9 New Beginning
I
The fates who deal out marriages seldom chose two more different human personalities for yoking together. Craig was all caution and I was all venture. She was all reticence, and I wanted to tell of my mistakes so that others could learn to avoid them. Craig would have died before she let anyone know hers. When she got some money she wanted to hide it like a squirrel; when I got some I wanted to start another crusade, to change a world that seemed to me in such sad shape. Craig agreed about the shape, but what she wanted to do was to hide us from it. This duel was destined to last for forty-eight years.
My mother and hers had proudly produced their family trees, and behold, we were both descended from the same English king. We had traveled by different routes: Craig’s ancestor, Lady Southworth, had come to Massachusetts to be married to the colonial governor, William Bradford; mine had come to Virginia and entered the Navy. One of my ancestors had been a commander in the Battle of Lake Huron in the War of 1812, and his son, Captain Arthur Sinclair, my grandfather, had commanded one of the vessels with which Admiral Perry opened up Japan. That grandfather, three uncles, and several cousins had fought in the Confederate States Navy. Craig’s great-grandfather had been appointed by President Jefferson the first surveyor general of the Territory of Mississippi. So those two mothers had got along conversationally, and Mama Kimbrough had good news to take back to Leflore County.
The youngest Kimbrough daughter, Dolly, was at a school in Tarrytown, on the Hudson, and I escorted Mama Kimbrough there. On the way she set out to make a Christian out of me, and I was so attentive that we went an hour past our station; we had to get out and wait for a train to take us back. We found Dolly in bed, blooming in spite of an appendix operation. By the time we returned to New York I had been able to persuade Mama that my socialism was just Christian brotherhood brought up to date; also Mama had decided that a trip to Europe with Craig and me would be educational for Dolly.
II
The first place we visited was Hellerau, in Germany, where the Dalcroze School was holding its annual spring festival. Hellerau means “bright meadow.” Rising from that meadow was a temple of art, and we witnessed a performance of Gluck’s Orpheus, represented in dance as well as in music. It was one of the loveliest things I had ever seen, and a quarter of a century later I used it for the opening scene of Worlds End—the world’s beginning of Lanny Budd. The young Lanny met on the bright meadow—as we ourselves had met—Bernard Shaw with his golden beard outshining any landscape. I had already had lunch at his home in London and at his country home; he welcomed us, and our joy in the Dalcroze festival was confirmed by Britain’s greatest stage critic. He was always so kind, and the letters he wrote me about the Lanny Budd books helped them to win translation into a score of foreign languages.
We traveled to David’s school and collected him. We had lunch in a restaurant in Dresden. I ordered an omelet in my most polished German, and very carefully specified that I did not want pancakes. “Kein Mehl,” I said several times, but they brought us pancakes; when we refused to accept them and tried to leave the restaurant, they would not let us out. Our train was due so we had to pay, and I bade an unloving farewell to Germany—just a year before World War I.
We went to Paris, and there rented an apartment for a couple of weeks. When we were ready to pay our bill, the proprietress pulled a rug from under the bed and accused us of having spilled grease on it. We had had no grease, and hadn’t even seen the rug; but when we refused to pay for the damage, the woman called in a policeman—I think he was the tallest man I ever saw in uniform. He told us we would have to pay or we could not leave. It was a “racket,” of course, but there was nothing we could do; so to France also we bade an unloving farewell. When World War I came, we weren’t quite sure which person we wanted most to have punished—the German restaurant proprietor or the French virago and tall policeman.
III
We went to England, where nobody ever robbed us. We settled in the model village of Letchworth, built by co-operatives. I had acquired from Mrs. Bernard Shaw the right to make a novel out of a drama by the French playwright Eugène Brieux, called Damaged Goods, dealing with venereal disease. I wrote that novel and got an advance from the publisher, and so we had a pleasant summer. I played tennis at the club, and in a middle-aged bachelor girl found the first female antagonist who could keep me busy. I have forgotten her name, but I remember that whenever I got in a good shot she would exclaim, “Oh, haught!”
Also I remember an outdoor socialist meeting at which I addressed an audience of co-operators, speaking from the tail of a cart along with dear, kind George Lansbury, member of Parliament and leader of the left-wing socialists.
