That Evening Sun by William Faulkner

That Evening Sun of William Faulkner, though has been written a long time ago reflects still the violence that some colored people go through in the US currently. There is the violence against Asian-American regardless of age, gender, and economic status of the victim. Comforting though is the thought that Pres. Biden denounces any forms of violence against any human being and thus proactively engages the citizens to protect each other from any such form of violence.

That Evening Sun, reminds us that our fight for equality and justice never rest, and if we wish to win this great humanitarian act, we all must learn to be more patient, kind, and most of all discerning as well as respectful and obedient ot the mandates of the constitution.   

 That Evening Sun

by William Faulkner 

 MONDAY IS NO DIFFERENT from any other weekday in Jefferson now. The streets are paved now, and the telephone and electric companies are cutting down more and more of the shade trees: the water oaks, the maples and locusts and elms to make room for iron poles bearing clusters of bloated and ghostly and bloodless grapes, and we have a city laundry which makes the rounds on Monday morning, gathering the bundles of clothes into bright-colored, specially-made motor cars: the soiled wearing of a whole week now flees apparitionlike behind alert and irritable electric horns, with a long diminishing noise of rubber and asphalt like tearing silk, and even the Negro women who still take in white people's washing after the old custom, fetch and deliver it in automobiles. But fifteen years ago, on Monday morning the quiet, dusty, shady streets would be full of Negro women with, balanced on their steady, turbaned heads, bundles of clothes tied up in sheets, almost as large as cotton bales, carried so without touch of hand between the kitchen door of the white house and the blackened washpot beside a cabin door in Negro Hollow. Nancy would set her bundle on the top of her head, then upon the bundle in turn she would set the black straw sailor hat which she wore winter and summer. She was tall, with a high, sad face sunken a little where her teeth were missing. Sometimes we would go a part of the way down the lane and across the pasture with her, to watch the balanced bundle and the hat that never bobbed nor wavered, even when she walked down into the ditch and up the other side and stooped through the fence. She would go down on her hands and knees and crawl through the gap, her head rigid, uptilted, the bundle steady as a rock or a balloon, and rise to her feet again and go on. Sometimes the husbands of the washing women would fetch and deliver the clothes, but Jesus never did that for Nancy, even before father told him to stay away from our house, even when Dilsey was sick and Nancy would come to cook for us. And then about half the time we'd have to go down the lane to Nancy's cabin and tell her to come on and cook breakfast. We would stop at the ditch, because father told us to not have anything to do with Jesus: he was a short black man, with a razor scar down his face and we would throw rocks at Nancy's house until she came to the door, leaning her head around it without any clothes on. "What yawl mean, chunking my house?" Nancy said. "What you little devils mean?" "Father says for you to come on and get breakfast," Caddy said. "Father says it's over a half an hour now, and you've got to come this minute." "I ain't studying no breakfast," Nancy said. "I going to get my sleep out." "I bet you're drunk," Jason said. "Father says you're drunk. Are you drunk, Nancy?" "Who says I is?" Nancy said. "I got to get my sleep out. I aint studying no breakfast." So after a while we quit chunking the cabin and went back home. When she finally came, it was too late for me to go to school. So we thought it was whisky until that day they arrested her again and they were taking her to jail and they passed Mr Stovall. He was the cashier in the bank and a deacon in the Baptist church, and Nancy began to say: "When you going to pay me, white man? When you going to pay me, white man? It's been three times now since you paid me a cent..." Mr Stovall knocked her down, but she kept on saying, "When you going to pay me, white man? It's been three times now since..." until Mr Stovall kicked her in the mouth with his heel and the marshal caught Mr Stovall back, and Nancy lying in the street, laughing. She turned her head and spat out some blood and teeth and said, "It's been three times now since he paid me a cent." That was how she lost her teeth, and all that day they told about Nancy and Mr Stovall, and all that night the ones that passed the jail could hear Nancy singing and yelling. They could see her hands holding to the window bars, and a lot of them stopped along the fence, listening to her and to the jailer trying to make her stop. She didn't shut up until almost daylight, when the jailer began to hear a bumping and scraping upstairs and he went up there and found Nancy hanging from the window bar. He said that it was cocaine and not whisky, because no nigger would try to commit suicide unless he was full of cocaine, because a nigger full of cocaine wasn't a nigger any longer. The jailer cut her down and revived her; then he beat her, whipped her. She had hung herself with her dress. She had fixed it all right, but when they arrested her she didn't have on anything except a dress and so she didn't have anything to tie her hands with and she couldn't make her hands let go of the window ledge. So the jailer heard the noise and ran up there and found Nancy hanging from the window, stark naked, her belly already swelling out a little, like a little balloon. When Dilsey was sick in her cabin and Nancy was cooking for us, we could see her apron swelling out; that was before father told Jesus to stay away from the house. Jesus was in the kitchen, sitting behind the stove, with his razor scar on his black face like a piece of dirty string. He said it was a watermelon that Nancy had under her dress. "It never come off of your vine, though," Nancy said. "Off of what vine?" Caddy said. "I can cut down the vine it did come off of," Jesus said. "What makes you want to talk like that before these chillen?" Nancy said. "Whyn't you go on to work? You done et. You want Mr Jason to catch you hanging around his kitchen, talking that way before these chillen?" "Talking what way?" Caddy said. "What vine?" "I can't hang around white man's kitchen," Jesus said. "But white man can hang around mine. White man can come in my house, but I can't stop him. When white man want to come in my house, I ain't got no house. I can't stop him, but he can't kick me outen it. He can't do that." Dilsey was still sick in her cabin. Father told Jesus to stay off our place. Dilsey was still sick. It was a long time. We were in the library after supper. "Isn't Nancy through in the kitchen yet?" mother said. "It seems to me that she has had plenty of time to have finished the dishes." "Let Quentin go and see," father said. "Go and see if Nancy is through, Quentin. Tell her she can go on home." I went to the kitchen. Nancy was through. The dishes were put away and the fire was out. Nancy was sitting in a chair, close to the cold stove. She looked at me. "Mother wants to know if you are through," I said. "Yes," Nancy said. She looked at me, "I done finished." She looked at me. "What is it?" I said. "What is it?" "I ain't nothing but a nigger," Nancy said. "It ain't none of my fault." She looked at me, sitting in the chair before the cold stove, the sailor hat on her head. I went back to the library. It was the cold stove and all, when you think of a kitchen being warm and busy and cheerful. And with a cold stove and the dishes all put away, and nobody wanting to eat at that hour. "Is she through?" mother said. "Yessum," I said. "What is she doing?" mother said. "She's not doing anything. She's through." "I'll go and see," father said. "Maybe she's waiting for Jesus to come and take her home," Caddy said. "Jesus is gone," I said. Nancy told us how one morning she woke up and Jesus was gone. "He quit me," Nancy said. "Done gone to Memphis, I reckon. Dodging them city police for a while, I reckon." "And a good riddance," father