# When I Was a Little Girl/Chapter 18

XVIII
THE DECORATION OF INDEPENDENCE
That year we celebrated Fourth of July in the Wood Yard.
The town had decided not to have a celebration, though we did not know who had done the actual deciding, and this we used to talk about.
“How can the town decide anything?” Delia asked sceptically. “When does it do it?”
“Why,” said Margaret Amelia—to whom, her father being a judge, we always turned to explain matters of state, “ its principal folks say so.”
“Who are its principal folks?” I demanded.
“Why,” said Margaret Amelia, “I should think you could tell that. They have the stores and offices and live in the residence part.”
I pondered this, for most of the folk in the little town did neither of these things.
“Why don't they have another Fourth of July for the rest, then,” I suggested, “and leave them settle on their own celebration?”
​Margaret Amelia looked shocked.
“I guess you don't know much about the Decoration of Independence,” said she.
The Decoration of Independence—we all called it this—was, then, to go by without attention because the Town said so.
“The Town,” said Mary Elizabeth, dreamily, “the Town. It sounds like somebody tall, very high, and pointed at the top, with the rest of her dark and long and flowy—don't it?”
“City,” she and I were agreed, sounded like somebody light and sitting down with her skirts spread out.
“Village” sounded like a little soft hollow, not much of any colour, with a steeple to it.
“I like ‘Town’ best,” Mary Elizabeth said. “It sounds more like a mother-woman. ‘City’ sounds like a lady-woman. And ‘Village’ sounds like a grandma-woman. I like ‘Town’ best.”
“What I want to do,” Margaret Amelia said restlessly, “is to spend my Fourth of July dollar. I had a Fourth of July dollar ever since Christmas. It's no fun spending it with no folks and bands and wagons.”
“I've got my birthday dollar yet,” I contrib​uted. “If I spent it for Fourth of July, I'd be glad of it, but if I spend it for anything else, I'll want it back.”
“I had a dollar,” said Calista, gloomily, “but I used a quarter of it up on the circus. Now I'm glad I did. I wish’t I'd stayed to the side-show.”
“Stitchy Branchitt says,” Betty offered, “that the boys are all going to Poynette and spend their money there. Poynette’s got exercises.”
Oh, the boys would get a Fourth. Trust them. But what about us? We could not go to Poynette. We could not rise at three a.m. and fire off fire-crackers. No fascinating itinerant hucksters would come the way of a town that held no celebration. We had nowhere to spend our substance, and to do that was to us what Fourth of July implied.
The New Boy came wandering by, eating something. Boys were always eating something that looked better than anything we saw in the candy-shop. Where did they get it? This that he had was soft and pink and chewy, and it rapidly disappeared as he approached us.
Margaret Amelia Rodman threw back her ​curls and flashed a sudden radiant smile at the New Boy. She became quite another person from the judicious, somewhat haughty creature whom we knew.
“Let's us get up a Fourth of July celebration,” she said.
We held our breath. It never would have occurred to us. But now that she suggested it, why not?
The New Boy leaped up on a gate-post and sat looking down at us, chewing.
“How?” he inquired.
“Get up a partition,” said Margaret Amelia. “Circulate it like for take-a-walk at school or teacher's present, and all sign.”
“And take it to who?” asked the New Boy.
Margaret Amelia considered.
“My father,” she proposed.
The scope of the idea was enormous. Her father was a judge and wore very black clothes every day, and never spoke to any of us. Therefore he must be a great man. Doubtless he could do anything.
Boys, as we knew them, usually flouted everything that we said, but—possibly because of Margaret Amelia’s manner of presentation— ​this suggestion seemed to strike the New Boy favourably. Afterward we learned that this was probably partly owing to the fact that the fare to Poynette was going to eat distressingly into the boys' Fourth money, unless they walked the ten miles.
By common consent we had Margaret Amelia and the New Boy draw up the “partition.” But we all spent a long time on it, and at length it read:—
“We the Undersigned want there should be a July 4 this year. We the Undersigned would like a big one. But if it can't be so very big account of no money, We the Undersigned would like one anyway, and hereby respectfully partition about this in the name of the Decoration of Independence.”
There was some doubt whether or not to close this document with “Always sincerely” but we decided to add only the names, and these we set out to secure, the New Boy carrying one copy and Margaret Amelia another. I remember that, to honour the occasion, she put on a pale blue crocheted shawl of her mother's and we all trailed in her wake, worshipfully.
