Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  According to the History of the Disciples of Christ in Illinois, John England, the brother of my great-great-grandfather, David England, and the son of the pioneer preacher, Stephen England, “preached the gospel in various parts of Logan County in the forties and early fifties.” He was born in Kentucky in 1811, and grew up in Illinois before there were any schoolhouses, so he was a man of limited education. He became a blacksmith, then a wagon maker, then a farmer, and finally a preacher, like his father. And while preaching he farmed a hundred and forty acres in Logan County. He had conscientious scruples about taking money for preaching, and was always afraid in his business deals that he would get the better of the other person. His son said of him, “If, in the evening, the topic of conversation would run upon anything of a financial character, in five to ten minutes he would be sleeping; but if there would be anything said pertaining to the Scriptures and the life beyond, he would be standing on his feet talking. He never seemed to be the least tired or skeptical about his hope for the future world.”

  At one time there were seven Christian churches here and there in the county. A series of revival meetings on a farm near Lincoln resulted in the forming of a church, which at first met in a warehouse and other places, all in town. In 1854 the congregation of about thirty people built a chapel, and for years struggled to pay for it. When the courthouse burned down, the Circuit Court was held in this building. The church I went to with my Grandmother Maxwell was built during 1903–4. It had 605 members, the History says, and the value of the church property, including the parsonage, was $29,000. Toward the end of the account, which takes up a little more than a page, I was pleased to come upon this elegiac sentence: “Among those who did much for the church were John A. Simpson, R. C. Maxwell, H. O. Merry, and L. P. Hanger; they merit remembrance.”

  My Grandfather Maxwell taught school for the first six years after he married. During the next five he farmed. My Great-grandfather Turley had nine children who survived to maturity, and he gave each of them eighty acres of land. The farm he gave my grandmother was three miles from Lincoln. After working in the fields all day, my grandfather saddled the poor horse and rode into town and read law in the office of the most eminent member of the local bar, a man who made a practice of taking on certain odd cases that his confreres shied away from. A farmer accused of having carnal knowledge of his daughter or of buggering his animals would be defended by him, cleared, and relieved of his farm by way of legal payment. My grandfather also had a year of law school; there was a brand-new university in Lincoln—one not very large Victorian brick building is what it amounted to physically—and he went there. He was admitted to the bar in the spring of 1877, and then spent a year in the office of my maternal grandfather. As a child I used to think how nice it would have been if my two grandfathers had been law partners, but this was not a very sensible idea. They were both ardent Republicans, and honest men, and so far as I know, much esteemed by all who knew them, but my Grandfather Blinn was a member of the Buttercup Hunting and Fishing Club, he kept whiskey in the sideboard of the dining room, and it is quite possible he was a Unitarian. As partners, he and my Grandfather Maxwell could only have got on one another’s nerves. But they were joined, after a fashion, in my older brother, who was given the first name of one and the middle name of the other,* and from an early age felt obliged to become a lawyer because his two grandfathers were.

  In 1878, the year that my Grandfather Maxwell hung out his shingle, the town of Lincoln had roughly six thousand inhabitants, and it was already well-supplied with lawyers, but what with one thing and another he managed. He was elected city attorney during the first year of his practice. At various times he was elected or appointed to the offices of public administrator of Logan County, township collector, township clerk, and justice of the peace. I have been told by an elderly member of the profession that he was a very competent office lawyer—that is, he examined abstracts, wrote wills, and was engaged in the probate practice.

  They lived in a little one-story house on Pekin Street, directly behind the jail.

  Though Alexander Campbell looked with disfavor on secret and fraternal orders, believing that the church was intended to do every good thing these societies could possibly do, my grandfather belonged to Glendower Lodge No. 45 of the Knights of Pythias, Lincoln Chapter No. 147, Lincoln Council No. 83, Constantine Commandery No. 51—all in Lincoln. He was also a member of the Mohammed Temple Ancient Arabic Order Noble Mystic Shriners, and a thirty-third degree Mason, and member of the Oriental Consistory at Peoria, which was sixty miles away—in those days a considerable train ride from Lincoln. Though the number of lodges seems excessive now, it probably wasn’t considered so then.

  When my grandfather stopped farming and moved into town, he also moved into the middle class, taking his family with him. What this meant was that to their other concerns a new one was added—the concern for respectability—which I do not suppose was of much interest to those men and women who walked six or seven miles to hear somebody preach, and found their way home by the light of a piece of burning hickory bark. On Sunday morning, my grandmother kept my grandfather waiting while she ran a couple of long hatpins through her hat and adjusted her veil and buttoned her gloves. And then, with the church bells ringing, they walked a block and a half to the Christian church. Sitting in her pew, my grandmother did not give her attention so completely to the sermon that she didn’t notice what Mrs. Spitley and Mrs. Holton were wearing. Certain things were necessary or she couldn’t hold her head up.

