FAIRFAX HUNTER
The erratic philanthropist of our family arrived from New York one spring day with a thin, sickly-looking, middle-aged, colored man, almost in rags. “This is Fairfax Hunter,” he announced with the professional cheeriness of the doer of good. “He’s pretty badly run down and needs country air. I thought maybe you could let him sleep in the barn, and work around enough for his board.”
There was nothing professionally or in any other way cheery about the colored man, who stood waiting indifferently for my decision, his knees sagging, his hollow chest sunken. As I glanced at him he raised his dark, blood-shot eyes and met my look. I decided hastily, on impulse, from something in the expression of his eyes, that we could not send him away.
I led him off to the barn and showed him the corner of the hay-mow where the children sometimes sleep when our tiny house overflows with guests. He sank down on it and closed his eyes. The lids were blue and livid as though bruised. He had nothing with him except the ragged clothes on his back.
When I returned to the house, the philanthropist explained that Fairfax was a Virginia negro—“You could tell that from his name, of course”—who had come to New York and fallen into bad ways, “drink, etc.... But there’s something about him....”
Yes, I agreed to that. There was something about him....
Fairfax lived with us after this for more than four years, the last years of his life. He was really very ill at first, the merest little flicker of life puffing uncertainly in and out of the bag of skin and bones which was his body. The doctor said that rest and food were the only medicines for him. He lay like a piece of sodden driftwood for long hours on the edge of the hay where the sun caught it.
The good-natured old Yankee woman who was cooking for me then, used to take him out big bowls of fresh milk, and slices of her home-baked bread, and stand chatting with him while he sat up listlessly and ate. At least, she being a great gossip, did the chattering, and Fairfax listened, once in a while murmuring the soft, slow, “Ye-e-s’m,” which came to be the speech he was known by, in our valley.
He seemed to have no interest in getting well, but little by little the sunshine, the quiet, the mountain air, and something else of which we did not dream till later, lifted him slowly up to health. He began to work a little in the garden, occasionally cut the grass around the house and, borrowing the carpentering tools, built himself a little room in the corner of the barn. One day I paid him a small sum for his services about the place, and my husband gave him some old clothes. The next afternoon he took his first walk to the village, and came back with a pipe and a bag of tobacco. That evening Nancy, our “help,” called me to the kitchen window and pointed out towards the barn. On a bench before the barn door sat Fairfax, smoking, his head tipped back, watching the moon sink behind the mountain. We agreed that it looked as though he were getting well.
Nancy had to go home to a sick sister that Fall, and Fairfax moved into the kitchen to occupy her place. It came out that he had once worked in a hotel kitchen in Virginia, so that thereafter our Vermont cookstove turned out Southern food, from hot biscuit to fried chicken.
There is very little caste feeling in our valley, and not a bit of color prejudice. Many of our people had never even seen a negro to speak to before they knew Fairfax, and they liked him very much.
He always was very thin, but he had filled out a little by this time; had gone to a dentist by my advice and had the blackened stumps of his teeth replaced by shining new ivories; had bought with his first wages a new suit of clothes, and was considered by our farmer families to be “quite a good-looking fellow.” He kept his curling gray hair cut short to his head, his thin cheeks scrupulously shaven, and was always presentable.
As a matter of course he was invited to all the country gatherings, like other people’s “hired help,” along with the rest of us. I remember the first of these invitations: some one telephoned from the village to announce a church supper, and I was urged, “Do bring down a good crowd. We’ve got a lot of food to dispose of.”
I stepped back into the kitchen and told Fairfax not to get supper that night, as we were all going to the village to a church supper.
“Yes’m,” said Fairfax.
“I want you to be ready to start at a quarter to six,” I added, glancing at the clock.
“Who, me?” said Fairfax, with a little start.
“Yes,” I answered, a little surprised. “Didn’t you hear me say I wanted us all to go?”
Fairfax looked at me searchingly, “Where’ll I get my supper?”
“Why, they usually have the church suppers out on the church green unless it rains, and then they go down to the basement rooms.”
Fairfax said apathetically, “No’m, they don’t want me.”
I saw now what was in his mind, and said, to set him right, “Oh, yes, they do. You know the people around here haven’t any of those notions. Come on.”
“No’m, they don’t want me,” he repeated.
I beckoned him to follow me, went back to the telephone and rang up the woman who was arranging for the supper. “Do you want me to bring Fairfax Hunter with us?” I asked her explicitly.
“Why, of course,” she said surprised. “I told you we want a crowd.”
After this Fairfax stood undecided, his sensitive face clouded and anxious. I had a glimpse then of the long years of brutal discrimination through which he had lived, and said, feeling very much ashamed of my civilization, “Now, Fairfax, don’t be so foolish. We want you to go. Get on your best clothes, so’s to do honor to the Ladies Aid.”
