The People, Yes Read online

  Contents

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  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

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  About the Author

  Copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace & Company

  Copyright renewed 1964 by Carl Sandburg

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  eISBN 978-0-544-41692-5

  v2.0421

  Dedicated

  to contributors

  dead and living

  THE PEOPLE, YES

  Being several stories and psalms nobody

  would want to laugh at

  interspersed with memoranda variations

  worth a second look

  along with sayings and yarns traveling on

  grief and laughter

  running sometimes as a fugitive air in the

  classic manner

  breaking into jig time and tap dancing

  nohow classical

  and further broken by plain and irregular

  sounds and echoes from

  the roar and whirl of street crowds, work

  gangs, sidewalk clamor,

  with interludes of midnight cool blue and

  inviolable stars

  over the phantom frames of skyscrapers.

  1

  From the four corners of the earth,

  from corners lashed in wind

  and bitten with rain and fire,

  from places where the winds begin

  and fogs are born with mist children,

  tall men from tall rocky slopes came

  and sleepy men from sleepy valleys,

  their women tall, their women sleepy,

  with bundles and belongings,

  with little ones babbling, “Where to now?

  what next?”

  The people of the earth, the family of man,

  wanted to put up something proud to look at,

  a tower from the flat land of earth

  on up through the ceiling into the top of the sky.

  And the big job got going,

  the caissons and pilings sunk,

  floors, walls and winding staircases

  aimed at the stars high over,

  aimed to go beyond the ladders of the moon.

  And God Almighty could have struck them dead

  or smitten them deaf and dumb.

  And God was a whimsical fixer.

  God was an understanding Boss

  with another plan in mind,

  And suddenly shuffled all the languages,

  changed the tongues of men

  so they all talked different

  And the masons couldn’t get what the hodcarriers said,

  The helpers handed the carpenters the wrong tools,

  Five hundred ways to say, “W h o a r e y o u?”

  Changed ways of asking, “Where do we go from here?”

  Or of saying, “Being born is only the beginning,”

  Or, “Would you just as soon sing as make that noise?”

  Or, “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.”

  And the material-and-supply men started disputes

  With the hauling gangs and the building trades

  And the architects tore their hair over the blueprints

  And the brickmakers and the mule skinners talked back

  To the straw bosses who talked back to the superintendents

  And the signals got mixed; the men who shovelled the bucket

  Hooted the hoisting men—and the job was wrecked.

  Some called it the Tower of Babel job

  And the people gave it many other names.

  The wreck of it stood as a skull and a ghost,

  a memorandum hardly begun,

  swaying and sagging in tall hostile winds,

  held up by slow friendly winds.

  2

  From Illinois and Indiana came a later myth

  Of all the people in the world at Howdeehow

  For the first time standing together:

  From six continents, seven seas, and several archipelagoes,

  From points of land moved by wind and water

  Out of where they used to be to where they are,

  The people of the earth marched and travelled

  To gather on a great plain.

  At a given signal they would join in a shout,

  So it was planned,

  One grand hosannah, something worth listening to.

  And they all listened.

  The signal was given.

  And they all listened.

  And the silence was beyond words.

  They had come to listen, not to make a noise.

  They wanted to hear.

  So they all stood still and listened,

  Everybody except a little old woman from Kalamazoo

  Who gave out a long slow wail over what she was missing

  because she was stone deaf.

  This is the tale of the Howdeehow powpow,

  One of a thousand drolls the people tell of themselves,

  Of tall corn, of wide rivers, of big snakes,

&n
bsp; Of giants and dwarfs, heroes and downs,

  Grown in the soil of the mass of the people.

  3

  In the long fiat panhandle of Texas

  far off on the grassland of the cattle country

  near noon they sight a rider coming toward them

  and the sky may be a cold neverchanging gray

  or the sky may be changing its numbers

  back and forth all day even and odd numbers

  and the afternoon slides away somewhere

  and they see their rider is alive yet

  their rider is coming nearer yet

  and they expect what happens and it happens again

  he and his horse ride in late for supper

  yet not too late

  and night is on and the stars are out

  and night too slides away somewhere

  night too has even and odd numbers.

  The wind brings “a norther”

  to the long flat panhandle

  and in the shivering cold they say:

  “Between Amarilla and the North Pole

  is only a barb wire fence,”

  which they give a twist:

  “Out here the only windbreak

  is the North Star.”

