Hilton Als

November 25, 2001

We’re in the closing moments of Carson McCullers’s 1946 novel "The Member of the Wedding." The setting: a well-worn kitchen in a small Southern town during the Second World War. There’s little in the room: a chair, a stove. Everything else has been packed up—everything, that is, except the memories of the two women in the room, as they supervise the noisy comings and goings of movers. They are Berenice Sadie Brown, a middle-aged colored housekeeper, and Frankie Addams, a thirteen-year-old motherless white girl who has grown up in the house under Berenice’s charge. A year ago, McCullers writes, Frankie felt like "an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid." Her fears—which were largely existential; no mere adolescent quirks, these, since Frankie serves as McCullers’s stand-in—dominated her home. Then she fell in love with the romance—or her idea of the romance—between her brother and his fiancée, her "we of me," as she called them. Berenice tried to warn Frankie against the sad allure of a love that remains forever beyond one’s grasp. To illustrate her point, she talked about her late husband, Ludie, and the men she’d been drawn to since his death:

"I loved Ludie and he was the first man I loved. Therefore, I had to go and copy myself forever afterward. What I did was to marry off little pieces of Ludie whenever I come across them. It was just my misfortune they all turned out to be the wrong pieces. My intention was to repeat me and Ludie. Now don’t you see?"

"I see what you’re driving at," [Frankie] said. "But I don’t see how it is a warning applied to me.". . .

"You and that wedding. . . . That is what I am warning about. . . . You think you going to march down the center of the aisle right between your brother and the bride. You think you going to break into that wedding, and then Jesus knows what else."

Now Frankie is moving on, away from Berenice’s "preaching." In the 1952 film adaptation of "The Member of the Wedding," the director, Fred Zinnemann, draws a telling visual comparison between Berenice’s heavy black body draped in black—a Masha of the Mason-Dixon Line—and Frankie’s lithe white figure darting here and there, her speech glowing with a nearly unbearable romanticism, like a Nina, unmindful of her imminent fall. James Baldwin once said that whites cleaved to the very thing that he, as a black person, could not afford: the romance of innocence. As Ethel Waters plays Berenice, we see in her face Baldwin’s sad realization: Frankie may choose to be an outcast, but Berenice has no choice. Frankie claims to dream of belonging, but, as Berenice knows, she has little interest in fulfilling that dream. She has invested too much in her own sharply defended and defensive outsiderness. Her emotional satisfaction will come from blaming "freaks" like Berenice (her closest point of identification and thus resistance) for keeping her from weddings that she doesn’t really want to go to, anyway—since being included would interfere with the comfort she takes in being "unjoined."Today, Berenice could be read as what Toni Morrison calls the "Africanist presence"—the black female figure whose marginal status defines the privilege of others. "Africanism has become . . . both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability," Morrison writes in her illuminating study "Playing in the Dark." But McCullers, rather than using Africanism to offset whiteness—as Melville, Twain, and others have—seems to use it as a way of identifying her own unjoined self. Can a white writer, a woman, who came to maturity in relatively secure circumstances during the Depression and the Second World War, be described as Africanist in spirit? (In some circles, this would be called having soul.) In a review of McCullers’s first novel, "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" (1940), Richard Wright remarked:

To me, the most impressive aspect of [this book] is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race. This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politically; it seems to stem from an attitude toward life which enables Miss McCullers to rise above the pressure of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.

In fact, as far as the description of black characters goes, "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" is McCullers’s most imperfect work. One black male has woolly hair and lips that seem "purple against his black skin." There is the taint of a "Negro smell" in a cabin. Strange dialect and syntax separate "educated" blacks from laborers. Ultimately, these tics seem best passed over—they are the sloppy reflex of the liberal testing her boundaries, excited to be in the presence of the "exotic" but having no new language with which to describe it; she falls back on the vocabulary of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Margaret Mitchell. What Wright sensed was actually McCullers’s lack of Southernness. Unlike so many other writers from the region, she didn’t luxuriate in rhetoric or try to break down the blood knot of race and class that kept Faulkner in Yoknapatawpha County. Nor did she share Katherine Anne Porter’s skill for writing intellectual political parables. In her essay "The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing," McCullers admitted to having little interest in history—the Southern writer’s most consistent trope. Such shortsightedness accounts for some of the very real limitations of her work. But it also accounts for her ability to understand and identify with those unmoored from their surroundings or searching for a self in the modern world. It’s impossible not to notice, while reading through the Library of America’s newly published edition of McCullers’s five novels, that almost all of her characters—from the wayward children to the deaf-mute, the alcoholic Communist, the hunchback dwarf, the pederast, and the closeted homosexual Army captain—are Africanist, in that each defines the status quo by existing outside it.

