The black boy’s shoofly, hanging limp from his inert hand, took up its frantic swishing. The air was cleared. The figures around the table relaxed. Their faces again turned toward Yancey Cravat. Yancey glanced at Sabra. Sabra’s lips puckered into a phantom kiss. They formed two words, unseen, unheard by the rest of the company. “Please, darling.”
“Cede Deo,” said Yancey, with a little bow to her. Then, with a still slighter bow, he turned to Cousin Dabney. “ ‘Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between thee and me.’ You may not recognize that either, Dabney. It’s from the Old Testament.”
Cousin Dabney Venable ran a finger along the top of his black silk stock, as though to ease his throat.
With a switch of his coat tails Yancey was off again, pausing only a moment at the sideboard to toss off three fingers of Spanish brandy, like burning liquid amber. He patted his lips with his fine linen handkerchief. “I’ve tasted nothing like that in a month, I can tell you. Raw corn whisky fit to tear your throat out. And as for the water! Red mud. There wasn’t a drink of water to be had in the town after the first twenty-four hours. There we were, thousands and thousands of us, milling around the Border like cattle, with the burning sun baking us all day, nowhere to go for shade, and the thick red dust clogging eyes and nose and mouth. No place to wash, no place to sleep, nothing to eat. Queer enough, they didn’t seem to mind. Didn’t seem to notice. They were feeding on a kind of crazy excitement, and there was a wild light in their eyes. They laughed and joked and just milled around, all day and all night and until near noon next day. If you had a bit of food you divided it with someone. I finally got a cup of water for a dollar, after standing in line for three hours, and then a woman just behind me—”
“A woman!” Cousin Arminta Greenwood (of the Georgia Greenwoods). And Sabra Cravat echoed the words in a shocked whisper.
“You wouldn’t believe, would you, that women would go it alone in a fracas like that. But they did. They were there with their husbands, some of them, but there were women who made the Run alone.”
“What kind of women?” Felice Venable’s tone was not one of inquiry but of condemnation.
“Women with iron in ’em. Women who wanted land and a home. Pioneer women.”
From Aunt Cassandra Venable’s end of the table there came a word that sounded like, “Hussies!”
Yancey Cravat caught the word beneath his teeth and spat it back. “Hussies, heh! The one behind me in the line was a woman of forty—or looked it—in a calico dress and a sunbonnet. She had driven across the prairies all the way from the north of Arkansas in a springless wagon. She was like the women who crossed the continent to California in ’49. A gaunt woman, with a weather-beaten face; the terribly neglected skin”—he glanced at Sabra with her creamy coloring—“that means alkali water and sun and dust and wind. Rough hair, and unlovely hands, and boots with the mud caked on them. It’s women like her who’ve made this country what it is. You can’t read the history of the United States, my friends” (all this he later used in an Oklahoma Fourth of July speech when they tried to make him Governor) “without learning the great story of those thousands of unnamed women—women like this one I’ve described—women in mud-caked boots and calico dresses and sunbonnets, crossing the prairie and the desert and the mountains enduring hardship and privation. Good women, with a terrible and rigid goodness that comes of work and self-denial. Nothing picturesque or romantic about them, I suppose—though occasionally one of them flashes—Belle Starr the outlaw—Rose of the Cimarron—Jeannette Daisy who jumped from a moving Santa Fe train to stake her claim—but the others—no, their story’s never really been told. But it’s there, just the same. And if it’s ever told straight you’ll know it’s the sunbonnet and not the sombrero that has settled this country.”
“Talking nonsense,” drawled Felice Venable.
Yancey whirled on his high heels to face her, his fine eyes blazing. “You’re one of them. You came up from the South with your husband to make a new home in this Kansas—”
“I am not!” retorted Felice Venable, with enormous dignity. “And I’ll thank you not to say any such thing. Sunbonnet indeed! I’ve never worn a sunbonnet in my life. And as for my skin and hair and hands, they were the toast of the South, as I can prove by anyone here, all the way from Louisiana to Tennessee. And feet so small my slippers had to be made to order. Calico and muddy boots indeed!”
“Oh, Mamma, Yancey didn’t mean—he meant courage to leave your home in the South and come up—he wasn’t thinking of—Yancey, do get on with your story of the Run. You got a drink of water for a dollar—dear me!—and shared it with the woman in the calico and the sunbonnet …”
He looked a little sheepish. “Well, matter of fact, it turned out she didn’t have a dollar to spare, or anywhere near it, but even if she had it wouldn’t have done her any good. The fellow selling it was a rat-faced
