voice took on the sound of something started on its way which could not
be stopped--not even by the preacher himself. There had been but one
rebellion in the Old Ship of Zion since he came: now was the time to
stamp out any last lingering embers of it. As he slowly raised his hand
and swung back into his march of words, Woodie’s vitals seemed to melt
and flow downward. Despair boiled in him like vomit.
“De Lawd Jesus’ll be a-waitin’! He’ll be a-settin’ on de edge er de
great white throne, a-waitin’--a-waitin’ fer dat boat! An’ when He see
it comin’, He’ll holler out ter de angels: ‘Hi’st up de silver spyglass
ter Mah eye!’ An’ de angels’ll h’ist it. Twelve angels it’ll take ter
h’ist up de silver spyglass ter His eye.
“An’ den He’ll p’int de silver spyglass, an’ ef dere’s anybody on dat
boat dat don’t belong--_He’ll see um! He’ll see spang through um!_
“An’ He’ll say: ‘Lean de silver spyglass erginst de throne, an’ lif’ up
de speakin’ trumpet dat’s made er gol’!’ An’ de angels’ll do it. Twenty
angels it’ll take ter lif’ up de speakin’ trumpet dat’s made er gol’!
“An’ den de Lawd Jesus’ll put His mouth ter de speakin’ trumpet, an’
He’ll holler out loud an’ cl’are: ‘Mistah Cap’n, yer hyeh Me?’” very
slowly and solemnly: “‘_Yer got er onbeliever on dat boat!_ Yer’ll have
ter stop an’ go back, Mistah Cap’n, an’ lan’ um----’”
Woodie’s hand closed round the pistol, when his eye chanced to fall on
Miss Jinny’s face. Her look of quiet certitude startled him. He leaned
forward, scarcely breathing.
“‘--an’ lan’ um whar he belongs!’”
Miss Jinny cleared her throat, but Draper didn’t notice.
“‘Back whar de brimstone’s at, an’ de fire----’”
Miss Jinny moved her chair, but Draper didn’t even look her way.
“‘Back whar de smoke’s a-curlin’ out de groun’, an’----’”
The sharp pounding of Miss Jinny’s cane fell across his sentence and
broke it as brittelely off as if it had been a rod of glass.
* * * * *
Woodie dropped back limply into his seat. He opened his mouth to still
the sound of his breathing. He grew weak under the surge of his relief.
For a moment all that he could realize was that he hadn’t had to
shoot--that Miss Jinny had saved him from that.
She sat on the edge of her chair, as delicately separate as a white
hepatica, looking straight at Draper, and as the sense of her sank into
Woodie it seemed to him that she was a part of the backbone of life
itself, and again he looked at the preacher with a flaming up of hope.
But the big Negro was staring at the white woman in blank amazement,
without meeting her eyes, much as he might have stared at the roof if
it had fallen in; uneasy only because the mood he had induced in his
people had been threatened.
For a moment he was silent, while he reassembled his scattered powers.
He shifted his weight until the floor creaked. He leaned forward and
began to speak again, and Woodie’s hope sank slowly and heavily. It was
going to take more than the pounding of a cane to stop Zachariah Draper.
With his hand on his father’s old pistol, that had never been pointed
at anything bigger than a chicken-hunting skunk, he leaned forward
breathlessly, while Draper, out of a deep instinct in such matters, and
as though rebuking his antagonist, laid his tongue to stronger words
than any of his own.
“De Good Book say”--with sombre emphasis--“‘Take heed lest dere be in
any uv yer an evil heart uv onbelief! Take heed, fer de sword uv Gawd
am quick an’ powerful, an’ sharper dan any two-edged sword, piercin’
even ter de dividin’ asunder uv de soul an’ de sperret, an’ uv de
j’ints an’ de marrow!’”
“Amen!” a woman said startlingly in a clear soprano; the others groaned
in chorus, “A-amen! A-amen, brudder!” and the shattered mood of the
people came together again.
Draper fanned it as a wind fans a prairie fire: “Brethren an’ sisters,
ef yer want ter lan’ at de great white throne, yer got ter git shed uv
dat evil heart uv onbelief!”
_Tap, tap_, went the cane, mild and premonitory, but he pretended not
to hear.
“De Good Book say: ‘He shall set de sheep on His right han’, but de
goats on de lef’. An’ He shall say unter dem on de lef’ han’, Depart
from me, ye cursed, inter everlastin’ fire, prepared fer de Devil an’
his angels!’”
