lady felt that anything more
than a petticoat under her dresses would be an encumbrance. Maybe Aunt
Caroline just wanted to verify the rumor. The way the lady tumbled, it
left no doubt in the matter. She was really a free soul. Evidently Aunt
Caroline was put out about it, because she had to expectorate at that
very moment, and it just happened to land where the lady was bare. Aunt
Caroline evidently tried to correct her error in spitting on her rival,
for she took her foot and tried to grind it in. She never said a word as
usual, so the lady must have misunderstood Aunt Caroline's curiosity.
She left town in a hurry--a speedy hurry--and never was seen in those
parts again.

So Papa did not take Uncle Jim's philosophy about handling the lady
people too seriously. Every time Mama cornered him about some of his
doings, he used to threaten to wring a chair over her head. She never
even took enough notice of the threat to answer. She just went right on
asking questions about his doings and then answering them herself until
Papa slammed out of the house looking like he had been whipped all over
with peach hickories. But I had better not let out a giggle at such
times, or it would be just too bad.

Our house was a place where people came. Visiting preachers, Sunday
school and B.Y.P.U. workers, and just friends. There was fried chicken
for visitors, and other such hospitality as the house afforded.

Papa's bedroom was the guest-room. Store-bought towels would be taken
out of the old round-topped trunk in Mama's room and draped on the
washstand. The pitcher and bowl were scrubbed out before fresh water
from the pump was put in for the use of the guest. Sweet soap was
company soap. We knew that. Otherwise, Octagon laundry soap was used to
keep us clean. Bleached-out meal sacks served the family for bath towels
ordinarily, so that the store-bought towels could be nice and clean for
visitors.

Company got the preference in toilet paper, too. Old newspapers were put
out in the privy house for family use. But when company came, something
better was offered them. Fair to middling guests got sheets out of the
old Sears, Roebuck catalogue. But Mama would sort over her old dress
patterns when really fine company came, and the privy house was well
scrubbed, lime thrown in, and the soft tissue paper pattern stuck on a
nail inside the place for the comfort and pleasure of our guests.




III. I Get Born


This is all hear-say. Maybe some of the details of my birth as told me
might be a little inaccurate, but it is pretty well established that I
really did get born.

The saying goes like this. My mother's time had come and my father was
not there. Being a carpenter, successful enough to have other helpers on
some jobs, he was away often on building business, as well as preaching.
It seems that my father was away from home for months this time. I have
never been told why. But I did hear that he threatened to cut his throat
when he got the news. It seems that one daughter was all that he figured
he could stand. My sister, Sarah, was his favorite child, but that one
girl was enough. Plenty more sons, but no more girl babies to wear out
shoes and bring in nothing. I don't think he ever got over the trick he
felt that I played on him by getting born a girl, and while he was off
from home at that. A little of my sugar used to sweeten his coffee right
now. That is a Negro way of saying his patience was short with me. Let
me change a few words with him--and I am of the word-changing kind--and
he was ready to change ends. Still and all, I looked more like him than
any child in the house. Of course, by the time I got born, it was too
late to make any suggestions, so the old man had to put up with me. He
was nice about it in a way. He didn't tie me in a sack and drop me in
the lake, as he probably felt like doing.

People were digging sweet potatoes, and then it was hog-killing time.
Not at our house, but it was going on in general over the country like,
being January and a bit cool. Most people were either butchering for
themselves, or off helping other folks do their butchering, which was
almost just as good. It is a gay time. A big pot of hasslits cooking
with plenty of seasoning, lean slabs of fresh-killed pork frying for the
helpers to refresh themselves after the work is done. Over and above
being neighborly and giving aid, there is the food, the drinks and the
fun of getting together.

So there was no grown folks close around when Mama's water broke. She
sent one of the smaller children to fetch Aunt Judy, the mid-wife, but
she was gone to Woodbridge, a mile and a half away, to eat at a
hog-killing. The child was told to go over there and tell Aunt Judy to
come. But nature, being indifferent to human arrangements, was
impatient. My mother had to make it alone. She was too weak after I
rushed out to do anything for herself, so she just was lying there, sick
in the body, and worried in mind, wondering what would become of her, as
well as me. She was so weak, she couldn't even reach down to where I
was. She had one consolation. She knew I wasn't dead, because I was
crying strong.

Help came from where she never would have thought to look for it. A
white man of many acres and things, who knew the family well, had
butchered the day before. Knowing that Papa was not at home, and that
consequently there would be no fresh meat in our house, he decided to
drive the five miles and bring a half of a shoat, sweet potatoes, and
other garden stuff along. He was there a few minutes after I was born.
Seeing the front door standing open, he came on in, and hollered,
"Hello, there! Call your dogs!" That is the regular way to call in the
country because nearly everybody who has anything to watch has biting
dogs.

Nobody answered, but he claimed later that he heard me spreading my
lungs all over Orange County, so he shoved the door open and bolted on
into the house.

He followed the noise and then he saw how things were, and, being the
kind of a man he was, he took out his Barlow Knife and cut the navel
cord, then he did the best he could about other things. When the
mid-wife, locally known as a granny, arrived about an hour later, there
was a fire in the stove and plenty of hot water on. I had been sponged
off in some sort of a way, and Mama was holding me in her arms.

As soon as the old woman got there, the white man unloaded what he had
brought, and drove off cussing about some blankety-blank people never
being where you could put your hands on them when they were needed.

He got no thanks from Aunt Judy. She grumbled for years about it. She
complained that the cord had not been cut just right, and the belly-band
had not been put on tight enough. She was mighty scared I was going to
have a weak back, and that I would have trouble holding my water until I
reached puberty. I did.

The next day or so a Mrs. Neale, a friend of Mama's, came in and
reminded her that she had promised to let her name the baby in case it
was a girl. She had picked up a name somewhere which she thought was
very pretty. Perhaps she had read it somewhere, or somebody back in
those woods was smoking Turkish cigarettes. So I became Zora Neale
Hurston.

There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing
things for them. Therefore, the man who grannied me was back next day to
see how I was coming along. Maybe it was pride in his own handiwork, and
his resourcefulness in a pinch, that made him want to see it through. He
remarked that I was a God-damned fine baby, fat and plenty of
lung-power. As time went on, he came infrequently, but somehow kept a
pinch of interest in my welfare. It seemed that I was spying noble,
growing like a gourd vine, and yelling bass like a gator. He was the
kind of a man that had no use for puny things, so I was all to the good
with him. He thought my mother was justified in keeping me.

But nine months rolled around, and I just would not get on with the
walking business. I was strong, crawling well, but showed no inclination
to use my feet. I might remark in passing, that I still don't like to
walk. Then I was over a year old, but still I would not walk. They made
allowances for my weight, but yet, that was no real reason for my not
trying.

They tell me that an old sow-hog taught me how to walk. That is, she
didn't instruct me in detail, but she convinced me that I really ought
to try.

It was like this. My mother was going to have collard greens for dinner,
so she took the dishpan and went down to the spring to wash the greens.
She left me sitting on the floor, and gave me a hunk of cornbread to
keep me quiet. Everything was going along all right, until the sow with
her litter of pigs in convoy came abreast of the door. She must have
smelled the cornbread I was messing with and scattering crumbs about the
floor. So, she came right on in, and began to nuzzle around.

My mother heard my screams and came running. Her heart must have stood
still when she saw the sow in there, because hogs have been known to eat
human flesh.

But I was not taking this thing sitting down. I had been placed by a
chair, and when my mother got inside the door, I had pulled myself up by
that chair and was getting around it right smart.

As for the sow, poor misunderstood lady, she had no interest in me
except my bread. I lost that in scrambling to my feet and she was eating
it. She had much less intention of eating Mama's baby, than Mama had of
eating hers.

With no more suggestions from the sow or anybody else, it seems that I
just took to walking and kept the thing a-going. The strangest thing
about it was that once I found the use of my feet, they took to
wandering. I always wanted to go. I would wander off in the woods all
alone, following some inside urge to go places. This alarmed my mother a
great deal. She used to say that she believed a woman who was an enemy
of hers had sprinkled "travel dust" around the doorstep the day I was
born. That was the only explanation she could find. I don't know why it
never occurred to her to connect my tendency with my father, who didn't
have a thing on his mind but this town and the next one. That should
have given her a sort of hint. Some children are just bound to take
after their fathers in spite of women's prayers.




IV. The Inside Search


Grown people know that they do not always know the why of things, and
even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got
the proof. Hence the irritation they show when children keep on
demanding to know if a thing is so and how the grown folks got the proof
of it. It is so troublesome because it is disturbing to the pigeonhole
way of life. It is upsetting because until the elders are pushed for an
answer, they have never looked to see if it was so, nor how they came by
what passes for proof to their acceptances of certain things as true.
So, if telling their questioning young to run off and play does not
suffice for an answer, a good slapping of the child's bottom is held to
be proof positive for anything from spelling Constantinople to why the
sea is salt. It was told to the old folks and that had been enough for
them, or to put it in Negro idiom, nobody didn't tell 'em, but they
heard. So there must be something wrong with a child that questions the
gods of the pigeonholes.

I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon's nest. It was
hard on my family and surroundings, and they in turn were hard on me. I
did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a
statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. And few people
want to be forced to ask themselves, "What if there is no me like my
statue?" The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the
beast of fear.

I was full of curiosity like many other children, and like them I was as
unconscious of the sanctity of statuary as a flock of pigeons around a
palace. I got few answers from other people, but I kept right on asking,
because I couldn't do anything else with my feelings.

Naturally, I felt like other children in that death, destruction and
other agonies were never meant to touch me. Things like that happened to
other people, and no wonder. They were not like me and mine. Naturally,
the world and the firmaments careened to one side a little so as not to
inconvenience me. In fact, the universe went further than that--it was
happy to break a few rules just to show me preferences.

For instance, for a long time I gloated over the happy secret that when
I played outdoors in the moonlight the moon followed me, whichever way I
ran. The moon was so happy when I came out to play, that it ran shining
and shouting after me like a pretty puppy dog. The other children didn't
count.

But, I was rudely shaken out of this when I confided my happy secret to
Carrie Roberts, my chum. It was cruel. She not only scorned my claim,
she said that the moon was paying me no mind at all. The moon, my own
happy private-playing moon, was out in its play yard to race and play
with her.

We disputed the matter with hot jealousy, and nothing would do but we
must run a race to prove which one the moon was loving. First, we both
ran a race side by side, but that proved nothing because we both
contended that the moon was going that way on account of us. I just knew
that the moon was there to be with me, but Carrie kept on saying that it
was herself that the moon preferred. So then it came to me that we ought
to run in opposite directions so that Carrie could come to her senses
and realize the moon was mine. So we both stood with our backs to our
gate, counted three and tore out in opposite directions.

"Look! Look, Carrie!" I cried exultantly. "You see the moon is following
me!"

"Aw, youse a tale-teller! You know it's chasing me."

So Carrie and I parted company, mad as we could be with each other. When
the other children found out what the quarrel was about, they laughed it
off. They told me the moon always followed them. The unfaithfulness of
the moon hurt me deeply. My moon followed Carrie Roberts. My moon
followed Matilda Clarke and Julia Moseley, and Oscar and Teedy Miller.
But after a while, I ceased to ache over the moon's many loves. I found
comfort in the fact that though I was not the moon's exclusive friend, I
was still among those who showed the moon which way to go. That was my
earliest conscious hint that the world didn't tilt under my footfalls,
nor careen over one-sided just to make me glad.

But no matter whether my probings made me happier or sadder, I kept on
probing to know. For instance, I had a stifled longing. I used to climb
to the top of one of the huge chinaberry trees which guarded our front
gate, and look out over the world. The most interesting thing that I saw
was the horizon. Every way I turned, it was there, and the same distance
away. Our house then, was in the center of the world. It grew upon me
that I ought to walk out to the horizon and see what the end of the
world was like. The daring of the thing held me back for a while, but
the thing became so urgent that I showed it to my friend, Carrie
Roberts, and asked her to go with me. She agreed. We sat up in the trees
and disputed about what the end of the world would be like when we got
there--whether it was sort of tucked under like the hem of a dress, or
just was a sharp drop off into nothingness. So we planned to slip off
from our folks bright and soon next morning and go see.

I could hardly sleep that night from the excitement of the thing. I had
been yearning for so many months to find out about the end of things. I
had no doubts about the beginnings. They were somewhere in the five
acres that was home to me. Most likely in Mama's room. Now, I was going
to see the end, and then I would be satisfied.

As soon as breakfast was over, I sneaked off to the meeting place in the
scrub palmettoes, a short way from our house and waited. Carrie didn't
come right away. I was on my way to her house by a round-about way when
I met her. She was coming to tell me that she couldn't go. It looked so
far that maybe we wouldn't get back by sundown, and then we would both
get a whipping. When we got big enough to wear long dresses, we could go
and stay as long as we wanted to. Nobody couldn't whip us then. No
matter how hard I begged, she wouldn't go. The thing was too bold and
brazen to her thinking. We had a fight, then. I had to hit Carrie to
keep my heart from stifling me. Then I was sorry I had struck my friend,
and went on home and hid under the house with my heartbreak. But I did
not give up the idea of my journey. I was merely lonesome for someone
brave enough to undertake it with me. I wanted it to be Carrie. She was
a lot of fun, and always did what I told her. Well, most of the time,
she did. This time it was too much for even her loyalty to surmount. She
even tried to talk me out of my trip. I couldn't give up. It meant too
much to me. I decided to put it off until I had something to ride on,
then I could go by myself.

So for weeks I saw myself sitting astride of a fine horse. My shoes had
sky-blue bottoms to them, and I was riding off to look at the belly-band
of the world.

It was summer time, and the mockingbirds sang all night long in the
orange trees. Alligators trumpeted from their stronghold in Lake Belle.
So fall passed and then it was Christmas time.

Papa did something different a few days before Christmas. He sort of
shoved back from the table after dinner and asked us all what we wanted
Santa Claus to bring us. My big brothers wanted a baseball outfit. Ben
and Joel wanted air rifles. My sister wanted patent leather pumps and a
belt. Then it was my turn. Suddenly a beautiful vision came before me.
Two things could work together. My Christmas present could take me to
the end of the world.

"I want a fine black riding horse with white leather saddle and
bridles," I told Papa happily.

"You, what?" Papa gasped. "What was dat you said?"

"I said, I want a black saddle horse with..."

"A saddle horse!" Papa exploded. "It's a sin and a shame! Lemme tell you
something right now, my young lady; you ain't white.[A] Riding horse!
Always trying to wear de big hat! I don't know how you got in this
family nohow. You ain't like none of de rest of my young'uns."

-----

[A] That is a Negro saying that means "Don't be too ambitious. You are a
Negro and they are not meant to have but so much."

-----

"If I can't have no riding horse, I don't want nothing at all," I said
stubbornly with my mouth, but inside I was sucking sorrow. My longed-for
journey looked impossible.

"I'll riding-horse you, Madam!" Papa shouted and jumped to his feet. But
being down at the end of the table big enough for all ten members of the
family together, I was near the kitchen door, and I beat Papa to it by a
safe margin. He chased me as far as the side gate and turned back. So I
did not get my horse to ride off to the edge of the world. I got a doll
for Christmas.

Since Papa would not buy me a saddle horse, I made me one up. No one
around me knew how often I rode my prancing horse, nor the things I saw
in far places. Jake, my puppy, always went along and we made great
admiration together over the things we saw and ate. We both agreed that
it was nice to be always eating things.



I discovered that I was extra strong by playing with other girls near my
age. I had no way of judging the force of my playful blows, and so I was
always hurting somebody. Then they would say I meant to hurt, and go
home and leave me. Everything was all right, however, when I played with
boys. It was a shameful thing to admit being hurt among them.
Furthermore, they could dish it out themselves, and I was acceptable to
them because I was the one girl who could take a good pummeling without
running home to tell. The fly in the ointment there, was that in my
family it was not ladylike for girls to play with boys. No matter how
young you were, no good could come of the thing. I used to wonder what
was wrong with playing with boys. Nobody told me. I just mustn't, that
was all. What was wrong with my doll-babies? Why couldn't I sit still
and make my dolls some clothes?

I never did. Dolls caught the devil around me. They got into fights and
leaked sawdust before New Year's. They jumped off the barn and tried to
drown themselves in the lake. Perhaps, the dolls bought for me looked
too different from the ones I made up myself. The dolls I made up in my
mind, did everything. Those store-bought things had to be toted and
helped around. Without knowing it, I wanted action.

So I was driven inward. I lived an exciting life unseen. But I had one
person who pleased me always. That was the robust, gray-haired white man
who had helped me get into the world. When I was quite small, he would
come by and tease me and then praise me for not crying. When I got old
enough to do things, he used to come along some afternoons and ask to
take me with him fishing. He said he hated to bait his own hook and dig
worms. It always turned out when we got to some lake back in the woods
that he had a full can of bait. He baited his own hooks. In between
fishing business, he would talk to me in a way I liked--as if I were as
grown as he. He would tell funny stories and swear at every other word.
He was always making me tell him things about my doings, and then he
would tell me what to do about things. He called me Snidlits, explaining
that Zora was a hell of a name to give a child.

"Snidlits, don't be a nigger," he would say to me over and over.
"Niggers[B] lie and lie! Any time you catch folks lying, they are
skeered of something. Lying is dodging. People with guts don't lie. They
tell the truth and then if they have to, they fight it out. You lay
yourself open by lying. The other fellow knows right off that you are
skeered of him and he's more'n apt to tackle you. If he don't do
nothing, he starts to looking down on you from then on. Truth is a
letter from courage. I want you to grow guts as you go along. So don't
you let me hear of you lying. You'll get 'long all right if you do like
I tell you. Nothing can't lick you if you never get skeered."

-----

[B] The word Nigger used in this sense does not mean race. It means a
weak, contemptible person of any race.

-----

My face was all scratched up from fighting one time, so he asked me if I
had been letting some kid lick me. I told him how Mary Ann and I had
started to fighting and I was doing fine until her older sister Janie
and her brother Ed, who was about my size, had all doubleteened me.

"Now, Snidlits, this calls for talking. Don't you try to fight three
kids at one time unlessen you just can't get around it. Do the best you
can, if you have to. But learn right now, not to let your head start
more than your behind can stand. Measure out the amount of fighting you
can do, and then do it. When you take on too much and get licked, folks
will pity you first and scorn you after a while, and that's bad. Use
your head!"

"Do de best I can," I assured him, proud for him to think I could.

"That's de ticket, Snidlits. The way I want to hear you talk. And while
I'm on the subject, don't you never let nobody spit on you or kick you.
Anybody who takes a thing like that ain't worth de powder and shot it
takes to kill 'em, hear?"

"Yessir."

"Can't nothing wash that off, but blood. If anybody ever do one of those
things to you, kill dead and go to jail. Hear me?"

I promised him I would try and he took out a peanut bar and gave it to
me.

"Now, Snidlits, another thing. Don't you never threaten nobody you don't
aim to fight. Some folks will back off of you if you put out plenty
threats, but you going to meet some that don't care how big you talk,
they'll try you. Then, if you can't back your crap with nothing but
talk, you'll catch hell. Some folks puts dependence in bluffing, but I
ain't never seen one that didn't get his bluff called sooner or later.
Give 'em what you promise 'em and they'll look up to you even if they
hate your guts. Don't worry over that part. Somebody is going to hate
you anyhow, don't care what you do. My idea is to give 'em a good cause
if it's got to be. And don't change too many words if you aim to fight.
Lam hell out of 'em with the first lick and keep on lamming. I've seen
many a fight finished with the first lick. Most folks can't stand to be
hurt. But you must realize that getting hurt is part of fighting. Keep
right on. The one that hurts the other one the worst wins the fight.
Don't try to win no fights by calling 'em low-down names. You can call
'em all the names you want to, after the fight. That's the best time to
do it, anyhow."

I knew without being told that he was not talking about my race when he
advised me not to be a nigger. He was talking about class rather than
race. He frequently gave money to Negro schools.

These talks went on until I was about ten. Then the hard-riding,
hard-drinking, hard-cussing, but very successful man, was thrown from
his horse and died. Nobody ever expected him to die in bed, so that part
was all right. Everybody said that he had been a useful citizen, just
powerful hot under the collar.

He was an accumulating man, a good provider, paid his debts and told the
truth. Those were all the virtues the community expected. Any more than
that would not have been appreciated. He could ride like a centaur, swim
long distances, shoot straight with either pistol or guns, and he
allowed no man to give him the lie to his face. He was supposed to be so
tough, it was said that once he was struck by lightning and was not even
knocked off his feet, but that lightning went off through the woods
limping. Nobody found any fault with a man like that in a country where
personal strength and courage were the highest virtues. People were
supposed to take care of themselves without whining.

For example, two men came before the justice of the peace over in
Maitland. The defendant had hit the plaintiff three times with his fist
and kicked him four times. The justice of the peace fined him seven
dollars--a dollar a lick. The defendant hauled out his pocketbook and
paid his fine with a smile. The justice of the peace then fined the
plaintiff ten dollars.

"What for?" he wanted to know. "Why, Mr. Justice, that man knocked me
down and kicked me, and I never raised my hand."

"That is just what I'm fining you for, you yellow-bellied coudar![C]
Nobody with any guts would have come into court to settle a fist fight."

-----

[C] A coudar is a fresh-water terrapin.

-----

The community felt that the justice had told him what was right. In a
neighborhood where bears and alligators raided hog-pens, wildcats fought
with dogs in people's yards, rattlesnakes as long as a man and as thick
as a man's forearm were found around back doors, a fist fight was a
small skimption. As in all frontiers, there was the feeling for direct
action. Decency was plumb outraged at a man taking a beating and then
swearing out a warrant about it. Most of the settlers considered a
courthouse a place to "law" over property lines and things like that.
That is, you went to law over it if neither party got too abusive and
personal. If it came to that, most likely the heirs of one or the other
could take it to court after the funeral was over.

So the old man died in high favor with everybody. He had done his
cussing and fighting and drinking as became a man, taken care of his
family and accumulated property. Nobody thought anything about his going
to the county seat frequently, getting drunk, getting his riding-mule
drunk along with him, and coming down the pike yelling and singing while
his mule brayed in drunken hilarity. There went a man!



I used to take a seat on top of the gate-post and watch the world go by.
One way to Orlando ran past my house, so the carriages and cars would
pass before me. The movement made me glad to see it. Often the white
travelers would hail me, but more often I hailed them, and asked, "Don't
you want me to go a piece of the way with you?"

They always did. I know now that I must have caused a great deal of
amusement among them, but my self-assurance must have carried the point,
for I was always invited to come along. I'd ride up the road for perhaps
a half-mile, then walk back. I did not do this with the permission of my
parents, nor with their foreknowledge. When they found out about it
later, I usually got a whipping. My grandmother worried about my forward
ways a great deal. She had known slavery and to her my brazenness was
unthinkable.

"Git down offa dat gate-post! You li'l sow, you! Git down! Setting up
dere looking dem white folks right in de face! They's gowine to lynch
you, yet. And don't stand in dat doorway gazing out at 'em neither.
Youse too brazen to live long."

Nevertheless, I kept right on gazing at them, and "going a piece of the
way" whenever I could make it. The village seemed dull to me most of the
time. If the village was singing a chorus, I must have missed the tune.

Perhaps a year before the old man died, I came to know two other white
people for myself. They were women.

It came about this way. The whites who came down from the North were
often brought by their friends to visit the village school. A Negro
school was something strange to them, and while they were always
sympathetic and kind, curiosity must have been present, also. They came
and went, came and went. Always, the room was hurriedly put in order,
and we were threatened with a prompt and bloody death if we cut one
caper while the visitors were present. We always sang a spiritual, led
by Mr. Calhoun himself. Mrs. Calhoun always stood in the back, with a
palmetto switch in her hand as a squelcher. We were all little angels
for the duration, because we'd better be. She would cut her eyes and
give us a glare that meant trouble, then turn her face towards the
visitors and beam as much as to say it was a great privilege and
pleasure to teach lovely children like us. They couldn't see that
palmetto hickory in her hand behind all those benches, but we knew where
our angelic behavior was coming from.

Usually, the visitors gave warning a day ahead and we would be cautioned
to put on shoes, comb our heads, and see to ears and fingernails. There
was a close inspection of every one of us before we marched in that
morning. Knotty heads, dirty ears and fingernails got hauled out of
line, strapped and sent home to lick the calf over again.

This particular afternoon, the two young ladies just popped in. Mr.
Calhoun was flustered, but he put on the best show he could. He
dismissed the class that he was teaching up at the front of the room,
then called the fifth grade in reading. That was my class.

So we took our readers and went up front. We stood up in the usual line,
and opened to the lesson. It was the story of Pluto and Persephone. It
was new and hard to the class in general, and Mr. Calhoun was very
uncomfortable as the readers stumbled along, spelling out words with
their lips, and in mumbling undertones before they exposed them
experimentally to the teacher's ears.

Then it came to me. I was fifth or sixth down the line. The story was
not new to me, because I had read my reader through from lid to lid, the
first week that Papa had bought it for me.

That is how it was that my eyes were not in the book, working out the
paragraph which I knew would be mine by counting the children ahead of
me. I was observing our visitors, who held a book between them,
following the lesson. They had shiny hair, mostly brownish. One had a
looping gold chain around her neck. The other one was dressed all over
in black and white with a pretty finger ring on her left hand. But the
thing that held my eyes were their fingers. They were long and thin, and
very white, except up near the tips. There they were baby pink. I had
never seen such hands. It was a fascinating discovery for me. I wondered
how they felt. I would have given those hands more attention, but the
child before me was almost through. My turn next, so I got on my mark,
bringing my eyes back to the book and made sure of my place. Some of the
stories I had re-read several times, and this Greco-Roman myth was one
of my favorites. I was exalted by it, and that is the way I read my
paragraph.

"Yes, Jupiter had seen her (Persephone). He had seen the maiden picking
flowers in the field. He had seen the chariot of the dark monarch pause
by the maiden's side. He had seen him when he seized Persephone. He had
seen the black horses leap down Mount Aetna's fiery throat. Persephone
was now in Pluto's dark realm and he had made her his wife."

The two women looked at each other and then back to me. Mr. Calhoun
broke out with a proud smile beneath his bristly moustache, and instead
of the next child taking up where I had ended, he nodded to me to go on.
So I read the story to the end, where flying Mercury, the messenger of
the Gods, brought Persephone back to the sunlit earth and restored her
to the arms of Dame Ceres, her mother, that the world might have
springtime and summer flowers, autumn and harvest. But because she had
bitten the pomegranate while in Pluto's kingdom, she must return to him
for three months of each year, and be his queen. Then the world had
winter, until she returned to earth.

The class was dismissed and the visitors smiled us away and went into a
low-voiced conversation with Mr. Calhoun for a few minutes. They glanced
my way once or twice and I began to worry. Not only was I barefooted,
but my feet and legs were dusty. My hair was more uncombed than usual,
and my nails were not shiny clean. Oh, I'm going to catch it now. Those
ladies saw me, too. Mr. Calhoun is promising to 'tend to me. So I
thought.

Then Mr. Calhoun called me. I went up thinking how awful it was to get a
whipping before company. Furthermore, I heard a snicker run over the
room. Hennie Clark and Stell Brazzle did it out loud, so I would be sure
to hear them. The smart-aleck was going to get it. I slipped one hand
behind me and switched my dress tail at them, indicating scorn.

"Come here, Zora Neale," Mr. Calhoun cooed as I reached the desk. He put
his hand on my shoulder and gave me little pats. The ladies smiled and
held out those flower-looking fingers towards me. I seized the
opportunity for a good look.

"Shake hands with the ladies, Zora Neale," Mr. Calhoun prompted and they
took my hand one after the other and smiled. They asked me if I loved
school, and I lied that I did. There was _some_ truth in it, because I
liked geography and reading, and I liked to play at recess time. Whoever
it was invented writing and arithmetic got no thanks from me. Neither
did I like the arrangement where the teacher could sit up there with a
palmetto stem and lick me whenever he saw fit. I hated things I couldn't
do anything about. But I knew better than to bring that up right there,
so I said yes, I _loved_ school.

"I can tell you do," Brown Taffeta gleamed. She patted my head, and was
lucky enough not to get sandspurs in her hand. Children who roll and
tumble in the grass in Florida, are apt to get sandspurs in their hair.
They shook hands with me again and I went back to my seat.

When school let out at three o'clock, Mr. Calhoun told me to wait. When
everybody had gone, he told me I was to go to the Park House, that was
the hotel in Maitland, the next afternoon to call upon Mrs. Johnstone
and Miss Hurd. I must tell Mama to see that I was clean and brushed from
head to feet, and I must wear shoes and stockings. The ladies liked me,
he said, and I must be on my best behavior.

The next day I was let out of school an hour early, and went home to be
stood up in a tub of suds and be scrubbed and have my ears dug into. My
sandy hair sported a red ribbon to match my red and white checked
gingham dress, starched until it could stand alone. Mama saw to it that
my shoes were on the right feet, since I was careless about left and
right. Last thing, I was given a handkerchief to carry, warned again
about my behavior, and sent off, with my big brother John to go as far
as the hotel gate with me.

First thing, the ladies gave me strange things, like stuffed dates and
preserved ginger, and encouraged me to eat all that I wanted. Then they
showed me their Japanese dolls and just talked. I was then handed a copy
of _Scribner's Magazine_, and asked to read a place that was pointed out
to me. After a paragraph or two, I was told with smiles, that that would
do.

I was led out on the grounds and they took my picture under a palm tree.
They handed me what was to me then a heavy cylinder done up in fancy
paper, tied with a ribbon, and they told me goodbye, asking me not to
open it until I got home.

My brother was waiting for me down by the lake, and we hurried home,
eager to see what was in the thing. It was too heavy to be candy or
anything like that. John insisted on toting it for me.

My mother made John give it back to me and let me open it. Perhaps, I
shall never experience such joy again. The nearest thing to that moment
was the telegram accepting my first book. One hundred goldy-new pennies
rolled out of the cylinder. Their gleam lit up the world. It was not
avarice that moved me. It was the beauty of the thing. I stood on the
mountain. Mama let me play with my pennies for a while, then put them
away for me to keep.

That was only the beginning. The next day I received an Episcopal
hymn-book bound in white leather with a golden cross stamped into the
front cover, a copy of The Swiss Family Robinson, and a book of fairy
tales.

I set about to commit the song words to memory. There was no music
written there, just the words. But there was to my consciousness music
in between them just the same. "When I survey the Wondrous Cross" seemed
the most beautiful to me, so I committed that to memory first of all.
Some of them seemed dull and without life, and I pretended they were not
there. If white people liked trashy singing like that, there must be
something funny about them that I had not noticed before. I stuck to the
pretty ones where the words marched to a throb I could feel.

A month or so after the two young ladies returned to Minnesota, they
sent me a huge box packed with clothes and books. The red coat with a
wide circular collar and the red tam pleased me more than any of the
other things. My chums pretended not to like anything that I had, but
even then I knew that they were jealous. Old Smarty had gotten by them
again. The clothes were not new, but they were very good. I shone like
the morning sun.

But the books gave me more pleasure than the clothes. I had never been
too keen on dressing up. It called for hard scrubbings with Octagon soap
suds getting in my eyes, and none too gentle fingers scrubbing my neck
and gouging in my ears.

In that box were Gulliver's Travels, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Dick
Whittington, Greek and Roman Myths, and best of all, Norse Tales. Why
did the Norse tales strike so deeply into my soul? I do not know, but
they did. I seemed to remember seeing Thor swing his mighty
short-handled hammer as he sped across the sky in rumbling thunder,
lightning flashing from the tread of his steeds and the wheels of his
chariot. The great and good Odin, who went down to the well of knowledge
to drink, and was told that the price of a drink from that fountain was
an eye. Odin drank deeply, then plucked out one eye without a murmur and
handed it to the grizzly keeper, and walked away. That held majesty for
me.

Of the Greeks, Hercules moved me most. I followed him eagerly on his
tasks. The story of the choice of Hercules as a boy when he met Pleasure
and Duty, and put his hand in that of Duty and followed her steep way to
the blue hills of fame and glory, which she pointed out at the end,
moved me profoundly. I resolved to be like him. The tricks and turns of
the other Gods and Goddesses left me cold. There were other thin books
about this and that sweet and gentle little girl who gave up her heart
to Christ and good works. Almost always they died from it, preaching as
they passed. I was utterly indifferent to their deaths. In the first
place I could not conceive of death, and in the next place they never
had any funerals that amounted to a hill of beans, so I didn't care how
soon they rolled up their big, soulful, blue eyes and kicked the bucket.
They had no meat on their bones.

But I also met Hans Andersen and Robert Louis Stevenson. They seemed to
know what I wanted to hear and said it in a way that tingled me. Just a
little below these friends was Rudyard Kipling in his Jungle Books. I
loved his talking snakes as much as I did the hero.

I came to start reading the Bible through my mother. She gave me a
licking one afternoon for repeating something I had overheard a neighbor
telling her. She locked me in her room after the whipping, and the Bible
was the only thing in there for me to read. I happened to open to the
place where David was doing some mighty smiting, and I got interested.
David went here and he went there, and no matter where he went, he smote
'em hip and thigh. Then he sung songs to his harp awhile, and went out
and smote some more. Not one time did David stop and preach about sins
and things. All David wanted to know from God was who to kill and when.
He took care of the other details himself. Never a quiet moment. I liked
him a lot. So I read a great deal more in the Bible, hunting for some
more active people like David. Except for the beautiful language of Luke
and Paul, the New Testament still plays a poor second to the Old
Testament for me. The Jews had a God who laid about Him when they needed
Him. I could see no use waiting till Judgment Day to see a man who was
just crying for a good killing, to be told to go and roast. My idea was
to give him a good killing first, and then if he got roasted later on,
so much the better.

In searching for more Davids, I came upon Leviticus. There were exciting
things in there to a child eager to know the facts of life. I told
Carrie Roberts about it, and we spent long afternoons reading what Moses
told the Hebrews not to do in Leviticus. In that way I found out a
number of things the old folks would not have told me. Not knowing what
we were actually reading, we got a lot of praise from our elders for our
devotion to the Bible.

Having finished that and scanned the Doctor Book, which my mother
thought she had hidden securely from my eyes, I read all the things
which children write on privy-house walls. Therefore, I lost my taste
for pornographic literature. I think that the people who love it got
cheated in the matter of privy houses when they were children.

In a way this early reading gave me great anguish through all my
childhood and adolescence. My soul was with the gods and my body in the
village. People just would not act like gods. Stew beef, fried fat-back
and morning grits were no ambrosia from Valhalla. Raking backyards and
carrying out chamber-pots, were not the tasks of Thor. I wanted to be
away from drabness and to stretch my limbs in some mighty struggle. I
was only happy in the woods, and when the ecstatic Florida springtime
came strolling from the sea, trance-glorifying the world with its aura.
Then I hid out in the tall wild oats that waved like a glinty veil. I
nibbled sweet oat stalks and listened to the wind soughing and sighing
through the crowns of the lofty pines. I made particular friendship with
one huge tree and always played about its roots. I named it "the loving
pine," and my chums came to know it by that name.

In contrast to everybody about me, I was not afraid of snakes. They
fascinated me in a way which I still cannot explain. I got no pleasure
from their death.

I do not know when the visions began. Certainly I was not more than
seven years old, but I remember the first coming very distinctly. My
brother Joel and I had made a hen take an egg back and been caught as we
turned the hen loose. We knew we were in for it and decided to scatter
until things cooled off a bit. He hid out in the barn, but I combined
discretion with pleasure, and ran clear off the place. Mr. Linsay's
house was vacant for a spell. He was a neighbor who was off working
somewhere at the time. I had not thought of stopping there when I set
out, but I saw a big raisin lying on the porch and stopped to eat it.
There was some cool shade on the porch, so I sat down, and soon I was
asleep in a strange way. Like clear-cut stereopticon slides, I saw
twelve scenes flash before me, each one held until I had seen it well in
every detail, and then be replaced by another. There was no continuity
as in an average dream. Just disconnected scene after scene with blank
spaces in between. I knew that they were all true, a preview of things
to come, and my soul writhed in agony and shrunk away. But I knew that
there was no shrinking. These things had to be. I did not wake up when
the last one flickered and vanished, I merely sat up and saw the
Methodist Church, the line of moss-draped oaks, and our strawberry-patch
stretching off to the left.

