—What is this Event? the Perfessor said, cooperatively.
—The Event is something that never happened. It’s a convenient myth abstracted from the welter of human fact. Events happen only in the newspapers and history books. But life goes on being one human being at a time, who is trying to find that mythical republic in which he can live with honor and happiness.
—Just so, the Perfessor said, and thus the Republic’s a lie and History’s a lie and the newspaper’s a great lie. Culture’s an inherited lie with which we hide from the human beast that he’s only an ape with nightmares. All the world’s a lie, and all the men and women merely liars. And with these lies we divert and deceive ourselves while our life-stuff goes through its little fury of growth, orgasm, and decay. Confess, my boy, that there’s nothing real but the nature of Nature.
—But that’s just the most primitive of all the lies.
—How does one get out of your chamber of mirrors? the Perfessor said, smiling pleasantly.
—It’s better than your chamber of horrors, Mr. Shawnessy said, smiling pleasantly.
The Senator returned to his chair through a series of deep bows, proposing his backside to the Perfessor’s contemplation.
—Thirty years ago, the Perfessor went on, we all murdered and sang and whooped it up for Liberty and Union here in the U.S.A. But the Southern Negro’s still a slave and the Northern Worker’s still a slave. Gentlemen, we grow old in a land of greed and lust.
The Senator, settling himself solidly in his chair, cleared his throat and looked around to see if he was observed.
—Gentlemen, it’s perfectly true that the Southern Negro is still a slave.
He lowered his voice.
—And what of it? I always thought and still do that the South was morally in the right during the Civil War. As a political entity, the South had a right to be independent from the North, as much so as America did from England. As for slavery, Southerners believed—and by God, they were right—that the Negro was a being inferior to a white man as a horse is, though in lesser degree. They believed that because of his jungle background and his native physical and mental characteristics he wasn’t a man in the same sense that the white man is a man. The proud people of the South wouldn’t live on a basis of equality with these pitiful black brutes, because such equality would finally mean that Sambo’s seed was as good as a white man’s and could go where a white man’s could. If Northerners had as many black men around them, they’d feel the same way. Before the War, the South had a system that kept the nigger in his place and yet took care of him. God knows, as a race, the nigger hasn’t been any happier since. I tell you, morally and politically the South was right.
—This Republic, the Perfessor said, will never achieve anything resembling real equality until the mixture of the bloods is complete. It’s too bad we don’t all have a big black buck swinging from a branch of the family elm—we’d all get over our pride of race. Really, the human beast’d be a lot happier and wiser if he returned to the morals of the Great Swamp. Let the seed go where it pleases. It’s all only a little passion and the earth.
—I will say one thing, the Senator said. The hottest women in the world are those famous octoroons. During a brief sojourn in New Orleans lately, I had occasion to—shall we say—observe some of them again. They have just enough black blood in ’em to make ’em boil.
—The loveliest faces in the world, if it comes to that, the Perfessor said, are good old Anglo-Saxon mixed with nigger. You take that noble Northern look, and you taint it with the jungle. For this erotic masterpiece, we’re indebted to the Old Southern Planter. I always thought he was well named. He planted. There was a lot of good black soil handy, and that fahn ole gemman put in a crop.
—I have a real fondness for the South, the Senator said. It gets into your blood.
The Perfessor raised his cane and recited:
—O subtle, musky, slumbrous clime!
O swart, hot land of pine and palm,
Of fig, peach, guava, orange, lime,
And terebinth and tropic balm!
Mr. Shawnessy, brooding and sad, lounged back in his chair and sipped through slow nostrils the black fragrance of his cigar.
Our thin smokes curl upon the summer air
Tracing a legend of an elder day.
Land of perennial summer woven with rivers, lost Eden of America, darkened with memory of a crime! I wandered in your old magnolia swamp and touched my face to one of your most sensual flowers. And a jovial, greatbearded God brooded above us watching. Lost pillars of a Southern paradise enshrined us where we sought a tree.
All this was long ago, the history of a lost republic. In sentimental vistas, we hid our nakedness for shame of old remembrance.