She was born Lula Carson Smith, on February 19, 1917, in Columbus, Georgia, a town where dogwood and wisteria bloomed along the avenues in early spring. Nearby were Fort Benning and the brown waters of the Chattahoochee River, which, since the early nineteenth century, had been used to power the local cotton mills and factories. McCullers’s father, Lamar Smith, was a mild-mannered watch repairman from Tuskegee, Alabama, who in 1910 had moved to Columbus in pursuit of work. There he met and married Vera Marguerite (Bebe) Waters, a small woman of Irish extraction and great ambition. Unlike their neighbors, the Smiths weren’t very interested in religion, and promoted social awareness instead—a Yankee sensibility that was at odds with the town’s conservatism. Marguerite enjoyed tweaking the townspeople with such remarks as the now famous "Oh, yes, my daughter Lula Carson"—then a teen-ager— “and I have such a good time smoking together. We do almost everything together, you know."

Neither of the couple’s two younger children—Lamar, Jr., born in 1919, and Margarita Gachet, born in 1922—was doted on in the way Lula Carson was. According to Lamar, Jr., quoted in Virginia Spencer Carr’s tenderhearted and thorough 1975 biography, "The Lonely Hunter," Lula Carson was spoon-fed a sense of her own exalted status long before she had actually achieved anything. ("I’m going to be both rich and famous," she told a young playmate.) Nevertheless, writing was not McCullers’s first love. She wrote plays and skits to amuse her parents, but her real passion was music. Between the ages of ten and seventeen, she trained to become a concert pianist, and in 1930 she began studying with Mary Tucker, a former soloist and the wife of a career officer stationed at Fort Benning. Tucker’s commitment instilled in her young protégée the discipline she would eventually put to use as a writer. In return, she grew to love Tucker and her family—McCullers’s first "we of me," which she favored over her own family simply because it was not her own. McCullers’s relationship with her mother was intense, and she feared that she would never be free as an artist until she was away from Marguerite’s prying eyes. (McCullers’s adolescent characters rarely have mothers.)

In 1932, Lula Carson took to her bed with rheumatic fever, which was misdiagnosed as pneumonia. After a few weeks of recovery, she decided that she lacked the genius and the physical stamina to undertake a concert career. Moreover, she would not be content, she concluded, to be the interpreter of someone else’s aesthetic architecture. In her 1948 essay "How I Began to Write," McCullers recalled that her first novel, "A Reed of Pan," which she wrote when she was fifteen (the manuscript has been lost), embodied her longing to get out of Columbus, to see New York, and to familiarize herself with the unfamiliar. "The details of the book were queer," she wrote. "Ticket collectors on the subway, New York front yards—but by that time it did not matter, for already I had begun another journey. That was the year of Dostoevski, Chekhov, and Tolstoy—and there were the intimations of an unsuspected region equidistant from New York. Old Russia and our Georgia rooms, the marvelous solitary region of simple stories and the inward mind." In Decision, in 1941, McCullers explained that the rigid social order portrayed by the "Russian realists" mirrored what she had observed in her own part of the world: "The Southerner and the Russian are both ’types,’ in that they have certain recognizable and national psychological traits. Hedonistic, imaginative, lazy, and emotional—there is surely a cousinly resemblance."Still, it was McCullers’s music and not the products of her "inward mind" that got her to New York in 1934. Her parents gave her the money to study at Juilliard, and with five hundred dollars pinned to her underwear she left Columbus. Shortly after she arrived in New York, however, the money was gone. Her friend Tennessee Williams told the story:

According to the legends that surround her early period in the city, she first established her residence, quite unwittingly, in a house of prostitution, . . . and had not the ghost of an idea of what illicit enterprise was going on there. One of the girls in this establishment . . . undertook to guide her about the town. . . . While she was being shown the subway route to the Juilliard School of Music, the companion and all of her tuition money, which the companion had offered to keep for her, abruptly disappeared. Carson was abandoned penniless in the subway, and some people say it took her several weeks to find her way out.

McCullers was now launched on the sort of life that is familiar to young artists struggling in a city unmoved by their dreams. During the next couple of years, she worked at a humor magazine and as a dog walker. She answered telephones and typed in a real-estate office. She lived in a series of boarding houses. She sat in phone booths to read and watch the passing throngs. And she took writing classes at New York University and Columbia, with Sylvia Chatfield Bates and with Whit Burnett, the editor of the renowned Story, a magazine devoted to emerging writers. In December, 1936, Burnett published a story by the nineteen-year-old Carson Smith.

