Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (21 page)

And in the pantries, above the stove, into the
dining-room, the rich voices of the negresses chuckled with laughter.

"Dat man sho' can tawk!"

Eliza got along badly with the negroes.  She had
all the dislike and distrust for them of the mountain people. 
Moreover, she had never been used to service, and she did not know
how to accept or govern it graciously.  She nagged and berated
the sullen negro girls constantly, tortured by the thought that they
were stealing her supplies and her furnishings, and dawdling away the
time for which she paid them.  And she paid them reluctantly,
dribbling out their small wages a coin or two at a time, nagging them
for their laziness and stupidity.

"What have you been doing all this time? 
Did you get those back rooms done upstairs?"

"No'm," said the negress sullenly, slatting
flatfootedly down the kitchen.

"I'll vow," Eliza fretted.  "I
never saw such a good-for-nothing shiftless darkey in my life. 
You needn't think I'm going to pay  you for wasting your time."

This would go on throughout the day.  As a
result, Eliza would often begin the day without a servant: the girls
departed at night muttering sullenly, and did not appear the next
morning.  Moreover, her reputation for bickering pettiness
spread through the length and breadth of Niggertown.  It became
increasingly difficult for  her to find any one at all who would
work for her.  Completelyflustered when she awoke to find
herself without help, she would immediately call Helen over the
telephone, pouring her fretful story into the girl's ear and
entreating assistance:

"I'll declare, child, I don't know what I'm
going to do.  I could wring that worthless nigger's neck. 
Here I am left all alone with a house full of people."

"Mama, in heaven's name, what's the matter? 
Can't you keep a nigger in the house?  Other people do. 
What do you do to them, anyway?"

But, fuming and irritable, she would leave Gant's and
go to her mother's, serving the tables with large heartiness, nervous
and animated good-humor.  All the boarders were very fond of
her: they said she was a fine girl.  Every one did.  There
was a spacious and unsparing generosity about her, a dominant
consuming vitality, which ate at her poor health, her slender supply
of strength, so that her shattered nerves drew her frequently toward
hysteria, and sometimes toward physical collapse.  She was
almost six feet tall: she had large hands and feet, thin straight
legs, a big-boned generous face, with the long full chin slightly
adroop, revealing her big gold-traced upper teeth.  But, in
spite of this gauntness, she did not look hard-featured or
raw-boned.  Her face was full of heartiness and devotion,
sensitive, whole-souled, hurt, bitter,  hysterical, but at times
transparently radiant and handsome.

It was a spiritual and physical necessity for her to
exhaust herself in service for others, and it was necessary for her
to receive heavy slatherings of praise for that service, and
especially necessary that she feel her efforts had gone
unappreciated.  Even at the beginning, she would become almost
frantic reciting her grievances, telling the story of her service to
Eliza in a voice that became harsh and hysterical:

"Let the least little thing go wrong and she's
at the phone.  It's not my place to go up there and work like a
nigger for a crowd of old cheap boarders.  You know that, don't
you?  DON'T you?"

"Yes'm," said Eugene, meekly serving as
audience.

"But she'd die rather than admit it.  Do
you ever hear her say a word of thanks?  Do I get," she
said laughing suddenly, her hysteria crossed for the moment with her
great humor, "do I get so much as 'go-to-hell' for it?"

"NO!" squealed Eugene, going off in fits of
idiot laughter.

"Why, law me, child.  H-m!  Yes. 
It's GOOD soup," said she, touched with her great earthy
burlesque.

He tore his collar open, and undid his trousers,
sliding to the floor in an apoplexy of laughter.

"Sdop!  Sdop!  You're g-g-gilling me!"

"H-m!  Why, law me!  Yes," she
continued, grinning at him as if she hoped to succeed.

Nevertheless, whether Eliza was servantless or not,
she went daily at dinner, the mid-day meal, to help at table, and
frequently at night when Gant and the boys ate with Eliza instead of
at home. She went because of her deep desire to serve, because it
satisfied her need for giving more than was returned, and because, in
spite of her jibes, along with Gant, at the Barn, and the "cheap
boarders," the animation of feeding, the clatter of plates, the
braided clamor of their talk, stimulated and excited her.