  In a place where everybody’s life was an open book, my grandfather was counted among the respectable. He paid his bills as promptly as he was able, his four children were properly fed and clothed and educated, and there was some but apparently not very much money left over at the end of the week to put in the bank or the collection plate. The older children were born on that eighty-acre farm. My father was born in town.

  In my grandfather’s upright nature there was a vein of rigidity—of harshness even—that was no doubt inherited from his Scottish forebears. When my father was a little boy, he longed for a pair of copper-toed boots, such as he had seen other boys wear at school. My grandfather tried to discourage him, but my father kept on talking about those boots until he got them. They proved to be extremely uncomfortable, just as my grandfather had said, and after two or three days he hated the sight of them, but my grandfather made him wear them out. It is not something my father would have done to me.

  For twenty years, my grandfather was an elder of the Christian church in Lincoln, and I have no doubt that the controversies that the Disciples of Christ were expending so much heat and energy on during this period were all thrashed out at the family dinner table, especially when some visiting preacher was bedded down on the couch in the parlor. It is questionable whether my Aunt Bert, with her delight in ribbons and bows, heard a word of what was said, but my father could not withdraw his attention so easily, and what he heard created a lasting impatience. His bent was toward whatever is practical, and he was neither persuaded by nor interested in the argument that because the church in Corinth in St. Paul’s time did not have an organ, it could not be used in the Christian church in Lincoln. My grandmother, having no mind to speak of, bypassed all questions of doctrine and went right to the heart of the religion. She never stopped talking about immersion, or thinking about it. She kept track of who was and who wasn’t. She had the makings of an evangelist.

  My grandmother did not like being stuck away in that little one-story house behind the jail, and she nagged at my grandfather to sell the farm her father had given her and use the money to build a house in town. My grandfather did not think very much of this idea, but my grandmother was a mulish woman, though dear, and very little ever came of arguing with her. The land, after all, was hers. In the end, he did what she wanted.

  All Middle Western houses of that period were dark and gloomy, and I have no reason to think that the house my grandparents built on Kickapoo Stree
t was an exception. I used to ride past it sometimes on my bicycle, but I was never in it. It was large, for that time and that place, with a round tower on one corner and spiderwebs of carpenter’s lace all around and even under the various porches. From an old photograph, it appears that the carpenter’s lace and the lace curtains in the bay window were almost identical. Driving past the house when he was an old man, my father shook his head and remarked sadly, “That fretwork cost eighty acres of the finest land in Logan County!”

  Without the income from the farm, and with four children to educate, my grandparents found they were living beyond their means. My father, lying in bed upstairs, heard his father and mother quarreling over money. It was the barbaric custom for dry goods stores, and no doubt other stores as well, to bill their customers annually. Night after night, all through the month of January, my Grandfather Maxwell walked the floor with the shocking and interminable statement from A. C. Boyd in his hand. “This item of five yards dress material,” he would begin, as if he had my grandmother on the witness stand. “What kind of dress material?” My grandmother didn’t remember what dress material she had charged on the twelfth of April of the year before. My grandfather didn’t see why she wouldn’t remember. “On the twenty-second you charged seven spools of cotton thread. And ten days later there’s another charge for ten more. And seven yards of silk braid … Does it ever occur to you when you are charging all these things that a day will come when they have to be paid for?” Though there were several possible answers to this question, my grandmother was not the woman to give voice to them. Instead she burst into tears, and perhaps wished they were back in that little house behind the jail. The next night it would begin all over again.

  The house on Kickapoo Street passed out of the family before I was born, but my Aunt Annette spent a night there when she was a young woman and was outraged by an electric bell that rang loudly all through the upstairs when it was time to get up, and again when it was time to come hurrying to the table, where, to her surprise, they had steak for breakfast. Her mother—my Grandmother Blinn—was a Kentuckian, and though she believed in the Life Hereafter, she did everything in her power to make life on this earth agreeable to her family and herself. When her daughters married and started raising a family, all it meant, really, was adding more leaves to the dining room table. And people were never hurried to it; they came when they were ready. It has occurred to me that the electric bell may have served a purpose my Aunt Annette was not aware of—that it was a piece of ritual magic, intended to keep disaster away from the house. Other men may think, if they choose, that man is not born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward; orphans know better.

  In his old age my father enchanted the Rotary Club with a speech which he titled “Memories of Lincoln Way Back When.” Being rather proud of this success, he presented me with a carbon copy of the notes he spoke from.

