Come along-a one an' a come along de uddeh,
Bring along a frien' an' a-bring along anuddeh;
Ain't you gwine to come to my bohnin'?_
De debbil done temp' me to visit his roof;
De debbil he's allus a follerin';
I stomp my foot on de debbil's hoof;
Don' you hear de debbil a-hollerin'?
I'se gwine to jine de fambly of de Lohd;
De debbil's done quit his harryin';
I'se gwine to be married to de son of Gohd;
Ain't you gwine to come to my marryin'?
_Come along-a sisteh, come along-a bruddeh,
Come along-a one an' a come along de uddeh,
Bring along a frien' an a-bring along anuddeh;
Ain't you gwine to come to my marryin'?_
De debbil done beg me to sail his ship;
De debbil he's allus a follerin';
I smack my han' on de debbil's lip;
Don' you hear de debbil a hollerin'?
I'se gwine to sail in de ship of de Lohd
Dat's a runnin' to glory at de ferryin';
I'se gwine to be buried in de grace of Gohd;
Ain't you gwine to come to my buryin'?
_Come along-a sisteh an' a come along-a bruddeh,
Come along-a one an' a come along de uddeh,
Bring along a frien' an' a bring along anuddeh;
Ain't you gwine to come to my buryin'?_
JUNGLE BLOOD
BY
ELMORE ELLIOTT PEAKE
ILLUSTRATIONS BY WALTER JACK DUNCAN
He was a coal-black, box-headed negro, of a bulk and stature never
before admitted to the dining-room of the Bluegrass Hotel. The blacks
preferred by the management of that fastidious hostelry were agile,
under-sized fellows with round heads and small hands; and Moss Harper
would assuredly never have effected an entrance to the dining-room, had
it not been for a waiters' strike, which made almost any kind of help
welcome.
The lynx-eyed head waiter, prejudiced from the start against his
gigantic underling, quickly discovered that salt-cellars and other
small objects eluded Moss' clumsy fingers like drops of quicksilver;
also, that the channels between the tables were wholly inadequate for
the safe navigation of a vessel of this draft. Hence Moss' term of
service would doubtless have been a very brief one, had it not been for
an unforeseen event. On his way home the very first night, he broke
the heads of half a dozen union pickets who had waylaid him in a dark
alley, and this feat gave the strike a shock from which it died the
next day.
Out of gratitude, and possibly also a desire to give the recalcitrant
negroes an object-lesson, the management decided to tolerate Moss for a
month. It was clearly a case of toleration. He broke more dishes than
any four of the other waiters; he forgot orders; he trod on toes; and,
although he was of a singularly peaceful disposition, never taking part
in the multitudinous squabbles of the dining-room, the incessant gibes,
sneers, and threats of his unionized associates would occasionally
prove too much for even his equanimity. Then, like an infuriated
gorilla, he would spring upon his tormentors, regardless of their
number, and dearly indeed would they pay for their sport.
He was, moreover, a silent fellow; and his silence was not that of the
well-bred waiter, but a solemn, profound, brooding, depressing thing,
acquired, one could almost believe, in the African jungles where his
forefathers had crept like wild beasts or squatted in superstitious
terror. People, consequently, were a little afraid of him. It was told
that he had once carried a piano up three flights of stairs on his
back; and when he would pass down the dining-room with a seventy-pound
tray balanced on the tips of three fingers as lightly as if it were
a pie-pan, a certain bald-headed, white-waist-coated, pink-faced old
bachelor, who made his home at the hotel, never tired of observing to
strangers, with his dry little chuckle: "How'd you like to meet that
boy on a lonely road, suh, afteh dark, with your gun at home?" And, in
truth, Moss' huge black paw, suddenly appearing over their shoulders
from behind, as he served a meal, was a trifle disconcerting to ladies
with delicate nerves.
There was, however, a force of some kind, a sort of dumb nobility about
the fellow, which made itself felt; and, in spite of his manifold
shortcomings, he had, when his month was up, made a fairly favorable
impression. Still, his fate was hanging in the balance when Fortune
once more intervened in his behalf. An imaginative reporter on one of
the Louisville papers, being hard pressed for a Sunday story, concocted
an article entitled "A Congo King," in which he solemnly averred that
the herculean waiter at the Bluegrass was the grandson of an African
prince who had been captured by slavers on the upper Congo, after a
desperate fight, and landed in Charleston in 1832.
