The Pritchett Century (17 page)

The only playwright I knew a little was Sean O’Casey. He was still living in his tenement on the North Side, a smashed fanlight over the door. His room was bare and contained only an iron bed, a table and a couple of poor chairs. He always wore a cloth cap in the house. A fire of cheap coal dust was smouldering on the fire where a kettle was singing—a true sign of the old Ireland. On the shabby wall was a notice he had printed:

He was writing
The Plough and the Stars
at this time. Again, only one thing remains of his conversation: he was angry because he said that the “authorities” were trying to keep the poor from using the Public Libraries, on the grounds that the poor would spread their diseases through the books. I’d been angered myself by the argument when I was ten, and I had read it in a book by Marie Corelli.

(1971)

The southern train had cannoned me loudly over Virginia into Tennessee. And after an eventless waiting at a junction there, I was tugged under difficult steam up a light railway into the mountains of the North Carolina border. I had seen the blue lips of these mountains before, briefly arched over and beyond nearer hills.

To live in blue mountains, I began to think; to alight in that horizon unawares and extravagantly to plunge one’s body in it! And then I was drawn over narrow steel into those very mountains. They circled by as we trudged. We invaded their gorges, serpenting through them, striking arcs into their townships, outlining their bases. And as we passed, echoes like unleashed dogs ran barking up the mountain sides and were lost in the woods.

The hills were at times huddled like sheep, at times scattered and grouped like herds. The sunlight was golden on them, the gold of laden furnaces, but the deep shades sunken between the ridges had the winding, varying blue of turf smoke. The processional hills trended back and down and away; new ones came before old ones had been grasped or regretted. I wished for the power of a king to halt them; and
for the gifted hands of a poet to grasp them and pull them into myself. For a mountain is something high and blue within one.

We pelted into N———, galloped in like mountaineer horsemen and reined in sharply at Jenkins’s store. N——— is highly set, like a pool on a mountain summit. There is a low, surrounding ridge of woods and the village itself has twenty timber shacks of all kinds, and about fifty-three inhabitants, including children. Of these, all the men sit on the platform of Jenkins’s store, accompanied by “Zeb” Jenkins, and wait for the daily train to arrive.

I remember the men, fifteen of them, taller than corn, but scarcely stouter, wearing blue overalls and wide black hats, with brims flapped this way and that with the challenging nonchalance of raven’s wings. There were no exceptions; each man wore blue overalls and a black hat. Each man was thin and nasal, drawling to canny length, with a startling amount of bone, with a reach as long as the dawn.

Each man had blue eyes and fair hair. It was as though these mountaineers were wearing a uniform, and my sensations were like those of Rip Van Winkle when he came upon the Dutchmen. As I watched these fifteen men, long and thin as turnpikes, looking wordlessly at me, and with their idle lengths of leg hung over the platform of the store, a fear seized me that by a general conspiracy of men, trains and blue mountains I had been thrown into an outlaw stronghold, and that the outlaws were just taking their time.

I found myself listening for their thoughts, trying to meet their spare blue gaze. But impossible. The main thoroughfare of N——— was the railway track, by which stood a few shacks and a sawmill, and as I turned back to escape this way I could feel that fifteen black hats, cocked at all angles of defiance, had turned with me, that thirty blue eyes turned and perforated me; and that the silence was refining to its ultimate frigidity. Oh, for a stout man!

As though answering, a rotund fellow came from behind a wagon and smiled at me, seized me and undertook my defense, strode over railway tracks and fields, gave me a bed for the night, and fed me on corn bread and chunks of salt bacon, and dippers of spring water. The strangeness of blue mountains departed and they attended my walk that night with so warm a familiarity that I did not even think about
them. It was dark, and as I reconnoitered the tracks and the store, there was not a man of that lanky band to be seen.

The world had been blackened out by the heavy charcoal of night. There was no moon. But the sky was vaguely luminous, a dome of light in which the stars swung, and their keen votive smoke brought involuntary tears to the eyes and dimmed them, as wood smoke will. The white stars burned at a far, heatless distance. On that sky they might have been the white-hot and minute cinders of diamonds, which the wind had raked down, blown and scattered.

