Chapter I

Poor people have children without much feeling of exaltation. Alas, the children just come. It is another child and children come easily. On such an occasion a man is for some obscure reason a little ashamed. The woman escapes because she is ill. Let’s see, now there were two boys and one girl. This makes only three so far. It is well this last one is another boy. He won’t cost much for a long time. He can wear the castoff clothing of his older brother and then, when he gets older and demands things of his own, he can work. It is the common fate of man to work. That was provided for in the beginning. Cain killed Abel with a club. It happened at the edge of a field. There is a picture of the scene in the Sunday School leaflet. Abel lies dead on the ground and Cain stands over him with a club in his hand.

In the background is one of God’s angels pronouncing the dreadful sentence. “By the sweat of your brow shall you eat your bread.” That sentence to go reverberating down through the ages to catch a small Ohio boy among all the others. Well, boys find places more readily than girls. They earn more.

The boy, named Edgar Moorehead, was called Edgar only while he was very young. He lived in Ohio but his father was a North Carolina man and North Carolina men are in derision called “Tar-heels.” A neighbor spoke of him as another little “Tar-heel” and after that he was called, first “Tar-heel” and then simply “Tar.” What a black sticky name!

Tar Moorehead was born in the town of Camden, Ohio, but when he left there he went in his mother’s arms. As a conscious human being he never saw the town, never walked in its streets and later when he grew to manhood he was careful never to go back.

Being an imaginative child and not fond of disillusions he preferred having one place all his own, the product of his own fancy.

Tar Moorehead became a writer and wrote tales of people in small towns, how they live, what they think, what things happen to them, but he never wrote of Camden. As a matter of fact there is such a place. It is on a railroad, tourists go through there, stopping to have their gas tanks filled. There are stores that sell chewing gum, electric fixtures, automobile tires, canned fruits and vegetables.

Tar discarded all these things when he thought of Camden. He thought of it as his own town, the product of his own fancy. Sometimes it sat at the edge of a long plain and the people of the town could see from the windows of their houses a vast expanse of earth and sky. Such a place to walk in the evening, out on the grassy plain, such a place to count the stars, feel the evening wind on the cheek, hear, coming from a distance, the little sounds of the night.

As a man Tar awoke, let us say, in a city hotel. All of his life he had been trying to put life into the tales he wrote but his job was difficult. Modern life is complex. What are you going to say about it? How are you going to get things straight?

There is a woman, for example. How are you, being a man, going to understand women? Some men writers pretend they have solved the problem. They write with great confidence and when you read the printed tale you are quite swept off your feet but later, when you think things over, it appears all false.

How are you going to understand women when you cannot understand yourself? How are you ever going to understand any one or anything?

As a man Tar sometimes lay in his bed in a city and thought of Camden, the town in which he was born and which he never saw and never intended to see, the town filled with people he could understand and who always understood him.

There was a reason for his love of the place. He owed no one money there, had never cheated any one, had never made love to a Camden woman he found out later he did not want.

Now Camden had become, for him, a place among hills. It was a little white town in a valley with high hills on each side. You reached it by a stagecoach, going up from a railroad town twenty miles away. Being a realist in his writing and thinking, Tar did not make the houses of his town very comfortable or the people particularly good or in any way exceptional.

They were what they were, plain people, leading rather hard lives, digging a living out of small fields in the valleys and on the hillsides. Because the land was rather poor and the fields steep, modern agricultural implements could not be introduced and anyway the people had no money to buy.

The town of Tar’s birth, this purely fanciful place, which has nothing to do with real Camden, had no electric lights, there was no waterworks, no one there owned an automobile. By day men and women went into the fields to plant corn by hand, they harvested wheat with a cradle. At night, after ten o’clock, the little streets with the poor little houses scattered about were unlighted. Even the houses were dark, except an occasional one where there was sickness or where company had come. It was, in short, such a place as might have been found in Judea in Old Testament days. Christ on his mission and followed by John, Matthew, that queer neurotic Judas and the rest, might well have visited just such a place.

A place of mystery--the home of romance. How thoroughly the citizens of the real Camden, Ohio, might have disliked Tar’s conception of their town.

