HILLARD WATTS
It is good for the world now and then to go back to first principles in religion. It would be better for it never to get away from them; but, since it has that way of doing—of breeding away and breaking away from the innate good—it is well that a man should be born in any age with the faith of Abraham.
It matters not from what source such a man may spring. And he need have no known pedigree at all, except an honest ancestry behind him.
Such a man was Hillard Watts, the Cottontown preacher.
Sprung from the common people of the South, he was a most uncommon man, in that he had an absolute faith in God and His justice, and an absolute belief that some redeeming goodness lay in every human being, however depraved he may seem to the world. And so firm was his faith, so simple his religion—so contrary to the worldliness of the religion of his day,—that the very practice of it made him an uncommon man.
As the overseer of General Jeremiah Travis's large estate before the war, he proved by his success that even slaves work better for kindness. Of infinite good sense, but little education, he had a mind that went to the heart of things, and years ago the fame of his homely but pithy sayings stuck in the community. In connection with kindness to his negroes one of his sayings was, “Oh, kindness can't be classified—it takes in the whole world or nothin'.”
When General Travis got into dire financial straits once, he sent for his overseer, and advised with him as to the expediency of giving up. The overseer, who knew the world and its ways with all the good judgment of his nature, dryly remarked: “That'll never do. Never let the world know you've quit; an' let the undertaker that buries you be the fust man to find out you're busted.”
General Travis laughed, and that season one of his horses won the Tennessee Valley Futurity, worth thirty-thousand dollars—and the splendid estate was again free from debt.
There was not a negro on the place who did not love the overseer, not one who did not carry that love to the extent of doing his best to please him. He had never been known to punish one, and yet the work done by the Travis hands was proverbial.
Among his duties as overseer, the entire charge of the Westmore stable of thoroughbreds fell to his care. This was as much from love as choice, for never was a man born with more innate love of all dumb creatures than the preacher-overseer.
“I've allers contended that a man could love God an' raise horses, too,” he would say; and it was ludicrous to see him when he went off to the races, filling the tent trunk with religious tracts, which, after the races, he would distribute to all who would read them. And when night came he would regularly hold prayers in his tent—prayer-meetings in which his auditors were touts, stable-boys and gamblers. And woe to the stable-boy who uttered an oath in his presence or dared to strike or maltreat any of his horses!
He preached constantly against gambling on the races. “That's the Devil's end of it,” he would say—“The Almighty lets us raise good horses as a benefit to mankind, an' the best one wins the purse. It was the Devil's idea that turned 'em into gambling machines.”
No one ever doubted the honesty of his races. When the Travis horses ran, the racing world knew they ran for blood.
Physically, he had been an athlete—a giant, and unconscious of his strength. Incidentally, he had taken to wrestling when a boy, and as a man his fame as a wrestler was coincident with the Tennessee Valley. It was a manly sport which gave him great pleasure, just as would the physical development of one of his race horses. Had he lived in the early days of Greece, he would have won in the Olympian wrestling match.
There was in Hillard Watts a trait which is one of the most pronounced of his type of folks,—a sturdy, honest humor. Humor, but of the Cromwell type—and withal, a kind that went with praying and fighting. Possessed, naturally, of a strong mind of great good sense, he had learned to read and write by studying the Bible—the only book he had ever read through and through and which he seemed to know by heart. He was earnest and honest in all things, but in his earnestness and strong fight for right living there was the twinkle of humor. Life, with him, was a serious fight, but ever through the smoke of its battle there gleamed the bright sun of a kindly humor.
The overseer's home was a double log hut on the side of the mountain. His plantation, he called it,—for having been General Travis's overseer, he could not imagine any farm being less than a plantation.
It consisted of forty acres of flinty land on the mountain side—“too po' to sprout cow-peas,” as his old wife would always add—“but hits pow'ful for blackberries, an' if we can just live till blackberry time comes we can take keer ourselves.”
Mrs. Watts had not a lazy bone in her body. Her religion was work: “Hit's nature's remedy,” she would add—“wuck and five draps o' turpentine if you're feelin' po'ly.”
She despised her husband's ways and thought little of his religion. Her tongue was frightful—her temper worse. Her mission on earth—aside from work—work—work—was to see that too much peace and good will did not abide long in the same place.
Elder Butts, the Hard-Shell preacher, used to say: “She can go to the full of the moon mighty nigh every month 'thout raisin' a row, if hard pressed for time an' she thinks everybody else around her is miser'ble. But if things look too peaceful and happy, she'll raise sand in the last quarter or bust. The Bishop's a good man, but if he ever gits to heaven, the bigges' diamon' in his crown'll be because he's lived with that old 'oman an' ain't committed murder. I don't believe in law suits, but if he ain't got a damage case agin the preacher that married him, then I'm wrong.”
