Part 2
Till recently the country where “them Huggins boys” live has been known all over North Carolina as “poor old Moore County”. It lies in the very heart of the Sandhills, and the farmers who “make corn and cotton on the clay” have long scoffed at the sandy slopes where, so the joke runs, “you can hear the cotton grunting trying to make a living in the poor soil”. Too poor even to give a decent stand of grass--except the coarse, useless crab grass--the Sandhills supported a fine growth of long leafed pine, and years ago the Huggins boys’ grandfather and his neighbors eked out their thin crops with the tall, straight timber and with turpentine. Their sons, the best of the timber gone, hewed out railroad ties and burned tar. They were poor farmers on poor soil, a ruinous combination. The roads were bad, and the Sandhills’ natives, having little to sell and nothing with which to buy, lived sufficient unto themselves. Theirs was a narrow life and a hard one, a life of few pleasures and almost no advantages, of much labor and little reward.
A score of years ago new factors entered into the life of the Sandhills. Inspired by the few passengers and little freight on this division of the road, railroad men turned their attention to this country. They sent agricultural and industrial experts who reported back that all the Sandhills had was a glorious winter climate. So the general passenger agent and the traffic manager consulted physicians, and the Sandhills became famous as a resort for tubercular patients. But wiser men nipped the growing sanitoriums in the bud and planted in their stead great winter resorts, big hotels, golf courses, hunting preserves.
Men and women came from all over the country to slip away from Jack Frost and play in the open, and the mysterious spell of the Sandhills was thrown over them.
Under this spell a little group of Northern men, fresh from college, ambitious and full of energy, decided the Sandhills should be good for other things besides golf and quail shooting. Agricultural experts from Raleigh and Washington said things that confirmed this belief, and these young men turned Sandhills farmers. The Huggins boys’ father and his neighbors in poor old Moore County laughed at these soft-handed agriculturists; but they fattened cattle with great profit over at Jackson Springs; they grew tobacco at Samarcand which brought top price in the open market, and their big dairy near Hoffman sold cream to the railroad and fed hogs on the skimmed milk. The pioneers have been followed by others, and most of the Huggins boys’ neighbors from good examples have learned to get bigger crops and sell them for higher prices.
But in among the hills, a little way back from the railroad and the new automobile highways the old life, the hard, narrow life, is still lived. “Them Huggins boys” and their poor, old mother and drab sister are still drudging along in the old way. That, after I knew them, was the only real fault I found. They are not vicious or mean: they are frightened and suspicious. They are not clever and they are very lazy, so they have no confidence in themselves to cope with the keener competition that the new life has brought. They have neither the speed nor the stamina to stand the swifter pace, and they balk. Underneath their diffidence and sham effrontery they are helpless and hopeless. They are the tattered remnants of an out-worn age.
A Sandhills Christmas Carol
“Chris’mas gift, Massa Billie, Chris’mas gift!”
Aunt Sally, black and beaming stood at the door of my room, trying at once to waken me and arouse my Christmas spirit. I opened one eye and she redoubled her efforts, laughing.
“Merry Christmas, Sally! What time is it?”
“Merry Chris’mas, yo’self, Massa Billie--’deed hit’s ’most aight o’clock.”
“The dickens it is!” I cried sitting bolt upright in bed, “didn’t I tell you to call me at six?”
“Yassah, yo’ shore did, but Ah jest knowed you’d not want to go shootin’ dis mawnin’. Hit’s rainin’.”
Sally was right; it was raining, a steady, soaking, most un-Christmas-like rain. Out of the little windows I could see the Sandhills drenched and dripping. The great long-leafed pines, so proud and stately in the bright sunlight, stood dejected and tawdry. Even the jovial little holly bush at the corner of the porch had quite lost its gay, holiday air. Down in the valley, at the head of the branch, the rich, warm greens and olives of the magnolias and bluegums seemed grey and melancholy in the fine mist that spread over the lowlands. “Sam,” the most sedate and dignified of pointers, strolled into my room and put his head on the side of the bed.
