Thomas Wolfe, page 346
You stayed beside me like the rock you are until I unearthed the plant, followed it back through every fiber of its pattern to its last and tiniest enrootment in the blind, dumb earth. And now that it is finished, and the circle come full swing—we, too, are finished, and I have a thing to say:
I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me—and I think for all of us—not only our own hope, but America’s everlasting, living dream. I think the life which we have fashioned in America, and which has fashioned us—the forms we made, the cells that grew, the honeycomb that was created—was self-destructive in its nature, and must be destroyed. I think these forms are dying, and must die, just as I know that America and the people in it are deathless, undiscovered, and immortal, and must live.
I think the true discovery of America is before us. I think the true fulfillment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land, is yet to come. I think the true discovery of our own democracy is still before us. And I think that all these things are certain as the morning, as inevitable as noon. I think I speak for most men living when I say that our America is Here, is Now, and beckons on before us, and that this glorious assurance is not only our living hope, but our dream to be accomplished.
I think the enemy is here before us, too. But I think we know the forms and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope. I think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the brutal power of his blind grab. I do not think the enemy was born yesterday, or that he grew to manhood forty years ago, or that he suffered sickness and collapse in 1929, or that we began without the enemy, and that our vision faltered, that we lost the way, and suddenly were in his camp. I think the enemy is old as Time, and evil as Hell, and that he has been here with us from the beginning. I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. I think he took our people and enslaved them, that he polluted the fountains of our life, took unto himself the rarest treasures of our own possession, took our bread and left us with a crust, and, not content, for the nature of the enemy is insatiate—tried finally to take from us the crust.
I think the enemy comes to us with the face of innocence and says to us:
“I am your friend.”
I think the enemy deceives us with false words and lying phrases, saying:
“See, I am one of you—I am one of your children, your son, your brother, and your friend. Behold how sleek and fat I have become—and all because I am just one of you, and your friend. Behold how rich and powerful I am—and all because I am one of you—shaped in your way of life, of thinking, of accomplishment. What I am, I am because I am one of you, your humble brother and your friend. Behold,” cries Enemy, “the man I am, the man I have become, the thing I have accomplished—and reflect. Will you destroy this thing? I assure you that it is the most precious thing you have. It is yourselves, the projection of each of you, the triumph of your individual lives, the thing that is rooted in your blood, and native to your stock, and inherent in the traditions of America. It is the thing that all of you may hope to be,” says Enemy, “for—” humbly—“am I not just one of you? Am I not just your brother and your son? Am I not the living image of what each of you may hope to be, would wish to be, would desire for his own son? Would you destroy this glorious incarnation of your own heroic self? If you do, then,” says Enemy, “you destroy yourselves—you kill the thing that is most gloriously American, and in so killing, kill yourselves.”
He lies! And now we know he lies! He is not gloriously, or in any other way, ourselves. He is not our friend, our son, our brother. And he is not American! For, although he has a thousand familiar and convenient faces, his own true face is old as Hell.
Look about you and see what he has done.
Dear Fox, old friend, thus we have come to the end of the road that we were to go together. My tale is finished—and so farewell.
But before I go, I have just one more thing to tell you:
Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where. Saying:
“To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth——
“—Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending—a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.”
the end
[¬]
thomas wolfe
THE HILLS BEYOND
Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1941
[The text follows the 1968 Signet Classics edition.]
THE HILLS BEYOND
[¬]
1 · The Quick and the Dead
2 · Old Man of the Tribe
3 · The Great Schism
4 · How Certain Joyners Went to Town
5 · The Plumed Knight
6 · The Battle of Hogwart Heights
7 · A Stranger whose Sermon was Brick
8 · The Dead World Relived
9 · The Bell Strikes Three
10 · The Lost Day
CHAPTER 1
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD
About midway along the Atlantic seaboard of the North American continent lies a strip of land which is known today as the State of Old Catawba. It is an ancient part of the everlasting earth, but its history is quite young. One of the earliest references to it occurs in the chronicle of old Hugh Fortescue. His narrative is so well known that it would hardly bear recounting, were it not for the curious legend which has grown out of it.
