The ancient Greek of apostolic days was not alone in his eagerness “to
see and to hear some new thing.” When the word went abroad in the negro
settlements of Tickfall that there was to be a new thing at the lodge
that night, cost of admission being one dollar, three hundred and
twenty-five negroes, by methods distinctly Ethiopian, secured the
necessary dollar, which for that night only was the password to the
lodge.
When Red Cutt appeared upon the scene, he by himself was worth the price
of admission. He had dressed himself in a faint imitation of the costume
of an aviator. That costume was a mixture of all the varied uniforms
that he had seen, and portions of which he could acquire.
Beginning at the feet, for some reason known only to himself, he wore a
pair of spurs; around his legs were leather puttees—to that extent he
resembled a cavalry officer. His pantaloons were hunting-breeches. His
coat was a hunting-coat, somewhat appropriate because it was rain-proof,
and might shed oil easily. His head-covering was a cap with a rubber
visor, and his eyes were covered with enormous automobile goggles. He
wore gauntlets on his hands, and somewhere he had acquired four brass
buttons, from each of which was suspended a gaudy ribbon. He had
evidently acquired these decorative ribbons at some association of
drummers or the convention of some political party. One ribbon bore the
words “Reception Committee.” A second ribbon was inscribed “Delegate,”
and a third ribbon bore the magic word “Information.”
He was escorted to a seat on the rostrum by the president of the lodge,
and looking through his automobile goggles at the crowd of negroes
assembled, he was surprised, and felt some uneasiness.
He had expected not more than one hundred negroes. That would have been
a crowd that he could manage; but when he found exactly three times that
number, the assemblage looked to him too much like a mob—or at least it
looked like it might be easily converted into one.
Hitch Diamond rose to his feet.
“Brudders, dar is a cullud pusson here to-night who is come on a
important job. He is de only nigger in dis country whut ever went up in
a airship. He has had plenty expe’unce as a flyin’ man, an’ he has come
to learn us all how to fly up!”
“Whar we gwine fly to?” a voice spoke up.
“Wharever you wants to go,” Hitch Diamond answered.
At this point Pap Curtain rose to his feet. “Is dis here nigger a member
of our lodge, Mr. Pres’dunt?” he snarled.
“Naw, suh.”
“Is dis here some new degree we takes in dis lodge?” Pap persisted.
“Naw, suh.”
“Well, whut is dis about?”
“Ef you’ll set down, Pap,” Hitch growled, “an’ let our visitin’ brudder
tell his bizzness in his own way, mebbe you’ll git some information.”
“I’s one of de bo’d of directors of dis here lodge,” Pap snarled. “Ef
dar is any bizzness dat I ain’t seen about befo’hand, I’m ag’in’ it.”
The lodge members showed impatience at this interruption. Pap had been a
conscientious objector to nearly everything the lodge had ever
undertaken. He was quick to notice their impatience, and sat down
grumbling to himself.
Red Cutt arose and fingered the three badges on his breast. Touching one
particular badge by the corner, and holding it out so that the lodge
could see, he announced:
“Dis badge is marked ‘Information,’ an’ means dat I’m de man who answers
questions an’ kin tell Pap Curtain whut he wants to know. Most of you
knows my visit to dis town is to organize a school of flyin’ niggers.
Some of you knows how to run automobiles, an’ so you kin ride over de
country. I wants to learn you how to fly through de sky jes’ as easy as
you walk on de ground. Atter you have got de lesson in yo’ mind, I will
he’p you to buy a cheap airship from de gover’ment, an’ den you will be
fixed jes’ like Gawd intended fer a nigger to be.”
Pap Curtain sprang to his feet, waved his hat in the air, and exclaimed
in a loud voice:
“I’ve heard tell of dese flyin’ fellers, but I ain’t never seen one fly.
Ef dis visitin’ brudder has come to give an exhibition I favors it!”
“Dat’s whut he has come to do,” Hitch assured him.
“Whar is yo’ flyin’-machine at?” Pap howled.
“Out in de Little Moccasin prairie,” Red told him.
“Less go out an’ take a look at it!” Pap exclaimed.
“I favor it,” three hundred negroes shouted in a chorus.
