7. Take white things out of kettle with broom handel, rench, then blew and starch.

  8. Spred tee towels on grass.

  9. Hang old rags on fence.

  10. Pour rench water in flowerbed,

  11. Scrub porch with sopy water.

  12. Turn tubs upside down.

  13. Go put on clean dress. Smooth hair with side combs, brew cup of tea, set and rest and rock a spell and count blessins.

  Perhaps the only direction still relevant is “count blessins.” But in our day and time, for too many reasons to enumerate, that direction, too, may be antiquated.

  The main event of the afternoon was to be a historical parade, arranged by one of the most highly regarded citizens of the region, an efficient, handsome, witty man, married to a very attractive and very blond young woman. He is the great-grandson of a Comanche chief and is usually called Nick, for the simple reason that his real name is unpronounceable by most Todd County tongues. Nick is noted for his public spirit. A trained emergency medical technician in a doctorless community, he is a member of the Todd County Rescue Squad, and is on call day and night, without pay. Now, as master of the parade, he wanted to get an antiquated farm wagon, with appropriate mules, to be driven by a certain grizzled old black of the outlying country, himself a relic of another era. The old man he wanted lived some seven miles away, and was of years uncountable. He was, he said, getting too old to be bothered by such goings on. But the old-fashioned black man had an afterthought. He said he might do it after all—if he had that stuff that used to come sealed up in a quart fruit jar and looked like water but wasn’t. The master of the parade, thinking how long it had been since the repeal of the Volstead Act, was hard put to it. But he proposed a compromise: “Would some of that store-bought stuff that comes in a big, flat bottle, brown, not white, and stuck in a brown paper bag, the kind of stuff white folks drinks—would that do?” After weighing the question, the old man said yes, it would do. If it held as much as a quart jar. I am not informed what hand passed the brown paper sack, but it was passed. Then on the great day, unpredictably—or predictably—after several nips from the bottle in the brown paper bag the mule driver, at a crucial point in the parade, dropped reins, stopped, lifted the bag, and held it high for a long time. The mules, meanwhile, had ventured, of their own accord, toward the railroad tracks. It took great powers of persuasion on the part of the Comanche, along with physical strength, to get things back in order.

  June 3rd, the birthday, to be commemorated by more serious proceedings than even the drama and the ball, dawned unseasonably cool, with overcast skies, but it cleared later. Above the gateway to the little park hung the flags of the United States, the Confederacy, and the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The base of the monument served as a platform, and the railings of the fourteen steps leading to it were draped with red-white-and-blue bunting. At 1 P.M., with an audience mostly in “church clothes,” in contrast to the casual attire at the dramatic productions, the commemoration opened. On the platform were various dignitaries, including the president of the Todd County Historical Society, the president of the Kentucky Historical Society, the curator of the museums and shrines of the Kentucky Department of Parks, the president of the Jefferson Davis Birthplace Association, David Wright, who had placed the bronze cap on the peak of the monument back in 1924, and the speaker of the occasion—Dr. Holman Hamilton, professor of history emeritus at the University of Kentucky. A letter of regret from President Carter at not being able to attend and speak was read, as was a statement he made on signing the document that returned citizenship to Davis. Dr. Hamilton included in his main address a quotation from Davis blessing Kentucky on his last visit to Fairview, in 1886. And so the ceremony ended.

  IT is a rainy morning in late August. I want to stand before the monument to see it rear, as years before, blank and lonely against the sky. There is no person in sight—none near the towering obelisk. And there is nobody beneath that structure. On December 11, 1889, in New Orleans, a hearse, drawn by black horses, bearing a now whittled-down and nearly weightless human burden, had led the longest funeral procession ever seen in that city out to the Metaire Cemetery. But the last tribute was to be a struggle among states for possession of the trivial remains of a man who in life had known as much revilement as honor. Now Kentucky claimed a son and Georgia a grandson, while Montgomery, the seat of the founding of the Confederacy, gave Alabama a claim. But Virginia quite properly won the contest, for it was here, in Richmond, that Davis had endured his fame and his tragedy. So on May 31, 1893, with full military honors, the body of the President of the Confederacy was re-interred in Hollywood Cemetery—with what comic irony in that name of the cemetery, so appropriate to “Gone with the Wind.” As a less comic irony, we may remember that the body now lay on the banks of the James River, where an America was born that the dead man had outlived.

  That morning, last August, I had already stood beside occupied graves, some miles southward of Fairview. My brother and I—wordless, as usual on such occasions—had observed the graves of our parents, then of his first wife, and then of one of the two persons who had been my closest friends in boyhood, the one who had been my tutor in boyish woodcraft, and who, through short years of greatness and long years of failure, had remained a friend. Then my brother said, ccFve tried to find out all I can down here about Old Jeff”—the one who had trodden the crossties with his croker sack on his way to town to do his “Sat’dy traden.” Nobody, my brother added, knew where he had come from. It seemed that he had just suddenly appeared as what he was.