A gleam came into his eye. He in his pulpit, in the midst of his
people, and the white woman down there alone...! Almost alone too,
now, in that part of the state: ten Negroes all about her now to
every poverty-stricken white...! He within his rights, and she a
trespasser...! His voice rolled out over her like a river:
“Yer got ter pull off from de goats! Yer got ter come inter de fold!”
He chanted like a warrior leading hosts, with a rhythm as heavily
marked as the beating of a drum.
“Ah been down yander in de canebrake, a-lookin’ fer dem
goats--a-studyin’ in mah min’ an’ a-wrastlin’ in mah soul! Ah been down
yander in de canebrake, an’ what yer think Ah see?”
A moan of anticipation--pleasure and horror and fear--ran over his
human harp strings. “What yer see, brudder?” “Glory, hallelujah!”
“Praise de name er Jesus!” “What yer see?”
“Ah done see de Devil, de big, black, shiny Devil, a-scorchin’ up de
canebrake wid his breath!”
A bass voice began to moan heavily. An alto joined. Others took it up,
improvising with a sure sense of harmony an elaborate background for
Draper’s trampling barytone.
“His tail was long an’ shiny lak’ er blacksnake! His eyes was lak’ de
haidlights on de train!”
Woodie shut his eyes and prayed. The long-continued pound of emotion
had beaten from him all acquired white folks’ methods of speech and
feeling. “Gawd gimme strength,” he prayed, “ter shoot um through de
heart ef Ah have ter!”
The trampling barytone went on: “His feet was p’inted lak’ er crowbar
an’ cloven in de midst, an’ his mouth was lak’ et watermillon full er
seeds!”
Woodie sat there stiff and cold with sweat, in his excitement almost as
white as a white boy. He looked childlike and harmless and pitiful, but
he was the most dangerous kind of potential murderer: the determined
coward, rapt out of himself past the reach of reason; ready to shoot
when Draper’s words should pull the trigger.
Draper’s words crept toward it steadily. “His long white teeth was
a-champin’ an’ a-scrunchin’ an’ a-gnashin’--_fer dem goats_!”
He got his people rocking and moaning to the drunken rhythm of his
feelings and his words. He got them ten thousand miles away from the
mind of the white woman, so that her lonely, pale face in their midst
seemed strange and unnatural. And suddenly, under cover of the eerie
din, he dropped like a waiting eagle straight for his prey:
“An’ de Devil say ter me: ‘_Whar’s dat backslider?_’”
_Tap, tap, tap_, insisted the cane, steady and sharp.
Woodie moved farther from his mother, for elbow room.
Tiny beads of sweat broke out on Draper’s face, but he didn’t swerve.
“‘_Whar’s de man dat laid his ’ligion down?_’”
“Gawd gimme strength!” Woodie prayed.
“‘He ain’t so dark,’ de Devil say, ‘an’ he ain’t so light.’”
Woodie cocked the old pistol in his pocket.
“‘He’s middle-sized,’ de Devil say, ‘an’ he’s got er limp----’”
Woodie leaned forward to shoot, but Miss Jinny was on her feet.
She had risen casually, as if to smooth the folds of the shawl that lay
over the back of her chair, but the straight thrust of her keen blue
eyes seeking the preacher’s made the air between them crackle with life.
Draper drew himself up to the full of his enormous height. He was as
superb and as sincere as a great coiled snake. He thrust out his jaw
and frowned; his eyes lightened in the way they had, and the essential
spirit within him met Miss Jinny’s steadily.
The whole church held its breath. There was a moment of intense
silence, through which the call of the flycatcher fanned its lazy
way, and then an inward and spiritual something behind the frail old
countenance broke something behind the big, glistening black face,
with its prow of a nose, its curling lips and heavy jowl and restless,
predatory eyes--broke it with a snap that might have been audible, so
definite it was.
Draper raised his hand and lowered it; opened his mouth and closed
it again; drew forth the polka-dotted handkerchief and mopped the
perspiration from his face.
And then Miss Jinny sat down, and he found that he could speak.
But whatever it was that had snapped in him had snapped, too, in his
people. An uneasy sense of shame lay over them. There wasn’t one who
didn’t know Tampa Simmons as he knew his own hearthstone; not one whom
the dead man hadn’t helped and comforted when he could; who didn’t
believe in him as no human being had ever believed in Draper. The tide
of feeling flowed away from the preacher; ebbed faster and faster with
his every word.
He couldn’t tell what was stopping him. He was like a bird trying to
fly through the pane of a window. Because he could not see it, he
thought there was nothing there, and battered himself to pieces against
the realest thing in all that country, going down at last before his
congregation, a beaten man, jabbering meaningless sentences out of
which one fact only stood up: that the soul of Tampa Simmons went to
heaven, where Miss Jinny Pickens wanted it to go.
