Part 6

“They must expect to draw a prize-package from the white Santa Clauses this year,” Gaitskill grinned. “Heretofore they’ve been jest as lazy before as after.”

At that moment Hitch Diamond came around the corner and stopped in front of the Gaitskill store.

“Marse Tom,” he said earnestly. “How much do a barrel of lime cost?”

“Not much,” Gaitskill said. “Want to whitewash something?”

“Yes, suh; dat is, some yuther niggers do. Us is got a notion to waste a lot of whitewash on our fences an’ cabins.”

“I’ll give the niggers all the lime they need,” Gaitskill said promptly. “Tell ’em to come to this store and get it free!”

Hitch Diamond turned and walked hastily down the street. In the next half hour he paid a call at every cabin in all the negro settlements of Tickfall. He pounded on each cabin door with his iron fist, and when the door was opened he entered and looked around.

“How many niggers lives in dis cabin?” he asked. “How many of dat gang is got ’um a job?”

When he found a negro who had no employment, he swept down upon him with all the righteous fury of a prophet of old.

“Whut ails you, nigger? Don’t you know you’s gwine to die? Git ready! Git ready! Go to Marse Tom Gaitskill’s sto’ an’ tell dem white men to gib you a bucket of lime an’ a white-wash brush. Den you white dis cabin, inside an’ out, an’ put whut’s lef’ on dis ole rickety, busted-down fence! Fix de fence up, too!”

At noon, when Gaitskill passed his store on the way to lunch, a clerk ran out and said:

“Colonel, do you really mean for us to give all that lime away? The niggers have carried away forty barrels of whitewash in the last two hours!”

Gaitskill emitted a sharp whistle of surprise. He scratched his head a moment, then grinned:

“It’s all right, Frank. Let ’em have it. Christmas is coming!”

Rev. Vinegar Atts found himself overwhelmed with work. The sudden change in the moral life of his parishioners made a demand upon his services every moment of that busy day. Sick people, who could not come to the church, sent for him to come to see them. Prayer-meetings were held in many of the cabins. A constant stream of people moved in and out of the Shoofly church, and their singing and shouting could be heard for a mile.

“Git ready to die! Git ready to die!” Vinegar bawled from house to house. “De ancestors will git you ef you don’t watch out!”

Under Hitch Diamond’s direction, all the negro settlements were being whitewashed. Under Vinegar Atts’s admonition the cabins were swept out, the yards were cleaned, the cabins were aired, and every scrap of paper and every particle of trash was gathered up and burned. These were not original ideas with the negroes. They had been taught this in the fever epidemic, when a government health officer had had charge of the sanitary work of the village.

The village began to fill up with strange darkies who had come in from the plantations and the swamp.

“Whut you coons doin’ here?” Vinegar Atts demanded of a bunch of them.

“Us come in whar de dorctors kin git to us easy,” one of them answered nervously. “Word wus sont dat all de niggers is about to die!”

“Dat’s right!” Vinegar bellowed. “But whut sort of sight will you coons be when you is dead--mud all over yo’ britches an’ no socks on? Git busy and clean up! Go down to de bayou an’ take a wash--buy you a clean shu’t an’ some socks--git ready to die!”

Skeeter Butts sat alone in the Hen-Scratch saloon. He was the only idler in Tickfall, a compulsory idler, for the reform had put him out of business. The sound of the fiddle and the banjo was heard no more. Laughter and shouting had ceased. Not a negro entered his barroom, and most of his regular customers passed on the other side of the street. Skeeter sat in front of his saloon all day in mournful and fearful loneliness.

Then, just at dark, he had the surprise of his life.

Three men came up the street and stopped, talked for a moment in low tones, then entered the saloon on tiptoe and came to where Skeeter was sitting behind the bar.

“Us is a cormittee to wait on you, Skeeter,” Vinegar Atts said in funereal tones.

“Whut is I done?” Skeeter asked in a frightened voice.

“’Tain’t whut you done; it’s whut you ain’t done,” Vinegar informed him. “You done showed yo’se’f de one sinner in Tickfall.”

“How come?” Skeeter asked.

Vinegar Atts produced the paper on which he had written the “Rules of Reform” in that very room the day before. He handed the paper to Skeeter.

“Whut do de fust rule say, Skeeter?” he demanded.

“‘No lofen,’” Skeeter read tremblingly.

Vinegar Atts placed a heavy hand upon the shoulder of the barkeeper and bawled:

“What is you done fer a livin’ to-day, nigger?”

