Then he strolled out. His walk took him past the little church his mother attended, down at the edge of the mill village. He heard singing in there and had heard singing in other churches as he came through town. How dull, dragging and heavy the singing was! Evidently the people in Langdon didn’t much enjoy their God. They did not give themselves to God with joy as did the Negroes. In Main Street the stores were all closed. Even the drug stores, where Coca Cola, that universal drink of the South, could be had, were closed. The men of the town would get their cokes after church. The drug stores would open then to let them coke up. Red had passed the town jail, standing back of the court house. There were some young moonshiners from the North Georgia hills lodged in there and they were also singing. They sang a ballad:
Don’t you know I’m a traveling man?
God knows I’m a traveling man.
Fresh young voices singing with delight in the song. In the mill village that lay just outside the corporation limits, a few young men and women walked about or sat in groups in the little porches before the houses. They were dressed in their Sunday best, the girls in bright colors. Although he was working in the mill, they all knew Red was not one of themselves. There was the mill village and then the mill, with its mill yard. There was a high wire fence about the mill yard. You went in, from the village, through a gate.
There was always a man at the gate, an old man with a lame foot who recognized Red but would not let him into the mill yard. “What do you want in there for?” he asked. Red did not know. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I was just looking.” He had just come out for a walk. Was he becoming fascinated by the mill? Like other young men, he hated the peculiar deadness of American towns on Sundays. He wished the mill team he had joined had a ball game on for the afternoon, but he knew also that Tom Shaw would not have permitted it. The mill, when it was running, all the machinery flying, was something. The man at the gate looked at Red without smiling and he walked away. He followed a high wire fence around the mill yard and got down to the river bank. The railroad that came to Langdon followed the river and there was a spur running into the mill yard. Red did not know why he was there. It may have been that he had left home because he knew that when his mother returned from church he would feel guilty for not having gone with her.
There were a few poor white families in town, families of laborers, who went to the same church his mother did. There was another Methodist church in the upper end of the town and there was a Negro Methodist church. Tom Shaw, president of the mill, was a Presbyterian.
There was a Presbyterian church and a Baptist church. There were Negro churches, little sects of Negroes too. There were no Catholics in Langdon. After the World War the Ku Klux Klan was strong there.
Some of the mill boys at Langdon had organized a baseball team. The question had come up in town: “Is Red Oliver going to play with them?” There was a town team. It was made up of young men of the town, a clerk in a store, a man who worked in the post office, a young doctor and others. The young doctor came to Red. “I see,” he said, “that you have got a job in the mill. Are you going to play on the mill team?” He had smiled when he said that. “I suppose you’ll have to if you want to hold your job, eh?” He didn’t say that. There was a new preacher, a young Presbyterian preacher, just come to town, who, if it came to a pinch, could take Red’s place on the town team. The mill team and the town team did not play each other. The mill team played other mill teams from other Georgia and South Carolina towns where there were mills and the team of the town played town teams from nearby towns. For the town team to have played the mill boys would have been almost like playing niggers. They wouldn’t have said that, but they felt it. There was a way in which they got across to Red what they felt. He knew.
That young preacher could take Red’s place on the town team. He seemed a bright alert young fellow. He was prematurely bald. He had played baseball in college.
Such a young fellow, coming to a town, to be a preacher. Red was curious about him. He wasn’t much like the revivalist who had converted Red’s mother or like the one who had once helped Tom Shaw sell stock in the mill. This one was more like Red himself. He had been to college and had read books. It was his aim to be a cultured young man.
Red didn’t know whether or not he wanted that. At that time he did not know what he did want. He had always felt a bit lonely and apart in Langdon, perhaps because of the attitude of the town toward his mother and his father; and after he went to work in the mill, the feeling grew.
The young preacher was a man intent on getting into the life of Langdon. Although he did not approve of the Ku Klux Klan he said nothing publicly against it. None of the preachers in Langdon did. It was said some of the prominent men of the town, prominent in the churches, were in the Klan. The young preacher spoke against it in private, to two or three men he knew well. “I believe a man should give himself to service not to violence,” he said. “That’s what I want to do.” He had joined an organization in Langdon called the “Kiwanis Club.” Tom Shaw belonged to it although he seldom went. At Christmas time, when presents had to be found for children of poor families of the town, the young preacher raced about, getting the presents. There had been something rather ugly in town, during the first year Red was in the North, while he was away at college. There was a man in town who was suspected.
He was a young salesman who took subscriptions for a Southern woman’s magazine.
It was said that he...
There was a young white girl of the town, a regular slut, people said.
