Birthright Part 2

Peter left his obese mother and hurried to the corner, Dawson Bobbs, the constable, had handcuffs on Tump's wrists, and stood with his prisoner amid a crowd of arguing negroes.

Bobbs was a big, fleshy, red-faced man, with chilly blue eyes and a little straight slit of a mouth in his wide face. He was laughing and chewing a sliver of toothpick.

"O Tump Pack," he called loudly, "you kain't git away from me! If you roll bones in Hooker's Bend, you'll have to divide your winnings with the county." Dawson winked a chill eye at the crowd in general.

"But hit's out o' date, Mr. Bobbs," the old gray-headed minister, Parson Ranson, was pleading.

"May be that, Parson, but hit's easier to come up before the J.P. and pay off than to fight it through the circuit court."

Siner pushed his way through the crowd. "How much do you want, Mr.

Bobbs?" he asked briefly.

The constable looked with reminiscent eyes at the tall, well-tailored negro. He was plainly going through some mental card-index, hunting for the name of Peter Siner on some long-forgotten warrant. Apparently, he discovered nothing, for he said shortly:

"How do I know before he's tried? Come on, Tump!"

The procession moved in a long noisy line up Pillow Street, the white residential street lying to the west. It stopped before a large shaded lawn, where a number of white men and women were playing a game with cards. The cards used by the lawn party were not ordinary playing-cards, but had figures on them instead of spots, and were called "rook" cards.

The party of white ladies and gentlemen were playing "rook." On a table in the middle of the lawn glittered some pieces of silver plate which formed the first, second, and third prizes for the three leading scores.

The constable halted his black company before the lawn, where they stood in the suns.h.i.+ne patiently waiting for the justice of the peace to finish his game and hear the case of the State of Tennessee, plaintiff, versus Tump Pack, defendant.

CHAPTER II

On the eastern edge of Hooker's Bend, drawn in a rough semicircle around the Big Hill, lies n.i.g.g.e.rtown. In all the half-moon there are perhaps not two upright buildings. The grimy cabins lean at crazy angles, some propped with poles, while others hold out against gravitation at a hazard.

Up and down its street flows the slow negro life of the village. Here children of all colors from black to cream fight and play; deep-chested negresses loiter to and fro, some on errands to the white section of the village on the other side of the hill, where they go to scrub or cook or wash or iron. Others go down to the public well with a bucket in each hand and one balanced on the head.

The public well itself lies at the southern end of this miserable street, just at a point where the drainage of the Big Hill collects. The rainfall runs down through n.i.g.g.e.rtown, under its sties, stables, and outdoor toilets, and the well supplies the negroes with water for cooking, was.h.i.+ng, and drinking. Or, rather, what was once a well supplies this water, for it is a well no longer. Its top and curbing caved in long ago, and now there is simply a big hole in the soft, water-soaked clay, about fifteen feet wide, with water standing at the bottom.

Here come the unhurried colored women, who throw in their buckets, and with a dexterity that comes of long practice draw them out full of water. Black mothers shout at their children not to fall into this pit, and now and then, when a pig fails to come up for its evening slops, a black boy will go to the public well to see if perchance his porker has met misfortune there.

The inhabitants of n.i.g.g.e.rtown suffer from divers diseases; they develop strange ailments that no amount of physicking will overcome; young wives grow sickly from no apparent cause. Although only three or four hundred persons live in n.i.g.g.e.rtown, two or three negroes are always slowly dying of tuberculosis; winter brings pneumonia; summer, malaria. About once a year the state health officer visits Hooker's Bend and forces the white soda-water dispensers on the other side of the hill to sterilize their gla.s.ses in the name of the sovereign State of Tennessee.

The Siner home was a three-room shanty about midway in the semicircle.

Peter Siner stood in the sunlight just outside the entrance, watching his old mother clean the bugs out of a tainted ham that she had bought for a pittance from some white housekeeper in the village. It had been too high for white people to eat. Old Caroline patiently tapped the honeycombed meat to scare out the last of the little green householders, and then she washed it in a solution of soda to freshen it up.