And in the midst of the debacle a strange thing happened. Softly,
spontaneously, without a leader, the people began to sing: “Done got
over!” they sang:
“Done got over!
Had a hard time;
Had to work so long;
But I done got over,
Done got over,
Done got over at last!”
The deep, old, patient, humble melody fell upon them like the spirit of
Christ, and they bowed their heads and sank to their knees, and most of
them wept.
And that night Woodrow Woodson Simmons, the son of Tampa Bay Florida
Simmons, who was the son of Wisdom, a chattel without surname belonging
to the Pickens estate; who was the son of Zebulon, likewise a slave;
who was the son of a naked savage of the Congo jungle, walked alone
through his native woods like a murderer reprieved, with a heart too
big for his breast; and, throwing the old pistol far out into the
swamp, caught the sound of the myriad feet of his people stumbling
painfully along the way his father had travelled, out of the land of
ignorance and out of the house of fear, and swore that some spark of
his father’s spirit should march in him at the head of that army until
he died.
MONKEY MOTIONS
BY ELEANOR MERCEIN KELLY
From _Pictorial Review_
Having lately discovered our Aunt Lady after a lapse of years, we made
the most of it, and frequently accepted her standing invitation to
motor over to the old town for Sunday dinner, saving up our Hooverized
appetites for days beforehand, since no mere world war had been able to
affect to any appreciable extent Aunt Lady’s table.
“A doctor’s got to keep his strength up these days,” she explained
apologetically, “and it isn’t as if we didn’t raise ’most everything on
the place.”
On such an occasion--and they were occasions--we noticed for the first
time a singularly limber, spindling, knock-kneed youth of a pale saddle
colour, who was being taught, with some difficulty, to wait on table.
He moved about his duties in a sort of rhythmical, high-stepping manner
that made one rather nervous, especially when soup was being served.
His eyes had the mournful, wistful anxiety of a young hound’s, but his
manner affected an easy pomposity, modelled obviously upon the best of
butler traditions, which are good in that part of the country.
“Sarvent, Moddom, sarvent!” he murmured as he placed me in my chair at
table; and at my husband’s ear he breathed solicitously, “I hopes de
julep was to Yore Honour’s tas’e?”
My husband, who is a mere business man and unaccustomed to such
attentions and entitlements, sat down with some suddenness as his chair
was thrust vigorously beneath his knees.
“Where,” he inquired of the Curtises, “did you get that?”
“It’s just the Infant Samuel; Mahaly’s child, you know.” Aunt Lady
spoke in rather a _distraite_ manner, her ear turned toward the pantry,
whence issued sounds of more or less repressed African mirth. Suddenly
there was a crash, and the mirth rose beyond repression.
“Excuse me one moment,” murmured Aunt Lady. “I expect Sam’l’s dropped
the shoat again.”
He had. It appeared that when the small roast pig, the _pièce de
résistance_ of the feast, was laid out prettily upon its platter,
fore feet folded on its breast and parsley arranged all round, it so
suggested to Sam’l’s vivid imagination a baby laid out for burial
that he could not make up his mind to bring it in to be carved. The
shoat had to be rescued, reinstated upon an unbroken platter, and
brought to table by Aunt Lady herself, the rest of the domestic force
being entirely demoralized. Only Sam’l remained serious, painfully,
shudderingly serious.
“He’s very fond of children,” observed our host, “and does not come of
a cannibal tribe, probably. Besides, he seems to have inherited his
mother’s nervous temperament. You remember Mahaly, I dare say?”
Certainly I did. She was one of the happiest memories of my childhood,
though overlaid, as such memories often are, with events more immediate.
I would no more have missed the weekly visit of Mahaly to our wash
house than I would have missed the circus, and for much the same
reason. She stimulated the imagination; she brought far things near; in
her companionship nothing seemed impossible, neither hippopotami, nor
miracles, nor “ha’nts.”
She moved in a world of her own, amid events invisible. One frequently
heard her conversing, giggling, coquetting with persons who were not
there, which might have been disconcerting to older and more rigid
minds.
But we loved to hear her tell about them, these invisibles: the King
of Yearth, for instance, one of her suitors, who came to court her in
the guise of a simple mole, although he lived in underground palaces
as gorgeous as Aladdin’s cave. (From which of the classic fables could
this have derived, and how?)
