Chapter X: Introduction: The Judges (10)

Hark, fum de tomb come do’fum soun’
(Jay-bird jump an’ jar de groun’).
I once was los’ but now I’se foun’
(Wash dem dishes an’ set ’em erroun’).

Why this rather inconsequent song should contain so much of pathos I could not have told then, nor can I now; perhaps one sensed the contrast between her supernatural yearnings, the Jeanne d’Arc voices which guided her, and the humble round of Mahaly’s daily life: “Washin’ dem dishes” (other people’s dishes) “an’ settin’ ’em erroun’.”

On occasion she was moved to dance for us; not the ordinary, frivolous clap-and-patter, buck-and-wing steps, for Mahaly had got religion and was very much saved indeed--so much so that she gave nearly all her earnings to the church--but a stately ceremonial prance, with odd jerks of the body and long, rhythmic pauses, to the tune of a muttered chant. Her eyes were half closed as in an ecstasy. So might some ancient jungle priestess have danced before the great god Mumbo-jumbo.

And she had the true artist’s passion for colour, for beautiful fabrics, which was doubtless the reason our mothers found her such an invaluable laundress. With what loving tenderness she would “rub out” some silken treasure entrusted to her care, or flute a delicate ruffle, or clear-starch a sheer organdy! And her cabin walls fluttered queerly with rags and tags of brilliant colour, discarded finery, bright garments which had ceased to function; meaningless, savage, more than a little mad, of course, yet cheerful to the eye as a patchwork quilt. Mahaly was, indeed, an advance agent of the decorative doctrines of Bakst.

Yet I recalled her most clearly--such is the sadism of childhood--not as the wistful seeker after beauty, the patient and adoring friend (for the most pestiferous of children never seemed to pester Mahaly), but as the guy she always looked when she started off for camp meeting. This great event of her church, known as “Conference,” took place annually at a camp ground in the next county, and during the week or so it lasted our kitchens were deserted, also our stables and gardens. An enforced holiday was declared for all but the leisure classes.

Mahaly used to prepare for “Conf’rence” weeks beforehand; and on the day of departure we youngsters would collect in groups to watch her pass, hurrying by short cuts to fresh points of vantage, sniggering, nudging one another, jeering at her, I am afraid, as cruelly as any of the Negroes. But Mahaly never seemed to realize it; we were only “the chillen,” whom she trusted and loved.

Moreover, she was uplifted beyond reach of our mocking, rapt in high inner contemplation; and moved along the road with her queer, rhythmic, jerking step to music that we could not hear, trailing clouds of glory--literally. Sheba herself, on her way to the court of Solomon, could have been no more magnificent. She wore, although the sun is hot in “Conf’rence” time, a pink velvet opera cloak trimmed with swan’s-down, which had belonged to Miss Mabilla Cornish in her days of bellehood; beneath it glittered and swept a voluminous spangled yellow evening gown from the same prolific source.

Her feet were encased in a pair of Dr. Tom Curtis’s rubber-sided _Romeo_ slippers, with the toes removed for greater ease; and she wore my mother’s Paris bonnet of many seasons past, an erection of jet which sprouted purple ostrich tips at intervals. There were other details, such as square gold-rimmed spectacles without glass, a _Janice Meredith_ curl (blond) draped coquettishly over one shoulder, an ancient carpetbag which bulged with sacrifices destined presumably for the altar: a fat roasting pullet, a jar of brandied peaches, a bottle of elderberry wine, other delicacies which she could not afford.

But Mahaly never got farther than to the railroad station. Whether the other Negroes would not let her go with them, whether their jeers caused her to lose confidence in the suitability of her appearance before the Lord, or whether at the last she dared not put to the risk of possible disillusionment her secret dreams, her hidden ecstasies, we never knew. But the train for camp ground invariably went off without Mahaly. She would reappear that evening, shorn of her glory and much subdued, to a welcome she was sure of, in some grateful kitchen. Never within my knowledge did Mahaly get to “Conf’rence.”

Except once. Aunt Lady told us about it, all these years afterward. It chanced that Dr. Tom, driving past the station just after the annual exodus to camp ground, was struck with the forlornness of the solitary figure which remained; and, being Aunt Lady’s husband and that sort of man, he had offered to drive Mahaly over in state behind his fast span of trotters, having a patient to see in that part of the country.

