“Does I mine tellin’ you? No, dat
I don’t! You ain’t got no ’casion
to be shame’ o’ yo’ father, I
kin tell you. He wuz de highest quality in dis
whole town—ole Virginny stock. Fust
famblies, he wuz. Jes as good stock as de Driscolls
en de Howards, de bes’ day dey ever seed.”
She put on a little prouder air, if possible, and
added impressively: “Does you ‘member
Cunnel Cecil Burleigh Essex, dat died de same year
yo’ young Marse Tom Driscoll’s pappy died,
en all de Masons en Odd Fellers en Churches turned
out en give him de bigges’ funeral dis town ever
seed? Dat’s de man.”
Under the inspiration of her soaring complacency the
departed graces of her earlier days returned to her,
and her bearing took to itself a dignity and state
that might have passed for queenly if her surroundings
had been a little more in keeping with it.
“Dey ain’t another nigger in dis town
dat’s as highbawn as you is. Now den, go
‘long! En jes you hold yo’ head up
as high as you want to—you has de right,
en dat I kin swah.”
All say, “How
hard it is that we have to die”—a
strange
complaint to come from
the mouths of people who have had to
live. —Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s Calendar
When angry, count
four; when very angry, swear. —
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s
Calendar
Every now and then, after Tom went to bed, he had
sudden wakings out of his sleep, and his first thought
was, “Oh, joy, it was all a dream!” Then
he laid himself heavily down again, with a groan and
the muttered words, “A nigger! I am a nigger!
Oh, I wish I was dead!”
He woke at dawn with one more repetition of this horror,
and then he resolved to meddle no more with that treacherous
sleep. He began to think. Sufficiently bitter
thinkings they were. They wandered along something
after this fashion:
“Why were niggers and whites made?
What crime did the uncreated first nigger commit that
the curse of birth was decreed for him? And why
is this awful difference made between white and black?
. . . How hard the nigger’s fate seems,
this morning!—yet until last night such
a thought never entered my head.”
He sighed and groaned an hour or more away. Then
“Chambers” came humbly in to say that
breakfast was nearly ready. “Tom”
blushed scarlet to see this aristocratic white youth
cringe to him, a nigger, and call him “Young
Marster.” He said roughly:
“Get out of my sight!” and when the youth
was gone, he muttered, “He has done me no harm,
poor wretch, but he is an eyesore to me now, for he
is Driscoll, the young gentleman, and I am a—oh,
I wish I was dead!”
A gigantic eruption, like that of Krakatoa a few years
ago, with the accompanying earthquakes, tidal waves,
and clouds of volcanic dust, changes the face of the
surrounding landscape beyond recognition, bringing
down the high lands, elevating the low, making fair
lakes where deserts had been, and deserts where green
prairies had smiled before. The tremendous catastrophe
which had befallen Tom had changed his moral landscape
in much the same way. Some of his low places he
found lifted to ideals, some of his ideas had sunk
to the valleys, and lay there with the sackcloth and
ashes of pumice stone and sulphur on their ruined heads.