We moved into London for a while, and there the lady from the Mississippi Delta met more strange kinds of people—among them Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, Sylvia Pankhurst, and other suffrage combatants. Craig’s sister Dolly had met them too, and we learned, somewhat to our dismay, that Dolly had carried into the National Art Gallery a hatchet concealed under her skirt. Known suffragettes, when they tried to go in, were searched; but the guards didn’t know Dolly, and it was a simple matter for her to retire to the ladies’ room and pass the hatchet. What would Chancellor Kimbrough, president of two banks in Mississippi, have said if a newspaper reporter had called him up and told him that his youngest daughter had been arrested for passing a hatchet!
While I renewed my acquaintance with my socialist friends, it was Craig’s pleasure to go out on the streets and watch the people. At home the servants had been black; here they had white skins but even so were like another race. The educated classes were gracious and keen-minded; but the poor seemed to be speaking a strange language. What did “Kew” mean? Every shop assistant said it when you handed her money; and once when Craig and I were going down into “the Tube,” two male creatures rushed past us in the midst of a hot argument. We caught one shouted sentence, “Ow, gow an’ be a Sowshalist!”
I had a curious experience in London with Jessica Finch, who was the owner and director of a fashionable American school for young ladies, just off Fifth Avenue in New York. Her prices were staggering, and admission had to be arranged years in advance. She was an ardent suffragist and a socialist as determined as myself; she taught these two doctrines to her pupils, and when they went home for Christmas vacation, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society moved into her school to hold its annual convention.
When Craig had first met me in New York, I had taken her to one of these conventions, and she had met a youth named Walter Lippmann, founder and president of the Harvard chapter of that organization. Walter was interested now to meet a young lady from the Far South, and began at once to further his education. “What is the economic status of the Negro in Mississippi?” Craig, with her red-brown eyes twinkling, replied, “I didn’t know he had any.”
Jessica was in the habit of taking a bevy of her pupils abroad at the end of each school year, and they were all snugly ensconced in the palatial home of London’s great department-store proprietor, Harry Gordon Selfridge. Jessica laughingly assured me that she had a Rembrandt in her bedroom and that every one of the girls had a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of pictures on her walls. Jessica loved to talk, and there was plenty to talk about; the suffragettes and the British socialist movement and the prospect of a world war. It must have been two or three o’clock in the morning when we parted. Craig and I saw her several years later in New York. She was married to J. O’Hara Cosgrave, onetime editor of Everybody’s Magazine and later editor of the New York Sunday World.
The happy summer passed. Damaged Goods was coming out, and I had to be in New York. Craig’s blessed mother, much against the judgment of the Judge, allowed Dolly to stay in London to become a paying guest at the Wilshires’ and attend the Dalcroze School of Eurythmics. My David was placed in one of the progressive schools near the city.
As I have already said, Craig had written some tales of her Southern girlhood; and I had stolen them from her for a novel to be called Sylvia. Damaged Goods, both the play and novel, had filled my mind with the subject of venereal disease, something considered unmentionable in those days. I now decided to use the material from Sylvia for a novel on that theme, and we settled down in a little apartment to finish it. We had long arguments of course. Craig was herself Sylvia, and she thought she knew what Sylvia would do and say. I had to agree; but I thought I knew what the public would want to read. If anybody had been in the next room while we were arguing they would surely have thought that World War I had already broken out.
IV
We decided to transfer the battleground to Bermuda for the winter. We found one of those little white cottages built of blocks carved out from coral. Craig had had enough of social life to last all her days, she said; all she wanted was to sit in the shade of a palm tree and decide what she believed about life. In the afternoon I would mount a bicycle and ride down to the Princess Hotel and play tennis with a captain of the British Army, stationed nearby.
A former young woman secretary of mine had married a Bermuda planter, and they would come for us in a carriage—no autos permitted in those days—and take us to a home completely surrounded by onions and potatoes. At night the planter took me out on Harrington Sound in a flat-bottomed boat; holding a torch we would look into the clear water, and there would be a big green lobster waiting to be stabbed with a two-pronged spear.
It was in Bermuda that we had an experience Craig delighted to tell about. Walking along the lovely white coral road, we stopped at a little store to buy something to eat. Looking up, my eyes were caught by familiar objects on shelves near the ceiling—flat cans covered with dust but with the labels still visible: “Armour’s Roast Beef.” “What are those cans doing up there?” I asked, and the proprietor replied, “Oh, some years ago a fellow wrote a book about that stuff, and I haven’t been able to sell a can since.”