said. "I hope he stays there." "Nancy's scaired of the dark," Jason said. "So are you," Caddy said. "I'm not," Jason said. "Scairy cat," Caddy said. "I'm not," Jason said. "You, Candace!" mother said. Father came back. "I am going to walk down the lane with Nancy," he said. "She says that Jesus is back." "Has she seen him?" mother said. "No. Some Negro sent her word that he was back in town. I won't be long." "You'll leave me alone, to take Nancy home?" mother said. "Is her safety more precious to you than mine?" "I won't be long," father said. "You'll leave these children unprotected, with that Negro about?" "I'm going too," Caddy said. "Let me go, Father." "What would he do with them, if he were unfortunate enough to have them?" father said. "I want to go, too," Jason said. "Jason!" mother said. She was speaking to father. You could tell that by the way she said the name. Like she believed that all day father had been trying to think of doing the thing she wouldn't like the most, and that she knew all the time that after a while he would think of it. I stayed quiet, because father and I both knew that mother would want him to make me stay with her if she just thought of it in time. So father didn't look at me. I was the oldest. I was nine and Caddy was seven and Jason was five. "Nonsense," father said. "We won't be long." Nancy had her hat on. We came to the lane. "Jesus always been good to me," Nancy said. "Whenever he had two dollars, one of them was mine." We walked in the lane. "If I can just get through the lane," Nancy said, "I be all right then." The lane was always dark. "This is where Jason got scared on Hallowe'en," Caddy said. "I didn't," Jason said. "Can't Aunt Rachel do anything with him?" father said. Aunt Rachel was old. She lived in a cabin beyond Nancy's, by herself. She had white hair and she smoked a pipe in the door, all day long; she didn't work any more. They said she was Jesus' mother. Sometimes she said she was and sometimes she said she wasn't any kin to Jesus. "Yes, you did," Caddy said. "You were scairder than Frony. You were scairder than T. P. even. Scairder than niggers." "Can't nobody do nothing with him," Nancy said. "He say I done woke up the devil in him and ain't but one thing going to lay it down again." "Well, he's gone now," father said. "There's nothing for you to be afraid of now. And if you'd just let white men alone." "Let what white men alone?" Caddy said. "How let them alone?" "He ain't gone nowhere," Nancy said. "I can feel him. I can feel him now, in this lane. He hearing us talk, every word, hid somewhere, waiting. I ain't seen him, and I ain't going to see him again but once more, with that razor in his mouth. That razor on that string down his back, inside his shirt. And then I ain't going to be even surprised." "I wasn't scaired," Jason said. "If you'd behave yourself, you'd have kept out of this," father said. "But it's all right now. He's probably in St. Louis now. Probably got another wife by now and forgot all about you." "If he has, I better not find out about it," Nancy said. "I'd stand there right over them, and every time he wropped her, I'd cut that arm off. I'd cut his head off and I'd slit her belly and I'd shove" "Hush," father said. "Slit whose belly, Nancy?" Caddy said. "I wasn't scaired," Jason said. "I'd walk right down this lane by myself." "Yah," Caddy said. "You wouldn't dare to put your foot down in it if we were not here too." II DILSEY WAS STILL SICK, so we took Nancy home every night until mother said, "How much longer is this going on? I to be left alone in this big house while you take home a frightened Negro?" We fixed a pallet in the kitchen for Nancy. One night we waked up, hearing the sound. It was not singing and it was not crying, coming up the dark stairs. There was a light in mother's room and we heard father going down the hall, down the back stairs, and Caddy and I went into the hall. The floor was cold. Our toes curled away from it while we listened to the sound. It was like singing and it wasn't like singing, like the sounds that Negroes make. Then it stopped and we heard father going down the back stairs, and we went to the head of the stairs. Then the sound began again, in the stairway, not loud, and we could see Nancy's eyes halfway up the stairs, against the wall They looked like cat's eyes do, like a big cat against the wall, watching us. When we came down the steps to where she was, she quit making the sound again, and we stood there until father came back up from the kitchen, with his pistol in his hand. He went back down with Nancy and they came back with Nancy's pallet. We spread the pallet in our room. After the light in mother's room went off, we could see Nancy's eyes again. "Nancy," Caddy whispered, "are you asleep, Nancy?" Nancy whispered something. It was oh or no, I don't know which. Like nobody had made it, like it came from nowhere and went nowhere, until it was like Nancy was not there at all; that I had looked so hard at her eyes on the stairs that they had got printed on my eyeballs, like the sun does when you have closed your eyes and there is no sun. "Jesus," Nancy whispered. "Jesus." "Was it Jesus?" Caddy said. "Did he try to come into the kitchen?" "Jesus," Nancy said. Like this: Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesus, until the sound went out, like a match or a candle does. "It's the other Jesus she means," I said. "Can you see us, Nancy?" Caddy whispered. "Can you see our eyes too?" "I ain't nothing but a nigger," Nancy said. "God knows. God knows." "What did you see down there in the kitchen?" Caddy whispered. "What tried to get in?" "God knows," Nancy said. We could see her eyes. "God knows." Dilsey got well. She cooked dinner. "You'd better stay in bed a day or two longer," father said. "What for?" Dilsey said. "If I had been a day later, this place would be to rack and ruin. Get on out of here now. and let me get my kitchen straight again." Dilsey cooked supper too. And that night, just before dark, Nancy came into the kitchen. "How do you know he's back?" Dilsey said. "You ain't seen him." "Jesus is a nigger," Jason said. "I can feel him," Nancy said. "I can feel him laying yonder in the ditch." "Tonight?" Dilsey said. "Is he there tonight?" "Dilsey's a nigger too," Jason said. "You try to eat something," Dilsey said. "I don't want nothing," Nancy said. "I ain't a nigger," Jason said. "Drink some coffee," Dilsey said. She poured a cup of coffee for Nancy. "Do you know he's out there tonight? How come you know it's tonight?" "I know," Nancy said. "He's there, waiting. I know. I done lived with him too long. I know what he is fixing to do fore he know it himself." "Drink some coffee," Dilsey said. Nancy held the cup to her mouth and blew into the cup. Her mouth pursed out like a spreading adder's, like a rubber mouth, like she had blown all the color out of her lips with blowing the coffee. "I ain't a nigger," Jason said. "Are you a nigger, Nancy?" "I hell-born, child," Nancy said. "I won't be nothing soon. I going back where I come from soon." Ill SHE BEGAN TO DRINK the coffee. While she was drinking, holding the cup in both hands, she began to make the sound again. She made the sound into the cup and the coffee sploshed out onto her hands and her dress. Her eyes looked at us and she sat there, her elbows on her knees, holding the cup in both hands, looking at us across the wet cup, making the sound. "Look at Nancy," Jason said. "Nancy can't cook for us now. Dilsey's got well now." "You hush up," Dilsey said. Nancy held the cup in both hands, looking at us, making the sound, like there were two of them: one looking at us and the other making the sound. "Whyn't you let Mr Jason telefoam the marshal?" Dilsey said. Nancy stopped then, holding the cup in her long brown hands. She tried to drink some coffee again, but it sploshed out of the cup, onto her hands and her dress, and she put the cup down. Jason watched her. "I can't swallow it," Nancy said. "I swallows but it won't go down me." "You go down to the cabin," Dilsey said. "Frony will fix you a pallet and I'll be there soon." "Wont no nigger stop him," Nancy said. "I ain't a nigger," Jason said. "Am I, Dilsey?" "I reckon not," Dilsey said. She looked at Nancy. "I don't