Modern American Memoirs (34 page)

It would have been better, but it would also have been intolerable, for Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need. Most of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other, and themselves. But as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a moment when these outlets do not work. That summer, for example, it was not enough to get into a fight on Lenox Avenue, or curse out one's cronies in the barber shops. If ever, indeed, the violence which fills Harlem's churches, pool halls, and bars erupts outward in a more direct fashion, Harlem and its citizens are likely to vanish in an apocalyptic flood. That this is not likely to happen is due to a great many reasons, most hidden and powerful among them the Negro's real relation to the white American. This relation prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and satisfactory as pure hatred. In order really to hate white people, one has to blot so much out of the mind—and the heart—that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one's own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black. One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene. Amputation is swift but time may prove that the amputation was not necessary—or one may delay the amputation too long. Gangrene is slow, but it is impossible to be sure that one is reading one's symptoms right. The idea of going through life as a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally unbearable is the risk of swelling up slowly, in agony, with poison. And the trouble, finally, is that the risks are real even if the choices do not exist.

“But as for me and my house,” my father had said, “we will serve
the Lord.” I wondered, as we drove him to his resting place, what this line had meant for him. I had heard him preach it many times. I had preached it once myself, proudly giving it an interpretation different from my father's. Now the whole thing came back to me, as though my father and I were on our way to Sunday school and I were memorizing the golden text:
And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom you will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
I suspected in these familiar lines a meaning which had never been there for me before. All of my father's texts and songs, which I had decided were meaningless, were arranged before me at his death like empty bottles, waiting to hold the meaning which life would give them for me. This was his legacy: nothing is ever escaped. That bleakly memorable morning I hated the unbelievable streets and the Negroes and whites who had, equally, made them that way. But I knew that it was folly, as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one's own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.

Born in Blossom, Texas, William Owens attended Southern Methodist University, and took his Ph.D. at Iowa State University. He taught English at Texas A&M University from 1937 to 1947
.

During World War II he was a member of the U.S. Army's Counter-intelligence Corps in the Philippines and received the Legion of Merit. Owens later became a professor of English at Columbia University, retiring in 1974
.

His memoir
, This Stubborn Soil,
published in 1966, received the Texas Institute of Letters Award. In this extract, Maggie is his older sister
.

 

from T
HIS
S
TUBBORN
S
OIL

L
ooking for a job in January was worse than I thought it could be, going from building to building, walking in cold or rain, hearing again and again that no more applications would be taken till spring, or that I did not have enough education and experience to apply. The money in my pocket ran out and I had to draw on the savings I had put away for Commerce. Some mornings I would have stayed at home but Maggie would not let me. Anybody staying at her house had to be out working, or out looking for work.

“You're eighteen,” she said. “You've got to make out like you're a man.”

Other mornings I went straight to the library, after telling myself that a job would not turn up that day.

In the middle of January there was a letter from Pat Swindle, mailed from Texarkana, the first word I had heard from him since the day he walked off from the cotton patch. He had a job with a lumber company in Texarkana, working on a timber crew in the woods of Arkansas. He wanted me to come and work with him.

“I'll meet you at the post office in Texarkana January 22. You've got to be there. You cain't let me down.”

I looked at the calendar and studied his letter. If I left the next day, I would have four days to meet him in Texarkana. It was warm outside, the sun bright. It would be a good thing to hit the road and meet him, to get a job on my own and not have to tell anybody how much money I was making or what I was going to do with it. Pat was a good friend to me. I would be as good a friend to him.

I kept the letter from them and did not tell them what I meant to do. I knew Maggie would try to stop me, and I did not want to be stopped.

The next morning I went to look for a job but came back to the house in the middle of the day, when I knew they would all be out at work. I put on clean overalls and shirt, work shoes and socks, my black coat and cap. I could send for the rest after I got a job. I wanted to go without leaving a word, but could not. I wrote a note telling them I had gone to meet Pat. I did not say when or where. Then, with the two dollars I had left, I walked out the Santa Fe tracks away from Dallas.

It was a bright winter afternoon, just cool enough to make me feel good walking. For some miles I stayed on the Santa Fe track, stepping on crossties, singing old songs I had learned at Pin Hook. “Send me a letter, Send it by mail.” All at once I was happier than I had been for months. What I was doing was right. I would go where I pleased, work when I pleased, and move on when I got tired of working. Pat was the right one to go with. He was younger, but he had been hoboing for months and knew how to get along.