V
In the spring of 1914 we came back to New York. The novel, which we called Sylvia’s Marriage, was finished: the story of a Southern girl who marries a wealthy Bostonian and Harvard man and bears a child blinded by gonorrhea. A terrible story, of course, and an innovation in the fiction of that time. I took the manuscript to Walter Lippmann, who had himself graduated from Harvard and had founded a branch of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society there. He read it, and invited me to lunch at the Harvard Club.
I remember vividly his reaction to my novel. I hadn’t thought of him as an ardent partisan of Harvard, but perhaps he was already coming to a more conservative attitude to life. He told me that my picture of a Harvard man was utterly fantastic; no such pretentious snob had ever been seen there, and my portrait was a travesty. I remember one sentence: “It’s as preposterous as if you were to portray an orgy in this place.” And Walter waved his hand to indicate that most decorous dining room.
I would have been embarrassed had I not known certain facts that, unfortunately, I was not at liberty to mention to my old ISS friend. I thanked him for his kindness, took my departure, and have not met him since.
It was Mary Craig who had provided me with the picture of that august Harvard senior, named Van Tuiver in the novel. What had happened was this. In my little cottage in the single-tax colony of Arden, Craig had met a patron of the colony, a leading paper manufacturer, Fiske Warren. When I left Arden, my secretary, Ellen, had become one of the secretaries to this extremely wealthy and important Bostonian. On his country estate each of his secretaries had a separate cottage of her own, and Ellen had invited Craig to pay her a visit in her cottage. Craig had done so, and Fiske had dropped in now and then in the evening to chat with Craig. He did not invite her to the mansion, and Craig was shrewd enough to guess why and proud enough to be amused. Fiske’s wife, Gretchen Warren, was the most august and haughty leader of Boston society, and was not accustomed to receive secretaries socially—or friends of secretaries.
To spare too many details: Craig happened to mention that she was a lineal descendant of that Lady Southworth who had come to Massachusetts to marry Governor Bradford. Fiske went up into the air as if she had put a torpedo under him. He hurried to confirm it in his genealogy books, and then to tell Gretchen about it—with the result that Ellen lost her guest and Craig was moved up to the “big house” (I use the phrase to which Craig was accustomed in Mississippi).
So it had come about that she had met “Van Tuiver”—only of course that was not his real name. Gretchen had invited the top clubmen of eligible age to meet this Southern belle, and Craig had listened to their magnificence. Of course, she was no longer “eligible,” being engaged to me, but she was not at liberty to reveal that fact; and she let them spread their glory before her. She had never met this particular kind of arrogance and self-importance, in Mississippi or anywhere else.
So when she came back from the visit she gave me Van Tuiver as a character for our book, with every detail of his appearance, his manner, and his language. And so it was that I was not disturbed by the opinion of Walter Lippmann. Walter’s chances of meeting such a man at Harvard had been of the slimmest, for Walter suffered not merely from the handicap of being Jewish but also from having declassed himself by setting up a socialist society. (Never have I forgotten the tone of voice in which the secretary of the Harvard Club answered me when I asked if I could obtain a list of Harvard students in order to send them a circular about the proposed Intercollegiate Socialist Society. “Socialist!” he exclaimed, incredulously; and I got the list elsewhere.)
VI
In New York we had found ourselves a ten-dollar-a-week apartment on Morningside Heights. One evening I went to a meeting at Carnegie Hall alone; Craig, being tired, preferred to sleep. I came back about midnight; and after that she had little sleep, because I told her about the meeting.
Mrs. Laura Cannon, wife of the president of the Western Federation of Miners, had told the story of what came to be known to the world as the Ludlow massacre. In the lonely Rocky Mountains were coal camps fenced in and guarded like medieval fortresses. No one could enter without a pass or leave without another, and the miners and their families were in effect white slaves. Rebelling against such conditions, they had gone on strike and had been turned out of the camps. Down in the valley, with the help of their unions, they had set up tent colonies; after they had held out for several months, the gunmen of the company had come one night, thrown kerosene on the tents, and set fire to them. Three women and eleven children had been burned to death; but the newspapers of the country, including those of New York, had given only an inch or two to the event.
The most important fact about the whole thing was that these coal camps were owned by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, a Rockefeller concern. I told my terrified wife what I had decided to do—to take Mrs. Cannon to the office of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in the morning and ask him to hear her story. If he refused, we would charge him with murder before the American public and organize a group of sympathizers who would put mourning bands around their arms and walk up and down in front of the Standard Oil Building in protest against the company’s crime.