​The lists grew amazingly. Long before noon we had to get new papers. By night we had every child that we knew, save Stitchy Branchitt. He had a railroad pass to Poynette, and he favoured the out-of-town celebration. But the personal considerations of economic conditions were as usual sufficient to swing the event, and the next morning I suppose that twenty-five or thirty of us, bearing the names of three or four times as many, marched into Judge Rodman's office.
On the stairs Margaret Amelia had a thought.
“Does your father pay taxes?” she inquired of Mary Elizabeth—who was with us, having been sent down town for starch.
“On his watch—he used to,” said Mary Elizabeth, doubtfully. “But he hasn't got that any more.”
“Well, I don't know,” said Margaret Amelia, “whether we’d really ought to of put down any names that their fathers don't pay taxes. It may make a difference. I guess you're the only one we got that their fathers don't—that he ain't—”
I fancy that what Margaret Amelia had in mind was that Mary Elizabeth’s father was the ​only one who lived meanly; for many of the others must have gone untaxed, but they lived in trim, rented houses, and we knew no difference.
Mary Elizabeth was visibly disturbed.
“I never thought of that,” she said. “Maybe I better scratch me off.”
But there seemed to me to be something indefinably the matter with this.
“The Fourth of July is for everybody, isn't it?” I said. “Didn't the whole country think of it?”
“I think it's like a town though,” said Margaret Amelia. “The principal folks decided it, I'm sure. And they always pay taxes.”
We appealed to the New Boy, as authority superior even to Margaret Amelia. How was this—did the Decoration of Independence mean everybody, or not? Could Mary Elizabeth sign the partition since her father paid no taxes?
“Well,” said the New Boy, “it says everybody, don't it? But nobody ever gets to ride in the parade but distinguished citizens—it always says them, you know. I s'pose maybe it meant the folks that pays the taxes, only it didn't like to put it in.”
​“I better take my name off,” said Mary Elizabeth, decidedly. “It might hurt.”
So the New Boy produced a stump of pencil, and we found the right paper, and held it up against the wall of the stairway, and Mary Elizabeth scratched her name off.
“I won't come up, then,” she whispered to me, and made her way down the stairs, her head held very high.
Judge Rodman was in his officek—he makes, I find, my eternal picture of “judge,” short, thick, frock-coated, bearded, bald, spectacled, square-toed, and with his hands full of loose papers and his watch-chain shining.
“Bless us,” he said, too, as a judge should.
Margaret Amelia was ahead,—still in the pale blue crocheted shawl,—and she and the New Boy laid down the papers, and the judge picked them up, and read. His big pink face flushed the more, and he took off his spectacles and brushed his eyes, and he cleared his throat, and beamed down on us, and stood nodding. . . . I remember that he had an editorial in his paper the next night called “A Lesson to the Community,” and another, later, “Out of the Mouths of Babes”—for Judge Rodman was a very ​great man, and owned the newspaper and the brewery and the principal department store, and had been to the legislature; and his newspaper was always thick with editorials about honouring the flag and reverencing authority and the beauties of home life—Miss Messmore used to cut them out and read them to us at General Exercises.
So Judge Rodman called a Town meeting in the Engine House, and we all hung about the door downstairs, because they said that if children went to the meeting, they would scrape their feet on the bare floor so that nobody could hear a sound; and so we waited outside until we heard hands clapped and the Doxology sung, and then we knew that it had passed.
We were having a new Court House that year, so the Court House yard was not available for exercises: and the school grounds had been sown with grass seed in the beginning of vacation, and the market-place was nothing but a small vacant lot. So there was only one place to have the exercises: the Wood Yard. And as there was very little money to do anything with, it was voted to ask the women to take charge of the celebration and arrange ​something “tasty, up-to-date, and patriotic,” as Judge Rodman put it. They set themselves to do it. And none of us who were the children then will ever forget that Fourth of July celebration—yet this is not because of what the women planned, nor of anything that the committee of which Judge Rodman was chairman thought to do for the sake of the day.
Our discussion of their plans was not without pessimism.
“Of course what they get up won't be any real good,” the New Boy advanced. “They'll stick the school organ up on the platform, and that sounds awful skimpy outdoors. And the church choirs ’ll sing. And somebody ’ll stand up and scold and go on about nothing. But it'll get folks here, and balloon men, and stuff to sell, and a band; so I s'pose we can stand the other doin's.”
“And there’s fireworks on the canal bank in the evening,” we reminded him.