"Wunderkind" was an elegant evocation of McCullers’s failure to become a pianist, and it detailed the enormous price the gifted child pays in order to fulfill the ambitions of adults whose own time has passed. The story’s heroine—McCullers’s first Frances—is a high-school student in Cincinnati. For several years, the center of her world has been the gemütlich studio of her Eastern European piano teacher, Mr. Bilderbach, and his wife, Anna. But now things have changed. Frances feels that she is no longer the wunderkind Bilderbach says she is. She performs badly in a recital, alongside another student, who is a truly talented violinist. She is ashamed of her defeat. But she is equally ashamed of her envy of the other student, who is beginning to attract notice. Maybe, Frances thinks, he plays better than she does because he is a Jew—the first of McCullers’s outsider characters.

Nothing is more chilling for the prodigy than the thought of her golden spotlight being turned off—or directed, instead, at the youth standing beside her. By the time Carson Smith published "Wunderkind," she had hit upon several ways to hold on to her own uniqueness, and to make the world recognize it. There was her writing, of course. And there would be, for the next thirty years or so, until her death, a multitude of infirmities and physical calamities, real and imagined, that demanded large amounts of sympathy and attention from anyone who dared to offer them. Who would be the mother to nurse her through it all? His name was James Reeves McCullers, Jr.

Reeves, as he was called, was the eldest of four children in a family from Wetumpka, Alabama. A small man, he was a dreamer attracted to big, capable women. (He called his paternal grandparents Big Mama and Little Papa.) When he was an adolescent, his father, an alcoholic, abandoned the family, and to ease the financial burden Reeves and his sister were sent to live with various relatives. As an adult, he pined for the kind of approval that children who see themselves as a burden seek in the larger world. "Querulous, sometimes vain, Reeves wanted desperately to be somebody," Carr writes in "The Lonely Hunter."

When Reeves met Carson in Columbus, in the summer of 1935, he had been in the infantry at Fort Benning for four years and had already got to know Carson’s mother. Marguerite, in her daughter’s absence, had become something of a local Elsa Maxwell, arranging informal "drop-ins," where the town’s artistically inclined came to drink punch and listen to classical recordings. She regaled the young men with tales of her daughter, who was back East pursuing a career as a writer. New York! A writer! Carson was living the life that Reeves had only dreamed of. And, when she returned home that summer, she made the mistake—at first—of believing that she was central to Reeves’s dream. "He was the best-looking man I had ever seen," McCullers wrote in an unfinished autobiography. "I knew he was a liberal, which was important, to my mind, in a backward Southern community. . . . I was eighteen years old, and this was my first love. . . . I did not realize the lost quality of Reeves until he was truly lost." Carson may have dusted off a little of that red Georgia earth when she lit out for New York, but she hadn’t entirely shaken her ties to convention. Becoming Mrs. McCullers would win her the social respectability that had so far eluded her. In Carson, Reeves believed he had found the earth beneath his feet. The couple were married two years later. Carson was twenty, Reeves twenty-four.The plan was this: Carson would finish her book, and then Reeves would quit his job as a debt collector in Charlotte, North Carolina—where they had moved after marrying—and she would support him while he wrote. Somehow, though, Carson never got around to helping Reeves realize his dream. Nor did she have any interest in their domestic situation. ("Reeves gave me moral support and wrung out the wash which was too heavy for me," she wrote.) Her thoughts were elsewhere. She was immersed in the writing of a book that she did not comprehend. "For a whole year I worked on ’The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,’ without understanding it at all," McCullers wrote in "The Flowering Dream." She went on:

Each character was talking to a central character, but why, I didn’t know. . . . Suddenly, as I walked across a road, it occurred to me that Harry Minowitz, the character all the other characters were talking to, was a different man, a deaf mute, and immediately . . . [t]he whole focus of the novel was fixed.

The book is set in an unnamed Southern town, and each chapter is told from a different character’s perspective. There is Mick Kelly, a teen-age girl who lives in a boarding house run by her parents, where the deaf-mute, renamed John Singer, rents a room. There’s Jake Blount, a Communist alcoholic driven half mad by the local provincialism; Dr. Copeland, a black doctor who is dying of tuberculosis; and Biff Brannon, who runs the local diner and is erotically fixated on Mick. As the long, mean days of summer go by, the Depression grinds the town down, and the hopes that sustain the characters turn to dust. Mick is forced to give up her dream of becoming a concert pianist and goes to work in a department store. Dr. Copeland dies. Jake is more or less run out of town. Biff descends into sexual confusion. And John Singer commits suicide. Only after Singer dies does it occur to the others that they had never asked him anything about himself. None of them knew where he’d lived before. None of them knew that he had loved someone once—an "obese and dreamy" Greek named Spiros Antonapoulos, who had been committed to an insane asylum. Talking does not make a difference, McCullers seems to say in this book. We are all in our own cells, writing messages to the world which that world cannot read. Those messages, the stories within the story of "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," include some of the most beautiful writing McCullers ever produced. The simplicity and lyricism here reveal the influence of Isak Dinesen, a writer to whom McCullers returned again and again for inspiration.