I won’t try to portray the dismay of my bride of just one year. We had been so perfectly happy and so carefully respectable—and now this horror! “You will all be arrested,” she exclaimed. I answered, “Maybe, but they couldn’t do anything but fine us, and someone will put up the money.” We didn’t have it.
Craig couldn’t bring herself to say no—not this time. In the morning I set to work to call people who had been at the meeting, and put them to work to call others to the Liberal Club that evening. And, of course, we did not fail to notify the newspapers. Some thirty or forty people assembled—having scented publicity, which “radicals” dearly love. I set forth the proposal and called for the help of those who would agree to a program of complete silence and complete nonresistance. One man, overcome with indignation, called for a program of collecting arms, and I invited him to go into the next room, shut the door, and collect all the arms he wanted.
Craig was willing to be one of the marchers but insisted that she had to have a proper costume. She waited until the department stores opened, and then she got herself an elegant long white cape. When I arrived at nine in the morning, I found no men but four ladies, one of whom had provided herself with a many-colored banner and a loud screaming voice. I invited her to set the banner against the wall of the Standard Oil Company and to stuff her handkerchief in her mouth; we then took up our silent parade in front of the office of Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (We never saw him, and I learned that he had taken up the practice of coming in by a back door.)
VII
We walked for perhaps five minutes, and then policemen politely told us to walk somewhere else; when we politely refused, they told us that we were under arrest. One of them grabbed me by the arm and started to hustle me, but I said to him very quietly, “Please behave like a gentleman. I have no idea but to go with you.” So after that we had a pleasant stroll to the police station, where we found a half-dozen newspaper reporters with their pads of scratch paper and their busy pens.
To the sergeant at the desk I told the story of the Ludlow massacre all over again. It wasn’t his business to listen, but it was the reporters’ business, and all police sergeants are respectful to reporters. A little later we were put into a patrol wagon and taken to the police court, and again I told the story, this time to the judge. The policeman who had arrested me testified that my conduct had been “that of a perfect gentleman”; whereupon the judge found me guilty of disorderly conduct and fined me three dollars. I declined to pay the fine, and so did the four ladies; so each of us got three days instead of three dollars, and I was led over the “Bridge of Sighs” to a cell in the ancient prison known as The Tombs.
A most interesting experience, because I had as cellmate a young Jewish fellow in for stealing. He was a lively talker and told me all about his art; and of course every kind of knowledge is useful to a novelist sooner or later. This young fellow stole because he loved to. It was a sporting proposition—he pitted his wits against the owners of property in the great metropolis, and he didn’t especially mind when he was caught because the charge was always petty theft; apparently they never bothered to compare his fingerprints with previous fingerprints, and he was always a “first offender.” He trusted me—I suppose he thought of a socialist as an intellectual and higher type of thief. Anyhow, we were pals, and I was entertained for two days.
I never left the cell, because I had learned about fasting, and when I contemplated prison fare, I decided this was a good time to apply my knowledge. At the end of the second day a message came to me that if I wanted to appeal my sentence I would have to pay a fine; for, obviously, if I served the whole three days I could not sue to get my time back. It was my wife who had sent this information, and she set out to find the court where the one dollar for the third day was to be paid. She has told in Southern Belle the delightful story of how she got lost in the several galleries of courtrooms and stopped a gentleman to ask the way to the room where the fine should be paid. The gentleman asked, “What is it for?” and Craig said, “Some idiot of a judge has sent my husband to jail.” “Madam,” was the reply, “I am that judge.” But he told her where to go to pay her dollar.
We kept that demonstration going for a couple of weeks, and Craig met such people as Judge Kimbrough’s daughter had never dreamed of meeting in this world—lumberjacks from the mountains, sailors from the harbor, and poor Jewish garment workers half-starved in a period of unemployment.
George Sterling, the poet, happened to be visiting in New York. He marched on one side of Craig, with Craig holding his arm to keep him from making any move when the “slugs” muttered insults at her. (“Slugs” was what Craig called them, groping for a word.) Clement Wood, stenographer and also poet, marched on the other side. Irish-born novelist Alexander Irvine and Irish-born suffragette Elizabeth Freeman took charge while Craig rested, and some rich supporter put up money for a rest room and feeding station. I went out to Colorado to make publicity there, and to write it; meantime Craig kept things going on lower Broadway. Clement told her that an agent of the Rockefellers had come to him and offered him money for secret information about our plans and purposes. Since we had no secrets of any sort, Craig told him to get all the Rockefeller money that was available.