He went back to the room in the corner of the barn, and half an hour later came out, fresh and neat in his new suit, closely shaven, his slim yellow hands clean, his gray hair smooth. He looked almost eager, with a light in his eyes that was like a distant reflection of gaiety. But when we cranked up the Ford to go he was not in sight. We called him, and he answered from the barn that he was not ready, and would walk in. I was vexed, and shouted back as we rolled down the hill, “Now don’t fail to come.”
It rained on the way in, and the supper was served in the basement, with all the neighbors spruced up and fresh, while the busy women of the Ladies Aid rushed back and forth bringing us salmon loaf, pickles, Boston brown bread, creamed potatoes, and coffee and ice-cream as from the beginning of time they always have; but though I kept a chair at our table empty for Fairfax, and sat where I could watch the door, he did not appear.
After the supper I went across the street to see my aunt, house-ridden with a hard cold. She told me that from her windows she had seen Fairfax come down to the village street, halt in front of the church, go on, turn back, halt again. She said he had paced back and forth in this way for half an hour, and finally had gone home.
When we reached the house we found Fairfax there, his good clothes put away, his cook’s white apron tied around him, eating bread and butter and cold meat.
I sat down to scold him for not doing as I had said. When I had finished Fairfax looked at me, hesitated, and said, “If it had been out of doors, maybe I’d have tried it.” There was an expression on his thin somber face, which made me get up and go away without venturing any more comment.
As his health increased, his spirits rose somewhat. My little son was born that winter, and Fairfax was very fond of the baby, who soon developed the most extravagant fondness for his company. When spring came on, and gardening arrived, Fairfax took over a part of that work, and had a long-running feud with the woodchucks who live in the edge of the woods beyond our garden patch. It was a quaint sight to see Fairfax in his white jacket and apron, sitting outside the kitchen door, peeling potatoes, a rifle across his knees, or to see him emerge in a stealthy run from the kitchen door, gun in hand, and dart across the road to get a better sight on the little brown garden thieves. It did me good to see him stirred up enough to care about anything.
He turned out to be a great reader and worked his way through most of our library. I know you will not believe me when I tell you who his favorite author was. But I am not concerned with seeming probable, only with telling the truth. It was Thomas Hardy, whose philosophy of life fitted in exactly with Fairfax’s views and experience. He was no talker and rarely said anything to me beyond the gentle “no’m” and “yes’m” with which he received orders. But once he remarked to my husband that Thomas Hardy certainly did know what life was like. He went straight through that entire set of novels, once he had found them on the shelves, and all that winter my life was tinged with the consciousness of Fairfax sitting in the kitchen after his work was done, deep in communion with Hardy. Our visiting friends used to find the sight so curious as to be amusing. I did not find it so.
The neighbors grew very used to him, and being sociable, friendly people, with a great deal of Yankee curiosity about the rest of the world, they often tried to get Fairfax to tell about life in the south. When he went out for a stroll in the evening, they would call to him, from where they were weeding a bed in the garden, or giving the pigs their last meal, “Hello, there, Fairfax, come on in for a minute.” If they were in the yard, or on the porch, Fairfax often accepted the invitation. As we went by in the car we used to see him leaning up against the porch-railing, talking, or helping some busy woman set out her cabbage plants. But he never went indoors.
Our corner of the valley is a very cheerful one with a number of lively children to keep us from “shucking over” into middle age too soon, and the school-house is often the place where we gather for good times. The school-benches are pushed back, the lamps lighted, the fiddler tunes up, and we all dance, young and old, children and grown-ups. Fairfax was invited as a matter of course to these informal affairs, and some of the children who were very fond of the kind, gentle, silent man, used to pull at his coat, and say, “Do come on in, Mr. Hunter! Dance with me!” But Fairfax only grinned uneasily and shook his head. He used to stand outside, smoking his pipe and looking in wistfully at the brightly lighted room. As we skipped back and forth in the lively old-fashioned dances, we could see him, a dim shape outside the window, the little red glow of his pipe reflected once in a while from his dark, liquid eyes. Sometimes when the window was open, he came and leaned his elbows on the sill, nodding his head with the music, and beating time lightly with his fingers, his eyes following us about as we stepped back and forth in the complicated figures.
When we were ready to serve the “refreshments,” some of us went out into the entry-way, and Fairfax came in to help us with the uncomfortable work of digging out the ice and salt from the top of the freezers, and opening the cans. I used to say at first, “Fairfax, why don’t you go in and dance, too? Anybody can see you know just how to.” But his invariable answer, “No’m, I guess I won’t,” had in it a quality which ended by silencing me.
The older people called him Fairfax, as we did, but because he was a grown man, and a middle-aged man, they thought it not good manners for the children to call him by his first name, and taught the boys and girls to call him Mr. Hunter. We thought this perfectly natural, and none of us, entirely ignorant of Southern ways, had the slightest idea of what this meant to him.
Once a year, Fairfax took a two weeks’ vacation, and all his earnings for the year. He went off to the city, clean, and strong, and well-dressed; and he always came back without a cent, sick, and coughing, and shabby, with a strong smell of whiskey all over him. Of course, we took him severely to task for this inexcusable behavior, getting out for his benefit all the accepted axioms of conduct, prudence, ambition, self-interest, and so on, showing him how he could save his money, and put it in the bank, and be prosperous.