Mahaly had stared incredulously. Then, with a wild shout of “Glory to Gawd! Here I come!” she had clambered into the buggy, and said not another word until, after many miles, he deposited her at the gates of the Promised Land. Then she came down to earth sufficiently to smile her gratitude speechlessly, radiantly. “I declare, the old wench looked almost handsome!” murmured Dr. Tom, remembering it.

And that was the last of Mahaly for many a long day. Nobody knew what had become of her.

It was a year later that they saw her coming home along the pike, still wearing the pink opera cloak, bedraggled, weak, exhausted, but bearing in her arms a puny yellow baby.

“Not her own?” I gasped, incredulous.

Aunt Lady nodded. “For all the world like an old cow that’s gone off into the woods to calve, and don’t know whether to be proud or sorry for herself,” she said with the rich tang of the soil that is her heritage.

Mahaly never told where she had been, nor with whom. I thought of the King of Yearth, in his Aladdin cave; I thought also of the sacrifices and libations she had prepared for the altar, and of priests who might well have appreciated them. But nobody ever knew. Once, pressed too closely, she had made some cryptic allusion to “a merracle”; and a miracle indeed it seemed to those who had known her half their lives as a man-hating spinster of uncertain age.

But people pay heavily for miracles. Mahaly never recovered from hers. She had the child christened “Infant Samuel” after an admired picture in Aunt Lady’s parlour; and then she died, vaguer and more queer than ever, babbling of mystic things. She left the Infant Samuel, of course, to Aunt Lady, who seemed to find the legacy quite natural. It was not her first.

“And, besides, I can’t help feeling that Tom was sort of responsible,” she admitted, ignoring her husband’s startled disclaimer.

Sam’l’s infancy was no problem; he just grew up, she said, “like any of the puppies,” in and out of the kitchen, the barn, the wash house--who minded an extra piccaninny or two around? But the school age brought difficulties. Not that Sam’l was mischievous, or disobedient, or lazy, like ordinary coloured children. His name seemed to have affected his nature, thus proving a theory of George Moore’s: the Infant Samuel was, like his pictured prototype, a model child. But the other coloured children failed to appreciate him.

“Dey mocks at me all de time,” he said quite patiently, not at all complaining.

No matter how serious Sam’l was, the teacher reported, he seemed to move his schoolmates to ribald mirth.

And for this there may have been some cause. He not only looked peculiar, with his long, pointed head, his anxious solemnity, and his extreme limberness of body, but he did peculiar things. For example, the sums on his slate looked like real sums, quite neatly done, until one examined them more closely, when they were found to be composed of mere pothooks, meaningless hieroglyphics which resembled figures, and which he seemed to think did quite as well.

“Ha, the imagist theory!” murmured my husband, who interests himself in movements.

And once during geography class, when there were visitors, the teacher had invited Sam’l, who drew quite nicely, to do a map of the United States upon the blackboard from memory. The result was a vaguely familiar outline which resembled a map, in that states and lakes and rivers were all neatly marked, the mountains very handsomely shaded indeed. But one of the visitors, examining it in a puzzled manner, had discovered that its outline was the profile, face downward, of George Washington.

Sam’l was sent home in disgrace for poking fun at company. But he protested earnestly that he “hadn’t never poked fun at nobody,” not he. That was the way he saw his native land, and he had drawn it so.

“Ho! The subjective school,” muttered my husband.

Later, under the influence of his name picture, Aunt Lady had thought to make a preacher of the Infant Samuel; but after a brief trial the coloured seminary had returned him with thanks. Their young brother, they reported, was undoubtedly an earnest seeker, even sanctified; he preached with fluency and was powerful in prayer; but though his language and gestures were most superior, neither prayers nor sermons seemed somehow to make sense; they sounded more like poetry. Nor would his fellow theologs take him seriously. Whatever he said or did, they sniggered at; a fatal handicap in the preaching profession.

So Dr. Tom took him in hand and decided to make a stable boy of him. Sam’l became at once every inch a horseman; he had great adaptability. True, whenever he entered a stall he got kicked, horses being intuitive creatures, not easily deceived. But Dr. Tom bore with him until one morning he found Sam’l running his aged, cherished buggy mare, Miss Susy, round and round the back lot, riding her neck like a jockey, plying the outraged favourite with whip and spur--“jes’ givin’ the ol’ gal a breath-out,” he explained, “to take the rheumatics out’n her knees.” Incidentally, he gave Miss Susy an attack of heaves from which she never recovered.

