Chapter IX: Introduction: The Judges (9)

There was no way of knowing what time it was and yet it might not be more than ten o’clock, Ronny thought. People ashore were just leaving hotels to go out for the evening, or dressing gaily for a dance. How strange it was--they here; those other people over there, hundreds of them, thousands of them, laughing and well fed and happy, walking around on pavements under bright lights. He could see them vividly, hear the murmur of their voices, the scuffing of their feet on sidewalks; and yet they could not think of the six here, even imagine them, or their helpless plight in the black devouring ocean, unless there were headlines in a morning paper. How queer things were.

And the stars far overhead moved slightly and slowly on their steady courses, and the black water lifted and lashed and fell, lifted and fell, lifted and fell, and the wind hummed its three notes interminably. Ronny’s head swam a little with a creeping weariness. His body was clammy inside and out, and it was extraordinary how his arms could ache.

Then Gloria’s wire went loose and she slipped down with a choked gasp and her head went under, and Ronny dived for her--dived with desperation, so that he crashed full into her down there in the strong surge, and came up with her weight caught in his arms. She coughed and tried to swim a little and spluttered and tried to conceal from him that she was crying in sheer wet misery. Then he could not find her piece of wire. It must have gone down, too. He put one arm around her and held her tightly while she recovered herself. Their wet bodies close together warmed each other feebly, and he was grateful for it. Her shivering stopped slowly and she put out a hand to a strut and held on, so that he was relieved of her weight. He took off what was left of his shirt and tied it around her and around the strut but warned her hoarsely not to trust it too much, torn and sodden as it was.

Then he dozed a little, locking his grip and jerking it tight again before it quite relaxed. It seemed to him that a second of real sleep, half a second of sleep, would be an oblivion so delicious that it would make up for everything. It was always just ahead--just ahead--and then salt water smacked in his face and he was wide awake again and his father’s head had disappeared, and he had to dive twice before he brought him safely back again and held him while he recovered from the longer immersion.

A fear that was not like any fear he had known yet clutched coldly at his heart. Was it really a possibility--could it be possible!--that he might lose someone down there? Was death really so near to any one of them in this casual adventure?

The stars slid a little; the waters hissed; the wind screamed. Time was an interminable agony, welding impossible moment to impossible moment that crawled, crawled, crawled. Gloria slipped in again, and then his father, and then Colonel Kinney, losing his wire, and Ronny dived again and again. He had lost track of the number of times. He was not even sure which one it was he hauled heavily to the surface, clinging to him and coughing weakly. Now his right leg was getting cramped. The pain shot up the stiffened muscle, needlelike and searing. Suppose it caught him down there next, when he most needed all the strength he had? He was ashamed to rouse Bill, but he had to, and he heard his own voice, husky and humble, as Bill’s had been.

Bill roused instantly and took charge. Ronny hooked his arm over the cockpit edge, and the doze that moved upon him was delightful. Yet it seemed only a moment when Bill was calling him again, exhausted, and the stars were altered and it was hours later.

As Ronny moved out to be among the others, and Bill hung gasping, he counted them carefully, to make sure they were all there. His hands lingered on a shoulder, and he saw that it was his father. After a moment his father’s voice came to him wearily. “Still--hanging--on,” he said. “Don’t go doing--too much now. We--depend on--you and Bill--a lot.”

The night went like that, passing so slowly, with such a minute succession of incidents, of wretchedness, that it seemed impossible that it could ever end or change above a half-drowned world.

So that when Ronny, floundering on a wave top, with one arm holding up Gloria, happened to see in the east a streak of pale colour, he stared at it for a long time with puzzled, bloodshot eyes, wondering dully what it could be. The glow widened, the sky and sea around it turned pale gray. A streak of burning gold swelled into that. And Ronny cried out suddenly, in his surprise, “Look; it’s morning!”