So when I left the porch, I left a great deal behind me. I was weighed
down with a power I did not want. I had knowledge before its time. I
knew my fate. I knew that I would be an orphan and homeless. I knew that
while I was still helpless, that the comforting circle of my family
would be broken, and that I would have to wander cold and friendless
until I had served my time. I would stand beside a dark pool of water
and see a huge fish move slowly away at a time when I would be somehow
in the depth of despair. I would hurry to catch a train, with doubts and
fears driving me and seek solace in a place and fail to find it when I
arrived, then cross many tracks to board the train again. I knew that a
house, a shotgun-built house that needed a new coat of white paint, held
torture for me, but I must go. I saw deep love betrayed, but I must feel
and know it. There was no turning back. And last of all, I would come to
a big house. Two women waited there for me. I could not see their faces,
but I knew one to be young and one to be old. One of them was arranging
some queer-shaped flowers such as I had never seen. When I had come to
these women, then I would be at the end of my pilgrimage, but not the
end of my life. Then I would know peace and love and what goes with
those things, and not before.

These visions would return at irregular intervals. Sometimes two or
three nights running. Sometimes weeks and months apart. I had no
warning. I went to bed and they came. The details were always the same,
except in the last picture. Once or twice I saw the old faceless woman
standing outdoors beside a tall plant with that same off-shape white
flower. She turned suddenly from it to welcome me. I knew what was going
on in the house without going in, it was all so familiar to me.

I never told anyone around me about these strange things. It was too
different. They would laugh me off as a story-teller. Besides, I had a
feeling of difference from my fellow men, and I did not want it to be
found out. Oh, how I cried out to be just as everybody else! But the
voice said No. I must go where I was sent. The weight of the commandment
laid heavy and made me moody at times. When I was an ordinary child,
with no knowledge of things but the life about me, I was reasonably
happy. I would hope that the call would never come again. But even as I
hoped I knew that the cup meant for my lips would not pass. I must drink
the bitter drink. I studied people all around me, searching for someone
to fend it off. But I was told inside myself that there was no one. It
gave me a feeling of terrible aloneness. I stood in a world of vanished
communion with my kind, which is worse than if it had never been.
Nothing is so desolate as a place where life has been and gone. I stood
on a soundless island in a tideless sea.

Time was to prove the truth of my visions, for one by one they came to
pass. As soon as one was fulfilled, it ceased to come. As this happened,
I counted them off one by one and took consolation in the fact that one
more station was past, thus bringing me nearer the end of my trials, and
nearer to the big house, with the kind women and the strange white
flowers.

Years later, after the last one had come and gone, I read a sentence or
a paragraph now and then in the columns of O. O. McIntyre which perhaps
held no special meaning for the millions who read him, but in which I
could see through those slight revelations that he had had similar
experiences. Kipling knew the feeling for himself, for he wrote of it
very definitely in his Plain Tales From the Hills. So I took comfort in
knowing that they were fellow pilgrims on my strange road.

I consider that my real childhood ended with the coming of the
pronouncements. True, I played, fought and studied with other children,
but always I stood apart within. Often I was in some lonesome
wilderness, suffering strange things and agonies while other children in
the same yard played without a care. I asked myself why me? Why? Why? A
cosmic loneliness was my shadow. Nothing and nobody around me really
touched me. It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see
visions and dream dreams.




V. Figure and Fancy


Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.
That is natural. There is no single face in nature, because every eye
that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box
seasons his own food.

Naturally, I picked up the reflections of life around me with my own
instruments, and absorbed what I gathered according to my inside juices.

There were the two churches, Methodist and Baptist, and the school. Most
people would say that such institutions are always the great influences
in any town. They would say that because it sounds like the thing that
ought to be said. But I know that Joe Clarke's store was the heart and
spring of the town.

Men sat around the store on boxes and benches and passed this world and
the next one through their mouths. The right and the wrong, the who,
when and why was passed on, and nobody doubted the conclusions. Women
stood around there on Saturday nights and had it proven to the community
that their husbands were good providers, put all of their money in their
wives' hands and generally glorified them. Or right there before
everybody it was revealed that one man was keeping some other woman by
the things the other woman was allowed to buy on his account. No doubt a
few men found that their wives had a brand new pair of shoes oftener
than he could afford it, and wondered what she did with her time while
he was off at work. Sometimes he didn't have to wonder. There were no
discreet nuances of life on Joe Clarke's porch. There was open
kindnesses, anger, hate, love, envy and its kinfolks, but all emotions
were naked, and nakedly arrived at. It was a case of "make it and take
it." You got what your strengths would bring you. This was not just true
of Eatonville. This was the spirit of that whole new part of the state
at the time, as it always is where men settle new lands.

For me, the store porch was the most interesting place that I could
think of. I was not allowed to sit around there, naturally. But, I could
and did drag my feet going in and out, whenever I was sent there for
something, to allow whatever was being said to hang in my ear. I would
hear an occasional scrap of gossip in what to me was adult double talk,
but which I understood at times. There would be, for instance, sly
references to the physical condition of women, irregular love affairs,
brags on male potency by the parties of the first part, and the like. It
did not take me long to know what was meant when a girl was spoken of as
"ruint" or "bigged."

For instance, somebody would remark, "Ada Dell is ruint, you know."
"Yep, somebody was telling me. A pitcher can go to the well a long time,
but its bound to get broke sooner or later." Or some woman or girl would
come switching past the store porch and some man would call to her,
"Hey, Sugar! What's on de rail for de lizard?" Then again I would hear
some man say, "I got to have my ground-rations. If one woman can't take
care of it, I gits me another one." One man told a woman to hold her ear
close, because he had a bug to put in her ear. He was sitting on a box.
She stooped over to hear whatever it was he had to whisper to her. Then
she straightened up sharply and pulled away from him. "Why, you!" she
exclaimed. "The idea of such a thing! Talking like dat to me, when you
know I'm a good church-worker, and you a deacon!" He didn't seem to be
ashamed at all. "Dat's just de point I'm coming out on, sister. Two
clean sheets can't dirty one 'nother, you know." There was general
laughter, as the deacon moved his foot so that I could get in the store
door. I happened to hear a man talking to another in a chiding manner
and say, "To save my soul, I can't see what you fooled with her for. I'd
just as soon pick up a old tin can out of the trash pile."

But what I really loved to hear was the menfolks holding a "lying"
session. That is, straining against each other in telling folks tales.
God, Devil, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Sis Cat, Brer Bear, Lion, Tiger,
Buzzard, and all the wood folk walked and talked like natural men. The
wives of the story-tellers might yell from backyards for them to come
and tote some water, or chop wood for the cook-stove and never get a
move out of the men. The usual rejoinder was, "Oh, she's got enough to
go on. No matter how much wood you chop, a woman will burn it all up to
get a meal. If she got a couple of pieces, she will make it do. If you
chop up a whole boxful, she will burn every stick of it. Pay her no
mind." So the story-telling would go right on.

I often hung around and listened while Mama waited on me for the sugar
or coffee to finish off dinner, until she lifted her voice over the tree
tops in a way to let me know that her patience was gone: "You Zora-a-a!
If you don't come here, you better!" That had a promise of peach
hickories in it, and I would have to leave. But I would have found out
from such story-tellers as Elijah Moseley, better known as "Lige," how
and why Sis Snail quit her husband, for instance. You may or may not
excuse my lagging feet, if you know the circumstances of the case:

One morning soon, Lige met Sis Snail on the far side of the road. He had
passed there several times in the last few years and seen Sis Snail
headed towards the road. For the last three years he had stepped over
her several times as she crossed the road, always forging straight
ahead. But this morning he found her clean across, and she seemed mighty
pleased with herself, so he stopped and asked her where she was headed
for.

"Going off to travel over the world," she told him. "I done left my
husband for good."

"How come, Sis Snail? He didn't ill-treat you in no ways, did he?"

"Can't exactly say he did, Brother Lige, but you take and take just so
much and then you can't take no more. Your craw gits full up to de neck.
De man gits around too slow to suit me, and look like I just can't break
him of it. So I done left him for good. I'm out and gone. I gits around
right fast, my ownself, and I just can't put up with nobody dat gits
around as slow as he do."

"Oh, don't leave de man too sudden, Sis Snail. Maybe he might come to
move round fast like you do. Why don't you sort of reason wid de poor
soul and let him know how you feel?"

"I done tried dat until my patience is all wore out. And this last thing
he done run my cup over. You know I took sick in de bed--had de misery
in my side so bad till I couldn't rest in de bed. He heard me groaning
and asked me what was de matter. I told him how sick I was. Told him,
'Lawd, I'm so sick!' So he said 'If you's sick like dat, I'll go git de
doctor for you.' I says, 'I sho would be mighty much obliged if you
would.' So he took and told me, 'I don't want you laying there and
suffering like dat. I'll go git de doctor right away. Just lemme go git
my hat.'

"So I laid there in de bed and waited for him to go git de doctor. Lawd!
I was so sick! I rolled from pillar to post. After seven I heard a noise
at de door, and I said, 'Lawd, I'm so glad! I knows dats my husband done
come back wid de doctor.' So I hollered out and asked, 'Honey, is dat
you done come back wid de doctor?' And he come growling at me and giving
me a short answer wid, 'Don't try to rush me. I ain't gone yet.' It had
done took him seven years to git his hat and git to de door. So I just
up and left him."

Then one late afternoon, a woman called Gold, who had come to town from
somewhere else, told the why and how of races that pleased me more than
what I learned about race derivations later on in Ethnology. This was
her explanation:

God did not make folks all at once. He made folks sort of in His spare
time. For instance one day He had a little time on his hands, so He got
the clay, seasoned it the way He wanted it, then He laid it by and went
on to doing something more important. Another day He had some spare
moments, so He rolled it all out, and cut out the human shapes, and
stood them all up against His long gold fence to dry while He did some
important creating. The human shapes all got dry, and when He found
time, He blowed the breath of life in them. After that, from time to
time, He would call everybody up, and give them spare parts. For
instance, one day He called everybody and gave out feet and eyes.
Another time He give out toe-nails that Old Maker figured they could
use. Anyhow, they had all that they got up to now. So then one day He
said, "Tomorrow morning, at seven o'clock _sharp_, I aim to give out
color; Everybody be here on time. I got plenty of creating to do
tomorrow, and I want to give out this color and get it over wid.
_Everybody_ be 'round de throne at seven o'clock tomorrow morning!"

So next morning at seven o'clock, God was sitting on His throne with His
big crown on His head and seven suns circling around His head. Great
multitudes was standing around the throne waiting to get their color.
God sat up there and looked, east, and He looked west, and He looked
north and He looked Australia, and blazing worlds were falling off His
teeth. So He looked over to His left and moved His hands over a crowd
and said, "You's yellow people!" They all bowed low and said, "Thank
you, God," and they went on off. He looked at another crowd, moved His
hands over them and said, "You's red folks!" They made their manners and
said, "Thank you, Old Maker," and they went on off. He looked towards
the center and moved His hand over another crowd and said, "You's white
folks!" They bowed low and said, "Much obliged, Jesus," and they went on
off. Then God looked way over to the right and said, "Look here,
Gabriel, I miss a lot of multitudes from around the throne this
morning." Gabriel looked too, and said, "Yessir, there's a heap of
multitudes missing from round de throne this morning." So God sat there
an hour and a half and waited. Then He called Gabriel and said, "Looka
here, Gabriel, I'm sick and tired of this waiting. I got plenty of
creating to do this morning. You go find them folks and tell 'em they
better hurry on up here and they expect to get any color. Fool with me,
and I won't give out no more."

So Gabriel run on off and started to hunting around. Way after while, he
found the missing multitudes lying around on the grass by the Sea of
Life, fast asleep. So Gabriel woke them up and told them, "You better
get up from there and come on up to the throne and get your color. Old
Maker is might wore out from waiting. Fool with Him and He won't give
out no more color."

So as the multitudes heard that, they all jumped up and went running
towards the throne hollering, "Give us our color! We want our color! We
got just as much right to color as anybody else." So when the first ones
got to the throne, they tried to stop and be polite. But the ones coming
on behind got to pushing and shoving so till the first ones got shoved
all up against the throne so till the throne was careening all over to
one side. So God said, "Here! Here! Git back! Git back!" But they was
keeping up such a racket that they misunderstood Him, and thought He
said, "Git black!" So they just got black, and kept the thing a-going.

In one way or another, I heard dozens more of these tales. My father and
his preacher associates told the best stories on the church. Papa, being
moderator of the South Florida Baptist Association, had numerous
preacher visitors just before the Association met, to get the politics
of the thing all cut and dried before the meetings came off. After it
was decided who would put such and such a motion before the house, who
would second it, and whom my father would recognize first and things
like that, a big story-telling session would get under way on our front
porch, and very funny stories at the expense of preachers and
congregations would be told.

No doubt, these tales of God, the Devil, animals and natural elements
seemed ordinary enough to most people in the village. But many of them
stirred up fancies in me. It did not surprise me at all to hear that the
animals talked. I had suspected it all along. Or let us say, that I
wanted to suspect it. Life took on a bigger perimeter by expanding on
these things. I picked up glints and gleams out of what I heard and
stored it away to turn it to my own uses. The wind would sough through
the tops of the tall, long-leaf pines and say things to me. I put in the
words that the sounds put into me. Like "Woo woo, you wooo!" The tree
was talking to me, even when I did not catch the words. It was talking
and telling me things. I have mentioned the tree near our house that got
so friendly I named it "the loving pine." Finally all of my playmates
called it that too. I used to take a seat at the foot of that tree and
play for hours without any toys. We talked about everything in my world.
Sometimes we just took it out in singing songs. That tree had a mighty
fine bass voice when it really took a notion to let it out.

There was another tree that used to creep up close to the house around
sundown and threaten me. It used to put on a skull-head with a crown on
it every day at sundown and make motions at me when I had to go out on
the back porch to wash my feet after supper before going to bed. It
never bothered around during the day. It was just another pine tree
about a hundred feet tall then, standing head and shoulders above a
grove. But let the dusk begin to fall, and it would put that crown on
its skull and creep in close. Nobody else ever seemed to notice what it
was up to but me. I used to wish it would go off somewhere and get lost.
But every evening I would have to look to see, and every time, it would
be right there, sort of shaking and shivering and bowing its head at me.
I used to wonder if sometime it was not going to come in the house.

When I began to make up stories I cannot say. Just from one fancy to
another, adding more and more detail until they seemed real. People
seldom see themselves changing.

So I was making little stories to myself, and have no memory of how I
began. But I do remember some of the earliest ones.

I came in from play one day and told my mother how a bird had talked to
me with a tail so long that while he sat up in the top of the pine tree
his tail was dragging the ground. It was a soft beautiful bird tail, all
blue and pink and red and green. In fact I climbed up the bird's tail
and sat up the tree and had a long talk with the bird. He knew my name,
but I didn't know how he knew it. In fact, the bird had come a long way
just to sit and talk with me.

Another time, I dashed into the kitchen and told Mama how the lake had
talked with me, and invited me to walk all over it. I told the lake I
was afraid of getting drowned, but the lake assured me it wouldn't think
of doing _me_ like that. No, indeed! Come right on and have a walk.
Well, I stepped out on the lake and walked all over it. It didn't even
wet my feet. I could see all the fish and things swimming around under
me, and they all said hello, but none of them bothered me. Wasn't that
nice?

My mother said that it was. My grandmother glared at me like open-faced
hell and snorted.

"Luthee!" (She lisped.) "You hear dat young'un stand up here and lie
like dat? And you ain't doing nothing to break her of it? Grab her!
Wring her coat tails over her head and wear out a handful of peach
hickories on her back-side! Stomp her guts out! Ruin her!"

"Oh, she's just playing," Mama said indulgently.

"Playing! Why dat lil' heifer is lying just as fast as a horse can trot.
Stop her! Wear her back-side out. I bet if I lay my hands on her she'll
stop it. I vominates a lying tongue."

Mama never tried to break me. She'd listen sometimes, and sometimes she
wouldn't. But she never seemed displeased. But her mother used to foam
at the mouth. I was just as sure to be hung before I got grown as gun
was iron! The least thing Mama could do to straighten me out was to
smack my jaws for me. She outraged my grandmother scandalously by not
doing it. Mama was going to be responsible for my downfall when she
stood up in judgment. It was a sin before the living justice, that's
what it was. God knows, grandmother would break me or kill me, if she
had her way. Killing me looked like the best one, anyway. All I was good
for was to lay up and wet the bed half of the time and tell lies,
besides being the spitting image of dat good-for-nothing yaller bastard.
I was the punishment God put on Mama for marrying Papa. I ought to be
thrown in the hogslops, that's what. She could beat me as long as I
last.

I knew that I did not have to pay too much attention to the old lady and
so I didn't. Furthermore, how was she going to tell what I was doing
inside? I could keep my inventions to myself, which was what I did most
of the time.

One day, we were going to have roasting-ears for dinner and I was around
while Mama was shucking the corn. I picked up an inside chunk and
carried it off to look at. It was such a delicate, blushy green. I
crawled under the side of the house to love it all by myself.

In a few minutes, it had become Miss Corn-Shuck, and of course needed
some hair. So I went back and picked up some cornsilk and tied it to the
pointed end. We had a lovely time together for a day or two, and then
Miss Corn-Shuck got lonesome for some company.

I do not think that her lonesomeness would have come down on her as it
did, if I had not found a cake of sweet soap in Mama's dresser drawer.
It was a cake of Pears' scented soap. It was clear like amber glass. I
could see straight through it. It delighted my senses just as much as
the tender green corn-shuck. So Miss Corn-Shuck fell in love with Mr.
Sweet Smell then and there. But she said she could not have a thing to
do with him unless he went and put on some clothes. I found a piece of
red and white string that had come around some groceries and made him a
suit of clothes. Being bigger in the middle than he was on either end,
his pants kept falling off--sometimes over his head and sometimes the
other way. So I cut little notches in his sides around the middle and
tied his suit on. To other people it might have looked like a cake of
soap with a bit of twine tied around it, but Miss Corn-Shuck and I knew
he had on the finest clothes in the world. Every day it would be
different, because Mr. Sweet Smell was very particular about what he
wore. Besides he wanted Miss Corn-Shuck to admire him.

There was a great mystery about where Mr. Sweet Smell came from. I
suppose if Mama had been asked, she would have said that it was the
company soap, since the family used nothing but plain, yellow Octagon
laundry soap for bathing. But I had not known it was there until I
happened to find it. It might have been there for years. Whenever Miss
Corn-Shuck asked him where his home was, he always said it was a secret
which he would tell her about when they were married. It was not very
important anyway. We knew he was some very high-class man from way
off--the farther off the better.

But sad to say, Miss Corn-Shuck and Mr. Sweet Smell never got married.
They always meant to, but before very long, Miss Corn-Cob began to make
trouble. We found her around the kitchen door one day, and she followed
us back under the house and right away started her meanness. She was
jealous of Miss Corn-Shuck because she was so pretty and green, with
long silky hair, and so Miss Corn-Cob would make up all kinds of mean
stories about her. One day there was going to be a big party and that
was the first time that the Spool People came to visit. They used to hop
off of Mama's sewing machine one by one until they were a great
congregation--at least fifteen or so. They didn't do anything much
besides second the motion on what somebody else did and said, so they
must have been the common people.

Reverend Door-Knob was there, too. He used to live on the inside of the
kitchen door, but one day he rolled off and came under the house to be
with us. Unconsciously he behaved a lot like Mayor Joe Clarke. He was
roundish and reddish brown, and used to laugh louder than anything when
something funny happened. The spool people always laughed whenever he
laughed. They used to cry too, whenever Mr. Sweet Smell or Miss
Corn-Shuck cried. They were always doing whatever they saw other people
do. That was the way the Spool People were.

When Mr. Sweet Smell left his fine house in the dresser drawer that day,
he came through the kitchen and brought a half can of condensed milk for
the refreshments. Everybody liked condensed milk for refreshment. Well,
Miss Corn-Cob sneaked around and ate up all the refreshments and then
she told everybody that Miss Corn-Shuck ate it. That hurt Mr. Sweet
Smell's feelings so bad till he went home and so he didn't marry Miss
Corn-Shuck that day. Reverend Door-Knob was so mad with Miss Corn-Cob
that he threw her clear over the house and she landed in the horse
trough, which everybody said, served her just right.

But not getting married that day sort of threw Mr. Sweet Smell in a kind
of fever. He was sick in the bed for several days. Miss Corn-Shuck went
to see him every day, and that was very nice. He rubbed off some of his
smell on her because she was so nice to come to see him.

Some people might have thought that Miss Corn-Shuck's green dress had
faded and her silky hair all dried up. But that was because they didn't
know any better. She just put on a brownish cloak over it, so it
wouldn't get dirty. She would let me see it any time I wanted to. That
was because she liked me better than anyone else except Mr. Sweet Smell.
She lay under the mattress of my bed every night. Mr. Sweet Smell always
went home to the dresser drawer. The Spool People slept on the sill
under the house because Reverend Door-Knob used to sleep there. They
couldn't do a thing unless they saw somebody else doing it. They wore a
string around their waist, trying to dress up like Mr. Sweet Smell.

Miss Corn-Cob played a very mean trick once. Miss Corn-Shuck and Mr.
Sweet Smell were going to get married down by the lake. The lake had
kindly moved into the washbasin for the occasion. A piece of cold
cornbread had turned into a magnificent cake. Plenty of egg-nogg had
come out of a cake of shaving soap. The bride and groom were standing
side by side and ready. When what did Miss Corn-Cob do? She shoved
Reverend Door-Knob into the lake, because she knew he couldn't swim.
Here everybody was waiting and nobody would have known where the
preacher was if one of the Spool People had not seen him kicking down at
the bottom of the lake and rescued him.

While he was getting dry and putting on a fresh suit of clothes, Miss
Corn-Cob sent our old dominecker rooster to steal the wedding cake. So
the wedding had to be put off until Christmas because then there would
be plenty of cake for everybody. The Spool People said they were glad of
it, because there ought to be enough cake to go around if you wanted a
really nice wedding. The lake told everybody goodbye, jumped out in the
yard and went on home. It could not stay off too long, because it would
be missed and people would not know what to think.

Miss Corn-Cob went and hid down a gopher hole for a whole week. Every
night she used to cry so loud that we could hear her at the house. You
see she was scared of the dark. Her mama gave her a good whipping when
she got back home and everybody stood around and said, "Goody! Goody!
Goody! Goody! Goody!" Because that makes everybody feel bad. That is, no
child likes to hear another one gloating "Goody!" when he is in trouble.

They all stayed around the house for years, holding funerals and almost
weddings and taking trips with me to where the sky met the ground. I do
not know exactly when they left me. They kept me company for so long.
Then one day they were gone. Where? I do not know. But there is an age
when children are fit company for spirits. Before they have absorbed too
much of earthy things to be able to fly with the unseen things that
soar. There came a time when I could look back on the fields where we
had picked flowers together but they, my friends, were nowhere to be
seen. The sunlight where I had lost them was still of Midas gold, but
that which touched me where I stood had somehow turned to gilt. Nor
could I return to the shining meadow where they had vanished. I could
not ask of others if they had seen which way my company went. My friends
had been too shy to show themselves to others. Now and then when the sky
is the right shade of blue, the air soft, and the clouds are sculptured
into heroic shapes, I glimpse them for a moment, and believe again that
the halcyon days have been.

When inanimate things ceased to commune with me like natural men, other
dreams came to live with me. Animals took on lives and characteristics
which nobody knew anything about except myself. Little things that
people did or said grew into fantastic stories.

There was a man who turned into an alligator for my amusement. All he
did was live in a one-room house by himself down near Lake Belle. I did
the rest myself. He came into the village one evening near dusk and
stopped at the store. Somebody teased him about living out there by
himself, and said that if he did not hurry up and get married, he was
liable to go wild.

I saw him tending his little garden all day, and otherwise just being a
natural man. But I made an image of him for after dark that was
different. In my imagination, his work-a-day hands and feet became the
reptilian claws of an alligator. A tough, knotty hide crept over him,
and his mouth became a huge snout with prong-toothed, powerful jaws. In
the dark of the night, when the alligators began their nightly mysteries
behind the cloaking curtain of cypress trees that all but hid Lake
Belle, I could see him crawling from his door, turning his ugly head
from left to right to see who was looking, then gliding down into the
dark waters to become a 'gator among 'gators. He would mingle his bellow
with other bull 'gator bellows and be strong and terrible. He was the
king of 'gators and the others minded him. When I heard the thunder of
bull 'gator voices from the lake on dark nights, I used to whisper to
myself, "That's Mr. Pendir! Just listen at him!"

I kept adding detail. For instance, late one afternoon, my mother had
taken me for a walk down around Lake Belle. On our way home, the sun had
set. It was good and dark when we came to the turning-off place that
would take us straight home. At that spot, the trees stood apart, and
the surface of the lake was plain. I saw the early moon laying a shiny
track across the water. After that, I could picture the full moon laying
a flaming red sword of light across the water. It was a road of
yellow-red light made for Mr. Pendir to tread. I could see him crossing
the lake down this flaming road wrapped in his awful majesty, with
thousands on thousands of his subject-'gators moving silently along
beside him and behind him in an awesome and mighty convoy.

I added another chapter to the Pendir story when a curious accident
happened in the village. One old woman, Mrs. Bronson, went fishing in
Blue Sink late one afternoon and did not return. The family, who had
opposed the idea of a woman of Mrs. Bronson's age going off to Blue Sink
to fish so late in the day, finally became worried and went out to hunt
for her. They went around the edge of the lake with lanterns and torches
and called and called, but they could not see her, and neither did she
answer. Finally, they found her, though people were beginning to be
doubtful about it. Blue Sink drops down abruptly from its shores, and is
supposed to be bottomless. She was in the lake, at the very edge, still
alive, but unable to crawl out. She did not even cry out when she heard
herself being called and could discern the moving lanterns. When she was
safely home in bed, she said that she had sat there till sundown because
she knew the fish would begin to bite. She did catch a few. But just as
black dark came on, a terrible fear came on her somehow, and something
like a great wind struck her and hurled her into the water. She had
fallen on the narrow inside rim of the lake, otherwise she would have
sunk into the hidden deeps. She said that she screamed a few times for
help, but something rushed across Blue Sink like a body-fied wind and
commanded her to hush-up. If she so much as made another sound, she
would never get out of that lake alive. That was why she had not
answered when she was called, but she was praying inside to be found.

The doctor came and said that she had suffered a stroke. One whole side
of her body was paralyzed, so when she tumbled over into the lake, she
could not get out. Her terror and fear had done the rest. She must have
had two or three horrible hours lying there in the edge of the water,
hard put to it to keep her face above water, and expecting the attack of
an alligator, water moccasin, gar fish, and numerous other creatures
which existed only in her terrified mind. It is a wonder that she did
not die of fright.

Right away, I could see the mighty tail of Mr. Pendir slapping Old Lady
Bronson into the lake. Then he had stalked away across the lake like the
Devil walking up and down in the earth. But when she had screamed, I
pictured him re-crossing to her, treading the red-gold of his
moon-carpet, with his mighty minions swimming along beside him, his feet
walking the surface like a pavement. The soles of his feet never even
being damp, he drew up his hosts around her and commanded her to hush.

The old woman was said to dabble in hoodoo, and some said that Pendir
did too. I had heard often enough that it was the pride of one hoodoo
doctor to "throw it back on the one that done it." What could be more
natural then than for my 'gator-man to get peeved because the old lady
had tried to throw something he did back on him? Naturally, he slapped
her in to the lake. No matter what the doctor said, I knew the real
truth of the matter.

I told my playmates about it and they believed it right away. I got bold
and told them how I had seen Mr. Pendir turning into a 'gator at night
and going down into the lake and walking the water. My chums even
believed part of it in a way. That is, they liked the idea and joined in
the game. They became timid in the presence of the harmless little man
and on the sly would be looking for 'gator signs on him. We pretended a
great fear of him. Lest we meet him in 'gator form some night and get
carried off into the lake, and die on that terrible road of light.

I told them how he couldn't die anyway. That is, he couldn't die
anymore. He was not a living man. He had died a long time ago, and his
soul had gone to the 'gators. He had told me that he had no fear of
death because he had come back from where other folks were going.

The truth of the matter was, that poor Mr. Pendir was the one man in the
village who could not swim a lick. He died a very ordinary death. He
worked too long in the hot sun one day, and some said on an empty
stomach, and took down sick. Two days later he just died and was buried
and stayed where he was put. His life had not agreed with my phantasy at
any point. He had no female relatives around to mourn loud and make his
funeral entertaining, even, and his name soon ceased to be called. The
grown folks of the village never dreamed what an exciting man he had
been to me. Even after he was dead and buried, I would go down to the
edge of Lake Belle to see if I could run across some of his 'gator hides
that he had sloughed off at daybreak when he became a man again. My
phantasies were still fighting against the facts.




VI. Wandering


I knew that Mama was sick. She kept getting thinner and thinner and her
chest cold never got any better. Finally, she took to bed.

She had come home from Alabama that way. She had gone back to her old
home to be with her sister during her sister's last illness. Aunt Dinky
had lasted on for two months after Mama got there, and so Mama had
stayed on till the last.

It seems that there had been other things there that worried her. Down
underneath, it appeared that Grandma had never quite forgiven her for
the move she had made twenty-one years before in marrying Papa. So that
when Mama suggested that the old Potts place be sold so that she could
bring her share back with her to Florida, her mother, urged on by Uncle
Bud, Mama's oldest brother, refused. Not until Grandma's head was cold,
was an acre of the place to be sold. She had long since quit living on
it, and it was pretty well run down, but she wouldn't, that was all.
Mama could just go on back to that yaller rascal she had married like
she came. I do not think that the money part worried Mama as much as the
injustice and spitefulness of the thing.

Then Cousin Jimmie's death seemed to come back on Mama during her visit.
How he came to his death is an unsolved mystery. He went to a party and
started home. The next morning his headless body was found beside the
railroad track. There was no blood, so the train couldn't have killed
him. This had happened before I was born. He was said to have been a
very handsome young man, and very popular with the girls. He was my
mother's favorite nephew and she took it hard. She had probably numbed
over her misery, but going back there seemed to freshen up her grief.
Some said that he had been waylaid by three other young fellows and
killed in a jealous rage. But nothing could be proved. It was whispered
that he had been shot in the head by a white man unintentionally, and
then beheaded to hide the wound. He had been shot from ambush, because
his assailant mistook him for a certain white man. It was night. The
attacker expected the white man to pass that way, but not Jimmie. When
he found out his mistake, he had forced a certain Negro to help him move
the body to the railroad track without the head, so that it would look
as if he had been run over by the train. Anyway, that is what the Negro
wrote back after he had moved to Texas years later. There was never any
move to prove the charge, for obvious reasons. Mama took the whole thing
very hard.

It was not long after Mama came home that she began to be less active.
Then she took to bed. I knew she was ailing, but she was always frail,
so I did not take it too much to heart. I was nine years old, and even
though she had talked to me very earnestly one night, I could not
conceive of Mama actually dying. She had talked of it many times.

That day, September 18th, she had called me and given me certain
instructions. I was not to let them take the pillow from under her head
until she was dead. The clock was not to be covered, nor the
looking-glass. She trusted me to see to it that these things were not
done. I promised her as solemnly as nine years could do, that I would
see to it.

What years of agony that promise gave me! In the first place, I had no
idea that it would be soon. But that same day near sundown I was called
upon to set my will against my father, the village dames and village
custom. I know now that I could not have succeeded.

I had left Mama and was playing outside for a little while when I noted
a number of women going inside Mama's room and staying. It looked
strange. So I went on in. Papa was standing at the foot of the bed
looking down on my mother, who was breathing hard. As I crowded in, they
lifted up the bed and turned it around so that Mama's eyes would face
the east. I thought that she looked to me as the head of the bed was
reversed. Her mouth was slightly open, but her breathing took up so much
of her strength that she could not talk. But she looked at me, or so I
felt, to speak for her. She depended on me for a voice.

The Master-Maker in His making had made Old Death. Made him with big,
soft feet and square toes. Made him with a face that reflects the face
of all things, but neither changes itself, nor is mirrored anywhere.
Made the body of Death out of infinite hunger. Made a weapon for his
hand to satisfy his needs. This was the morning of the day of the
beginning of things.

But Death had no home and he knew it at once.

"And where shall I dwell in my dwelling?" Old Death asked, for he was
already old when he was made.

"You shall build you a place close to the living, yet far out of the
sight of eyes. Wherever there is a building, there you have your
platform that comprehends the four roads of the winds. For your hunger,
I give you the first and last taste of all things."

We had been born, so Death had had his first taste of us. We had built
things, so he had his platform in our yard.

And now, Death stirred from his platform in his secret place in our
yard, and came inside the house.

Somebody reached for the clock, while Mrs. Mattie Clarke put her hand to
the pillow to take it away.

"Don't!" I cried out. "Don't take the pillow from under Mama's head! She
said she didn't want it moved!"

I made to stop Mrs. Mattie, but Papa pulled me away. Others were trying
to silence me. I could see the huge drop of sweat collected in the
hollow at Mama's elbow and it hurt me so. They were covering the clock
and the mirror.

"Don't cover up that clock! Leave that looking-glass like it is! Lemme
put Mama's pillow back where it was!"

But Papa held me tight and the others frowned me down. Mama was still
rasping out the last morsel of her life. I think she was trying to say
something, and I think she was trying to speak to me. What was she
trying to tell me? What wouldn't I give to know! Perhaps she was telling
me that it was better for the pillow to be moved so that she could die
easy, as they said. Perhaps she was accusing me of weakness and failure
in carrying out her last wish. I do not know. I shall never know.

Just then, Death finished his prowling through the house on his padded
feet and entered the room. He bowed to Mama in his way, and she made her
manners and left us to act out our ceremonies over unimportant things.

I was to agonize over that moment for years to come. In the midst of
play, in wakeful moments after midnight, on the way home from parties,
and even in the classroom during lectures. My thoughts would escape
occasionally from their confines and stare me down.

Now, I know that I could not have had my way against the world. The
world we lived in required those acts. Anything else would have been
sacrilege, and no nine-year-old voice was going to thwart them. My
father was with the mores. He had restrained me physically from
outraging the ceremonies established for the dying. If there is any
consciousness after death, I hope that Mama knows that I did my best.
She must know how I have suffered for my failure.

But life picked me up from the foot of Mama's bed, grief,
self-despisement and all, and set my feet in strange ways. That moment
was the end of a phase in my life. I was old before my time with grief
of loss, of failure, and of remorse. No matter what the others did, my
mother had put her trust in me. She had felt that I could and would
carry out her wishes, and I had not. And then in that sunset time, I
failed her. It seemed as she died that the sun went down on purpose to
flee away from me.

That hour began my wanderings. Not so much in geography, but in time.
Then not so much in time as in spirit.

Mama died at sundown and changed a world. That is, the world which had
been built out of her body and her heart. Even the physical aspects fell
apart with a suddenness that was startling.

My oldest brother was up in Jacksonville in school, and he arrived home
after Mama had passed. By then, she had been washed and dressed and laid
out on the ironing-board in the parlor.

Practically all of the village was in the front yard and on the porch,
talking in low tones and waiting. They were not especially waiting for
my brother Bob. They were doing that kind of waiting that people do
around death. It is a kind of sipping up the drama of the thing.
However, if they were asked, they would say it was the sadness of the
occasion which drew them. In reality it is a kind of feast of the
Passover.

Bob's grief was awful when he realized that he was too late. He could
not conceive at first that nothing could be done to straighten things
out. There was no ear for his excuse nor explanation--no way to ease
what was in him. Finally it must have come to him that what he had
inside, he must take with him wherever he went. Mama was there on the
cooling board with the sheet draped over her blowing gently in the wind.
Nothing there seemed to hear him at all.