After that Aunt Lady thought best to take Sam’l into the house under her own eye, where there were less valuable things than horses to learn upon; and that was the period during which we had discovered him, dramatizing himself on the model of Judge Cornish’s stately old factotum, Romulus. He had already, in his zeal, polished most of the silver off Aunt Lady’s tea set, and he averaged one smash a meal; whereas Romulus had never been known in his long career to break so much as a teacup.

“Sam’l can’t seem really to _do_ things, somehow,” said Aunt Lady, sighing. “He just does _at_ ’em. Play-acting, like. ‘Monkey motions’; you remember?”

It was a game the little darkies used to play when we were all young together, a left-over from the care-free days of slavery and the plantation “street.” A leader, chosen for skill at pantomime, would select something to imitate, and the circle around him must represent the subject as best they could each in his own way, singing as they went:

“I ack monkey moshuns, too-ra-loo;
I ack monkey moshuns, so I do.
I ack ’em good, and dat’s a fack:
I ack jes’ like dem monkeys ack.”

And so they did--“gemman moshuns,” “lady moshuns,” “preacher moshuns,” and other less polite--absurd little skinny-shanked, mop-headed creatures, with their soft, bright animal eyes and ingratiating ways; the bandar-log indeed. But why should his fellow bandar-log object so consistently to Sam’l’s monkey motions? For the grown-up Negroes were as unkind to him as his schoolmates had been. Was it, I suggested, that they thought him a “white-folks’ nigger”?

On the contrary. Sam’l had great ambitions for his “race,” as he loved to call them; yearned to lead it on to victory (against what enemy was not stated--presumably the Germans); treated his persecutors--for they amounted almost to that--with a magnanimity that was not without pathos.

“It’s jus’ ign’ance,” he would apologize for them kindly. “They ack so mean an’ ornery an’ outrageous ’cause they got such woolly heads; that’s all!”

Sam’l’s own hair happened by some odd freak to be quite straight and thick and silky, like coarse floss.

“If he didn’t show off so much, I’d be downright sorry for him,” said Aunt Lady. “The boy’s lonesome for his kind; but--just listen to that!” (as a burst of song reached us from the pantry). “He can’t even sing like other people!”

The pantry door having been thoughtfully propped open, we got full benefit in the parlour of a fine falsetto aria done after Caruso’s best manner, the impassioned tremolo, the husky little break at the climax, all complete.

“Do you mean to say,” murmured my husband respectfully, “that the Infant Samuel is serenading us in Italian?”

“Practically,” said the doctor. “As near as he can make it. He’s been that way ever since I made the mistake of bringing Lady home a phonograph from the city. She lends it to Sam’l to take to his room on holidays, and our housework is accomplished to the strains of _I Pagliacci_ and _Lucia_.”

“Never mind, it won’t last long,” his wife soothed him. “Sam’l’s going off to be a hero soon.”

It appeared that, although the draft had twice rejected him, once because of insufficient age and once because of defective vision, Sam’l had managed to overcome all difficulties and was shortly to report at training camp.

I exclaimed with surprise, not able somehow to visualize the temperamental child of Mahaly as a warrior, and such a determined warrior. It did seem in his case peculiarly heroic, he was so inept and helpless-looking; so what the Negroes call “shackly” in the knees.

“Humph!” remarked Aunt Lady to my praise of this patriotism. “Showing off, as usual. ‘I ack soldier moshuns, so I do.’ If Sam’l ever hears a cannon he’ll start for home like a gun-shy setter. A mere ocean won’t be able to stop him.”

* * * * *

It was a prophecy that came to pass, as many of Aunt Lady’s prophecies do. But in the meanwhile Sam’l got as far as France; supplied by me, because of auld lang syne, with the sort of comfort kit that would have pleased Mahaly. It included a Bible, perfumed soap, a box of chocolate, some very fancy notepaper, and a fountain pen; also a letter of sound advice, as I rather dreaded the effect of foreign travel upon so adaptable a temperament.