reckon so. What you going to do, then?" Nancy looked at us. Her eyes went fast, like she was afraid there wasn't time to look, without hardly moving at all. She looked at us, at all three of us at one time. "You member that night I stayed in yawls' room?" she said. She told about how we waked up early the next morning, and played. We had to play quiet, on her pallet, until father woke up and it was time to get breakfast. "Go and ask your maw to let me stay here tonight," Nancy said. "I won't need no pallet. We can play some more." Caddy asked mother. Jason went too. "I can't have Negroes sleeping in the bedrooms," mother said. Jason cried. He cried until mother said he couldn't have any dessert for three days if he didn't stop. Then Jason said he would stop if Dilsey would make a chocolate cake. Father was there. "Why don't you do something about it?" mother said. "What do we have officers for?" "Why is Nancy afraid of Jesus?" Caddy said. "Are you afraid of father, mother?" "What could the officers do?" father said. "If Nancy hasn't seen him, how could the officers find him?" "Then why is she afraid?" mother said. "She says he is there. She says she knows he is there tonight." "Yet we pay taxes," mother said. "I must wait here alone in this big house while you take a Negro woman home." "You know that I am not lying outside with a razor," father said. "I'll stop if Dilsey will make a chocolate cake," Jason said. Mother told us to go out and father said he didn't know if Jason would get a chocolate cake or not, but he knew what Jason was going to get in about a minute. We went back to the kitchen and told Nancy. "Father said for you to go home and lock the door, and you'll be all right," Caddy said. "All right from what, Nancy? Is Jesus mad at you?" Nancy was holding the coffee cup in her hands again, her elbows on her knees and her hands holding the cup between her knees. She was looking into the cup. "What have you done that made Jesus mad?" Caddy said. Nancy let the cup go. It didn't break on the floor, but the coffee spilled out, and Nancy sat there with her hands still making the shape of the cup. She began to make the sound again, not loud. Not singing and not unsinging. We watched her. "Here," Dilsey said. "You quit that, now. You get aholt of yourself. You wait here. I going to get Versh to vvalk home with you." Dilsey went out. We looked at Nancy. Her shoulders kept shaking, but she quit making the sound. We watched her. "What's Jesus going to do to you?" Caddy said. "He went away," Nancy looked at us. "We had fun that night I stayed in yawls' room, didn't we?" "I didn't," Jason said. "I didn't have any fun." "You were asleep in mother's room," Caddy said. "You were not there." "Let's go down to my house and have some more fun," Nancy said. "Mother won't let us," I said. "It's too late now." "Don't bother her," Nancy said. "We can tell her in the morning. She won't mind." "She wouldn't let us," I said. "Don't ask her now," Nancy said. "Don't bother her now." "She didn't say we couldn't go," Caddy said. "We didn't ask," I said. "If you go, I'll tell," Jason said. "We'll have fun," Nancy said. "They won't mind, just to my house. I been working for yawl a long time. They won't mind." "I'm not afraid to go," Caddy said. "Jason is the one that's afraid. He'll tell." "I'm not," Jason said. "Yes, you are," Caddy said. "You'll tell." "I won't tell," Jason said. "I'm not afraid." "Jason ain't afraid to go with me," Nancy said. "Is you, Jason?" "Jason is going to tell," Caddy said. The lane was dark. We passed the pasture gate. "I bet if something was to jump out from behind that gate, Jason would holler." "I wouldn't," Jason said. We walked down the lane. Nancy was talking loud. "What are you talking so loud for, Nancy?" Caddy said. "Who; me?" Nancy said. "Listen at Quentin and Caddy and Jason saying I'm talking loud." "You talk like there was five of us here," Caddy said. "You talk like father was here too." "Who; me talking loud, Mr Jason?" Nancy said. "Nancy called Jason 'Mister,'" Caddy said. "Listen how Caddy and Quentin and Jason talk," Nancy said. "We're not talking loud," Caddy said. "You're the one that's talking like father " "Hush," Nancy said; "hush, Mr Jason." "Nancy called Jason 'Mister' again." "Hush," Nancy said. She was talking loud when we crossed the ditch and stooped through the fence where she used to stoop through with the clothes on her head. Then we came to her house. We were going fast then. She opened the door. The smell of the house was like the lamp and the smell of Nancy was like the wick, like they were waiting for one another to begin to smell. She lit the lamp and closed the door and put the bar up. Then she quit talking loud, looking at us. "What're we going to do?" Caddy said. "What do yawl want to do?" Nancy said. "You said we would have some fun," Caddy said. There was something about Nancy's house; something you could smell besides Nancy and the house. Jason smelled it, even. "I don't want to stay here," he said. "I want to go home." "Go home, then," Caddy said. "I don't want to go by myself," Jason said. "We're going to have some fun," Nancy said. "How?" Caddy said. Nancy stood by the door. She was looking at us, only it was like she had emptied her eyes, like she had quit using them. "What do you want to do?" she said. "Tell us a story," Caddy said. "Can you tell a story?" "Yes," Nancy said. "Tell it," Caddy said. We looked at Nancy. "You don't know any stories." "Yes," Nancy said. "Yes, I do." She came and sat in a chair before the hearth. There was a little fire there. Nancy built it up, when it was already hot inside. She built a good blaze. She told a story. She talked like her eyes looked, like her eyes watching us and her voice talking to us did not belong to her. Like she was living somewhere else, waiting somewhere else. She was outside the cabin. Her voice was inside and the shape of her, the Nancy that could stoop under a barbed wire fence with a bundle of clothes balanced on her head as though without weight, like a balloon, was there. But that was all. "And so this here queen come walking up to the ditch, where that bad man was hiding. She was walking up to the ditch, and she say, 'If I can just get past this here ditch,' was what she say..." "What ditch?" Caddy said. "A ditch like that one out there? Why did a queen want to go into a ditch?" "To get to her house," Nancy said. She looked at us. "She had to cross the ditch to get into her house quick and bar the door." "Why did she want to go home and bar the door?" Caddy said. IV NANCY LOOKED at us. She quit talking. She looked at us. Jason's legs stuck straight out of his pants where he sat on Nancy's lap. "I don't think that's a good story," he said. "I want to go home." "Maybe we had better," Caddy said. She got up from the floor. "I bet they are looking for us right now." She went toward the door. "No," Nancy said. "Don't open it." She got up quick and passed Caddy. She didn't touch the door, the wooden bar. "Why not?" Caddy said. "Come back to the lamp," Nancy said. "We'll have fun. You don't have to go." "We ought to go," Caddy said. "Unless we have a lot of fun." She and Nancy came back to the fire, the lamp. "I want to go home," Jason said. "I'm going to tell." "I know another story," Nancy said. She stood close to the lamp. She looked at Caddy, like when your eyes look up at a stick balanced on your nose. She had to look down to see Caddy, but her eyes looked like that, like when you are balancing a stick. "I won't listen to it," Jason said. "I'll bang on the floor." "It's a good one," Nancy said. "It's better than the other one." "What's it about?" Caddy said. Nancy was standing by the lamp. Her hand was on the lamp, against the light, long and brown. "Your hand is on that hot globe." Caddy said. "Don't it feel hot to your hand?" Nancy looked at her hand on the lamp chimney. She took her hand away, slow. She stood there, looking at Caddy, wringing her long hand as though it were tied to her wrist with a string. "Let's do something else," Caddy said. "I want to go home," Jason said. "I got some popcorn," Nancy said. She looked at Caddy and then at Jason and then at me and then at Caddy again. "I got some popcorn." "I don't like popcorn," Jason said. "I'd