There was my sister Sarah in the kitchen crying and trying to quiet
Everett, who was just past two years old. She was crying and trying to
make him hush at the same time. He was crying because he sensed the
grief around him. And then, Sarah, who was fifteen, had been his nurse
and he would respond to her mood, whatever it was. We were all grubby
bales of misery, huddled about lamps.

I have often wished I had been old enough at the time to look into
Papa's heart that night. If I could know what that moment meant to him,
I could have set my compass towards him and been sure. I know that I did
love him in a way, and that I admired many things about him. He had a
poetry about him that I loved. That had made him a successful preacher.
He could hit ninety-seven out of a hundred with a gun. He could swim
Lake Maitland from Maitland to Winter Park, and no man in the village
could put my father's shoulders to the ground. We were so certain of
Papa's invincibility in combat that when a village woman scolded Everett
for some misdemeanor, and told him that God would punish him, Everett,
just two years old, reared back and told her, "He better not bother me.
Papa will shoot Him down." He found out better later on, but that goes
to show you how big our Papa looked to us. We had seen him bring down
bears and panthers with his gun, and chin the bar more times than any
man in competing distance. He had to our knowledge licked two men who
Mama told him had to be licked. All that part was just fine with me. But
I was Mama's child. I knew that she had not always been happy, and I
wanted to know just how sad he was that night.

I have repeatedly called up that picture and questioned it. Papa cried
some too, as he moved in his awkward way about the place. From the
kitchen to the front porch and back again. He kept saying, "Poor thing!
She suffered so much." I do not know what he meant by that. It could
have been love and pity for her suffering ending at last. It could have
been remorse mixed with relief. The hard-driving force was no longer
opposed to his easy-going pace. He could put his potentialities to sleep
and be happy in the laugh of the day. He could do next year or never,
what Mama would have insisted must be done today. Rome, the eternal
city, meant two different things to my parents. To Mama, it meant, you
must build it today so it could last through eternity. To Papa, it meant
that you could plan to lay some bricks today and you have the rest of
eternity to finish it. With all time, why hurry? God had made more time
than anything else, anyway. Why act so stingy about it?

Then too, I used to notice how Mama used to snatch Papa. That is, he
would start to put up an argument that would have been terrific on the
store porch, but Mama would pitch in with a single word or a sentence
and mess it all up. You could tell he was mad as fire with no words to
blow it out with. He would sit over in the corner and cut his eyes at
her real hard. He was used to being a hero on the store porch and in
church affairs, and I can see how he must have felt to be always outdone
around home. I know now that that is a gripping thing to a man--not to
be able to whip his woman mentally. Some women know how to give their
man that conquesting feeling. My mother took her over-the-creek man and
bare-knuckled him from brogans to broadcloth, and I am certain that he
was proud of the change, in public. But in the house, he might have
always felt over-the-creek, and because that was not the statue he had
made for himself to look at, he resented it. But then, you cannot blame
my mother too much if she did not see him as his entranced congregations
did. The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly
he might have molded the clay. You cannot have knowledge and worship at
the same time. Mystery is the essence of divinity. Gods must keep their
distances from men.

Anyway, the next day, Sam Moseley's span of fine horses, hitched to our
wagon, carried my mother to Macedonia Baptist Church for the last time.
The finality of the thing came to me fully when the earth began to thud
on the coffin.

That night, all of Mama's children were assembled together for the last
time on earth. The next day, Bob and Sarah went back to Jacksonville to
school. Papa was away from home a great deal, so two weeks later I was
on my way to Jacksonville, too. I was under age, but the school had
agreed to take me in under the circumstances. My sister was to look
after me, in a way.

The midnight train had to be waved down at Maitland for me. That would
put me into Jacksonville in the daytime.

As my brother Dick drove the mile with me that night, we approached the
curve in the road that skirts Lake Catherine, and suddenly I saw the
first picture of my visions. I had seen myself upon that curve at night
leaving the village home, bowed down with grief that was more than
common. As it all flashed back to me, I started violently for a minute,
then I moved closer beside Dick as if he could shield me from those
others that were to come. He asked me what was the matter, and I said I
thought I heard something moving down by the lake. He laughed at that,
and we rode on, the lantern showing the road-way, and me keeping as
close to Dick as I could. A little, humped-up, shabby-backed trunk was
behind us in the buckboard. I was on my way from the village, never to
return to it as a real part of the town.

Jacksonville made me know that I was a little colored girl. Things were
all about the town to point this out to me. Streetcars and stores and
then talk I heard around the school. I was no longer among the white
people whose homes I could barge into with a sure sense of welcome.
These white people had funny ways. I could tell that even from a
distance. I didn't get a piece of candy or a bag of crackers just for
going into a store in Jacksonville as I did when I went into Galloway's
or Hill's at Maitland, or Joe Clarke's in Eatonville.

Around the school I was an awful bother. The girls complained that they
couldn't get a chance to talk without me turning up somewhere to be in
the way. I broke up many good "He said" conferences just by showing up.
It was not my intention to do so. What I wanted was for it to go full
steam ahead and let me listen. But that didn't seem to please. I was not
in the "he said" class, and they wished I would kindly please stay out
of the way. My underskirt was hanging, for instance. Why didn't I go
some place and fix it? My head looked like a hoo-raw's nest. Why didn't
I go comb it? If I took time enough to match my stockings, I wouldn't
have time to be trying to listen in on grown folk's business. These
venerable old ladies were anywhere from fifteen to eighteen.

In the classroom I got along splendidly. The only difficulty was that I
was rated as sassy. I just had to talk back at established authority and
that established authority hated backtalk worse than barbed-wire pie. My
brother was asked to speak to me in addition to a licking or two. But on
the whole, things went along all right. My immediate teachers were
enthusiastic about me. It was the guardians of study-hour and prayer
meetings who felt that their burden was extra hard to bear.

School in Jacksonville was one of those twilight things. It was not
dark, but it lacked the bold sunlight that I craved. I worshipped two of
my teachers and loved gingersnaps with cheese, and sour pickles. But I
was deprived of the loving pine, the lakes, the wild violets in the
woods and the animals I used to know. No more holding down first base on
the team with my brothers and their friends. Just a jagged hole where my
home used to be.

At times, the girls of the school were lined up two and two and taken
for a walk. On one of these occasions, I had an experience that set my
heart to fluttering. I saw a woman sitting on a porch who looked at a
distance like Mama. Maybe it _was_ Mama! Maybe she was not dead at all.
They had made some mistake. Mama had gone off to Jacksonville and they
thought that she was dead. The woman was sitting in a rocking-chair just
like Mama always did. It must be Mama! But before I came abreast of the
porch in my rigid place in line, the woman got up and went inside. I
wanted to stop and go in. But I didn't even breathe my hope to anyone. I
made up my mind to run away someday and find the house and let Mama know
where I was. But before I did, the hope that the woman really was my
mother passed. I accepted my bereavement.




VII. Jacksonville and After


My sister moped a great deal. She was Papa's favorite child, and I am
certain that she loved him more than anything on earth, my baby brother
Everett being next in her love. So two months after I came to school,
Sarah said that she was sick and wanted to go home. Papa arranged for
her to leave school.

That had very tragic results for Sarah. In a week or two after she left
me in Jacksonville, she wrote back that Papa had married again. That
hurt us all, somehow. But it was worse for Sarah, for my stepmother must
have resented Papa's tender indulgence for his older daughter. It was
not long before the news came back that she had insisted that Papa put
Sarah out of the house. That was terrible enough, but it was not
satisfactory to Papa's new wife. Papa must go over and beat Sarah with a
buggy whip for commenting on the marriage happening so soon after Mama's
death. Sarah must be driven out of town. So Sarah just married and went
down on the Manater River to live. She took Everett with her. She
probably left more behind her than she took away.

What Papa and Sarah felt during these times, I have never heard from
either of them. I know that it must have plowed very deep with both of
them.

God, how I longed to lay my hands upon my stepmother's short, pudgy
hulk! No gun, no blade, no club would do. Just flesh against flesh and
leave the end of the struggle to the hidden Old Women who sit and spin.

Papa had honored his first-born daughter from the day of her birth. If
she was not foretold, she was certainly forewished. Three sons had come,
and he was glad of their robust health, but after the first one he
wanted a little girl child around the house. For several years then, it
had been a wish deferred. So that when she did arrive, small,
undersized, but a girl, his joy was boundless. He changed and washed her
diapers. She was not allowed to cry as an infant, and when she grew old
enough to let on, her wishes did not go unregarded. What was it Papa's
girl-baby wanted to eat? She wanted two dolls instead of one? Bless her
little heart! A cheeky little rascal! Papa would bring it when he came.
The two oldest boys had to get out of their beds late one night and stay
outdoors for an hour or more because little three-year-old Sarah woke up
and looked out of the window and decided that she wanted to see the
stars outdoors. It was no use for the boys to point out that she could
see stars aplenty through the window. Papa thundered, "Get up and take
dat young'un outdoors! Let her look at de stars just as long as she
wants to. And don't let me hear a mutter out of you. If I hear one
_grumble_, I'll drop your britches below your hocks and bust de hide on
you!"

Sarah was diminutive. Even when she was small, you could tell that she
never would grow much. She would be short like Papa's mother, and her
own mother. She had something of both of them in her face. Papa
delighted in putting the finest and the softest shoes on her dainty
feet; the fluffiest white organdy dresses with the stiffest ribbon
sashes. "Dat's a switching little gal!" He used to gloat.

She had music lessons on the piano. It did not matter that she was not
interested in music, it was part of his pride. The parlor organ was
bought in Jacksonville and shipped down as a surprise for Sarah on her
tenth birthday. She had a gold ring for her finger, and gold earrings.
When I begged for music lessons, I was told to dry up before he bust the
hide on my back.

If the rest of us wanted to sneak jelly or preserves and get off without
a licking, the thing to do was to get Sarah in on it. Papa might ignore
the whipping-purge that Mama was organizing until he found that Sarah
was mixed up in it. Then he would lay aside the county newspaper which
he was given to reading, and shout at Mama, "Dat'll do! Dat'll do, Lulu!
I can't stand all dat racket around de place." Of course, if Mama was
really in the mood, Papa's protest would change no plans, but at times
it would, and we would all escape because of Sarah. I have seen Papa
actually snatch the switch out of Mama's hand when she got to Sarah. But
if Mama thought that the chastisement was really in order, she would
send out to the peach tree for another one and the whipping would go
right on. Papa knew better than to stick his bill in when Mama was
really determined. Under such circumstances, Sarah was certain to get
some sort of a present on Monday when Papa came back from Sanford.

He had never struck her in his life. She never got but one from him, and
that was this cruel thing at the instigation of our stepmother. Neither
Papa nor Sarah ever looked at each other in the same way again, nor at
the world. Nor did they look like the same people to the world who knew
them. Their heads hung down and they studied the ground under their feet
too much.

As for me, looking on, it made a tiger out of me. It did not matter so
much to me that Sarah was Papa's favorite. I got my joys in other ways,
and so, did not miss his petting. I do not think that I ever really
wanted it. It made me miserable to see Sarah look like that. And six
years later I paid the score off in a small way. It was on a Monday
morning, six years after Sarah's heartbreak, that my stepmother
threatened to beat me for my impudence, after vainly trying to get Papa
to undertake the job. I guess that the memory of the time that he had
struck Sarah at his wife's demand, influenced Papa and saved me. I do
not think that she considered that a changed man might be in front of
her. I do not think that she thought that I would resist in the presence
of my father after all that had happened and had shown his lack of will.
I do not think that she even thought that she could whip me if I
resisted. She did think, if she thought at all, that all she had to do
was to start on me, and Papa would be forced to jump in and finish up
the job to her satisfaction in order to stay in her good graces. Old
memories of her power over him told her to assert herself, and she
pitched in. She called me a sassy, impudent heifer, announced that she
was going to take me down a buttonhole lower, and threw a bottle at my
head. The bottle came sailing slowly through the air and missed me
easily. She never should have missed.

The primeval in me leaped to life. Ha! This was the very corn I wanted
to grind. Fight! Not having to put up with what she did to us through
Papa! Direct action and everything up to me. I looked at her hard. And
like everybody else's enemy, her looks, her smells, her sounds were all
mixed up with her doings, and she deserved punishment for them as well
as her acts. The feelings of all those six years were pressing inside me
like steam under a valve. I didn't have any thoughts to speak of. Just
the fierce instinct of flesh on flesh--me kicking and beating on her
pudgy self--those two ugly false teeth in front--her dead on the
floor--grinning like a dead dog in the sun. Consequences be damned! If I
died, let me die with my hands soaked in her blood. I wanted her blood,
and plenty of it. That is the way I went into the fight, and that is the
way I fought it.

She had the advantage of me in weight, that was all. It did not seem to
do her a bit of good. Maybe she did not have the guts, and certainly she
underestimated mine. She gave way before my first rush and found herself
pinned against the wall, with my fists pounding at her face without
pity. She scratched and clawed at me, but I felt nothing at all. In a
few seconds, she gave up. I could see her face when she realized that I
meant to kill her. She spat on my dress, then, and did what she could to
cover up from my renewed fury. She had given up fighting except for
trying to spit in my face, and I did not intend for her to get away.

She yelled for Papa, but that was no good. Papa was disturbed, no doubt
of it, but he wept and fiddled in the door and asked me to stop, while
her head was traveling between my fist and the wall, and I wished that
my fist had weighed a ton. She tried to do something. She pulled my hair
and scratched at me. But I had come up fighting with boys. Hair-pulling
didn't worry me.

She screamed that she was going to get Papa's pistol and kill me. She
tried to get across the room to the dresser drawer, but I knew I
couldn't let that happen. So the fight got hotter. A friend of hers who
weighed over two hundred pounds lived across the street. She heard the
rumpus and came running. I visualized that she would try to grab me, and
I realized that my stepmother would get her chance. So I grabbed my
stepmother by the collar and dragged her to a hatchet against the wall
and managed to get hold of it. As Mrs. G. waddled through the
living-room door, I hollered to her to get back, and let fly with that
hatchet with all that my right arm would do. It struck the wall too
close to her head to make her happy. She reeled around and rolled down
those front steps yelling that I had gone crazy. But she never came back
and the fight went on. I was so mad when I saw my adversary sagging to
the floor I didn't know what to do. I began to scream with rage. I had
not beaten more than two years out of her yet. I made up my mind to
stomp her, but at last Papa came to, and pulled me away.

I had a scratch on my neck and two or three on my arms, but that was
all. I was not at all pacified. She owed me four more years. Besides
there was her spit on the front of her dress. I promised myself to pay
her for the old and the new too, the first chance I got. Years later,
after I had graduated from Barnard and I was doing research, I found out
where she was. I drove twenty miles to finish the job, only to find out
that she was a chronic invalid. She had an incurable sore on her neck. I
couldn't tackle her under such circumstances, so I turned back, all
frustrated inside. All I could do was to wish that she had a lot more
neck to rot.

The fight brought things to a head between Papa and his wife. She said
Papa had to have me arrested, but Papa said he didn't have to do but two
things--die and stay black. And then, he would never let me sleep in
jail a night. She took the matter to the church and the people laughed.
Most of them had been praying for something like that to happen. They
were annoyed because she didn't get her head stomped. The thing rocked
on for a few months. She demanded that Papa "handle" some of the sisters
of the church who kept cracking her about it, but he explained that
there was nothing he could do. They were old friends of my mother's and
it was natural for them to feel as they did. There were two or three hot
word-battles on the church grounds, and then she left Papa with the
understanding that he could get her back when he had made "them
good-for-nothing nigger wimmens know dat she was Mrs. Reverend." So she
went on off with her lip hung down lower than a mason's apron.

Papa went to see a lawyer and he said to send her clothes to her if she
had not come back after three weeks. And that is just what Papa did. She
"lawed" for a divorce and he let it slide. The black Anne Boleyn had
come at last to the morning and the axe. The simile ends there. The King
really had an axe. It has always seemed to me under the provocation a
sad lack that preachers could not go armed like that. Perhaps it is just
as well that it has been arranged so that the state has taken over the
business of execution. Not every skunk in the world rates a first-class
killing. Hanging is too good for some folks. They just need their
behinds kicked. And that is all that woman rated. But, you understand,
this was six years after I went up to Jacksonville. I put it in right
here because I was thinking so hard.

But back to Jacksonville and the school. I had gotten used to the grits
and gravy for breakfast, had found out how not to be bored at
prayer-meeting--you could always write notes if you didn't go to
sleep--and how to poke fun at acidulated disciplinarians, and how to
slip through a crack in the fence and cross the street to the grocery
store for gingersnaps and pickles which were forbidden between meals. I
had generally made a sort of adjustment. Lessons had never worried me,
though arithmetic still seemed an unnecessary evil.

Then, one day, the Second in Command sent for me to tell me that my room
and board had not been paid. What was I going to do about it? I
certainly didn't know. Then she gave me a free-hand opinion of the
Reverend John Hurston that Chief Justice Taney could not have surpassed.
Every few days after that I was called in and asked what was I going to
do. After a while she did not call me in, she would just yell out of the
window to where I might be playing in the yard. That used to keep me
shrunk up inside. I got so I wouldn't play too hard. The call might come
at any time. My spirits would not have quite so far to fall.

But I stayed out the year, but not because my bills were paid. I was put
to scrubbing down the stair steps every Saturday, and sent to help clean
up the pantry and do what I could in the kitchen after school. Then too,
the city of Jacksonville had a spelling bee in all the Negro schools and
I won it for my school. I received an atlas of the world and a Bible as
prizes, besides so much lemonade and cake that I told President Collier
that I could feel it coming through my skin. He had such a big laugh
that I made up my mind to hurry up and get grown and marry him. For his
part, he didn't seem to know that he had been picked out. In fact, he
seemed to be quite patient about it. Never tried to hurry my growth at
all, and never mentioned the matter. He acted like he was satisfied with
some stale, old, decrepit woman of twenty-five or so. It used to drive
me mad. I comforted myself with the thought that he would cry his eyes
out when I would suddenly appear before him, tall and beautiful and
disdainful and make him beg me for a whole week before I would give in
and marry him, and of course fire all of those old half-dead teachers
who were hanging around him. Maybe they would drown themselves in the
St. John's River. Oh, I might stop them just before they jumped in. I
never did decide what to do with all my disgruntled rivals after I
dragged them away from the river. They could rake up the yard, but a
yard somewhere a long way from where _he_ was. That would be better for
everybody. A yard in Africa would be just dandy. They would naturally
die of old age in a week or so.

I wrote some letters from him to me and read his tender words with tears
in my eyes. I made us a secret post office behind the laundry. One day
his letters to me would get written and buried, and the next day I would
dig them up and read them. Then I would answer them and assure him he
did not have to worry. I meant to marry him as soon as they let me put
on long dresses, which I hoped would not be too far off. A month or two
more ought to age me quite a bit.

This torrid love affair was conducted from a hole in the ground behind
the laundry and came to an abrupt end. One of those same hateful
teachers who was mean enough to get grown before I did, reported to my
husband-in-reserve that it was I who put a wet brick in her bed while
she was presiding over study hour in the chapel. So much fuss over
nothing! Just a brick that had been soaked overnight in a rain-barrel
placed between the sheets near the foot of the bed, and they made as
much fuss about it as if ice cream had been abolished.

It was true that it was a coldish spell of weather in February and all
that. But what fun would a cold brick be in June? I ask you!

Oh, the perfidy, the deceit of the man to whom I had given my love and
all my lovely letters in the hole behind the laundry! He listened to
this unholy female and took me into his office and closed the door. He
did not fold me lovingly in his arms and say, "Darling! I understand.
You did it all for me." No! The blind fool lifted up my skirt in the
rear and spanked a prospective tall, beautiful lady's pants. So
improper, to say the least! I made up my mind to get even. I _wouldn't_
marry him now, no matter how hard he begged me. Insult me, would he?
Turning up _my_ dress just like I was some child! Ah, he would pine for
my love and never get it. In addition to letting him starve for my love,
I was going off and die in a pitiful way. Very lonely and dramatic at
the same time, however.

The whole thing was so unjust. She did _not_ see me put that brick in
her bed. And if the duty-girl did look back over her shoulder and see me
coming down the hall with the brick in my hand, what kind of a decent
person is that? Going around and looking backwards at people! When I
would be grown and sit up in my fine palace eating beef stew and fried
chicken, that duty-girl was going to be out in my backyard gnawing
door-knobs.

Time passed. Spring came up the St. John's River from down the
Everglades way, and school closed in a blaze of programs, cantatas and
speeches, and trunks went bumping downstairs. My brother hurried off to
take a job. I was to stay there and Papa would send for me.

I kept looking out of the window so that I could see Papa when he came
up the walk to the office. But nobody came for me. Weeks passed, and
then a letter came. Papa said that the school could adopt me. The Second
in Command sent for me and told me about it. She said that she had no
place for a girl so young, and besides she was too busy to bring up any
children.

It was crumbling news for me. It impressed every detail of the office
and her person on my mind. I noted more clearly than ever the thick
gray-black ropes of her half-Negro, half-white hair, her thin lips, and
white-folks-looking nose. All in all, her yellow skin browned down by
age looked like it had been dried between the leaves of a book. I had
always been afraid of her sharp tongue and quick hand, but this day she
seemed to speak a little softer than usual, and in half-finished
sentences, as if she had her tender parts to hide. She took out her
purse and handed me some money. She was going to pay my way home by the
boat, and I must tell my father to send her her dollar and a half.

The boat trip was thrilling on the side-wheeler _City of Jacksonville_.
The water life, the smothering foliage that draped the river banks, the
miles of purple hyacinths, all thrilled me anew. The wild thing was back
in the jungle.

The curtain of trees along the river shut out the world so that it
seemed that the river and the chugging boat was all that there was, and
that pleased me a lot. Inside, the boat was glittering with shiny brass.

White-clad waiters dashed about with trays for the first-class upstairs.
There was an almost ceaseless rattle of dishes. Red carpet underfoot.
Big, shiny lights overhead. White men in greasy overalls popping up from
down below now and then to lean on the deck rail for a breath of air. A
mulatto waiter with a patch over one eye who kept bringing me slabs of
pie and cake and chicken and steak sandwiches, and sent me astern to eat
them. Things clattered up the gang plank, and then more things rumbled
down into the hold. People on the flimsy docks waving goodbye to anybody
who wanted to wave back. Wild hogs appearing now and then along the
shore. 'Gators, disturbed by the wash, slipping off of palm logs into
the stream. Schools of mullet breaking water now and then. Flocks of
waterfowl disturbed at the approach of the steamer, then settling back
again to feed. Catfish as long as a man pacing the boat like porpoises
for kitchen scraps. A group of turpentine hands with queer haircuts, in
blue overalls with red handkerchiefs around their necks, who huddled
around a tall, black man with a guitar round his neck. They ate out of
shoe-boxes and sang between drinks out of a common bottle. A
stocking-foot woman was with them with a dirk in her garter. Her new
shoes were in a basket beside her. She dipped snuff and kept missing the
spittoon. The glitter of brass and the red carpet made her nervous. The
captain kept passing through and pulling my hair gently and asking me to
spell something, and kept being surprised when I did. He called out
"separate" when I was getting off at Sanford, and I spelled it back at
him as I went down the gangplank. I left him leaning on the rail and
looking like he had some more words he wanted spelled. Then he threw a
half dollar that fell just ahead of me and smiled goodbye.

The day after I started from Jacksonville, the boat docked at Sanford,
with the town of Enterprise a shadowy suspicion across the five miles of
Lake Monroe. I had to go to the railroad station to take the train for
the fifteen miles to Maitland.

The conductor and the whole crew knew me from seeing me with my father
so often. They remembered me for another reason, too, which embarrassed
me a lot. This very train and crew had been my first experience with
railroads. I had seen trains often, but never up so close as that day
about four years before when Papa had decided to take me up to Sanford
with him. Then I was at the station with Papa and my two oldest
brothers. We heard the train blow, leaving Winter Park, three miles
south. So we picked up our things and moved down from the platform to a
spot beside the track. The train came thundering around Lake Lily, and
snorted up to the station. I was there looking the thing dead in the
face, and it was fixing its one big, mean-looking eye on me. It looked
fit to gnaw me right up. It was truly a most fearsome thing!

The porter swung down and dropped his stool. The conductor in his
eyeglasses stood down, changing greetings with Papa, Mr. Wescott, the
station-agent, and all of the others whom he knew from long association.

"All aboard!" The train only hesitated at Maitland. It didn't really
stop.

This thing was bad, but I saw a chance to save myself yet and still. It
did not just have to get me if I moved fast enough.

My father swung up to the platform, and turned around. My brother Bob
had me by the hand and prepared to hand me up. This was the last safe
moment I had. I tore loose from Bob and dashed under the train and out
again. I was going home.

Everybody yelled. The conductor louder than anybody else. "Catch her!
Head her off over there!" The engineer held down his whistle. The
fireman jumped off and took after me. Everybody was after me. It looked
as if the whole world had turned into my enemies. I didn't have a friend
to my name.

"There she goes! Hem her up! Head her off from that barbed-wire fence!"
My own big brother was chasing me as hard as anybody else. My legs were
getting tired and I was winded, but I was running for my life. Brother
Bob headed me off from home, so I doubled back into Galloway's store and
ran behind the counter. Old Harry, Galloway's son, about Bob's age,
grabbed me and pulled me out. I was hauled on board kicking and
screaming to the huge amusement of everybody but me. As soon as I saw
the glamor of the plush and metal of the inside of that coach, I calmed
down. The conductor gave the engineer the high ball and the train
rolled. It didn't hurt a bit. Papa laughed and laughed. The porter
passed through holding his sides. The conductor came to take Papa's
ticket and kept on teasing me about hurting the train's feelings. In a
little while he was back with a glass pistol filled with candy. By the
time I got to Sanford, I was crazy about the train. I just wished they
would quit laughing at me. The inside of that train was too pretty for
words. It took years for me to get over loving it.

So when I climbed on board that morning--some four years later, I had
that look of "Get away from me, porter! Don't you see I'm too big to be
helped on trains"--they all smiled in memory of our first meeting, and
let it go at that. The porter was a member of Papa's church in Sanford,
and sat beside me when he was not busy.

So I came back to my father's house which was no longer home. The very
walls were gummy with gloom. Too much went on to take the task of
telling it. Papa's children were in his way, because they were too much
trouble to his wife. Ragged, dirty clothes and hit-and-miss meals. The
four older children were definitely gone for good. One by one, we four
younger ones were shifted to the homes of Mama's friends.

Perhaps it could be no other way. Certainly no other way was open to a
man who loved peace and ease the way my father did.

My stepmother was sleeping in Mama's featherbed. The one thing which
Mama had brought from her father's house. She had said it must be mine.
To see this interloper piled up in my mother's bed was too much for me
to bear. I had to do something. The others had been miserable about it
all along. I rallied my brother Joel to my aid and we took the mattress
off of the bed.

Papa had told her that it was his, so he was faced with the dilemma. I
stood my ground, and the other children present backed me. She thought a
good beating for me ought to settle the ownership once and for all. John
took my part, he was always doing that, dear John, and physical
violence, yes actual bloodshed seemed inevitable for a moment. John and
Papa stood face to face, and Papa had an open knife in his hand.

Then he looked his defiant son in the eyes and dropped his hand. He just
told John to leave home. However, my stepmother had lost her point. She
never was pleasured to rack her bones on Mama's featherbed again. Though
there were plenty of beds for her to sleep in, she hated to take any
dictation at all from us, especially me.

But Papa's shoulders began to get tired. He didn't rear back and strut
like he used to. His well-cut broadcloth, Stetson hats, hand-made
alligator-skin shoes and walking-stick had earned him the title of Big
Nigger with his children. Behind his back, of course. He didn't put and
take with his cane any more. He just walked along. It didn't take him
near so long to put on his hat.

So my second vision picture came to be. I had seen myself homeless and
uncared for. There was a chill about that picture which used to wake me
up shivering. I had always thought I would be in some lone, arctic
wasteland with no one under the sound of my voice. I found the cold, the
desolate solitude, and earless silences, but I discovered that all that
geography was within me. It only needed time to reveal it.

My vagrancy had begun in reality. I knew that. There was an end to my
journey and it had happiness in it for me. It was certain and sure. But
the way! Its agony was equally certain. It was before me, and no one
could spare me my pilgrimage. The rod of compelment was laid to my back.
I must go the way.




VIII. Backstage and the Railroad


There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams
dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around
the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground
caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in
shoes.

This wordless feeling went with me from the time I was ten years old
until I achieved a sort of competence around twenty. Naturally, the
first five years were the worst. Things and circumstances gave life a
most depressing odor.

The five years following my leaving the school at Jacksonville were
haunted. I was shifted from house to house of relatives and friends and
found comfort nowhere. I was without books to read most of the time,
except where I could get hold of them by mere chance. That left no room
for selection. I was miserable, and no doubt made others miserable
around me, because they could not see what was the matter with me, and I
had no part in what interested them.

I was in school off and on, which gave me vagrant peeps into the light,
but these intervals lacked peace because I had no guarantee that they
would last. I was growing and the general thought was that I could bring
in something. This book-reading business was a hold-back and an
unrelieved evil. I could not do very much, but look at so-and-so. She
was nursing for some good white people. A dollar a week and most of her
clothes. People who had no parents could not afford to sit around on
school benches wearing out what clothes they had.

One of the most serious objections to me was that having nothing, I
still did not know how to be humble. A child in my place ought to
realize I was lucky to have a roof over my head and anything to eat at
all. And from their point of view, they were right. From mine, my
stomach pains were the least of my sufferings. I wanted what they could
not conceive of. I could not reveal myself for lack of expression, and
then for lack of hope of understanding, even if I could have found the
words. I was not comfortable to have around. Strange things must have
looked out of my eyes like Lazarus after his resurrection.

So I was forever shifting. I walked by my corpse. I smelt it and felt
it. I smelt the corpses of those among whom I must live, though they did
not. They were as much at home with theirs as death in a tomb.

Gradually, I came to the point of attempting self-support. It was a
glorious feeling when it came to me. But the actual working out of the
thing was not so simple as the concept. I was about fourteen then.

For one thing, I really was young for the try. Then my growth was
retarded somewhat so that I looked younger than I really was. Housewives
would open the door at my ring and look me over. No, they wanted someone
old enough to be responsible. No, they wanted someone strong enough to
do the work, and so on like that. Did my mother know I was out looking
for work? Sometimes in bed at night I would ask myself that very
question and wonder.

But now and then someone would like my looks and give me a try. I did
very badly because I was interested in the front of the house, not the
back. No matter how I resolved, I'd get tangled up with their reading
matter, and lose my job. It was not that I was lazy, I just was not
interested in dusting and dishwashing. But I always made friends with
the children if there were any. That was not intentional. We just got
together somehow. That would be fun, but going out to play did not help
much on jobs.

One woman liked me for it. She had two little girls, seven and five. I
was hired as an upstairs maid. For two or three days things went on very
well. The president of the kitchen was a fat, black old woman who had
nursed the master of the house and was a fixture. Nobody is so powerful
in a Southern family as one of these family fixtures. No matter who
hires you, the fixture can fire you. They roam all over the house
bossing everybody from the boss on down. Nobody must upset Cynthia or
Rhoda or Beckey. If you can't get along with the house president you
can't keep the job.

And Miz Cally was President in Full in this house. She looked at me
cut-eye first thing because the madam had hired me without asking her
about it. She went into her grumble just as soon as I stuck my head in
the kitchen door. She looked at me for a moment with her hands on her
hips and burst out, "Lawd a'mercy! Miz Alice must done took you to
raise! She don't need no more young'uns round de place. Dis house needs
a woman to give aid and assistance."

She showed her further disapproval by vetoing every move I made. She was
to show me where to find the aprons, and she did. Just as soon as I
pulled open the drawer, she bustled me right away from it with her hips.

"Don't you go pulling and hauling through _my_ drawers! I keeps things
in they place. You take de apron I give you and git on up dem stairs."

I didn't get mad with her. I took the apron and put it on with quite a
bit of editing by Sister Cally, and went on up the back stairs. As I
emerged on the upper floor, two pairs of gray-blue eyes were ranged on
me.

"Hello!" said the two little girls in chorus.

"Hello!" I answered back.

"You going to work for us?" the taller one asked, and fell in beside me.

"Yeah." Maybe I cracked a smile or something, for both of them took a
hand on either side and we went on into the room where Mrs. Alice was
waiting for me to show me what to do and how to do it.

She was a very beautiful woman in her middle twenties, and she was
combing out her magnificent hair. She looked at me through the
looking-glass, and we both started to grin for some reason or another.

She showed me how to make beds and clean up. There were three rooms up
there, but she told me not to try to do too much at a time. Just keep
things looking sort of neat. Then she dressed and left the house. I got
things straightened out with Helen and Genevieve acting as convoy at
every step. Things went all right till I got to the bathroom, then
somehow or other we three found ourselves in a tussle. Screaming,
laughing, splashing water and tussling, when a dark shadow filled up the
door. Heinz could have wrung enough vinegar out of Cally's look to run
his pickle works.

"You going 'way from here!" she prophesied, and shook her head so
vigorously that her head rag wagged. She was going to get me gone from
there!

"No!" screamed Helen, the littlest girl, and held on to me.

"No! No! No!" Genevieve shrieked.

"Humph! You just wait till yo' daddy come home!" Cally gloomed. "I ain't
never seen no sich caper like dis since I been borned in dis world."
Then she stumped on back downstairs.

"Don't you go," Genevieve begged. "I like you."

"Me too, I like you too," Helen chorused. "If you go home, we'll go with
you."

I had to wait on the table at dinner that night, with my apron too long
for me. Mrs. Alice and the children were giving a glowing account of me.
The boss glanced at me tolerantly a time or two. Helen would grab hold
of my clothes every time I passed her chair, and play in the vegetable
dishes when I offered them to her, until her father threatened to spank
her hands, but he looked up at me and smiled a little. He looked to me
like an aged old soul of thirty-five or so.

Cally kept on cracking the kitchen door to see how I was getting along
in there, and I suspect to give the boss a view of her disapproving
face.

Things rocked on for a week or two. Mrs. Alice went out more and more to
bridge clubs and things like that. She didn't care whether I made up the
rooms or not so long as the children were entertained. She would come in
late in the afternoon and tell Cally to run upstairs and straighten up a
bit.

"What's dat gal been doing?" Cally would growl. Dat gal she was talking
about had been off to the park with the children, or stretched out on
the floor telling stories or reading aloud from some of their story
books. Their mother had been free to go about her business, and a good
time was had by all--except Cally.

Before a month passed, things came to a head: Cally burst into the
dining-room one night and flew all over the place. The boss had to get
somebody to do his cooking. She was tired of doing all the work. She
just wasn't going to cook and look after things downstairs and then
troop upstairs and do the work somebody else was getting paid for. She
was old. Her joints hurt her so bad till she couldn't rest of nights.
They really needed to get somebody to help.

Mrs. Alice sat there stark, still and quiet. The boss looked at her,
then at old Cally, and then at me.

Finally, he said, "I never meant for you to work yourself down like
that, Aunt Cally. You've done more than your share."

"'Deed, Gawd knows I is!" Cally agreed belligerently, rolling her white
eyeballs in my direction.

"Isn't Zora taking care of the upstairs? I thought that was what she was
hired for," the boss asked, and looked at his wife.

"Taking care of what?" Cally snorted. "'Deed, I ain't lying, Mr. Ed. I
wouldn't tell a lie on nobody--"

"I know you wouldn't, Auntie," he soothed.

"Dat gal don't do a living thing round dis house but play all day long
wid these young'uns. Den I has to scuffle up dem stairs and do round,
cause effen I didn't, dis here place would be like a hawg-pen. Dat's
what it would. I _has_ to go and do it, Mr. Ed, else it wouldn't never
git done. And I'm sick and _tired_. I'm gwine 'way from here!"

"Naw, Cally, you can't do it. You been with me all my life, and I don't
aim to let you go. Zora will have to go. These children are too big now
to need a nurse."