“Nothin’,” Skeeter stammered. “I--it ’pears like you-all is done put me outside of a job. I ain’t had no customers to-day.”

“You been loafin’,” Hitch Diamond proclaimed in a pugnacious voice. “How does you especk to git to heaven when you die? Don’t you know de ancestors will get you befo’ mawnin’?”

“Less don’t gib de ancestors no show at him,” Figger Bush squealed. Figger was covered with whitewash, had done his first day’s work for years, and was feeling righteous. “Less hang him to a tree an’ larn him a lesson!”

“Hol’ on, fellers!” Skeeter begged earnestly. “I didn’t ketch on ’bout dis rule. I figgered dat a nigger whut had a job oughter stay on it. De Tickfall niggers all j’ined de refawm, but I thought I oughter stay on my job so I could sell booze to de coons from de swamp an’ de plantations. But none of ’em didn’t buy!”

“You git outen dis sinful saloon an’ go to wuck,” Hitch howled, shaking his hamlike fist under Skeeter’s nose, “or I’ll bust yo’ fool neck!”

“Yo’ intentions is good, Hitch,” Vinegar Atts said reprovingly; “but you is done busted rule two whut says ‘no quorlin’,’ an’ you mighty nigh fractioned rule number three whut specifies ‘no fightin’!”

“I--er--uh--Skeeter knows I ain’t mean no harm,” Hitch murmured painfully. “I jes’ said dat because I loves him. I’d druther bust his neck dan not hab him foller along atter us when us goes to heaben.”

“I’ll git good,” Skeeter said meekly. “I’ll see Marse John Flournoy as soon as it’s good daylight to-morrer.”

“Better not pesticate Marse John, Skeeter,” Figger Bush advised him. “He tole me dat de nex’ nigger whut axed him fer a job wus flirtin’ wid a hearse!”

“Whut kin I do?” Skeeter lamented. “Dar uster be mo’ free jobs dan willin’ niggers; now dar’s mo’ niggers dan jobs.”

“Ef you cain’t wuck fer somebody else, wuck, for yo’se’f,” Vinegar Atts advised him. “Git a scrub-brush an’ slop-bucket an’ scour out dis here saloom. Git a sack of lime an’ whitewash it! Dis house belongs to Sheriff Flournoy, an’ he’ll remember you kind when you is goned hencefo’th an’ ain’t never no mo’!”

“I’ll shore do it!” Skeeter assured them.

Having accomplished their mission, the committee then sat down and became sociable over Skeeter’s cigarettes. When they had smoked for a while Skeeter suddenly asked:

“Revun Atts, whut is de lates’ news from de epizootic?”

“I ain’t heerd nothin’,” Atts replied. “Of co’se, I ain’t gwine aroun’ beggin’ fer de pest-wagon by axin’ de white folks no fool questions!”

“Whut do de papers say?” Skeeter persisted.

“Dunno.”

“I bet you some of dem papers is got a heap mo’ in ’em ’bout de disease dan de papers us niggers got to read,” Figger Bush proclaimed.

“Huh!” Vinegar Atts exclaimed. “I never thunk of dat! Of co’se, de white folks ain’t gwine print all de news fer a nigger.”

“Dey don’t divide up nothin’ else even,” Hitch Diamond said. “I motions dat Skeeter Butts be ’p’inted a cormittee to visit all de white folks’ houses an’ colleck up deir old Tickfall _Whoopses_ so us kin git de lates’ news.”

“I’ll do it,” Skeeter said uneasily; “but I ain’t gwine tell ’em whut I wants wid de papers. I’ll specify dat I wants ’em to cover some shelves in de Hen-Scratch.”

“Start soon in de mawnin’, Skeeter,” Atts admonished him. “We’ll meet you here at dinner-time an’ read up--mebbe all de niggers on de plantations is dead an’ us don’t know it. I’s seed a whole passel of buzzards sailin’ aroun’ to-day!”

The committee moved on, visiting from house to house, admonishing each occupant who had not observed all the rules of reform, just as the white men had done years before during the fever epidemic.

Then a totally unexpected thing happened.

The next day being Christmas Eve, every negro in Tickfall lost his job at noon. All business places were closed, and every man went home to get a good start for the Christmas celebration. Several hundred negroes found themselves with a half-day of idleness confronting them. They cut all the weeds on the streets in all the negro settlements, burned all the trash, put four coats of whitewash on the Shoofly church, mended all the fences, tore down several unsightly shacks which had been decaying in the sun for half a century, dug ditches to drain their communities, and ceased their work at dark to get supper and assemble in their church, where Vinegar Atts later confronted more work-weary parishioners then he had ever seen before.

