I turned pitying eyes upon my neighbor in the peach-colored organdie frock. “Wouldn’t you like to come to a meeting of our Literary Society?” I asked her, thinking that if she became acquainted with those farm folks she would see that there was something greater than fresh frocks every season.
“Why, yes,” she said, her eyes kindling at the thought of another farm thing she could play she was doing—she would have plenty of stories to tell how she and Kerry went on a farm when she married him.
So she came one night to go with me to the school-house. She and Kerry were too early, Literary not beginning for an hour. I sat and talked to her—or, rather, she gave me an intelligence test, in the course of which she discovered that I had studied in three colleges, one of them the University of Michigan. At the name of that institution I saw her stiffen, a look of horror coming into her eyes.
“Ah know about the University of Michigan,” she declared. “Ah had a friend, Pete Stevens, went there; from Alabama, he was. But he didn’t stay. Would you believe it, Mrs. Greenwood, when he went into a classroom, theah sat a big buck niggah, and my friend, Pete Stevens, he said to that big niggah, ‘You get out of heah, you niggah, you! What you doin’ in this white man’s college?’ And would you believe it, Mrs. Greenwood, that big buck niggah didn’t make a move to go, but just sat theah, and he said, ‘Ah got just as much right to be heah as you have. Ah paid my tuition, and heah Ah’m goin’ to stay!’ And with that my friend, Pete Stevens, he said, ‘Well, if you stay, Ah go!’ And he marched out of that college and nevah went back!”
I felt an inward scorn at this intolerance. But don’t give me too much credit. Had a colored man come to her door, the Southern bride would have called him a “niggah,” and fed him, and given him work. I might have fed him, but it would have been with that peculiar squeamishness which Northern women feel who have never had anything to do with Negroes. I saw but one Negro in my entire childhood, and I did not see a colored woman until I was an adult. I am certain I could treat them as human beings, and shame on me if I could not, since I so treat dogs and cats. But I have not yet learned the easy familiarity of the Southerner with the black man. I don’t think my scorn of Mrs. Rawson need be taken too seriously.
It was not until I was walking down the hill with the Rawsons that it occurred to me what a terrible breach of considerate hospitality I was about to commit. In my hand were sheaves of paper: I was to give a book review that night, the topic being Up from Slavery, by Booker T. Washington. How could I ever explain that this was not a deliberate insult?
On the program I read the review—I consider that one of the greatest autobiographies ever written—and I waited for Mrs. Rawson to march out of Literary with head high. She did not make a move. I could see her eyes wandering over the indigent-looking audience, most of the men needing hair-cuts, their long locks plastered with water but sticking out at the ends, and most of the women with attempts at keeping up with the styles in coiffures falling pitifully short of their object. Mrs. Hatch always oiled her hair, which fascinated me, for I was intent on getting rid of the natural oil in my hair with a weekly shampoo—laundry-soap shampoo. The younger generation were advertisements of their various mothers’ tonsorial aptitude. We sagebrush women cut all the hair in our families.
For years I barbered my youngsters’ heads, even doing a pretty expert job on Charley. Toward the very last of my years on the farm I laid down on that job. This was really the beginning of the end of my slavery. The whole family seemed to have but one idea when there was anything to cut, from rubber boots to wire—my hair-cutting shears. If there is any barber reading these lines, he will know how I used to feel at the weekly hair-cutting when I found my shears dulled and nicked. I bore this, and bore it, not without complaint, and at last—a last which had lasted years and years—I said, “I will not cut another head of hair!” I was a little aghast and astonished at my own voice, scared even, and then tremblingly elated.
The whole family stared at me in dismayed surprise. I think they saw themselves dragging around yards of hair for years to come. It would not occur to them that any one else might cut their hair. And we certainly could not afford town barbering. But we could afford tobacco—smoking and chawing. I had never uttered a single complaint about either habit, and they were not the reason for my rebellion. They were only the justification. I cannot imagine a farm woman having any habit that would require the expenditure of a single penny for herself alone. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, while she was still Mary Wilkins, wrote a story of a farm woman, in which she incidentally described how this woman ate the scraggy edges of the omelette that the rest of the family might be spared that sacrifice. A New England farm woman that...well, I suppose the nature of a farm woman is always the same, whether on a parsimonious, stark New England farm or on a pioneer sagebrush-desert farm.