What did he say that for? My public went into sound and action. Mrs.
Alice was letting a tear or two slip. Otherwise she was as still as
stone. But Helen scrambled out of her chair with her jaws latched back
to the last notch. She stumbled up against me and swung on. Genevieve
screamed "No!" in a regular chant like a cheer leader, and ran to me,
too. Their mother never raised her head. The boss turned to her.

"Darling, why don't you quiet these children?" he asked gently.

"No! No! No! Zora can't go!" my cheering squad yelled, slinging tears
right and left.

"Shut up!" the boss grated at the children and put his hand on the table
and scuffled his feet as if he meant to rush off for the hairbrush.
"I'll be on you in one more minute! Hush!"

It was easy to see that his heart was not in any spanking. His frown was
not right for it. The yelling kept right on. Cally flounced on back to
the kitchen, and he got up and hauled the children upstairs. In a minute
he called his wife and shut the bedroom door.

Well, then, I didn't have a job any more. I didn't have money either,
but I had bought a pair of shoes.

But I was lucky in a way. Somebody told the woman I was staying with
about another job, so I went to see about it, and the lady took me. She
was sick in the bed, and she had a little girl three years old, but this
child did not shine like Helen and Genevieve. She was sort of
old-looking in the face.

I didn't like that house. It frowned at me just as soon as I crossed the
doorsill. It was a big house with plenty of things in it but the rooms
just sat across the hall from each other and made gloomy faces back and
forth.

I was soon out of a job again. I got out of many more. Sometimes I
didn't suit the people. Sometimes the people didn't suit me. Sometimes
my insides tortured me so that I was restless and unstable. I just was
not the type. I was doing none of the things I wanted to do. I had to do
numerous uninteresting things I did not want to do, and it was tearing
me to pieces.

I wanted family love and peace and a resting place. I wanted books and
school. When I saw more fortunate people of my own age on their way to
and from school, I would cry inside and be depressed for days, until I
learned how to mash down on my feelings and numb them for a spell. I
felt crowded in on, and hope was beginning to waver.

The third vision of aimless wandering was on me as I had seen it. My
brother Dick had married and sent for me to come to Sanford and stay
with him. I got hopeful for school again. He sent me a ticket, and I
went. I didn't want to go, though. As soon as I got back to Sanford, my
father ordered me to stay at his house.

It was no more than a month after I got there before my stepmother and I
had our fight.

I found my father a changed person. The bounce was gone from the man.
The wreck of his home and the public reaction to it was telling on him.
In spite of all, I was sorry for him and that added to my resentment
towards his wife.

In all fairness to her, she probably did the best she could, according
to her lights. It was just tragic that her light was so poor. A little
more sense would have told her that the time and manner of her marriage
to my father had killed any hope of success from the start. No warning
bell inside of her caused her to question the wisdom of an arrangement
made over so many fundamental stumbling stones. My father certainly
could not see the consequences, for he had never had to consider them
too seriously. Mama had always been there to do that. Suddenly he must
have realized with inward terror that Lucy was not there any more. This
was not just another escapade which Mama would knot his head for in
private and smooth out publicly. It had rushed him along to where he did
not want to go already and the end was not in sight. This new wife had
wormed her way out of her little crack in the world to become what
looked to her like a great lady, and the big river was too much for her
craft. Instead of the world dipping the knee to the new-made Mrs.
Reverend, they were spitting on her intentions and calling her a
storm-buzzard. Certainly if my father had not built up a strong
following years before, he could not have lasted three months. As it
was, his foundations rotted from under him, and seven years saw him
wrecked. He did not defend her and establish her. It might have been
because he was not the kind of a man who could live without his friends,
and his old friends, male and female, were the very ones who were
leading the attack to disestablish her. Then, too, a certain amount of
the prestige every wife enjoys arises out of where the man got her from
and how. She lacked the comfort of these bulwarks too. She must have
decided that if she could destroy his children she would be safe, but
the opposite course would have been the only extenuating circumstance in
the eyes of the public. The failure of the project would have been
obvious in a few months or even weeks if Papa had been the kind of man
to meet the conflict with courage. As it was, the misery of the
situation continued for years. He was dragging around like a stepped-on
worm. My brief appearance on the scene acted like a catalyzer. A few
more months and the thing fell to pieces for good.

I could not bear the air for miles around. It was too personal and
pressing, and humid with memories of what used to be.

So I went off to another town to find work. It was the same as at home
so far as the dreariness and lack of hope and blunted impulses were
concerned. But one thing did happen that lifted me up. In a pile of
rubbish I found a copy of Milton's complete works. The back was gone and
the book was yellowed. But it was all there. So I read Paradise Lost and
luxuriated in Milton's syllables and rhythms without ever having heard
that Milton was one of the greatest poets of the world. I read it
because I liked it.

I worked through the whole volume and then I put it among my things.
When I was supposed to be looking for work, I would be stretched out
somewhere in the woods reading slowly so that I could understand the
words. Some of them I did not. But I had read so many books that my
reading vocabulary at least was not too meager.

A young woman who wanted to go off on a trip asked me to hold down her
job for two months. She worked in a doctor's office and all I had to do
was to answer the telephone and do around a little.

The doctor thought that I would not be suitable at first, but he had to
have somebody right away so he took a deep breath and said he'd try me.
We got along very well indeed after the first day. I became so
interested and useful that he said if his old girl did not come back
when she promised, he was going to see to it that I was trained for a
practical nurse when I was a bit older.

But just at that time I received a letter from Bob, my oldest brother.
He had just graduated from Medicine and said that he wanted to help me
to go to school. He was sending for me to come to him right away. His
wife sent love. He knew that I was going to love his children. He had
married in his Freshman year in college and had three of them.

Nothing can describe my joy. I was going to have a home again. I was
going to school. I was going to be with my brother! He had remembered me
at last. My five haunted years were over!

I shall never forget the exaltation of my hurried packing. When I got on
the train, I said goodbye--not to anybody in particular, but to the
town, to loneliness, to defeat and frustration, to shabby living, to
sterile houses and numbed pangs, to the kind of people I had no wish to
know; to an era. I waved it goodbye and sank back into the cushions of
the seat.

It was near night. I shall never forget how the red ball of the sun hung
on the horizon and raced along with the train for a short space, and
then plunged below the belly-band of the earth. There have been other
suns that set in significance for me, but _that_ sun! It was a book-mark
in the pages of a life. I remember the long, strung-out cloud that
measured it for the fall.

But I was due for more frustration. There was to be no school for me
right away. I was needed around the house. My brother took me for a walk
and explained to me that it would cause trouble if he put me in school
at once. His wife would feel that he was pampering me. Just work along
and be useful around the house and he would work things out in time.

This did not make me happy at all. I wanted to get through high school.
I had a way of life inside me and I wanted it with a want that was
twisting me. And now, it seemed I was just as far off as before. I was
not even going to get paid for working this time, and no time off. But
on the other hand, I was with my beloved brother, and the children were
adorable! I was soon wrapped up in them head over heels.

It was get up early in the morning and make a fire in the kitchen range.
Don't make too much noise and wake up my sister-in-law. I must remember
that she was a mother and needed the rest. She had borne my brother's
children and deserved the best that he could do for her, and so on. It
didn't sound just right. I was not the father of those children, and
several months later I found out what was wrong. It came to me in a
flash. She had never borne a child for me, so I did not owe her a thing.
Maybe somebody did, but it certainly wasn't I. My brother was acting as
if I were the father of those children, instead of himself. There was
much more, but my brother is dead and I do not wish even to risk being
unjust to his memory, or unkind to the living. My sister-in-law is one
of the most devoted mothers in the world. She was brave and loyal to my
brother when it took courage to be that way. After all she was married
to him, not I.

But I made an unexpected friend. She was a white woman and poor. She had
children of my own age. Her husband was an electrician. She began to
take an interest in me and to put ideas in my head. I will not go so far
as to say that I was poorly dressed, for that would be bragging. The
best I can say is that I could not be arrested for indecent exposure. I
remember wanting gloves. I had never had a pair, and one of my friends
told me that I ought to have on gloves when I went anywhere. I could not
have them and I was most unhappy. But then, I was not in a position to
buy a handkerchief.

This friend slipped me a message one day to come to her house. We had a
code. Her son would pass and whistle until I showed myself to let him
know I heard. Then he would go on and as soon as I could I would follow.
This particular day, she told me that she had a job for me. I was
delighted beyond words.

"It's a swell job if you can get it, Zora. I think you can. I told my
husband to do all he can, and he thinks he's got it hemmed up for you."

"Oooh! What is it?"

"It is a lady's maid job. She is a singer down at the theater where he
is electrician. She brought a maid with her from up North, but the maid
met up with a lot of colored people and looks like she's going to get
married right off. She don't want the job no more. The lady asked the
men around the theater to get her somebody, and my husband thought about
you and I told him to tell the rest of the men he had just the right
girl for a maid. It seems like she is a mighty nice person."

I was too excited to sit still. I was frightened too, because I did not
know the first thing about being a lady's maid. All I hoped was that the
lady would overlook that part and give me a chance to catch on.

"You got to look nice for that. So I sent Valena down to buy you a
little dress." Valena was her daughter. "It's cheap, but it's neat and
stylish. Go inside Valena's room and try it on."

The dress was a navy blue poplin with a box-pleated skirt and a little
round, white collar. To my own self, I never did look so pretty before.
I put on the dress, and Valena's dark blue felt hat with a rolled brim.
She saw to it that I shined my shoes, and then gave me car-fare and sent
me off with every bit of advice she could think of.

My feet mounted up the golden stairs as I entered the stage door of that
theater. The sounds, the smells, the backstage jumble of things were all
things to bear me up into a sweeter atmosphere. I felt like dancing
towards the dressing-room when it was pointed out to me. But my friend
was walking with me, coaching me how to act, and I had to be as quiet
and sober as could be.

The matinee performance of H. M. S. Pinafore was on, so I was told to
wait. In a little while a tenor and a soprano voice quit singing a duet
and a beautiful blond girl of about twenty-two came hurrying into the
dressing-room. I waited until she went inside and closed the door, then
I knocked and was told to come in.

She looked at me and smiled so hard till she almost laughed.

"Hello, little girl," she chanted. "Where did you come from?"

"Home. I come to see you."

"Oh, you did? That's fine. What did you come to see me about?"

"I come to work for you."

"Work for me?" She threw back her head and laughed. That frightened me a
great deal. Maybe it was all a joke and there was no job after all.
"Doing what?" she caroled on.

"Be your lady's maid."

"You? Why, how old are you?"

"Twenty," I said, and tried to look serious as I had been told. But she
laughed so hard at that, till I forgot and laughed too.

"Oh, no, you are not twenty." She laughed some more, but it was not
scornful laughter. Just bubbling fun.

"Well, eighteen, then," I compromised.

"No, not eighteen, either."

"Well, then, how about sixteen?"

She laughed at that. Instead of frowning in a sedate way as I had been
told, here I was laughing like a fool myself.

"I don't believe you are sixteen, but I'll let it go at that," she said.

"Next birthday. Honest."

"It's all right; you're hired. But let's don't bring this age business
up again. I think I'm going to like you. What is your name?"

I told her, fearing all the time she was going to ask questions about my
family; but she didn't.

"Well, Zora, I pay ten dollars a week and expenses. You think that will
do?"

I almost fell over. Ten dollars each and every week! Was there that much
money in the world sure enough? Com-press-ti-bility!! It wouldn't take
long for me to own a bank at that rate.

"Yes, ma'am!" I shouted.

"Well, change my shoes for me."

She stuck out her foot, and pointed at the pair she wanted to put on. I
got them on with her tickling me in the back. She showed me a white
dress she wanted to change into and I jumped to get it and hook it up.
She touched up her face laughing at me in the mirror and dashed out. I
was crazy about her right then. I washed out her shoelaces from a pair
of white shoes and her stockings, which were on the back of a chair, and
wrung them out in a bath towel for quick drying, and sat down before the
mirror to look at myself. It was truly wonderful!

So I had to examine all the curious cosmetics on the table. I was sort
of trying them out when she came in.

That night, she let me stand in the wings and hear her sing her duet
with the tenor, "Farewell, my own! Light of my life, farewell!" It was
so beautiful to me that she seemed more than human. Everything was
pleasing and exciting. If there was any more to Heaven than this, I
didn't want to see it.

I did not go back home, that is to my brother's house, at all. I was
afraid he would try to keep me. I slept on a cot in the room with
Valena. She was almost as excited as I was, had come down to see me
every night and had met the cast. We were important people, she and I.
Her mother had to make us shut up talking and go to sleep every night.

The end of the enchanted week came and the company was to move on. Miss
M---- whom I was serving asked me about my clothes and luggage. She told
me not to come down to the train with an old dilapidated suitcase for
that would make her ashamed. So the upshot of it was that she advanced
me the money to buy one, and then paid me for the week. I paid my friend
the six dollars which she had spent for my new dress. Valena gave me the
hat, an extra pair of panties and stockings. I bought a comb and brush
and toothbrush, paste, and two handkerchiefs. Miss M---- did not know
when I came down to the station that morning that my new suitcase was
stuffed with newspapers to keep my things from rattling.

The company, a Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire, had its own coach. That
was another glory to dazzle my eyes. The leading man had a valet, and
the contralto had an English maid, both white. I was the only Negro
around. But that did not worry me in the least. I had no chance to be
lonesome, because the company welcomed me like, or as, a new
play-pretty. It did not strike me as curious then. I never even thought
about it. Now, I can see the reason for it.

In the first place, I was a Southerner, and had the map of Dixie on my
tongue. They were all Northerners except the orchestra leader, who came
from Pensacola. It was not that my grammar was bad, it was the idioms.
They did not know of the way an average Southern child, white or black,
is raised on simile and invective. They know how to call names. It is an
everyday affair to hear somebody called a mullet-headed, mule-eared,
wall-eyed, hog-nosed, 'gator-faced, shad-mouthed, screw-necked,
goat-bellied, puzzle-gutted, camel-backed, butt-sprung, battle-hammed,
knock-kneed, razor-legged, box-ankled, shovel-footed, unmated so-and-so!
Eyes looking like skint-ginny nuts, and mouth looking like a dishpan
full of broke-up crockery! They can tell you in simile exactly how you
walk and smell. They can furnish a picture gallery of your ancestors,
and a notion of what your children will be like. What ought to happen to
you is full of images and flavor. Since that stratum of the Southern
population is not given to book-reading, they take their comparisons
right out of the barnyard and the woods. When they get through with you,
you and your whole family look like an acre of totem-poles.

First thing, I was young and green, so the baritone started out teasing
me the first day. I jumped up and told him to stop trying to run the hog
over me! That set everybody off. They teased me all the time just to
hear me talk. But there was no malice in it. If I got mad and spoke my
piece, they liked it even better. I was stuffed with ice-cream sodas and
Coca-cola.

Another reason was that it was fun to them to get hold of somebody whom
they could shock. I was hurt to my heart because the company manager
called me into his dressing-room and asked me how I liked my job. After
I got through telling him how pleased I was, he rushed out with his face
half-made up screaming, "Stop, oh, Zora! Please stop! Shame on you!
Telling me a dirty story like that. Oh! I have never been so shocked in
all my life!"

Heads popped out of dressing-rooms all over. Groans, sad head-shakings
and murmurs of outrage. Sad! Sad! They were glad I had not told them
such a thing. Too bad! Too bad! Not a smile in the crowd. The more I
tried to explain the worse it got. Some locked their doors to shield
their ears from such contamination. Finally Miss M---- broke down and
laughed and told me what the gag was. For a long while nobody could get
me inside a dressing-room outside of Miss M----'s. But that didn't stop
the teasing. They would think up more, like having one of the men
contrive to walk down the aisle with me and then everybody lift shocked
eyebrows, pretend to blush and wink at each other, and sigh, "Zora!
Zora! What would your mother say?" I would be so upset that I wouldn't
know what to do. Maybe they really believed I wasn't nice!

Another sly trick they played on my ignorance was that some of the men
would call me and with a very serious face send me to some of the girls
to ask about the welfare and condition of cherries and spangles. They
would give me a tip and tell me to hurry back with the answer. Some of
the girls would send back word that the men need not worry their heads
at all. They would never know the first thing about the condition of
their cherries and spangles. Some of the girls sent answers full of
double talk which went over my head. The soubrette spoke her mind to the
men about that practice and it stopped.

But none of this had malice in it. Just their idea of good backstage
gags. By the time they stopped, it seemed that I was necessary to
everybody. I was continually stuffed with sweets, nut meats, and
soft-drinks. I was welcome in everybody's coach seat and the girls used
to pitch pennies to see who carried me off to their hotel rooms. We
played games and told stories. They often ordered beer and pretzels, but
nobody offered me a drink. I heard all about their love affairs and
troubles. They were all looking forward to playing or singing leads some
day. Some great personage had raved about all of their performances. The
dirty producers and casting directors just hadn't given them their
chance. Miss M---- finally put a stop to my going off with the others as
soon as she was ready for bed. I had to stay wherever she stayed after
that. She had her own affairs to talk about.

She paid for a course for me in manicuring and I practiced on everybody
until I became very efficient at it. That course came in handy to me
later on.

With all this petting, I became as cocky as a sparrow on Fifth Avenue. I
got a scrapbook, and everybody gave me a picture to put in it. I pasted
each one on a separate page and wrote comments under each picture. This
created a great deal of interest, because some of the comments were
quite pert. They egged me on to elaborate. Then I got another idea. I
would comment on daily doings and post the sheets on the call-board.
This took on right away. The result stayed strictly mine less than a
week because members of the cast began to call me aside and tell me
things to put in about others. It got to be so general that everybody
was writing it. It was just my handwriting, mostly. Then it got beyond
that. Most of the cast ceased to wait for me. They would take a pencil
to the board and set down their own item. Answers to the wise-cracks
would appear promptly and often cause uproarious laughter. They always
started off with either "Zora says" or "The observant reporter of the
Call-board asserts"--Lord, Zora said more _things_! I was continually
astonished, but always amused. There were, of course, some sly digs at
supposedly secret love affairs at times, but no vicious thrusts.
Everybody enjoyed it, even the victims.

When the run came to an end, Miss M---- had a part in another show all
set, but rehearsals would not start for two weeks, so she took me to her
home in Boston and I found out some things which I did not want to know,
particularly.

At times she had been as playful as a kitten. At others, she would be
solemn and moody. She loved her mother excessively, but when she
received those long, wordy letters from her, she read them with a still
face, and tore them up carefully. Then she would be gloomy, and keep me
beside her every minute. Sometimes she would become excessively playful.
It was puzzling to see a person cry awhile and then commence to romp
like a puppy and keep it up for hours. Sometimes she had to have sherry
before she went to bed after a hard romp with me. She invented a game
for us to play in our hotel room. It was known as "Jake." She would take
rouge and paint her face all over a most startling red. Then I must take
eyeshadow and paint myself blue. Blue Jake and Red Jake would then chase
each other into closets, across beds, into bathrooms, with our
sheet-robes trailing around us and tripping us up at odd moments. We
crouched and growled and ambushed each other and laughed and yelled
until we were exhausted.

Then maybe next day she hardly said a word.

While I was with her, she met a wealthy business man of Newark, and I
could tell that she was sunk. It all happened very suddenly, but
gloriously. She told me that now that she was going to be married and
leave the stage, she did not want me to work for anyone else in the
business. In fact, she thought that I should not be working at all. I
ought to be in school. She said she thought I had a mind, and that it
would be a shame for me not to have any further training. She wished
that she herself could go abroad to study, but that was definitely out
of the question, now. The deep reservoir of things inside her gave off a
sigh.

We were in northern Virginia then, and moving towards Baltimore. When we
got there, she inquired about schools, gave me a big bearful hug, and
what little money she could spare and told me to keep in touch with her.
She would do whatever she could to help me out.

That was the way we parted. I had been with her for eighteen months and
though neither of us realized it, I had been in school all that time. I
had loosened up in every joint and expanded in every direction.

I had done some reading. Not as much as before, but more discriminate
reading. The tenor was a Harvard man who had traveled on the Continent.
He always had books along with him, and offered them to me more and
more. The first time I asked to borrow one, he looked at me in a way
that said "What for?" But when he found that I really read it and
enjoyed it, he relaxed and began to hand them to me gruffly. He never
acted as if he liked it, but I knew better. That was just the Harvard in
him.

Then there was the music side. They broke me in to good music, that is,
the classics, if you want to put it that way. There was no conscious
attempt to do this. Just from being around, I became familiar with
Gilbert and Sullivan, and the best parts of the light-opera field. Grand
opera too, for all of the leads had backgrounds of private classical
instruction as well as conservatory training. Even the bit performers
and the chorus had some kind of formal training in voice, and most of
them played the piano. It was not unusual for some of the principals to
drop down at the piano after a matinee performance and begin to sing
arias from grand opera. Sing them with a wistfulness. The arias which
they would sing at the Metropolitan or La Scala as they had once hoped
actively, and still hoped passively even as the hair got thinner and the
hips got heavier. Others, dressed for the street, would drift over and
ease into the singing. Thus I would hear solos, duets, quartets and
sextets from the best-known operas. They would eagerly explain to me
what they were when I asked. They would go on to say how Caruso, Farrar,
Mary Garden, Trentini, Schumann-Heink, Matzenauer and so forth had
interpreted this or that piece, and demonstrate it by singing. Perhaps
that was their trouble. They were not originators, but followers of
originators. Anyway, it was perfectly glorious for me, though I am sure
nobody thought of it that way. I just happened to be there while they
released their inside dreams.

The experience had matured me in other ways. I had seen, I had been
privileged to see folks substituting love for failure of career. I would
listen to one and another pour out their feelings sitting on a stool
backstage between acts and scenes. Then too, I had seen careers filling
up the empty holes left by love, and covering up the wreck of things
internal. Those experiences, though vicarious, made me see things and
think.

And now, at last it was all over. It was not at all clear to me how I
was going to do it, but I was going back to school.

One minute I felt brave and fine about it all. The wish to be back in
school had never left me. But alone by myself and feeling it over, I was
scared. Before this job I had been lonely; I had been bare and bony of
comfort and love. Working with these people I had been sitting by a warm
fire for a year and a half and gotten used to the feel of peace. Now, I
was to take up my pilgrim's stick and go outside again. Maybe it would
be different now. Six of my unhappy visions had passed me and bowed. The
seventh one, the house that needed paint, that had threatened me with so
much suffering that I used to sit up in bed sodden with agony, had
passed. I had fled from it to put on the blue poplin dress. At least
that was not before me any more. I took a firm grip on the only weapon I
had--hope--and set my feet. Maybe everything would be all right from now
on. Maybe. Well, I put on my shoes and I started.




IX. School Again


Back, out walking on fly-paper again. Money was what I needed to get
back in school. I could have saved a lot of money if I had received it.
But theatrical salaries being so uncertain, I did not get mine half the
time. I had it when I had it, but when it was not paid I never worried.
But now I needed it. Miss M---- was having her troubles, trying to help
her folks she informed me by mail, so I never directly asked her for
anything more. I had no resentment, either. It had all been very
pleasant.

I tried waiting on table, and made a good waitress when my mind was on
it, which was not often. I resented being patronized, more than the
monotony of the job; those presumptuous cut-eye looks and supposed-to-be
accidental touches on the thigh to see how I took to things. Men at the
old game of "stealing a feel." People who paid for a quarter meal, left
me a nickel tip, and then stood outside the door and nodded their heads
for me to follow on and hear the rest of the story. But I was lacking in
curiosity. I was not worrying so much about virtue. The thing just did
not call me. There was neither the beauty of love, nor material
advantage in it for me. After all, what is the use in having swine
without pearls? Some educated men sat and talked about the things I was
interested in, but if I seemed to listen, looked at me as much to say,
"What would that mean to you?"

Then in the midst of other difficulties, I had to get sick. Not a
sensible sickness for poor folks to have. No, I must get down with
appendicitis and have to have an operation right away. So it was the
free ward of the Maryland General Hospital for me.

When I was taken up to the amphitheatre for the operation I went up
there placing a bet with God. I did not fear death. Nobody would miss me
very much, and I had no treasures to leave behind me, so I would not go
out of life looking backwards on that account. But I bet God that if I
lived, I would try to find out the vague directions whispered in my ears
and find the road it seemed that I must follow. How? When? Why? What?
All those answers were hidden from me.

So two o'clock that day when they dressed me for surgery and took me up
there in that room with the northern light and many windows, I stepped
out of the chair before the nurse could interfere, walked to a window
and took a good look out over Baltimore and the world as far as I could
see, resigned myself to fate and, unaided, climbed upon the table, and
breathed deeply when the ether cone was placed over my nose.

I scared the doctor and the nurses by not waking up until nine o'clock
that night, but otherwise I was all right. I was alive, so I had to win
my bet with God.

Soon, I had another waitress's job, trying to save money again, but I
was only jumping up and down in my own foot-tracks.

I tried several other things but always I had that feeling that you have
in a dream of trying to run, and sinking to your knees at every step in
soft sticky mud. And this mud not only felt obscure to my feet, it
smelled filthy to my nose. How to pull out?

How then did I get back to school? I just went. I got tired of trying to
get the money to go. My clothes were practically gone. Nickeling and
dimering along was not getting me anywhere. So I went to the night high
school in Baltimore and that did something for my soul.

There I met the man who was to give me the key to certain things. In
English, I was under Dwight O. W. Holmes. There is no more dynamic
teacher anywhere under any skin. He radiates newness and nerve and says
to your mind, "There is something wonderful to behold just ahead. Let's
go see what it is." He is a pilgrim to the horizon. Anyway, that is the
way he struck me. He made the way clear. Something about his face killed
the drabness and discouragement in me. I felt that the thing could be
done.

I turned in written work and answered questions like everybody else, but
he took no notice of me particularly until one night in the study of
English poets he read Kubla Khan. You must get him to read it for you
sometime. He is not a pretty man, but he has the face of a scholar, not
dry and set like, but fire flashes from his deep-set eyes. His
high-bridged, but sort of bent nose over his thin-lipped mouth...
well, the whole thing reminds you of some old Roman like Cicero, Csar
or Virgil in tan skin.

That night, he liquefied the immortal brains of Coleridge, and let the
fountain flow. I do not know whether something in my attitude attracted
his attention, or whether what I had done previously made him direct the
stream at me. Certainly every time he lifted his eyes from the page, he
looked right into my eyes. It did not make me see him particularly, but
it made me see the poem. That night seemed queer, but I am so
visual-minded that all the other senses induce pictures in me. Listening
to Coleridge's poem for the first time, I saw all that the writer had
meant for me to see with him, and infinite cosmic things besides. I was
not of the work-a-day world for days after Mr. Holmes's voice had
ceased.

This was my world, I said to myself, and I shall be in it, and
surrounded by it, if it is the last thing I do on God's green dirt-ball.

But he did something more positive than that. He stopped me after class
and complimented me on my work. He did something else. He never asked me
anything about myself, but he looked at me and toned his voice in such a
way that I felt he knew all about me. His whole manner said, "No matter
about the difficulties past and present, step on it!"

I went back to class only twice after that. I did not say a word to him
about my resolve. But the next week, I went out to Morgan College to
register in the high-school department.

William Pickens, a Negro, was the Dean there, and he fooled me too. I
was prepared to be all scared of him and his kind. I had no money and no
family to refer to. I just went and he talked to me. He gave me a brief
examination and gave me credit for two years' work in high school and
assigned me to class. He was just as understanding as Dwight Holmes in a
way.

Knowing that I had no money, he evidently spoke to his wife, because she
sent for me a few days later and told me enthusiastically that she had a
job for me that would enable me to stay in school. Dr. Baldwin, a white
clergyman, and one of the trustees of Morgan, had a wife with a broken
hip. He wanted a girl to stay at the house, help her dress in the
morning, undress at night and generally look after her. There was no
need for anyone except in the morning and at night. He would give me a
home and two dollars a week. The way Mrs. Pickens described the work to
me, I could tell she knew I would be glad to accept the job, and I was.

So I went to live with the Baldwins. The family consisted of the
Minister, his wife and his daughter, Miss Maria, who seemed to be in her
thirties and unmarried.

They had a great library, and I waded in. I acted as if the books would
run away. I remember committing to memory, overnight--lest I never get a
chance to read it again--Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Next I
learned the Ballad of Reading Gaol and started on the Rubaiyat.

It would be dramatic in a Cinderella way if I were to say that the
well-dressed students at school snubbed me and shoved me around, but
that I studied hard and triumphed over them. I did study hard because I
realized that I was three years behind schedule, and then again study
has never been hard to me. Then too, I had hundreds of books under my
skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be
called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M.
Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really
constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no
way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the
important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the
rest later on.

Nobody shoved me around. There were eighteen people in my class. Six of
them were boys. Good-looking, well-dressed girls from Baltimore's best
Negro families were classmates of mine: Ethel Cummings, the daughter of
a very successful lawyer, Bernice Naylor, whose father was a big
preacher, the Hughes girls, Bernice and Gwendolyn, who were not only
beautiful, but whose family is distinguished in the professions all over
America, Mary Jane Watkins of New York, now a dentist, and considered
the most sex-appealing thing, with her lush figure and big eyes and soft
skin--all of the girls in my class passed for pretty. It was said to be,
not only the best-looking class on the campus, college or prep, but
about the best-looking group ever to happen to come together. Rosa Brown
was in that class too. She had not only lovely eyes set in a cameo-like
face, but shining, beautiful black curls that fell easily to her waist.
She has done well by herself, too. She is now married to Tanner Moore, a
prosperous lawyer of Philadelphia. Town house, cars and country place,
and things like that.

Well, here was this class of pretty girls and snappy boys. The girls
were in the majority, but what we had of boys were in demand in town and
on campus. The class knew it caused a lot of trouble too, as the college
girls were always growling about "that prep class" grabbing off the
college men. They passed a rule about it, but it did not help matters.
They, the college girls, just got left out of things, themselves, while
the prep girls romped on.

And here I was, with my face looking like it had been chopped out of a
knot of pine wood with a hatchet on somebody's off day, sitting up in
the middle of all this pretty. To make things worse, I had only one
dress, a change of underwear and one pair of tan oxfords.

Therefore, I did not rush up to make friends, but neither did I shrink
away. My second day at school, I had to blow my nose and I had no
handkerchief with me. Mary Jane Watkins was sitting next to me, so she
quickly shoved her handkerchief in my hand without saying a word. We
were in chapel and Dr. Spencer was up speaking. So she kept her eyes
front. I nodded my thanks and so began a friendship.

One day, after about a week in school, Bernice Hughes, whose father, Dr.
W. A. C. Hughes, was somebody important in the Methodist Episcopal
Church, and a trustee of the College, sat watching me. Her gray eyes
were fixed on me, and her red lips were puckered in a frown. I did not
know what to think. But it was in English History which I liked very
much and I was not doing badly in recitation. When the period was over
and the class passed on to the next room, she fell in beside me and
said, "If you ain't one knowing fool! I'm naming you old Knowledge Bug."
Then she laughed that kind of a laugh she has to cover up her feelings
and I laughed too. Bernice can register something that makes you look at
her and like her no matter what she does.

"I'm sitting by you tomorrow, fool, and from now on. You hear me?" She
went on with her catching laugh. "No use in both of us studying like a
fool. You can just study for both of us."

So from then on I was knee deep in the Hughes family. There is more
looks and native ability in the Hughes clan to the square child than any
I can think of offhand. If they do not always make a brilliant showing,
it is not because they can't do it. Their looks and charm interfere with
their brain-work, that is all. And you are not going to forget them
either. If a Hughes is in town, you are going to know it in one way or
another.

It soon became apparent that my lack of clothes was no drawback to my
getting along. Sometimes somebody would ask me, "Zora, what do you think
you'll wear to school tomorrow?" I'd humor the joke and describe what I
was going to wear. But let a program or a get-together come along, and
all the girls in the class would be backing me off in a corner, or
writing me notes offering to lend me something to wear. I would have to
take it in rotation to keep from causing hard feelings.

I got on with the boys, too. In no time I made Stanley James, a varsity
football man. Then it was Douglas Camper, a senior college man. His
brother was a football star at Howard University in Washington. Our
class had cornered all of the college seniors so that not one college
girl was escorted to the senior prom. We just couldn't see how functions
like that could go on without our gang. Mary Jane had cornered Ed
Wilson, the Clark Gable of the campus, for the occasion, so the marines
had landed.

Whenever Miss Clarke, our English teacher, was absent, I was put in
charge of the class. This happened time and time again, sometimes for a
whole week at a time. With history it was the same. Once I had the
history classes for nearly a month and had to be excused from my other
classes. At times like that, my classmates were perfectly respectful to
me until the bell rang. Then how they would poke fun at my serious face
while I was teaching!

With Dean Pickens to coach me, I placed second in the school oratorical
contest. Rosa Brown placed first and Bernice Hughes third, indicating
that our class was determined to be head muck-de-muck in everything that
went on.

My first publication was on the blackboard in the assembly hall at
Morgan. I decided to write an allegory using the faculty members as
characters. Most of my classmates were in the know.

I went to school extra early that morning and when the bell rang for
assembly, the big board was covered with the story. Dr. Spencer, the
President of Morgan, had a great shock of curly white hair. He was the
kindly "Great Gray Bear" of the story. Dean Pickens was the "Ferocious
Pick." Practically every faculty member was up there, to the great
entertainment of the student body. Furthermore, we could see the various
members of the faculty sneaking peeps at the board over their shoulders
from time to time as the service went on.

When Dr. Spencer rose to read from the Bible, his face was as red as a
beet under all that white hair. He ran his fingers through his hair two
or three times as he kept looking back at the board.

After the short service was over, he commented on it and actually burst
out laughing. Then, of course, everybody else could laugh. All except
one man who was there to succeed Dean Pickens, who was going to New York
to work for the N.A.A.C.P. This man clouded up and tried to rain. He was
up there in the character of "Pocket Tooth" and he didn't like it. He
had earned that name because his two canine teeth were extra long, but
sort of square at the ends. My class decided that they looked like the
pockets on my dress. So far as we were concerned, he was Pocket Tooth,
and he stayed Pocket Tooth for the duration. He led devotions next
morning and dared everybody to write anything like that on that board
again. Dean Pickens, for all his ferocious official frown and hot
temper, was full of boy. Down in his apartment, Mrs. Pickens ran things,
and he played with his three children. Ruby, the youngest, seemed to
have the inside track with him. I was in and out of the Pickens home
every day. I actually heard him discussing with Ruby her chances of
licking Harriet, her older sister. She had tried it, and failed. Dean
Pickens was full of sympathy, but he told her he was afraid Harriet was
too tough for her. She had better get even with Harriet some other way.
If she felt she must fight, hit Harriet one quick lick and run. That was
the best advice he could give her. Mrs. Pickens put down her book and
looked at her husband just as she would have at Bill, her son.

My two years at Morgan went off very happily indeed. The atmosphere made
me feel right. I was at last doing the things I wanted to do. Every new
thing I learned in school made me happy. The science courses were
tremendously interesting to me. Perhaps it was because Professor
Galloway was such an earnest teacher. I did not do well in Mathematics.
Why should A be minus B? Who the devil was X anyway? I could not even
imagine. I still do not know. I passed the courses because Professor
Johnson, knowing that I did well in everything else, just made it a rule
to give me a C. He probably understood that I am one of those people who
have no number sense. I have been told that you can never factor A -- B
to the place where it comes out even. I wouldn't know because I never
tried to find out.

When it came time to consider college, I planned to stay on at Morgan.
But that was changed by chance. Mae Miller, daughter of the well-known
Dr. Kelly Miller of Howard University, came over to Morgan to spend the
week-end with her first cousins, Bernice and Gwendolyn Hughes. So we
were thrown together. After a few hours of fun and capers, she said,
"Zora, you are Howard material. Why don't you come to Howard?"