From that hour Moss became a show-piece which the proprietors of
the Bluegrass would not willingly have parted with. Guests almost
daily asked to be shown the "Congo King." A German ethnologist who
was touring the country ran down from Chicago to get some exact
measurements of the royal descendant's head. An artist of State
reputation painted him in what was alleged to be his grandfather's
court costume--a strip of leopard-skin around his loins; and a
photograph from this painting made the most popular souvenir post-card
which the hotel's news-stand had ever handled.
Curiously enough, his fame did not spoil him. Indeed, for any change in
him, he might have been unaware of his fame, and possibly was unaware
of it. At all events, he continued to pursue the simple routine of his
life. He worked seven days in the week, from six in the morning until
nine at night, with a respite from two till six. Most of the hotel
negroes spent this recess in shooting craps and guzzling beer in an
adjacent dive, but Moss devoted it to the prosecution of an enterprise
very near to his heart. He was learning to read! He could already read
a bill-of-fare, of course, to any near-sighted guest who had chanced to
forget his glasses; but this was merely a mnemonic trick, assisted by
the position of the words on the card. He yearned to be able to read
"really and truly," out of a newspaper or a book.
One afternoon, after laying off his dining-room livery and getting
into his own shabby clothes,--in which few of the Bluegrass guests
would have recognized their Congo King!--he set off with unusual
alacrity. At the street door he paused to turn up his collar and
draw down his hat-brim, and then indifferently stepped out into a
pelting shower. A block away he entered a second-hand book-store and
bought a greasy, dog-eared Second Reader which he had priced the day
before. Stowing his purchase in an inside pocket to keep it dry, he
longingly eyed a passing street-car, for he was tired; but he put the
temptation aside--five cents would buy a loaf of bread or two quarts of
buttermilk--and stepped out into the rain again.
A walk of ten blocks brought him to the head of an ill-smelling, narrow
alley, dotted with foul pools of water and bordered with tumble-down
shanties. The rain had now ceased, and the sun, beating down more
fiercely than ever, was raising a pestilential reek which had brought
the black denizens of the alley to their tiny stoops for a breath
of comparatively fresh air. Children, the smaller ones quite naked,
pattered about like ducks in the black mud.
The number of men present, considering it was midday, would have
surprised any one not familiar with the fact that the residents of
Goosefoot Lane plied their varied trades mostly by night. Oily-skinned
and blear-eyed from heat, drink, and loss of sleep, these gentlemen of
color somewhat resembled the animals of an over-traveled menagerie,
blinking stupidly, staring morosely into vacancy, slapping viciously
at flies, and occasionally exposing their red mouths and gleaming teeth
in a wide, fierce, carnivorous yawn. Some few, in a better humor, were
drinking pailed beer and shooting craps. The women held their babies
and chatted with their neighbors, while now and then some fat old mammy
would waddle out into the lane to settle a row among the youngsters.
It was into this atmosphere that the student took his way, nodding at
an acquaintance here and there, until he reached the shanty which the
payment of four dollars a month in advance entitled him to call home.
An old darky sat drowsing on the stoop. There was something ape-like
about his long arms, his flat, wide-nostriled nose, and the mat of
gray wool which crept down his forehead to within two inches of his
eyebrows. Yet, on a closer inspection, his face was human, kindly, and
benevolent, and even lit with a shrewd humor.
"This you' Secum Reader, sonny?" asked old Benjy, starting from
his doze as Moss thrust the book into his hand. He fumbled in his
pocket for his silver-rimmed spectacles,--cherished memento of better
days,--pinched the book between his thick, knotted fingers, and opened
it about as gracefully as a bear would open an oyster. Then he squinted
at the page with an owl-like expression, moving the book now nearer,
now farther, and turning it this way and that for a better light. For
he was Moss' teacher, and it would be highly injurious to his prestige
for him to show any flustration over this new volume. Nevertheless, he
was not quite at ease.
"Yass--book-store man di'n' cheat you. He Secum Reader," he observed
astutely, after moving his lips inaudibly for a moment. "Says so--right
theh--top o' the page--in plain print. An' print don' lie! 'Member
that, sonny,--print don' lie. Men lies, women lies, clouds lies--say
it's gwine rain when it don' do nothin' but blow up a li'l' dust--but
print neveh lies. 'Cause why? 'Cause the Good Book is print. But,
sonny, if you gwine git an educashum, you gotter strike out for
it--strike out--strike out."
"Ain't I strikin' out?" asked Moss in an aggrieved tone.
"Shuh, sonny, shuh. But this yere vollum make you scratch you' haid.