In the midst of their evening service Skeeter Butts arrived, carrying a bundle of papers almost as large as himself, which he placed upon a table in front of the pulpit desk.

This incident was sensational in itself, promising all sorts of fearful possibilities; but the congregation received its greatest jolt when it beheld the Rev. Dr. Sentelle crippling slowly up the aisle behind Skeeter, leaning heavily upon his eleven-pound walking stick.

Dr. Sentelle was the lion of Tickfall, beloved and magnified by whites and blacks. He was a man of influence and power for miles around. Intense courage glowed in his eyes, which held smoldering flames like the eyes of a jungle beast; tenderness, gentleness, sweetness, and love, love, love were etched in the map of his pain-wrinkled face like an illuminated missal by Bellini; and his beautiful voice was as sweet as music, every spoken word caressing like a woman’s hand.

“Bless Gawd!” Vinegar Atts bellowed at sight of the white clergyman. “I capsizes right now in favor of de Revun Dr. Sentelle. He’s gwine fotch us a Chris’mus message!”

The entire congregation rose to their feet. Vinegar Atts trotted half-way down the aisle and met the cripple. With a murmur of thanks, the white man placed his delicate, blue-veined hand in the crotch of Vinegar’s powerful arm and stumbled slowly, feebly forward to the pulpit platform. When he had seated himself the negroes sank quietly back upon the benches.

* * * * *

In the meantime all the business men in Tickfall were holding a meeting in the rear of the Tickfall bank.

“I propose a basket of grub for every nigger cabin in town!” Gaitskill proclaimed as he sat at the head of the table. “We have no poor whites in this village, but the negroes are always hungry.”

There was a unanimous murmur of assent.

Then Gaitskill laughed.

“By the way, what has happened to set all the coons to cleaning up? I’ve been too dang liberal with my benefactions--I’m short sixty-two barrels of lime!”

“Christmas is coming!” several voices murmured, and there were many nodding heads, and a broad grin passed around the table.

“Say, fellers,” Sheriff Flournoy grinned, rising to his feet and taking a newspaper from his pocket, “er--ah--I beg pardon, are we through with business?”

“Sure!” Gaitskill smiled. “We’re agreed that the niggers get the grub.”

“I started a little joke in town the other day,” Flournoy went on.

Then he explained about the article he had written, and read it aloud to them.

There was a whoop of laughter, after which one asked:

“Did you get results?”

“No,” Flournoy said disgustedly. “I ought not to have started it with old Isaiah Gaitskill--he’s about half-witted.”

“By George!” Gaitskill exclaimed, springing to his feet. “That accounts for all this cleaning up and whitewash--the niggers are expecting an epidemic of disease and are getting ready to die!”

Perfect silence greeted this announcement as its full significance dawned upon each man. Then Dr. Moseley, the parish health officer, spoke earnestly:

“Gentlemen, let us not say one word to the contrary. Let the darkies clean up and keep clean!”

“I have done good by stealth and blush to find it fame!” Flournoy interrupted mockingly.

“It means health, gentlemen,” Dr. Moseley declared. “Health and long life to us all--er--by the way, I propose that as a toast right now!”

For nearly forty years Gaitskill had held this meeting in the rear of his bank on every Christmas Eve. The men were familiar with his custom, and the physician’s suggestion met with instant response.

Gaitskill rose, unlocked his desk, pushed back the top, and the men gazed with lively anticipation upon the glasses and decanters there concealed.

“Hitch!” Gaitskill called. “Oh, Hitch Diamond! Come here!”

There was no answer. Hitch had long before deserted the colonel and gone to the Shoofly church.

“I bet that coon answers promptly to-morrow morning,” Gaitskill laughed as he grumblingly filled the glasses.

“Christmas is coming!” a laughing chorus murmured.

Suddenly there was a shout which rolled like thunder over Tickfall, the sound permeating even the thick walls of the Tickfall bank.

“Listen to the niggers!” Flournoy grinned.

There was a moment’s silence; then the mighty ululations of a negro song floated to them on the wings of the wind. The men arose.

“Health and long life to us all!” Dr. Moseley repeated.

“To us all!” the men murmured with nodding heads. Then they drank.

* * * * *

Time inevitably weakens all reforms. It robs the greatest and most imminent danger of its terror. And time completely overthrew the reform in Tickfall and so endowed the negroes with courage that any timid darky would have tickled the whiskers of a bearcat with the end of his flat nose.

