Thomas Wolfe, page 349
The Joyners of this early flowering not only “knowed that they was good,” but they made little effort to conceal it. Apparently, none of them—unless it was Robert—hid his light under a bushel. And the truth is, each of them, in his own way—even Theodore!—had a light to show.
The reasons? Well, the reasons were complex, but perhaps the first one was the consciousness they had of special heritage. Bear Joyner’s first wife was a “special woman”: she was a Creasman, and the Creasmans were “good people.” The Joyners of the first lot were all proud of their Creasman ancestry. Of Martha Creasman herself there is little to be told except that she was a good wife, a quiet and hard-working mother, and a Presbyterian. This last fact, trifling as it seems, was all important: for it bespeaks a kind of denominational snobbishness which is still more prevalent than the world may know, and which the Joyners of the first lot never lost.
As to Bear Joyner’s second wife, she was a Baptist. The first Joyners—Zack, and the rest of them—were always careful to speak of her respectfully, but with a touch of unconscious patronage that was infuriating to “the country cousins” of the lesser breed:
“Well now, she was a mighty good woman, and all of that. . . . Of course”—with a kind of hesitant and regretful concessiveness—“she was a Baptist. . . . I reckon you might call her a kind of religious fanatic. . . . She had queer religious notions. . . . But she was a good woman. . . . She had some queer ideas, but she was a good mother to those children. . . . Now everyone will have to give her that!”
Here then, obviously, were the roots of the great schism. Bear Joyner himself seems to have shared unconsciously in this prejudice of his elder children. He had apparently always been somewhat in awe of his first wife: her family was well known, and there is reason to believe he felt he was making a considerable step forward in the world when he married her. Toward his second wife he had no such feeling: she was one of a hard-shell Baptist tribe, and there is a story that he met her at camp meeting. However that may be, he was “looking for a woman to keep house”; and it was pretty much in this capacity that he married her.
That she worked long and faithfully there can be no doubt: or that she was a patient, strong, enduring woman—“a good mother,” as the elder Joyners always willingly admitted, to the numerous family that she now began to bring into the world.
As for Bear Joyner’s older children by his previous marriage—Zack, Hattie, Robert, Theodore, and Rufe (Martha and George, the two remaining of the seven, had died in childhood)—they seem from the beginning to have been outside the sphere of their stepmother’s control. Their strongly marked individualities had already been defined and shaped by the time their father married again. They had inherited, in liberal measure, his own strong character, his arrogant confidence in his own powers, a good measure of his color, his independence, his intelligence, his coarse and swinging humor, his quick wit.
There is no evidence that they were consciously contemptuous of their new mother, but there is no doubt they felt superior to her. Even in a backwoods community theirs was a larger, bolder, more tolerant and experienced view of life than she had ever known; and her narrow prejudice, her cramped vision, her rigid small moralities (all products of an inheritance she couldn’t help) simply amused them, aroused their ridicule and mirth.
Zachariah, especially, although in later years he always spoke feelingly of her excellent qualities, was particularly active in his humorous analysis of her. Her superstitions and prejudices amused him; the operations of her mind, and the narrow cells of her morality seemed grotesque and ludicrous to him; and he questioned, teased, examined her rather cruelly in order, as he said, “to see what made her tick.”
Hers, indeed, poor woman, was a strange and contradictory code, and yet, because it was the only one she knew, she thought it was the only one there was: it seemed natural to her, and it never occurred to her to question it.
That harsh code to which she adhered was indigenous to America. It has not only done much to shape our lives and histories, but it persists to this day, and is at the root of much of the sickness, the moral complex of America. For example, she believed it was wrong to take a life “in cold blood,” but it was not nearly so wrong as to take a drink. She was always warning her children against evil ways and loose living, and speaking of people who committed “all kinds of immorality and licentiousness”; but it would have come strangely to her ears to hear murder referred to as an immoral act. True, it was “an awful crime”—she could understand it in these terms because the Bible told about Cain and Abel, and taught that it was wicked to take life. But, privately, she did not consider it half as bad for a man to take a life as to take a drink, or—what was the most immoral act of all—to sleep with a woman who was not his wife.
