Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Well, I write freely when I write what I feel and my own feeling is that coal and the industrial power that has come from coal and the coal mines is now king. The black giant, disturbed in his sleep, has set forth and has conquered. We all breathe his black breath.

  Also I believe that self-respecting men, once they have accepted a town or a country as their town or country, do want to bring something like beauty into the place where their lives are to be lived and that in this king there is as yet little beauty. Having been disturbed in his bed in the hills he has set out, Hunlike, to conquer and will conquer. Even as I write he is on the march, with a vanguard of Rotary Club members, invading new towns, building newer and larger cities, breathing his black breath over greater and greater stretches of green country.

  The king is, I admit, King.

  What a laugh the word “democracy” must sometimes stir within his black bowels!

  May one be ribald when a King is crowned?

  It has long been my desire to be a little worm in the fair apple of Progress.

  As I sit writing and feeling very important and serious about this whole matter of what coal and industrialism is doing to the towns of the Middle West I do have to stop and for a sane moment think that I know little of the matter about which I have made all these words. And it happens I am at this moment sitting in one of the few spots in America where coal is not king.

  Perched out on the lip of that Mississippi River that drains nearly the whole of Mid-America there is a city within a city. Where the new and modern city of New Orleans begins, some ten city blocks away from where I sit, the king is King; but in this old French and Creole town, hidden away, half forgotten in its corner, we can make him sing low.

  It is afternoon and cool here, and the night will be cooler. I shiver a little as I sit writing of that Coal King who is making so many great fires burn in so many places. I look at my empty fireplace.

  From the street there comes a cry that is also a song. I run out on my little balcony KING COAL, and look down. A ragged negro is driving a bony horse along the street and to the horse is hitched a wagon with wobbly wheels. There are a dozen bushels of coal in the wagon and the driver has made himself a song.

  “Do you want any coal?

  It’s gwy’an be cold.

  Do you want any coal?

  It’s gwy’an be cold.”

  Is he one who sells three buckets of coal for four bits or does he give but two? There is a moment of intense mutual inspection and then from a window on the floor below my landlady comes to my rescue. She speaks sharply a few words of Creole French and a delightful grin spreads over the black face. “Sho, boss. Three heapen ones,” he says, and comes up the stairway with my portion of fire and comfort in a broken bushel basket on his shoulder. He is preceded by my friend the landlady who has brought an old iron tub to sit beside my hearth and hold the coal.

  And so all is well. I sit and contemplate mankind and such things as social progress or decay with a calm mind.

  Why not? My fire burns! The King has been humbled.

  The King is in a washtub and I burn his bones.

  Another delightful thought comes. In the end the King may lose the battle, after all. It would be a delicious outcome of the whole affair if, gradually, year after year, an ever and ever increasing number of men should decide that the spoils offered in the King’s service were not worth the price of service and should manage in some way to get the King at last into a place where he is compelled to coo him softly like a suckling dove, as he does here in this forgotten spot where Progress is unknown.

  NOTES OUT OF A MAN’S LIFE

  NOTE 23

  IF some white artist could go among the negroes and live with them much beautiful stuff might be got. The trouble is that no American white man could do it without self-consciousness. The best thing is to stand aside, listen and wait. If I can be impersonal in the presence of black laborers, watch the dance of bodies, hear the song, I may learn something.

  NOTE 24

  A dream — I saw a tall fine-looking man with a light coming from his forehead. Everything hung suspended in space. A beautiful, rather sensual-looking woman, quite naked, was half turned, in just the position taken by a baseball pitcher about to throw a ball.

  Later, I saw negro women framed by windows as pictures are framed. There were no buildings, just the framed windows floating in space.

  At each window was a negro woman and they were all old. They were old house servants, field hands, cotton pickers. As I saw each face the woman’s whole story was revealed. Years of labor close down to the soil, the soil running through the fingers. When they were young women, nights sitting by a river or by a bayou. Dark earth-floored cabins. The big house of the whites, with lights shining in the distance.

  Sometimes the negro men were violent. They took knives and cut each other.

  At other times many negroes sat on the ground together and sang.

  The connection between the man with the light in his forehead, the naked white woman and the faces of aged negro women was not much. There are no direct connections made in such dreams. One feels sensuality, wonder, interest, quite naturally — is unashamed, does not try to be logical. It may be that thus the negro gets life. As for myself I leave the fact that I have such dreams to the psychoanalysts.

  NOTE 25

  A friend of mine was on a boat coming from the South Seas. On the boat was another American, from the South, from the State of Mississippi. As the night was hot and they could not sleep they sat on the deck talking.

  The talk turned to negro life in the American South and the Southerner told a tale.

  When he was a young man he, the Southerner, went with another young man to hunt. In the late afternoon they came out of a cane-brake and up onto a levee facing the Mississippi River.

