Through a Glass, Darkly

by Charlotte Miller

  Janson was more silent than usual through supper that night. He sat across from Elise, moving his food about with a fork, but eating very little, and then he got up and left the room only halfway through the meal without saying a word.

  Elise found him on the front steps, staring out at the newly picked fields. She leaned against one of the uprights that supported the porch roof, trying to think of a way to ask what was bothering him so deeply.

  “We got t’ leave,” he said before she could speak. “I lost my temper, an’—well—I lost my temper—”

  She watched him in silence. She had known all along that at some point Janson would tire of Stubblefield taking the entire crop every year, all their hard work—it had only been a matter of time. His temper, his pride—nothing else could have happened.

  And, now the time had come. She sat on the step near him as he told her what had taken place.

  “He said we didn’t even clear enough t’ cover th’ credit we run at th’ store—I lost my temper, an’, well—”

  She nodded slowly—it had been inevitable. “When do we have to leave?”

  “He didn’t say; he was just yellin’ for us t’ get off his land. I guess soon as we can. I don’t know where we’ll go. I didn’t think. I just got mad an’—I know I shouldn’t have, but—”

  “No.” He turned where he sat there on the step to look at her, his face showing surprise at the feeling behind the one word. “We couldn’t keep on going like this, year after year. There has to be something else we can do.”

  “There ain’t many jobs t’ be had. They keep sayin’ times are gettin’ better, but it seems t’ me like th’ Depression’s th’ same as its been for years.” He sighed and looked back out toward the fields of picked cotton plants again. “I guess we’ll go back int’ town. I don’t know what I can find t’ do, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna sharecrop for anybody again.” There was a bitterness in his voice that she had heard from many people over the past years. “I’m tired ’a losin’ half th’ crop every year t’ somebody just t’ use his land, an’ then bein’ cheated out ’a th’ other half. I’m tired ’a seein’ you an’ Henry an’ Catherine worked s’ hard, an’ us gettin’ only deeper an’ deeper every year with somebody else takin’ all our work an’ us gettin’ nothin’ out ’a it—I ain’t never gonna work another man’s land again. I’ll crop my own land, but nobody else’s—I’ll be damned if I’ll ever sharecrop for anybody again. I’ll be damned if I will.”

  There was determination in his voice, and a tone she recognized so well—his dream, to have his own place, to work his own land and produce a crop that would be all his own. For years that dream had been crushed beneath work and worry, beneath fighting to just get by, and the need to support the family, beneath the weight of the Depression and the burden of struggle just to put food in their mouths and clothes on their backs.

  They had even less now than nine years before when they had run off to be married. Times were hard, money lacking from not only the pockets of themselves but of everyone else they knew, and now it was not just the two of them, but the children and Stan to worry about—but, as she looked at him, he seemed very much like the young man who had sat at the edge of that clearing with her back in Endicott County, Georgia, and told her of his dreams, of what he had lost but would one day have again, a home, land, a place as much him as his own soul was, something that no one could ever take from him again.

  Looking back now to those days when she had first known him, before he had told her about his dreams, she realized that perhaps she had fallen in love with him because he made her feel safe and protected in those days after Ethan Bennett had attacked her. As she had gotten to know him and his dreams and the determination and pride, that feeling had deepened into something that was now such a part of her that she could not imagine living without it, or living without him. That girl who had wanted to feel safe seemed so young to her now—but there had not been a day since she had been that girl that she had not loved him. They had been through so much, and his dream had to seem farther away than ever—but it was still there. He was just as proud and just as stubborn, still just as determined that one day he would stand on his own land again. He rarely spoke of it now, keeping it locked inside, but it was there—she could often see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice, and for the first time in those nine years she felt a worry inside of her that he might never touch that dream again. How could he, how could they, when just getting by and living seemed struggle enough to fill their days.

  “I guess I should ’a held my temper, but I couldn’t. A man can only take s’ much. I’ll find some kind ’a work in town—anything’d be better’n this.”

  And Elise could only hope that it would be.

  Janson found work with the WPA on the Beautification Project in Pine, raking leaves, planting shrubs, cleaning off graves in the City Cemetery, doing hard work in all kinds of weather. Times were tight, but now there was that steady wage coming in every two weeks. They found a three-room shotgun house to rent a few streets in from the edge of town, a house that now seemed almost lavish compared to the house they had lived in on Stubblefield’s place. Elise immediately made a sign that said Sewing Done and placed it in the front window. There was little sewing to be had, but she found at least some work, making new curtains for the Baptist parsonage, and then altering a wedding dress for the only daughter of a family who lived just a few blocks from downtown. She had thought the alteration job would be an easy one, but the bride made the job anything but easy as she twisted about trying to see herself in the mirror as Elise struggled to pin a straight hem.