His reply is one of my cherished possessions. He had been allotted to a labour battalion, diggers, road makers, and the like, of whom he wrote modestly:

We are the Chosen People who must go before, like a Voice in the
Wilderness, to puppare the way. Hallelujah, praise the Lord. What
we’ll do to them en’emies, respeckted Madam, is a plenty. These yere
foreign nations is wusser than what you write about them. The way
they ack, respeckted Madam, is somethin’ scand’lous. Specially the
French. White wimmen makin’ over a sanctified cullud boy like who but
he! But don’ you fret, respeckted Madam, for fear I mought fergit my
raisin’. Pussonally I wouldn’t so demeen myself as to ’sociate with
no white wimmen what would demeen theirselves by ’sociatin’ with
cullud.

It was reassuring to feel that a representative from our old town was keeping so stern an eye upon the morals and manners of our volatile ally.

We learned not long afterward that Sam’l had been invalided safely home, suffering from something like shell-shock. As Aunt Lady put it in her letter, he must have heard a gunshot somewhere.

We forgot about Sam’l for a while after that, until one very early morning I heard our furnace being shaken down with a sort of rhythmic emphasis, and asked the maid who brought in my coffee what all the racket was about.

She tossed her head. “Hit’s de new houseman,” she reported, “and he ’lows don’t nobody but him know how to shake a furnace nohow.” She giggled angrily.

Intuition told me what had occurred, even before a voice came floating up the furnace pipes:

“Hark, fum de tomb come do’fum soun’
(Jay-bird jump an’ jar de groun’).”

Nobody but Mahaly’s child could have given this song its old, peculiar eeriness. Sam’l had abandoned the coloratura type of vocalization and returned to an earlier manner.

“Yes, M’dame, hit’s me,” he called up cheerily (since his sojourn in France he no longer pronounced me “Moddom”). “Miss Lady done sent me along to work for you-all a while,” and he presently handed me his credentials.

Since his return from the war, Aunt Lady wrote, the other Negroes had treated him so unsympathetically that she thought best for him to convalesce elsewhere, in the care of people like ourselves who could understand his sensitive nature. While Sam’l, she went on to say, was not and could never be a decent house servant, he was certainly better than the city sort, who, she understood, were likely as not to sit down beside you in the street car.

He did not drink or gamble, he was not light-fingered (though of course he sometimes borrowed things, like anybody), and he was willing and anxious to do whatever was expected of him, whether he knew how or not. His shell-shock merely took the form of a sort of nervousness in the feet, resembling St. Vitus’s dance.

We did not, as it happened, either need or want a houseman, particularly one afflicted with St. Vitus’s dance; but Aunt Lady, having never in her life failed a friend, is naturally not a person whom her friends can fail. Sam’l and I engaged each other.

It proved a relation which, while pleasant, was of short duration. Sam’l was neglecting his operatic interests at the time in favour of interpretative dancing, and his habit of constant practise in kitchen and basement not only bade fair to disrupt our domestic arrangements, but even to endanger the foundations of the house. At all hours of the day and some of the night there was to be felt a certain measured vibration in the atmosphere, accompanied by a slight warning rattle of chandeliers and crockery.

We might have ignored this growing menace in the interests of friendship, but that one day my husband happened to observe our houseman going off for a holiday sporting golf tweeds and stockings whose vivid pattern was unmistakable. Sam’l, as Aunt Lady had forewarned us, was merely borrowing these articles, and had every intention of returning them to my husband’s closet at the first favourable opportunity; but husbands have their little crotchets. I parted with Sam’l, to our mutual regret.

He bore no hard feelings, confessing that he was really on his gradual way northward to join some influential acquaintances he had made during his military career. We were, it appeared, merely a stepping stone, albeit an honoured and a valued stepping stone, upon his upward progress.

That should by all rights have been the end of Sam’l so far as we were concerned, for when Negroes go North they are usually lost to us. But some years later a visitor was announced, who had sent up no card.

“Leastways he _tried_ to gimme a card,” bridled the housemaid, giggling, “but I never took’n it off him.”

The drawing room was empty. I asked where she had put the caller.

“In the kitchen, whar he belongs at!” was the emphatic response.

