Butler County Genealogy Trails Kansas Mary White Bio

BUTLER COUNTY'S EIGHTY YEARS BIOS

MARY WHITE

(Transcribed by Lori DeWinkler)

Williams Allen White wrote this classic for his Emporia Gazette as a tribute to his daughter on the day of her funeral:

The press reports carrying the news of Mary White’s death declared that it was the result of a fall from a horse. How she would have hooted at that! She never fell from a horse in her life. Horses have fallen on her and with her—“I’m always trying to hold ‘em in my lap,” she used to say. She could ride anything that had four legs and hair. Her death resulted not from a fall, but from a fractured skull, and the blow came from the limb of an overhanging tree.

The last hour of her life was typical of its happiness. She came home from school, and felt that a ride would refresh her. She climbed into khakis, chattering to her mother, and hurried to get her horse and be out. As she rode through the town on an easy gallop she kept waving at passersby. She knew everyone. For a decade the little figure with the long pigtail and the red hair-ribbon had been familiar in Emporia. She passed the Kerrs, and waved at them; passed another friend farther on, and waved at her. As she turned into Merchant Street the horse swung into a lope. She passed a schoolboy friend and she waved at him, but with her bridle hand; the horse veered quickly, plunged into the parking where the low-hanging limb faced her, and, while she still looked back waving, the blow came. But she did not fall from the horse; she slipped off, staggered and fell in a faint. She never recovered consciousness.

But she did not fall from the horse, neither was she riding fast. A year ago she used to go like the wind; but that habit was broken, and she used the horse to get fresh, hard exercise. Need for that has kept the dauntless little brown-clad figure on the country roads of this community; it built into a strong, muscular body what had been a frail and sickly frame. But the riding gave her more than a body; it released a gay and hardy soul. She was the happiest thing in the world. And she was happy because she was enlarging her horizon.

She came to know all sorts of conditions of men; Charley O’Brien, the traffic cop; and all the girls, black and white, above the track and below the track, were among her acquaintances. She brought home riotous stories of her adventures. She loved to rollick; persiflage was her natural expression at home; her humor was a continual bubble of joy. She was mischievous without malice, as full of faults as an old shoe. No angel was Mary White, but an easy girl to live with, for she never nursed a grouch five minutes in her life.

With all her eagerness for the out-of-doors, she loved books. On her table when she left her room were a book by Conrad, one by Galsworthy, and a Kipling. She read Mark Twain, Dickens and Kipling before she was ten. Within the last two years she had begun to draw. She began as most children do by scribbling in her schoolbooks, funny pictures. She took a course—rather casually, naturally, for she was, after all, a child with no strong purposes—and she tasted success by having her pictures accepted by the high school Annual. But her delight when asked to do cartoons for the Normal Annual was too beautiful for words. The drawings accepted, her pride—always repressed by a sense of the ridiculous—was a gorgeous thing to see. In her glory, she almost forgot her horse—but never her car.

She used the car as a jitney bus. It was her social life. She never had a “party” in all her nearly 17 years—wouldn’t have one; but she never drove a block in the car in her life that she didn’t fill it with pick-ups! Everybody rode with Mary White—white and black, old and young. She liked nothing better than to fill the car full of long-legged high school boys and an occasional girl, and parade the town. She never had a “date,” nor went to a dance, except once with her brother, Bill, and the “boy proposition” didn’t interest her—yet. But great spring-breaking carloads of “kids” gave her great pleasure. Her zests were keen.

The poor she had always with her, and was glad of it. The last engagement she tried to make was to take the poor folks at the county home out for a car ride. And the last endeavor of her life was to try to get a rest room for colored girls in the high school. She found one girl reading in the toilet, because there was no better place for a colored girl to loaf, and it inflamed her sense of injustice and she became a nagging harpie to those who, she thought, could remedy the evil.

She hungered and thirsted for righteousness; and was the most impious creature in the world. She joined the church because she felt the church was an agency for helping people, and she wanted to help. She never wanted to help for herself. Clothes meant little her; she never wore a jewel and never asked for anything but a wristwatch. She refused to have her hair up, though she was nearly 17. Above every other passion of her life was her passion not to grow up, to be a child. The tomboy in her seemed to loathe to be put away forever in skirts. She was a Peter Pan, who refused to grow up.

Her funeral was as she would have wished it; no singing, no flowers save the big bunch of red roses from her Brother Bill’s Harvard classmen—Heavens, how proud that would have made her! and the red roses from the Gazette force—in vases at her head and feet. A short prayer, Paul’s beautiful essay on “Love” from First Corinthians, some remarks about her democratic spirit by her friend, the pastor, (which she would have deprecated if she could), a prayer, and opening the service, the slow, poignant movement from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which she loved, and closing the service the joyously melancholy first movement of Tschaikowski’s Pathetic Symphony, which she like on the phonograph; then the Lord’s Prayer by her friends.

The was all.

It would have made her smile to know that Charley O’Brien, the traffic cop, had been transferred to the corner near the church to direct her friends who came to big her goodby.

A rift in the gray clouds threw a shaft of sunlight upon her coffin as her energetic little body sank to its last sleep. But the soul of her, the glowing, fervent soul of her, surely was flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn.