Chapter One
By two P.M. they had walked for half an hour, the man and his family, and the sweat of that sun-blanched September Saturday in 1903 lay sour in waistbands and collars and dampened pale hair and ran rank down thin necks and backs and legs. Pink dust puffed and flew from beneath the wheels of passing wagons and buggies, coating wet skin miserably and mingling with residual traces of cotton lint and waste to catch in the creases of elbows and neck and in hair. The dust was the effluvia of the great brick mill behind them to the south, where they all worked... all except the small girl and the woman. It had not rained for nearly six weeks, and the small town lay in a near-coma of drought and unrelenting heat.
In the town, in backyards and browning gardens and over fences, the wives of the small merchants and liverymen and smiths and draymen paused over their black-iron washpots, their chicken coops, and their clotheslines. Steaming in close-buttoned, high-collared shirtwaists and long, swathing skirts, viciously bound in viselike, back-laced corsets, they pushed back straggling hair and mopped red faces and sighed to one another.
"Cruel hot, ain't it?" "Will it ever rain?" "Have you got summer sickness at your house? Two of mine are down with it." "Dear Lord, we need rain."
Downtown, their husbands struggled against the relentless pall of dust that lay over their stores and wagons and wares, and hauled water for their stock, and scanned the white-bronze sky a dozen times a day. The bell on the volunteer fire wagon rang frequently, and old Dr. Hopkins's buggy and young Dr. Hopkins's phaeton were seen often on the choking streets. Voices dropped, faces stilled, heads turned slowly when the bell rang and the buggy rolled. With the murderous heat and drought came the threat of the summer murderers: Fire. Typhoid, in stagnant and diminished wells and rain barrels and reservoirs. Infantile paralysis, from no one knew where.
But outside the town, in the rolling pink and green fields, the farmers sweated and stank and stumbled and drank more often from the water wagon... and smiled.
"Good for the cotton, though, ain't it?" "Cotton looks real good this year. Real good." "Heard in town that cotton might go as high as twelve this fall, maybe higher."
Cotton! In Sparta, and all over the Deep South in that malignant third September of the new century, cotton was once more the lifeblood of the red land. For the first time since the guns of Sumter, in Charleston, tolled the death knell of the great plantations and the slave nation that supported them, southern agriculture was reversing its sickening downward spiral... or, at least, the descent was becoming markedly less precipitous. And once again it was cotton that fueled the march back to prosperity and former glory. Not cotton in the role it had played before the war, when black backs broke in endless red fields to send the white tide surging north to mills and manufacturers. But cotton in a new role: grown by small farmers on small, poor farms, hauled in their own homemade, iron-wheeled wagons by lean-honed mules into the nearest town, to be sold on marketing day and fed into the maws of the great, forbidding mills that had sprung up across the southern earth like ravenous mushrooms.
After the Civil War there had been only a scant handful of crude mills operating in the South; by 1900, four hundred mills bulked dark against the sky. And across the South, more than a quarter of a million of the white tenant farmers and sharecroppers, reduced by poverty of land, purse, and spirit to subsisting at the level of the blacks they despised and, worse, to working side by side with them, had flown for refuge into the mills. Cotton. What was good for cotton was good for the South, and those who damned the heat and drought of early autumn did so in small voices.
Around Sparta, on this late summer afternoon, the roads into town billowed and thundered with a steady stream of mules and white-laden wagons. Farm families sat decorously in large wagons and a few newer buggies, their cotton on the way to market and their purses filled with coins to buy household supplies and a small luxury or two in the shops of town. Saturday. Cotton-market day.
In all the crowd streaming into Sparta that Saturday, only Negroes walked in the dust of the roadside. Negroes and the family of Cater Yancey. None of the families from the rotting, rectilinear mill village owned buggies or wagons, let alone mules to pull them, but there were no other mill families afoot on the road into town that day. They all did their meager shopping at the company commissary, where thin-strung credit could be spun even tauter against the hopelessly small wages that never were enough. The Yanceys alone walked the streets of Sparta, with Cater at their head, his back straight and rigid in the dusty black clawhammer coat he wore, summer and winter, for Sunday preaching and weddings and funerals and town, his blue eyes far-focused and flat with hating. He did not break the long, rolling stride that he had learned on the blue mountains of North Georgia when he took his first steps. Seventy-two hours a week for twenty-six years as a spinner in the roaring, radiant hells of two cotton mills had not crushed the long hill stride from his legs nor dimmed the mad blue of his eyes. The cruel, stern God of his Presbyterian ancestry thundered in his head day and night, and the Celtic gods of his ancestral Scotland chanted and howled silently to him of blood and red, sweet pleasures and wild rites in the thin blue air of the Highlands, and both took his tongue in turn on Sundays when he sometimes preached at the unpainted little church in the mill village, when the regular Baptist preacher from town had fatter and sleeker fish to fry.
