American Adventures Part 41

The Industrial Inst.i.tute and College is for girls of sixteen years or over who are graduates of high schools. There are about 800 students taking either the collegiate, normal, industrial, or musical courses, or combination courses. This college, I was informed, was the first in the country to offer industrial education to women.

Most of the students come from families in modest circ.u.mstances, and attend the college with the definite purpose of fitting themselves to become self-supporting. The cost is very slight, the only regular charge, aside from board and general living expenses, being a nominal matriculation fee of $5. There is no charge for rooms in the large dormitories connected with the college. Board, light, fuel, and laundry are paid for cooperatively, the average cost per student, for all these, being about ten dollars a month--which sum also includes payment for a lyceum ticket and for two hats per annum. Uniforms are worn by all, these being very simple navy-blue suits with sailor hats. Seniors and juniors wear cap and gown. All uniform requirements may be covered at a cost of twenty dollars a year, and a girl who practices economy may get through her college year at a total cost of about $125, though of course some spend considerably more.

Many students work their way, either wholly or in part. Thirty or forty of them serve in the dining room, for which work they are allowed sixty-five dollars a year. Others, who clean cla.s.srooms are allowed fifty dollars a year, and still others earn various sums by a.s.sisting in the library or reading room or by doing secretarial work.

Unlike the other departments of the college, the musical department is not a tax upon the State, but is entirely self-sustaining, each girl paying for her own lessons. This department is under the direction of Miss Weenonah Poindexter, to whose enthusiasm much if not all of its success is due. Miss Poindexter began her work in 1894, as the college's only piano teacher, giving lessons in the dormitories. Now she not only has a splendid music hall and a number of a.s.sistants, but has succeeded in making Columbus one of the recognized musical centers of the South, by bringing there a series of the most distinguished artists: Paderewski, Nordica, Schumann-Heinck, Gadski, Sembrich, Bispham, Albert Spaulding, Maud Powell, Damrosch's Orchestra, and Sousa's Band.

So much I had learned of the I.I. and C. when it came time for me to flee to the train. My companion and I had already packed our suitcases, and it had been arranged between us that, instead of consuming time by trying to meet and drive together to the station, we should work independently, joining each other at the train.

I left the college in an automobile, stopping at Mrs. Eichelberger's only long enough to get my suitcase. As I drove on past the next corner I chanced to look up the intersecting street. There, by a lilac bush, stood my companion. He was not alone. With him was a very pretty girl wearing a soft black dress and a corsage of narcissus. But the corsage was now smaller, by one flower, than it had been before, for, as I sighted them, she was in the act of placing one of the blooms from her bouquet in my companion's b.u.t.tonhole. Her hands looked very white and small against his dark coat, and I recall that he was gazing down at them, and that his features were distorted by a sentimental smile.

"Come on!" I called to him.

He looked up. His expression was vague.

"Go along," he returned.

"Why don't you come with me now?"

"I'll be there," he replied. "You buy the tickets and check the baggage." And with that he turned his back.

"Good-by," I called to the young lady. But she was looking up at him and didn't seem to hear me.

My companion arrived at the station in an old hack, with horses at the gallop. He was barely in time.

When we were settled in the car, bowling along over the prairies toward the little junction town of Artesia, I turned to him and inquired how his work had gone that morning. But at that moment he caught sight, through the car window, of some negroes sitting at a cabin door, and exclaimed over their picturesqueness.

I agreed. Then, as the train left them behind, I repeated my question: "How did your work go?"

"This is very fertile-looking country," said he.

This time I did not reply, but asked:

"Did you finish both sketches?"

"No," he answered. "Not both. There wasn't time."

"Let's see the one you did."

"As a matter of fact," he returned, "I didn't do any. You know how it is. Sometimes a fellow feels like drawing--sometimes he doesn't. Somehow I didn't feel like it this morning."

With that he lifted the lapel of his coat and, bending his head downward, sniffed in a romantic manner at the sickeningly sweet flower in his b.u.t.tonhole.

CHAPTER XLV

VICKSBURG OLD AND NEW

I should advise the traveler who is interested in cities not to enter Vicksburg by the Alabama & Vicksburg Railroad, which has a dingy little station in a sort of gulch, but by the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad--a branch of the Illinois Central--which skirts the river bank and flashes a large first impression of the city before the eyes of alighting pa.s.sengers.