The young subscription solicitor, like Red’s father, was given to drink. When he had been drinking he became quarrelsome. First it was said that he beat his wife when he was drunk. People heard her crying in her house in the night. Then he was said to have been seen going to the house of that woman. The woman, who had got such a bad reputation, lived with her mother in a little frame house, just off Main Street, in the lower end of town, the end of town where the cheaper stores and the stores patronized by Negroes were located. It was said her mother sold drinks.
The young solicitor was seen going in and out of the place. He had three children. He went there and then went home to beat his wife. Some men in masks went and got him one night. They got also the young girl he was with and they were both taken to a lonely road, some miles from town, and tied to trees. They were lashed with whips. The woman had been taken, clad only in a thin gown, and when the two people had been thoroughly whipped, the man was turned loose, to make his way as best he could to town. The woman, almost naked now, her thin dress torn and shredded, herself white and silent, had been taken to the front door of her mother’s house and pushed out of a car. How she had screamed! “The bitch!” The man had taken it in grim silence. There was some fear the girl might die but she got well. There had been an effort made to find and whip the mother also, but she had disappeared. Afterwards she reappeared and continued to sell drinks to the men of the town and her daughter continued to see men. It was said that more men than ever went there. The young subscription solicitor, who had a car, got his wife and children and drove away. He did not even return to get his furniture and was never seen again in Langdon. When this event had occurred, the young Presbyterian preacher had just arrived in town. There was an Atlanta newspaper that took the matter up. A reporter came to Langdon to interview several prominent men. Among others he went to the young preacher.
He spoke to him in the street in front of a drug store and there were several men standing about. “They got what they deserved,” most of the Langdon men said. “I wasn’t there but I wish I had been,” the druggist said. Some one in the crowd whispered, “There are other men in this town who should long ago have had that happen to them.”
“What about George Ricard and that woman of his... you know the one I mean.” The reporter for the Atlanta paper did not hear the words. He kept boring away at the young preacher. “What do you think?” he asked. “What do you think?”
> “I think that none of the better men of the town could have been in it at all,” the preacher said.
“But what do you think of the idea back of it? What do you think of that?”
“You wait a minute,” the young preacher said. “I’ll be right back,” he said. He went into the drug store but did not come out. He was unmarried and kept his car in a garage in an alleyway. He got into his car and drove out of town. That evening he phoned to the house at which he boarded. “I won’t be at home to-night,” he said. He said he was with a sick woman and was afraid the sick woman might die in the night. “She might need a spiritual adviser,” he said. He thought he had better stay for the night.
It was a little strange, Red Oliver thought, to find the mill at Langdon so silent on Sunday. It did not seem like the same mill. That Sunday when he went down there, he had been working in the mill for some weeks. The young Presbyterian preacher had also asked him about playing on the mill team. That had happened shortly after Red went to the mill to work. The preacher knew about Red’s mother going to the church where mostly mill people went. He felt sorry for Red. His own father, in another Southern town, hadn’t been counted among the best people. He had kept a little store where Negroes traded. The preacher had worked his own way through school. “I’m nothing beside you as a player,” he said to Red. He asked a question, “Have you affiliated with any church?” Red said he hadn’t. “Well, you are welcome to come and worship with us.”
The mill boys did not mention the matter of Red’s playing with them for a week or two after he went to the mill to work, and then, as he knew Red had quit playing on the town team, a young foreman spoke to him. “Are you going to play on the team here at the mill?” he asked. The question was asked tentatively. Some of the members of the team had spoken to the foreman. He was a young mill man, from a mill family, who had begun to work his way up. It may be that such a one, who works his way up, must always have respect in him. That one had great respect for the better people of Langdon. After all, if Red’s father hadn’t been such a big man in town, his grandfather had. Every one respected him.
Old Doctor Oliver had been a surgeon in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. It was said he was a relative of that Alexander Stevenson who was Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy. “The boys don’t play very well,” the foreman said to Red. Red had been a star player on the town’s high school and had already attracted notice on the freshman team in college.
“Our boys don’t play very well.”
The young foreman, although Red was just a common workman in the shop under him... Red had begun work in the mill by being a sweeper... he swept floors... the young foreman was certainly respectful enough. “If you would like to play.... The boys would be grateful to you. They’d appreciate it.” It was as though he had said: “You’ll be doing them a kindness.” For some reason something in the man’s voice made Red squirm.
“Sure,” he said.
Just the same... that time Red took the walk on Sunday and visited the silent mill, walking through the mill village... it was in the late morning... people would be out of church soon... they would be going to Sunday dinners.
To be on a baseball team, with the men of the mill, was one thing. Going to that church with his mother was another.
He had gone to church with his mother several times. After all, he went few enough places with her. Since that time, after her conversion, when he heard her praying in the house, he had continually wanted something for her she did not seem to have, never had got out of life.