Fourth of July morning began as usual before it dawned. The New Boy and the ten of his tribe assembled at half past three on the lawn between our house and that of the New Family, and, at a rough estimate, each fired off the cost ​of his fare to Poynette and return. Mary Elizabeth and I awoke and listened, giving occasional ecstatic pulls at our bell. Then we rose and watched the boys go ramping on toward other fields, and, we breathed the dim beauty of the hour, and, I think, wondered if it knew that it was Fourth of July, and we went back to bed, conscious that we were missing a good sixth of the day, a treasure which, as usual, the boys were sharing.
After her work was done, Mary Elizabeth and I took our bags of torpedoes and popped them off on the front bricks. Delia was allowed to have fire-crackers if she did not shoot them off by herself, and she was ardently absorbed in them on their horse-block, with her father. Calista had brothers, and had put her seventy-five cents in with their money on condition that she be allowed to stay with them through the day. Margaret Amelia and Betty always stopped at home until annual giant crackers were fired from before their piazza, with Judge Rodman officiating in his shirt-sleeves, and Mrs. Rodman watching in a starched white “wrapper” on the veranda and uttering little cries, all under the largest flag that there was in the ​town, floating from the highest flagpole. Mary Elizabeth and I had glimpses of them all in a general survey which we made, resulting in satisfactory proof that the expected merry-go-round, the pop-corn wagon, a chocolate cart, an ice-cream cone man, and a balloon man and woman were already posted expectantly about.
“If it wasn't for them, though,” observed Mary Elizabeth to me, “the town wouldn't be really acting like Fourth of July, do you think so? It just kind of lazes along, like a holiday.”
We looked critically at the sunswept street. The general aspect of the time was that people had seized upon it to do a little extra watering, or some postponed weeding, or to tinker at the screens.
“How could it act, though?” I inquired.
“Well,” said Mary Elizabeth, “a river flows, don't it? And I s'pose a mountain towers. And the sea keeps a-coming in . . . and they all act like themselves. Only just a Town don't take any notice of itself—even on the Fourth.”
That afternoon we were all dressed in our white dresses—“Mine used to have a sprig in it,” said Mary Elizabeth, “but it's so faded out anybody ’d ’most say it was white, don't you ​think so?”—and we children met at the Rodmans'—where Margaret Amelia and Betty appeared in white embroidered dresses and blue ribbons and blue stockings, and we marched down the hill, behind the band, to the Wood Yard. The Wood Yard had great flags and poles set at intervals, with bunting festooned between, and the platform was covered with bunting, and the great open space of the yard was laid with board benches. Place in front was reserved for us, and already the rest of the town packed the Yard and hung about the fences. Stitchy Branchitt had given up his journey to Poynette after all, and had established a lemonade stand at the Wood Yard gate—“a fool thing to do,” the New Boy observed plainly. “He knows we’ve spent all we had, and the big folks never think your stuff’s clean.” But Stitchy was enormously enjoying himself by deafeningly shouting:—
“Here’s what you get—here’s what you get—here’s what you get. Cheap—cheap—cheap!”
“Quit cheepin' like some kind o' bir-r-rd,” said the New Boy, out of one corner of his mouth, as he passed him.
​Just inside the Wood Yard gate I saw, with something of a shock, Mary Elizabeth’s father standing. He was leaning against the fence, with his arms folded, and as he caught the look of Mary Elizabeth, who was walking with me, he smiled, and I was further surprised to see how kind his eyes were. They were almost like my own father's eyes. This seemed to me somehow a very curious thing, and I turned and looked at Mary Elizabeth, and thought: “Why, it's her father—just the same as mine.” It surprised me, too, to see him there. When I came to think of it, I had never before seen him where folk were. Always, unless Mary Elizabeth were with him, he had been walking alone, or sitting down where other people never sat.
Judge Rodman was on the platform, and as soon as the band and the choirs would let him—he made several false starts at rhetorical pauses in the music—he introduced a clergyman who had always lived in the town and who prayed for the continuance of peace and the safe conquest of all our enemies. Then Judge Rodman himself made the address, having generously consented to do so when it was proposed ​to keep the money in the town by hiring a local speaker. He began with the Norsemen and descended through Queen Isabella and Columbus and the Colonies, making a detour of Sir Walter Raleigh and his cloak, Benedict Arnold, Israel Putnam and Pocahontas, and so by way of Valley Forge and the Delaware to Faneuil Hall and the spirit of 1776. It was a grand flight, filled with what were afterward freely referred to as magnificent passages about the storm, the glory of war, and the love of our fellow-men.