Like Gant, like Luke, she needed extension in life,
movement, excitement: she wanted to dominate, to entertain, to be the
life of the party.  On small solicitation, she sang for the
boarders, thumping the cheap piano with her heavy accurate touch, and
singing in her strong, vibrant, somewhat hard soprano a repertory of
songs classical, sentimental, and comic.  Eugene remembered the
soft cool nights of summer, the assembled boarders and "I Wonder
Who's Kissing Her Now," which Gant demanded over and over; "Love
Me and the World Is Mine"; "Till the Sands of the Desert
Grow Cold"; "Dear Old Girl, the Rob-BIN Sings Above You";
"The End of a Perfect Day"; and "Alexander's Rag-Time
Band," which Luke had practised in a tortured house for weeks,
and sung with thunderous success in the High School Minstrels.

Later, in the cool dark, Gant, rocking violently,
would hold forth on the porch, his great voice carrying across the
quiet neighborhood, as he held the charmed boarders by his torrential
eloquence, his solution of problems of state, his prejudiced but 
bold opinion upon current news.

"--And what did WE do, gentlemen?  We sank
their navy in an action that lasted only twenty minutes, stormed at
by shot and shell, Teddy and his Rough Riders took the hill at
Santiago--it was all over, as you well know, in a few months. 
We had declared war with no thought of ulterior gain; we came because
the indignation of a GREAT people had been aroused at the oppression
of a smaller one, and then, with a magnanimity well worthy the
greatest people of the face of the earth, we paid our defeated enemy
twenty millions of dollars.  Ah, Lord!  That was
magnanimity indeed!  You don't think any other nation would have
done that, do you?"

"No, sir," said the boarders emphatically.

They didn't always agree with his political
opinions--Roosevelt was the faultless descendant of Julius César
Napoleon Bonaparte, and Abraham Lincoln--but they felt he had a fine
head and would have gone far in politics.

"That man should have been a lawyer," said
the boarders.
 
 

And yet, there was surging into these chosen hills
the strong thrust of the world, like a kissing tide, which swings
lazily in with a slapping glut of waters, and recoils into its parent
crescent strength, to be thrown farther inward once again.

It was an element of Eliza's primitive and focal
reasoning that men and women withered by the desert would seek an
oasis, that those  who were thirsty would seek water, and that
those panting on the plains would look into the hills for comfort and
relief.  She had that bull's-eye accuracy which has since been
celebrated, when plum-picking's over, under the name of "vision."

The streets, ten years before raw clay, were being
paved: Gant went into frenzies over the paving assessments, cursed
the land, the day of his birth, the machinations of Satan's
children.  But Eugene followed the wheeled casks of boiling tar;
watched the great roller, a monster that crushed him in night-mares,
powder the layered rock; felt, as he saw the odorous pressed tongue
of pavement lengthen out, a swelling ecstasy.

From time to time, a stilted Cadillac gasped
cylindrically up the hill past Dixieland: Eugene said a spell, as it
faltered, for its success--Jim Sawyer, a young blood, came for Miss
Cutler, the Pittsburgh beauty: he opened a door behind in the fat red
belly. They got in.

Sometimes, when Eliza awoke to find her servants
gone, he was sent down into Niggertown to capture a new one: in that
city of rickets he searched into their fetid shacks, past the slow
stench of little rills of mire and sewage, in fetid cellars, through
all the rank labyrinth of the hill-sprawled settlement.  He
came, in the hot sealed dungeons of their rooms, to know the wild
grace of their bodies, thrown upon a bed, their rich laughter, their
smell of the jungle tropics stewed in with frying cookery and a
boiling wash.

"Do you want a job?"

"Whose little boy are you?"

"Mrs. Eliza Gant's."

