Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Things had happened. Dick’s father went to a nearby city and bought some niggers, a pair of them, both over sixty. The old nigger woman had no teeth and her old nigger man had a bad leg. He just could hobble about.

  Why bad Thad Moorehead bought the pair? Well, the man who owned them was broke and wanted them to have a home. Thad Moorehead had bought them because he was a Moorehead. He got the two of them for a hundred dollars. It was a Moorehead kind of thing to do, buying such niggers.

  The old nigger man was really a rascal. No Uncle Toms Cabin monkey business about him. He had been owned far South, in a half dozen places, and had always managed to keep himself attached to some negro woman who stole for him, had children by him, took care of him. In the Far South, when he was owned down there on a sugar plantation, he had made himself a set of reed pipes and could play. It was the playing of the pipes that had attracted Thad Moorehead.

  Too many of that kind of niggers about.

  When Dick’s father got the old couple home they could do little enough work. The woman helped some in the kitchen and the man made a pretense of working with the Moorehead boys in the fields.

  The old black man told stories, he played his pipes and Thad Moorehead listened. Finding himself a shady place under a tree at the edge of a field the old rascally black got out his pipes and played or-he sang songs. One of the Moorehead boys was superintending the work in the field and a Moorehead is a Moorehead. The work went to pieces. All gathered about.

  The old black could keep it up all day and all night. Tales of strange places, of the Far South, of the sugar plantations, the big cotton fields, of the time when he was leased out by his owner to be a hand on a river steamer on the Mississippi. After the talk a turn on the pipes. Sweet strange music making echoes in the woods at the edge of the field, creeping up the nearby hillside. It fairly made the birds stop singing in envy sometimes. Strange that an old man could be so wicked and make such sweet heavenly sounds. It made you doubt the value of goodness, that sort of thing. Not strange though that an old black woman liked her nigger man, stuck to him. The trouble was [that] all the Mooreheads listened, letting the work go. Always too many of that kind of niggers around. Thanks be, a horse can’t tell tales, a cow can’t play pipes when she should be giving milk.

  You pay less for a cow or a good horse and a cow or a horse can’t tell strange tales of far places, can’t tell stories to young men when they should be plowing corn or chopping tobacco, can’t make music on reed pipes that will make you forget any kind of work should ever be done.

  When Dick Moorehead had made up his mind he wanted to strike out for himself old Thad had simply sold a few [more] acres of land to give him his start. Dick had put in a few years as an apprentice in a harness shop in a nearby town and then the old man had produced the money. “I think you had better go up North, it’s a more enterprising place,” he said.

  Enterprising indeed. Dick had tried to be enterprising. Up North, specially where [abolitionists] have come in, they would never put up with wasteful niggers. Suppose an old nigger man can play the pipes until it makes you sad and glad and careless about getting work done. Better let music alone. [You can get the same thing on a talking machine nowdays.] [It’s the devil’s business.] Enterprise is enterprise.

  Dick was the sort who turn out to believe what the people about him believe. In the Ohio town Uncle Toms Cabin was being read. Sometimes he thought of the blacks at home and smiled in secret.

  “I’ve got into a place where people are against shiftlessness. The niggers are responsible.” He began to hate slavery now. “This is a new century, new times. The South is too pigheaded.”

  Being enterprising’ in business, the retail kind anyway, was simply standing in with [the] people. You had to stand in with [the] people to get them into your shop. If you are a Southerner in a Northern community and go over to their point of view you are stronger with them than you would be if you were born a Northerner. There is more joy in Heaven over one sinner, etc.

  How could Dick tell he was himself a player of the pipes?

  Blow your reed pipes, get a woman to take care of your children — if you are unfortunate enough to have any — tell tales, go with the crowd.

  Dick went over bang. His popularity in the Ohio community went up to boiling point. Everyone wanted to buy him drinks at the bar, in the evening his shop was full of men. Now Jeff Davis, Stevenson of Georgia and others were making fiery speeches in Congress, making threats. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was running for president. The Democrats were all split up, had put three tickets in the field. The fools!

  Dick even joined the crowd who were running off niggers at night. If you go in for a thing you might as well go the whole hog and anyway running off niggers was half the fun of the game. It was against the law for one thing — against the law and all the good law-abiding citizens, the very best in fact, going into it.

  Fun, eh? Plenty of excitement. They slipped the niggers across the Ohio River at night in a row boat. A lot of them not of much account to their owners if they had stayed South, Dick thought. Well, he was no special judge of good niggers. The kind his father had at home weren’t of much account. “If you want to make niggers pay you got to own land down in Alabama or Mississippi. Then you put a good overseer in charge and pretty much keep out of the fields yourself.” A lot of the best overseers were Northern men, nigger drivers. “Small owners got all the worst of it in the slavery business. You owned four or five or even a dozen niggers and got acquainted with them. The worst [thing] was that they got acquainted with you, knew your weaknesses, knew how to work you.” More niggers like that old reed-blower all through the South in slavery days than the North ever dreamed of. They got through life pretty easy, flattered their masters, flattered the women and the children. “A shrewd canny lot, the niggers of the South,” Dick thought.

