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Our second black mainstay and refuge in the time of storm, was cast in a temperamental mold very different from the managerial Mandy’s. For Uncle Rufus was tolerant of small transgressions and ready to shield the transgressors. He combined a great personal dignity with a great humility, and that, I’d say, is an admirable consolidation not so common as it might be, in persons of any color. He had belonged originally to my grandfather’s second wife, the Widow Lockett of Virginia, and on her death my Grandfather Saunders bought him from the estate to keep a family from being divided. When Freedom came Rufus elected to stay on with his former master. He stayed on long past his time of real usefulness but continued to enjoy all the perquisites. So loyalty was repaid with loyalty.

Aloof and grave, he pottered about the place, raking up leaves, fetching in kindling, running errands—no, that’s wrong; ambling slowly on errands—and doing such-like odd jobs. He was tall and almost fleshless but carried his meager shape most erectly. From age his skin had taken on a curious grayish cast like a dusty mold. About his features there was hardly a traceable suggestion of the negroid. He had an aquiline nose and a high narrow forehead and a Coptic profile. You see faces like his on Egyptian mummy cases. He told me his mother had been an “Affikin princess” and how her neck bore scars where she, being of chieftain blood, had fought against her iron collar in the blackbirder’s chain gang until the metal bit deeper and deeper into the galled flesh. This may well have been true for in various of his ways Uncle Rufus seemed very close to the jungle.

He rarely would come to the kitchen, preferring to cook messes of his own concoction in the tumble-down one-room cubicle which was the sole surviving unit of what, before Emancipation, had been a short row of quarters for the domestic staff. He lived alone there, fending for himself and resenting intrusion by the other servants. Except in the hottest weather there nearly always were logs burning in his fireplace and although he had a mountainous “feather-tick” on his bedstead and a wealth of gay rag quilts, frequently he slept on the bare floor with his head muffled in a coverlid and his naked feet thrust into the warm ashes. Or he might choose to hunker down by the mantel shelf, for hours on end staring into the flicker of the little bright flames.

Sometimes I found him in that somber posture when, filled with a delicious anticipatory horror, I came in the twilight to make him tell me “buggerman tales” while I squatted at his bony knees and the fire burned lower and from the corners the thickened shadows stole out across the planking, drawing nearer and nearer until I was in a very frenzy of shuddering.

First though I might join him at his eating. Supper in the “big house” never had such savor as when I slipped away from the table, leaving my portion half-eaten, and went to share with him drainings of “pot licker” out of a besmudged and dented kettle, and the hoe-cake which he baked on the hearth and then wiped on his shirt sleeve to rid it of the grit—but never got quite all the grit off; and the roasted sweet potatoes which he raked out from the embers and then peeled with a deft thumbnail. Fingering hot things didn’t seem to bother him. I’ve seen him catch up a blazing spark to light his pipe with, or with the flat of his hand pat down a bank of smouldering cinder-fluff and never wince.

And then, if the mood was on him and after he had been sufficiently teased and pleaded with, he would launch his storytelling. It was through him that fear, stark hair-lifting fear, first came into my world, for he peopled it with all manner of hideousities. Here was no gentle, whimsical fabulist of the Uncle Remus school; here was a realist dealing in the pure essences of Ethiopian nightmare and making dreadful the wild things and the harmless tame things, as well. On a Friday, from noon on, you never saw a jay bird except he were on his way to the Bad Place to tattle to his master, the Devil; and you couldn’t kill a rain crow with any bullet except a silver bullet because he also was under Old Nick’s protection. It was a bad sign, a powerfully bad sign, did an owl light on the roof, and any bird flying inside a house meant bad luck, too. But a dog baying under the windows of a sickroom foretold death for the one who was sick. Cats in general, but black cats in particular, loved to invade a room where a corpse was laid out and squat on the coffin lid and squall. Another specialty of a cat was to stretch itself on a baby’s breast and suck the breath of life out of the child while it slept. Toad-frogs carried pizen bags in their backs—years later I found out this, in a way of speaking, was a fact. All snakes whatsoever were highly venomous but especially the hoop snake which put its tail in its mouth and rolled downhill at you and if you were smart enough to dodge behind a tree then the hoop snake’s deadly horn, which jutted forth from its head, would stick in the bark and before sundown the leaves of that tree would all be withered and within a week the wood would start rotting. You couldn’t burn the wood either, it just crumbled away to nothing, leaving a loathsome stink behind. The little green praying mantis—only I knew him as a devil’s race horse—would bite you in a minute and make a running sore which never healed; and the most trivial of lizards, sunning herself on the garden walk, was a dangerous “scoripin” although perhaps not quite so evilly inclined as some other members of the menagerie that might be mentioned and, in their proper order, invariably were.

