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The Worm in the Wheat
Rosalie Evans and Agrarian Struggle in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley of Mexico, 1906-1927
By Timothy J. Henderson Duke University Press
Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9880-6
CHAPTER 1
Thou, Lord, my allotted portion, thou my cup, Thou dost enlarge my boundaries: the lines fall for me in pleasant places, indeed I am well content with my inheritance. — Psalm 16:5
* * *
Despite the sober pleadings of friends and family, Rosalie Evans went to Mexico City in mid-January 1918, resolved to take up the fight where Harry had left it. Among her first stops was the hospital where Harry had died three weeks earlier. On a pulpit in the hospital's chapel she found a Bible opened to St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Eager for any tender mercies, she approached the Bible, her eye drawn to one passage in particular: "And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain. But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body."
She was quick to grasp this comforting assurance, surely of divine providence, that her husband's spirit had survived the loss of his corporeal self, but the passage was eerily appropriate even in its central metaphor. Wheat was the crop of the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley — the product of the hacienda that Harry had died trying to regain, the object of his sacrifice.
It would be no mean feat to reclaim the farm from the clutches of revolutionaries and a rural population fired by the promise of land. At some level, she knew, the fierce civil war ravaging the valley and much of Mexico was all about abstractions such as justice and dignity, but it also had to do with the substance of life, with the land, its fruits, and their claimants.
Her mind drifted back to an image of the utopia that had been Mexico before the war: she and Harry standing in the fields of their hacienda, admiring the young wheat that "seemed to stretch a great plain of green to the mountains," Harry holding a bit of grain proudly in his palm and, imagining a bright future. Few places in the world, it had seemed, produced such splendid grain as their own newly irrigated fields.
HARRY AND ROSALIE BUY A FARM
Mexican agriculture was not a popular pursuit among British and American entrepreneurs, who apparently viewed the countryside as anachronistic and ill suited to their special skills. To be sure, Harry and Rosalie Evans had never intended to become farmers. They both hailed from families that had built comfortable fortunes in commerce or engineering. Harry was born in Mexico, the son of a longtime employee of the British-owned Mexican Railway, Mexico's first important rail line. Except for a brief apprenticeship with a cotton-importing firm in Bristol, he had spent his entire twenty-seven years in Mexico, grooming himself for a career in banking. When he met Rosalie Caden in 1896, he was a branch manager of the Bank of London and Mexico.
Rosalie Caden was born in Galveston, Texas, probably on January 6, 1875, one of four daughters of Thomas Caden, an Irish immigrant, and Charlotte Brooks, a New Orleans belle. The Galveston of Rosalie's youth was a teeming, cosmopolitan city, one said to be as rich as any city its size anywhere in the world. Immigrants, mostly from Germany and the United Kingdom, had swelled the city's population to more than twenty thousand by 1880. By then it had an opera house modeled on Europe's finest, graced by the likes of Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, John Philip Sousa, and Lily Langtry. Along its main street, known as the Strand, fashionable shops stayed open late selling French perfume, Cuban cigars, and apparel made of English wool. It was a modern city with electric lights, streetcars, telephones, and direct steamship service to New York. Rich Britons could celebrate at the posh Agiola Club, while Germans bowled, drank, and played tennis at the fashionable and exclusive Garten Verein, where the flags of all nations were flown.
Galveston — which Rosalie would resurrect in her memory as a place of "pink seashells, childhood dreams and drives on the beach" — was not without its contradictions, however. For all of the city's fabled civility, the wild frontier was alive and well only a few blocks from the opera house and the Strand in the notorious neighborhood of Fat Alley, where the less seemly elements of Gulf Coast society gathered to gamble and drink and fight. Mornings often found the victims of murder or drugs lying in the streets beside open sewers. Wild pigs ran through the streets, devouring the detritus of the city.
In a word, Galveston was a boomtown, and young Rosalie Caden responded to its occasional savagery by turning inward: learning foreign languages, imbibing the classics of world literature, writing poetry, imagining herself in illustrious roles (in a drawing in a child's notebook, she appears with eyes flashing and hair flying wildly above the caption: "Rosalie Caden as Lady Macbeth"). She saw herself living amid rather small-minded folk and was determined to find something nobler within herself. Her own infrequent efforts at verse extolled an idealized world of sanitized nature, where rivers fall in love with trees and the moon worships the sun, but where people seldom appear: "[T]owards people I feel very cold," she would confess.