The tender light fell on faces sodden and strained almost beyond recognition. But even as the light grew white and radiant over the crested wave tops and the strange emerald of the waters, animation came into the faces and they were once more his father and Gloria and Mrs. Kinney and the colonel and Bill.

As if light were the supreme necessity, the supreme miracle, they sought it. It was hope; it was food; it was safety; it was life. A faint burst of animation, exclamation, broken words, feeble, husky laughter passed among them like a renewed pledge. They were once more capable of watching the sea to the west, where any moment now a boat might come. Yet no boat came. The flash of spray was only the edge of a higher wave. The drone was only the wind in the wires. Bill, lifting himself up with greater difficulty now, peered out above them over an empty sea.

Presently the reassuring warmth of the sun had changed to the agonizing glare of yesterday. Their faces were a raw crimson against which the wave edges were knife cuts. Their salt-crusted lips were swollen and cracked. Their eyes were bloodshot and inflamed. Ronny and Bill managed to find rags enough about them to make masks to tie over the faces of the four. Ronny and Bill dared not mask themselves. They had to be on the alert now, both of them. For now that the flash of hope was over and the sun glared nearer and nearer to noon, the others slipped down more easily into the blue depths. It was easier to find them there now, that was all.

It must have been afternoon when Colonel Kinney, slipping down almost without a splash, eluded Ronny’s grasp. Beneath the surface the big body was only a whirling shadow which Ronny caught lightly once and lost. When Ronny’s lungs seemed bursting he shot to the surface empty-handed, with despairing eyes for Bill’s anxious look. One full breath and he was down again, fighting down amidst the strong heave and swirl of the waters, and Bill was with him. Twice they clutched each other fiercely. There was no other shape.

Gasping dreadfully the two hung together on the fuselage, staring into each other’s eyes. There was nothing to be said. Ronny was thankful for the mask over Mrs. Kinney’s eyes. She need not know yet. She was like a dead thing, hanging there, half held by the wire about her, with one hand locked about a strut. She clung as if by no volition of her own, but only the gripping tenacity of the life within her, straining to go on. The sun beat down upon them. The wind screamed steadily in the wires. The eternal water roared and hissed. No one had said anything for hours and hours.

It was late afternoon. “Ron,” whispered his father feebly through his mask, “where’s the colonel?”

“Gone,” said Ronny after a moment. “I--lost him.”

His father tore off his mask suddenly. Beneath it the contorted swollen features were almost unrecognizable. “He’s lucky,” his father rasped. “Why not? Why not?”

“Hush, Dad,” Ronny said patiently, “they’ll hear you. There’ll be a boat before long. There must be.”

Andrew Burgess said nothing more. Ronny stared at the haggard, bitter face where the stiff gray hairs bristled about the chin. It smote through his numbed brain suddenly that his father--his splendid father--was an old, old man.

The sunset flared hideously down upon them. Another night came slowly from the west. And Gloria, tearing off her mask, leaned back abruptly in the rag that held her, and tore free. Her lips strained back from her gaunt face in a queer tense smile and she threw both hands over her head and went down suddenly, before Ronny could guess what she had intended. And below there was only the swirl and the silvery bubbles of his own and Bill’s frantic search.

When they came back again it was almost night, and Ronny was shaken by a paroxysm of grief which he had not even strength enough to express in sobs. He remembered vaguely how beautiful she had been on that morning, ages ago, when he was a boy, before the flight began.

In that night his father disappeared. It was a night such as Ronny had never dreamed possible. He and Bill were left alone in all the lost world, hanging mute and feeble on each side of the faintly warm figure of Mrs. Kinney. Her wire still held. With the mask off, under the stars, her face was not so ravaged as the others. From time to time she moaned a little and they took turns in chafing gently her clammy hands and feet. She was something infinitely precious that they had left to care for, in the whirling chaos in their minds, in the roaring black about them and the high black over them, punctuated with the glittering smear of stars.