But far and away the most awful, the most gruesome and grisly of all were the creatures that wore human shapes. With an instinctive but sure dramatic craft, Uncle Rufus saved back these monsters for his climax. The proceedings followed invariably a certain rote: To start with, the perilous parade through the animal kingdom, then the introduction of such comparatively minor performers as “witchin’ wimmin” who worked wicked spells and “hoodoos” who brewed lovers’ charms and mixed villainous “goofer-powders.” I knew what would be coming next and shook in all my members, yearning for and yet dreading the elaborated cataloguing of the prize specimens of his collection—“ghostes” that walked by moonlight in the burying ground; “hags” that left a hot breath like a gush from a furnace as they flitted across the road just ahead of some lonesome traveler; “ha’nts” that throve in deserted houses where a suicide or a murder had been committed, but preferably a murder, and clanked heavy chains and moaned in the walls and made a door open and close yet with no hand seen to touch it.

And, deliberately held in reserve until the very end, I shudderingly heard again about “Ole Raw Haid an’ Bloody Bones” and “Plateye.” Raw Haid was a thing that had been flayed alive, no skin left anywhere on him but only twitchy, oozing tissues. He delighted to lurk in dark places and steal up from behind on small boys who had been bad and clamp down on them with his dripping red paws and bear them off to be devoured at leisure in his den underground. Plateye was a ghoul of so frightful an aspect as to be past describing, and anyhow none who ever met Plateye face to face had survived to tell what he looked like. Still there was a rumor that he used burning coals for eyes in his eye sockets and had tushes longer than a boar pig’s. He took his victims apart while they lived, snapping their fingers like stick candy and plucking off ears like ripe figs. He then ate the remains and hollered for more, being chronically hungry.

Sooner or later the shouted summons would come—a grief and a shock to my enthralled soul—that I was to go and be put to bed. But ere I quit the dubious shelter of that cabin there was a protective program to be carried out. It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from the tip of the latticed porch of the kitchen wing to Uncle Rufus’ threshold, yet before I ventured to travel that short span Mandy or Donie, the nurse, must station herself at the porch end holding aloft a coal-oil lamp and Uncle Rufus must stand in his open door, with the glare of his poked-up logs shining through, and then, with my heart up in my gasping throat and my marrows jellifying from terror, I would dart along the lighted pathway, yelling every step I took, and hurl myself against the legs of her who awaited me, and try to hide my quaking person in her skirts.

And the very next chance I got I’d go back, like a drug addict, for a fresh spasm. I wonder how many years’ growth I lost under Uncle Rufus’ fascinating treatments.

Here’s the right place to make a belated and until now an unrevealed confession. I was past eighteen and upwards of six lanky feet tall and the downy beginnings of the cherished makings of a future mustache were sprouting on my upper lip before I got over flinching when called on to enter an empty dark room. I had literally to drive myself to it.

Getting drowned, or to all interests and purposes, practically getting drowned, was another thing which put an even deeper dent in my brain, for it has endured to this good day. I was perhaps fourteen years old and just learning to paddle “dog-fashion.” A number of us had secured the loan of a skiff without saying anything to the skiff’s owner about it, and cruised over to a sandbar where the Tennessee merged its blue with the Ohio’s muddier volume, directly in front of town. Having waded out to a breast-high depth, I took a few splashing strokes parallel to the shore and confidently let down my probing toes to find the gently sloped bottom. There was no bottom, sloped or otherwise. I was in a “step-off,” where the treacherous current had scooped a deepish cavity among the hidden shallows. Such unsuspected pitfalls sometimes form in an hour especially when the stream is in freshet.

In that first disconcerting instant I didn’t altogether go into panic. Very vividly I remember how I tried to bring my legs up by thrusting with the soles of my feet against the water and how I tried with my arms to stroke my way back to safety. But a swift cross eddy had formed above the undermined shoal and this little whirlpool had caught me and was carrying me along. I opened my mouth to call for help. Half a dozen companions were taking sunbaths not fifty yards distant, and some larger boys who swam well were sporting about on beyond me. But the water ran into my mouth and smothered my cries to faint gurglings. I went under, bobbed up, struggling hard; went under again.

You have heard—you must have heard it because everybody else has—how drowning persons always come up three times and how all in a flash their lives pass in review before their despairing eyes. I am here to testify that these phenomena do not necessarily occur. At least in my case they did not.

