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I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century
John Andrew Rice
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I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century
John Andrew Rice
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About This Book
John Andrew Rice's autobiography, first published to critical acclaim in 1942, is a remarkable tour through late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. When the book was suppressed by the publisher soon after its appearance because of legal threats by a college president described in the book, the nation lost a rich first-person historical account of race and class relations during a critical periodânot only during the days of Rice's youth, but at the dawn of the civil rights movement.
I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century begins with Rice's childhood on a South Carolina plantation during the post-Reconstruction era. Later Rice moved to Great Britain when he won a Rhodes scholarship, then to the University of Nebraska to accept a professorship. In 1933 he founded Black Mountain College, a legendary progressive college in North Carolina that uniquely combined creative arts, liberal education, self-government, and a work program.
Rice's observations of social and working conditions in the Jim Crow South, his chronicle of his own fading Southern aristocratic family, including its famous politicians, and his acerbic portraits of education bureaucrats are memorable and make this book a resource for scholars and a pleasure for lay readers. Historical facts are leavened with wit and insight; black-white relations are recounted with relentless and unsentimental discernment. Rice combines a sociologist's eye with a dramatist's flair in a unique voice.
This Southern Classics edition includes a new intro-duction by Mark Bauerlein and an afterword by Rice's grandson William Craig Rice, exposing a new generation of readers to Rice's incisive commentaries on the American South before the 1960s and to the work of a powerful prose stylist.
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Nordamerikanische GeschichteCHAPTER I
Grandmother Smithâs Plantation
EVERY DAY IN SUMMER AND ON WARM DAYS IN THE WINTER MY grandmother sat in her chair at the end of the long front piazza and smoked her clay pipeâa thing, I have since been told, a lady never did. But a lady did.
She did, in fact, whatever she pleased and no one had the hardihood to question. She was little and old and dried up, and attention to looks stopped at cleanliness; a stranger would not have guessed, to see her sitting there, that so much power could be lodged in so little space. The split-bottom chair was her movable throne, placed to catch the warmth of the sun; here she sat quietly puffing her pipe, meditating upon the rights and privileges and duties of a matriarch. She wore her crown as a busy queen must, on the back of her head: a generous coil to which her fine gray hair was drawn back straight from the forehead. Her steel-rimmed spectacles, impatiently pushed up on top of her head, rode out a precarious existence winking in the sun, to be used only on occasion, like false teeth and hats and corsets.
This was before the days when old women thought they could stay young, when they let themselves go in unstayed ease. There was a deep fold where bosom and stomach met, cut deeper by her apron string, a pleasant place for a small boy to warm his hands on a chilly day and useful for holding thimble, scissors, spools of threadânot needles; needles were worn high on the left shoulder, trailing from their eyes lengths of black and brown and white. Her head had settled down between her shoulders and her chin was not very far from her nose. But there was no laxness anywhere. She was whole, and the full expression of her wholeness could be seen in her face, where the tiny muscles around the mouth and between eyes and ears held the flat surfaces of forehead and cheeks together in an active harmony. No part of her face ever spoke alone.
When she sat humped in her chair, her crown riding low on the back of her neck and the pipe going good, we knew that we could come to her with our troubles and our joys, all of us, children and grown-ups, black and white, and receive from her what can be got from only the very old and very good, a sort of fusion of love and justice, a thing so rare as to be without a name. Wisdom is perhaps the nearest word, though lacking in warmth.
But she could be stern. Her eyes grew sharp and pointed, as sharp and pointed as the words that came clipped from her thin and sensitive lips. A blundering male was most often the victim. She never forgot that women live in a man-made world, and she had a way with men; not, however, the way to which they were pleasantly accustomed. She had long put away everything that was female, even everything that was feminine, retaining in the armory of her old age only the intellectual trickery that is peculiar to women, a strange irrational logic that leaves men gasping and helpless.
She was gentle with womenâwith her three daughters-in-law, who were always being a little startled at the unruly household in which they found themselves, and with others who lived on and about the place. In general, she chose the gentler way, despising the coward precept, âdivide and rule.â
It was a wild kingdom when her children came for a visit, always at Christmastime and in the summer. It took skill to hold together a family of three sons and their wives, a daughter and her husband, and seventeen grandchildren, among them three orphans, ranging in age from infancy to middle youth.
