“I got a little tired of all of them, that’s the truth.” Aunt Sally laughed. “But that wasn’t until I had got what I went after. Oh, pshaw, they took up too much of my time after I got enough to be safe.”
Aunt Sally is now sixty-five. If you like her and she likes you she will let you sit with her in her patio gossiping of the old times, of the old river days. Perhaps — well you see there is still something of the French influence at work in New Orleans, a sort of matter-of-factness about life — what I started to say is that if you know Aunt Sally and she likes you, and if, by chance, your lady likes the smell of flowers growing in a patio at night — Really I am going a bit too far. I only meant to suggest that Aunt Sally at sixty-five is not harsh. She is a motherly soul.
We sat in the garden talking, the little Southern poet, Aunt Sally, and myself — or rather they talked and I listened. The Southerner’s great grandfather was English, a younger son, and he came over here to make his fortune as a planter and did it. Once he and his sons owned several great plantations with slaves, but now his father had but a few hundred acres left, about one of the old houses — somewhere over in Alabama. The land is heavily mortgaged and most of it has not been under cultivation for years. Negro labor is growing more and more expensive and unsatisfactory since so many negroes have run off to Chicago, and the poet’s father and the one brother at home are not much good at working the land. “We aren’t strong enough and we don’t know how,” the poet said.
The Southerner had come to New Orleans to see Fred, to talk with Fred about poetry, but Fred was out of town. I could but walk about with him, help him drink his home-made whisky. Already I had taken nearly a dozen drinks. — In the morning I would have a headache.
I drew within myself, listening while David and Aunt Sally talked. The Chinaberry tree had been so and so many years growing — she spoke of it as she might have spoken of a daughter. “It had a lot of different sicknesses when it was young, but it pulled through.” Someone had built a high wall on one side her patio so that the climbing plants did not get as much sunlight as they needed. The banana plants however did very well and now the Chinaberry tree was big and strong enough to take care of itself. She kept giving David drinks of whisky and he talked.
He told her of the place in his leg where something, a bone, perhaps, pressed on the nerve, and of the place on his left cheek. A silver plate had been set under the skin. She touched the spot with her fat old fingers. The moonlight fell softly down on the patio floor. “I can’t sleep except somewhere out of doors,” David said.
He explained how that, at home on his father’s plantation, he had to be thinking all day of whether or not he would be able to sleep at night.
“I go to bed and then I get up. There is always a bottle of whisky on the table downstairs and I take three or four drinks. Then I go out doors.” Often very nice things happened.
“In the fall it’s best,” he said. “You see the niggers are making molasses.” Every negro cabin on the place had a little clump of ground back of it where cane grew and in the fall the negroes were making their ‘lasses. “I take the bottle in my hand and go into the fields, unseen by the niggers. Having the bottle with me, that way, I drink a good deal and then lie down on the ground. The mosquitoes bite me some, but I don’t mind much. I reckon I get drunk enough not to mind. The little pain makes a kind of rhythm for the bigger pain — like poetry.
“In a kind of shed the niggers are making the ‘lasses, that is to say pressing the juice out of the cane and boiling it down. They keep singing as they work. In a few years now I reckon our family won’t have any land. The banks could take it now if they wanted it. They don’t want it. It would be too much trouble for them to manage I reckon.
“In the fall, at night, the niggers are pressing the cane. Our niggers live pretty much on ‘lasses and grits.
“They like working at night and I’m glad they do. There is an old mule going round and round in a circle and beside the press a pile of the dry cane. Niggers come, men and women, old and young. They build a fire outside the shed. The old mule goes round and round.
“The niggers sing. They laugh and shout. Sometimes the young niggers with their gals make love on the dry cane pile. I can hear it rattle.
“I have come out of the big house, me and my bottle, and I creep along, low on the ground, ‘til I get up close. There I lie. I’m a little drunk. It all makes me happy. I can sleep some, on the ground like that, when the niggers are singing, when no one knows I’m there. I don’t know. Maybe they do know I’m there.
“I could sleep here, on these bricks here,” David said, pointing to where the shadows cast by the broad leaves of the banana plants were broadest and deepest.
He got up from his chair and went limping, dragging one foot after the other, across the patio and lay down on the bricks.
For a long time Aunt Sally and I sat looking at each other, saying nothing, and presently she made a sign with her fat finger and we crept away into the house. “I’ll let you out at the front door. You let him sleep, right where he is,” she said. In spite of her huge bulk and her age she had walked across the patio floor as softly as a kitten. Beside her I felt awkward and uncertain. When we had got inside she whispered to me. She had some champagne left from the old days, hidden away somewhere in the old house. “I’m going to send a magnum up to his dad when he goes home,” she explained.
She, it seemed, was very happy, having him there, drunk and asleep on the brick floor of the patio. “We used to have some good men come here in the old days too,” she said. As we went into the house through the kitchen door I had looked back at David, asleep now in the heavy shadows at a corner of the wall. There was no doubt he also was happy, had been happy ever since I had brought him into the presence of Aunt Sally. What a small huddled figure of a man he looked, lying thus on the brick, under the night sky, in the deep shadows of the banana plants.