When I came to where the highway crossed the tracks at Rinehart, I took the pavement. Better to try catching rides on the highway than riding the rods, when I had never been on the rods. I took the road and walked along, flagging rides, and glad for the ones I got. I knew that Paris was not on the direct road to Texarkana, but at the first turning off place I went toward Paris.

At sundown I walked into the town of Wylie, knowing I could not get another ride that night. I ate a bowl of chili in a café and went to the railroad station. When the stationmaster left, I stretched out on a bench by a warm coal stove and slept through the night.

The next day I made it to Paris and then to Blossom. It was late in the day when I walked past the Blossom school and the line of stores. I saw people I knew but they did not know me. It was hard
not to ask them for something to eat and a place to stay all night. “Don't steal, don't beg.” My mother's words came to mind. It was harder to pass the road to Pin Hook and not turn down it. Somebody else lived in our house at Pin Hook. Somebody else would have to give me grub and bed if I went there.

The next morning I was on the road again, after sleeping at the house of people who had been our neighbors when we lived at Blossom, with eighty miles ahead of me to Texarkana and a day and a half to make it in. The skies were gray with clouds and I was beginning to get a cold. There were a few cars on the road between Blossom and Clarksville, but not many. By the middle of the day I was catching rides on wagons when I could, walking when I could not, and beginning to feel dragged down by the cold.

Out of Clarksville I missed the road and in the late afternoon came to English, a place with store and school and houses at the edge of the pine woods. At the store, men told me the road was too boggy for a wagon all the way to Avery. At the school I stopped to rest and watch the end of a basketball game. The school was like Pin Hook but bigger. When the game was over I walked along the road with children ahead of me, children behind me till the last ones stopped at a house out in a field. There was nothing left for me but to keep on walking.

It was late at night when I got to Avery. The last mile or so was on gravel. It rattled under my shoes but was easier to walk in than the bogging clay. The town was asleep and dark, and dogs barked at me from house to house as I went along. I looked for a place to buy supper but everything was closed. Almost to the other side of town I saw a light burning on a porch and a sign: “Rooms, Fifty Cents.” Hungry, worried about my cold, I stood at the edge of the porch and yelled “Hello” till an old man came with a coal oil lamp.

“You want a room?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Four bits, cash.”

I gave him half a dollar and he took me to a room in another house. He set the lamp on a washstand and went to the door.

“Privy's out back,” he said.

“Any grub anywhere?”

“No grub tonight.”

After he had gone I went to bed with my clothes on and wrapped the thin quilts around me, with a layer over my head. I needed to breathe warm air to stop coughing. I slept some, but was awakened in between by the sound of wind and rain on the tin roof over me.

I left Avery in gray daylight, before anything had opened. There was a heavy cloud to the north and a strong wind was blowing from the northeast. In January that meant bad weather and I was still forty miles from Texarkana. In a few hours Pat would be waiting for me at the post office.

At the edge of town a touring car with the curtains up stopped beside me. A young man unbuttoned a curtain on the driver's side and looked out.

“You want a ride?” he asked.

“I sure do.”

He opened the door on the other side and I got in. He was about my age. An older man and woman sat together on the back seat with a black lap rope pulled up to their waists. The car started moving and gravel ground under the wheels.

“Where are you going, boy?” the woman asked.

“Texarkana, ma'am.”

“What are you going there for?”

“To get me a job. Work. Make me some money.”

She looked at me, at the man beside her, and back at me, and I could see a change in her face.

“You're running away, aren't you?”

“No, ma'am. Nothing for me to run away from.”

“There must be something. You've got to tell us so we'll know. We don't want to be helping boys run away from home.”

Out of the wind and weather, with a ride all the way to Texarkana, I talked and answered their questions. Better to talk than walk. I told them about Pin Hook—mostly about school in Pin Hook—my job at Sears, Roebuck and why I lost it—the job I hoped to get in Texarkana cutting timber.

“You're a peart boy,” the woman said. She looked at the man. “Don't you think he ought to go to school some more?”

“It never hurt anybody.”

They were right but I had to say something.

“I quit school to work. All I need is a job.”

They let me out in Texarkana, not far from the post office, and I had not told them how hungry I was or how little money I had. They might have given me something and that would have been begging.

Hungry as I was, I went straight to the post office and up the front steps. A cold wind shipped around the brick building. Pat would be inside where it was warm. I went the length of the building but did not see him. I went through again slowly, looking in every possible place. Pat was not there. For the first time I was scared. I asked at the general delivery window but there was no letter for me—nothing. That meant he would be there later in the day.