Mrs. Rawson was sizing up all those farmers, their wives and children. “Yes, Boone, deah. Ah act’ally began my ma’ed life on a Weste’n ranch. You have no idea what rough, uncouth people Ah lived among....”
I waited for the explosion of indignation from Mrs. Kerry Rawson. Then, as she smiled vaguely at me while I was taking my seat at the desk in front of her, I realized that she had not heard a word of what I was reading. Her mind had been far from my effort.
“UP FROM SLAVERY” was my last book from the outer contemporaneous world. Until that time I had reveled in all the current biography, philosophy, psychology, and like subjects. I began reading the best fiction when I was a very little girl; writers of every nation interested me, and, being omnivorous, I practically read myself out along that line. The day I discovered what my father’s big library meant for me is marked as one of the most notable in my life. I happened to open The Arabian Nights, read a few lines, and my heart literally stood still—at least that was the effect upon me. I remember looking up, child that I was, and thrilling at the vision I saw of endless worlds which opened to me. I was not just Doctor Pike’s daughter Annie, I was an adventurer through the ages. Oh, my dear books, how I love you! I shall never be able to express what reading has meant to me. It has liberated me when I was in slavery; given me joy when I was in the midst of bleakness; taught me control of a nature too passionate; revealed to me myself.
I read so much fiction in my younger years that I scarcely ever read it now. Only superior craftsmanship can lure me in that direction. I have never needed to be entertained. So, for years on that sagebrush farm, while I worked from dawn to dark, I read my few pages every day, remembering them, exhausting all that was best in the books that most interested me.
What enabled me to do this? It was a beneficent arrangement which brought the books to our door from the State Library at Boise. I had learned that a case might be obtained by any responsible farm person if the carriage from the Library were paid. I wrote things for editors, and the checks paid the freight.
The mail; boxes from our relations; the traveling library case—such joyous occasions as no power of wealth can surpass! I could hardly wait to get my work out of the way before I sat down on the floor in front of that treasure case, to handle those books and read snatches here and there. To be perfectly frank, Jeanette Bennett and her brother George and I were almost the only readers in our neighborhood. The Bennett children, city-bred and born readers too, read the fiction; I read the nonfiction. Surely it was worthwhile to feed three such starving souls in the desert.
Then an appalling thing happened. A case got lost in transit, and the State Library would send me no more. I cannot see how I could have been to blame, since the case was being forwarded from Boise, yet I had to be punished. I suppose some one was reprimanded at the other end, and the farm woman had to bear the reflex of that blow. Probably the person involved, no doubt as innocent as I, determined that she would be responsible for no more books that I could lose. The solution oftenest presenting itself to me was that I was under suspicion of having made away with those books, for the letter regarding the lost case was all but in
sulting. Just another of those unjust visitations on the farmer’s family because there is no power there to retaliate.
All my life in the sagebrush I was forced to speak two languages. The one was the restricted, halting tongue of two or three syllables, chosen carefully, and with painful precision of selection, that nothing might be misunderstood and that the stigma of pride of learning might not be fastened upon me. I was free to use the other only when I was writing. I must confess that an Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language is the most exciting book I ever read, and I cannot pass a day without reading it, a habit which dates back as long as I can remember. I have a storehouse of words which I dare not even write—lovely, juicy, marvelous, magic words, which, written, would be called “pedantic.” Yet they and many of their foreign compeers are my beloved, horizon-stretching friends.
THE WAR! THE WAR! Down at the school-house was a constant boiling, like a great kettle, patriotic city steam scalding the quiet rural air—speeches, speeches, speeches, to pry loose the few coppers still clinging to the interiors of overall pockets; to make farm women cook such penurious concoctions as city women would scorn to attempt; to force contentment with barley and oatmeal when the farm granaries were bursting with wheat; to give, to whom you knew not, to do without, for what you could not be sure.
