He had got himself into an absurd position. He knew that. If one of the strikers came forward now, out of the bridge, he would have to shoot him. Not very nice business, this shooting another man, perhaps an unarmed man. Well, a soldier’s a soldier. He had made a threat and the men of his company had heard the threat. A commander of soldiers cannot weaken. If one of the strikers did not come forward soon, did not call his bluff... if it was just a bluff... he would be all right. There was a little prayer in Ned. He wanted to call out to the strikers. “Don’t. Don’t do it,” he wanted to cry. He had begun to tremble a little. Was he growing ashamed?
It could last only a minute. If he won they would go back into their camp.
None of the strikers except the woman, Molly Seabright, knew Red Oliver. He had not seen her that morning in the mass of strikers but he had consciousness of her. “I’ll bet she’s here — looking.” She was standing in the crowd among the strikers, her hand gripping the coat of the communist leader who had wanted to do what Red was now doing. When Red Oliver stepped forward her hands dropped to her side. “God! Look!” she cried.
Red Oliver had stepped out from among the strikers. “Well, hell,” he thought. “What the hell,” he thought.
“I’m a silly ass,” he thought.
Ned Sawyer also thought. “What the hell,” he thought. “I’m a silly ass,” he thought.
“Why’d I want to get myself into such a hole? I’ve made an ass of myself.
“No brains. No brains.” He could have made his men rush forward — with fixed bayonets rushing the strikers. He could have overwhelmed them. They would have had to give way, go back to their camp. “A damn fool, that’s what I am,” he thought. He wanted to cry. He became furiously angry. His anger steadied him.
“The hell,” he thought, raising his revolver. The revolver spoke and Red Oliver pitched forward. Ned Sawyer appeared cool now. Afterwards, the little stationer of Birchfield said of him, “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “he was as cool as a cucumber.” Red Oliver had been killed at once. There was a moment of silence....
*
THERE was a cry from the lips of a woman. It came from Molly Seabright’s lips. The man shot and killed was that young communist she had, only a few hours before, found sitting quietly in a quiet wood far from this spot. She with a crowd of other men and women from among the workers surged forward. Ned Sawyer was knocked down. He was kicked. He was beaten. Afterwards it was said — it was sworn to by the stationer of Birchfield and by two deputy sheriffs — that the commander of the soldiers did not shoot on that morning until after the communists had attacked. There were other shots fired... some of the shots coming from among the strikers... many of the strikers were mountain men... they also carried guns....
The soldiers did not shoot. Ned Sawyer had kept his head. Although he had been knocked down and kicked he got to his feet. He made the soldiers club their guns. Many of the strikers were knocked down in the forward rush of the soldiers. Some were beaten and bruised. The strikers were driven back across the bridge and across the road to the camp and, later on that same morning, all three of the leaders, with several of the strikers, all those who had been beaten... who showed bruises and who had been such fools as to remain in the camp... many had fled into the hills back of the camp... were taken from the camp and thrown into the Birchfield jail and later they were given prison sentences. The body of Red Oliver was shipped home to his mother. He had a letter in his pocket, a letter from his friend Neil Bradley. It was a letter about Neil and his school-teacher love — an immoral letter. It was the end of the communist strike. A week later the mill at Birchfield was running again. There was no trouble getting plenty of workers.
*
RED OLIVER was buried in Langdon, Georgia. His mother had his body shipped home from Birchfield and many people of Langdon went to the funeral. The boy — the young man — remembered there as such a nice boy — a bright boy — a crack ball player — he, killed in a communist riot? “Why? What?”
Curiosity had taken the people of Langdon to Red’s funeral. They were puzzled.
“What, young Red Oliver a communist? I don’t believe it.”
Ethel Long, of Langdon, now Mrs. Tom Riddle, did not go to see Red buried. She sat at home. After her marriage she and her husband did not speak of Red and they did not speak of what had happened to him at Birchfield, in North Carolina, but one night, during the summer of 1931, a year after Red’s burial, when there was a sudden violent thunderstorm — just such a storm as the one on the night Red went to Ethel in the Langdon library — on that night Ethel took a drive. It was late at night and Tom Riddle had been at his office. When he came home the rain was beating against the walls of his house. He sat down to read his newspaper. No use turning on the radio. The radio is no good on such a night — too much static.
This happened — his wife was sitting near him and reading a book, but suddenly she got up. She went and got a raincoat. She had her own car now. When she had reached the door, Tom Riddle looked up and spoke. “What the hell, Ethel,” he said. She had gone pale and did not answer. Tom followed her to the door of the house and saw her run across the yard to the Riddle garage. The wind was threshing the branches of the trees overhead. It was raining violently. There was a sudden flare of lightning and the crash of thunder. Ethel backed her car out of the garage and drove away. The day had been fair. The top of the car had been put down. It was a sport model car.