  Dick kept smiling to himself, helping run niggers off at night, Northern Methodist and Baptist preachers in the party, superintendents of Sunday schools, earnest men. When they got their niggers across the river wagons were waiting. Sometimes the niggers were made to lie on the wagon beds and straw was piled on them. There was a husky young wench with two children, worth about eighteen hundred dollars in Alabama — the three of them — and a negro preacher who wanted to begin shouting until Dick made him shut up. “Shut up, nigger,” he growled and the tone of his voice shocked some of the members of the party.

  Dick did not do much thinking. They took the runaway niggers to some farm house, usually on a side road, and after feeding hid them in a barn. The next night they would be shoved on their way, toward Zanesville, Ohio, toward a distant place called Oberlin, Ohio, places where the abolitionists were thick. “Damn an abolitionist anyway.” They were bound to raise hell for Dick.

  Sometimes the parties running the escaped niggers off had to hide in the woods. The next town to the west was as strong in its Southern feeling as Dick’s town was for abolition. The citizens of the two towns hated each other and the neighboring town got up parties to catch the nigger runners. Dick would have been among them had he happened to settle in that town. It was a game for them too. None of the crowd owned any slaves. Sometimes shots were fired but no one in either of the towns ever got hit.

  For Dick it was, for the time, fun, excitement. His getting to the front in the abolitionists ranks made him a marked man, an outstanding figure. He never wrote letters home and his father of course knew nothing of what he was doing. Like everyone else he did not think war would really come and if it did what of it? The North thought it could lick the South in sixty days. The South thought it would take them thirty days to whip the North. “The Union must and will be preserved,” said Lincoln, who had been elected president. That seemed good sense anyway. He was a backwoods fellow, that Lincoln. People in the know said he was tall and gawky, a regular country man. The smart fellows down East would handle him all right. When it came to a showdown the South would give in or the North would.

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p; Dick went sometimes to see the runaway niggers hidden in the barns at night. The other white men were in the farm house and he was alone with two or three blacks. He stood over them, looking down. It’s the South’s way. There were a few words passed. The niggers knew he was [a] Southern[er] all right. Something in his tone told them. He thought of what he had heard his father say. “For the smaller whites, the common white farmers in the South, it would have been better had there never been any slavery, never any blacks.” What happened, when you had them around, was that you got the notion into your head you didn’t have to work. Dick’s father had seven strong sons before his wife died. They were a shiftless lot, really. Dick himself was the only one who had any enterprise, had ever wanted to get out. Had there never been any niggers he and all of his brothers might have been taught to work, the Moorehead place in North Carolina might have amounted to something.

  Abolition, eh? If abolition could only abolish. A war wouldn’t make any deep essential difference in the attitude of the whites toward the blacks. Any black man or woman would lie to a white man or woman. He made the niggers in the bam tell him why they had run away. They lied of course. He laughed and went back to the house. If the war came his father and his brothers would get in on the Southern side [as casually as he would get in on the Northern side]. What did they care about slavery? They really cared about the way the Northerners talked. The North cared about the way the South talked. Both sides sent talkers to Congress. That was natural. Dick was a talker himself, an adventurer.

  And then the war came and Dick Moorehead, Tar’s father, got in. He was made a captain and wore a sword. Could he resist that? Not Dick.

  He went south, to Middle Tennessee, was in Rosecrans’ army and then later in Grant’s. His harness shop had been sold. When he paid his debts there wasn’t much left. He had set ’em up too often at the tavern, during the exciting days when enlistment was going on.

  What fun, during enlistment, what excitement. Women scurrying about, men and boys scurrying about. They were grand days for Dick. He was the town’s hero. You don’t get many such chances in life if you are not born a money-maker and can’t pay to get yourself into a prominent position. In times of peace you just go along, telling stories, drinking with other men at the bar, spending your money for a good suit of clothes and a heavy silver watch, letting your mustache grow, stroking it, talking when some other man wants to talk as much as you do. He may be a better talker, at that.

  At night sometimes, during the excitement, Dick thought of his brothers, going into the Southern army, much in the spirit in which he had gone in with the North. They would hear speeches, the women of the neighborhood would be holding meetings. How could they stay out? They would go in to hold on to such fellows as that shiftless old black, playing his reed pipes, singing his songs, lying about his past, entertaining the whites so he wouldn’t have to work. Dick and his brothers might be shooting at each other someday. He refused to think of that side of the matter. The thought came only at night. He had been made a captain and wore a sword.

  One day a chance came to distinguish himself. The Northerners, among whom he lived, who were his fellows now, were great rifle shooters. They called themselves “the squirrel shooters of Ohio,” bragged a lot of what they would do when they drew a bead on a Reb. During the time when the companies were being formed they held shooting matches.

  It was all the go. The men went to the edge of a field near town and fastened a small target to a tree. They stood off an unbelievable distance and nearly every man hit the target. If they did not hit the center of the target they at least made the bullets do what they called “biting paper.” Everyone had the illusion that wars are won by good shots.