For I’m sure I got my nose above the surface a score of times and I know my chief mental sensation, aside from a mounting realization of my danger, was resentment toward those others for callously disregarding my plight. All mixed in with this was a darting regret that my mother would grieve so when she got the news. There formed before me a most clearly imagined picture of our front porch with my mother and one of my sisters sitting there in rocking chairs and a neighbor—it was Mr. Ed Noble, who lived over the way, and I visioned him perfectly—hurrying up the walk to tell them I was dead.

That was the last I remembered except the water going different shuttling colors—red, blue, purple, green—and then shifting to a black pall which very gently, very slowly, enveloped me, so that I quit fighting and let the blackness close over my head. I was going elsewhere and now I didn’t much care.

It must have been about that time that the rescuer arrived. One of my mates on the bar finally arrived at the conclusion that not for the fun of the thing was I imitating an agitated fishing cork out in the supposed safety zone but might be in earnest about it. So he raised the alarm and the best swimmer in the lot got there just as I ceased to be actively interested in the proceedings. He saw my descending topknot before it altogether vanished and made a short dive and got me by the hair. He said I grabbed one of his wrists with both my hands as he heaved me up and kept my grip on him until he had dragged me ashore. So he was surprised to note that I seemed entirely unconscious. But of these latter details I was not cognizant. Some ten minutes later my mind began dizzily to function. I was being emptied. Two youngsters, holding me by the legs, had tilted me upside down and a sizable trickle, yes, a streamlet really, was gurgling out of me and I was beginning to hurt amidships where I had been rolled back and front, belly downward on a cottonwood drift-log having much rough bark still on it. Within two hours we were over on the Illinois mainland and I was industriously engaged, along with several confederates, in stealing melons out of a farmer’s field, and never felt sprier in my life although afflicted with an incurable thirst which seemed strange seeing how much of the Ohio River I had swallowed that same morning.

The effect of that experience is still a part of me and has been since the hour the event happened and always will be. For timidity is branded into my faculties. I reckon you might call it mental hydrophobia since I am beset by a menace that my intelligence tells me does not exist—which doesn’t make the menace any less real. It was years before I conquered that implanted distrust of water in large quantities to a point where I learned to swim, but have remained always an awkward and overly cautious swimmer. I have never dived—and never shall. Over and over again have I tried to. But my obstinate spirit rebels and my shameless will power balks like a mule. Even though I stand flatfooted in a swimming pool and merely try to sink my head under and straighten and strike out, the effort results in humiliating failure. As my nostrils fill and the water pulses against my eardrums I am again a frantic drowning boy and up I come, all quaky and wabbly and cursing my fool self for being so contemptible a craven. I’ve even made the experiment of kneeling in a filled bathtub and submerging my person, face downward. But it’s no use. Besides, the attitude is not dignified and somebody might come in and catch me. I guess you might say that the only aquatic pursuit at which I really excel is gargling.

I take it that courage is a relative term, that in each one of us a lion and a mouse lie down together and under contrariwise impulses one or the other will rise up and show itself and sometimes both together at once. Making the application personal, I’m trying to sift out from a jumble of more or less fixed impressions of boyhood some of my own psychological reactions and reflexes. For an outstanding instance, I was an indifferent not to say lackadaisical fisticuffer. It wasn’t so much that I feared the other boy. Nor did the prospect of the bruises and scratches which he might inflict daunt me. Without whimpering too much, I could endure pain as well as the next one. Rather it was the fear of being licked—the mortification of it, the blow to my vanity, and worst of all, the ridicule of the crowd. So inevitably I already was half-licked. Yet beforehand I often welcomed the prospect of conflict. I was forever provoking the issue and then at the crucial moment going suddenly cold with the dread of defeat. I figure I lost fewer arguments and won fewer fights than any boy ever born in McCracken County. I may even have been state-wide champion although modesty forbids my taking in that much territory.

I was not timorous about snakes. Indeed as regards snakes I was a gay and gallus young exhibitionist. Yet any snarly little fice-dog yapping at my shrinking calves could run me up a tree. I was none too happy at most deeds requiring bodily risk though when it came to robbing orchards and berry patches I shone forth as the admitted leader of any foraging party. And so on and so forth.

