Dust Tracks on a Road: Chapters 1–4

The strong and powerful Cherokees, aided by the conglomerate Seminoles, raided the plantations and carried off Negro slaves into the Spanish-held Florida. Ostensibly they were carried off to be slaves to the Indians, but in reality the Negro men were used to swell the ranks of the Indian fighters against the white plantation owners.

The sore point of returning escaped Negroes could not be settled satisfactorily to either side. Who was an Indian and who was a Negro? The whites contended all who had negro blood. The Indians contended all who spoke their language belonged to the tribe.

The Cherokees and most of the Seminoles, with their Negro adherents, were moved west.

So into this original hush came the three frontier-seekers who had been so intrigued by its prospects that they had turned back after actually arriving at the coast of Brazil without landing. These young men were no poor, refuge-seeking, wayfarers.

Roads were made by the simple expedient of driving buggies and wagons back and forth over the foot trail, which ran for seven miles between Maitland and Orlando.

While the White estates flourished on the three-mile length of Lake Maitland, the Negroes set up their hastily built shacks around St. John’s Hole, a lake as round as a dollar, and less than a half mile wide.

The Negro women could be seen every day but Sunday, squatting around St. John’s Hole on their haunches, primitive style, washing clothes and fishing, while their men went forth and made their support in cutting new ground, building, and planting orange groves.

So when it was decided to hold an election, the Eatons, Lawrences, Vanderpools, Hurds, Halls, the Hills, Yateses and Galloways, and all the rest including Bishop Whipple, head of the Minnesota diocese, never for a moment considered excluding the Negroes from participation.

Lawrence and Eaton bought a tract of land a mile west of Maitland for a town site.

White Maitland and Negro Eatonville, have lived side by side for fifty-five years without a single instance of enmity.

The big boys all slept up there, and it was a good place to hide and shirk from sweeping off the front porch or raking up the back yard.

Mama carried us all past long division in arithmetic, and parsing sentences in grammar, by diagrams on the black-board.

So on moonlight nights, two-thirds of the village children from seven to eighteen would be playing “hide and whoop,” “chick-mah-chick,” “hide and seek,” and other boisterous games in our yard.

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to “jump at de sun.”

She conceded that I was impudent and given to talking back, but she didn’t want to “squinch my spirit” too much for fear that I would turn out to be a mealy-mouthed rag doll by the time I got grown.

Posses with ropes and guns were going to drag me out sooner or later on account of that stiff neck I toted.

She meant by that that Sarah had a disposition like Papa’s, while mine was like hers.

He stopped long enough there to buy a quart of peanuts, two stalks of sugar cane, and then tripped on off to the little house in the woods where lived a certain transient light of love.

About an hour later, when it was almost black dark, they saw a furtive figure in white dodging from tree to tree until it hopped over Clarke’s strawberry patch fence and headed towards Uncle Jim’s house until it disappeared.

Aunt Cal’line might have done that just to satisfy her curiosity, since it was said that the lady felt that anything more than a petticoat under her dresses would be an incumbrance.

Evidently Aunt Caroline was put out about it, because she had to expectorate at that very moment, and it just happened to land where the lady was bare. Aunt Caroline evidently tried to correct her error in spitting on her rival, for she took her foot and tried to grind it in.

Old newspapers were put out in the privy house for family use.

Fair to middling guests got sheets out of the old Sears, Roebuck catalogue.

Everything was going along all right, until the sow with her litter of pigs in convoy came abreast of the door.

Her heart must have stood still when she saw the sow in there...

Naturally, the world and the firmaments careened to one side a little so as not to inconvenience me. In fact, the universe went further than that—it was happy to break a few rules just to show me preferences.

Naturally, the world and the firmaments careened to one side a little so as not to inconvenience me. In fact, the universe went further than that—it was happy to break a few rules just to show me preferences.

“Look! Look, Carrie!” I cried exultantly. “You see the moon is following me!”

The thing was too bold and brazen to her thinking.

I had to hit Carrie to keep my heart from stifling me.

So for weeks I saw myself sitting astride of a fine horse.

Lying is dodging. People with guts don’t lie. They tell the truth and then if they have to, they fight it out. You lay yourself open by lying. The other fellow knows right off that you are skeered of him and he’s more’n apt to tackle you.

“That is just what I’m fining you for, you yellow-bellied coudar! Nobody with any guts would have come into court to settle a fist fight.”

Decency was plumb outraged at a man taking a beating and then swearing out a warrant about it.

Nobody thought anything about his going to the county seat frequently, getting drunk, getting his riding-mule drunk along with him, and coming down the pike yelling and singing while his mule brayed in drunken hilarity.

Always, the room was hurriedly put in order, and we were threatened with a prompt and bloody death if we cut one caper while the visitors were present.

Some of the stories, I had reread several times, and this Greco-Roman myth was one of my favorites. I was exalted by it, and that is the way I read my paragraph.

One hundred goldy-new pennies rolled out of the cylinder. Their gleam lit up the world. It was not avarice that moved me. It was the beauty of the thing.

It called for hard scrubbings with Octagon soap suds getting in my eyes, and none too gentle fingers scrubbing my neck and gouging in my ears.

We knew we were in for it and decided to scatter until things cooled off a bit. He hid out in the barn, but I combined discretion with pleasure, and ran clear off the place.