Title:      Cross Creek (1942)
Author:     Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Cross Creek (1942)
Author:     Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings




CONTENTS

Preface: Cross Creek

1. For this is an enchanted land

2. Taking up the slack

3. The magnolia tree

4. The pound party

5. The census

6. The evolution of comfort

7. Antses in Tim's breakfast

8. The Widow Slater

9. Catching one young

10. 'Geechee

11. A pig is paid for

12. My friend Moe

13. Residue

14. Toady-frogs, lizards, antses, and varmints

15. The ancient enmity

16. Black shadows

17. Our daily Bread

18. Spring at the Creek

19. Summer

20. Fall

21. Winter

22. Hyacinth drift

23. Who owns Cross Creek?




CROSS CREEK


Cross Creek is a bend in a country road, by land, and the flowing
of Lochloosa Lake into Orange Lake, by water.  We are four miles
west of the small village of Island Grove, nine miles east of a
turpentine still, and on the other sides we do not count distance
at all, for the two lakes and the broad marshes create an infinite
space between us and the horizon.  We are five white families; "Old
Boss" Brice, the Glissons, the Mackays and the Bernie Basses; and
two colored families, Henry Woodward and the Mickenses.  People in
Island Grove consider us just a little biggety and more than a
little queer.  Black Kate and I between us once misplaced some
household object, quite unreasonably.

I said, "Kate, am I crazy, or are you?"

She gave me her quick sideways glance that was never entirely
impudent.

"Likely all two of us.  Don't you reckon it take somebody a little
bit crazy to live out here at the Creek?"

At one time or another most of us at the Creek have been suspected
of a degree of madness.  Madness is only a variety of mental
nonconformity and we are all individualists here.  I am reminded of
Miss Malin and the Cardinal in the Gothic tale, "The Deluge at
Norderney."

"But are you not," said the Cardinal, "a little--"

"Mad?" asked the old lady.  "I thought that you were aware of that,
My Lord."

The Creek folk of color are less suspect than the rest of us.  Yet
there is something a little different about them from blacks who
live gregariously in Quarters, so that even if they did not live at
the Creek, they would stay, I think, somehow aloof from the layer-
cake life of the average Negro.  Tom Glisson and Old Boss and I
think anybody is crazy not to live here, but I know what Kate
meant.  We have chosen a deliberate isolation, and are enamored of
it, so that to the sociable we give the feeling that St. Simeon
Stylites on top of his desert pillar must have given the folk who
begged him to come down and live among them.  He liked the pillar
or he would not have been there.  Something about it suited his
nature.  And something about Cross Creek suits us--or something
about us makes us cling to it contentedly, lovingly and often in
exasperation, through the vicissitudes that have driven others
away.

"I wouldn't live any place else," Tom said, "if I had gold buried
in Georgia.  I tell you, so much happens at Cross Creek."

There is of course an affinity between people and places.  "And God
called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of waters
called He Seas; and God saw that it was good."  This was before
man, and if there be such a thing as racial memory, the
consciousness of land and water must lie deeper in the core of us
than any knowledge of our fellow beings.  We were bred of earth
before we were born of our mothers.  Once born, we can live without
mother or father, or any other kin, or any friend, or any human
love.  We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and
something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it
and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.

And along with our deep knowledge of the earth is a preference of
each of us for certain different kinds of it, for the earth is
various as we are various.  One man longs for the mountains, and
does not even need to have been a child of the mountains to have
this longing; and another man yearns for the valleys or the plains.
A seaman I know said that he was making a great effort to assure
himself of going to Hell, for the Bible says that in Heaven "there
shall be no more sea," and Heaven for him is a place of great
waters.

We at the Creek need and have found only very simple things.  We
must need flowering and fruiting trees, for all of us have citrus
groves of one size or another.  We must need a certain blandness of
season, with a longer and more beneficent heat than many require,
for there is never too much sun for us, and through the long
summers we do not complain.  We need the song of birds, and there
is none finer than the red-bird.  We need the sound of rain coming
across the hamaca, and the sound of wind in trees--and there is no
more sensitive Aeolian harp than the palm.  The pine is good, for
the needles brushing one another have a great softness, and we have
the wind in the pines, too.

We need above all, I think, a certain remoteness from urban
confusion, and while this can be found in other places, Cross Creek
offers it with such beauty and grace that once entangled with it,
no other place seems possible to us, just as when truly in love
none other offers the comfort of the beloved.  We are not even
offended when others do not share our delight.  Tom Glisson and I
often laugh together at the people who consider the Creek dull, or,
in the precise sense, outlandish.

"There was a fellow woke me up," he said, "was lost.  I'd heard his
car go by and hit the Creek bridge like cattle stompeding.  I
wondered if ary one in that big of a hurry knowed where he was
going.  Directly he come back and stopped and I heard him holler
from the gate.  I pulled on my breeches and went out to him.  I
said, 'Reckon you're lost.'  'Lost ain't the word for it,' he said.
'Is this the end of the world?  Where in God's name am I?'  I said,
'Mister, you're at Cross Creek.'  'That don't tell me a thing,' he
said.  'I still ain't anywhere.'"

"People in town sometimes say to me when I start home at night," I
said, "'We hate to see you drive off alone to that awful place.'"

"Well," he said comfortably, "they just don't know the Creek."

We do.  We know one another.  Our knowledge is a strange kind,
totally without intimacy, for we go our separate ways and meet only
when new fences are strung, or some one's stock intrudes on
another, or when one of us is ill or in trouble, or when woods
fires come too close, or when a shooting occurs and we must agree
who is right and who must go to jail, or when the weather is so
preposterous, either as to heat or cold, or rain or drought, that
we seek out excuses to be together, to talk together about the
common menace.  We get into violent arguments and violent quarrels,
sometimes about stock, sometimes because we take sides with our
favorites when the dark Mickens family goes on the warpath.  The
village exaggerates our differences and claims that something in
the Creek water makes people quarrelsome.  Our amenities pass
unnoticed.  We do injustices among ourselves, and another of us,
not directly involved, usually manages to put in a judicious word
on the side of right.  The one who is wrong usually ends by
admitting it, and all is well again, and I have done my share of
the eating of humble pie.  And when the great enemies of Old
Starvation and Old Death come skulking down on us, we put up a
united front and fight them side by side, as we fight the woods
fires.  Each of us knows the foibles of the others and the strength
and the weaknesses, and who can be counted on for what.  Old Aunt
Martha Mickens, with her deceptive humility and her face like
poured chocolate, is perhaps the shuttle that has woven our
knowledge, carrying back and forth, with the apparent innocence of
a nest-building bird, the most revealing bits of gossip; the sort
of gossip that tells, not trivial facts, but human motives and the
secrets of human hearts.  Each of us pretends that she carries
these threads only about others and never about us, but we all know
better, and that none of us is spared.

A dozen other whites and a baker's dozen of other blacks have lived
at one time or another among us, or in the immediate vicinity of
the Creek, coming and going like the robins.  We are clannish and
do not feel the same about them as we feel about ourselves.  It was
believed in the beginning that I was one of these.  Surely the
Creek would drive me away.  When it was clear that a freezing of
the orange crop was as great a catastrophe to me as to the others,
surely I would not be here long.  It was when old Martha, who had
set up the Brices as Old Boss and Old Miss, referred to me one day
as Young Miss, that it was understood by all of us that I was here
to stay.

For myself, the Creek satisfies a thing that had gone hungry and
unfed since childhood days.  I am often lonely.  Who is not?  But I
should be lonelier in the heart of a city.  And as Tom says, "So
much happens here."  I walk at sunset, east along the road.  There
are no houses in that direction, except the abandoned one where the
wild plums grow, white with bloom in springtime.  I usually walk
halfway to the village and back again.  No one goes, like myself,
on foot, except Bernie Bass perhaps, striding firmly in rubber
boots with his wet sack of fish over his shoulder.  Sometimes black
Henry passes with a mule and wagon, taking a load of lighter'd home
to Old Boss; sometimes a neighbor's car, or the wagon that turns
off toward the turpentine woods to collect the resin, or the timber
truck coming out from the pine woods.  The white folks call "Hey!"
and children wave gustily and with pleasure.  A stranger driving by
usually slows down and asks whether I want a lift.  The Negroes
touch a finger to their ragged caps or pretend courteously not to
see me.  Evening after evening I walk as far as the magnolias near
Big Hammock, and home, and see no one.

Folk call the road lonely, because there is not human traffic and
human stirring.  Because I have walked it so many times and seen
such a tumult of life there, it seems to me one of the most
populous highways of my acquaintance.  I have walked it in ecstasy,
and in joy it is beloved.  Every pine tree, every gall-berry bush,
every passion vine, every joree rustling in the underbrush, is
vibrant.  I have walked it in trouble, and the wind in the trees
beside me is easing.  I have walked it in despair, and the red of
the sunset is my own blood dissolving into the night's darkness.
For all such things were on earth before us, and will survive after
us, and it is given to us to join ourselves with them and to be
comforted.



1.  For this is an enchanted land


The road goes west out of the village, past open pine woods and
gallberry flats.  An eagle's nest is a ragged cluster of sticks in
a tall tree, and one of the eagles is usually black and silver
against the sky.  The other perches near the nest, hunched and
proud, like a griffon.  There is no magic here except the eagles.
Yet the four miles to the Creek are stirring, like the bleak,
portentous beginning of a good tale.  The road curves sharply, the
vegetation thickens, and around the bend masses into dense hammock.
The hammock breaks, is pushed back on either side of the road, and
set down in its brooding heart is the orange grove.  Any grove or
any wood is a fine thing to see.  But the magic here, strangely, is
not apparent from the road.  It is necessary to leave the
impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it
behind.  By this, an act of faith is committed, through which one
accepts blindly the communion cup of beauty.  One is now inside the
grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another.
Enchantment lies in different things for each of us.  For me, it is
in this: to step out of the bright sunlight into the shade of
orange trees; to walk under the arched canopy of their jadelike
leaves; to see the long aisles of lichened trunks stretch ahead in
a geometric rhythm; to feel the mystery of a seclusion that yet has
shafts of light striking through it.  This is the essence of an
ancient and secret magic.  It goes back, perhaps, to the fairy
tales of childhood, to Hansel and Gretel, to Babes in the Wood, to
Alice in Wonderland, to all half-luminous places that pleased the
imagination as a child.  It may go back still farther, to racial
Druid memories, to an atavistic sense of safety and delight in an
open forest.  And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of
nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again.  Here
is home.  An old thread, long tangled, comes straight again.

I think that the shabbiness of the Creek is a part of its endearing
quality.  I for one might admire, but never truly love, an affluent
perfection.  The Williamsburg restoration, for instance, is fine
and proud, but it is something only to be stared at.  Old
Williamsburg lived in a genteel poverty that was more elegant than
the new shining Governor's mansion, for its gentility came not from
superimposed wealth but from long years of gracious living.  The
restoration is a good thing, of course, and Time will make all come
right again.  The Creek shabbiness was never elegant and never will
be.  It is merely comfortable and weather-beaten, meeting Time
halfway.  I am sometimes tempted to put up a new fence across the
house yard.  I have always thought that a white picket fence must
be a great comfort to a householder.  I think of the pride I should
take in seeing white paint gleaming from around the bend in the
road.  Then Snow the grove man becomes quietly tired of waiting for
me to do something, and comes driving the farm truck into the yard
over the cattle-gap with a load of fresh fatwood pine posts from
the hammock.

He asks, "You aim just to use the old gate, don't you?"

I aim to use the old gate, and say so, and Snow goes ahead and
replaces the rotten and sagging posts with new ones.  He tightens
the fence wire, "Hog and cattle 4-inch mesh," and the effect is
trim and eminently suitable.  I tell myself that a white picket
fence would interfere with the feeling one has inside the house of
being a part of the grove; that a new fence would mean tearing out
the coral honeysuckle vines that cling passionately to the old
wire.  But the real objection is that an elegant fence would bring
to the Creek a wanton orderliness that is out of place.

When I came to the Creek, and knew the old grove and farmhouse at
once as home, there was some terror, such as one feels in the first
recognition of a human love, for the joining of person to place, as
of person to person, is a commitment to shared sorrow, even as to
shared joy.  The farmhouse was all dinginess.  It sat snugly then
as now under tall old orange trees, and had a simple grace of line,
low, rambling and one-storied.  But it was cracked and gray for
lack of paint, there was a tin roof that would have ruined a
mansion, and the porch was an excrescence, scarcely wide enough for
one to pass in front of the chairs.  The yard was bare sand spotted
with sandspurs, with three lean Duchess rosebushes left behind to
starve, like cats.  Inside the house, all the delight of the
Florida sunlight vanished.  The walls were painted a battleship
gray and the floors a muddy ochre.  The brick fireplaces were
walled over with tin and filled with a year's rubbish.  It was four
years before the gray of the last room was decently covered with
white, money for paint being scarce, and time so filled with other
work that an hour with the brush was a stolen pleasure.  And even
now, the house shining inside and out, roofed with good gray hand-
hewn cypress shingles, the long wide screened veranda an invitation
to step either inside or out, the yard in lush green grass, there
is still a look of weather-worn shabbiness.  It is a constant
reminder that wind and rain and harsh sun and the encroaching
jungle are ready at any moment to take over.  I suppose that a
millionaire, perhaps even just a New Englander, might stand off the
elements and maintain a trim tidiness--and a picket fence.  But the
rest of the Creek would not know what to make of it, and would be
made most unhappy.