“I nominates myself to lead de peerade!” Vinegar Atts vociferated.
The movement was so unanimous that Red Cutt was frightened. He had no
desire to go out to that airplane in the dark. He remembered a negro who
had come to a little town where he had lived once and had pretended to
be able to walk on the water. He posed as a divine healer, and a
frequently made statement was: “I kin walk on de water, but I don’t want
to.” Thereupon some skeptical negroes had carried him down to the banks
of the Mississippi and tossed him headlong into the yellow stream,
insisting that he give them a demonstration of his ability to do what he
said he could do. They had fished this divine healer out of the river
with a hook and rolled him on a barrel for an hour before he showed the
least sign of returning consciousness. Red Cutt was appalled by the
thought of what might happen to him if that mob of negroes insisted upon
his giving a trial flight.
“Come on, niggers!” Vinegar Atts bellowed. “Less go out an’ see de
flyin’-machine!”
Three hundred negroes moved their feet as one man. Hitch Diamond laid
his hand upon the arm of Red Cutt about as a policeman would put a man
under arrest. Vinegar stepped forward and got on the other side of the
aviator, and they conducted him down the rickety stairs of the lodge
room and led the procession that formed in a straggling line in the
middle of the sandy street.
It was a night in which the moon shone in all its glory—such a moon as
glows over the Louisiana swamps when the humidity of the atmosphere
seems to focus the rays in startling brightness on every object. The
negro is like a cat, sleepy and dull during the day; but he wakes up at
night, and is a prowler in the streets and woods and fields. It was four
miles to the Little Moccasin prairie, but that tramping crowd of men
thought nothing of that, and as they marched they sang, keeping step to
music that carried echoes of the African jungle, and those minor tones
which are characteristic of all people who have been enslaved since the
ancient days when subjugated Israel in the land of Egypt “hung their
harps on the willows.”
“Look here, niggers,” Red said to Vinegar and Hitch. “Dis is not de
proper night to take a ride in a airplane. De moon is shining too dang
bright. Ef I git up fawty thousand foots in de air, an’ look down at the
yearth in dis moonlight, eve’ything below me would look like a smooth
sheet of white paper. I never would know whar I come from, an’ I
wouldn’t know whar to land, an’ I might drif’ off, whar nobody never
could find me, an’ whar I cain’t never git back here.”
“We don’t want nothin’ like dat,” Hitch Diamond growled. “We cain’t
affode to lose you.”
“Ef dese niggers insist on me takin’ a ride, how is we gwine prevent
it?” Red Cutt inquired.
“I’ll tell you,” Vinegar replied. “When we gits out whar de airship is
at, I’ll make ’em a speech.”
In an hour they reached that point in the Little Moccasin prairie where
the airplane rested on the smooth short grass. When they approached that
wonder-mechanism of man’s hand and brain, the negroes became reverently
silent, and yet that silence was vocal with the weird, nerve-racking
funereal sounds of the swamp. Great bullfrogs bellowed like
multitudinous lost cattle; a wildcat screamed like the tones of a woman
in great pain and fright; and the swamp wolves galloped to the edge of
the clearing and barked at them with all the annoying impertinence of
fice dogs.
Vinegar Atts did not like the looks of the airship. It was the first he
had ever seen, and it bore too much resemblance to a wasp, and looked
very much as if it might carry a dangerous stinger in its tail. With the
true orator’s instinct for dramatic effect, he looked around to find the
most impressive place for him to stand. Not at the tail, because that
might be dangerous; not at the sides, for wasp might flap its wings; so
he moved up in front and stood looking with great interest at a wheel of
paddles right in front of the machine. That did not look good to him,
either, so he backed off well out of range, and announced:
“Brudders of the Nights of Darkness lodge, as fer as I knows, dar ain’t
only two niggers in dis crowd dat ever seen one of dese things befo’,
but dis here chariot of fire ain’t no new thing. De Prophet Elijah went
up in one of ’em to heaven.”
“Bless Gawd!” a negro’s voice exclaimed reverently.
Then in his rich barytone voice, Vinegar Atts began to sing, and one by
one the voices of the negroes joined in:
“I rode on de sky,
Went up mighty high,
Nor did envy Elijah his seat;
My soul mounted higher
In a chariot of fire,
And the moon, it wus under my feet.”