As a correspondent on the Western Front in the Great War I found out at first hand a good deal about the trait which we call bravery and the inter-related trait which we call lack of bravery. For illustration, let us arbitrarily take a formation of one thousand men, organized for war, and trained for war and now shoved into war. As the tumult breaks upon them, five men, say, out of those ranks cannot adjust their nervous organisms to this imminent prospect of destruction which all at once has confronted them. Under the intolerable strain of it they quit in the face of the enemy and we label them with the foul name of coward and visit all manner of disgrace upon them—even to the point of setting them up as targets for a firing squad. Yet under differing circumstances any one of them might show a prowess which would shame the rest of us—might go into a burning building or leap into a torrent to save a stranger’s life while we stand by, wringing our impotent hands.

Five others, let us say, of that same thousand have so little imagination, so little perception of the attendant perils that these dull fatalists automatically will lead forlorn hopes or uncomplainingly perish in last ditches without ever, I think, comprehending the fear element which besets their more sensitive and therefore more rational fellow beings. This abnormality passes for gallantry. Perhaps it is gallantry, but in it an ox-like stupidity must surely be a factor.

The remaining nine hundred and ninety are even as you and I, that is, assumed that you also are of the run of the mill and not one of these cited exceptions to the prevalent type. Before the fever of the fighting, which generally makes ravaging, unreasoning beasts of men, has laid hold on the herd, you are scared, horribly scared. Your bowels gripe and grind under a cruel pressure, your scalp crawls on your skull and the sour taste of terror is on your tongue. You recognize that your leg muscles are turning to limber tripe inside the puttees which sustain those uncertain shanks of yours and nothing to be done about it. Every time a shell bursts behind you, you feel your backbone being shredded into a whisk broom. Every time a bullet whistles past in front, you feel it plumping in among your most cherished vital organs. But about then you discover there is just one contradictory thing which you fear more than death or mutilation and that is that the chap next to you may find out how afraid you are. And he is thinking the same thoughts about you and so you both stick it out, each saying to himself, “I’ll stay here and I’ll go ahead, too, so long as this idiot alongside me does. But, oh boy, if ever this line does break, if ever the rest of this outfit gets fed up on this foolishness and starts falling back, just watch me. I’ll show these fellows some running as is running. But damned if I’ll be the first one to quit.”

Call it self-respect, call it an egotism stronger even than the voice of prudence and the craving for self-preservation, call it the triumph of the spirit over the body, call it sublimated discipline. Call it a sense of duty or heroism or blind stubbornness or whatever you please. Whatever it is, there it is and there’s no getting away from it and this I claim is the main reason why a battle sometimes lasts longer than half a minute.

I hark back to the first time these paradoxical symptoms overtook me. That would be in the early fall of 1914 and the scene was a harried strip of terrain just below the Franco-Belgian frontier. Barring some Democratic primary elections back in Kentucky, I had never before been under direct fire. A pair of flattened insteps, among other defects, kept me out of the Spanish-American mess. I strove to convince the examining surgeon that in case of a retreat fallen arches wouldn’t keep me from traveling as fast as anybody else whereas for a cautious and circumspect advance toward the stronghold of the foe I should have a decided advantage. But he couldn’t see eye to eye with me there, and I lost the argument and Uncle Sam lost a volunteer.

On the other hand, my present companion was John T. McCutcheon, the famous cartoonist and correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. As a newspaper observer, John had gone through some sharp engagements in the Philippines and so, compared with me, he was a seasoned campaigner.

We were skirting the forward edge of a supposedly quiet but rather exposed sector, being then with the German forces under extraordinary permits from corps headquarters. All of a sudden, we realized that a considerable amount of unshirted Hades had broken out in our immediate vicinity. Either we had blundered into an area of active hostilities or from their trenches just over yonder the Allies had decided to put up a show on special account of our little band of strollers.

Now we enjoyed a distinct advantage over the masses of German troops about us. Unless ordered away from there, they must stand fast while we, being merely innocent bystanders, as it were, and likewise citizens of a then neutral country, were as free as birds. Within me the temptation to take my foot in my hand and forthwith depart out of that racked bailiwick was well-nigh overpowering. I trust I was not altogether governed by selfishness in this matter. Aside from the personal equation, what of the future of American literature if anything happened to John and me? But our escorts, a group of staff officers, showed no signs of an intent to fall back although none of them seemed notably happy and one or two seemed downright uneasy. I wouldn’t in the least blame them for that. It wasn’t their business to be killed; some other day perhaps, but not this particular day. This, more or less, was presumed to be in the nature of a pleasure trip, or anyhow a tour of unofficial inspection for the benefit of a brace of foreign journalists. Besides, in a way of speaking, John and I represented an American republic. Nothing was said but simultaneously, I think, we reached the conclusion that, insofar as we might, it devolved upon us to remain outwardly calm, cool and collected before the eyes of all these Germans. We must dissemble; I only hoped a shell wouldn’t come along and dissemble me all over the landscape.