The battle has not gone too well for all at the Creek.  One or two
have gone ahead, some hold precariously to the narrow ledge of
existence, and others have slipped back, and back, until each day's
subsistence has become a triumph.  Their houses reflect their
fortunes.  Mine lies the farthest east in the small settlement.  To
the west are my neighbors, my friends.  There have been enmities.
At the moment, we are living in unparalleled amiability, a state at
Cross Creek that, like a sinner's hope of Heaven, is never assured.
But it makes a good moment in which to speak of other people.

I live within screaming distance of Tom Glisson and Old Boss Brice.
This is literal.  No ordinary sound carries from one place to the
other.  We hear faintly the barking of one another's dogs.  We hear
the far crowing at dawn of one another's roosters.  Occasionally,
when the wind is right, I hear the Brice or Glisson cows lowing at
milking time, night or morning.  No voice carries, ever.  A
determined scream is audible.  This I proved, not in a time of
fear, but a time of fury.  I should be ashamed but am not.  Of folk
who would have been silent under the circumstances, there comes to
mind only St. Francis, and I believe that he might have cast
despairing eyes to Heaven.

I can bear much physical discomfort and a great deal of actual
pain, but now and then one achieves a combination of bodily
annoyances that makes Job's boils seem a luxury.  I shall be brief
and explicit.  I was entirely alone on the grove.  The summer was
one of the two unbearable ones, as to heat, that I have known in my
years here.  Summer is our unproductive period for vegetables.  I
had been some time without them, and was afflicted with an itching
rash that I recognized too late as nutritional.  The Widow Slater
and I had been repairing fences together, for I gave her pasture
for her milch cow in return for milking my own.  We had plowed
through long vines of poison ivy along the decrepit fence.  Her
long black flowing skirts had evidently protected her.  I had
worked stockingless and in brief voile.  The poison ivy had erupted
from hips to ankle, from fingertips to throat, overlaying the rash.

Soothing ointments and a prone position might have brought some
ease.  I was far from ointments and too busy to lie down.  My cow
broke loose from the pasture and came into the grove, tearing at
the low-hanging orange boughs.  I drove her out and penned her
properly, and returning to the house, found myself in the middle of
a patch of sandspurs waist-high.  These barbed instruments of
torture are all the proof one needs that there is a Devil as well
as a God.  I was enmeshed with sandspurs, they stuck to voile skirt
and to petticoat, creeping up underneath and getting a firm hold
with one or two barbs, leaving the others free to grate against my
skin.  On normal skin they are like arrows.  On a skin covered with
rash and poison ivy, they were shafts of fire.  I plucked at them
as I went and came to the house.  There the dogs were waiting for
me, shut on the back porch, since they had nothing but chaos to
contribute in the matter of penning a cow.

I did not think they had been there very long.  Even for puppies,
it did not seem too much to ask of them that they wait like
gentlemen for, say, half an hour.  There were four, all told.
There was my own puppy.  There were two of his litter mates that
the travelling owner had asked me to keep for him.  There was old
Sport, whose huntsman master, my friend Fred, had left with me
while he fished on the east coast.  I can only relate that time is
relative, and that what seemed like a short period to me, was
evidently a long, long time in the minds of three puppies.  Old
Sport had become excited at their incontinence and forgotten
himself, too.  The porch was a shambles.  Water for cleansing had
to be brought from the outside pump, a bucket at a time.  It took
twenty buckets, as I remember, and dusk was on me when I finished.

I went then, the porch well cleaned, wet and glistening in the
fading light, to water my garden.  There were a few carrots that I
hoped to bring through the heat, a few zinnias, half a dozen
desperate collard plants, poor things but mine own.  I pulled away
sandspurs abstractedly as I carried out the watering pot.  The
mosquitoes descended on me.  One would think that exposed neck,
arms and face would suffice the hungriest of insects.  But a
mosquito is Freudian, taking delight only in the hidden places.
They wavered with their indecisive flight up under my skirts and
stabbed me in the poison ivy, in the nutritional rash, around the
sandspurs, and settled with hums of joy in all unoccupied small
spaces.  It was too much.  I set down the watering pot, and with no
thought of help for my distress, for I was past helping, let out
shriek after shriek of sheer indulgent frustration.  As I say, St.
Francis might have blessed the puppies and old Sport and the
mosquitoes, with a kind word thrown in for the sandspurs, but I am
not of the stuff of saints.  I screamed.  The screaming satisfied
me.  I finished the watering, went into the house, fed the dogs,
made myself a supper, and went to the veranda to meditate.  As I
sat, exhausted but content, two figures strolled cautiously up the
road and paused in front of my gate.  It was Tom Glisson and Old
Boss.

Old Boss called, "Everything all right?"

"Why, yes," I said.  "Yes, indeed."

Tom said, "Seemed to us like we heard somebody call for help.  We
just wondered, was everything all right."

I hesitated.  After all, there was nothing to be done, and at the
moment, it seemed, all was too embarrassing to be told.

"I was singing," I said.  "Perhaps you heard me--singing."

"Oh," they said, and turned and walked home again.

So I say that I live within screaming distance of my nearest
neighbors.

Old Boss' grove joins up with mine.  We share an east-west fence
line and a double row of spite trees.  The spite is none of our
doing, but an inheritance from earlier owners of the adjoining
groves.  There was a day, before the Big Freeze of '94-5, when
oranges were truly golden apples, bringing, in their rareness,
incredible sums.  Suitable orange land was considered worth its
weight in gold.  So the two unfriendly neighbors planted their
orange trees, each as close to the joint fence as possible, to get
all the good of the priceless soil.  The result is that two lines
of scrawny trees send out their roots futilely in search of
sufficient nourishment.  Among large trees, there are few of whom
two can live as cheaply as one.

Old Boss wandered down to Florida from Georgia as a boy, nearly
sixty years ago.  He came down to die, he told me once, and wanted
to die in the tropical sunshine.  He is still a frail little man,
but I think he drew sustenance from the sun and earth and the
fruiting trees around him.  He clerked in a country store in the
village and became the owner.  He yearned always for the Creek, he
said.  At last he took over the neglected grove on an unpaid
mortgage and moved out.  It means to him precisely what it means to
me, and we sometimes sit together on his back porch and just look
about us and say nothing.  We seldom meet, but when we see each
other down the road, we wave, and I know that the same warm feeling
comes over the old man that comes to me.  He has been father,
arbiter, disciplinarian to all the Negroes who have ever lived or
worked here.  I challenged his authority on one occasion, but that
is another story.  His house is a rococco two-story affair, tall
and gangling like an antique spinster.  There is bamboo in the
sandy yard, and hibiscus and allamanda, and a pittosporum that is
so old it is not a shrub, but a great tree, covered in spring with
minute flowers of a strange exotic scent.  The house is on the
opposite side of the road from mine, just out of sight.

Tom Glisson lives on the same side of the road as I do, and
opposite Old Boss.  Tom has prospered.  He and his wife are Georgia
folk, too, and as hard workers as I have ever known.  I am not at
all sure that Tom can read or write, but he talks well, with a
flair for the picturesque and the dramatic.  He was put to the plow
when he was so small he could scarcely reach the plow handles, he
told me.  He was given no education.

"I made up my mind," he said, "my young uns would get a better
chance than their daddy."

It has been good to see the three children grow tall and bright and
handsome.  The oldest boy even had a year at the University.  The
youngest, "J. T.," was a tragic little cripple when I first knew
him.  I would see him hobbling down the road on his crooked legs,
with the luminous expression on his face that seems peculiar to
those we call the "afflicted."  Tom and his wife were not of the
breed to accept an evil that could be changed, and they worked day
and night to save money to send the boy away for braces and
treatments.  Now he too is tall and strong, and I saw him ride by
yesterday on his own dwarf-mule, talking to himself and lifting his
hand to an invisible audience.  He was, I knew, the Lone Ranger or
perhaps Buck Rogers, but he took time out courteously from his
duties to call "Hey!" to me, then returned to his important and
secret activities.

The Glisson house is small and brown, well kept, and the yard has
been slowly given shrubs and even a bit of grass.  Tom raises hogs
and some cattle, has built up a little grove, and he and his wife
do anything profitable they can turn their hands to.  They have
fought ill health as well as poverty, and it is sometimes hard to
feel sympathy for what seem offhand less fortunate people, knowing
what can be done with courage and hard work and thrift.  Tom and I
began with a strange mistrust of each other, and had some harsh
encounters.  I was in the wrong, and that is a story, too, and now
I know him for a friend and would turn to him in any trouble.

There are no further houses until you take the sharp curve in the
road that sweeps down to the Creek itself.  There is a patch of
thick hammock, an open field, and then, on the right, old Joe's
abandoned house.  Old Joe Mackay is the last of a good farming
family.  The Mackay acres were well-tilled and profitable some
fifty years ago.  There has been no regular cultivation for years,
though now and then lately some farmer from the village rents the
largest cleared field to raise some special crop.  Old Joe lived
alone in the old Mackay house.  He is ageless in appearance, small
and stooped and wiry, with his thin face ruddy from being on Orange
Lake in every sort of weather.  He runs a catfish line for a
living.  The house is as silver gray as the speckled perch he
sometimes catches.  It is a tall box of a house and even in its
desertion maintains a look of sturdy livability.  It was a good
house in its day.  Something about it is beautiful, its color most
of all, and tall palms bend over it, and there are live oaks and
holly and a few orange trees around it, and the hammock is a soft
curtain beyond it.  It was because he had a house that he was able
to get a wife.  His good friend Tom Morrison found a very pretty
widow.  He married the pretty widow to Old Joe, and Tom and Old Joe
and the widow and the widow's children lived happily in the house.

Tom said, "Somebody has to look out for Old Joe."

I suppose the roof leaked, as old roofs do.  The cockroaches may
have become too abundant in the walls and floors.  At any rate, the
contented family left the house a few years ago and moved a hundred
yards closer to the Creek, into the abandoned church on the same
side of the road.  They put up partitions to make rooms, moved the
old pews out into the yard and swept out the hymnbooks.  The church
has made a fine home.  It sits under a magnificent live oak and is
cozy in winter and cool in summer.

The old Mackay house was turned over for a time to Aunt Martha
Mickens and her husband, Old Will.  It was agreed that Martha and
Will, progenitors of all the colored help that had ever been at the
Creek, should be brought back home again.  Old Joe's wife found
Martha good company when she was alone.  There was trouble, and
Martha and Will were obliged to leave, and that again is a story.
The old Mackay house is now tenantless.  But it is still
hospitable, and when some family in the environs finds itself
temporarily roofless, it moves in for a time, and then moves on
again.  The house has sheltered a slow stream of deserted husbands
and wives with large numbers of children, homeless for the moment.

At an angle from the bend in the road is a deep sand road that
leads through hammock, and past the north edge of Old Boss' grove,
to another house.  The house is not the same one that was there
when I first came to the Creek.  It seems as though one house, one
family, is all the dusky break in the forest will tolerate.  The
house I used to know belonged to Old Boss and was inhabited by the
Widow Slater and her brood.  The Slater house lived from rain to
rain and the Slaters from hand to mouth.  The Widow moved back to
Carolina with her "chappies," leaving Snow behind, and in time he
became my grove-man and co-worrier over the hazardous fortunes of
my grove.  The Slater house, stricken of the moral support of human
occupancy, fell promptly to the ground.  Now there is another small
house up the deep hammock road.  The Bernie Basses live there.

This makes up the white population of the Creek.  Across the lovely
Creek itself, over the narrow bridge, are scattered in a migratory
flux two or three other families.  We do not say of them that they
live "at" the Creek but that they live "beyond" it.  Mr. Martin is
a newcomer.  He has prospered and I presume he is here to stay.  It
looked at one time as though the Creek area were too small to hold
both me and Mr. Martin.  If Mr. Martin had put me under the jail,
as he threatened, or sent me to eternity by way of gunshot, as he
wanted, I should have made an effort to take his big burly body
along to either place with me.  We have become good friends.  I was
never angry with Mr. Martin.  He was only angry with me.

Past Mr. Martin's place have been Mr. Swilley and George Fairbanks
and the Townsends and Mr. Marsh Turner.  Mr. Swilley has gone of
late to a widow and Mr. Marsh Turner has gone to Hell.  I know he
is in Hell by his own choice.  And even if the Angel Gabriel
forgave his sins, as his friends did, and called him to Heaven,
that peaceful and virtuous stamping ground would above all be Hell
to Marsh.  George Fairbanks drifts from cabin to cabin and the
Townsends drift from one new baby to another.  They have a young
un, as we say, every time the woods burn, and each one is welcome
and a fresh surprise.

The colored population of the Creek has the solid base of the
Mickens family, against which other transient Negroes surge and
retreat.  When old Martha Mickens shall march at last through the
walls of Jericho, shouting her Primitive Baptist hymns, a dark rock
at the core of the Creek life will have been shattered to bits.
She is nurse to any of us, black or white, who fall ill.  She is
midwife and layer out of the dead.  She is the only one who gives
advice to all of us impartially.  She is a dusky Fate, spinning
away at the threads of our Creek existence.



