life is feudal wiki bones from slaughter

LIFE IS FEUDAL WIKI BONES FROM SLAUGHTER FULL

But the stranger will obstinately continue to admire them for living and working in this land over which the sun seems to be bending low, and for doing more than live and work: for luxuriating in rhetoric, and topping rhetoric with opera. When they name the antagonist against whom they have to pit themselves, they simply and passionately and frequently name the North, with the same hatred, the profounder because it is insolently unrequited, that the Irish feel for the English. They speak of the coolness of the nights almost before the stranger has mentioned the heat of the day. These people would deny that it is the climate that has challenged them. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end. To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. In fact, the lynching for which thirty-one men were being tried in the Court House was committed not, as might be imagined by an interested person who was trying to size the matter up by looking at a map and gazetteer, in a backward small town, but in a large, modern city. But outside Greenville city, in Greenville County, there are 137,000 people, 123,000 of whom live within ten miles of the city. So Greenville has a naïve-looking Main Street, with cross streets that run, after a block or two, into residential sections, where the white houses stand among gardens that look as if they were presently going to pass into woods and fields and the clear countryside and it has a population of 35,000. It is the habit of the mills and other factories to build themselves outside the city limits to dodge taxation. But in those cities the people do not live a modern life, they do not work too grimly, and they sleep in the afternoons here they keep the same commercial hours as in New York, and practice the hard efficiency that is the price this age asks for money. Greenville was as hot as the cities that lie on the Spanish plains, as Seville and Córdoba.

LIFE IS FEUDAL WIKI BONES FROM SLAUGHTER FULL

When the lynching trial in Greenville came to its end, late in May, it was full summer there, and the huge, pale bush roses that grow around the porches were a little dusty.

The heat of the South is an astonishment to the stranger. One is always thinking about water, for one is always wanting to have a drink or take a shower or get some clothes washed. Here one remembers that water is a vital element, as it is not in the North or in England. The exuberance of the inscription is actually a sober allusion to reality. The water supply of Greenville, South Carolina, pure, sparkling, life’s most vital element, flows by gravity from an uncontaminated mountain watershed of nine thousand acres, delivered through duplicated pipe lines, fourteen million gallons capacity, a perfect water for domestic and industrial uses.” Not in such exuberant terms would the existence of a town water supply be celebrated in the North or in my native England, and no deduction can be drawn from this that is damaging to the South.

Among the stores and offices on Main Street there is a vacant lot that suddenly pretends to be a mountain glade, with a stream purling over a neatly assembled rockfall and in the foreground there is staked a plaque bearing the words “Greenville City Water Works. The note of Greenville, South Carolina, is rhetorical.

Life is feudal wiki bones from slaughter