I waited to approach the wagon until the team had quieted, and then I handed my grip up to Dick, who lifted it over onto the floor behind the seat. And then, reaching down, he helped me to climb up and onto the seat between them.
He turned the wagon around and we headed home. We could no longer hear any noise from the bigger road at all. The only sounds now were the rattling of the breast chains and traces, the footsteps of the mules, and the rumble of the turning wheels. The Bird’s Branch road in those days was still just a two-track graveled lane, wide enough in most places for two vehicles to meet and pass. It was snug sitting there between Grandpa and Dick, and I no longer minded the wind. Before long my caffeinated thoughts had eased from the speed of the bus to the perhaps four-mile-an-hour gait of the mules, which seemed to allow the country to come to rest around me. The mules too had relaxed. They were striding along at a brisk walk, their ears, now that they had abandoned themselves to their work, swaying back and forth as they stepped.
My grandfather, who had been watching them with eager attention, said, “Ay Lord, they’re good ones, Dick!” And then, without waiting for Dick to reply, he shook his head in solemn agreement with himself.
It was as though a curtain had fallen on a stage and the credulous audience (I, that is to say) was now in a different world from the one I had waked up in only a short time ago. The world I was in now was an older one that had been in existence a long time, though it would last only a few more years. The time was about over when a boy traveling into the Port William community might be met by a team of mules and a wagon. Dick Watson would die in the fall of 1945 and Grandpa Catlett in the late winter of 1946. By 1950 or so most of the horse and mule teams would have departed from the country. The men and women who had known only the old ways were departing fast. I knew well at that time that the two worlds existed and that I lived in both. During the school year I lived mostly in Hargrave, the county seat at the confluence of the rivers. Hargrave, though it seemed large to me, was a small town that loved its connections with the greater world, had always aspired to be bigger, richer, and grander than it was, and had always apologized to itself for being only what it was. When school was out, I lived mostly in the orbit of the tiny village of Port William, which, so long as it remained at the center of its own attention, was entirely satisfied to be what it was.
That those two worlds were in mortal contention had never occurred to me. When in a few years one had entirely consumed the other, so that no place anywhere would ever again be satisfied to be what it was, I was surprised, and I am more surprised now by the rapidity of the change than I was then. In only a few years the world of pavement, speed, and universal dissatisfaction had extended itself into nearly every place and nearly every mind, and the old world of the mule team and wagon was simply gone, leaving behind it a scatter of less and less intelligible relics.
But on that morning in 1943 I had no premonition of such an ending. In my innocence, I thought only that the world the mules were drawing us into was a truer world than the world of Hargrave, and I liked it better. It was a world placed unforgettably within the weather, in the unqualified daylight and darkness. I thought it had always been and would always be pretty much as it was.
And on that morning of my journey I was happy to be sitting scrunched on the wagon seat between the two old men, one black and one white, both of whom I loved. Dick I loved for his never-failing kindness to me, his ready companionship, his lore of horses and mules and fox hounds. My love for Grandpa was more complicated, varyingly mixed with awe and sometimes with fear, for he was a monument and a force.
Though bent a little at the hips from age and wear, he was tall and lean, straight-backed even then. He sat upright on the wagon seat as a man would sit who was mounted assuredly on a good horse, as he had been on many days of his life and as he would be still for another year or two. He carried a heavy stockman’s cane that he sometimes leaned on but when walking seldom touched to the ground; at times he did without it altogether. He had been at one time a horse trainer; for a longer time he had been a trader in livestock, riding to court days in the nearby county seats to buy weanling calves or mules and in all weather driving them home; and always and above all he had been a farmer. He was born during the Civil War in the place where he lived all his life, and where he would die. For much of his life times had been hard, and he had struggled just to hold onto the farm. At the time when my father came home with his law degree and by his earnings reinforced the family’s hold on the place, it had been in danger of being sold for taxes.
And so my brother Henry and I, born just soon enough to know him a little, were not merely the descendants of his blood; as he saw us, we belonged to a line of succession that had maintained itself in that place by struggle, and we therefore had to be prepared to continue the struggle. His love for us therefore was rarely indulgent, and it could be extremely demanding, burdened as it was by a fearful tenderness and an expectation that was and would be difficult to bear.
He would, for instance, halt in front of us the team he was working and demand to know which mule was in the lead, which was the best in conformation, and if they were hitched right. And how many inches made a hand? And did we know gee from haw?
If our answers were good, he would snort with approval. “Ay God, that’s right!”
If we were wrong, he would revert to his opinion that we were still unfit to be weaned. “You ought to be at the house sucking your mammy!” And then, to the team, “Come up!”
I have in mind a vision of him that must come from near the end of his working life. He is bareheaded, wearing a pair of bib overalls, a blue shirt, a pair of leather leggings. It is a bright, windy day. He is walking rapidly, leading a young mule from the barn to the pasture behind the barn. His shirt is billowing in the wind. The mule, excited by the wind’s commotion and by the imminence of freedom, is dancing sideways on the lead rein. My grandfather, paying the mule no mind whatever, is holding the rein in his right hand but leaning leftward away from the mule. With his left hand he is pinching shut first one nostril and then the other, blowing his nose freely into the air. And so they disappear around the corner of the barn, the mule capering to the right, snot flying to the left, and that blue shirt fluttering in the wind.