He always answered with his invariable soft, “Yes’m,” except on one occasion, the last year of his life, when he said somberly, with his soft, Southern accent, “I’ve got no use for money. I can’t buy what I want. I’m a colored man.”
We learned more about him ... a little ... that he had a sister now married to a sober, hard-working carpenter, living in Buffalo, that he had lived at home with his mother till long after he was grown up, working in the hotel, and supporting them both with his wages. That was the only time I ever saw him show emotion. His thin face suddenly twisted like a child’s, and tears shone in his eyes. “She was an awful good woman, my mother was. She had a terrible time to get along when my sister and I were little. She never had a husband to help her. My father was a white man.”
“Fairfax, why don’t you think of marrying and having a home of your own?” I said impulsively.
“To bring up children to be Jim-Crowed?” he asked, shortly.
On another occasion, when I was commenting on the singular excellence of his writing and figuring, I heard about his school taught by a northern Negro, who had gone down south as a volunteer teacher after the war. It was from him that Fairfax had learned his correct speech, without a trace of what we call the Negro dialect.
When the war in Europe came, and we decided to take the children and go to France we were confronted with the question of what to do with Fairfax. He wanted to go with us, and asked for it with more insistence than he ever showed, and I often now regret that I did not try to take him. But it seemed impossible to add to the responsibility of little children in a war-ridden country, the heavier responsibility in a country flowing with alcohol, for a man with a weakness for drink. Besides, we could not afford the extra expense.
There was no place for him in our region, where few people keep help in the kitchen. In the hurry and confusion of our preparations for departure I simply could not think of anything satisfactory to do in the United States of America for a proud sensitive colored man. The best I could devise was to find him a place with a friend, unfortunately in a city where there were plenty of saloons and plenty of race prejudice. I can’t see now why I did not think of Canada. But we knew no one in Canada.
When we separated, he kissed the children good-by, seriously, and shook the hand which I held heartily out to him. After our last words, I said, making a great effort to break through the wall of dignified reserve which his silence built around him, “Fairfax, do keep straight, won’t you?”
He looked at me with that passive, neutral look of his, which had to my eye an ironical color, and made a little gesture with his shoulders and eyebrows that might mean anything.
He drank himself to death inside six months. I read the news in a letter from his sister, the first and only letter I ever had from her. I had hurried back to the apartment in Paris one evening to be with the children during an air-raid, found the American mail arrived, and read it to the accompaniment of that anti-aircraft bombardment which was so familiar a part of the war to make the world safe for democracy. My letter from the country of democracy informed me that Fairfax had died, alone, before his sister could reach him. “He had been drinking again, I am afraid, from what they told me. I always felt so bad about Fairfax drinking, but he wouldn’t stop—he was just plain discouraged of life. He never touched a drop as long as our mother was living. He was always so sorry for our mother, and so good to her, though she was only a poor ignorant woman, who couldn’t read or write, and Fairfax was so smart. The teacher in our school wanted Fairfax to study to be a minister or a doctor, but he never would. He said he thought the more colored people try to raise themselves, the worse they get treated. He felt so bad, always, about the way colored people were treated. He said white folks wanted them to be low-down, so he was going to be. I used to tell him how wrong this was, and how the good white people weren’t like that, but he didn’t have any patience. Colored people have got to have patience. Our mother was always patient. And my husband and I manage pretty well. But Fairfax was proud. And colored people can’t be proud. I don’t believe he ever let you-all know how he liked the way the folks up your way treated him. He said their folks taught the white children to call him mister just like a white man, and that the white people used to ask him to parties and dances. He tried to go, he said, but at the door, he’d remember all the times when white people made a scene and called him a nigger and got mad if he even stood near them on the street, and looked at him that way white people do ... if you were colored you’d know what I mean. And then he just didn’t dare risk it. When he was a boy and something like that happened, it used to make him down sick so he couldn’t eat for days. And when he got up to where you live, it was too late. My husband and I had Fairfax taken to our old home town in Virginia and buried there beside our mother.”
The air-raid was over when I finished that letter. The noisy bombardment of hate and revenge was quiet. The night was as still there in France as in the graveyard in Virginia. I was very thankful to know that Fairfax was sleeping beside his mother.
We are back in Vermont now, the curtain lowered over air-raids and barrages. Everything goes on as before.
The other evening we were all down at the school-house for an entertainment. The children spoke pieces, and then we had a dance. About eleven o’clock some of us went out to the entry-room and began to serve the ice-cream. One of my neighbors said, after a while, “Do you remember how Fairfax used to get all dressed up so nice, and then always stayed around outside to watch?”
“Yes,” I remembered.
“Sometimes,” said another one of the women, “sometimes when we’re out here like this, it seems to me when I look up quick and glance out there in the dark, as though I could almost see him there now.”
After a time, some one else said, “’Twas a pity he never would come in.”