ma ‘am,” he said. “We’re from the Red Cross.”
The laughter abruptly departed Aunt Bessie’s eyes and was replaced with a sad and worried frown. She turned with trembling hands and reached for her purse that lay on a marble topped table beside the door.
“Well, boys,” she said grimly, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you much this year. It’s been a right hard winter.”
The Conscience of America
Somewhere on the outskirts of
Flat Rock, North Carolina
Pop: 2,565
The Scene: Carl Sandburg had already become a Pulitzer-Prize winning author, a poet of national acclaim, minstrel, lecturer, and biographer by the time he moved with his family to a mountain farm in the Blue Ridge highlands of North Carolina in 1945. The estate was called “Connemara” and had been built prior to the War Between the States. It served as home for Christopher Memminger, the Secretary of the Confederate Treasury. But since the Confederacy had little money, there was little for him to do. He remained as a gentleman farmer, far removed from the fighting, during the bitter years of conflict.
The Sights: Sandburg’s twenty-two years at Connemara were productive ones. He published poems, children’s literature, fiction, non-fiction, and even earned his second Pulitzer Prize. He never got around to framing either of the awards. He worked most of the night while it was quiet and still, writing wherever his imagination carried him. He dealt with words while his wife raised goats on the farm. The Carl Sandburg Home is a National Historic Site, open every day except Christmas. The rooms are much as the Sandburgs left them, warm and inviting, inspiring and restful. Books and personal items are scattered throughout the house, and it appears as though the family may return at any moment from a morning or afternoon walk. The house, with seventeen thousand volumes of books from Sandburg’s own collection, is filled with the presence of a spirited man whose writing echoed loudly the voice of the American people.
The Story: His was a curious and a simple life. He would have it no other way. He was a common man who found a curious sense of belonging among common men in common places under common circumstances.
Hidden away among them, he discovered the uncommon rhythm of a life that possessed shape and form but little definition and hardly any meaning at all. He heard only the odd cadence of a nation’s voices, often as loud as thunder, sometimes as soft as a whisper, and they spoke to him, and he spoke for them, and very seldom did their diffident collection of words ever rhyme or need to.
His was a crooked road with twists and turns and crossroads, and he seldom knew which road to take, so he tried to take them all. He was a vagabond in the wayward midst of an aimless journey. It could have turned out far different than it did.
Carl Sandburg was a quiet and gentle little man who wandered adrift in a strange world even when he wasn’t lost, and he was never lost. He simply wanted to know what lay beyond the next bend in the road, around the next corner, over the next hill, and who might be waiting for him when the day ended and the bright city lights gave way to the soft glow of moonlight.
The narrow highway stretched out before him, and it was, as it had always been, a dead end. Like a fly in the ragged web of a spider, he seldom knew what to do next.
It was not the easiest of times. He had been born on a corn shuck mattress, the son of a Swedish blacksmith who could not write his name, not in English anyway. The birth certificate referred to the child as Carl August, and his family was determined for the boy to be far removed from the culture of the Old Country. He would speak the language of a bold new land. None would ever speak it with more eloquence.
But mostly, during those early years, Carl just listened, and the soul of those who fought and survived a hard life became his own soul, his own conscience. He wondered what God had chosen him to do with his life, and he found few options.
None of them dealt with a pen and paper.
It could have turned out far different.
The boy, at the mercy of a financial depression that swept the country in the late 1800s, quit school in the eighth grade. He never had a home for very long.
His father was always on the move.
A better job, a better day, a better life always lay somewhere ahead of him. He chased but never caught it.
Carl was abandoned with a scattered assortment of newspapers, magazines, and books to read. He crawled between their covers and closed the pages around him.
He had no other place to go.
Carl Sandburg dressed in old clothes even when he became famous, and fame was one of the few words that escaped his vocabulary. Given his choice, he preferred a simple meal of homemade soups and dark bread.
He had never been a stranger to poverty, and the bad times hardened him just as they had strengthened his father. As a boy, he dug his garden and raised vegetables. He delivered newspapers, scrubbed brick from demolished homes, and cleaned brass cuspidors in a barbershop.
He distributed handbills for twenty-five cents a day and worked as a milk slinger on a milk wagon route for twelve dollars a month and dinner on most nights. Carl washed bottles in a pop bottling plant, worked as a water boy for mules and men as they graded the hills where trolley cars would run, rented rowboats, stacked heavy blocks of ice in an ice house, and sponged down sweating horses at the gamblers racetrack.
Carl could have been discouraged. He wasn’t
Young, disconnected, and growing older, he was trapped in the midst of a great struggle. It was pulling him somewhere. He had no idea where the struggle would take him.
Carl asked for little. He expected little. He found much on a road that allowed him to watch the “fog come in on little cat feet,” witness “a sunset sea-flung, bannered with fire and gold,” and stumble across “a pier running into a lake straight as a rifle barrel.” He could not escape the scenes forged in the back reaches of his mind, and they would not leave him alone. He had no idea what to do with them.
It could have turned out far different.
Carl would always know “hours as empty as a beggar’s tin cup on a rainy day, empty as a soldier’s sleeve with an arm lost,” and he had seen “where the music goes when the fiddle is in the box.”
These became the sights he could not forget, the subtle sounds he heard, the pain he felt, the loneliness that gripped him on a road with no end. He was haunted by the memories of a face, a love, a thought he had somehow left behind. None of them, at the moment, were lines of poetry.
He scribbled a little now and then but generally had no use for writing pads. The unforgiving battle for survival was much more important to him. Maybe somewhere along the way from one small, out-of-the-way town to another, he would find a job, a trade, a livelihood that could put a dollar or two in a pocket that was mostly as empty as the streets he walked. A young man’s ambition never stretched farther than his next meal, which often seemed thousands of miles away.
Carl