"The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," which was published in 1940, was something of a sensation. Among the book’s more compelling reviews was one written by May Sarton for the Boston Evening Transcript. "There have been candid-camera studies of American life, past and present. There have been the usual quota of sensitively recorded novels of personal experience," she wrote. "But we have waited a long time for a new writer." McCullers truly was new. In the early forties, America was at war, and still grappling with the aftereffects of the Depression. The books that sold then—Betty Smith’s 1943 "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," for one—were about the unconquerable adolescent spirit, which is to say, America’s unconquerable Coca-Cola optimism. But McCullers’s book had no happy ending. And she was from the South, a locale that was just about as far as one could get from the glitter and irony of New York publishing circles. "You have to remember that the South was really where nobody went, I mean nobody," the writer Phoebe Pierce Vreeland recalled of that time.After the publication of "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," Carson and Reeves moved to New York and entered the pantheon of famous American literary marriages—Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Paul and Jane Bowles, Robert Lowell and Jean Stafford—that were alternately fuelled and derailed by alcohol, infidelity, rivalry, emotional and physical brutality, and mutual understanding. The twenty-three-year-old McCullers was a publicist’s dream, with a pixie haircut, men’s shirts, and a cigarette-husky voice: an androgyne not only of the spirit but of the flesh. ("I bless the Latin poet Terence, who said, ’Nothing human is alien to me,’ " she was fond of saying.) Thanks to her compulsion for blurring the line between male and female in her work and in her personal life, she enjoyed an exalted status in a milieu dominated by gay editors and writers. Championed in Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle, McCullers, along with Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Jane Bowles, represented a sensibility that was distinctly at odds with that of the writers published in the Partisan Review. They weren’t political, as such—they were writers who spoke not about how the quotidian could be radicalized but about their own personal radicalization. And it was while exploring her own difference that McCullers wrote one of her more shallow and difficult works, "Reflections in a Golden Eye" (1941). The novel begins as every McCullers novel begins—with a description of a town that is soon to be changed forever:

An army post in peacetime is a dull place. Things happen, but then they happen over and over again. The general plan of a fort itself adds to the monotony—the huge concrete barracks, the neat rows of officers’ homes built one precisely like the other. . . . At the same time things do occasionally happen on an army post that are not likely to re-occur. There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed. The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse.

The soldier is Private Ellgee Williams, a dark, quiet man who grooms horses. The horse he pays particular attention to belongs to Leonora Penderton, whose husband, Captain Penderton, in addition to being sexually ambiguous, is a thief and a sadist. Leonora is having an affair with her next-door neighbor, whose wife is a bedridden hysteric—after her baby is stillborn, she cuts off her nipples with garden shears. All but one of McCullers’s novels have been made into films, and it’s clear why: on the surface, they have the energy of melodrama. But the subtext of "Reflections in a Golden Eye"—which garnered the bitterest reviews of McCullers’s career, not to mention the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan for its grotesque portrait of Southern whiteness—is the spiritual desolation of marriage, of keeping up appearances, of following ritual for the sake of "belonging." It’s difficult not to see in Marlon Brando’s fascinating portrayal of Penderton in the 1967 film version the sad, defeated eyes of Reeves McCullers, trapped in a sexuality he despises. Poor Reeves was the Africanist presence in McCullers’s real life—a Berenice Sadie Brown with a bigger case of the blues.Through Thomas Mann’s daughter, Erika, who was also a writer and also gay, McCullers met the Swiss writer and adventurer Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, who was to loom large in her imagination. Although it’s unlikely that McCullers had much of a physical relationship with anyone other than Reeves, Schwarzenbach had the kind of androgyny and physical fearlessness that McCullers most admired. When Schwarzenbach died in a motorcycle accident, in 1942, McCullers pursued other attachments. "Please, Katherine Anne, let me come in and talk with you—I do love you so very much," she told Katherine Anne Porter, while standing outside the older author’s door at Yaddo. Virginia Spencer Carr relates:

Miss Porter demanded that Carson leave. She shouted from within that she would not come out until Carson vacated the hall. It was 6:30 p.m., however, and time for dinner. . . . After a brief interval the elder woman cautiously opened the door and stepped out. To her astonishment, there lay Carson sprawled across the threshold. "But I had had enough," said Miss Porter. "I merely stepped over her and continued on my way to dinner."