Yass, indeed, sonny,--make you scratch you' haid. Purt' near makes me
scratch mine!" The last, however, was accompanied by a low chuckle to
indicate that it was only a joke; after which he adjusted his glasses
afresh and again fixed his gaze on the book. "Wuds in heah, sonny, you
neveh seen befo'. I done seen 'em, of co'se, 'cause ole Mis' tuk me
mos' through the Thud Reader befo' the Wah broke out. But, of co'se, my
eyesight ain't what it was--no, sonny, 'tain't what it was." He stared
harder than ever, shutting first one eye, as though squinting along his
old coon-gun, then the other, blinking, and moving his lips. Finally
his black face lighted.
"Heah's an ole devil I used to wrastle with!" he exclaimed shrilly.
"Lawd, Lawd, how I used to wrastle with that ole devil! _Succumstance!
Succumstance!_ That's the ole devil!"
"Lemme see 'im," said Moss curiously, bending nearer.
"Right theh," answered Benjy proudly, pointing with his stub
forefinger. "That long, crinkly, twis'ed feller. Looks a good 'eal like
a dried fish-wum. Sonny, when you kin read a wud like him, easy-like,
same as I do--_succumstance_--see!--_suc-cum-stance_--you' educashum
mighty neah complete."
Satisfied with this feat, however, the old man turned from the text to
the pictures, which were less trying, he declared, to his eyesight.
His attention was at once caught by a little girl, in an old-fashioned
pinafore, driving a hoop amid a fairly Edenic profusion of butterflies,
flowers, and birds, with a squirrel eating a nut overhead. For a moment
he stared fixedly through his grimy lenses, and then his hands trembled
with excitement.
"Sonny," he almost shouted, "dis the same Secum Reader ole Mis' done
learn _me_ out of! Dar's li'l' gull with her hoop, and squ'ull up
above. An' dar"--turning a page--"is li'l' boy with pony--spotted
pony with a collah 'stid of breas'-strap. An' dar anudder li'l' boy
with white rabbits. I 'members 'em all. I 'members what ole Mis' said
about 'em all," he ran on eagerly, while Moss' own eyes grew large
with wonder at the strange coincidence. "I 'members de day ole Mis'
guve me de book. I done driv' her back that day fum the Law'ences',
where she spend the day with ole Mis' Lutie. She spend lots of days
with ole Mis' Lutie, 'cause ole Mis' Lutie's husband killed in Mexican
Wah, same as ole Mistis'. An' as we driv' up the ca'igeway, Miss Pen
and Marse Willie Hahpeh, her cousin, come kitin' by us on theh hosses,
makin' sich a clatter, my hosses shied in the blackberry-bushes. But
Miss Pen juss larf, like she always do when Marse Willie with her, and
neveh slowed up a bit. Ole Mis' kind of sighed and sayed: 'Benjy, that
gull gwine breck her neck some day on that hoss.' An' I say, 'Mis'
Judie, neveh while Marse Willie aroun'. He got better use for her neck
than breckin' it.' An' she say, 'Shut up, Benjy; you fohget they fust
cousins.' So we kim on up to the po'ch. Then she han' me a book an'
say, 'Benjy, that's Secum Reader. You done learn all they is in the
Fust.' An', sonny, it's the same book, the same book."
For a moment he was lost in reverie. His faded, age-filmed eyes, lifted
to an archipelago of fleecy cloudlets, grew dreamy as his mind wandered
back to the shady driveways of the old Harper mansion; the spacious,
rose-curtained veranda; the cool, high-ceiled rooms within; Old Marse
and Old Mis', Miss Pen and Miss Patty, and the troops of guests who
kept the great house ringing with merriment, with few intermissions,
from January till December.
"Times is change, sonny," he murmured plaintively. "Ole Mistis been
grave-dust fo' thutty yeahs, eenamost, I reckon. Miss Pen done
mah'd Marse Willie, spite of bein' fust cousins; de Wah kem on, an'
Benjy--fool Benjy--run away with the Linkum sojers. Yass, ole fool
Benjy run away with the Linkum sojers, an' been livin' on 'taters and
sow-belly eveh since."
The new Second Reader was forgotten, and he rambled on with the tale
of the old days--a tale which had neither beginning nor end, whose
characters and events grew sharper with each repetition, and of which
the old man never grew weary.
It was a tale of which Moss never grew weary, either. In his childhood
it had served him in lieu of the fairy-tales which a white child hears
at its mother's knees, and throughout his later years it had served him
in lieu of books, pictures, music--in short, had been the sole food
of his esthetic nature. At Harper Hall, before the War, according to
Benjy, it was never too hot or too cold; birds and flowers were present
throughout the year; the grass was always green, the streams were
always full of water; nobody ever worked very hard; there was always
time to fish and hunt, to dance and play the banjo; there was always
plenty to eat. Best of all, there was always love. In that Garden of
Eden, a broken head or a broken heart was equally sure of healing balm.