(“Supposing you happen to love the enemy,” said Mary Elizabeth, afterward.
“Well, a pretty thing that would be to do,” said the New Boy, shocked.
“We had it in the Sunday school lesson,” Mary Elizabeth maintained.
“Oh, well,” said the New Boy. “I don't mean about such things. I mean about what you do.”
But I remember that Mary Elizabeth still looked puzzled.)
Especially was Judge Rodman's final sentence generally repeated for days afterward:—
“At Faneuil Hall,” said the judge, “the ​hour at last had struck. The hands on the face of the clock stood still. ‘The force of Nature could no further go.’ The supreme thing had been accomplished. Henceforth we were embalmed in the everlasting and unchangeable essence of freedom—freedom—freedom.”
Indeed, he held our attention from the first, both because he did not read what he said, and because the ice in the pitcher at his elbow had melted before he began and did not require watching.
Then came the moment when, having completed his address, he took up the Decoration of Independence, to read it; and began the hunt for his spectacles. We watched him go through his pockets, but we did so with an interest which somewhat abated when he began the second round.
“What is the Decoration of Independence, anyhow?” I whispered to Mary Elizabeth, our acquaintance with it having been limited to learning it “by heart” in school.
“Why, don't you know?” Mary Elizabeth returned. “It's that thing Miss Messmore can say so fast. It's when we was the British.”
“Who decorated it?” I wanted to know.
​“George Washington,” replied Mary Elizabeth.
“How?” I pressed it. “How'd he do it?”
“I don't know—but I think that's what he wanted of the cherry blossoms,” said she.
At this point Judge Rodman gave up the search.
“I deeply regret,” said he, “that I shall be obliged to forego my reading of our national document which, next to the Constitution itself, best embodies our unchanging principles.”
And then he added something which smote the front rows suddenly breathless:—
“However, it occurs to me, since this is preeminently the children's celebration and since I am given to understand that our public schools now bestow due and proper attention upon the teaching of civil government, that it will be a fitting thing, a moving thing even, to hear these words of our great foundation spoken in childish tones. Miss Messmore, can you, as teacher of the city schools, in the grades where the idea of our celebration so fittingly originated, among the tender young, can you recommend, madam, perhaps, one of your bright pupils to repeat for us these undying utterances whose ​commitment has now become, as I understand it, a part of our public school curriculum?”
There was an instant's pause, and then I heard Margaret Amelia Rodman's name spoken. Miss Messmore had uttered it. Judge Rodman was repeating it, smiling blandly down with a pleased diffidence.
“There can be no one more fitted to do this, Judge Rodman,” Miss Messmore had promptly said, “than your daughter, Margaret Amelia, at whose suggestion this celebration, indeed, has come about.”
Poor Margaret Amelia. In spite of her embroidered gown, her blue ribbons, and her blue stockings, I have seldom seen anyone look so wretched as did she when they made her mount that platform. To give her courage her father met her, and took her hand. And then, in his pride and confidence, something else occurred to him.
“Tell us, Margaret Amelia,” he said with a gesture infinitely paternal, “how came the children to think of demanding of us wise-heads that we give observance to this day which we had already voted to let slip past unattended? What spirit moved the children to this act?”
​At first Margaret Amelia merely twisted, and fingered her sash at the side. Margaret Amelia was always called on for visitors' days, and the like. She could usually command her faculties and give a straightforward answer, not so much because of what she knew as because of her unfailing self-confidence. Of this her father was serenely aware; but, aware also that the situation made unusual demands, he concluded to help her somewhat.
“How came the children,” he encouragingly put it, “to think of making this fine effort to save our National holiday this year?”
Margaret Amelia straightened slightly. She faced her audience with something of her native confidence, and told them:—
“Why,” she said, “we all had some Fourth of July money, and there wasn't going to be any way to spend it.”
A ripple of laughter ran round, and Judge Rodman's placid pink turned to purple.
“I fear,” he observed gravely, “that the immediate nature of the event has somewhat obscured the real significance of the children's most superior movement. Now, my child! Miss Messmore thinks that you should recite ​for us at least a portion of the Declaration of Independence. Will you do so?”
Margaret Amelia looked at him, down at us, away toward the waiting Wood Yard, and then at Miss Messmore.
“Is it that about ‘The shades of night were falling fast’?” she demanded.