  He began by describing the town in his boyhood in the 1880’s—the, for the most part, unpaved streets, the original courthouse and the hitching posts all around the courthouse square, the horse fountains, the volunteer fire department, the coal-oil lamps in the houses, and the outside privies. At this time the town of Lincoln was less than forty years old. Up and down the streets of the happy past my father went, locating defunct hotels and dancing academies, banks that had changed their names or failed, dry goods stores, livery stables, boarding houses, barber shops (colored and white), saloons, meat markets, jewelers, gents’ furnishings, greenhouses, ice houses, brickyards and coal mines, the collar factory and the shooting gallery. He mentioned long-dead doctors and dentists, lawyers and judges, bankers and newspaper editors, the main Negro families of the town, the major social events of the years, the sports and the sporting characters. But not one church did he name, and not one preacher.

  * He was almost never called by either name. When he was a baby someone started calling him “Happy”—my Aunt Bert said she named him after Happy Hooligan in the funny papers; my Aunt Annette, my mother’s younger sister, says it was because he had such a happy disposition. When two family stories do not agree, I tend to believe both of them. In any case, the name stuck.

  9

  Nothing as splendid as the World’s Columbian Exposition ever had happened in the Middle West before or has since. “For the first time cosmopolitanism visited the western world,” Louis B. Fuller wrote; “for the first time woman publicly came into her own, for the first time on a grand scale, art was made vitally manifest to the American consciousness.” And Theodore Dreiser wrote: “All at once and out of nothing, in this dingy city of six or seven hundred thousand which but a few years before had been a wilderness of wet grass and mud flats, and by this lake which but a hundred years before was but a lone silent waste, had now been reared this vast and harmonious collection of perfectly constructed and showy buildings, containing in their delightful interiors, the artistic, mechanical and scientific achievements of the world.”

  If only these showy buildings had been made of white marble—but they were made of staff, a material that looked like marble and was, unfortunately, impermanent. One building, the Palace of Fine Arts, was rebuilt afterwards in marble and still stands, in Jackson Park. Everything else is gone without a trace. The huge exhibition buildings, the thousands of statues proved to be no more substantial than the jets of the fountains and the shafts of colored light. But for a whole generation of Americans who had been trying to make up their minds between Victorian Gothic and Romanesque, an image was set, and they went about reproducing on a smaller scale in every town and city of the country the neoclassical style of those white buildings.

  At some point in the summer of 1893 my Grandfather Maxwell took his family to Chicago. My father was fifteen, my Aunt Bert was seventeen, my Aunt Maybel nineteen, and my Uncle Charlie twenty-one. Putting various old photographs together, I see them moving in the immense crowd, clutching at each other’s hand or coatsleeve, lest they be separated—one eye out for purse-snatchers and pickpockets and the other for the artistic, mechanical, and scientific achievements of the world—and now and then, to their infinite amazement, coming face to face with somebody from home.

  Later my grandparents went again. In my grandmother’s scrapbook there is a postcard of the Electrical Building, in color. It is impossible to tell who the card is addressed to, my grandmother’s flour-and-water paste having absorbed the writing on the other side. The message is on the front, in pencil, in my grandfather’s even hand:

  Mecca Hotel. Chicago, Illinois, 9.22.93

  We are at the Mecca and having a nice time. Uncle Will and Aunt Etta Uncle Joe and Aunt Mary and Mr. Matthewson and Mrs. Matthewson are here. We go to the fair in day time and eat breakfast and supper and spend the evening together very pleasantly. We will leave here Sunday night for home. Weather cool. Hope you will watch after the house closely.

  Your father,

  Robt C. Maxwell

  My guess is that it was addressed to my Uncle Charlie, who had just graduated from college with high honors and was reading law in his father’s office.

  With me, education and the formation of moral character are identical expressions. The words are Alexander Campbell’s. The Disciples founded many schools here and there around the country, and my Grandfather Maxwell was a trustee of Eureka College, which took its ridiculous name from the small town where it was located. He sent all four of his children there. My father always spoke slightingly of it; he would have preferred to go to the University of Illinois. From my Aunt Maybel’s references to it you would have thought that Eureka College was the only institution of higher learning. Her mind expressed itself most naturally in mythological terms, and there was usually just one of everything. While she was a student at Eureka College she was the victim of an injustice that still rankled, and that she would tell about every time the subject of Eureka College came up. If my father and my Aunt Bert were present, they would join in, because the story was common property. When my Uncle Charlie was a freshman, one o
f his professors mispronounced a word in class and my Uncle Charlie set him straight on it. Professor Hieronymous didn’t forgive him for this, nor did he forgive my Aunt Maybel, when she came along two years later; nor my Aunt Bert, two years after that; nor my father. He flunked all four of them because my Uncle Charlie corrected him on the pronunciation of a word. Judging by the photographs of my father taken in college, he did not let this blight his life.