In the month of September, 1593, Fortescue, one of the hardiest and most celebrated sea adventurers of the time, set sail from Plymouth harbor with a full cargo of provisions and material, and, in addition to his crew, a company of one hundred and seven men, women, and children, whom he proposed to land upon the shores of Old Catawba to establish a colony there. The colony, as everyone knows, was founded four months later, in January, 1594. According to Fortescue’s account, he remained for two months, helping the colonists build huts and log houses; then Fortescue sailed for England, leaving the colony apparently well established, with everything going briskly.
It was the old sea dog’s intention, as he tells us in his lusty chronicle, to return again early the following year with additional supplies for the settlers, and with the further purpose, of course, of collecting and taking home the first fruits of their crops or findings in the New World. Troubles at home, however, delayed him far beyond his reckoning, and it was August, 1595, before he stood in past the shifting dunes again, into the pearl gray waters of the Great Sound. He was a good six months late. And everyone knows what he found.
The settlement was still there, but all the people had disappeared. The natural supposition was that they had been massacred by the Indians. Curiously, however, the rude huts and cabins were intact. Fortescue says that they had been stripped of every utensil, ornament, and stick of furniture that might conceivably be of use to anyone, but there was no evidence of violence. The whole place was just empty and deserted. And, nailed to a tree at the edge of the clearing, was a kind of rude sign on which had been crudely painted the word “here”—or “heare,” as it was actually spelled. Below, an arrowhead, blazed in the bark, pointed toward the wilderness. This was all.
Fortescue and his men, taking this clue for what it was worth, or what it might imply, explored the wilderness of the whole region for weeks. They found nothing—not even a footprint—that could give any hint of what had happened to the people in the settlement. So, after exhausting every hope and every possibility of search, Fortescue set sail again and headed back for England.
That’s the story—all that was ever known. No new light has since been shed upon the mystery. But the human mind is so constructed that it cannot abide an unresolved mystery. From Fortescue’s day onward, people wondered what became of the Lost Colony, and since history gave no answer, they were free to invent an answer of their own. This, as we shall shortly see, is exactly what they did.
Time passed, and other settlers came to Old Catawba. The manner of their coming was very much like that by which all the colonies of the British Crown were eventually peopled. And like the nation of which it was to be a part, Old Catawba grew from east to west. Its expansion followed the inevitable direction prescribed by geography and economic pressure. The earliest settlements were in the tide-water regions along the coast. In the 1660’s the population of the colony did not exceed ten thousand persons, and they were distributed in a thin belt of settlements that penetrated no more than seventy-five or a hundred miles inland.
One hundred years later, just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the population had grown to two hundred thousand, and had pushed westward to the foothills of the upper Piedmont, at the base of the great mountain wall, three hundred and fifty miles from the ocean. Intrepid pioneers and daring huntsmen had actually surmounted the last barrier of the West, had blazed their way through the wilderness, had lived for months alone in what was then Indian country, and had returned at length laden with furs and skins and other trophies of the hunt, as token of the fact that they had been there. The first settlements behind the mountain wall, in the great wilderness of western Catawba, occurred in the years immediately following the Revolution, and as a direct result of the war: the settlers were men who had been soldiers in the Continental Army, and had been induced to go there through land grants given them as a reward for their services.
Slowly but surely the movement to the West continued, until by the first quarter of the nineteenth century the western regions of the state had so grown in numbers that they threatened to wrest control of the government from the East, which had hitherto maintained its supremacy unchallenged. The West demanded its rightful representation in the legislature. The East, stiffnecked with pride, refused, and since the East still had the edge in population, as well as most of the wealth, the refusal stood. Thus began the first in the long series of conflicts between East and West that were to disturb the life of the state for years.
But it was an unequal struggle, and time was with the West. The East fought back desperately against this giant stripling, this obscure country cousin, this uncouth hillbilly, but the West, with gangling stride and dangling arms and gap-toothed grin, refused to know when it was licked, and instead just wiped the lank hair from its eyes, spat briefly through its bloody lips, and kept coming on again after every knockdown. The East used every weapon at its command, and when fair means failed, it did not scruple to use foul. One of the foulest and most specious weapons that it used was the arrogant claim that the East was superior to the West in birth and breeding, and therefore born to rule.
