Thomas Wolfe, page 348
A myth, then, to like food and women, and to take a drink? . . . A myth to know the use of corncobs in the country? . . . To be able to say——, and make a joke about it? . . . To be a lawyer, and have “a high and squeaky voice,” and yet be able to speak Gettysburg?
O, little men, come, come!
Then why the Myth?
The Myth is founded on extorted fact: wrenched from the context of ten thousand days, and rutted roads, the desolations of lost voices long ago, the rheumy nostrils in the month of March, the winter howling in the oak, the superfetation of the dreary wait, the vacancy of unremembered hours.
For it is not a question of having faith, or lack of it. It is a simple fact of seeing. Seeing, we are saved. Half-seeing, we are worse than blind. And wrong.
It is important, then, to know that William Joyner “chawed the b’ar.” But it is even more important to know that William Joyner was a man who learned to read a book.
It may be that some later period in the human history will dispense with the whole necessity of print, and that book-reading, book-writing, book-publishing, all the ramified accessories that have accumulated since old Gutenberg, will (through some system of psychophones, printoscopes, empathic waves, or type telepathies; or what more of the strange and unbelievable we can wot not of) be as prehistoric as the dinosaur. But in William Joyner’s day the thing was known—not only known, but, aside from speech, the swiftest and most common way of all communication; and the point is that, illiterate as he was until his fortieth year, unread, unlettered, not even knowing the look of his own name in common script—he learned it!
Why?
We do not know; and cannot guess the reason except that men sought India once, and braved inhuman seas beyond the world’s edge, in their scallop shells; and looked at one another with “a wild surmise.” As for all other antecedents—possible Joyners in the Middle Ages, with the Roses, or King Charles—let others search them: all things must have their precincts, and our own are there, in Old Catawba, with Bear Joyner, in the hills of home.
Whatever seed produced him, or what kernel of his own unknown heritage, the man was “there”—and not only “chawed the b’ar,” but learned to read a book. And of all the facts that can be evidenced, of all the traits that bind the clan of William Joyner’s seed together, none is more strange than its respect for learning.
Where did it come from?
In the century since old Bear Joyner’s time, there have been some thousands of his name who have been dwellers in these hills. Some have been mountain folk, bowed down by poverty, who never learned to write, or to construe in print, their names. Others have been half-literate. Others have had the rudiments of education. Still others have risen in the world to places of commercial eminence: some have been lawyers, doctors, business men; there has been a preacher here and there; there has been more, much more, than an average sprinkling of “radical thinkers”—“atheists and agnostics” (that is to say, people who would openly debate the divinity of Jesus Christ, or the existence of “the after-life”); others who had “radical notions” (people who would challenge the accepted standards of law and property: there was one such who ran for Congress on the ticket of Eugene Debs, and got eight votes—it was said, however, that his sons and brothers did not vote for him). In the mountain districts to this day the Joyners have the reputation of being “queer.” The word is not used scornfully, for generally, no matter what their station, the Joyners are respected folk. But any variation from the norm in them does not astonish anyone: people have come to accept it casually and as a matter of expected fact. If a Joyner is an “atheist,” an “agnostic,” a “socialist,” a “radical,” it has come to be accepted because the Joyners are “queer” folk.
But again—why?
Boiled down to their essential element, all of these “eccentric” qualities which have, for a hundred years or more, caused their neighbors to accept the Joyners as belonging to their special type, and “queer,” are nothing but the marks of an intensely heightened curiosity, a questioning, probing debating, and examining intelligence that their neighbors did not have. There’s the mystery—if mystery it be; indeed, the only mystery there is.
The Joyners have always been “individualists.” But so are all mountain folk. Yet other mountain folk are individualistic more convenably. Most mountain folk are individuals within the narrow frame of a convention. True, they will go their own way, make their own law, “take nothing off of any man”—but all of this follows a close code. They are clannish, suspicious of the strange, world-lost, mistrustful of the outer world—conformant, really, in their non-conforming. For even when they go their way and kill their man, they are unquestioning of the special law of their own world.
In this respect the Joyners were all different from their neighbors, and the pattern of divergence was set by the founder of the clan. At a time when it was the convention for all men in the wilderness to be illiterate, in a place where the knowledge contained in books was of no earthly use, nothing would suit old Bear Joyner but that he must learn to read.
At a later time, as has already been stated, the genealogists of the Aborigines tried to account for Zachariah Joyner’s distinction by tracing his line back to the Middle Ages. It was no use. The answer lay closer home. For no one ever really knew where his father came from. And it did not matter. Old Bear Joyner came from the same place, and was of the same kind, as all the other people in the mountains. But he was a man who learned to read. And there is the core of the whole mystery.
