Peace in Friendship Village

By this time she didn't hear anything anybody said back – she'd got to that point in the argument.

"If," she says, positive, "if the Lord had intended dark-skinned folks to be different from what they are, he'd have seen to it by now."

I shifted with her obliging.

"Then," says I, "take the Fernandez family, in the Oldmoxon House. They're different. They're more different than you and I are. What you going to do about it?"

Mis' Sykes stamped her foot. "How do you know," she says, "that the Lord intended them to be educated? Tell me that!"

I sat looking down at her three-ply Ingrain carpet for a minute or two. Then I got up, and asked her for her chocolate frosting receipt.

"I'm going to use that on my cake for to-morrow night," I says. "And do you want me to help with the rest of the telephoning?"

"What do you mean?" she says, frigid. "You don't think for a minute I'm going on with that, I hope?"

"On with it?" I says. "Didn't you tell me you had the arrangements about all made?"

She sunk back, loose in her chair. "I shall be the Laughing Stock, – the Laughing Stock," she says, looking wild and glazed.

"Yes," says I, deliberate, determined and serene, "they'll say you were going to dance around and cater to this family because they've moved into the Oldmoxon House. They'll say you wanted to make sure, right away, to get in with them. They'll repeat what you've been saying about the elegant furniture, in good taste. And about the academic and scholastic work being done. And about these folks being a distinct addition to Friendship Village society – "

"Don't, Calliope – oh, don't!" said Mis' Sykes, faint.

"Well, then," I says, getting up to leave, "go on ahead and act neighborly to them, the once, and decide later about keeping it up, as you would with anybody else."

It kind of swept over me – here we were, standing there, bickering and haggling, when out there on the planet that lay around Daphne Street were loose ends of creation to catch up and knit in.

"My gracious," I says, "I ain't saying they're all all right, am I? But I'm saying that as fast as those that try to grow, stick up their heads, it's the business of us that tootle for democracy, and for evolution, to help them on."

She looked at me, pitying.

"It's all so much bigger than that, Calliope," she says.

"True," says I, "for if some of them stick up their heads, it proves that more of them could – if we didn't stomp 'em down."

I got out in the air of the great, gold May day, that was like another way of life, leading up from our way. I took in a long breath of it – and that always helps me to see things big.

"One Spring," I says, "One world – one God – one life – one future. Wouldn't you think we could match ourselves up?"

But when I got in my little house, I looked around on the homely inside of it – that always helps me to think how much better things can be, when we really know how. And I says:

"Oh, God, we here in America got up a terrible question for you to help us settle, didn't we? Well, help us! And help us to see, whatever's the way to settle anything, that giving the cold shoulder and the uplifted nose to any of the creatures you've made ain't the way to settle nothing. Amen."

Next morning I was standing in my door-way, breathing in the fresh, gold air, when in at the gate came that colored man of Mis' Fernandez's, and he had a big bouquet of roses. Not roses like we in the village often see. They were green-house bred.

"Mis' Fernandez's son done come home las' night and brung 'em," says the man.

"Her son," I says, "from college?"

"No'm," says the man. "F'om the war."

"From the what?" I says.

"F'om the war," he says over. "F'om U'pe."

He must have thought I was crazy. For a minute I stared at him, then I says "Glory be!" and I began to laugh. Then I told him to tell Mis' Fernandez that I'd be over in half an hour to thank her myself for the flowers, and in half an hour I was going up to her front door. I had to make sure.

"Your son," I says, forgetting all about the roses, "he's in the American army?"

"He was," she said. "He fought in France for eighteen months. Now he has been discharged."

"Oh," I says to myself, "that arranges everything. It must."

"Perhaps you will let me tell you," she said. "He comes back to us wearing the cross of war."

"The cross of war!" I cried. "That they give when folks save folks in battle?" I said it just like saving folks is the principal business of it all.

"My son did save a wounded officer in No-man's land," she told me. "The officer – he was a white man."

"Oh," I says, and I couldn't say another word till I managed to ask her if her son had been in the draft.

"No," she said. "He volunteered April 7, 1917."