When the sun at last broke up the permanence of that night they blinked their salt-incrusted eyes at each other unbelievably, to see the sun, to see that they were still there--three nameless, shapeless beings, under the incredible light.

Ronny turned his head presently to see a boat come surging toward them with a great fan of spray at the bow--a boat with men in it, with young, dry, smooth faces looking anxiously at them, and waving. Ronny watched it come with no emotion whatsoever. He had always known that it would come. But now that hardly mattered.

When hands clutched and hauled him up, he fought them until he saw they had clutched also Bill and Mrs. Kinney. He felt himself in a dry boat, with something to drink burning in his throat. But he felt nothing. There was nothing to feel. Until they told him, gently, that Mrs. Kinney had been dead for very many hours. Then he cried with terrible retching sobs, vaguely ashamed that Bill should see him so.

“DONE GOT OVER”

BY ALMA AND PAUL ELLERBE

From _Collier’s_

Woodie Simmons walked past the house three times before he found courage to open the gate. He was trying to decide what he was going to say. His mind switched; no sooner had he chosen sentences than he forgot them and thought of others. He went up the walk at last because he was afraid that if he delayed longer he wouldn’t be able to think of any at all.

There were four-o’clocks on either side of the walk, their blossoms furled into tight little yellow and red fists, and beyond them prince’s feather, nasturtiums, a chinaberry tree, and a syringa bush all mixed in with tomatoes (the kind that bear small fruit, like red marbles), collards, mint, jimson weeds and white and yellow dog fennel. The Rev. Zachariah Draper spent but little time on things like gardening. But his congregation kept his house in good repair. It was the best in the Negro section of Lower Habersham.

Woodie knocked. There was the sound of a tilted chair let down to the floor, and then of a heavy foot, and Draper came into the doorless hallway that ran through the middle of the house with the slinging slouch that had always made Woodie think of an enormous, sore-footed cat. He had been afraid of the preacher all his life.

“Good-morning,” he said, as simply as he could, but he knew his voice had a stilted sound.

Draper straightened and fumbled with his collar, which was unbuttoned. He buttoned it and made a pompous bow. “Howdy, suh? What can Ah do fer yer?”

The boy had the miserable consciousness that he had been mistaken for a white man. He was tall for his seventeen years, with a coffee-and-cream coloured skin; the light shone from behind him; he and Draper had not met for five years, and he wore the kind of clothes that in that place only white men wore: a gray tweed suit, tan Oxford shoes and blue socks, a clean white collar, a blue cravat and a sailor straw hat. He was intensely conscious of them, but they were all he had.

“It--it’s jest Woodie Simmons, Brudder Zach,” he stammered, dropping desperately into the vernacular in an attempt at conciliation. “Don’t yer know me?”

Draper came nearer, and the morning sun shone on his boldly modelled, lustful face until it gleamed like oiled black marble. His huge body seemed to exude health and strength, along with a rank, unpleasant odour of its own and the smell of snuff. He wore enormous carpet slippers on his bare feet, blue overalls, a dirty white stiff shirt without a cravat, and the greenish black frock coat which was his inevitable badge of office. He tilted back his head, his lips curled away from his snuff-chinked teeth and bluish gums, something lightened in his live black eyes and he broke into a great whoop of laughter.

The volume and unexpectedness of it startled the boy. He shrank back as if he had been pushed. His anger rose, but fear and grief made him weak.

“Li’l Woodie Simmons!” Draper roared. “Li’l’ pickaninny Woodie, dressed up lak’ _dat_!” He drew an immense blue handkerchief with white polka dots on it from the tails of his coat and wiped his eyes and blew his nose, watching Woodie the while with a malignant shrewdness beneath his feigned amusement. He enjoyed the boy’s discomfort and wanted to prolong it. “Tell me, son, do de Yankee white man what’s payin’ fer yer at dat school up North throw in dem clo’es?”

“He--he pays all my expenses. All the boys dress thisaway. And--and everybody else in the town.”