Life-taking, the shedding of man’s blood, was so much a part of the life of a pioneer community that it occasioned no surprise. To be sure, she would not openly defend the practice of killing, although in a surprising number of individual cases she was willing to defend it, becoming quite aroused, in fact, when Zachariah, with deceptive gravity, would point out that her own brother—whose life in other ways she esteemed as a model of the Christian virtues—had been quite handy with his gun in his hot youth, and was known to have killed three men:
“Now, Zack,” she would cry angrily, “don’t you go a-diggin’ into that. Reese had his faults, like everyone, and I reckon maybe in his young days he may have been hot-tempered. But he’s always led a good Christian and God-fearin’ sort of life. He never drank or smoked or used bad language or ran around with women—like some people I know about.” Here she glanced accusingly at her erring stepson, who returned her look with an expression of bland innocence. “So don’t you start on him: he’s always been an upright, moral sort of man.”
All of this amused Zachariah no end: he did not mean to be cruel to her, but, as she said, he was “always tormenting” her, rummaging gravely about in the confusing rag-bag of her moral consciousness to see what further mysteries would be revealed.
He is known to have spoken of the physical sharpness of her sense of smell, which really was amazing, and which all of her children inherited (she is said one time to have “smelled burning leaves five miles away upon the mountain, long before anyone else knowed there was a fire”):
“Well, she can smell fire and brimstone farther off than that. And Hell! If I took a drink in Libya Hill, she’d smell it on my breath before I crossed the county line!”
On another occasion, she is said to have called out to him the moment that he came into the house: “Zack Joyner! You’ve been drinkin’ that bad, old, rotten, vile corn licker again. I can smell it on your breath!”
“Now, mother,” he answered temperately, “there is no bad, old, rotten, vile corn licker. Some is good—” he went on in a tone of judicious appraisal that she must have found very hard to take—“and some is better. But there is no bad!”
Again, when Bear Joyner returned from Libya Hill one day with this announcement:
“Well, Thad Burton’s gone and done it again!”
“Gone and done what?” said Zachariah, looking up.
“Gone and killed a man,” Bear Joyner answered.
“Oh!” said Zachariah with a relieved air, casting a sly look toward his stepmother, “I was afraid you were goin’ to tell me he’d done something really bad, like gettin’ drunk.”
Bear Joyner was no less adept than his sons in this sport of teasing his bewildered wife. It is said that having driven in with her one day from Zebulon, to see the boys who at that time were “keeping store” for him in Libya Hill, he went into the store and, finding Zack on duty there, the following conversation then took place between them:
“You boys been leadin’ the Christ-life like your mother told you to?”
“Yes, sir,” Zachariah said.
“Have you done your chores this mornin’?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Watered the milk?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sanded the sugar?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fixed the scales?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well,” said Bear, “you’d better call in Ted and Bob. Your mother’s here, an’ we’re goin’ to have prayers.”
Finally, there was the case of Harriet—the “Miss Hattie” of later years, for she never married—to add to the confusion and distress of William Joyner’s second wife. Of all Bear Joyner’s children, Hattie was the favorite. In her, perhaps, more than in any of the others he saw the qualities—the quick wit, the humor, the independence and intelligence—that in himself he most esteemed. It has been said that she was his “love child”—a euphemism maybe for the fact that she was illegitimate—and that this accounted for her father’s deeper care. At any rate, although her birth was hidden in an obscurity that was never cleared—for old Bear Joyner never spoke of it, and no one dared to speak of it to him—she was brought up as a member of his elder brood. The story goes that he was gone one time for several weeks upon a journey to the south, and then when he returned he brought the child with him. She was almost eight years old then, and Martha, the first wife was still alive. The story goes that Joyner brought the child into the house—the family was at dinner, and the faces of the other children wonderingly turned—and sat her down beside them at the table.