At an alley cafe I bought a bowl of chili. A girl set a bowl before me and shoved a tray of crackers and a bottle of catsup down the counter. The smell of chili made my mouth water and my stomach growl. With shaking fingers I crumbled in crackers and covered them with catsup. I could fill myself up with chili and crackers and catsup. But the waitress was watching me. She let me have crackers and catsup once and moved them out of reach. What I got was enough to hold me but not to fill me.

Back at the post office I sat in a corner waiting for Pat. There were men close to me, bums in to keep out of the cold, rod riders on the way south from places like Chicago to places like New Orleans. From them I learned that Texarkana was a tough town on hoboes. Police arrested hoboes and made them work out their fines.

“You better warm up and move on,” they told each other. “The law'll get you if you don't keep moving.”

Pat did not come. I walked up and down, keeping away from the bums, but he did not come.

A policeman came in one door and I went out another, into the cold and gathering darkness. There was no other place for me to go and I did not have enough money for a bed. Cold and afraid, I started walking out the street I had come in on that morning, with nothing in mind now but to get away from the police. I walked past the edge of town and out on the highway, and felt safe in the dark on the highway.

When I knew that I could not walk another mile the road passed through heavy woods. Build a fire, I thought. Build a fire and get
warm. I would feel better warm and not cough so much. Back from the road, I piled up leaves and sticks and struck a match to them. Soon I had a good fire going and bright flames whipped in the sharp wind.

The fire could warm my body, but it could not take the chill from me. I was sick, hungry, and with no place to go. It was not my fault; it was that I had been born poor, and at Pin Hook. Then I was warm through and I sat up looking into the fire. I was sick and hungry now, but, by God, the time had to come when I would not be. I had been soft—too soft. I had to be hard—hard enough to make what I needed to fill my belly and warm my back. I had to do it by myself, without Pat or anybody.

Before daylight a fine drizzle fell on my face and woke me. I put more wood on the fire but the rain turned heavy enough to wet me and put out the fire. I went back to the road and walked west till I came to a country store. The owner was building a fire in the stove. I bought a piece of candy and waited by the stove for the rain to stop.

“You mind if I stay awhile?” I asked.

“You ain't bothering me none.”

I sat on a keg of nails with my head against a counter and slept through the morning. When I woke up the rain had stopped, and I went on the road again, walking west, thinking only of getting back to Dallas. There had to be a job of some kind for me in Dallas.

Water stood in ruts deep enough to bog a car. I got a ride on a wagon that took me half the way to Avery. At Avery I bought a loaf of bread and warmed myself in the railroad station. Then I walked on the tracks. I would not get lost in the dark if I kept on the tracks.

When daylight came I was still walking; it was not a night for the open. The sky was clear and a cold wind blew from the north. Rainwater froze where it stood on the road and in the fields. There would be no rides that day, maybe for three or four days. I could be in Dallas in that time, if I could hold up to walk forty miles a day.

I went from the Texas Pacific to the Santa Fe tracks at Paris, stopping only to buy a piece of cheese to go with the bread I had left. It took the last of my money, so I put half of each in my pockets for the next day. To keep down hunger and thirst, and to ease my burning throat, I broke pieces of ice from the ditches to suck on as I
walked. They helped my throat but not my cough. I had nothing for it or for the rawness in my armpits and crotch.

At Ben Franklin I warmed myself in the station and watched a train pull out for Dallas. I knew that hoboes rode the blinds and the rods. I found the blinds but was afraid to swing on when the train started moving. I watched it out of sight and then followed it down the tracks.

Somewhere in the darkness I saw the shape of a barn close to the tracks. Knowing I had to stop and rest, I went inside the barn and climbed up to the hayloft. There was no loose hay, and I was afraid to break the bales that stood in straight stacks. I could get in trouble breaking bales. I crawled between stacks of bales and shut myself in with others to keep out the wind and cold. It was not warm enough but I could rest and sleep a little.

By daylight I was on the track again, eating the last of my bread and cheese, knowing that I should keep some of it for the time when I would be hungrier. I felt weak and my legs wobbled when I stepped from tie to tie. I thought of trying to find a highway but the fields were sheets of ice and I could not see where to go. I took to the ditch when freight trains passed. Nobody riding the rods, I could see. Anybody would freeze to death riding the rods on a day like that.