“No hunting for us today, old man,” I said to him, and he sniffed sympathetically and blinked his yellow eyes as much as to say, “I know it--ain’t it the devil?” He was so very sad about it that I could not help laughing at the old sportsman.
Indeed it was not a pleasing prospect. A rainy Christmas--no shooting--and stuck off in a tiny bungalow, several miles from anywhere, with only the remnants of another man’s library for company--Ugh! I dragged on my clothes without any enthusiasm for the day. But Aunt Sally’s breakfast--golden scrambled eggs heaped up in the center of a fringe of crisp bacon, with corn bread, and steaming cakes smothered in molasses--cheered me wonderfully; and then, after breakfast, Uncle Willis, her husband, came shuffling up from his cabin for his “Chris’mas gift.”
He inspected his present thoughtfully, and thanked me with verbose formality for it. Then he began talking. Willis is always an entertaining conversationalist, though I fear he is not a thoroughly reliable source of exact information. As Toby confided to me one day, “Dat nigger’s de wo’st liar in de Sandhills, ef not on de whol’ state of No’th Carolina, an’ thar’s some tol’ably good liars down disaways.” His vivid imagination made penniless, ragged Willis a Midas. He knew more about cotton than the whole of the Department of Agriculture, and as for tar burning, he could sweat more black, sticky stuff out of a cord of pine wood than any nigger in Moore County, though he would begrudgingly acknowledge that Jim Watson could go him one better in this. There was a wonderful, childlike simplicity in his optimism, but his absolute faith in your belief of his yarns was irritating till you recognized the artist in him. I remember how out of patience I was with him when he solemnly informed me one day “dat ’bout fo’ y’ars ago he’d been huntin’ b’ar wif Massa Teddy Roos’velt down in Drownin’ Creek Swamp.”
“Willis,” I said to him sharply, “you are an unmitigated liar!”
“’Deed I is, Massa Billie, but Ah jest thought you’d like t’ heah ’bout hit.”
So I did, but this Christmas morning I was in no humor to listen to his prattle, and until he got on the subject of “hants and conjurin’,” I gave him but scant attention. The sly rascal knows this way of arousing my flagging interest, and employs it very effectively.
“Massa Billie,” he said, “Ah doan’ su’pose yo’ done heah dat sumbuddy’s been conjurin’ Lee Gordon, has yo’?”
“I haven’t, no--who is Lee Gordon?”
“He’s a cousin of mah Sally’s over at Cognac. He’s been a-workin’ on de railroad wid de section gang, but he done move to Hoffman las’ night.”
“In all the rain? On Christmas eve?” I asked skeptically.
“Yassah, right in de rain an’ on Chris’mas eve. When he come home last evenin’ he done found a conjure layin’ right on de front do’-step. Ah doan’ jest ’actly know what kind ob a conjure, but hit war shore a mighty pow’ful one.” And sure of his audience he launched forth in full details of how the darky had moved his wife and numerous children, all his goods and chattels, right over to Hoffman and was staying with his wife’s brother, Noah Wilson.
“Why did he move last night?” I asked to egg him on.
“But yo’ shore doan’ ’spect him t’ stay in dat cabin wid a conjure layin’ on de front do’-step, does yo’, Massa Billie?”
“Why not?” I replied, New England fashion, to draw him out.