It wasn't until I got out in the street that I remembered I hadn't thanked her for the roses at all. But there wasn't time to think of that.

I headed straight for Mis' Silas Sykes. She looked awful bad, and I don't think probably she'd slept a wink all night. I ask' her casual how the reception was coming on, and she kind of began to cry.

"I don't know what you hector me for like this," she says. "Ain't it enough that I've got to call folks up to-day and tell them I've made a fool of myself?"

"Not yet," I says. "Not yet you ain't made one of yourself, Mis' Sykes. That's to come, if any. It is hard," I says, "to do the particular thing you'll have to do. There's them," I says crafty, "as'll gloat."

"I thought about them all night long," she says, her breath showing through her words.

"Then think no more, Mis' Sykes," I says, "because there's a reason over there in that house why we should go ahead with our plan – and it's a reason you can't get around."

She looked at me, like one looking with no hope. And then I told her.

I never saw a woman so checkered in her mind. Her head was all reversed, and where had been one notion, another bobbed up to take its place, and where the other one had been previous, a new one was dancing.

"But do they do that?" she ask'. "Do they give war-crosses to negroes?"

"Why not?" I says. "France don't care because the fore-fathers of these soldiers were made slaves by us. She don't lay it up against them. That don't touch their bravery. England never has minded dark skins – look at her East Indians and Egyptians that they say are everywhere in London. Nobody cares but us. Of course France gives negroes crosses of war when they're brave – why shouldn't she?"

"My gracious," Mis' Sykes says, "but what'll folks say here if we do go ahead and recognize them?"

"Recognize him!" I cried. "Mis' Sykes – are you going to let him offer up his life, and go over to Europe and have his bravery recognized there, and then come back here and get the cold shoulder from you – are you? Then shame on us all!" I says.

Then Mis' Sykes said the things folks always say: "But if we recognize them, what about marriage?"

"See here," says I, "there's thousands and thousands of tuberculosis cases in this country to-day. And more hundreds of thousands with other diseases. Do we set the whole lot of them apart, and refuse to be decent to them, or do business with them, because they ought not to marry our girls and boys? Don't you see how that argument is just an excuse?"

"All the same," said Mis' Sykes, "it might happen."

"Then make a law against inter-marriage," I says. "That's easy. Nothing comes handier than making a new law. But don't snub the whole race – especially those that have risked their lives for you, Mis' Sykes!"

She stared at me, her face looking all triangular.

"It's for you to show them what to do," I pressed her. "They'll do what you do."

Mis' Sykes kind of stopped winking and breathing.

"I could make them do it, I bet you," she says, proud.

"Of course you could," I egged her on. "You could just take for granted everybody meant to be decent, and carry it off, matter-of-fact."

She stood up and walked around the room, her curl-papers setting strange on her proud ways.

"Don't figger on it, Mis' Sykes," I says. "Just think how much easier it is to be leading folks into something they ain't used to than to have them all laughing at you behind your back for getting come up with."

It wasn't the highest motive – but then, I only used it for a finishing touch. And for a tassel I says, moving off rapid:

"Now I'm going home to stir up my cake for the party."

She didn't say anything, and I went off up the street.

I remember it was one of the times when it came to me, strong, that there's something big and near working away through us, to get us to grow in spite of us. In spite of us.

And when I had my chocolate cake baked, I lay down on the lounge in my dining-room, and planned out how nice it was going to be, that night…

There was a little shower, and then the sun came back again; so by the time we all began to move toward Mis' Sykes's, between seven and eight, everything was fresh and earth-smelling and wet-sweet green. And there was a lovely, flowing light, like in a dream.

Whenever I have a hard thing to do, be it housecleaning or be it quenching down my pride, I always think of the way I see Mis' Sykes do hers. Dressed in her best gray poplin with a white lace yoke, and hair crimped front and back, Mis' Sykes received us all, reserved and formal – not with her real society pucker, but with her most leader-like look.

Everybody was there – nobody was lacking. There must have been above fifty. I couldn't talk for trying to reckon how each of them would act, as soon as they knew.