Old Mis', Miss Pen, and Miss Patty were little lower than the angels.
Moss had heard of slavery, of course. He even knew that his father
had been a slave. But the word conveyed little meaning to him. The
war of which his father so often spoke was equally vague. The only
clear thing about it was that it had ended the old times and begun the
new. How vastly superior those old times had been to the new! What
possible comparison could there be, for instance, between Harper Hall
and Goosefoot Lane? What a fallen creature was the landlord at the
Bluegrass, compared with Benjy's old master! How miserable a thing was
Moss' daily fare beside the feasts to which his father habitually used
to sit down!
[Illustration: "MOST OF THE HOTEL NEGROES SPENT THIS RECESS IN AN
ADJACENT DIVE"]
The old man was still muttering reminiscently, and Moss was still
sitting with his chin buried in his hands, when an apparition appeared
at the head of the Lane. It was a lady, with a white parasol and
broad-brimmed white hat, daintily lifting a fluffy, many-ruffled white
skirt, and exposing a pair of white shoes and stockings. She nodded
amiably at the blacks on either side as she picked her way along, and
halted once for a bit of chat; but at last she bore airily down on Moss
Harper's stoop, where she folded her parasol as a dove might fold its
wings on reaching its ledge.
It was then, and not till then, that a stranger, unless a Southerner,
would have discovered that black blood flowed in her veins--that she
was, in the vernacular of the South, a "nigger"--no more so and no less
so than her thick-lipped, ebon-hued husband, Moss Harper.
She paused for a last covetous glimpse of the stream of life flowing
past the head of the Lane, out there in the white man's world, and
then, with a careless nod at her husband, she passed through the squat
doorway of the musty den--a butterfly entering a rat-hole.
Moss had not spoken,--with elemental human nature mere words count for
little,--but his mind glided from Benjy's broken recital to his wife.
He never thought of her as half white, for she had been suckled at
a black breast; she had played with black pickaninnies; her present
associates were black, like her husband; and she spoke the jargon of
the blacks. He preferred, in fact, to think of her as of his own race.
Yet her undeniable beauty, her fair skin and her wavy hair, were facts
to be reckoned with. And beneath that fair skin and wavy hair were
other things to be reckoned with--yearnings and ambitions unknown to
an Ethiopian, a taste for fine clothes, a discontent with her present
state and a blind groping for something better in the way of life, all
handed down in her white father's blood.
It is true that the ladies for whom Estelle formerly acted as maid had
pronounced her worthless--vain, frivolous, and dishonest. And they
were right. She was a thief. The beautiful skirt which she had this
day flaunted in the envious eyes of the wenches of Goosefoot Lane had
been stolen from the laundry at which she worked three days in a week,
and many a neat job of shoplifting had she done. Yet, after all, these
were only mistaken means to a great End--means which, if history speaks
true, were not unknown to a far-distant generation of our own race when
they were groping _their_ way out of the darkness of barbarism.
Of these means Moss, fortunately, knew nothing; for old Benjy, rigidly
drilled in honesty by his mistress, had done the same for his son. But
the End he saw, mistily and uncertainly, for Estelle had handed over
to him a great deal of that which her father had handed down to her;
and it was toward this end that he himself was now making his slow and
painful way, with a Second Reader in his hand.
Estelle laid off her scented finery lingeringly and lovingly, put on
a calico wrapper, and passed into the diminutive lean-to which they
called a kitchen. Five minutes later she appeared at the front door,
shot a searching glance up the Lane for anything of interest, and
coolly announced supper. Then the man who, for eleven hours of seven
days in the week, served other men with every luxury which the four
quarters of the globe could supply, sat down to a meal of buttermilk,
cold potatoes, and dry bread.
* * * * *
When Moss got home again that night, Estelle was sitting on the stoop
alone, old Benjy having gone to bed with the chickens, as usual. His
eyes brightened, for very often she was summoned to the laundry at
night to take care of "immediate" work from the hotels, she being an
expert at ironing women's fine fabrics. He sat down beside her on one
of the benches which flanked the stoop, and she rested her head on his
arm, as if weary.
"You done paid Fitzpatrick the rent to-day?" he finally asked.
"Yass."
"You show him that hole in the flo'?"
