The Web and the Root

by Thomas Wolfe

  Each day at three o’clock he knew that they would come and call him “Paul.” each day at three o’clock he waited for them, with warmth, with joy, with longing and affection, with a strange sense of ecstasy and magic, with fear they might not come. But each day at three o’clock, hard on the market’s opening and the booming of the courthouse bell, the black boys came and flashed before him.

  He knew that they would come. He knew they could not fail him. He knew that he delighted them, that they adored the look of him—the long-armed, big-handed, and flat-footed look of him. He knew that all his words and movements—his leaps and springs, his argument and stern insistence on his proper name—gave them an innocent and enormous pleasure. He knew, in short, that there was nothing but warm liking in their banter when they called him “Paul.”

  Each day, therefore, he waited on their coming—and they always came! They could not have failed him, they would have come if all hell had divided them. A little before three o’clock, each day of the week except Sundays, the black boys roused themselves from their siesta in the warm sun round the walls of the City Market, saying:

  “It’s time to go and see ole Paul!”

  They roused themselves out of the pleasant reek of cod-heads rotting in the sun, decaying cabbage leaves and rotten oranges; they roused themselves from drowsy places in the sun, delicious apathy, from the depth and dark of all their African somnolence—and said:

  “We got to go now! Ole Paul is waitin’ for us! Stay with us, footses; we is on ouah way!”

  And what a way it was! Oh, what a splendid, soaring, flashing, winglike way! They came like streaks of ebon lightning; they came like ravens with a swallow-swoop; they came like shot out of a gun, and like a thunderbolt; they came like demons—but they came!

  He heard them coming from afar, he heard them racing down the street, he heard the furious thrum of all their flashing wheels, and then they flashed before him, they were there! They shot past, eight abreast, bent over, pedaling like black demons; they shot past on their flashing wheels, the fibrous market baskets rattling lightly; and as they flashed before him, they cried “Paul!”

  Then, wheeling solemnly in squadrons, they rode slowly, gravely back, and wheeled and faced him, steady and moveless on their wheels, and said, “Hi, Paul!…How’s ole Paul today!”

  Then the parade began. They did amazing things, performed astounding evolutions on their wheels; they flashed by in fours, and then by twos; they did squads-right, retreated or advanced in echelon, swooped past in single file like soaring birds, rode like demons soaring in the wind.

  Then madness seized them, and desire for individual excellence, a lust for championship, wild inventiveness, whimsical caprice. They shouted with rich nigger laughter, howled derisory comments at their fellows, strove to outdo one another—to win applause and approbation—all for Paul! They swooped down the street with lightlike swiftness and a bullet speed; they swooped down in terrific spirals, snaking from one side to the other, missing curbs by hair-line fractions of an inch; they shot past, stooping like a cowboy from the saddle, and snatching up their ragged caps as they shot past. They shouted out to one another things like these:

  “Outa my way, ole Liver Lips! I got somethin’ dat I got to show to Paul!”

  “Hey, Paul—look at ole Slewfoot ride dat wheel!”

  “Move ovah deh, M’lasses! Let ole Paul look at someone who can ride!”

  “Get outa my way, Big Niggah, ’fo’ I rides all ovah you! I’m goin’ to show Paul somethin’ dat he nevah saw befo’!—How’s dis one, Paul?”

  And so they soared and swooped and flashed, their rich black voices calling back to him, their warm good voices bubbling with black laughter, crying, “Paul!”

  And then they were off like furies riding for town and the reopening of the markets, and their rich, warm voices howled back to him with affectionate farewell:

  “Good-bye, Paul!”

  “So long, Paul.”

  “We’ll be seein’ you, Paul!”

  “My name,” he shouted after them, “is George Josiah Webber!”

  Flashed and rose the splendid name as proud and shining as the day.

  And answered faintly, warm with pleasant mockery, upon the wind:

  “Yo’ name is Paul! Paul! Paul!”

  And coming faintly, sadly, haunting as a dream:

  “—is Paul! Paul! Paul!”