2.  Taking up the slack


It is always bewildering to change one's complete way of life.  I
was fitted by temperament and by inheritance for farm and country
living, yet to take it up after some thirty years of urban life was
not too easy.  I had known my maternal grandfather's Michigan farm,
but there I was both guest and child, and the only duties were to
gather the eggs from the sweet-smelling hayloft.  I had known my
father's Maryland farm, but that farm was his love, his escape from
Washington governmental routine, and we lived there only in the too
few summers.  I had no duties there at all.  There was only
delight; the flowering locust grove; the gentle cows in pasture;
Rock Creek, which ran, ten miles away from its Washington park, at
the foot of the hill of the locusts, where my brother and I learned
to swim and to fish for tiny and almost untakable fishes; long
walks with my father through the woods where he hoped some day to
build a home; jaunts with him behind Old Dan in the carriage, to
the county seat of Rockville, or to buy mules at Frederick.  These
things got in the blood but were no preparation for running a farm
oneself.  When I bought the Florida orange grove with my
inheritance that represented my share of the Maryland farm, my
father's sister Madeline wrote me in lament.

"You have in you," she said, "that fatal drop of Pearce blood,
clamoring for change and adventure, and above all, for a farm.  I
never knew a Pearce who didn't secretly long for a farm.  Mother
had one, Uncle Pierman was ruined by one, there was your father's
tragic experience.  I had one, once--"

I see no reason for denying so fundamental an urge, ruin or no.  It
is more important to live the life one wishes to live, and to go
down with it if necessary, quite contentedly, than to live more
profitably but less happily.  Yet to achieve content under
sometimes adverse circumstances, requires first an adjustment
within oneself, and this I had already made, and after that, a
recognition that one is not unique in being obliged to toil and
struggle and suffer.  This is the simplest of all facts and the
most difficult for the individual ego to accept.  As I look back on
those first difficult times at the Creek, when it seemed as though
the actual labor was more than I could bear, and the making of a
living on the grove impossible, it was old black Martha who drew
aside a curtain and led me in to the company of all those who had
loved the Creek and been tormented by it.

Martha welcomed me with old-fashioned formality.  She came walking
toward me in the grove one bright sunny December day.  I turned to
watch her magnificent carriage.  It was erect, with a long free
graceful stride.  It was impossible to tell her age.  She walked
like a very young woman and walks so to this day.  She is getting
on to seventy, yet glimpsing her down the road she might be a girl.
She was dressed neatly in calico, with a handkerchief bound around
her head, bandana fashion.  She was a rich smooth brown.  She came
directly to me and inclined her head.

She said, "I come to pay my respecks.  I be's Martha.  Martha
Mickens."

I said, "How do you do, Martha."

She said, "I wants to welcome you.  Me and my man, Old Will, was
the first hands on this place.  Time the grove was planted, me and
Will worked here.  It's home to me."

"Where do you live now?"

"T' other side o' the Creek.  We too old now to do steady work, but
I just wants to tell you, any time you gets in a tight, us is here
to do what we can."

"How long has it been since you worked here on the grove?"

"Sugar," she said, "I got no way o' tellin' the years.  The years
comes and the years goes.  It's been a long time."

"Was it the Herberts you worked for?"

"Yessum.  They was mighty fine folks.  They's been fine folks here
since and they's been trash.  But Sugar, the grove ain't trash, and
the Creek be's trashified here and there, but it's the Creek right
on.  I purely loves the Creek."

I said, "I love it, too."

"Does you?  Then you'll make out.  I reckon you know, you got to be
satisfied with a place to make out.  And is you satisfied, then it
don't make too much difference does you make out or no."

We laughed together.

She said, "Heap o' folks has lived here.  Ain't nobody has lived
here since the Herberts but had to scratch and scramble.  The ones
loved it, stayed 'til death or sich takened 'em away.  The ones
ain't loved it, has moved on like the wind moves."

I said, "The grove hasn't always made a living, then."

"Tends on what you calls a livin'.  To get yo' grease an' grits in
the place you enjoys gettin' 'em, ain't that makin' a livin'?"

"Yes."

"Then lemme tell you.  Ain't nobody never gone cold-out hongry
here.  I'se seed the grove freeze to the ground.  I'se seed it
swivvel in a long drought.  But Sugar, they was grove here before
my folks crossed the big water.  They was wild grove here as long
back as tongue can tell.  Durin' the war for freedom the white
ladies used to drive out here in wagons and pick the wild oranges
to squeeze out the juice and send it to the sojers.  And they'll be
grove here right on, after you and me is forgotten.  They'll be
good land to plow, and mast in the woods for hogs, and ain't no
need to go hongry.  All the folks here ahead o' you has fit cold
and wind and dry weather, but ain't nary one of 'em has goed
hongry."

Hunger at the moment was not immediate, but when it menaced later,
I remembered the things the old black woman said, and I was
comforted, sensing that one had only to hold tight to the earth
itself and its abundance.  And if others could fight adversity, so
might I.

"I won't keep you," she said.  "I jes' wanted to tell you I was
here."

She bobbed her head and went away.

She lived at the time four miles away, across the Creek, in an old
gray house immaculately kept, with oleanders and dogwood in the
clean bare yard.  She had always "porch plants" about, grown from
slips, of geranium and aspidistra; fuchsia, "the Georgia flower,"
sansivaria and elephant-ear and impatient Sultana, all blooming
lushly in containers of old tin.  She walked the four miles back
and forth to help in the bean field or the cucumber patch, to nurse
the sick, to wash and clean for Old Boss or the Mackays or, as time
went on, for me.

About her, the nucleus, were her sons and daughters and their wives
and husbands, who worked transiently for the rest of us.  The best
of her daughters, to my personal knowledge, is Estelle.  There is a
very elegant daughter who works for a wealthy family outside of
Baltimore, and of her I know nothing, except that she sends her
mother good clothes not too much worn.  Estelle and her husband Sam
worked many years for Old Boss.  They lived at the edge of the road
and were patient and faithful, except that Sam had an unwonted
impudence "under the influence."  A son-in-law of Old Boss was
somehow unable to deal with Sam, and in a huff he took Estelle and
moved off to Hawthorn.  Estelle is gentle and soft-spoken like her
mother.

For a long time I knew of Zamilla only that she was "the one what
got shot."  I pictured a leaf-brown hussy subject to brawling,
whose wild life finally caught up with her.  I was never more
mistaken.  When Sam and Estelle cleared out in righteous
indignation, Old Boss notified Martha that it was up to her to
replace her delinquent offspring.  Henry and Sissie appeared on the
scene and took over the small cabin.  Sissie, too, was gentle,
bearing Henry's abuse when he was drunk and, absurdly, jealous.
One day I discovered that Sissie was the wounded Zamilla, shot
innocently in a jook from which she was trying to extricate her
husband.  The shot was probably intended for Henry, and much as I
like him, sober, I know of no darky who more deserves shooting when
drunk.

Adrenna is a daughter whose life became so involved with mine that
I have wondered where one ended and the other began.  She was a
lean angular creature whom at first I took to be a girl, but found
to be of my own age.  She was shingle-butted, but what there was of
butt stuck out sharply.  She was a femme fatale, and I have never
been able to identify any possible appeal she might have for the
colored men, unless it be that little square boxlike rear.  She was
careless in her dress and cleanliness, to Martha's distress, and
mine, and usually wore her hair in Topsy pigtails that stuck out
around her face like a halo.  She could seduce any man she wanted,
for the moment, but she could not hold them, or, if they were
faithful, she grew tired of them.  She did my work for several
years and there was true love and exasperation between us.  Our
involvement came through her attempts to capture a husband.  The
husband must serve a dual purpose.  He must provide her with
whatever she wanted of a husband, and me with a good grove and yard
man.  Adrenna and I fell constantly between the upper and the
nether millstone.

"Little Will" Mickens, her brother, is my grove man at this
instant, and while all seems well, I can guarantee nothing by the
time this chronicle goes to press.  Other sons and daughters of
Martha are scattered here and there through the state.

"I was a fast-breedin' woman," Martha says with dignity and without
apology.  Such things are elemental, a matter of fact.  "I got
sympathy for a woman is a fast-breeder."

When any of the daughters working at the Creek are ill or absent or
brought to child-bed, or the sons or husbands are drunk and cannot
do their work, Martha takes their places.  Last winter a freeze
menaced and Little Will was taken suddenly drunk.  Martha came
without notice to gather Spanish moss to cover the flower plants in
my garden.  I drove in from town and found her bending over the
plants.

"I always likes to take up the slack," she said.

There have been occasions when her slack-taking has been so zealous
as better to have gone untaken.  I left the Creek for a vacation at
a beach cottage seventy miles away.  Adrenna left behind by
accident six napkins that I had picked up at the dime store for
twenty cents.  The morning after our arrival at the cottage, my
farm truck clattered up to the door.  Little Will presented me
breathlessly with a neatly wrapped package.

"Mama sont me to carry you these.  She say she jes' know you wanted
'em.  She say, tell you you don't never need worry when Adrenna
forget things.  She see you gets 'em."

The parcel contained the twenty cents' worth of napkins.  The round
trip for the truck stood me several dollars.  Will had left the
grove fertilizing in the very middle, while the extra hands must
sit idle, waiting for the return of the truck to move the
fertilizer.  I accepted the napkins and sent him on his way.  Two
hours later he returned on foot.  The truck had broken a spring on
a rough back road.  I was editing a story to meet a magazine
deadline and was obliged to drop my work, arrange for a new spring
and a repairman from the nearest city.  The job cost fifteen
dollars, the details filled my day, and it was night before Little
Will reached the grove again.  I take a rueful satisfaction in
using the flimsy napkins, saying to friends, "Please be careful.
These napkins are worth about six dollars apiece."  My only
dividend on the investment is their puzzled expression at my bad
taste and the obvious worthlessness of the napkins.  I take no more
chances on Martha's slack-taking.  Whenever I leave the Creek for
the beach, I say, "If we leave anything behind, do not send the
truck with it."  I have probably deprived her of many triumphs in
despatching a pound of butter or a magazine by farm express.

We call Martha "old-timey."  That means specifically that to our
white faces she presents a low-voiced deference, to our backs an
acute criticism, and to the colored world a tongue before which it
bows as before a flail.  She has an inviolable sense of proportion.
It comes of the gift, and I think it is a gift, that many of her
alleged superiors do not possess, of seeing people as they are.
Wealth does not impress her, on the rare occasions when she
encounters it.  "Fame" is a word without meaning.  Those few of the
worldly great who have paused briefly at the Creek have passed
before her silent appraisal as they must pass that of St. Peter.
On the other hand, the poorest tramp receives a kind word from her
if she senses in him that integrity that even the most unfortunate
often possess.  I fed one such one day, for at the Creek the hungry
have a great claim on us.  The ragged creature blessed me as he
went away with his full stomach and small gifts.

"It will all come back to you," he said, "many times over."

It was of course the ancient response of the mendicant, through
whom the charitable curry favor in the sight of the gods, but the
man had something more.

Martha said, "That ain't no beggar.  That's a person."

She has her own standards of payment for services rendered.  She
accepts nothing from those too poor to pay.  When I came to my own
lean period, and found that I could not carry all the manual labor
alone, she washed and cleaned for me, at the current rate of ten
cents an hour.  She would not cheapen herself by loitering over her
work, to draw a higher pay, and was always finished in a few hours.
I paid her the small sums with guilt and necessity.  She accepted
with infinite politeness.  Now, when accident has raised my
fortunes, I pay her generously for the smallest labors, and she
accepts the over-pay with equal understanding.  Who knows better
than she that one pays as one can, and that the Lord giveth and the
Lord taketh away?  Blessed be the name of the Lord.

None of her get is of the same stuff as her own.  If she were white
I should call her a natural aristocrat, and I see no reason to
withhold the adjective because of color or race.  She is
illiterate, she can tell a judicious lie when necessary, she does
not know sterling silver from aluminum, and scours old English
Sheffield along with the cooking pots and pans.  But she is well-
bred.  Breeding is after all a matter of manner, of social
adjustment, of exquisite courtesy.  Perhaps she is descended from
old African kings and queens.  At any rate, the hallmark is on her.

Old Will, her husband, some ten years older than she, is almost of
her breed.  He has the arrogance of the elite but not the
graciousness.  Many of the quarrels at the Creek have been of his
instigating.  Perhaps he too came of a regal line but a more
belligerent one.  He looks for all the world like Uncle Tom, with
grizzled hair and whiskers, and walks with a cane.  The cane is a
badge of his independence, indicating that he is frail and cannot
or will not stoop to labor.  But he was a hard worker in his day
and made money on cotton and at share-cropping of all sorts.  When
I am his age, if I have no other subsistence, I think that I too
shall walk with a cane and accept a livelihood as my right, after
years of toiling.

Martha is a Primitive, or foot-washing, Baptist, militant and
certain of her doctrines.  She does not go often to church only
because there is none nearby of her denomination.  There was a
Primitive Baptist church across the Creek when I first came, but
the leader absconded with the hard-saved church funds, and his
house, which was also the meeting-house, was quite properly struck
by lightning and burned to the ground by the wrath of the Lord.
Martha is an inexhaustible fount of old spirituals.  When we get
hungry for song, she gathers several of her family together, lines
them up in a row and "leads off."  Her voice is high and reedlike
and utterly true.  The other voices weave in and out of her melody,
sometimes only humming, for some of the songs are so rare and old
that only she is familiar with the words.  Her favorite, and mine,
is "Come, Mary, toll the bell."  For this, she throws back her
kerchiefed head, closes her eyes, pats her foot and accompanies
herself with an intricate syncopation of hand clapping.  Rhythm-
minded friends attempt to follow her timing, charmed by its
perfection, and can never duplicate the fine shading of beats.  Her
son-in-law Henry is her favorite to sing with her, for he too knows
many of the old songs, and has a rich sweet bass that ripples like
velvet under the silver of her voice.  Unfortunately Henry is often
in disfavor and we must sing without him.  It is of no use ever for
me to ask him to sing "St. Louis Blues" or "Coon-shine Baby."