Now as everyone knows, Howard University is the capstone of Negro
education in the world. There gather Negro money, beauty, and prestige.
It is to the Negro what Harvard is to the whites. They say the same
thing about a Howard man that they do about Harvard--you can tell a
Howard man as far as you can see him, but you can't tell him much. He
listens to the doings of other Negro schools and their graduates with
bored tolerance. Not only is the scholastic rating at Howard high, but
tea is poured in the manner!

I had heard all about the swank fraternities and sororities and the
clothes and everything, and I knew I could never make it. I told Mae
that.

"You can come and live at our house, Zora," Bernice offered. At the
time, her parents were living in Washington, and Bernice and Gwendolyn
were in the boarding department at Morgan. "I'll ask Mama the next time
she comes over. Then you won't have any room and board to pay. We'll all
get together and rustle you up a job to make your tuition."

So that summer I moved on to Washington and got a job. First, as a
waitress in the exclusive Cosmos Club downtown, and later as a
manicurist in the G Street shop of Mr. George Robinson. He is a Negro
who has a chain of white barber shops in downtown Washington. I managed
to scrape together money for my first quarter's tuition, and went up to
register.

Lo and behold, there was Dwight Holmes sitting up there at Howard! He
saved my spirits again. I was short of money, and Morgan did not have
the class-A rating that it now has. There was trouble for me and I was
just about to give up and call it a day when I had a talk with Dwight
Holmes. He encouraged me all he could, and so I stuck and made up all of
those hours I needed.

I shall never forget my first college assembly, sitting there in the
chapel of that great university. I was so exalted that I said to the
spirit of Howard, "You have taken me in. I am a tiny bit of your
greatness. I swear to you that I shall never make you ashamed of me."

It did not wear off. Every time I sat there as part and parcel of
things, looking up there at the platform crowded with faculty members,
the music, the hundreds of students about me, it would come down on me
again. When on Mondays we ended the service by singing Alma Mater, I
felt just as if it were the Star Spangled Banner:

                   Reared against the eastern sky
                   Proudly there on hill-top high
                   Up above the lake so blue
                   Stands Old Howard brave and true.
                   There she stands for truth and right,
                   Sending forth her rays of light,
                   Clad in robes of majesty
                   Old Howard! We sing of thee.

My soul stood on tiptoe and stretched up to take in all that it meant.
So I was careful to do my class-work and be worthy to stand there under
the shadow of the hovering spirit of Howard. I felt the ladder under my
feet.

Mr. Robinson arranged for me to come to work at 3:30 every afternoon and
work until 8:30. In that way, I was able to support myself. Soon, most
of the customers knew I was a student, and tipped me accordingly. I
averaged twelve to fifteen dollars a week.

Mr. Robinson's 1410 G Street shop was frequented by bankers, Senators,
Cabinet Members, Congressmen, and gentlemen of the Press. The National
Press Club was one block down the same street, the Treasury Building was
one block up the street and the White House not far away.

I learned things from holding the hands of men like that. The talk was
of world affairs, national happenings, personalities, the latest quips
from the cloakrooms of Congress and such things. I heard many things
from the White House and the Senate before they appeared in print. They
probably were bursting to talk to somebody, and I was safe. If I told,
nobody would have believed me anyway. Besides, I was much flattered by
being told and warned not to repeat what I had heard. Sometimes a
Senator, a banker, a newspaper correspondent attached to the White House
would all be sitting around my table at one time. While I worked on one,
the others waited, and they all talked. Sometimes they concentrated on
teasing me. At other times they talked about what had happened, or what
they reasoned was bound to happen. Intimate stories about personalities,
their secret love affairs, cloakroom retorts, and the like. Soon they
took me for granted and would say, "Zora knows how to keep a secret.
She's all right." Now, I know that my discretion really didn't matter.
They were relieving their pent-up feelings where it could do no harm.

Some of them meant more to me than others because they paid me more
attention. Frederick William Wile, White House correspondent, used to
talk to me at times quite seriously about life and opportunities and
things like that. He had seen three presidents come and go. He had
traveled with them, to say nothing of his other traveling to and fro
upon the earth. He had read extensively. Sometimes he would be full of
stories and cracks, but at other times he would talk to me quite
seriously about attitudes, points of view, why one man was great and
another a mere facile politician, and so on.

There were other prominent members of the press who would sit and talk
longer than it took me to do their hands. One of them, knowing that
certain others sat around and talked, wrote out questions two or three
times for me to ask and tell him what was said. Each time the questions
were answered, but I was told to keep that under my hat, and so I had to
turn around and lie and say the man didn't tell me. I never realized how
serious it was until he offered me twenty-five dollars to ask a certain
Southern Congressman something and let him know as quickly as possible.
He sent out and bought me a quart of French ice cream to bind the
bargain. The man came in on his regular time, which was next day, and in
his soft voice, began to tell me how important it was to be honorable at
all times and to be trustworthy. How could I ask him then? Besides, he
was an excellent Greek scholar and translated my entire lesson for me,
which was from Xenophon's _Cyropdeia_, and talked at length on the
ancient Greeks and Persians. The news man was all right. He had to get
his information the best way he could, but, for me, it would have been
terrible to do that nice man like that. I told the reporter how it was
and he understood and never asked me again.

Mr. Johns, a pressman, big, slow, with his eternal walking-stick, was
always looking for a laugh. Logan, our head-porter, was his regular
meat. Logan had a long head, so flat on each side that it looked like it
had been pressed between two planks. His toes turned in and his answers
were funny.

One day, while shining Mr. Johns's shoes, he told him what a fighter he
was. He really was tough when he got mad, according to himself.
According to Logan, Logan was mean! Just couldn't help it. He had Indian
blood in him. Just mean and strong. When he straightened out his African
soup-bone (arm), something was just bound to fall. If a man didn't fall
when _he_ hit him, he went around behind him to see what was propping
him up. Yassuh! Mr. Johns listened at Logan and smiled. He egged him on
to tell more of his powers. The very next day Mr. Johns came in and
announced that they had a bear up at Keith's theater, and they needed
somebody to wrestle with him. There was good money in it for the man who
would come right forward and wrestle with that bear, and knowing that
Logan needed money and that he was fearless, he had put Logan's name
down. He liked Logan too well to let him get cheated out of such a swell
chance to get rich and famous. All Logan needed to do was to go to the
theater and tell them that Mr. Johns sent him.

"Naw sir, Mr. Johns," Logan said, "I ain't wrestling no bear. Naw sir!"

"But Logan, you told me--everybody in here heard you--that when you get
mad, you go bear-hunting with your fist. You don't even have to hunt
this bear. He's right up there on the corner waiting for you. You can't
let me down like this. I've already told the man you would be glad to
wrestle his old bear!"

"How big is dat bear, Mister Johns?"

"Oh, he is just a full-grown bear, Logan. Nothing to worry about at all.
He wouldn't weigh more than two hundred pounds at the outside. Soft snap
for a man like you, and you weigh about that yourself, Logan."

"Naw sir! Not no big bear like that. Naw sir!"

"Well, Logan, what kind of a bear would you consider? You just tell me,
and I'll fix it up with the man."

"Git me a little bitty baby bear, Mr. Johns, 'bout three months old.
Dats de kind of bear I wants to wrestle wid. Yassuh!"

An incident happened that made me realize how theories go by the board
when a person's livelihood is threatened. A man, a Negro, came into the
shop one afternoon and sank down in Banks's chair. Banks was the manager
and had the first chair by the door. It was so surprising that for a
minute Banks just looked at him and never said a word. Finally, he found
his tongue and asked, "What do you want?"

"Hair-cut and shave," the man said belligerently.

"But you can't get no hair-cut and shave here. Mr. Robinson has a fine
shop for Negroes on U Street near Fifteenth," Banks told him.

"I know it, but I want one here. The Constitution of the United
States--"

But by that time, Banks had him by the arm. Not roughly, but he was
helping him out of his chair, nevertheless.

"I don't know how to cut your hair," Banks objected. "I was trained on
straight hair. Nobody in here knows how."

"Oh, don't hand me that stuff!" the crusader snarled. "Don't be such an
Uncle Tom."

"Run on, fellow. You can't get waited on in here."

"I'll stay right here until I do. I know my rights. Things like this
have got to be broken up. I'll get waited on all right, or sue the
place."

"Go ahead and sue," Banks retorted. "Go on uptown, and get your hair
cut, man. Don't be so hard-headed for nothing."

"I'm getting waited on right here!"

"You're next, Mr. Powell," Banks said to a waiting customer. "Sorry,
mister, but you better go on uptown."

"But I have a right to be waited on wherever I please," the Negro said,
and started towards Updyke's chair which was being emptied. Updyke
whirled his chair around so that he could not sit down and stepped in
front of it. "Don't you touch _my_ chair!" Updyke glared. "Go on about
your business."

But instead of going, he made to get into the chair by force.

"Don't argue with him! Throw him out of here!" somebody in the back
cried. And in a minute, barbers, customers all lathered and hair half
cut, and porters, were all helping to throw the Negro out.

The rush carried him way out into the middle of G Street and flung him
down. He tried to lie there and be a martyr, but the roar of oncoming
cars made him jump up and scurry off. We never heard any more about it.
I did not participate in the mle, but I wanted him thrown out, too. My
business was threatened.

It was only that night in bed that I analyzed the whole thing and
realized that I was giving sanction to Jim Crow, which theoretically, I
was supposed to resist. But here were ten Negro barbers, three porters
and two manicurists all stirred up at the threat of our living through
loss of patronage. Nobody thought it out at the moment. It was an
instinctive thing. That was the first time it was called to my attention
that self-interest rides over all sorts of lines. I have seen the same
thing happen hundreds of times since, and now I understand it. One sees
it breaking over racial, national, religious and class lines.
Anglo-Saxon against Anglo-Saxon, Jew against Jew, Negro against Negro,
and all sorts of combinations of the three against other combinations of
the three. Offhand, you might say that we fifteen Negroes should have
felt the racial thing and served him. He was one of us. Perhaps it would
have been a beautiful thing if Banks had turned to the shop crowded with
customers and announced that this man was going to be served like
everybody else even at the risk of losing their patronage, with all of
the other employees lined up in the center of the floor shouting, "So
say we all!" It would have been a stirring gesture, and made the
headlines for a day. Then we could all have gone home to our unpaid
rents and bills and things like that. I could leave school and begin my
wanderings again. The "militant" Negro who would have been the cause of
it all, would have perched on the smuddled-up wreck of things and
crowed. Nobody ever found out who or what he was. Perhaps he did what he
did on the spur of the moment, not realizing that serving him would have
ruined Mr. Robinson, another Negro who had got what he had the hard way.
For not only would the G Street shop have been forced to close, but the
F Street shop and all of his other six downtown shops. Wrecking George
Robinson like that on a "race" angle would have been ironic tragedy. He
always helped out any Negro who was trying to do anything progressive as
far as he was able. He had no education himself, but he was for it. He
would give any Howard University student a job in his shops if they
could qualify, even if it was only a few hours a week.

So I do not know what was the ultimate right in this case. I do know how
I felt at the time. There is always something fiendish and loathsome
about a person who threatens to deprive you of your way of making a
living. That is just human-like, I reckon.

At the University, I got on well both in class-work and the matter of
making friends. I could take in but so many social affairs because I had
to work, and then I had to study my lessons after work hours at night,
and I was carrying a heavy program.

The teacher who most influenced me was Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner, head of
the English department. He was tall, lean, with a head of wavy black
hair above his thin, sthetic, tan-colored face. He was a Harvard man
and knew his subject. His delivery was soft and restrained. The fact
that he looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties at most made
the girls conscious of shiny noses before they entered his classroom.

Listening to him, I decided that I must be an English teacher and lean
over my desk and discourse on the eighteenth-century poets, and explain
the roots of the modern novel. Children just getting born were going to
hear about Addison, Poe, DeQuincey, Steele, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley
from me, leaning nonchalantly over my desk. Defoe, Burns, Swift, Milton
and Scott were going to be sympathetically, but adequately explained,
with just that suspicion of a smile now and then before I returned to my
notes.

The man who seemed to me to be most overpowering was E. C. Williams,
Librarian and head of the Romance Language department. He was
cosmopolitan and world-traveled. His wit was instant and subtle. He was
so inaccessible in a way, too. He told me once that a flirtation with a
co-ed was to him like playing with a teething-ring. He liked smart,
sophisticated women. He used to lunch every day with E. D. Davis, head
of the Greek and German department. Davis was just the antithesis of
Williams, so shy, in the Charles S. Johnson manner, in spite of his
erudition. They would invite me to come along and would pay for my milk
and pie. Williams did most of the talking. I put in something now and
then. Davis sat and smiled. Professor Williams egged me on to kiss him.
He said that Davis would throw a fit, and he wanted to be present to see
it. He whispered that Davis liked to have me around, but from what he
ever said, I couldn't notice. When I was sick, Professor Davis came to
see me and brought an arm-load of roses, but he sat there half an hour
and scarcely said a word. He just sat there and smiled now and then.

All in all, I did a year and a half of work at Howard University. I
would have done the two full years, but I was out on account of illness,
and by the time that was over, I did not have the money for my tuition.

I joined the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, took part in all the literary
activities on the campus, and made The Stylus, the small literary
society on the hill. I named the student paper _The Hill Top_. The
Stylus was limited to nineteen members, two of them being faculty
members. Dr. Alain Leroy Locke was the presiding genius and we had very
interesting meetings.

My joining The Stylus influenced my later moves. On account of a short
story which I wrote for The Stylus, Charles S. Johnson, who was just
then founding _Opportunity Magazine_, wrote to me for material. He
explained that he was writing to all of the Negro colleges with the idea
of introducing new writers and new material to the public. I sent on
_Drenched in Light_ and he published it. Later, he published my second
story _Spunk_. He wrote me a kind letter and said something about New
York. So, beginning to feel the urge to write, I wanted to be in New
York.

This move on the part of Dr. Johnson was the root of the so-called Negro
Renaissance. It was his work, and only his hush-mouth nature has caused
it to be attributed to many others. The success of _Opportunity_ Award
dinners was news. Later on, the best of this material was collected in a
book called _The New Negro_ and edited by Dr. Alain Locke, but it was
the same material, for the most part, gathered and published by Dr.
Charles Spurgeon Johnson, now of the Department of Social Sciences, Fisk
University, Nashville.

Being out of school for lack of funds, and wanting to be in New York, I
decided to go there and try to get back in school in that city. So the
first week of January, 1925, found me in New York with $1.50, no job, no
friends, and a lot of hope.

The Charles Johnsons befriended me as best they could. I could always
find something to eat out at their house. Mrs. Johnson would give me
car-fare and encouragement. I came to worship them really.

So I came to New York through _Opportunity_, and through _Opportunity_
to Barnard. I won a prize for a short story at the first Award dinner,
May 1, 1925, and Fannie Hurst offered me a job as her secretary, and
Annie Nathan Meyer offered to get me a scholarship to Barnard. My record
was good enough, and I entered Barnard in the fall, graduating in 1928.

I have no lurid tales to tell of race discrimination at Barnard. I made
a few friends in the first few days. Eleanor Beer, who lived on the next
chair to me in Economics, was the first. She was a New York girl with a
sumptuous home down in West 71st Street, near the Hudson. She invited me
down often, and her mother set out to brush me up on good manners. I
learned a lot of things from them. They were well traveled and
cosmopolitan. I found out about forks, who entered a room first, sat
down first, and who offered to shake hands. A great deal more of
material like that. These people are still lying very close to my heart.
I was invited to Eleanor's wedding when she married Enzo de Chetalat, a
Swiss mining engineer, but I was down in Florida at the time. So I sent
her a hat-box full of orange blossoms for the occasion, so she could
know how I felt.

The Social Register crowd at Barnard soon took me up, and I became
Barnard's sacred black cow. If you had not had lunch with me, you had
not shot from taw. I was secretary to Fannie Hurst and living at her
67th Street duplex apartment, so things were going very well with me.

Because my work was top-heavy with English, Political Science, History
and Geology, my adviser at Barnard recommended Fine Arts, Economics, and
Anthropology for cultural reasons. I started in under Dr. Gladys
Reichard, had a term paper called to the attention of Dr. Franz Boas and
thereby gave up my dream of leaning over a desk and explaining Addison
and Steele to the sprouting generations.

I began to treasure up the words of Dr. Reichard, Dr. Ruth Benedict, and
Dr. Boas, the king of kings.

That man can make people work the hardest with just a look or a word,
than anyone else in creation. He is idolized by everybody who takes his
orders. We all call him Papa, too. One day, I burst into his office and
asked for "Papa Franz" and his secretary gave me a look and told me I
had better not let him hear me say that. Of course, I knew better, but
at a social gathering of the Department of Anthropology at his house a
few nights later, I brought it up.

"Of course, Zora is my daughter. Certainly!" he said with a smile. "Just
one of my missteps, that's all." The sabre cut on his cheek, which it is
said he got in a duel at Heidelberg, lifted in a smile.

Away from his office, Dr. Boas is full of youth and fun, and abhors
dull, stodgy arguments. Get to the point is his idea. Don't raise a
point which you cannot defend. He wants facts, not guesses, and he can
pin you down so expertly that you soon lose the habit of talking all
over your face. Either that, or you leave off Anthropology.

I had the same feeling at Barnard that I did at Howard, only more so. I
felt that I was highly privileged and determined to make the most of it.
I did not resolve to be a grind, however, to show the white folks that I
had brains. I took it for granted that they knew that. Else, why was I
at Barnard? Not everyone who cries, "Lord! Lord!" can enter those sacred
iron gates. In her high scholastic standards, equipment, the quality of
her student-body and graduates, Barnard has a right to the first line of
Alma Mater. "Beside the waters of the Hudson, Our Alma Mater stands
serene!" Dean Gildersleeve has that certain touch. We know there are
women's colleges that are older, but not better ones.

So I set out to maintain a good average, take part in whatever went on,
and just be a part of the college like everybody else. I graduated with
a _B_ record, and I am entirely satisfied.

Mrs. Meyer, who was the moving spirit in founding the college and who is
still a trustee, did nobly by me in getting me in. No matter what I
might do for her, I would still be in her debt.

Two weeks before I graduated from Barnard, Dr. Boas sent for me and told
me that he had arranged a fellowship for me. I was to go south and
collect Negro folklore. Shortly before that, I had been admitted to the
American Folk-Lore Society. Later, while I was in the field, I was
invited to become a member of the American Ethnological Society, and
shortly after the American Anthropological Society.

Booker T. Washington said once that you must not judge a man by the
heights to which he has risen, but by the depths from which he came. So
to me these honors meant something, insignificant as they might appear
to the world. It was a long step for the waif of Eatonville. From the
depth of my inner heart I appreciated the fact that the world had not
been altogether unkind to Mama's child.

While in the field, I drove to Memphis, and had a beautiful
reconciliation with Bob, my oldest brother, and his family. We had not
seen each other since I ran off to be a lady's maid. He said that it had
taken him a long time to realize what I was getting at. He regretted
deeply that he had not been of more service to me on the way. My father
had been killed in an automobile accident during my first year at
Morgan, and Bob talked to me about his last days. In reality, my father
was the baby of the family. With my mother gone and nobody to guide him,
life had not hurt him, but it had turned him loose to hurt himself. He
had been miserable over the dispersion of his children when he came to
realize that it was so. We were all so sorry for him, instead of feeling
bitter as might have been expected. Old Maker had left out the steering
gear when He gave Papa his talents.

In Memphis, my brother Ben was doing well as a pharmacist and owner of
the East Memphis Drug Store. Between his dogs, his wife, his store, and
his car, he was quite the laughing, witty person and I was glad that he
was. We talked about Clifford Joel, who had become, and still is,
principal of the Negro High School in Decatur, Alabama, and I told him
about seeing John in Jacksonville, Florida, where he was doing well with
his market. I had the latest news for them on Everett, Mama's baby
child, in the Post Office in Brooklyn, New York. Dick, the lovable, the
irresponsible, was having a high-heel time up and down the east coast of
the United States. He had never cared about school, but he had developed
into a chef cook and could always take care of himself. Sarah was
struggling along with a husband for whom we all wished a short sickness
and a quick funeral.

It was a most happy interval for me. I drove back to New Orleans to my
work in a glowing aura. I felt the warm embrace of kin and kind for the
first time since the night after my mother's funeral, when we had
huddled about the organ all sodden and bewildered, with the walls of our
home suddenly blown down. On September 18th, that house had been a
hovering home. September 19th, it had turned into a bleak place of
desolation with unknown dangers creeping upon us from unseen quarters
that made of us a whimpering huddle, though then we could not see why.
But now, that was all over. We could touch each other in the spirit if
not in the flesh.




X. Research


Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a
purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets
of the world and they that dwell therein.

I was extremely proud that Papa Franz felt like sending me on that
folklore search. As is well known, Dr. Franz Boas of the Department of
Anthropology of Columbia University, is the greatest anthropologist
alive, for two reasons. The first is his insatiable hunger for knowledge
and then more knowledge; and the second is his genius for pure
objectivity. He has no pet wishes to prove. His instructions are to go
out and find what is there. He outlines his theory, but if the facts do
not agree with it, he would not warp a jot or dot of the findings to
save his theory. So knowing all this, I was proud that he trusted me. I
went off in a vehicle made out of corona stuff.

My first six months were disappointing. I found out later that it was
not because I had no talents for research, but because I did not have
the right approach. The glamor of Barnard College was still upon me. I
dwelt in marble halls. I knew where the material was all right. But, I
went about asking, in carefully accented Barnardese, "Pardon me, but do
you know any folk-tales or folk-songs?" The men and women who had whole
treasuries of material just seeping through their pores looked at me and
shook their heads. No, they had never heard of anything like that around
there. Maybe it was over in the next county. Why didn't I try over
there? I did, and got the selfsame answer. Oh, I got a few little items.
But compared with what I did later, not enough to make a flea a waltzing
jacket. Considering the mood of my going south, I went back to New York
with my heart beneath my knees and my knees in some lonesome valley.

I stood before Papa Franz and cried salty tears. He gave me a good going
over, but later I found that he was not as disappointed as he let me
think. He knew I was green and feeling my oats, and that only bitter
disappointment was going to purge me. It did.

What I learned from him then and later, stood me in good stead when
Godmother, Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, set aside two hundred dollars a month
for a two-year period for me to work.

My relations with Godmother were curious. Laugh if you will, but there
was and is a psychic bond between us. She could read my mind, not only
when I was in her presence, but thousands of miles away. Both Max
Eastman and Richmond Barthe have told me that she could do the same with
them. But, the thing that delighted her was the fact that I was her only
Godchild who could read her thoughts at a distance. Her old fingers were
cramped and she could not write, but in her friend Cornelia Chapin's
exact script, a letter would find me in Alabama, or Florida, or in the
Bahama Islands and lay me by the heels for what I was _thinking_. "You
have broken the law," it would accuse sternly. "You are dissipating your
powers in things that have no real meaning," and go on to lacerate me.
"Keep silent. Does a child in the womb speak?"

She was just as pagan as I. She had lived for years among the Plains
Indians and had collected a beautiful book of Indian lore. Often when
she wished to impress upon me my garrulity, she would take this book
from the shelf and read me something of Indian beauty and restraint.
Sometimes, I would feel like a rabbit at a dog convention. She would
invite me to dinner at her apartment, 399 Park Avenue, and then she,
Cornelia Chapin, and Miss Chapin's sister, Mrs. Katherine Garrison
Biddle would all hem me up and give me what for. When they had given me
a proper straightening, and they felt that I saw the light, all the
sternness would vanish, and I would be wrapped in love. A present of
money from Godmother, a coat from Miss Chapin, a dress from Mrs. Biddle.
We had a great deal to talk about because Cornelia Chapin was a
sculptor, Katherine Biddle, a poet, and Godmother, an earnest patron of
the arts.

Then too, she was Godmother to Miguel Covarrubias and Langston Hughes.
Sometimes all of us were there. She has several paintings by Covarrubias
on her walls. She summoned us when one or the other of us returned from
our labors. Miguel and I would exhibit our movies, and Godmother and the
Chapin family, including brother Paul Chapin, would praise us and pan
us, according as we had done. Godmother could be as tender as
mother-love when she felt that you had been right spiritually. But
anything in you, however clever, that felt like insincerity to her,
called forth her well-known "That is nothing! It has no soul in it. You
have broken the law!" Her tongue was a knout, cutting off your outer
pretenses, and bleeding your vanity like a rusty nail. She was merciless
to a lie, spoken, acted or insinuated.

She was extremely human. There she was sitting up there at the table
over capon, caviar and gleaming silver, eager to hear every word on
every phase of life on a saw-mill "job." I must tell the tales, sing the
songs, do the dances, and repeat the raucous sayings and doings of the
Negro farthest down. She is altogether in sympathy with them, because
she says truthfully they are utterly sincere in living.



My search for knowledge of things took me into many strange places and
adventures. My life was in danger several times. If I had not learned
how to take care of myself in these circumstances, I could have been
maimed or killed on most any day of the several years of my research
work. Primitive minds are quick to sunshine and quick to anger. Some
little word, look or gesture can move them either to love or to sticking
a knife between your ribs. You just have to sense the delicate balance
and maintain it.

In some instances, there is nothing personal in the killing. The killer
wishes to establish a reputation as a killer, and you'll do as a sample.
Some of them go around, making their announcements in singing:

            I'm going to make me a graveyard of my own,
            I'm going to make me a graveyard of my own,
            Oh, carried me down on de smoky road,
            Brought me back on de coolin' board,
            But I'm going to make me a graveyard of my own.

And since the law is lax on these big saw-mill, turpentine and railroad
"jobs," there is a good chance that they never will be jailed for it.
All of these places have plenty of men and women who are fugitives from
justice. The management asks no questions. They need help and they can't
be bothered looking for a bug under every chip. In some places, the
"law" is forbidden to come on the premises to hunt for malefactors who
did their malefacting elsewhere. The wheels of industry must move, and
if these men don't do the work, who is there to do it?

So if a man, or a woman, has been on the gang for petty-thieving and
mere mayhem, and is green with jealousy of the others who did the same
amount of time for a killing and had something to brag about, why not
look around for an easy victim and become a hero, too? I was nominated
like that once in Polk County, Florida, and the only reason that I was
not elected, was because a friend got in there and staved off old
club-footed Death.

          Polk County! Ah!
          Where the water tastes like cherry wine.
          Where they fell great trees with axe and muscle.

These poets of the swinging blade! The brief, but infinitely graceful,
dance of body and axe-head as it lifts over the head in a fluid arc,
dances in air and rushes down to bite into the tree, all in beauty.
Where the logs march into the mill with its smokestacks disputing with
the elements, its boiler room reddening the sky, and its great circular
saw screaming arrogantly as it attacks the tree like a lion making its
kill. The log on the carriage coming to the saw. A growling grumble.
Then contact! Yeelld-u-u-ow! And a board is laid shining and new on a
pile. All day, all night. Rumble, thunder and grumble. Yee-ee-ow!
Sweating black bodies, muscled like gods, working to feed the hunger of
the great tooth. Polk County!

Polk County. Black men laughing and singing. They go down in the
phosphate mines and bring up the wet dust of the bones of pre-historic
monsters, to make rich land in far places, so that people can eat. But,
all of it is not dust. Huge ribs, twenty feet from belly to backbone.
Some old-time sea monster caught in the shallows in that morning when
God said, "Let's make some more dry land. Stay there, great Leviathan!
Stay there as a memory and a monument to Time." Shark-teeth as wide as
the hand of a working man. Joints of backbone three feet high, bearing
witness to the mighty monster of the deep when the Painted Land rose up
and did her first dance with the morning sun. Gazing on these relics,
forty thousand years old and more, one visualizes the great surrender to
chance and change when these creatures were rocked to sleep and slumber
by the birth of land.

Polk County. Black men from tree to tree among the lordly pines, a
swift, slanting stroke to bleed the trees for gum. Paint, explosives,
marine stores, flavors, perfumes, tone for a violin bow, and many other
things which the black men who bleed the trees never heard about.

Polk County. The clang of nine-pound hammers on railroad steel. The
world must ride.

Hah! A rhythmic swing of the body, hammer falls, and another spike
driven to the head in the tie.

                     Oh, Mobile! Hank!
                     Oh, Alabama! Hank!
                     Oh, Fort Myers! Hank!
                     Oh, in Florida! Hank!
                     Oh, let's shake it! Hank!
                     Oh, let's break it! Hank!
                     Oh, let's shake it! Hank!
                     Oh, just a hair! Hank!

The singing-liner cuts short his chant. The straw-boss relaxes with a
gesture of his hand. Another rail spiked down. Another offering to the
soul of civilization whose other name is travel.

Polk County. Black men scrambling up ladders into orange trees. Singing,
laughing, cursing, boasting of last night's love, and looking forward to
the darkness again. They do not say embrace when they mean that they
slept with a woman. A behind is a behind and not a form. Nobody says
anything about incompatibility when they mean it does not suit. No bones
are made about being fed up.

       I got up this morning, and I knowed I didn't want it,
       Yea! Polk County!
       You don't know Polk County like I do
       Anybody been there, tell you the same thing, too.
       Eh, rider, rider!
       Polk County, where the water tastes like cherry wine.

Polk County. After dark, the jooks. Songs are born out of feelings with
an old beat-up piano, or a guitar for a mid-wife. Love made and unmade.
Who put out dat lie, it was supposed to last forever? Love is when it
is. No more here? Plenty more down the road. Take you where I'm going,
woman? Hell no! Let every town furnish its own. Yeah, I'm going. Who
care anything about no train fare? The railroad track is there, ain't
it? I can count tires just like I been doing. I can ride de blind, can't
I?

     Got on de train didn't have no fare
     But I rode some
     Yes I rode some
     Got on de train didn't have no fare
     Conductor ast me what I'm doing there
     But I rode some.
     Yes I rode some.

     Well, he grabbed me by de collar and he led me to de door
     But I rode some
     Yes I rode some.
     Well, he grabbed me by de collar and he led me to de door
     He rapped me over de head with a forty-four
     But I rode some
     Yes I rode some.

Polk County in the jooks. Dancing the square dance. Dancing the scronch.
Dancing the belly-rub. Knocking the right hat off the wrong head, and
backing it up with a switch-blade.

"Fan-foot, what you doing with my man's hat cocked on _your_ nappy head?
I know you want to see your Jesus. Who's a whore? Yeah I sleeps with my
mens, but they pays me. I wouldn't be a fan-foot like you--just on de
road somewhere. Runs up and down de road from job to job making
pay-days. Don't nobody hold her! Let her jump on me! She pay her way on
me, and I'll pay it off. Make time in old Bartow jail for her."

Maybe somebody stops the fight before the two switch-blades go together.
Maybe nobody can. A short, swift dash in. A lucky jab by one opponent
and the other one is dead. Maybe one gets a chill in the feet and leaps
out of the door. Maybe both get cut badly and back off. Anyhow, the fun
of the place goes on. More dancing and singing and buying of drinks,
parched peanuts, fried rabbit. Full drummy bass from the piano with
weepy, intricate right-hand stuff. Singing the memories of Ella Wall,
the Queen of love in the jooks of Polk County. Ella Wall, Planchita,
Trottin' Liza.

It is a sad, parting song. Each verse ends up with:

       Quarters Boss! High Sheriff? Lemme git gone from here!
       Cold, rainy day, some old cold, rainy day
       I'll be back, some old cold, rainy day.
       Oh de rocks may be my pillow, Lawd!
       De sand may be my bed
       I'll be back some old cold, rainy day.

"Who run? What you running from the man for, nigger? Me, I don't aim to
run a step. I ain't going to run unless they run me. I'm going to live
anyhow until I die. Play me some music so I can dance! Aw, spank dat
box, man!! Them white folks don't care nothing bout no nigger getting
cut and kilt, nohow. They ain't coming in here. I done kilt me four and
they ain't hung me yet. Beat dat box!"

"Yeah, but you ain't kilt no women, yet. They's mighty particular 'bout
you killing up women."

"And I ain't killing none neither. I ain't crazy in de head. Nigger
woman can kill all us men she wants to and they don't care. Leave us
kill a woman and they'll run you just as long as you can find something
to step on. I got good sense. I know I ain't got no show. De white mens
and de nigger women is running this thing. Sing about old Georgy Buck
and let's dance off of it. Hit dat box!"

              Old Georgy Buck is dead
              Last word he said
              I don't want no shortening in my bread.
              Rabbit on de log
              Ain't got no dog
              Shoot him wid my rifle, bam! bam!

And the night, the pay night rocks on with music and gambling and
laughter and dancing and fights. The big pile of cross-ties burning out
in front simmers down to low ashes before sun-up, so then it is time to
throw up all the likker you can't keep down and go somewhere and sleep
the rest off, whether your knife has blood on it or not. That is, unless
some strange, low member of your own race has gone and pimped to the
white folks about something getting hurt. Very few of those kind are to
be found.

That is the primeval flavor of the place, and as I said before, out of
this primitive approach to things, I all but lost my life.

It was in a saw-mill jook in Polk County that I almost got cut to death.

Lucy really wanted to kill me. I didn't mean any harm. All I was doing
was collecting songs from Slim, who used to be her man back up in West
Florida before he ran off from her. It is true that she found out where
he was after nearly a year, and followed him to Polk County and he paid
her some slight attention. He was knocking the pad with women, all
around, and he seemed to want to sort of free-lance at it. But what he
seemed to care most about was picking his guitar, and singing.

He was a valuable source of material to me, so I built him up a bit by
buying him drinks and letting him ride in my car.

I figure that Lucy took a pick at me for three reasons. The first one
was, her vanity was rubbed sore at not being able to hold her man. That
was hard to own up to in a community where so much stress was laid on
suiting. Nobody else had offered to shack up with her either. She was
getting a very limited retail trade and Slim was ignoring the whole
business. I had store-bought clothes, a lighter skin, and a shiny car,
so she saw wherein she could use me for an alibi. So in spite of public
knowledge of the situation for a year or more before I came, she was
telling it around that I came and broke them up. She was going to cut
everything off of me but "quit it."

Her second reason was, because of my research methods I had dug in with
the male community. Most of the women liked me, too. Especially her
sworn enemy, Big Sweet. She was scared of Big Sweet, but she probably
reasoned that if she cut Big Sweet's protge it would be a slam on Big
Sweet and build up her own reputation. She was fighting Big Sweet
through me.

Her third reason was, she had been in little scraps and been to jail off
and on, but she could not swear that she had ever killed anybody. She
was small potatoes and nobody was paying her any mind. I was easy. I had
no gun, knife or any sort of weapon. I did not even know how to do that
kind of fighting.

Lucky for me, I had friended with Big Sweet. She came to my notice
within the first week that I arrived on location. I heard somebody, a
woman's voice "specifying" up this line of houses from where I lived and
asked who it was.

"Dat's Big Sweet" my landlady told me. "She got her foot up on somebody.
Ain't she specifying?"

She was really giving the particulars. She was giving a "reading," a
word borrowed from the fortune-tellers. She was giving her opponent
lurid data and bringing him up to date on his ancestry, his looks,
smell, gait, clothes, and his route through Hell in the hereafter. My
landlady went outside where nearly everybody else of the four or five
hundred people on the "job" were to listen to the reading. Big Sweet
broke the news to him, in one of her mildest bulletins that his pa was a
double-humpted camel and his ma was a grass-gut cow, but even so, he
tore her wide open in the act of getting born, and so on and so forth.
He was a bitch's baby out of a buzzard egg.

My landlady explained to me what was meant by "putting your foot up" on
a person. If you are sufficiently armed--enough to stand off a panzer
division--and know what to do with your weapons after you get 'em, it is
all right to go to the house of your enemy, put one foot up on his
steps, rest one elbow on your knee and play in the family. That is
another way of saying play the dozens, which also is a way of saying
low-rate your enemy's ancestors and him, down to the present moment for
reference, and then go into his future as far as your imagination leads
you. But if you have no faith in your personal courage and confidence in
your arsenal, don't try it. It is a risky pleasure. So then I had a
measure of this Big Sweet.

