“Chris’mas gift, Massa Billie, Chris’mas gift!”
Aunt Sally, black and beaming stood at the door of my room, trying at
once to waken me and arouse my Christmas spirit. I opened one eye and
she redoubled her efforts, laughing.
“Merry Christmas, Sally! What time is it?”
“Merry Chris’mas, yo’self, Massa Billie--’deed hit’s ’most aight
o’clock.”
“The dickens it is!” I cried sitting bolt upright in bed, “didn’t I
tell you to call me at six?”
“Yassah, yo’ shore did, but Ah jest knowed you’d not want to go
shootin’ dis mawnin’. Hit’s rainin’.”
Sally was right; it was raining, a steady, soaking, most
un-Christmas-like rain. Out of the little windows I could see the
Sandhills drenched and dripping. The great long-leafed pines, so proud
and stately in the bright sunlight, stood dejected and tawdry. Even the
jovial little holly bush at the corner of the porch had quite lost its
gay, holiday air. Down in the valley, at the head of the branch, the
rich, warm greens and olives of the magnolias and bluegums seemed grey
and melancholy in the fine mist that spread over the lowlands. “Sam,”
the most sedate and dignified of pointers, strolled into my room and
put his head on the side of the bed.
“No hunting for us today, old man,” I said to him, and he sniffed
sympathetically and blinked his yellow eyes as much as to say, “I know
it--ain’t it the devil?” He was so very sad about it that I could not
help laughing at the old sportsman.
Indeed it was not a pleasing prospect. A rainy Christmas--no
shooting--and stuck off in a tiny bungalow, several miles from
anywhere, with only the remnants of another man’s library for
company--Ugh! I dragged on my clothes without any enthusiasm for the
day. But Aunt Sally’s breakfast--golden scrambled eggs heaped up in the
center of a fringe of crisp bacon, with corn bread, and steaming
cakes smothered in molasses--cheered me wonderfully; and then, after
breakfast, Uncle Willis, her husband, came shuffling up from his cabin
for his “Chris’mas gift.”
He inspected his present thoughtfully, and thanked me with verbose
formality for it. Then he began talking. Willis is always an
entertaining conversationalist, though I fear he is not a thoroughly
reliable source of exact information. As Toby confided to me one day,
“Dat nigger’s de wo’st liar in de Sandhills, ef not on de whol’ state
of No’th Carolina, an’ thar’s some tol’ably good liars down disaways.”
His vivid imagination made penniless, ragged Willis a Midas. He knew
more about cotton than the whole of the Department of Agriculture, and
as for tar burning, he could sweat more black, sticky stuff out of a
cord of pine wood than any nigger in Moore County, though he would
begrudgingly acknowledge that Jim Watson could go him one better in
this. There was a wonderful, childlike simplicity in his optimism, but
his absolute faith in your belief of his yarns was irritating till you
recognized the artist in him. I remember how out of patience I was
with him when he solemnly informed me one day “dat ’bout fo’ y’ars ago
he’d been huntin’ b’ar wif Massa Teddy Roos’velt down in Drownin’ Creek
Swamp.”
“Willis,” I said to him sharply, “you are an unmitigated liar!”
“’Deed I is, Massa Billie, but Ah jest thought you’d like t’ heah ’bout
hit.”
So I did, but this Christmas morning I was in no humor to listen to his
prattle, and until he got on the subject of “hants and conjurin’,” I
gave him but scant attention. The sly rascal knows this way of arousing
my flagging interest, and employs it very effectively.
“Massa Billie,” he said, “Ah doan’ su’pose yo’ done heah dat sumbuddy’s
been conjurin’ Lee Gordon, has yo’?”
“I haven’t, no--who is Lee Gordon?”
“He’s a cousin of mah Sally’s over at Cognac. He’s been a-workin’ on de
railroad wid de section gang, but he done move to Hoffman las’ night.”
“In all the rain? On Christmas eve?” I asked skeptically.
“Yassah, right in de rain an’ on Chris’mas eve. When he come home last
evenin’ he done found a conjure layin’ right on de front do’-step. Ah
doan’ jest ’actly know what kind ob a conjure, but hit war shore a
mighty pow’ful one.” And sure of his audience he launched forth in full
details of how the darky had moved his wife and numerous children, all
his goods and chattels, right over to Hoffman and was staying with his
wife’s brother, Noah Wilson.
