Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  The man Red had seen stretching went toward the light.

  The camp into which Red had come reminded him of something. It was on a gently sloping hillside that had been covered with bushes, but some of the bushes had been cut away. There was a little open place with shacks, like dog houses stuck up. There were a few tents.

  It was like places Red had seen before. In the South, in Red’s own country, in Georgia, there were such places set up sometimes in a field at the edge of a town or in the country at the edge of a pine forest.

  The places were called camp meetings and people came there to worship. They got religion there. As a young boy Red used to drive sometimes with his father, the country doctor, and once, when they were driving on a country road at night, they had come upon such a place.

  There had been something in the air of the place, that night, that Red remembered now. He remembered his own wonder and the contempt of his father. The people were religious enthusiasts, his father had said. His father hadn’t explained much, not being a talkative man. Still Red had understood, had sensed what was going on.

  Poor people of the South, religious enthusiasts, Methodists and Baptists for the most part, gathered in such places. They were poor whites from nearby farms.

  They had put up little tents and shacks as in the camp of strikers to which Red had now come. Such a religious meeting, in the South, among the poor whites, was carried on sometimes for weeks or even months. People came and went. They brought food from their houses.

  There was an in-flocking. The people were ignorant and illiterate and came from the little tenant farms or at night from a mill village. They dressed in their best clothes and came afoot along the red Georgia roads at evening, young men and women walking together, older men with their wives, women with babes in their arms and sometimes men leading children by the hand.

  There they were at the camp meeting at night. There was preaching going on day and night. There were long prayers said. There was singing. The poor whites worshipped thus sometimes in the South and so also did the Negroes but they didn’t do it together. In the white camps, as in the Negro camps, as the nights grew late, there was intense excitement.

  There was preaching going on out of doors under the stars. Quavering voices arose in song. People suddenly got religion. Men and women became excited. Sometimes a woman, often a young woman, began to shout and scream.

  “God. God. Give me God,” she cried.

  Or, “I’ve got him. He’s here. He has hold of me.

  “It’s Jesus. I can feel his hands touching me.

  “I can feel his face touching me.”

  Women, often young unmarried women, came to such meetings and sometimes grew hysterical. There would be a young white woman, the daughter of some poor white tenant farmer of the South. All of her life she had been shy and afraid of people. She was a little starved thing, physically and emotionally starved, but now at the meeting something happened to her.

  She had come with her own people. It was night and she had been working all that day in a cotton field or in the cotton mill in the nearby town. There had been for her that day ten, twelve or even fifteen hours of hard labor in the mill or in a field.

  Now there she was at the camp meeting.

  She could hear the voice of a man, the preacher, shouting under the stars or under trees. The woman sat, a little thin, half-starved being, looking up occasionally through branches of trees to the sky and the stars.

  And even for her, the poor starved one, there was a moment. Her eyes could see the stars and the sky. Red Oliver’s own mother had got religion in that way, not at a camp meeting but in a poor little church at the edge of a mill village.

  No doubt, Red thought, hers had also been a starved life. He hadn’t thought of that when he was a boy with his father and when he had seen the poor whites at a camp meeting. His father had stopped his car in the road. There were voices calling in a little grassy place under trees and he saw men and women kneeling under a torch made from a pine knot. His father had smiled and a look of disdain had flitted across his face.

  There was a voice calling to the young woman at the camp meeting. “He’s there... up there... it’s Jesus. He wants you.” In the young woman a trembling began. There was something going on in her unlike anything she had ever known before. She felt hands touching her body in the night. “Now. Now.”

  “You. You. I want you.”

  Could there be some one... God... a strange being off somewhere in the mysterious distance who wanted her?

  “Who wants me, with my thin little body and the tiredness in me?” She would have been like that little girl named Grace who used to work in the cotton mill at Langdon, Georgia, the one Red Oliver had seen the first summer he worked in the mill... the one the other mill woman named Doris was always trying to protect.

  Doris going to that one at night, caressing her with her hands, trying to take the tiredness out of her, trying to bring life into her.

  But you may be a tired, thin young woman and have no Doris. Dorises are, after all, pretty rare in this world. You are a poor white working girl in a mill or you work all day with your father or mother in a cotton field. You look at your own thin sticks of legs and at your thin arms. You don’t even dare say to yourself, “I’d like to be rich, or beautiful. I’d like to have the love of a man.” What would be the use?

  But at the camp meeting. “It’s Jesus.”

  “White. Wonderful.”

  “Up there.”

  “He wants You. He will take you.”

  It might be just a debauch. Red knew that. He knew his father had felt that way about the camp meeting they had watched when Red was a boy. There was such a young woman letting herself go. She screamed. She fell to the ground. She groaned. People gathered about — her own kind of people.

  “Look, she has got it.”

  She had wanted it so. She hadn’t known what she wanted.

  It was an experience for that girl, vulgar but certainly strange. Nice people didn’t do it. That might be the trouble with nice people. It might be only the poor, the humble, the ignorant, who could let themselves go like that.