rather have candy." Nancy looked at Jason. "You can hold the popper." She was still wringing her hand; it was long and limp and brown. "All right," Jason said. "I'll stay a while if I can do that. Caddy can't hold it. I'll want to go home again if Caddy holds the popper." Nancy built up the fire. "Look at Nancy putting her hands in the fire," Caddy said. "What's the matter with you, Nancy?" "I got popcorn," Nancy said. "I got some." She took the popper from under the bed. It was broken. Jason began to cry. "Now we can't have any popcorn," he said. "We ought to go home, anyway," Caddy said. "Come on, Quentin." "Wait," Nancy said; "wait. I can fix it. Don't you want to help me fix it?" "I don't think I want any," Caddy said. "It's too late now." "You help me, Jason," Nancy said. "Don't you want to help me?" "No," Jason said. "I want to go home." "Hush," Nancy said; "hush. Watch. Watch me. I can fix it so Jason can hold it and pop the corn." She got a piece of wire and fixed the popper. "It won't hold good," Caddy said. "Yes, it will," Nancy said. "Yawl watch. Yawl help me shell some corn." The popcorn was under the bed too. We shelled it into the popper and Nancy helped Jason hold the popper over the fire. "It's not popping," Jason said. "I want to go home." "You wait," Nancy said. "It'll begin to pop. We'll have fun then." She was sitting close to the fire. The lamp was turned up so high it was beginning to smoke. "Why don't you turn it down some?" I said. "It's all right," Nancy said. "I'll clean it. Yawl wait. The popcorn will start in a minute." "I don't believe it's going to start," Caddy said. "We ought to start home, anyway. They'll be worried." "No," Nancy said. "It's going to pop. Dilsey will tell um yawl with me. I been working for yawl long time. They won't mind if yawl at my house. You wait, now. It'll start popping any minute now." Then Jason got some smoke in his eyes and he began to cry. He dropped the popper into the fire. Nancy got a wet rag ard wiped Jason's face, but he didn't stop crying. "Hush," she said. "Hush." But he didn't hush. Caddy took the popper out of the fire. "It's burned up," she said. "You'll have to get some more popcorn, Nancy." "Did you put all of it in?" Nancy said. "Yes," Caddy said. Nancy looked at Caddy. Then she took the popper and opened it and poured the cinders into her apron and began to sort the grains, her hands long and brown, and we watching her. "Haven't you got any more?" Caddy said. "Yes," Nancy said; "yes. Look. This here ain't burnt. All we need to do is..." "I want to go home," Jason said. "I'm going to tell" "Hush," Caddy said. We all listened. Nancy's head was already turned toward the barred door, her eyes filled with red lamplight. "Somebody is coming," Caddy said. Then Nancy began to make that sound again, not loud, sitting there above the fire, her long hands dangling between her knees; all of a sudden water began to come out on her face in big drops, running down her face, carrying in each one a little turning ball of firelight like a spark until it dropped off her chin. "She's not crying," I said. "I ain't crying," Nancy said. Her eyes were closed. "I ain't crying. Who is it?" "I don't know," Caddy said. She went to the door and looked out. "We've got to go now," she said. "Here comes father." "I'm going to tell," Jason said. "Yawl made me come." The water still ran down Nancy's face. She turned in her chair. "Listen. Tell him. Tell him we going to have fun. Tell him I take good care of yawl until in the morning. Tell him to let me come home with yawl and sleep on the floor. Tell him I won't need no pallet. We'll have fun. You member last time how we had so much fun?" "I didn't have fun," Jason said. "You hurt me. You put smoke in my eyes. I'm going to tell." V FATHER CAME IN. He looked at us. Nancy did not get up. "Tell him," she said. "Caddy made us come down here," Jason said. "I didn't want to." Father came to the fire. Nancy looked up at him. "Can't you go to Aunt Rachel's and stay?" he said. Nancy looked up at father, her hands between her knees. "He's not here," father said. "I would have seen him. There's not a soul in sight." "He in the ditch," Nancy said. "He waiting in the ditch yonder." "Nonsense," father said. He looked at Nancy. "Do you know he's there?" "I got the sign," Nancy said. "What sign?" "I got it. It was on the table when I come in. It was a hogbone, with blood meat still on it, laying by the lamp. He's out there. When yawl walk out that door, I gone." "Gone where, Nancy?" Caddy said. "I'm not a tattletale," Jason said. "Nonsense," father said. "He out there," Nancy said. "He looking through that window this minute, waiting for yawl to go. Then I gone." "Nonsense," father said. "Lock up your house and we'll take you on to Aunt Rachel's." "'Twont do no good," Nancy said. She didn't look at father now, but he looked down at her, at her long, limp, moving hands. "Putting it off won't do no good." "Then what do you want to do?" father said. "I don't know," Nancy said. "I can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine." "Get what?" Caddy said. "What's yours?" "Nothing," father said. "You all must get to bed." "Caddy made me come," Jason said. "Go on to Aunt Rachel's," father said. "It won't do no good," Nancy said. She sat before the fire, her elbows on her knees, her long hands between her knees. "When even your own kitchen wouldn't do no good. When even if I was sleeping on the floor in the room with your chillen, and the next morning there I am, and blood " "Hush," father said. "Lock the door and put out the lamp and go to bed." "I scared of the dark," Nancy said. "I scared for it to happen in the dark." "You mean you're going to sit right here with the lamp lighted?" father said. Then Nancy began to make the sound again, sitting before the fire, her long hands between her knees. "Ah, damnation," father said. "Come along, chillen. It's past bedtime." "When yawl go home, I gone," Nancy said. She talked quieter now, and her face looked quiet, like her hands. "Anyway, I got my coffin money saved up with Mr. Lovelady." Mr. Lovelady was a short, dirty man who collected the Negro insurance, coming around to the cabins or the kitchens every Saturday morning, to collect fifteen cents. He and his wife lived at the hotel. One morning his wife committed suicide. They had a child, a little girl. He and the child went away. After a week or two he came back alone. We would see him going along the lanes and the back streets on Saturday mornings. "Nonsense," father said. "You'll be the first thing I'll see in the kitchen tomorrow morning." "You'll see what you'll see, I reckon," Nancy said. "But it will take the Lord to say what that will be." VI WE LEFT HER sitting before the fire. "Come and put the bar up," father said. But she didn't move. She didn't look at us again, sitting quietly there between the lamp and the fire. From some distance down the lane we could look back and see her through the open door. "What, Father?" Caddy said. "What's going to happen?" "Nothing," father said. Jason was on father's back, so Jason was the tallest of all of us. We went down into the ditch. I looked at it, quiet. I couldn't see much where the moonlight and the shadows tangled. "If Jesus is hid here, he can see us, can't he?" Caddy said. "He's not there," father said. "He went away a long time ago." "You made me come," Jason said, high; against the sky it looked like father had two heads, a little one and a big one. "I didn't want to." We went up out of the ditch. We could still see Nancy's house and the open door, but we couldn't see Nancy now, sitting before the fire with the door open, because she was tired. "I just done got tired," she said. "I just a nigger. It ain't no fault of mine." But we could hear her, because she began just after we came up out of the ditch, the sound that was not singing and not unsinging. "Who will do our washing now, Father?" I said. "I'm not a nigger," Jason said, high and close above father's head. "You're worse," Caddy said, "you are a tattletale. If something was to jump out, you'd be scairder than a nigger." "I wouldn't," Jason said. "You'd cry," Caddy said. "Caddy," father said. "I wouldn't!" Jason said. "Scairy cat," Caddy said. "Candace!" father said.  

