Essays of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  Her ride ended as casually as it had begun. The older woman stopped the horse, and the girl slid to the ground. As she walked toward us to leave, there was a quick, small burst of applause. She smiled broadly, in surprise and pleasure; then her face suddenly regained its gravity and she disappeared through the door.

  It has been ambitious and plucky of me to attempt to describe what is indescribable, and I have failed, as I knew I would. But I have discharged my duty to my society; and besides, a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him. At any rate, it is worth reporting that long before the circus comes to town, its most notable performances have already been given. Under the bright lights of the finished show, a performer need only reflect the electric candle power that is directed upon him; but in the dark and dirty old training rings and in the makeshift cages, whatever light is generated, whatever excitement, whatever beauty, must come from original sources—from internal fires of professional hunger and delight, from the exuberance and gravity of youth. It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars.

  The South is the land of the sustained sibilant. Everywhere, for the appreciative visitor, the letter “s” insinuates itself in the scene: in the sound of sea and sand, in the singing shell, in the heat of sun and sky, in the sultriness of the gentle hours, in the siesta, in the stir of birds and insects. In contrast to the softness of its music, the South is also cruel and hard and prickly. A little striped lizard, flattened along the sharp green bayonet of a yucca, wears in its tiny face and watchful eye the pure look of death and violence. And all over the place, hidden at the bottom of their small sandy craters, the ant lions lie in wait for the ant that will stumble into their trap. (There are three kinds of lions in this region: the lions of the circus, the ant lions, and the Lions of the Tampa Lions Club, who roared their approval of segregation at a meeting the other day—all except one, a Lion named Monty Gurwit, who declined to roar and thereby got his picture in the paper.)

  The day starts on a note of despair: the sorrowing dove, alone on its telephone wire, mourns the loss of night, weeps at the bright perils of the unfolding day. But soon the mockingbird wakes and begins an early rehearsal, setting the dove down by force of character, running through a few slick imitations, and trying a couple of original numbers into the bargain. The redbird takes it from there. Despair gives way to good humor. The Southern dawn is a pale affair, usually, quite different from our northern daybreak. It is a triumph of gradualism; night turns to day imperceptibly, softly, with no theatrics. It is subtle and undis-turbing. As the first light seeps in through the blinds I lie in bed half awake, despairing with the dove, sounding the A for the brothers Alsop. All seems lost, all seems sorrowful. Then a mullet jumps in the bayou outside the bedroom window. It falls back into the water with a smart smack. I have asked several people why the mullet incessantly jump and I have received a variety of answers. Some say the mullet jump to shake off a parasite that annoys them. Some say they jump for the love of jumping—as the girl on the horse seemed to ride for the love of riding (although she, too, like all artists, may have been shaking off some parasite that fastens itself to the creative spirit and can be got rid of only by fifty turns around a ring while standing on a horse).

  In Florida at this time of year, the sun does not take command of the day until a couple of hours after it has appeared in the east. It seems to carry no authority at first. The sun and the lizard keep the same schedule; they bide their time until the morning has advanced a good long way before they come fully forth and strike. The cold lizard waits astride his warming leaf for the perfect moment; the cold sun waits in his nest of clouds for the crucial time.

  On many days, the dampness of the air pervades all life, all living. Matches refuse to strike. The towel, hung to dry, grows wetter by the hour. The newspaper, with its headlines about integration, wilts in your hand and falls limply into the coffee and the egg. Envelopes seal themselves. Postage stamps mate with one another as shamelessly as grasshoppers. But most of the time the days are models of beauty and wonder and comfort, with the kind sea stroking the back of the warm sand. At evening there are great flights of birds over the sea, where the light lingers; the gulls, the pelicans, the terns, the herons stay aloft for half an hour after land birds have gone to roost. They hold their ancient formations, wheel and fish over the Pass, enjoying the last of day like children playing outdoors after suppertime.

  To a beachcomber from the North, which is my present status, the race problem has no pertinence, no immediacy. Here in Florida I am a guest in two houses—the house of the sun, the house of the State of Florida. As a guest, I mind my manners and do not criticize the customs of my hosts. It gives me a queer feeling, though, to be at the center of the greatest social crisis of my time and see hardly a sign of it. Yet the very absence of signs seems to increase one’s awareness. Colored people do not come to the public beach to bathe, because they would not be made welcome there; and they don’t fritter away their time visiting the circus, because they have other things to do. A few of them turn up at the ballpark, where they occupy a separate but equal section of the left-field bleachers and watch Negro players on the visiting Braves team using the same bases as the white players, instead of separate (but equal) bases. I have had only two small encounters with “color.” A colored woman named Viola, who had been a friend of my wife’s sister years ago, showed up one day with some laundry of ours that she had consented to do for us, and with the bundle she brought a bunch of nasturtiums, as a sort of natural accompaniment to the delivery of clean clothes. The flowers seemed a very acceptable thing and I was touched by them. We asked Viola about her daughter, and she said she was at Kentucky State College, studying voice.