Tom Riddle never did speak to his wife of what happened that night. Nothing much happened. Ethel drove her car at a furious speed out of the town and into the country.
The roach about Langdon, Georgia, are sand-clay roads. In fair weather they are smooth fine roads but in wet weather they are treacherous and uncertain. It was a wonder Ethel didn’t get killed. She drove her car furiously for miles along country roads. The storm continued. The car skidded in and out of the road. It was in the ditch. It leaped out. Once she just missed going over a bridge.
A kind of fury had seized her, as though she hated the car. She was soaking wet and her hair was in disorder. Was she trying to get killed? She did not know where she was. Once during the drive that night she saw a man walking in the road and carrying a lantern. He shouted at her. “Go to hell,” she screamed. It is a country of many poor little farm houses, shad s really, and now and then, when the lightning came, she could see a house close to the road. In the darkness there were a few distant lights, like stars fallen to earth. In one house near a town ten miles from Langdon, she heard a woman sinking.
She grew quiet and returned to her husband’s house at three in the morning. Tom Riddle had gone to bed. He was a shrewd capable man. He was awake but he said nothing. He and his wife slept in separate rooms. On that night he did not speak to her of her drive and afterwards he did not ask her where she had been.
THE END
Kit Brandon: A Portrait
Kit Brandon: A Portrait, first published in 1936, is the story of a tomboy (the eponymous Kit), who moves from the industrial regions of Appalachia to New York, where she becomes embroiled in the organised crime that has arisen after the imposition of Prohibition. The novel is written in the social realist tradition, unflinching in its portrayal of Kit’s upbringing, her subsequent criminal activities and her motivations. This uncompromising realism is also reflected in the novel’s vocabulary and style, which makes extensive use of Mid-Western speech patterns and idioms.
Cover of the first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A bird’s-eye-view of New York (taken during the construction of the Empire State Building) during the 1930s
TO
MARY PRATT EMMETT
CHAPTER ONE
KIT DIDN’T SPEAK much or often of her father. “Pap,” she sometimes called him and sometimes she spoke of him as “Father.” After all, Kit when I knew her had been made over in the big world. She had her knowing, her way of knowing, and it seemed to me more real than most of the ways of knowing most of us have.
And then, too, she was wanting something not culture, in the restricted sense. “The hell with that,” would have been her word.
Her story came to me in fragments. We were together for that purpose, that I might get her story as one more of the multitude of curious, terrible, silly, absorbing or wonderful stories all people could tell if they knew how.
“All right, then, I’ll tell you about when I was a young girl, if you’ll let me drive the car.”
This would have been when she came to me in the winter, that time when I was doing a magazine story about conditions in South Dakota. It was the year of the long terrible dry time in South Dakota — of the dust storms, whole farms buried under drifting sand and dust, fences buried — during the winter after that. Kit came up there by train, meeting me in a little town.
“You let me drive.
“I think better when I’m driving a car. I’ve driven so much.
“We lived, my father, my mother and my two younger sisters and my one younger brother, in a mountain cabin in East Tennessee. My father had a little farm up there and he was quite old, for getting married I mean, when he married my mother, who was pretty young. She was only seventeen when she married him and he must have been thirty-five.
“He had been married before but he didn’t have any kids by his first woman, so that didn’t count.
“And it’s mighty funny, when you think of it, that I haven’t ever had any kids, the chances I’ve taken and never been careful.
“So there was a little cabin and it was down under quite a big road going over a mountain. It was on a little road that was rutty and filled with stones.
“And we had a cow and a barn right close up against the little road and there was a horse.
“There were a good many horses. My father was always trading horses.”
Kit laughed — the queer cold little laugh that came only when she spoke of her father. She was a woman nearing thirty when we were together during the cold bleak days in the desolated land of South Dakota.
“He’d trade horses and trade horses. It was his fun. He loved it. It was his way of outwitting some man or being outwitted. He’d get on a bony old horse we had and ride off. It might be that some other man, a neighbor on another old horse, would go with him. He might be gone for days. He was horse trading. It was seeing people, other men, and being with them. It was drinking some. It was showing how smart you are.”
She described the house in which she lived as a child. It was a slovenly, dirty little house, as she described it and it was difficult to think of her as living there, she who had become what she had, really so slender and handsome, so upstanding, so curiously, in her own way, beautiful. She said she hadn’t, she supposed, known or noticed much when she was a little thing.
In spite of his poverty he always wore overalls, she said, even on Sundays, and they were patched and mended... he patched and mended them himself she said... in spite of everything, he did keep neat-looking.
He, the father, Kit explained, was a small, wiry man with black hair, very stiff. It stood up straight and hard on his head and he kept it cut close.... “Like the grass on the front yard of a house that is mowed every week,” she said, “and he was dark.
“He was like an Italian or maybe a Greek, not looking much like an American,” she thought.
“He had the whitest teeth you ever saw in a man’s head and they were all sound.”