In the melody of this song all the weird, jungle voices of the swamp
were silenced. It seemed as if every bird and beast stood still to
listen, and the Gulf breeze, playing over the fluted tree-tops, made a
beautiful, Eolian accompaniment to the rich African voices.
Startled eyes glanced up at that moon which rode majestically through
the still oceans of the sky, and the soul of every man was filled with
awe at the thought of having that globe of glowing yellow under his
brogan-shod feet. It was a thought to stir the Ethiopian soul to its
depths, laying hold upon the rich Oriental imagination, appealing to the
jungle heritage of superstition, and causing them to thrill with mingled
feelings of rapture and fear.
Vinegar Atts knew the value of the oratorical pause; he waited until the
sighing of the trees and the radiance of the moonbeams had touched even
the most stupid mind among them. And then in a deep, solemn voice he
continued:
“Way back in de Ole Testarment day whar people lived forty thousan’
years ago, de Prophet Ezekiel tell us about dis here machine. I wus
readin’ it to-night, and dis is whut de Good Book says:
“‘I looked an’ behold in de firmament dat wus above my head, dar wus de
appearance of de likeness of a throne——’”
“My Gawd!” an awed voice exclaimed, as all the negroes turned and looked
at the seat in the airplane. Vinegar Atts resumed:
“‘Dar appeared in de cherubim de form of a man’s hand under de wings,
an’ when I looked, behold, four wheels as ef a wheel had been in de
midst of a wheel. An’ when de cherubim went, de wheels went wid him——’”
“My—good—gosh!” Pap Curtain interrupted with his snarling voice, his
tone surcharged with terror.
Vinegar Atts paid no heed to the interruption, but went on in a voice
that was like a great bellow:
“‘De cherubim lifted up deir wings to mount from de yearth, an’ de same
wheels turned not from beside dem; when dey stood, dese stood, an’ when
dey wus lifted up, dese lifted up demselves also, fer de spirit of de
livin’ creature wus in dem, an’ de cherubim lifted up deir wings an’
mounted from de yearth in my sight.’”
With the utterance of the last word, Vinegar waved his hand in a
dramatic gesture toward the sky. There was one dark cloud in all the
clearness of the atmosphere, a mass of fog and mist which had risen from
the Gulf of Mexico and was scudding with amazing speed before the stiff,
salty breeze from the south. The negroes glanced up at that cloud and
watched it as it became smaller, sped to the edge of the horizon made by
the forest, and disappeared from their sight. It seemed to them that
some winged creature of the sky had sailed above them, and Vinegar, in
his great superb barytone voice, began to sing:
“Let de chariot of fire roll by,
De sooner earth’s trials and sorrers shall cease,
De sooner us’ll enter de mansions of peace—
Let de chariot of fire roll by!”
The famous Tickfall quartet was there. Instantly Hitch Diamond, Skeeter
Butts, and Figger Bush chimed in, and the song swept out across the
silence of the swamp, echoing in that vast greenhouse of vegetation
which grew in such rank profusion. From the throats of three hundred
negroes issued a low, moaning wail in perfect harmony with the music.
Vinegar Atts and Hitch Diamond turned and walked away. Skeeter Butts and
Figger Bush followed, still singing, and the other negroes forgot the
purpose for which they had walked four miles into the woods, and meekly,
without protestation, trailed their leaders back to the town.
After all, they had seen enough to pay them for their trip. They had
seen an airplane for the first time. They had something to think about;
something to talk about, and, as for the flight of Red Cutt, they had
something to anticipate.
One man alone was dissatisfied, but he was always dissatisfied. The
sneer on Pap Curtain’s lips was more pronounced, and the snarl in his
voice was accentuated as he said to those who plodded along in the rear
of the procession:
“Dat Red Cutt wus pretty sharp when he side-tracked his ride in dat
airplane fer a speech by Elder Vinegar Atts. But dat nigger can’t excape
away, an’ I’ll make him fly yit or know the reason why.”
The other negroes did not answer. They were too busy harmonizing with
the Tickfall quartet:
“Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming to carry me home.”