"Mama don't let me sing them low-down songs where she can hear it,"
he says.

I wonder often what she thinks of the mysterious business that is
my writing.  Once in the midst of creative difficulties, I said
facetiously, "Martha, I'm in trouble.  I'll do the washing if
you'll write this chapter for me."

"Sugar," she said gravely, "God knows I'd do it if I could."

I recall the time I rang late for my breakfast coffee.  It seemed
necessary to apologize for the hour, for at the Creek one is not
quite decent who is not up with the red-birds.

I said, "I'm sorry to be so late.  I worked very late last night at
my writing."

She said compassionately, "Oh Sugar, I knows you're tired in the
arms."

There is indeed much writing that sounds as though the only
possible fatigue to the author were manual, but working as I do
with great mental anguish, I could hope that a trace of cerebration
might register, even for Martha.  Pride pricked me, I think, or the
need of self-justification that Martha is likely to impose on one,
and that day I showed her my published books.  She recognized my
picture on a jacket and turned the unintelligible pages with a
cautious black finger.  She put her hands on her hips and threw
back her head.

"Sugar," she said, "they ain't nobody at Cross Creek can do that."



3.  The magnolia tree


I do not know the irreducible minimum of happiness for any other
spirit than my own.  It is impossible to be certain even of mine.
Yet I believe that I know my tangible desideratum.  It is a tree-
top against a patch of sky.  If I should lie crippled or long ill,
or should have the quite conceivable misfortune to be clapped in
jail, I could survive, I think, given this one token of the
physical world.  I know that I lived on one such in my first days
at the Creek.

The tree was a magnolia, taller than the tallest orange trees
around it.  There is no such thing in the world as an ugly tree,
but the magnolia grandiflora has a unique perfection.  No matter
how crowded it may be, no matter how thickly holly and live oak and
sweet gum may grow up around it, it develops with complete
symmetry, so that one wonders whether character in all things,
human as well as vegetable, may not be implicit.  Neither is its
development ruthless, achieved at the expense of its neighbors, for
it is one of the few trees that may be allowed to stand in an
orange grove, seeming to steal nothing from the expensively
nourished citrus.  The young of the tree is courteous, waiting for
the parent to be done with life before presuming to take it over.
There are never seedling magnolias under or near an old magnolia.
When the tree at last dies, the young glossy sprouts appear from
nowhere, exulting in the sun and air for which they may have waited
a long hundred years.

The tree is beautiful the year around.  It need not wait for a
brief burst of blooming to justify itself, like the wild plum and
the hawthorn.  It is handsomer than most dressed only in its broad
leaves, shining like dark polished jade, so that when I am
desperate for decoration, I break a few sprays for the house and
find them an ornament of which a Japanese artist would approve.
The tree sheds some of its leaves just before it blooms, as though
it shook off old garments to be cleansed and ready for the new.
There is a dry pattering to earth of the hard leaves and for a
brief time the tree is parched and drawn, the rosy-lichened trunk
gray and anxious.  Then pale green spires cover the boughs,
unfolding into freshly lacquered leaves, and at their tips the
blooms appear.  When, in late April or early May, the pale buds
unfold into great white waxy blossoms, sometimes eight or ten
inches across, and the perfume is a delirious thing on the spring
air, I would not trade one tree for a conservatory filled with
orchids.  The blooms, for all their size and thickness, are as
delicate as orchids in that they reject the touch of human hands.
They must be cut or broken carefully and placed in a jar of water
without brushing the edges, or the creamy petals will turn in an
hour to brown velvet.  Properly handled, they open in the house as
on the tree, the cupped buds bursting open suddenly, the fullblown
flowers shedding the red-tipped stamens in a shower, so that in a
quiet room you hear them sifting onto the table top.  The red seed
cones are as fine as candles.  They mature slowly from the top of
the tree down, as a Christmas tree is lighted.

Because I miss the flowers when the blooming season is over, I
begged my artist friend Robert to paint a spray on my old Tole
tray.  He rebelled, being a true artist who is annoyed by owners'
specifications, and wanted to do a stylized landscape on the tray.
I sulked and grumbled, and as sulky as I, at last he began the
magnolias.  He put on a few white daubs and growled some more and
let the months pass.  Then the magnolia season came around, and he
had a jug of the blooms in his studio, and my battle was won.  The
magnolias were irresistible.  Now I have them, imperishable at
least for my lifetime, with the inexplicable added loveliness that
true art gives to reality.  Unfortunately, the tray is now too fine
a work of art to put back on its low table, where the convivial and
the careless will set down their damp silver julep cups.  I have
the alternatives of taking it to bed with me, or hanging it
inappropriately on the farmhouse wall, or following my guests about
like a secret service agent, ready to snatch up the dripping
symbols of my hospitality from off the white breasts of the
magnolias.

The tree that nourished me in a lean time is still here and will be
as long as I can protect it from everything short of lightning.  It
is not conspicuous when walking through the grove.  It comes into
its own from the west kitchen window beside the sink.  The high
window frames it, so that its dark glossy top is singled out for
the attention of one standing there, washing dishes, preparing
vegetables, rolling pie crust on the table under the window,
putting a cake together.  The sun sets behind it and is tangled in
the branches.  In the days when the life and the work at the Creek
were new, and the three brothers, for whom the pattern proved
within a year to be not the right one, seemed three bottomless
capacities for food, and there was no domestic help, the hours by
the west window were endless, and the magnolia never failed of its
beauty and its comfort.  One wanted to cut it down, believing that
it sapped the nourishment of the orange trees around it, but
another laughed and upheld me, and it was left to raise its leaves,
its blossoms, its red cones, to the changing sky.  Now oranges
scarcely pay for their care and their picking and shipping, and we
know that magnolias, like palm trees, are good things in a grove,
breeding and harboring many friendly parasites, and I have been
alone a long time, and the magnolia tree is still here.

The matter of adjustment to physical environment is as fascinating
as the adjustment of man to man, and as many-sided.  The place that
is right for one is wrong for another, and I think that much human
unhappiness comes from ignoring the primordial relation of man to
his background.  Certainly the creatures are sensitive to this, and
while some seem contented almost anywhere as long as food is
provided, and perhaps a mate, others cannot accept the change of
scene or the cage.  Monkeys, I think, do not mind the zoo, but the
eagle hunched on his public perch, the panther behind his bars,
break the heart with their desperation.  My own two animals who
came to the Creek with me from urban life reacted as opposites.
They were a Scottish terrier, a shy fellow, and a young tiger cat,
both city-bred and reared.  Both knew town apartment life, the
sound of city traffic and the small bed at night behind safe walls.
Both had been happy in that life.

Dinghy the Scotty hated the Florida backwoods from the first
sandspur under his tail.  He hated the sun, he hated the people,
black and white, he hated the roominess of the farm-house and the
long quiet of the nights.  From the beginning, he sat on his fat
Scotch behind and glowered.  Perhaps he sensed that his breed and
pedigree were not here properly appreciated.  Florida is a country
of the work-dog, even where that dog is a pointer or setter and so
something, always, of a pet.  We live a leisurely life, but while
our dogs lie, as we, in the sun, they are also expected to serve
us, as the Negro serves.  Dinghy was not approved.  He was not even
understood.  There were those who did not believe he was a dog.
The iceman professed to be in deadly fear of him.  I took Dinghy in
the car with me to Hawthorn for groceries, and the clerk came to
put the packages in the car.  He retreated, shrieking, "There's a
varmint in that car!"  I am certain that if Dinghy did not know
what was meant by a varmint, he knew that humans were not impressed
by him.  He was accustomed to slavish overtures, the proffered
tidbit and the friendly touch.  He retired into his mental
Highlands and stayed there.

Jib, his tabby companion, was of different stuff.  He too had lived
the languid life of a city pet, in the house most of the time, fed
on ground beef and liver from the butcher, his only excitement an
occasional excursion into the back yard after some intrepid city
mouse.  I was so busy when I took up life at the Creek that Jib was
left to shift for himself.  He had his warm milk fresh from old
Laura, night and morning, but that was all.  And where Dinghy
turned into a hopeless introvert, Jib thrived.

The jungle that was a terror to the dog was to him enchanting.  All
the generations of urban life were dissolved in a moment, and he
prowled the marsh and hammock as though he had known them always.
He returned home with shining eyes, bearing some trophy unutterably
strange, a lizard or small snake.  We use the expression here,
"poor as a lizard-eating cat," and I think Jib learned they were
not the healthiest of foods, for as the years passed I would see
him lying in the shade, watching a lizard with no attempt to catch
it.  He must once have been bitten by a snake, for he disappeared
for two days, and came in with his head swollen to twice its size,
and very wobbly on his legs.  He refused food for two days more and
then was himself again, but with a holy fear of anything resembling
the serpent.  I have seen him jump three feet in the air, like a
released spring, at the sudden sight of a curving stick or a ribbon
on the floor.

He seemed to sense the unhappiness of Dinghy and made a great
effort to teach the Scotty the new delights he had discovered.  He
brought his lizards to the melancholy Scot and was puzzled by his
disgust.  He spent hours trying to teach Dinghy to catch a mouse.
He would cripple it, cat-fashion, and release it under the dog's
nose.  Dinghy would move a few morose inches away.  Jib would pick
up the mouse and push it under Dinghy's belly with one paw, then
sit back and wait hopefully for the mouse to slip away and Dinghy
to pounce, as any rational animal would do.  The mouse would begin
its escape and Dinghy would look the other way.  At last, with
evident lack of relish, Jib would kill and eat his mouse.

Dinghy was returned to the city, lived happily in a bed-indoor
apartment filled with the commotion of newspaper people, and
fathered many broods of equally haughty and urban Scottish
terriers.  I am sure that if he had stayed in Florida he would have
sired no progeny, out of sheer boredom.  Old Jib has lived to be a
veritable Egyptian mummy of a cat, lean and dessicated, with an eye
cocked to watch the birds and the chameleons he has not disturbed
for many years.  Life will be for him always a lively matter, even
when it is reduced to mere speculation.  I drove over the cattle-
gap into the grove late one night recently, and my lights shone two
bright pairs of eyes, one on either side of the driveway.  Old Jib
was curled comfortably there, watching with friendly interest an
opossum who had come by on his night's business.

There was more of Jib's response to the jungle than of Dinghy's in
my own feeling about it.  It will always seem strange to me, and
though I live to be as thin and dried as he, I shall go into its
shadows with a faster heart-beat, as Jib must have gone.  Even with
my first fear, long since vanished, there was more of excitement,
and this is a thing I should not choose to have leave me about
anything glamorous and lovely.  I was most stirred, I think, by
knowing that this was Indian and Spanish country, and that
Vitachuco, chief of the Ocali Indians, was embroiled with the
Spaniards somewhere north of the present Ocala--and it may have
been here.  The word "hammock" comes from the Spanish "hamaca,"
meaning "a highly arable type of soil."  I wanted to name my book
"Golden Apples," "Hamaca," and to indicate the triumphs and defeats
that different kinds of men have encountered in this hammock
country, but it was believed that the name would be so strange no
one would buy the book.

I like to think of the Spaniards blazing their trails through the
Florida hammocks.  The hammocks were the same then as now, and will
be the same forever if men can be induced to leave them alone.
Hammock soil is dark and rich, made up of centuries of accumulation
of humus from the droppings of leaves.  The hammock is marked by
its type of trees, and these are the live oak, the palm, the sweet
gum, the holly, the ironwood and the hickory and magnolia.  We have
high hammock and low hammock, and oak hammock and palm hammock, and
there is likely to be a body of water nearby.  The piney woods and
the flat-woods are more open and therefore perhaps more hospitable,
in spite of their poorer soil and dryness, but the hamaca shares
with marsh and swamp the great mystery of Florida.

When I had caught the swing of the work so that there was now and
then a breathing spell, I moved beyond the orbit of the magnolia
tree seen from the kitchen window, and began to learn the hammock
and lake edge that with the grove made up my seventy-two acres.  I
have since bought forty acres from the Widow Lowry, worthless marsh
and low hammock that adjoin my east grove, from that peculiar
instinct, relic no doubt of pioneer farming ancestors, that makes a
landowner want to "round out his block."  The grove itself seems
safe and open, no matter how high the tea-weed grows, and the red-
top.  There are times when the evening sun infiltrates so eerily
the dense summer cover crop under the orange trees that the green
growth seems, not vegetation, but sea, emerald green, with the
light seeming to come from high distant earthly places down through
the luminous waters.  Yet the effect is open.