“Why did he move last night?” I asked to egg him on.
“But yo’ shore doan’ ’spect him t’ stay in dat cabin wid a conjure
layin’ on de front do’-step, does yo’, Massa Billie?”
“Why not?” I replied, New England fashion, to draw him out.
“Eff yo’ steps ober a conjure,” he replied earnestly, “yo’ is laik
t’ die, an’ eben eff yo’ doan’ step ober it, yo’ is laik t’ die
anyway. But dey all moved out de back do’,” he added reassuringly. He
digressed to tell how all the household goods had been taken out the
back way, stopping to recount the history of a certain bed, a family
heirloom of slavery days. Finally, however, he got back to conjuring,
and, expressing in the same breath his most abject fear and his
utter contempt for all Black Art, he told me considerable about this
mysterious matter. “Eff yo’ has de conjurin’ pow’rs,” so I learned, you
can kill your enemies by placing a conjure where they will walk over
it. If, however, you are not so terribly vindictive, you can merely
drive them crazy by placing a hair of their head in the tough bark of a
little, twisted black-jack oak. Should you be very merciful indeed, and
if you merely wish to get some objectionable person out of your path,
you can pick up a bit of dirt out of his footprint in the high-road and
throw it, accompanied by proper chants and incantations, into running
water. Henceforth that person will be a hapless wanderer over the face
of the earth. There are, I gather, other awful powers that obey the
commands of the conjurer, and his poor victims can only be freed from
his spell by applying to a witch doctor. He, his palm having been duly
crossed, will first determine the exact nature of the spell. He takes
a little iron kettle about the size of your two fists, and mounts this
upon a little pyramid of dry pine sticks. In the kettle he places cold
water from a running stream and into it he throws salt, herbs, and
sundry mysterious powders. Then he kindles the fire. While the little
blaze crackles, he chants, and then, if the kettle falls off the sticks
before the kettle boils it means “yo’ is shore conjured”--a thing that
must assuredly happen if the doctor is careful to use dry wood that is
fairly steeped with rosin. Then you must cross his palm again, and he
will throw about you a counter-charm.
At this point my lesson in Black Art was interrupted.
Jerry, a half-grown negro who lived over by the Tower, knocked on the
door, and I could never get Willis to resume his course of instruction.
Jerry, grinning and bobbing, delivered a formal invitation from the
switch operator over at the signal tower on the railroad, half a mile
away, to come and share with him a Christmas box he had received from
his wife. I accepted, and we set off, the boy and I, through the warm
drizzle that enveloped you and soaked through your clothes as if they
had been tissue paper.
The Christmas box was not a perfect success. It had been packed in
cardboard and had been sadly damaged in transit, so that you would
bite into a crumpled piece of capital, homemade cake to find the
frosting--and maybe a brick-like gum drop--embedded in the center. But
my host, the operator, is a communicative, ingenuous soul whose spirits
no amount of Christmas rain could dampen. On Christmas Eve he had spent
two hours of his spare time ploughing through swamps to pick a great
bunch of holly. He had even found a mistletoe, a sprig of which dangled
at the end of a silver cord, relic of a box of candy, over the levers
of his switches. The day was close and muggy, but in honor of the
occasion his little, pot-bellied, iron stove glowed ruddy with heat.
Over his telegraph instruments was strung a line of garish Christmas
post cards, flaming with scarlet and emerald green daubs of color,
besprinkled with tinsel, declaring, as through a megaphone, “Peace on
Earth--Good Will to Men.” The stuffy little signal tower fairly reeked
with the Christmas spirit, and as we sat munching fruit cake I looked
over at my happy host and was ashamed that a little rain should wash
all the warm, generous Christmas out of me.
Yes, this was decidedly better than moping alone in the bungalow.
