5
THE PALM PORCH
I
Below, a rock engine was crushing stone, shooting up rivers of steam and signaling the frontier's rebirth. Opposite, there was proof, a noisy, swaggering sort of proof, of the gradual death and destruction of the frontier post. Black men behind wheelbarrows slowly ascended a rising made of spliced boards and emptied the sand rock into the maw of a mixing machine. More black men, a peg down, behind wheelbarrows, formed a line which caught the mortar pouring into the rear organ of the omnivorous monster.
"All, all gone," cried Miss Buckner, and the girls at her side shuddered. All quietly felt the sterile menace of it. There, facing its misery, tears came to Miss Buckner's eyes and a jeweled, half-white hand, lifted gently to give a paltry vision of the immensity of it.
"All of that," she sighed, "all of that was swamp—when I came to the Isthmus. All." A gang of "taw"-pitching boys, sons of the dusky folk seeping up from Caribbean isles, who had first painted Hudson Alley and "G" Street a dense black, and were now spreading up to the Point—swarmed to a spot in the road which the stone crusher had been especially cruel to, and drew a marble ring. Contemptibly pointing to them, Miss Buckner observed, "a year ago that would have been impossible. I can't understand what the world is coming to." Gazing at one another the girls were not tempted to speak, but were a bit bewildered, at this show of grossness on their mother's part. And anyway, it was noon, and they wanted to go to sleep.
But a light, flashed on a virgin past, burst on Miss Buckner, and she became reminiscent....