My Ántonia
front of him with his gold-headed cane. His yellow face was lifted in
the light, with a show of white teeth, all grinning, and his shrunken,
papery eyelids lay motionless over his blind eyes.
‘Good evening, gentlemen. No ladies here? Good evening, gentlemen. We
going to have a little music? Some of you gentlemen going to play for
me this evening?’ It was the soft, amiable Negro voice, like those I
remembered from early childhood, with the note of docile subservience
in it. He had the Negro head, too; almost no head at all; nothing
behind the ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool. He would
have been repulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy. It
was the happiest face I had seen since I left Virginia.
He felt his way directly to the piano. The moment he sat down, I
noticed the nervous infirmity of which Mrs. Harling had told me. When
he was sitting, or standing still, he swayed back and forth
incessantly, like a rocking toy. At the piano, he swayed in time to the
music, and when he was not playing, his body kept up this motion, like
an empty mill grinding on. He found the pedals and tried them, ran his
yellow hands up and down the keys a few times, tinkling off scales,
then turned to the company.
‘She seems all right, gentlemen. Nothing happened to her since the last
time I was here. Mrs. Gardener, she always has this piano tuned up
before I come. Now gentlemen, I expect you’ve all got grand voices.
Seems like we might have some good old plantation songs tonight.’
The men gathered round him, as he began to play ‘My Old Kentucky Home.’
They sang one Negro melody after another, while the mulatto sat rocking
himself, his head thrown back, his yellow face lifted, his shrivelled
eyelids never fluttering.
He was born in the Far South, on the d’Arnault plantation, where the
spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted. When he was three weeks
old, he had an illness which left him totally blind. As soon as he was
old enough to sit up alone and toddle about, another affliction, the
nervous motion of his body, became apparent. His mother, a buxom young
Negro wench who was laundress for the d’Arnaults, concluded that her
blind baby was ‘not right’ in his head, and she was ashamed of him. She
loved him devotedly, but he was so ugly, with his sunken eyes and his
‘fidgets,’ that she hid him away from people. All the dainties she
brought down from the Big House were for the blind child, and she beat
and cuffed her other children whenever she found them teasing him or
trying to get his chicken-bone away from him. He began to talk early,
remembered everything he heard, and his mammy said he ‘wasn’t all
wrong.’ She named him Samson, because he was blind, but on the
plantation he was known as ‘yellow Martha’s simple child.’ He was
docile and obedient, but when he was six years old he began to run away
from home, always taking the same direction. He felt his way through
the lilacs, along the boxwood hedge, up to the south wing of the Big
House, where Miss Nellie d’Arnault practised the piano every morning.
This angered his mother more than anything else he could have done; she
was so ashamed of his ugliness that she couldn’t bear to have white
folks see him. Whenever she caught him slipping away from the cabin,
she whipped him unmercifully, and told him what dreadful things old Mr.
d’Arnault would do to him if he ever found him near the Big House. But
the next time Samson had a chance, he ran away again. If Miss d’Arnault
stopped practising for a moment and went toward the window, she saw
this hideous little pickaninny, dressed in an old piece of sacking,
standing in the open space between the hollyhock rows, his body rocking
automatically, his blind face lifted to the sun and wearing an
expression of idiotic rapture. Often she was tempted to tell Martha
that the child must be kept at home, but somehow the memory of his
foolish, happy face deterred her. She remembered that his sense of
hearing was nearly all he had—though it did not occur to her that he
might have more of it than other children.
One day Samson was standing thus while Miss Nellie was playing her
lesson to her music-teacher. The windows were open. He heard them get
up from the piano, talk a little while, and then leave the room. He
heard the door close after them. He crept up to the front windows and
stuck his head in: there was no one there. He could always detect the
presence of anyone in a room. He put one foot over the window-sill and
straddled it.
His mother had told him over and over how his master would give him to
the big mastiff if he ever found him ‘meddling.’ Samson had got too
near the mastiff’s kennel once, and had felt his terrible breath in his
face. He thought about that, but he pulled in his other foot.
Through the dark he found his way to the Thing, to its mouth. He
touched it softly, and it answered softly, kindly. He shivered and
stood still. Then he began to feel it all over, ran his finger-tips
along the slippery sides, embraced the carved legs, tried to get some
conception of its shape and size, of the space it occupied in primeval
night. It was cold and hard, and like nothing else in his black
universe. He went back to its mouth, began at one end of the keyboard
and felt his way down into the mellow thunder, as far as he could go.
He seemed to know that it must be done with the fingers, not with the
fists or the feet. He approached this highly artificial instrument
through a mere instinct, and coupled himself to it, as if he knew it
was to piece him out and make a whole creature of him. After he had
tried over all the sounds, he began to finger out passages from things
Miss Nellie had been practising, passages that were already his, that
lay under the bone of his pinched, conical little skull, definite as
animal desires.
The door opened; Miss Nellie and her music-master stood behind it, but
blind Samson, who was so sensitive to presences, did not know they were
there. He was feeling out the pattern that lay all ready-made on the
big and little keys. When he paused for a moment, because the sound was
wrong and he wanted another, Miss Nellie spoke softly. He whirled about
in a spasm of terror, leaped forward in the dark, struck his head on
the open window, and fell screaming and bleeding to the floor. He had
what his mother called a fit. The doctor came and gave him opium.
