My first thirty years, p.15
My First Thirty Years, page 15
My brother said something else; he used the word justice; I believe he said there was “no justice in the world”; the socialists wanted to divide up the land and just give a man as much as he could work. I had never felt that I had ever had an idea or feeling in common with Rush before; my mother often said that sometimes she didn’t believe he had more’n half sense. Once, when he had been there and she was disgusted with him, my mother whispered a story which Emma had confided in her about Rush’s having tried to arouse her sexually, after she was a great big girl, thirteen years old. Sometimes she was afraid of “these boys.” And I felt the same way about them; I would not have liked to sleep in the same room with one of them overnight, alone. Perhaps any highly sexed girl feels that way about an older brother. I disliked having them around on account of that feeling; I was afraid of them. I was afraid of my own wish too, and found all sorts of reasons for hating them and being glad when they left home. They were dirty, vulgar-tongued and ignorant; they knew none of the correct forms of speech; I would have dropped dead had I been forced to introduce them as my brothers to my professors. Perhaps I would have liked them if they had washed up, had taken a job, stuck to it, gone to night school, become serious and given their money to my mother. In short, if they had become as I was going to be. But I think I would have liked it better always if they had lived away from home. Well, if they had made themselves over after my prescription, I would have talked socialism with them; it fell on my ears with more poignance and more softly and beautifully than Christianity did (I mean my first impressions of religion).
September arrived and Brother Druery came in his buggy to take me to Simmons College. I was sure to have to answer embarrassing questions. They would ask about my father; and I would tell them he was dead; no, I wouldn’t; yes, I would. Perhaps the girls would make fun of me; maybe they would feel sorry for me; maybe they would all look upon me as belonging to the charity list. I dreaded it; it was like pulling teeth, to use my mother’s expression. I felt the scholarship would jeopardize me in some way; my mother’s doubts, when Druery had mentioned the subject first, had sunk in. If I recall correctly, I performed my old childish trick when the Bursar asked about my father; my father was not living; “not with my mother” I kept to myself. And how old was I; and what subjects did I wish to take; and where were my credentials. I went through the usual red tape and I believe bought most of the books I required the first day.
At that time (1908) there were no street cars in Abilene and the preacher made arrangements for me to go to school in the college hack which went about picking up children and young people who were furnished with no other means of transportation. The girls whom I remember most distinctly in this hack were Virginia Guitar, whose father was more than a millionaire, and Mary Paxton, oldest daughter of the president of the Citizens National Bank of Abilene. They were gay and full of chatter and wore pretty clothes; besides they had everything one required in the way of book cases and lunch baskets. Mary and I were in one or two of the same classes and sometimes we talked about the lessons; we may even have exchanged answers in Algebra or talked about theorems in geometry. But what interested me was their chatter; they rarely chatted and joked with me, but with one another they were like so many magpies. Their tongues would go, as my mother often described us when we talked too much or too rapidly, “like the clatter bone of a goose’s ass (arse)”; and the stream of conversation was just what one would expect. Flirtations, sweet-hearting, small talk, make-believing; who was elegant, who was clever; Prof. Mullins was the most polite gentleman they had ever known; Virginia remarked every facial expression and every gesture of his hands. This girl wore a necklace of real diamonds. She acted as though it didn’t trouble her at all. Mary wore two small glittering stones in rings.
They were both studying French and sometimes tried to speak to one another in this curious language. The teacher was a French woman who scarcely spoke English; but she knew German and Spanish. I should have liked to enter one of the modern language classes, but Latin was required in the academy (as the high school course attached to this school was called) and I had to confine myself to subjects which the teachers’ examinations called for, and to courses required for graduation from the academy. That year I studied physics, geometry, algebra, Latin composition (translations from English to Latin), read Caesar and Cicero; Ancient History (Greece and Rome), a part of Modern History of Europe; English and American Poetry; and it seems to me a special course of Shelley and Keats, though it is likely that I only sat in the room where Shelley and Keats were being recited; more rhetoric and composition. The young people of the cream of society rarely talked or joked or played with me. Many times I spent the noon hour studying, as there was always work to do at home, and all lessons required preparation in advance. There were papers to write, problems to solve, history to learn, and Latin to translate. I read on the hack in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon. The theorems in geometry troubled me because I tried to memorize them; and the Latin lesson often required two hours to prepare. This entailed staying up in the evening, burning the midnight oil. Besides I had to throw in one or two courses in Bible that year; in a Christian Institution one had to know something about the Scriptures. But on the whole the work went comparatively well; I had high marks in Latin and good grades in almost everything else. I failed one exam in geometry and had to take it over; never told my mother about this; and at the end of school when my report showed another failure in physics, I was chagrined and hid the letter from my mother.