The silent, dull-eyed congregation understood little of his garbled litany, but his yellow and beautiful head and long white hands stirred and fed them, and his terrible fervor frightened and excited them as little else in their deadened days did. On the Sundays he did not preach, he herded his cowed family into the bare little front room of the mill house, and cried aloud from the Old Testament to them for hours, and harangued and exhorted them in a voice of ringing brass until the smaller children wept with fear, and all trembled. Cater's family knew that he could not read, that his prodigious store of biblical knowledge had been learned at the knee of the mad old grandmother who had raised him on her wild mountaintop; but no one else knew, and his repertoire was much admired in the mill village.
After the sessions in the church and the front room, he was white and drained and silent, gone away somewhere within himself; he remembered nothing of what he had said. Most who heard him agreed that it was the Holy Spirit who spoke through Brother Yancey, but some, Ruth and Pearl Yancey among them, knew that it was something or someone else, and feared and hated the sessions, recognizing without being able to name it the thing that truly spoke on those mornings: his amorphous and immutable madness. They did not protest, for Cater Yancey was a violent and dangerous man. He beat his family frequently -- long, savage beatings with the heavy length of mule harness he kept for the purpose on a peg on the kitchen wall. They stifled their cries as best they could, with fists and sometimes wads of skirt pressed to their mouths, for all knew that to cry out was to fuel his efforts. Even sly, proud Pearl Steed Yancey sometimes broke and cried aloud under the harness. But small Ruth never did. She had been sustained since her earliest memory by a bright, hard, and perfect hatred of her father.
It burned steadily and purely on this afternoon as she followed him, matching his stride step for step, not lifting her hand to wipe away the perspiration that ran from her own white-blond hair and blinded her blue eyes, or to claw the choking dust from her mouth. There were whimpers from eight-year-old Sarah and nine-year-old Hagar, and mutinous mutters and whispered oaths from twelve-year-old Lot, and Isaac, who was thirteen. But Ruth, aged ten and a miniature replica of Cater Yancey, was silent in her hate. If she were silent enough, still enough, except for her bare feet in the whispering dust, if she kept her blue eyes fixed steadily enough on his back, if she concentrated hard enough on the flame of her hatred for him, she could shut out the sights and sounds of the people on the road beside her, get through their scalding mission in the stores of Sparta and back out on the road toward home again without ever once meeting a pair of searing, scornful town eyes or hearing a single hissed epithet of "linthead" or "mill rat."
It seemed to her on those hated once-a-month Saturday trips that the town eyes bit into her like rodents, and in a sense she was right; eyes did rest more often on her than on the other children of Pearl and Cater Yancey, and lingered longer. For Ruth Steed Yancey was an extraordinarily, startlingly beautiful child, and the promise of a womanhood so spectacular as to stop breath hung about her, even at ten. Pearl whispered often to her daughter that she was pretty, and a special child, marked for a special destiny, but since any Yancey child who gazed longer into the crazed shard of Cater's shaving mirror than it took to straighten hair into seemliness would quickly feel the wrath of the mule harness, Ruth did not know the extent of her physical comeliness, and would not for yet a little while longer.
Cater Yancey's mission on those Saturdays was threefold. One, he took his family among the Philistines of Sparta to show them the sins of the flesh and the evils of affluence, intoning loudly before the glittering array of goods in Dorrance's Mercantile and Mabry's Drugstore and pressing their faces ruthlessly to the glass windows of the Sparta Cafe and Wright's glorious barbershop. He stopped them before the alien mystery of the Sparta telephone exchange, to chant of the evils of mindless progress against the Old Ways, and herded them, stiff-faced and inwardly cringing, through the cold and gamy plenty of the butcher shop and the marble and wrought-iron magnificence of the Sparta Railroad Savings Bank. He howled imprecations at the town's two stuttering automobiles as they jumped harelike through the dust of the street, and raised his fist like a prophet of the Old Testament at the upholtered carriages of the comfortable and at the smart liveried coaches and broughams from the great old white houses on the edge of the university campus. It was for these houses, and the university itself, that he saved his bitterest imprecations. In Cater Yancey's twilit mind, Satan himself dwelled in those houses, and walked the shade-dappled hills of the mellow old brick university.
