Читать книгу The Shadow - Mary White Ovington - Страница 6

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In the far south of the United States, where through the winter months the sun holds in warmth the blue encircling sky, opening the buds of the roses in December, where palmetto and white sand meet deep green swamp and heavily scented magnolia, there flows a great river. From its narrow source it deepens and widens until toward the end of its course it becomes an estuary, and for many miles dwellers on one side can dimly distinguish the contour of the opposite shore. The dwellers, as it happens, are not many, and the little boat that makes its daily trip to and from the busy city at the river's mouth is not overburdened with freight or passengers. It zigzags from shore to shore, stopping at one port for timber, at another to land an itinerant preacher, at a third to receive a fragrant load of oranges or grapefruit destined for a market in the north.

Merryvale is one of the oldest and most important of its stops. As long as the state has had a history there has been a Merryvale living on the river bank. In the days when the alligators climbed up the long wharf to sun themselves, and the moccasins dropped from the overhanging trees into the stream, the Merryvales owned thousands of acres at the water's edge and other thousands back in the pine forests. Then there was a Merryvale in Congress and another in the State Senate, while scores of slaves tilled the land and tended the cherished orange groves. But with the passing of time the alligators slipped from the wharf, the moccasins retreated to where gunshots were less frequent, and vast stretches of pines and of river-front passed into other hands.

Nevertheless, in the year 1910, when Lee Merryvale came back from college, there was astonishingly little apparent change in the old estate. To be sure, the timber had been depleted, acres of pines had been shipped down the river to some sawmill; and, worse, noble trees had been gashed in the trunks, their lifeblood drawn from them, drop by drop, and then left to decay and fall. But the hyacinth still choked the river near its bank where the gaunt cows waded in to chew the tough leaves, and the great house at the front among the live-oaks and the little cabins in the rear among the pines held descendants of old masters and old slaves and viewed life in much the timeworn way.

You approached Merryvale, of course, from the water; only the ignorant newcomer drove or motored the weary miles along the sandy road from the railway station. The true approach from the city was up the wide river for some three or four hours to the Merryvale landing. Here, disembarking with a friendly good-by from the captain, you walked down the long wharf, and, turning to the right, followed a narrow path in the white sand until you came out upon the great house.

Unchanged since the first Merryvale built it many decades ago, it stands a beautiful mansion of cool, high-ceilinged rooms and broad hallways. Across the front, which faces east, are spacious verandas or galleries that protect the rooms from the summer heat and afford pleasant places to sun oneself on chill winter days. The kitchen and sheds, screened by hardy bamboo, are in the rear; but at the front, before the house, as far as the bank at the river's edge, is a broad open expanse that in the North would be a lawn, but that here is sand dotted with tufts of grass and strewn with fallen leaves. For the glory of the open space is the live-oaks. These immense spreading trees stand well apart with huge roots that twist along the ground to disappear in the sand, there to send out other roots whose hungry mouths drink up the hidden moisture. The leaves are small, a dark rich green; but neither the leaves nor the great trunks attract your gaze; you are fascinated by the bunches of white, fibrous moss that hang from each bough. On a still day they are motionless, but the slightest breeze sends them softly waving, and in a storm they swing back and forth, the wind tearing through their long, thin strands, dragging off a bit here and a bit there, but in the end leaving them still companions of the live-oak. Birds use the moss for their nests, and probably no child in the Merryvale household has failed at some time to fashion of the soft fibres a long white beard with which to make the magic change from youth to venerated age. On either side of the house, extending in both directions, are orange groves, and back of the groves comes the second world, the world of the black folk.

As the world of the rulers has been among the live-oaks, so the world of the workers has been among the pines. Back of the great house you come to the clearing dotted with cabins that belong to the period before the war, rough affairs of hewn logs, well-ventilated by their many cracks. Whether of logs or the more modern clapboard, they are all set on supports away from the earth, and under their flooring hens with their chickens move about industriously scratching with their toes and penetrating the inhospitable-looking sand with their strong beaks. Occasionally a dog or a pig joins them and there is a general, but since they are all good friends, quite senseless cackle of dissent. Numberless weeds grow in the sand and flowers are about all the cabins; in the spring, violets and red lilies, in the summer, cosmos and zinnias, and the year through, red roses at the cabin doors.