All this was long ago and far away, in the old Kentucky homeland of our soul, where ’tis summer and the darkies are gay, all this was on the river, down upon the river, way down upon the Mississippi River
1859—1860
FAR, FAR AWAY TO AN EVERBLOOMING SUMMER
the river brought him on its broadening flood. Days and nights, he and Susanna travelled in one of the big river boats south, a floating hotel paddled by a huge wheel. The boat’s lobby sparkled with cutglass chandeliers. Carpets paved the floor with a soundless softness. Mirrors in mahogany frames swarmed with the images of a fashionable throng making the winter journey down the river.
It was a lazy, lavish voyage; yet there was a constant sense of danger.
From what?
It was hard to say. In part, from the yellow river and its snags, shallows, hidden bars, treacherous channels, shifting shores; in part from the leashed fury of the boilers roaring with pine fires in the boat’s entrails; in part also from the glittering crowd that swarmed along the river—gamblers, roustabouts, planters, Negroes, whores, fine ladies, soldiers, statesmen. These and a hundred other vivid types of humanity, most of them entirely new to Johnny Shawnessy, sought the river with a strange devotion. Down the Mississippi, the oldest highway of the Republic, these pilgrims travelled toward a sensual Canterbury. Its name was woven through all their conversations. And always this name meant exciting, sinful, dangerous, much desired.
It was at night that the boat carried Johnny Shawnessy and his wife Susanna into the harbor of New Orleans on the Mississippi Delta. Herds of boats, shrilling and baying, wallowed to their stalls. Down five miles of masts and funnels, light blazed from rows of floating windows. Orchestras played familiar Southern airs, and voices drifted across the water in nostalgic tunes.
As for the City, lying there on its silty bed, it winked, hovered, trembled, breathed, sighed, and stank. Mainly, it stank.
It stank of fish, tar, rum, cess, garbage, horse dung, human beings. It stank appallingly, and this stink as they neared the docks in the windless night almost choked Johnny. He looked in embarrassment at his wife leaning against the rail, eagerly watching the levee. Was it possible that she wasn’t aware of this stink? What about all these others—habitués of New Orleans—didn’t they smell this great stink? As for him, he never would be able to live in this stench. Even if he closed his nose to it, the mere thought of it would gag him.
Yet before long his nostrils had accepted it; and later he had to remind himself that this great human stink was there, always there, and that it would envelop everything he saw and did in New Orleans during the next few months.
—There they are! Look, Johnny! Aren’t they sweet!
The levee, as they approached it, was alight from lanterns and the boat’s own blazing battery of windows. Among the many people waiting there for friends, relatives, and loved ones, Johnny saw a group of young men and women, perhaps a dozen in number, who at this distance looked oddly prim and stiff, bristling and fluttering with canes, hats, curls, ribbons, handkerchiefs. Their faces were all upturned, the women’s in bonnets tied under chin; the men’s under tall, dandy hats. These creatures nodded, waved, smiled in happy unison, jerking their chins.
—Aren�
��t they wonderful! Susanna shrieked. O, Johnny, you’ll just love them! Hi Bobby! Dody! Barbara! Judy!
As they came nearer, Johnny became uneasily aware of their eyes, all fixed upon him with a brilliant intensity.
But as soon as he and Susanna had descended the gangplank, all these figurines dissolved into real people and overwhelmed the bridal pair with kisses, handshakes, backslaps, hugs, tears. Everyone was delighted to meet Johnny. Though Susanna had posted him ahead of time, so many young women gave him cousinly kisses that he could only distinguish Cousin Barbara Drake, a tall, languid blonde, who said in a voice mingling pleasure with surprise,
—My! Isn’t he nice!
and Cousin Dody Ransome, a plump brunette with big shy eyes, who said in a sweet voice,
—Why, Sue, I’m so pleased with your new husband.
Of the men, he instantly picked out Dody’s husband and Susanna’s favorite relative, Robert Seymour Drake, with whom the honey-mooners planned to pass most of their sojourn in New Orleans. Cousin Bobby, as Susanna called him, was in his middle twenties, a tall, lean man with a delightfully casual air. He had kind, handsome blue eyes and a dry, humorous mouth.