The old sixteen-acre field is open, too.  It is reached through Old
Boss' grove, and I remember the sense of discovery when I went
through the sagging gate back of his house and came out into the
old clearing.  It is a fine sweep of field, level for ten acres,
dropping to the east to a line of hickories, and to the north
melting into a dense six acres of virgin hammock.  In the heart of
the clearing is a gigantic live oak, with crepe myrtle bushes
nearby, and an old well, and though there is not a trace left of
any house, one knows this was a home-site, and that children swung
from the low-spreading limbs of the oak tree.  The field has lost
its fertility, and I have struggled with successive optimistic
plantings of beans and squash and cucumbers and even, hopeful folly
on that neglected soil, young orange trees.  But the field is
through with the bother of cultivation and will have none of it,
and everything withers on its arid and cynical and weary breast.
It nourishes only a thick cluster of persimmon trees and wild
grapevines, and a spindling grapefruit tree at the edge of the
hammock, and a great sweet seedling orange tree among the
hickories.  The squirrels and raccoons and birds and foxes make a
good living there, where a human fails.

The east grove, across the road from the farmhouse, is bounded on
the east and south by hammock.  This lies around it in a protective
crescent.  Entering here is a trek into the wilderness.  Boots and
breeches are required, for the way goes through saw palmettos and
is part of the trail where, Tom Morrison says, the snakes cross.
Twice each year the moccasins and rattlers move, he says, taking
the same path, and back and forth between the east and west groves
is a known crossing.  It must be so, for I see more snakes on the
road there than in any other place I frequent.  Once through the
dense palmettos the hammock opens out, so that where the old Lowry
fence runs the woods make a clear park.  There are tall long-leaf
pines among the palms and live oaks, so that the earth has a clean
carpet of pine needles and brittle oak leaves, and one walks
silently over it.  The bluejays nest there, and the hush is broken
only by their cries, harsh above the soft slurring of the wind in
the tree-tops.  I began my hunting there, practicing with a .410 on
the gray squirrels that whisked up and down the tree trunks.  There
was great sport at first in all the hunting.  Then it came to
sicken me, and now I go to the pines as a guest and not an invader.
The squirrels strip half a dozen pecan trees of their crop each
fall, but there are a dozen trees more, and when a gray streak of
fur flashes by my window of an autumn morning on its way to the
rich nuts, I say to it, "Come in and welcome.  There is enough for
us all."

Down through the west grove, which is the house grove, is the
hammock on the shore of Orange Lake that has been from the
beginning a true retreat.  I went to it often in the early days but
have not gone much since life itself has had more to offer.  This
has been not for disloyalty or for any treachery, but because at
all times we turn to what we need only when we need it.  It is a
matter of indifference to the lake-shore hammock whether I come or
go, and so I went to it in my need, as I have gone along the road
that nourished me.

To reach it, I might go by one of two ways: through the grove,
dipping at the end to a patch of seedling pecan trees and a great
bush of trifoliata, the ground thick with blue spiderwort and wild
mustard; a ragged fence is here, marking off what had been a garden
in a dry time, but now, with the lake high, is damp muck grown
rankly in coffee-weed and brambles.  I might go persistently
through the coffee-weed and the tearing briers and cross another
ragged fence, and come out on a cattle trail along the lake edge
that crossed into the hammock.  Or I might reach it by going to the
south pasture and cutting straight through the hammock edge.  The
border is an almost impenetrable tangle of blackberry bushes and
bamboo vines.  But by crouching low, a way may be found under the
overhanging thicket, and it is found that this too is a cattle
trail, and a low narrow way leads through perpetual shadow to the
open hammock.

I do not understand how any one can live without some small place
of enchantment to turn to.  In the lakeside hammock there is a
constant stirring in the tree-tops, as though on the stillest days
the breathing of the earth is yet audible.  The Spanish moss sways
a little always.  The heavy forest thins into occasional great
trees, live oaks and palms and pines.  In spring, the yellow
jessamine is heavy on the air, in summer the red trumpet vine
shouts from the gray trunks, and in autumn and winter the holly
berries are small bright lamps in the half-light.  The squirrels
are unafraid, and here I saw my first fox-squirrel, a huge fellow
made of black shining plush.  Here a skunk prowled close to me,
digging industrious small holes for grubs.  I sat as still as a
stump, and if he saw me, as I suspect, he was a gentleman and went
on steadily with his business, then loped away with a graceful
rocking motion.  A covey of quail passed me often, so that I came
to know their trail into the blackberry thicket where they gathered
in a circle for the night, making small soft cries.  It is
impossible to be among the woods animals on their own ground
without a feeling of expanding one's own world, as when any foreign
country is visited.

To the west, the hammock becomes damp, the trees stand more
sparsely.  Beyond is a long stretch of marsh where the cattle feed
lazily, belly-deep in water hyacinths and lily pads, then the wide
lake itself.  There is a clamor of water birds, long-legged herons
and cranes, visiting sea-gulls from the coasts, wild ducks, coots,
the shrill scream of fish-hawks, with now and then a bald-headed
eagle loitering in the sky, ready to swirl down and take the fish-
hawk's catch from him in midair.  Across the lake, visible the four
miles only on a clear day, is the tower of the old Samson manse,
decaying in the middle of the still prosperous orange grove.  From
the tower itself, decrepit and dangerous, is a sight of a tropical
world of dreams, made up of glossy trees and shining water and palm
islands.  When I am an old woman, so that too much queerness will
seem a natural thing, I mean to build a tower like it on my own
side of the lake, and I shall sit there on angry days and growl
down at any one who disturbs me.

I dig leaf mould from this hammock to enrich my roses and camellias
and gardenias.  When I went with my basket one morning a breath of
movement, an unwonted pattern of color, caught my eye under a
tangle of wild grapevines.  A wild sow lay nested at the base of a
great magnolia.  At a little distance, piled one on the other, lay
her litter, clean and fresh as the sunshine, the birth-damp still
upon them.  Sow and litter were exhausted with the business of
birthing.  The one lay breathing profoundly, absorbed in the
immensity of rest.  The others lay like a mass of puppies, the
lowest-layered tugging himself free to climb again on top of the
pile and warm his tender belly.  The mass shifted.  The most
adventuresome, a pied morsel of pig with a white band like a belt
around his middle, wobbled over to the sow's side.  He gave a
delighted whimper and the whole litter ambled over to discover the
miracle of the hairy breasts.

The jungle hammock breathed.  Life went through the moss-hung
forest, the swamp, the cypresses, through the wild sow and her
young, through me, in its continuous chain.  We were all one with
the silent pulsing.  This was the thing that was important, the
cycle of life, with birth and death merging one into the other in
an imperceptible twilight and an insubstantial dawn.  The universe
breathed, and the world inside it breathed the same breath.  This
was the cosmic life, with suns and moons to make it lovely.  It was
important only to keep close enough to the pulse to feel its
rhythm, to be comforted by its steadiness, to know that Life is
vital, and one's own minute living a torn fragment of the larger
cloth.



4.  The pound party


We pay no attention to a newcomer at the Creek.  There is no more
formal getting-acquainted than among the rabbits in the woods and
the birds in the trees.  When any one has been here long enough,
sooner or later his path crosses that of the other inhabitants and
friendship or enmity or mere tolerance sets in.  I was never
welcomed to the Creek except by Martha, or my presence acknowledged.
If I stayed, that was my own business, so long as I minded it.  If
I did not stay, no one would be surprised and there was no point
in making overtures to me.  But how was I to have known this and
that the Townsends' invitation to a pound party was not a social
gesture?  I took it at face value.

I knew vaguely that a family lived half a mile away as tenants in
Cow Hammock.  A lean brown-eyed man who looked like John the
Baptist often walked down the sand road in front of my house,
scuffling up the dust with long bare feet.  A pretty woman with a
baby in her arms sometimes walked with him, or followed him an hour
later, or sometimes appeared mysteriously with him only on his way
back, as though she had gone off to the Creek in the night and he
had come after her by daylight.  Actually, I found, they fished
both from Cow Hammock Landing and from Cross Creek, and one or the
other might take the rowboat back and forth.  Apparently countless
children loitered along the road, like beads set far apart in a
string, sometimes in little knots, sometimes singly.  They
resembled neither St. John nor the woman, but among themselves were
as alike as peas in a pod and precisely the color of that vegetable
when a little wilted.  I began speaking to the children and they
answered, not the conventional "Hey!", but "How-do," politely.
Apparently none of them went to school, although I believe it was
that winter that the school bus began collecting children from the
Creek.  Once a wagon went by, lurching in the ruts, filled to
overflowing with these passers-by, integrated at last into one
family.  They were the Townsends, and a community to themselves,
aloof by choice.  There were enough of them to need no other
contacts.  One day two of the small girls appeared at my back door.

The oldest said rapidly, before she should forget the memorized
words, "I'm Ella May, and Mama says we're having a pound party
tomorrow evening and she'd be proud did you come."

It came to me that this was the first neighborly gesture I had
encountered at the Creek.  I was touched.

I said, "I'd be glad to.  But what is a pound party?"

"Everybody brings a pound of something.  Sugar, or butter, or
candy, or a cake.  A cake's fine.  Such as that."

The evening of the party was clear as glass and I walked the half-
mile to Cow Hammock.  Remembering the swarm of little Townsends,
and adding a houseful of guests in my mind's eye, I had doubled my
largest cake recipe and baked it in a roasting pan.  I thought I
must be early, for there was no one in the shabby house but the
Townsends.  The children were watching and at sight of me scattered
within.

I heard a sibilant, "Here she comes."

The suspicion had not yet touched me not only that they knew I
should be the sole arrival, but that the party had been built
around the probability of my innocent acceptance.  The Townsends
were in their Sunday best, fresh-scrubbed and uncomfortable.  The
girls were starched, the boys in stiff clean blue overalls and
shirts.  I was given a seat on a bench along a wall.  Behind me a
ragged screen over the open window let in a steady stream of
mosquitoes, attracted by the oil lamp on the table.  Ella May was
assigned with a newspaper to sit beside me and fan my legs to keep
them from biting me.  When Ella May lagged, Beatrice took up the
paper.  Their work was enthusiastic but inadequate to the ingenuity
of mosquitoes.  I slapped furtively.  My cake had the place of
honor on the bare deal table in the center of the room.  A Townsend
layer cake dripping sticky icing was pushed modestly to one side.
The rest of the refreshments provided by the hostess consisted of a
bucket of water, a ten-cent jar of peanut butter and a nickel box
of soda crackers.

She said easily, "We'll wait a while to eat, just in case."

I made conversation as best I could.  We talked of the heavy crop
of blackberries, of the Hamon sow that could not be kept up, no
matter how one tried, of the summer rains and of the fishing.  Mr.
Townsend spoke up brightly when we reached the fishing.  Fishing
was not only the family livelihood but its delight.  The Townsends
would have sat all day with poles if they had been millionaires.

"I'll bring you a mess of bream one day," he said.

The talk ebbed.  The mosquitoes buzzed and the Townsends slapped
automatically.  The lamp flickered in a gust of wind.

Mrs. Townsend said, "Be nice, did you blow some, Floyd."

Mr. Townsend echoed, "Blow some, Floyd."

Floyd, the oldest, long, thin and pale, brought out a mouth organ
from his pocket and drew up a straight wooden chair.  He began to
pat his foot before he started his tune.  Into the patting came
suddenly the whine of the mouth organ.  The tune, formless,
unrecognizable, was mournful.  One sad phrase repeated itself over
and over.  Other Townsends took up the patting and the rickety
floor shook to the thumping.  Floyd stopped abruptly.

Mrs. Townsend said to the air, "Be nice, did Preston dance."

Preston was five, the youngest weaned Townsend.  The older children
seized him and dragged him from the doorway.  He hung his head but
made no resistance.  They seemed to prop him up, then retreated and
left him standing alone.  Floyd took up his tune.  Preston stood
staring vacantly.  The tune and the party seemed no concern of his.
As though one note had set off a mechanical spring, he began to
shuffle his feet.  His body was still.  His arms jerked a little,
like a broken jack-in-the-box.  His feet shuffled back and forth
without rhythm.  He might have been trying to keep his footing on a
slippery treadmill.  This was the dance.  I expected him to stop in
a moment but he kept it up.  The tune, the dance, were endless.

Mrs. Townsend said complacently, "Preston holds out good, don't
he?"

The compliment seemed a signal, for he stopped as suddenly as he
had begun.

Mrs. Townsend said, "We just as good to eat."

She passed the crackers in one hand and the tiny jar of peanut
butter, with a spoon in it, in the other.  Eyes followed her
hungrily.  I refused, to the relief of the eyes.  I had a dipper of
water and as small a piece of cake as I dared take and yet be
courteous.  The two cakes disappeared as though a thunder-shower
had melted them.  The party was obviously over.  Mrs. Townsend
accompanied me outside the house and to the head of the path.  She
looked up into a cloudless and star-lit sky.

"I reckon the threat of bad weather kept the others away," she said
placidly.

I inquired about pound parties at the Creek, and my gullibility was
verified.  Yet the occasion had been truly a party, and the
Townsends had done their best to make it festive.  I decided that I
should go any time I was invited, and should see to it that a
larger jar of peanut butter was provided.  After the party, the
Townsend children and I were great friends.  Ella May and Beatrice
came almost every day to visit me.  Dorsey and Floyd and Glenwood
came to do odd chores.  They were thin, grave boys and very
capable.  They moved slowly, like old men, and had the look of age
that hunger puts on children.  The boys were the right size to
climb into the pecan trees and shake down and gather the nuts.  The
crop was heavy that year, and the filled sacks and baskets amounted
to many hundred pounds.

The boys were asked, "What would you do if you had a dollar for
every one of those pecans?"