Cater's second purpose on the Saturday mission was to shame and instruct, by example, the townspeople of Sparta, and to this end he bade his family dress in their cleanest but shabbiest scraps of clothing, and assume their most modest demeanor, and cast down their eyes and close their lips in the face of even the crudest taunts. He would, from somewhere, lay by a few pennies with which to buy a scrap or two of salt pork and a bag of dried beans and a small bag of flour, and these he selected after long and ostentatious examination of each single item in Lapham's Grocery, all the while railing at the folly and wastefulness of Lapham's bounty of fresh meats, cheeses, produce, coffee waiting to be ground, and, above all, the temptations of the long glass-and-mahogany case full of candies. Ruth, whose flashing, if untutored, intelligence led her to teach herself reading and sums at an early age, aided by Pearl's scanty store of knowledge, assumed the task of toting up the family's purchase and doling out the coins that Cater grudgingly handed her. The sight of the small, beautiful child, grave and pale in her rags and possessed of a powerful adult dignity, silently adding up the price of the pitiful objects while the starveling man howled his outrage and the wasted woman and her razor-shanked children shrank mutely away from him in shame wrung more than one good Spartan heart. But when Marcus Lapham once slipped Ruth a red jawbreaker, Cater wrenched the godless candy from her fist and flung it on the counter beneath the grocer's nose, and his rantings were so terrible and caused his family to quail in such obvious humiliation that Lapham never did it again, nor did any of the townspeople who witnessed the incident again offer aid or succor to the family of Cater Yancey.
His third mission in town was simpler. As the humbled band stole out of town on their way home to the mill village, he would station them under a giant magnolia that hung over the railroad trestle and, bidding them not move from their tracks nor speak to passersby, slip away down a well-worn path through the kudzu thickets into the shadows of the ravine. Through and beyond the ravine lay Suches, or niggertown, as it was called by the impoverished whites of the mill village, and in a grease-smelling house propped anonymously among the other unpainted, stilted houses of Suches, Titterbaby Calhoun dispensed fruit jars of his malignant homemade whiskey at prices that were, to say the least, fiercely competitive with those at Carnes's saloon in Sparta proper.
The blue-green shadows on the kudzu in the ravine would be deepening into solid darkness by the time Cater returned. Pearl and the children would hear him singing and mumbling his way up through the kudzu, and wait silently to see how bad it would be this time. Often he would have had only a taste of Titterbaby's whiskey in Titterbaby's kitchen. If this was the case, and the croker sack he carried was still full of sealed fruit jars chinking softly together in newspaper cocoons, Cater would be expansive and mildly indulgent, patting Ruth and the smaller girls roughly on their heads and poking awkwardly at the sullen boys and laying light, crab-like hands on Pearl's flanks and buttocks. He would sing oddly cadenced, silvery ballads with the sounds of pipes and fiddles in them, and once or twice he stopped on these trips home and caught Pearl around the waist and swept her, protesting, into a light-footed, jigging dance. At these times the children would look at their father with flat and unknowing eyes, with no ken in them for this stranger capering in the dust.
But at other times the croker sack would be only half full, and the shadows in the ravine would have turned to black, and at these times Cater would be lost and deep in that strange, terrible country behind his eyes, and they knew that when they got home there would be shouting and singing, and then the beatings, and the breath-strangling moment when he would catch their mother by her sharp-knobbed shoulders and jerk her into the tiny, windowless room where they slept and slam the warped door. Then the children would creep into the other room, where their stale pallets were, and lie in the darkness, and hear their mother's screams, and the howls and singing rising, and then the last great howl, and then a thumping, squeaking silence that faded at last into Pearl's soft, snuffling sobs and Cater's great gargling snores.
In the morning Pearl would be windbroke and lame, with bruises and scratches on her sallow flesh, and often her injuries were more severe. Blackened and swollen eyes were not unusual on the Sunday after cotton-market Saturday, and one morning three teeth were gone from her mouth that decay had not claimed.
Once Ruth had asked her mother, after one of those nights, "What does he do to you in there?"
"Well, he beats me. You know. He's a beatin' man when the likker takes him."
"No'm, I mean when he hollers funny like that. I know it's a long time after he's quit beatin' you, because you've quit yellin' way before then. What does he do then?"
Pearl looked at her daughter, a long, measuring look. The child looked back at her, the slanted blue eyes aware and old, with nothing of childhood in them.
"He has this old thing between his legs... you know, like Lot and Isaac have, only lots bigger... and it gets all swole up and fat and long and red-like, and he pushes me down on my back and pulls my legs apart and he rams it way up between them."
"Mama! He don't! Oh, Lord! You mean where you tee-tee?" Ruth began to cry with fright.
"Right there. And he leaves it there and jams it up and down till he gits real excited, and then he hollers like that, and he shoots this nasty old white stuff all up me, and it runs down all over my legs, and sometimes there's blood, too. That's what he does."
"He must be awful mad at you, Mama, to do a thing like that to you," Ruth snuffled.