<script data-ad-client="ca-pub-2181451582583481" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>

Directive by Robert Frost

The Lenten Season makes one think of one's humanity- sense of belongingness, and journey of finding the true meaning of life. This leads to Robert Frost's Directive, a poem which seems to tell of the traveler's (speaker) journey his quest for truth, his quest for acceptance, his quest for reality. The poem shows us that the speaker went again home oily to find a different home, quite far from how he had imagined it growing up in the area, this tells us, indeed our homes also evolve and the ideal home can only be kept in our hearts, 

As one reads the poem, one would realize that indeed finding your way isn't a neat road /The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you/Who only has at heart your getting lost,/May seem as if it should have been a quarry—/Great monolithic knees the former town/Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered./ The road is filled with different challenges, dangers, not just from the outside but also from the inside. Although it is like this, the speaker is rather positive in saying /Here are your waters and your watering place./Drink and be whole again beyond confusion./ like our spiritual journey, once we have taken the water of life, we are made whole again amidst confusions, amidst fear.

The Directive isn't actually a directive, perse, it is a presentation of what could happen and what could not happen if we find the strength to take the map and embark on our personal journeys.

Directive 

by Robert Frost 

Back out of all this now too much for us,

Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there’s a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny’s
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

<script data-ad-client="ca-pub-2181451582583481" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>

La Naval de Manila by Nick Joaquin

 Nick Joaquin's La Naval de Manila brings us to the grandeur and power of the old Manila. As the essay shows us what is in store in that old city, it also shows us the valor, courage, and strength of both the women and the men of the old. It shows us hos Christianity has been strengthened by the image of La Naval de Manila.

As you read the essay, you would discover that indeed, we are each  apart of this pilgrimage and as the world grows older and humanity is again being challenged, we know, though little, we have a task to do and  a duty to fulfill. 

   LA NAVAL DE MANILA

Nick Joaquín

 

 

HISTORICAL NOTE: The battle of Lepanto was a naval engagement between the combined fleets of Venice, Spain, and the Papal States, commanded by Don John of Austria, natural brother of the King of Spain, and a powerful Turkish armada under Ali Pasha. After a desperate and sanguinary engagement, the Christian fleet routed the Turks. Some 8,009 Christians were killed, but 20,000 Turks were killed, wounded, or taken as prisoners. The Christian victory broke the Turkish naval power in the Mediterranean and ended the last Crusade. Locale of the conflict was near the Cursolari Islands at the western entrance to the Gulf of Patras, Greece.

 

source: https://images.app.goo.gl/TUfXEopvNfDMuEYC9

1. THE HISTORY

 

When on the first Sunday of October, 1571, Cross and Crescent grappled at Lepanto, the Cross won a signal victory. Gilbert Chesterton has, in a famous ballad, celebrated the victory for what it is: the farewell gesture of Christian Chivalry. Wherefore, the break in his voice. Lepanto was the last act of the medieval drama, and Chesterton, being a Christian, lets the curtain fall, not upon the vivas and banners of Success, but rather upon the silence, the stark waste of a Castilian plain, upon the figures of the Sorrowful Buffoon, the Crusading Skeleton, the Knight Ridiculous.

 

His cast, though, is incomplete: Selim the Sot, Don John of Austria, Felipe II, St. Pius V, Cervantes—there is a grave omission, an omission the latter Chesterton would surely not have made. For it is well known how firmly the Christian soldiery at Lepanto believed that the Queen of Heaven herself had participated in the battle, that she had appeared in the midst of the fighting with a rosary in hand and a sword in the other, exhorting her champions and confounding her foes.

 

Certainly, St. Pius V, then pope, and father of this crusade, had ordered that on the day of the battle the rosary be publicly offered throughout Christendom in spiritual support of the Christian navies; himself though aged and ailing, presiding on foot the rogative procession in Rome. Being a Dominican, he was naturally to invoke most fervently the aid of the great Patroness of his order and to place his confidence in her rosary, those holy beads the continuous recitation of which he and the entire body of the faithful were to lift to her all that day —now meditating on the various mysteries of her life (the happy, the tragic, the victorious), now chanting the graceful invocations of her litany— while out upon the embattled Mediterranean the “last knight of Europe” chopped down the arrogance of the Sot.

 

The Church was quick to acknowledge the role of Mary at Lepanto; October 7, the date of the victory, has ever since been her feast as Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, a feast and an advocation of hers around which maritime traditions consequently clustered: the Virgin of the Beads is popularly a Virgin of Sea Battles, a Virgin of Naval Victories. Some eighty years after

Lepanto, she was again to justify those titles, to manifest her power in the faraway Orient of the conquistadores, to wield her mighty beads in favor of a handful of islands: the small necklacelike archipelago that had been named after the brother of the Lepanto hero.

 

Among those islands Spanish Chivalry was being granted a long and active indian- summer. Indeed, if the Manco of Lepanto had come over instead of moping behind in Andalusia, this sufficiently tearful world would have been spared his Quijote: all dressed up and no place to go. For in the Philippines the breed of hidalgos still had its Moors to face, its turreted towns to defend, its unknown lands to conquer. If Lepanto was its last act, our colonial history may be termed an oriental epilogue to the miracle play of the West.

 

Besides Moors, there were also the heretics — those Dutch and English buccaneers who had long harassed the Manila galleons. It was the Age of Pirates. The notorious Drake had dared set sail on Philippine waters and Thomas Cavendish once all but captured Iloílo. As crusader and visionary had founded the Spanish empire under the banner of the Cross, so now, pirate and buccaneer were unconsciously founding the empires of the future—under the banner of the Skull and Bones.

