The Choir Invisible

"And don't you recollect how you little babes in the wilderness could never

go anywhere? If you heard wild turkeys gobbling just inside the forest, or

an owl hooting, or a paroquet screaming, or a fawn bleating, you were warned

never to go there; it was the trick of the Indians. You could never go near

a clump of high weeds, or a patch of cane, or a stump, or a fallen tree. You

must not go to the sugar camp, to get a good drink, or to a salt lick for a

pinch of salt, or to the field for an ear of corn, or even to the spring for

a bucket of water: so that you could have neither bread nor water nor sugar

nor salt. Always, always, it was the Indians. If you cried in the night,

your mother came over to you and whispered 'Hush! they are coming! They will

get you!' And you forgot your pain and clung to her neck and listened.

"Now you are let alone, you go farther and farther away from your homes, you

can play hide-and-seek in the canebrakes, you can explore the woods, you

fish and you hunt, you are free for the land is safe.

"And then only think, that by the time you are men and women, Kentucky will

no longer be the great wilderness it still is. There will be thousands and

thousands of people scattered over it; and the forest will be cut down--can

you ever believe that?--cut through and through, leaving some trees here and

some trees there. And the cane will be cut down: can you believe that? And

instead of buffalo and wild-cats and bears and wolves and panthers there

will be flocks of the whitest sheep, with little lambs frisking about on the

green spring meadows. And under the big shady trees in the pastures there

will be herds of red cattle, so gentle and with backs so soft and broad that

you could almost stretch yourselves out and go to sleep on them, and they

would never stop chewing their cuds. Only think of the hundreds of orchards

with their apple-blossoms and of the big ripe, golden apples on the trees in

the fall! It will be one of the quietest, gentlest lands that a people ever

owned; and this is the gift of your fathers who fought for it and of your

mothers who fought for it also. And you must never forget that you would

never have had such fathers, had you not had such mothers to stand by them

and to die with them.