The time required to accomplish this relapse was one day--the day which comes but once a year--Christmas!

The day found every negro in Tickfall in a receptive mood. As a result, every white man in the town had the privilege of a few moments’ conversation with all the blacks in the town some time during the day.

The sun-slashed streets of Tickfall were filled with them, moving to and fro, like ants in a hill, all feverish in their activity, and all so shoutingly happy that the town was as noisy as a parrot’s cage.

Their order of advance was something like this:

a The servants of the household. b Those who had been servants during the year. c Servants of former years. d Those who had done odd jobs. e Those whose names the white man knew. f Those who knew the white man’s name. g All the other niggers in town.

And each white man had supplied himself with about half a barrel of cheap candy, three or four bunches of bananas, a barrel of apples, a hatful of small change, and a supply of tobacco, cigars, plugs, and snuff, bestowing these gifts according to his inclination.

The first ceremony of the day was the formal distribution of the eggnog to the servants of the household.

Of course, after Hitch Diamond, Vinegar Atts, Figger Bush, and the rest of our colored friends had spent three days in a frightful ride upon the water-wagon, their repeated visits to the homes of their Tickfall white friends where the eggnog foamed like the surf of the sea had a most demoralizing effect.

In fact, Hitch Diamond and Vinegar Atts called upon Marse Tom Gaitskill and made themselves such nuisances that Gaitskill locked them both up in an empty corn-crib and turned the water-hose on them.

Death had no terrors for these people on Christmas Day.

“Huh!” Hitch Diamond bellowed. “I wouldn’t be skeart to-day even ef de Revun Dr. Sentelle hadn’t made us such a purty speech. I done separated my idears from my habits!”

“I ain’t skeart, neider!” Vinegar Atts whooped. “Nobody ain’t gwine pat me in de face wid a spadeful of dirt!”

Christmas baskets came to every cabin; pickaninnies ran the streets, their pockets filled with pennies, and their hats laden with oranges, bananas, and cheap candy; children, white and black, cluttered up the few asphalt pavements with every sort of Christmas toys, until the careless pedestrian was in danger of tripping over some contraption and breaking every leg he had; and negro women gadded the streets dressed in finery which was very suggestive to the white folks of dresses they had seen earlier in the year in the drawing-rooms of their women.

By nightfall the Hen-Scratch saloon was filled with negro men, all perfectly sober, and all laughing, and all happy beyond the dreams of angels.

Figger Bush thrummed a banjo; Pap Curtain had a fiddle; Mustard Prophet blew a cornet; while every man exhausted the vocal treasury of his throat for sounds to add to the volume of music:

I’s as crazy as a loon, Fer I gib a silber spoon To a yeller she-coon, On dis here Chris’mus day. But a white woman owned it, An’ said she never loaned it, An’ de cotehouse kotch me right away!

Vinegar Atts pushed through the crowd, shaking hands cordially, smiling like a big, fat baby, and bellowing his congratulations:

“Merry Chris’mus, niggers! Us is done fell from amazin’ grace to a floatin’ opportunity!”

“Bless Gawd!” Skeeter Butts squealed. “I’s shore glad us ain’t refawmed no more! Less all j’ine hands in a circuous-ring an’ sing dat good ole favoryte toon, ‘De Star-Spangled Banana’!”

“Naw!” Vinegar Atts bawled. “We is done loss all our good sense! Less go an’ pay our manners to de white folks!”

“Lead de way! Lead de way!” a chorus of voices answered. “Us follers right at yo’ hip!”

Weep and howl, ye dwellers in the East and West and North, because ye were not in Tickfall on that Christmas night! Your negroes have cast aside the supreme gifts which make us love them in the South--humor, pathos, laughter, and music!

You listen to your phonographs and try to imagine what real music is like; you go to grand opera and think you hear it; but reserve your judgment until you hear a marching column of negro men, each of their throats having the range and capacity of a pipe-organ, and all of their songs set to a sweet minor, which is characteristic of the music of all enslaved people since that far distant day when the whip-driven Israelites “hung their harps on the willows.”

On the Christmas following the close of the Civil War, the impoverished white people of Tickfall sent Christmas baskets to their ex-slaves, who were as poor and hungry as themselves. That night those ex-slaves, as an expression of their gratitude to their old masters, formed in a body and walked from house to house, singing the songs of the old plantation days. White women came out upon the porticoes, leaned their quivering shoulders against the big columns, and wept uncontrollably in memory of other and happier days.