I loved him first of all, I think, in a sort of homage that I did not consciously give and he did not consciously require. Something in his aspect and his bearing called love from me, as if love were not so much a common bond as a common condition of both our lives. I loved him also because I knew that he loved me, and because, when he was pleased with me, he could be intently gentle, as my father could be also.
I love him now more than I did then, for now, sixty-some years later, I understand that his life had been lived in devotion to our place here and its creatures, as my own life, in its way, also has been lived. And I know now how to value his passion for good crops, good animals, and good work, and how to appreciate his grief when he failed to live up to his passion. For he had known failure, as he would acknowledge bluntly, as he acknowledged everything else. He had too rarely been free of the stress of debt, and therefore of haste and overwork. He had been compelled by the urgencies of debt to put his land too much at risk, and he and it had paid the inevitable costs. His life, his very flesh, had been shaped by weather, work, and the struggle to keep what he had and what he loved.
The town of Port William stands less than a mile from the river on an upland deeply grooved by branching valleys and hollows. The human geography of the countryside around it is inscribed by roads winding out along open ridges that give way at their edges to wooded bluffs, and by roads winding through the valleys of the larger streams.
The road we were following that morning lies, widened and paved now, along one of the ridges, bending this way and that, rising and falling, according to various compromises between topography and property lines and its own inclination toward the level and the straight. In the swags the road dipped down almost to
touch the thickets at the upper ends of the wooded hollows. On the rises of the ground we could see ahead of us, at varying angles and ever closer, the house and barns and other outbuildings of what we still call “the home place.” It is where my brother Henry now lives.
From the next-to-last rise we could see also the bare woods below the house, and the small house at the woods’ corner where Dick lived. We could see the smoke rising from the chimneys of the two houses, and smoke also from the corner of the tobacco barn where Jess and Rufus Brightleaf and whoever was helping them were at work in the stripping room, preparing the crop for market. We could see Rufus’s run-down old car parked in the lot in front of the feed barn. These signs gave the place a look of coherence and calm, all its purposes clear and intact. Before long the kitchens would begin to fill with the smells of dinner cooking. The sense of the place came to me, the whole of it. The place, the season, the weather, the work going on—how I loved it!
The weather too felt relatively calm in the draws, but on the rises, where the long wind drove unobstructed across the distances, we felt the cold, for the night’s frost still lay on the fields. It was cloudy. The days since Christmas had been, not bitterly cold, but merely windy and raw with spats of drizzle, freezing rain, or snow, just enough to keep the bare ground muddy when it thawed. Now a few snowflakes were again in the air, drifting down laggardly in the sheltered places but on the high ground flying straight across so that they did not seem to fall.
When we had driven up past the woods and the pasture above it and the mailbox, and turned finally through the front gate and started up the drive toward the house, I had begun to look forward to Grandma’s kitchen and the warmth of the stove and maybe a leftover biscuit or batter cake to tide me over until dinnertime.
Turning into that gate was not, for me, merely the entrance into a place. I was also entering my sense, almost my memory, of my father’s childhood; of his pet coon; of his pony; of his friend, the white hired hand, John Penley, who played the banjo and took him hunting; of his friend, the black hired hand, Saul Demint, who could play his own head like a musical instrument; of the day my father’s fingers were caught by the falling lid of the flour bin and Grandma walked the yard with him while he suffered and cried; of the family’s sometime economic despair; of his going away to school. And I had at least one memory, vividly colored in my imagination, of Grandpa’s childhood: the night the old brick house where he was born caught fire. He was six years old. He had saved his money and bought a saddle, which he kept under his bed, and he saved his saddle from the fire. Before that I had a memory, dark and indistinct, only a feeling really, of the Civil War and some soldiers coming in the night to take away my great-grandfather, in an attempt to make a soldier of him, and his rescue by my great-grandmother—all this while Grandpa was “just a little bit of a baby laying up yonder in the bed.”
Dick stopped the team as we drew even with the back of the house, gave me a hand to get down, and handed me my grip.
I gave him a wave and said, “Thank you, Dick.”
He grinned at me, his teeth tobacco-stained under his mustache, raised his hand, and said, “You’re welcome, buddy.”
Henry and I called Dick Watson “Dick” in defiance of good manners and the instructions of my white elders who wanted us to call him “Uncle Dick,” and who finally, unprevailing, gave up. Dick called me, as he called my brother, “buddy.” However consciously it was done, and at least on Henry’s and my part it was not done very consciously, our so naming one another put our friendship at an angle to the custom of the time and place in which Dick and my grandfather were to each other “Dick” and “Boss.” As far as I was concerned, I called Dick “Dick” and he called me “buddy” because we were buddies and that was that. My love for him, which the years have not diminished, was not, in my own mind, affected at all by considerations of race. To me, he was merely himself. And perhaps, in his affection for me, I was merely myself: a young boy, a listener, not too much trouble, sometimes useful, good sometimes for company, and manifestly devoted to him. Our friendship was a small reality within a larger reality that granted little importance to it.