With every freight that came to a screeching, bumpy stop beneath,
a burly brakeman would thrump up the steps of the signal tower for
train orders. Dripping rain water from his rubber coat, he would throw
open the door with a “Merry Christmas! Say, ain’t this a peach of a
Christmas day?” If his train must wait on the switch for another to
pass, he would sit down by the fire and between enormous mouthfuls
of cake and candy, tell a railroad yarn or retail a bit of railroad
gossip. For hours I perched on the telegraph table watching this
strange procession. After a short nod they paid little attention to
me, for my host never bothered with introductions, and I sat there
with the curious feeling that I was at the theatre. Certainly these
men were of another world, each so different and yet each so true to
the type. A thick-set, square-faced little fellow with the sharp twang
of Down East in his voice would be followed by a tall, light stripling
whose low drawl betrayed him long before he casually mentioned that he
wished he could have been home in Savannah this day. They talked only
of railroading. They whirled up and down the length of the country from
New York to Florida and back again, many times during the year and saw
nothing but switches and roundhouses; they passed nothing but expresses
and other freights; they met no one save engineers, conductors, and
brakemen like themselves. They lived a life divided into miles and
minutes, bounded by the glistening rails, but within this life they
found complete absorption, for it is a complicated, dangerous life in
which exact knowledge is at a premium.
[Illustration: ON THE SWITCH BY THE TOWER]
About three o’clock in the afternoon, “Shorty” thrumped in from Cognac.
He was working the “second trick,” or as we out of the signal towers
would say, the second shift, and he came over on a freight to be ready
to take up his duties at four.
“Say,” he exclaimed gleefully, after the season’s greetings had been
exchanged and he had sampled the now nearly demolished Christmas box,
“McNab sure did play some good trick on some of his niggers last
night.”
“He’s like to play one too many tricks on them niggers of his,” said
our host. “D’you remember ’bout that section boss over on the L. & N.
that was found with his skull stove in with a sledge?”
“Aw, shucks! McNab treats his niggers good, but there was a family of
them livin’ in a shack right behind his house, an’ they’d sing an’
howl half the night, so McNab’s been ’bout crazy to get shut of them
someway. He tried fifty ways to close them up, but yesterday he took
a bit of rabbit skin and rolled it up in a little ball and wrapped it
round with a strip of red flannel, and tied it all ’round with a horse
hair. Then he went an’ left it on the nigger’s front door step. When
the nigger comes home, he starts hollerin’ bloody murder about somebody
tryin’ to conjure him. He and his whole tribe moves out last night,
an’ every bit of their studdings went out the back door to dodge that
conjure of McNab’s.”
[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
NEGRO FAMILY AT HOME]
Shorty broke off laughing, and I asked, “Was the nigger’s name Lee
Gordon?”
“’Deed I don’t know, but they moved to Hoffman. Say, I’ll bet there
ain’t a nigger in the whole Sandhills will live in that cabin now,” and
Shorty chuckled to himself.
I told Uncle Willis all about it later. All that he would say was,
“H’m! Those railroad men am mighty smart, ain’t dey?” He did not,
however, mean to be sarcastic, for a couple of weeks later when I
suggested that his brother Henry move into Lee Gordon’s old cabin in
Cognac he was horrified at the thought. Yet Henry lived in Hoffman and
worked in Cognac and was always complaining of the length and expense
of his commuting. Although the cabin in Cognac would have solved this
problem and was really a first-class house in good condition, Willis
could only answer with a shrug and a shuffle, and a “Ah doan’ ’spect
Henry’ll care none ’bout livin’ in dat dere shack.”
[Illustration: SANDHILLS RAPID TRANSIT]
“Tar Burnin’”
When first I went to North Carolina to spend the winter in the
Sandhills, my knowledge of tar was limited to schoolboy memories of
tar-balls made from material purloined from the contractors who paved
New York’s streets and a rather indirect connection through a cousin
who had once put a tar roof on his stables and cordially regretted it.
Down in the Sandhills, old Uncle Willis Baldwin, by verbose precept and
halting example, taught me just how the black, sticky stuff is wrung
from the dried wood of the long-leaf pine, barreled up, and brought to
market.
Soon the good old-fashioned way that Uncle Willis burns his tar will
be replaced by a very efficient, but thoroughly uninteresting machine,
a great still, with a gigantic metal retort in a brick oven as big as
Willis’ little shanty. The old darky tar burner who considers himself
lucky to get a barrel of crude tar from a cord of dry pine is but a
faltering competitor of the machine that from the same wood can wring
two barrels of tar, valuable creosote, and other important wood oils.
Squeezing out fifteen dollars where before but three or four were
extracted is all in strict accord with economic progress, and plainly
it is very much more profitable--for those who own the stills--but
this fine machine is costly beyond the dreams even of Willis’ vivid
imagination, and it is but a question of time when the negro tar burner
and his handmade tar kilns will be another vanished bit of the Old
South.
