Fox's Earth - Hardcover

By two P.M. they had walked for half an hour, the man and his family, and the sweat of that sun-blanched September Saturday in 1903 lay sour in waistbands and collars and dampened pale hair and ran rank down thin necks and backs and legs. Pink dust puffed and flew from beneath the wheels of passing wagons and buggies, coating wet skin miserably and mingling with residual traces of cotton lint and waste to catch in the creases of elbows and neck and in hair. The dust was the effluvia of the great brick mill behind them to the south, where they all worked... all except the small girl and the woman. It had not rained for nearly six weeks, and the small town lay in a near-coma of drought and unrelenting heat.

In the town, in backyards and browning gardens and over fences, the wives of the small merchants and liverymen and smiths and draymen paused over their black-iron washpots, their chicken coops, and their clotheslines. Steaming in close-buttoned, high-collared shirtwaists and long, swathing skirts, viciously bound in viselike, back-laced corsets, they pushed back straggling hair and mopped red faces and sighed to one another.

"Cruel hot, ain't it?" "Will it ever rain?" "Have you got summer sickness at your house? Two of mine are down with it." "Dear Lord, we need rain."

Downtown, their husbands struggled against the relentless pall of dust that lay over their stores and wagons and wares, and hauled water for their stock, and scanned the white-bronze sky a dozen times a day. The bell on the volunteer fire wagon rang frequently, and old Dr. Hopkins's buggy and young Dr. Hopkins's phaeton were seen often on the choking streets. Voices dropped, faces stilled, heads turned slowly when the bell rang and the buggy rolled. With the murderous heat and drought came the threat of the summer murderers: Fire. Typhoid, in stagnant and diminished wells and rain barrels and reservoirs. Infantile paralysis, from no one knew where.

But outside the town, in the rolling pink and green fields, the farmers sweated and stank and stumbled and drank more often from the water wagon... and smiled.

"Good for the cotton, though, ain't it?" "Cotton looks real good this year. Real good." "Heard in town that cotton might go as high as twelve this fall, maybe higher."

Cotton! In Sparta, and all over the Deep South in that malignant third September of the new century, cotton was once more the lifeblood of the red land. For the first time since the guns of Sumter, in Charleston, tolled the death knell of the great plantations and the slave nation that supported them, southern agriculture was reversing its sickening downward spiral... or, at least, the descent was becoming markedly less precipitous. And once again it was cotton that fueled the march back to prosperity and former glory. Not cotton in the role it had played before the war, when black backs broke in endless red fields to send the white tide surging north to mills and manufacturers. But cotton in a new role: grown by small farmers on small, poor farms, hauled in their own homemade, iron-wheeled wagons by lean-honed mules into the nearest town, to be sold on marketing day and fed into the maws of the great, forbidding mills that had sprung up across the southern earth like ravenous mushrooms.

After the Civil War there had been only a scant handful of crude mills operating in the South; by 1900, four hundred mills bulked dark against the sky. And across the South, more than a quarter of a million of the white tenant farmers and sharecroppers, reduced by poverty of land, purse, and spirit to subsisting at the level of the blacks they despised and, worse, to working side by side with them, had flown for refuge into the mills. Cotton. What was good for cotton was good for the South, and those who damned the heat and drought of early autumn did so in small voices.

Around Sparta, on this late summer afternoon, the roads into town billowed and thundered with a steady stream of mules and white-laden wagons. Farm families sat decorously in large wagons and a few newer buggies, their cotton on the way to market and their purses filled with coins to buy household supplies and a small luxury or two in the shops of town. Saturday. Cotton-market day.

In all the crowd streaming into Sparta that Saturday, only Negroes walked in the dust of the roadside. Negroes and the family of Cater Yancey. None of the families from the rotting, rectilinear mill village owned buggies or wagons, let alone mules to pull them, but there were no other mill families afoot on the road into town that day. They all did their meager shopping at the company commissary, where thin-strung credit could be spun even tauter against the hopelessly small wages that never were enough. The Yanceys alone walked the streets of Sparta, with Cater at their head, his back straight and rigid in the dusty black clawhammer coat he wore, summer and winter, for Sunday preaching and weddings and funerals and town, his blue eyes far-focused and flat with hating. He did not break the long, rolling stride that he had learned on the blue mountains of North Georgia when he took his first steps. Seventy-two hours a week for twenty-six years as a spinner in the roaring, radiant hells of two cotton mills had not crushed the long hill stride from his legs nor dimmed the mad blue of his eyes. The cruel, stern God of his Presbyterian ancestry thundered in his head day and night, and the Celtic gods of his ancestral Scotland chanted and howled silently to him of blood and red, sweet pleasures and wild rites in the thin blue air of the Highlands, and both took his tongue in turn on Sundays when he sometimes preached at the unpainted little church in the mill village, when the regular Baptist preacher from town had fatter and sleeker fish to fry.