To tell the truth Tar was trying, through the creation of a town of his own fancy, to get at something it was almost impossible to get at in the reality of life. In real life people never stood still. Nothing in America stands still very long. You are a boy in a town and go away to live for a mere twenty years. Then one day you come back and walk through the streets of your town. Nothing is as it should be.

The shy little girl who lived on your street and whom you thought so wonderful has now become a woman. She has protruding teeth and her hair is already getting thin. What a shame! When you knew her, as a boy, she seemed the most wonderful creature in the world. You used to go far out of your way, coming home from school, just to go past her house. There she was in the front yard and when she saw you coming she ran to the door and stood just within the house in the half light. You stole one glance and then did not dare look again. But in fancy how lovely she had been.

A sorry day for you when you go back to the real place of your childhood. Better go to China or the South Seas. Sit on the deck of a ship and dream. The little girl is married now and the mother of two children. The boy who played shortstop on the baseball team and whom you envied until it hurt has become a barber. Everything has gone wrong. Much better to adopt Tar Moorehead’s plan, move away from your town early, so early that you can remember nothing very definitely, and then never go back.

Tar kept the town of Camden as something special in his life. Even when he had become a grown man and was called successful he clung to his dreams of the place. He had been spending the evening with some men at a big city hotel and did not go to his room until late. Well, his head was tired, his spirit tired. There had been talk and more talk, perhaps some kind of disagreement. He had quarreled with a fat man who wanted him to do something he did not want to do.

Then he went up into his room and closed his eyes and at once he was back in the town of his fancy, his birthplace, the town he had never consciously seen, in Camden, Ohio.

It was night and he walked in the hills above the town. The stars shone out. A little wind was making the leaves of the trees rustle.

When he had walked in the hills until he was tired he could come down through meadows where cows were being pastured and get among the houses.

He knew the people in every house along the little streets, knew all about them. They were what he had dreamed people were like when he was a small boy. The man he had thought brave and kind was really brave and kind; the little girl he had thought lovely had grown into a beautiful woman.

It is coming close to people that hurts. We find out people are like ourselves. Better, if you want peace, keep far off, dream about people. The men who make a romance of life are perhaps right after all. The reality is too terrible. “By the sweat of your brow shall you earn your bread.”

By cheating too, by all kinds of dodges.

Cain made things hard for all of us that time he killed Abel at the edge of the field. He did it with a club. What a mistake it was to be carrying clubs about. If Cain had not had the club with him that day long ago the Camden of fact, where Tar Moorehead was born, might have been more like the Camden of his dreams.

But then perhaps it would not have wanted to be that. Camden wasn’t a very progressive town as Tar saw it, in dreams.

After Camden how many other towns. Tar Moorehead’s father was a drifter as he was himself. There are certain people who settle down in one place in life, hang on and finally make their mark but Dick Moorehead, Tar’s father, wasn’t that sort. If he finally settled in one place it was because he was too tired and worn out to make another move.

Tar became a story teller but, if you will notice, it is the shiftless roving fellows who tell tales. Few tellers of tales are good citizens. They only pretend to be.

Dick Moorehead, Tar’s father, came from the South, from North Carolina. He must have just drifted down the mountain sides, looking about, smelling out the land as did the two men Joshua, the son of Nun, sent out of Shittim to look at Jericho. He crossed a corner of the old state of Virginia, the Ohio River, finally alighting upon a town where he thought he might do well.

What he did on the way, where he slept, what women he saw, what he thought he was up to, no one will ever know.

As a young man he was rather handsome and he then had a little money in a community where money was scarce. When he set up a harness shop in the Ohio town people flocked to him.

For a time it was easy sailing. The other shop in the town was owned by an old crusty fellow who was a good enough workman but not very entertaining. In these earlier days in the Ohio communities people had no theaters, no movies, no radio, no busy brightly-lighted streets. Newspapers were rare. There were no magazines.

What a god-send to have a fellow like Dick Moorehead coming into town. Coming from a distance, he had of course tales to tell and people were eager to listen.