  Faith Taggart stood on a low table in the living room of her home one afternoon in December, having ascended to its surface with the help of several friends who stood now talking as Elise worked on the dress. They were a giggling bunch, none over seventeen years of age, making Elise, at not quite twenty-six, feel old by comparison. They were talking, as almost everyone else had been in the past days, on the question of whether Great Britain’s King Edward VIII would abdicate the throne so he could marry the American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson—as the British monarch, he could not marry a divorced woman and remain king. Faith’s mother had voiced her opinion before she had left the room, saying it would be lunacy for a king to give up his throne in order to marry a woman.

  “Oh, but it’s so romantic,” Faith had said, twisting about so that Elise feared she would stick her with a pin.

  The radio was on, its sound blending with the voices of the giggling girls as Elise attempted to pin a straight hem in spite of the girl she was trying to fit. Mrs. Taggart came back into the room, stopping for a moment to fuss at the decorations on the large Christmas tree in one corner, bending to rearrange again packages beneath it, and straightening to survey her work before coming to join the conversation of the girls.

  Then came words from the radio that hushed for a time the female voices in the room. “At long last I am able to say a few words,” came the voice of the British monarch, “. . . I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I should wish to, without the help and support of the woman I love. . . . And now we have a new king. . . . God bless you all! God save the king!”

  “He’s a fool to give up so much to marry that woman,” Mrs. Taggart declared, her lips set in a disapproving pout when Elise glanced up at her.

  “Oh, Mama, you just don’t have a romantic bone in you.”

  “I still say he’s a fool,” the older woman said, standing now to survey Elise’s work even more critically than she had her own. “No matter how much he thinks he loves that woman, there are some things more important than love—”

  Not very many—Elise thought, sticking the girl at last and swearing to herself that it had been an accident. Not very many.

  Living in Pine seemed strange now to Elise who could not forget
the night some of the men in this county had burned the shantytown near the tracks and had wanted to lynch Janson. She could not see the smoke-blackened brick that still showed where stores had been rebuilt after the fire without remembering that night, and with it the anger and hatred and the pure fear that had filled her. With convenient amnesia born of embarrassment and shame, people had forgotten what they wanted to do to Janson, to an innocent man, but Elise could not forget. Janson worked now beside men who just a few years before had stood before that police station and had wanted him dead. “I cain’t think about what happened,” he had told her when she asked him about it. “If I do, I know I’ll break somebody’s neck—” Though the same men who would have stood by to watch her husband hang now met her eyes with no visible shame or regret, she could not look at them without feeling anger, and a sense of injustice over what had happened to them all—Buddy Eason was free, though he had been gone from the county now since shortly after that night. Buddy Eason she hated, as she knew she would until the day she died.

  There was a bad feeling toward the Sanders from some people in Pine because, like so many others, Janson worked on the WPA. Men who had held their jobs through the Depression, who had not known unemployment, hunger, and desperation throughout those years, looked down now on those working under government aid:

  “They could find real jobs if they wanted to work—” Elise sometimes heard.

  “It’s just a boondoggle—”

  “Nothin’ but a bunch of leaf rakers—”

  “Livin’ off the government ’cause they’re too lazy t’ work—”

  But Elise knew that it was work created to busy idle hands, to give needed money to put food in stomachs long empty and clothes on backs dressed in rags, work for proud men who had been too long unemployed through no fault of their own.

  The WPA workers planted shrubs, re-bound books for a library, repaired and refurbished desks in school buildings, cleaned off the Pine City Cemetery, landscaped city buildings and county property, and built the new City Hall—but it was “made-up work just to give them something to do,” they often heard, no matter how hard they worked or how much they accomplished. There should be no pride, no self-respect in made work, they were told—but to Janson, as to most of the others who worked their hours with the WPA, or the young people who could continue their educations because of the NYA, it was respectable work. Any honest work that a man or woman could put hands to to support a family was respectable. Any work a teenager could accomplish that allowed him or her to stay in school was worthy. Let those more fortunate, those who had not been hurt by the Depression, call it a boondoggle—there was still self-respect and pride in work that gave a man back his dignity.

  President Roosevelt had been opposed in the ’36 election by Republican Alf Landon, who had pledged that he would see that “relief is purged of politics”—but few people on the WPA were concerned with politics. They were concerned only that their children now had food to eat, clothes to wear, and shoes on their feet against the cold months that had worried them all.

  Elise had not expected to hear the speech FDR would give at his second inauguration, but found herself listening to it over the radio in a small store. Janson had been rained out of work on the Beautification Project for the third day that week, and he stood beside her in silence as they listened, for all activity in the store had ceased with the first of the President’s words, the now long-familiar voice fighting to make itself heard over the sound of rainfall striking umbrellas at the inauguration.

