Katherine Anne Porter (106 page)

It is only in the varying levels of quality in the individual nature that we are able finally more or less to measure the degree of virtue in each man. Mr. Thompson’s motives are most certainly mixed, yet not ignoble; not the highest but the highest he is capable of, he helps someone who helps him in turn; while acting in defense of what he sees as the good in his own life, the thing worth trying to save at almost any cost, he is trying at the same time to defend another life—and the life of Mr. Helton, who has proved himself the bringer of good, the present help, the true friend. Mr. Helton would have done as much for me, Mr. Thompson says, and he is right. Yet he hated Mr. Hatch on sight, wished to injure him before he had a reason: could it not be a sign of virtue in Mr. Thompson that he surmised and resisted at first glance the evil in Mr. Hatch? The whole countryside, let us remember (for this is most important, the relations of a man to his society), agrees with Mr. Burleigh the lawyer, and the jury and the judge, that Mr. Thompson’s deed was justifiable homicide: but this did not, as his neighbors confirmed, make it any less a murder. Mr. Thompson was not an evil man, he was only a poor sinner doing his best according to his lights, lights somewhat dimmed by his natural aptitude for Pride and Sloth. He still had his virtues, even if he did not quite know what they were, and so gave himself credit for some few that he had not.

But Hatch was the doomed man, evil by nature, a lover and
doer of evil, who did no good thing for anyone, not even, in the long run, for himself. He was evil in the most dangerous irremediable way: one who works safely within the law, and has reasoned himself into believing his motives, if not good, are at least no worse than anyone else’s: for he believes quite simply and naturally that the motives of others are no better than his own; and putting aside all nonsense about good, he will always be found on the side of custom and common sense and the letter of the law. When challenged he has his defense pat and ready, and there is nothing much wrong with it—it only lacks human decency, of which he has no conception beyond a faint hearsay. Mr. Helton is, by his madness, beyond good and evil, his own victim as well as the victim of others. Mrs. Thompson is a woman of the sort produced in numbers in that time, that class, that place, that code: so trained to the practice of her prescribed womanly vocation of virtue as such—manifest, unrelenting, sacrificial, stupefying—she has almost lost her human qualities, and her spiritual courage and insight, to boot. She commits the, to her, dreadful unforgivable sin of lying; moreover, lying to shield a criminal, even if that criminal is her own husband. Having done this, to the infinite damage, as she sees it, of her own soul (as well as her self-respect which is founded on her feeling of irreproachability), she lacks the courage and the love to see her sin through to its final good purpose; to commit it with her whole heart and with perfect acceptance of her guilt to say to her husband the words that might have saved them both, soul and body—might have, I say only. I do not know and shall never know. Mrs. Thompson was not that robust a character, and his story, given all, must end as it does end. . . . There is nothing in any of these beings tough enough to work the miracle of redemption in them.

Suppose I imagine now that I really saw all of these persons in the flesh at one time or another? I saw what I have told you, a few mere flashes of a glimpse here and there, one time or another; but I do know why I remembered them, and why in my memory they slowly took on their separate lives in a story. It is because there radiated from each one of those glimpses of strangers some element, some quality that arrested my attention at a vital moment of my own growth, and caused me, a child, to stop short and look outward, away from myself; to
look at another human being with that attention and wonder and speculation which ordinarily, and very naturally, I think, a child lavishes only on himself. Is it not almost the sole end of civilized education of all sorts to teach us to be more and more highly, sensitively conscious of the reality of the existence, the essential being, of others, those around us so very like us and yet so bafflingly, so mysteriously different? I do not know whether my impressions were on the instant, as I now believe, or did they draw to their magnet gradually with time and confirming experience? That man on the fine horse, with his straight back, straight neck, shabby and unshaven, riding like a cavalry officer, “the proudest man in seven counties”—I saw him no doubt as my father saw him, absurd, fatuous, but with some final undeniable human claim on respect and not to be laughed at, except in passing, for all his simple vanity.