"Hurt who?" Mrs. Bertha snorted at my fears. "Big Sweet? Humph! 'Tain't
a man, woman nor child on this job going to tackle Big Sweet. If God
send her a pistol she'll send him a man. She can handle a knife with
anybody. She'll join hands and cut a duel. Dat Cracker Quarters Boss
wears two pistols round his waist and goes for bad, but he won't break a
breath with Big Sweet lessen he got his pistol in his hand. Cause if he
start anything with her, he won't never get a chance to draw it. She
ain't mean. She don't bother nobody. She just don't stand for no
foolishness, dat's all."

Right away, I decided that Big Sweet was going to be my friend. From
what I had seen and heard in the short time I had been there, I felt as
timid as an egg without a shell. So the next afternoon when she was
pointed out to me, I waited until she was well up the sawdust road to
the Commissary, then I got in my car and went that way as if by
accident. When I pulled up beside her and offered her a ride, she
frowned at me first, then looked puzzled, but finally broke into a smile
and got in.

By the time we got to the Commissary post office we were getting along
fine. She told everybody I was her friend. We did not go back to the
Quarters at once. She carried me around to several places and showed me
off. We made a date to go down to Lakeland come Saturday, which we did.
By the time we sighted the Quarters on the way back from Lakeland, she
had told me, "You sho is crazy!" Which is a way of saying I was witty.
"I loves to friend with somebody like you. I aims to look out for you,
too. Do your fighting for you. Nobody better not start nothing with you,
do I'll get my switch-blade and go round de ham-bone looking for meat."

We shook hands and I gave her one of my bracelets. After that everything
went well for me. Big Sweet helped me to collect material in a big way.
She had no idea what I wanted with it, but if I wanted it, she meant to
see to it that I got it. She pointed out people who knew songs and
stories. She wouldn't stand for balkiness on their part. We held two
lying contests, story-telling contests to you, and Big Sweet passed on
who rated the prizes. In that way, there was no argument about it.

So when the word came to Big Sweet that Lucy was threatening me, she put
her foot up on Lucy in a most particular manner and warned her against
the try. I suggested buying a knife for defense, but she said I would
certainly be killed that way.

"You don't know how to handle no knife. You ain't got dat kind of a
sense. You wouldn't even know how to hold it to de best advantage. You
would draw your arm way back to stop her, and whilst you was doing all
dat, Lucy would run in under your arm and be done; cut you to death
before you could touch her. And then again, when you sure 'nough
fighting, it ain't enough to just stick 'em wid your knife. You got to
ram it in to de hilt, then you pull _down_. They ain't no more trouble
after dat. They's _dead_. But don't you bother 'bout no fighting. You
ain't like me. You don't even sleep with no mens. I wanted to be a
virgin one time, but I couldn't keep it up. I needed the money too bad.
But I think it's nice for you to be like that. You just keep on writing
down them lies. I'll take care of all de fighting. Dat'll make it more
better, since we done made friends."

She warned me that Lucy might try to "steal" me. That is, ambush me, or
otherwise attack me without warning. So I was careful. I went nowhere on
foot without Big Sweet.

Several weeks went by, then I ventured to the jook alone. Big Sweet let
it be known that she was not going. But later she came in and went over
to the coon-can game in the corner. Thinking I was alone, Lucy waited
until things were in full swing and then came in with the very man to
whom Big Sweet had given the "reading." There was only one door. I was
far from it. I saw no escape for me when Lucy strode in, knife in hand.
I saw sudden death very near that moment. I was paralyzed with fear. Big
Sweet was in a crowd over in the corner, and did not see Lucy come in.
But the sudden quiet of the place made her look around as Lucy charged.
My friend was large and portly, but extremely light on her feet. She
sprang like a lioness and I think the very surprise of Big Sweet being
there when Lucy thought she was over at another party at the Pine Mill
unnerved Lucy. She stopped abruptly as Big Sweet charged. The next
moment, it was too late for Lucy to start again. The man who came in
with Lucy tried to help her out, but two other men joined Big Sweet in
the battle. It took on amazingly. It seemed that anybody who had any
fighting to do, decided to settle-up then and there. Switch-blades,
ice-picks and old-fashioned razors were out. One or two razors had
already been bent back and thrown across the room, but our fight was the
main attraction. Big Sweet yelled to me to run. I really ran, too. I ran
out of the place, ran to my room, threw my things in the car and left
the place. When the sun came up I was a hundred miles up the road,
headed for New Orleans.



In New Orleans, I delved into Hoodoo, or sympathetic magic. I studied
with the Frizzly Rooster, and all of the other noted "doctors." I
learned the routines for making and breaking marriages; driving off and
punishing enemies; influencing the minds of judges and juries in favor
of clients; killing by remote control and other things. In order to work
with these "two-headed" doctors, I had to go through an initiation with
each. The routine varied with each doctor.

In one case it was not only elaborate, it was impressive. I lay naked
for three days and nights on a couch, with my navel to a rattlesnake
skin which had been dressed and dedicated to the ceremony. I ate no food
in all that time. Only a pitcher of water was on a little table at the
head of the couch so that my soul would not wander off in search of
water and be attacked by evil influences and not return to me. On the
second day, I began to dream strange exalted dreams. On the third night,
I had dreams that seemed real for weeks. In one, I strode across the
heavens with lightning flashing from under my feet, and grumbling
thunder following in my wake.

In this particular ceremony, my finger was cut and I became blood
brother to the rattlesnake. We were to aid each other forever. I was to
walk with the storm and hold my power, and get my answers to life and
things in storms. The symbol of lightning was painted on my back. This
was to be mine forever.

In another ceremony, I had to sit at the crossroads at midnight in
complete darkness and meet the Devil, and make a compact. That was a
long, long hour as I sat flat on the ground there alone and invited the
King of Hell.

The most terrifying was going to a lonely glade in the swamp to get the
black cat bone. The magic circle was made and all of the participants
were inside. I was told that anything outside that circle was in deadly
peril. The fire was built inside, the pot prepared and the black cat was
thrown in with the proper ceremony and boiled until his bones fell
apart. Strange and terrible monsters seemed to thunder up to that ring
while this was going on. It took months for me to doubt it afterwards.

When I left Louisiana, I went to South Florida again, and from what I
heard around Miami, I decided to go to the Bahamas. I had heard some
Bahaman music and seen a Jumping Dance out in Liberty City and I was
entranced.

This music of the Bahaman Negroes was more original, dynamic and
African, than American Negro songs. I just had to know more. So without
giving Godmother a chance to object, I sailed for Nassau.

I loved the place the moment I landed. Then, that first night as I lay
in bed, listening to the rustle of a cocoanut palm just outside my
window, a song accompanied by string and drum broke out in full harmony.
I got up and peeped out and saw four young men and they were singing
Bellamina, led by Ned Isaacs. I did not know him then, but I met him the
next day. The song has a beautiful air, and the oddest rhythm.

                 Bellamina, Bellamina!
                 She come back in the harbor
                 Bellamina, Bellamina
                 She come back in the harbor
                 Put Bellamina on the dock
                 And paint Bellamina black! Black!
                 Oh, put the Bellamina on the dock
                 And paint Bellamina, black! Black!

I found out later that it was a song about a rum-running boat that had
been gleaming white, but after it had been captured by the United States
Coast Guard and released, it was painted black for obvious reasons.

That was my welcome to Nassau, and it was a beautiful one. The next day
I got an idea of what prolific song-makers the Bahamans are. In that
West African accent grafted on the English of the uneducated Bahaman, I
was told, "You do anything, we put you in sing." I walked carefully to
keep out of "sing."

This visit to Nassau was to have far-reaching effects. I stayed on, ran
to every Jumping Dance that I heard of, learned to "jump," collected
more than a hundred tunes and resolved to make them known to the world.

On my return to New York in 1932, after trying vainly to interest
others, I introduced Bahaman songs and dances to a New York audience at
the John Golden Theater, and both the songs and the dances took on. The
concert achieved its purpose. I aimed to show what beauty and appeal
there was in genuine Negro material, as against the Broadway concept,
and it went over.

Since then, there has been a sharp trend towards genuine Negro material.
The dances aroused a tremendous interest in primitive Negro dancing.
Hall Johnson took my group to appear with his singers at the Lewisohn
Stadium that summer and built his "Run Lil' Chillun" around them and the
religious scene from my concert, "From Sun to Sin." That was not all,
the dramatized presentation of Negro work-songs in that same concert
aroused interest in them and they have been exploited by singers ever
since.

I had no intention of making concert my field. I wanted to show the
wealth and beauty of the material to those who were in the field and
therefore I felt that my job was well done when it took on.

My group was invited to perform at the New School of Social Research; in
the folk-dance carnival at the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York; at Nyack;
at St. Louis; Chicago; Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida; Lake
Wales; Sanford; Orlando; Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C.; and
Daytona Beach, Florida.

Besides the finding of the dances and the music, two other important
things happened to me in Nassau. One was, I lived through that terrible
five-day hurricane of 1929. It was horrible in its intensity and
duration. I saw dead people washing around on the streets when it was
over. You could smell the stench from dead animals as well. More than
three hundred houses were blown down in the city of Nassau alone.

Then I saw something else out there. I met Leon Walton Young. He is a
grizzly, stocky black man, who is a legislator in the House. He
represented the first district in the Bahamas and had done so for more
than twenty years when I met him.

Leon Walton Young was either a great hero, or a black bounder, according
to who was doing the talking. He was a great champion and a hero in the
mouths of the lowly blacks of the islands and to a somewhat lesser
degree to the native-born whites. He was a Bahaman for the Bahaman man
and a stout fellow along those lines. To the English, who had been sent
out to take the jobs of the natives, white and black, he was a cheeky
dastard of a black colonial who needed to be put in his place. He was
also too much for the mixed-blood Negroes of education and property, who
were as prejudiced against his color as the English. What was more, Leon
Walton Young had no formal education, though I found him like George
Schuyler of New York to be better read than most people with college
degrees. But did he, because of his lack of schooling, defer to the
Negroes who had journeyed to London and Edinburgh? He most certainly did
not, and what was more, he more than held his own in the hustings.

There was a much felt need for him to be put down, but those who put on
the white armor of St. George to go out and slay the dragon always came
back--not honorably dead on their shields--but splattered all over with
mud and the seat of their pants torn and missing. A peasant mounted on a
mule had unhorsed a cavalier and took his pants. The dance drums of
Grantstown and Baintown would throb and his humbled opponents would be
"put in sing."

He so humbled a governor, who tried to overawe Young by reminding him
that he was "His Majesty's representative in these Islands" that the
governor was recalled and sent to some peaceful spot in West Africa.
Young had replied to that pompous statement with, "Yes, but if you
continue your tactics out here you will make me forget it."

That was one of his gentlest thumps on the Governor's pride and
prestige. His Majesty's Representative accused Young of having said
publicly that he, the Governor, was a bum out of the streets of London,
and to his eternal rage, Young more than admitted the statement. The
English appointees and the high yellows shuddered at such temerity, but
the local whites and the working blacks gloried in his spunk.



The humble Negroes of America are great song-makers, but the Bahaman is
greater. He is more prolific and his tunes are better. Nothing is too
big, or little, to be "put in sing." They only need discovery. They are
much more original than the Calypso singers of Trinidad, as will be
found the moment you put it to the proof.

I hear that now the Duke of Windsor is their great hero. To them, he is
"Our King." I would love to hear how he and his Duchess have been put in
sing.

I enjoyed collecting the folk-tales and I believe the people from whom I
collected them enjoyed the telling of them, just as much as I did the
hearing. Once they got started, the "lies" just rolled and story-tellers
fought for a chance to talk. It was the same with the songs. The one
thing to be guarded against, in the interest of truth, was
over-enthusiasm. For instance, if a song was going good, and the
material ran out, the singer was apt to interpolate pieces of other
songs into it. The only way you can know when that happens, is to know
your material so well that you can sense the violation. Even if you do
not know the song that is being used for padding, you can tell the
change in rhythm and tempo. The words do not count. The subject matter
in Negro folk-songs can be anything and go from love to work, to travel,
to food, to weather, to fight, to demanding the return of a wig by a
woman who has turned unfaithful. The tune is the unity of the thing. And
you have to know what you are doing when you begin to pass on that,
because Negroes can fit in more words and leave out more and still keep
the tune better than anyone I can think of.



One bit of research I did jointly for the Journal of Negro History and
Columbia University, was in Mobile, Alabama. There I went to talk to
Cudjo Lewis. That is the American version of his name. His African name
was Kossola-O-Lo-Loo-Ay.

He arrived on the last load of slaves run into the United States and was
the only Negro alive that came over on a slave ship. It happened in 1859
just when the fight between the South and the Abolitionists was moving
toward the Civil War. He has died since I saw him.

I found him a cheerful, poetical old gentleman in his late nineties, who
could tell a good story. His interpretation of the story of Jonah was
marvelous.

He was a good Christian and so he pretended to have forgotten all of his
African religion. He turned me off with the statement that his Nigerian
religion was the same as Christianity. "We know it a God, you
unner'stand, but we don't know He got a Son."

He told me in detail of the circumstances in Africa that brought about
his slavery here. How the powerful Kingdom of Dahomey, finding the slave
trade so profitable, had abandoned farming, hunting and all else to
capture slaves to stock the barracoons on the beach at Dmydah to sell to
the slavers who came from across the ocean. How quarrels were
manufactured by the King of Dahomey with more peaceful agricultural
nations in striking distance of Dahomey in Nigeria and Gold Coast; how
they were assaulted, completely wiped off the map, their names never to
appear again, except when they were named in boastful chant before the
King at one of his "customs" when his glory was being sung. The
able-bodied who were captured were marched to Abomey, the capital city
of Dahomey and displayed to the King, then put into the barracoons to
await a buyer. The too old, the too young, the injured in battle were
instantly beheaded and their heads smoked and carried back to the King.
He paid off on heads, dead or alive. The skulls of the slaughtered were
not wasted either. The King had his famous Palace of Skulls. The Palace
grounds had a massive gate of skull-heads. The wall surrounding the
grounds were built of skulls. You see, the Kings of Dahomey were truly
great and mighty and a lot of skulls were bound to come out of their
ambitions. While it looked awesome and splendid to him and his warriors,
the sight must have been most grewsome and crude to Western eyes.

One thing impressed me strongly from this three months of association
with Cudjo Lewis. The white people had held my people in slavery here in
America. They had bought us, it is true and exploited us. But the
inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had _sold_ me and
the white people had bought me. That did away with the folklore I had
been brought up on--that the white people had gone to Africa, waved a
red handkerchief at the Africans and lured them aboard ship and sailed
away. I know that civilized money stirred up African greed. That wars
between tribes were often stirred up by white traders to provide more
slaves in the barracoons and all that. But, if the African princes had
been as pure and as innocent as I would like to think, it could not have
happened. No, my own people had butchered and killed, exterminated whole
nations and torn families apart, for a profit before the strangers got
their chance at a cut. It was a sobering thought. What is more, all that
this Cudjo told me was verified from other historical sources. It
impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory. Lack of power
and opportunity passes off too often for virtue. If I were King, let us
say, over the Western Hemisphere tomorrow, instead of who I am, what
would I consider right and just? Would I put the cloak of Justice on my
ambition and send her out a-whoring after conquests? It is something to
ponder over with fear.

Cudjo's eyes were full of tears and memory of fear when he told me of
the assault on his city and its capture. He said that his nation, the
Takkoi, lived "three sleeps" from Dahomey. The attack came at dawn as
the Takkoi were getting out of bed to go to their fields outside the
city. A whooping horde of the famed Dahoman women warriors burst through
the main gate, seized people as they fled from their houses and beheaded
victims with one stroke of their big swords.

"Oh, oh! I runnee this way to that gate, but they there. I runnee to
another one, but they there, too. All eight gates they there. Them
women, they very strong. I nineteen years old, but they too strong for
me. They take me and tie me. I don't know where my people at. I never
see them no more."

He described the awful slaughter as the Amazons sacked the city. The
clusters of human heads at their belts. The plight of those who fled
through the gates to fall into the hands of the male warriors outside.
How his King was finally captured and carried before the King of
Dahomey, who had broken his rule and come on this expedition in person
because of a grudge against the King of Takkoi, and how the vanquished
monarch was led before him, bound.

"Now, that you have dared to send impudent words to me," the King of
Dahomey said, "your country is conquered and you are before me in
chains. I shall take you to Abomey."

"No," the King of Takkoi answered. "I am King in Takkoi. I will not go
to Dahomey." He knew that he would be killed for a spectacle in Dahomey.
He chose to die at home.

So two Dahoman warriors held each of his hands and an Amazon struck off
his head.

Later, two representatives of a European power attended the customs of
the King at Abomey, and told of seeing the highly polished skull of the
King of Takkoi mounted in a beautiful ship-model. His name and his
nation were mentioned in the chant to the glory of Dahomey. The skull
was treated with the utmost respect, as the King of Dahomey would expect
his to be treated in case he fell in battle. That was the custom in West
Africa. For the same reason, no one of royal blood was sold into
slavery. They were killed. There are no descendants of royal African
blood among American Negroes for that reason. The Negroes who claim that
they are descendants of royal African blood have taken a leaf out of the
book of the white ancestor-hounds in America, whose folks went to
England with William the Conqueror, got restless and caught the
_Mayflower_ for Boston, then feeling a romantic lack, rushed down the
coast and descended from Pocahontas. From the number of her children,
one is forced to the conclusion that that Pocahontas wasn't so poky,
after all.

Kossola told me of the March to Abomey after the fall of Takkoi. How
they were yoked by forked sticks and tied in a chain. How the Dahomans
halted the march the second day in order to smoke the heads of the
victims because they were spoiling. The prisoners had to watch the heads
of their friends and relatives turning on long poles in the smoke.
Abomey and the palace of the King and then the march to the coast and
the barracoons. They were there sometime before a ship came to trade.
Many, many tribes were there, each in a separate barracoon, lest they
war among themselves. The traders could choose which tribe they wanted.
When the tribe was decided upon, he was carried into the barracoon where
that tribe was confined, the women were lined up on one side and the men
on the other. He walked down between the lines and selected the
individuals he wanted. They usually took an equal number.

He described the embarcation and the trip across the ocean in the
_Chlotilde_, a fast sailing vessel built by the Maher brothers of Maine,
who had moved to Alabama. They were chased by a British man-of-war on
the lookout for slavers, but the _Chlotilde_ showed her heels. Finally
the cargo arrived in Mobile. They were unloaded up the river, the boat
sunk, and the hundred-odd Africans began a four-year life of slavery.

"We so surprised to see mule and plow. We so surprised to see man pushee
and mule pullee."

After the war, these Africans made a settlement of their own at Plateau,
Alabama, three miles up the river from Mobile. They farmed and worked in
the lumber mills and bought property. The descendants of these people
are still there.

Kossola's great sorrow in America was the death of his favorite son,
David, killed by a train. He refused to believe it was his David when he
saw the body. He refused to let the bell be tolled for him.

"If dat my boy, where his head? No, dat not my David. Dat not my boy. My
boy gone to Mobile. No, No! Don't ringee de bell for David. Dat not
him."

But, finally his wife persuaded him that the headless body on the window
blind was their son. He cried hard for several minutes and then said,
"Ringee de bell."

His other great sorrow was that he had lost track of his folks in
Africa.

"They don't know what become of Kossola. When you go there, you tellee
where I at." He begged me. He did not know that his tribe was no more
upon this earth, except for those who reached the barracoon at Dmydah.
None of his family was in the barracoon. He had missed seeing their
heads in the smoke, no doubt. It is easy to see how few would have
looked on that sight too closely.

"I lonely for my folks. They don't know. Maybe they ask everybody go
there where Kossola. I know they hunt for me." There was a tragic catch
in his voice like the whimper of a lost dog.

After seventy-five years, he still had that tragic sense of loss. That
yearning for blood and cultural ties. That sense of mutilation. It gave
me something to feel about.

Of my research in the British West Indies and Haiti, my greatest thrill
was coming face to face with a Zombie and photographing her. This act
had never happened before in the history of man. I mean the taking of
the picture. I have said all that I know on the subject in the book,
"Tell My Horse," which has been published also in England under the
title "Voodoo Gods." I have spoken over the air on We the People on the
subject, and the matter has been so publicized that I will not go into
details here. But, it was a tremendous thrill, though utterly macabre.

I went Canzo in Voodoo ceremonies in Haiti and the ceremonies were both
beautiful and terrifying.

I did not find them any more invalid than any other religion. Rather, I
hold that any religion that satisfies the individual urge is valid for
that person. It does satisfy millions, so it is true for its believers.
The Sect Rouge, also known as the Cochon Gris (gray pig) and Ving
Bra-Drig (from the sound of the small drum), a cannibalistic society
there, has taken cover under the name of Voodoo, but the two things are
in no wise the same. What is more, if science ever gets to the bottom of
Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical
secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather
than the gestures of ceremony.




XI. Books and Things


While I was in the research field in 1929, the idea of "Jonah's Gourd
Vine" came to me. I had written a few short stories, but the idea of
attempting a book seemed so big, that I gazed at it in the quiet of the
night, but hid it away from even myself in daylight.

For one thing, it seemed off-key. What I wanted to tell was a story
about a man, and from what I had read and heard, Negroes were supposed
to write about the Race Problem. I was and am thoroughly sick of the
subject. My interest lies in what makes a man or a woman do such-and-so,
regardless of his color. It seemed to me that the human beings I met
reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms, yes.
Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent
difference, no. But I said to myself that that was not what was expected
of me, so I was afraid to tell a story the way I wanted, or rather the
way the story told itself to me. So I went on that way for three years.

Something else held my attention for a while. As I told you before, I
had been pitched head-foremost into the Baptist Church when I was born.
I had heard the singing, the preaching and the prayers. They were a part
of me. But on the concert stage, I always heard songs called spirituals
sung and applauded as Negro music, and I wondered what would happen if a
white audience ever heard a real spiritual. To me, what the Negroes did
in Macedonia Baptist Church was finer than anything that any trained
composer had done to the folk-songs.

I had collected a mass of work-songs, blues and spirituals in the course
of my years of research. After offering them to two Negro composers and
having them refused on the ground that white audiences would not listen
to anything but highly arranged spirituals, I decided to see if that was
true. I doubted it because I had seen groups of white people in my
father's church as early as I could remember. They had come to hear the
singing, and certainly there was no distinguished composer in Zion Hope
Baptist Church. The congregation just got hold of the tune and arranged
as they went along as the spirit moved them. And any musician, I don't
care if he stayed at a conservatory until his teeth were gone and he
smelled like old-folks, could never even approach what those untrained
singers could do. LET THE PEOPLE SING, was and is my motto, and finally
I resolved to see what would happen.

So on money I had borrowed, I put on a show at the John Golden Theater
on January 10, 1932, and tried out my theory. The performance was well
received by both the audience and the critics. Because I know that music
without motion is not natural with my people, I did not have the singers
stand in a stiff group and reach for the high note. I told them to just
imagine that they were in Macedonia and go ahead. One critic said that
he did not believe that the concert was rehearsed, it looked so natural.
I had dramatized a working day on a railroad camp, from the shack-rouser
waking up the camp at dawn until the primitive dance in the deep woods
at night.

While I did not lose any money, I did not make much. But I am satisfied
that I proved my point. I have seen the effects of that concert in all
the Negro singing groups since then. Primitive Negro dancing has been
given tremendous impetus. Work-songs have taken on. In that performance
I introduced West Indian songs and dances and they have come to take an
important place in America. I am not upset by the fact that others have
made something out of the things I pointed out. Rather I am glad if I
have called any beauty to the attention of those who can use it.

In May, 1932, the depression did away with money for research so far as
I was concerned. So I took my nerve in my hand and decided to try to
write the story I had been carrying around in me. Back in my native
village, I wrote first "Mules and Men." That is, I edited the huge mass
of material I had, arranged it in some sequence and laid it aside. It
was published after my first novel. Mr. Robert Wunsch and Dr. John Rice
were both on the faculty at Rollins College, at Winter Park, which is
three miles from Eatonville. Dr. Edwin Osgood Grover, Dr. Hamilton Holt,
President of Rollins, together with Rice and Wunsch, were interested in
me. I gave three folk concerts at the college under their urging.

Then I wrote a short story, "The Gilded Six-Bits," which Bob Wunsch read
to his class in creative writing before he sent it off to _Story
Magazine_. Thus I came to know Martha Foley and her husband, Whit
Burnett, the editors of _Story_. They bought the story and it was
published in the August issue, 1933. They never told me, but it is my
belief that they did some missionary work among publishers in my behalf,
because four publishers wrote me and asked if I had anything of
book-length. One of the editors of the J. B. Lippincott Company, was
among these. He wrote a gentle-like letter and so I was not afraid of
him. Exposing my efforts did not seem so rash to me after reading his
letter. I wrote him and said that I was writing a book. Mind you, not
the first word was on paper when I wrote him that letter. But the very
next week I moved up to Sanford where I was not so much at home as at
Eatonville, and could concentrate more and sat down to write "Jonah's
Gourd Vine."

I rented a house with a bed and stove in it for $1.50 a week. I paid two
weeks and then my money ran out. My cousin, Willie Lee Hurston, was
working and making $3.50 per week, and she always gave me the fifty
cents to buy groceries with. In about three months, I finished the book.
The problem of getting it typed was then upon me. Municipal Judge S. A.
B. Wilkinson asked his secretary, Mildred Knight, if she would not do it
for me and wait on the money. I explained to her that the book might not
even be taken by Lippincott. I had been working on a hope. She took the
manuscript home with her and read it. Then she offered to type it for
me. She said, "It is going to be accepted, all right. I'll type it. Even
if the first publisher does not take it, somebody will." So between
them, they bought the paper and carbon and the book was typed.

I took it down to the American Express office to mail it and found that
it cost $1.83 cents to mail, and I did not have it. So I went to see
Mrs. John Leonardi, a most capable woman lawyer, and wife of the County
Prosecutor. She did not have the money at the moment, but she was the
treasurer of the local Daughter Elks. She "borrowed" $2.00 from the
treasury and gave it to me to mail my book. That was on October 3, 1933.
On October 16th, I had an acceptance by wire.

But it did not come so simply as that. I had been hired by the Seminole
County Chamber of Commerce to entertain the business district of Sanford
with my concert group for that day. I was very glad to get the work,
because my landlord was pressing me for the back rent. I now owed $18. I
was to receive $25 for the day, so I saw my way clear to pay up my rent,
and have a little over. It was not to be that way, however. At eight
o'clock of October 16th, my landlady came and told me to get out. I told
her that I could pay her that day, but she said she didn't believe that
I would ever have that much money. No, she preferred the house. So I
took my card table and my clothes up to my Uncle Isaiah's house and went
off to entertain the city at eleven o'clock. The sound truck went up and
down the streets and my boys sang. That afternoon while I was still on
the sound truck, a Western Union messenger handed me a wire. Naturally I
did not open it there. We were through at three o'clock. The Chamber of
Commerce not only paid us, we were all given an order which we could
take to any store we wanted and get what we chose. I needed shoes, so I
took mine to a shoe store. My heart was weighing as much as cord-wood,
and so I forgot the wire until I was having the shoes fitted. When I
opened it and read that "Jonah's Gourd Vine" was accepted and that
Lippincott was offering me $200 advance, I tore out of that place with
one old shoe and one new one on and ran to the Western Union office.
Lippincott had asked for an answer by wire and they got it! Terms
accepted. I never expect to have a greater thrill than that wire gave
me. You know the feeling when you found your first pubic hair. Greater
than that. When Producer Arthur Hornblow took me to lunch at Lucey's and
hired me at Paramount, it was nice--very nice. I was most elated. But I
had had five books accepted then, been a Guggenheim Fellow twice, spoken
at three book fairs with all the literary greats of America and some
from abroad, and so I was a little more used to things. So you see why
that editor is _Colonel_ to me. When the Negroes in the South name a
white man a colonel, it means CLASS. Something like a monarch, only
bigger and better. And when the colored population in the South confer a
title, the white people recognize it because the Negroes are never
wrong. They may flatter an ordinary bossman by calling him "Cap'n" but
when they say "Colonel," "General" and "Governor" they are recognizing
something internal. It is there, and it is accepted because it can be
seen.

I wrote "Their Eyes Were Watching God" in Haiti. It was dammed up in me,
and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks. I wish that I
could write it again. In fact, I regret all of my books. It is one of
the tragedies of life that one cannot have all the wisdom one is ever to
possess in the beginning. Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and
foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would be
written at all. It might be better to ask yourself "Why?" afterwards
than before. Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands
you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the
pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony
like bearing an untold story inside you. You have all heard of the
Spartan youth with the fox under his cloak.

"Dust Tracks on a Road" is being written in California where I did not
expect to be at this time.

I did not come out here to California to write about the state. I did
not come to get into the movies. I came because my good friend,
Katharane Edson Mershon, invited me out here to rest and have a good
time. However, I have written a book here, and gone to work in the
movies. This surprises me because I did not think that I would live long
enough to do anything out here but die. Friend Katharane Mershon is a
mountain goat while I am a lowland turtle. I want to rock along on level
ground. She can't look at a mountain without leaping on it. I think she
is ashamed if she ever catches both of her feet on the same level. She
cries "Excelsior!" in her sleep. Jack, her husband, told me that the
reason he has that sort of smoothed-off look was because she dragged him
up a mountain the next day after they got married and he has never been
able to get his right shape back again. Well, 1941 was a hard year for
me, too. She showed me California. Before it was over, I felt like I had
spent two months walking a cross-cut saw. The minute I get to be
governor of California, I mean to get me an over-sized plane and
a spirit-level and fix this state so it can be looked at without
rearing back. EPIC nothing! LEVEL! Level California! And I do mean
L  E  V  E  L !!!




XII. My People! My People!


"My people! My people!" From the earliest rocking of my cradle days, I
have heard this cry go up from Negro lips. It is forced outward by pity,
scorn and hopeless resignation. It is called forth by the observations
of one class of Negro on the doings of another branch of the brother in
black. For instance, well-mannered Negroes groan out like that when they
board a train or a bus and find other Negroes on there with their shoes
off, stuffing themselves with fried fish, bananas and peanuts, and
throwing the garbage on the floor. Maybe they are not only eating and
drinking. The offenders may be "loud-talking" the place, and holding
back nothing of their private lives, in a voice that embraces the entire
coach. The well-dressed Negro shrinks back in his seat at that, shakes
his head and sighs, "My people! My people!"

Now, the well-mannered Negro is embarrassed by the crude behavior of the
others. They are not friends, and have never seen each other before. So
why should he or she be embarrassed? It is like this: the well-bred
Negro has looked around and seen America with his eyes. He or she has
set himself to measure up to what he thinks of as the white standard of
living. He is conscious of the fact that the Negro in America needs more
respect if he expects to get any acceptance at all. Therefore, after
straining every nerve to get an education, maintain an attractive home,
dress decently, and otherwise conform, he is dismayed at the sight of
other Negroes tearing down what he is trying to build up. It is said
every day, "And that good-for-nothing, trashy Negro is the one the white
people judge us all by. They think we're all just alike. My people! My
people!"

What that educated Negro knows further is that he can do very little
towards imposing his own viewpoint on the lowlier members of his race.
Class and culture stand between. The humble Negro has a built-up
antagonism to the "Big Nigger." It is a curious thing that he does not
resent a white man looking down on him. But he resents any lines between
himself and the wealthy and educated of his own race. "He's a nigger
just like us," is the sullen rejoinder. The only answer to this is "My
people! My people!"

So the quiet-spoken Negro man or woman who finds himself in the midst of
one of these "broadcasts" as on the train, cannot go over and say,
"Don't act like that, brother. You're giving us all a black eye." He or
she would know better than to try that. The performance would not only
go on, it would get better with the "dickty" Negro as the butt of all
the quips. The educated Negro may know all about differential calculus
and the theory of evolution, but he is fighting entirely out of his
class when he tries to quip with the underprivileged. The bookless may
have difficulty in reading a paragraph in a newspaper, but when they get
down to "playing the dozens" they have no equal in America, and, I'd
risk a sizable bet, in the whole world. Starting off in the first by
calling you a seven-sided son-of-a-bitch, and pausing to name the sides,
they proceed to "specify" until the tip-top branch of your family tree
has been "given a reading." No profit in that to the upper-class Negro,
so he minds his own business and groans, "My people! My people!"

It being a traditional cry, I was bound to hear it often and under many
circumstances. But it is not the only folk label that I heard. "Race
Pride"--"Race Prejudice"--"Race Man"--"Race Solidarity"--"Race
Consciousness"--"Race."

"Race Prejudice" I was instructed was something bad that white people
used on us. It seemed that white people felt superior to black ones and
would not give Negroes justice for that reason. "Race Pride" was
something that, if we had it, we would feel ourselves superior to the
whites. A black skin was the greatest honor that could be blessed on any
man. A "Race Man" was somebody who always kept the glory and honor of
his race before him. Must stand ever ready to defend the Negro race from
all hurt, harm and danger. Especially if a white person said "Nigger,"
"You people," "Negress" or "Darkies." It was a mark of shame if somebody
accused: "Why, you are not a Race Man (or woman)." People made whole
careers of being "Race" men and women. They were champions of the race.

"Race Consciousness" is a plea to Negroes to bear their color in mind at
all times. It was just a phrase to me when I was a child. I knew it was
supposed to mean something deep. By the time I got grown I saw that it
was only an imposing line of syllables, for no Negro in America is apt
to forget his race. "Race Solidarity" looked like something solid in my
childhood, but like all other mirages, it faded as I came close enough
to look. As soon as I could think, I saw that there is no such thing as
Race Solidarity in America with any group. It is freely admitted that it
does not exist among Negroes. Our so-called Race Leaders cry over it.
Others accept it as a natural thing that Negroes should not remain an
unmelting black knot in the body politic. Our interests are too varied.
Personal benefits run counter to race lines too often for it to hold. If
it did, we could never fit into the national pattern. Since the race
line has never held any other group in America, why expect it to be
effective with us? The upper-class Negroes admit it in their own
phrases. The lower-class Negroes say it with a tale.

It seems that a Negro was asked to lead the congregation in prayer. He
got down on his knees and began, "Oh, Lawd, I got something to ask You,
but I know You can't do it."

"Go on, Brother Isham and ask Him."

"Lawd," Brother Isham began again, "I really want to ask You something
but I just know You can't do it."

"Aw, Brother Isham, go on and tell the Lawd what you want. He's the
Lawd! Ain't nothing He can't do! He can even lead a butt-headed cow by
the horns. You're killing up time. Go 'head on, Brother Isham, and let
the church roll on."

"Well then, Lawd, I ask You to get these Negroes together, but I know
You can't do it." Then there is laughter and "My people! My people!"

Hearing things like this from my childhood, sooner or later I was bound
to have some curiosity about my race of people.

What fell into my ears from time to time tended more to confuse than to
clarify. One thing made a liar out of the one that went before and the
thing that came after. At different times I heard opposite viewpoints
expressed by the same person or persons.

For instance, come school-closing time and like formal occasions, I
heard speeches which brought thunderous applause. I did not know the
word for it at the time, but it did not take me long to know the
material was traditional. Just as folk as the songs in church. I knew
that because so many people got up and used the same, identical phrases:
(_a_) The Negro had made the greatest progress in fifty years of any
race on the face of the globe. (_b_) Negroes composed the most
_beautiful_ race on earth, being just like a flower garden with every
color and kind. (_c_) Negroes were the bravest men on earth, facing
every danger like lions, and fighting with demons. We must remember with
pride that the first blood spilled for American Independence was that of
the brave and daring Crispus Attucks, a Negro who had bared his black
breast to the bullets of the British tyrants at Boston, and thus struck
the first blow for American liberty. They had marched with Colonel Shaw
during the Civil War and hurled back the forces of the iniquitous South,
who sought to hold black men in bondage. It was a Negro named Simon who
had been the only one with enough pity and compassion in his heart to
help the Savior bear His cross upon Calvary. It was the Negro troops
under Teddy Roosevelt who won the battle of San Juan Hill.