Because there was a cook-stove in the Teacherage, the sagebrush women were called there by the Government home-economics experts, dressed, these college cooks, in immaculate, starched white, with smooth, untroubled brows and delicate, perfectly manicured hands. They had called us together to lecture us on food conservation, us who were the champion food conservationists of the world—pioneer farm women, struggling without money and almost without materials.
We sat there in the Teacherage, on chairs we had brought with us, and watched those women demonstrate the making of bread with a pat of dough about the size of a baseball, smiling condescendingly, as they did so, into our enigmatical sagebrush eyes. Those college cooks had no faintest suspicion that the night before we had battled with dough the size of four footballs, and that we had left at home, when we had come, the great, sweet, light loaves airing on our kitchen tables, before stowing them away in the tall cans used for bread-boxes, bought for a small sum from the grocery stores, no manufactured bread-box being large enough to accommodate any batch of farm bread. Not only had we just baked it, but such a batch would be baked several times a week by each of us farm women. So much foolish advice is wasted on farm folks, who just lie low, not sayin’ nothin’, like old Brer Fox. But lots of good it does them, for citified Brer Rabbit always has a Tar Baby to stick to Brer Fox no matter how he may struggle, thus reversing the original Uncle Remus story.
Then there was that night in the school-house when Frontier Grange showed how dumb it was to a city speaker. City-dumb, I mean, for there is nothing so dumb to a farmer as a city man trying to talk farm—country-dumb. In a fit of patriotism the National Grange had filled a Grange-magazine issue with doggerel “of-thee-I-sing” efforts, using borrowed tunes, even as our national hymn of hate has for a scandalous number of years taught churchers and little children the drinking-song “Anacreon in Heaven.” (Dear me! Debunking “The Star-Spangled Banner” again? Don’t you know, woman, that Congress decided all that? Yes, and Senator Reed Smoot tried to exclude the unexpurgated great literature of the world, forgetting, or perhaps not being familiar with the greatest of all—the Bible. My tender mind traveled from Genesis to Revelation twice over, and dipped in at scattered intervals of print, and was not thereby besmirched. Dwelling upon the unspeakable is what besmirches.)
The school now owned its own organ, which was even followed later by a piano. Some farm woman played, while we Grangers stood, open National Grange magazines in hand. Our eyes were fixed on the speaker of the evening, a lawyer from Rupert, long afterward sued for sending obscene matter through the mail, which has nothing to do with the episode I am relating, unless as a matter of revenge, since brilliancy and beauty may be the ornamental architecture built above a cesspool.
This speaker was famous throughout southern Idaho, and we were feeling very happy about being honored by his presence. We were all horse-tired after the long day’s work, and none of us, except possibly Old Bab and Baldy Parsons, had any ambition to be a singer. But we must sing for our country, and so that was what we did. Some one at National Grange Headquarters was lacking in visual or auditory imagination, or never would such a tune as “Old Black Joe” have been considered appropriate for a patriotic song that should inspire farmers to put more mortgages on the farm for the sake of the United States of America.
We sang, trusting eyes fixed expectantly, proudly, gratefully, on the speaker-to-be. But we did sing somnolently, without exclamation points or flag-wavings. We were tired.
O-o-o-o-old Glory,...O-o-o-o-old Glory,...
Old Glo-o-o-ory wa-a-a-aves on hi-i-i-igh....
We’ll li-i-i-ive for yo-o-ou, Old Glo-o-o-ory,
And for yo-o-o-ou we-e-e-e’ll di-i-i-ie....
We sounded as though we were already dying, right then and there, reminding me of a band of melancholy cattle mourning under the freshly skinned carcass of one of their number, strung up on the beam of a hay-derrick. And then something terrible happened. The handsome speaker leaped to his feet “as though stang by a bee” and, brandishing a fist in our bovine countenances, he yelled, “For God’s sake don’t sing like that! If you give to the War like you sing, we cannot expect much from you!”