Pearl smiled, a crippled smile. "He ain't mad. It's what he likes, he wants to do that. All men want to do that to all women. They'll be wantin' to do that to you pretty soon, an' some probably already do, seein' what a pretty thing you are. But you listen to me, Ruth, and listen good. You don't let no man put that old thing up you until you've got what you want from him, startin' with a gold wedding ring. If you remember that, you can get a lot of good things by keepin' your legs together. A man's a fool when it comes to his big ol' thing."
"No man is ever gon' do that to me," Ruth sobbed between clenched teeth. "No man in shoe leather on this earth is goin' to put that thing in me. I'll kill the man that does that."
Pearl crouched down on her heels beside her daughter and took Ruth's slender shoulders in her hands. She looked into the small, furious face with her dead eyes. She dropped her voice.
"Ruth, listen. Men are devils, and a man'll hurt you and half-kill you 'fore he'll look at you. He'll use you up and wear you out and take what's yours and never give you what ought to be yours. A man has all the power, a man is strong, a man will win every time... but a man is a fool. A woman is weak, a woman don't have nothing, a woman is a man's toy and a man's slave... but a woman has one thing that can git anything a man has, if she uses it right. And that's what's between her legs. You can use that to git anything in this world that you want, if you do the right things, if you know what to do...."
"What do you do, Mama?"
"Well, you just pick out the man you want something from, and you git around him an' make sure he notices you good, an' has time to think about it, and then you sorta let him see what you got, and you rub up against him like, and when you see that thing start swellin' up, you just lay back and take your hands and put it in you slow-like, and you pet him, and you wiggle, and you whisper to him, "That's right, honey. That's good, honey. You got a real fine one, honey, just what a woman wants, and on and on like that, and pretty soon that ol' fool will give you anything he's got that you want. You just make sure you pick you out a man that has somethin' worth gittin'. You, now, there ain't nothing you can't git, lookin' like you do, if you take your best chance and pick out the right man. But you got to be ready, Ruth. All the time you got to be lookin' for that chance, and when it comes, you got to take it an' never look back. Not ever, not for nothin'. You remember what I'm sayin' to you."
Ruth looked at her mother. Saffron bruises were fading at her throat; fresh, dark ones mottled her upper arms, so thin that the skin hung slackly from them like wet, dimpled cloth, with no cushioning fat beneath them. The long hair, wound into an untidy bun at her nape, had been thick and glossy and a vivid chestnut once, but it was thin now, and dull and dry, like the mane of an old horse. The three missing teeth gave Pearl's mouth the sunken appearance of a very old woman, and the stark lunar ridge of the collarbone, notched where an old break had healed unevenly, moved up and down under the faint, persistent hacking that was the beginning of white lung.
"What did all that ever git you from Pa?" she said.
Pearl was silent so long that Ruth thought she was not going to answer. She looked beyond and over the child's head, her eyes full of time and distance, seeing into a long-ago time that seemed, now, so remote and fabled as to be myth. She looked back at Ruth.
"You ain't never worked in the mill, have you? That's what I got from your pa. That's all he had to give me, and that's what I got. And that's how I got it. You ain't never knowed the inside of the mill nor any other, and you never will. You can thank that place between my legs for that."
Ruth had been nine then. It was the last time in her life she remembered crying.
They passed over the railroad trestle, shimmering mirage-like in the heat over the fathomless green of the kudzu ravine, and turned onto a tree-shaded street that narrowed tunnel-like through dim, cool green, straight into the heart of the town. Parallel to the street proper, set far back on smooth lawns vaulted with soaring old oaks, stretched a long line of great white-columned houses. Ornamental ironwork, hanging balconies, ranks of Doric and Corinthian colonnades, Grecian pediments and friezes shimmered remotely, like the tombs of Atlantis, behind formal box and rose gardens, magnolias and cedars of Lebanon, arbors of wisteria and Virginia creeper. To the left of the street were other streets like it, if not quite so sepulchrally white and grand; to the right, behind it, lay the complex of the university. Sounds on this street were strangely muffled, even in winter, when the enshrouding trees were bare; it was a quiet that seemed to breathe on the street like a benediction from an enchanted past. A slammed door, the cries and laughter of a children's party in a cloistered back garden, the rich laughter of Negro servants, the chink of harness and the light tattoo of delicate and expensive hooves, a dinner bell, a woman's low laugh, a spinet's splash... the great quiet drew them all into itself and drowned them. Church Street.
Of all the streets of the town, Ruth Yancey loved this one best of all. Her small, knotted body relaxed on Church Street; her stiff, set little face lifted to the great houses and trees and, of itself, smoothed and softened into something tender and misted, only then young. The houses on Church Street had voices; they spoke and sang to Ruth Yancey. It was the only sound she heard.
There was one house.... The voice of this house rose to an anthem so pure and drowning that Ruth, when she first saw it and heard its song, turned involuntarily to the others. When she saw that they did not hear it, she was surprised, but later she came to accept it. The house spoke just to her; its song was hers alone.