"Blistering Benson," says Timothy Toplady, that his wife had got him into his frock-tail coat that he keeps to be pall-bearer in, " – kind of nice to welcome in another first family, ain't it?"

Mis' Sykes heard him. "Timothy Toplady, you ain't enough democracy to shake a stick at," she says, regal; and left him squenched, but with his lips moving.

"I'm just crazy to get upstairs in the Oldmoxon House," says Mis' Hubbelthwait. "How do you s'pose they've got it furnished?"

"They're thinking more about the furniture of their heads than of their upstairs chambers," snaps back Mis' Sykes. And I see anew that whatever Mis' Sykes goes into, she goes into up to her eyes, thorough and firm.

"Calliope," she says, "you might run over now and see how they're situated. And be there with them when we come."

I knew that Mis' Sykes couldn't quite bear to make her speech with me looking at her, so I waited out in the entry and heard her do it – I couldn't help that. And honest, I think my respect for her rose while she done so, almost as much as if she'd meant what she said. Mis' Sykes is awful convincing. She can make you wish you'd worn gloves or went without, according to the way she's done herself; and so it was that night, in the cause she'd taken up with, unbeknownst.

She rapped on the table with the blue-glass paper weight.

"Friends," she says, distinct and serene, and everybody's buzzing simmered down. "Before we go over, I must tell you a little about our new – neighbors. The name as you know is Fernandez – Burton Fernandez. The father is a college professor, now in the City doing academic and scholastic work to a degree, as they say. The daughter is in one of our great universities. The mother, a graduate of a Southern college, has traveled extensive in Venice and – and otherwise. I can't believe – " here her voice wobbled just for an instant, "I can't believe that there is one here who will not understand the significance of our party when I add that the family happens to be colored. I am sure that you will agree with me – with me– that these elegant educations merit our approbation."

She made a little pause to let it sink in. Then she topped it off. She told them about the returned soldier and the cross of war.

"If there is anybody," said she – and I knew how she was glancing round among them; "if there is anybody who can't appreciate that, we'll gladly excuse them from the room."

Yes, she done it magnificent. Mis' Sykes carried the day, high-handed. I couldn't but remember, as I slipped out, how in Winter she wears ear-muffs till we've all come to consider going without them is affected.

I ran across the street, still in that golden, pouring light. In the Oldmoxon House was a surprise. Sitting with Mrs. Fernandez before the little light May fire, was her husband, and a slim, tall girl in a smoky brown dress, that was their daughter, home from her school to see her brother. Then the soldier boy came in. Even yet I can't talk much about him: A slight, silent youth, that had left his senior year at college to volunteer in the army, and had come home now to take up his life as best he could; and on the breast of his uniform shone the little cross, won by saving his white captain, under fire.

I sat with them before their hearth, but I didn't half hear what they said. I was looking at the room, and at the four quiet folks that had done so much for themselves – more than any of us in the village, in proportion – and done it on paths none of us had ever had to walk. And the things I was thinking made such a noise I couldn't pay attention to just the talk. Over and over it kept going through my head: In fifty years. In fifty years!

At last came the stir and shuffle I'd been waiting for and the door-bell rang.

"Don't go," they said, when I sprang up; and they followed me into the hall. So there we were when the door opened, and everybody came crowding in.

Mis' Sykes was ahead, and it came to me, when I saw how deathly pale she was, that a prejudice is a living thing, after all – not a dead thing; and that to them that are in its grasp, your heart has got to go out just as much as to them that suffer from it.

I waved my hand to them all, promiscuous, crowding in with their baskets.

"Neighbors," I says, "here's our new neighbors. Name yourselves gradual."

They set their baskets in the hall, and came into the big room where the fire was. And I was kind of nervous, because our men are no good on earth at breaking the ice, except with a pick; and our women, when they get in a strange room, are awful apt to be so taken up looking round them that they forget to work up anything to say.

But I needn't have worried. No sooner had we sat down than somebody spoke out, deep and full. Standing in the midst of us was Burton Fernandez, and it was him. And his voice went as a voice goes when it's got more to carry than just words, or just thoughts.