The hills which had waited with heads raised, like lowing cattle, during the day, were now straightened and flattened into a one-dimensional rim circling the world, and bluntly standing out against the light of void thrown up from beyond it. The earth was like a black caldron swinging over the reflected glow of the night fires of space.

I found a dimmed road and followed it to the liquid pulsations of the crickets. There were shrill encampments of these insects blotted in the fields and hills. Their notes were the sizzling of the caldron. Over the floor of silence ricocheted the sudden barking of dogs. A fan of yellow light opened across the fields, from the porch of a house, and in the porch two men were talking.

I heard solitary words drop on to the air and eddying briefly down, extinguish into the dark. I passed closed doors, and windows in which oil lamps burned sparingly and laid a film of yellow light on the heads of talking people. A hand moving the light would start a whirligig of shadows over the walls, like the wings of big moths; and settling would cast and fix a new fantasy.

I passed a shack on a hill, and out of its window was hopping the skirl of a gramophone. But the trees broke up and subdued the noise, and the black silence crept closely in as though it had been the breathing of the earth. I blotted myself into the woods, led on by a light which I discovered to be the lamp of a white frame church standing up naively like a child’s toy.

In the church a wide voice was preaching, and words of the sermon jumped out of the open door into its funnel of light and fell out of the light to earth like the turning leaves. There was singing, a reverent
monody. After, a deep silence, and I expected to see the lights put out. But a long silence of vacant dark. A chestnut aimed to earth.

The lights clicked out. The preacher came out of the church and by the light of a storm lantern walked with a dozen men and women between the trees. The preacher, seeing the star smoke above, sang out courageously the tune of a hymn, till a woman’s voice stopped him with,

“Right smart o’ chestnuts bin fallin’, Mr. Cooper. Last night one fell and hit Doc McDowell plum’ on the head.”

The high nasal comment from Doc:

“Yes. And I hain’t never seen no chestnut the size o’ that-a-one. Seemed like it kind o’ fell searchin’ for me.”

Then the moon rose, yellow as candle light, and I could see the group by the boles of the columnar trees. The men were wearing black hats and blue overalls.

After hearing Doc McDowell’s widely drawling voice tell how the bursting chestnut hit him “plumb on the head,” I hurried home, feeling the ice of mountain strangeness had been cracked by this small wedge of overheard speech. But I awoke the next morning to see the immutable highlands waiting for me. They seemed to be mirrored in the air, like glass, to resist anything but a surface acquaintance.

North Carolina is proud. Proud of having less than 1 percent of foreign blood in its stock. Proud of its pure Scottish, Irish and English blood. There you hear a strange dialect, not an acquired twang, but a traditional, custom-hewn brogue, something which hovers naïvely between a Devonshire accent and the Oxford manner.

In these border mountains of western North Carolina, in the Unakas and Blue Ridge, it is said you may hear the English of Shakespeare and Chaucer; though in my wanderings to the remote parts of these mountains I did not experience the happiness of noting anything so rare, except the name Leander.

Sitting in his storm-thinned and weather-split shack in one of the
highest ranges, fifteen miles from a railway and eight miles from any road but a rough wagon trail, was Leander, tall, shaggy, unkempt as a furze bush; and his brother Beaumont. They could neither read nor write. Beaumont and Leander Wiggins, who gave us apples and asked, “Now is you-uns kin to ol’ Uncle Moses P——— on the yon side o’ Little Rock Creek?” That is as near to Shakespeare as we ever got!

The mountaineers are perhaps America’s only peasantry. These men and women have been shut up in their loved mountains since the coming of the first settlers, and have conserved their rough, antique modes of living. The mountains still hold more of mysterious life than a stranger can quickly penetrate.

The scattered huts shelter men almost startled by their own voices. Their speech has the intonation of solitude. Within the last two or three years roads have been carved into the mountains, and it is possible for the avid to “do” them at anything up to forty miles an hour. But the mountaineers accept the change suspiciously, keep to where one can travel only on horseback, and often only on foot.

