college boys who spend the old man’s money and wear fur coats to the football games; it is the place of the lovely girls up North who have rich fathers, of the beautiful wives of business men.
The train broke down somewhere beyond Manassas, and I went forward along the tracks with all the other passengers. “What’s the matter?” I said to the engineer. “The eccentric strap is broken, son,” he said. It was a very cold day, windy and full of sparkling sun. This was the farthest north I’d ever been, and I was twelve years old and on my way to Washington to see Woodrow Wilson inaugurated. Later I could not forget the face of the engineer and the words “eccentric strap.”
It is the place of the immense and lonely earth, the place of fat ears and abundance where they grow cotton, corn, and wheat, the wine-red apples of October, and the good tobacco.
It is the place that is savage and cruel, but it is also the innocent place; it is the wild lawless place, the vital earth that is soaked with the blood of the murdered men, with the blood of the countless murdered men, with the blood of the unavenged and unremembered murdered men; but it is also the place of the child and laughter, where the young men are torn apart with ecstasy, and cry out in their throats with joy, where they hear the howl of the wind and the rain and smell the thunder and the soft numb spitting of the snow, where they are drunk with the bite and sparkle of the air and mad with the solar energy, where they believe in love and victory and think that they can never die.
It is the place where you come up through Virginia on the great trains in the night-time, and rumble slowly across the wide Potomac and see the morning sunlight on the nation’s dome at Washington, and where the fat man shaving in the Pullman washroom grunts, “What’s this? What’s this we’re coming to—Washington?”—And the thin man glancing out of the window says, “Yep, this is Washington. That’s what it is, all right. You gettin’off here?”—And where the fat man grunts, “Who—me? Naw—I’m goin’on to Baltimore.” It is the place where you get off at Baltimore and find your brother waiting.
Where is my father sleeping on the land? Buried? Dead these seven years? Forgotten, rotten in the ground? Held by his own great stone? No, no! Will I say “Father” when I come to him? And will he call me “Son”? Oh, no, he’ll never see my face; we’ll never speak except to say—
It is the place of the fast approach, the hot blind smoky passage, the tragic lonely beauty of New England, and the web of Boston; the place of the mighty station