And what an opportunity for him. Having a little money and being Southern, he of course hired a man to do most of his work and prepared to spend his own time doing the entertaining, a kind of work more in his line. He bought himself a suit of black clothes and a heavy silver watch with a heavy silver chain. Tar Moorehead, the son, saw the watch and the chain long afterwards. When bad times came to Dick they were the last things he let go.

Being a young man and for the time prosperous, the seller of harness was a public favorite. The land was still new, forests were still being cut away and the fields under cultivation were filled with stumps. At night there was nothing to do. During the long winter days there was nothing to do.

Dick was a favorite with the unmarried women but for a time confined his attentions to the men. There was a certain craftiness in him. “If you pay too much attention to the women the first thing you know you get married and then look where you are.”

Being a dark hairy man Dick let his mustache grow and this, with his thick black hair, gave him a certain foreign air. How impressive it was to see him making his way along the street before the little stores in the neat black suit with the heavy silver watch chain dangled across his then slender waist.

He strutted. “Well, well, ladies and gentlemen, do look at me. Here I am, come to live among you.” In the backwoods Ohio of that time the man who wore, on week days, a tailor-made suit and who shaved every morning when he got up was bound to make a deep impression. At the little hotel he got the best place at the table and the best room. Awkward country girls, who had come to town to take places as servants at the hotel, went into his room to make the bed and change the sheets trembling with excitement. Dreams for them too. In the Ohio town Dick was, for the time, a kind of king.

He stroked his mustache, he spoke kindly to the landlady and to the waitresses and chambermaids but for the time he courted no woman. “You wait. Let them court me. I am a man of affairs. I must attend to business.”

Farmers came to Dick’s shop bringing harnesses to be repaired, came wanting to buy new harnesses. Town people came in. There was a doctor, two or three lawyers, a county judge. In the town there was an undercurrent of excitement. It was a time when there was plenty of talk about.

Dick had come into Ohio in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-eight and the story of his coming is not Tar’s story. However, the tale aims to concern itself, somewhat vaguely to be sure, with the childhood of the Middle-west too.

The background is really a poor badly-lighted village some twenty-five miles back from the Ohio River in Southern Ohio. There was a rather rich valley among the rolling Ohio hills and the people were just such people as could be found nowadays in the hills of North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. They had come into the country and taken up land, the more fortunate ones in the valley itself, the less fortunate ones on the hillsides. For a long time they lived largely by hunting and then the timber was cut off, hauled over the hills to the river and rafted South to be sold. The game gradually disappeared. Good farming land began to be worth something, railroads were being built and there were the canals with their canal boats and the steamers on the river. Cincinnati and Pittsburgh were not so far away. Daily newspapers began to circulate and there was presently a telegraph line.

In this community and against this awakening background Dick Moorehead strutted away his few years of prosperity. Then the Civil War came and upset things for him. They were days he always remembered and magnified later. Well, he was prosperous then, was popular, he attended to business.

He lived then at the town hotel, run by a short fat man who let his wife attend to the affairs of the hotel while he tended bar and talked of race horses and politics, and it was in the bar Dick spent much of his time. It was a time when women worked. They milked the cows, did the washing, cooked the food, had children and made clothes for them. After they married they stayed pretty much out of sight.

It was such a town as, being located in Illinois, might well have been visited on court days by an Abraham Lincoln, a Douglas, a Davis. In the bar, the harness shop, the hotel office, the livery stable, men gathered of an evening. There was talk. Men drank whiskey, told stories, chewed tobacco and talked of horses, religion and politics and Dick was there among them, setting them up at the bar, expressing his opinions, telling stories, getting off jokes. At night, when nine o’clock came and if the men of the town had not drifted to his shop, he closed up and made his way to the livery stable where he knew they could be found. Well, it was time for talk now and there was something special to talk about.

For one thing Dick was a Southerner in a Northern community. That set him apart. Was he loyal? You bet. He was a Southerner and knew niggers and niggers were now to the fore. The Pittsburgh paper had come. Samuel Chase of Ohio had made a speech, Lincoln of Illinois was holding a debate with Stephen Douglas, Seward of New York spoke of war. Dick held to Douglas. All this nonsense about the niggers. Well, well! What an idea! The Southerners in Congress, Davis, Stevens, Floyd, were so in earnest, Lincoln, Chase, Seward, Sumner and the other Northerners were so in earnest. “If war comes we’ll catch it hot here in Southern Ohio. Kentucky will go in and Tennessee and Virginia. The city of Cincinnati is none too loyal.”

