The Worm Turns

YESTERDAY I sat on the front gallery, enjoying the Sabbatical fragrance of gumbo and fried chicken which floated from Mammy’s kitchen, and gazing appreciatively upon PhyllisAnne in a rocking-chair much too big for her: a little girl in white frock, pink sash, and patent leather shoes — the conventional picture of a good child reading a Sunday School paper. Suddenly an expression of outraged justice crossed the small countenance, and an indignant, forefinger pointed to an innocent-looking photograph of an arbutus plant in blossom. Underneath was the inscription, ‘A Flower that Every Good American Knows.’

Now Phyllis-Anne’s eight years have all been passed in the land of magnolia and jasmine. I, her mother, was born, as it were, in the shade of a Middle Western sunflower. Therefore I quite understood the italics of her pronunciamento: ‘ I am a perfectly good American, and I do not know that flower.'

I hesitate before making my confession, realizing that it will put me outside the cultural pale, but I have never seen an arbutus.

I know it academically, of course. My principal association with it is as one of a list of ‘words commonly mispronounced.’ I have met it frequently in literature, and have heard its virtues extolled. I believe it to be a worthy flower. The dictionary tells me that ‘it has oblong, hairy leaves and fragrant pink-and-white blossoms.’ I realize that the soupçon of prejudice that I feel against it, on account of its hairy leaves, is unreasonable and inconsistent with the fact that I don’t like Mexican dogs, who have no hair at all. And in any event the fragrant pink-and-white flowers no doubt more than compensate for the hirsute foliage. Indeed, I have nothing against the arbutus per se. The dictionary further informs me that ‘it is especially abundant in New England.’ (Did I say that Phyllis-Anne’s Sunday School paper is published in New England?)

Now poppies are especially abundant in the Far West, dandelions gild the pastures in the corn-belt, and the trumpet-honeysuckle drapes itself on every fence-post in the Blue Grass country; but would it occur to any of these sections to specify acquaintance with its particular flora as a condition of good Americanism?

The arbutus, I am told, is a modest plant. Can it be — this is mere speculation — that its pink blossoms are white ones, which are blushing at having been made the emblem of sectional complacency?

California is conceited, and it is necessary to treat all Californians with firmness, or they will tell you ad nauseam that the geraniums reach the second-story windows. The Northwest is blatant, but not provincial. Dixie is rather vain, but, like most vain people, has a wholesome underlying sense of her own shortcomings. But New England is complacent with the complacency of ignorance. It simply has not penetrated to her consciousness that there is any nation to speak of west of the Alleghanies. Corn, certainly — and beef. But culture!

‘Oh, yes,’ said a New England lady to the man from Montana; ‘I have a friend in the West. She lives in Buffalo.’

‘June,’ says a Boston magazine intended for national circulation, ‘is the best-loved month.’ Of course, the editor means best loved in New England. Here in the South we regard Lowell’s ‘What is so rare as a day in June?’ as mere poetic license.

But the worm has turned. For many years we have swallowed New England morals and New England culture, and have felt apologetic because we did not care for baked beans and could not learn to say ‘ kimoner.’ Sundrenched California and Louisiana have patiently taught their children to read ‘I have a new red sled’ out of New England primers.

But what is the use? In imagination I feel the New England lorgnette turned upon me, and I am shaking in my shoes.