There was silence while the thought of wealth was contemplated.

Dorsey said slowly, "First off, I'd get me a whole plug of Brown
Mule tobaccy, all for myself."

Floyd said, "I'd have all I want of rich folks' rations--light
bread and jelly."

The questioner went on, "What, no cornbread?"

Glenwood said quickly, "Oh yes.  We know you got to have cornbread
to grow on."

One week in the next spring the whole family left off its fishing
and picked, without enthusiasm, the heavy crop of beans.  Their pay
on Saturday totalled thirty-six dollars.  I thought happily how far
this would go.  I pictured the big sack of groceries that night,
with money laid by for future needs, seed and fertilizer perhaps
for a garden of their own.  On Monday morning Floyd came to the
house.

"Could you let us have two dollars," he asked, "to get us some
rations?"

Their money had surely been stolen from them, or the heavy hand of
poor folks' luck had made them lose it in some fashion.

"But what happened to the thirty-six dollars you had on Saturday?"

Floyd's pale face was bright with pleasure.

"We bought us an ottymobile," he said.

They were somehow a challenge.  I have never known a more exquisite
courtesy than the whole family possessed.  There were good blood
and breeding back of them.  I have known no one with more gracious
manners.  The children were intelligent.  Their finances were a
problem beyond me and would evidently have to take care of
themselves, but it seemed to me that the children's futures held
something better than a precarious living fishing on Orange Lake.
The two great needs, where I could give tangible help, were their
health and their education.

Their green color came from a lifetime of hookworm.  I persuaded
the mother and father to let the children be treated.  The
tetrachlorethylene capsules were dispensed free by the state.  I
obtained capsules and instructions, and set off for the Townsend
house one Saturday night.  One by one I handed out the preliminary
doses of Epsom salts.  I gave orders about no further food.  On
Sunday morning I trudged back again and saw the capsules safely
down the Townsends.  I departed with the sense of smugness common
to all meddlers, leaving word that in ten days we would repeat the
treatment.  When the ten days were up, the mother refused point
blank to let the children be treated again.

"It made them sick," she said.

"Of course it made them sick.  They were eaten up with hookworm."

She shook her head.

"'Twouldn't be safe to give that medicine to them again," she said
firmly.  "It must of been stale.  You can't trust nothin' is free."

I was beaten there, and passed on slyly to the matter of education.
Once safely in school, I was sure the visiting county nurse would
have a chance for a fresh battle against the hookworms.  I would
give clothes, I said, to all the children who would go to school.
St. John and his wife consulted and it was agreed that Dorsey and
Glenwood, Ella May and Beatrice, might condescend to be clothed and
to allow the school bus from the village to stop for them.

I am no seamstress, the holding of a threaded needle in my hand
producing an acute stomach ache.  But a long line of Methodist
preachers behind me has left the evil thought in the blood of my
brain that the more difficult a job, the more certainly one must
apply oneself to its mastering.  I bought yards of good gingham and
sat hour after hour, developing stomach ulcers, I was certain, at
the sewing machine.  The girls came for fittings and had light
bread and jelly as reward.  I turned out creditable dresses, nicely
trimmed, and went at the job of underwear.  I cut down my own two
woolen coats for Ella May and Beatrice.  I bought shirts and pants
for the boys.  I took my bundles with a missionary's pride to the
Townsends and modest pleasure was shown in my products.  I arranged
for the school bus to stop at the entrance to Cow Hammock.  I went
home and took a large dose of bicarbonate of soda.

The next morning one of the smaller children brought me a dress
length of very good silk.

"Mama says will you please make a dress for her."

I took the material to the Townsend house, puzzled, unwilling as
yet to be outraged.  Mama was on the lake, fishing.  I was shown
some of Mama's other garments.  Mama was a much better seamstress
than I--But if the Lord sends forth a strangely agreeable slave to
the sewing machine, surely it is pleasanter and more profitable to
spend one's time on the lovely lake, dangling a bamboo pole for
bream.  I left the material and word that my offer to sew for the
Townsends applied only to those in need of education, not to those
who had advanced in philosophy far beyond me.

The children went to school just long enough to make ownership of
the clothes indisputable.  Then they were all home again, playing
in the sandy yard, or as a special treat, taken along on the
fishing parties.

"They didn't like school," St. John informed me gently.

It would be satisfying, if sad, to tell of their tragic maturities.
I can only report that they have grown up as healthy as any one
else, and within the limits of their congenital leisureliness, are
living as active and prosperous lives as their neighbors.  I am
sometimes haunted by the feeling that it is I who could have
learned of the Townsends.



5.  The census


For learning a new territory and people as quickly as possible, I
recommend taking the census on horseback.  In 1930 my friend Zelma
from the village was commissioned to take the census in the back-
country sections of Alachua County.  Zelma is an ageless spinster
resembling an angry and efficient canary.  She manages her orange
grove and as much of the village and county as needs management or
will submit to it.  I cannot decide whether she should have been a
man or a mother.  She combines the more violent characteristics of
both and those who ask for or accept her manifold ministrations
think nothing of being cursed loudly at the very instant of being
tenderly fed, clothed, nursed or guided through their troubles.
She was the logical census taker for our district.  She knew all
the inhabitants, black and white, and every road and trail leading
to their houses.  None of the places could be reached by a main
road, and travelling by automobile would leave most of the noses
uncounted.  She borrowed two horses from the manager of the Maxcey
packing house, and on a bright fall morning we set out together.

I had not ridden since childhood.  Even then, my mounts had been
the weary work horses on the Maryland farm, and my brother and I
had been able to ride safely, without saddles, on their broad
backs.  I was uneasy at first on my lively mare.  Then the beauty
of the country took me over, and I was aware only that this high
vantage point was perfection for the traveller in strange places.
Zelma planned a wide circle for the first day.  We set out to the
northwest and came to the hammock lands across the Creek that
bordered Orange Lake.  The population was sparse.  I could not
understand how folk could settle in the bare piney-woods, when here
were uninhabited hammock acres, rich of soil, magnificent of
vegetation.  But the work of clearing hammock is heavy, and land
easily cleared and already open is tempting to migrants who are
often not aware of the differences in fertility.  The sun streamed
through the interstices and glinted on the shining magnolia leaves
and sparkleberry bushes.  Red-birds darted down the narrow trail
before us and among the palms twined with trumpet vines, the
blossoms the same bright orange-red color as the birds.  Coveys of
quail whirred away from us.

"It's a ---- blessing for us not many Yankees have seen country
like this, or they'd move in on us worse than Sherman," Zelma said,
and reined in her horse to dismount in front of the first cabin.

We finished the scanty counting along Orange Lake and cut west
toward the River Styx.  The name chilled me.  My mare was
obstreperous, and as we moved into a wet narrow road, I thought
that all that was needed to make her bolt under me was the sight of
a moccasin.  As though I had conjured him up, he was there.  We
were approaching a wooden foot-bridge and the mare, who had balked
at all previous bridges, was taking this one of her own accord.
The snake lay on a mound of earth to the right of the bridge.  He
was solidly coiled, an ancestral cottonmouth, taking up as much
space as a dishpan.  His triangular and venomous head rested flatly
on the outer edge of his coils.  The mare failed to see him because
he lay so still.  She was intent on her footing, on the welcome
sight of the road ahead.  Her careful, dainty hooves passed three
inches from the dark sleek head.  I loosened my feet from the
stirrups, ready to jump free.  The patriarch eyed me and did not
stir.  I decided that such a live-and-let-live philosophy was
admirable, and I touched one finger to my hat, saluting a
gentleman.

We entered the River Styx gently.  Surely, death itself must come
as quietly.  The open fields, bright in the reality of sunlight,
gave way easily to pine lands.  The pines grew thicker, the sweet
scent of their needles rising.  The sunlight was spotty, the
shadows of the tall trees wider.  Here and there a live oak told of
changing soil.  Then, imperceptibly, we were in deep hammock.
Coolness came in on us.  The leaves of magnolia and bay trees shut
out the sun, as all dark everlasting foliage must shut it out from
the silent places of the dead.  The hammock merged into cypress
swamp.  A trumpet vine dropped flamboyant flowers from a lone palm.
The blossoms seemed gaudy and funereal.  There were no birds
singing from the cypresses.  No squirrels swung in and out of the
sepulchral arches of the trees.  Out of the dimly defined road a
great white bird rose, flapping noiseless wings.  It was huge, snow-
white as an angel of death, with a wide black mourning band around
the edge of the wings.  I became aware that the soft dampness of
the road had turned into a soft rippling.  The whole floor of the
forest was carpeted with amber-colored water, alive, moving with a
slow, insidious current.  We had entered the River Styx.

Some English youth, fresh from his Oxford Greek and Latin, some
unhappy, outlawed scapegrace, must have named this silent stream.
Long ago, before the Big Freeze, Florida was a tropic land of
exile.  Numbers of younger sons or ne'er-do-wells were sent here
from England, subsidized to stay away.  Some were given funds with
which to establish orange groves, funds they often squandered.  One
of these, morose, ironic, must have come on this unknown, unsailed
waterway.  Bitter, perhaps, certainly homesick, he was struck by
the deathly peace and the dark beauty; stirred by the pale water
hyacinths, diaphanous and unearthly; and it was truly to him the
River of Death, over which, once traversed, there is no crossing
back again.  Because this country had become as dear as life to me,
the river held for me no horror.  I wondered if the greater Styx
might not be as darkly beautiful.  The leaf-brown overflow of water
deepened to the horses' knees.  The white ibis flapped away slowly
and came to rest high in a cypress.  Then we were on the rickety
bridge over the main body of the stream, and on the other side, and
counting children again.

I thought, "It is not given to many to cross the Styx and live to
tell it."

We circled back from Orange Lake and across Lochloosa Prairie.  We
use the word "prairie" in a special sense.  We have no open plains,
but around most of the larger lakes are wet flat areas thick with
water grasses, and these we call our prairies.  They are more
nearly marshes, yet we save the word "marsh" for the deep mucky
edges of lake and river, dense with coontail and lily pads, and for
the true salt marshes of the tidal rivers.  We found no living soul
across this tract.  There were trails used by half-wild gaunt
cattle and dim, deep-rutted roads travelled only by the lurching
turpentine wagons that came with mule and Negro driver to scrape
resin from the clay cups on the tapped turpentine trees.

We came out at last on a turpentine still and here the population
was black and dense.  So many little pickaninnies ran away from the
cabins as the strange horses approached, that it was a long job
gathering them all in to be counted, and their fancy names and
vaguely estimated ages written down on the papers.  Zelma knew all
the older Negroes and many of the younger ones.  She joked with
some and sympathized with others, recommended cures for this and
that, and promised to send medicine to one, quilt scraps to
another, and a pound of little conch pea seed to yet another.  She
chided one lean brown girl for her immense brood, fathers unknown.

"I know it's too many, Miss Zelma," the girl agreed.  "I sho' got
to git me a remedy."

By the time we had finished the Quarters, dusk was falling.  Zelma
knew a short cut back to the Creek.  It took us by Burnt Island,
and she told me fabulous tales of it in the growing darkness.
There was believed to be the grandfather of all rattlesnakes living
there.  Only glimpses had been had of him, but several reported to
have seen his shed skin, and all agreed that it was nine feet long.
The "shed" stretches, and the snake could reasonably and
conceivably have been seven feet in length.  There were wild boars
on Burnt Island, savage, long-tusked and dangerous.  The place was
also a hideout for criminals who preferred the great rattler and
the wild boars to the arm of the law.  I was not happy when Zelma
announced profanely that high water had covered the old road she
meant to take, and we were lost.

Darkness and our own uncertainty and the long hours away from the
stable made the horses restless.  My mare shied at every stick and
reared when a hoot owl cried over our heads from a pine tree.  Then
the full moon rose blessedly and roads and woods and prairie and
water were again as plain as by day.  We skirted ponds and
continued in a general west by south direction.  We came out on the
Creek road, but three miles away from the Creek.  We had been in
the saddle from seven in the morning until eleven at night.  I
ached through the night and in the morning was obliged to move with
some caution.  Yet my own country had been revealed to me and a
twinge of pain was a small price to pay.

The second day we made a wider circle.  We found a cabin here and a
shack there, where even Zelma did not know folk were living, silent
people who gave their statistics reluctantly.  We rode down a piney-
woods road in the late morning and as the trees broke at the edge
of a clearing, we heard a piano.  It was a good piano, not quite in
tune, and it was being played with the touch of an artist.  I
thought my senses were playing tricks on me.  Surely I heard only
the wind in the pines.

Zelma said, "I forgot that woman was buried back here."

The woman left the piano and came to the door.  She was in
immaculate rags and she had once been lovely.  The house was gaping
with holes and was stripped bare of all but the most fundamental
pieces of furniture.  Several thin clean children came to stare at
us.  The woman was starved for talk with her own kind, and long
after the family had been itemized, detained us.  Zelma told me her
story as we rode away.  She had come some twenty years before on a
tourist's visit to Florida, a young and beautiful girl of high
breeding.  Taking in a local square dance as a spectator she had
met a young Cracker and fallen absurdly in love with him, for the
mating instinct knows no classes.  She had married him, and her
outraged and prosperous family had left her to her own devices.
Her piano was the only salvage from her early life.  There are
hundreds of handsome and sturdy backwoodsmen who would make good
husbands even for such a girl, if her tastes in living were simple.
She had chosen a hopeless and worthless fellow who sat idly in the
sun as her life fell to pieces about her.  The children held her to
him.  There was something more, too; a pride that would not admit
defeat.  I came to know her well, and I have never known a woman to
make a gayer thing of life with only empty hands to work with.  The
family was half-starved most of the time.  Yet she made a game of
hunger, and a meal of fish and cornpone was a festival.  I went
once to visit with her, when the girls were grown, and found them
all strange specters with their faces smeared with something wet
and brown.