Whereas my grandfather’s life had been shaped by the effort to keep what he had, Dick’s had been shaped by the effort implied in not-having. Dick owned nothing but a few clothes, a few sticks of furniture, a few chickens varying in number according to the success of the foxes and the hawks, and a cheap insurance policy that provided him in the end a decent burial but not a permanent marker for his grave. Never in his life had he owned more than that.
Much earlier in his life Dick had been married to a woman named Etta, of whom he would occasionally speak with affection and sorrow. They had no children. Now he lived with Aunt Sarah Jane, also childless, and they had each other for support in their declining years. I spent a lot of time with them, separately and together, and I never heard them utter an unpleasant word about each other or to each other.
Dick would be felled by a stroke one morning as he stepped out the door to go to work, and he would die that evening before dark. Jess and Rufus Brightleaf, who were already at the barn, helped Aunt Sarah Jane to get him out of the open doorway where he had been lying in the cold and into bed. As soon as she heard, my grandmother went to give what help she could, which was not much. She told me that when she went into the room Dick looked at her, in his terrible stillness, as though he had something he longed to say, but he could not speak. And in all the years since, that look, which I did not see, has stayed in my memory. He never moved or spoke again. After his burial in the “colored graveyard” at Port William, his grave had for a while a metal marker that finally rusted away or was lost, and then a few people remembered, until they died, where his grave was, and now nobody knows.
When the sunlight came through clouds in visible shafts, he would say, “Sun’s drawing water.”
When it was dry and the crescent moon lay on her back, he would say, “Moon’s holding water in her lap.”
Of a fine saddle mare he had known once he would say, “You be standing half a mile off, you’d hear her hit the pike: racka-tacka racka-tacka racka-tacka!”
Time and history being as they are, it is not possible now to think of that long gone aging couple and their household down at the corner of the woods without thinking also of the history of racism. But the history of racism, for anybody involved in it, is a difficulty, for it is a history that exists only as it has been interfused with the life and work of particular times and places and people. Moreover, it is a history with two sides, involving nobody who has experienced both. And now, when the two races are more divided than ever, this history has acquired a conventional oversimplification, implying that what we came to call “segregation” was a highly generalized circumstance in which the two races disliked or hated each other, and which assured the happiness of one race and the misery of the other. And so perhaps I offend current political etiquette, as I offend the racism to which it is opposed, by saying that, in and in spite of the old racial arrangement into which we both were born, I loved Dick Watson, and he treated me with affection and with perfect and unfailing kindness.
In and in spite of that old arrangement with all its implied costs and demands, Dick Watson was a man of consummate dignity. I heard him, one time, ventriloquize rather bitterly a dialogue between “Sambo” and “Massa.” I remember this, I think, mainly because of my puzzlement. I didn’t know the immediate cause, and I was too little adept in the history of racism to know clearly what he was talking about. I associated the name “Sambo” only with “little black Sambo,” whom I regarded as a sort of hero. And as I had not heard the word “Massa” before—the related term that I knew was “Old Marster,” by which Grandpa and others of his kind referred to God—I could gather only the vaguest sense of what it meant. But there was no mistaking Dick’s tone or Aunt Sarah Jane’s wish to hush him, and so I was properly disturbed. I am sure that he must have had other moments of bitterness, but I
did not know him as a bitter man. I knew him as a man who had achieved an authentic gentleness.
Owning little, living day to day from his small daily wage, such provender as the farm by agreement furnished, and what he and Aunt Sarah Jane grew or found for themselves, he lived a life that was in some ways less dragged upon by past and future than my grandfather’s. He did not live upon accumulations. It seems to me that he was capable, often enough, of life as contemporary as the daily sunlight. Both he and Aunt Sarah Jane loved questing at large in the woods and fields, she for greens and herbs and mushrooms, he for a fox or to see what he could see. Following them about on these travels, I learned to see our country without the stress of requirement or judgment or worry, with only the expectation that at any moment it might reveal something of interest. And so I include them in the ancestry of my mind. My grandfather could not have taught me to see the country as they saw it, for his own history in it pressed too heavily upon him, though I learned also to see it in his way, and his way also has stayed with me and is dear and necessary.
Dick Watson’s life would be as unimaginable to most people, black or white, in the present world, as would my grandfather’s. As unimaginable and, I am saddened to say, as little honored. Different as they were, they were in significant ways alike. They both belonged entirely to the older world, the world of the team and wagon. They both were born farmers, utterly reconciled to the demands of weather and work. Neither of them expected life to be easy or to get easier, or thought it was supposed to get easier. Both lived and died in a society that depreciated their work, took it for granted, and increasingly held them and others like them in contempt for doing it.