My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms, into the arms of the others, over the top of the wall.
And now the weary prisoners with their escort have come down off the hillside to a valley and are approaching a large old southern mansion, standing back from the road they have been traveling, and the officers in charge of the prisoners — there were two of them — command the guards to turn in at a gate that leads to the house.
There is an open space before the house where the prisoners are gathered and the ground — covered with firm turf during most of the year — has, under the continuous rains, become soft and yielding. Where each prisoner stands a puddle gathers about his feet.
The house is dark, but for a single light at the back, and one of the officers begins shouting. A large pack of hunting dogs have come from a shed, hidden away in the darkness somewhere, and are gathered growling and barking in a half circle about the prisoners.
One of the dogs rushes through the mass of prisoners and with a glad cry leaps upon father, and all the others follow so that guards are compelled to drive the dogs off, kicking them and using the butts of their guns. Lights are lit inside the house. The people are astir.
You will understand what a moment this was for father. By one of those strange streaks of fate — which he is very careful to explain to his audience happen much more frequently in life than one imagines — he had been led, as a prisoner on his way to a southern prison pen, right to the door of his own father’s house.
What a moment indeed! Being a prisoner he has of course no idea how long he will be kept there. Thank God, he has grown a thick, bushy beard since he left home.
As to his fate — if the prisoners are kept in the yard until daylight comes — well, he knows his own mother.
His own father, old man though he is, has gone off to the war and all his brothers have gone; and his mother has come from a proud old southern family, one of the oldest and proudest. Had she known he was there among the prisoners she would have seen him hanged without a protest and would herself have lent a hand at pulling the rope.
Ah, what had not my father given for his country! Where will his equal be found, even among the whole world’s heroes? In the eyes of his own mother and father, in his brother’s eyes, in the eyes of all the branches and ramifications of his southern family, in the eyes of all — except only one unsophisticated and innocent girl — he had brought everlasting disgrace on one of the proudest names of the South.
Indeed it was just because he, the son, had gone off to fight with the northern army that his father, a proud old man of sixty, had insisted on being taken into the southern army. “I have a strong old frame and I insist,” he had said. “I must make good the loss to my Southland for my own son, who has proven himself a dog and a renegade.”
And so the old man had marched off with a gun on his shoulder, insisting on being taken as a common soldier and put where he could face constant and terrible danger, and the seeds of an undying hatred against the son had been planted deep in the hearts of the whole family.
The dullest mind surely will comprehend now what a position father was in when, in answer to the shouts of the officer, lights began to appear all through the house. Was it not a situation to wring tears from the heart of a man of stone! As for a woman’s heart — one can scarcely speak of the matter.
And in the house, before father’s eyes, there was one — a pure and innocent southern girl of rare beauty — a pearl of womanhood in fact — rarest example of the famed spotless womanhood of the Southland — his younger sister — the only woman child of the family.
You see, as father would so carefully have explained that evening in the farmhouse, he did not care so much for his own life. That had already been given to his country, he would have said proudly.
But, as you will understand quickly enough, had his presence among the prisoners been discovered, his proud mother — eager to wipe out the only stain on the family escutcheon — would at once have insisted that he be hanged to the doorpost of the very house in which he was born, her own hand pulling at the rope that was to jerk him up, into the arms of death — to make white again the family escutcheon, you understand.
Could a proud southern woman do less?
And in the event of such an outcome to the adventures of the night, see how that younger sister — the love of his life at that time — see how she would have suffered.
There she was, the pure and innocent girl, the one who understood nothing, to be sure, of the import of his decision to stick to the old flag and fight for the land of Washington and Lincoln, and who, in her innocent way, just loved him. On that day at his father’s table, when he — so deeply affected by the Lincoln-Douglas debates — had dared say a word for the cause of the North, it had been her eyes and her eyes alone that had looked at him with love, when all the other eyes of his family had looked at him with hatred and loathing.
And she would just be bursting into womanhood now. The aroma of awakening womanhood would be lying over her as perfume over the opening rosebud.
Think of it! There she, the pure and innocent one, would have to stand and see him hanged. A blight would be brought down upon her young life and her head would, ever after that night, be bowed in lonely and silent sorrow. That brave pure and just girl made old before her time. Ah; well might it be that in one night the mass of golden locks, that now covered her head like a cloud just kissed by the evening sun — that very golden hair might be turned as white as snow!
I can, in fancy, hear my father saying the words I have set down here and coming very near to crying himself as he said them. At the moment he would have believed without question the story he himself was telling.
And now the front door to the old southern mansion is thrown open and there, in the doorway facing the prisoners in the rain, stands a gigantic young negro — my father’s own body servant before he left home. (Father stops the flow of his talk long enough to explain how he and the negro boy, as lads together, had fought, wrestled, hunted, fished and lived together like two brothers. I will not go into that, however. Any professional southerner will tell you all about it, if you care to hear. It would have been the most trite part of father’s evening’s effort.)
