Authors: Ross Lockridge
He then dimly understood that every memory of his life, like every journey of his body, returned at last to the same mysterious place which had nothing to do with space. And he wondered at the miracle by which he had been spun out of the substance of his mother's flesh in some prehistoric era that had nothing to do with time. Somehow he had sprung without a pollution into the world of names. And the names made all the difference and rescued him from the feeling of being lost in a void of earth and nightâthe names, the omnipotent words, Johnny, father, mother, Raintree County.
For Johnny always had a curious feeling that he would one day find the meaning of himself and Raintree County locked up in words. He himself had sprung into being from words in an immense blackboarded book on the parlor table.
This book was the Family Bible. On its first page the beginning of all things was recorded in the inspired word of God. On its last page Johnny's beginning was recorded in T. D.'s handwriting:
John Wickliff Shawnessy, Borned in Raintree
County at the Home Place, April 23, 1839
It early seemed to Johnny that his whole life had been woven from the pages of this august book. Over and over, at church and in the home, he heard its stories of beginnings, its dreadful dooms, and its beautiful lives and deaths. His very substance was shaped from its archaic language. In a way, even his Christian name had come from the Bible. T. D. had called his last child after the great English Reformer who had been one of the first to attempt a translation of the
Bible into English. The name, variously spelled and misspelled in the old texts, was further misspelled âWickliff' by T. D., and Wickliff it became in the middle of Johnny's name.
John Wickliffâthis name had been set upon him like a badge. Perhaps he too was fated to rewrite the great book of God in a new land and in a new tongue.
Some of the legends of the Bible became as much a part of him as his own life in the County. His mother had early read him the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, of God and the guileful Serpent, and of the Tree that bore the Forbidden Fruit.
The story of Adam and Eve was the oldest story in the world, sealed with the seal of primal mystery. What earth was more secret than the Garden of Eden? Where was this garden in which the father and mother of mankind had wandered naked? At first, Johnny had supposed that because Raintree County was the whole world, therefore Eden was somewhere in Raintree County, especially since there was a lake in the center of the County called Paradise Lake. But T. D. laughed pleasantly at this misconception and cleared it up.
The greatest mystery of all was the Forbidden Tree. What kind of tree was it and why was it forbidden? And where was that other tree, the Tree of Life, that Adam and Eve might also have eaten of to live forever? And why had God forbidden them to eat the fruit of the trees at all?
Yes, that story had a light of dawn like an early memory of the County. Much of the mystery came from the fact that Adam and Eve were the only people who lived naked. He had seen a picture of them in the frontispiece of the Family Bible, tasting the Forbidden Fruit, Eve having her long hair down and a figleaf over the vital spot. This story was the boldest and truest of all the stories and the most marvellous and exciting because in it the father and mother of mankind had been naked. And the wonderful word ânaked' was used, and it meant âwithout clothes.'
In the Danwebster Church, where T. D. preached about God and the Bible, everyone wore clothes, a mysterious result of the sin which Adam and Eve had committed in the garden. The divine disease of curiosity that burned in the vitals of Johnny Shawnessy ended for most Raintree County citizens when they entered the church. To it
they came for the same answer to life's riddle that had been given to their fathers before them.
One of the dominant images of Johnny's childhood was the approach to the Danwebster Church. Following the road from the Home Place, the family wagon would make a sharp turn, dip down through trees across the river bridge, and clattering over and through the screening foliage on the far side, would bring suddenly into view the form of the Danwebster Church standing on a hill above the river, a white frame building with a steeple holding a bell. It was like a revelation austere and tranquil. The doors would open, and the bell would ring, and from miles around the dwellers of Raintree County would gather to raise their voices in song and prayer.
What was the thing to which they prayed?
It was a rather appalling mystery called God. Toward the little church of Danwebster, Johnny had a divided emotion. He always associated it with sunshine, a gentle boredom, the image of T. D. pleasantly rocking in the pulpit. But over it there hovered too the memory of a crime, the old unlucky error by which the history of mankind had been darkened. The mystery of Raintree County was all stained and bloody and confused with this crime. The whole mournful affair was only slightly relieved by the worship of God's gentle son, who, after all, had been nailed to a cross for being good.
More satisfying to Johnny's yearning for definite answers was the little schoolhouse at Danwebster where he learned to read and write and cipher. Here he studied a legend called American History, bloody, irrational, and exciting like the Bible, and was told that he lived in the greatest republic since the beginning of time, a place where all men were created equal and where they were all entitled to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Though the school at Danwebster was only spasmodically in operation under a succession of itinerant teachers, Johnny here began to show his phenomenal memory. In Class Day exercises he recited gems of oratory and rhetoric, including the peroration of Webster's famous reply to Hayne. He emerged from his schooling with the conviction that Liberty and Union were one and inseparable, that George Washington was the greatest man who ever lived, and that two plus two equalled four in Raintree County and throughout the universe. Above all, he acquired a holy faith in the printed word.
After he had learned to read, Johnny read newspapers, books, magazines, or just odd pieces of anything covered with words. He believed that some day, if he read fast and far enough, he would strip away the thin black veil of words and behold the great mystery that dwelt at the beginning of himself. He read with complete absorption, and when he was lost in a book, he was truly and completely lost, so much so that sometimes his mother was obliged to call several times before he heard.
And as he read and didn't find the answer to the secret, he made a resolution that he would someday write the book that would unlock the riddle of the earth of Raintree County, of his mother and father, and himself. Thus when he was very young, only about seven years old, he decided upon his life work.
Most of the words that he read as a boy only carried him farther from the secret, but a few stories were filled with revelation.