  *

  RED OLIVER sat with his back against the little tree in the camp of workers. There was something in the air of the place, a kind of subdued tenseness that had got into him. That might have been due to the sound of the voices of people coming from the shack where the light was. Voices of people talked low and earnestly in the dark places. There came times of silence, then the talk began again. Red couldn’t distinguish words. His nerves were stirred. He had grown wide awake. “Lord,” he thought, “I am here, in this place now.”

  “How did I get here? Why did I let myself get here?”

  This wasn’t a camp of religious enthusiasts. He knew that. He knew what it was. “Well, I don’t know,” he thought. He smiled a little sheepishly, sitting under the tree and thinking. “I have got myself into a mess,” he thought.

  He had wanted to come to the communist camp. No, he hadn’t. Yes, he had. He sat quarreling with himself as he had been doing for days. “If I could only be sure of myself,” he thought. Again he thought of his mother getting religion in the little church at the edge of the mill village when he was at home, still a high school boy. He had been for a week, for ten days, for perhaps two weeks, coming toward this place into which he had now got. He had wanted to come. He hadn’t wanted to come.

  He had let himself get excited about something that perhaps didn’t concern him at all. He had been reading newspapers, books, thinking, trying to think. The newspapers of the South had been full of strange news. They announced the coming of communism into the South. The newspapers hadn’t told Red much.

  He and Neil Bradley used to talk about that, about the lying of the newspapers. They didn’t lie openly, Neil said. They were clever. They twisted the stories, made things seem as they weren’t.

  Neil Bradley had wanted a social revolution or had thought he did. “I guess he want
s it okay,” Red thought that night sitting in the camp.

  “But why should I be thinking about Neil?”

  It was strange to be sitting there in that place and thinking that only a few months before, that very spring, when he had got out of college, he had been with Neil Bradley on a Kansas farm. Neil had wanted him to stay out there. If he had stayed, how different his summer might have been He hadn’t stayed. He had felt guilty about his mother, alone after his father’s death, and after a few weeks had left the Bradley farm and had gone home.

  He had again got a job in the cotton mill at Langdon. The mill people had taken him on again, even though they didn’t need him.

  That had been strange, too. There were workers in the town that summer, men with families, who had needed any work they could get. The mill people had known that, but they had hired Red.

  “I guess they had thought... they thought I would be all right. I guess they knew labor trouble might come, that it was likely to come. Tom Shaw’s pretty slick,” Red thought.

  The mill at Langdon had kept cutting wages all that summer. The mill people made all the piece-workers do more work for less money. They had cut Red’s wages, too. He got less pay than he got the first year he had worked in the mill.

  Thump. Thump. Thump. Thoughts kept running through Red Oliver’s head. He was excited thinking. He was thinking of his summer in Langdon. Suddenly across his thoughts, as across his dreams when he had tried to sleep, went the figure of Ethel Long. It might have been because he had been with a woman that night that he had suddenly now begun thinking of Ethel. He didn’t want to think of her. “She did me dirt,” he thought. The other woman, whom he had stumbled upon by accident during the late evening of the day before and who had brought him to the communist camp, was as tall as Ethel. “She’s not like Ethel, though. By God, she’s not like her,” he thought. There was a queer crosscurrent of thoughts in his head. Thump. Thump. Thump. The thoughts were like little hammers beating in his head. “If I could only let go like that woman at the camp meeting,” he thought, “if I could begin, be a communist, fighting the battle of the under-dog, be anything definite.” He tried to laugh at himself. “Ethel Long, eh. You thought you had her, didn’t you? She played with you. She made a fool of you.”

  Just the same, Red couldn’t help remembering. He was a young man. He had been with Ethel a moment, such a delicious moment.

  She was such a woman, so swank. His thoughts had gone flying back to the night in the library. “What does a man want?” he asked himself.

  His friend, Neil Bradley, had got himself a woman. It might have been Neil’s letters, coming to Red that summer, that had got him stirred up.

  Then suddenly had come the chance with Ethel.

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, he had her... in the library that night when it stormed. It had taken his breath away.

  God, a woman could be strange. She had just wanted to find out whether or not she wanted him. She had found out she didn’t.

  A man, such a young man as Red, was a queer creature, too. He had wanted a woman — why? Why had he so wanted Ethel Long?

  She was older than he was and didn’t think the same kind of thoughts he did. She wanted swell clothes — to put on a certain kind of swank in life.

  She had wanted a man, too.

  She had thought she wanted Red.

  “I’ll try him out, put him through his paces,” she had thought.

  “I didn’t make good with her.” Red felt uncomfortable when the thought came to him. He stirred uneasily. He was a man making himself uncomfortable by his own thoughts. He began trying to justify himself. “She never gave me a fair chance. Just that once. How could she know?

  “I was too shy and frightened.

  “She let me go — bang. She went and got that other man. Right away — bang — the next day, she did it.

  “I wonder if he suspected, if she told him.

  “I’ll bet she didn’t.

  “Maybe she did.

  “Ah, lay off that.”