But if her ideal was of something timeless, noble, and untainted, the world around her went on its brutish way. Her home town owed its prosperity to the commerce unleashed by the completion in 1881 of the International and Great Northern Railroad linking the United States directly to Mexico via Texas. Empresarios of the day were drunk with the possibilities: "No country in the world," said General John Frisbie, who reportedly favored annexing the whole of Mexico, "offers such inducements to American enterprise and capital as does Mexico at this moment." There were mines to be worked, railroads to be built, crops to be harvested and imported. Likewise, Mexico afforded a great potential market for U.S. manufactures. General Ulysses S. Grant, a tireless promoter of Mexico's potential, preached that the Veracruz-Mexico City railway had already spurred a boom in coffee, sugar, and tobacco and was fast creating "a conservative, well-to-do population." Better yet, he noted (apparently blind to any contradiction), Mexico could supply workers who were "industrious, frugal, and willing to work for even a pittance, if afforded an opportunity."
Thomas Caden, Rosalie's father, was among the Americans who heeded the call. Working alone or in a series of partnerships, he sought his fortune as an importer of hides and wool, a booming commerce in those years. Leather, goatskins, deerhides — even the skins of otter, beaver, rabbit, and bear — were shipped through Matamoros en route to the factories and markets of New York and Philadelphia.
Business was good, but it kept Mr. Caden on the road much of the time and his family scattered. Rosalie, a slight and sickly child, spent most of her youth in Galveston and Laredo, but she would later recall as her happiest years those she spent living with her aunt and attending St. Catherine's School in New York City. It was owing to her frequent separations from her sisters, especially her younger sister Florence, that she began to cultivate her epistolary skills.
Florence, even more than Rosalie, suffered from a delicate constitution and a melodramatically morose disposition. "I am as dead to men and life as a statue," she once confessed laconically to Rosalie; "[t]hat is my most alarming symptom." Although "the utter nothingness of existence" preoccupied the sisters, they also discussed love and jealousy and family matters with a profound intimacy. Rosalie was always more fortunate in matters of the heart, a fact that provoked some jealousy in Florence. When the sisters toured Scotland in 1893, Florence wrote of Rosalie's charms to her mother in Laredo: "[T]here washardly one day that she did not have a caller. And yet she is disposed to grumble and does not seem a bit proud." Two years later, when she was back East and Rosalie in Laredo, she chastized her sister for allowing a man named Varrios — a man Florence herself claimed to be in love with — to do "some passionate love-making." She was convinced her sister's relationship with Varrios could never work. "I am sorry Varrios is a Mexican," she wrote. "I think he has very attractive qualities and you could be happy with him. But when you think of what marrying is, the responsibility is too great a risk. That Mexican blood is there and I believe it is impossible to change them [sic].... Marrying and living in a civilized state with a man who was differently formed and incapable of entering into your soul would be awful."
As it turned out, neither sister married Varrios, although marriage prospects remained a major preoccupation. The eldest sister, Daisy, had married "quite well," to Jerdone Pettus, an assistant surgeon general of the Navy, a man who traced his American ancestry back to 1646. The sisters stayed with them for a time on the Jamestown, a battleship dating from the War of 1812, which had been fitted up as a quarantine hospital anchored in the Chesapeake Bay. A visitor to that ship was charmed by Dr. Pettus and his beautiful wife, who had fitted out the quarantine ship as if it were a luxury yacht, with "white enamel paint, yellow China silk curtains, book shelves and divans." The visitor recalled that Mrs. Pettus's younger sisters were pretty, although they looked too much like Mexican women for his taste. Even so, he had to confess that they were highly intelligent, chatting in several languages as they "reclined on steamer chairs beneath the great awnings, sucking in the cool breeze from the sea." No doubt the sisters' happiness at being together after so many extended separations was infectious. He spoke of the family's "delightful manner of life for the summer quarantine season" as though that season should highlight anyone's social calendar.
The idyll was short-lived. In late 1896, Thomas Caden moved permanently to the city of Puebla, capital of the state of the same name and an important commercial center on Mexico's central plateau about sixty miles southeast of the national capital, taking along Florence and her sixty-seven-year-old aunt, Rosalie and her mother joining them a month later. The highland climate and the thinness of the air quickly took its toll: within four months, the girls' aunt fell ill and died.