“Eff yo’ steps ober a conjure,” he replied earnestly, “yo’ is laik t’ die, an’ eben eff yo’ doan’ step ober it, yo’ is laik t’ die anyway. But dey all moved out de back do’,” he added reassuringly. He digressed to tell how all the household goods had been taken out the back way, stopping to recount the history of a certain bed, a family heirloom of slavery days. Finally, however, he got back to conjuring, and, expressing in the same breath his most abject fear and his utter contempt for all Black Art, he told me considerable about this mysterious matter. “Eff yo’ has de conjurin’ pow’rs,” so I learned, you can kill your enemies by placing a conjure where they will walk over it. If, however, you are not so terribly vindictive, you can merely drive them crazy by placing a hair of their head in the tough bark of a little, twisted black-jack oak. Should you be very merciful indeed, and if you merely wish to get some objectionable person out of your path, you can pick up a bit of dirt out of his footprint in the high-road and throw it, accompanied by proper chants and incantations, into running water. Henceforth that person will be a hapless wanderer over the face of the earth. There are, I gather, other awful powers that obey the commands of the conjurer, and his poor victims can only be freed from his spell by applying to a witch doctor. He, his palm having been duly crossed, will first determine the exact nature of the spell. He takes a little iron kettle about the size of your two fists, and mounts this upon a little pyramid of dry pine sticks. In the kettle he places cold water from a running stream and into it he throws salt, herbs, and sundry mysterious powders. Then he kindles the fire. While the little blaze crackles, he chants, and then, if the kettle falls off the sticks before the kettle boils it means “yo’ is shore conjured”--a thing that must assuredly happen if the doctor is careful to use dry wood that is fairly steeped with rosin. Then you must cross his palm again, and he will throw about you a counter-charm.
At this point my lesson in Black Art was interrupted.
Jerry, a half-grown negro who lived over by the Tower, knocked on the door, and I could never get Willis to resume his course of instruction. Jerry, grinning and bobbing, delivered a formal invitation from the switch operator over at the signal tower on the railroad, half a mile away, to come and share with him a Christmas box he had received from his wife. I accepted, and we set off, the boy and I, through the warm drizzle that enveloped you and soaked through your clothes as if they had been tissue paper.
The Christmas box was not a perfect success. It had been packed in cardboard and had been sadly damaged in transit, so that you would bite into a crumpled piece of capital, homemade cake to find the frosting--and maybe a brick-like gum drop--embedded in the center. But my host, the operator, is a communicative, ingenuous soul whose spirits no amount of Christmas rain could dampen. On Christmas Eve he had spent two hours of his spare time ploughing through swamps to pick a great bunch of holly. He had even found a mistletoe, a sprig of which dangled at the end of a silver cord, relic of a box of candy, over the levers of his switches. The day was close and muggy, but in honor of the occasion his little, pot-bellied, iron stove glowed ruddy with heat. Over his telegraph instruments was strung a line of garish Christmas post cards, flaming with scarlet and emerald green daubs of color, besprinkled with tinsel, declaring, as through a megaphone, “Peace on Earth--Good Will to Men.” The stuffy little signal tower fairly reeked with the Christmas spirit, and as we sat munching fruit cake I looked over at my happy host and was ashamed that a little rain should wash all the warm, generous Christmas out of me.
Yes, this was decidedly better than moping alone in the bungalow. With every freight that came to a screeching, bumpy stop beneath, a burly brakeman would thrump up the steps of the signal tower for train orders. Dripping rain water from his rubber coat, he would throw open the door with a “Merry Christmas! Say, ain’t this a peach of a Christmas day?” If his train must wait on the switch for another to pass, he would sit down by the fire and between enormous mouthfuls of cake and candy, tell a railroad yarn or retail a bit of railroad gossip. For hours I perched on the telegraph table watching this strange procession. After a short nod they paid little attention to me, for my host never bothered with introductions, and I sat there with the curious feeling that I was at the theatre. Certainly these men were of another world, each so different and yet each so true to the type. A thick-set, square-faced little fellow with the sharp twang of Down East in his voice would be followed by a tall, light stripling whose low drawl betrayed him long before he casually mentioned that he wished he could have been home in Savannah this day. They talked only of railroading. They whirled up and down the length of the country from New York to Florida and back again, many times during the year and saw nothing but switches and roundhouses; they passed nothing but expresses and other freights; they met no one save engineers, conductors, and brakemen like themselves. They lived a life divided into miles and minutes, bounded by the glistening rails, but within this life they found complete absorption, for it is a complicated, dangerous life in which exact knowledge is at a premium.
About three o’clock in the afternoon, “Shorty” thrumped in from Cognac. He was working the “second trick,” or as we out of the signal towers would say, the second shift, and he came over on a freight to be ready to take up his duties at four.