The house was larger than its neighbors on Church Street, though not by far. Like its neighbors, it was three-storied and flat-roofed, in the Classical Revival style for which the small town was renowned. Fourteen tall, dazzling white Corinthian columns extended in a colonnade around the front and two sides, and a fan of shallow steps swept in a graceful curve up to the Italian-tile veranda. The steps were flanked by dignified Medici lions, and there was another lion, a fine, militant head, on the bronze door knocker. Tall green-shuttered windows marched symmetrically around the house on the ground floor, reaching from the veranda ceiling to the tiles, and more shuttered windows girdled the second floor. Ruth counted sixteen windows on the front of the house, eight on the first floor and eight on the second; the windows marched on around the house and were lost in the towering Cape jessamine hedges that shielded the back garden from the street. She did not know how many rooms there were but thought there were a great many.
Between the windows on the second floor, floating in space like a small boat under sail, hung a white-railed balcony. Once Ruth saw a beautiful woman in a cloud of starched white standing on the balcony, her hand resting lightly on the railing, staring out over the street. In the leaf-dappled light and silence of early afternoon, she looked inconstant, incorporeal. Ruth thought she might be a ghost. It seemed fitting that such a house would have a beautiful ghost. She said nothing about seeing the woman.
And once, in the front garden, which was a formal box garden planted with clipped box, magnolias, and cedars of Lebanon, cherry laurel, gardenia, tea olive, sweet syringa, and flowering quince, she saw a boy on the path of flat marble squares that led from the hollowed carriage block at the street up to the steps. He was older than she by about three years -- eleven, maybe, at the time -- and wore white, like the woman on the balcony. His was a starched sailor suit, with a square collar that hung down his back, and a black sateen tie, and short pants. His legs were encased in black stockings, and his high-topped shoes were magnificently mirror-shiny. He wore a round, upbrimmed straw sailor hat on his hair, which was a clear, ashen brown, and he had a hoop and a stick in his hand. He was a pudgy boy, somehow soft and unformed in his fine clothes, and his face was round and pale and small-featured, with great brown eyes.
The boy stood very still on the path, pinned motionless under the stolid eyes of the passing children. They stared at his clothes, fabled garments which they could not imagine, for they knew no clothes but their own thin-worn cutoff overalls and long-tailed shirts made from the feed sacks which the mill produced; they stared at the hoop, which they had seen before only in Olcott's dry-goods store, never in the living hand of a child. There was no glint of surprise in the five pairs of children's eyes; like white sailor suits and hoops, surprise was not a part of their world. The boy might have been a phantom.
The boy's brown eyes met Ruth's blue ones, and widened slightly, and then Cater, bringing up the rear, spied him, and he paused on the sidewalk and motioned his flock to a halt, and lifted his long face to heaven.
"Spawn of Hell," he began, pointing a long white finger at the frozen boy. "Imp of Satan... "
The boy fled up the walk and into the house as soundlessly as a fawn in a forest, leaving the flickering light on the lawn as still and untouched as if he had never been there. The Yancey family moved on.
That night, before Cater jerked Pearl into the closed room and the shouting and screaming began, while he still nodded and mumbled on the damp-rotted back porch with his croker sack of fruit jars, Ruth went to Pearl Yancey in the tiny, evil-smelling kitchen, where Pearl was frying salt pork.
"Who was the boy, Mama?" Ruth asked. She did not say which boy she meant, but Pearl knew.
"That's the Fox boy. Po'-lookin' soul, ain't he? Comes from bein' the only one. Spoiled, I reckon, with all that money and them schoolin' him at home an' all. No 'count, most likely, and'll never be."
"Are they the people that live in the house? The Foxes? Tell me about the Foxes, Mama."
"Why do you care about them people? They ain't no mind of yourn."
"I want to know. I want to know about who lives in that house."
Pearl shot her a keen look. "You like that house?"
"It's the most beautiful house in the world. I'm going to have one just like it some day."
Pearl snorted, but she set down her fork and leaned against the rickety kitchen table that stood, covered with stained oilcloth, in the middle of the room, and crossed her arms.
"Well, the daddy, Mr. Fox, he's president of the school. And the mama, Mrs. Fox, she's a rich Yankee schoolmarm that he met while he was up North at that fancy rich man's college. And the boy is their only chick. He don't go to the school; they have a schoolteacher come to the house to teach him."
"How do you know about 'em, Mama? Have you met 'em?"
"Of course I ain't met 'em. I've just heard about 'em. Where would I be meetin' the great Foxes of Fox's Earth?"
"Fox's Earth..." Ruth breathed softly. The words rang with portent, sang like the voice of the house.
"It's what they call the house, what they named it. Did you ever hear such nonsense? A house with a name?"