Kindly monotony has been the keynote of Merryvale. To live on what you have, parting when necessary with a piece of timberland among the pines or a stretch of acres at the waterfront, this has been the history for many years at the great house. And monotony has triumphed, too, among the pines. After the war there were heart-throbbings and a sense of portentous changes; but when freedom had come and gone; when the Negro learned that he was still wholly dependent upon his old master, a liberated laborer but without the tools that made possible a new life, he turned to work again in his old surroundings at his familiar tasks. Industrious and ambitious colored fathers and mothers at Merryvale had been known to save enough to buy their homes; but their children, fed too by ambition, left them for the North. Thus Aunt Lucindy had a son who was head waiter in a hotel in Philadelphia, and Brother Jonathan's daughter made a thousand dollars a year teaching school in Washington. These depletions, so common in the country that pours her best stock into the city, held the settlement back. Altogether, the old place was full of pleasant, uneventful life touched with kindly decay.

And then Merryvale experienced a change. It came to black Merryvale first. In 1905 the colored school lacked a teacher and the colored Methodist church a preacher. These positions had been held by the same person who, to the lasting benefit of the community, was called to a wider field. Word came that the Church was sending a worthy and well-known brother who had filled a pulpit in a distant city, but whose failing health necessitated a change. With him was a daughter who would teach school. Then of an autumn evening the Williams family arrived and with them a multitude of envied possessions. Wealth entered the four-roomed cabin that was scrubbed with furious intensity before the white iron beds, the modern cooking-stove, the books—in all, a multitude of bewildering furnishings were placed within its walls. A period of whitewashing followed, of fencing in of chickens and garden, of trimming and pruning. It was as though some modern machine with its driving power, its whirring engine, had dropped into a medieval town.

Brother Williams was a feeble, kindly old man who preached but a short six months before death came and the Methodist church was again without a spiritual guide. After his death the preaching was by an itinerant, but by that time the church had lost its preëminent place in the community life. Salvation was taught indeed, but in a new guise and under a new roof, and the leader and prophet of the new gospel was the school teacher, Brother Williams' daughter Ellen.

Ellen Williams had been educated in one of the Negro colleges, founded shortly after the Civil War by northern philanthropy, and conducted by white women, and she had been filled with an unquenchable zeal to help her race. She went into this poor, remote country school with the zeal of the missionary to Africa; and if she was confronted by no wild beasts or savage chieftains she met with disheartening indifference, with envy and even with malice. But the true missionary burns with so pure a flame that she destroys in her bright fire the obstructions that are placed in her path. Moreover, she is made to rule and men and women obey, first critically, then enthusiastically, her decrees. There were mutterings at Ellen's demands. First the children must be washed beyond the strength and dignity of those who have to tote their every pail of water; then an unprecedented amount of needlework was needed to close up rents; and, last, they must forever give money, money that might go for whisky, for patent medicine, for the lodge or for the church, money needed to fill out the meager four months' salary by the county to the seven months demanded by the teacher as a minimum school year. Like all fanatics, Ellen saw one supreme duty—the bringing of education to the children of Merryvale. Other things, even preaching, might languish if this could be accomplished.

Ellen had her triumph at the end of seven months, when all the pupils of the school took part in the spring exhibition, from five-year-old Samantha Johnson who recited an evening hymn, to twenty-year-old Ebenezer, a half-witted youth and former laughing-stock, who displayed a beautifully woven basket that had already been sold for two dollars to some Rockefeller of the north, ("and the school is to have one dollar of it for books," the teacher said emphatically). The Negro parent is ambitious for his children, he looks forward with unfaltering hope to the recognition of merit that shall come when his boy enters the world and acquits himself like a man. And though the recognition be never accorded, though to the average American the Negro who is not performing humble tasks is a cross between an impudent upstart and a "nigger" minstrel dude, the parent hopes on until death comes and his son, like himself, turns for his hope to his offspring. Ellen had builded on this firm foundation of parental ambition, and after the first year she received the coöperation of the people among whom she had come to give her life. A few evil spirits mocked, but they did not affect the success of the Merryvale school. And indeed marvels can be accomplished in a small community where, day and night, one may keep watch over one's charges, and where the county superintendent is too indifferent or too lazy to interfere with suggestion or criticism. So Ellen, a modern in educational methods, with the zealot's untiring energy, taught her children to keep clean and decent, to work steadily and to relate their study to their daily life. As they learned to write they indited letters to absent uncles and aunts, and (the teacher was judiciously blind to this) begged stamps from old Mr. Merryvale. They did number work, counting their chickens and multiplying their eggs with sober intentness. When readers grew scarce they got the discarded newspapers from the great house, and the older boys and girls began to watch the happenings in the outer world. They dug in the school garden and planted vegetables in gardens of their own. They even learned to cook and introduced new dishes into the limited regimen of their homes.