“Say,” he exclaimed gleefully, after the season’s greetings had been exchanged and he had sampled the now nearly demolished Christmas box, “McNab sure did play some good trick on some of his niggers last night.”
“He’s like to play one too many tricks on them niggers of his,” said our host. “D’you remember ’bout that section boss over on the L. & N. that was found with his skull stove in with a sledge?”
“Aw, shucks! McNab treats his niggers good, but there was a family of them livin’ in a shack right behind his house, an’ they’d sing an’ howl half the night, so McNab’s been ’bout crazy to get shut of them someway. He tried fifty ways to close them up, but yesterday he took a bit of rabbit skin and rolled it up in a little ball and wrapped it round with a strip of red flannel, and tied it all ’round with a horse hair. Then he went an’ left it on the nigger’s front door step. When the nigger comes home, he starts hollerin’ bloody murder about somebody tryin’ to conjure him. He and his whole tribe moves out last night, an’ every bit of their studdings went out the back door to dodge that conjure of McNab’s.”
Shorty broke off laughing, and I asked, “Was the nigger’s name Lee Gordon?”
“’Deed I don’t know, but they moved to Hoffman. Say, I’ll bet there ain’t a nigger in the whole Sandhills will live in that cabin now,” and Shorty chuckled to himself.
I told Uncle Willis all about it later. All that he would say was, “H’m! Those railroad men am mighty smart, ain’t dey?” He did not, however, mean to be sarcastic, for a couple of weeks later when I suggested that his brother Henry move into Lee Gordon’s old cabin in Cognac he was horrified at the thought. Yet Henry lived in Hoffman and worked in Cognac and was always complaining of the length and expense of his commuting. Although the cabin in Cognac would have solved this problem and was really a first-class house in good condition, Willis could only answer with a shrug and a shuffle, and a “Ah doan’ ’spect Henry’ll care none ’bout livin’ in dat dere shack.”
“Tar Burnin’”
When first I went to North Carolina to spend the winter in the Sandhills, my knowledge of tar was limited to schoolboy memories of tar-balls made from material purloined from the contractors who paved New York’s streets and a rather indirect connection through a cousin who had once put a tar roof on his stables and cordially regretted it. Down in the Sandhills, old Uncle Willis Baldwin, by verbose precept and halting example, taught me just how the black, sticky stuff is wrung from the dried wood of the long-leaf pine, barreled up, and brought to market.
Soon the good old-fashioned way that Uncle Willis burns his tar will be replaced by a very efficient, but thoroughly uninteresting machine, a great still, with a gigantic metal retort in a brick oven as big as Willis’ little shanty. The old darky tar burner who considers himself lucky to get a barrel of crude tar from a cord of dry pine is but a faltering competitor of the machine that from the same wood can wring two barrels of tar, valuable creosote, and other important wood oils. Squeezing out fifteen dollars where before but three or four were extracted is all in strict accord with economic progress, and plainly it is very much more profitable--for those who own the stills--but this fine machine is costly beyond the dreams even of Willis’ vivid imagination, and it is but a question of time when the negro tar burner and his handmade tar kilns will be another vanished bit of the Old South.
Willis had made a tar-burning agreement--the usual one in such cases--with Massa Ralph. Massa Ralph supplied the dry pine wood--“light ’ud” Willis calls it--and he further agreed to furnish the barrels to hold the tar. Uncle Willis, on his part, undertook to collect the wood on Massa Ralph’s land, to build and burn the tar-kiln, to fill the barrels and deliver them to the railroad at Hoffman. Each was to receive a half of the receipts from the sale of the tar.
