602
PARTISAN REVIEW
So only the old cItizens knew the jail any more, not old people but
old citizens: men and women old not in years but in the constancy
of the town, or against that constancy, concordant (not coeval of
course, the town's date was a century and a quarter ago now, but in
accord against that continuation) with that thin durable continuity
born a hundred and twenty-five years ago out of a handful of bandits
captured by a drunken militia squad, and a bitter ironical incorruptible
wilderness mail-rider, and a monster wrought-iron padlock-that stead–
fast and durable and unhurryable continuity against or across which
the vain and glittering ephemerae of progress and alteration washed
in substanceless repetitive evanescent scarless waves, like the wash
and glare of the neon sign on what was still known as the Holston
House diagonally opposite, which would fade with each dawn from
the old brick walls of the jail and leave no trace; only the old citizens
still knew it: the intractable and obsolescent of the town who still
insisted on wood-burning ranges and cows and vegetable gardens and
handymen who had to be taken out of hock on the mornings after
Saturday nights and holidays; or the ones who actually spent the
Saturday- and holiday-nights inside the barred doors and windows of
the cells or bullpen for drunkenness or fighting or gambling-the
servants, housemen and gardeners and handymen, who would be ex–
tracted the next morning by their white folks, and the others (what
the town knew as the New Negro, independent of that commodity)
who would sleep there every night beneath the thin ruby checker–
barred wash and fade of the hotel sign, while they worked their fines
out on the street; and the County, since its cattle-thieves and moon–
shiners went to trial from there, and its murderers-by electricity now
(so fast, that fast, was Progress)-to eternity from there; in fact it
was still, not a factor perhaps, but at least an integer, a cipher, in
the county's political establishment; at least still used by the Board
of Supervisors, if not as a lever, at least as something like Punch's
stuffed club, not intended to break bones, not aimed to leave any
permanent scars;
So only the old knew it, the irreconcilable Jeffersonians and Yok–
napatawphians who had (and without doubt firmly intended to con–
tinue to have) actual personal dealings with it on the blue Monday
mornings after holidays, or during the semi-yearly terms of Circuit
or Federal Court:-until suddenly you, a stranger, an outlander say
from the East or the North or the Far West, passing through the
little town by simple accident, or perhaps relation or acquaintance