Dr. Cooper liked my work in Latin; when he was called away for a few days he gave the class into my hands for one day and to a young man for the other day. He announced to the class that both this young fellow and myself were going to be teachers. How I trembled! The president of the school was going to let me teach one of his classes. Perhaps my tongue would stick up in the roof of my mouth and wouldn’t come down; perhaps I would forget; perhaps I was not clever anyway. I knew I was not learning as I used to before I began worrying about things; such little things crushed or distracted me then. The day came and I stepped up on the little square rostrum in the corner of the room; and sat in Dr. Cooper’s chair; we would begin the lesson; I looked down the list and called on members of the class to translate. After a little, I was able to raise my eyes from Caesar; they all wore serious faces, but my cheeks were burning like fire. There were men in the class, preachers past forty; one of them was about as ugly a man as I have ever seen; but before the class was over, I had found in him an admirable character. One of the girls looked as though she was going to laugh; the flesh around her eyes showed it; and he looked at her in just the right way and at just the right time to suppress her.
The pastor of the First Baptist Church, Brother Lee Scarborough, used to hold the chapel exercises very often. Some of the people had already started calling him Dr. Scarborough. According to the tale which some feller handed on to my mother, the preacher was first known as Lee Scarborough, then he got to be a pretty big preacher and everybody called him Brother Scarborough; and after he’d been off travelling around in the Holy Lands or some place, people called him Dr. Scarborough. She would pooh-pooh; she once heard that he said he went down to the Willow Street Mission on Sunday afternoons (that was when we were living down there) to preach to the washerwomen and the prairie dogs. He kept his wife in mother-hubbards all the time; and then some of the old women cried and snorted around him too much at church to suit her; Mrs. Paxton would cry and snort around him until, “Ah declare to God, I thought she was crazy.” There was something in my mother’s expression or suggestions which made me think she believed there was a love affair, or some sexual relation, existing between the preacher and Mrs. Paxton. Of course, she did not say so straight out, but her words were sufficient to destroy my confidence. Besides she whispered that a lot of people had heard that, when Scarborough was a boy, he and his father were connected in some way with cattle thieving.
This was a part of my preface to the preacher who was giving some three or four hundred students an evangelical discourse that morning. Then was something inside me that looked just like my mother; perhaps it was a shadowy thing just inside the skin of my face; maybe it even showed at times; one might see it in my eyes or in the flesh around them. The skin around and the lids of my mother’s eyes told me so many things. One ought to suppress this thing in the presence of others. While I was sometimes interested watching my mother when we were alone, I should not have liked to have anyone hear her talk or see her expression, especially her eyes; I had a feeling that there was something almost obscene about it. Brother Scarborough pleaded with us to give our hearts and lives to Christ. He told a story of his early life as a cowboy. He had once tied a rope around a bull-yearling’s neck; tied the other end around his own waist, and then let the calf out of the pen. “Did you ever run faster than you can!” he cried, while students chuckled. He had run much faster, on that occasion, than he had ever thought it possible. “Tie your life to Christ,” he went on, changed, and almost tearful (many times the tears rolled away), “and then you can run faster than you can.”
I was disgusted and almost nauseated…I told my stories sometimes at home, but life was too hard, too sorrowful, too full of hate to talk much. Besides if I told too much it might be used against me, when my mother or some one of them was angry with me, or wanted to hurt me, or to laugh at me. I picked and chose most of my stories I related to them. My mother and sister had grown to hate one another. This had been brewing for a long time and now since Corrie had had the typhoid fever, their quarreling was like an open sore all the time. My mother was on a tirade when Corrie came down with the fever. Here, we couldn’t pay the grocery bill, much less a doctor’s bill and one of the family down with a long spell of sickness. And how she had cautioned Corrie to take medicine (she would never see to herself); keep her bowels open; and see that the water she drank at that store was boiled. She boiled water for the whole family at home and stood over the stove and worked and sweat until she felt as though she’d drop dead; but “these children tore down everything she built up.” Besides the doctor said she had typhoid fever and it was catching. It was a disgrace: everybody knew it came from filth and neglect. “Ole Doctor said so hisself.” She would go on with this conversation interspersing it with curses, tears, and slamming things around, perfectly conscious that the sick girl was hearing every word of it. I always imagined my sister never forgave her for this; perhaps it was only something to tie her hate to; many things had stored up in the past. How ugly and dreary and sad!
At odd times for a few years my mother used to go out as a sort of nurse, or second to the doctor (I never understood just how they looked upon her) in obstetrics cases. This was when we had few boarders, or no boarders, and the children’s money seemed all taken up before the end of the month arrived, and notes on the place were falling in arrears. She invariably came home in a temper and made me feel that we were the lowest people that God ever let breathe for permitting her to go out and work in any such way. Ah, God! One could only wring one’s hands, grit one’s teeth, shed a few tears, and put it out of one’s mind.