On a piece of level ground, down in the valley beside the little trickling branch, just behind my bungalow, Willis “done built hisself a whalin’ big tar-kil’.” First he dug out a slight hollow, like a great wash basin full twenty feet across, with a trench leading from the center to a deep pit dug just outside the outer edge. Then he and his brother Henry hitched up their old grey mule and scoured all over the land, piling the dilapidated wagon with the dry wood they picked up everywhere and hauling load after load to the site of the kiln. After a great store had been collected, Henry fell to work chopping up the knotty stumps and splitting the long logs, while Willis painstakingly constructed the kiln. This must be carefully and neatly done, for the quantity of the tar yielded depends most directly upon the close and proper building of the kiln. Around the outer edge Uncle Willis laid row upon row of the long, straight, split rails, each pointing due to the center and each one fitted with scrupulous nicety into its place. In the center of the kiln he stowed away the little twisted knots and gnarled bits of root, all so rich in tar. This is rough work too, and were not old Willis’ black hands as tough as sole leather, they would be filled with splinters.
After the kiln had slowly risen till it was full seven feet high at its outer rim, it was topped off with a roof made of the split rails. Aunt Sally and “de chilluns” were now pressed into service flagging the kiln. On the roof they laid a covering of long-leaf pine boughs, and then they stuck similar branches into the crevices of the sides until the whole looked like a great, regular mound of giant pine needles. Uncle Willis and Henry again took up the work. They now banked the kiln. Starting at the ground, and building up tier on tier, they laid long logs of green wood round the kiln. In between the long logs and the kiln itself they packed sod and dirt, transforming the great heap of pine needles into an octagonal, log block house in miniature. Sand and clay piled six inches deep on the top and then packed down finished the job. Willis was now ready to burn his kiln.
So far everything had gone swimmingly, but now a long series of troubles began to fall with distressing regularity on Willis’ woolly head. A dozen times a day he would come shuffling up for my consolation and advice. Off would come his battered hat and he would begin, “’Deed, Massa Billie, Ah doan’ know----”, till, had I not felt so sorry for the old man, I would have been driven crazy by these woeful consultations.
In this big tar-kiln he had planned and executed his _magnum opus_, which should not only re-establish his shaky credit at the store in Hoffman, but must also supply the necessary capital for cotton seed and fertilizer against the fast approaching planting season. He was staking more than his little all on this kiln; he was gambling in futures, futures of slab-side pork and corn meal; a promised dress for the Xantippean Sally and much needed shoes for Carolina, Liza, Sally II, Robert Lee, and a couple of the other children whose names I forget.
His great tar-kiln, built so patiently and with such great expectations, contained about seventy cords of good wood and should, according to all expert calculation, yield about seventy barrels of tar. Massa Ralph’s overseer, deputized to get these seventy barrels, had only been able to collect forty. He scoured the country, mills, cross-road stores, freight offices, but every available source of supply that usually had barrels almost to give away had no barrels now, even at fancy prices. And Willis, because once the kiln was started there would be no stopping nor turning back, was afraid to fire the kiln until he had on hand enough containers to hold his expected quantity of tar. Moreover, poor Willis had agreed to pay Henry fifty cents a day till the tar was all run, and he saw the wages of his helper daily eating deeper and deeper into his profits. To cap the climax, the market price of tar was tumbling down at an amazing rate, and every no-’count nigger that passed along the road took a diabolical delight in stopping at Willis’s cabin and giving him the very latest and most discouraging market quotations. Poor old Willis! Whenever he saw me he implored help in getting him some barrels, and I never rode over to Hoffman without bearing an urgent message to the freight agent--“Fo’ de Lawd’s sake, Massa Billie, tell him t’ hurry hup dat lot ob bar’ls what Massa Ralph done order in Wilmington.”
At last the long-expected barrels came, and one evening about dusk Jim Watson scraped the dirt and boughs off the roof of Willis’ kiln for a couple of square feet and applied a match to the dry lightwood underneath. As the red flames darted through the black smoke, Willis heaved a great sigh of relief. Had everything gone smoothly, Willis would have run the kiln himself. So many things had gone wrong and so very much depended on this kiln that he called in Jim Watson, who plays the part of tar burning efficiency expert throughout the Sandhills, in the hope, I believe, of his being able to break the spell of bad luck. In the back of his brain there was some notion that the fee he paid to Jim Watson hired not only his supposedly superior experience, but also bought a charm against further misfortune.