The speaker was no doubt handsome, and he was certainly, from all reports, a magnetic orator, but he was neither a psychologist nor tactful. We were dead on our feet, yet we had been willing to come to have him wheedle the blood out of our veins. We had stood up when we would rather have sat down; we had tried to sing when we would rather have remained silent. And now we had been bawled out for our efforts.
I was always very sensitive to changes in the atmosphere of sagebrush farm audiences. I felt the chill that suddenly pervaded the whole mass of human beings crowded into those school-house seats. The speech began, the orator being just as good-looking as before, and he made an astonishing, highfalutin, spread-eagle, star-spangled speech, yet that night there was promised for the cause of the War the smallest amount yet pledged by those poor sagebrush farm folks.
You cannot slap a farmer in the face and get away with it. He may look dumb, but something is going on inside him which is not dumb. It takes tired men a longer time to think out an injustice, and it takes them just as long to get over it. They have no time to train for thinking, and they are too tired to do it. They plow their brains into the earth that you may eat. Somebody must do their outside thinking while they provide the bread for the world, or the day is coming when that great mass of suffering dumbness is going to stop the wheels of government. Your prize anarchist is not a Communist, but a farmer, and with good reason.
OUR GOVERNMENT was snooping around everywhere, feathers and wings spread, pecking this way and that, like a broody hen. It behooved each man to leap first, crying “Traitor!” in order to avoid being leaped at with the same damnable epithet. The self-righteous One Hundred Per Cent Pickled Americans, of whom I was one, went about in the armor of holiness, casting eyes of suspicion and hatred upon everyone within their range.
We sagebrush folks hounded good, old, blameless Burkhausen, and our Government was hunting down the foreign-born who lacked citizenship papers. Out of the cities of the East rose a great horde of the hunted, moving like a tidal wave toward the wide-spaced farmlands of the West, where they might lose themselves under the privileges of agriculture as an essential industry. Particularly the artists and thinkers surged toward us, all ambitious to be farm hands.
The first of our deportation farm hands was Mischa Pushkin. If he or any of his people read this book, I want him to know that never would I have parted with him if the decision had been mine to make. I would have been willing to slave on my knees, my broken-nailed hands raw from the scrubbing-brush
and soap, if I could have kept him. For he was a wonderful artist, a fine musician, and music means so much to me. From those artists and musicians among my ancestors, I was born an instrument on which the arts can play.
Mischa Pushkin was a delicate little fellow, blonde-haired, with fingers which almost emitted harmony of themselves. He brought a suitcase and a violin-case. The Warrens, folks who had bought land for speculation purposes and who left us soon afterward, had sent him to us. He was married to their niece. They sent him, they said, to be our unpaid farm hand.
I fixed the upstairs bedroom for Pushkin—cheap iron bed, old-fashioned wash-stand, chair, dresser, worn rug. But he had four gorgeous pictures, framed by the four windows in that room—the checkered gray and green of sagebrush and alfalfa, and beyond that the blue Minidokas, lovely, enchanting mountains.
I was sweeping the living-room the first time I heard Pushkin’s violin. I would like you to see me there, dressed in my white black-dotted house dress, a nurse’s little white cap controlling my fluffy blonde locks but not hiding them. I learned that trick of the becoming little caps while I was in the hospital after Rhoda’s birth. I do not know whether the custom still persists, but while I was there, my little white caps swept like a contagion among the sagebrush farm women, giving us all a picturesque uniform head-dress which defied changes in style until we went to the school-house meetings, for only then were the little caps discarded. We had something of the artistic look of Brittany peasants.
You can see me sweeping away on the linoleum of that living-room. Suddenly there came those full-voiced notes from Pushkin’s violin, in harmony so exquisite that I was transfixed, face uplifted toward the sounds, broom gripped rigidly in my hands. Brahms, I think it was. I was so agitated that my memory of the feeling it gave me is more vivid than the identity of the music.
Annie Pike Greenwood Page 35
