502
PARTISAN REVIEW
greased wheels, but was swept, hurled, flung not only out of Yok–
napatawpha County and Mississippi but the United States too,
immobile and intact-the wagon, the mules, the rigid shapeless old
Indian woman and the nine heads which surrounded her-like a
float or a piece of stage property dragged rapidly into the wings
across the very backdrop and amid the very bustle of the property–
men setting up for the next scene and act before the curtain had
even had time to fall;
There was no time; the next act and scene i,tsel£ clearing its own
stage without waiting for property-men; or rather, not even bother–
ing to clear the stage but commencing the new act and scene right
in the midst of the phantoms, the fading wraiths of that old time
which had been exhausted, used up, to be no more and never re–
turn: as though the mere and simple orderly ordinary succession of
days was not big enough, comprised not scope enough, and so weeks
and months and years had to be considered and compounded into
one burst, one surge, one soundless roar filled with one word: town:
city: with a name: Jefferson; men's mouths and their incredulous
faces (faces to which old Alex Holston had long since ceased try–
ing to give names or, for that matter, even
to
recognise) were filled
with it; that was only yesterday, and by tomorrow the vast bright
rush and roar had swept the very town one block south, leaving in the
tideless backwater of an alley on a side-street the old jail which,
like the old mirror, had already looked at too much too long, or
like the patriarch who, whether or not he decreed the conversion of
the mud-chinked cabin into a mansion, had at least foreseen it,
is
now not only content but even prefers the old chair on the back
gallery, free of the rustle of blueprints and the uproar of bickering
architects
in
the already dismantled living-room;
It
(the old jail) didn't care, tideless in that backwash, insulated by
that city block of space from the turmoil of the town's birthing, the
mud-chinked log walls even carcerant of the flotsam of an older
time already on its rapid way out too: an occasional runaway slave
or drunken Indian or shoddy would-be heir of the old tradition of
Mason or Hare or Harpe (biding its time until, the courthouse fin–
ished, the jail too would be translated into brick, but, unlike the
courthouse, merely a veneer of brick, the old mud-chinked logs of