  Dick yearned to shoot but did not dare. He had been elected captain of a company. “You be careful,” he told himself. One day when all the men had gone to the shooting ground he picked up a rifle. He had hunted some as a boy but not much, was never a good shot.

  Now he stood with the rifle in his hands. A small bird flew far up in the sky over the field. Quite casually he raised the rifle, took aim and fired, and the bird came down, almost at his feet. It had been shot cleanly, through the head. One of those strange accidents that get into stories but never happen in fact — when you want them to.

  Dick strutted out of the field and never went back. Things were on the wing for him, he was a hero already, before the war started.

  A marvelous shot, a captain. Already he had got his sword and had spurs fastened on his bootheels. When he walked through the streets of his town young women looked at him from behind window curtains. Almost every night there was a party at which he was the central figure.

  How was he to know that after the war he was to marry and have many children, that he would never be a hero again, that all the rest of his life he would have to build on these days, creating in fancy a thousand adventures that never happened.

  The race of the tale tellers is always an unhappy race but luckily they never find out how unhappy they are. They are always hoping somewhere they will find believers, living in that hope. It is in the blood.

  CHAPTER II

  FOR TAR MOOREHEAD life began with a procession of houses. They were at first very dim in his mind. They marched. Even when he grew to be a man the houses went across the walls of his fancy like soldiers in a dusty road. As when soldiers marched some few were sharply remembered.

  Houses were like people. An empty house was like an empty man or woman. There were houses cheaply built, thrown together. Others were carefully built and carefully lived in, having careful loving attention.

  When you went into an empty house the experience was sometimes terrifying. Voices kept calling. They must have been the voices of people who had lived there. Once, when Tar was a boy and had gone out of town alone to pick wild berries in the fields, he saw a small empty house, standing in a field of corn.

  Something induced him to go in. The doors were open and many panes had been broken in the windows. There was grey dust on the floor.

  A small bird, a swallow, had flown into the house and could not get out. In its terror it flew directly at Tar, at the doors, at the windows. Its body struck the window sash and its terror began to get into Tar’s blood. The terror had something to do with empty houses. Why should houses be empty? He ran away and at the edge of the field looked back and saw the swallow make its escape. It flew gladly, joyously, circling about over the field. Tar was half beside himself with desire to leave the ground and fly away through the air.

  To a mind like Tar’s — the truth always washed by the colors being brushed on by his fancy — houses in which he lived as a child could not be definitely placed. There was one house [he was quite sure] he had never lived in that was very clearly remembered. The house was low and long and a grocer with a large family lived in it. Back of the house, its roof almost touching the kitchen door, was a long low barn. Tar’s own family must have lived near this house and no doubt he wanted to live under its roof. A child is always wanting to try the experiment of living in some house other than his own.

  There was always laughter in the grocer’s house. In the evening songs were being sung. One of the grocer’s daughters thumped on a piano and the others danced. Also there was an abundance of food. Tar’s sharp little nose could smell it being cooked and served. Did not a grocer deal in foods? Why not an abundance of food in such a house? At night he lay in bed in his own house dreaming he had become the son of the grocer. The grocer was a strong-looking man with red cheeks and a white beard and when he laughed the sides of his house seemed to shake. In desperation Tar told himself that he did live in the house, that he was the grocer’s son. What he dreamed became, in fancy at least, a fact. It had happened that all of the grocer’s children were daughters. Why not a trade that would make everyone happy? Tar selected the grocer’s daughter who was to come and live in his house while he went to her house as a son. She was small and rather quiet. Perhaps she would not protest so much as the
others. She did not look like a protester.

  What a glorious dream! As the only son of the grocer Tar would be given the first choice of the food on the table, he would ride the grocer’s horse, sing songs, dance, be treated as a kind of prince. Already he had read or heard fairy tales in which such a prince as he wanted to be lived in such a place. The grocer’s house was his castle. So much laughter, so much song and food. What more could a boy want?

  Tar was the third child of a family of seven, five of whom were boys. From the beginning the family of Dick Moorehead, the ex-soldier, was on the march and no two were born in the same house.

  And what does not the house mean to the child? There should be a garden with flowers, vegetables and trees. Also there should be a barn with horses standing in stalls and back of the barn a vacant lot in which tall rank weeds grow. For older children in the house it is all very well, no doubt, to have an automobile but for the small child nothing will take the place of an old gentle black or grey horse. If the later and grown Tar Moorehead were to be born again surely he would have selected as parent a grocer with a fat jolly wife and he would not have wanted him to own a delivery truck. He would have wanted him to make his grocery deliveries with horses and in the morning Tar would have wanted older boys to come to the house and drive them away.

  Then Tar could run out of the house and touch each horse on the nose. The boys would give him presents, apples or bananas, things they had got at the store, and after that he would breakfast in state and go through the empty barn to play in the tall weeds. The weeds would grow high above his head and he could hide among them. There he could be a robber, a man making his fearless way through dark forests — anything he pleased.

  Other houses than the ones in which Tar’s family lived during his early childhood, houses often on the same street, had all of these things while his house always seemed to sit on a small grassless lot. In the barn back of the neighbor’s house there was a horse, often two horses, and a cow.