  There was a strike of mill workers in a mill town in North Carolina and it wasn’t just an ordinary strike. It was a communist strike and word of it had been running through the South for two or three weeks. “What do you think of it... it’s at Birchfield, North Carolina... actually. These communists have come into the South now. It’s terrible.”

  A shiver had run through the whole South. It had been a challenge to Red. The strike was in the town named Birchfield, in North Carolina, a town by a river among hills, well down in North Carolina near the South Carolina line. There was a big cotton mill there... “The Birchfield Mill,” it was called... where the strike had broken out.

  Before that there had been a strike in the Langdon mills at Langdon, Georgia, and Red Oliver had been in that one, too. What he had done in it wasn’t, he thought, very nice. He was ashamed thinking of it. His thoughts of it were like little pins pricking him. “I was rotten,” he muttered to himself, “rotten.”

  There had been strikes in several Southern cotton-mill towns, strikes breaking out suddenly, upflarings from down below... Elizabeth ton, Tennessee, Marion, in North Carolina, Danville, in Virginia.

  Then one at Langdon, Georgia.

  Red Oliver had been in that strike; he had got into it.

  It had come as a sudden outbreak — a strange, unexpected thing.

  He had been in it.

  He wasn’t in it.

  He was.

  He wasn’t.

  Now he sat in another place, at the edge of another town, in a camp of strikers, his back against a tree — thinking.

  Thoughts. Thoughts.

  Thump. Thump. Thump. More thoughts.

  “Well, why not let myself think, then? Why not try to face myself? I’ve got all night. I’ve got plenty of time to think.”

  Red had wished that the woman with whom he had come to the camp — the tall, thin woman, half factory hand, half farm hand — he wished she hadn’t left him lying on the boards in the camp and gone off to bed. It would have been nice if she had been one of the sort of women who could talk.

  She could have stayed outside the camp with him, anyway for an hour or two. They might have stayed up above the camp in the dark path that came over the hills.

  He wished he were himself more of a woman’s man, and for a few minutes he sat again lost in woman thoughts. There used to be a fellow in college who said — you met him — he seemed absorbed — he was a wit — he was having wants-woman thoughts — he said, “I was having me a big think time — I was in bed with a woman. Why did you speak to me? You jerked me out of her bed. Boy, she was a hot baby.”

  Red had begun doing that. For a moment he let his fancy go. He had lost out with the Langdon woman, Ethel Long, but had got him another. In fancy he held her. He began kissing her.

  His body was pressed against hers. “Quit it,” he said to himself. When he had got to the camp with the new woman he had been with that night, to the edge of the camp... they were in the path in the woods then, near the field in which the camp had been set up... they had stopped together in the path at the edge of the field.

  She had already told him what she was and she thought she knew what he was. She had made the mistake about him at a place several miles away, over the hills, at the back of a little cabin on a side road, when she had first seen him.

  She had thought he was something he wasn’t. He had let her thoughts go on. He wished he hadn’t.

  *

  SHE had thought that he, Red Oliver, was a communist going to Birchfield to help in the strike. Red smiled, thinking that he had forgotten the chill of the night and the discomfort of the seat under the tree at the edge of the camp. In front of the little camp and below it there was a paved road and just before the camp a bridge crossed a rather wide river. It was a steel bridge and the paved road crossed the bridge and went on up into the town of Birchfield.

  The Birchfield Mill, in which the strike had been called, was across the river from the ca
mp of strikers. Evidently some sympathizer owned the land and had let the communists set up their camp there. The land, being thin and sandy, was of no value for farming.

  The mill owners were trying to run their mill. Red could see long rows of lighted windows. His eyes could make out the outlines of the bridge that had been painted white. Now and then a loaded truck came along the paved road and crossed the bridge, making a heavy rumbling sound. The town itself lay beyond the bridge on rising ground. He could see the spread of the lights of the town beyond the river.

  His mind was on the woman who had brought him to the camp. She had been working in the cotton mill at Birchfield and was in the habit of going home to her father’s farm for the week-ends. He had found that out. Weary from the long week of work in the mill she nevertheless started out on Saturday afternoon to walk home over the hills.

  Her people were growing old and feeble. There was a feeble old man and an old woman back there in a little log cabin hidden away in one of the hollows in the hills. They were illiterate hill people. Red had got a glimpse of the old people after the woman had come upon him in the woods. He had gone into a little log barn that stood near the mountain house and the old mother had come into the barn while the daughter was milking a cow. He had seen the father sitting on a little porch before the house. He was a tall old man with a bent form, in figure rather like the daughter.

  At home the daughter of the two old people kept busy over the week-end. Red had a sense of her flying about and giving the old people a rest. He imagined that she cooked the food, cleaned the house, milked the cow, worked in the little garden back of the house, made butter and put everything in order for another week away from home. It is true that most of the things that Red had found out about her were imagined. Admiration had been born in him. “There’s a woman,” he had thought. She was, after all, not much older than he was. Certainly, she was not older than Ethel Long of Langdon.