“Do tell! Ah thought mebbe dey’d done made yer er perfesser or somethin’. And now yer’s done gradyerwaited yerse’f, is yer gwine take de colonel’s place down ter de bank, or be de chief er _po_lice, or what?”

Woodie’s eyes filled with tears. He trembled like a colt in a thunderstorm--he was leggy and sensitive and slender like a colt. “Brother Zack,” he said timidly, “my father--died--last night.”

A swift change went over the preacher. His easy, bantering air disappeared. He bent forward an intent grave face. Always and innately dramatic, he listened in every line.

“There’s nobody but--but you to preach--at his funeral. Will you--will you please do it?”

Draper gazed at the boy for a long moment. “Tampa Simmons daid!” he said slowly. He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, nodding his head to emphasize the words. “Tampa Simmons _daid_!”

He still seemed to be listening, but now to something inside himself. His unseeing eyes were turned inward. A change went over his face and illumined his eye. He regarded Woodie with stern dignity. The boy knew the issue had been settled, but not how.

“Yer paw was er backslider an’ er Philly-stine. He turned his back on ’ligion. He fought me up an’ he fought me down, ever since de day Ah first come ter de Ole Ship er Zion, fifteen years ago. Ah wrastled wid um in de presence uv de Lawd, an’ he scandalized mah name.”

It was the deep, sure barytone that had won him half his battles. He could turn it on like an organ stop whenever he needed it. It had a strangely moving quality. Woodie felt it in the flesh of his back.

“But de Sperret says ter me: ‘Bury um from de Ole Ship an’ preach ter his funeral.’ Ah feel de Sperret movin’ in mah heart, an’ dat what it say: ‘Bury um from de Ole Ship an’ preach ter his funeral.’ Yer can tell yer maw Ah’ll do it.”

Woodie told her two hours later, after he had bought food in the town, made arrangements for the funeral to be held the next morning at nine o’clock--the hour set by Draper--notified their friends, and jogged the three miles back home on the old white mule that had gone down the furrows ahead of his father ever since he could remember.

“Praise de name er Jesus!” she said gently in her soft voice. “Glory be ter Gawd! Ah never thought he’d do it!”

She turned her face to the whitewashed wall where she lay on her bed and began to cry quietly to herself, from relief. Before Woodie could leave the room she had gone to sleep, for the first time in forty-eight hours.

She was a soft, plump little woman, almost the same colour as her son, full of kindness and forgivingness. She had had no part in the feud between her husband and the preacher. She had always gone to church at the Old Ship of Zion. When Draper became a part of it she had accepted him without question. He preached only hate and fear: hate of the unconverted, of the liberal-minded, of white people, and fear of, almost equally, God and the devil, but she didn’t see that. She was perplexed and frightened when her husband denounced him as unchristian and withdrew his family from the church. That had been fifteen years ago, when Woodie was a baby.

Other people had followed Tampa Simmons--who was a good deal of a leader in his own right--but not for long. There was fascination in the very boards of the Old Ship and a dread fascination in Draper. His gift of torrential oratory was unlike anything the Piney Woods had known. His congregation whispered that he “had a hand,” and shivered with dreadful pleasure, seeing his power as half from Satan and half from God, and wholly interesting. Their meagre lives would have been barren of entertainment, their genuine religious fervour denied an outlet, without Draper and the Old Ship. Everyone had drifted back but the Simmonses.

Woodie’s mother had remained away solely from loyalty to his father. As Woodie lingered, looking down at her, he realized with a pang that at any time during the fifteen years she would have returned to the Old Ship, if she could, as a carrier pigeon to its home. She had never really understood how his father felt, nor why. Woodie had understood, even five years ago--when he was too young to talk about it. He could have talked about it now, and now it was too late.