[Illustration: THE BURNING TAR KILN]
Willis had made a tar-burning agreement--the usual one in such
cases--with Massa Ralph. Massa Ralph supplied the dry pine wood--“light
’ud” Willis calls it--and he further agreed to furnish the barrels
to hold the tar. Uncle Willis, on his part, undertook to collect the
wood on Massa Ralph’s land, to build and burn the tar-kiln, to fill
the barrels and deliver them to the railroad at Hoffman. Each was to
receive a half of the receipts from the sale of the tar.
On a piece of level ground, down in the valley beside the little
trickling branch, just behind my bungalow, Willis “done built hisself a
whalin’ big tar-kil’.” First he dug out a slight hollow, like a great
wash basin full twenty feet across, with a trench leading from the
center to a deep pit dug just outside the outer edge. Then he and his
brother Henry hitched up their old grey mule and scoured all over the
land, piling the dilapidated wagon with the dry wood they picked up
everywhere and hauling load after load to the site of the kiln. After
a great store had been collected, Henry fell to work chopping up the
knotty stumps and splitting the long logs, while Willis painstakingly
constructed the kiln. This must be carefully and neatly done, for the
quantity of the tar yielded depends most directly upon the close and
proper building of the kiln. Around the outer edge Uncle Willis laid
row upon row of the long, straight, split rails, each pointing due to
the center and each one fitted with scrupulous nicety into its place.
In the center of the kiln he stowed away the little twisted knots and
gnarled bits of root, all so rich in tar. This is rough work too, and
were not old Willis’ black hands as tough as sole leather, they would
be filled with splinters.
[Illustration: THE TAR BURNER’S WAGON]
After the kiln had slowly risen till it was full seven feet high at
its outer rim, it was topped off with a roof made of the split rails.
Aunt Sally and “de chilluns” were now pressed into service flagging the
kiln. On the roof they laid a covering of long-leaf pine boughs, and
then they stuck similar branches into the crevices of the sides until
the whole looked like a great, regular mound of giant pine needles.
Uncle Willis and Henry again took up the work. They now banked the
kiln. Starting at the ground, and building up tier on tier, they laid
long logs of green wood round the kiln. In between the long logs and
the kiln itself they packed sod and dirt, transforming the great heap
of pine needles into an octagonal, log block house in miniature. Sand
and clay piled six inches deep on the top and then packed down finished
the job. Willis was now ready to burn his kiln.
[Illustration: FLAGGING]
So far everything had gone swimmingly, but now a long series of
troubles began to fall with distressing regularity on Willis’ woolly
head. A dozen times a day he would come shuffling up for my consolation
and advice. Off would come his battered hat and he would begin, “’Deed,
Massa Billie, Ah doan’ know----”, till, had I not felt so sorry for the
old man, I would have been driven crazy by these woeful consultations.
In this big tar-kiln he had planned and executed his _magnum opus_,
which should not only re-establish his shaky credit at the store in
Hoffman, but must also supply the necessary capital for cotton seed and
fertilizer against the fast approaching planting season. He was staking
more than his little all on this kiln; he was gambling in futures,
futures of slab-side pork and corn meal; a promised dress for the
Xantippean Sally and much needed shoes for Carolina, Liza, Sally II,
Robert Lee, and a couple of the other children whose names I forget.
[Illustration: BUILDING THE TAR KILN]
His great tar-kiln, built so patiently and with such great
expectations, contained about seventy cords of good wood and should,
according to all expert calculation, yield about seventy barrels of
tar. Massa Ralph’s overseer, deputized to get these seventy barrels,
had only been able to collect forty. He scoured the country, mills,
cross-road stores, freight offices, but every available source of
supply that usually had barrels almost to give away had no barrels now,
even at fancy prices. And Willis, because once the kiln was started
there would be no stopping nor turning back, was afraid to fire the
kiln until he had on hand enough containers to hold his expected
quantity of tar. Moreover, poor Willis had agreed to pay Henry fifty
cents a day till the tar was all run, and he saw the wages of his
helper daily eating deeper and deeper into his profits. To cap the
climax, the market price of tar was tumbling down at an amazing rate,
and every no-’count nigger that passed along the road took a diabolical
delight in stopping at Willis’s cabin and giving him the very latest
and most discouraging market quotations. Poor old Willis! Whenever
he saw me he implored help in getting him some barrels, and I never
rode over to Hoffman without bearing an urgent message to the freight
agent--“Fo’ de Lawd’s sake, Massa Billie, tell him t’ hurry hup dat lot
ob bar’ls what Massa Ralph done order in Wilmington.”
