The People, Yes Read online

  Lincoln? did he gather

  the feel of the American dream

  and see its kindred over the earth?

  “As labor is the common burden of our race,

  so the effort of some to shift

  their share of the burden

  onto the shoulders of others

  is the great durable curse of the race.”

  “I hold,

  if the Almighty had ever made a set of men

  that should do all of the eating

  and none of the work,

  he would have made them

  with mouths only, and no hands;

  and if he had ever made another class,

  that he had intended should do all the work

  and none of the eating,

  he would have made them

  without mouths and all hands.”

  “—the same spirit that says, ‘You toil and

  work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No

  matter in what shape it comes, whether

  from the mouth of a king who seeks to

  bestride the people of his own nation,

  and live by the fruit of their labor, or

  from one race of men as an apology for

  enslaving another race, it is the same

  tyrannical principle.”

  “As I would not be a slave, so I would not

  be a master. This expresses my idea of

  democracy. Whatever differs from this,

  to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

  “I never knew a man who wished to be himself

  a slave. Consider if you know any

  good thing that no man desires for himself.”

  “The sheep and the wolf

  are not agreed upon a definition

  of the word liberty.”

  “The whole people of this nation

  will ever do well

  if well done by.”

  “The plainest print cannot be read

  through a gold eagle.”

  “How does it feel to be President?” an Illinois

  friend asked.

  “Well, I’m like the man they rode out of

  town on a rail. He said if it wasn’t for

  the honor of it he would just as soon

  walk.”

  Lincoln? he was a dreamer.

  He saw ships at sea,

  he saw himself living and dead

  in dreams that came.

  Into a secretary’s diary December 23, 1863 went an entry: “The President tonight had a dream. He was in a party of plain people, and, as it became known who he was, they began to comment on his appearance. One of them said: ‘He is a very common-looking man.’ The President replied: ‘The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them.’”

  He spoke one verse for then and now:

  “If we could first know where we are,

  and whither we are tending,

  we could better judge

  what to do, and how to do it.”

  58

  The people, yes,

  Out of what is their change

  from chaos to order

  and chaos again?

  “Yours till the hangman doth us part,”

  Don Magregor ended his letters.

  “It annoys me to die,”

  said a philosopher.

  “I should like to see what follows.”

  To those who had ordered them to death,

  one of them said:

  “We die because the people are asleep

  and you will die because the people will awaken.”

  Greek met Greek when Phocion and Democritus spoke.

  “You will drive the Athenians mad some day and they will kill you.”

  “Yes, me when they go mad, and as sure as they get sane again, you.”

  59

  The transient tar-paper shack

  comes from the hands of the people.

  So does the floodlighted

  steel-and-concrete skyscraper.

  The rough-lumber two-room houseboat

  is from the hands of the people.

  So is the turbine-driven steamboat

  with ballroom, orchestra, swimmingpool,

  the fat of the land,

  moving in the mid-atlandc ocean.

  Every day the people of the city haul it away,

  take it apart, and put it together again.

  Every day around the globe and its atmospheric

  fringe the people of the earth live

  the unwritten saga of one day.

  Today the fishing boats go out and little men

  shade their eyes and study the treacherous,

  rolling, free-handed sea.

  Today the steel-and-aluminum streamlined

  passenger train cuts through a blizzard,

  the transcontinental planes are hung up,

  and a liner at sea sends a distress wireless.

  Today strikes break out where strikes were

  never heard of before, the lumber trade

  stands in fear of steel-fabricated houses,

  and farming in Somaliland is a hazard.

  Every hour thousands of six-decker novels

  lived, every minute millions of long and

  short stories.

  Today homes are lost, farms won, cars traded

  in, old furniture lacquered, pigs littered,

  an albatross shot, pearls lost in Vienna

  found in a fishcan in Omaha.

  Today jobs landed and lost, contracts signed

  and broken, families scattered and joined,

  girls after long waiting saying Yes to men

  No to men.

  The books of man have begun only a short

  stammering memorandum of the toil,

  resources and stamina of man,

  Of the required errands, the dramatic impulses,

  the irresistible songs of this given moment,

  this eyeblink now.

  Every day the people of the city haul it away,

  take it apart, and put it together again.

  The how and the why of the people so doing

  is the saga not yet written.

  Is the story true or a make-believe?

  In an ancient clan the elders found one of the

  younger, a man of dreaminess, writing a

  scroll and record.

  Where he had picked up letters and the forbidden

  art of putting down one word

  after another so as to make sense, they

  didn’t know and he refused to tell.

  On sheets to be read long after by other

  generations he was doing an eye-witness

  tale of their good and evil doings.

  And he swore to them: “I will be the word of

  the people! Mine is the bleeding mouth

  from which the gag is snatched!”

  So they took and killed him and set his bloody

  head on a pike for public gaze. Who had

  asked him to be the word of the people?

  When they wanted a history written they

  would elect someone to write it as they

  would have it written.

  “You will see me surrender,”

  said one old Viking,

  “when hair grows in the palm of my hand.”

  “What are you fellows scared of? nothing?”

  this too they asked the old Viking who said,

  “Yes, one thing we are scared of, we are scared

  the sky might come tumbling down on us.”

  60

  The grass lives, goes to sleep, lives again,

  and has no name for it.