He went into the other room. Pieces of dark cloth had been tacked up at the windows to keep out the light. Two old women were bent together beside the fireless hearth. He had always called them Aunt Caroline and Aunt Miranda, but they were not related to him. He could barely see them in the half dark, but the mound of his father’s body beneath a sheet on the bed stood out clearly. Nothing could have lain so still which had not once had life in it. The room smelled of medicine and snuff and food, and somehow faintly of death. The old women were talking in whispers and dipping snuff.

There was another woman in the lean-to kitchen, beside the stove, where he had never seen anyone but his mother. She was cooking dinner: collards, turnip greens with pork, and crackling bread. The strong odours made him a little queasy. The woman was stout and black and shone with perspiration. She had big, loose breasts and cheeks and lips and shrewd, tolerant eyes. She wore the garbled remains of white women’s clothes: shoes broken at the bulges, a black silk skirt that had split on the creases, and a newly blackened waist still damp with pokeberry dye. Her face looked strange to Woodie without its usual half smile. Her name was Maria Knox, and her husband was a truck gardener. He had known her all his life, but when they spoke to each other their words were stiff and unnatural. He had played with her children almost every day until he went away, but now it seemed that it wasn’t he who had known them.

He was feeling more clearly and deeply than he had ever felt; the impressions made upon him were going to last until he was an old man, but because he kept seeing himself as if he were someone else, he thought he wasn’t much affected, and was disappointed in himself. He couldn’t help seeing the house as if it were a stage-set for a play about inferior people, and the people in the house as if they had been actors, and that seemed to him cruel and unworthy.

He went on out of doors and sat on a stump near the house, where his father used to smoke his pipe in the evening. It came to him there that _he_ was the head of the family now. Somehow he had to take the place of the strong, resourceful man who was dead. He felt slight and ignorant--incompetent. The flash and fragrance of the spring day seemed inappropriate and unnatural. He held up his hand to shield his eyes. The fresh yellow-jasmine-scented air was strange in his nostrils.

He stared off across the clearing. That, too, seemed like a scene in a play, and yet no other spot of ground was so familiar. The climbing sun lit as if they had been candles the red trumpet flowers that hung on a twisted pine. There had always been a trumpet vine on that tree....

Something moved near the base of the tree. He looked more closely and saw that it was a woman. She was waving her hand--beckoning. He got up and walked across the clearing.

As he came nearer he recognized a spry, birdlike creature who played the melodeon in the Old Ship. He remembered that she used to give him tea cakes.

“Why, howdy, sis? Charity?” He held out his hand.

She took it and peered at him with nearsighted eyes from a kindly face as wrinkled as a nanny-oak ball.

“Howdy, Woodie? Yer sho’ has growed lak’ er weed! De spittin’ image uv yer maw! Ah called yer over hyeh ter keep from disturbin’ her. Ah--Ah got somethin’ ter tell yer.”

Her eyes blinked rapidly; she put her head first on one side and then on the other with quick little jerks and her fingers worked nervously together.

“Dat low-down nigger, dat Zach Draper”--she looked around uneasily--“when he preach ter yer paw’s funeral ter-morrer, he gwine--gwine”--her voice shook--“_he gwine sen’ his soul ter hell!_”

Woodie stared in blank amazement. “He’s go’n’er do _what_?”

“_He gwine sen’ yer paw’s soul ter hell!_”

“But--but how can he? What’s _he_ got to do with it? Don’t everybody know Pappy was a good man? Do you think anybody will believe him?”

“_Ev’ybody_ b’lieve um! Ain’t he de preacher? An’ ain’t yer paw laid his ’ligion down? Fer fifteen years he ain’t gone ter church nowhar!”

“There warn’t anywheres else to go but the Old Ship.”

“That ain’t gwine make no diff’rence ter most folks. Dey’ll say Brudder Zach’s got de right ter decide ’bout dat. He’s er powerful man when it comes ter de ’splainments uv de Sperret!”