When Samson was well again, his young mistress led him back to the
piano. Several teachers experimented with him. They found he had
absolute pitch, and a remarkable memory. As a very young child he could
repeat, after a fashion, any composition that was played for him. No
matter how many wrong notes he struck, he never lost the intention of a
passage, he brought the substance of it across by irregular and
astonishing means. He wore his teachers out. He could never learn like
other people, never acquired any finish. He was always a Negro prodigy
who played barbarously and wonderfully. As piano-playing, it was
perhaps abominable, but as music it was something real, vitalized by a
sense of rhythm that was stronger than his other physical senses—that
not only filled his dark mind, but worried his body incessantly. To
hear him, to watch him, was to see a Negro enjoying himself as only a
Negro can. It was as if all the agreeable sensations possible to
creatures of flesh and blood were heaped up on those black-and-white
keys, and he were gloating over them and trickling them through his
yellow fingers.
In the middle of a crashing waltz, d’Arnault suddenly began to play
softly, and, turning to one of the men who stood behind him, whispered,
‘Somebody dancing in there.’ He jerked his bullet-head toward the
dining-room. ‘I hear little feet—girls, I spect.’
Anson Kirkpatrick mounted a chair and peeped over the transom.
Springing down, he wrenched open the doors and ran out into the
dining-room. Tiny and Lena, Ántonia and Mary Dusak, were waltzing in
the middle of the floor. They separated and fled toward the kitchen,
giggling.
Kirkpatrick caught Tiny by the elbows. ‘What’s the matter with you
girls? Dancing out here by yourselves, when there’s a roomful of
lonesome men on the other side of the partition! Introduce me to your
friends, Tiny.’
The girls, still laughing, were trying to escape. Tiny looked alarmed.
‘Mrs. Gardener wouldn’t like it,’ she protested. ‘She’d be awful mad if
you was to come out here and dance with us.’
‘Mrs. Gardener’s in Omaha, girl. Now, you’re Lena, are you?—and you’re
Tony and you’re Mary. Have I got you all straight?’
O’Reilly and the others began to pile the chairs on the tables. Johnnie
Gardener ran in from the office.
‘Easy, boys, easy!’ he entreated them. ‘You’ll wake the cook, and
there’ll be the devil to pay for me. She won’t hear the music, but
she’ll be down the minute anything’s moved in the dining-room.’
‘Oh, what do you care, Johnnie? Fire the cook and wire Molly to bring
another. Come along, nobody’ll tell tales.’
Johnnie shook his head. ‘’S a fact, boys,’ he said confidentially. ‘If
I take a drink in Black Hawk, Molly knows it in Omaha!’
His guests laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Oh, we’ll make it
all right with Molly. Get your back up, Johnnie.’
Molly was Mrs. Gardener’s name, of course. ‘Molly Bawn’ was painted in
large blue letters on the glossy white sides of the hotel bus, and
‘Molly’ was engraved inside Johnnie’s ring and on his
watch-case—doubtless on his heart, too. He was an affectionate little
man, and he thought his wife a wonderful woman; he knew that without
her he would hardly be more than a clerk in some other man’s hotel.
At a word from Kirkpatrick, d’Arnault spread himself out over the
piano, and began to draw the dance music out of it, while the
perspiration shone on his short wool and on his uplifted face. He
looked like some glistening African god of pleasure, full of strong,
savage blood. Whenever the dancers paused to change partners or to
catch breath, he would boom out softly, ‘Who’s that goin’ back on me?
One of these city gentlemen, I bet! Now, you girls, you ain’t goin’ to
let that floor get cold?’
Ántonia seemed frightened at first, and kept looking questioningly at
Lena and Tiny over Willy O’Reilly’s shoulder. Tiny Soderball was trim
and slender, with lively little feet and pretty ankles—she wore her
dresses very short. She was quicker in speech, lighter in movement and
manner than the other girls. Mary Dusak was broad and brown of
countenance, slightly marked by smallpox, but handsome for all that.
She had beautiful chestnut hair, coils of it; her forehead was low and
smooth, and her commanding dark eyes regarded the world indifferently
and fearlessly. She looked bold and resourceful and unscrupulous, and
she was all of these. They were handsome girls, had the fresh colour of
their country upbringing, and in their eyes that brilliancy which is
called—by no metaphor, alas!—‘the light of youth.’
D’Arnault played until his manager came and shut the piano. Before he
left us, he showed us his gold watch which struck the hours, and a
topaz ring, given him by some Russian nobleman who delighted in Negro
melodies, and had heard d’Arnault play in New Orleans. At last he
tapped his way upstairs, after bowing to everybody, docile and happy. I
walked home with Ántonia. We were so excited that we dreaded to go to
bed. We lingered a long while at the Harlings’ gate, whispering in the
cold until the restlessness was slowly chilled out of us.
VIII
The Harling children and I were never happier, never felt more
contented and secure, than in the weeks of spring which broke that long
winter. We were out all day in the thin sunshine, helping Mrs. Harling
and Tony break the ground and plant the garden, dig around the orchard