Some of the little towns nearby were Southern in their feelings but Dick had got into a place that was hotly Northern. A lot of mountain men had happened to settle in there in the early days. It was just his luck.

At first he kept quiet and listened. Then people began to want him to speak out. Very well, he would. He was a Southerner, fresh from the South. “What have you got to say?” It was a perplexing question.

“What have I got to say, eh?” Dick had to think fast. “There won’t be any war--about niggers.” At home in North Carolina Dick’s people had owned niggers, a few of them. They weren’t cotton raisers but lived in another hill country, and raised corn and tobacco. “Well, you see.” Dick hesitated and then plunged. What did he care about slavery. It meant nothing to him. A few niggers hanging around. They weren’t very good workers. At home you had to have a few to be respectable, to avoid being called a poor white.

While he was hesitating and keeping quiet, before he took the plunge and became a thoroughgoing abolitionist and a Northerner, Dick did a good deal of thinking.

His father had been prosperous once, had inherited lands, but he was a shiftless man and, before Dick had left, things at home had not gone too well. The Mooreheads weren’t broke or really hard up but from owning two thousand acres of land they had been reduced to four or five hundred.

Things had happened. Dick’s father went to a nearby city and bought some niggers, a pair of them, both over sixty. The old nigger woman had no teeth and her old nigger man had a bad leg. He just could hobble about.

Why had Thad Moorehead bought the pair? Well, the man who owned them was broke and wanted them to have a home. Thad Moorehead had bought them because he was a Moorehead. He got the two of them for a hundred dollars. It was a Moorehead kind of thing to do, buying such niggers.

The old nigger man was really a rascal. No Uncle Tom’s Cabin monkey business about him. He had been owned far South, in half a dozen places, and had always managed to keep himself attached to some negro woman who stole for him, had children by him, took care of him. In the Far South, when he was owned down there on a sugar plantation, he had made himself a set of reed pipes and could play. It was the playing of the pipes that had attracted Thad Moorehead.

Too many of that kind of niggers about.

When Dick’s father got the old couple home they could do little enough work. The woman helped some in the kitchen and the man made a pretense of working with the Moorehead boys in the fields.

The old black man told stories, he played his pipes and Thad Moorehead listened. Finding himself a shady place under a tree at the edge of a field the old rascally black got out his pipes and played or he sang songs. One of the Moorehead boys was superintending the work in the field and a Moorehead is a Moorehead. The work went to pieces. All gathered about.

The old black could keep it up all day and all night. Tales of strange places, of the Far South, of the sugar plantations, the big cotton fields, of the time when he was leased out by his owner to be a hand on a river steamer on the Mississippi. After the talk a turn on the pipes. Sweet strange music making echoes in the woods at the edge of the field, creeping up the nearby hillside. It fairly made the birds stop singing in envy sometimes. Strange that an old man could be so wicked and make such sweet heavenly sounds. It made you doubt the value of goodness, that sort of thing. Not strange though that an old black woman liked her nigger man, stuck to him. The trouble was that all the Mooreheads listened, letting the work go. Always too many of that kind of niggers around. Thanks be, a horse can’t tell tales, a cow can’t play pipes when she should be giving milk.

You pay less for a cow or a good horse, and a cow or a horse can’t tell strange tales of far places, can’t tell stories to young men when they should be plowing corn or chopping tobacco, can’t make music on reed pipes that will make you forget any kind of work should ever be done.

When Dick Moorehead had made up his mind he wanted to strike out for himself old Thad had simply sold a few acres of land to give him his start. Dick had put in a few years as an apprentice in a harness shop in a nearby town and then the old man had produced the money. “I think you had better go up North, it’s a more enterprising place,” he said.

Enterprising indeed. Dick had tried to be enterprising. Up North, specially where abolitionists have come in, they would never put up with wasteful niggers. Suppose an old nigger man can play the pipes until it makes you sad and glad and careless about getting work done. Better let music alone. It’s the devil’s business. Enterprise is enterprise.