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CHAPTER 3
THE GREAT SCHISM
If, as Carlyle says, the history of the world is recorded in the lives of its great men, so, too, the spirit of a people is recorded in the heroes it picks. No better illustration of this fact could be found than in the life of Zachariah Joyner. Historically, his position is secure enough. True, his greatest fame is where he would himself have wished to be—at home. His name has not attained the national celebrity of a Webster or Calhoun; no doubt most people outside Catawba would have difficulty in placing him. But historians will remember him as a leader in the affairs of his own state for almost fifty years; as an able and resourceful Governor; later, as one of the more forceful and colorful leaders of debate in the affairs of the United States Senate; and all in all, when the whole record of his life is weighed and estimated, as a man of great natural ability and intelligence, considering his place and time and situation.
He directed the affairs of his state through the Civil War, and he directed them courageously and ably. In periods of stress he was unmoved by threat and unswayed by the hysterias of popular feeling. In the closing days of the Confederacy, when the armies were in desperate need, he curtly refused a demand from Jefferson Davis for almost seventy thousand suits of uniforms, shoes, and coats which the state owned and had in its possession. He refused bluntly and without apology, saying that the equipment would be used first of all for the rehabilitation of his own people; and although this act of rebellion brought down upon him bitter denunciation from all quarters, he stuck to his decision and refused to budge.
Later, in the darker days of Reconstruction, military occupation, black legislatures, and night riders, he rendered even greater service to his state. And he concluded a long life, full of honors and accomplishments, as a member of the nation’s Senate, in which capacity he died, during Cleveland’s last administration, in 1893.
All these facts are sufficiently well known to make his position in the nation’s chronicle secure. But to people in Catawba his name means a great deal more than this. They are well acquainted with the story of his life, and the record of his offices as it has been outlined here. But these honors and accomplishments, splendid as they are, do not in themselves explain the place he holds in Catawba’s heart. For he is their hero: in the most local and particular sense, they feel that he belongs to them, is of them, could in no conceivable way belong to anything else, is theirs and theirs alone. Therefore, they love him.
He was not only their own native Lincoln—their backwoods son who marched to glory by the log-rail route—he was their Crockett and Paul Bunyan rolled in one. He was not alone their hero; he was their legend and their myth. He was, and has remained so to this day, a kind of living prophecy of all that they themselves might wish to be; a native divinity, shaped out of their clay, and breathing their own air; a tongue that spoke the words, a voice that understood and spoke the language, they would have him speak.
They tell a thousand stories about him today. What does it matter if many of the things which they describe never happened? They are true because they are the kind of things he would have said, the kind of things that would have happened to him. Thus, to what degree, and in what complex ways, he was created so in their imaginations, no one can say. How much the man shaped the myth, how much the myth shaped the man, how much Zack Joyner created his own folk, or how much his people created him—no one can know, and it does not matter.
For he was of them, and the rib; and they of him the body and the flesh. He was indigenous to them as their own clay, as much a part of all their lives as the geography of their native earth, the climate of their special weather. No other place on earth but Old Catawba could have produced him. And the people know this: therefore, again, they love him.
In examining the history of that great man, we have collected more than eight hundred stories, anecdotes, and jokes that are told of him, and of this number at least six hundred have the unmistakable ring—or smack—of truth. If they did not happen—they should have! They belong to him: they fit him like an old shoe.
“But,” the pedants cunningly inquire, “did they happen? Now, really, did they? Ah, yes, they sound like him—he might have said them—but that’s not the point! Did he?”
Well, we are not wholly unprepared for these objections. Of the six hundred stories which have the smack of truth, we have actually verified three hundred as authentic beyond the shadow of a doubt, and are ready to cite them by the book—place, time, occasion, evidence—to anyone who may inquire. In these stories there is a strength, a humor, a coarseness, and a native originality that belonged to the man and marked his every utterance. They come straight out of his own earth.
As a result of our researches, we can state unequivocally that there is no foundation in fact for the story that one time, in answer to a lady’s wish, he called out to a Negro urchin at a station curb, who had a donkey wagon and a load of peanuts:
“Boy! Back your——over here and show this lady your——!”
But he certainly did make the speech in the United States Senate (in rejoinder to the Honorable Barnaby Bulwinkle) that is generally accredited to him, even though there is no account of it in the Congressional Record:
“Mr. President, sir, we are asked by the honorable gentleman to appropriate two hundred thousand dollars of the taxpayer’s money for the purpose of building a bridge across Coon Creek in the honorable gentleman’s district—a stream, sir, which I have seen, and which, sir, I could——halfway across.”
The Vice-President (pounding with his gavel): “The Senator is out of order.”
Senator Joyner: “Mr. President, sir, you are right. If I was in order, sir, I could——the whole, way across it!”
The last story that is told of Zachariah Joyner is that in his final days of illness (and, like King Charles, in dying, he was “an unconscionable time”) he was aroused from coma one afternoon by the sound of rapid hoofs and wheels, and, looking wearily out of the window of his room, he saw the spare figure of his brother Rufus hastening toward the house. Even in his last extremity his humor did not forsake him, for he is said to have smiled wanly and feebly croaked:
“My God! I reckon it’s all up with me! For here comes Rufe!”
People told the story later and, despite the grimness of the joke, they laughed at it; for the family trait to which it pointed was well known.