  CHAPTER 3

  Two Worlds Discrete

  When Aunt Maw spoke, at times the air would be filled with unseen voices, and the boy knew that he was listening to the voices of hundreds of people he had never seen, and knew instantly what those people were like and what their lives had been. Only a word, a phrase, an intonation of that fathomless Joyner voice falling quietly at night with an immense and tranquil loneliness before a dying fire, and the unknown dead were moving all around him, and it seemed to him that now he was about to track the stranger in him down to his last dark dwelling in his blood, explore him to his final secrecy, and make all the thousand strange, unknown lives in him awake and come to life again.

  And yet Aunt Maw’s life, her time, her world, the fathomless intonations of that Joyner voice, spoken quietly, interminably at night, in the room where the coal-fire flared and crumbled, and where slow time was feeding like a vulture at the boy’s heart, could overwhelm his spirit in tides of drowning horror. Just as his father’s life spoke to him of all things wild and new, of exultant prophecies of escape and victory, of triumph, flight, new lands, the golden cities—of all that was magic, strange, and glorious on earth—so did the life of his mother’s people return him instantly to some dark, unfathomed place in nature, to all that was tainted by the slow-smouldering fires of madness in his blood, some ineradicable poison of the blood and soul, brown, thick, and brooding, never to be cured or driven out of him, in which at length he must drown darkly, horribly, unassuaged, unsavable, and mad.

  Aunt Maw’s world came from some lonely sea-depth, some huge abyss and maw of drowning time, which consumed all things it fed upon except itself—consumed them with horror, death, the sense of drowning in a sea of blind, dateless Joyner time. Aunt Maw fed on sorrow with a kind of tranquil joy. In that huge chronicle of the past which her terrific memory wove forever, there were all the lights and weathers of the soul—sunlight, Summer, singing—but there was always sorrow, death and sorrow, the lost, lonely lives of men there in the wilderness. And yet she was not sorrowful herself. She fed on all the loneliness and death of the huge, dark past with a kind of ruminant and invincible relish, which said that all men must die save only these triumphant censors of man’s destiny, these never-dying, all-consuming Joyner witnesses of sorrow, who lived, and lived forever.

  This fatal quality of that weblike memory drowned the boy’s soul in desolation. And in that web was everything on earth—except wild joy.

  HER LIFE WENT back into the wilderness of Zebulon County before the Civil War.

  “Remember!” Aunt Maw would say in a half-amused and half-impatient voice, as she raised the needle to the light and threaded it. “Why, you fool boy, you!” she would exclaim in scornful tones, “What are you thinkin’ of! Of course I can remember! Wasn’t I right there, out in Zebulon with all the rest of them, the day they came back from the war?…Yes, sir, I saw it all.” She paused, reflecting. “So here they came,” she continued tranquilly, “along about ten o’clock in the morning—you could hear them, you know, long before they got there—around that bend in the road—you could hear the people cheerin’ all along the road—and, of course, I began to shout and holler along with all the rest of them,” she said, “I wasn’t goin’ to be left out, you know,” she went on with tranquil humor, “—and there we were, you know, all lined up at the fence there—father and mother and your great-uncle Sam. Of course, you never got to know him, boy, but he was there, for he’d come home sick on leave at Christmas time. He was still limpin’ around from that wound he got—and of course it was all over or everyone kn
ew it would be before he got well enough to go on back again. Hm,” she laughed shortly, knowingly, as she squinted at her needle, “At least that’s what he said——”

  “What, Aunt Maw?”

  “Why, that he was waitin’ for his wound to heal, but, pshaw!”—she spoke quietly, shaking her head—“Sam was lazy—oh, the laziest feller I ever saw in all my life!” she cried. “Now if the truth were told, that was all that was wrong with him—and let me tell you something; it didn’t take long for him to get well when he saw the war was comin’ to an end and he wouldn’t have to go on back and join the rest of them. He was limpin’ around there one day leanin’ on a cane as if every step would be his last, and the next day he was walkin’ around as if he didn’t have an ache or a pain in the world….

  “That’s the quickest recovery I ever heard of, Sam,’ father said to him. ‘Now if you’ve got some more medicine out of that same bottle, I just wish you’d let me have a little of it.’—Well, then, so Sam was there.” She went on in a moment, “And of course Bill Joyner was there—old Bill Joyner, your great-grandfather, boy—as hale and hearty an old man as you’ll ever see!” she cried.