 

One such marauding expedition, a Dutch fleet of five, threatened Manila on March 15, 1646, when there happened to be but two galleons ready to defend her: the said galleons sallying forth undaunted nevertheless, trusting to win (as the chronicles say) “more by spiritual weapons than by weapons of war”; and while riding to face the enemy, “the members of the said armada did with much devotion recite the Holy Rosary, on their knees and in two choirs, all trusting that by such means they might be found worthy to succeed against the foe.”

 

The two forces met in the bay of Bolinao, the battle beginning at two in the afternoon and ending at six in the evening, with the Dutch fleeing in panic, “their lights covered and much damage done to their ships, but of our side not a man was lost.”

 

On July 29 of the same year this armada of two was again to sally forth in defense of the City, enemy having in returned; this time on seven large vessels “which carried such powerful artillery and some eight hundred men, not including the sailors — and this battle (fought between Bantón and Marinduque) was one of the fiercest and bloodiest in our day, lasting from seven in the evening till four at dawn — at which time, seeing how grievously maltreated their ships were and one on fire, they did retreat and seek shelter, and would not give battle though we called them to it.”

 

Two days later the enemy reappeared with six ships, and hostilities were resumed off the coast of Mindoro, this conflict enduring from noon to the Angelus, when the Dutch fled a third time, one ship lost and another crippled — “and our armada did acclaim that victory as miraculous and did attribute it to Our Lady saying that she herself had fought and not men; and many did testify how, during the battle, voices moved in the air crying: Viva the Faith of Christ and the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary!” Before the initial battle, moreover, the commanding- general, seeing the great disparity between forces, “did make a vow to the Virgin of the Rosary, promising her a feast of thanksgiving should the victory fall side, and with every man in the armada to come on bare feet and offer thanks at her shrine in Manila; which vow and promise, when laid before the soldiery, they did accept and ratify.”

This vow, still unfulfilled, was to be renewed at the express order of the governor-general of the Philippines, for hardly had the two triumphant galleons reached Cavite when news came of a fresh Dutch fleet approaching Mariveles. Though much battered and in need of repairs, the armada of two had once again to go and grapple with a superior force, this fourth encounter taking place between the islands of Luban and Ampil, and raging steadily for ten hours, “until seeing themselves hard-pressed, the enemy did escape and take flight, our ships pursuing and giving fire still, though one, our Capitana, had been hit in the side and was much feared for and yet did not sink.”

 

About a week later three of the Dutch ships, repaired and re-equipped, returned to the scene and found the disabled Capitana alone, her sister ship having sailed ahead, “and they did surround and fiercely set on her and did fire so close that there was long a danger of their boarding the ship; but our men, calling on God and Our Lady, did rise to the contest in such manner that they wrought a woeful destruction among the enemy, and did totally destroy one ship and scatter the others, which, fleeing, were discovered and severely punished by the Galera, a ship dispatched to our assistance — and though our Capitana had been engaged on such close quarters that for hours it seemed to rain bullets, nevertheless we had but four men dead.”

 

Only fifteen men, in fact, had been lost by the defenders in all five battles. And these victories were decisive: the Dutch were to trouble the islands no more, were never again to overcast with Calvin’s shadow the tiny Rome growing up by the Pásig. This last attempt of theirs to besiege it had but furnished that “noble and ever loyal city” with one more festival, its most traditional one. For the armada heroes were not to be content with the simple fulfillment of their vow. True to that age-old courtesy towards heaven, with which the hidalgo has ever insisted that any victory of his arms is not so much a victory of his courage as of his faith, they were urgently to demand from the cathedral-chapter of Manila an official recognition and declaration of those five victories as miracles wrought by the Mother of God.

 

The ecclesiastics were, however, not to be hurried: the witnesses must first be heard, the evidence examined; only after six years did they pronounce a decision, declaring “that the five victories achieved by Catholic arms over the enemy Dutch in the year 1646 were and must be considered as miracles, vouchsafed by the divine Majesty of God through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, Our Lady, and the devotion to her Holy Rosary; wherefore it is authorized that, as miracles, the said victories be commemorated, preached, and celebrated.”

 

And commemorated, preached, and celebrated they have ever since been among us, in a feast which is purely ours, yet spaciously historical too, kept always on the second Sunday of October, and popularly known as the “Naval de Manila.”

 

2. THE IMAGE

source: https://images.app.goo.gl/KpHXCydHJnj1o8jcA

 

The institution of this feast was, of course, to enhance the fame of that marvelous Virgin of the Rosary enshrined at Sto.  Domingo church; was indeed to focus on her the Marian devotion of the City. But even before all this, votive gifts that covered her chapel from floor to ceiling and the ever increasing splendors of her cult, shrine, and wardrobe could testify to the effectiveness of her thaumaturgic powers, to the volume of her clients, and to the faith and gratitude she inspired. It needed but these naval successes of 1646 for the devout to see in her truly the great Lady of Lepanto, giver of sea victories.

 

And yet, of all the famous Virgins of the Philippines, this one alone has not been seafaring, has never guided a galleon safe into Acapulco, or come sailing from some old shrine in Spain to occupy a new one in the Islands. A “native Virgin,” she was sculptured in Manila in 1612, the joint masterpiece of a Chinese catechumen and an officer of the Spanish garrison, the work being commissioned by Don Luis Pérez Dasmariñas, then governor-general, by whom the image was presented to the Manila Dominicans for their newly erected church and priory at the mouth of the Pásig.

 

Life-size, of combined wood and ivory, the image is arrayed as a royal lady at the court of the Felipes — just such a figure, in fact, as John of Austria and his men would have imagined heaven’s Queen. In the pronounced majesty of her aspect and bearing, she exemplifies the transition from the simple gothic Virgins, where it is Mary’s motherliness that is most stressed, as the emphasis, in these more elaborate images of the seventeenth century (the Spanish “golden age,” and the period of the great monarchies), has shifted to her dignity and power, the properties of queenship; while a still later phase of devotion (for the firmer the creed, the more flexible and progressive the devotion) would seek out what is most maidenly, most virginal, most girlish in her, turning piously from Maria Theotokos to Mary the person, and progressing from the Murillo madonnas, through the cult of the Immaculate Conception, to such purely modern concepts of her as the Lourdes apparition and the Virgin of the Medal.

 

In our Santo Rosario (as she is popularly called), though very much of the “golden age,” there are both gothic and modern elements. The posture is a stiff and conventional as any feudal Virgin’s: the Child on one arm, the other outstretched; but the face is individualized, is warmly human, and was surely chiseled by the Chinese catechumen. The features strike one as oriental (now, especially, when time has mellowed the ivory to a delicate brown), the cheekbones set high, the eyes small and slanting. Around her famous jewels (tributes of three grateful centuries), three hovers as brilliant a cluster of legend, each rare stone having a romance behind it — the great one, especially, blazing on her forehead (a “carbuncle,” the old people called it,  and which they will further tell you, a monstrous snake that once haunted the Manila walls had carried about in its mouth, but would greedily lay aside for a bowl of milk; its greed serving at last to trap and kill the monster, its treasure being despoiled to adorn, quite appropriately, the image of her whose feet had crushed the serpent’s head). Her annual novena has become almost as legendary for its splendor, and the earliest memories of many a Manilan of devout family are of October evenings at these rites — of the blaze of chandeliers within the gothic and crowded vastness of Sto. Domingo, with a black sky looming and a windy rain whipping through the windows; the dramatic quality of the music, the prayers, the sermons; the sound and smell of corn popping and chestnuts crackling on coals outside on the patio and the acute loveliness of the Despedida, that haunting song with which the ceremonies have always closed and which, once heard, is not to be forgotten, ever evoking afterwards the atmosphere peculiar to these evenings; their indefinable excitement and vague joyousness.