It was the genius of the Negro which had invented the steam engine, the
cotton-gin, the airbrake, and numerous other things--but conniving white
men had seen the Negro's inventions and run off and put them into
practice before the Negro had a chance to do anything about it. Thus the
white man got credit for what the genius of the Negro brain had
produced. Were it not for the envy and greed of the white man, the Negro
would hold his rightful place--the noblest and the greatest man on
earth.

The people listening would cheer themselves hoarse and go home feeling
good. Over the fences next day it would be agreed that it was a
wonderful speech, and nothing but the God's truth. What a great people
we would be if we only had our rights!

But my own pinnacle would be made to reel and rock anyway by other
things I heard from the very people who always applauded "the great
speech," when it was shouted to them from the schoolhouse rostrum. For
instance, let some member of the community do or say something which was
considered either dumb or underhand: the verdict would be "Dat's just
like a nigger!" or "Nigger from nigger leave nigger"--("Nothing from
nothing leave nothing"). It was not said in either admiration or pity.
Utter scorn was in the saying. "Old Cuffy just got to cut de fool, you
know. Monkey see, monkey do. Nigger see de white man do something, he
jump in and try to do like de white man, and make a great big old mess."
"My people! My people!"

"Yeah, you's mighty right. Another monkey on de line. De white man, you
understand, he was a railroad engineer, so he had a pet monkey he used
to take along wid him all de time. De monkey, he set up there in de cab
wid de engineer and see what he do to run de train. Way after while,
figger he can run de train just as good as de engineer his own self. He
was just itching to git at dat throttle and bust dat main line wide
open. Well, one day de engineer jumped down at de station to git his
orders and old monkey seen his chance. He just jumped up in de
engineer's seat, grabbed a holt of dat throttle, and dat engine was
splitting de wind down de track. So de engineer sent a message on ahead,
say 'Clear de track. Monkey on de line!' Well, Brer Monk he was holding
de throttle wide open and jumping up and down and laughing fit to kill.
Course, he didn't know nothing about no side tracks and no switches and
no schedules, so he was making a mile a minute when he hit a open switch
and a string of box cars was standing on de siding.
Ker-blam-er-lam-er-lam! And dat was de last of Brer Engine-driving Monk.
Lovely monkey he was, but a damned poor engineer." "My people! My
people!"

Everybody would laugh at that, and the laughter puzzled me some. Weren't
Negroes the smartest people on earth, or something like that? Somebody
ought to remind the people of what we had heard at the schoolhouse.
Instead of that, there would be more monkey stories.

There was the one about the white doctor who had a pet monkey who wanted
to be a doctor. Kept worrying his master to show him how, and the doctor
had other troubles, too. Another man had a bulldog who used to pass the
doctor's gate every day and pick a fight with the monkey. Finally, the
doctor saw a way to stop the monkey from worrying him about showing him
how to be a doctor. "Whip that bulldog until he evacuates, then bring me
some of it, monkey. I'll take it and show you how to be a doctor, and
then I'll treat it in a way so as to ruin that bulldog for life. He
won't be no more trouble to you."

"Oh, I'll git it, boss. Don't you worry. I sho' wants to be a doctor,
and then again, dat old bulldog sho' is worrisome."

No sooner did the bulldog reach the gate that day, than the monkey,
which could not wait for the bulldog to start the fight as usual, jumped
on the dog. The monkey was all over him like gravy over rice. He put all
he had into it and it went on until the doctor came out and drove the
dog off and gave the monkey a chance to bolt into the office with what
he had been fighting for.

"Here 'tis, boss. It was a tight fight, but I got it."

"Fine! Fine!" the doctor told him. "Now, gimme that bottle over there.
I'll fix that bulldog so he'll never be able to sit down again. When I
get through with this, he'll be ruined for life."

"Hold on there, boss! Hold on there a minute! I wish you wouldn't do
dat, boss."

"How come? You want to get rid of that old bulldog, don't you?"

"Dat's right, I sho' do."

"Well, why don't you want me to fix him, then?"

"Well, boss, you see it's like dis. Dat was a tight fight, a mighty
tight fight. I could have been mistaken about dat bulldog, boss, we was
all tangled up together so bad. You better leave dat fixing business
alone, boss. De wrong man might git hurt."

There were many other tales, equally ludicrous, in which the Negro,
sometimes symbolized by the monkey, and sometimes named outright, ran
off with the wrong understanding of what he had seen and heard. Several
white and Negro proposals of marriage were compared, and the like. The
white suitor had said his love had dove's eyes. His valet had hurried to
compliment his girl by saying she had dog's eyes, and so on.

There was a general acceptance of the monkey as kinfolks. Perhaps it was
some distant memory of tribal monkey reverence from Africa which had
been forgotten in the main, but remembered in some vague way. Perhaps it
was an acknowledgment of our talent for mimicry with the monkey as a
symbol.

The classic monkey parable, which is very much alive wherever the
Negroes congregate in America, is the one about "My people!"

It seems that a monkey squatted down in the middle of a highway to play.
A Cadillac full of white people came along, saw the monkey at play and
carefully drove around him. Then came a Buick full of more white people
and did the same. The monkey kept right on playing. Way after a while a
T-model Ford came along full of Negroes. But instead of driving around
the monkey, the car headed straight for him. He only saved his life by a
quick leap to the shoulder of the road. He sat there and watched the car
rattle off in the distance and sighed "My people! My people!"

A new addition to the tale is that the monkey has quit saying "My
people!" He is now saying, "Those people! Those people!"

I found the Negro, and always the blackest Negro, being made the butt of
all jokes,--particularly black women.

They brought bad luck for a week if they came to your house of a Monday
morning. They were evil. They slept with their fists balled up ready to
fight and squabble even while they were asleep. They even had evil
dreams. White, yellow and brown girls dreamed about roses and perfume
and kisses. Black gals dreamed about guns, razors, ice-picks, hatchets
and hot lye. I heard men swear they had seen women dreaming and knew
these things to be true.

"Oh, gwan!" somebody would chide, laughing. "You know dat ain't so."

"Oh, now, he ain't lying," somebody else would take up the theme. "I
know for my own self. I done slept wid yaller women and I done slept wid
black ones. They _is_ evil. You marry a yaller or a brown woman and wake
her up in de night and she will sort of stretch herself and say, 'I know
what I was dreaming when you woke me up. I was dreaming I had done baked
you a chicken and cooked you a great big old cake, and we was at de
table eating our dinner out of de same plate, and I was sitting on your
lap and we was just enjoying ourselves to death!' Then she will kiss you
more times than you ask her to, and go on back to sleep. But you take
and wake up a black gal, now! First thing she been sleeping wid her
fists balled up, and you shake her, she'll lam you five or six times
before you can get her awake. Then when she do git wake she'll have off
and ast you, 'Nigger, what you wake me up for? Know what I was dreaming
when you woke me up? I dreamt dat you shook your old rusty black fist
under my nose and I split your head open wid a axe.' Then she'll kick
your feets away from hers, snatch de covers all over on her side, ball
up her fists agin, and gwan back to sleep. You can't tell me nothing. I
know." "My people!"

This always was, and is still, good for a raucous burst of laughter. I
listened to this talk and became more and more confused. If it was so
honorable and glorious to be black, why was it the yellow-skinned people
among us had so much prestige? Even a child in the first grade could see
that this was so from what happened in the classroom and on school
programs. The light-skinned children were always the angels, fairies and
queens of school plays. The lighter the girl, the more money and
prestige she was apt, and expected, to marry. So on into high-school
years, I was asking myself questions. Were Negroes the great heroes I
heard about from the platform, or were they the ridiculous monkeys of
everyday talk? Was it really honorable to be black? There was even talk
that it was no use for Negro boys and girls to rub all the hair off of
their heads against college walls. There was no place for them to go
with it after they got all this education. Some of the older heads held
that it was too much for Negroes to handle. Better leave such things for
the white folks, who knew what to do with it. But there were others who
were all for pushing ahead. I saw the conflict in my own home between my
parents. My mother was the one to dare all. My father was satisfied.

This Negro business came home to me in incidents and ways. There was the
time when Old Man Bronner was taken out and beaten. Mr. Bronner was a
white man of the poor class who had settled in aristocratic Maitland.
One night just after dark, we heard terrible cries back in the woods
behind Park Lake. Sam Moseley, his brother Elijah, and Ike Clarke,
hurried up to our gate and they were armed. The howls of pain kept up.
Old fears and memories must have stirred inside of the grown folks. Many
people closed and barred their doors. Papa and the men around our gate
were sullen and restless as the cries churned over the woods and lake.

"Who do you reckon it is?" Sam Moseley asked.

"I don't know for sure, but some thinks it's Jim Watson. Anyhow, he
ain't home yet," Clarke said, and all of them looked at each other in an
asking way.

Finally Papa said, "Well, hold on a minute till I go get my rifle."

"'Tain't no ifs and buts about it," Elijah Moseley said gravely, "We
can't leave Jim Watson be beat to death like that."

Papa had sensed that these armed men had not come to merely stand around
and talk. They had come to see if he would go with the rest. When he
came out shoving the sixteen bullets into his rifle, and dropping more
into his pocket, Mama made no move to stop him. "Well, we all got
families," he said with an attempt at lightness. "Shoot off your gun,
somebody, so de rest will know we ready."

Papa himself pointed his Winchester rifle at the sky and fired a shot.
Another shot answered him from around the store and a huddle of figures
came hurrying up the road in the dark.

"It's Jim Watson. Us got to go git him!" and the dozen or more men armed
with double-barreled shotguns, breech-loaders, pistols and Papa's
repeating Winchester hurried off on their grim mission. Perhaps not a
single one of them expected to return alive. No doubt they hoped. But
they went.

Mama gasped a short sentence of some sort and herded us all into the
house and barred the door. Lights went out all over the village and
doors were barred. Axes had been dragged in from woodpiles, grass-hooks,
pitch-forks and scythes were ranked up in corners behind those barred
doors. If the men did not come back, or if they only came back in part,
the women and children were ready to do the best they could. Mama spoke
only to say she wished Hezekiah and John, the two biggest boys, had not
gone to Maitland late in the afternoon. They were not back and she
feared they might start home and--But she did not cry. Our seven hounds
with big, ferocious Ned in the lead, barked around the house. We huddled
around Mama in her room and kept quiet. There was not a human sound in
all the village. Nothing had ever happened before in our vicinity to
create such tension. But people had memories and told tales of what
happened back there in Georgia, and Alabama and West Florida that made
the skin of the young crawl with transmitted memory, and reminded the
old heads that they were still flinchy.

The dark silence of the village kept up for an hour or more. The once
loud cries fell and fell until our straining ears could no longer find
them. Strangest of all, not a shot was fired. We huddled in the dark and
waited, and died a little, and waited. The silence was ten times more
punishing than the cries.

At long last, a bubble of laughing voices approached our barn from the
rear. It got louder and took on other dimensions between the barn and
the house. Mama hissed at us to shut up when, in fact, nobody was saying
a thing.

"Hey, there Little-Bits," Papa bellowed. "Open up!"

"Strike a light, Daught," Mama told my sister, feeling around in the
dark to find Sarah's hand to give her the matches which I had seen
clutched in her fingers before she had put out the light. Mama had said
very little, and I could not see her face in the dark; somehow she could
not scratch a match now that Papa was home again.

All of the men came in behind Papa, laughing and joking, perhaps more
from relief than anything else.

"Don't stand there grinning like a chessy cat, Mr. Hurston," Mama
scolded. "You ain't told me a thing."

"Oh, it wasn't Jim Watson at all, Lulu. You remember 'bout a week ago
Old Man Bronner wrote something in de Orlando paper about H.'s daughter
and W.B.G.'s son being seen sitting around the lakes an awful lot?"

"Yeah, I heard something about it."

"Well, you know those rich white folks wasn't going to 'low nothing like
dat. So some of 'em waylaid him this evening. They pulled him down off
of a load of hay he was hauling and drug him off back there in de woods
and tanned his hide for him."

"Did y'all see any of it?"

"Nope, we could hear him hollering for a while, though. We never got no
further than the lake. A white man, one of the G--boys was standing in
the bushes at de road. When we got ready to turn off round de lake he
stepped out and spoke to us and told us it didn't concern us. They had
Bronner down there tied down on his all-fours, and de men was taking
turns wid dat bull whip. They must have been standing on tip-toes to do
it. You could hear them licks clear out to de road."

The men all laughed. Somebody mocked Bronner's cries and moans a time or
two and the crowd laughed immoderately. They had gone out to rescue a
neighbor or die in the attempt, and they were back with their families.
So they let loose their insides and laughed. They resurrected a joke or
two and worried it like a bone and laughed some more. Then they just
laughed. The men who spoke of members of their race as monkeys had gone
out to die for one. The men who were always saying, "My skin-folks, but
not kin-folks; my race but not my taste," had rushed forth to die for
one of these same contemptibles. They shoved each other around and
laughed. So I could see that what looked like ridicule was really the
Negro poking a little fun at himself. At the same time, just like other
people, hoping and wishing he was what the orators said he was.

My mother eased back in her chair and took a dip of snuff. Maybe she did
not feel so well, for she didn't get tickled at all. After a while, she
ordered us off to bed in a rough voice. Time was, and the men scattered.
Mama sat right where she was until Hezekiah and John came home around
ten o'clock. She gave them an awful going over with her tongue for
staying out late, and then she eased to bed.

I was dredged up inside that night, so I did not think about the
incident's general connection with race. Besides I had to go to sleep.
But days later, it was called to my recollection again. There was a
program at the Methodist Church, and Mrs. Mattie Moseley, it was
announced, was to have a paper. She was also going to have a fine new
dress to read it in. We all wanted to see the dress.

The time came and she had the dress on. The subject of her paper was,
"What will the Negroes do with the whites?" I do not know what she
decided was to be done. It seemed equally unimportant to the rest of the
town. I remember that everybody said it was a fine subject. But the next
week, the women talked about nothing else but the new wrist-watch she
had on. It was the first one ever seen in our town.

But in me, the affair stirred up more confusion. Why bring the subject
up? Something was moving around me which I had no hooks to grasp. What
was this about white and black people that was being talked about?

Certainly nothing changed in the village. The townspeople who were in
domestic service over in Maitland or Winter Park went to work as usual.
The white people interested in Eatonville came and went as before. Mr.
Irving Bacheller, the author, who had a show place in Winter Park,
petted up Willie Sewell, who was his head gardener, in the same old way.
Bishop Whipple petted Elijah Moseley, and Mrs. Mars, who was his sister,
did lots of things for Lulu Moseley, Elijah's wife. What was all the
talk about? It certainly was puzzling to me.

As time went on, the confusion grew. By the time that I got to high
school, I was conscious of a group that was neither the top nor the
bottom of Negrodom. I met the type which designates itself as "the
better-thinking Negro." I was thrown off my stride by finding that while
they considered themselves Race Champions, they wanted nothing to do
with anything frankly Negroid. They drew color lines within the race.
The Spirituals, the Blues, _any_ definitely Negroid thing was just not
done. They went to the trouble at times to protest the use of them by
Negro artists. Booker T. Washington was absolutely vile for advocating
industrial education. There was no analysis, no seeking for merits. If
it was old cuffy, down with it! "My People! My People!"

This irritated me until I got to the place where I could analyze. The
thing they were trying to do went wrong because it lacked reason. It
lacked reason because they were attempting to stand equal with the best
in America without having the tools to work with. They were attempting a
flight away from Negrodom because they felt that there was so much scorn
for black skin in the nation that their only security was in flight.
They lacked the happy carelessness of a class beneath them and the
understanding of the top-flight Negro above them. Once, when they used
to set their mouths in what they thought was the Boston Crimp, and ask
me about the great differences between the ordinary Negro and "the
better-thinking Negro," I used to show my irritation by saying I did not
know who the better-thinking Negro was. I knew who the
think-they-are-better Negroes were, but who were the better-thinkers was
another matter. But when I came to understand what made them make their
useless motions, and saw them pacing a cage that wasn't there, I felt
more sympathy than irritation. If they want to establish a sort of
fur-coat peerage, let 'em! Since they can find no comfort where they
happened to be born, no especial talents to lift them, and other doors
are closed to them, they have to find some pleasure somewhere in life.
They have to use whatever their mentality provides. "My People! My
People!"

But one thing and another kept the conflict going on inside me, off and
on for years. Sometimes I was sure that the Negro race was all that the
platform speakers said. Then I would hear so much self-deprecation that
I would be deflated. Over and over I heard people shake their heads and
explain us by the supposed prayer of a humble Negro, who got down on his
knees and said: "Lawd, you know I ain't nothing. My wife, she ain't
nothing. My chillun ain't nothing, and if you fool 'round us, Lawd, you
won't be nothing neither."

So I sensed early, that the Negro race was not one band of heavenly
love. There was stress and strain inside as well as out. Being black was
not enough. It took more than a community of skin color to make your
love come down on you. That was the beginning of my peace.

Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any
racial group as a whole. God made them duck by duck and that was the
only way I could see them. I learned that skins were no measure of what
was inside people. So none of the Race cliches meant anything any more.
I began to laugh at both white and black who claimed special blessings
on the basis of race. Therefore I saw no curse in being black, nor no
extra flavor by being white. I saw no benefit in excusing my looks by
claiming to be half Indian. In fact, I boast that I am the only Negro in
the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was _not_ an
Indian chief. Neither did I descend from George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, or any Governor of a Southern state. I see no need to
manufacture me a legend to beat the facts. I do not coyly admit to a
touch of the tarbrush to my Indian and white ancestry. You can consider
me Old Tar-Brush in person if you want to. I am a mixed-blood, it is
true, but I differ from the party line in that I neither consider it an
honor nor a shame. I neither claim Jefferson as my grandpa, nor exclaim,
"Just look how that white man took advantage of my grandma!" It does not
matter in the first place, and then in the next place, I do not know how
it came about. Since nobody ever told me, I give my ancestress the
benefit of the doubt. She probably ran away from him just as fast as she
could. But if that white man could run faster than my grandma, that was
no fault of hers. Anyway, you must remember, he didn't have a thing to
do but to keep on running forward. She, being the pursued, had to look
back over her shoulder every now and then to see how she was doing. And
you know your ownself, how looking backwards slows people up.

In this same connection, I have been told that God meant for all the
so-called races of the world to stay just as they are, and the people
who say that may be right. But it is a well-known fact that no matter
where two sets of people come together, there are bound to be some
in-betweens. It looks like the command was given to people's heads,
because the other parts don't seem to have heard tell. When the next
batch is made up, maybe Old Maker will straighten all that out. Maybe
the men will be more tangle-footed and the women a whole lot more faster
around the feet. That will bring about a great deal more of racial and
other kinds of purity, but a somewhat less exciting world. It might
work, but I doubt it. There will have to be something harder to get
across than an ocean to keep East and West from meeting. But maybe Old
Maker will have a remedy. Maybe even He has given up. Perhaps in a
moment of discouragement He turned the job over to Adolf Hitler and went
on about His business of making more beetles.

I do not share the gloomy thought that Negroes in America are doomed to
be stomped out bodaciously, nor even shackled to the bottom of things.
Of course some of them will be tromped out, and some will always be at
the bottom, keeping company with other bottom-folks. It would be against
all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in
between. It has never happened with anybody else, so why with us? No, we
will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is
up to the individual. If you haven't got it, you can't show it. If you
have got it, you can't hide it. That is one of the strongest laws God
ever made.

I maintain that I have been a Negro three times--a Negro baby, a Negro
girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear-cut
impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the
same place with me. There is no _The Negro_ here. Our lives are so
diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities
so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that
it will cover us all, except My people! My people!




XIII. Two Women in Particular


Two women, among the number whom I have known intimately force me to
keep them well in mind. Both of them have rare talents, are drenched in
human gravy, and both of them have meant a great deal to me in
friendship and inward experience. One, Fannie Hurst, because she is so
young for her years, and Ethel Waters because she is both so old and so
young for hers.

Understand me, their ages have nothing to do with their birthdays. Ethel
Waters is still a young woman. Fannie Hurst is far from old.

In my undergraduate days I was secretary to Fannie Hurst. From day to
day she amazed me with her moods. Immediately before and after a very
serious moment you could just see her playing with her dolls. You never
knew where her impishness would break out again.

One day, for instance, I caught her playing at keeping house with
company coming to see her. She told me not to leave the office. If the
doorbell rang, Clara, her cook, was to answer it. Then she went
downstairs and told Clara that I was to answer the doorbell. Then she
went on to another part of the house. Presently I heard the bell, and it
just happened that I was on my way downstairs to get a drink of water. I
wondered why Clara did not go to the door. What was my amazement to see
Miss Hurst herself open the door and come in, greet herself graciously
and invite herself to have some tea. Which she did. She went into that
huge duplex studio and had toasted English muffins and played she had
company with her for an hour or more. Then she came on back up to her
office and went to work.

I knew that she was an only child. She did not even have cousins to play
with. She was born to wealth. With the help of images, I could see that
lonely child in a big house making up her own games. Being of artistic
bent, I could see her making up characters to play with. Naturally she
had to talk for her characters, or they would not say what she wanted
them to. Most children play at that at times. I had done that
extensively so I knew what she was doing when I saw her with the door
half open, ringing her own doorbell and inviting herself to have some
tea and muffins. When she was tired of her game, she just quit and was a
grown woman again.

She likes for me to drive her, and we have made several tours. Her
impishness broke out once on the road. She told me to have the car all
serviced and ready for next morning. We were going up to Belgrade Lakes
in Maine to pay Elizabeth Marbury a visit.

So soon next day we were on the road. She was Fannie Hurst, the famous
author as far as Saratoga Springs. As we drove into the heart of town,
she turned to me and said, "Zora, the water here at Saratoga is
marvelous. Have you ever had any of it?"

"No, Miss Hurst, I never did."

"Then we must stop and let you have a drink. It would never do for you
to miss having a drink of Saratoga water."

We parked near the famous United States Hotel and got out.

"It would be nice to stop over here for the night," she said. "I'll go
see about the hotel. There is a fountain over there in the park. Be sure
and get yourself a drink! You can take Lummox for a run while you get
your water."

I took Lummox out of the car. To say I took Lummox for a run would be
merely making a speech-figure. Lummox weighed about three pounds, and
with his short legs, when he thought that he was running he was just
jumping up and down in the same place. But anyway, I took him along to
get the water. It was so-so as far as the taste went.

When I got back to the car, she was waiting for me. It was too early in
the season for the hotel to be open. Too bad! She knew I would have
enjoyed it so much. Well, I really ought to have some pleasure. Had I
ever seen Niagara Falls?

"No, Miss Hurst. I always wanted to see it, but I never had a chance."

"Zora! You mean to tell me that you have never seen Niagara Falls?"

"No." I felt right sheepish about it when she put it that way.

"Oh, you must see the Falls. Get in the car and let's go. You must see
those Falls right now." The way she sounded, my whole life was bare up
to then and wrecked for the future unless I saw Niagara Falls.

The next afternoon around five o'clock, we were at Niagara Falls. It had
been a lovely trip across Northern New York State.

"Here we are, now, Zora. Hurry up and take a good look at the Falls. I
brought you all the way over here so that you could see them."

She didn't need to urge me. I leaned on the rail and looked and looked.
It was worth the trip, all right. It was just like watching the Atlantic
Ocean jump off Pike's Peak.

In ten minutes or so, Miss Hurst touched me and I turned around.

"Zora, have you ever been across the International Bridge? I think you
ought to see the Falls from the Canadian side. Come on, so you can see
it from over there. It would be too bad for you to come all the way over
here to see it and not see it from the Bridge."

So we drove across the Bridge. A Canadian Customs Official tackled us
immediately. The car had to be registered. How long did we intend to
stay?

"You'd better register it for two weeks," Miss Hurst answered and it was
done. The sun was almost down.

"Look, Zora, Hamilton is only a short distance. I know you want to see
it. Come on, let's drive on, and spend the night at Hamilton."

We drove on. I was surprised to see that everything in Canada looked so
much like everything in the United States. It was deep twilight when we
got into Hamilton.

"They tell me Kitchener is a most interesting little place, Zora. I know
it would be fun to go on there and spend the night." So on to Kitchener
we went.

Here was Fannie Hurst, a great artist and globe famous, behaving like a
little girl, teasing her nurse to take her to the zoo, and having a fine
time at it.

Well, we spent an exciting two weeks motoring over Ontario, seeing the
countryside and eating at quaint but well-appointed inns. She was like a
child at a circus. She was a run-away, with no responsibilities.

Fannie Hurst, the author, and the wife of Jacques Danielson, was not
with us again until we hit Westchester on the way home. Then she
replaced Mrs. Hurst's little Fannie and began to discuss her next book
with me and got very serious in her manner.

While Fannie Hurst brings a very level head to her dressing, she exults
in her new things like any debutante. She knows exactly what goes with
her very white skin, black hair and sloe eyes, and she wears it. I doubt
if any woman on earth has gotten better effects than she has with black,
white and red. Not only that, she knows how to parade it when she gets
it on. She will never be jailed for uglying up a town.

                           THIS ETHEL WATERS

I am due to have this friendship with Ethel Waters, because I worked for
it.

She came to me across the footlights. Not the artist alone, but the
person, and I wanted to know her very much. I was too timid to go
backstage and haunt her, so I wrote her letters and she just plain
ignored me. But I kept right on. I sensed a great humanness and depth
about her; I wanted to know someone like that.

Then Carl Van Vechten gave a dinner for me. A great many celebrities
were there, including Sinclair Lewis, Dwight Fiske, Anna May Wong,
Blanche Knopf, an Italian soprano, and my old friend, Jane Belo. Carl
whispered to me that Ethel Waters was coming in later. He was fond of
her himself and he knew I wanted to know her better, so he had persuaded
her to come. Carl is given to doing nice things like that.

We got to talking, Ethel and I, and got on very well. Then I found that
what I suspected was true. Ethel Waters is a very shy person. It had not
been her intention to ignore me. She felt that I belonged to another
world and had no need of her. She thought that I had been merely
curious. She laughed at her error and said, "And here you were just like
me all the time." She got warm and friendly, and we went on from there.
When she was implored to sing, she asked me first what I wanted to hear.
It was "Stormy Weather," of course, and she did it beautifully.

Then I did something for her. She told us that she was going to appear
with Hall Johnson's Choir at Carnegie Hall, and planned to do some
spirituals. Immediately, the Italian soprano and others present advised
her not to do it. The argument was that Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes
and Paul Robeson had sung them so successfully that her audience would
make comparisons and Ethel would suffer by it. I saw the hurt in Ethel's
face and jumped in. I objected that Ethel was not going to do any
concertized versions of spirituals. She had never rubbed any hair off
her head against any college walls and she was not going to sing that
way. She was going to sing those spirituals just the way her humble
mother had sung them to her.

She turned to me with a warm, grateful smile on her face, and said,
"Thank you."

When she got ready to leave, she got her wraps and said, "Come on, Zora.
Let's go on uptown." I went along with her, her husband, and faithful
Lashley, a young woman spiritual singer from somewhere in Mississippi,
whom Ethel has taken under her wing.

We kept up with each other after that, and I got to know her very well.
We exchanged confidences that really mean something to both of us. I am
her friend, and her tongue is in my mouth. I can speak her sentiments
for her, though Ethel Waters can do very well indeed in speaking for
herself. She has a homely philosophy that reaches all corners of Life,
and she has words to fit when she speaks.

She is one of the strangest bundles of people that I have ever met. You
can just see the different folks wrapped up in her if you associate with
her long. Just like watching an open fire--the color and shape of her
personality is never the same twice. She has extraordinary talents which
her lack of formal education prevents her from displaying. She never had
a chance to go beyond the third grade in school. A terrible fear is in
me that the world will never really know her. You have seen her and
heard her on the stage, but so little of her capabilities are seen. Her
struggle for adequate expression throws her into moods at times. She
said to me Christmas Day of 1941, "You have the advantage of me, Zora. I
can only show what is on the stage. You can write a different kind of
book each time."

She is a Catholic, and deeply religious. She plays a good game of
bridge, but no card-playing at her house on Sundays. No more than her
mother would have had in her house. Nobody is going to dance and cut
capers around her on the Sabbath, either. What she sings about and acts
out on the stage, has nothing to do with her private life.

Her background is most humble. She does not mind saying that she was
born in the slums of Philadelphia in an atmosphere that smacked of the
rural South. She neither drinks nor smokes and is always chasing me into
a far corner of the room when I light a cigarette. She thanks God that I
don't drink.

Her religious bent shows in unexpected ways. For instance, we were
discussing her work in "Cabin in the Sky." She said, "When we started to
rehearse the spirituals, some of those no-manners people started to
swinging 'em, and get smart. I told 'em they better not play with God's
music like that. I told 'em if I caught any of 'em at it, I'd knock 'em
clean over into that orchestra pit." Her eyes flashed fire as she told
me about it. Then she calmed down and laughed. "Of course, you know,
Zora, God didn't want me to knock 'em over. That was an idea of mine."

And this fact of her background has a great deal to do with her approach
to people. She is shy and you must convince her that she is really
wanted before she will open up her tender parts and show you. Even in
her career, I am persuaded that Ethel Waters does not know that she has
arrived. For that reason, she is grateful for any show of love or
appreciation. People to whom she has given her love and trust have
exploited it heartlessly, like hogs under an acorn tree--guzzling and
grabbing with their ears hanging over their eyes, and never looking up
to see the high tree that the acorns fell from.

She went on the stage at thirteen and says that she got eight dollars a
week for her first salary. She was so frightened that she had to be
pushed on to sing her song, and then another member of the cast had to
come on with her until she could get started. Then too, they had to
place a chair for her to lean on to overcome her nervousness.

At fifteen, she introduced the "St. Louis Blues" to the world. She saw a
sheet of the music, had it played for her, then wrote to W. C. Handy for
permission to use it. Handy answered on a postal card and told her to go
as far as she liked, or words to that effect. If W. C. Handy had only
known at that time the importance of his act!

She is gay and sombre by turns. I have listened to her telling a story
and noticed her change of mood in mid-story. I have asked her to repeat
something particularly pungent that she has said, and had her tell me,
"I couldn't say it now. My thoughts are different. Sometime when I am
thinking that same way, I'll tell it to you again."

The similes and metaphors just drip off of her lips. One day I sat in
her living-room on Hobart Street in Los Angeles, deep in thought. I had
really forgotten that others were present. She nudged Archie Savage and
pointed at me. "Salvation looking at the temple forlorn," she commented
and laughed. "What you doing, Zora? Pasturing in your mind?"

"It's nice to be talking things over with you, Zora," she told me
another time. "Conversation is the ceremony of companionship."

Speaking of a man we both know, she said, "The bigger lie he tells, the
more guts he tells it with."

"That man's jaws are loaded with big words, but he never says a thing,"
she said speaking of a mutual friend. "He got his words out of a book. I
got mine out of life."

"She shot him lightly and he died politely," she commented after reading
in the _Los Angeles Examiner_ about a woman killing her lover.

Commenting on a man who had used coarse language, she said, "I'd rather
him to talk differently, but you can't hold him responsible, Zora, they
are all the words he's got."

Ethel Waters has known great success and terrible personal tragedy, so
she knows that no one can have everything.

"Don't care how good the music is, Zora, you can't dance on every set."

I am grateful for the friendship of Fannie Hurst and Ethel Waters. But
how does one speak of honest gratitude? Who can know the outer ranges of
friendship? I am tempted to say that no one can live without it. It
seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear
to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and
then not worth much after you get it.




XIV. Love


What do I really know about love? I have had some experiences and feel
fluent enough for my own satisfaction. Love, I find is like singing.
Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress
the neighbors as being very much. That is the way it is with me, but
whether I know anything unusual, I couldn't say. Don't look for me to
call a string of names and point out chapter and verse. Ladies do not
kiss and tell any more than gentlemen do.

I have read many books where the heroine was in love for a long time
without knowing it. I have talked with people and they have told me the
same thing. So maybe that is the way it ought to be. That is not the way
it is with me at all. I have been _out_ of love with people for a long
time, perhaps without finding it out. But when I fall _in_, I can feel
the bump. That is a fact and I would not try to fool you. Love may be a
sleepy, creeping thing with some others, but it is a mighty wakening
thing with me. I feel the jar, and I know it from my head on down.

Though I started falling in love before I was seven years old, I never
had a fellow until I was nearly grown. I was such a poor picker. I would
have had better luck if I had stuck to boys around my own age, but that
wouldn't do me. I wanted somebody with long pants on, and they acted as
if they didn't know I was even born. The heartless wretches would walk
right past my gate with grown women and pay me no attention at all,
other than to say hello or something like that. Then I would have to
look around for another future husband, only to have the same thing
happen all over again.

Of course, in high school I received mushy notes and wrote them. A day
or two, a week or month at most would see the end of the affair. Gone
without a trace. I was in my Freshman year in college when I first got
excited, really.

He could stomp a piano out of this world, sing a fair baritone and dance
beautifully. He noticed me, too, and I was carried away. For the first
time since my mother's death, there was someone who felt really close
and warm to me.

This affair went on all through my college life, with the exception of
two fallings-out. We got married immediately after I finished my work at
Barnard College, which should have been the happiest day of my life. St.
Augustine, Florida, is a beautiful setting for such a thing.

But, it was not my happiest day. I was assailed by doubts. For the first
time since I met him, I asked myself if I really were in love, or if
this had been a habit. I had an uncomfortable feeling of unreality. The
day and the occasion did not underscore any features of nature or
circumstance, and I wondered why. Who had canceled the well-advertised
tour of the moon? Somebody had turned a hose on the sun. What I had
taken for eternity turned out to be a moment walking in its sleep.

After our last falling-out, he asked me please to forgive him, and I
said that I did. But now, had I really? A wind full of memories blew out
of the past and brought a chilling fog. This was not the expected bright
dawn. Rather, some vagrant ray had played a trick on the night. I could
not bring myself to tell him my thoughts. I just couldn't, no matter how
hard I tried, but there they were crowding me from pillar to post.

Back in New York, I met Mrs. Mason and she offered me the chance to
return to my research work, and I accepted it. It seemed a way out
without saying anything very much. Let nature take its course. I did not
tell him about the arrangement. Rather, I urged him to return to Chicago
to continue his medical work. Then I stretched my shivering insides out
and went back to work. I have seen him only once since then. He has
married again, and I hope that he is happy.

Having made such a mess, I did not rush at any serious affair right
away. I set to work and really worked in earnest. Work was to be all of
me, so I said. Three years went by. I had finished that phase of
research and was considering writing my first book, when I met the man
who was really to lay me by the heels. I met A.W.P.

He was tall, dark-brown, magnificently built, with a beautifully modeled
back head. His profile was strong and good. The nose and lip were
especially good front and side. But his looks only drew my eyes in the
beginning. I did not fall in love with him just for that. He had a fine
mind and that intrigued me. When a man keeps beating me to the draw
mentally, he begins to get glamorous.

I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump. No matter which
way I probed him, I found something more to admire. We fitted each other
like a glove. His intellect got me first for I am the kind of a woman
that likes to move on mentally from point to point, and I like for my
man to be there way ahead of me. Then if he is strong and honest, it
goes on from there. Good looks are not essential, just extra added
attraction. He had all of those things and more. It seems to me that God
must have put in extra time making him up. He stood on his own feet so
firmly that he reared back.

To illustrate the point, I got into trouble with him for trying to loan
him a quarter. It came about this way.

I lived in the Graham Court at 116th Street and Seventh Avenue. He lived
down in 64th Street, Columbus Hill. He came to call one night and
everything went off sweetly until he got ready to leave. At the door he
told me to let him go because he was going to walk home. He had spent
the only nickel he had that night to come to see me. That upset me, and
I ran to get a quarter to loan him until his pay day. What did I do that
for? He flew hot. In fact he was the hottest man in the five boroughs.
Why did I insult him like that? The responsibility was all his. He had
known that he did not have his return fare when he left home, but he had
wanted to come, and so he had come. Let him take the consequences for
his own acts. What kind of a coward did I take him for? How could he
deserve my respect if he behaved like a cream puff? He was a _man_! No
woman on earth could either lend him or give him a cent. If a man could
not do for a woman, what good was he on earth? His great desire was to
do for me. _Please_ let him be a _man_!