One sees the tall blue figures, with narrow heads looking to the ground, with hands in pockets, and gun laid across their arms, behind their backs—one sees them stalking along in depths of thought beyond the length of our conventional-sounding chains.

Is it as grim as it appears to be? What does this brooding betoken? The thoughts of the mountaineer flow in deep, evasive channels. One is warned of the suspicious nature and lawless tendencies of these men. But I am safely back in New York to testify that a more hospitable and genial people does not exist, that they have what Pío Baroja—who would have been enthusiastic about them—would call a “dynamic” sense of freedom, the unconfiding, unadministered freedom of bears and squirrels, and that like the rest of us they do not want outsiders to meddle in their affairs.

I became involved in no feuds. I discovered no stills—about which hearsay has brought forth a vast brood of exaggerations, though there was vague evidence of both feuds and stills. But, even in these desperate matters, I prefer to remember these men are living according to the customs of 150 or 200 years ago. Better education and roads have only begun to penetrate their retreats. They have been a law unto themselves,
have lived as clansmen and hunters, shot, hewn and eaten for their own bare needs in solitudes where even the echo of an ordered society has not been heard.

Knowing only the stark changes of life, the unexplained varying of sun, wind, rain, the diurnal infusions of light and darkness, and the sporadic labor of the open air, the mountaineer obeys instinct without discriminating. Though unconsciously he carries within him, as he breaks into the laurel, that primal instinct of all, the instinct for law.

The mountaineer fights hard for his liquor yet, and will do so until his adventurous impulses and his active mind are given occupations measuring up to his powers. Meanwhile, he is shrewd enough to let his children take advantage of the better opportunities for education which are now offering.

I heard of one aged mountaineer, whose wild career had become a byword in the country, but who fell upon hard times and was forced to live in the corner of a sawmill shed throughout a severe winter. When strangers commiserated and asked how he spent the long, bare evenings, he said he taught his two grandchildren to read and write. “Thar never hain’t bin no ignorant Perkinses,” he said proudly.

All this and “a right smart piece” more—as they say—I have discovered since that morning when, hesitating before the start, I saw the mountains indifferently, signlessly waiting like furred animals with the casual, upward forest marked on them. The moist, alluring blue had gone from them. They were gray-green, real, ponderous. They exhaled odors, the humid odors of sap and clay.

The noon heat swayed over their hollows. Chords of wind moved in white vibration over their ridges. There were the short, warm smell of fields and the smell of damp earth under trees. There were the tang of thickets, the hanging odor of laurel or rhododendron, the flavor of stripped bark. The torches of corn rattled dryly like paper. The air weighed like the air of a warm barn, the rafterless barn of the sky to which the steep fields of corn and rye reached and attained.

Blue rainclouds, sagging and weighty spheres of vapor, were forced over the ridges and, listing heavily, rolled over upon us with staring, electric clarity. Their enormous movements were defined powerfully in white curves and blue bodies of polished thunder. They bulked in silence.

“Hit hain’t rained since the spring o’ the year. What way was it whaur ye came from?” commented and asked the first man we met on our way. Large and single circles of rain, slate blue, tapped the dust; and as we turned up our first creek, we heard ahead of us, lumbering wagons of thunder jolting stolidly down from the gaps.

Unknowingly we were on the trail of Alison, the grandiloquent Alison.

Vagrant unshapely audiences of cloud moved before the sun, broke up, obscured and then released the main force of his light, giving the earth an inconstant, vaporous glaze. We walked through a valley for miles and miles, among sumac, goldenrod and Michaelmas daisies.

Finding the mountains now built into ranges of loftiness, like green naves; the hills like chapels and chapters around them; and the ranges themselves supported by flying buttresses, ridges; and windows of light shining with the soft restraint of sun-wakened hills, the scene changed for us. We turned up one of the least habited creeks, as though it were the aisle of a cathedral. We climbed, as it were, turret, stairs, ridding ourselves of the weighty valley sun, and breathing a more agile air.