 

Indeed the twin feasts of the Naval de Lepanto and the Naval de Manila on the first and second Sundays of October have imparted to that month so intimate and traditional a flavor of festivity that it has become the month most truly special to Manila, the month when in full typhoon season, the City broke out into the biggest celebrations: these of the Naval; besides the fiestas of San Miguel, Sta. Cruz, and Binondo; the month that started the display of hams and cheeses among its grocers and of turrones among its sweetshops, when her markets overflowed  with apples, grapes, oranges, pomelos, and her sidewalks with chestnuts and lanzons; the month when back in our childhood, the very air turned festive and the Circus came to town and the season opened at the old Opera House.

 

3. THE DEFINITION

 

The story of the Naval having identified itself with Manila, it can yield a full pertinence only to the Manilan with a pious eye for the past; but equivalent traditions are embodied for, say, the Visayan in Cebú’s historic image of the Holy Child, or of the Bicolano in Naga’s famed Virgin of Peñafrancia. There is indeed no Philippine town or village, however humble, that does not feel peculiarly itself, as belonging to that spot of ground and no other, because of some patronal cult traditional to the locality, some holy image there venerated and investing the site with legend and association. When we talk today of the need for some symbol to fuse us into a great people, we seem to forget that all over the country there lies this wealth of a “usable past,” of symbols that have grown through and through the soil of the land and the marrow of its people.

             

The angels keep their ancient places,

Turn but a stone and start a wing; ’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangéd faces

That miss the many-coloured thing.

 

But the past can become “usable” only if we be willing to enter into its spirit and to carry there a reasonably hospitable mind. As long as we regard it with hatred, contempt, and indignation, so long will it remain hateful and closed to us. Like a mirror (to borrow Aldous Huxley’s image of the Future), it will meet us with spears if we advance towards it with spears. And as long as we remain estranged from it, so long will we remain a garish and uncouth and upstart people, without graces because without background. Henry James has noted what an infinite amount of history it takes to form even a little tradition, and what an infinite amount of tradition to form even a little taste. Merely from his viewpoint, the esthetic one, it should be instantly apparent how little we can afford to spare a single one of our four hundred years of conscious history. Towards our Spanish past, especially, it is time we became more friendly; bitterness but inhibits us; those years cry for a fresher appraisal.

 

To accuse the Spanish, over and over again, of having brought us all sorts of things, mostly evil, among which we can usually remember nothing very valuable “except, perhaps,” religion and national unity, is equivalent to saying of a not very model mother that she has given her child nothing except life. For in the profoundest possible sense, Spain did give birth to us — as a nation, as an historical people. This geographical unit of numberless islands called the Philippines — this mystical unit of numberless tongues, bloods and cultures called a Filipino — was begotten of Spain, is a Spanish creation. There is as great a gulf between the pre-Spanish drift of totem-and-taboo tribes and our present existence as one people as there is between protoplasm and a human creature. The content of our national destiny is ours to create, but the basic form, the temper, the physiognomy, Spain has created for us. If she had managed, for instance, to conquer Borneo along with these islands, we would have had four stars in our flag and (possibly) that swaggering self-confidence a big territory is apt to foster. Or Spain might have succeeded in holding only the island of Luzón, in which case we would have found ourselves a group of very minor islanders to whom the Visayans would be, not brother-“Filipinos,” but peoples as strange and remote as the Borneans now seem to be.

 

For three and a half centuries we lay within the womb of Spain; the Revolution was our violent birth; and in the bitterness with which we have ever since regarded the great and tragic nation to whom we owe so much, Freudians may read a parallel to that obscure enmity that haunts the relations of even the most loving son with his father—an enmity that perhaps voices the resentment of matter that has been wrenched out of its sleep and burdened with consciousness. It is just such a resentment—most vividly expressed in the poetry of Houseman (“Oh, why did I awake? When shall I sleep again?”) —that underlies much of our present vengefulness towards the Spanish. It should also help to explain the sluggishness of which we have been accused, and which, along with the equally famous “fatalism” of ours (so blankly accepted as native to us, being oriental, with no attempt to explain its presence or locate its source) may be no more than our blood’s memories of the communal tribe-house, where custom and taboo lay heavy upon life, pre-determining all event, all action, all speech even (we still dimly recall the taboo on uttering the chief’s or parent’s name); within whose rigid circle— everything being pre-ordained, pre-established—men moved as in a trance, without having to exercise their wills, and, therefore, without creating history. The dreaminess thick in our nature, our incapacity for decisive thought or action (as in the see-saw character of our politics) may, if analyzed, be found to derive from our failure so far to break loose completely from primeval carry-overs, from those submerged longings for the tight, fixed web of the tribal obedience—the mechanicality, the drift, the “even tenor” of passive vegetation as against the pain and effort of responsible and personal existence.

 

The prime work of Christianity for us (as for all the peoples of its information) has been this awakening of the self, this release and expansion of the consciousness, a work undoubtedly still in progress, we being not yet fully awake nor perfectly conscious; immature Christians at best; Catholics but not catholic; enclosed within the Faith as within a sect; having still to realize that to open oneself to this, “one of the great, conjoint, and—so to term it—necessary products of the human mind… rich in the world’s experience,” is to let in “a great, tide of that experience and (to make), as it were, with a single step, a great experience of one’s own, and with great consequent increase to one’s sense of color, variety, and relief, in the spectacle of men and things.”

 

That passage from Pater will ring with special accuracy to the Manilan who has grown up on the story of his city’s principal feast, and who, year after year, from earliest childhood, has participated, with pious “attentiveness,” in its popular celebration—in the culminating pageant especially: that of the procession (Manila’s “procesión de las procesiónes”), where in her triumphant march through the streets of her city, the miraculous image has for glittering escort the flower-and-fruit of the Dominican sanctoral: St. Vincent Ferrer, who could move the very stones to penance, and St. Rose of Lima, first bloom of American faith; Aquinas, who took all knowledge for his province, and the ecstatic Catherine of Siena, “that intellect of a man’s ablaze within the quintessence of womanhood”; the founding father, St. Dominic, terror of the troubadours; and, of course, St. Pius V of Lepanto, and St. Joseph.

 

Our Manilan will realize that such practices, such pieties, have developed in him—long before the possibility of books—a “sense of infinity,” of being “at home in history”; so that no page of Aquinas, however profound, no ecstasy of St. Catherine’s, however mystical, but strikes him now as intimately clear and long familiar, for a feeling that he has known those people all his life and has often seen them strolling along the streets of his city. The Battle of Lepanto will always smell to him of rain and popcorn and roasting chestnuts; upon mention of the Elizabeth pirates he hears the high tremolo of a boy’s voice keening the Despedida. And, conversely, the most local, the most native objects will, like windows in a tower, open out for him upon immense vistas, upon the whole crowded spectacle, in fact, of “men and things.”