The depot at Lynchburg, South Carolina, was the most exciting place in the world. I cannot remember the beginning of the journey with my mother from our temporary dwelling-place in Darlington or Kingstree or Columbia; I remember only my arrival at Lynchburg, grimy and cindery and happy. I was terrified at the snorting engine belching black woodsmoke and the lordly baggage-smasher dropping trunks from a dizzy height. My fears were matched only by the joy of greeting old Uncle Washâcoachman, blacksmith, carpenter, general handy manâand the horses again, and the lofty carriage. The step was still too high for a small boyâs legs to reach, tinging with ignominy the delight of being lifted high to the driverâs seat. Not that I was allowed to drive, not yet; only to sit at the left of the old man and hand him reins and whip and drink in the smells of horse and leather and Negro.
We drove over the bumpy road between fields of corn and cotton with an occasional cool cavern of pine-woods. All the while I was impatiently tugging and straining with every step of the horses to get to the end of my journey, only to be distracted to where I was by the freshly shined-up harness or the horses being different from last time, or a new whip. Happily a horsefly zoomed up and settled on the sweaty flank of a horse, to be whisked away with a skillful flick of the whipâs lash. Meanwhile there was talk, questions from me to Uncle Wash as to how many puppies there were, and kittens, and calvesâa thousand things, tumbling out of me so fast that the old man could hardly get an answer in edgewise.
As I twisted and turned I glanced back at my mother from time to time to see if she was happy too. She always was. Care had slipped away and she was calm and quiet, so serene that the very absence of her troubled look troubled me. She had never got used to the unrooted life of her preacher husband, who, according to a rule of the Methodist Church in South Carolina, in all the South, could not stay in one charge more than four years at one stretch; never got used, in fact, to being a preacherâs wife. She took any pretext to get away and go back home. This was the reason we were always first to arrive, she and I, and later, as her family grew, my younger and youngest brothers. But this I was to learn when I was older. In these earliest years, unhappiness in others struck me a glancing blow.
We turned off from the main road into a grove of hickory trees whose roots pushed themselves out into the winding road and made the last part of the journey most precarious, as the carriage swayed from side to side and was almost turning over. When we finally came to a halt before the pillared porch my grandmother stood at the top of the steps waiting for us, to be reached through a swarm of delighted dogs, tremendous pointers and setters, whose cold muzzles left sticky patches on my face and hands. It was a mighty task to climb the gigantic steps, knee bumping chin, but to be managed unassisted. At last my face was hidden in the folds of my grandmotherâs apron and the top of my head pushed into her warm stomach. I was home, the only home I ever knew.
A double paneled door with fanlight above opened into the wide hall, a breeze-way in summer, in winter a chilly interval, except on Christmas day, when it was warmed by oil stoves and the long table stretched its full length. On either side of this door were narrow windows on whose panes had been pasted transparent paper designs to make them look like stained glassâonly they never did, they always looked wetâand it was a delight to look through them at the many-colored trees outside.
Through this door and down the long hall Granâma led me, her favorite grandchildâmy small hand holding on to her warm, dry fingersâjust beyond the parlor to her room on the left. Here every Christmastime, promptly on my arrival, she gave me absolute proof of her love. There grew on the place a single fig tree almost Biblical in its parsimony of fruit, yet always bearing enough to make one glass of preserves. This was mine, to be eaten in aloof gluttony before the rest should come. When this ritual was over and I had eaten them all and licked the inside of the glass as far down as my tongue could reach, I set out to explore again the great plantation world.
First I went straight through the back door and along the covered runway that led to the kitchen, to greet the cookâWinifred was her name, Winnie for shortâto be admired and measured and fed, and to be put through a catechism whose purpose, as I now see, was to keep me in the best tradition of the family. In the priesthood of service Winnie stood at the top, as her slave mother before her had stood, quick to detect and suppress any tendency toward change in her underlings or in the family. She was a complete conservative. What had been was to be, and life must be cut to a known pattern. As a rule I did not objectâchildren seldom doâbut sometimes I thought her prudence went too far. She boasted that for eighteen years she had not washed her head; didnât hold with head-washing, a dangerous experiment apt to bring on colds or worse. For eighteen yearsâit was always eighteen years (she, in common with other conservatives, had the knack of stopping time dead in his tracks)âfor eighteen years she had not had a cold nor so much as a sniffle. She was also expert in the rearing of children, for had she not brought twenty-one into the world and were not seven of them still living?
The kitchen had originally been farther away from the house, when this was built in the latter part of the eighteenth century, but with the passing of slavery and the decrease in the size of households these sprawling plantation establishments had begun to pull themselves together. The old kitchen was now used as a storehouse, where, along with unimportant things, great barrels of cane syrup lay in rows, gradually to be emptied during the year, from early fall on through the following summer. When all the syrup had been drawn from a barrel, the top was knocked in and at the bottom lay a thick deposit of grainy brown sugar, rich and gooey, better than any candy, and filling.