[Illustration: FILLING THE BARRELS]
At last the long-expected barrels came, and one evening about dusk
Jim Watson scraped the dirt and boughs off the roof of Willis’ kiln
for a couple of square feet and applied a match to the dry lightwood
underneath. As the red flames darted through the black smoke, Willis
heaved a great sigh of relief. Had everything gone smoothly, Willis
would have run the kiln himself. So many things had gone wrong and so
very much depended on this kiln that he called in Jim Watson, who plays
the part of tar burning efficiency expert throughout the Sandhills, in
the hope, I believe, of his being able to break the spell of bad luck.
In the back of his brain there was some notion that the fee he paid to
Jim Watson hired not only his supposedly superior experience, but also
bought a charm against further misfortune.
All night long the ruddy glow of the burning kiln lighted up the little
valley, and the pungent, piney smell of the black smoke filled the
air. Up at the bungalow, two hundred yards away, we could hear the
snap and crackle of the burning knots and the thick scent of the pitch
penetrated the house. Early in the morning, Willis covered the hole in
the banking of the roof under the direction of Jim Watson who, perched
on an up-turned barrel, gave directions with a thoroughly expert and
professional air. Now the kiln began to smoulder, and the pair sat
down, only getting up to patch with great shovelsful of earth any
cracks that appeared in the banking.
[Illustration: BANKING]
About the middle of the afternoon, the tar, sweated out of the pine
wood by the intense heat, began to ooze out of the trench. Slowly at
first, drop by drop; soon in a little trickle that grew in size, till
by nightfall, it was pouring out so that one of the workers must busily
ply the bucket all the time. This bucket Willis had fastened on the end
of a long pole, and with it he scooped the black, sticky mess out of
the pit, pouring it into a rough wooden trough through which it flowed
into the waiting barrel. This work must go on day and night, and the
kiln must also be carefully watched lest it catch fire; so Willis had
built a crude hut for shelter, and here, when not on duty, the burners
rested on a great heap of filthy blankets. Sally brought them their
meals, and they slept by turns in snatches.
Jim Watson had not brought good luck with him, for just as the tar
began to run, it started to rain. A chilly northwest wind sent the
shivers chasing each other down old Willis’ sun-loving back, and the
water soon came pouring through the chinks in the imperfect shelter.
The wet and cold could, at worst, mean a heavy cold or a sharp twinge
of the rheumatism; a heavier blow of misfortune awaited Willis.
The great kiln behaved itself very properly indeed for a day and a
half, and twenty good barrels were filled with tar. In spite of the
bad weather old Willis was jubilant, but his joy was untimely, for
despite his expert help, things went wrong with the kiln. Air sneaked
in somewhere through some unnoticed crack in the banking, and then the
lightwood, instead of smouldering, burst into flame, burning up both
wood and tar. What a blaze the tar-soaked pine made! It roared and
it snapped. Great jets of red fire, followed by puffs of inky smoke,
thrust themselves through the banking. Every now and then a blazing
knot, accompanied by a whole train of bright sparks, would be hurled
through the roof and shot ten feet into the air. Fifty feet from the
kiln I had to hold my hands over my face to keep off the intense heat,
but like a great black Satan stoking the brimstone fires, Willis
slaved, patching the shattered banking, throwing dirt on the roof
in the hope of smothering the fierce fire and saving the remnant of
the tar. And Jim Watson worked too, like a Trojan, for the blame and
disgrace of the accident were his.
Finally, they succeeded in choking the flames under control, but the
seventy barrels of tar for which Willis had worked so hard and waited
so long had shrunk to thirty-one. Over at Hoffman he received just four
dollars and a quarter a barrel for his tar, and but ten days before the
price had been five dollars. He paid off his high-priced expert and
settled up with his brother Henry. Then he came over to consult with
me. He took the crumpled, little wad of dirty bank notes out of his
pocket and looked at it ruefully.
“Hit doan’ mak’ much ob ah show fo’ all dat work an’ all dat time,
does hit, Massa Billie?” and then he added earnestly, his black face
seamed with doubt and apprehension, “Mebbe so--Ah doan’ know--but hit
do ’most seem as eff thar’s sumbuddy conjured dat ole tar kil’.”