Anyway, there the gigantic young negro stands in the doorway and he is holding in his hand a candle. Back of him stands my grandmother and back of her the young and innocent sister.
The figure of father’s mother is erect. She is old but she is yet tall and strong. One of the officers explains to her that he and his men have been on an allnight march, taking the crowd of Yankee prisoners to a prison camp, and asks for the hospitality of the house. Being a southerner himself he knows that southern hospitality can never fail, even at midnight. “A bite to eat and a cup of hot coffee in the name of our Southland,” he asks.
It is granted, of course. The proud woman beckons him and his brother officer into the house and herself steps out into the cold, drizzling rain.
She has ordered the young negro to stand on the porch, holding the candle aloof, and now, marching across the wet lawn, approaches the prisoners. The southern guards have stepped aside, bowing low before southern womanhood, and she goes near the prisoners and looks at them, as well as one may in the uncertain light. “I have a curiosity to see some of the unmannerly dogs of Yanks,” she says, leaning forward and staring at them. She is very near her own son now but he has turned his face away and is looking at the ground. Something however causes him to raise his head just as she, to express more fully her contempt, spits at the men.
A little speck of her white spittle lands upon father’s thick, tawny beard.
And now his mother has gone back into the house and it is again dark on the lawn in front. The Rebel guards are relieved — two at a time — to go to the kitchen door, where they are given hot coffee and sandwiches. And once his young sister, she of the tender heart, tries to creep to where the prisoners stand in the darkness. She is accompanied by an old neg
ro woman and has planned to give food aid and comfort to the weary men but is prevented. Her mother has missed her inside the house and coming to the door falls to her. “I know your tender heart,” she says, “but it shall not be. The teeth of no Yankee dog shall ever bite into food raised on the land of your father. It shall not happen, at least while your mother is alive to prevent.”
NOTE III
SO THERE WAS father, sitting comfortably in the warm farmhouse living room — he and Aldrich having been well fed at the table of a prosperous farmer — and having before him what he most loved, an attentive and absorbed audience. By this time the farmer’s wife would be deeply moved by the fate of that son of the South that father had represented himself as being? and as for Tilly — while, in the fanciful picture he is making, he stands in the cold and wet outside the door of that southern mansion, Heaven knows what is going on in poor Tilly’s heart. It is however bleeding with sympathy, one may be sure of that.
So there is father and, in the meantime, what of his own actual flesh-and-blood family, the family he had left behind in an Ohio village when he set forth on his career as an actor?
It is not suffering too much. One need not waste too much sympathy on his family. Although he was never what we called in our Ohio country, “a good provider,” he had his points and as one of his sons I at least would be loath to trade him for a more provident shrewd and thoughtful father., It must however have been a fairly hard winter, for mother at least and in connection with that winter and others that followed I have often since had an amusing thought. In later years, when my own name had a little got up in the world as a teller of tales I was often accused of having got my impulse, as a story-teller, from the Russians. The statement is a plausible one. It is, in a way, based upon reason.
When I had grown to be a man, and when my stories began to be published in the pages of the more reckless magazines, such as The Little Review, the old Masses and later in The Seven Arts and The Dial, and when I was so often accused of being under the Russian influence, I began to read the Russians, to find out if the statement, so often made concerning me and my work, could be true.
This I found, that in Russian novels the characters are always eating cabbage soup and I have no doubt Russian writers eat it too.
This was a revelation to me. Many of the Russian tales are concerned with the lives of peasants and a Boston critic once said I had brought the American peasant into literature; and it is likely that Russian writers, like all the other writers who have ever lived and have not pandered to the popular demand for sentimental romances were fortunate if they could live as well as a peasant. “What the critics say is no doubt true,” I told myself; for, like so many of the Russian writers, I was raised largely on cabbage soup.
Let me explain.
The little Ohio farming community, where I lived as a lad had in it, at that time, no factories, and the merchants artisans lawyers and other townspeople were all either owners of land which they rented out to tenant farmers, or they sold goods or their services to farmers. The soil on the farms about the town was a light sandy loam that would raise small fruits, corn, wheat, oats or potatoes, but that did particularly well when planted to cabbages.
As a result the raising of cabbages became a sort of specialty with us in our country; and there are now, I believe, in my native place, some three or four prosperous factories, devoted to the making of what before the war was called “sauerkraut.” Later, to help win the war, it was called:— “Liberty Cabbage.”
The specialization in the raising of cabbage began in our Ohio country in my day, and in a good year some of the fields produced as high as twenty tons of cabbage an acre.
