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CHAPTER 1
Woodsfield, Ohio
1909–27
In winter, the snow sometimes fell thick in Woodsfield, melted for a day under a feeble sun, and froze again during the night. Then it was possible to take a toboggan holding about five persons, go to the top of Reservoir Hill at the north end of town, get on, and with a wild whooping go sliding down the street through town, a mile and a half, to the Catholic Church at the south end. Without knowing exactly why, I always managed to sit in front of the school's handsomest basketball player, who wrapped his long arms around me, holding me tight, and pressed his long legs close against each side of my body. I was about ten years old.
Woodsfield, Ohio, was the county seat, in those days a sleepy little town. It still is. It has grown worse; it has been arrested in time. It had a narrow-gauge railroad and a county courthouse with a huge round dome in which were set four clock faces, and beneath the dome a columned structure housing a large bell that struck the hours. Since my father at one time was county auditor, I had access to this mysterious region, and after finding out what I was and getting to the proper age, I used to take tricks up there.
Woodsfield sprawled considerably for a small town; the little white houses were spaced far apart. There were many trees shading the brick streets — not macadam or asphalt, but honest red paving bricks. There was no west side to the town; it lay north, south, and east — and curiously enough, the wealthiest families were not bunched together but existed side by side with the average ones. The Monroe Bank was run by the Mooney family, who had the largest yard in town and a beautiful house with four two-story white columns in front and a porch that ran almost entirely around the house. It was situated next to the Shafer house; the Mooneys and Shafers were related. Oh, how grand they were, this "society" of Woodsfield! Yet it was the Monroe Bank that was the first bank in town to fail, taking with it the savings of innumerable farmers from the surrounding countryside. Many of the townspeople were secretly pleased when the bank failed — provided, that is, they did not lose much money — for they saw the disaster as bringing the Mooneys down a peg ... and that of course was as it should be in a democracy. Puttin' on all them airs. Served 'em right.
I lived in a two-story boarding house that my Grandfather Morris built. Its small rooms were rented out to traveling salesmen, and there was a dining room where three meals a day were served. Thus my maiden aunts made a living for themselves and their parents — a rather cheerless existence of cooking and serving, making beds and washing, and tending the garden when there was time for it.
The Morris House was about a half block from the town square and the courthouse. Diagonally across the street from our house was the Methodist Church with its square bell tower, and alongside the church ran an alley down a small incline which led over to Paul Street. The alley was the path I took to grade school. For those days, the schoolhouse must have been a magnificent building — all of red brick, set in a wide lawn with trees (and right next to the Mooney house, too, from which it was separated by a high impenetrable hedge).
Woodsfield was a WASP town, certainly — white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. There was an abundance of Catholics —"Catlickers" they were called — and all the good Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and the rest tried to ignore them and were even a bit frightened of them. For were not the basements of their church and rectory and convent stacked with rifles and ammunition against the day when the Catlickers would take over the world? And were there not secret subterranean tunnels leading from the priest's house to the nuns' house, where vile things happened at night? Oh my yes ... and we believed it all.
There was one Jewish family — Mike Schahet, who had a daughter Lily. His presence was tolerated in town because he was a junk dealer — real junk, that is, the metal and rubber kind — and thus beneath the notice of everyone. And there was one black family, who lived across the street from my Aunt Tillie; curiously (and some thought it a disgrace) my Aunt Matilda's married name was Cooper, and that too was the name of the Negro (we did not call them black in those days), who happened to be a chiropractor. He had a wife and daughter. When I was eight or nine, playing on Aunt Tillie's front lawn one afternoon, I saw a car drive up — an old Model T Ford sedan, with isinglass window curtains up in place. It belonged to the town butcher (I recognized it), and out jumped four men in white sheets and peaked hats — the dreaded Ku Klux Klan! They ran into the Negro Cooper's house and brought him struggling into the car and drove off with him, leaving me paralyzed with shock. The next day his wife and child left, and none of them was ever heard from again; their house and furnishings were sold at auction. Thus Woodsfield maintained its purity.
Actually, cross burnings in empty fields and Klan Konclaves were common in Monroe County; I had seen many. Years later, while I was working on a rewriting of the World Book Encyclopedia, we received a new article on Ohio from one of the "authenticators," and in it occurred a sentence somewhat like this: "The southeast corner of Ohio is possibly one of the most backward and culturally deprived sections of the United States, worse even than Appalachia." We had to take out the sentence — but I knew what he was talking about.