Throughout her life, McCullers exhibited the self-punishing solipsism and cruelty of the romantic. If you didn’t love her, or if she didn’t love you, you simply didn’t exist; you were banished to the nether regions of a mind that, after the publication of "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," didn’t take in much of anything new. In an essay about Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal wrote, "I could never take any of [his women friends], from Carson McCullers to Jane Bowles to Anna Magnani. . . . Carson spoke only of her work. Of its greatness. The lugubrious Southern singsong voice never stopped: ’Did ya see muh lovely play? Did ya lahk muh lovely play? Am Ah gonna win the Pew-litzuh prahzz?’ "

In 1941, at the age of twenty-four, McCullers had the first of a series of strokes that eventually left her partially paralyzed, and she filed for divorce from Reeves. Adrift, he reënlisted and was wounded in the 1944 D Day invasion. McCullers’s letters to him during this period are filled with tenderness and longing (and written, perhaps, with a view to posterity?). "Reeves, my dearest one," she wrote in early 1945, "I am still in this queer purgatory, waiting and waiting for more news of you. I haunt the hall, waiting for the postman or for a sudden telegram. At times I am seized with the feeling you are on the way home." Remarried in 1945, Reeves and McCullers quarrelled, drank, and fell in love with a variety of men and women, but in the end they were together to the death—his, a suicide, in 1953. McCullers herself died of another stroke, in 1967, at the age of fifty, having outlived virtually all of her powerful relationships. It was as if, in the process of trying to fit her mother, Reeves, Schwarzenbach, and others into the twisted shape of her own soul, she had wholly consumed them.

It was that soul—all of it—that McCullers poured into her most brilliant work, "The Ballad of the Sad Café," which was written in 1942 but not published in book form until 1951. A long short story rather than a novel—the Library of America is fudging a bit by including it in the "Complete Novels"—the work eclipses McCullers’s other efforts. It does not have the whimsy of "The Member of the Wedding," in which, one fears, McCullers was too aware of her role as the grand dame of the adolescent spirit. Nor does it have the awkward construction of her unfortunate last novel, "Clock Without Hands," which is marred by the effects of McCullers’s various illnesses and by its self-consciously rendered "issues": miscegenation, the New South versus the Old, homosexual love.

Inspired by a dwarf McCullers had seen at a bar in Brooklyn Heights, "The Ballad of the Sad Café" begins (again) with a description of a town:

The town itself is dreary. . . . [It] is lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world. . . . The largest building, in the very center of the town, is boarded up completely and leans so far to the right that it seems bound to collapse at any minute. . . . Nevertheless, on the second floor there is one window which is not boarded; sometimes in the late afternoon when the heat is at its worst a hand will slowly open the shutter and a face will look down on the town. It is a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams—sexless and white, with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief.

This opening has the power of music, a prelude introducing the story’s themes: a far-off place, grief, estrangement from the self, dreams, isolation. The bearer of the face with the crossed eyes is not, in fact, sexless. She is Miss Amelia, the owner of the building, which was once a café. Before she locked herself in, Miss Amelia was a strong, practical, and greedy woman, who ran a small shop and a liquor still and was wildly litigious. One evening, when she was sitting on her front porch, a man appeared, carrying a suitcase. "The man was a stranger, and it is rare that a stranger enters the town on foot at that hour. Besides, the man was a hunchback. He was scarcely more than four feet tall," McCullers writes. Claiming to be "kin" to Miss Amelia, the dwarf, who would be known as Cousin Lymon, began to cry. Then Miss Amelia did something that no one had ever seen her do before. She offered him a drink from her own hip flask, free of charge, and she invited him to stay.

That was the beginning of Miss Amelia’s love. "What sort of thing, then, was this love?" McCullers asks. She goes on, "The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. . . . The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself." And it is precisely the lover’s need to know the value of the person he loves that, McCullers explains, results in the beloved’s eventual betrayal: "For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved." Cousin Lymon does eventually strip Miss Amelia bare. He falls in love with Marvin Macy, Miss Amelia’s brokenhearted ex-husband, and helps him to trash the café. Cousin Lymon, it seems, was just biding his time with Miss Amelia until he could feel what she felt: the excitement of trying to wrest love from an unwilling subject. He leaves her for a love as impossible as hers, and her grief-stricken eyes turn inward as if to gaze at her own soul.

Never in McCullers’s fiction would her poetic symbols be as perfectly integrated as they are here. In an essay on Isak Dinesen, McCullers wrote, "In the true tale the characters are bound in the end to get what is coming to them. . . . The tale-teller assumes the responsibility of God, and grants to his characters a moral freedom accountable only to the author himself." Accountable only to McCullers, Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Marvin Macy were aspects of herself: a suite of voices examining McCullers’s determination both to know and not to know, to cling to her romanticism while exploring its cruelty, to hurt others while taking a long and public time to destroy herself. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 3, 2001, issue.

Hilton Als, a staff writer at The New Yorker, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He, most recently, published, “My Pinup,” in November, 2022.