  “But he’s over there now in the potter’s field,” my brother said—an unmowed strip of weeds and grass near the railroad, where the heavy freights groaned up a long grade eastward. And there, too, was the grave of Old Jeff’s wife, the tombstone the handiwork of the bereaved, twisted old husband, the town’s feckless jack-of-all-trades, whose grief-stricken masterpiece was scarcely a masterpiece. He had obviously first made a wooden box, some twenty inches by thirty, and about five inches deep, then filled it with cement, probably bracing it with scraps of chickenwire. At last, before the cement had really hardened, he had, with some blunt blade, scratched on an epitaph. It said, with brute economy of language and space:

  GONE

  TO REST

  MANDY

  DAVIS

  BORN APRIL

  17-1877

  DIED JULY

  23-1941

  Beside the crank-sided slab was a neater little stone, commercial-made—the kind a grateful government sets up to commemorate its penniless veteran. From it I learned that Old Jeff, too, had served his country, at the time of the Spanish-American War and a little thereafter. In heroism or in quaking fear—it is not recorded.

  As for the great monument of the other Jeff Davis, who had received enemy lead into his own body and continued to sit his mount while a boot filled with blood, it stood there blank, whiter now after a refurbishing for the commemoration: preternaturally white against the slow, curdling grayness of clouding sky, and somehow, suddenly, meaningless.

  The growth of thistle and mullein, the discarded planks, the random shacks of the process of building, the scrabble pastures stretching into distance—all the things I remembered from boyhood had changed. The modest park is now green and is mowed with official efficiency. It is a rectangle something more than a city block wide and two or three long, reaching into the straggling settlement. A few abandoned and decaying frame houses face the park, and on the street along one side are several boxlike, tidy little white houses of recent vintage and one great chunk of a reddish brick building, two stories high or more, ugly, looking out of place. It was built after the monument, I learned, and was once the schoolhouse but is now the Arm of the Lord Trinity Pentecostal Church, staring across at the worldly glory and vainglory of an ex-Baptist turned Episcopalian. A couple of buildings down the main street stands a rather handsome, well-maintained old white farmhouse, and beyond it the fields stretch westward away into the fertile green of Christian County.

  I wander back into the park. The drizzle has ceased, but now and then a drop falling from a higher vantage point makes its hollow resonance on a stout oak leaf. Over to one side, slick with wet, a few painted metal seesaws, slides, and swings look out of place in the almost rural setting. But no doubt in bright summer weather, when cars pull in bearing all kinds of license plates and carrying passengers who know, by and large, as little about the history of the nation as about the difference between the doctrine of transubstantiation and that of consubstantiation, and when candy wrappers and lunch wrappers spot the officially mowed grass, some children do find use for the swings and seesaws.

  Then, no doubt, the spirit of the man to whom the monument is erected, wherever and whatever it may be, may look down with pleasure on the gaiety of children; for, in spite of all rigidity of character, stiffness of dignity, abstract logicality, and locked-in personality, he had a simple affection for the very young and naturally won their confidence. More wryly, perhaps, he looks down on the well-meant and ignorant charade honoring his sufferings and triumphs.

  Davis died without rancor, and wishing us all well. But if he were not now defenseless in death, he would no doubt reject the citizenship we so charitably thrust upon him. In life, in his old-fashioned way, he would accept no pardon, for pardon could be construed to imply wrongdoing, and wrongdoing was what, in honor and principle, he denied. (As did Lee, quite specifically.) So he holds eternal franchise in that shadowy, ages-ago-established, rarely remembered nation of men and women who in their brief lives learned the true definition of honor, far beyond the triviality of the code duello once defended by the young Davis.

  Some historians say that with Appomattox the “business ethic” became triumphant in American life, and that common speech reflects the notion. “Mr. Smith,” we say, “is worth a million dollars”: Mr. Smith is no longer a person—he is a million dollars. Suppose that Lincoln, who, some historians say, scarcely understood the world he helped to bring to birth, or even the fuddled Grant, who after the farce of his Presidency and his idiotic business operations redeemed himself in his final days of lonely suffering and honor—suppose Lincoln or Grant should have citizenship thrust upon him by the America of today. Would either happily accept citizenship in a nation that sometimes seems technologically and philosophically devoted to the depersonalization of men? In a way, in their irrefrangible personal identity, Lincoln and Grant were almost as old-fashioned as Jefferson Davis.

  MEANWHILE, some of us may now and then look up at the obelisk in Todd County, white against sunny or cloudy sky, and remember what Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the first historian, said of his purpose in writing—in creating the first great verbal monument: “. . . that the great deeds of men may not be forgotten . . . whether Greek or foreigners; and especially the causes of their wars.”

 

 

  Robert Penn Warren, Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back

 

 

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