The woman said, "We have no place to go and no way of going.  So we
think up our own ways of having fun.  We're at the beauty parlor
today.  We read about beauty masks, so we made a trip to the edge
of the lake and dug mud to make our packs."

Martha has served her without pay when her children were born.

She said to me, "She shames most women, don't she?  I does all I
can for her, 'cause me and the Lord is all she's got to look out
for her, and the Lord ain't exactly put Hisself out."

Martha fixed lunch for Zelma and me that day.  We reached her house
in the afternoon and were famished.  She made us biscuits and fried
white bacon, and served her best preserves.  She had baked sweet
potatoes still hot in the wood range and when we left she gave us a
paper sack of them to carry with us.  Our next stop was at a small
Negro cabin and we were thirsty from the salty bacon.  Zelma asked
for water and a small black boy handed us up cool well water in
clean gourds.  When he reached up to me, he spilled the cold water
on my mare's flank and she bolted like a rabbit.  The woods were
full of gopher holes and I dared not try to rein her in too
sharply, for fear she should stumble.  I gave her her head and we
tore away madly, and as we went, I scattered hot baked sweet
potatoes all over the piney-woods.  The mare and I were both
trembling when she came to a voluntary stop.  I was proud of myself
for having stayed on, but all I had from Zelma was her special
brand of profanity for having lost the sweet potatoes.

I was sorry when the census was over and done with.  The region
around me was plainly mapped now in my mind, I knew every one,
black and white, and could never again be a stranger.  We allowed
ourselves to be interrupted for one day toward the end.  The day
was mild and cloudy.  Our friend Fred rounded up Zelma and me to go
fishing with him.  The bream were on the bed and the weather was
exactly right.  We protested that we should be finishing the
census.

"Now you just as good to come on fishing with me," Fred said.
"You'd ought to know, nobody ain't going to give you their census
on a good fishing day like this."



6.  The evolution of comfort


When I first came to the Creek, I had for facilities one water
faucet in the kitchen, a tin shower adjoining the Kohler shed and
an outhouse.  For the water faucet in the kitchen I was always
grateful, for water pumps at the Creek are all placed in relation
to the well and with little or no concern with distance from the
house.  When Martha lived in the Mackay house she had even no well,
but must carry water from the Creek itself.  My outside shower was
acceptable enough in summer, though it meant going damply over the
sand to the house afterward.  In cold weather--and you may believe
the Chamber of Commerce that we have none, or you may believe me
that on occasion bird-baths have been frozen solid--in cold weather
the outside shower was a fit device for masochistic monks.  The icy
spray that attacked the shoulders like splinters of fine glass was
in the nature of a cross.  I shall not forget the early Christmas
afternoon, with six men gathered for dinner, the turkey savory in
the oven, the pies cooling, the vegetables ready, the necessity if
not the desire for the bath borne in on me, and the temperature at
thirty-eight and dropping.  I emerged shivering and snarled at the
indifferent heavens, "The first time I get my hands on cash money,
so help me, I shall have a bathroom."

Because of the cold shower, open at the front to a wandering world,
an unfriendly shower, I took to watching for rain like a tree-toad.
For when the soft sluiceways of the skies opened and the lichened
shingle roof shed the waters in a surge down the northwest
sheltered corner of the house, I could strip and accept the
benediction.  When the day was hot the rain was cool.  When the day
was cool the rain was many degrees warmer, and as bland as perfumed
bath powder.  The water faucet and the shower, then, could be
endured.  It seemed to me that I had done nothing in all my life to
deserve the outhouse.

It had been years since I had come any closer to one than James
Whitcomb Riley's verses on the subject.  But I could look back on
them almost with nostalgia, for those I had known had a certain
coziness and a definite privacy.  One of my fondest recollections
is of an outhouse in Virginia.  It stood under a locust, at the top
of a little rise of ground.  The terrain before one sloped down
past a corner of the flower-bed, bright with balsam and phlox, to a
valley where a cornfield was bordered by a line of willows.  The
blue hills of Virginia lifted in the distance.  Three walls of the
outhouse were gay with travel posters from Switzerland, the Rhine
and Brittany.  It was pleasant to follow pensively the depicted
trails, highways and views.  On the fourth wall hung a sonnet in
French, a charming and vulgar and beautifully composed bit of
comment on the circumstances in which the reader found himself at
the moment.  All was conducive to a sense of well-being.

The outhouse on Grandfather's farm was papered with perfectly
beautiful colored pictures of reigning queens.  Alexandra was
magnificent.  Wilhelmina was demure and very pretty in pale pink
with a pearl and diamond crown.  I cannot look today at the news
pictures of the stout housewife in tweeds on a bicycle and believe
that it is the same woman.  The queen of Norway I recall as rather
austere, the queen of Italy as blackly horselike.  But all were
queens, in full color, in décolleté and jewelled diadems.  The
building had a door with crescent windows and it stood discreetly
behind a hickory tree and was reached by a high trim boardwalk
bordered with marigolds.

The outhouse that I inherited at the Creek had no boardwalk, it had
no queens, no marigolds, it had, amazingly, no door.  It stood on a
direct line with the dining room windows.  One fortunate diner
might sit with his back to it.  The others could not lift their
eyes from their plates without meeting the wooden stare of the
unhappy and misplaced edifice.  They were fortunate if they did not
meet as well the eye of a belated occupant, assuring himself
stonily that he could not be seen.  For there was indeed a wire
screen, and this screen had been, or so the instigator fatuously
pretended, modernized with camouflage.  Streaks of gray paint
zigzagged across the screening.  The effect was to make of a human
being seated behind it a monster.  The monster had gray bolts of
lightning for arms and moss-gray tree-trunks for legs.  Possibly
the head of a human tall enough might have lifted to meet and be
shielded by another streak of gray paint, or one short enough might
have been veiled entirely, but I never peeked in fascination at any
occupant of the infernal box whose face did not gaze recognizably
out in a silent and steely torment.

The camouflage, cruelly, worked perfectly when approached from the
path.  The result was that it was impossible to tell, until too
late, whether a living thing was trapped behind it.  It seemed for
a time that Uncle Fred had solved this problem.  Two days after his
arrival on a visit he asked in a low, strained voice, "Do you have
an old piece of bright flannel I could cut up?"  His manner
prohibited questioning.  I had been here too short a time to have
acquired scraps of cloth, but I brought out a ragged quilt, flaming
red in color.  His face brightened.  He went solemnly away and a
little later a two-foot-square red flag stood in the middle of the
path just outside the outhouse.  The technique was obvious and
simple.  When one went in, one placed the flag in the path.  When
one came out, one put the flag back inside the outhouse.  One went
in and put the flag in the path.  One returned to the house,
forgetting to put the flag back again.  The flag stood like a red
light against traffic, for hours and hours and hours.

These were only the day hazards.  Only a pillar of fire by night
would have seemed sufficient comfort and guidance, and this was
never provided except by the dubious assistance of lightning.
There were provided instead, none the less appalling because
harmless, spiders, lizards, toads and thin squeaking noises made by
bats.  Over all the dark hours hung the fear of snakes.  I had
arrived in Florida with the usual ignorant terror.  If time proved
that the sight of a snake was a rarity, there was no help then for
the conviction that the next footstep would fall on a coiled
rattler.  An imaginary snake is so much more fearful than a real
one, that I should rather handle a rattlesnake, as I have done
since, than dream of one.  I dreaded the sunset, thinking of the
dark box of the outhouse.  And once there, even on the blessed
nights of moonlight, the small ominous thuds against floor and wall
that by day were the attractive little green tree-toads, by night
were the advance of nameless reptiles.  I would not yield to the
temptation of installing in the house the old-fashioned
"conveniences," for that was an admission of defeat.  I would stick
it out and the first cash money should go into a bathroom.

The first cash money from the first orange crop, a good one,
disappeared into mortgage and note payments, fertilizer and a Ford,
for the seven-passenger Cadillac, a shabby behemoth from more
affluent northern days, had literally torn its heavy heart out on
the deep sand road to the Creek, and was sold for sixty dollars to
a Negro undertaker.  He must have towed it with the hearse, for it
was past repairing.  There was a year of low citrus prices and a
year of freeze.  Then my first Florida story, Jacob's Ladder,
brought in the fantastic sum of seven hundred dollars.

The instant that I saw this wealth begin to dissolve as usual, I
worked rapidly.  I would not do anything so reckless as ordering a
complete new bathroom outfit, but would shop around and pick up
something second-hand.  The boom was over, and in abandoned houses
in unsold "scrub divisions" bathroom fittings were gathering rust
and discoloration.  Inquiry aroused fresh boom hope in various
owners of the unwanted houses and a toilet without a seat
immediately became worth its weight in gold.

My good friend carpenter Moe was at work on the building of the
bathroom.  The farmhouse had been built casually in three separate
eras, and while the gap between the front and the back was now
filled in with a porch, there was nothing but space between the
main part of the house and the two large bedrooms with fireplaces
that made up a wing.  One stepped into the air from what, we
decided, was not a French door but an Irish door.  That vacuum was
providential for a bathroom.  It would link the two bedrooms to the
house as cozily as though an architect had planned it; a careless
architect, perhaps, for a difference in floor levels meant a step
down from the first bedroom that has proved no friend to the aged,
the absent-minded and the inebriated.  Moe was pounding away while
I lamented that I should have to go to Sears Roebuck after all.  He
laid down his hammer and sat back on his heels.

"Why, I know a feller's got a bathroom outfit," he said.  "Hain't
never been used.  Brand new, and he's got no more use fer it than a
dog.  Feller right over in Citra.  You come by for me this evenin'
and we'll go make you a trade.  Now I'm plumb proud I remembered
that feller's new bathroom outfit, jest settin' there."

Moe and I drove to Citra that night.  I had the fortunate feeling
that time has taught me to mistrust more than nightmares and bad
omens.  We stopped at a shabby house on a side street and the owner
of the bathroom set, presumably so irrelevant to his life, came to
the door.

"I told this lady you had a bathroom set you got no use for," Moe
said.  "Don't say I ain't a friend to you.  She'll take it off your
hands and pay cash money for it if the price is right."

A small gloomy man scowled at me and did not answer.

Moe persisted, "Ain't you got a set the Baptist preacher give you
afore he died?"

"Tain't a set.  It's just the toilet.  It's mine, all right, but I
ain't exactly got it."

"Ain't it handy, where you can git it?"

The little man came to angry life.

He shouted, "It's in the smokehouse to the Baptist parsonage and
I'll git it when I'm o' mind to!  They don't want I should take it
but they can't stop me.  I've had nothin' but meanness from the
Baptists all my life and I'll go off with that toilet when I'm
ready."

Moe said with deliberate aggravation, "Mebbe you cain't prove it's
yourn."

"I got no call to prove it.  Everybody knows how it come to be
mine.  The Baptists was too mean to put in runnin' water for
Preacher Wilson, so he give the toilet to me."

"Well, you got no more runnin' water than the Baptists.  You want
to sell it?"

The legatee pondered in the dusk.

"No," he said.  "No, I don't.  I tell you--I thought a heap o'
Preacher Wilson.  He give me that toilet--and it's all I got to
remember him by."

Moe comforted me on the way home.

"Like as not it's a no-account thing," he said.

The toilet had to be ordered new after all, but passing over the
catalogue lure of a green-pedestalled monument for washing one's
hands and face, and a Venetian-style recessed tub--for in spite of
the literary windfall, oranges were bringing twenty-five cents a
box--I found a second-hand lavatory and a very good tub with
crooked legs.  The formal opening of the bathroom was a gala social
event, with a tray of glasses across the lavatory, ice and soda in
the bathtub, and a bouquet of roses with Uncle Fred's card in a
prominent and appropriate position.

The royalties from my first book, South Moon Under, went mostly for
old debts, but the second, Golden Apples, brought temporary
prosperity again and I decided that nothing is more tangible for
one's money than plumbing.  New friends had found their way to the
Creek and were old friends now, and when there was a week-end
houseful, a second bathroom seemed the most hospitable gesture
possible.  I contracted again for Moe to add one beside my own
bedroom.  The oldest four of his boys were big enough by this time
to give a hand with the carpentering and the small new room was
filled with male Sykeses when we reached the point of measuring for
the height of the shower.  Moe was a realist.

"Git in the tub," he ordered me.  "Stand up straight.  We'll git
this right the sure way."

I stepped in the tub and stood up straight.

"Now whereabouts you want this here stream o' water to hit you?
'Bout there?"

Four pairs of bright Sykes eyes helped us gauge the proper play of
water on the bathing form, and I have never felt so undressed in my
life.  But the Sykeses rejoiced with me in the completed bathroom,
and although the linoleum buckled for nearly a year, we all felt
that we had achieved unparalleled elegance.  If I give an
impression of nouveau riche when I inform guests pointedly, "The
OTHER bathroom is beyond my room," I am not bragging, but only
grateful.  I go happily from one bathroom to the other, and when a
flying squirrel thumps on the roof at night, the sound is pleasing,
for I am safe inside, and I remember the old Scotch prayer:


     "From ghillies and ghosties,
     And long-legged beasties,
     And all things that go boomp in the night,
     Good Lord, deliver us."



