Hilda Doolittle: The Gift

They had so much to give us, Papa and Papalie and old Father Weiss, as the whole town had affectionately called our grandmother’s father. There were the others before these, who went back to the beginning of America and before America, but … we were none of us “gifted,” they would say.

“How do you mean — what?”

“Oh — I don’t mean — I don’t mean anything.”

But they did mean something. They didn’t think any of us were marked with that strange thing they called a gift, the thing Uncle Fred had had from the beginning, the thing Papalie (they said) wasn’t sure about, so Uncle Fred was put in a drugstore. An errand-boy who crawls under the counter and hides there with stolen fragments of church music was not much good in a drugstore. So Papalie made sure of the gift that Uncle Fred had. We hadn’t any gift to make sure about.

But where did he get the gift, just like that? Why didn’t Mama wait and teach us music like she did Uncle Fred when he was a little boy? Mama gave all her music to Uncle Fred, that is what she did. That is why we hadn’t the gift, because it was Mama who started being the musician, and then she said she taught Uncle Fred; she gave it away, she gave the gift to Uncle Fred, she should have waited and given the gift to us. But there were other gifts, it seemed.

“What — what do you mean, Uncle Hartley?”

“People draw, if a person draws or writes a book or something like that; a gift isn’t just music. Artists are people who are gifted.”

“Is Uncle Fred an artist?”

“Well, yes, I suppose so. Yes, of course Fred is an artist.”

“But an artist is someone with a paintbox and a big hat?”

“No, an artist is someone who — well — he can draw or paint or write a book or even do other things.”

“Like what?”

“Well, I don’t know — well — to be artistic —I suppose you might say your Aunt Belle was artistic.”

“Then can ladies be just the same as men?”

“Just the same what?”

“I mean what you said — about writing a book?”

“Why, yes, ladies write books of course, lots of ladies write very good books.”

“Like Louisa M. Alcott?”

“Yes, like Louisa Alcott and like Harriet Beecher Stowe.”

“Who is that?”

“That’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin , you know, you saw the procession and the play, didn’t you?”

We saw Uncle Tom. He sat on a bench before a wooden hut that was drawn in a cart. The wooden hut was his cabin, and they told us that the book was called Uncle Tom’s Cabin and that the play we were going to be taken to see, in a real theater, on the other side of the river, was called Uncle Tom’s Cabin , but it was the book that started it or it was the real story, in the beginning, that started it, because Uncle Tom was a real darkie in shape like a branch of a Christmas tree Way down upon the Sewanee river .

That was before the Civil War; that happened a long time ago when Papa was seventeen, though he told them he was eighteen, so that he could run away with his brother Alvin in Indiana and help free the slaves.

The slaves were roped together and they walked along tied together like that, in torn trousers and old shoes or no shoes, and a man with a big hat and a whip, slashed round them with the whip, but Ida said he wasn’t really hurting them, only cracking with his whip like that to show how Simon Legree (that was his name) drove the poor slaves in the cotton fields, down in the south.

There was someone on the ice with a baby, but the baby, Ida said, was a doll, and the ice was not real because it was summer and it would have melted. But Eliza, I think it was, was pulled along with the ice on wheels, like Uncle Tom’s cabin. Then there were some horses and donkeys; it was a sort of golden cart or it was a chariot like Swing low, sweet chariot , and there was an angel, only it was made of wood and gilded over like the things on the Christmas tree, and it had a wreath in its hands. It was stretching out its wings and it was holding the wreath over the head of Little Eva who was the most important thing in the procession.

There were real dogs pulling on straps, with collars round their necks. They were very big dogs. Ida said they were bloodhounds, they were to hunt the slaves, and the slaves went along and they sang songs out of Uncle Bob’s songbook on the top of the piano. They sang Massa’s in the cold, cold ground or they just hummed, and then Simon Legree cracked his whip and they stopped singing. The bloodhounds would chase them through the woods — only now they weren’t slaves any more.

“It’s only a parade,” Gilbert said, “they are as free as you are.”

The darkies tied together were as free as I was because our father and our Uncle Alvin had fought in the Civil War and now we all had the same flag that Betsy Ross made in a house in Philadelphia, which we have a picture of in school, with the thirteen original States which are the thirteen stripes and all the other States which are the Stars. Our State, which is Pennsylvania, is one of the thirteen original States.

Once we had a procession, too; we all waved flags when we met other children from other schools. That was for 1492, I mean it was in 1892 which made four hundred years since Columbus discovered America.

We were Americans and so were the darkies who were tied together and so was Simon Legree and so was Little Eva. Little Eva died in a bed, we saw her die. It was a stage, Ida said. You call it the stage, and this was our first time at the theater. We knew it was a stage because we had our school entertainments on the stage in the big hall at school. Now Little Eva died and it was just as if she had died, but then she came back again in a long nightgown. Little Eva was not really dead at all. She was the same little girl with the long gold hair who was driven in the chariot down the street, and she would do it all over again in Allentown or Easton, Ida said. They went on to other towns like the circus did, but this was not the circus. Uncle Tom died too, and that was when Little Eva came back after she was dead and she was a dream or a vision, like something in the Bible, that Uncle Tom had when he died.

That was how it was. Little Eva was really in a book, yet Little Eva was there on the stage and we saw her die, just like the book, Aunt Belle said, though we hadn’t read it. Aunt Belle sat in the row back of us with Tootie and Tootie changed places with Gilbert (because he couldn’t see very well) between the acts. Tootie liked Topsy best and Harold did too, I think.

Ida and Aunt Belle liked the song Little Eva’s father sang when Little Eva’s mother played the piano. We had to wait for them to finish that before we could see the bloodhounds. The bloodhounds did really chase Eliza on the ice. She screamed and jumped on the pieces of ice and you forgot that it wasn’t ice at all. You forgot the people around you and that you were in the theater, you forgot you were in a town even, that you would have to go home after this. That is how it was. Everybody waited, and someone laughed when the bloodhounds sniffed round the lights in front of the stage and didn’t chase Eliza. But I could see that they were not real terrible dogs. I could see that they were really very good dogs, yet at the same time, something else in me that listened when Ida reads us a fairy tale, would know that they were terrible and horrible dogs, that they would rush at Eliza and her baby, which was only a big bundled-up doll or even only a bundle, and tear at her and bite her to death. I mean, I would know that we were there, that Harold was beside me, and that Tootie had the place on the end that Harold had had, so that he could see down the aisle. Harold was next to me, where Gilbert had been.