So with a make-believe jauntiness we stayed right where we were. And to prove how carefree we were, how casually disposed toward the whole tiresome affair, each of us lighted up one of those saffron-colored tubular objects which Northern Europeans call a cigar. Inasmuch as they labor under the delusion that almost anything shaped like a cigar must be a cigar these Continentals suffocate themselves on inhalations of dried chicory and dessicated stable-sweepings and the other standard ingredients, including the fumes from the straw which thoughtfully is run through the center of the device to make the flues draw better. Such people never have tasted any real tobacco so why should they know how real tobacco tastes?

Thereby adding materially to the horrors of war, we touched off our respective flambeaux, I gripping the butt firmly between my teeth so the teeth couldn’t chatter. Even so something was gone wrong with those clenched jaws of mine. Immediately I was embarrassed, not to say chagrined, to note that my cigar persistently performed the most weird acrobatics. With a little sidewise convulsion, it would dip downward until it pointed like a divining rod at the earth, next jerkily would go into reverse and climb upward, higher and higher, so that its swaying tip threatened to scorch my pale nose. At least it felt pale, my nose did. Vainly I strove to check these mechanical betrayals.

And then I beheld how John’s cigar was behaving after an erratic fashion fully as high, wide and handsome as my cigar’s behavior. In my whole life I was never so proud of myself.

Freakishly enough or perhaps naturally enough, at that identical moment while our cigars were doing their St. Vitus’s dance duet, there popped into my consciousness out of a long-gone time a consoling admission which, as a quite small boy, I heard from my father’s brother, Major Robert Cobb, late C. S. A. After Pelham of Alabama fell, a good many military experts rated him as the most brilliant and audacious gunner of the Southern armies. Assuredly his comrades of the famous Kentucky Orphan Brigade so rated him. In ’61 he shut up his law office to help enlist in his home county an infantry company which, when its members had stolen four field pieces from the complacent and secretly approving state authorities, became Cobb’s Battery. Of the hundred and forty men—and boys—who originally composed that oversized unit, just seventeen tramped home following the surrender; the rest all killed, missing, captured or straggled. And of the six commissioned officers who served with it or died with it, four were by blood or marriage related to our tribe. Uncle Bob emerged as chief of artillery on Breckinridge’s staff. For valor and dash he got promotions and citations and frequently was mentioned in the dispatches. Boylike, I worshiped him as a demigod who could never have known trepidation. So it had jolted me in that far-distant past—but now it sustained and comforted me—to hear him say:

“Gentlemen, I went through those four years scared half to death every waking moment of the whole time. On the night before an engagement I couldn’t sleep for worrying. My legs would hardly lift me to the saddle to ride into action. I reckon my voice trembled every time I gave a command while the fighting was on. I’ve always figured that, being constituted as I was, I deserved infinitely more credit for doing my duty and occasionally taking chances than any of those congenital idiots I sometimes met up with who didn’t have sense enough to be scared.”

This adored Uncle Bob was a slim short-coupled figure of a man with a mop of hair which, until the years frostbit it, was as red as his temper and that was very red indeed. He never exactly became reconciled to the outcome of that war. Once from Texas where he spent his latter days, he wrote me deploring that some of our remote New England kindred had been what he was pleased to call “crazy Abolitionist fanatics.” I think I caught an echo there of the handed-on sentiments of his Virginia-born mother who, I have gathered, couldn’t quite forgive her husband for being of Down-East parentage. In the very last letter he ever wrote me—it was shortly before his death in 1914—he said:

“Son, I’ve finally gone lame. The fool doctors here call it rheumatism but I know better. The Dutchman who used to make my boots quit business and I committed the error of buying out of a store a pair made by a firm in Fall River, Massachusetts. Those infernal Yankees waited more than fifty years to cripple me up but, by crackies, the persistent scoundrels finally did it!”

If ever, Over There, Uncle Bob met up with any or all three of his pet antipathies among the Union commanders, to wit, in the order named, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ben Butler and Nelson A. Miles, I’ll bet there was a frightful row in the Eternal Old Soldiers’ Home.^[1]

[1]

Had he been alive when it happened, I suspect Uncle Bob would have repudiated me as a traitor, spoiled by sojourning among the Northern hordes. For actually I dedicated a book to Olga Wiborg Fish, one of the most charming and gracious women I ever knew—and she by way of being a blood-kinswoman of both the Shermans and the Miles’.