Eventually, the railroad was removed, and finally the bus line, and after that, you reached the town only by private car or taxi. The physical isolation of Woodsfield was indicative of its artistic, aesthetic, and intellectual isolation as well. But Monroe County had proudly named itself the "Switzerland of Ohio," and the scenery was pretty — lots of wooded green hills and the Ohio River, blue-green in those days. And later on, the farm boys proved handsome, and the town boys as well, as stalwart and ruddy as the real Swiss.
Not much of my childhood remains in my memory. I remember how painful it was when my mother held my hand as I walked beside her when I was three or four, for my arm was pulled straight up. In Richmond, Virginia, where we lived for a while because my father had one of his innumerable jobs there, I went across the street to a vacant lot and set fire to the dry grass. (I could not have known then that "between jobs" was the family's way of covering the fact that my father had twice taken the Keeley cure for alcoholism and opium addiction and that he had also dabbled in laudanum and morphine.) I remember also in Richmond my mother dropped a jar of homemade tomato catsup and the lid came off, spilling the catsup all over the kitchen floor, at which my father hit her across the face. I also recall lying on my stomach reading a child's book about King Arthur, while a few feet away my sister Virginia, five years younger, was on the potty, and a bit of poop exploded from her tiny behind, to fall directly on King Arthur's face. And once I was roller skating on the street near a telephone pole, the kind that had climbing spikes out the sides; a motorcyclist with goggles rounded the corner from Monument Avenue too fast, hit the curb, and flew into the air. His skull-pan was punctured on a spike. He hung there a moment and then fell to the ground dead, with brains and blood splattered all over the sidewalk. This accident furnished me with nightmares for a long time.
Once in Richmond we went to a carnival. There was a peaked building with the flags of all nations running to the top, at which point the Confederate battle flag waved in the breeze.
"But where is the American flag?" I asked my father. "Shush," he said. "We are in Richmond."
There was a bully in our block. He used to pick me up by the ears. That hurt.
"Damnyankee," he said.
"Ow," I screamed. He would hold me for about twenty seconds.
My mother died in Richmond, of an intestinal obstruction. I was once permitted to go see her in the hospital. "Oh Sammy," she said. "I'm all cut up inside." This gave me a vivid picture of her belly cut into tiny pieces, and I wept. I was six. After her death, I was taken back to Woodsfield, where I lived until I was about seventeen.
The trip home was made in the company of my aunt Elizabeth, a large kind bosomy woman who never married. I had a lot of aunts. Elizabeth, Minnie, and Amy were the spinsters. Amy — a talented artist — died of dropsy. Aunts Elizabeth and Minnie brought up my sister and myself, along with Grandmother Morris. We all lived together in the old Morris House. I grew up thus in a house filled with women, and it must have had some effect on me. My father didn't count, for he was a weak man and often absent traveling.
As a child, I had the usual diseases, plus some not so usual — a broken eardrum (treated with laudanum and pepper on a pledget of cotton) and rheumatic fever, which without antibiotics lasted a long time and was very painful, making it difficult to walk. I was much babied and coddled. I had mumps, chicken pox, measles four times, and a broken nose. The nose accident occurred when I ran into a board extending across a sidewalk, running with my head down. For two or three weeks, I had two of the blackest eyes ever, and all my classmates in the third grade tried to find out who had socked me.
A fight? Not I, not ever. Once some bully picked on me when I was nine, and I ran screaming to my father.
"Teach me how to fight," I sobbed.
"Sorry, son — I can't," he said lamely. "You just have to make your hands into fists and keep them in front of your face. But the important thing is you must stand your ground."
Stand my ground, hell! Ever afterward, I ran from that particular oppressor and never stood my ground for any physical fight. After a while, I learned to talk my way out of difficulties and have used that method ever since.
Most of the townspeople thought me smart for my age. Perhaps I was. But I remember more disasters than triumphs. In second grade, Miss Goddard asked me to stand and read a passage. It should not have given me trouble, but it concerned a horse and had the word "Whoa" in it, which I pronounced "hoo-ay."
"Sit down, Samuel," she said, and called on Harriet Claugus.
Harriet had just come in from the country outside Woodsfield; she was considered a hick by all of us third-grade sophisticates. With her loping walk, her monkey mouth with buck teeth, her braids and receding chin, she was the object of our cruel laughter.
A year after "hoo-ay," Miss Griffith in the fourth grade asked, "Who can give us an example of an exclamation in grammar?"
Harriet's hand went up. "Write it on the board, Harriet," said Miss Griffith.
Harriet wrote: "Pshaw, the building fell down."
Miss Griffith frowned. "That's not a strong enough word for such an event."
I put up my hand. "Yes, Samuel," Miss Griffith said. "What would you say?"
"God damn it, the building fell down," I said.
