“All young ’uns needs it,” Shug replied virtuously, as he tossed the switch aside. “Hadn’t been my daddy usetah whale me powerful, I wouldn’t a been nigh the man I am now; not nigh.”
It was a matter for remark between the parents that, even at a tender age, Selina Jo rarely emitted any outcry under punishment. There burned in her sloe-black eyes, though, the flame of an emotion which she checked upon the surface.
One would have expected the girl to respond to the influence of heredity. Her parents, the cattle, the hogs, even the crops about her were stunted, half-starved in appearance. By contrast, Selina Jo, upon a daily ration made up almost exclusively of corn pone, molasses, and home-cured pork as salt as ocean brine, defied all known dietary laws, and flourished amazingly. She was precocious, too. When she was only seven years old she could swear just as well—rather, just as wickedly—as could Shug himself. She learned early, though, that, as a source of information, her parents were practically nil. Thenceforth, the questions that had rushed to her lips were succeeded by a look of eternal interrogation in her sombre eyes.
It was shortly after her twelfth birthday that a young school-teacher—the only one the community ever knew—came into the Hudsill settlement. Selina Jo was grudgingly allowed to attend the school. For six months the young man’s enthusiasm held out. Then it waned and died. Few of the older people could either read or write, and the opinion among them seemed to be universal that what was good enough for them was good enough for their offspring. But before the school closed Selina Jo had learned the alphabet and a portion of the old-fashioned first reader.
She missed the school, and she always kept, close at hand, her thumbed and dog-eared book, the only one that she possessed. The school-teacher had lighted the fires of ambition within her. She came to be troubled by the realization that her mental development was lagging behind her physical growth.
“S’liny Jo,” she informed herself one day in a fit of musing, “you air as p’izen strong as a gallon o’ green shinny, but you don’t know skercely nothin’.” A moment later she added dejectedly: “Ner ain’t got no chanchet o’ learnin’, neether; not nary par-tick-le of a chancet!”
Shoalwater River afforded her chief means of diversion. She never remembered when or how she learned to swim. Every day that the weather permitted she enjoyed a plunge in the river. Soon she noticed that no less pleasant than the contact of the water with her naked body was the comfortable after-feeling of cleanliness. Following this, came a feeling of repugnance toward her shiftless and slovenly parents.
She had long since begun to assist with the crops. With the manure scraped from the cow lot she made the beds for the potatoes. At planting time she pulled the slips and set them out. She hoed the sugar cane and thinned the corn. During harvest she did almost as much work as Shug and Marthy combined.
Before she was fourteen she had broken a pair of young steers to the yoke. She split the rails and laid the fence for a new potato patch. Using for the purpose the young oxen which she had broken, she prepared the ground for planting. She was as tall as her father now, a slender, wiry creature, her symmetrical young body as free from blemish as the trunk of a healthy pine tree.
A vague unrest troubled her at times, though. Something occurred one day which intensified this. In a corner of the cabin she found a dust-covered photograph. Brushing it off, she gazed upon a face that was unfamiliar. She took the picture to Marthy.