—So this is the lucky man, Sue, Cousin Bobby said, holding Johnny by the shoulders at arms’ length. Children, I’m downright proud of you.
Johnny instantly liked Cousin Bobby, and all the others too, for that matter, as they swarmed around him, drenching his ears in an accent musical and mannered almost to lewdness. At first, he felt that he could no more adjust himself to its barbarous exaggerations than he could to the great stench of New Orleans; but in a short time, the whole party had poured into barouches, and with a feeling of enchantment and abandonment Johnny was swallowed up into the malodorous night and the soft voices of Susanna’s people.
Later it seemed to him that during his sojourn in the South, he had lived in the scenes of a new Uncle Tom’s Cabin, starring in the principal role Mr. John Wickliff Shawnessy from Raintree County, Indiana. And indeed this life in which he steeped himself was a delightful, barbarous, cruel old melodrama which for some reason or other all the actors and the audience passionately believed in. Johnny himself was constantly alternating between wholehearted participation and amused aloofness during his time there—and he was there a long time before he finally disentangled himself from that dark sweet land.
From December to the following August, he and his bride were entertained in New Orleans and the country up and down river. Those months were a procession of parties, balls, picnics, river excursions, and country week-ends. As Bobby Drake said when he ushered Johnny into his big winter mansion in New Orleans, a pile of brick, stucco, and iron reflecting the mongrel Spanish-French-English descent of New Orleans,
—Son, we’ll try to show you a little of that famous Southern Hospitality.
The everblooming South showered warmth and fragrance on him from the beginning, beguiled him with beauty and leisure. You’ll love it, honey, Susanna had said. And the truth was that he did love it. For young Johnny Shawnessy at the age of twenty-one was a rare mixture of poet and moralist. Moralist, he stored his memories for another day. Poet, he drank the warm milk of this existence and tasted its dark, exquisitely flavored honey. He had the poet’s insatiable appetite for life, and New Orleans and the downriver country were everything that Southern life was—distilled to a dark quintessence. He saw it all. He saw its chattering blend of races, Spanish, French, Creole, Indian, Negro, Anglo-Saxon, a welter of tongues, bloods, manners. The river had lured them down its broad stream, had carried them along with centuries of silt, and dumped them on the Delta.
He saw the French Quarter, its Place d’Armes and whitewashed cathedral, the cafés where swarthy men and vivid brunette women sipped exotic drinks—eau sucrée, cognac, orange-water.
He saw the glittering amusements of the City, bullfights, cockfights, dogfights, horse races, operas, acrobats, melodramas, farces, gambling, bals masqués.
He saw the levees, miles of manmade walls to hold back the river, the levees crowded with commerce from all over the world, pouring the lavish wealth of the South into the Gulf and so to the ports of the world. He saw the molasses, sugar, tar, rum, timber, furs.
He saw especially the cotton, fat bales piled high on the docks waiting to be shipped. He saw that it was cotton which made this City the fourth port of the world, filled it with its glut of races, gave it wealth, beauty, seduction, sin, and death.
And as the months went by, he saw the wealth, the beauty, the seduction, the sin, and the death.
The young people of New Orleans with whom Johnny Shawnessy mainly consorted during his sojourn there were not like the people back home. As a class, they enjoyed something that didn’t exist in Raintree County—leisure. Leisure to be fashionable, charming, and—on occasion—exquisitely sinful. The young men seldom read anything or performed any visible labor. They drank, danced, rode, gambled, whored. In the process, they laughed and cursed and talked like gentlemen. They were young Southern gentlemen.
The young women were in general a lively, pretty, romantic lot, completely dominating the men before and after marriage by a posture of defenseless womanhood requiring adoration and protection. The attitude was pretty and natural; they had been educated to it, and their mothers before them. They were young Southern ladies. And if they seemed during those months somewhat more daring than most young ladies of their class in the South, there were no doubt good reasons for it.