"Fox's Earth. What does it mean, Mama?"
"I don't know, Ruth. Nothing good, sure as gun's iron."
"Could you find out?"
"No, and you don't need to know, neither. Why are you carryin' on so about that house? You'd think you was gon' go live in it tomorrow, the way you're talkin' on about it."
"Mama," said Ruth slowly, knowing with a faraway, unsurprised certainty that came from somewhere far outside herself that what she said was true, "Mama, I might. I could."
Pearl did not chide her daughter. She turned back to the hissing meat in the skillet, and her thin back stiffened under the sweat-soiled everyday dress that had come out of the poor box at the mill church.
"Well, it ain't like you warn't born to it," she said, but she said no more.
Ruth had heard it before, this legend of her aristocratic birthright, intoned to her like a rosary in the nights when she was sick with colic or earache or summer fever; repeated, like a catechism, as she and her mother worked together over the iron washpot in the scanty backyard, or scrubbed futilely at the whitening, buckled boards of the floors with lye soap and a stiff brush, or labored over the heavy sadirons that sat in the ashes of the fire that burned, winter and summer, in the kitchen fireplace.
For it was as Pearl had said. From the moment her first daughter was born, Pearl had set her sloping jaw in the face of Cater Yancey's incandescent wrath and refused to go back into the mill, and no amount of beating and roaring and exhorting of God could budge her. Moreover, when Ruth reached the age of six, the time when most children went into the mills to climb upon their wooden boxes and tend their bobbins for twelve or fourteen hours a day, Pearl had once again defied Cater and refused to let her daughter join the boys, Lot and Isaac, in the eternally lighted, booming caldron of the Dixie Bag and Cotton Manufacturing Company. The other little girls who came along after Ruth, sallow Hagar and weaseled, squinting Sarah, she surrendered to the mill without a qualm, for it was true that as many of them as possible must work if Cater was to receive a subsistence family wage. None of the other children of Cater Yancey was curious or energetic enough to question the fact that Ruth stayed home with their mother. There was about Ruth, from the day she was born, a bright and preternaturally focused aura, a nimbus of gold, that set her apart from the dull-eyed, lank-haired, worm-and-pellagra-riddled mill children and silenced resentful questioning. If it was a reflection from the furnace of Cater's own madness, no one saw it. On Ruth's flesh it seemed a promise, a patina, like the bloom on a grape.
Looking on her new daughter, beautiful even in the first hour after the birth that almost killed her mother, the exhausted and white-bled Pearl performed her first act of defiance of her husband in Ruth's behalf. Sister Martha Flaherty, the obese, mustached midwife who had jerked the child into the world, paused over the Yancey family Bible to record the newborn's name, and looked to Cater.
"She will be called Esther," mumbled Cater, drunk and in a rage because his third child was a girl, and a fragile, small one at that.
"No," Pearl said clearly from the bed. "She will be called Ruth. For whither I goeth she will go, and whither I lodgeth, she will lodge. And my people will be her people."
The midwife looked upon Pearl Yancey's rapt face and wrote down, "Ruth Steed Yancey." For weeks afterward, although the midwife denied it indignantly, Pearl insisted that the child must have been born with a caul, and implored the woman to give it back to her.
"Because anybody can plainly see that she ain't no mill baby, not this one," Pearl said, and even the coarse old woman was forced to agree that there was something unique about little Ruth Yancey, something luminous and more finely wrought than in other children.
The story of how she acquired her name was one of the first Ruth heard from Pearl when she was old enough to understand her mother's talk.
"Tell again about my name, Mama," Ruth would say, and Pearl would repeat again the story of Ruth, who said to her mother-in-law, "Thy people shall be my people."
"Because, Ruth," Pearl would say, "our people wasn't born to the mill, no matter if we have come on hard times, and you wasn't, neither. I cain't hardly remember a time when things was different, but I know they was. My mama was born on a great big plantation the year the war started, and even if things was real bad by the time she was old enough to remember 'em, she used to tell me the stories her mama told her, about the house they lived in, and the clothes they wore, and the food they ate, and the parties and balls and barbecues. The ground was white like snow as far as the eye could see at pickin' time, white with cotton an' black with niggers pickin' it, an' all of it was ourn. So you just remember, you wasn't born to no mill, an' you ain't gon' end up in no mill. We was the cream of the county in them days, an' you will be again."