"My friends," he said, "I cannot bear to have you put yourselves in a false position. When you came, perhaps you didn't know. I mean – did you think, perhaps, that we were of your race?"

It was Mis' Sykes who answered him, grand and positive, and as if she was already thinking up her answer when she was born.

"Certainly not," she says. "We were informed – all of us." Then I saw her get herself together for something tremenjus, that should leave no doubt in anybody's mind. "What of that?" says she.

He stood still for a minute. He had deep-set eyes and a tired face that didn't do anything to itself when he talked. But his voice – that did. And when he began to speak again, it seemed to me that the voice of his whole race was coming through him.

"My friends," he said, "how can we talk of other things when our minds are filled with just what this means to us?"

We all kept still. None of us would have known how to say it, even if we had known what to say.

He said: "I'm not speaking of the difficulties – they don't so much matter. Nothing matters – except that even when we have made the struggle, then we're despised no less. We don't often talk to you about it – it's the surprise of this – you must forgive me. But I want you to know that from the time I began my school life, there have been many who despised, and a few who helped, but never until to-night have there been any of your people with the look and word of neighbor – never once in our lives until to-night."

In the silence that fell when he'd finished, I sat there knowing that even now it wasn't like he thought it was – and I wished that it had been so.

He put his hand on his boy's shoulder.

"It's for his sake," he said, "that I thank you most."

Mis' Sykes was equal to that, too.

"In the name of our whole town," she says to that young soldier, "we thank you for what you've done."

He just nodded a little, and nobody said anything more. And it came to me that most everything is more so than we most always suppose it to be.

When Mis' Toplady don't know quite what to do with a minute, she always brings her hands together in a sort of spontaneous-sounding clap, and kind of bustles her shoulders. She done that now.

"I motion I'll take charge of the refreshments," she says. "Who'll volunteer? I'm crazy to see what-all we've brought."

Everybody laughed, and rustled, easy. And I slipped over to the daughter, standing by herself by the fire-place.

"You take, don't you?" I ask' her.

"'Take?'" she says, puzzled.

"Music, I mean," I told her. (We always mean music when we say "take" in Friendship Village.)

"No," she says, "but my brother plays, sometimes."

The soldier sat down to the piano, when I asked him, and he played, soft and strong, and something beautiful. His cross shone on his breast when he moved. And me, I stood by the piano, and I heard the soul of the music come gentling through his soul, just like it didn't make any difference to the music, one way or the other…

Music. Music that spoke. Music that sounded like laughing voices… No, for it was laughing voices…

I opened my eyes, and there in my dining-room, by the lounge, stood Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb, laughing at me for being asleep. Then they sat down by me, and they didn't laugh any more.

"Calliope," Mis' Toplady says, "Mis' Sykes has been round to everybody, and told them about the Oldmoxon House folks."

"And she took a vote on what to do to-night," says Mame Holcomb.

"Giving a little advice of her own, by the wayside," Mis' Toplady adds.

I sat up and looked at them. With the soldier's music still in my ears, I couldn't take it in.

"You don't mean – " I tried to ask them.

"That's it," says Mis' Toplady. "Everybody voted to have a public meeting to honor the soldiers – the colored soldier with the rest. But that's as far as it will go."

"But he don't want to be honored!" I cried. "He wants to be neighbored – the way anybody does when they're worth it."

"Mis' Sykes says," says Mis' Toplady, "that we mustn't forget what is fitting and what isn't."

And Mis' Holcomb added: "She carried it off grand. Everybody thinks just the way she does."

My reception-surprise cake stood ready on the table. After a while, we three sat down around it, and cut it for ourselves. But all the while we ate, that soldier's music was still playing for me; and what hadn't happened was more real for me than the things that were true.

THE BROTHER-MAN 9

When the New Race comes – those whom Hudson calls "that blameless, spiritualized race that is to follow" – surely they will look back with some sense of actual romance upon the faint tapers which we now light, both individual and social tapers. They will make their allowance for us, as do we for the ambiguous knights of chivalry. And while the New Race will shudder at us – at our disorganization with its war, its poverty and its other crime – yet I think that they will love us a little for our ineffectual ministries, as already we love them for exceeding our utmost dream.