Bear Joyner, in his later years, after he had moved to Libya Hill, when told of the death of one of his sons in Zebulon by his second marriage, is known to have said:
“Well, I reckon some of the children will attend the funeral.” Here he considered seriously a moment, then nodded his head with an air of confirmation. “Hit’s—hit’s no more than right!” And after another pause he added virtuously “If I was thar, I’d go myself!” And with these words, he wagged his head quite solemnly, in such a way as to leave no doubt about the seriousness of his intent.
Zachariah is reported, when asked the number of his kin, to have replied “Hell, I don’t know! You can’t throw a rock in Zebulon without hitting one of them!” He reflected on his metaphor a moment, and then said: “However, let him that is without sin among you throw the first stone. I can’t!” And with these words he turned virtuously away, scratching himself vigorously in the behind.
Again, when he responded to the greeting of a member of the audience after a political rally at which he had made a speech he is reported to have said:
“My friend, your face looks familiar to me. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”
To which the person so addressed replied: “Yes, sir. I think you have. I was yore pappy’s ninth child by his second marriage, and you was his fourth ’un by his first. So I reckon you might say that you and me was both half-brothers, distantly removed.”
The grimmest story in the whole Joyner catalogue, perhaps, is that old Bear Joyner, when reproached one time for a seeming neglect of his own brood, is reputed to have said to his inquisitor:
“My God Almighty! A man can plant the seed, but he cain’t make the weather! I sowed ’em—now, goddamn ’em, let ’em grow!”
There is no reason to believe that either William or his children were as neglectful of each other as these stories indicate, yet they really do denote a trait—or failing—of the clan. The fault—if fault it be—has long been known in Catawba, where it is said that “the only thing that will bring ’em all together is a wedding or a funeral; and it has to be a good one to do that.” And yet, this trait has been too easily interpreted. Many people have taken such stories as evidence that the Joyners were lacking in a sense of family feeling; but nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth is that no family ever lived that had a stronger sense of their identity. It is hard to describe the thing in more familiar terms, for the whole tribe violates the standards by which such things are commonly appraised. Of “affection,” “love,” “devotion,” even “clannishness”—as these terms are generally accepted—the family seems to have had little. It is perfectly true that years have gone by when brothers have not seen or spoken to each other, even when they lived in the same town. It is also true that some have grown rich, indifferent to others who have struggled on in obscure poverty; that children have been born, and grown up, and gone away, scarcely familiar with the look of a cousin’s face, the identity of a cousin’s face, the identity of a cousin’s name.
Many people have observed these things and wondered at them, and then accepted them as further proof that the tribe was “queer.” And yet, paradoxically, out of this very indifference came the family unity. From this very separateness came the deep and lasting sense of their identity. In a way, they reversed completely the old adage that if men refuse to hang together, they will all hang separately: of the Joyners it could rather be said that they hang separately because they know they hang together.
To find what produced their sense of “separateness” one must look into the history of the family.
The many children of Bear Joyner by his two marriages—there were more than twenty by the lowest count—grew up in a community where every man had to look out for himself. As for old Bill himself, nothing in his earlier life had prepared him for the exacting duties of parenthood. Whatever his career had been before he came into the hill-bound fastness of Zebulon, it had been very hard. He is known to have said: “If a young’un don’t learn to root afore fourteen, he never will. A hen’ll scrabble for young chicks, but before they’re fryin’ size they’ve got to scratch for themselves.”
Although he was a man of substance for his time and place, his means were not enough to give two dozen children an easy start in life. Moreover, it must be owned that, like so many men who have been widowed in first marriage, he ventured into a second because it was the best expedient to meet his need. And the fourteen or sixteen children who came later—well, it is a brutal fact, but it was a sowing of blind seed. They came. They just came. And that was all.
Perhaps it is unjust to emphasize the schism of this second marriage. And yet, a separation did exist. It is inevitable that this should have been. For one thing, the older children of Bear Joyner’s first marriage were fairly well grown when he married for the second time, and when the children of the second brood began to come along. Again, the surviving children of the first—Zack, Robert, Hattie, Theodore, and Rufe—were, if not a different breed, yet of a separate clan. And they knew it. From the first, instinctively, they seemed to know it. It was not that, consciously, they felt themselves to be “superior”—a bitter accusation that was later made—and yet they seemed to feel they were. And—since the blunt truth must be spoken—in the light of their accomplishment, and in the world’s esteem, they were.
Another fact—the Joyners, first to last, were a vainglorious folk. Even old William had his share of this defect, perhaps even more than the rest of them, for old men thirty years ago who could remember him, and would pay due tribute to his prowess and his extraordinary gifts, would often add: “Well, he knowed that he was good. . . . He was remarkable, but he knowed that he was good. And he was bigoted. He could be bigoted; and he was overbearing, too. . . . And as for Zack,” old men would smile when they said his name, “Well, there was Zack, too. He knowed that he was good. Zack was a wonder . . . but no one ever said he was a blushing violet.”