And there was the Queen of Sheba, African, like herself, but of a
“brighter” shade, who was not really dead, but sometimes chose to
manifest in the body of some descendant--“ef she kep’ herse’f _to_
herse’f,” added Mahaly significantly. That was the reason she lived
quite alone in a ramshackle cabin on the far side of the graveyard,
where “nigger folks wouldn’t come pesterin’.”
The Negroes were only too content to leave her alone, less out of fear,
apparently, than out of scorn. They regarded her as “foolish in the
head.” They jeered and laughed at her whenever she appeared, to poor
Mahaly’s wincing surprise; the penalty an artist pays for living in a
conservative community.
For Mahaly was unmistakably an artist in the broader sense of the word.
How the queer creature could sing! I am haunted yet by the dramatic
pathos she used to put into her favourite washtub ditty:
Hark, fum de tomb come do’fum soun’
(Jay-bird jump an’ jar de groun’).
I once was los’ but now I’se foun’
(Wash dem dishes an’ set ’em erroun’).
Why this rather inconsequent song should contain so much of pathos
I could not have told then, nor can I now; perhaps one sensed the
contrast between her supernatural yearnings, the Jeanne d’Arc voices
which guided her, and the humble round of Mahaly’s daily life: “Washin’
dem dishes” (other people’s dishes) “an’ settin’ ’em erroun’.”
On occasion she was moved to dance for us; not the ordinary, frivolous
clap-and-patter, buck-and-wing steps, for Mahaly had got religion and
was very much saved indeed--so much so that she gave nearly all her
earnings to the church--but a stately ceremonial prance, with odd jerks
of the body and long, rhythmic pauses, to the tune of a muttered chant.
Her eyes were half closed as in an ecstasy. So might some ancient
jungle priestess have danced before the great god Mumbo-jumbo.
And she had the true artist’s passion for colour, for beautiful
fabrics, which was doubtless the reason our mothers found her such an
invaluable laundress. With what loving tenderness she would “rub out”
some silken treasure entrusted to her care, or flute a delicate ruffle,
or clear-starch a sheer organdy! And her cabin walls fluttered queerly
with rags and tags of brilliant colour, discarded finery, bright
garments which had ceased to function; meaningless, savage, more than a
little mad, of course, yet cheerful to the eye as a patchwork quilt.
Mahaly was, indeed, an advance agent of the decorative doctrines of
Bakst.
Yet I recalled her most clearly--such is the sadism of childhood--not
as the wistful seeker after beauty, the patient and adoring friend (for
the most pestiferous of children never seemed to pester Mahaly), but as
the guy she always looked when she started off for camp meeting. This
great event of her church, known as “Conference,” took place annually
at a camp ground in the next county, and during the week or so it
lasted our kitchens were deserted, also our stables and gardens. An
enforced holiday was declared for all but the leisure classes.
Mahaly used to prepare for “Conf’rence” weeks beforehand; and on the
day of departure we youngsters would collect in groups to watch her
pass, hurrying by short cuts to fresh points of vantage, sniggering,
nudging one another, jeering at her, I am afraid, as cruelly as any of
the Negroes. But Mahaly never seemed to realize it; we were only “the
chillen,” whom she trusted and loved.
Moreover, she was uplifted beyond reach of our mocking, rapt in high
inner contemplation; and moved along the road with her queer, rhythmic,
jerking step to music that we could not hear, trailing clouds of
glory--literally. Sheba herself, on her way to the court of Solomon,
could have been no more magnificent. She wore, although the sun is
hot in “Conf’rence” time, a pink velvet opera cloak trimmed with
swan’s-down, which had belonged to Miss Mabilla Cornish in her days of
bellehood; beneath it glittered and swept a voluminous spangled yellow
evening gown from the same prolific source.
Her feet were encased in a pair of Dr. Tom Curtis’s rubber-sided
_Romeo_ slippers, with the toes removed for greater ease; and she
wore my mother’s Paris bonnet of many seasons past, an erection of
jet which sprouted purple ostrich tips at intervals. There were other
details, such as square gold-rimmed spectacles without glass, a _Janice
Meredith_ curl (blond) draped coquettishly over one shoulder, an
ancient carpetbag which bulged with sacrifices destined presumably for
the altar: a fat roasting pullet, a jar of brandied peaches, a bottle
of elderberry wine, other delicacies which she could not afford.
But Mahaly never got farther than to the railroad station. Whether the
other Negroes would not let her go with them, whether their jeers
caused her to lose confidence in the suitability of her appearance
before the Lord, or whether at the last she dared not put to the risk
of possible disillusionment her secret dreams, her hidden ecstasies, we
never knew. But the train for camp ground invariably went off without
Mahaly. She would reappear that evening, shorn of her glory and much
subdued, to a welcome she was sure of, in some grateful kitchen. Never
within my knowledge did Mahaly get to “Conf’rence.”