I went into the house and out at the front door and into a dark narrow street thinking. Well, I was after all a Northern man. It was possible Aunt Sally had become completely Southern, being down here so long.
I remembered that it was the chief boast of her life that once she had shaken hands with John L. Sullivan and that she had known P. T. Barnum. “We were friends once,” she said with a touch of pride in her voice, speaking of Barnum. “I knew Dave Gears. You mean to tell me you don’t know who Dave Gears was? Why he was one of the biggest gamblers we ever had in this city.”
As for David and his poetry — it is in the manner of Shelley. “If I could write like Shelley I would be happy. I wouldn’t care what happened to me,” he had said during our walk of the early part of the evening.
I went along enjoying my thoughts. The street was dark and occasionally I laughed. A notion had come to me. It kept dancing in my head and I thought it very delicious. It had something to do with aristocrats, with such people as Aunt Sally and David. “Lordy,”
I thought, “maybe I do understand them a little. I’m from the Middle-West myself and it seems we can produce our aristocrats too. I kept thinking of Aunt Sally and of my native state of Ohio. “Lordy, I hope she comes from up there, but I don’t think I had better inquire too closely into her past,” I said to myself as I went smiling away into the soft smoky night.
NOTES OUT OF A MAN’S LIFE
NOTE 6
I MAKE NOTES only of fragmentary things. In one moment a dozen moods may pass through me.
I arise from sleep and am shaving in the bathroom. With each stroke of the razor my mood may change.
People come into the house — my secretary — the negro servant who will get my breakfast.
My wife walks along a hallway, my son sings in his room.
A house is a shut-in place into which many people bring their moods. What has happened to the secretary before she came — to the cook?
What is in my wife’s mind, my son’s mind?
People are trained to say certain formal words— “Good m
orning” — What do the words mean?
My secretary is making fair copy of a novel I have written. It is inadequate. A novel should be written that will comprehend all lives.
When I am at all sensitive to life the moods of people beat upon me as waves beat upon a swimmer in the sea. I try to keep myself clear, but cannot.
I float in many lives, am distressed, made gay, made happy — a thousand times each day.
What I have learned, a little, is not to try to express in words my understanding of moods I feel in others. People prefer such things kept secret.
The cook, a splendid brown girl with a strong body, has quarreled with her brown man. He got drunk and took money from her. The story is all told by the way she walks into a room. I keep silent, watching. After a time, if I am lucky, if my day is to be a fortunate one for me, I will escape into one life, one impulse, and get it working down through my fingers. To do that both exhausts and relieves me.
However I leave a trail behind. This man or woman I might have loved. There was a marvelous tale I might have told.
“Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.”
Presently I shall die with a thousand, a hundred thousand tales untold. People I might have loved I shall not love.
As I stand in the bathroom preparing my body to receive others I am also preparing my mind. I came out of sleep a scattered thing, a sensitive plate ready to receive any sort of impression.
If my day is not to be a failure I must gather myself together and concentrate on one impression.
NOTE 7
Nights come when the whole world seems more alive than during the day. Often I go tramping in empty streets on such nights, myself more alive than in the day. Others more alive too. Something electric is in the air, something everyone feels.
As E sat reading a book daylight came. She looked down the narrow street. Two young men, walking in the roadway, came to a street intersection. Their figures were but dimly seen. They stopped and seemed to kiss. When E told me of it she spoke of how the book she had been reading at that strange hour had made all the world seem strange. Then the embrace of the young men in the dawn. She had to struggle for a moment to get back again into reality.
NOTE 8
I like my friend X. He is somewhat pompous and slow and is rather fat. Once or twice a year he comes to see me or I go to him.
He spends hours talking, telling over and over the most trite things. Then of a sudden he makes the most penetrating observations.
He was educated carefully and pronounces his words in the English manner.
When he was a young man an odd thing happened to him. He went to walk with a young lady on a Sunday afternoon. Some boys had built a house in a tree. There was a ladder going up. On a dare X and the young lady crawled up the ladder.
It was nice up there. The house had been built from a huge store box. They could just squeeze in.
They sat on a bench the boys had built in the box-house and forgot the passing of time. A great wind came up and blew the ladder away.
My friend was preparing for the church. The young lady was a virgin. They were in a wood a half hour’s walk from town. It began to rain. They stayed in the tree all night.
Later X thought he might have managed to crawl down out of the tree but the young lady would not let him. She said she was afraid to be alone. When searchers came looking for them she would not let him cry out. She said it would cause a scandal, they would be laughed at.
She herself started a conversation about what people would think. She cried a good deal so he took her into his arms. He kissed her.
Nothing else happened. There was no room.
However, as he always very carefully explained, nothing would have happened anyway.
Later he married her. Their life has always been that way. When she wants anything she cries.