Now the history of genealogies is very significant and curious. In America, as in most young countries, people are much less likely to be snobs over the thing they have than over the thing they lack. Thus, Americans are seldom snobs about money, but they are often snobs about “family.” The amount of time spent by certain people in New England and the South in talking about their “families” is appalling. In the South, particularly, this preoccupation seems to absorb most of the spare energies of the female population, for it is an axiom of Southern life that a woman without “family” is nothing. A woman may be poor; she may be abysmally ignorant (and usually is); she may have read nothing, seen nothing, gone nowhere; she may be lazy, nasty, vain, arrogant, venomous, and dishonest; her standards of morality, government, justice may not differ one whit from that of the lynching mob: but if she can assert, loudly and without challenge, that her “family” is older (and therefore better) than other families, then her position in the community is unquestioned, she is the delicate flower of “Southern culture,” she must not be “talked back to”—she is, in short, “a lady.”
So it was in this final phase of the war between the East and the West. As a last resort, the East claimed the right to rule the West on grounds of “family.” In a state which had hitherto been singularly free of aristocratic pretensions this was a most peculiar development. But the reasons for it are not far to seek.
The East now knew that its cause was hopeless. It had grown fat on power, and now it saw that it must yield before the new men of the West. It read the signs of its declining influence, and hated to think of the future. So, as nearly always happens under such circumstances, the East took refuge in the glories of an imagined past as compensation for the threatened loss of its future.
What happened was this:
The bare facts of the Lost Colony, as old Hugh Fortescue recorded them, had been known for years to the more literate people in the eastern part of the state. The mystery surrounding the disappearance of those first colonists had always been a subject of speculation, and a body of legend had grown up about it. According to this legend, the people of that colony were not killed, but were taken captive and carried off into the wilderness by an Indian tribe. In the course of time they adopted the language and customs of their captors; they intermarried with the Indians and bore children; and these children, in turn, intermarried with colonists of a still later date. Thus the Lost Colony was not really lost at all. And it followed from the legend that the descendants of this colony were not only still living, but could lay claim to the oldest English ancestry of any people in the New World—dating thirteen years before Jamestown, and twenty-six before Plymouth.
For years, this legend had existed as folklore, kept alive by idle curiosity and gossip. No one believed it. It was not until about a decade before the Civil War, at a time when the legends of Massachusetts and Virginia were already venerable with tradition, that the Catawba legend began to congeal into a form imposing enough for anyone to take it seriously.
Then it was that a professor of history at one of the local colleges published a book entitled The History of the Lost Colony. It achieved some passing notice in the world at large, being generally received in learned circles as a fairly interesting experiment in conjectural possibility. The author himself did not make any greater claim for it. He was too conservative and cautious a historian to try to prove that the legend of the colonists’ survival through intermarriage with the Indians was anything more than a theory of what might have happened. Still, in a manner that is distressingly familiar to the local historian everywhere, he sometimes let his patriotic ardor get the better of his scholarly judgment, and, in modern parlance, was inclined “to give himself the breaks.”
No doubt it was for this reason that the book produced a considerable sensation at home. Its sales in Old Catawba were phenomenal, and its effect was both profound and startling, in a way that the worthy professor had never intended or foreseen. The time was ripe for it, and people in the eastern part of the state fell upon the book eagerly, and began straightway to embroider and to weave, as composers do, with what are called “improvisations on a theme.” The ladies proved themselves especially proficient in this form of intellectual exercise. Starting from scratch—indeed, from the most scratchy sort of scratch—they began to erect a glittering edifice of pure fantasy, all of it proceeding, of course, out of something which started merely as a titillating thought, grew rapidly to a rosy hope, and ended in an unshakable conviction that they themselves were descended from the presumptive survivors of the Lost Colony.
In almost no time at all a new and highly exclusive social organization came into being, calling itself The Society of the Sons and Daughters of the Aborigines. The aristocratic pretensions of its members threatened overnight to eclipse even the haughty claims of the F. F. V.’s and the Mayflower descendants. The Sons and Daughters of the Aborigines had just discovered who they were, and from this point on they would play second fiddle to no one. No doubt it was all well enough, they said patronizingly, to talk about royal grants and tide-water plantations and the early days of Plymouth, but such trifling originalities as these could not be expected to matter very greatly to people who were aboriginally descended from the first English colonists and from Indian chieftains. It was quite surprising to see how proudly the Aborigines laid claim to this tinge of savage color in their veins. Ladies whose husbands would have reached for their dueling pistols at any imputation of a recent tinge of color in their blood felt no hesitation whatever in proclaiming their dusky ancestors of some two and a half centuries before.