Woodie had the feel of things crumbling down inside of him. “I’ll--stop him somehow!” he said in a choked voice; but he felt frightened and confused. He looked into the troubled eyes of the little organist. “What can I do, sis--Charity?” he faltered.

“Ah dunno, chile! Ah dunno! Ah’s knowed yer paw all mah life, and, preacher or no preacher, Zach Draper ain’t fitten ter tote swill fer um!”

“Can’t you--can’t you change him somehow? Can’t you talk him out of it?”

“Ah’s done tried ter! Ah’s talked ter um till he won’t listen ter me no mo’.”

Woodie shook with sudden anger. “Did you tell him he’s ornery--lowdown--mean?”

“Gawd A’mighty, boy, Ah dassent! Ah’m skeered uv um! Ev’ybody’s skeered uv um!” She lowered her voice almost to a whisper: “Dey do say he’s got er han’!”

Woodie shivered. You got a “hand” from a conjure doctor, and it gave you supernatural power over your enemies. He had thought, off at school, that he had come to regard such things as nonsense, but down here a deep live current of terror ran through the people, and he found himself tingling to it as he used to do.

Woodie stood for a long time beneath the swaying trumpet flowers, thinking. There was one person who could stop Draper if she would. Miss Jinny Pickens could stop any coloured man or woman in that county from doing anything. His grandfather and grandmother had belonged to her, and he had seen his father and mother turn to her in every emergency. He went to her now as naturally as they would have done.

But first he told the three women what Charity had said, and made them promise to help him keep it from his mother.

From the other side of the gentle tree-smothered valley that stretched before it the house lifted itself with its old air of remote nobility, but when he had walked up the long, winding driveway under the oaks and hickory trees and sycamores, he saw that the paint had flaked from the tall Corinthian columns--which no longer had the effect of propping up the sky--and that the iron balcony behind them drooped like a disillusioned mouth.

And at the rear, where all coloured people were supposed to enter and his feet took him of their own accord, the arms of the tall fig tree couldn’t hide the broken shutters at the windows, the gaps in the railing of the upstairs porch, nor the rotting boards of the steps--the air the old place had of dropping minutely into ruin, bit by bit.

The harsh smell of fig leaves in the sun came to him strongly, and he took a sudden sharp breath. It brought back his father more vividly than even the sight of his dead face had done. Tampa Simmons seemed to be standing against the big three-fingered leaves, heavily listed to the left on account of his lame leg, just as he had stood that day when he had brought cream (and Woodie) to the back yard and Miss Jinny had come out to talk with him.

“Miss Jinny, ma’am,” he had said, “Ah don’t want mah li’l’ boy ter grow up ter be lak’ Ah is! Miss Jinny--look at me!” He had spread out his work-twisted hands in the mellow sunshine of late afternoon and looked at her earnestly, and Miss Jinny (and Woodie) had looked at him. “Ah don’t know nothin’; Ah can’t read an’ Ah can’t write; Ah ain’t got nothin’ an’ Ah ain’t never goin’ ter have. Ah’m jest er cawnfiel’ nigger--er li’l’ better’n er mule. Don’t yer expec’ that mebbe somehow it might be fixed so’s mah li’l’ boy might be--diff’rent?”

Woodie heard again the grave, self-respecting bass and saw the deeply furrowed, kindly face looking out at him with what had come to be to the boy the wistfulness of their race.

Miss Jinny, too, had seen and heard, and felt, and in the end had found a man in Boston--and Jerusalem seemed no farther from the Piney Woods--to send Woodie away to school and give him such an opportunity as had fallen to the lot of no other coloured child he had ever known. Even his vacations were provided for: that the experiment might have a thorough chance, he had spent them, until this year, with a prosperous Negro family who had a summer place in Maine.

Behind the humble Simmons family always, as protection, somehow, from any hardship too great to be borne, had stood the great rock of Miss Jinny Pickens: impoverished, elderly, and alone, but a Pickens; knit into the fibres of the state; indomitable by nature and affiliations. Woodie felt her there. He stepped up and knocked at her door with confidence.