But on this first day the house must be gone over, any alterations discovered and appraised. (A piece of furniture moved from one room to another could be disturbing.) ⌠To the right of the back door was the childrenâs playroom; to the left the dining room with a couple of bedrooms on the same side. From the hall a stairway led to the upstairs, where the layout was the same, wide hall with three bedrooms on each side. In the middle one on the left I was born, I have been told, in 1888. A big chest had stood in this upstairs hall unopened within the memory of any one then living. Later, a deed to the property was found in it, made out to a great-great-grandfather and signed by George the Third of England.
Off the front end of the upstairs hall a balcony projected over the piazza, from where I looked way down to the pediments of the four square pillarsâoff one of which, when I was very small indeed, I had fallen and broken my armâand out through the pillars over the tops of the hickory trees.
The branches were now bare and the ground covered thick with brown leaves, underneath which lay the cream-colored nuts. With the swift leap of a childâs imagination I was knee-deep among the leaves. The pleasantest way to gather the nuts was to wade through the leaves until you felt them bump against your toes. The best way to crack them was, not to lay them flat and smash them, but to hold them narrow side up and hit them where the shell was thinnest. In this way the halves came out all of a piece. The best implement for picking out the meat was a hairpin. The best place to find a hairpin was in grandmotherâs roomâand safest, for she was nearsighted and scorned glasses except when she was reading or sewing. The quickest way downstairs, if no grownups were around, was by the banisters, worn slick by the crotches of oneâs forefathers. A swift descent landed one just in front of the parlor.
On this first day the parlor must be inspected, on others avoided, dismal as it was alike in aspect and association. Here were to be found all the family mementos, albums, enlarged photographs, an oil portrait or two, the family Bible (an excellent place to keep Octagon soap coupons)âeverything that was unused or useless. It was exactly like the parlor of any of my numerous relatives, except for two things. From a whatnot in a dark comer of the room gleamed a silver cup and saucer, a memorable Christmas gift from my Uncle Coke, the bishop, to his mother. More wonderful still was a family tree made of hair, in a deep glass case, itself a wonder. The trunk of the tree was gray, the hair of some greatest-grandfather and his wife, and from this sprang many branches, topped off each with the bright yellow curl of a child. Mine was not there, for the tree was old when I was young.
Here in the parlor the family gathered on gloomy and disturbing occasions, funerals, weddings, christenings, and the reception of important unwelcome visitors, each occurrence an affliction of equal pain to children; but none so painful as the roomâs strangest use, for it was the seat of correction. Here we were always led for admonition or worse; but it was a question as to which was really worse, to be turned over a knee and feel the sting of a peach-tree switch and have the business shortly over with, or to sit on a horsehair sofa and suffer martyrdom down below from the stabbing hair ends while listening to a lecture on the development of character.
If in the house there were no innovations of such importance as to require justification, I set out on the long journey to the lot, the Southern name for barnyard, which lay a few hundred yards back of the main house. I might get there at last, if I could drag myself past the carriage house. This was a museum of vehicular travel in America, for here were preserved all the coaches, carriages, and buggies that the family had ever owned. That is, all except one. The most antique coach had collapsed some years before and the body been set out in the weather. Its red leather cushions were rotted, the horsehair bulged out through holes, the velvet straps were falling to pieces, and the paint was almost gone, but to young imagination it was still magnificent. In it we rode over wide western plains and fought off Indians, and in the mountains on narrow trails many a highwayman lost his life trying to capture it. From its windows were dragged bleeding victims of train wrecks. This was on fair days. If it was rainy, the carriage house became the place of slaughter. But sometimes my cousins were slaying and dying elsewhere and I curled up on a seat in the dark cool with a book. Nearby was the smokehouse, smelling of salt and brown hickory smoke, with hams and sides of bacon and links of sausages hanging from the crosspieces, and great tubs of lard ranged against the wall. If the ham in present use lay upon the chopping block, and no one else was there, I cut myself a slice and ate it raw.
It being unsafe to call on the dogs with a piece of ham in my hand, I went behind the smokehouse into the nearby garden, a world of private delight, surrounded by a high paling fence made of split slabs of hickory and oak. Against the winter sky the bare fruit trees etched themselves; I could tell them at a glance, but now I was looking for something more to eat, or rather, chew. There were turnips and the cool hearts of cabbage and collards with their broad green leaves, but these could be left for a slimmer day. There was something better waiting for me, hiding in its dark nest.
