The Purple Heights | Page 2

to him any idea or
image except a crayon portrait and a grave, he being a posthumous
child. The really important figures filling the background of his early
days were his mother and big black Emma Campbell.
Emma Campbell washed clothes in a large wooden tub set on a bench
nailed between the two china-berry trees in the yard. Peter loved those
china-berry trees, covered with masses of sweet-smelling lilac-colored
blossoms in the spring, and with clusters of hard green berries in the
summer. The beautiful feathery foliage made a pleasant shade for
Emma Campbell's wash-tubs. Peter loved to watch her, she looked so
important and so cheerful. While she worked she sang endless
"speretuals," in a high, sweet voice that swooped bird-like up and
down.
"I wants tuh climb up Ja-cob's la-ad-dah, Ja-cob's la-ad-dah, Jacob's
la-ad-dah, I wants tuh climb up Ja-cob's la-ad-dah, But I cain't-- Not
un-tell I makes my peace wid de La-a-wd, En I praise _Him_--de
La-a-wd! I 'll praise Him--tell I di-e, I 'll praise Him--tell I die! I 'll
si-ng, Je-ee-ru-suh-lem!"
Emma Campbell would sing, and keep time with thumps and clouts of
sudsy clothes. She boiled the clothes in the same large black iron pot in
which she boiled crabs and shrimp in the summer-time. Peter always
raked the chips for her fire, and the leaves and pine-cones mixed with
them gave off a pleasant smoky smell. Emma had a happy fashion of
roasting sweet potatoes under the wash-pot, and you could smell those,
too, mingled with the soapy odor of the boiling clothes, which she
sloshed around with a sawed-off broom-handle. Other smells came
from over the cove, of pine-trees, and sassafras, and bays, and that
indescribable and clean odor which the winds bring out of the woods.
The whole place was full of pleasant noises, dear and familiar sounds
of water running seaward or swinging back landward, always with odd
gurglings and chucklings and small sucking noises, and runs and rushes;
and of the myriad rustlings of the huge live-oaks hung with long gray

moss; and the sycamores frou-frouing like ladies' dresses; the palmettos
rattled and clashed, with a sound like rain; the pines swayed one to
another, and only in wild weather did they speak loudly, and then their
voices were very high and airy. Peter liked the pines best of all. His
earliest impression of beauty and of mystery was the moon walking
"with silver-sandaled feet" over their tall heads. He loved it all--the
little house, the trees, the tide-water, the smells, the sounds; in and out
of which, keeping time to all, went the whi-r-rr of his mother's
sewing-machine, and the scuff-scuffing of Emma Campbell's
wash-board.
Sometimes his mother, pausing for a second, would turn to look at him,
her tired, pale face lighting up with her tender mother-smile:
"What are you making now, Peter?" she would ask, as she watched his
laborious efforts to put down on his slate his conception of the things
he saw. She was always vitally interested in anything Peter said or did.
"Well, I started to make you--or maybe it was Emma. But I thought I'd
better hang a tail on it and let it be the cat." He studied the result
gravely. "I'll stick horns on it, and if they're very good horns I'll let it be
the devil; if they're not, it can be Mis' Hughes's old cow."
After a while the things that Peter was always drawing began to bear
what might be called a family resemblance to the things they were
intended to represent. But as all children try to draw, nobody noticed
that Peter Champneys tried harder than most, or that he couldn't put his
fingers on a bit of paper and a stub of pencil without trying to draw
something--a smear that vaguely resembled a tree, or a lopsided
assortment of features that you presently made out to be a face.
But Peter Champneys, at a very early age, had to learn things less
pleasant than drawing. That tiny house in Riverton represented all that
was left of the once-great Champneys holdings, and the little widow
was hard put to it to keep even that. Before he was seven Peter knew all
those pitiful subterfuges wherewith genteel poverty tries to save its face;
he had to watch his mother, who wasn't robust, fight that bitter and
losing fight which women of her sort wage with evil circumstances.

Peter wore shoes only from the middle of November to the first of
March; his clothes were presentable only because his mother had a
genius for making things over. He wasn't really hungry, for nobody can
starve in a small town in South Carolina; folks are too kindly, too
neighborly, too generous, for anything like that to happen. They have a