7.  Antses in Tim's breakfast


I have used a factual background for most of my tales, and of
actual people a blend of the true and the imagined.  I myself
cannot quite tell where the one ends and the other begins.  But I
do remember first a place and then a woman, that stabbed me to the
core, so that I shall never get over the wound of them.

The place was near the village on the Creek road, and I thought
when I saw it that it was a place where children had been playing.
A space under a great spreading live oak had been lived in.  The
sand was trodden smooth and there were a decrepit iron stove and a
clothes line, on which a bit of tattered cloth still hung.  There
were boxes and a rough table, as though little girls had been
playing house.  Only opened tin cans and a rusty pot, I think, made
me inquire about it, for children were not likely to carry a game
so far.  I was told that a man and woman, very young, had lived
there for a part of one summer, coming from none knew where, and
going away again with sacks over their shoulders when the autumn
frosts came in.

What manner of man and women could this be, making a home under an
oak tree like some pair of woods animals?  Were they savage
outlaws?  People who might more profitably be in jail?  I had no
way of knowing.  The Florida back country was new and beautiful but
of the people I knew nothing.  The wild home at the edge of the
woods haunted me.  I made pictures to myself of the man and woman,
very young, who had come and gone.  Somehow I knew that they would
be not fierce, but gentle.  I took up my own life at the Creek.

The answer to my wonderings was on my own grove and for a long time
I did not know that it was there.  A tenant house stood a few
hundred yards from my farmhouse.  It was placed beautifully under a
vast magnolia tree and was all gray age and leaning walls.  It was
a tall two stories and had perhaps been the original home on the
grove.  It was windowless and seemed on the point of collapsing
within itself.  The occupants were Tim and his wife and their baby.
I saw only Tim, red-haired and on the defensive and uninterested in
his work.  His job with the previous owner of the grove had been
his first of the kind, he said.  His weekly wage was low but I did
not question it.  He had come with the place.  His passion was for
trapping and the hides of raccoons and skunks and opossums and an
occasional otter or wild-cat hung drying on the walls of his house.
He trapped along the lake edge back of the grove, and I would see
him coming in of an early morning with a dead creature or two in
his hands.  The well at the barn, in front of the tenant house, was
sulphurous and fit only for the stock, and Tim came to my pump by
my back door for water for his family uses.  I saw his wife only
from a distance and made no inquiries about her.

Callousness, I think, is often ignorance, rather than cruelty, and
it was so in my brief relation with Tim and his wife.  My excuse is
that at the time I myself had so much hard physical work to do and
was so confused with the new way of living that I did not
understand that life might be much more difficult for others.  The
woman came striding to my back door one day.  She had her baby
slung over one hip, like a bundle.  She walked with the tread of an
Indian, graceful and direct.  She was lean and small.  As she came
close I saw that she had tawny skin and soft honey-colored hair,
drawn back smoothly over her ears and knotted at her neck.  She
held a card in her hand and she thrust it at me.

"Please to read hit," she said.

I took the card, addressed to Tim, and turned it over.  It was only
an advertisement from a wholesale fur house, quoting current prices
on such pelts as Tim trapped for.  I must have seemed very stupid
to her, for I did not know what she wanted.  At last I understood
that she could not read, that the card had come in the morning's
rural mail while Tim was at work at the far side of the grove.
Mail, all reading matter, was cryptic and important and it was
necessary to know whether she should call Tim from his work because
of the card.  I read it aloud and she listened gravely.  She took
it from me and turned to walk away.

"I thank you," she said.

Her voice was like the note of a thrush, very soft and sweet.

I called after her, seeing her suddenly as a woman, "Tell me, how
are you getting on?"

She looked at me with direct gray eyes.

"Nothin' extry.  They ain't no screens to the house and the
skeeters like to eat us alive.  And I cain't keep the antses outen
Tim's breakfast."

Her statement was almost unintelligible.  I myself was troubled by
the mosquitoes, for they came up through holes in the kitchen floor
and had my legs swollen to twice their size.  But my bedrooms were
tight and comfortable, and when sleep is possible, one can stand
much in the daytime.  I had actually not noticed that the tenant
house was wide open to the intrusion not only of insects, but of
wind and weather.  The matter of ants in the breakfast was beyond
me.  It was only as I came to know the backwoods cooking customs
that I knew that enough food was cooked once or at the most twice a
day, to last for the three meals.  The people were up long before
daylight and the remnants of the previous evening's biscuits and
greens and fat bacon were set aside for the early breakfast, eaten
by lamplight.  Where a house was rotting to the ground, ants and
roaches inhabited the very wood of floors and walls and swarmed
over the family's edibles.  The situation of Tim's wife puzzled but
still did not concern me.  I did not yet understand that in this
way of life one is obliged to share, back and forth, and that as
long as I had money for screens and a new floor, I was morally
obligated to put out a portion of it to give some comfort to those
who worked for me.  I took others' discomfort for granted and the
only palliation of my social sin is that I took my own so, too.

I made another profound mistake in my short time with these two.
I asked Tim one day if his wife would do my washing for me.  He
looked at me, and looked away angrily and spat.

"A white woman don't ask another white woman to do her washin' for
her, nor to carry her slops," he said.  "'Course, in time o'
sickness or trouble or sich as that a woman does ary thing she can
for another and they's no talk o' pay."

There was a fierce pride here, then, and above all, services that
would be gladly given but could not be bought.  I began to
understand and then Tim announced that they were leaving.

I asked, "Are you going to another job?"

"No'm.  I ain't made for this kind o' work.  I don't do it to suit
and it don't suit me."

"Where will you go and what will you do?"

"Same as we done before.  I only takened this on account o' the
baby comin'.  A woman's got to have a roof over her then.  Us'll
git along better thouten no house, pertickler jest a piece of a
house like this un here.  In the woods, you kin make a smudge to
keep off the skeeters.  Us'll make out."

They moved on, the proud angry man and the small tawny lovely woman
and the baby.  But they put a mark on me.  The woman came to me in
my dreams and tormented me.  As I came to know her kind, in the
scrub, the hammock and the piney-woods, I knew that it was a woman
much like her who had made a home under the live oak.  The only way
I could shake free of her was to write of her, and she was Florry
in Jacob's Ladder.  She still clung to me and she was Allie in
Golden Apples.  Now I know that she will haunt me as long as I
live, and all the writing in the world will not put away the memory
of her face and the sound of her voice.



8.  The Widow Slater


The Widow Slater and I understood each other from the beginning.
She was a violent person and I was warned to beware of her
eccentric and unpredictable indignations.  I found that nothing
about her was unpredictable, for all her being was keyed to the one
idea, that whatever is, is good.  At the time when I was warned
against her, she had just made a local reputation by lifting a
shotgun in defiance against the starched white bosom of a county
nurse.  The occasion was simple and her violence was no
contradiction in her character.  The order had gone forth from
health authorities that all school children were to be inoculated
against smallpox or typhoid or something or other.  The Widow
Slater had refused to have done anything so unnatural and savoring
of witchcraft as injecting the blood of a horse in the veins of her
offspring.

Her feeling was, simply, that God knows best.  What she meant by
"God" I do not know, and no two people mean the same thing in their
invocation of the mystic Word.  My own idea is that those of us who
are least positive are closest to the truth.  We know only that as
human beings we are very stupid and that somewhere beyond us are
forces unintelligibly wiser or cleverer or more fixed than we.  The
forces may concern themselves with us or they may not, but it seems
to me, and seemed to the Widow Slater, that people live or die,
thrive or pine, quite beyond human reason.  In the matter of the
inoculation and in several kindred matters I believe that the
belligerent mother was wrong.  I am only applauding her philosophy.

Her firm conviction that God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders
to perform, applied to the delights of life as well as to its
burdens and its sorrows.  In this, she differed from most
"professing" Christians, who see God in everything difficult and
unpleasant, but seldom in the natural joys.  I have never known a
person who had less over which to rejoice, who found more in daily
living to rejoice her.  She was herself almost constantly ill,
local doctors being certain that she had a tumor that required
removal.  This she rejected, saying, "I come into the world in one
piece and I aim to go out the same way.  I'll not have a part of me
buried here and the rest yon."  Yet for all the reverence for the
short, stout, untidy body which had been given her, she never
spared it.  People with a philosophy are usually inconsistent.

She had been a widow for some years and her family was large for
one of no means at all.  There was a daughter, distant in Alabama.
There was Snow, a grave, brown-eyed youth, sullen when I first knew
him under the family difficulties.  There was Henry, a cripple,
with the same indomitable spirit as his mother, who took a course
in watch repairing and set up in a hole in the wall in Gainesville
and became a personage.  There were Alvah and Little Irene.  And
there was the youngest, Rodney, whose club feet and twisted legs
and tortured back made Henry seem an athlete in comparison.
Somewhere in the family blood was a strain that should not,
eugenically, have been perpetuated.  Yet all of the Widow Slater's
brood, the "chappies" as she called them, Carolina fashion, had a
luminous quality that somehow set them beyond the well and fit and
made of them more desirable citizens and friends and neighbors than
many a well-cared-for aristocrat.

She was an artist in optimism.  Her rented house leaked so badly
that beds must be moved and all available pots and pans set under
the worst holes whenever the rain fell.

She only said, "You know there's plenty of places in the roof I
could get through, and a heap more Irene could," and chuckled at
her own description.

In her place I should either have kicked down the walls of the
house, or lain down and given up, putting the full responsibility
for my care on that Providence that she was so sure watched over
the sparrow's fall.

She asked me for work, in an early year at the Creek when I had
little to spend for help of any sort.  All I could offer was the
washing.  It was too heavy even for me, though I did it when
necessary, and I told her so and did not see how she might manage
it.  But she insisted and took the unreasonable labor as a favor.
She asked to do it of a Saturday morning, when Alvah and Little
Irene were home from school to help, and begged of me only that I
not hurry her at it.  The washing was a long and incredibly sloppy
procedure.  The Widow Slater dressed always in a Victorian white
shirtwaist and a long full-flowing black skirt.  She trailed her
long black skirts through the puddles of soapsuds splashed around
her and carried great dripping armfuls of half-wrung sheets to the
clothes line, and was concerned, not with the hardships, but with
the weather and the phlox.  The weather almost always suited her,
for if it was fine the clothes would dry well and if it rained,
why, nothing was better for bleaching them.  The phlox bothered her
for the reason that they grew wild in the yard around the wash-
bench and she was afraid of stepping on them.

"They look up at you with little faces," she said, "and it seems
treacherous to stomp them."

She reported happily one day that Snow was doing better at his
fishing.

"Folkses has woke up a catfish market," she said.

The closest to complaint I ever heard her come was when she would
say, as though it were a great joke, "I feel as if I'd been drug
between two twisted Fridays."

She made high-spirited play even of our fence-repairing.  The
fences around Old Boss' orange grove and mine were old and rotten.
Her cow Betsy and my Laura, pastured jointly in my sixteen-acre
field, were wise in forbidden ways.  They went through the old
fence as if it were not there, until we learned to fool them.  We
did this by dragging boughs and brush to the weakest places and
propping them up with a plausible look of impenetrability.  We had
done this through a steaming hot summer afternoon, through the
poison ivy, until we had exhausted our supply of camouflage.  We
stood scratched and perspiring and very dubious.

"Well," she said, "I reckon it may look solid to a cow, but it's a
mighty hypocritical kind of a fence."

The word "hypocrite" may have been a favorite in the family.
Little Irene came out with it one day.  She brought us a katydid to
show, cupped carefully in her small grubby hands.

"I caught me a hypocrite," she said.

The widow chuckled.

"That's a jizzywitch, honey," she corrected her.

Irene stamped her bare foot.

"'Tis not.  It's a hypocrite.  I know, because all hypocrites is
long-legged."

The Widow Slater, as I look back on it, did much more for me than I
did for her.  She trudged from our joint pasture night and morning
with my bucket of milk.  She gave me settings of eggs.

"Now if your hen," she said, "proves up anyways false to you, I
have one setting I'll lend to you."

Most helpful of all, after we were well acquainted, she loaned me
Alvah afternoons after school to wash dishes.  Alvah saved part of
her small pay to buy me a Christmas present.  The present was a set
of glass wind chimes, and until the day when a strong wind blew
them to the floor in splinters, the high thin tinkling sounded to
me like the laughter of the child herself.  There was something fey
about most of the family.  Rodney, the cripple, foretold the
weather with a strange accuracy.  He had always some small pet, a
squirrel or chameleon or perhaps a chicken hurt and crippled like
himself.  I think that "Fodder-wing" in The Yearling must have been
Rodney.

The widow's confidence in me faltered only once.  Several eminently
respectable souls in the town of Ocala had offered me their
friendship, among them the venerable white-haired mayor.  It was
time to return their hospitality and I invited them for supper.  I
asked Alvah to come and help me with the serving.  She agreed with
enthusiasm.  The next day she did not meet my eyes.  She said in a
low voice that Mama would have to think about the question of her
helping with the party.  I assured her that the work would be light
and I would take her home myself.  The day of the supper the Widow
Slater came unhappily, twisting her apron.

"You been migh