The prodigal had returned, but a metamorphosed, almost an unrecognizable prodigal. He had grown a neat little shoebrush moustache (in itself quite a feat for a coloured man); he wore an extremely well-tailored cutaway, mouse-coloured trousers and gloves to match, immaculate white spats, and a gardenia in his buttonhole. His manner was even more of a metamorphosis; it had become as simple as his appearance was elaborate; crisp, clear, decisive, very much the manner, in fact, of my husband closing up a business deal. Sam’l invariably profited by his contacts.

“I shall not take up mo’ than a moment of yore vallyble time, Madam” (pronounced in plain American now), “but I have come to tender you and His Honour some free tickets for the performance to-morrow night. I also mailed free tickets,” he added, “to Doctor and Miss Lady Curtis, and I took’n the libbuty to suggest that they better come and stay with you-all for the event.”

“Quite right, Sam’l; I’m glad you did,” I murmured, rather dazed, “but what is the event?”

In silence he handed me a card--the one my housemaid had rejected--printed in Old English lettering, “Professor Samuel K. Curtis, Esq.” Mahaly’s child had evidently paid his “white folks” the compliment of incorporating their names with his own.

“How nice!” I murmured. “But what are you professor of, Sam’l?”

“The art of Terpsichore, Madam. I thought perhaps you’d reckernize the name. But it’s natural you wouldn’t,” he added, “being as how I’m better known to the public as ‘Slippyfoot.’ Also,” he added simply, “as ‘the Charleston King.’”

I began to understand. One knew by hearsay--our personal ambitions in that line having ceased with the fox trot--of the new dancing step which was taking America and even Europe by storm; and I remembered reading that our own city was to be the privileged scene of a coloured Charleston contest, with competitors from all quarters of the country.

“So you’ve come to compete in the Charleston contest?” I asked.

“Hardly to compete,” he replied gently, looking rather disappointed in me. “Rather to expound, Madam. To show ’em,” he elucidated further, “how the Charleston should be did; its origins, methods, and significations, like I showed ’em,” he added very, very modestly, “in London and in Paris.”

I rose to the occasion sufficiently to invite the Charleston King to remain for supper; an invitation he accepted on condition that he be allowed to wait on us at table, which he did, white spats, gardenia, and all. Greatness had not gone to his head; he still remembered his “raisin’.” Incidentally, he dropped and broke my favourite salad bowl.

None of us had happened to see the Charleston danced before, or so we thought, until the contest begun. Then we recognized it: the same old clap-and-patter, wriggling and prancing, familiar to any Southern childhood, with some elaborations: a constant St. Vitus-like movement of the feet, odd sidewise skating-motions, a slow dipping of the body up and down and up again, with flapping arms, as of some clip-winged bird trying to fly.

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Aunt Lady, beside me. “You don’t tell me _ladies_ and _gentlemen_ are carrying on like this in the ballroom? And what’s the crowd making such a to-do about, anyhow? They can see this sort of thing any day if they look out the back window!”

Yet the large auditorium was packed as for a prize fight; white people on the main floor, standing up, mounting their chairs in order to see better; coloured people packing the gallery, in delegations, with appropriate banners; and all shouting together, catcalling, yelling for Slippyfoot Sam.

What a descent from his christened name! I was glad for the moment that Mahaly was not present at this apotheosis of her miracle child. But only for a moment.

He came in the place of honour on the programme, the spotlight full upon him, heralded by a fanfare of snare drums and saxophones. To my surprise, it was not the elegant gentleman I had promised my companions. He had left to lesser luminaries the fine raiment, the spats, and the gardenia. Even the neat moustache had been sacrificed to art. He had deliberately reverted to type. Barefoot, in ragged trousers, and a hat without a crown, it was a Sam’l any one in that audience would recognize, as we did, and love because he was their own. He had shown the intuition of genius; achieved the crowning artistry of imitating himself.

The audience, with one gasp of surprise, went wild. There were shrieks of welcome and approval, congratulatory howls.

“Attaboy, Slippyfoot!” they yelled. “You show ’em, King!”

And of course they laughed at him, as people always did and always would. But it was a new laughter, sympathetic, almost affectionate. Sam’l, I realized, had become to his public a sort of symbol, like the Charleston itself, like the tune “Dixie”; a reminder of a South that was passing now, and would never come again.