“This,” he said, “is your new sister. From this time on, she’ll be one of the family, and you’ll treat her so.”
And this is all that was ever spoken. It is said that Martha, Joyner’s first wife, took the child as one of her own; and in justice to the second wife, no matter what additional distress and confusion this new proof of Joyner wickedness may have caused that bewildered woman’s soul, it was always freely acknowledged, most loyally of all by Harriet herself, as a further tribute to the woman’s qualities, that she was a good mother, and brought the girl up as if she were “one of her own.”
Historically, time-periods are most curiously defined: the world does not grow up together. The footpads that made Johnson carry his stick at night when he went out alone in London in the Eighteenth Century have been quite actively abroad in recent years in our own land. As for “human life,” a commodity which our editorial writers tell us they most jealously esteem, the security of human life in our own broad land—whether from murder, violence, or sudden death of every kind soever—is perhaps almost as great in America at the present time as it was in England at the period of Elizabeth, although our figures are by far the more bloody of the two.
And as for our own Dick Whittingtons—our country boys who went to town—there, too, we ape the European pattern; but we have been late.
The history of human celebrity for the most part is an urban one. In our own land, although children are taught that most of their great men “came from the country,” it is not sufficiently emphasized that most of them also “went to town.” Certainly, this has been true in America: the national history could almost be written in the lives of men who went to town.
Zachariah Joyner, in his later years, was very fond of using the log-cabin theme for politics, but if he had been more true to fact, he would have admitted that the turning point in his own career had come when he abandoned finally the world-lost fastnesses of Zebulon for the most urban settlement of Libya Hill. There, truly, was his starting point, his threshold, the step from which he gained his vantage, took off for the larger community of public life and general notice in which for fifty years he was to play so large a role.
And, in various ways, the same transitional experience was true of his more immediate family—his three brothers, who came with him. In one sense the whole history of the many Joyners, their divided lot and the boundary that separated the lowly from the great, might be stated in one phrase. It was the history of those who stayed at home, and of those who went to town.
As the years passed, the division of each group became more widely marked, the sense of unity more faint and far. Hill-bound, world-lost, locked in the narrow valleys and the mountain walls of Zebulon, the Joyners who remained at home became almost as strange and far away to those who lived in Libya Hill as if their home had been the Mountains of the Moon. True, they lived only fifty miles away, but as Bear Joyner had himself said so many years before, it was “the wrong way.” It really was this sense of two directions that divided them. The Libya Hill Joyners were facing ever toward the world, and those in Zebulon away from it; and as years went by, it seemed that this directiveness became more marked than ever—the town Joyners ever more the world’s men; those in Zebulon more withdrawn from the world.
By 1900, a whole century since William Joyner crossed the Blue Ridge and came down into the wilderness with his rifle and his grant of land, if some curious historian, gifted with immortality, could have returned there, he would have observed a change as startling as it was profound. He would have found the lives of the town Joyners (for by this time Libya Hill had grown to twelve thousand people) so greatly altered as to be scarcely recognizable; but he would have found the lives of the country Joyners scarcely changed at all.
True, some changes had occurred in Zebulon in those hundred years, but for the most part these were tragic ones. The great mountain slopes and forests of the section had been ruinously detimbered; the farm-soil on hill sides had eroded and washed down; high up, upon the hills, one saw the raw scars of old mica pits, the dump heaps of deserted mines. Some vast destructive “Suck” had been at work here; and a visitor, had he returned after one hundred years, would have been compelled to note the ruin of the change. It was evident that a huge compulsive greed had been at work: the whole region had been sucked and gutted, milked dry, denuded of its rich primeval treasures: something blind and ruthless had been here, grasped, and gone. The blind scars on the hills, the denuded slopes, the empty mica pits were what was left.