  The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton mill, the two-room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two colored windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long. On Saturdays the tenants from the near-by farms come in for a day of talk and trade. Otherwise the town is lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world. The nearest train stop is Society City, and the Greyhound and White Bus Lines use the Forks Falls Road which is three miles away. The winters here are short and raw, the summers white with glare and fiery hot.

  If you walk along the main street on an August afternoon there is nothing whatsoever to do. The largest building, in the very center of the town, is boarded up completely and leans so far to the right that it seems bound to collapse at any minute. The house is very old. There is about it a curious, cracked look that is very puzzling until you suddenly realize that at one time, and long ago, the right side of the front porch had been painted, and part of the wall – but the painting was left unfinished and one portion of the house is darker and dingier than the other. The building looks completely deserted. Nevertheless, on the second floor there is one window which is not boarded; sometimes in the late afternoon when the heat is at its worst a hand will slowly open the shutter and a face will look down on the town. It is a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams – sexless and white, with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief. The face lingers at the window for an hour or so, then the shutters are dosed once more, and as likely as not there will not be another soul to be seen along the main street. These August afternoons – when your shift is finished there is absolutely nothing to do; you might as well walk down to the Forks Falls Road and listen to the chain gang.

  However, here in this very town there was once a café. And this old boarded-up house was unlike any other place for many miles around. There were tables with cloths and paper napkins, colored streamers from the electric fans, great gatherings on Saturday nights. The owner of the place was Miss Amelia Evans. But the person most responsible for the success and gaiety of the place was a hunchback called Cousin Lymon. One other person had a part in the story of this café – he was the former husband of Miss Amelia, a terrible character who returned to the town after a long term in the penitentiary, caused ruin, and then went on his way again. The café has long since been closed, but it is still remembered.

  The place was not always a café. Miss Amelia inherited the building from her father, and it was a store that carried mostly feed, guano, and staples such as meal and snuff. Miss Amelia was rich. In addition to the store she operated a still three miles back in the swamp, and ran out the best liquor in the county. She was a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like a man. Her hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead, and there was about her sunburned face a tense, haggard quality. She might have been a handsome woman if, even then, she was not slightly cross-eyed. There were those who would have courted her, but Miss Amelia cared nothing for the love of men and was a solitary person. Her marriage had been unlike any other marriage ever contracted in this county – it was a strange and dangerous marriage, lasting only for ten days, that left the whole town wondering and shocked. Except for this queer marriage, Miss Amelia had lived her life alone. Often she spent whole nights back in her shed in the swamp, dressed in overalls and gum boots, silently guarding the low fire of the still.

  With all things which could be made by the hands Miss Amelia prospered. She sold chitterlins and sausage in the town near-by. On fine autumn days, she ground sorghum, and the syrup from her vats was dark golden and delicately flavored. She built the brick privy behind her store in only two weeks and was skilled in carpentering. It was only with people that Miss Amelia was not at ease. People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and changed overnight to something more worthwhile and profitable. So that the only use that Miss Amelia had for other people was to make money out of them. And in this she succeeded. Mortgages on crops and property, a sawmill, money in the bank – she was the richest woman for miles around. She would have been rich as a congressman if it were not for her one great failing, and that was her passion for lawsuits and the courts. She would involve herself in long and bitter litigation over just a trifle. It was said that if Miss Amelia so much as stumbled over a rock in the road she would glance around instinctively as though looking for something to sue about it. Aside from these lawsuits she lived a steady life and every day was very much like the day that had gone before. With the exception of her ten-day marriage, nothing happened to change this until the spring of the year that Miss Amelia was thirty years old.

  It was toward midnight on a soft quiet evening in April. The sky was the color of a blue swamp iris, the moon clear and bright. The crops that spring promised well and in the past weeks the mill had run a night shift. Down by the creek the square brick factory was yellow with light, and there was the faint, steady hum of the looms. It was such a night when it is good to hear from faraway, across the dark fields, the slow song of a Negro on his way to make love. Or when it is pleasant to sit quietly and pick a guitar, or simply to rest alone and think of nothing at all. The street that evening was deserted, but Miss Amelia's store was lighted and on the porch outside there were five people. One of these was Stumpy MacPhail, a foreman with a red face and dainty, purplish hands. On the top step were two boys in overalls, the Rainey twins – both of them lanky and slow, with white hair and sleepy green eyes. The other man was Henry Macy, a shy and timid person with gentle manners and nervous ways, who sat on the edge of the bottom step. Miss Amelia herself stood leaning against the side of the open door, her feet crossed in then: big swamp boots, patiently untying knots in a rope she had come across. They had not talked for a long time.

  One of the twins, who had been looking down the empty road, was the first to speak. "I see something coming," he said.

  "A calf got loose," said his brother.