  “Bill Joyner…why he must have been all of eighty-five right then, but you’d never have known it to look at him! Do anything! Go anywhere! Ready for anything!” she declared. “And he was that way, sir, right up to the hour of his death—lived over here in Libya Hill then, mind you, fifty miles away, but if he took a notion that he’d like to talk to one of his children, why he’d stand right out and come, without waitin’ to get his hat or anything. Why yes! didn’t he turn up one day just as we were all settin’ down to dinner, without a hat or coat or anything!” she cried. “Why, what on earth!’ said mother. ‘Where did you come from, Uncle Bill?’—she called him Uncle Bill, you know. ‘Oh, I came from Libya Hill,’ says he. ‘Yes, but how did you get here?’ she says—asks him, you know. ‘Oh, I walked it,’ he says. ‘Why, you know you didn’t!’ mother says, ‘And where’s your hat and coat?’ she says. ‘Oh, I reckon I came without ’em,’ he said, ‘I was out workin’ in my garden and I just took a notion that I’d come to see you all, so I didn’t stop to get my hat or coat,’ he said, ‘I just came on!’ And that’s just exactly what he’d done, sir,” she said with a deliberate emphasis. “He just took the notion that he’d like to see us all, and he lit right out, without stoppin’ to say hello or howdy-do to anybody!”

  She paused for a moment, reflecting. Then, nodding her head slightly, in confirmation, she concluded:

  “But that was Bill Joyner for you! That’s just the kind of feller that he was.”

  “So he was there that day?” said George.

  “Yes, sir. He was right there standin’ next to father. Father was a Major, you know,” she said, with a strong note of pride in her voice, “but he was home on leave at the time the war ended. Why yes! he came home every now and then all through the war. Bein’ a Major, I guess he could get off more than the common soldiers,” she said proudly. “So he was there, with old Bill Joyner standin’ right beside him. Bill, of course—he’d come because he wanted to see Rance, and he knew he’d be comin’ back with all the rest of them. Of course, child,” she said, shaking her head slightly, “none of us had seen your great-uncle Rance since the beginning of the war. He had enlisted at the very start, you know, when war was declared, and he’d been away the whole four years. And oh! they told it, you know, they told it!” she half-muttered, shaking her head slightly with a boding kind of deprecation, “what he’d been through—the things he’d had to do—whew-w!” she said suddenly with an expostulation of disgust—“Why, the time they took him prisoner, you know, and he escaped, and had to do his travelin’ by night, sleepin’ in barns or hidin’ away somewheres in the woods all day, I reckon—and that was the time—whew-w!—‘Go away,’ I said, ‘it makes me shudder when I think of it!’—why that he found that old dead mule they’d left there in the road—and cut him off a steak and eaten it—‘And the best meat,’ says, ‘I ever tasted!’—Now that will give you some idea of how hungry he must have been!

  “Well, of course, we’d heard these stories, and none of us had seen him since he went away, so we were all curious to know. Well, here they came, you know, marchin’ along on that old river road, and you could hear all the people cheerin’, and the men a-shoutin’ and the women folks a-cryin’, and here comes Bob Patten. Well then, of course we all began to ask him about Rance, said, ‘Where is he? Is he here?’

  “Oh, yes, he’s here, all right,’ said Bob, ‘He’ll be along in a minute now. You’ll see him—and if you don’t see him’”—suddenly she began to laugh—“if you don’t see him,’ says Bob, ‘why, by God, you’ll smell him!’ That’s just the way he put it, you know, came right out with it, and of course, they had to laugh…. But, child, child!” with strong distaste she shook her head slightly—“That awful—oh! that awful, awful, odor! Poor feller! I don’t reckon he could help it! But he always had it…. Now he was clean enough!” she cried out with a strong emphasis, “Rance always kept himself as clean as anyone you ever saw. And a good, clean-livin’ man, as well,” she said.

