CHAPTER FIVE

His voice was mellow and loaded with more meaning than I could fathom. As I drove, faded and yellowed pictures of the school's early days displayed in the library and fragmentarily to life- photographs of men and women in wagons drawn by mule teams and oxen, dressed in black, dusty clothing, people who seemed almost without individuality, a black mob that seemed to be waiting, looking with blank faces, and among them the inevitable collection of white men and white women in smiles, clear features, striking, elegant and confident. Until now, and although I could recognise the Founder and Dr. Benson among them, the figures in the photographs had never seemed actually to have been Alive, but were more like signs or symbol one found on the last pages in the dictionary... But now I felt that I was sharing in a great work with the car leaping leisurely beneath the pressure of my foot, I identified myself with the rich man reminiscing on the rear seat...

A pleasure fate," he repeated, "and I hope yours will be a pleasant for me.

But at the time I was puzzled. How could anyone's fate be pleasant?" I had always thought of it as something painful. No one I knew spoke of it as pleasant- not even Woodridge who made us read Greek plays.

We were beyond the farthest extension of the school, owned lands now and I suddenly decided to turn off the highway, down a road that seemed unfamiliar. There were no trees and the air was brilliant. For down the road the sun glared cruelly against a tin sign nailed to a barn. A lone figure bending over a hoe on the hillside raised up wearily and waved, more a shadow against the skyline than a man.

"How far have we come?" I heard over my shoulder. "Just about a mile, sir."

"I don't remember this section," he said.

I didn't answer I was thinking of the first person who'd mentioned anything like fate in my presence, my grandfather. There had been nothing pleasant about it and I had tried forget it. Now, riding here in the powerful car with this white man who was so pleased with what he called his fate, I felt a sense of dread. My grandfather would have called this treachery and I could not understand in just what was it was. Suddenly I grew guilty at the realization that the white man might have thought so too. What would he have thought? Did he know that Negroes like my grandfather had been free during those days before the college had been founded? Or would he have suspended that I'm a girl disguised as a guy? Many thoughts ran through my mind at that moment.

As we came to a side road I saw a team of oxen hitched to a broken-down wagon, the ragged driver dozing on the seat beneath the shades of a clump of trees.

"Did you see that sir?" I asked over my shoulder.

"What was it,"

"The ox team, sir."

"Oh! No, I can't see it for the trees," he said looking back. It's good timber."

I'm sorry, sir. Shall I turn back?"

"No, it isn't much," he said, "Go on."

I drove on, remembering the lean, hungry face of the sleeping man, He was the kind of white man I feared. The brown fields swept out the horizon. A flock of birds dipped down, circled, swung up and out though linked by invisible ming. Waves of heat danced above the engine hood. The tires sang over the highway. Finally I overcame my timidity and asked him:

"Sir, why did you become interested in the school?"

"I think," he said, thoughtfully, raising his voice, "It was because I felt even as a young man that your people were somehow closely connected with my destiny. Do you understand?"

"Not so clearly sir," I said, ashamed to admit it. "You have studied Emerson, haven't you?" "Emerson, sir?"

"Ralph Waldo Emerson."

I was embarrassed because I hadn't. "Not yet sir. We haven't come to him yet."

"No?" he said with a note 9f surprise. Well never mind. I am a New Englander, like Emerson. You must learn about him, for he was important to your people. He gad a hand in your destiny. Yes, perhaps that is what I mean. I had a feeling that your people were somehow connected with what would happen to me..."

I slowed the car, trying to understand. Through the glass I saw him gazing at the long hall of his cigar, holding it delicate in his slender, manicured fingers.

"Yes, you are my fate, young man. Only you can tell me what it really is. Do you understand?"

"I think I do, sir."

"I mean that you depends the outcome of the years I have spent in helping your school. That has been my real life's work, not my banking or my researcher or my researches, but my first-hand organising of human life."

I saw him now, leaning toward the front seat, speaking with an intensity which had not been there before. It was hard not to turn my eyes from the highway and face him.

"There's is another reason, a reason more important, more passionate and yes, even more scared than all the others," he said, no longer seeming to see me, but speaking to himself alone. "Yes, even more sacred than all the others. A girl, my daughter. She was a being more rare, more beautiful, purer, more perfect, and more delicate than widest dream of a poet. I could never believe her to be my own flesh and blood. Her beauty was a wellspring of purest water-of-life, and to look upon her was to drink and drink again... she was rare, a perfect creation, a work if purest art. A delicate flowers that bloomed in the liquid light of the moon. A nature of this world, a personality like that if some biblical maiden, gracious and queenly. I found it difficult to believe her my own..."

Suddenly he fumble in his vest pocket and thrust something over the back of the seat, surprising me.

"Here, young man, you owe so much of your good fortune in attending such a school to her."

I looked upon the tinted miniature framed in engraved platinum. I almost dropped it. A young woman of delicate dreamy features looked up at me. She was very beautiful, I thought at the time, so beautiful that I did not know whether I should express admiration to an extent I felt it or merely act polite. And yet I seemed to remember her, or someone like her in the past. I know now that it was flowing costume of soft, flimsy materials that made for the effects; today, dressed in one of the smart, well-tailored, angular, sterile, streamlined, engine turned, air-conditioned modern outfits you see in the women's magazines, she would appear as ordinary as ab expensive piece of machine-tooled jewellery and just as lifeless. Then, however, I shared something of his enthusiasm.

"She was too pure for life," he said sadly; too pure and too good and too beautiful. We were sailing together, touring the world, just she and I, when she became ill in Italy. I thought little of it at the time and we continued across the Alps. When we reached Munich she was already fading away. While we were attending an embassy party she collapsed. The best medical scientist in the world could not save her. It was a lonely return, a bitter voyage. I have never recovered. I have never forgiven myself. Everything I've done since her passing has been a monument to her memory."

He became silent, looking with his blue eyes far young the field stretching away in the sun. I returned the miniature, wondering what in the world had made him open his heart to me. That was something I never did; it was dangerous, rust, it was dangerous if you feel like that about anything because then you'd never get it or something or someone would it take it away from you and they'd only laugh and think you were crazy.

"So, you see young nan; you're involved in my life quite intimately, even thought you've involved in my life quite intimately, even though you've never seen me before. You are bound to a great dream and to a beautiful monument. If you become a good farmer, a chef, a preacher, doctor, singer, mechanic– whatever you become and even if you fail, you're my fate. And you must wrote me and tell me about the outcome. "

I was relieve to see him smiling through the mirror. My feelings were mixed. Was he kidding me? Was he talking to me, like someone in a book just to see how I would take it? Or could it be, I was almost afraid to think, that this rich man was just the tiniest bit crazy? How could I tell him his fate? He raised his head and our eyes met for an instant in the glass, then I lowered mine to the blazing white line that divided the highway.