In the roar of laughter that followed, Margaret Amelia ran down, poor child, and sobbed on Miss Messmore’s shoulder. I never think of that moment without something of a return of my swelling sympathy for her who suffered this species of martyrdom, and so needlessly. I have seen, out of schools and out of certain of our superstitions, many martyrdoms result, but never one that has touched me more.
I do not know whether something of this feeling was in the voice that we next heard speaking, or whether that which animated it was only its own bitterness. That voice sounded, clear and low-pitched, through the time’s confusion.
“I will read the Declaration of Independence,” it said.
And making his way through the crowd, and mounting the platform steps, we saw Mary Elizabeth’s father.
​Instinctively I put out my hand to her. But he was wholly himself, and this I think that she knew from the first. He was neatly dressed, and he laid his shabby hat on the table and picked up the book with a tranquil air of command. I remember how frail he looked as he buttoned his worn coat, and began to read.
“'We, the people of the United States—’”
It was the first time that I had ever thought of Mary Elizabeth’s father as to be classed with anybody. He had never had employment, he belonged to no business, to no church, to no class of any sort. He merely lived over across the tracks, and he went and came alone. And here he was saying “We, the people of the United States,” just as if he belonged.
When my vague fear had subsided lest they might stop his reading because he was not a taxpayer, I listened for the first time in my life to what he read. To be sure, I had—more or less—learned it. Now I listened.
“Free and equal,” I heard him say, and I wondered what this meant. “Free and equal.” But there were Mary Elizabeth and I, were we equal? Perhaps, though, it didn't mean little girls—only grown-ups. But there were Mary ​Elizabeth’s father and mother, and all the other fathers and mothers, they were grown up, and were they equal? And what were they free from, I wondered. Perhaps, though, I didn't know what these words meant. “Free and equal” sounded like fairies, but folks I was accustomed to think of as burdened, and as different from one another, as Judge Rodman was different from Mary Elizabeth’s father. This, however, was the first time that ever I had caught the word right: Not Decoration, but Declaration of Independence, it seemed!
Mary Elizabeth’s father finished, and closed the book, and stood for a moment looking over the Wood Yard. He was very tall and pale, and seeing him with something of dignity in his carriage I realized with astonishment that, if he were “dressed up,” he would look just like the men in the choir, just like the minister himself. Then suddenly he smiled round at us all, and even broke into a moment of soft and pleasant laughter.
“It has been a long time,” he said, “since I have had occasion to remember the Declaration of Independence. I am glad to have had it called to my attention. We are in danger of ​forgetting about it—some of us. May I venture to suggest that, when it is taught in the schools, it be made quite clear to whom this document refers. And for the rest, my friends, God bless us all—some day.”
“Bless us,” was what Judge Rodman had said. I remember wondering if they meant the same thing.
He turned and went down the steps, and at the foot he staggered a little, and I saw with something of pride that it was my father who went to him and led him away.
At once the band struck gayly into a patriotic air, and the people on all the benches got to their feet, and the men took off their hats. And above the music I heard Stitchy Branchitt beginning to shout again:—
“Here’s what you get—here’s what you get—here’s what you get! Something cheap—cheap—cheap!”
When I came home from the fireworks with Delia’s family and Mary Elizabeth, my father and mother were sitting on the veranda.
“It's we who are to blame,” I heard my father saying, “though we’re fine at glossing it over.”
​I wondered what had happened, and I sat down on the top step and began to untie my last torpedo from the corner of my handkerchief. Mary Elizabeth had one left, too, and we had agreed to throw them on the stone window-sills of our rooms as a final salute.
“Let's ask her now,” said father.
Mother leaned toward me.
“Dear,” she said, “father has been having a talk with Mary Elizabeth’s father and mother. And when her father isn't here any more which may not be long now, we think . . . would you like us to have Mary Elizabeth come and live here?”
“With us?” I cried. “With us?”
Yes, they meant with us.
“To work?” I demanded.
“To be,” mother said.
“Oh, yes, yes!” I welcomed it. “But her father—where will he be?”
“In a little while now,” father said, “he will be free—and perhaps even equal.”
I did not understand this wholly. Besides, there was far too much to think about. I turned toward the house of the New Family. A light glowed in Mary Elizabeth’s room. I ​brought down my torpedo on the brick walk, and it exploded merrily, and from Mary Elizabeth’s window came an answering pop.
“Then Mary Elizabeth will get free and equal too!” I cried joyously.