In May of that year the county teachers’ examinations were held. I had prepared for them a little as a sort of sideline to the work I was carrying at Simmons. I told Dr. Cooper that I wanted to take the exams for a second grade certificate, and asked permission to remain away from school for a week; I wanted a few days in which to cram for them. This was granted and I sat all day and away into the evening in one of our unoccupied rooms going through question and answer books, looking up rules in arithmetic which I perhaps had forgotten, skimming through histories and books on methods and management. There were fourteen subjects: reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, grammar, composition, geography, Texas History, U.S. History, agriculture, methods and management, School laws, physiology, and another which I do not recall now. All of these papers were to be written in two or three days. There were a few older girls whom I knew at the Christian College and several country teachers taking the tests. On the last day when the averages were made up, the teacher who was helping to mark the papers informed me that I had failed in composition. And then as though to divert a scene, she told me I was still eligible for the third grade county certificate, as composition belonged to the second grade subjects. This threw me into a sort of hysteria internally, but I tried to control myself with the thought that the Superintendent might change his mind after he saw all my papers. I heard them say the tests were difficult this year; this was because they didn’t need many teachers; “a lot of people took the exams last summer and passed.”
But when the County Superintendent, Mr. E.V. White, wrote out a third grade county certificate and gave it to me, I put my head down on the top of the files near his desk and sobbed like a child. He talked a little as though he were scolding: I must study the subject I was weak in and take the examination again; there was plenty of time; I was only sixteen, the youngest in the crowd; besides a third grade certificate was as good as any for me, because they would not let me teach any but the primary grades; there were people in the county who were teaching on third grade certificates. I took the roll of paper and went home trying to choke back the tears. He had asked me about my father the first day. White knew my father; in fact I had gone to Old Man White’s in a wagon with my father when I was nine or ten years old; we went there to pick cotton after we had finished our own; E.V. was a young man then; his sister, an old maid, a woman perhaps twenty-five years of age, had given me a hat; it was a child’s hat which just fit my age. And I had liked it very, very much in spite of the fact that someone had given it to me. I showed it to my father and he let me take it home. Maybe White thought I was a fool. I had talked severely about my father and said we never had anything to do with him. On such occasions I always felt that I looked like my mother. My father was a very bad man and you had to be strong, when you couldn’t lie to people, and stand up and say he was a bad man; righteousness was the greatest thing in the whole world. Maybe White had just thought he could; that’s the reason he had failed me.
I tried to look more cheerful to my mother and to show her that this was a real certificate, a teacher’s permit or diploma or whatever she might want to call it; but she saw my tears. “But what are you crying about?” I explained and she supposed there was plenty of time. There would be a teachers’ “normal” held in the summer where one could take the state examinations; one’s papers were sent to the State Department at Austin and graded there; it was a good thing to take the grading out of the hands of the local people.
Emma did not come home so very often and when she did, seemed to be glad to get out of the quarrels, messes, and fusses as soon as she could. She said so herself. Though she humored my mother more than Corrie, she was not able to do much else, as she required most of her wage to pay her board, and then she always had (she just had to have) clothes. Sometimes she sewed for people at night in order to earn more money. And so Corrie and I were together much more; and we got along very well together. Occasionally, she would take me down a notch or two about the way I looked, or about what I had said.
One evening when we were walking after supper, just after I received my certificate, Corrie began, “Why don’t you quit school now and get some work?” And this, when school was nearly out, and it was my last year. I wanted my credits from Simmons; why should I quit now when there were only five weeks more? It was all foolishness, my wanting to do so much. “Aw, we cayn’t be nobody nohow,” she sighed. I thought she was referring to my oldest sister, or to my father. “But I ain’t to blame for what someone else has done,” I told her. It wasn’t so much that, she said, it was the fact that we had such sorry blood in our veins; you’ve got to have the right kind of parents to be anything in this world; sometimes she thought she had just about as soon have dawg blood. I had heard remarks as crude as that from her before; but this time I was incensed. “What do you mean?” I demanded. I was angry, as one is after receiving an unexpected blow or a dash of cold water. “Don’t you know?” she mocked. I didn’t know; I wanted her to tell me. “We’ve got Indian blood,” she stated coolly, as though the fact were sufficient for conviction of crime. I thought so too; I felt convicted, and tried to defend myself. “But, Mother says it ain’t so.” “Ah,” she scorned, “she says a lot of things that ain’t so.” I went on arguing with her; the Old Man showed no traces of it at all, his eyes were as blue as indigo. “Except in his cheek bones,” she put in; but I thought they were not unlike other men’s. He looked Irish; I once heard him say laughingly, “I am Irish.” And Mother had known ole grandpa Beasley and surely if there had been anything wrong with him she would have mentioned it; and she even knew great grandpa Beasley. I was getting more angry with her as I talked and she finally admitted that she or no one of the family seemed to know where the Indian blood came in, but she still held her point that it was there. She wasn’t going to try to be anything except to just get along, what was the use? She had tried but she saw now; everything was against you.