The woman I have called Mrs. Thompson—I never knew her name—showed me for the first time, I am certain, the face of pure shame; humiliation so nearly absolute it could not have been more frightening if she had groveled on the floor; and I knew that whatever the cause, it was mortal and beyond help. In that bawling sweating man with the loose mouth and staring eyes, I saw the fear that is moral cowardice and I knew he was lying. In that yellow-haired, long-legged man playing his harmonica I felt almost the first glimmer of understanding and sympathy for any suffering not physical. Most certainly I had already done my share of weeping over lost or dying pets, or beside someone I loved who was very sick, or my own pains and accidents; but
this
was a spiritual enlightenment, some tenderness, some first awakening of charity in my self-centered heart. I am using here some very old-fashioned noble words in their prime sense. They have perfect freshness and reality to me, they are the irreplaceable names of Realities. I know well what they mean, and I need them here to describe as well as I am able what happens to a child when the bodily senses and the moral sense and the sense of charity are unfolding, and are touched once for all in that first time when the soul is prepared for them; and I know that the all-important things in that way have all taken place long and long before we know the words for them.

1956

N
OT
long ago there appeared in a weekly news magazine the snapshot of a lady in advanced years, of solid weight and vitality, and a smiling face full of comic humor. She wore large blue jeans, a country-style shirt, and a floppy straw hat much like the ten-cent peanut straw hat I wore on the farm every summer from more or less 1893 to 1901. The lady was armed with a rake, and was raking up the leaves and trash from the courthouse square of a small town of which she is the mayor. The town is Kyle, Texas, and our lady is Mayor Mary Kyle, the daughter of Old Captain Fergus Kyle, who founded and named the place, and lived out his life admired, respected, and loved by the five hundred citizens who lived there with him rather as contented guests. Everybody knew the town belonged to him, and now it belongs to Miss Mary by divine right, and though her working outfit—jeans and shirts or turtlenecks—has been the high fashion among all classes and kinds for some time, yet other things are changed in an important way. In my time of childhood there, Miss Mary would have had a squad of boys eager to rake the square just for the fun of it. Now she could not find, not for money nor thought of love, any lad in the place so underprivileged he would rake that lawn at any price.

My grandmother lived on a corner of the stony, crooked little road called Main Street, in a six-room house of a style known as Queen Anne, who knows why? It had no features at all except for two long galleries, front and back galleries—mind you,
not
porches or verandas, and I shall stick without further translation to whatever other word of my native dialect occurs here—and these galleries were shuttered in green lattice and then covered again with honeysuckle and roses, adding two delightful long summer rooms to the house, the front a dining room, the back furnished with swings and chairs for conversation and repose, iced tea, limeade, sangaree—well, have it your way: sangria—and always, tall frosted beakers of mint julep, for the gentlemen, of course.

Stories I see in newspapers now remind me constantly
of things as they were then, in my childhood, in my little town.

Let me quote from the Washington
Post
of Monday, October 28, 1974, a report of a certain incident: “A U.S. Army Private, Felix Longoria, was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in 1949. Only his family, a representative of President Truman and some Texas Congressmen attended the ceremony. Among the Congressmen was Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who had arranged for the re-interment of Pvt. Longoria who had died while fighting in the Philippines but who was refused burial in his Texas home town of Three Trees because of his heritage.” He was a Mexican-Indian peon. The
Post
published this story because it had what I suppose we may regard as a happy ending—after twenty-five years and a good deal of agitation on the subject from several equality-loving sources, our hero’s remains were recently accepted for burial in his native town in the white cemetery in Three Trees, Texas.

I remember one of the annual religious “Revivals” in the Methodist church in Kyle. The Mexicans of the Spanish-Indian peon class lived in a colony just outside town; they subsisted by rudimentary farming, selling chickens and eggs and vegetables. They were poor, most humble, never employed in any regularly paid work, such as gardening for the town people; or, for the women, housework of any kind. These jobs were for Negroes strictly, who also occupied a servant place, but privileged. The prejudices against the Mexicans were simple: they were foreigners, they spoke Spanish, they ate strange stuff, they were Catholic in an iron-bound Protestant region. There was no Catholic church nearer than San Marcos, a good two hours’ trip away by family surrey.