Dick was the sort who turns out to believe what the people about him believe. In the Ohio town “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was being read. Sometimes he thought of the blacks at home and smiled in secret.

“I’ve got into a place where people are against shiftlessness. The niggers are responsible.” He began to hate slavery now. “This is a new century, new times. The South is too pig-headed.”

Being enterprising in business, the retail kind anyway, was simply standing in with the people. You had to stand in with the people to get them into your shop. If you are a Southerner in a Northern community and go over to their point of view you are stronger with them than you would be if you were born a Northerner.

“There is more joy in Heaven over one sinner,” etc.

How could Dick tell he was himself a player of the pipes?

Blow your reed pipes, get a woman to take care of your children--if you are unfortunate enough to have any--tell tales, go with the crowd.

Dick went over, bang. His popularity in the Ohio community went up to boiling point. Every one wanted to buy him drinks at the bar, in the evening his shop was full of men. Now Jeff Davis, Stevenson of Georgia and others, were making fiery speeches in Congress, making threats. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was running for President. The Democrats were all split up, had put three tickets in the field. The fools!

Dick even joined the crowd who were running off niggers at night. If you go in for a thing you might as well go the whole hog and anyway running off niggers was half the fun of the game. It was against the law for one thing--against the law and all the good law-abiding citizens, the very best in fact, going into it.

Fun, eh? Plenty of excitement. They slipped the niggers across the Ohio River at night in a row boat. A lot of them not of much account to their owners if they had stayed South, Dick thought. Well, he was no special judge of good niggers. The kind his father had at home weren’t of much account. “If you want to make niggers pay you got to own land down in Alabama or Mississippi. Then you put a good overseer in charge and pretty much keep out of the fields yourself.” A lot of the best overseers were Northern men, nigger drivers. Small owners got all the worst of it in the slavery business. You owned four or five or even a dozen niggers and got acquainted with them. The worst was that they got acquainted with you, knew your weaknesses, knew how to work you. More niggers like that old reed-blower all through the South in slavery days than the North ever dreamed of. They got through life pretty easy, flattered their masters, flattered the women and the children. “A shrewd canny lot, the niggers of the South,” Dick thought.

Dick kept smiling to himself, helping run niggers off at night, Northern Methodist and Baptist preachers in the party, superintendents of Sunday Schools, earnest men. When they got their niggers across the river wagons were waiting. Sometimes the niggers were made to lie on the wagon beds and straw was piled on them. There was a husky young wench with two children, worth about eighteen hundred dollars in Alabama--the three of them--and a negro preacher who wanted to begin shouting until Dick made him shut up. “Shut up, nigger,” he growled and the tone of his voice shocked some of the members of the party.

Dick did not do much thinking. They took the runaway niggers to some farmhouse, usually on a side road, and after feeding hid them in a barn. The next night they would be shoved on their way, toward Zanesville, Ohio, toward a distant place called Oberlin, Ohio, places where the abolitionists were thick. “Damn an abolitionist anyway.” They were bound to raise hell for Dick.

Sometimes the parties running the escaped niggers off had to hide in the woods. The next town to the west was as strong in its Southern feeling as Dick’s town was for abolition. The citizens of the two towns hated each other and the neighboring town got up parties to catch the nigger runners. Dick would have been among them had he happened to settle in that town. It was a game for them too. None of the crowd owned any slaves. Sometimes shots were fired but no one in either of the towns ever got hit.

For Dick it was, for the time, fun, excitement. His getting to the front in the abolitionist ranks made him a marked man, an outstanding figure. He never wrote letters home and his father of course knew nothing of what he was doing. Like every one else he did not think war would really come and if it did what of it? The North thought it could lick the South in sixty days. The South thought it would take them thirty days to whip the North. “The Union must and will be preserved,” said Lincoln, who had been elected President. That seemed good sense anyway. He was a backwoods fellow, that Lincoln. People in the know said he was tall and gawky, a regular countryman. The smart fellows down East would handle him all right. When it came to a showdown the South would give in or the North would.