In the summer of 1852, T. D. got hold of a two-volume copy of the novel
Uncle Tom's Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe. He gave sermons about it, and people discussed it for weeks pro and con. It was one of the great spiritual events of Raintree County, having as much effect on the County's mind as a National Election or even a minor war. Long after Johnny had read the book, a permanent residue of simple images remained, and this residue was the great American legend of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The legend of Uncle Tom's Cabin was a legend of the South, but not the South which was below the Ohio River, a hundred and fifty miles from Johnny's home in Indiana. It was the South of Stephen Foster's songs. It was way down upon the Swanee Ribber, far far away in the Old Kentucky Home. There beneath a scented beauty lay a black evil called slavery. There the good and the poor and the humble and the enslaved of the earth were set clearly apart by God in black skins and patiently awaited their deliverance. Uncle Tom's Cabin was the story of a few enduring characters, too simple to be real and thus more true than life: little Eva, that good, goldenhaired child, destroyed somehow by the noxious blight of slavery:
Farewell, beloved child! the bright eternal doors have closed after thee; we shall see thy sweet face no more. . . .
Eliza running across the icefloes on the river from slave land into
free with the bloodhounds roaring after; Topsy, the puckish Negro child who wasn't born but just growed; Simon Legree, whose fist had got hard as iron from knocking down niggers; and Uncle Tom himself, the good old woollytopped Negro, who died like Christ that a people might be saved.
Think of your freedom, every time you see UNCLE TOM'S CABIN; and let it be a memorial to put you all in mind to follow in his steps, and be as honest and faithful and Christian as he was.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was a legend eternally true because it was eternally good. It spoke directly to the heart of Johnny Shawnessy and became blended in his being with Raintree County and America. After he read
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
he was never confused again about the question of slavery. He knew where and what slavery was, he knew that it was bad, he knew also that it would one day be destroyed.
There was a time during which Johnny read and reread all the Greek myths he could get hold of. It seemed to him that in these stories of human forms woven from the teeming earth, of women flying from the love-pursuit of gods beside the river, of monsters that mingled beast and god, of combat, love, and epic quests and everlasting godlike games, he had perhaps recovered the lost prehistoric summer of his own life.
At about the same time he read some of the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the great American mythmaker. One of these filled him again with the old sense of mystery and seemed to have a special meaning for his own life. This was the story of âThe Great Stone Face.' Johnny read it over and over until he had it almost by heart. The austere language seemed imbued with a mystical meaning beyond the literal phrase. To him it seemed the most wonderful story ever told.
The story opened with a description of a mother and a little child named Ernest sitting at their cottage door and gazing at a Great Stone Face. High above the populous valley where they lived, a colossal face of stone had been shaped in a cliff by some remote convulsion of the earth and transformed to human aspect by the weathering touch of time.
It was a happy lot for children to grow up to manhood or womanhood with the Great Stone Face before their eyes,
for all the features were noble, and the expression was at once grand and sweet, as if it were the glow of a vast, warm heart, that embraced all mankind in its affections.
Gazing at the Great Stone Face, the mother repeated to the little child a legend of the valley, older even than the Indian peoples who had formerly lived there. The purport was that some day a child would be born in the valley who would become
the greatest and noblest personage of his time,
and whose face in manhood would bear an exact resemblance to the Great Stone Face.
The boy Ernest grew up in the valley, having no teacher except the Great Stone Face. While he was yet a child,
an exceedingly rich merchant
returned to the valley, hailed as the one who fulfilled the ancient prophecy. He had great wealth and was known by the name of Gathergold. As the rich man passed in his carriage among the applauding people, Ernest caught a glimpse of a withered yellow face that bore no resemblance at all to the Great Stone Face, having none of its benignity and wisdom. And yet the people seemed actually to believe that here was the likeness of the Great Stone Face.
But as time passed, the episode was forgotten, and Ernest growing now to manhood continued to hope that he might live to see the fulfillment of the prophecy. Then there came back to the valley of his birth
an illustrious commander,
who was affectionately called Old Blood-and-Thunder and who the people asserted was the exact likeness of the Great Stone Face. Obtaining a view of the famous soldier, Ernest beheld
a war-worn and weather-beaten countenance, full of energy, and expressive of an iron will,
but lacking the gentle wisdom and humane sympathy of the Great Stone Face.
Years passed. Ernest became a preacher, remaining in the valley and hoping that he might yet see the man who would resemble the beloved Face. Then there came back to the valley of his birth
a certain eminent statesman,
who was so wonderfully eloquent that he had
finally persuaded his countrymen to select him for the Presidency.
He was known by the name of Old Stony Phiz, so much was he thought to resemble the Great Stone Face, but once again Ernest was disappointed.
Ernest was now aged and had ceased to be obscure. Meanwhile,
a bountiful Providence had granted a new poet to this earth.
Likewise a native of the valley, he had spent most of his life
a distance
from that romantic region, pouring out his sweet music amid the bustle and din of cities.
Now he took passage by railroad and returned to the valley in order to speak with Ernest, because he deemed nothing so desirable as to meet this man,
whose untaught wisdom walked hand in hand with the noble simplicity of his life
and
who made great truths so familiar by his simple utterance of them.
Ernest hoped that the poet would fulfill the prophecy, but the poet himself declined the nomination, insisting that while he had dreamed great dreams, he had lived by his own choice among poor and mean realities.
Then at the story's end, Ernest had gone out to address the people, and the light of the setting sun had shone for a brief while in mist and splendor on the distant image of the Great Stone Face. And the poet had called out:
'Behold! Behold! Ernest is himself the likeness of the Great Stone Face!'. . .
But Ernest, having finished what he had to say, took the poet's arm, and walked slowly homeward, still hoping that some wiser and better man than himself would by and by appear, bearing a resemblance to the GREAT STONE FACE.