The station itself is a pretty brick colonial building, backed by a neat if tiny park maintained by the railroad company, and facing the levee (p.r.o.nounce "_lev_-vy"), along which the tracks are laid. Beyond the tracks untidy landing places are scattered along the water front, with here and there a tall, awkward, stern-wheel river steamer tied up, looking rather like an old-fashioned New Jersey seacoast hotel, covered with porches and jimcrack carving, painted white, embellished with a cupola and a pair of tall, thin smokestacks, and set adrift in its old age to masquerade in maritime burlesque.

At other points along the bank are moored a heterogeneous a.s.sortment of shanty boats of an incredible and comic slouchiness. Some are nothing but rafts made of water-soaked logs, bearing tiny shacks knocked together out of driftwood and old patches of tin and canvas, but the larger ones have barges, or the hulks of old launches, as their foundation. These curious craft are moored in long lines to the half-submerged willow and cottonwood trees along the bank, or to stakes driven into the levee, or to the railroad ties, or to whatever objects, ash.o.r.e, may be made fast an old frayed rope or a piece of telephone wire. Long, narrow planks, precariously propped, connect them with the river bank, so that the men, women, children, dogs, and barnyard creatures who inhabit them may pa.s.s to and fro. Some of the boats are the homes of negro families, some of whites. On some, negro fish markets are conducted, advertised by large catfish dangling from their posts and railings.

Whether fishing for market, for personal use, or merely for the sake of having an occupation involving a minimum of effort, the residents of shanty boats--particularly the negroes--seem to spend most of their days seated in drowsy att.i.tudes, with fish poles in their hands. Their eyes fall shut, their heads nod in the sun, their lines lag in the muddy water; life is uneventful, pleasant, and warm.

When Porter's mortar fleet lay in the river, off Vicksburg, bombarding the town, that river was the Mississippi, but though it looks the same to-day as it did then, it is not the Mississippi now, but the Yazoo River. This comes about through one of those freakish changes of course for which the great stream has always been famous.

In the old days Vicksburg was situated upon one of the loops of a large letter "S" formed by the Mississippi, but in 1876 the river cut through a section of land and eliminated the loop upon which the town stood.

Fortunately, however, the Yazoo emptied into the Mississippi above Vicksburg, and it was found possible, by digging a ca.n.a.l, to divert the latter river from its course and lead its waters into the loop left dry by the whim of the greater stream. Thus the river life, out of which Vicksburg was born, and without which the place would lose its character, was retained, and the wicked old Mississippi, which has played rough pranks on men and cities since men and cities first appeared upon its banks, was for once circ.u.mvented. This is but one item from the record of grotesque tricks wrought by changes in the river's course: a record of farms located at night on one side of the stream, and in the morning on the other; of large tracts of land transferred from State to State by a sudden switch of this treacherous fluid line of boundary; of river boats crashing by night into dry land where yesterday a deep stream flowed; of towns built up on river trade, utterly dependent upon the river, yet finding themselves suddenly deserted by it, like wives whose husbands disappear, leaving them withering, helpless, and in want.

Where the upper Mississippi, above St. Louis, flows between tall bluffs it attains a grandeur which one expects in mighty streams, but that is not the part of the river which gets itself talked about in the newspapers and in Congress, nor is it the part of the river one involuntarily thinks of when the name Mississippi is mentioned. The drama, the wonder, the mystery of the Mississippi are in the lower river: the river of countless wooded islands, now standing high and dry, now buried to the tree tops in swirling torrents of muddy water; the river of black gnarled snags carried downstream to the Gulf with the speed of motor boats; the river whose craft sail on a level with the roofs of houses; the river of broken levees, of savage inundations.

The upper river has a beauty which is like that of some lovely, stately, placid, well-behaved blond wife. She is conventional and correct. You always know where to find her. The lower river is a temperamental mistress. At one moment she is all sweetness, smiles and playfulness; at the next vivid and pa.s.sionate. Even when she is at her loveliest there is always the possibility of sudden fury: of her rising in a rage, breaking the furniture, wrecking the house--yes, and perhaps winding her wicked cold arms about you in a final destroying embrace.

Being the "Gibraltar of the river" (albeit a Gibraltar of clay and not of rock), Vicksburg does not suffer when floods come. Turn your back upon the river, as you stand on the platform of the Yazoo & Mississippi railroad station, and you may gather at a glance an impression of the town piling up the hillside to the eastward.

The first buildings, occupying the narrow shelf of land at the water's edge, are small warehouses, negro eating houses, dilapidated little steamship offices, and all manner of shacks in want of paint and repairs. From the station Mulberry Street runs obliquely up the hillside to the south. This street, which forms the main thoroughfare to the station, used to be occupied by wholesale houses, but has more lately been given over largely to a frankly and prominently exposed district of commercialized vice--negro and white. Not only is it at the very door of Vicksburg, but it parallels, and is but one block distant from, the city's main street.

