The Ordways by William Humphrey Read Free Book Online Page A

us have in mind: the Civil War—but all of the past. If the Civil War is more alive to the Southerner than to the Northerner it is because all the past is, and this is so because the Southerner has a sense of having been present there himself in the person of one or more of his ancestors. The War forms merely a chapter—the most vivid single chapter, it is true, but still just one chapter—in his book of books, the bible of his family—which is not to say the family Bible, but rather that collection transmitted orally from father to son of proverbs and prophecies, legends, laws, traditions of the origins and tales of the wanderings of his own tribe. For it is this, not any fixation on the Civil War, but this feeling of identity with his dead (who are the past) which characterizes and explains the Southerner, which accounts for his inflexible conservatism, his lawlessness and love of violence, his exaggerated respect for old age, his stubborn resistance to change, his hospitality and his xenophobia, his legalism and his anarchy. It is with kin, not causes, that the Southerner is linked. Confederate Great-grandfather lived in stirring and memorable times, but he is not remembered by his descendants for his (probably undistinguished) part in the Battle of Bull Run; rather, the Battle of Bull Run is remembered because Great-grandfather was there. For the Southerner the Civil War is in the family, and if he belongs to the generation now forty or older, then he was in time to hear about it from the lips of elderly relatives who had lived through it. A man, or men, had fought in it who bore his own name. That very blood which stirred in his veins had been shed at Shiloh, at Chickamauga, at Gettysburg.
    â€œWell now, the men who fought on the other side in that old war had families, left descendants, too,” says one of them, a friend of mine. “You didn’t lose it without our help. It was our war, too. As the winners we cut a pretty sorry figure by comparison, no doubt; but please remember that though the poetry be all on your side, we were there. I heard those old Civil War tales too when I was little. Us Yankee boys had great-grandads the same as you-all. But we never thought the world began at—where was it? Appomattox? Why should you think it ended there? For Christ’s sake, did all your clocks stop down there that day? My great-grandfather! May the old gentleman rest in peace, but what has he got to do with me ?”
    Now that is a question which a Southerner could never ask. He might wish to, might envy the man who can (while despising him for it at the same time), but he could never do it. He is conscious of his great-grandfather as a constant companion through life. He will seek his counsel in moments of moral perplexity, his guidance in the choice of a career (if the family tradition leaves him any choice), will borrow courage from him on going into battle and will expect to join him in eternity in whichever place he and the majority of the family men (the women are one and all in heaven) are judged to have gone. No, the clocks of the South did not all stop in 1865; they have gone on ticking; but they are all grandfather’s clocks.
    Scotch, in good likelihood, by blood, the Southerner has retained the Scottish clan spirit. It is inculcated in him from birth. At his numerous family gatherings the stories told are of his ancestors, who in the retelling are purified of all superfluities and become heroes, and like figures out of legend, beyond good and evil. The manner in which they deceived or in whatever way triumphed over their and their family’s enemies is the important thing; that they may have been the ones originally in the wrong is lost sight of. Mark Twain is dead serious—and dead right—when he suggests that reading Sir Walter Scott helped condition Southerners to fight the Civil War, but he got the reasons wrong why this was so. In Scott they read of the