It would not have been possible for Ellen to have carried her school to the final triumph of the spring exhibition had she not been in touch with the college, as it was somewhat grandiosely called, at which she had received her education. Gifts of discarded blackboards, old but still useful maps, song-books, tools, many essentials to her undertaking, arrived at odd times on the river boat. Nor could she have kept always well and strong, neatly dressed and abundantly fed, had it not been for her mother's presence. Aunt Maggie, as Mrs. Williams was called, while not as energetic as her daughter was a capable woman who contributed her full part to the school's success. She earned more at laundry-work than Ellen could at teaching; and the two, by selling eggs and chickens and pork, by making jellies and candies for the hotel people four miles away whose laundry more than anything else kept them in funds, lived in decent comfort and put by for the future.

The second change that came to Merryvale dropped upon the great house. Five years after the Williams' advent, Lee Merryvale, only son of an only son, came back from college. He had made but two brief visits home since he had left to take up his freshman work, offering the expense of the trip as his excuse; and while his father missed him more with each year of slackened strength, he confessed that Lee made small demands upon his purse. He would write in affectionate and wondering solicitude that no land need slip from the estate to be converted into bank-checks, and would receive answer from his son that the college had given him a scholarship and that he worked in the summer months. It was wisest not to question but to wait until Lee returned to take up law, the traditional Merryvale profession.

With long explanations, with pacing up and down what remained of the old plantation, Lee Merryvale expounded to his father his ambition to become a grower of vegetables and fruits. In his summer months, it seemed, he had earned his way sweating on other men's farms, and he returned eager to bring life and prosperity to the old place. Other people were making money in his state, northerners of course, and why not he? He knew the secret of northern success—the careful oversight of workers and the willingness to pitch in and do things yourself. What if frost did come every few years and destroy all you had? You made allowance for that in your years of plenty. And so he argued, answering expressed doubts and unexpressed questionings, until at length his father answered: "How should I object when it will keep you by my side? You have your mother's energy."

Lee had only a few recollections of his mother, but one was a bright picture of a young girl with golden-red hair digging energetically at the roots of a rose-bush. It was pleasant to think that, like him, she had loved the taste of the earth and the fragrance of growing things. His ambition was to down all the scoffers along the river and in the city who thought his ambition a passing amusement, and predicted abandonment and a season of gaiety during the coming winter.

Of the other members of the two households there were, at the great house, Miss Patty, as every one called her, John Merryvale's sister who came to him after his wife's death; and at the cabin in the pines, Tom, the son of the household, a serious, reliable boy, deliberate to slowness.

And lastly, there was Hertha. Ellen had insisted when they moved to Merryvale that Hertha remain a second year at her college, and the girl stayed away for that time; but the next season, the year Lee Merryvale went North, she made her entrance, a girl of nineteen, into Merryvale life. It was a modest entrance and she played her part shyly in the background. Hertha bore no resemblance to her sister and brother. Among the cabins in the pines you noticed her tightly curling hair and deep brown eyes, but as she moved about the great house you saw her graceful figure, her slender feet and hands, her small head on its long neck, her delicate nose and mouth, her white skin. She was a good needlewoman, and Miss Patty quickly seized upon her as her maid, and, for a pittance, Hertha worked for her by day, while at night and on Sundays she joined mother and brother and sister in the cabin. "You's a contented chile," her mother used to say, "an' 'member, dat's a gift." She had not been so contented in the city where she spent her childhood, but this new world by the river touched her spirit. She loved the quiet days, sewing and waiting on Miss Patty whose indolence and advancing years made her increasingly dependent. She loved on Sundays to take walks with Tom through the woods to where the creek set in, black, mysterious, a long line of cypresses guarding the stream. She was contented with her home, and her mind sometimes wandered when Ellen talked in the evening of plans for the future. Ellen was full of plans, she lived not for to-day but for to-morrow, but Hertha lived in to-day. Life was not always pleasant, the autumn tempests that lashed the great oaks and uprooted the pines were terrifying, but there were more days of sunshine than of storm. Lee Merryvale might sweat over his orange grove and swear at his workers, Ellen might lead out the whole settlement in a mad orgy of whitewashing, but no one expected anything disturbing from Hertha. Tom, once, painstakingly reading through a collection of poems acquired by Ellen in her school days as a prize, found the lines that suited the lady of his home; for, to Tom, Hertha was not only sister but queen.

"And hers shall be the breathing balm,

And hers the silence, and the calm

Of mute, insensate things."