VIII
A group of students of the Ferrer School, an anarchist institution, came down to march, and later decided to carry the demonstration to the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills. They did not ask our consent, and we had nothing to do with it—until they were beaten up for trying to hold a free-speech meeting in nearby Tarrytown. Then I went up to try to persuade the board of directors of the town to let us hold a meeting; I carried with me a letter from Georg Brandes, perhaps the most highly respected literary critic in Europe—but I doubt if the trustees had heard of him. They turned down our request.
What should turn up then but an offer from a millionaire lady, whose estate adjoined the Rockefellers’, to let us hold a free-speech meeting in her open-air theater; I went there and made a speech and was not beaten up. Let would-be reformers make a note of this item and always have their free-speech meetings on the property of millionaires.
The time came when all our money was gone, and we went back to our little apartment on Morningside Heights. A day or two later our telephone rang. It was the nearby police station calling to ask Craig if she knew Arthur Caron and if she would come and identify his body. Caron was a French-Canadian boy who had been in a strike in Rhode Island and beaten there. After being beaten at Tarrytown, he and two of his colleagues had set to work in a tenement-house room to make a bomb, doubtless to blow up the Rockefellers. Instead, they had blown out the top floor of the tenement house, and two of them were killed.
I have often thought what must have been the effect of that event upon the Rockefeller family. There has been an enormous change in their attitude to the public since that time. John D., Jr., went out to his coal mines and danced with the miners’ wives and made friends with the angry old Mother Jones; more important, he made a deal to recognize the unions and reform conditions in all the camps of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. If you look at the record that his son, the present Nelson A. Rockefeller, is making as governor of New York State, you will see that our lessons were indeed learned by that family.
One curious outcome of that “civil war” of ours had to do with the newspapers. Craig had made friends with some of the reporters, and they had told her how their stories were being mutilated in the office. The New York Herald gave us especially bad treatment, making many statements about us that were pure invention. For example, they said that the president of the board of trustees in Tarrytown had denounced my conduct in an angry speech. I went up to see the gentleman, to whom I had been perfectly courteous. He assured me he had made no such statement to anyone—and he gave me a letter to that effect.
That letter was shown to the Herald, but they refused publication and even repeated the charge; so I told a lawyer friend to bring a libel suit against them. Then I went back to my writing and forgot all about it. The usual law’s delay occurred. Some three years later, to my astonishment, I received a letter from my lawyer telling me that the case had been settled, with the Herald paying three thousand dollars’ damages!
George Sterling and Clement Wood each got a fine poem out of this experience. George wandered down to the battery and gazed at the Statue of Liberty and asked,
Say, is it bale-fire in thy brazen hand,
A traitor light set on betraying coast
To lure to doom the mariner?...
And Clement Wood, after collecting his Rockefeller money, wrote a sonnet beginning:
White-handed lord of murderous events,
Well have you guarded what your father gained....
Both these poems are in my anthology, The Cry for Justice, which I set out to compile as soon as the excitement of the “mourning parade” was over.
IX
We were broke as usual, but the John C. Winston Company of Philadelphia fell for my proposition of a book, The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of Social Protest; they advanced a thousand dollars to make possible its compilation. A good friend, Frederick C. Howe, then United States Commissioner of Immigration, offered us the use of a cottage in the hills above Croton-on-Hudson; so we moved out of our ten-dollar-a-week apartment into a fifty-dollar-a-month cottage on the edge of woods that sloped down to the Croton River. In summer the woods were green, and in winter the ground was white, and George Sterling came and chopped down dead trees for firewood. Clement Wood came to be my secretary and to quarrel with me over all the poetry I put into The Cry for Justice and all that I left out—including some of his. Vachel Lindsay had come to see us in New York, and his book had set Clement on fire; we would hear him roaring through the forest:
Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo...
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you!
Poor dear Vachel! He had been sending me his stuff for two or three years, and I had been praising it; but when I met him he suddenly burst out, to my consternation, “Oh, you don’t like me!” I had to persuade him that I liked him very much indeed. Clement liked him, and liked Walt Whitman too, but he didn’t like Edward Carpenter for two cents. We had fierce arguments, but in the end we got The Cry for Justice put together, and it was published and widely reviewed.