Everybody of whatever denomination, all white, of course, attended these Revivals. It was a social occasion, with visiting preachers renowned for dramatic orations. Little by little, the Mexican people began to show up at the meetings, which started in the morning and went on until late in the evening, all singing and shouting and praying, tears and sacred joy. But there was uneasiness among the white congregation as the number of Mexicans increased in attendance. They sat in the back benches, in silence. They knelt or stood or sat as the others did, and their faces were eager and pleasant and very attentive.
So one morning (I was there, seven years old) an old deacon named Schwartz rose and made a stern talk which I could not understand, but he turned and gestured in the direction of the Mexicans and poured out hard-voiced words. I remember only the last line: “We must do something in self-defense.” At this point the preacher rose and said, “Let us pray for guidance.” Everybody bowed his head and the prayer ended with a chorus of Amens. The preacher moved near the Mexicans and very politely asked them to leave, saying that the revival was a private occasion, only for church members (a lie, incidentally), he regretted not being able to invite them, and he wished them well. They rose in silence, some of them trying to smile, and they went out in a bowed little huddle, with tears in their eyes—even the old men wept. One old woman whimpered, “Dios, Dios. . .” as if trying to invoke the return of her vanished God.

You can see how bitterly I remember this. I was mystified and unhappy, but I knew something was badly wrong when my father motioned to us. He and my grandmother, Aunt Jane, grandmother’s former slave, my sister and brother rose also in a group and walked out just behind the Mexicans. And I heard what my family thought of the event for a good while. (My grandmother, when she heard that Mr. Lincoln had abolished slavery and the Negroes were free, was heard to say “I hope it works both ways,” and lived to realize that it did not.) We were a mixed company of Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, and Presbyterians, and all were equally outraged. It fixed my point of view on that subject unchangeably for life. I had not imagined it still happened, now, at this time.

An earlier memory I have is when I was about two-and-a-half years old. I was still wearing soft shoes, and a white wool crochet cap with a bunch of crochet grapes on top and a large ribbon bow under my chin. I know this because I was on a train, being held up on the lap of my nurse, a smiling Negro girl I was to know for a good number of years. I was romping on my nurse’s lap, and gazing in the looking glass, fascinated by my cap with the soft woolly grapes. My father was facing us, and now and then he would reach over, pull the cap off my head, and fluff up my short, black, curly hair with gentle fingers,
and he would try to persuade me to leave it off—“Let’s show the pretty hair,” he would say—but I would hold on to the cap, and put it on again and gaze at myself in the looking glass, something new and exciting. The cap was the magic, not my face.

I remember driving through Texas a good many years ago with my father. We passed through Round Rock and my father remembered that it was here Sam Bass, the train robber, and his Right Bower companion were shot, and I said, “Those poor lugs were big popular heroes, weren’t they?” and my father said, “No, not with my generation. We knew exactly who and what they were. It’s the movies have made them out heroes.” Later, he pointed out in another part of the state a clump of live oak on a small hill and remembered Sam Bass again. He was supposed to have hidden there at one time or another. But the really important memory to my father was that he and his older brother had once been riding together there and had taken refuge in this knoll of trees to let a herd of buffalo go by. They sheltered within on their horses and the buffalo herd divided and went around them. “There were several hundred of them,” my father said.

I remember the fruits of my childhood, the orchards, red grapefruit, oranges, peaches, watermelon, cantaloupes, figs, pecans, wild grapes. I remember the barrels of grape juice under the trees on the farm, with long tubes from the vent bubbling into great pails of water, red foam running down the sides, the chickens sitting on the barrels or clustering under them, staggering, flopping, wobbling drunk, and glad of it. They were seen leaning against tree trunks, or seated in open space as if on nests, but there were no fatalities or terminal alcoholics among them. Hens, as with all domestic creatures and most human females in that region, led fairly laborious, monotonous country lives. As I grew up a little, I began to see this melancholy state of affairs, and thought it only just and right that they should have an occasional spree. But it was really only the chickens who enjoyed the wine-making. The roosters went fairly mad and spent their time trying to seduce any hen in sight, who for once ignored their advances. We, the children,
thought we knew exactly what the wild flurry among the chicken flock meant: a rooster chasing a hen meant they were making eggs, which we took pleasure in looking for all over the place, because no number of carefully prepared nests ever lured the hens into settling down to leaving their eggs where we could pick them up tidily. It seems curious to me now that all this nonchalant, casual knowledge of what went on in the chicken society never taught us anything about sex generally speaking. Their antics had no relation to the way calves, pigs, ponies (colts), or children came into the world.