The Law of the Land | Page 4

the heart of the warm
South-land, was above all things suited to its environment. It was a
home taking firm hold upon the soil, its wide roots reaching into
traditions of more than one generation. Well toward the head of the vast
Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, the richest region on the face of the whole
earth, the Big House ruled over these wide acres as of immemorial right.
Its owner, Colonel Calvin Blount, was a king, an American king, his
right to rule based upon full proof of fitness.
In the heart of the only American part of America, the Big House,
careless and confident, could afford to lie blinking at the sun, or at the
broad acres which blinked back at it. It was all so safe and sure that
there was no need for anxiety. Life here was as it had been for
generations, even for the generation following the upheaval of the Civil
War. Open-handed, generous, rich, lazily arrogant, kindly always,
though upon occasions fiercely savage, this life took hold upon that of
a hundred years ago. These strings of blacks, who now, answering the
plantation bell, slowly crawled down the lane to the outlying fields,
might still have been slaves. This lazy plow, tickling the opulent earth,
might have been handled by a slave rather than by this hired servitor,
whose quavering, plaintive song, broken mid-bar betimes, now came
back across the warm distances which lay trembling in the rays of the
advancing sun. These other dark-skinned servants, dawdling along the
galleries, or passing here and yonder from the detached quarters of
kitchen, and cook-room, and laundry and sleeping-rooms--they also
humming musically at their work, too full of the sun and the certainty
of comfort to need to hurry even with a song--all these might also have
been tenants of an old-time estate, giving slow service in return for a
life of carelessness and irresponsibility. This was in the South, in the
Delta, the garden of the South, the garden of America; a country crude,
primitive, undeveloped in modern ways, as one might say, yet by right
entitled to its own assuredness. It asked nothing of all the world.

All this deep rich soil was given to the people of that land by Father
Messasebe. Yards deep it lay, anciently rich, kissed by a sun which
caused every growing thing to leap into swift fruition. The entire lesson
of the scene was one of an absolute fecundity. The grass was deep and
green and lush. The sweet peas and the roses and the morning-glories,
and the honeysuckles on the lattice, hung ranks deep in blossoms. A
hundred flocks of fowl ran clucking and chirping about the yard.
Across the lawn a mother swine led her brood of squeaking and
squealing young. A half-hundred puppies, toddlers or half-grown,
romped about, unused fragments of the great hunting pack of the owner
of this kingdom. Life, perhaps short, perhaps rude, perhaps swiftly
done, yet after all life--this was the message of it all. The trees grew
vast and tall. The corn, where the stalks could still be seen, grew stiff
and strong as little trees. The cotton, through which the negroes rode,
their black kinky heads level with the old shreds of ungathered bolls,
showed plants rank and coarse enough to uphold a man's weight free of
the ground. This sun and this soil--what might they not do in brooding
fecundity? Growth, reproduction, the multifold--all this was written
under that sky which now swept, deep and blue, flecked here and there
with soft and fleecy clouds, over these fruitful acres hewn from the
primeval forest.
The forest, the deep, vast forest of oak and ash and gum and ghostly
sycamore; the forest, tangled with a thousand binding vines and briers,
wattled and laced with rank blue cane--sure proof of a soil
exhaustlessly rich--this ancient forest still stood, mysterious and
forbidding, all about the edges of the great plantation. Here and there a
tall white stump, fire-blackened at its foot, stood, even in fields long
cultivated, showing how laborious and slow had been the whittling
away of this jungle, which even now continually encroached and
claimed its own. The rim of the woods, marked white by the deadened
trees where the axes of the laborers were reclaiming yet other acres as
the years rolled by, now showed in the morning sun distinctly, making
a frame for the rich and restful picture of the Big House and its lands.
Now and again overhead there swung slowly an occasional great black
bird, its shadow not yet falling straight on the sunlit ground, as it would
at midday, when the puppies of the pack would begin their daily

pastime of chasing it across the fields.
This silent surrounding forest even yet held its ancient creatures-- the
swift