Edgar Selwyn and his wife, Margaret Mayo, lived within bicycling distance, and so I had tennis. Isadora Duncan’s sister had her dancing school nearby, and we met unusual characters there. Floyd Dell and Robert Minor constituted a little radical colony, and we could go there and solve all the problems of the world, each in his own special way.
As usual, I was on the verge of making a fortune; The Jungle was being made into a movie, and I went to watch the procedure in a big warehouse in Yonkers. An odd confusion there—the show was being directed by A. E. Thomas; I took this to be Augustus Thomas and named him as the director, greatly to his surprise. It was a poor picture; the concern went into bankruptcy, and so ended another dream. All I got was the film, and I loaned it to some organization and never got it back. Whoever has it, please let me know!
One incident I remember on the opening night. In the lobby of the theater I found myself being introduced to Richard Harding Davis. He had come back from some expedition and was still wearing khaki. I had read one or two of his books, and had an impression of him as a prince among snobs; but when he heard my name, he held my hand and said, “Ah, now, you are a real writer. I only write for money.” I never saw him again.
I saw the world war coming. I had a friend, J. G. Phelps Stokes, well known in New York as the “millionaire socialist”—you didn’t have to be more than moderately rich to receive that title. I learned that his butler was in England and about to return, so I made arrangements for the butler to bring back my son, David. I put the boy in the North Carolina school of C. Hanford Henderson, whose wise and gracious book about education I had read. That left Craig and me free, and at last there came the long-awaited letter from the Judge, inviting us “home.”
X
That meant Ashton Hall, on the Mississippi Sound near Gulfport. The family used it only in summer, and we were free to have it eight months of the year. I have a vivid memory of getting off at a little railroad stop in the backwoods: we were the only persons to descend, and there was only one person to meet us—a boy of fourteen dressed in the uniform of a military academy, a boy with gracious manners and a strong Southern brogue. Such was my first meeting with Hunter Southworth Kimbrough, who was to be our standby for almost half a century. I remember how he insisted on carrying both bags; and today I have only to go to the telephone and call him, and eight hours later he arrives from Phoenix, Arizona, ready to lift all the contents of the house on his sturdy shoulders.
We walked a quarter of a mile or so to the Gulf of Mexico, and there just beyond a sandy-beach drive stood the lovely old house, built of sound timbers before the Civil War. The front stood high above the ground, so there was room underneath to stow sailboats and even buggies. (Jefferson Davis’ buggy and his daughter’s boat were there.) We went up a wide flight of steps to what was called a gallery, which ran around three sides of the house. On it were big screened cages in which you could hide from the mosquitoes when the wind from the back marshes drove them to the front.
There was a dining room that could seat a score of persons, and two reception rooms with doors that rolled back to make a big room for dancing. Upstairs were four bedrooms, and above that a great attic with a row of beds and cots to accommodate the beaux when they came from New Orleans. That attic was haunted for Craig, because it was there the Judge had hung bunches of bananas to ripen, and Craig’s five-year-old sister had climbed up and eaten unripe bananas and died in Craig’s arms—this when Craig herself was little more than a child. The mother had been screaming to God while Craig was making the child vomit; but neither effort helped.
There was “Aunt” Catherine, whom I had been hearing about ever since I had met Craig, a half-dozen years previously. Aunt Catherine—all the older Negroes were “Aunt” or “Uncle”—was an ex-slave and happy to tell about “dem days.” “Dey wormed us all,” she said, “wormed us all good.” Which sounded alarming but merely meant the giving of worm medicine. Aunt Catherine’s happiness was to fix elaborate meals, and her distress was great when she discovered that I did not want them. She took to wandering off down the beach, visiting the servants in other beach homes. She was elegant in the castoff clothing of Craig’s mother and sisters, and I remember her coming down the beach with the wind blowing half-a-dozen colored scarves in front of her. When Craig rebuked her for neglecting her duties, the answer was, “But, Miss Ma’y, somebody gotta keep up de repitation of de family—you won’t do it.”