  “Never touched a drop of licker in all his life,” she said decisively, “No, sir—neither him nor father.—Oh father! father!” she cried proudly, “Why father wouldn’t let anyone come near him with the smell of licker on his breath! And let me tell you something!” she said solemnly, “If he had known that papa drank, he’d never have let your mother marry him!—Oh! he wouldn’t have let him enter his house, you know—he would have considered it a disgrace for any member of his family to associate with anyone who drank!” she proudly said. “And Rance was the same—he couldn’t endure the sight or taste of it—but oh!” she gasped, “that awful, awful odor—that old, rank body-smell that nothing could take out!—awful, awful,” she whispered. Then for a moment she stitched silently. “And of course,” she said, “that’s what they say about him—that’s what they called him——”

  “What, Aunt Maw?”

  “Why,” she said—and here she paused again, shaking her head in a movement of strong deprecation, “to think of it!—to think, they’d have no more decency or reverence than to give a man a name like that! But, then, you know what soldiers are—I reckon they’re a pretty rough, coarse-talkin’ lot, and of course they told it on him—that was the name they gave him, the one they called him by.”

  “What?”

  She looked at him quietly for a moment with a serious face, then laughed.

  “Stinkin’ Jesus,” she said shyly. “Whew-w!” she gently shrieked. “‘Oh, you know they wouldn’t say a thing like that!’ I cried—but that was it, all right. To think of it!…And of course, poor fellow, he knew it, he recognized it, says, ‘I’d do anything in the world if I could only get rid of it,’ says, ‘I reckon it’s a cross the Lord has given me to bear.’…But there it was—that—old—rank—thing!—Oh, awful, awful!” she whispered, peering downward at the needle. “And say! yes! Didn’t he tell us all that day when he came back that the Day of Judgment was already here upon us?—Oh! said Appomattox Courthouse marked the comin’ of the Lord and Armageddon—and for us all to get ready for great changes! And, yes! don’t I remember that old linen chart—or map, I reckon you might call it—that he kept strung around his neck, all rolled up in a ball, and hangin’ from a string? It proved, you know, by all the facts and figures in the Bible that the world was due to end in 1865…. And there he was, you know, marchin’ along the road with all the rest of them, with that old thing a-hangin’ round his neck, the day they all came back from the war.”

  She stitched quietly with deft, strong fingers for a moment, and then, shaking her head, said sadly:

  “Poor Rance! But I tell you what! He was certainly a good man,” she said.

  RANCE JOYNER HAD been the youngest of all old Bill Joyner’s children. Rance was a good twelve years the junior of Lafayette, George Webber’s grandfather. Between them had been born two ot
her brothers—John, killed at the battle of Shiloh, and Sam. The record of Rance Joyner’s boyhood, as it had survived by tongue, by hearsay, which was the only record these men had, was bare enough in its anatomy, but probably fully accurate.

  “Well, now I tell you how it was,” Aunt Maw said. “The rest of them used to tease him and make fun of him. Of course, he was a simple-minded sort of feller, and I reckon he’d believe anything they told him. Why, yes! Didn’t father tell me how they told him Martha Alexander was in love with him, and got him to believin’ it, and all!—And here Martha, you know, was the belle of the neighborhood, and could pick and choose from anyone she liked! But didn’t they write him all sorts of fool love letters then, pretendin’ to come from Martha, and tellin’ him to meet her at all sorts of places—up on the Indian Mound, and down in the holler, or at some old stump, or tree, or crossroads—oh! anywheres!” she cried, “just to see if he’d be fool enough to go! And then, when she didn’t turn up, wouldn’t they write him another letter, sayin’ her father was suspicious and watchin’ her like a hawk! And didn’t they tell him then that Martha had said she’d like him better if he grew a beard! And then they told him, you know, they had a special preparation all fixed up that would make his beard grow faster if he washed his face in it, and then didn’t they persuade him to wash his face in old blue indigo water that was used to dye wool in, and didn’t he go around there for weeks as blue in the face as a monkey!…

  “And didn’t he come creepin’ up behind her after church one day, and whisper in her ear: ‘I’ll be there. Just swing the light three times and slip out easy when you’re ready, and I’ll be there waitin’ for you!’—Why, he almost frightened the poor girl out of her wits. ‘Oh!’ she screamed, you know, and hollered for them to come and get him, ‘Oh! Take him! Take him away!’—thinkin’ he’d gone crazy—and of course that let the cat out of the bag. They had to tell it then, the joke they’d played on him.” She smiled quietly, shaking her head slightly, with the sad and faintly troubled mirth of things far and lost.