There was a grain of truth in the story, but only a grain. The Steeds had been mildly prosperous small upland planters in the red-hill country to the north of Sparta, clinging to the fringes of the rich cotton land that began at the fall line and lay like a fecund mantle over middle Georgia. But with the defeat of the Confederacy had come grinding poverty and illness, and Pearl Steed's grandparents and, later, the elderly farmer who married her mother and begat Pearl died struggling to claw a living out of the ruined earth. The day after her husband's funeral, Pearl's mother sold the unpainted house with its two peeling columns and its crazily canted chimneys, the puny livestock, and the flinty acres to her prosperous adjoining neighbor, sewed the money into the last remaining machine-made corset cover from her scanty trousseau, took tiny Pearl and her clothing and a basket of eggs down the red-dirt road and into town to the mill village, to the house of a woman with whom she had become friendly at church, and vanished on foot toward the seductive silver ribbon of the railroad track that stretched shimmering in the heat haze toward Atlanta. Pearl never saw her again.
The woman who took her in was husbandless herself; her man had simply left a line scrawled on a feed-store receipt some years before, "Gone to West," and vanished, leaving her with eight children between the ages of two and thirteen. The woman could neither read nor write and, without her husband, could not expect to stay on in the tenant farmhouse they occupied. She had no choice. She took her children and went into town and the new mill that had risen nearby on the banks of a mountain river. She was, in the main, rather glad to have small Pearl Steed with her. The child did not take up much room, nor eat much, nor require any clothing, and she was so silent as to give no trouble at all. She did as she was bidden, trudging into the mill before daybreak and coming home with the other children after sunset in the winter months; and it was soon obvious that her small, quick hands were destined to become the hands of a weaver. Considering Pearl's contribution to the family wage and the fact that, by age fourteen, she was already an apprentice weaver, the woman got a real bargain in Pearl Steed.
Pearl grew into a slight, silent girl with a sly face, downcast eyes, and an erect back in spite of the hours and years of work at the loom. The only color about her was in the heavy, silken mass of hair that burned a living red on her small head and slender neck. She said little, even when spoken to; she had said little since the day her mother went away. When she did speak, her voice was the texture and color of tepid water, with nothing in it of her grandfather's rich Irish brogue or her mother's fluting trill, and her speech soon lapsed back into the laconic illiteracy of the mill people she lived among. She was meek, biddable, and almost totally unremarkable. It would have been impossible to guess that inside her inconsequential small body there stretched an entire, vast country of burning rage at the people around her, and at the mill, towering grief and yearning for her vanished mother and for the refuge of that other life that had never been, her legacy that never was, the great white ghost house that had, in reality, been an unpainted frame house with two pitted columns, surrounded by dead earth.
The land. The actual, palpable red earth, the fertile clay of North Georgia, the land of the South, the bearer of the great white houses, the nurturer of the sacred white surf of cotton. In the clamorous mill, in the stilling church, in the fetid little mill house, or on the baked, treeless streets of the mill village, the land called and called to Pearl Steed, slipped into body and being to become bone of her spine, fiber of her heart. The slow rhythms of the days and the majestic turning of the years upon the land became the rhythm and pulse of her blood; the void where the land was not howled in her soul, the loss of the phantom land of her people was her life force.
Something had been born in Pearl's grandmother after the war, something that she had passed on to her girl child, who had in turn planted it in the willing heart and mind of her daughter Pearl before the child could remember; there was not a time that Pearl had not been aware of that thing. It was a knowing, a certainty, an unspoken tenet, an immutable constant, a gift from woman to woman to woman down a web of days that stretched from that rending time of folly and loss into a future that could not even be imagined. It was an absolute surety, as basic as the world-old knowledge of love and evil and death, that only the land and its gifts mattered, and with that surety came an accompanying cool and ruthless determination that never again would the winning and tending of the land be left in the hands of men, who had so cavalierly tossed it away for the sake of a foolish and nebulous ideal, a Glorious Cause made more stingingly ludicrous because it was not a cause at all, but the crowing hatred of thwarted children masquerading in clouds of chauvinistic idealism.
They were pragmatists of the highest order, those defeated southern women, and they realized that, while they could not control their men and their land and their destinies by strength and force, they could control them through wiles and graces and the very femininity that rendered them overtly helpless. They taught their daughters well, and those daughters taught their daughters, and whether or not the earliest of those women to whom the knowing came were, in their lifetimes, able to regain the lands and the lives they had lost, they never ceased their instruction.
And so Pearl Steed, fingers flying at her loom, heart and soul walking in the cool green-and-white grace of her imagined birthright, pregnant with the bitter knowing that was her mother's only legacy to her, met Cater Yancey on a Sunday in June when she was sixteen years old and as supple and sweetly wrought as she would ever be, when the only promise in her life was the promise that sang secretly in blood and viscera, for in her foreseeable tomorrows in the house of the woman and the mill, there was no promise. And she married him five months later.