For a minute I was hurt and then I saw his point. He had done a
beautiful thing and I was killing it off in my blindness. If it pleased
him to walk all of that distance for my sake, it pleased him as evidence
of his devotion. Then too, he wanted to do all the doing, and keep me on
the receiving end. He soared in my respect from that moment on. Nor did
he ever change. He meant to be the head, _so help him over the fence_!

That very manliness, sweet as it was, made us both suffer. My career
balked the completeness of his ideal. I really wanted to conform, but it
was impossible. To me there was no conflict. My work was one thing, and
he was all of the rest. But, I could not make him see that. Nothing must
be in my life but himself.

But, I am ahead of my story. I was interested in him for nearly two
years before he knew it. A great deal happened between the time we met
and the time we had any serious talk.

As I said, I loved, but I did not say so, because nobody asked me. I
made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since that they did not
seem to matter to anyone else but me.

I went South, did some more concert work and wrote "Jonah's Gourd Vine"
and "Mules and Men," then came back to New York.

He began to make shy overtures to me. I pretended not to notice for a
while so that I could be sure and not be hurt. Then he gave me the
extreme pleasure of telling me right out loud about it. It seems that he
had been in love with me just as long as I had been with him, but he was
afraid that I didn't mean him any good, as the saying goes. He had been
trying to make me tell him something. He began by complimenting me on my
clothes. Then one night when we had attended the Alpha Phi Alpha
fraternity dance--yes, he is an Alpha man--he told me that the white
dress I was wearing was beautiful, but I did not have on an evening wrap
rich enough to suit him. He had in mind just the kind he wanted to see
me in, and when he made the kind of money he expected to, the first
thing he meant to do was to buy me a gorgeous evening wrap and
everything to go with it. He wanted _his_ wife to look swell. He looked
at me from under his eyelashes to see how I was taking it. I smiled and
so he went on.

"You know, Zora, you've got a real man on your hands. You've got
somebody to do for you. I'm tired of seeing you work so hard. I wouldn't
want _my_ wife to do anything but look after me. Be home looking like
Skookums when I got there."

He always said I reminded him of the Indian on the Skookum Apples, so I
knew he meant me to understand that he wanted to be coming home to me,
and with those words he endowed me with Radio City, the General Motors
Corporation, the United States, Europe, Asia and some outlying
continents. I had everything!

So actively began the real love affair of my life. He was then a
graduate of City College, and was working for his Master's degree at
Columbia. He had no money. He was born of West Indian parents in the
Columbus Hill district of New York City, and had nothing to offer but
what it takes--a bright soul, a fine mind in a fine body, and courage.
He is so modest that I do not think that he yet knows his assets. That
was to make trouble for us later on.

It was a curious situation. He was so extraordinary that I lived in
terrible fear lest women camp on his doorstep in droves and take him
away from me. I found out later on that he could not believe that I
wanted just him. So there began an agonizing tug of war. Looking at a
very serious photograph of me that Carl Van Vechten had made, he told me
one night in a voice full of feeling that that was the way he wanted me
to look all the time unless I was with him. I almost laughed out loud.
That was just the way I felt. I hated to think of him smiling unless he
was smiling at me. His grins were too precious to be wasted on ordinary
mortals, especially women.

If he could only have realized what a lot he had to offer, he need not
have suffered so much through doubting that he could hold me. I was
hog-tied and branded, but he didn't realize it. He could make me fetch
and carry, but he wouldn't believe it. So when I had to meet people on
business, or went to literary parties and things like that, it would
drive him into a sulk, and then he would make me unhappy. I, too, failed
to see how deeply he felt. I would interpret his moods as indifference
and die, and die, and die.

He begged me to give up my career, marry him and live outside of New
York City. I really wanted to do anything he wanted me to do, but that
one thing I could not do. It was not just my contract with my
publishers, it was that I had things clawing inside of me that must be
said. I could not see that my work should make any difference in
marriage. He was all and everything else to me but that. One did not
conflict with the other in my mind. But it was different with him. He
felt that he did not matter to me enough. He was the master kind. All,
or nothing, for him.

The terrible thing was that we could neither leave each other alone, nor
compromise. Let me seem too cordial with any male and something was
going to happen. Just let him smile too broad at any woman, and no
sooner did we get inside my door than the war was on! One night (I
didn't decide this) something primitive inside me tore past the barriers
and before I realized it I had slapped his face. That was a mistake. He
was still smoldering from an incident a week old. A fellow had met us on
Seventh Avenue and kissed me on my cheek. Just one of those casual
things, but it had burned up A.W.P. So I had unknowingly given him an
opening he had been praying for. He paid me off then and there with
interest. No broken bones, you understand, and no black eyes. I realized
afterwards that my hot head could tell me to beat him, but it would cost
me something. I would have to bring head to get head. I couldn't get his
and leave mine locked up in the dresser drawer.

Then I knew I was too deeply in love to be my old self. For always a
blow to my body had infuriated me beyond measure. Even with my parents,
that was true. But somehow, I didn't hate him at all. We sat down on the
floor and each one of us tried to take all the blame. He went out and
bought some pie and I made a pot of hot chocolate and we were more
affectionate than ever. The next day he made me a bookcase that I needed
and you couldn't get a pin between us.

But fate was watching us and laughing. About a month later when he was
with me, the telephone rang. Would I please come down to an apartment in
the Fifties and meet an out-of-town celebrity? He was in town for only
two days and he wanted to meet me before he left. When I turned from the
phone, A.W.P. was changed. He begged me not to go. I reminded him that I
had promised, and begged him to come along. He refused and walked out. I
went, but I was most unhappy.

This sort of thing kept up time after time. He would not be reconciled
to the thing. We were alternately the happiest people in the world, and
the most miserable. I suddenly decided to go away to see if I could live
without him. I did not even tell him that I was going. But I wired him
from some town in Virginia.

Miss Barnicle of New York University asked me to join her and Alan Lomax
on a short bit of research. I was to select the area and contact the
subjects. Alan Lomax was joining us with a recording machine. So because
I was delirious with joy and pain, I suddenly decided to leave New York
and see if I could come to some decision. I knew no more at the end than
I did when I went South. Six weeks later I was back in New York and just
as much his slave as ever.

Really, I never had occasion to doubt his sincerity, but I used to drag
my heart over hot coals by supposing. I did not know that I could suffer
so. Then all of my careless words came to haunt me. For theatrical
effect, I had uttered sacred words and oaths to others before him. How I
hated myself for the sacrilege now! It would have seemed so wonderful
never to have uttered them before.

But no matter how soaked we were in ecstasy, the telephone or the
doorbell would ring, and there would be my career again. A charge had
been laid upon me and I must follow the call. He said once with pathos
in his voice, that at times he could not feel my presence. My real self
had escaped him. I could tell from both his face and his voice that it
hurt him terribly. It hurt me just as much to see him hurt. He really
had nothing to worry about, but I could not make him see it. So there we
were. Caught in a fiendish trap. We could not leave each other alone,
and we could not shield each other from hurt. Our bitterest enemies
could not have contrived more exquisite torture for us.

Another phase troubled me. As soon as he took his second degree, he was
in line for bigger and better jobs. I began to feel that our love was
slowing down his efforts. He had brains and character. He ought to go a
long way. I grew terribly afraid that later on he would feel that I had
thwarted him in a way and come to resent me. That was a scorching
thought. Even if I married him, what about five years from now, the way
we were going?

In the midst of this, I received my Guggenheim Fellowship. This was my
chance to release him, and fight myself free from my obsession. He would
get over me in a few months and go on to be a very big man. So I sailed
off to Jamaica. But I freely admit that everywhere I set my feet down,
there were tracks of blood. Blood from the very middle of my heart. I
did not write because if I had written and he answered my letter,
everything would have broken down.

So I pitched in to work hard on my research to smother my feelings. But
the thing would not down. The plot was far from the circumstances, but I
tried to embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him in "Their Eyes
were Watching God."

When I returned to America after nearly two years in the Caribbean, I
found that he had left his telephone number with my publishers. For some
time, I did not use it. Not because I did not want to, but because the
moment when I should hear his voice something would be in wait for me.
It might be warm and eager. It might be cool and impersonal, just with
overtones from the grave of things. So I went South and stayed several
months before I ventured to use it. Even when I returned to New York it
took me nearly two months to get up my courage. When I did make the
call, I cursed myself for the delay. Here was the shy, warm man I had
left.

Then we met and talked. We both were stunned by the revelation that all
along we had both thought and acted desperately in exile, and all to no
purpose. We were still in the toils and after all my agony, I found out
that he was a sucker for me, and he found out that I was in his bag. And
I had a triumph that only a woman could understand. He had not turned
into a tramp in my absence, but neither had he flamed like a newborn
star in his profession. He confessed that he needed my aggravating
presence to push him. He had settled down to a plodding desk job and
reconciled himself. He had let his waistline go a bit and that bespoke
his inside feeling. That made me happy no end. No woman wants a man all
finished and perfect. You have to have something to work on and prod.
That waistline went down in a jiffy and he began to discuss work-plans
with enthusiasm. He could see something ahead of him besides time. I was
happy. If he had been crippled in both legs, it would have suited me
even better.

What will be the end? That is not for me to know. Life poses questions
and that two-headed spirit that rules the beginning and end of things
called Death, has all the answers. And even if I did know all, I am
supposed to have some private business to myself. Whatever I do know, I
have no intention of putting but so much in the public ears.

Perhaps the oath of Hercules shall always defeat me in love. Once when I
was small and first coming upon the story of The Choice of Hercules, I
was so impressed that I swore an oath to leave all pleasure and take the
hard road of labor. Perhaps God heard me and wrote down my words in His
book. I have thought so at times. Be that as it may, I have the
satisfaction of knowing that I have loved and been loved by the perfect
man. If I never hear of love again, I have known the real thing.

So much for what I know about the major courses in love. However, there
are some minor courses which I have not grasped so well, and would be
thankful for some coaching and advice.

First is the number of men who pant in my ear on short acquaintance,
"You passionate thing! I can see you are just _burning_ up! Most men
would be disappointing to you. It takes a man like me for you. Ahhh! I
know that you will just wreck me! Your eyes and your lips tell me a lot.
You are a walking furnace!" This amazes me sometimes. Often when this is
whispered gustily into my ear, I am feeling no more amorous than a
charter member of the Union League Club. I may be thinking of turnip
greens with dumplings, or more royalty checks, and here is a man who
visualizes me on a divan sending the world up in smoke. It has happened
so often that I have come to expect it. There must be something about me
that looks sort of couchy. Maybe it is a birthmark. My mother could have
been frightened by a bed. There is nothing to be done about it, I
suppose. But, I must say about these mirages that seem to rise around
me, that the timing is way off on occasion.

Number two is, a man may lose interest in me and go where his fancy
leads him, and we can still meet as friends. But if I get tired and let
on about it, he is certain to become an enemy of mine. That forces me to
lie like the cross-ties from New York to Key West. I have learned to
frame it so that I can claim to be deserted and devastated by him. Then
he goes off with a sort of twilight tenderness for me, wondering what it
is that he's got that brings so many women down! I do not even have to
show real tears. All I need to do is show my stricken face and dash away
from him to hide my supposed heartbreak and renunciation. He understands
that I am fleeing before his allure so that I can be firm in my
resolution to save the pieces. He knew all along that he was a hard man
to resist, so he visualized my dampened pillow. It is a good thing that
some of them have sent roses as a poultice and stayed away. Otherwise,
they might have found the poor, heartbroken wreck of a thing all dressed
to kill and gone out for a high-heel time with the new interest, who has
the new interesting things to say and do. Now, how to break off without
acting deceitful and still keep a friend?

Number three is kin to Number two, in a way. Under the spell of
moonlight, music, flowers, or the cut and smell of good tweeds, I
sometimes feel the divine urge for an hour, a day or maybe a week. Then
it is gone and my interest returns to corn pone and mustard greens, or
rubbing a paragraph with a soft cloth. Then my ex-sharer of a mood calls
up in a fevered voice and reminds me of every silly thing I said, and
eggs me on to say them all over again. It is the third presentation of
turkey hash after Christmas. It is asking me to be a seven-sided liar.
Accuses me of being faithless and inconsistent if I don't. There is no
inconsistency there. I was sincere for the moment in which I said the
things. It is strictly a matter of time. It was true for the moment, but
the next day or the next week, is not that moment. No two moments are
any more alike than two snowflakes. Like snowflakes, they get that same
look from being so plentiful and falling so close together. But examine
them closely and see the multiple differences between them. Each moment
has its own task and capacity; doesn't melt down like snow and form
again. It keeps its character forever. So the great difficulty lies in
trying to transpose last night's moment to a day which has no knowledge
of it. That look, that tender touch, was issued by the mint of the
richest of all kingdoms. That same expression of today is utter
counterfeit, or at best the wildest of inflation. What could be more
zestless than passing out canceled checks? It is wrong to be called
faithless under circumstances like that. What to do?

I have a strong suspicion, but I can't be sure, that much that passes
for constant love is a golded-up moment walking in its sleep. Some
people know that it is the walk of the dead, but in desperation and
desolation, they have staked everything on life after death and the
resurrection, so they haunt the graveyard. They build an altar on the
tomb and wait there like faithful Mary for the stone to roll away. So
the moment has authority over all of their lives. They pray constantly
for the miracle of the moment to burst its bonds and spread out over
time.

But pay no attention to what I say about love, for as I said before, it
may not mean a thing. It is my own bathtub singing. Just because my
mouth opens up like a prayer book, it does not just have to flap like a
Bible. And then again, anybody whose mouth is cut cross-ways is given to
lying, unconsciously as well as knowingly. So pay my few scattering
remarks no mind as to love in general. I know only my part.

Anyway, it seems to be the unknown country from which no traveler ever
returns. What seems to be a returning pilgrim is another person born in
the strange country with the same-looking ears and hands. He is a
stranger to the person who fared forth, and a stranger to family and old
friends. He is clothed in mystery henceforth and forever. So, perhaps
nobody knows, or can tell, any more than I. Maybe the old Negro folk
rhyme tells all there is to know:

         Love is a funny thing; Love is a blossom;
         If you want your finger bit, poke it at a possum.




XV. Religion


You wouldn't think that a person who was born with God in the house
would ever have any questions to ask on the subject.

But as early as I can remember, I was questing and seeking. It was not
that I did not hear. I tumbled right into the Missionary Baptist Church
when I was born. I saw the preachers and the pulpits, the people and the
pews. Both at home and from the pulpit, I heard my father, known to
thousands as "Reverend Jno" (an abbreviation for John) explain all about
God's habits, His heaven, His ways and means. Everything was known and
settled.

From the pews I heard a ready acceptance of all that Papa said. Feet
beneath the pews beat out a rhythm as he pictured the scenery of heaven.
Heads nodded with conviction in time to Papa's words. Tense snatches of
tune broke out and some shouted until they fell into a trance at the
recognition of what they heard from the pulpit. Come "love feast"[D]
some of the congregation told of getting close enough to peep into God's
sitting-room windows. Some went further. They had been inside the place
and looked all around. They spoke of sights and scenes around God's
throne.

-----

[D] The "Love Feast" or "Experience Meeting" is a meeting held either
the Friday night or the Sunday morning before Communion. Since no one is
supposed to take Communion unless he or she is in harmony with all other
members, there are great protestations of love and friendship. It is an
opportunity to reaffirm faith plus anything the imagination might
dictate.

-----

That should have been enough for me. But somehow it left a lack in my
mind. They should have looked and acted differently from other people
after experiences like that. But these people looked and acted like
everybody else--or so it seemed to me. They plowed, chopped wood, went
possum-hunting, washed clothes, raked up backyards and cooked collard
greens like anybody else. No more ornaments and nothing. It mystified
me. There were so many things they neglected to look after while they
were right there in the presence of All-Power. I made up my mind to do
better than that if ever I made the trip.

I wanted to know, for instance, why didn't God make grown babies instead
of those little measly things that messed up didies and cried all the
time? What was the sense in making babies with no teeth? He knew that
they had to have teeth, didn't He? So why not give babies their teeth in
the beginning instead of hiding the toothless things in hollow stumps
and logs for grannies and doctors to find and give to people? He could
see all the trouble people had with babies, rubbing their gums and
putting wood-lice around their necks to get them to cut teeth. Why did
God hate for children to play on Sundays? If Christ, God's son, hated to
die, and God hated for Him to die and have everybody grieving over it
ever since, why did He have to do it? Why did people die anyway?

It was explained to me that Christ died to save the world from sin and
then too, so that folks did not have to die any more. That was a simple,
clear-cut explanation. But then I heard my father and other preachers
accusing people of sin. They went so far as to say that people were so
prone to sin, that they sinned with every breath they drew. You couldn't
even breathe without sinning! How could that happen if we had already
been saved from it? So far as the dying part was concerned, I saw enough
funerals to know that somebody was dying. It seemed to me that somebody
had been fooled and I so stated to my father and two of his colleagues.
When they got through with me, I knew better than to say that out loud
again, but their shocked and angry tirades did nothing for my
bewilderment. My head was full of misty fumes of doubt.

Neither could I understand the passionate declarations of love for a
being that nobody could see. Your family, your puppy and the new
bull-calf, yes. But a spirit away off who found fault with everybody all
the time, that was more than I could fathom. When I was asked if I loved
God, I always said yes because I knew that that was the thing I was
supposed to say. It was a guilty secret with me for a long time. I did
not dare ask even my chums if they meant it when they said they loved
God with all their souls and minds and hearts, and would be glad to die
if He wanted them to. Maybe they had found out how to do it, and I was
afraid of what they might say if they found out I hadn't. Maybe they
wouldn't even play with me any more.

As I grew, the questions went to sleep in me. I just said the words,
made the motions and went on. My father being a preacher, and my mother
superintendent of the Sunday School, I naturally was always having to do
with religious ceremonies. I even enjoyed participation at times; I was
moved, not by the spirit, but by action, more or less dramatic.

I liked revival meetings particularly. During these meetings the
preacher let himself go. God was called by all of His praise-giving
names. The scenery of heaven was described in detail. Hallelujah Avenue
and Amen Street were paved with gold so fine that you couldn't drop a
pea on them but what they rang like chimes. Hallelujah Avenue ran north
and south across heaven, and was tuned to sound alto and bass. Amen
Street ran east and west and was tuned to "treble" and tenor. These
streets crossed each other right in front of the throne and made harmony
all the time. Yes, and right there on that corner was where all the
loved ones who had gone on before would be waiting for those left
behind.

Oh yes! They were all there in their white robes with the glittering
crowns on their heads, golden girdles clasped about their waists and
shoes of jeweled gold on their feet, singing the hallelujah song and
waiting. And as they walked up and down the golden streets, their shoes
would sing, "sol me, sol do" at every step.

Hell was described in dramatic fury. Flames of fire leaped up a thousand
miles from the furnaces of Hell, and raised blisters on a sinning man's
back before he hardly got started downward. Hell-hounds pursued their
ever-dying souls. Everybody under the sound of the preacher's voice was
warned, while yet they were on pleading terms with mercy, to take steps
to be sure that they would not be a brand in that eternal burning.

Sinners lined the mourner's bench from the opening night of the revival.
Before the week was over, several or all of them would be "under
conviction." People, solemn of face, crept off to the woods to "praying
ground" to seek religion. Every church member worked on them hard, and
there was great clamor and rejoicing when any of them "come through"
religion.

The pressure on the unconverted was stepped up by music and high drama.
For instance I have seen my father stop preaching suddenly and walk down
to the front edge of the pulpit and breathe into a whispered song. One
of his most effective ones was:

           Run! Run! Run to the City of Refuge, children!
           Run! Oh, run! Or else you'll be consumed.

The congregation working like a Greek chorus behind him, would take up
the song and the mood and hold it over for a while even after he had
gone back into the sermon at high altitude:

        Are you ready-ee? Hah!
        For that great day, hah!
        When the moon shall drape her face in mourning, hah!
        And the sun drip down in blood, hah!
        When the stars, hah!
        Shall burst forth from their diamond sockets, hah!
        And the mountains shall skip like lambs, hah!
        Havoc will be there, my friends, hah!
        With her jaws wide open, hah!
        And the sinner-man, hah!
        He will run to the rocks, hah!
        And cry, Oh rocks! Hah!
        Hide me! Hah!
        Hide me from the face of an angry God, hah!
        Hide me, Ohhhhhh!
        But the rocks shall cry, hah!
        Git away! Sinner man git away, hah!

(Tense harmonic chant seeps over the audience.)

                      You run to de rocks,
              CHORUS: You can't hide
             SOLOIST: Oh, you run to de rocks
              CHORUS: Can't hide
             SOLOIST: Oh, run to de mountain, you can't hide
                 ALL: Can't hide sinner, you can't hide.
                      Rocks cry 'I'm burning too, hah!
                      In the eternal burning, hah!
                      Sinner man! Hah!
                      Where will you stand? Hah!
                      In that great gittin'-up morning? Hah!'

The congregation would be right in there at the right moment bearing
Papa up and heightening the effect of the fearsome picture a
hundredfold. The more susceptible would be swept away on the tide and
"come through" shouting, and the most reluctant would begin to waver.
Seldom would there be anybody left at the mourners' bench when the
revival meeting was over. I have seen my father "bring through" as many
as seventy-five in one two-week period of revival. Then a day would be
set to begin the induction into the regular congregation. The first
thing was to hear their testimony or Christian experience, and thus the
congregation could judge whether they had really "got religion" or
whether they were faking and needed to be sent back to "lick de calf
over" again.

It was exciting to hear them tell their "visions." This was known as
admitting people to the church on "Christian experience." This was an
exciting time.

These visions are traditional. I knew them by heart as did the rest of
the congregation, but still it was exciting to see how the converts
would handle them. Some of them made up new details. Some of them would
forget a part and improvise clumsily or fill up the gap with shouting.
The audience knew, but everybody acted as if every word of it was new.

First they told of suddenly becoming conscious that they had to die.
They became conscious of their sins. They were Godly sorry. But somehow,
they could not believe. They started to pray. They prayed and they
prayed to have their sins forgiven and their souls converted. While they
laid under conviction, the hell-hounds pursued them as they ran for
salvation. They hung over Hell by one strand of hair. Outside of the
meeting, any of the listeners would have laughed at the idea of anybody
with hair as close to their heads as ninety-nine is to a hundred hanging
over Hell or anywhere else by a strand of that hair. But it was part of
the vision and the congregation shuddered and groaned at the picture in
a fervent manner. The vision must go on. While the seeker hung there,
flames of fire leaped up and all but destroyed their ever-dying souls.
But they called on the name of Jesus and immediately that dilemma was
over. They then found themselves walking over Hell on a foot-log so
narrow that they had to put one foot right in front of the other while
the howling hell-hounds pursued them relentlessly. Lord! They saw no way
of rescue. But they looked on the other side and saw a little white man
and he called to them to come there. So they called the name of Jesus
and suddenly they were on the other side. He poured the oil of salvation
into their souls and, hallelujah! They never expect to turn back. But
still they wouldn't believe. So they asked God, if he had saved their
souls, to give them a sign. If their sins were forgiven and their souls
set free, please move that big star in the west over to the east. The
star moved over. But still they wouldn't believe. If they were really
saved, please move that big oak tree across the road. The tree skipped
across the road and kept on growing just like it had always been there.
Still they didn't believe. So they asked God for one more sign. Would He
please make the sun shout so they could be sure. At that God got mad and
said He had shown them all the signs He intended to. If they still
didn't believe, He would send their bodies to the grave, where the worm
never dies, and their souls to Hell, where the fire is never quenched.
So then they cried out "I believe! I believe!" Then the dungeon shook
and their chains fell off. "Glory! I know I got religion! I know I been
converted and my soul set free! I never will forget that day when the
morning star bust in my soul. I never expect to turn back!"

The convert shouted. Ecstatic cries, snatches of chants, old converts
shouting in frenzy with the new. When the tumult finally died down, the
pastor asks if the candidate is acceptable and there is unanimous
consent. He or she is given the right hand of fellowship, and the next
candidate takes the floor. And so on to the end.

I know now that I liked that part because it was high drama. I liked the
baptisms in the lake too, and the funerals for the same reason. But of
the inner thing, I was right where I was when I first began to seek
answers.

Away from the church after the emotional fire had died down, there were
little jokes about some of the testimony. For instance a deacon said in
my hearing, "Sister Seeny ought to know better than to be worrying God
about moving the sun for her. She asked Him to move de tree to convince
her, and He done it. Then she took and asked Him to move a star for her
and He done it. But when she kept on worrying Him about moving the sun,
He took and told her, says, 'I don't mind moving that tree for you, and
I don't mind moving a star just to pacify your mind, because I got
plenty of _them_. I aint got but one sun, Seeny, and I aint going to be
shoving it around to please you and nobody else. I'd like mighty much
for you to believe, but if you can't believe without me moving my sun
for you, you can just go right on to Hell.'"

The thing slept on in me until my college years without any real
decision. I made the necessary motions and forgot to think. But when I
studied both history and philosophy, the struggle began again.

When I studied the history of the great religions of the world, I saw
that even in his religion man carried himself along. His worship of
strength was there. God was made to look that way too. We see the
Emperor Constantine, as pagan as he could lay in his hide, having his
famous vision of the cross with the injunction: "_In Hoc Signo Vinces_,"
and arising next day not only to win a great battle, but to start out on
his missionary journey with his sword. He could not sing like Peter, and
he could not preach like Paul. He probably did not even have a good
straining voice like my father to win converts and influence people. But
he had his good points--one of them being a sword--and a seasoned army.
And the way he brought sinners to repentance was nothing short of
miraculous. Whole tribes and nations fell under conviction just as soon
as they heard he was on the way. They did not wait for any stars to
move, nor trees to jump the road. By the time he crossed the border,
they knew they had been converted. Their testimony was in on Christian
experience and they were all ready for the right hand of fellowship and
baptism. It seems that Reverend Brother Emperor Constantine carried the
gospel up and down Europe with his revival meetings to such an extent
that Christianity really took on. In Rome where Christians had been
looked upon as rather indifferent lion-bait at best, and among other
things as keepers of virgins in their homes for no real good to the
virgins, Christianity mounted. Where before, Emperors could scarcely
find enough of them to keep the spectacles going, now they were
everywhere, in places high and low. The arrow had left the bow.
Christianity was on its way to world power that would last. That was
only the beginning. Military power was to be called in time and time
again to carry forward the gospel of peace. There is not apt to be any
difference of opinion between you and a dead man.

It was obvious that two men, both outsiders, had given my religion its
chances of success. First the Apostle Paul, who had been Saul, the
erudite Pharisee, had arisen with a vision when he fell off of his horse
on the way to Damascus. He not only formulated the religion, but exerted
his brilliant mind to carry it to the most civilized nations of his
time. Then Constantine took up with force where Paul left off with
persuasion.

I saw the same thing with different details, happen in all the other
great religions, and seeing these things, I went to thinking and
questing again. I have achieved a certain peace within myself, but
perhaps the seeking after the inner heart of truth will never cease in
me. All sorts of interesting speculations arise.

So, having looked at the subject from many sides, studied beliefs by
word of mouth and then as they fit into great rigid forms, I find I know
a great deal about form, but little or nothing about the mysteries I
sought as a child. As the ancient tent-maker said, I have come out of
the same door wherein I went.

But certain things have seemed to me to be true as I heard the tongues
of those who had speech, and listened at the lips of books. It seems to
me to be true that heavens are placed in the sky because it is the
unreachable. The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems
divine--hence, religion. People need religion because the great masses
fear life and its consequences. Its responsibilities weigh heavy.
Feeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance
with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though
the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds. It
gives them a feeling of security. Strong, self-determining men are
notorious for their lack of reverence. Constantine, having converted
millions to Christianity by the sword, himself refused the consolation
of Christ until his last hour. Some say not even then.

As for me, I do not pretend to read God's mind. If He has a plan of the
universe worked out to the smallest detail, it would be folly for me to
presume to get down on my knees and attempt to revise it. That, to me,
seems the highest form of sacrilege. So I do not pray. I accept the
means at my disposal for working out my destiny. It seems to me that I
have been given a mind and will-power for that very purpose. I do not
expect God to single me out and grant me advantages over my fellow men.
Prayer is for those who need it. Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness,
and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid
down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of
responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made
my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws. The
ever-sleepless sea in its bed, crying out "How long?" to Time;
million-formed and never motionless flame; the contemplation of these
two aspects alone, affords me sufficient food for ten spans of my
expected lifetime. It seems to me that organized creeds are collections
of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. However, I would not,
by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it
affords. It is simply not for me. Somebody else may have my rapturous
glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of morning
out of the misty deep of dawn, is glory enough for me. I know that
nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the
consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part
and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape
and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled
out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and
still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and
disintegrated in infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling
rubble in space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever
changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and
creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of
the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite
and need no other assurance.




XVI. Looking Things Over


Well, that is the way things stand up to now. I can look back and see
sharp shadows, high lights, and smudgy in-betweens. I have been in
Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the
peaky mountain wrappen in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.

What I had to swallow in the kitchen has not made me less glad to have
lived, nor made me want to low-rate the human race, nor any whole
sections of it. I take no refuge from myself in bitterness. To me,
bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the
graceless acknowledgment of defeat. I have no urge to make any
concessions like that to the world as yet. I might be like that some
day, but I doubt it. I am in the struggle with the sword in my hands,
and I don't intend to run until you run me. So why give off the smell of
something dead under the house while I am still in there tussling with
my sword in my hand?

If tough breaks have not soured me, neither have my glory-moments caused
me to build any altars to myself where I can burn incense before God's
best job of work. My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my
seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation as the whole intent of
the universe. When I see what we really are like, I know that God is too
great an artist for we folks on my side of the creek to be all of His
best works. Some of His finest touches are among us, without doubt, but
some more of His masterpieces are among those folks who live over the
creek.

So looking back and forth in history and around the temporary scene, I
do not visualize the moon dripping down in blood, nor the sun batting
his fiery eyes and laying down in the cradle of eternity to rock himself
into sleep and slumber at instances of human self-bias. I know that the
sun and the moon must be used to sights like that by now. I too yearn
for universal justice, but how to bring it about is another thing. It is
such a complicated thing, for justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the
beholder. There is universal agreement on the principle, but the
application brings on the fight. Oh, for some disinterested party to
pass on things! Somebody will hurry to tell me that we voted God to the
bench for that. But the lawyers who interpret His opinions, make His
decisions sound just like they made them up themselves. Being an
idealist, I too wish that the world was better than I am. Like all the
rest of my fellow men, I don't want to live around people with no more
principles than I have. My inner fineness is continually outraged at
finding that the world is a whole family of Hurstons.

Seeing these things, I have come to the point by trying to make the day
at hand a positive thing, and realizing the uselessness of gloominess.

Therefore, I see nothing but futility in looking back over my shoulder
in rebuke at the grave of some white man who has been dead too long to
talk about. That is just what I would be doing in trying to fix the
blame for the dark days of slavery and the Reconstruction. From what I
can learn, it was sad. Certainly. But my ancestors who lived and died in
it are dead. The white men who profited by their labor and lives are
dead also. I have no personal memory of those times, and no
responsibility for them. Neither has the grandson of the man who held my
folks. So I see no need in button-holing that grandson like the Ancient
Mariner did the wedding guest and calling for the High Sheriff to put
him under arrest.

I am not so stupid as to think that I would be bringing this descendant
of a slave-owner any news. He has heard just as much about the thing as
I have. I am not so humorless as to visualize this grandson falling out
on the sidewalk before me, and throwing an acre of fits in remorse
because his old folks held slaves. No, indeed! If it happened to be a
fine day and he had had a nice breakfast, he might stop and answer me
like this:

"In the first place, I was not able to get any better view of social
conditions from my grandmother's womb than you could from your
grandmother's. Let us say for the sake of argument that I detest the
institution of slavery and all that it implied, just as much as you do.
You must admit that I had no more power to do anything about it in my
unborn state than you had in yours. Why fix your eyes on me? I
respectfully refer you to my ancestors, and bid you a good day."

If I still lingered before him, he might answer me further by asking
questions like this:

"Are you so simple as to assume that the Big Surrender (Southerners,
both black and white speak of Lee's surrender to Grant as the Big
Surrender) banished the concept of human slavery from the earth? What is
the principle of slavery? Only the literal buying and selling of human
flesh on the block? That was only an outside symbol. Real slavery is
couched in the desire and the efforts of any man or community to live
and advance their interests at the expense of the lives and interests of
others. All of the outward signs come out of that. Do you not realize
that the power, prestige and prosperity of the greatest nations on earth
rests on colonies and sources of raw materials? Why else are great wars
waged? If you have not thought, then why waste up time with your vapid
accusations? If you have, then why single _me_ out?" And like Pilate, he
will light a cigar, and stroll on off without waiting for an answer.

Anticipating such an answer, I have no intention of wasting my time
beating on old graves with a club. I know that I cannot pry aloose the
clutching hand of Time, so I will turn all my thoughts and energies on
the present. I will settle for from now on.

And why not? For me to pretend that I am Old Black Joe and waste my time
on his problems, would be just as ridiculous as for the government of
Winston Churchill to bill the Duke of Normandy the first of every month,
or for the Jews to hang around the pyramids trying to picket Old
Pharaoh. While I have a handkerchief over my eyes crying over the
landing of the first slaves in 1619, I might miss something swell that
is going on in 1942. Furthermore, if somebody were to consider my
grandmother's ungranted wishes, and give _me_ what _she_ wanted, I would
be too put out for words.

What do I want, then? I will tell you in a parable. A Negro deacon was
down on his knees praying at a wake held for a sister who had died that
day. He had his eyes closed and was going great guns, when he noticed
that he was not getting any more "amens" from the rest. He opened his
eyes and saw that everybody else was gone except himself and the dead
woman. Then he saw the reason. The supposedly dead woman was trying to
sit up. He bolted for the door himself, but it slammed shut so quickly
that it caught his flying coat-tails and held him sort of static. "Oh,
no Gabriel!" the deacon shouted, "dat aint no way for you to do. I can
do my own running, but you got to 'low me the same chance as the rest."

I don't know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will
be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is
the nearest thing to happiness that I can find. No matter what else I
have among the things that humans want, I go to pieces in a short while
if I do not work. What all my work shall be, I don't know that either,
every hour being a stranger to you until you live it. I want a busy
life, a just mind and a timely death.

But if I should live to be very old, I have laid plans for that so that
it will not be too tiresome. So far, I have never used coffee, liquor,
nor any form of stimulant. When I get old, and my joints and bones tell
me about it, I can sit around and write for myself, if for nobody else,
and read slowly and carefully the mysticism of the East, and re-read
Spinoza with love and care. All the while my days can be a succession of
coffee cups. Then when the sleeplessness of old age attacks me, I can
have a likker bottle snug in my pantry and sip away and sleep. Get
mellow and think kindly of the world. I think I can be like that because
I have known the joy and pain of deep friendship. I have served and been
served. I have made some good enemies for which I am not a bit sorry. I
have loved unselfishly, and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs
of Hell. That's living.

I have no race prejudice of any kind. My kinfolks, and my "skin-folks"
are dearly loved. My own circumference of everyday life is there. But I
see their same virtues and vices everywhere I look. So I give you all my
right hand of fellowship and love, and hope for the same from you. In my
eyesight, you lose nothing by not looking just like me. I will remember
you all in my good thoughts, and I ask you kindly to do the same for me.
Not only just me. You, who play the zig-zag lightning of power over the
world, with the grumbling thunder in your wake, think kindly of those
who walk in the dust. And you who walk in humble places, think kindly
too, of others. There has been no proof in the world so far that you
would be less arrogant if you held the lever of power in your hands. Let
us all be kissing-friends. Consider that with tolerance and patience, we
godly demons may breed a noble world in a few hundred generations or so.
Maybe all of us who do not have the good fortune to meet, or meet again,
in this world, will meet at a barbecue.


THE END






[Dust Tracks on a Road, by Zora Neale Hurston]