Silence.  Presently:  "Dere's a gal up
de street at Mis' Cawpening's who's lookin' fo' wuk.  YOU go see
HUH."

Eliza watched them with a falcon's eye for thefts. 
Once, with a detective, she searched a departed girl's room in
Niggertown, finding there sheets, towels, spoons that had been stolen
from her. The girl went to the penitentiary for two years. 
Eliza loved the commotion of law, the smell and tension of the
courts.  Whenever she could go to law she did so: she delighted
in bringing suit against people, or in having suit brought against
her.  She always won.

When her boarders defaulted payments she seized their
belongings triumphantly, delighting particularly in eleventh-hour
captures at the railway station, with the aid of an obedient
constabulary, and ringed by the attentive offal of the town.

Eugene was ashamed of Dixieland.  And he was
again afraid to express his shame.  As with The Post, he felt
thwarted, netted, trapped.  He hated the indecency of his life,
the loss of dignity and seclusion, the surrender to the tumultuous
rabble of the four walls which shield us from them.  He felt,
rather than understood, the waste, the confusion, the blind cruelty
of their lives?his spirit was stretched out on the rack of despair
and bafflement as there came to him more and more the conviction that
their lives could not be more hopelessly distorted, wrenched,
mutilated, and perverted away from all simple comfort, repose,
happiness, if they set themselves deliberately to tangle the skein,
twist the pattern. He choked with fury: he thought of Eliza's slow
speech, her endless reminiscence, her maddening lip-pursing, and
turned white with constricted rage.

He saw plainly by this time that their poverty, the
threat of the poorhouse, the lurid references to the pauper's grave,
belonged to the insensate mythology of hoarding; anger smouldered
like a brand in him at their sorry greed.  There was no place
sacred unto themselves, no place fixed for their own inhabitation, no
place proof against the invasion of the boarders.

As the house filled, they went from room to little
room, going successively down the shabby scale of their lives. 
He felt it would hurt them, coarsen them: he had even then an intense
faith in food, in housing, in comfort--he felt that a civilized man
must begin with them; he knew that wherever the spirit had withered,
it had not withered because of food and plumbing.

As the house filled, in the summer season, and it was
necessary to wait until the boarders had eaten before a place could
be found for  him, he walked sullenly about beneath the propped
back porch of Dixieland, savagely exploring the dark cellar, or the
two dank windowless rooms which Eliza rented, when she could, to
negresses.

He felt now the petty cruelty of village caste. 
On Sunday for several years, he had bathed, brushed, arrayed his
anointed body in clean underwear and shirting and departed, amid all
the pleasurable bustle of Sunday morning, for the Presbyterian Sunday
School.  He had by this time been delivered from the instruction
of the several  spinsters who had taught his infant faith the
catechism, thegoodness of God, and the elements of celestial
architecture.  The five-cent piece which formerly he had yielded
up reluctantly, thinking of cakes and ale, he now surrendered more
gladly, since he usually had enough left over for cold gaseous
draughts at the soda-fountain.

In the fresh Sunday morning air he marched off with
brisk excitement to do duty at the altars, pausing near the church
where the marshalled ranks of the boys' military school split cleanly
into regimented Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians.

The children assembled in a big room adjacent to the
church, honey-combed to right and left with small classrooms, which
they entered after the preliminary service was finished.  They
were exhorted from the platform by the superintendent, a Scotch
dentist with a black-gray beard, fringed by a small area of embalmed
skin, whose cells, tissues, and chemical juices seemed to have been
fixed in a state of ageless suspension, and who looked no older from
one decade to another.

He read the text, or the parable of the day's study,
commented on it with César dryness and concision, and surrendered
the service to his assistant, a shaven, spectacled, Wilsonian-looking
man, also Scotch, who smiled with cold affection at them over his
high shiny collar, and led them through the verses of a hymn, heaving
up his arms and leering at them encouragingly, as they approached the
chorus.  A sturdy spinstress thumped heavily upon a piano which
shook like a leaf.