The cabbage fields grew larger and larger and, as we grew older, my brothers and I went every spring and fell to work in the fields. We crawled across the fields, setting out cabbage plants in the spring, and in the fall went out to cut cabbages. The huge round hard heads of cabbage were cut from their stalks and pitched to a man who loaded them upon a hay wagon; and on fall days I have often seen twenty or thirty wagons, each bearing its two or three tons of cabbages and waiting its turn to get to the cars on the railroad siding. The waiting wagons filled our streets as tobacco-laden wagons fill the streets of a Kentucky town in the fall, and in the stores and houses everyone for a time talked of nothing but cabbages. “What would the crop bring on the markets at Cleveland or Pittsburgh?” Pittsburgh, for some reason I have never understood, had a passion for cabbages; and why Pittsburgh hasn’t produced more so-called realistic writers, in the Russian manner, I cannot understand.
However, one may well leave that to the modern psychologists.
During the fall of that year, after father had set out on his adventures as an actor, mother did something she had often done before. By a stroke of strategy she succeeded in getting a winter’s supply of cabbages for her family, without the expenditure of any monies.
The fall advanced, father had gone, and the annual village cut-up time, called among us “Hallowe’en,” came on.
It was the custom among the lads of our town, particularly among those who lived on the farms near town, to make cabbages part of their celebration of the occasion. Such lads, living as they did in the country, had the use of horses and buggies, and on Hallowe’en they hitched up and drove off to town.
On the way they stopped at the cabbage fields and, finding in some of the fields many cabbages yet uncut, pulled them out by the roots and piled them in the backs of their buggies.
The country lads, giggling with anticipated pleasure, drove into one of the quieter residence streets of our town and, leaving the horse standing in the road, one of them got out of the buggy and took one of the cabbages in his hand. The cabbage had been pulled out of the ground with the great stalklike root still clinging to it and the lad now grasped this firmly. He crept toward one of the houses, preferably one that was dark — an indication that the people of the house, having spent a hard day at labor, had already gone to bed. Approaching the house cautiously, he swung the cabbage above his head, holding it by the long stalk, and then he let it go. The thing was to just hurl the cabbage full against the closed door of the house. It struck with a thunderous sound and the supposition was that the people of the house would be startled and fairly lifted out of their beds by the hollow booming noise, produced when the head of cabbage landed against the door and, as a matter of fact, when a stout country boy had hurled the cabbage the sound produced was something quite tremendous.
The cabbage having been thrown the country boy ran quickly into the road, leaped into his buggy and, striking his horse with the whip, drove triumphantly away. He was not likely to return unless pursued, and there it was that mother’s strategy came into play.
On the great night she made us all sit quietly in the house. As soon as the evening meal was finished the lights were put out and we waited while mother stood just at the door, the knob in her hand. No doubt it must have seemed strange to the boys of our town that one so gentle and quiet as mother could be so infuriated by the hurling of a cabbage at the door of our house.
But there was the simple fact of the situation to tempt and darkness had no sooner settled down upon our quiet street that one of the lads appeared. It was worth while throwing cabbages at such a house. One was pursued, one was scolded, threats were hurled:— “Don’t you dare come back to this house!
I’ll have the town marshal after you, that’s what I’ll do! If I get my hands on one of you I’ll give you a drubbing!” There was something of the actor in mother also.
What a night for the lads! Here was something worth while and all evening the game went on and on. The buggies were not driven to our house, but were stopped at the head of the street, and town boys went on pilgrimages to cabbage fields to get ammunition and join in the siege. Mother stormed scolded and ran out into the darkness waving a broom while we children stayed indoors, enjoying the battle — and when the evening’s sport was at an end, we all fell to and gathered
in the spoils. As she returned from each sally from the fort mother had brought into the house the last cabbage thrown — if she could find it; and now, late in the evening when our provident tormentors were all gone, we children went forth with a lantern and got in the rest of our crop. Often as many as two or three hundred cabbages came our way and these were all carefully gathered in. They had been pulled from the ground, with all the heavy outer leaves still clinging to them, so that they were comparatively uninjured and, as there was also still attached to them the heavy stalklike root, they were in fine shape to be kept. A long trench was dug in our back yard and the cabbages buried, lying closely side by side, as I am told the dead are usually buried after a siege.
Perhaps indeed we were somewhat more careful with them than soldiers are with their dead after a battle. Were not the cabbages to be, for us, the givers of life? They were put into the trench carefully and tenderly with the heads downward and the stalks sticking up, mother supervising, and about each head straw was carefully packed — winding sheets. One could get straw from a strawstack in a near-by field at night, any amount of it, and one did not pay or even bother to ask.
When winter came quickly, as it did after Hallowe’en, mother got small white beans from the grocery and salt pork from the butcher, and a thick soup, of which we never tired, was concocted. The cabbages were something at our backs. They made us feel safe.
And there was also a sense of something achieved. In the land in which we lived one did not need to have a large income. There was food all about, plenty of it, and we who lived so precariously in the land of plenty had, by our “mother’s wit,” achieved this store of food without working for it. A common sense of pride in our cleverness held us together.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 333