  The other encounter was when I was explaining to our cook, who is from Finland, the mysteries of bus travel in the American Southland. I showed her the bus stop, armed her with a timetable, and then, as a matter of duty, mentioned the customs of the Romans. “When you get on the bus,” I said, “I think you’d better sit in one of the front seats—the seats in back are for colored people.” A look of great weariness came into her face, as it does when we use too many dishes, and she replied, “Oh, I know—isn’t it silly!”

  Her remark, coming as it did all the way from Finland and landing on this sandbar with a plunk, impressed me. The Supreme Court said nothing about silliness, but I suspect it may play more of a role than one might suppose. People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust. I note that one of the arguments in the recent manifesto of Southern Coungressmen in support of the doctrine of “separate but equal” was that it had been founded on “common sense.” The sense that is common to one generation is uncommon to the next. Probably the first slave ship, with Negroes lying in chains on its decks, seemed commonsensical to the owners who operated it and to the planters who patronized it. But such a vessel would not be in the realm of common sense today. The only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change—and we all instinctively avoid it, and object to the passage of time, and would rather have none of it.

  The Supreme Court decision is like the Southern sun, laggard in its early stages, biding its time. It has been the law in Florida for two years now, and the years have been like the hours of the morning before the sun has gathered its strength. I think the decision is as incontrovertible and warming as the sun, and, like the sun, will eventually take charge.

  But there is certainly a great temptation in Florida to duck the passage of time. Lying in warm comfort by the sea, you receive gratefully the gift of the sun, the gift of the South. This is true seduction. The day is a circle—morning, afternoon, and night. After a few days I was clearly enjoying the same delusion as the girl on the horse—that I could ride clear around the ring of day, guarded by wind and sun and sea and sand, and be not a moment older.

  P.S. (April 1962). When I first laid eyes on Fiddler Bayou, it was wild la
nd, populated chiefly by the little crabs that gave it its name, visited by wading birds and by an occasional fisherman. Today, houses ring the bayou, and part of the mangrove shore has been bulkheaded with a concrete wall. Green lawns stretch from patio to water’s edge, and sprinklers make rainbows in the light. But despite man’s encroachment, Nature manages to hold her own and assert her authority: high tides and high winds in the gulf sometimes send the sea crashing across the sand barrier, depositing its wrack on lawns and ringing everyone’s front door bell. The birds and the crabs accommodate themselves quite readily to the changes that have taken place; every day brings herons to hunt around among the roots of the mangroves, and I have discovered that I can approach to within about eight feet of the Little Blue Heron simply by entering the water and swimming slowly toward him. Apparently he has decided that when I’m in the water, I am without guile—possibly even desirable, like a fish.

  The Ringling circus has quit Sarasota and gone elsewhere for its hibernation. A few circus families still own homes in the town, and every spring the students at the high school put on a circus, to let off steam, work off physical requirements, and provide a promotional spectacle for Sarasota. At the drugstore you can buy a postcard showing the bed John Ringling slept in. Time has not stood still for anybody but the dead, and even the dead must be able to hear the acceleration of little sports cars and know that things have changed.

  From the all-wise New York Times, which has the animal kingdom ever in mind, I have learned that one of the creatures most acutely aware of the passing of time is the fiddler crab himself. Tiny spots on his body enlarge during daytime hours, giving him the same color as the mudbank he explores and thus protecting him from his enemies. At night the spots shrink, his color fades, and he is almost invisible in the light of the moon. These changes are synchronized with the tides, so that each day they occur at a different hour. A scientist who experimented with the crabs to learn more about the phenomenon discovered that even when they are removed from their natural environment and held in confinement, the rhythm of their bodily change continues uninterrupted, and they mark the passage of time in their laboratory prison, faithful to the tides in their fashion.

  What Do Our Hearts Treasure?

  BAYOU LOUISE, JANUARY 1966

  Up until a couple of years ago, the Christmases I have known have been in lands of the fir tree and pine. The same is true of my wife, who is a New Englander and whose Christmases have been observed in a cold setting, Bostonian in design. But times change, circumstances alter, health glides slowly downhill, and there is, of course, Christmas in lands of the palm tree and vine—which is what we were up against last month. Our Christmas, 1965, was spent in a rented house on the edge of a canal in Florida, locally called a bayou.

  I knew there would have to be certain adjustments, emotional and physical, to this shift in ceremony, but I guess I was not quite prepared for them and had not really figured them out. It was obvious to both of us that we were not looking forward to being away from home at Christmas, but I busied myself with road maps and thermos arrangements and kept my mind off the Nativity. We arrived in Florida tired from the long motor journey but essentially cheerful and ready for anything.