The effect was magical. Miss Griffith had a fit of coughing and hustled me out of the room to see the principal, who sent me home with a note, even though I tried to explain it was only something I had heard my father say. My Grandmother Morris, a very tiny woman but remarkably strong for her size, washed out my mouth with soap on a toothbrush. Sixty years later, I can still taste it.
The change that came over me from grade school to high school was amazing, both to my family and to the teachers. The meek mild little mama's boy, the potential sissy, may have remained that on the outside, but inside there was a curious change to a twelve-year-old devil. The only reason that I have ever been able to find for this alteration reached me years later, when I happened to read Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Imp of the Perverse." In that not-very-good tale, Poe nonetheless investigated what may have been one of the most profound observations he ever made — that there is something within a man which causes him to do exactly the opposite of what he should do for his own self-preservation. A man's reason violently deters him from the brink; therefore do we most impetuously approach it. We perpetuate an action merely because we feel that we should not. In the story, a man had committed a murder and got away with it — yet slowly working within him was the compulsion to reveal his dark deed, so that finally he ran down the street shouting the details of his crime to the world — and was caught.
It has been observed by the psychologists and the psychiatrists too that the personality which has been kept repressed, as mine had been by the strict Methodist upbringing my aunts had given me, and kept within the strictest lines and boundaries really goes wild — hog wild — when it finally breaks away. And although I was still living within the family walls, the rebellious spirit was growing daily stronger. Perhaps I was not, like the man in Poe's story, seeking to ruin myself by becoming a "bad boy," but at any rate, I was reaching out for freedom.
And it is amazing to me that such a reaching out for freedom has lasted so long in my life and been the motivating force behind what must have seemed to many an urge to destroy myself. I had to be free; I could not take orders for long. And I suppose, looking backward and making the roughest of counts, considerably less than a third of my years has been spent in a situation where it was necessary for me to take orders. Whether consciously or not, I seemed to arrange my life so that most of it was spent in freedom, as my own master.
By the time I reached the eighth grade in school, at the advanced age of fourteen, one might think that some of the delights of sex would have unfolded for me.
Not so. One afternoon, the principal, W. J. Crawford, a dour-faced man, gathered all the eighth-grade boys in a room. The knowledgeable ones knew what was coming. I didn't.
Cyril Dougherty poked me in the ribs. "This is the day we learn all about life," he said.
"Uh, ha ha, yes," I said.
The only thing remembered from that talk was that the principal spoke of the danger of "touching oneself down there," which he said while one hand vaguely swung in the segment of an arc in front of his own crotch. The room was hushed.
As we marched down the sidewalk after school, Cyril said, "Imagine — Clark Loper didn't know what ole W. J. was talkin' about." And laughed.
"Ha ha," I said. Neither did I. But that hour's talk by W. J. caused me a great deal of private agony. In my sheltered little-boy Methodist way, I imagined that the slightest brushing against my penis with my hand not only was a religious sin but would lead equally to blindness and pimples, kidney disease, bed-wetting, stooped shoulders, insomnia, weight loss, fatigue, stomach trouble, impotence, genital cancer, and ulcers. Many nights thereafter, I prayed secretly to God to keep me from sin and any inadvertent "touching of myself" which might occur during the night while I was asleep. It was during this period that I experienced my first wet dream, a frightening occurrence which caused me to leap from bed and run to my father's bedroom — for he was then temporarily staying in a room at the Morris House. He comforted me, took me to bed with him, and explained as best he knew how that this was a usual thing for growing boys. But he did not at that time, or ever, instruct me in anything sexual nor give me one word of sexually oriented advice. As for my spinster aunts — well, they were dears, but they may still have believed in storks and cabbage plants, for all I knew.
And then wicked Bill Shafer, a redheaded friend related to the Mooneys, showed me what old W. J. was really talking about. He introduced me to fantasyland and showed me a new device for my solitary hours with his none-too-specific instructions: "You just keep going back and forth on it, like this, and you'll see what will happen."
Wicked Bill, delightful Bill — thanks a lot forever and ever! Alone in the Morris House bathroom, I kept going back and forth on it, and suddenly my whole body began to tingle, and the tingling raced from head to feet. My breathing stopped, and like a strongly pulled bow, my body bent almost double over the toilet to release the four magic drops. Then with senses reeling, heart racing, panting, I fell back against the door until the black-red specks stopped dancing before my eyes.
Marvel of marvels! Was it sinful? Who cared? Say rather it was the toy that would forever be with me. Whether in green pastures or beside still waters — my rod and my staff would comfort me, enliven my darkest hours with visions that would delight, satisfy, and soothe, that would excite, fulfill my deepest desires, and respond to all my questions about the meaning of life. Along with Genet — who first suggested it — let us form a cult of the solitary pleasure.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward"
by .
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