Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

He turned into the Richland House, with the darky following him with his valises and us following the darky; and after he had registered, old Mr. Dudley Dunn, the clerk, let us...

Mr. Irons didn't answer a word. He stood up, just so, and hauled off and hit Daniel the Mystic in the face. Daniel the Mystic said “Ouch!” in a loud, pained tone of voice, and f...

All through the short changeable winter, with its alternate days of snow flurrying and sunshine, Emmy Hardin and Miss Puss Whitley, a crushed forlorn pair, together minded the s...

“Ah, hah.” Judge Priest sucked at his pipe. “Herman,” he J wheezed back over his shoulder to Felsburg, “did you notice a tall sort of a saddle-colored darky playing a juice harp...

There had grown up a younger generation of men who complained--and perhaps they had reason for the complaint--that they did nearly all the work of organizing and campaigning and...

But there was one institution among us that remained as it was--Eighth of August, 'Mancipation Day, celebrated not only by all the black proportion of our population--thirty-six...

Nevertheless, this feud, such as it was, persisted in a sluggish intermittent kind of a way for twenty years or so. It started in a dispute over a line boundary away back in War...

“They brought Tallow Dave out of the jail with his arms tied back, and put him in a wagon, him sitting on his coffin, and drove him under a tree and noosed him round the neck, a...

“Judge Priest, sir,” said the sick boy, panting with weak eagerness, “I want to see the grand free street parade. I've been sick a right smart while, and I can't go to the circu...

“Oh, I didn't mean that, Billy,” Doctor Lake made haste to explain. “I wasn't thinking so much of what happened just now in the court yonder. I reckon old Press deserved it--he'...

AFTER I came North to live it seemed to me, as probably it has seemed to many Southern born men and women that the Southerner of fiction as met with in the North was generally j...

The judge didn't answer. His eyes were on the dustcloud and his hand was extended. His pudgy fingers closed round the heavy handful of blued steel that Dink Bynum passed over an...

And so it moved, slowly and deliberately, after the fashion of circus parades, past some sparsely scattered cottages that were mainly closed and empty, seeing that their customa...

ONE or two nights a week my uncle used to take me with him when he went to spend the evening with old Judge Priest. There were pretty sure to be a half dozen or more gray heads...

While Major Covington and Judge Priest and the foremost of the others got in one another's way and packed in a solid, heaving mass behind the pair, all shouting and all trying t...

With infinite pains and a manner almost reverential, as though he were handling sacred vessels, the old judge compiled two dark reddish portions which he denominated toddies. Ma...

“However, remember this, gentlemen--there is need of haste. Within forty-eight hours I should be in Memphis, where I am to confer with certain of my associates--Eastern men like...

“You may resume, Judge Priest,” said the trial judge in a voice that was not entirely free from huskiness, although its owner had been clearing it steadily for some moments.

The steam Flyin' Jinny--it would be a carousel farther North--ground unendingly, loaded to its gunwales with family groups. Crap games started in remote spots and fights broke o...

“What's the reason you ain't out sashaying round on the Eighth with your own people?” asked the Judge. The old negro began a thin, hen-like chuckle, but his cackle ended midway...