  The approaching figure was still too distant to be clearly seen. The moon made dim, twisted shadows of the blossoming peach trees along the side of the road. In the air the odor of blossoms and sweet spring grass mingled with the warm, sour smell of the near-by lagoon.

  "No. It's somebody's youngun," said Stumpy MacPhail.

  Miss Amelia watched the road in silence. She had put down her rope and was fingering the straps of her overalls with her brown bony hand. She scowled, and a dark lock of hair fell down on her forehead. While they were waiting there, a dog from one of the houses down the road began a wild, hoarse howl that continued until a voice called

out and hushed him. It was not until the figure was quite close, within the range of the yellow light from the porch, that they saw dearly what had come.

  The man was a stranger, and it is rare that a stranger enters the town on foot at that hour. Besides, the man was a hunchback. He was scarcely more than four feet tall and he wore a ragged, dusty coat that reached only to his knees. His crooked little legs seemed too thin to carry the weight of his great warped chest and the hump that sat on his shoulders. He had a very large head, with deep-set blue eyes and a sharp little mouth. His face was both soft and sassy – at the moment his pale skin was yellowed by dust and there were lavendar shadows beneath his eyes. He carried a lopsided old suitcase which was tied with a rope.

  "Evening," said the hunchback, and he was out of breath.

  Miss Amelia and the men on the porch neither answered his greeting nor spoke. They only looked at him.

  "I am hunting for Miss Amelia Evans."

  Miss Amelia pushed back her hair from her forehead and raised her chin. "How come?"

  "Because I am kin to her," the hunchback said.

  The twins and Stumpy MacPhail looked up at Miss Amelia.

  "That's me," she said. "How do you mean 'kin'?"

  "Because -" the hunchback began. He looked uneasy, almost as though he was about to cry. He rested the suitcase on the bottom step, but did not take his hand from the handle. "My mother was Fanny Jesup and she come from Cheehaw. She left Cheehaw some thirty years ago when she married her first husband. I remember hearing her tell how she had a half-sister named Martha. And back in Cheehaw today they tell me that was your mother."

  Miss Amelia listened with her head turned slightly aside. She ate her Sunday dinners by herself; her place was never crowded with a flock of relatives, and she claimed kin with no one. She had had a great-aunt who owned the livery stable in Cheehaw, but that aunt was now dead. Aside from her there was only one double first cousin who lived in a town twenty miles away, but this cousin and Miss Amelia did not get on so well, and when they chanced to pass each other they spat on the side of the road. Other people had tried very hard, from time to time, to work out some kind of far-fetched connection with Miss Amelia, but with absolutely no success.

  The hunchback went into a long rigmarole, mentioning names and places that were unknown to the listeners on the porch and seemed to have nothing to do with the subject. "So Fanny and Martha Jesup were half-sisters. And I am the son of Fanny's third husband. So that would make you and I -" He bent down and began to unfasten his suitcase. His hands were like dirty sparrow daws and they were trembling. The bag was full of all manner of junk – ragged clothes and odd rubbish that looked like parts out of a sewing machine, or something just as worthless. The hunchback scrambled among these belongings and brought out an old photograph. "This is a picture of my mother and her half-sister."

  Miss Amelia did not speak. She was moving her jaw slowly from side to side, and you could tell from her face what she was thinking about. Stumpy MacPhail took the photograph and held it out toward the light. It was a picture of two pale, withered-up little children of about two and three years of age. The faces were tiny white blurs, and it might have been an old picture in anyone's album.

  Stumpy MacPhail handed it back with no comment. "Where you come from?" he asked.

  The hunchback's voice was uncertain. "I was traveling."

  Still Miss Amelia did not speak. She just stood leaning against the side of the door, and looked down at the hunchback. Henry Macy winked nervously and rubbed his hands together. Then quietly he left the bottom step and disappeared. He is a good soul, and the hunchback's situation had touched his heart. Therefore he did not want to wait and watch Miss Amelia chase this newcomer off her property and run him out of town. The hunchback stood with his bag open on the bottom step; he sniffled his nose, and his mouth quivered. Perhaps he began to feel his dismal predicament. Maybe he realized what a miserable thing it was to be a stranger in the town with a suitcase full of junk, and claiming kin with Miss Amelia. At any rate he sat down on the steps and suddenly began to cry.

  It was not a common thing to have an unknown hunchback walk to the store at midnight and then sit down and cry. Miss Amelia rubbed back her hair from her forehead and the men looked at each other uncomfortably. All around the town was very quiet.

  At last one of the twins said: "I'll be damned if he ain't a regular Morris Finestein."

  Everyone nodded and agreed, for that is an expression having a certain special meaning. But the hunchback cried louder because he could not know what they were talking about. Morris Finestein was a person who had lived in the town years before. He was only a quick, skipping little Jew who cried if you called him Christ-killer, and ate light bread and canned salmon every day. A calamity had come over him and he had moved away to Society City. But since then if a man were prissy in any way, or if a man ever wept, he was known as a Morris Finestein.

