BEN É T, Stephen Vincent


John Brown's Body

…..

There were three stout pillars that held up all

The weight and tradition of Wingate Hall.

One was Cudjo and one was you

And the third was the mistress, Mary Lou.

Mary Lou Wingate, as slightly made

And as hard to break as a rapier-blade.

Bristol's daughter and Wingate's bride,

Never well since the last child died

But staring at pain with courteous eyes.

When the pain outwits it, the body dies,

Meanwhile the body bears the pain.

She loved her hands and they made her vain,

The tiny hands of her generation

That gathered the reins of the whole plantation;

The velvet sheathing the steel demurely

In the trained, light grip that holds so surely.

She was at work by candlelight,

She was at work in the dead of night,

Smoothing out troubles and healing schisms

And doctoring phthisics and rheumatisms,

Guiding the cooking and watching the baking,

The sewing, the soap-and-candle-making,

The brewing, the darning, the lady-daughters,

The births and deaths in the negro-quarters,

Seeing that Suke had some new, strong shoes

And Joe got a week in the calaboose,

While Dicey's Jacob escaped a whipping

And the jellybag dripped with its proper dripping,

And the shirts and estrangements were neatly mended,

And all of the tasks that never ended.

Her manner was gracious but hardly fervent

And she seldom raised her voice to a servant.

She was often mistaken, not often blind,

And she knew the whole duty of womankind,

To take the burden and have the power

And seem like the well-protected flower,

To manage a dozen industries

With a casual gesture in scraps of ease,

To hate the sin and to love the sinner

And to see that the gentlemen got their dinner

Ready and plenty and piping-hot

Whether you wanted to eat or not.

And always, always, to have the charm

That makes the gentlemen take your arm

But never the bright, unseemly spell

That makes strange gentlemen love too well,

Once you were married and settled down

With a suitable gentleman of your own.

And when that happened, and you had bred

The requisite children, living and dead,

To pity the fool and comfort the weak

And always let the gentlemen speak,

To succor your love from deep-struck roots

When gentlemen went to bed in their boots,

And manage a gentleman's whole plantation

In the manner befitting your female station.

This was the creed that her mother taught her

And the creed that she taught to every daughter.

She knew her Bible—and how to flirt

With a swansdown fan and a brocade skirt.

For she trusted in God but she liked formalities

And the world and Heaven were both realities.

—In Heaven, of course, we should all be equal,

But, until we came to that golden sequel,

Gentility must keep to gentility

Where God and breeding had made things stable,

While the rest of the cosmos deserved civility

But dined in its boots at the second-table.

This view may be reckoned a trifle narrow,

But it had the driving force of an arrow,

And it helped Mary Lou to stand up straight,

For she was gentle, but she could hate

And she hated the North with the hate of Jael

When the dry hot hands went seeking the nail,

The terrible hate of women's ire,

The smoky, the long-consuming fire.

The Yankees were devils, and she could pray,

For devils, no doubt, upon Judgment Day,

But now in the world, she would hate them still

And send the gentlemen out to kill.

The gentlemen killed and the gentlemen died,

But she was the South's incarnate pride

That mended the broken gentlemen

And sent them out to the war again,

That kept the house with the men away

And baked the bricks where there was no clay,

Made courage from terror and bread from bran

And propped the South on a swansdown fan

Through four long years of ruin and stress,

The pride—and the deadly bitterness.

Let us look at her now, let us see her plain,

She will never be quite like this again.

Her house is rocking under the blast

And she hears it tremble, and still stands fast,

But this is the last, this is the last.

The last of the wine and the white corn meal,

The last high fiddle singing the reel,

The last of the silk with the Paris label,

The last blood-thoroughbred safe in the stable

—Yellow corn meal and a jackass colt,

A door that swings on a broken bolt,

Brittle old letters spotted with tears

And a wound that rankles for fifty years—

This is the last of Wingate Hall,

The last bright August before the Fall,

Death has been near, and Death has passed,

But this is the last, this is the last.

There will be hope, and a scratching pen,

There will be cooking for tired men,

The waiting for news with shut, hard fists,

And the blurred, strange names in the battle-lists,

The April sun and the April rain,

But never this day come back again.

…..