 

Many an October evening, while watching this procession of the Naval, and having divined, by a general excitement, the approach of the Image, he has heard the cries and trumpets of the passing concourse dissolve into the cries and trumpets of battle — that battle being, confusedly, now the medieval one against the Albigensians (when Our Lady, through St. Dominic, instituted the Rosary), now the Lepanto debacle, now the Philippine skirmishes with the Dutch; and he has understood afresh how these various wars were really one, that, in this particular advocation of hers, Our Lady has been concerned with the same conflict: the supreme and eternal one between pagan fate and Christian freedom; that, whether it be the Albigensian cult of suicide, the kismet of Islam or the predestination of Calvin, her beads have ever been wielded against the same foe; despair — and in defense of the same article: spiritual unction. And the trumpets of battle dissolving again into the trumpets of the procession, he has then seen her blaze into vision against the skies of his city, borne upon cloud on cloud of incense and music, her face on fire with jewels and mysterious with the veneration of centuries, with gleaming rainbows forming and falling all about her and silken doves bobbing whitely among her flowers of gold and silver—Oh, beautiful and radiant as an apparition! —the Presence at Lepanto, Lady and Queen and Mother of Manila, the Virgin of the Fifteen Mysteries.

 

 

October 1943

<script data-ad-client="ca-pub-2181451582583481" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>

The Mango Tree by Outhine Bounyavong

 

Othine Bounyavong's collections of Folktales show us the universal desire of the people to create a better world. It shows us that the desire for unity, justice, and acceptance is so universal that it reflects the aspirations of the different tales around the world. 

The Mango tree for instance, shows us how greed kills not to mention ignorance. The Earth gifts us with natural wonder and thus we have no power to abuse it not take it as our own. 

The Mango Tree

 

Once upon a time a fine mango tree grew in the jungle near the village. Every year when the fruit was ripe the village children ran into the jungle and picked the fruit. One day, however, when the children went to the tree, they found a fence all around it. At the side of the fence there were two huge, fierce dogs. A stranger came out of the jungle. "Go away!" he shouted loudly. "This is my tree now." "No, it is not," the children cried. "You don't own the jungle. The tree is everybody's tree. Anyone can have the fruit."

The children were telling the truth but the stranger did not listen to them. He made his dogs chase the children back to the village. The children went to the village headman and told him what had happened. The village headman was very wise and, after some thought, he worked out a clever trick to play on the nasty stranger. The next day one of the girls of the village went to the tree again. She threw two pieces of meat to the dogs and climbed over the fence. Then she took a mango from the tree and began to eat it. Again, the stranger ran out of the jungle and he shouted at her: "Stop! You cannot take my mangoes. Go away." The girl took another bite from the mango. Suddenly she screamed out loud and fell to the ground. At that moment, the headman came by and asked: "What have you done to that girl?" "Nothing!" the man answered. "She took one of my mangoes and fell to the ground."

"The headman looked sadly at the little girl."She has mango sickness," he said. "Once every ten years, this mango tree has poisonous fruit. This must be the tenth year for this tree. You must not eat the mangoes on it this year." Then he picked up the girl and carried her back to the village. The next morning, the village headman took the children into the jungle to the mango tree. The stranger had gone, and he had taken his fence and his huge dogs with him. Once again, the children picked up the fruit, and carried them back to the village, laughing and singing because the tree was everybody's tree once more.

The Magic White Swan

The farmer went fishing one day.  He had a long fishing net.  Like other farmers, he wore a piece of cloth around his head.  He cast his net, but he got nothing.  He did it again and again, but he got nothing.  There was not a single fish.  He cast his net once, twice, thrice, but he got nothing.  He cast his net for the last time and pulled up the net.  He pulled and he pulled. "Oh, it is so heavy."

Then, he found a white pebble in his net.  It was the most beautiful pebble that he had ever seen.  So, he took the pebble home and placed it on the altar above his head.  After dinner, he went to sleep.  The next day, the white pebble had turned into a white swan.  The swan approached the farmer and said, "I will take you to a place, a beautiful place, full of flowers.  You can take whatever you like."

So the swan began flapping its wings and flew off to the garden with the farmer sitting on its back.

Once there the farmer enjoyed the garden. He picked one flower and felt that it was heavy.  He picked the second one and it got heavier.  He picked the third one and it was even heavier. 

"Oh, I don't think I should pick any more flowers.  It will be too heavy for the swan to fly and take me home."

So, the swan took the farmer back home and disappeared.  The flowers were turned into gold!  So, the farmer became a rich man.

The news of his wealth reached the ears of his friend, who came to ask the farmer right away about how he had acquired his wealth.  The farmer told his friend everything.

The next day, his friend went to fish in the river with his long net.  

He cast his net, but he got nothing.   He cast his net once, twice, thrice, but he got nothing.  He cast his net for the last time and pulled up the net.   Then, he found a white pebble in his net.  He took the pebble home and placed it in his room.

The pebble became the beautiful white swan who said to the second farmer:

"I will take you somewhere today, to a flower garden."

So, the man jumped on the swan's back and the swan took off to the flower garden.   Once there the man picked the flowers, one, two, three. 

"Oh, I have to pick a lot since I have come here already,"  he said.

So he picked two arms' full of flowers and went to the swan.

"Take me home now.  I will put these away and I will come back for more."

So he jumped on the swan's back.  It was so heavy.  The swan almost could not fly.  He flew, swaying left and right with weight.  But he was able to take the man to his house with difficulty.

The man jumped off the swan's back and said, "Now, wait here.  Don't go away.   I will go back to the garden to pick more flowers." 

Then he took the flowers into his room.  When he came back, the swan disappeared.   He returned to his room, but he found . . .

only ordinary flowers, no gold.  And that's the story.

1)     What a Beauty

What a Beauty was first published in 1978. It describes the relationship of Lao women to the revolution. In this type of story, a Lao woman oppressed by the corrupt capitalist society of pre-revolutionary Laos ultimately finds respect and romance from the revolutionary cadres. The story’s heroine, a young woman named Phaengkham, is unpopular because she is poor. During the Lao lamuong dance described in the story’s opening scene, she cannot find a dance partner because her clothes are not fashionable and she does not know how to dance in western style. Eventually, however, one man shows an interest in her and explains to her privately that he understands the true value of poor people, farmers, peasants, and laborers. Only after the revolution does Phaengkham learn that her admirer is a member of the Lao People’s Army. As for the wealthier women who had been her competition on the pre-revolutionary dance floor, after the communist victory they all have either fled the country or been sent away "to one of those Women’s Islands to be re-educated."

 

These are some of the stories written by Outhine Bounyavong, There are other stories, folktales, essays written by other Lao writers deposited in literature-rich Laos waiting to be translated and for the world to read.

 From: Mother’s Beloved: Stories from Laos

<script data-ad-client="ca-pub-2181451582583481" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>