He paid no attention to laughter or to cheers; a ludicrous enough figure with his great flat feet and exquisitely awkward body, yet oddly dignified. It was the dignity of conscious power; Sam’l knew what he was about. Those melancholy, anxious hound’s eyes roamed over the enormous audience till suddenly they paused and lighted. He had found his white folks. He smiled at us; I think I had never seen Sam’l smile before. It was an experience; sudden, irradiating, infinitely proud and trustful. He was among friends.

He began to move, a strange, slow prance with measured jerks and pauses, which I recognized--Mahaly before the great god Mumbo-jumbo! Suddenly he crouched, shivering, trembling, and began to run desperately--all without leaving one spot; he fought against unseen enemies, shield before him, thrusting his spear, flinging his assegai; he moved away, drooping, heavy, a captive in chains; never losing a single beat of the wild rhythm, a single intricate double pat of the foot.

I began to understand what he was doing. This was no mere exposition of the Charleston “as it should be did, its origins, methods, and significations.” Sam’l, the despised and rejected of them, was interpreting his people for our benefit, dramatizing in dance the history of his race, even as Roland Hayes in song, as others in literature.

There was something hypnotic in that ceaseless beating rhythm, those constant, significant movements of the half-naked body. We saw through his imagination; we remembered through his race-memory. Hoeing and sowing; picking cotton under the eye of an overseer with a lash; escaping into the swamp, with bloodhounds following; terror he danced for us, the terror that crouches and prays and kills; ecstasy, the shouting joys of religion, the release of freedom--springing up and up as if he would dance with the stars.

There followed the humble, happy life of the quarters: picking a banjo, crooning as he patted and swung, flashing his teeth at a girl; rocking a child in his arms, tenderly, lovingly; bending up and down over a wash-tub, testing a flatiron with wetted forefinger; “washin’ dem dishes an’ settin’ ’em erroun’.” (We heard him humming his mother’s old working song to the timeless steady thump of the orchestra, and Aunt Lady smiled at me dimly.)

* * * * *

Now and again the music changed, and for a moment some familiar tune emerged. To the beat of “Greased my heel wid hog-eye lard,” we saw him slip stealthily along the hen-roosts, seize his prey and still it with a quick twist of the wrist; later he seemed to be shooting craps, down on his knees, shaking the dice and rolling them out, to delighted cries from the audience:

“He fives! He sevens! Attaboy, King! Roll your own! Babies, come to Papa!”

We rode a race with him, jockeying home to a grand-stand finish. (I thought of poor, astonished Miss Susy.) We saw him off to the war, strutting gloriously, twirling his baton at the head of a brass band, and we saw him slipping ingloriously home again, peering back over his shoulder as if he had seen a ghost; for Sam’l did not spare himself. Next he mounted the pulpit, wrestled with the Lord in prayer, laying off his hands in eloquent gesture, giving us the Word straight from the shoulder, so that a sudden hysterical voice out of the gallery shouted, “Yas, O my Lawdy! _I_ hears You callin’ me!”

And all the time his feet kept up that steady, monotonous, hypnotic beat and shuffle, shuffle and beat, as if they could never stop; as if they could never stop until the unseen force that manages the puppet show should cease to pull the strings.

When at the end he stumbled away out of the spotlight, dancing still, bent over double like an old rheumatic that leans upon a stick, there was a moment’s quiet.

Some two thousand people felt for that moment, perhaps, just what he intended them to feel: the loneliness of children in a world that has grown old, the helplessness of a simple jungle folk, a bandar-log, set down in the life of cities and expected to be men. “They ack so mean an’ ornery an’ outrageous ’cause they got such woolly heads!”

Then the audience followed him, as it had welcomed him, with shouts and shrieks of laughter.

But Sam’l’s white folks would never laugh at him again; dreamer of dreams that he was, seer of visions. Aunt Lady’s dear, wrinkled face was frankly wet with tears.

Her husband put an arm around her.

“Why, old honey, it’s only Sam’l at his monkey motions! What are you weeping about?”

“_I_ don’t know. What are you!” she countered snappishly.

FOUR DREAMS OF GRAM PERKINS

BY RUTH SAWYER

From _American Mercury_

Gram Perkins was not my grandmother. I had good reason to believe that she had died and received Christian burial a half century before I first set foot in Haddock harbour. Neither were the dreams of my dreaming; so my connection with her was always remote and impersonal. Nevertheless, I came to know through her all the horror and the fascination of a perturbed spirit.