  "Well, he is afflicted," said Stumpy MacPhail. "There is some cause."

  Miss Amelia crossed the porch with two slow, gangling strides. She went down the steps and stood looking thoughtfully at the stranger. Gingerly, with one long brown forefinger, she touched the hump on his back. The hunchback still wept, but he was quieter now. The night was silent and the moon still shone with a soft, dear light – it was getting colder. Then Miss Amelia did a rare thing; she pulled out a bottle from her hip pocket and after polishing off the top with the palm of her hand she handed it to the hunchback to drink. Miss Amelia could seldom be persuaded to sell her liquor on credit, and for her to give so much as a drop away free was almost unknown.

  "Drink," she said. "It will liven your gizzard."

  The hunchback stopped crying, neatly licked the tears from around his mouth, and did as he was told. When he was finished, Miss Amelia took a slow swallow, warmed and washed her mouth with it, and spat. Then she also drank. The twins and the foreman had their own bottle they had paid for.

  "It is smooth liquor," Stumpy MacPhail said. "Miss Amelia, I have never known you to fail."

  The whisky they drank that evening (two big bottles of it) is important. Otherwise, it would be hard to account for what followed. Perhaps without it there would never have been a café. For the liquor of Miss Amelia has a special quality of its own. It is clean and sharp on the tongue, but once down a man it glows inside him for a long time afterward. And that is not all. It is known that if a message is written with lemon juice on a clean sheet of paper there will be no sign of it. But if the paper is held for a moment to the fire then the letters turn brown and the meaning becomes clear. Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man – then the worth of Miss Amelia's liquor can be understood. Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harbored far back in the dark mind, are suddenly recognized and comprehended. A spinner who has thought only of the loom, the dinner pail, the bed, and then the loom again – this spinner might drink some on a Sunday and come across a marsh lily. And in his palm he might hold this flower, examining the golden dainty cup, and in him suddenly might come a sweetness keen as pain. A weaver might look up suddenly and see for the first time the cold, weird radiance of midnight January sky, and a deep fright at his own smallness stop his heart. Such things as these, then, happen when a man has drunk Miss Amelia's liquor. He may suffer, or he may be spent with joy – but the experience has shown the truth; he has warmed his soul and seen the message hidden there.

  They drank until it was past midnight, and the moon was clouded over so that the night was cold and dark. The hunchback still sat on the bottom steps, bent over miserably with his forehead resting on his knee. Miss Amelia stood with her hands in her pockets, one foot resting on the second step of the stairs. She had been silent for a long time. Her face had the expression often seen in slightly cross-eyed persons who are thinking deeply, a look that appears to be both very wise and very crazy. At last she said: "I don't know you

r name."

  "I'm Lymon Willis," said the hunchback.

  "Well, come on in," she said. "Some supper was left in the stove and you can eat."

  Only a few times in her life had Miss Amelia invited anyone to eat with her, unless she were planning to trick them in some way, or make money out of them. So the men on the porch felt there was something wrong. Later, they said among themselves that she must have been drinking back in the swamp the better part of the afternoon. At any rate she left the porch, and Stumpy MacPhail and the twins went on off home. She bolted the front door and looked all around to see that her goods were in order. Then she went to the kitchen, which was at the back of the store. The hunchback followed her, dragging his suitcase, sniffing and wiping his nose on the sleeve of his dirty coat.

  "Sit down," said Miss Amelia. "I'll just warm up what's here."

  It was a good meal they had together on that night. Miss Amelia was rich and she did not grudge herself food. There was fried chicken (the breast of which the hunchback took on his own plate), mashed rootabeggars, collard greens, and hot, pale golden, sweet potatoes. Miss Amelia ate slowly and with the relish of a farm hand. She sat with both elbows on the table, bent over the plate, her knees spread wide apart and her feet braced on the rungs of the chair. As for the hunchback, he gulped down his supper as though he had not smelled food in months. During the meal one tear crept down his dingy cheek – but it was just a little leftover tear and meant nothing at all. The lamp on the table was well-trimmed, burning blue at the edges of the wick, and casting a cheerful light in the kitchen. When Miss Amelia had eaten her supper she wiped her plate carefully with a slice of light bread, and then poured her own clear, sweet syrup over the bread. The hunchback did likewise – except that he was more finicky and asked for a new plate. Having finished, Miss Amelia tilted back her chair, tightened her fist, and felt the hard, supple muscles of her right arm beneath the clean, blue cloth of her shirtsleeves – an unconscious habit with her, at the close of a meal. Then she took the lamp from the table and jerked her head toward the staircase as an invitation for the hunchback to follow after her.