“Meanwhile,” his uncle snarled, “we lived like dogs, rooting into the earth for esculent herbs that we might stay our hunger on, gorging ourselves on wild berries plucked from roadside hedges, finding a solitary ear of corn and hugging it to our breasts as we hurried home with it as if we had looted the golden granaries of Midas, while the Major—the Major—surrounded by the rabble-rout of all his progeny, the youngest of whom crawled and scrambled in their dirty rags about his feet while the great man sat enthroned on the celestial lights of his poetic inspiration, his great soul untainted by all this earthly misery about him, composing verses,” sneered his uncle, “to the lady of his dreams. ‘My lady’s hair!’” he howled derisively. “My lady’s hair!” And for a moment, blind with his gaunt, tortured grimace, he kicked and stamped one leg convulsively at the earth—“Oh, sublime! Sublime!” he howled huskily at length. “To see him there lost in poetic revery—munching the cud of inspiration and the frayed end of a pencil—his eyes turned dreamily upon the distant hills—slowly stroking his luxuriant whiskers with the fingers of those plump white hands of which he was so justly proud!” his uncle sneered—“dressed in his fine black broadcloth suit and white boiled shirt that she—poor, patient, and devoted woman that she was—who never owned a store dress in her whole life—had laundered, starched, and done up for her lord and master with such loving care….
“My dear child,” he went on in a moment, in a voice that had become so husky, faint, and tremulous that it scarcely rose above a whisper. “My dear, dear child!” he said, “may your life never know the anguish, frenzy, and despair, the hideous mutilations of the soul, that passion of inchoate hatred, loathing, and revulsion, that I felt towards my father—my own father!—with which my own life was poisoned in my youth!—Oh! To see him sitting there so smug, so well-kept and complacent, so invincibly assured in his self-righteousness, with his unctuous, drawling voice of limitless self-satisfaction, his pleased laughter at his own accursed puns and jests and smart retorts, his insatiable delight in all that he—he alone—had ever seen, done, thought, felt, tasted, or believed—perched there on the mountainous summit of his own conceit—while the rest of us were starving—writing poems to his lady’s hair—his lady’s hair—while she, poor woman—that poor, dead, lost, and unsung martyr of a woman that I have the honor to acknowledge as my mother,” he said huskily, “did the drudgery of a nigger as he sat there in his fine clothes writing verses—kept life in us somehow, those of us who managed to survive,” he said bitterly, “when she had so little of her own to spare—scrubbed, sewed, mended, cooked—when there was anything at all to cook—and passively yielded to that sanctimonious lecher’s insatiable and accursed lust—drudging, toiling, drudging to the very moment of our birth—until we dropped full-born out of our mother’s womb even as she bent above her labors at the tub…. Is it any wonder that I came to hate the very sight of him—venerable whiskers, thick lips, white hands, broadcloth, unctuous voice, pleased laughter, smug satisfaction, invincible conceit, and all the tyranny of his narrow, vain, inflexible, small soul?—why, damn him,” the boy’s uncle whispered huskily. “I have seen the time I could have taken that fat throat and strangled it between my hands, blood, bone, body, father of my life though he might be—oh!” he howled, “damn’bly, indubitably, was!”
And for a moment his gaunt face burned into the western ranges, far, lost, and lonely in the red light, westering to wintry dark.
“The Major!” he muttered quietly at length. “You have heard your good Aunt Maw speak, no doubt, about the Major—of his erudition and intelligence, the sanctified infallibility of all his judgments, of his fine white hands and broadcloth clothes, the purity of his moral character, of how he never uttered a profane word, nor allowed a drop of liquor in his house—nor would have let your mother marry your father had he known that your father was a drinking man. That paragon of morals, virtues, purities, and manners—that final, faultless, and inspired judge and critic of all things!—Oh, my dear boy!” he howled faintly, with his husky and contemptuous laugh—“she is a woman—therefore governed by her sentiment; a woman—therefore blind to logic, the evidence of life, the laws of ordered reason; a woman—therefore at the bottom of her heart a Tory, the slave of custom and conformity; a woman—therefore cautious and idolatrous; a woman—therefore fearful for her nest; a woman—therefore the bitter enemy of revolt and newness, hating change, the naked light of truth, the destruction of time-honored superstitions, however cruel, false, and shameful they may be. Oh! she is a woman and she does not know!…
“She does not know!” the boy’s uncle howled with his contemptuous laugh. “My dear child, I have no doubt that she has told you of her father’s wisdom, erudition, and his faultless elegance of speech…. Pah-h!” he sneered. “He was a picker-up of unconsidered trifles—a reader of miscellaneous trash—the instant dupe for every remedy, nostrum, cure-all that any traveling quack might offer to him, and the gullible believer of every superstitious prophesy, astrological omen, ghost-story, augury, or portent that he heard…. Why, my boy,” his uncle whispered, bending towards him with an air of horrified revelation, “he was a man who used big words when he had no sense of their real meaning—a fellow who would try to impress some backwoods yokel with fine phrases which he didn’t understand himself. Yes! I have heard him talk so even in the presence of people of some education and intelligence—I have seen them nudge and wink at one another over the spectacle he was making of himself—and I confess to you I had to turn my head away and blush for shame,” his uncle whispered fiercely, his eyes blazing, “for shame to think my own father could expose himself in that degrading fashion.”