Don't you love a love-story; starting right before your eyes as casual as if it was preserves getting cooked or parsley coming up? It doesn't often happen to me to see one start, but once it did. It didn't start like anything at all that was going to be anything, but just still and quiet, same as the stars come out. I guess that's the way most great things move, isn't it? Still and quiet, like stars coming out. Or similar to stars.

It was the time of the Proudfits' big what-they-called week-end parties, and it was the Saturday of the biggest of them, when a dozen city people came down to Friendship Village for the lark. And with them was to come a Piano Lady and a Violin Man – and a man I'd known about in the magazines, a Novel-and-Poem Man that writes the kind of things that gets through all the walls between you and the world, so's you can talk to everything there is. I was crazy to see the Novel-and-Poem Man – from behind somewheres, though, so's he wouldn't see me and look down on me. And when Miss Clementina Proudfit asked me to bring her out some things from the city Saturday night, chocolate peppermints and red candles and like that, and said she'd send the automobile to the train for me to fetch up the things and see the decorations, I was real pleased. But I was the most excited about maybe seeing the Poem-and-Novel Man.

"What's he like, Miss Clementina?" I ask' her. "When I hear his name I feel like when I hear the President's. Or even more that way."

"I've never met him," she says. "Mother knows him – he's her lion, not mine."

"He writes lovely things," I says, "things that makes you feel like everybody's way of doing is only lukewarm, and like you could just bring yourself to a boil to do good and straighten things out in the world, no matter what the lukewarm-way folks thought."

Miss Clementina looked over to me with a wonderful way she had – beautiful face and beautiful eyes softening to Summer.

"I know – know," she says; "I dread meeting him, for fear he doesn't mean it."

I knew what she meant. You can mean a thing you write in a book, or that you say in talk, or for other folks to do. But meaning it for living it – that's different.

I came out from the city that night on the accommodation, tired to death and loaded down with bundles for everybody in Friendship Village. Folks used to send into town by me for everything but stoves and wagons, though I wouldn't buy anything there except what you can't buy in the village: lamb's-wool for comforters, and cut-glass and baby-pushers, and shrimps – that Silas won't keep in the post-office store, because they don't agree with his stomach. Well, I was all packages that night, and it was through dropping one in the seat in front of me that I first saw the little boy.

He was laying down, getting to sleep if he could and pulling his eyes open occasional to see what was going on around him. His mother had had the seat turned, and she sat there beyond him, facing me, and I noticed her – flat red cheeks, an ostrich feather broke in the middle, blue and red stone rings on three fingers, and giving a good deal of attention to studying the folks around her. She was the kind of woman you see and don't look back to, 'count of other things interesting you more.

But the little boy, he was different. He wasn't more than a year old, and he didn't look that – and his cheeks were flushed and his eyelashes and mouth made you think "My!" I remember feeling I didn't see how the woman could keep from waking him up, just to prove he was hers and she could if she wanted to.

Instead of that, all she did was continually to get up and go out of the car. Every station we stopped at – and the accommodation acts like it was made for the stations and not the stations for it – she was up and out, as if the town was something swimming up to the car-door to speak to her. She'd leave the baby asleep in the seat, and I wondered what would happen if he woke up while she was gone, and started to roll. She stayed every time up till after the train started – I didn't wonder it made her cold, and that after a bit she put on her coat before she went. And once or twice she carried out her valise with her, as if she might have expected somebody to be there to get it. "Mebbe she's got somebody's laundry," thinks I, "and mebbe a stranger has asked her to bring it out on the train and she can't remember what station it's to be put off at." They send things to stations along the way a lot on the accommodation – everybody being neighbors, so.

Well, when we got to the Junction, out she went again, cloak and valise and all. But I didn't think much about her then, because at the Junction it's always all excitement, being that's where they switch the parlor car off the train, and whoever is in it for Friendship Village has to come back in the day coach for the rest of the way, and be just folks. And among those that came back that night was the Brother-man.