  At that moment a buggy came tearing along the levee top. It was driven by a young white woman of the neighborhood and she was terribly excited. She kept lashing the horse with a buggy whip and when she saw the white men she screamed.

  The white men managed to stop the horse and inquired the reason for her terror. A negro man had come alone out of the canebrake a half mile below.

  She had been frightened. Many terrible things, she reminded them, had happened in the South.

  The young white men ran along the levee, their guns in their hands. When they came to the negro, a man of thirty-five and the father of a family, they presented their guns and made him march before them into the canebrake. They kept swearing, “You black son of a bitch.” As they tied him securely to a tree he kept protesting. What had he done? “You know well enough, you black son of a bitch.”

  When they had him tied one of them took his hunting knife and cut off an ear. Then he handed the knife to his friend who took the other ear. They were collecting souvenirs of the occasion.

  The negro man was left tied in the canebrake several hours. It was very hot and the mosquitoes came in swarms. Later, other negroes came and cut him loose.

  The two young men dried the ears and kept them. The man on the boat, when he had told the story, went down to his cabin to get his dried ear and show it. He seemed to think it — my friend said — a symbol of the superiority of the whites.

  NOTE 26

  Dreamed of running horses. Their names sang in my head all night. In my dreams, when they were running, they ran to a rhythm produced by the chanting of the names. Something in me seemed to flow with the names, with the bodies of the horses.

  NOTE 27

  The Mississippi River drives me to despair. I go to it every day, spend hours walking beside it. I get on boats and travel up and down the river. Stories should be so written that they flow toward their inevitable end as majestically and powerfully as the great river flows down to the Gulf.

  NOTE 28

  Business men, workers, and others not directly concerned with the arts think of all practicing artists as a race apart. There is no discrimination. All writers, painters, musici
ans, actors, are put in one class. An Irvin Cobb, a Harold Bell Wright, a Henry Fielding, a Dreiser, a De Foe — it is all one thing.

  To know such men at all your occupation must be concealed. When I travel about I become what my fancy at the moment dictates. I am a cotton planter, a fireman from Cleveland, Ohio, taking a vacation, a horse owner, a gambler.

  Being a gambler or horse owner goes best. Something about my looks betrays me when I pick out other occupations. In the popular mind the artist is easier associated, perhaps not unfairly, with the gambler, the sport, or the criminal.

  NOTE 29

  He was a manufacturer’s agent in New Orleans and sold printers’ ink. The storeroom where he kept his supplies was in the old city, near the Museum and the old Cathedral. It is delightful to walk in that part of the old city, just as evening comes, when the light is uncertain.

  I used to see him at work in the dark storehouse under an electric lamp and one evening I went in.

  He was making a wooden model of an American clipper ship and it was lovely.

  I asked him about it. This is the tale he told me. He was fifty-five. His wife was dead and his children were married. He had never been a great success in business. Once he made considerable money — but later.

  He had got an agency — selling printers’ ink in New Orleans. In his younger years he lived in a Northern city where men hustled more. In New Orleans he could take things easier. Rents were lower. He knew a good many small printers. They bought ink from him. Why not? He sold good ink. The price was all right.

  One day he was in the Museum where there are a good many rather fine models of old ships. New Orleans is a seafaring town. In the old days of sailing ships a good many sailors used to carve such models of ships during long voyages.

  In the Museum there was a man from the state university of an interior state. He had come to New Orleans to buy models of old ships but there were none to be found. Nowadays they are picked up by curio dealers who buy them at a high price. The rich want them to put on library shelves above the books. They are no doubt made now in some factory.

  The man from the interior was puzzled. Could a man be found who would carve from models in the museum a few such ships?

  The wholesale dealer in ink stepped forward. “I’ll do it,” he said. He had never carved anything but when he was a boy in Philadelphia he spent a great deal of time in the shipping. At night, as a boy, he dreamed of ships.

  The man seeking ship models asked him how much he would charge. “Thirty dollars each. It will take me a long time. I won’t ask you to pay me anything down. When I have completed the models, if you do not like them, it will be all right.”

  The whole affair, the old man told me, had been foolish enough. He had never used tools. Books concerning ships had to be bought. His hands had to be trained.

  When I saw him he was completing the first model that satisfied him. It was the fourth one he had attempted and the first three had been burned.

  “Will you do the others?” I asked. “Surely,” he said. He worked every evening from six until nearly midnight. He had never been so well, so contented. “The whole foolish business has cost me nearly two hundred dollars. It is the only thing I ever did that gave me any real satisfaction,” he said.

  THE END

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  Series Contents

  Series One

  Anton Chekhov

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  Dickensiana Volume I

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  Alexander Pushkin

  Alexandre Dumas (English)

  Andrew Lang

  Anthony Trollope

  Bram Stoker

  Christopher Marlowe

  Daniel Defoe

  Edith Wharton

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  G. K. Chesterton

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  Laurence Sterne

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br />
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