It was in Puebla that Rosalie met Harry Evans and before long the two were engaged to be married. From the start theirs was clearly a felicitous match, even though their correspondence suggests that they were quite different personalities. Harry was a sober fellow, somewhat given to clichés. His fastidious and precisely penned letters invariably filled the four sides of a single folded sheet, as though the paper itself would determine their content. Rosalie's letters, by contrast, lunged forward in a breathless, sprawling hand, oblivious to lines and margins, as though the paper were too small and mundane to contain her thoughts. Often, her letters ended in increasingly cramped words dribbled down the top of her first page — "Love, Rosalie" appearing in a narrow space just above "Dearest Harry."
Yet, though their personalities and nationalities were different, they shared an outlook that highlighted the contradictions between themselves and their surroundings. Harry Evans was a proper British gentlemen who had been brought up in what he regarded as a semisavage country. Rosalie Caden grew up on the Texas-Mexico border at a time when Indian and bandit raids were not so distant memories. She had always been acutely aware of the country to the south and appears to have regarded its inhabitants as exotic, mysterious, often childlike, and not altogether human. She and Harry came to see themselves as inevitable allies in a world where they did not entirely belong.
They were married at the Chamberlain Hotel in Fortress Monroe, Virginia, on October 6, 1898, six months after Harry had received a promotion to head the Puebla branch of his bank. Florence served as a bridesmaid, together with Daisy's young daughter Charlotte.
The new couple settled in Puebla, where they found solitary diversions. Rosalie wrote poems and stories and became an expert horsewoman. Harry became an amateur archaeologist who in fact was credited with finding a set of mammoth tusks of some use in dating the region geologically. Together, they would ride horses and climb the treacherous volcanoes. Although Rosalie was always eager to shine in that mysterious and exclusive realm known as "society," she was concerned more with image than amusement. Her thirst for admiration was tempered by a profound misanthropy. Even while visiting Germany, which she considered something of a spiritual homeland, she found the human stock unimpressive: "These people interest me for their foreign ways and their language, even as I would go to a zoo," she confessed to her diary, "but in my heart I prefer my own dogs." She considered the English to be "dull and unbearable unless one drinks" (which she did not). The Mexicans who entered her social circles were witty and fun, but when she looked deeper, she could see that they were essentially "vicious and shallow." Among the couple's acquaintances of the prerevolutionary years, only Lady Carden, wife of the British ambassador, stood out, for although she was bombastic at times, she at least had opinions. "The worst evil I can think of," Rosalie Evans wrote in 1917, "is being bored."
Apart from Harry, Rosalie's closest relationship continued to be with her sister Florence, who felt bereft by the marriage of her elder sister. To Florence, it seemed a betrayal of the symbiosis that had sustained them both, and she gave full vent to her already lugubrious disposition, at times refusing even to speak Harry's name. Florence's own marriage prospects remained dim. A certain "Henri," the son of a French banker, was, like many others who knew Florence, put off by her frailty and wondered why she seemed haunted by her childhood in Galveston and Laredo, why "that time of your life was at the same time so full, so empty, so full of regrets?" At some point, though, Henri returned to France, from whence he dismissed Florence with a philosophical flourish: "We are both free to marry not whom we like, but whom we have a chance to, since circumstances play such a powerful role in human action."
Circumstances gave Florence her chance in the person of Bernardo de Olivares, whom she met in Celaya, Guanajuato, and to whom she was soon engaged. Olivares appears only as a shadowy figure in the family's correspondence, perhaps because most family members seem to have found him distasteful. He would join the Evans party on their occasional trips up the sides of the volcanoes, an activity that envigorated Rosalie but was poorly suited to Florence's delicate constitution. On one such trip, at an altitude of twelve thousand feet, Florence became violently ill. She gasped for air, her pulse raced, she took a bad chill. The Indian guides made her a tea from a lichen that adhered to the high mountain pines, which restored her breathing almost to normal, and they set her to rest beneath a lean-to hut that had once been used for smelting sulphur before European competition had ruined the business.
Florence and Bernardo de Olivares were married in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in the fall of 1903. One evening, while awaiting her fiancee's arrival in Maryland just before the wedding, Florence leapt up from the dinner table without warning and ran off sobbing, inconsolable for much of the night. "I have been expecting a breakdown," Rosalie confessed to Harry.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Worm in the Wheat by Timothy J. Henderson. Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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