Ida Pages and Her Friends

Ida and Lizzie Smith Talk About Innocence

Ida Pages was telling her friend Lizzie Smith that her mama used to say that no grown woman had any business thinking of herself as innocent.

“My mama told me—I behaved respectfully when she said it, though I didn’t much listen to her because my ears weren’t really wanting to hear it—that `a person’s not to hide the fact of her guilt from herself.’ That’s what Mama said—and she said it more than once. `Oh, yes,’ she’d grant you, `you might could say that about a child—“she’s all innocence”—but if you’ve lived much—by the time you’re twenty-one or so—you know the stubborn fact of shame and guilt, and of rebellion against what’s truly good is going on inside you all the time—and a man or woman’s to be blamed by the time they’re grown if they’re not seeing it, and reconciled to it—and most of all, fighting it.’

“But I told Mama, respectfully, mind you, that `there was too much guilt being talked about and I didn’t enjoy listening to such talk very much at all.’ And Mama would just smile and say, `Child, one day you will be more willing to listen and even to talk of it, for there’s hardly anything more important to a body if she wants real peace of mind.’”

Ida told her friend Lizzie that her mama first told her that way back—in ’33—when she was only nineteen.

“I reckon I’m a bit wiser now, anyway,” Ida said.

Ida and Lizzie were on Ida’s veranda—one was swinging on the swing suspended from the porch ceiling, the other rocking in Ida’s big rocker. They were quiet for a while and then Ida was talking again.

“Ah, dear Lizzie, so my mama used to say `We’re all hopelessly mired in sin,’ but while I’ll say I agree with that now, oh, it took a long time for me to see it. I’ll tell you I think it takes some talkin’– a good deal of it—for folks to want to admit it.”

“Ida, I guess there’s the matter of getting folks to sit still and hear it. They’re not any more likely to want to listen to it nowadays than you were back yonder with your mama,” Lizzie Smith told her. “That’s the problem, seems like.”

Ida was swinging for some time then before she replied, and Lizzie thought there was something like a twinkle in Ida’s eye when she did.

“Lizzie, maybe someone ought to write a book,” Ida said, “kind of putting it in a story—that sort of thing. That’s maybe how to talk about the matter so folks’ll listen–if that’s what you’re aiming to do.”

“Um hmm,” said Lizzie.

“Maybe a book–writing a book, you know–is the way to get close enough to people to disabuse a few, anyway, of the nonsense of their innocence. It will take some wisdom, though, for sure, I imagine, to manage that successfully. But we’d do it so folks could get a look at how to find some peace of mind.”

“Yes, that’d be a good enough reason to do it. Oh, Ida, you know what? Someday you’ll need to tell me again about how you changed your position on the subject, for that’s interesting and I’m still not clear on that. ‘Course only if you want to. But as to what you were sayin’, that might be one way—putting it in a story,” Lizzie told her, “though speaking of it taking some wisdom, you’ll need to be sure you’ve got some of it yourself—wisdom, I mean. Else no one will read it for long.”

“I don’t mean that I would be the one to write it, Lizzie Smith,” said Ida, “Mustering up half the wisdom might plumb wear me out.”

“Well all right, then, Ida. You could find someone who had a way of scribbling who could scribble it into a book, telling it in a story and all that—I mean finding some writer to write it. But besides making sure there was a point to it—that the writer had some real wisdom on the matter—there’s also the challenge of getting someone to open that book and read it.”

“Finding readers–that would be the second problem. But the first one would be finding the scribbler, as you put it. It would also take someone with lots of time to write something like that, I imagine,” Ida said, laughing out loud. “Where do you find someone like that? Ah, me!”

“Dearie, the world’s full of lots of odd folks looking for something to do,” Lizzie said. They both laughed then. “But like we’re saying, they’d need to have some wisdom, Ida, or at least something like that.”

“Something like wisdom would do, maybe. Something very like it, perhaps. Well, we’ll get started looking for someone right away, what do you say, Lizzie?” Ida said, smiling at herself and starting to reach for the teapot. “Maybe after dinner. Meanwhile, can I get you some more tea?”

“I believe I will have another cup,” Lizzie replied contentedly while Ida got up to pour.