Other streets, so steep as hardly to be pa.s.sable, directly a.s.sault the face of the hill, mounting abruptly to Washington Street, which runs on a flat terrace at about the height of the top of the station roof, and exposes to the view of the newly arrived traveler the unpainted wooden backs of a number of frame buildings which, though they are but two or three stories high in front, reach in some cases a height of five or six stories at the rear, owing to the steepness of the hillside to which they cling. The roof lines, side walls, windows, chimneys, galleries, posts, and railings of these sad-looking structures are all picturesquely out of plumb, and some idea of the general dilapidation may be gathered from the fact that, one day, while my companion stood on the station platform, drawing a picture of this scene, a brick chimney, a portrait of which he had just completed, softly collapsed before our eyes, for all the world like a sitter who, having held a pose too long, faints from exhaustion.

A brief inspection of the life on the galleries of these foul old fire traps reveals them as negro tenements; and, though they front on the main street of Vicksburg, it should be explained that about here begins the "n.i.g.g.e.r end" of Washington Street--the more prosperous portion of the downtown section lying to the southward, where substantial brick office buildings may be seen.

Between the ragged, bulging tenements above are occasional narrow gaps through which are revealed cinematographic glimpses of street traffic; and over the tenement roofs one catches sight of sundry other buildings, these being of brick, and, though old, and in no way imposing, yet of a more prosperous and self-respecting character than the nearer structures.

Altogether, the scene, though it is one to delight an etcher, is not of a character to inspire hope in the heart of a humanitarian, or an expert on sanitation or fire prevention. Nor, indeed, would it achieve completeness, even on the artistic side, were it not for its crowning feature. Far off, over the roofs and above them, making an apex to the composition, and giving to the whole picture a background of beauty and of ancient dignity, rises the graceful white-columned cupola of Vicksburg's old stone courthouse, partially obscured by a feathery green tree top, hinting of s.p.a.ce and foliage upon the summit of the hill.

Pamphlets on Vicksburg, issued by railroad companies for the enticement of tourists, give most of their s.p.a.ce to the story of the campaign leading to Grant's siege of Vicksburg and to descriptions of the various operations in the siege--the battlefield, now a national military park, being considered the city's chief object of interest.

Though I am not const.i.tutionally enthusiastic about seeing battlefields, I must admit that I found the field of Vicksburg engrossing. The siege of a small city presents a comparatively simple and compact military problem which is, therefore, comprehensible to the civilian mind, and in addition to this the Vicksburg battlefield is splendidly preserved and marked, so that the visitor may easily reconstruct the conflict.

The park, which covers the fighting area, forms a loose crescent-shaped strip over the hills which surround the city, its points ab.u.t.ting on the river above and below. The chief drives of the park parallel each other, the inner one, Confederate Avenue, following, as nearly as the hills permit, the city's line of defense, while the other, Union Avenue, forms an outer semicircle and follows, in a similar manner, the trenches of the attacking forces.

That the battlefield is so well preserved is due in part to man and in part to Nature. Many of the hills of Warren County, in which Vicksburg is situated, are composed of a curious soft limy clay, called marl, which, normally, has not the solidity of soft chalk. Ma.r.s.e Harris d.i.c.kson, who knows more about Vicksburg--and also about negroes, common law, floods, funny stories, geology, and rivers--than any other man in Mississippi, tells me that this marl was deposited by the river, in the form of silt, centuries ago, and that it was later thrown up into hills by volcanic action. He did not live in Vicksburg when this took place, but deduces his facts from the discovery of the remains of sh.e.l.lfish in the soil of the hills.

Whatever its geological origin, this soil has some very strange characteristics. In composition it is neither stone nor sand, but a cross between the two--brown and brittle. One can easily crush it to dust in one's hand, in which form it has about the consistency of talc.u.m powder, and it may be added that when this brown powder is seized by the winds and whirled about, Vicksburg becomes one of the most mercilessly dusty cities on this earth.

On exposed slopes the marl washes very badly, forming great caving gullies, but, curiously enough, where it is exposed perpendicularly it does not wash, but slicks over on the outside, and stands almost as well as soft sandstone, although you can readily dig into it with your fingers.

Many of the highways leading in and out of the city pa.s.s between tall walls of this peculiar soil, through deep cuts which a visitor might naturally take for the result of careful grading by the road builders; but Ma.r.s.e Harris d.i.c.kson tells me that the cuts are entirely the result of erosion wrought by a hundred years of wheeled traffic.