XI
Hunter, in the course of his explorations in Gulfport, picked up a sailor on liberty from one of the ships. He brought the man to the house to cut firewood and perform other labors. He was a Norwegian, a good fellow, and we put him up in one of the rooms in a back building, where the cooking was done and where the Negroes slept on the second floor. Gus, as his name was, quarreled with Catherine, who had contempt for any white man in the position of servant. She neglected to prepare his breakfast early, and Gus burst into her room to scold her. Catherine came to Craig, weeping wildly, “Oh, Miss Ma’y, I done seed a naked white man—never befo’ in my life I seed a naked white man!”
The great thing in Craig’s life now was the impending visit of her father. Her heart was in her mouth when I came up the steps after a walk, and the Judge was there. We shook hands, he bade me welcome, and I thanked him for the most precious gift I had ever received. He had hated to give it, of course, but all the same I had it, and for keeps. After a little talk I went into the house, and Craig said, “Well, Papa, what do you think of him?” The answer was, “I guess I overspoke myself.” Craig told me afterward it was the first time in her life she had heard him make any sort of apology.
He was six feet four, with a little white beard. He was a judge of the Chancery Court, which means that he handled estates and was happy in his duty of protecting the property of widows. Also, he traveled a “circuit” and presided at court in four counties, where he was famous for his way of handling the Negroes who got into trouble. He could be very stern, but he also had a keen sense of humor and knew there was nothing the Negroes dreaded more than to be laughed at. He would propose penalties that would make the audience roar, such as making two husky men who had been fighting kiss each other and make up.
But for good Negroes he had only kindness and understanding. He owned plantations and lands, and some of his land was worked by trusted Negroes on shares. They would come to see him and tell him their needs, and he would sit on the back porch and chat with them, being interested in their minds. He would tell funny stories about them, but he gave serious advice and help when needed. On Christmas Day they all came to have their “dram,” and in the evening when there were parties some would play music and be as happy as the dancers.
But don’t think that he couldn’t be stern, for he had to be. Dreadful things happened. A Negro woman, furious with jealousy, poured boiling grease into her sleeping husband’s ear; a woman nurse, jealous of a rival for the position, set fire to the curtains on the balcony where the white children were sleeping. Craig told the story of a Negro meeting in the woods back of her Greenwood home. A fight broke out in the night, and the Judge grabbed his shotgun and rushed out; Mama Kimbrough grabbed his rifle and followed behind—to protect her big six-foot-four husband. He didn’t want to shoot any of the Negroes because they were “his.” He just waded in, using his shotgun as a club, and scattered them and drove them to their cabins. Such was life on a Mississippi plantation when Craig was a child, three quarters of a century ago. The sight of bleeding Negroes was familiar to her from the beginning of her life, and once she helped to sew on a torn ear.
XII
My aim that winter was to write a novel called King Coal, dealing with those labor camps in the Rocky Mountains about which I had learned so much. The first essential for my work was quiet, and the way to get it was to have a tent at a corner of the property remote from the house. A tent must have a platform, so I ordered the necessary lumber and set to work. Nobody at Ashton Hall, white or black, had ever seen a white “gentleman” doing such work, and I damaged my reputation thereby. A colored boy helped me to get the tent up, since that couldn’t be done alone. I built a little doorframe for the front and tacked on mosquito netting.
Thereafter, when the wind brought mosquitoes, my technique was as follows: I would dart out from the big house, run as fast as my feet could take me to the tent, brush off the mosquitoes that had already attached themselves, dart inside and fasten the door, then with a flyswat proceed to eliminate all the mosquitoes inside. The size of the tent was eight by ten; so I had three steps east and then three steps west while I thought up the next scene in my story. I would sit down and write for a while on the typewriter, then get up and walk and think some more. So, in the end I had King Coal.
The Judge came from Greenwood now and then and took me fishing—always with a Negro man to row the boat and bait our hooks. Brother Willie Kimbrough came, a big laughing stout man, and took me to catch pompano in what was called Back Bay, a sort of deep sound.
Craig’s sister Dolly, back from England, came to stay with us; Craig, who disapproved of idleness, assigned her a job. Behind the house stood an enormous arbor of scuppernong grapes, loaded with ripe fruit that it would be a shame to waste. So Dolly put two Negro boys to picking grapes. When they had two big baskets full, they would take them to the trolley, and Dolly would ride into town and arrange with a grocery to buy them. Never before had an occupant of Ashton Hall engaged in trade, and Dolly wept once or twice, then became interested in making pocket money.