Except once. Aunt Lady told us about it, all these years afterward. It
chanced that Dr. Tom, driving past the station just after the annual
exodus to camp ground, was struck with the forlornness of the solitary
figure which remained; and, being Aunt Lady’s husband and that sort of
man, he had offered to drive Mahaly over in state behind his fast span
of trotters, having a patient to see in that part of the country.
Mahaly had stared incredulously. Then, with a wild shout of “Glory to
Gawd! Here I come!” she had clambered into the buggy, and said not
another word until, after many miles, he deposited her at the gates of
the Promised Land. Then she came down to earth sufficiently to smile
her gratitude speechlessly, radiantly. “I declare, the old wench looked
almost handsome!” murmured Dr. Tom, remembering it.
And that was the last of Mahaly for many a long day. Nobody knew what
had become of her.
It was a year later that they saw her coming home along the pike, still
wearing the pink opera cloak, bedraggled, weak, exhausted, but bearing
in her arms a puny yellow baby.
“Not her own?” I gasped, incredulous.
Aunt Lady nodded. “For all the world like an old cow that’s gone off
into the woods to calve, and don’t know whether to be proud or sorry
for herself,” she said with the rich tang of the soil that is her
heritage.
Mahaly never told where she had been, nor with whom. I thought of the
King of Yearth, in his Aladdin cave; I thought also of the sacrifices
and libations she had prepared for the altar, and of priests who might
well have appreciated them. But nobody ever knew. Once, pressed too
closely, she had made some cryptic allusion to “a merracle”; and a
miracle indeed it seemed to those who had known her half their lives as
a man-hating spinster of uncertain age.
But people pay heavily for miracles. Mahaly never recovered from hers.
She had the child christened “Infant Samuel” after an admired picture
in Aunt Lady’s parlour; and then she died, vaguer and more queer than
ever, babbling of mystic things. She left the Infant Samuel, of course,
to Aunt Lady, who seemed to find the legacy quite natural. It was not
her first.
“And, besides, I can’t help feeling that Tom was sort of responsible,”
she admitted, ignoring her husband’s startled disclaimer.
Sam’l’s infancy was no problem; he just grew up, she said, “like any of
the puppies,” in and out of the kitchen, the barn, the wash house--who
minded an extra piccaninny or two around? But the school age brought
difficulties. Not that Sam’l was mischievous, or disobedient, or lazy,
like ordinary coloured children. His name seemed to have affected his
nature, thus proving a theory of George Moore’s: the Infant Samuel was,
like his pictured prototype, a model child. But the other coloured
children failed to appreciate him.
“Dey mocks at me all de time,” he said quite patiently, not at all
complaining.
No matter how serious Sam’l was, the teacher reported, he seemed to
move his schoolmates to ribald mirth.
And for this there may have been some cause. He not only looked
peculiar, with his long, pointed head, his anxious solemnity, and his
extreme limberness of body, but he did peculiar things. For example,
the sums on his slate looked like real sums, quite neatly done, until
one examined them more closely, when they were found to be composed of
mere pothooks, meaningless hieroglyphics which resembled figures, and
which he seemed to think did quite as well.
“Ha, the imagist theory!” murmured my husband, who interests himself in
movements.
And once during geography class, when there were visitors, the teacher
had invited Sam’l, who drew quite nicely, to do a map of the United
States upon the blackboard from memory. The result was a vaguely
familiar outline which resembled a map, in that states and lakes and
rivers were all neatly marked, the mountains very handsomely shaded
indeed. But one of the visitors, examining it in a puzzled manner, had
discovered that its outline was the profile, face downward, of George
Washington.
Sam’l was sent home in disgrace for poking fun at company. But he
protested earnestly that he “hadn’t never poked fun at nobody,” not he.
That was the way he saw his native land, and he had drawn it so.
“Ho! The subjective school,” muttered my husband.
Later, under the influence of his name picture, Aunt Lady had thought
to make a preacher of the Infant Samuel; but after a brief trial the
coloured seminary had returned him with thanks. Their young brother,
they reported, was undoubtedly an earnest seeker, even sanctified;
he preached with fluency and was powerful in prayer; but though his
language and gestures were most superior, neither prayers nor sermons
seemed somehow to make sense; they sounded more like poetry. Nor would
his fellow theologs take him seriously. Whatever he said or did, they
sniggered at; a fatal handicap in the preaching profession.