The door was opened by a woman of his own race whom he did not know. “_She_ ain’t hyeh!” she said, with inflections that suggested that only the undesirable wouldn’t have known it. “She done gone ter Leestown, ter see Miss Sadie Lee.”

The Lees were cousins of the Pickenses. He hadn’t thought of any of the old names for a long time. He asked when Miss Jinny would return.

“Mebbe ter-morrer an’ mebbe not. Is you Tampa Simmons’ boy?”

When he said he was she told him what Draper meant to do at the funeral. She told him with sympathy, but with a strange gusto. There had been a trace of it even in the kindly Charity.

He had come through the woods. As he went back by the road and one Negro after another stopped him to tell him the same thing in the same way, the sick consciousness dawned within him of something which he could not have expressed. The sympathy of these people was real enough, but there was in it an excitation of horror that they craved; a brushing near of occult and of awful things. They awaited his father’s funeral in a state of delicious, morbid expectancy.

If Miss Jinny failed him!...

He got out the old white mule and started for Leestown.

When he returned the mule to the stable a round white moon was pouring light steadily into the velvet darkness. Sore and stiff, he stumbled into the kitchen, where a pallet had been fixed for him on the floor.

He had ridden the mule to Leestown and back--twenty-four miles. He had had to ride slowly, because the old mule tired easily and had gone a little lame. He would have made the trip by stage, but no stage went in the afternoon. Both towns were off the railroad.

He had gone to Miss Sadie Lee’s house, and again Miss Jinny had been away. Miss Sadie had taken her motoring. The best he had been able to accomplish was to leave a note, to be delivered to Miss Jinny immediately upon her return. He hadn’t dared wait for her. If she wasn’t going to stop Zach Draper, he had to do it himself.

He couldn’t sleep. His mind ran all night, as uselessly as the arms of an unconnected windmill. It showed him scores of unrelated pictures: the faces of boys he knew off at school; the little white New England church in the village there; Draper, laughing at him; a bend in the creek where he used to swim; his father’s body; the corner of a cornfield behind a snake fence covered with purple morning glories. It repeated scraps of the day’s conversations. On and on and on. It reverberated soundlessly with the voodooistic terror that ran through the Negroes of the Piney Woods at the prospect of the morrow’s sensation. Fear, like a hot wind, blew across it, searing and drying his thoughts. He felt things older and bigger and more terrible than he had realized threshing around him in the hot, humid Southern air....

Finally he got up and rummaged in a cupboard and slipped his father’s old pistol into the pocket of his coat, where it hung over the back of a chair. He had a plan now. It was as simple as Cain’s....

Toward morning he slept a little.

* * * * *

Woodie sat on the front pew in the Old Ship of Zion, between his mother and Maria Knox. His mother was heavily swathed in borrowed black. Her plump, innocent features, still swollen from weeping, looked purged and peaceful beneath her veil. She alone was unaware of the air of tense expectancy that bound the rest of the congregation together.

In front of them stood his father’s coffin, on two sawhorses banked deep with cape jasmine, which had just begun to bloom; dead-white, half-opened flowers set stiffly in stiff, glistening green leaves. Their heavy odour lay like a blanket over the place in spite of the open windows. A score of spring scents outside strove against it in vain.

Behind him the church filled steadily. He could feel the waiting people: row on close-packed row, all their faces turned one way--tense--expectant--frightened. They were all very still. Somewhere in the distance a man was calling hogs. The long-drawn notes of his voice sounded like a horn. It died away, and the kind of silence that belongs only to funerals fell upon the little church. Into it the clock on the wall plumped nine twangy notes.

Charity spread her thin black fingers over the keys of the melodeon. Draper erected his bulk in the chancel and began lining out the first hymn: “Shall We Gather at the River?”