But no one ever heard the old man use harsher language in speaking of her than to remark that she was “a female Jineral—that's what Tabitha is.”
Perhaps she was, and but for her the Bishop and his household had starved long ago.
“Furagin' is her strong point”—he would always add—“she'd made Albert Sydney Johnston a great chief of commissary.”
And there was not an herb of any value that Mrs. Watts did not know all about. Any fair day she might be seen on the mountain side plucking edibles. Ginseng was her money crop, and every spring she would daily go into the mountain forests and come back with enough of its roots to help them out in the winter's pinch.
“Now, if anybody'll study Nature,” she would say, “they'll see she never cal'c'lated to fetch us here 'ithout makin' 'lowance fur to feed us. The fus' thing that comes up is dandelions—an' I don't want to stick my tooth in anything that's better than dandelion greens biled with hog-jowl. I like a biled dinner any way. Sas'fras tea comes mighty handy with dandelions in the spring, an' them two'll carry us through April. Then comes wild lettice an' tansy-tea—that's fur May. Blackberries is good fur June an' the jam'll take us through winter if Bull Run and Appomattox ain' too healthy. In the summer we can live on garden truck, an' in the fall there is wild reddishes an' water-cresses an' spatterdock, an' nuts an' pertatoes come in mighty handy fur winter wuck. Why, I was born wuckin'—when I was a gal I cooked, washed and done house-work for a family of ten, an' then had time to spin ten hanks o' yarn a day.”
“Now there's the old man—he's too lazy to wuck—he's like all parsons, he'd rather preach aroun' all his life on a promise of heaven than to wuck on earth for cash!”
“How did I ever come to marry Hillard Watts? Wal, he wa'n't that triflin' when I married him. He didn't have so much religiun then. But I've allers noticed a man's heredity for no-countness craps out after he's married. Lookin' back now I reckin' I married him jes' to res' myself. When I'm wuckin' an' git tired, I watches Hillard doin' nothin' awhile an' it hopes me pow'ful.”
“He gits so busy at it an' seems so contented an' happy.”
Besides his wife there were five grandchildren in his family—children of the old man's son by his second wife. “Their father tuck after his stepmother,” he would explain regretfully, “an' wucked hisself to death in the cotton factory. The dust an' lint give him consumption. He was the only man I ever seed that tuck after his stepmother”—he added sadly.
An old soldier never gets over the war. It has left a nervous shock in his make-up—a memory in all his after life which takes precedence over all other things. The old man had the naming of the grandchildren, and he named them after the battles of the Civil war. Bull Run and Seven Days were the boys. Atlanta, Appomattox and Shiloh were the girls. His apology for Shiloh was: “You see I thout I'd name the last one Appomattox. Then came a little one befo' her mammy died, so weak an' pitiful I named her Shiloh.”
It was the boast of their grandmother—that these children—even little Shiloh—aged seven—worked from ten to twelve hours every day in the cotton factory, rising before day and working often into the night, with forty minutes at noon for lunch.
They had not had a holiday since Christmas, and on the last anniversary of that day they had worked until ten o'clock, making up for lost time. Their pay was twenty-five cents a day—except Shiloh, who received fifteen.
“But I'll soon be worth mo', pap,” she would say as she crawled up into the old man's lap—her usual place when she had eaten her supper and wanted to rest. “An you know what I'm gwine do with my other nickel every day? I'm gwine give it to the po' people of Indy an' China you preaches about.”
And thus she would prattle—too young to know that, through the cupidity of white men, in this—the land of freedom and progress—she—this blue-eyed, white-skinned child of the Saxon race, was making the same wages as the Indian sepoy and the Chinese coolie.
It was Saturday night and after the old man had put Shiloh to bed, he mounted his horse and rode across the mountain to Westmoreland.
“Oh,” said the old lady—“he's gwine over to Miss Alice's to git his Sunday School less'n. An' I'd like to know what good Sunday school less'ns 'll do any body. If folks'd git in the habit of wuckin' mo' an' prayin' less, the worl'ud be better off, an' they'd really have somethin' to be thankful fur when Sunday comes, 'stid of livin' frum han' to mouth an' trustin' in some unknown God to cram feed in you' crops.”
Hardened by poverty, work, and misfortune, she was the soul of pessimism.