The essential interest of Evansville to me, however, was that at that particular time in my youth, and just at the time when seemingly things had reached a crisis for my mother—whose moods were invariably my own—Evansville had appeared like a splendid new chapter in our lives, and resolved all of our difficulties, for the time being, into nothing. How was this done? Well, as I have indicated somewhere, I believe, our oldest brother, the oldest living member of the family of children, had come to my mother’s rescue in the nick of time. By now he was a successful, though up to this time wandering, minstrel man—an “end man,” no less. But, more recently still, he had secured a position with a permanent or stock minstrel company located in the Evansville Opera House, where he was honored with the position of interlocutor and end man, as the mood prompted him, and where nightly he was supposed to execute a humorous monologue. Incidentally, he was singing his own songs. Also, incidentally he was conducting a humorous column in a local paper, the Evansville Argus. The fences and billboards of the city attested to his comparative popularity, for a large red and yellow single sheet print of his face was conspicuously displayed in many windows.
His life so far had proved a charming version of the prodigal son. As a boy of seventeen, for errors which need not be recounted here, he was driven out of the home. As a man of twentyseven (or boy) he had now returned (the winter previous to our moving) adorned with a fur coat, a high silk hat, a gold-headed cane.
My mother cried on his shoulder and he on hers. He really loved her so tenderly, so unwaveringly, that this in itself constituted a fine romance. At once he promised to solve all her difficulties. She must come out of this. He was going to Evansville now. There is a bit of private history which should be included here, but which I do not wish to relate, at present. The result was that thereafter a weekly letter containing a few dollars—three or four—arrived every Monday. (How often have I gone to the postoffice to get it!) Then there was some talk of a small house he was going to rent, and of the fact that we were soon to move. Then one summer day we did go, and I recall so well how, arriving in Evansville at about nine o’clock at night (my mother and we three youngest), we were met at the station by the same smiling, happy brother, and taken to the house at 1413 East Franklin Street; where on seeing her new home and its rather comfortable equipment, my mother stood in the doorway and cried—and he with her. I cannot say more than that. It all seems too wonderful—too beautiful, even now.
CHAPTER LVI
EVANSVILLE
But I cannot possibly hope to convey the delicious sting life had in it for me at this time as a spectacle, a dream, something in which to bathe and be enfolded, as only youth and love know life. Not Evansville alone but life itself was beautiful—the sky, the trees, the sun, the visible scene. People hurrying to and fro or idling in the shade, the sound of church bells, of whistles, a wide stretch of common. Getting up in the morning, going to bed at night. The stars, the winds, hunger, thirst, the joy of playing or of idly musing.
In Evansville I was just beginning to come out of the dream period which held for me between the years of seven and eleven. The significance of necessity and effort were for the first time beginning to suggest themselves. Still, I was not awake, only vaguely disturbed at times, like a silky, shimmery sea, faintly touched by vagrom winds. The gales and storms were to come fast enough. I was really not old enough to understand all or even any of the troublesome conditions affecting our family. Like my companionable brother and sister, I was too young, undaunted, hopeful. Sometimes, in my dreams, a faint suggestion of my mood at the time comes back, and then I know how I have changed—the very chemistry of me. I do not respond now as I did then, or at any rate, I think not.
As we neared the city we could see the ground elevating itself in the distance, and soon we were riding along a ridge or elevated highroad, suggestively alive with traffic and dotted with houses.
Evansville is a southern city, in spite of the fact that it is Indiana, and has all the characteristic marks of a southern city—a hot, drowsy, almost enervating summer, an early spring, a mild winter, a long, agreeable autumn. Snow falls but rarely and does not endure long. Darkies abound, whole sections of them, and work on the levee, the railroad, and at scores of tasks given over to whites in the north. You see them ambling about carrying packages, washing windows, driving trucks and autos, waiting on table. It is as though the extreme south had reached up and just touched this projecting section of Indiana.
Again, it is a German city, strangely enough, a city to which thousands of the best type of German have migrated. Despite the fact that Vincennes and Terre Haute were originally French, and then English, except for small sections through here, the German seems to predominate. We saw many German farmers, the Americanized type, coming up from Terre Haute, and here in Evansville German names abounded. It was as true of my days as a boy here as it is now—even more so, I believe. There are a number of purely German Catholic or Lutheran churches controlled by Bavarian priests or ministers.
Again it is a distinctly river type of town, with that floating population of river squatters—you can always tell them—drifting about. I saw a dozen in the little while I was there, river nomads or gypsies bustling about, dark, sallow, small, rugged. I have seen them at St. Louis, at Memphis, in Savannah, where the boats come up from the sea and down from Augusta. I can always tell them.