  The house we walked into had been engaged sight unseen, and this is always fun and full of jolts, like a ride at an amusement park. Our pleasure palace was built of cinder blocks and was painted shocking pink. The principal tree on the place was a tall power pole sprouting transformers; it stood a few feet from the canal and threw a pleasant shade across the drive. The house itself, we soon discovered, was wonderfully supplied with modern labor-saving appliances and almost completely bare of any other sort of furnishing. We found an automatic washing machine, a dryer, an automatic dishwasher, a reverse-cycle heating-and-air-conditioning unit that had just burned out its compressor and was lying in disarray behind a board fence outside, a disposal device that would grind up a grapefruit rind if you cut the rind into slices, a big refrigerator, an electric wall oven, an electric stove, an electric warming oven, and so on. All this was pretty good except that there was no ice bucket, no water pitcher, no rugs on the terrazzo floors, no pictures on the pastel walls, no bookshelves, no books, and no garbage pail. There were bathrooms everywhere you turned, but I saw no sign that anybody had ever done anything in the house except take baths and adjust the controls on the machinery.

  When we were rested from our trip, we started buying things for the house, mostly from a large department store in town. This store fell into the habit of delivering most of our purchases not to us but to a house next door, whose owners were away. We got on the phone and stayed there for most of the daylight hours.

  Several days before Christmas, I began to notice that my wife was suffering from crying spells, all of them of short duration. I would find her weeping quietly in what seemed like elegant, if uncomfortable, surroundings. “It’s Vietnam that is making me feel this way,” she said. But I did not believe it was Vietnam. I knew her well enough, in her December phase, to know that something far deeper than Southeast Asia was at work.

  I was too busy to cry. There was a man that came each day to work on the collapsed heating system. He was from a firm called “Air Comfort” and was a fine, brave, taciturn man. I would find him in a kneeling position, as though he were a figure in a crèche, gazing at the tangle of tubes and wires left by the removal of the burned-out compressor. He, too, seemed melancholy, but did not weep. He kept his own counsel and did what he could, hour after hour, to remedy an almost impossible situation. I felt that if I hung around him long enough, I might catch the drift of the reverse-cycle system and pick up a crumb or two of knowledge that would stand me in good stead later on. On the west side of the building I found a pile of fatwood logs, and when the living room became chilly I would light a fire. The logs left no ash; it was as though you were burning clear kerosene. The weather held good, and we were not really cold. The sunsets were spectacular. But the sun always sank behind the Australian pines and the palms on the opposite shore across the Pass, and I knew that my wife and I were, unconsciously, watching it descend in its more familiar rim behind the birches, the black spruces, the firs, the hackmatacks across the road from our house in Maine. Like everything else in Florida, the birds seemed inappropriate. I happen to admire the mourning dove, but by no stretch of the eardrum can its lament be called Christmassy. I like to see the turkey buzzard wheeling in the sky, but he is not a merry bird, like the chickadee; his vigil is for the dying. There arrived in the mail a program of the Christmas ceremony in the school at home, reporting that our youngest grandson had appeared in a pageant called “Goodbye to Last Year’s Toys,” and that our granddaughter had recited something called “What Do Our Hearts Treasure?”

  There was very little traffic in the canal. Once in a while a pint whiskey bottle would float slowly by on the outgoing tide. A small powerboat named Digitalis made an occasional sortie, and two boys in a homemade bateau paddled through. Sometimes, toward the end of the day, a little green heron showed up and fished from a mangrove that overhung the water. The scene was idyllic. Christmas was in the air, yet the air seemed too soft to sustain it. In the vast shopping centers that ringed the city, Santa, in jumbo size, dominated the parking lots. In the commanding noonday sun, with the temperature in the seventies, he seemed vastly overdressed in his red suit with the ermine trimming—a saint who perspired under the arms. Through the arcades in front of the shops sauntered an endless procession of senior citizens, with their sad faces, their painful joints, their last-minute errands.

  I went on an errand of my own. I visited a nursery and bought a poinsettia plant, hoping to introduce a spot of the correct color into our house. In the North, this errand would have enjoyed a certain stature, but in Florida the thing seemed faintly ridiculous. Driving away from the nursery with my prize, I passed a great forest of poinsettias blooming naturally in somebody’s front yard. It seemed to take the point out of my purchase. A lot of things are red
in Florida—the powder-puff bush, the red hibiscus, the red bougainvillaea, the cannas—all these blooms make a monkey out of a husband carrying home a small red potted plant.

  We talked over the matter of the tree and decided that the traditional Christmas tree would be silly under these circumstances. We would get, we said, a tropical thing of some sort, that would look good all winter in a corner of our stylish living room, next to the glass wall through which we watched the tropical sunsets. The nursery came up with something very fine indeed—a cluster of three little palmlike trees called Dracaena marginata (the man called it imaginata, which I liked better). The pot was handsome, and the trees looked like a miniature version of the classic oasis scene in the desert. When the plant was delivered, a small chameleon arrived with it and soon made the living room his own. He liked the curtain on the south wall, and would poke his evil little head out and join us for cocktails. I named him Beppo. Everyone admired our plant. The crying spells ceased, but it was plain that there was still something the matter; it wasn’t Vietnam, it wasn’t the reverse-cycle system, it was some kind of unreality that pervaded our lives.