Springfield (Ill.) -- Fiction; Springfield (Ill.) -- In literature; Utopias in literature
March 7:—I am dining again in the tower cafeteria with Avanel, a quite
early dinner, and while the afterglow still blazes we look down upon the
clustered cottages of our town. They are, in design, dominated by the
so-called “Violet Curve,” a complex rhythm, which is magnified from the
whorls of the violet petals, and the cottages are generally violet in
hue. Some of the roofs and cupolas are beginning to be gilded.
Springfield extends over the whole county through the taking in of
countless groves, orchards, and aviation fields.
Not only in their special groves, but everywhere titan Amaranth Apple
vines rise on trellises high above the other trees, for this famous
Amaranth is a kind of a tree-vine that is in the fall thick with red and
white blossoms and clusters of red apples. There are many parks in the
New Springfield that were not in the old Springfield: Rankin, Sandburg,
Humphrey, Roberts, Joyce Kilmer, Masters, Untermeyer, and others. Avanel
points out the public schools beneath us, often rebuilt on the old sites
or near them, and bearing the same names. Ancient streets keep their
names, except where boulevards have replaced them.
East of Tenth Street is the Negro district, all new, beautiful,
flamboyant jungle houses, constructed for his people by John Emis, and
through his influence not one slack old building remains, though, “most
of them still hold slack colored people,” Avanel says. These houses are
far richer than the towers and other buildings of the World’s Fair, for
only here in Africa has John Emis an unrestrained hand.
March 8:—Avanel, with a view to my further chastisement, takes me about,
scolding again, and we encounter a row of grotesques on great pedestals,
which she confesses were put up by a group of young Boones who came from
near Cairo, led by her father in his more fiery youth, when the Boones
had by no means so strong a hold on the city.
They are in Liberty Park, near Concordia College, whose golden pinnacles
glitter through the bare limbs of the trees. On the central pedestal of
the grotesques is inscribed: “To the cornerstones of the town; to the
newspaper and motion picture and stage censors; to the respectables, the
lady bountifuls, the so-called senior families; to the Sons and
Daughters of the American Revolution; to the Sons and Daughters of the
Ancient Democrats, and the Sons and Daughters of the Ancient
Republicans; and in general, to the dragon-quack worm of respectability,
that dieth not.” Avanel says these were put up the day the “_Boone Ax_”
newspaper was founded.
On the central pedestal, which is higher and more massive than the rest,
crawling down from the top, is a dragon with a duck’s head. On the top
of the other pedestals are the stone images of a fretful ape, an
enormous frog, a long nosed ant eater, a laughing idiot, a hawk, a goat,
a three-legged bull dog wearing a plug hat, a chicken without feathers,
and a hog wearing trousers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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