Did she get something out of religion? After her first excitement, the revivalist preacher coming to the Oliver house to pray with her, Red had not heard her praying aloud any more. She went determinedly to church twice every Sunday and to prayer meetings during the week. In the church she sat always in one place. She sat alone. The members of the church often got excited during the ceremonies. There were low muttered words coming from them. This happened particularly during prayers. The minister, a small man with a red face, stood up before the people and closed his eyes. He prayed loudly. “Oh, Lord, give us contrite hearts. Keep us humble.”
Nearly all the people of the congregation were older mill people. Red thought they were surely humble enough... “Yes, Lord. Amen. Help us, Lord,” low voices said. The voices came from the audience. Sometimes a member of the church was asked to lead in the prayer. Red’s mother wasn’t asked. No words came from her. She bowed her shoulders and kept looking at the floor. Red, who had come to church with her, not because he wanted to come but because he had felt guilty, seeing her always going off to church alone, thought he saw her shoulders tremble. As for himself, he did not know what to do. The first time he went with his mother, and when the time of prayer came, he bowed his head as she did and the next time he sat with head held straight up. “I’ve no right to pretend I am feeling humble or being religious when I’m not,” he thought.
Red went down past the mill and sat on the railroad tracks. There was a steep bank leading down to the river and some trees grew at the river’s edge. Two Negro men were fishing, having hid out of sight under the steep bank to fish on Sunday. They paid no attention to Red, perhaps did not see him. There was a small tree between him and the fishermen. He sat on the projecting end of a railroad tie.
He did not go home to dinner that day. He had got into a queer position in the town and had begun to feel it sharply, half separated from the life of the other young men of his own age, among whom he had once been quite popular, and he was not admitted really to the lives of the workers in the mill. Did he want admission among them?
The mill boys with whom he played baseball were nice enough. All of the workers in the mill treated him all right, as for that matter did the people of the town. “What am I kicking about?” he asked himself that Sunday. Sometimes the team from the mill went in a bus on a Saturday afternoon to play at another town with another mill team and Red went with them. When he made a good play or got a good hit the young men of his own team clapped their hands and shouted with delight. “Good,” they cried. There was no doubt his presence had strengthened the team.
Just the same, when after the game they were driving home... they left Red sitting alone at one end of the bus, hired for the occasion, as his mother sat alone in her church, and did not address him directly. Occasionally, when he was walking down to the mill in the early morning or was leaving it at night, he walked as far as the mill village with some man or with a little group of men. They had been talking freely until he had joined them and then, suddenly, the talk stopped. Words seemed to freeze on the men’s lips.
With the girls in the mill it was, Red thought, somewhat better. Now and then one of the girls gave him the eye. He did not talk much with them that first summer. “I wonder if my going to the mill to work is something like mother’s joining the church?” he thought. He might have asked for a job in the mill office. Most of the people of the town who worked in the mill did work in the office. When there was a ball game they came to see it but did not play. Red hadn’t wanted such a job. He didn’t know why.
Had there always been something in the attitude of the town toward him, because of his mother?
There had been that mystery about his father. Red dids not know that story. When he was playing ball on the high school team, during his last year in high school he had slid into second base and had accidentally cut a player of the opposing team with his spikes. He was a high school player from a nearby town. He grew angry. “That’s nigger stuff,” he said angrily to Red. He had started toward Red as if he wanted to fight. Red had tried to apologize. “What do you mean ‘nigger stuff’?” he asked.
“Oh, I guess you know,” the boy said. That was all. There had been nothing more said. Some other players came rushing up. The incident was forgotten. Once, standing in a store, he had overheard some men talking of his father. “He’s that kind,” a voice said, speaking of Doctor Oliver.
“He likes the low-grade o
nes, the low-grade whites and the black ones.” That had been all. Red was a young boy then. The men had not seen him standing in the store and he had gone out without being seen. On the Sunday when he was sitting on the railroad tracks, lost in thought, he remembered the chance remark heard long ago. He remembered how angry he had been. What had they meant in speaking thus of his father? He had been thoughtful and rather upset when he went to bed on the night after the incident, but later he had forgotten it. Now it came back.
Perhaps Red was merely having a fit of the blues. Young men have the blues as well as older men. He hated going home. A freight train came along and he went to lie on some long grass on the incline leading down to the stream. He was quite hidden now. The Negro fishermen went away and, during the afternoon, some young men from the mill village came down to the river to swim. Two of them played about for a long time. They dressed and went away.
It was growing late in the afternoon. What a queer day it had been for Red! A group of young girls, also from the mill village, walked along the tracks. They were laughing and talking. Two of them were quite pretty girls, Red thought. Many of the older people, who had been working in the mill for years, were not very strong and a good many of the children were delicate and sickly. People in town said it was because they did not know how to take care of themselves. “The mothers do not know how to take care of their babies. They are ignorant,” the people of Langdon said.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 145
