The Ordways by William Humphrey Read Free Book Online Page B

exploits of their own clansmen—or the clans they liked to claim kin with. What is more, they knew from Scott’s tales of the border wars that they were destined to lose—another inducement, given their contrary and quixotic turn of mind, to fight. They had an affinity for lost causes.
    Conscious of a long and vigorous lineage, the Southerner is assured of a long continuity to follow him. Meanwhile in his time he is the priest of the tribal scripture; to forget any part of it would be sacrilege. He treasures the sayings of his kin, and “As my grandaddy always used to say … As my poor father would say if he were here … As dear old Aunt Pris (God rest her soul) was fond of declaring …”—these expressions and others like them will preface his remarks to an extent hardly to be observed anywhere else. If he forgets them, he will be forgotten. If he remembers, he will be remembered, will take the place reserved and predestined for him in the company of his kin, in the realm of myth, outside of time.
    The usual sort of selective genealogical pride, which seats certain relatives below the salt, others in the kitchen out of company’s sight, has no resemblance to this clan feeling I am trying to define, which is all-embracing, all-forgiving, catholic, disowning none, welcoming alike the sinner and the saint, the pirate and the patrician, all who can claim the indissoluble tie of blood. Indeed, with his innate love of violence and his disrespect for the law (also Scotch, also exacerbated by a sense that the laws are not of his making but imposed upon him by conquerors), the Southerner will boast of ancestors whose memory another man would hide at the back of the highest shelf in his family skeleton closet. He will not only exhibit to view that particular limb of his family tree from which a horse thief dangles by the neck; he will cheerfully charge his ancestor with more horses than he was hanged for the theft of. The Southerner is like those ancient Hebrews who preserved and recounted and gloried in the stories of double-dealing and the bloodymindedness of their untrammeled forebears, and in his own rather frequent outbreaks he is emulating the exploits of his family heroes whom he has heard about all his life, who lived in freer and more manly times. When a Southerner sighs and says, “We are not the men our fathers were” (an expression often on his tongue), he means to say we are more civilized; he is lamenting the fact.
    Undoubtedly the Southerner clings to certain outmoded social attitudes and resists changes, which for his own part he knows he could learn to live with, because they are unacceptable to Great-grandfather, whose voice, should he think one moderate thought, he hears accusing him of capitulation, of cowardice, of betrayal, of unworthiness of the name he bears in trust. To appeal to his reason does no good: he admires foolishness above all qualities—in the sense one intends when saying, a fool never changes his mind, a fool never knows when he’s licked. “That’s the kind of fool I am! A damn fool!” he will proudly assert. This is why telling him that the old cause, Great-grandfather’s old cause, is doomed, already lost, is the surest way to harden his resistance: those are precisely the odds which appeal to his imagination, the odds which Great-grandfather fought against, which are calculated to win Great-grandfather’s esteem. Tell him he is on the winning side, he loses interest and quits the field. This is not because he does not like to win, but because he does not like to have a side. He sees himself as the stubborn lone remnant, conquered but unsubdued, unreconstructed, he and Great-grandpa, ready to grapple with the very winds of change.
    Great-grandpa, by a huge statistical probability, not only did not own any slaves, he hated the institution of slavery as only a poor man can hate the symbol of a leisure to which he will