The silent, dull-eyed congregation understood little of his garbled litany, but his yellow and beautiful head and long white hands stirred and fed them, and his terrible fervor frightened and excited them as little else in their deadened days did. On the Sundays he did not preach, he herded his cowed family into the bare little front room of the mill house, and cried aloud from the Old Testament to them for hours, and harangued and exhorted them in a voice of ringing brass until the smaller children wept with fear, and all trembled. Cater's family knew that he could not read, that his prodigious store of biblical knowledge had been learned at the knee of the mad old grandmother who had raised him on her wild mountaintop; but no one else knew, and his repertoire was much admired in the mill village.

After the sessions in the church and the front room, he was white and drained and silent, gone away somewhere within himself; he remembered nothing of what he had said. Most who heard him agreed that it was the Holy Spirit who spoke through Brother Yancey, but some, Ruth and Pearl Yancey among them, knew that it was something or someone else, and feared and hated the sessions, recognizing without being able to name it the thing that truly spoke on those mornings: his amorphous and immutable madness. They did not protest, for Cater Yancey was a violent and dangerous man. He beat his family frequently -- long, savage beatings with the heavy length of mule harness he kept for the purpose on a peg on the kitchen wall. They stifled their cries as best they could, with fists and sometimes wads of skirt pressed to their mouths, for all knew that to cry out was to fuel his efforts. Even sly, proud Pearl Steed Yancey sometimes broke and cried aloud under the harness. But small Ruth never did. She had been sustained since her earliest memory by a bright, hard, and perfect hatred of her father.

It burned steadily and purely on this afternoon as she followed him, matching his stride step for step, not lifting her hand to wipe away the perspiration that ran from her own white-blond hair and blinded her blue eyes, or to claw the choking dust from her mouth. There were whimpers from eight-year-old Sarah and nine-year-old Hagar, and mutinous mutters and whispered oaths from twelve-year-old Lot, and Isaac, who was thirteen. But Ruth, aged ten and a miniature replica of Cater Yancey, was silent in her hate. If she were silent enough, still enough, except for her bare feet in the whispering dust, if she kept her blue eyes fixed steadily enough on his back, if she concentrated hard enough on the flame of her hatred for him, she could shut out the sights and sounds of the people on the road beside her, get through their scalding mission in the stores of Sparta and back out on the road toward home again without ever once meeting a pair of searing, scornful town eyes or hearing a single hissed epithet of "linthead" or "mill rat."

It seemed to her on those hated once-a-month Saturday trips that the town eyes bit into her like rodents, and in a sense she was right; eyes did rest more often on her than on the other children of Pearl and Cater Yancey, and lingered longer. For Ruth Steed Yancey was an extraordinarily, startlingly beautiful child, and the promise of a womanhood so spectacular as to stop breath hung about her, even at ten. Pearl whispered often to her daughter that she was pretty, and a special child, marked for a special destiny, but since any Yancey child who gazed longer into the crazed shard of Cater's shaving mirror than it took to straighten hair into seemliness would quickly feel the wrath of the mule harness, Ruth did not know the extent of her physical comeliness, and would not for yet a little while longer.

Cater Yancey's mission on those Saturdays was threefold. One, he took his family among the Philistines of Sparta to show them the sins of the flesh and the evils of affluence, intoning loudly before the glittering array of goods in Dorrance's Mercantile and Mabry's Drugstore and pressing their faces ruthlessly to the glass windows of the Sparta Cafe and Wright's glorious barbershop. He stopped them before the alien mystery of the Sparta telephone exchange, to chant of the evils of mindless progress against the Old Ways, and ...