The Southern education of Johnny Shawnessy began early with an exposition of the phrase ‘Southern Hospitality.’ The young women of New Orleans, who presided over its hospitality and dispensed its blandishments, were much interested in Johnny for some reasons that he could fathom and some that he couldn’t. At the first balls and parties, he felt himself watched by feverishly brilliant eyes. Later, the interest became more specific and personal. As Susanna had said, there was something about him. Perhaps it was a mixture of virility and gentleness, conscience and humor that could come only from Raintree County. Perhaps it was his dark hair shot with red, his expressive mouth and quick smile, his blue eyes watching the world with a mixture of innocent excitement and serene evaluation under their slightly lifted brows. At any rate, he had a peculiar effect on the young women whom he met in New Orleans—Susanna’s own relatives and friends, some of whom carried the principle of hospitality rather far.
There was, for example, Cousin Barbara Drake. Cousin Barbara was tall, slender, and blonde in a languidly voluptuous way. Perhaps because she was thoroughly wearied of her young husband, who was a gamecock and a bore, she spent a great deal of time with Johnny on social occasions and was always coaxing him out for talks on lawns and balconies. As much the same group went to everything, Johnny was thrown with her constantly, a circumstance that pleased him as she was the most intelligent and witty woman he had met in New Orleans. But he hadn’t become fully aware of the trend of things until one night when she said abruptly,
—Johnny, why did it have to be you?
—Yes?
They were sitting alone in an alcove off the ballroom at a home of mutual friends. Cousin Barbara, who had perhaps taken too much wine, was very languid and relaxed beside him.
—I mean, she said, you’re just so darn nice. Tell me, weren’t you ever in love with anyone but Cousin Sue—some girl up there where you live?
—Well, yes, I was, Cousin Barbara, he said.
She took his hand and gently pressed it.
—And was she in love with you?
—Well, she did in a way reciprocate my youthful passion, Johnny-said, more and more embarrassed.
—No wonder. With that smile and those eyes. There’s something about you, Johnny.
For a moment, he thought that that something was going to be the long, slender arms of Barbara Drake, but some other couples drifted by, and after a while Susanna came around and found him.
Johnny had no idea how far the thing had gone until the day he got an unsigned note in elegan
t script telling him to come, if his heart so prompted him, to a certain street corner in a remote part of New Orleans at dusk where a certain person, whose identity he could perhaps divine, would be waiting in a carriage to impart to him something of value. This invitation savored so finely of all the romantic stories he had read about the romantic South that he kept the rendezvous just out of curiosity. A carriage drove up, and the door opened. A lady in a veil beckoned him in with long, slender hand. When he was inside and the carriage was driving away, the lady in the veil said,
—O, Johnny, you must think me an evil woman. I had something I felt I must tell you.
Before she told him, however, she swooned in his arms and clung languidly to him, staining his shirt collar through the veil with tears and cosmetics. It was a very delicate situation.
—We really mustn’t do this, he said. After all, Susanna’s your cousin, and—uh—that makes you my cousin.
Along with this, he smiled lamely and held the slender trunk of the lady, which was quivering with sobs.
—O, dear, Johnny, she said. What have you done to me?
—We wouldn’t want to hurt Susanna, Johnny said. After “11, it’s my honeymoon, and I want to remain worthy of her.
The lady in the veil sat bolt upright.
—O, I wish someone else would tell you, Johnny!
—Tell me what?
—Cousin Sue just isn’t the right type for you, the lady in the veil said evasively.
—Why not? Johnny said, inwardly agreeing.
—Surely you know you’re a very desirable young man, Johnny. You could pick and choose.
—Well, it strikes me that Susanna’s a very desirable match. Money, culture, beauty——
—But why do you suppose she didn’t marry down here? She had enough affairs.
—I don’t know. Why?
—I didn’t mean to get on this subject, the lady in the veil said. I feel so nervous.
She swooned again. Puzzled, he hung on through another storm, and after a while, she became very contrite and murmured some words about a moment of indiscretion and her certainty that a man of Johnny’s character would not betray a heart which had never before deviated from the path of rectitude but which had been in this one instance, alas! too susceptible.
Raintree County Page 48