  The oaks and poplars know seasons while standing

  to take what comes.

  The grinding of the earth on its gnarled axis

  touches many dumb brothers.

  Time toils on translations of fire and rain int
o

  air, into thin air.

  In the casual drift of routine

  in the day by day run of mine

  in the play of careless circumstance

  the anecdotes emerge

  alive with people in words, errands,

  motives and silhouettes

  taller than the immediate moment:

  “You have fourteen sons in the war?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have more children at home?”

  “Five.”

  “And they all came one by one?”

  “No, they was four pair twins, two sets triplets.”

  “I remember,” said the fond Irish mother to the whiteheaded boy, “I remember when you was nothing but a beautiful gleam in your father’s eye.”

  “Breath is made out of air,” wrote the schoolboy.

  “We breathe with our lungs. If it wasn’t for our breath we would die when we slept. Our breath keeps the life going through the nose when we sleep.”

  Back and forth strode the campaign orator,

  back and forth till an Irishman shouted:

  “If you’re talkin’ stop walkin’!

  If you’re walkin’ stop talkin’!”

  The classical orator from Massachusetts had pronounced the words “Vox Populi” five times in an Indianapolis speech when one Hoosier Congressman bet another he didn’t know what Vox Populi meant. The money was put up and the winner of the bet freely translated Vox Populi to mean “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

  “There on the same track I saw the westbound passenger train coming fifty miles an hour and the eastbound freight forty miles an hour.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “I thought what a hell of a way to run a railroad!”

  “Is you married?” the elder negro asked his son.

  “I ain’t sayin’ I is and I ain’t sayin’ I ain’t.”

  “I ain’t askin’ you is you ain’t. Ise askin’ you ain’t you is.”

  They were ninety years old and of their seventeen children had just buried the firstborn son who died seventy-two years of age.

  “I told you,” said the old man as he and his hillborn wife sat on the cabin steps in the evening sunset, “I told you long ago we would never raise that boy.”

  “I am John Jones.”

  “Take a chair.”

  “Yes, and I am the son of John

  Throckmorton Jones.”

  “Is that possible? Take two chairs.”

  “What’s the matter up there?”

  “Playing soldier.”

  “But soldiers don’t make that kind of noise.”

  “We’re playing the kind of soldier that

  makes that kind of noise.”

  “No, captain, I never stole nothing to eat out

  of that chest. Why, captain, when I

  looked in that chest to see if there was

  anything to eat in it I met a cockroach

  coming out of it with tears in his eyes.”

  “How do you do, my farmer friend?”

  “Howdy.”

  “Nice looking country you have here.”

  “Fer them that likes it.”

  “Live here all your life?”

  “Not yit.”

  61

  The nickels click off fares in the slot machines of the subway, the elevated.

  “Fare, please,” say the bus conductors to millions every day of the week.

  Riders they are, riders to work, to home, to fun, to grief, each nickel and dime audited and accounted for as current income payable for taxes, overhead, upkeep, rehabilitation, surplus, dividends, flimflam.

  To the whang and purr of steel and motors, streets and stations, the fares, the riders, with nickels and dimes, go and return, return and go.

  One in a thousand says, “Whither goest thou?” but mostly “Where you going?”

  Mostly they are in accord with the Minnesota Swede:

  “Maybe I don’t know so much but what I do know I know to beat hell.”

  Like tools tested for grinding and cutting and durability, they have gathered them clews of wisdom and they talk things over in the bus, the elevated, the subway:

  “The penitentiary is to learn to behave better, to think things over, it is lonesome.”

  “A comedian acts funny and gets paid to make people laugh if he can.”

  “Shakespeare is the greatest writer of them all, a dead Englishman and you have to read him in high school or you don’t pass.”

  “The police pass examinations and then get a club and a star to show who they are. They keep order and arrest you unless you got a pull.”

  “Handkerchief is to carry in the pocket and blow your nose with and tie nickels in the corner of for carfare and church.”

  “Economy is when you save without being stingy.”

  “Banks keep money when you have some left over. They let nobody else get it. And they let you take money out if you pay for it and do what is regular.”

  “The Constitution tells how the government runs. It is a paper in Washington for the lawyers.”

  “War is when two nations go to it killing as many as you can for the government.”

  “The army is men in uniforms, they go away and fight till they come back or you hear from them.”

  “The president is the same as a king four years signing bills in the White House and meeting people. He can do whatever he wants to unless he is stopped.”

  “Oath is what you swear to in court that you will tell everything God help you and hold nothing back no matter what.”

  “Poverty is when you work hard, live cheap and can’t pay up, you figure and you can’t tell where you’re coming out at.”

  “Liberty is when you are free to do what you want to do and the police never arrest you if they know who you are and you got the right ticket.”

  “The past is long ago and you can’t touch it. Tomorrow today will be yesterday and belong in the past, like that, see?”

  The ingenuity of the human mind and what passes the time of day for the millions who keep their serenity amid the relentless processes of wresting their provender from the clutch of tongs organized against them—this is always interesting and sometimes marvelous.

  Daily is death and despair stood off by those who in hard trials know how and when to laugh.

  The fox counts hens in his dreams. The eagle has an empire in the air. Man under his hat has several possessions of comedy.

  The name of a stub line under the Lone Star banner is The Houston Eastern and Western Texas railroad.