  4

  The people know what the land knows

  the numbers odd and even of the land

  the slow hot wind of summer and its withering

  or again the crimp of the driving white blizzard

  and neither of them to be stopped

  neither saying anything else than:

  “I’m not arguing. I’m telling you.”

  The old-timer on the desert was gray

  and grizzled with ever seeing the sun:

  “For myself I don’t care whether it rains.

  I’ve seen it rain.

  But I’d like to have it rain

  pretty soon sometime.

  Then my son could see it.

  He’s never seen it rain.”

  “Out here on the desert,”

  said the first woman who said it,

  “the first year you don’t believe

  what others tell you

  and the second year you don’t

  believe what you tell yourself.”

  “I weave thee, I weave thee,”

  sang the weaving Sonora woman.

  “I weave thee,

  thou art for a Sonora fool.”

  And the fool spoke of her,

  over wine mentioned her:

  “She can teach a pair of stilts to dance.”

  “What is the east? Have you been in the east?”

  the New Jersey woman asked the little girl

  the wee child growing up in Arizona who said:

  “Yes, I’ve been in the east,

  the east is where trees come

  between you and the sky.”

  Another baby in Cleveland, Ohio,

  in Cuyahoga County, Ohio—

  why did she ask:

  “Papa,

  what is the moon

  supposed to advertise?”

  And the boy in Winnetka, Illinois who wanted to know:

  “Is there a train so long you can’t count the cars?

  Is there a blackboard so long it will hold all the numbers?”

  What of the Athenian last year on whose bosom

  a committee hung a medal to say to the world

  here is a champion heavyweight poet?

  He stood on a two-masted schooner

  and flung his medal far out on the sea bosom.

  “And why not?

  Has anybody ever given the ocean a medal?

  Who of the poets equals the music of the sea?

  And where is a symbol of the people

  unless it is the sea?”

  “Is it far to the next town?”

  asked the Arkansas traveller

  who was given the comfort:

  “It seems farther than it is

  but you’ll find it ain’t.”

  Six feet six was Davy Tipton

  and he had the proportions

  as kingpin Mississippi River pilot

  nearly filling the pilothouse

  as he took the wheel with a laugh:

  “Big rivers ought to have big men.”

  On the homestretch of a racetrack

  in the heart of the bluegrass country

  in Lexington, Kentucky

  they strewed the ashes of a man

  who had so ordered in his will.

  He loved horses

  and wanted his dust

  in the flying hoofs of the homestretch.

  5

  For sixty years the pine lumber barn

  had held cows, horses, hay, harness, tools, junk,

  amid the prairie winds of Knox County, Illinois

  and the corn crops came and went, plows and wagons,

  and hands milked, hands husked and harnessed

  and held the leather reins of horse teams

  in dust and dog days, in late fall sleet

  till the work was done that fall.

  And the barn was a witness, stood and saw it all.

  “That old barn on your place, Charlie,

  was nearly falling last time I saw it,

  how is it now?”

  “I got some poles to hold it on the east side

  and the wind holds it up on the west.”

  6

  And you take hold of a handle

  by one hand or the other

  by the better or worse hand

  and you never know

  maybe till long afterward

  which was the better hand.

  And you give an anecdote

  out of profound and moving forms of life

  and one says you’re an odd bird to tell it

  and it was whimsical entertaining thank you

  while another takes it as a valentine

  and a fable not solved offhand

  a text for two hours talk and

  several cigars smoked—

  You might say there never was a man who cut

  off his nose to spite his face.

  Yet the cartoon stands for several nations

  and more than one ruler of a realm.

  Likewise the man who burned his barn to get

  rid of the rats

  Or the woman who said her “No” meant “Perhaps”

  and her “Perhaps” meant “Yes”

  Or Monte Cristo yes he was a case.

  Monte Cristo had a list, a little roll call.

  And one by one he took them each for a ride

  Saying One and Two and Three and so on

  Till the names were all crossed off

  And he had cleansed the world of a given number

  Of betrayers who had personally wronged him.

  He was judge, jury, and executioner,

  On a par with Frankie who shot Johnnie,

  Only far colder than Frankie.

  “He created a solitude

  and called it peace.”