The sight of his bulky old mother working at the spoiled ham and of the negro women in the street moving to and from the infected well filled Peter Siner with its terrible pathos. Although he had seen these surroundings all of his life, he had a queer impression that he was looking upon them for the first time. During his boyhood he had accepted all this without question as the way the world was made. During his college days a criticism had arisen in his mind, but it came slowly, and was tempered by that tenderness every one feels for the spot called home. Now, as he stood looking at it, he wondered how human beings lived there at all. He wondered if Ida May used water from the n.i.g.g.e.rtown well.

He turned to ask old Caroline, but checked himself with a man's instinctive avoidance of mentioning his intimacies to his mother. At that moment, oddly enough, the old negress brought up the topic herself.

"Ida May wuz 'quirin' 'bout you las' night, Peter."

A faint tingle filtered through Peter's throat and chest, but he asked casually enough what she had said.

"Didn' say; she wrote."

Peter looked around, frankly astonished.

"Wrote?"

"Yeah; co'se she wrote."

"What made her write?" a fantasy of Ida May dumb flickered before the mulatto.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Up and down its street flows the slow negro life of the village]

"Why, Ida May's in Nashville." Caroline looked at Peter. "She wrote to Cissie, astin' 'bout you. She ast is you as bright in yo' books as you is in yo' color." The old negress gave a pleased abdominal chuckle as she admired her broad-shouldered brown son.

"But I saw Ida May standing on the wharf-boat the day I came home,"

protested Peter, still bewildered.

"No you ain't. I reckon you seen Cissie. Dey looks kind o' like when you is fur off."

"Cissie?" repeated Peter. Then he remembered a smaller sister of Ida May's, a little, squalling, yellow, wet-nosed nuisance that had annoyed his adolescence. So that little spoil-sport had grown up into the girl he had mistaken for Ida May. This fact increased his sense of strangeness--that sense of great change that had fallen on the village in his absence which formed the groundwork of all his renewed a.s.sociations.

Peter's prolonged silence aroused certain suspicions in the old negress.

She glanced at her son out of the tail of her eyes.

"Cissie Dildine is Tump Pack's gal," she stated defensively, with the jealousy all mothers feel toward all sons.

A diversion in the shouts of the children up the mean street and a sudden furious barking of dogs drew Peter from the discussion. He looked up, and saw a negro girl of about fourteen coming down the curved street, with long, quick steps and an occasional glance over her shoulder.

From across the thoroughfare a small chocolate-colored woman, with her wool done in outstanding spikes, thrust her head out at the door and called:

"Whut's de matter, Ofeely?"

The girl lifted a high voice:

"Oh, Miss Nan, it's that constable goin' th'ugh the houses!" The girl veered across the street to the safety of the open door and one of her own s.e.x.

"Good Lawd!" cried the spiked one in disgust, "ever', time a white pusson gits somp'n misplaced--" She moved to one side to allow the girl to enter, and continued staring up the street, with the whites of her eyes accented against her dark face, after the way of angry negroes.

Around the crescent the dogs were furious. They were n.i.g.g.e.rtown dogs, and the sight of a white man always drove them to a frenzy. Presently in the hullabaloo, Peter heard Dawson Bobbs's voice shouting:

"Aunt Mahaly, if you kain't call off this dawg, I'm sh.o.r.e goin' to kill him."

Then an old woman's scolding broke in and complicated the melee.

Presently Peter saw the bulky form of Dawson Bobbs come around the curve, moving methodically from cabin to cabin. He held some legal- looking papers in his hands, and Peter knew what the constable was doing. He was serving a blanket search-warrant on the whole black population of Hooker's Bend. At almost every cabin a dog ran out to blaspheme at the intruder, but a wave of the man's pistol sent them yelping under the floors again.

When the constable entered a house, Peter could hear him b.u.mping and rattling among the furnis.h.i.+ngs, while the black householders stood outside the door and watched him disturb their housekeeping arrangements.

Presently Bobbs came angling across the street toward the Siner cabin.

As he entered the rickety gate, old Caroline called out:

"Whut is you after, anyway, white man?"