Woodie’s hour was on him, and Miss Jinny hadn’t come.

Things swam together and went black. He clutched the butt of the pistol in his coat pocket with a cold, damp hand and stared at Draper. The man seemed of superhuman size. He was like something the little church had been built to hold. Woodie shook with fear.

His mother laid her hand on his arm. “Is yer all right, Son?”

“Yes’m,” he muttered thickly, “I’m all right.” But he scarcely heard her and was barely aware that he had replied.

The first notes of the hymn came whining out of the old melodeon. He rose with the rest, and the congregation sang. It passed over his mind in a blur of sound.

Draper knelt beside the pulpit and prayed, and the people bowed their heads to the roll of his voice. Woodie listened long enough to be sure the prayer held no menace for the dead man; the rest of it became a confused rumble in his ears.

Draper rose from his knees. Omitting the hymn between the prayer and the sermon, he looked out over his people--gathered them in with his eye. A hush fell upon them. The faint, lazy call of a distant flycatcher pulsed its way clearly through their midst, and he spoke, slowly.

“Brethren an’ sisters, de hymn done ax yer, shall we gather at de river, de beautiful river dat flows by de throne uv Gawd? An’ _Ah’m_ a-axin’ yer”--he paused, spread out his arms in a slow gesture of restrained power and let his voice fall upon a note that went through the waiting people as a wind through leaves--“_Ah’m_ a-axin’ yer, brethren an’ sisters, when yer gits ter de river, de beautiful river dat flows by de throne uv Gawd, is yer gwine ter be fitten ter _git on de boat_: de big boat dat’s a-waitin’ by de bank, wid de steam a-shootin’ outer de chimbley an’ de paddles a-splashin’ in de water--de big boat dat’s a-waitin’ dar ter take yer on down ter de throne itse’f? _Is yer gwine ter be fitten?_”

A groan went over the people. A scarcely audible sigh of anticipation came out of them. Draper caught it and fanned it. His voice began its steady march toward its goal. Woodie’s mouth grew dry. His heart seemed about to burst.

“It ain’t gwine do yer no good ter _sneak_ on ter de big boat ef yer ain’t fitten, caise’ yer can’t fool de Lawd Jesus! Yer might fool de cap’n er de boat, or de Angel Gabriel, but”--the creak of an automobile brake came through the window--“yer can’t”--his outstretched hand sank to his side--“fool----”

His big features stiffened with displeasure. He stood silent, staring toward the door.

Woodie turned with the rest. His heart bounded like a toy balloon and then crowded up into his throat and stuck there.

Miss Jinny Pickens was coming down the aisle.

But not the Miss Jinny Pickens he remembered: a frail, little old woman with bent back and brown time spots on her wrinkled cheeks, who wore shabby clothes and walked slowly, leaning on a cane.

A swift sense came back to him of the Miss Jinny whose foot had tapped the floor as positively as a woodpecker’s beak against a tree; whose back had been as straight as a child’s; whose movements had been marked with crisp decisiveness; whose clothes had been magnificent.

Or had they only seemed so to the ragged little boy who had never owned a pair of shoes or seen a train? Was it possible that she had been old and frail and shabby then?

He couldn’t tell; but then and always she had been _Miss Jinny Pickens_, and a member of the super-supreme court which in the last analysis settled everything of importance in that countryside. No Negro in the state had ever openly crossed one of them and lived out the day. He looked with swift hope at Draper--and saw that things had changed.

Something inhered in Miss Jinny that stood for power, but Draper didn’t see it. He waited there in haughty, calculating silence, watching her progress down the aisle, through contemptuous, half-closed eyes, unimpressed and unafraid. The consciousness that the issue lay solely between him and Draper grew tight about Woodie’s heart. Miss Jinny faded out for him almost before she had settled herself in the chair that someone brought from the little room behind the melodeon.

And Draper, too, as soon as he began to talk again, forgot her. His 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: