Poor White | Page 7

To move about at all was a painful performance,
something he did not want to do. All physical acts were to him dull but
necessary parts of his training for a vague and glorious future that was
to come to him some day in a brighter and more beautiful land that lay

in the direction thought of rather indefinitely as the East. "If I do not
move and keep moving I'll become like father, like all of the people
about here," Hugh said to himself. He thought of the man who had bred
him and whom he occasionally saw drifting aimlessly along Main
Street or sleeping away a drunken stupor on the river bank. He was
disgusted with him and had come to share the opinion the station
master's wife had always held concerning the people of the Missouri
village. "They're a lot of miserable lazy louts," she had declared a
thousand times, and Hugh, agreed with her, but sometimes wondered if
in the end he might not also become a lazy lout. That possibility he
knew was in him and for the sake of the woman as well as for his own
sake he was determined it should not be so.
The truth is that the people of Mudcat Landing were totally unlike any
of the people Sarah Shepard had ever known and unlike the people
Hugh was to know during his mature life. He who had come from a
people not smart was to live among smart energetic men and women
and be called a big man by them without in the least understanding
what they were talking about.
Practically all of the people of Hugh's home town were of Southern
origin. Living originally in a land where all physical labor was
performed by slaves, they had come to have a deep aversion to physical
labor. In the South their fathers, having no money to buy slaves of their
own and being unwilling to compete with slave labor, had tried to live
without labor. For the most part they lived in the mountains and the hill
country of Kentucky and Tennessee, on land too poor and unproductive
to be thought worth cultivating by their rich slave-owning neighbors of
the valleys and plains. Their food was meager and of an enervating
sameness and their bodies degenerate. Children grew up long and gaunt
and yellow like badly nourished plants. Vague indefinite hungers took
hold of them and they gave themselves over to dreams. The more
energetic among them, sensing dimly the unfairness of their position in
life, became vicious and dangerous. Feuds started among them and they
killed each other to express their hatred of life. When, in the years
preceding the Civil War, a few of them pushed north along the rivers
and settled in Southern Indiana and Illinois and in Eastern Missouri and

Arkansas, they seemed to have exhausted their energy in making the
voyage and slipped quickly back into their old slothful way of life.
Their impulse to emigrate did not carry them far and but a few of them
ever reached the rich corn lands of central Indiana, Illinois or Iowa or
the equally rich land back from the river in Missouri or Arkansas. In
Southern Indiana and Illinois they were merged into the life about them
and with the infusion of new blood they a little awoke. They have
tempered the quality of the peoples of those regions, made them
perhaps less harshly energetic than their forefathers, the pioneers. In
many of the Missouri and Arkansas river towns they have changed but
little. A visitor to these parts may see them there to-day, long, gaunt,
and lazy, sleeping their lives away and awakening out of their stupor
only at long intervals and at the call of hunger.
As for Hugh McVey, he stayed in his home town and among his own
people for a year after the departure of the man and woman who had
been father and mother to him, and then he also departed. All through
the year he worked constantly to cure himself of the curse of indolence.
When he awoke in the morning he did not dare lie in bed for a moment
for fear indolence would overcome him and he would not be able to
arise at all. Getting out of bed at once he dressed and went to the station.
During the day there was not much work to be done and he walked for
hours up and down the station platform. When he sat down he at once
took up a book and put his mind to work. When the pages of the book
became indistinct before his eyes and he felt within him the inclination
to drift off into dreams, he again arose and walked up and down the