In the late fall, before the first frost, the chewing stock of sugar-cane stalks was gathered and piled in a great heap to the south of the smokehouse, where the sun would strike, and over them laid a thick matting of pine straw, on top of this a layer of earthââdirt,â we always saidâand the whole mound well sodded. This was their winter bed. Close to the ground a hole was left, stuffed with straw to keep out the cold. I squatted, pushed aside the straw, felt with experienced hand for a large butt, and pulled out a stalk about five feet long, dark purple and jointed like a bamboo pole, which I balanced over my shoulder and took along until I should find someone to peel it for me, meanwhile laying it down now and then when it got too heavy.
In the far corner of the garden sat the privy, very far indeed from the house for a small boy in a hurry, but so placed for an obvious reason: scents travel far on a warm day. But I think there was another reason, seen in the countrymanâs contempt for the central plumbing of the degenerate city dweller. I think putting the privy so far away had something to do with the training of character. Else how explain the fact that they are still so placed in the colleges of Oxford? Oxford, when I knew it, was eighteenth century, and so was South Carolina, and the eighteenth century had a puritan hang-over. At any rate, far off in the corner of the garden sat the privy, a quiet place to take a book and read. (The mail order catalogue had not yet begun to corrupt the reading habits of the nation with its disjointed and dilettantish offerings.) It was a trifle smelly, but the scent was always the same, and children, like peasants, do not mind bad smells.
Through a crack in the fence I could see beyond the intervening cotton patch into another world. Around their quarters Negro children played, darting into sight and out among the ancient oaks, or sitting underneath the cabins, coaxing from their nests with whirling twigs the doodlebugsâlittle grey insects that made their home in the dust. The cabins stood high up off the ground, to keep them cool in summer and dry in winter. The oldest were built of pine logs chinked with clay, but often the clay had fallen out and on a cold winterâs night the passerby could see ribbons of light broken by chair and Negro legs crowded close around the fire. When the logs of one had rotted and the roof of white-oak shingles could not be patched again, another took its place, built this time of different materials and in a different way, breaking into the row and standing out at first harsh in its newness. Two-by-fours and rough-dressed pine were cheap and nails could now be bought at the general store, no longer hammered out by hand but machine-made. But with age these cabins began to take on an unexpected beauty, as sun and rain painted them grey, mottled with the yellow of pine knots and streaked with brick red and black from resin and rusting nails.
The quarters stretched in a thin line squeezed between grove behind and cotton field in front. Down in the bottoms, where land was not so precious, the corn was grown, to be ground into meal at the water mill or fed to hogs and cattle; but here in the uplands the fields came edging close, for cotton was the cash crop and every square foot counted. The bare stalks stood now in spiny rows; in summer the fields would be a choppy sea of leaves, hiding beneath their shade dewberries, rabbit-tobacco, a dry grey weed on which we learned to smoke, and an occasional stray watermelon vine. Each field had its name, Upper Patch, Lower Patch, and half a dozen more. The House Patch lay behind the Negro quarters.
Here in the narrow space the men and women lay or sat in spots of sun, and talked and dozedâthis was the slack time of the year and they could be as lazy as they pleasedâthe men in groups, the women in twos, one with anotherâs head in her lap. Expert fingers searched among the stiff black wiry hairs for lice and nits, and cracked the finds between skillful thumbnails. Some of the women moved slowly between cabin and woodpile and washpot, calling to one another, scolding the children, and breaking into piercing cackles. I was tempted by the sounds, but I must first see my best and oldest friend, whose cabin was apart from the rest.
Uncle Melt, short for Milton, lived alone, for his wife Thisbe had died a year or so before. He was very feeble now; he had got his freedom nearly thirty years before and had called himself old even then. When I had climbed the steep steps I saw him sitting over by a tiny window, one of the two that lighted the single room, next to the broad hearth, in the âchimbly corner.â As soon as he saw me he struggled up from his chair, leaning on his smooth hickory stickâI was white folks and he knew his placeâand took my hand in his, told me I had grown a lot since last summer and was a fine-looking boy and a good boy, as he always knew I would be. Then, as if greatly surprised, he said, âGoodness gracious, where dâyu git dat stalk oâ sugar cane? It shoâ is a big old stalk. Where dâyu git it? You ainât stole it, is yu?â and he laughed. âNo, Uncle Melt,â I said, âyou know I didnât steal it. I just got it out of the bed. Grandma always lets me. She always has,â I said with a little uncertainty. âShoâ, honey. I was jesâ pokinâ fun,â and he drew me to him and pulled my curls. âWill you peel it for me?â I asked, but he shook his head and answered, âNo, chilâ, Iâs âfraid my peelinâ days is over. My hanâ trimbles so I cainâ holâ de knife. But yu wait. Dat triflinâ little nigger Ginnyâll be along in a minute to git my dinner. Yu wait. Sheâll peel it.â
I sat down on a footstool by the wide...