For those who may not know the harbour, let me explain that it bites into the northern stretch of Maine coast. Summer resorters are still in the minority, and peace and beauty serve as perpetual handmaidens to those few exhausted, nerve-racked city folk who have found refuge there. I was there only a few days when the immortal essence of Gram Perkins confronted me. Perkins is a prevailing name at the harbour. A Perkins peddles fish on Tuesdays and Fridays. A Perkins keeps the village store in whose windows are displayed those amazing knickknacks somebody or other creates out of sweet grass, beads, birch bark, and sealing wax. A Perkins is framed daily in the general delivery window of the post office, and his brother drives the one village jitney.

It was Cal Perkins of tender years who indirectly introduced me to the mysterious dreamer of the dreams. Cal took me on my first scaling of the blueberry ledges. Standing like Balboa on the Peak of Darien he swept a hand inland and said: “Somewhars, over thar, lives Zeb Perkins. Hain’t never laid eyes on him myself, but Pa says you doan’t never want to hear him tell of them four dreams he’s had of Grandmother Perkins. Woan’t sleep ag’in fur a month ef you do.” It was not long before I discovered those dreams were as firm a tradition at the harbour as the “Three Hairs of Grandfather Knowital” are in Eastern Europe--only with a difference. Natives in the Balkans pass on their story for the asking; whereas in Haddock harbour they evade all questions leading to Gram Perkins, while their tongues travel to their cheeks.

One day Cal took me to the cemetery and showed me the Perkins monument. It was a splendid affair in two shades of marble with a wrought-iron fence and gateway, and all about it were the head stones marking the graves of the separate members of the family. I read the inscription on Gram Perkins’s stone:

Sara Amanda Perkins
Beloved wife of Benjamin Perkins, Sea Captain
1791-1863
May she rest in perfect peace!

“Wall, she didn’t!” Cal hurled the words at me as he catapulted through the gate, shaking all over like the aspen back of the lot. I caught a final mumbling: “Never aim to stop nigh _her_. Pa says I might git to dreamin’, too.”

Here was distinctly unpleasant food for thought. Already she had a firm grip on my waking hours, and there was no relish to the idea of her haunting my sleeping ones. The manner in which she possessed the town was astounding. She lurked wherever one went, popping out with the most casual remark when one was buying a pound of butter or a pint of clams. And yet, for all the daily allusions and innuendoes, one never got at the heart of the matter; one never rightly understood why Gram Perkins was and yet was not five feet below the sod. As for the dreamer of the dreams, one never found him clothed in anything more solid than words.

I questioned Peddling Perkins one Friday when he came to our house with the makings of a chowder. “Tell me,” I began, “where does Zeb Perkins live and what relation is he to you?”

He paused in his weighing. The scales hung from a rafter in his cart and worked somewhat mysteriously. He might have been weighing out the exact amount of relationship he cared to claim. “Fur as I can make out he’s sort of a third cousin.”

“Did he ever tell you about those dreams?”

“No, m’am!” He fixed me with a fore-warning eye. “What’s more, he hain’t never goin’ to. I seen Scip Perkins--time he told him. Scairt! Never seen a feller so shook up in his life. Didn’t take off his clothes and lay good abed fur a week. No, m’am!”

I questioned the post-office Perkins one day: “Do you happen to know what Zeb Perkins dreamed about his grandmother?”

“Dreamed! Gosh, what didn’t he dream? Think of anything a sensible woman, dead and buried fifty years, stands liable to do and you wouldn’t have the half of it.” He finished snapping his teeth together to signify that he had gone as far with those dreams as he intended to go--for the present, anyway.

A few days later I took the matter to the village store. I even bought a chain and earrings of sealing wax to make my going seem less mercenary. “Those dreams,” I ventured, “how did they happen and do they belong entirely to Zeb?”

“They do, God be praised!” Whereupon the storekeeper retired behind the necklace for a good two minutes, and then partially emerged to whisper, “No one’s layin’ any claim at all to those dreams but Zeb. And I’ve always thought myself if he hadn’t had them, no knowing what he mightn’t have had.”