White men stumped out upon those same porches with crutches and canes, or with wooden legs, and listening, visualized the smoke-fogged battlefields, the blood-drenched ground, the clash and onsets of the great war, and beyond the acrid smoke of that holocaust they beheld a magnificent civilization which rose in beauty like a dream, and then vanished forever more. For over half a century this custom had been observed every Christmas. It survived the horrors of the Reconstruction Era when Northern carpet-baggers sought to lead the black race astray and turn them against their former masters.

And now that marching column had formed again, two hundred strong, two abreast, with Vinegar Atts and Hitch Diamond in the lead.

All over Tickfall the white people were waiting for this, the day’s supreme event. The negroes knew the favorite songs of all the older citizens. Rev. Dr. Sentelle listened to “Dixie,” and “Jesus Lover of my Soul.” Bowing his acknowledgments, Dr. Sentelle said:

“Boys, when I die, I want you to sing both of those songs at my funeral!”

And a few years later they did it!

Marse Tom Gaitskill, being a Kentuckian, listened to “My Old Kentucky Home,” and to “Darling Nellie Gray”----

Oh, my eyes are getting blinded, and I cannot see my way; Hark! There’s somebody knocking at the door. I hear the angels calling, and I see my Nellie Gray, Farewell to my old Kentucky shore!

Leaving one house to go to another, the negroes always broke into some rollicking plantation melody, singing it on the way, so that their pilgrimage was a pilgrimage of song. At the end of the town, remote from all the negro settlements, was the home of the sheriff, Mr. John Flournoy, so that the negroes came to his residence last.

They marched melodiously into his yard, spread out over the lawn, taking care to trample down none of the flowers and shrubs, and their mighty voices reverberated through the valleys and from the hilltops, and could literally be heard for miles.

Mr. John Flournoy and his gracious wife stood upon the portico, sometimes smiling, sometimes with serious faces and moist eyes, as they listened to the old melodies which had colored the very fiber of their souls.

Finally a hush fell upon the crowd, and Mr. Flournoy thought the time for his speech had come. But not so.

Vinegar Atts stepped forward within a few feet of the porch steps, removed his battered slouch hat, and began:

“Marse John, all us niggers is been singing to youall white folks ever sense we warn’t more’n hawn-high to a billy-goat. We remembers all dem happy Chris’mus times of yuther years, an’ we wish we could keep up dis music eve’y Chris’mus till ole Gabriel blows his hawn. But de time is done come when us muss tell you good-by, an’ you won’t never hear our singin’ no more!”

“Lawd hab mussy!” a chorus of men’s voices sounded like a prayer.

“You is done been a good frien’ to all us po’ niggers, Marse John,” Vinegar went on earnestly. “We hates to go away an’ leave you----”

The negroes had begun to “weave,” and a moaning sound issued from every throat like a great organ tone, and the light of the full moon casting the shadows of the trees upon the upturned faces of the men, made an effect funereal and impressive indeed.

“What the devil are you talking about?” Flournoy demanded in a voice which was almost a scream.

“Us is gittin’ ready to die, Marse John,” Vinegar told him. “De paper is done printed de word about all de niggers havin’ dat new kind of epizootic, an’ you rickoleck when de yeller fever kotch us niggers all of us fell right down in de middle of de big road an’ died!”

Vinegar took a worn and ragged newspaper out of his pocket, unfolded it carefully, and handed it to Sheriff Flournoy. It was one of the copies of the Tickfall _Whoop_ which Flournoy had given to old Isaiah Gaitskill several days before.

“You kin read whut de paper says yo’se’f, Marse John,” Vinegar said.

That was one time in Mr. John Flournoy’s life when he wished himself to be somewhere else immediately. He was an inveterate practical joker, but he was as tender-hearted as a woman, and it appalled him that he had administered this wound to his negro friends on this happiest day of the year.

“Boys,” he said painfully, “this article is not true--it is a joke! Somebody has been trying to scare you!”

“Who played dat joke on us, Marse John?” Vinegar Atts asked.

Flournoy took thirty seconds to consider his answer to that question, realizing as never before how very much the truth hurts, when you have to tell it!

“I did it!” he answered, and the words strangled in his throat.

There was one minute of perfect silence.

Then Vinegar Atts replied with just two words: “Ye-es, suh!”

Slowly he turned and started toward the street, Hitch Diamond walking beside him. Two and two, the crowd of negroes silently fell into line and marched out.

Skeeter Butts was the last to leave.

As Skeeter started through the gate he felt Flournoy’s heavy hand upon his shoulder and winced.