FEARSOME THOUGHTS

Poetry and superstition were atmospheric conditions of the mind. As a child, I believed in ghosts, spirits, and signs. Knowledge has delivered me, but my instincts never will. I can think of no other reason why I still pass the seventh day of March warily and more innocently than I do my other days. This has been regarded as an ominous day in my family for generations, although I do not recall a single disaster that overtook any of us on this day. I am also at some pains not to see a new moon for the first time through the branches of trees, because mammy often warned me when I was a child that such an indiscretion would be followed by bad luck.

I received constant instructions from the negro servants in the primitive occult sciences, duly proved and illustrated.

There was a tiny sunken grave outlined with white flint stones on the edge of the forest behind the house. Aunt Parthenia, the old black woman who milked the cows, told me that a child had been murdered and buried there. She said the face was very pale, the hair white like wool. It was a small child about my age, and wore a long white gown. Just at dark she said it often climbed a tree and wailed piteously on account of having been murdered. Hidden in the plum bushes near the house, I used to see this thing clinging and swinging in the top of a poplar tree that grew beside the grave. I cannot recall the features of any living person I knew then so vividly as I do the pale, pinched face of that forlorn little ghost. The hair on its head did stand out and glisten in the darkness. And my own hair stood up in delicious fright, listening to its shuddering cries. Years passed before I could believe this was a screech owl screaming.

Somewhere in this same period I met a ghost in the flower garden when I was expecting no such encounter--a crooked woman wrapped in a black shawl. I remember how stiff and ghostly white her hands were. She looked at me and I could not move. After a while mother came and led me back to the house. My legs were trembling with excitement, but I did not tell her what I had seen. I never confided any of my experiences with ghosts to her, feeling somehow that she might disapprove of them. She was particular about the company I kept.

Mother belonged to the old order of saints. She was the kind of Christian who would have died at the stake for a doctrine. She believed in infant baptism because this was one of the doctrines of her church, and made haste to have me baptized before I could hold up my head. She not only believed you must be born again, spiritually speaking, but she had her doubts about your conversion if you did not suffer the birth pangs of repentance at least with groanings and tears. I was too young to think a doubt when she instructed me in the doctrine of damnation. Hell was a very literal pit of fire and brimstone, where the wicked burned forever and the worm never dieth. If she had not included the worm in this picture, I might not have received the reptilian idea of the place, which was particularly abhorrent. One day I met a turtle in the flower garden. The eyes were red. There were red gills under its neck. I fled shrieking, believing it to be some kind of infernal insect that had crawled out of the pit, still hot and malevolent.

At this age I must have been like those birds in the far places that do not fear or fly at the sight of man. I was never afraid of the dark, nor of the considerable number of ghosts I collected under the guidance of Aunt Parthenia.

I also believed in certain animals. The marvelous things I heard about the doings of rabbits, cats, and foxes surpass anything recorded in Æsop’s Fables. There was a donkey on the plantation. I was shy of this beast, not because I was afraid of him, but because he might speak to me. Some native delicacy I had, forbade conversation with an ass. But if our old dog wagged his tail, I understood him. I have always been able to interpret dogs. They have no souls, no minds of their own; but if they associate intimately with human beings, and not with other dogs, they develop a telepathic relation to us that amounts to divination. They understand us and act according to our will and mood, however secret, because they worship us.

I have had fearful thoughts along this line. What if we sustain a similar relation to the Almighty? What if we are simply the tail-wagging medium of infinite mind? Such speculations are no doubt of the devil, but if you have a mind you cannot resist now and then taking an intellectual whiff at your powers and principalities of darkness.

Negroes do not include fairies among their superstitions; so I was deprived of the lighter, happier comradeship of these gossamer-winged beings. My impression is that they do not last so long, nor are they so sternly stimulating to the imagination as the illusions we have of spirits and ghosts. Even a child discards his fairies at an early age, but mankind never quite escapes the prescience of the supernatural. Wise men as well as fools have been haunted by these uneasy figments. All literature from beginning to end is populated with ghosts and apparitions of the dead. This is testimony accumulated, not about the supernatural, but about what we are. The Lord knew us. This is the reason why heavenly messengers were seen by the naked eye in the Scriptures. Something imprisoned in us responds to that ‘cloud of witnesses,’ and to the Holy Ghost of Jesus Christ. We require such symbolism because we are forever and inalienably kin to spirits. But we never see them.

During the whole of my life I have been subject to these visions. I have had a curious consciousness of not being alone when I was really alone. I have seen a whiteness take shape in impenetrable darkness, heard sounds, had a sense of wings and motion about me in silence and stillness. Maybe this is merely the blind stirring of immortal instinct; but my suspicion is that these ‘presences’ we feel, or think we see, are freaks of memory, subconsciously aroused by the loves or hates we used to have, and that any one with a lively imagination can get himself haunted or blessed by these illusions. I think it is an exercise in supernatural lying which never fully convinces a rational person; therefore, a dangerous diversion to indulge, and bad for the soul. The practice of spiritualism seems to me gross and strangely repulsive, like some kind of abnormal vulgarity. Compare the noble significance of that ‘cloud of witnesses’ mentioned in the Scriptures with the ‘spirit’ conjured up at a psychic séance. The first is designed to inspire faith and courage; the latter merely gratifies your human anxiety or curiosity by informing you that your maiden aunt who died last spring is well and happy!

We must learn; it is inevitable. The time comes when we can no longer avoid the facts accumulated by human experience. I would not go so far as to call this wisdom; much of it is based upon errors of judgment, weakness, and prejudice, but we must master as much of it as possible in order to live sensibly in an erroneous world.

I come now to this momentous period in my own life when the amorphous but still entrancingly immortal faculties I had must be adjusted, according to the mortal mind, to God and man. This is a flighty business when you consider the strange contradictions involved.