Part 21

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.

So Dr. Tom took him in hand and decided to make a stable boy of him. Sam’l became at once every inch a horseman; he had great adaptability. True, whenever he entered a stall he got kicked, horses being intuitive creatures, not easily deceived. But Dr. Tom bore with him until one morning he found Sam’l running his aged, cherished buggy mare, Miss Susy, round and round the back lot, riding her neck like a jockey, plying the outraged favourite with whip and spur--“jes’ givin’ the ol’ gal a breath-out,” he explained, “to take the rheumatics out’n her knees.” Incidentally, he gave Miss Susy an attack of heaves from which she never recovered.

After that Aunt Lady thought best to take Sam’l into the house under her own eye, where there were less valuable things than horses to learn upon; and that was the period during which we had discovered him, dramatizing himself on the model of Judge Cornish’s stately old factotum, Romulus. He had already, in his zeal, polished most of the silver off Aunt Lady’s tea set, and he averaged one smash a meal; whereas Romulus had never been known in his long career to break so much as a teacup.

“Sam’l can’t seem really to _do_ things, somehow,” said Aunt Lady, sighing. “He just does _at_ ’em. Play-acting, like. ‘Monkey motions’; you remember?”

It was a game the little darkies used to play when we were all young together, a left-over from the care-free days of slavery and the plantation “street.” A leader, chosen for skill at pantomime, would select something to imitate, and the circle around him must represent the subject as best they could each in his own way, singing as they went:

“I ack monkey moshuns, too-ra-loo; I ack monkey moshuns, so I do. I ack ’em good, and dat’s a fack: I ack jes’ like dem monkeys ack.”