As often happens with such couples there were children — four of them. He has educated them very carefully. They all bully him. When they want anything they cry or make a fuss and he surrenders.
He knows exactly what he is doing. He laughs at himself. Sometimes when he comes to see me he tells me the whole story. He has worked like a devil all his days, making money.
What he wanted was to be a scholar. Show him a priest in a long smock reading a book and he almost weeps.
“I would have been such a success, so cynical, so well behaved. A fat priest is something charming but look at me. I have missed my chance because I am tender-hearted,” he says and laughs.
NOTE 9
As to this matter of a man’s relations to other men and to women. Directly — being a man — I have no relation to anything. I play — am of no direct importance. It may be that I sometimes fertilize another man or woman, mentally or physically. That seems to me quite accidental. If the thing were not done by me someone else might do it.
The woman who has a child, carrying it in her body, thrusting it forth in pain, can walk feeling a direct relation between herself and trees, grasses, animals. I am much less the animal, being male. Often I pitch off into the world of fancy, losing, for the time being, all direct connection with the physical world.
I visit China, the South Seas, the frozen North. I talk to men, make love to women, play with children. I am, in fancy and during one day, a dozen other men. I live inside them, pick up objects with their fingers, think their thoughts, feel what they feel.
If I could stay quite completely in the world of fancy or in the physical world I might be satisfied. I stay in neither.
I am a candle blown by the wind. Soon I shall go out.
I go to the river where men are loading ships. I sit watching two strong negroes who are putting great timbers into the hold of a ship. What they touch with their great black fingers is something definite. I am envious of them.
In fancy I can build a whole city of beautiful houses. I can sail a ship on stormy seas, can lift great stones — but my fancies, that can come so swiftly and quickly, are as quickly blown away.
I sleep in a room in the midst of books. I write books. In one night, when I am sleepless, enough fancies come to me to make a whole library of books.
They come and go. Nothing stays. I produce nothing of any permanence. Men like me, feeling keenly this impermanence, have invented heaven and hell. “Better roast forever in hell than to disappear like a candle blown out,” they say.
But the vision of heaven and hell is also a fancy.
The negro working on the docks is envious of me sitting and thinking. I am envious of him rolling the great timbers. He thinks me an aristocrat and I think him an aristocrat.
What would I not give to accomplish something definite — related to trees, the earth, the sky, the seas!
What would I not give to be a man, not the shadow of a man!
NOTE 10
In New Orleans men in white clothes and women in light summer dresses are coming from the Cathedral. It is a hot still summer morning.
My own figure, clad in white, pleases me as I come into the room.
On Sunday every negro, in town or in the country, who can raise the money, goes for a ride. They ride up and down on boats, on railroad trains, mules or street cars. If you have an automobile that will go but ten more miles sell it to a negro. He will take his wife and children, invite his friends. They will ride the ten miles joyfully and walk patiently back.
The negro woman who had washed my clothes white came in white to get my breakfast. Her voice is smooth, her body strong.
By washing my clothes she has made herself a part of me. I shall now eat the food cooked by her brown hands. The food will make white flesh on my bones.
For whole days I try being a black man. I sat once all night at a boat landing at Baton Bouge. It was hot and still. Mother Mississippi made a soft whispering little sound as her lips touched the land. The steamer had but one eye — a glowing headlight that shot up along the landing stage to a warehouse on a high bluff.
Soft swaying bodies, dancing
, dancing, dancing. In the night the great bugs, that come out of the darkness to the light, also danced about the heads of the negro stevedores.
For a long time all was still. The negroes came out of darkness into the light and the great bugs flew about their heads striking black faces but the negroes did not mind. Grain was being unloaded — thousands of sacks.
There was nothing for the white captain and the mate to do. The negroes had fallen into their rhythm. No good swearing now, shouting commands. The night was very hot.
I lay on my back in dusty weeds. Shuffle, shuffle — shuffle along.
Sadness too. The long reach of the silent empty river — the dead river that was once alive.
Ghostly echoes of cries, oaths. Explorers on the river, De Soto, La Salle, Tonti of the Iron Hand, keel-boat men, longhorn men, pilots on steamers, Mark Twain, “no bottom, no bottom, no bottom.”
Human cries across nights, Mason, Big Harpe, Little Harpe, gamblers, steamboat men.
The Natchez — the Robert E. Lee.
Too late. Too late.
For myself I could have done without many things, Woolworth Buildings, the Henry Fords, the aeroplane, the automobile, modern Chicago, Detroit, the movies, the radio, Los Angeles, Miami.
I lay in the weeds by the big river all night, a thousand miles of empty river, no sound — the soft lap of little waves in soft mud, the shuffle of negro feet.
Hours passed — no song. It was midnight. On the deck of the boat the mate sat under a light reading a newspaper.
Then it began. Generations of load bearers in the bodies of these men, the blacks. Did something whisper to them out of the silent river?
First the soft beginning of laughter — out of the bowels of the ship. The laughter ran up the gangplank.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 369