  Elise thought that Janson was paying little attention as they listened, but saw his head rise and a peculiar look come to his face as the President spoke the words:

  “. . .‘each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth’. . .”

  The look permanently settling on his features as the President’s voice continued

  “. . . In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens—a substantial part of its whole population—who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life. I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day. I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by a so-called polite society half a century ago. I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children . . . I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished . . .”

  The hour was late by the time Elise got the children into bed and the house had settled down to quiet around them. She sat at the rough wooden table, a kerosene lamp pulled close on its surface to better light her sewing of a dress she was remaking for Judith from one that Catherine had outgrown. Janson stood just across the room, leaning against the mantel and staring down into the flames that burned within the fireplace.

  Elise glanced up at him often, seeing the yellow and orange light moving along the high cheekbones and making small plays of light and shadow in his black hair. He had been brooding for much of the day. He had had little to say since the President’s speech, but had watched Henry, Catherine, and Judith with a thoughtful look throughout the evening, and that look was still there even though the children were now long asleep in the next room.

  He left the fireplace and went to the rocker where Catherine had sat earlier bent over her schoolbooks. The books remained on the small table beside the rocker, the kerosene lamp showing their worn edges. Janson sat in the rocker and let the fingers of one hand trail along the surface of the book that rested on the top.

  After a while he rose, taking the book into his hand, and walked across the room to Elise. He set it down before her as she lowered her sewing and looked up at him, Elise finding a resolved and determined look now in his eyes.

  “Someday, when I got my own land again, I want t’ be able t’ read my name on th’ papers, an’ t’ read th’ words good enough t’ know that it is mine. Th’ old ways won’t never be back again, an’ I guess a man’s got t’ know how t’ read an’ write nowadays t’ get along an’ t’ be anythin’—I hear you tellin’ Henry that all th’ time, an’ I guess it’s about time I listened.”

  “I never meant—”

  “I know,” he said, a light smile touching his lips. “I know—but th’ world’s changin’; I guess it’s done changed, an’ maybe I better change with it.”

  He stepped long legs over the bench and sat down at the table beside her, and Elise found herself looking at him, seeing shame and pride that battled again for a moment in his features. He put one hand on the book and drew it closer.

  “You offered me once, a long time ago, an’ I told you no. I’m askin’ this time, Elise—teach me, I want t’ learn.”

  Chapter Twelve

  As 1937 drew into its final months, it seemed as if hard times might get harder. Already the year had seen disaster, told on the radio in horror-filled words as the German airship, the Hindenburg, crashed on May 6th in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Already Amelia Earhart and her airplane had disappeared, presumably lost forever. Farm prices had dropped, business had slowed, and people were again finding themselves unemployed.

  To Henry and his family, the current economic problems affected them little more than did the Hindenburg disaster or the Earhart disappearance—none of it touched them directly, but it was all around them, on the radio, in the talk of most every person, in the general feeling that seemed to exist somewhat within everyone. Disaster had struck and hard times seemed bent to worsen—but, at least for the time being, Janson still held his job on the WPA, there was a rented roof over their heads, food on the table, and adequate, though worn, faded, and often-patched clothes to cover their backs.

  Living in town again and Janson working on the WPA had brought the family more security than they had ever known in the years of sharecropping. The little house they
rented was better shelter than the sharecropper’s shack had ever been, the WPA wage more reliable than any split on crops that might be sold at a fallen price, the little money that Janson, Elise, and Stan each made at least some buffer against a world they had learned could turn against them all at a moment’s notice. But, Henry Sanders was not happy. He hated living in town, hated school, and hated most of the boys he had met since moving into Pine. He had already been in more fights in the months he had been in the town school than in all the time they had lived in the country—he wasn’t like the kids in town; he knew that, and he was certain the other kids knew it, because they never missed an opportunity to let him know how different he was.

  And Reuben Knott and Teddy Wiggins were the worst. There seemed to be nothing about Henry they could even tolerate, not the way he looked, or the way he talked, not the clothes he wore or where he had come from or what his pa did for a living, and they never missed the chance to tell him so, teasing until he would go after one or both of them. That had happened to him already three times in that first week of November, landing him in trouble with the teacher and at home.

  He had to stay after school that Thursday, as he had already two days that week. It had been Reuben and Teddy, as it usually was, and Henry had only defended himself—but the teacher had not seen it that way. The teacher rarely saw it his way.

  Henry left the school that afternoon long after the other kids had left for the day. Catherine had walked on without him, as she always did, in the rush of girls usually headed in their direction on the way home from school. He knew his mother would know why he was late, and that would only bring him more trouble—I can’t win no matter what I do, he told himself, turning down a dirt street that ran along the edge of the colored section of town, as he usually did in the evenings, for it was the shortest route home. Walking by himself gave him time to think, and to get madder—one of these days he would show Reuben and Teddy a thing or two, he told himself.