She had lived in the mountain house through childhood and young girlhood and, in spite of her later adventures, the figure of the father had remained sharply in her mind. “You see, I am like my mother, tall and rather skinny”... she smiled, using the word “skinny” to describe her slender graceful body, calling attention to it thus, as all women love to do... “but I’m like my father too. I’m dark like him and I’ve got good teeth, and my hair’s black like his was.”
I got little pictures of her early life, as she talked, driving my car, often over dirt roads, on bitter winter days, myself breaking the talk as we came to some town.
They were fragmentary pictures she gave me — a mountain road, going up out of an East Tennessee valley... this before East Tennessee became industrialized, factories coming into many of the little towns to pick up and use the cheap mountain labor....
A mountain road, going up and up... some fifteen or twenty miles out of a valley in which there were a few rich farms and farmers — the road curling up and up. You could drive up along the road, over several mountains, through a few rich valleys, past long miles of forest, deep grown with underbrush — stopping maybe to admire the view from some mountain top — some seventy or eighty miles and you’d come to Knoxville, Tennessee. The road wasn’t paved and was pretty rough when Kit was a child. It’s a highway now.
“And down there, in the town in the valley, some eighteen miles from us,” Kit explained, “was the first town I ever saw.” She was fifteen before she ever got a chance to go to town. “There wasn’t any factory down there then but there’s a rayon plant now,” she said.
She said also something else, that you might travel yet over the big road, going from Asheville in North Carolina to Knoxville in Tennessee... TVA town now... center of government effort to remake, recast, the lives of a whole people, the Southern Appalachian Highlanders of America... going some 250 miles through just the kind of country she was raised in, “and you’d say to yourself— ‘There don’t any one live up here — they couldn’t because they couldn’t make a living,’ you’d say, but you’d be wrong.”
There were, she explained, plenty of people, thousands and many thousands of them, when she was a child, living as her family lived, “if you can call it living,” she said. They hung on up there in their hills, a quite isolated, a strong enough people, in the very heart of America, sticking tight to their barren hills, “like fleas on a dog,” she said.
To earth — clinging to it, to their barren enough earth, clinging.
Little pockets of flat ground, a few acres. Hillsides, planted to corn, so steep, some of them, you’d think a horse or an ox pulling a plow would fall off and be killed. Kit, although she had come to me frankly to tell her own story, grew, at times, impersonal enough... memories of her childhood in the hills coming back as she talked, little stories of other mountain families simply enough told, men, heads of mountain families, she said, going sometimes out of their hills, even to places as far away and strange to them as Detroit... employment, perhaps in the Ford plant... five dollars a day, a fabulous-seeming sum to them. She said that most of them couldn’t stand it long. I used the expression, “The hills had them,” and she nodded her head. She meant to say that the land of the skies — always the far-reaching skies — the beautiful hill lands of Southwest Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, called the men back as it hadn’t called her. She had got, although it had apparently not touched her, a sense, in her father and other men, neighbors perhaps in her childhood, a sense of land love, hill-land love, that had made her mountaineers almost a distinct and separate people in America.
The little houses, usually very small, tucked away on some side road, very narrow, winding and stony, almost always the house standing by a mountain stream. There would be plenty of clear mountain streams. Sometimes three or four men could build a house in three or four days.
> The barn would be a mere shed.
“You should have seen my father’s barn,” Kit said. “It was more than our house ever was. My mother, my ma, she wasn’t much good.
“She was always sitting around. She had me and then, when I had grown a little and she had the others — she didn’t have as many as most of the women up there in that mountain — maybe she was too lazy — she began to make me tend to the others, and do everything in the house too.”
Kit thought that perhaps her mother, daughter of a near-by mountain family, named Tuttle — her own family name was Brandon — had got some disease, after she married Kit’s father, hookworm perhaps, she thought.
So there was Kit, that child in that place, in that house, on the little farm, tucked away in the East Tennessee hills, with the tall indolent mother, always, Kit said, with the snuff stick in her mouth, stains of the tobacco on her broken teeth and dripping from the corners of her mouth. Not much chance for romance in the figure of that woman, as Kit spoke of her, not bitterly but with odd detachment... not much chance among these defeated women, slovenly and dirty, for such romances as The Trail of the Lonesome Pine of our Southern Highlander, John Fox, Jr.... these defeated women, slovenly and dirty... I had myself seen them. I knew them, had lived among them.
Her hair — blond it was, or had been — always uncombed, her cheap cotton dress always dirty.
“I don’t see how Pa ever brought himself to sleep with her but he did,” said Kit in her own curious, oddly detached way.
And then the father gone sometimes for days, on one of his horse-trading trips, usually with other mountain men, perhaps with two or three of them, a little cavalcade going along mountain trails, up and over mountain roads, stopping at some store at a crossroads — a mean enough little unpainted frame building the store would be, mountain men lounging about up there.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 175