Everything was going beautifully, and if it went wrong there was someone to attend to it. I made the mistake of leaving my small possessions, such as fountain pen and cuff links, on my bureau, and one by one these objects disappeared. After searching everywhere I mentioned the matter to the youthful Hunter, who knew exactly what to do. He called a Negro boy, one of the house servants, and said with due sternness, “Empty your pockets.” Sure enough, the boy proceeded to shell out all my possessions. Hunter didn’t say, “I’ll call the police.” He said, “Now, you keep out of Mr. Sinclair’s room; if I ever hear of you being in there again, I’ll skin you alive.” Such was “gov’ment” on the Mississippi Sound. I don’t know how it is now, but I am able to understand both sides in the racial problem.
XIII
Visitors came to see us—among them Captain Jones. I don’t know that I ever heard his first name, but that wasn’t necessary as there was only one “Captain Jones” in that world. He had built the Gulfport harbor, also the railroad that connected Gulfport with the North, and also the trolley line that paralleled the road in front of Ashton Hall and carried me into town when I wanted to play tennis at Captain Jones’s Great Southern Hotel.
The old gentleman and his wife came to Ashton Hall, and he poured out his heart to us. He was probably the richest man in Mississippi; but nobody loved him, nobody wanted anything but money from him, and some of their ways were wicked and cruel. His railroad, which ran through the desolate “piney woods” of southern Mississippi, was a blessing to everybody along the way; but the miserable piney-woods people, “clayeaters” as they were called, had only one thought—to plunder Captain Jones’s railroad. They would cut the wire fence that protected both sides of the track and turn some scrawny old cow onto the railroad right of way; when the creature was struck and killed by a train, they would demand the price of a prize bull in a cattle show.
I was duly sympathetic, of course, and was somewhat embarrassed when a strike of the dockworkers developed in Captain Jones’s Gulfport. He had made all the prosperity of that town, and here was one more case of ingratitude. It was embarrassing to me and to the Kimbrough family when the strikers sent a deputation to ask me to speak at a meeting in the largest hall in Gulfport. I had never refused an invitation from strikers, and I wasn’t going to begin at the age of thirty-six. I told them I couldn’t discuss their particular issues because I didn’t know the circumstances and didn’t have time to investigate them; but I would tell them my ideas of democracy in industry, otherwise known as socialism, where strikes would be unnecessary because workers would be striking against themselves.
The meeting was duly announced, and the Kimbrough family were too polite to tell me what they thought about the matter. What the wife of Captain Jones thought about it surprised both Craig and me. She called us up and said she would be glad to go to the meeting with us; and would we come to the Great Southern Hotel and have dinner with her before the meeting? Of course we said we would be pleased.
It was Craig’s practice to sit in the very back of a hall, where she would be inconspicuous and if possible unrecognized. But Mrs. Jones wouldn’t have it that way. She took me by an arm and Craig by an arm, and marched us straight down the center aisle to the front seats in the hall so that everybody would know who had brought us. I have had a number of experiences like that with the very rich, and they have encouraged me to realize that democracy is a real force in America.
XIV
So everything seemed lovely at Ashton Hall, until one tragic day when the roof fell in on us—the moral and spiritual roof. My former wife saw fit to come to Gulfport and bring a lawsuit for the custody of our son. I cannot shirk the telling of this story because it played an enormous part in my life and Craig’s; but I tell it as briefly and tactfully as possible. I don’t think the lady actually wanted David, but the grandmother did. My former wife is still living, has been married twice, and has children and grandchildren whom I have no desire to hurt. Suffice it to say that her coming created a scandal in Gulfport—one that not even the wife of Captain Jones could mitigate.
David was with us at the time, and I had a secretary, a young man from the North, who considered it a great lark to carry the lad off into the woods and hide him from the courts of Mississippi for a few days. There was a trial with plenty of publicity; the court, presided over by a Catholic judge, awarded six months’ custody to me and six months’ to his mother. To make the painful story short, I took David to California for the first six months; and when the time came for his mother to come and get him, I heard nothing from her—then or afterward.
Judge Kimbrough had made Craig an offer promising her Ashton Hall if she would live there. It was said to be worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and with the development that has come in the past thirty or forty years, the lot alone is probably worth that now. But we couldn’t be happy there. A friend had told me about the wonders of southern California, where there were no mosquitoes. I begged Craig to come, and I went ahead to find a home.