And true, the hills were left—with these deteriorations; and all around, far-flung in their great barricades, the immense wild grandeur of the mountain wall, the great Blue Ridge across which they had come long, long ago; and which had held them from the world.
And the old formations of the earth were left: the boiling clamor of the rocky streams, the cool slant darkness of the mountain hollows. Something wild, world-lost, and lyrical, and special to the place called Zebulon was somehow left: the sound of rock-bright waters, birds calls, and something swift and fleeting in a wood; the way light comes and goes; cloud shadows passing on a hill; the wind through the hill grasses, and the quality of light—something world-lost, far, and haunting (special to the place as is the very climate of the soil) in the quality of light; and little shacks and cabins stuck to hill or hollow, sunken, tiny, in the gap; the small, heart-piercing wisps of smoke that coiled into the clear immensity of weather from some mountain shack, with its poignant evidence that men fasten to a ledge, and draw their living from a patch of earth—because they have been here so long and love it and cannot be made to leave; together with lost voices of one’s kinsmen long ago—all this was left, but their inheritance was bare. Something had come into the wilderness, and had left the barren land.
And the people—ah, the people!—yes, the people!—
They were left! They were left “singing the same songs” (as college Doctors of Philosophy so gloatingly assure us) “their Elizabethan forebears sang”—which is a falsehood; and no glory—they should have made new and better ones for themselves. “Speaking the same tongue” their Elizabethan forebears spoke—which also is a falsehood; and they should have made a new one for themselves. “Living the same lives” their forebears lived a hundred years ago—which further is a falsehood. The lives their forebears lived were harsh and new, still seeking and explorative; their own lives often were just squalid, which should have been better.
What remained? It has been said, “The earth remains.” But this was wrong. The earth had changed, the earth had eroded, the earth had washed down the gulleys in a billion runnels of red clay; the earth was gone.
But the people—ah, the people!—yes, the people! The people were still there!
Turned backwards now, world-lost, in what was once new land! Unseeking now, in what their forebears with blue vistas in their eyes, alone, in Indian country, sought! Turned in upon themselves, congruent as a tribe, all intermarried (so each man now was cousin to the very blood he took: each Cain among them brother to his very deed!)——
The people!—aye, the people! The people of Zack Joyner, and old Bear, who sought a world, and found it, that such as these might lose it; had wandered so that such as these should stay; had sought great vistas to the West, so that such as these remain——
The people! To be gloated over by exultant Ph.D’s (who find in mountain shacks the accents of Elizabeth); to be gawked at by tourists (now the roads are good) in search of the rare picturesque; to be yearned over by consecrated school-marms “from the North”; have their “standards” “improved” by social service workers, who dote upon the squalor, ignorance, and poverty; lasciviously regret the degradations of the people’s lot, and who do valiantly their little bit (God bless their little, little souls!) to help the people, teach the people, prop the people, heal the people, with their little salves (not, too completely, else what are little salves and social service work about?)—and who therefore (in spite of dirt, filth, rickets, murder, lean-tos, children, syphilis, hunger, incest, and pellagra) love the people, adore the people, see underneath their “drawbacks” and their “lack of opportunities” all “the good” in people—because the people, at the bottom, “are so fine.”
It is a lie! . . . Dear God! . . . Dear Jesus God, protect us, all men living, and the people, from such stuff as this!
The people are not “fine”—the people are not picturesque—the people——
Well, after a hundred years of it—denudings, minings, lootings, intermarryings, killings, dyings, bornings, livings, all the rest of it—the people—in spite of Smike, the lumber thief, who stole their hills; and Snead, his son, who stole their balladry; in spite of Gripe, who took their mica and their ore, and gave them “the lung-sickness” in exchange for it; despite Grace, Gripe’s daughter, who now brings rubber condoms and tuberculin; and his wife, Gertrude, who schools them in hand-weaving—despite Gripe, Smike, and Grace, and all lovers of the picturesque soever—despite rickets, incest, syphilis, and sham—the people!—ah, the people!—well, the people——