Cater was then in his mid-twenties, and had been in the mills since he was eighteen years old. He had come out of the high mountains of northernmost Georgia almost literally a starveling; the intrepid revenue officers of the United States were, by the close of the century, well on the way to closing off the southern mountaineers' chief source of revenue, the production of corn whiskey. The Yancey clan had devoted its carefully husbanded energies to the making of shine, hunting, and a very little crop tending in the narrow valleys between their crags, since time out of the clan's collective mind. Like many of the people of the Southern Appalachians, the family of Cater Yancey were a strange, insular lot, half pagan-wild, half sternly Presbyterian, both traits legacies from the Scots who had first found refuge in those hills after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden.
The Yanceys, like most of the other mountain men living in the hidden clefts and under the great shoulders of the mountains, kept to themselves, often speaking to no outsider for the space of a year or more, speaking little enough to each other. Locked away from other men by weather and topography and preference, and often by the necessity of keeping blood crimes hidden, these mountain men got their children on their own silent women, and their children in turn on theirs, so that whole mountain communities and outposts were filled with people who looked startlingly the one like the other.
In Cater Yancey's case, the generations that were got on each other in those inhospitable hills were a handsome people, long and slender of bone, light of hair and eye, narrow of head and hands and feet, heirs to a strain of marauding Viking blood that overwrestled the blood of the squat black Celt and culminated, in young Cater, in a beauty that was fine-honed and almost princely, though he was illiterate, ill-clad, and eerily aberrant by the time he reached puberty. His madness, at least in those early years, seemed more a sheen, a bloom sprung from the blood, so that he walked in a vivid luminosity that drew eyes as naturally as a wild animal, or wildfire.
He had, in addition, from his half-crazed grandmother, who took him in early childhood after his uncle killed his father with an ax and took his mother to earth in his hidden cabin across the mountain, a ringing gift of tongue and a worshipful terror of a strange and privately perceived God of the Old Testament. When the old woman died and left him alone in the bare cabin, he had already preached for three or four years, sporadically, to congregations of perhaps a dozen people in tiny churches huddled meanly in the valleys, and he went down out of the mountains with the thought of working in the mills only until he could establish himself as a preacher and choose a regular church. He buried his grandmother in a shallow grave clawed from the shale a way up the mountain, left her there unmarked but covered with large stones against animals, packed his few tatters of clothes and put on his shoes and removed the small store of money from the prized Staffordshire cow creamer in the tin pie safe, set fire to the cabin and watched it until it burned itself out, raked out and sanded the embers, and strode off down the mountain to the hill town to the south, where, in the mill for which he was bound, Pearl Steed dreamed and hungered.
Pearl Steed walked straight up to Cater Yancey after his first sermon in the little mill church, straight as an arrow, as if in a trance... as indeed she was, seeing in the slender, long figure and the crown of bright hair the plantation aristocrat she thought her grandfather to have been, and hearing in the sweet, thundering tongue a song that, for the first time in her life, seemed sung to her alone... and asked him to come to supper. Cater watched as Pearl's slender figure moved around the kitchen preparing the spare dinner. From her guardian's prattle he deduced that Pearl was already a weaver and capable of earning top money in the mills. She had a neat, narrow waist and a ripe swell of hip and buttock and heavy, plummy breasts that called out to the cups of his hands; and her hair was living fire on her shoulders, for she had let it down for the evening. Out of the old knowing, quickening for the first time somewhere in her loins and lights, she hung on to his words and complimented his sermon shyly and blushed from her delicate collarbone when he admired her cooking.
He could feel her warmth and moisture reaching out to him, feel it palpably against his face and the backs of his hands, and he burned with it, and since the Bible clearly stated that it is better to marry than to burn, marry her he did, five months later, and burn with her and in her each night in the company house that was let to him for a dollar a week, until the children began to come and she slowed and thickened and drooped with the unrelenting toil and privation, and began to grow querulous and bitter, wriggling away from under him in the nights, so that the red rage that had been seeded in him in the womb budded and bloomed, and he would beat her until she lay down for him once more.
Under her increasing scorn his sermons grew more terrible and vague, and the madness that had seemed a skin of light was now a fire on him, consuming him and frightening the congregation. The deacons of the church finally told him that he could preach there no more, and, souring with the rejection and simmering in the juices of the madness in his blood, he brought his family down out of the hills to the older mill and more worldly church and congregation in the beautiful white town of Sparta. Here Ruth Yancey was born, and here, after she had won from him his promise that he would not send the child into the mill, Pearl Steed Yancey closed her legs to him forever, except when he beat and raped her on market Saturdays.
And here the child Ruth grew, and toiled ceaselessly and futilely beside Pearl (but never in that mill, or any other), and was petted and groomed and doted upon by her mother, and was regaled with stories of the phantom many-columned house on that long-ago lost hill, and was catechized by Pearl in the knowing, so that once again, anew, it was whole and perfect, waiting, waiting.
Copyright © 1981 by Anne Rivers Siddons