Dick went sometimes to see the runaway niggers hidden in the barns at night. The other white men were in the farmhouse and he was alone with two or three blacks. He stood over them looking down. It’s the South’s way. There were a few words passed. The niggers knew he was a Southerner all right. Something in his tone told them. He thought of what he had heard his father say. “For the smaller whites, the common white farmers in the South, it would have been better had there never been any slavery, never any blacks.” What happened, when you had them around, was that you got the notion into your head you didn’t have to work. Dick’s father had seven strong sons before his wife died. They were a shiftless lot, really. Dick himself was the only one who had any enterprise, had ever wanted to get out. Had there never been any niggers he and all of his brothers might have been taught to work, the Moorehead place in North Carolina might have amounted to something.

Abolition, eh? If abolition could only abolish. A war wouldn’t make any deep essential difference in the attitude of the whites toward the blacks. Any black man or woman would lie to a white man or woman. He made the niggers in the barn tell him why they had run away. They lied of course. He laughed and went back to the house. If the war came his father and his brothers would get in on the Southern side as casually as he would get in on the Northern side. What did they care about slavery? They really cared about the way the Northerners talked. The North cared about the way the South talked. Both sides sent talkers to Congress. That was natural. Dick was a talker himself, an adventurer.

* * * * *

And then the war came and Dick Moorehead, Tar’s father, got in. He was made a captain and wore a sword. Could he resist that? Not Dick.

He went south to Middle Tennessee, was in Rosecrans’ army and then later in Grant’s. His harness shop had been sold. When he paid his debts there wasn’t much left. He had set ’em up too often at the tavern, during the exciting days when enlistment was going on.

What fun, during enlistment, what excitement. Women scurrying about, men and boys scurrying about. They were grand days for Dick. He was the town’s hero. You don’t get many such chances in life if you are not born a money-maker and can’t pay to get yourself into a prominent position. In times of peace you just go along, telling stories, drinking with other men at the bar, spending your money for a good suit of clothes and a heavy silver watch, letting your mustache grow, stroking it, talking when some other man wants to talk as much as you do. He may be a better talker, at that.

At night sometimes during the excitement, Dick thought of his brothers, going into the Southern army, much in the spirit in which he had gone in with the North. They would hear speeches, the women of the neighborhood would be holding meetings. How could they stay out? They would go in to hold on to such fellows as that shiftless old black, playing his reed pipes, singing his songs, lying about his past, entertaining the whites so he wouldn’t have to work. Dick and his brothers might be shooting at each other some day. He refused to think of that side of the matter. The thought came only at night. He had been made a captain and wore a sword.

One day a chance came to distinguish himself. The Northerners, among whom he lived, who were his fellows now, were great rifle shooters. They called themselves “the squirrel shooters of Ohio,” bragged a lot of what they would do when they drew a bead on a Reb. During the time when the companies were being formed they held shooting matches.

It was all the go. The men went to the edge of a field near town and fastened a small target to a tree. They stood off an unbelievable distance and nearly every man hit the target. If they did not hit the center of the target they at least made the bullets do what they called “biting paper.” Every one had the illusion that wars are won by good shots.

Dick yearned to shoot but did not dare. He had been elected captain of a company. “You be careful,” he told himself. One day when all the men had gone to the shooting ground he picked up a rifle. He had hunted some as a boy but not much, was never a good shot.

Now he stood with the rifle in his hand. A small bird flew far up in the sky over the field. Quite casually he raised the rifle, took aim and fired, and the bird came down, almost at his feet. It had been shot cleanly, through the head. One of those strange accidents that get into stories but never happen in fact--when you want them to.

Dick strutted out of the field and never went back. Things were on the wing for him, he was a hero already, before the war started.

A marvelous shot, a captain. Already he had got his sword and had spurs fastened on his boot-heels. When he walked through the streets of his town young women looked at him from behind window curtains. Almost every night there was a party at which he was the central figure.

How was he to know that after the war he was to marry and have many children, that he would never be a hero again, that all the rest of his life he would have to build on these days, creating in fancy a thousand adventures that never happened.

The race of the tale tellers is always an unhappy race but luckily they never find out how unhappy they are. They are always hoping somewhere they will find believers, living in that hope. It is in the blood.