"Yass." She dropped her long dark lashes for an instant, and then
added: "I _tole_ him about it. He di'n' come here. I took the money to
his saloom. You know, he sayed if he haved to come here again fo' that
money, he th'ow us out in the alley."
"He ain' neveh tried to th'ow _me_ yet," observed Moss quietly. "We'll
th'ow ourseffs out befo' long. We ain' gwine to live in this hawg-pen
all the time." He paused, and added more gently: "I don' want you to go
to his saloom no mo', 'Stelle."
"I went in the side do'," she explained. "Nobody di'n' see me. An' I
di'n' go no furder than the do'. But I won' go no mo' ef you don' want
me to."
"I don' want you to," he repeated definitely. "I don' want him to
insult you like he did me when I axed him to fix that hole what you
could th'ow a bull thoo."
"Why, Mossie, you neveh tole me about that! What he say?" There was an
indescribable undertone--possibly of amusement--in her velvety voice.
"He sayed he'd hoss-whip me ef I eveh come to his saloom again beggin'
for repai's."
Estelle's lashes again quivered slightly, and her lips parted in the
shadow of a smile--just enough to reveal the straight, faultless
joint between her two rows of glistening teeth. She reached for the
great black hand which rested on his knee and laid it in her lap,
covering it with her own. It was as if she recognized in that member
of sledge-hammer size and hardness a sure defense from all harm. Yet
the light which played in her eyes, as she lazily turned her face
toward his, was still half-ironical. Was it Caucasian fleering at
Ethiopian--white blood mocking black?
"Moss, I'd lak to see him try to hoss-whip you." She laughed at the
thought.
"You mus'n' want me to fight," he rebuked her quietly. "I don' lak
to fight. I want to git where I won' never have to fight. When I
gits awdained as preacher, we gwine live in the country, an' have a
li'l' house with a gyahden, where dad kin potter roun' and raise us
veg'tables. You won' have to wuk in no laundry then, or live in a
hawg-pen lak this."
Estelle was quiet for several minutes, with her large eyes fixed
reflectively on the stars.
"When you think you gwine be awdained?" she finally asked.
"Pretty soon, now; soon's I learns to read a li'l' better."
But in his heart he was not so sure. Old Benjy was of the opinion that
he would at least have to go through the Third Reader to qualify for
ordination, and he was only beginning the Second.
"You think you lak the country better as you do the city?" asked
Estelle hesitatingly.
"Don' you?" he demanded in astonishment.
"Oh, _I_ do," she hastened to assure him. "But I was juss wunnerin' ef
you wou'n' make mo money in a big chu'ch in the city as you would in a
li'l' chu'ch in the country."
"Got to take li'l' chu'ch fust," he observed astutely.
That he was still dissatisfied with her question, Estelle seemed to
detect by some sixth sense, for she ran on suavely: "You know, I neveh
lived in the country, lak you. Tha's why I axed you what I did. I
reckon I don' know how sweet the country is. Moss, I wish we gwine the
country to-mo'ow to live!" She flung her arms about his neck and let
herself settle down upon his broad chest.
Tears filled the giant's eyes. "I wish you was, honey. But I cyarn take
you--juss yit. Got to wait a li'l' while--juss a li'l' while."
In that moment Estelle probably meant what she said. In that moment
her love for the man whose name she bore was probably uppermost in her
foolish heart. In that moment her impulse toward a higher life may have
carried her beyond her love of finery, and she may have been willing to
give up the city and the very questionable means which it afforded for
securing that finery.
[Illustration: "IT WAS INTO THIS ATMOSPHERE THAT THE STUDENT TOOK HIS
WAY"]
II
We drift along the placid stream of Time, complaining of the monotony
of the voyage, when already the murmur of rapids which are to try every
muscle and thrill every nerve might be heard if we but stilled our
peevish notes long enough to listen. A week after the above events a
party of four ladies from central Kentucky arrived one evening at the
Bluegrass. The register showed them to be mother and daughters; and
their gentle manners and soft voices, added to the beauty of the girls,
had put the clerk on his mettle, spurring him to an exhibition of his
choicest Kentucky gallantry. He had just promised them a large, cool
room on the second floor, containing two beds, and, in answer to their
laughing, half-ironical request that they might be shown the Congo
King, he had assured them that they should be seated at that royal
scion's table.
"You certainly are entitled to the privilege," he added blandly, "for
his real name is the same as yours."
"Harper?" queried the mother of the pretty trio, with some surprise.
"Yes; Moss Harper."
The four ladies exchanged quick glances.