Show THE ' A PI3fEY-WOOD- S KjE CHARACTER One of the ‘queerest things in human nature is the’ early rising of these piney-woqmen of Mississippi coupled with their egregious laziness and personal uncleanliness A score of times' I have known them to rise long before daybreak spit on their hands “to git a good start” make a fire and then sit in the house tne whole day Theirearly rising I presume is sufficiently accounted for by the remarkably good ventilation of their cabins By the door are some sunflowers — those universal hierophants of the rude poetry wlucn blossoms in the soul of the poor There is perhaps also a harmless and and a little patch of necessary cowpeas okra and “sich like truck” Against the house are stretched pelts — raccoons’ oppossums’ foxes’ and beavers’ — whose speckled and spotted tails flutter like the captured battle flags I once saw on the cabin of a famous Major General These are the Earchments testifying to his graduation in College and these caudal ribbons are fairer in his eyes than all bacal- aureate silks and seals Tammany Jones wears a brindled suit throughout trousers with an old time flap to set down before jerkin waiscoat buttoned to the chin and a fox skin cap with a queue of tails He has an immense shock of hair which stands out all around below his cap in a bushy rim In that part of his gristly face not concealed by his beard you can nomoreread the workings of his soul than you could on a Dutch clock which winks its eyes except now: and then when he gave a sort of dry squeeze of self satisfaction You must watch his eyes for everything The pupils contract and dilate continually like a cat’s Now they glint with a flash of clownish humor and now they roll wbitely upward like the orbs of a dying sheep when he is about to utter some extraorcli-naril- y whimsical conceit which has just flashed upon him In the cabin what a clutter! I have a confused recollection of pots kettles poker wife axe stag’s horns snuff swab but the only objects of whose presence I am positively certain are that drinking-gour- d ornamented with a - raccoon’s tail and the thirteen n There is also a in use embellished with several rattles of rattlesnakes The thirteen small children are all girls regularly graded in height except where the war made a gap in the succession Tneir only garments I judge are kirtles of coarse negro cloth which was once white which’ hung to the floor as limp and as straight as an evacuated hen-hous- : small-childre- cob-pip- e night-gow- n EE A P ITCH ININ 91 ‘Tin not one of the original stock but wuz so contrairy his ha’r growedup ’stead 1 suppose you call every Northern man a of down like one of these h’yur frizzly Yankee since the war?” “Well I recon y ass That ’ar war wuz an unliickj circumstance I alluz kinder tuk to Yankees bofo’ but that ’ar sorter rubbed the ha’r up niy back” “Were you badly treated by our army?” : “Bight smart yass D’ye see that ’ar gal thar ? Well shewuzn’t bigger’n a fyste and wuz as party as a speckled ‘pup A soldier fellercome along and thought as how he must have somethin’ though twuz the Ta3fct blanket we hed in the housen: so he just laid the gal onto the flo tuk the blanket by the corners and histen it up and you orter seed that ’ar gal roll ’cross the flo’” “But then the soldiers couldn’t always tell their friends for every one said he was a Unionist” “But they sometimes knowed mighty well who their enemies wuz Thar wuz edge Sours up in Hinds they run him clean off and burnt his housens and tuk his pianer and his pictures out in the But I yard fur to make targets’ outen d kinder felt when I heered that ’ar fur he’d wanted secession so bad his teeth wuz loose He could whip a hull cow-pefull of Yankees and mind the gap he could He would fight a sawmill and give it three licks the start But when a passel of cavalry fellers come a trottin’ into his yard one mornin’ the way he lit outen them diggins wuz a caution to tom cats He wuz that bad skeered he run plump agin a yeller fyste and knocked a yelp outen it but he wuz half a mile ‘off befo’ lie heered the yelp A steer a runnin’ in spring and eatin’ switchin’ his tail with a of his back wuzn’t a circumstance to : ’ -- J hull-foote- n all-fir- grub-wor- him” “Ha! ba! ha! He was considerably then before the surrender came” “You could a’ tuk him out through the cooled stitches of his britches he wuz so small I seed him ’bout' a fortnit after his housens was done burnt and he looked like he’d let them go He’s the wusf whipped t man in the I reckon Now thar wuz his neighbor Cap’n Jarnley he wuz a ole Whig and wuz agin secedin’ original' but when he seed ’twuzen’t no use he lit in and he fit till: the hull kit and bilin busted up I never seed a man keep his dander up like he did He wuz like the dog said to the cat when he seed her tryin’ to pull a mouse out of the hole by nippin’ onto the end of the tail— ‘you must purrsevere’ ” “How ls it so many who opposed secession afterward fought best in the army?” “Well it happened mostly by their mad Leastwise' they said gittin’ as how they wuz druv into it they fit outen pure cussedness” “There is a proverb you know ‘Beware the fury of a patient man’ The old-- j line’ Whigs were generally moderate men but they seem to have become roused at last by accusation of disloyalty toward the set-cu- Jones sits on a tripod stool at one chimney eorner and I at the other while the children huddle all over the wood-pil- e in the corner and watch me with the owleyed unwinking stare of childhood Mrs Jones dusts the clay hearth with a and puts more yams brush of broom-gras- s into the ashes for the stranger Then she South” sifts meal into a tray and makes pones ' “Them’s ’bout the licks stranger ‘I Meantime Jones and I fall to talking When reckon Cap’n Jarnly wunst got 7 “Well I saayl if I’d be gwine to shoot wuz the aYankee I’d never pinted a gun at’ you his mind: sot onto a thing heseed ?He most contrairiest man I ever' You look mo’ like one of we uns” : i hens” “If everybody had been so obstinate the South would have won perhaps” “I reckon not stranger Tf werd fit the Yankees by y themselves mebbe: so we would but the whole world was agin us The Yankee armies come tlirough h’yur jest like sheep jumpin’ over a fence they wuz so thick” “It would have been more agreeable to you at least than the results which did happen” “Well now : you’re stranger sorter under my ribs I reckon a man had a leetle rather see his neighbors’ house blown down than hissen But I’ve often thought kinder to myself like mebbe so ’twas better as it turned out If we’d gained our freedom us po’ men would a’ been like little dogs in high oats” feelin’ “How so?” “Well all the big Secessjoners as had niggers would a’ made laws for no man to vote ’less he had niggers that they’d tuk away eddication from us then they’d jest hev sticks for us to jump over like trainin’ pups” “But now that the negro works for like white men every tub will stand on its own bottom” “Well you see when a nigger is hired it’s mighty nigh as if he was a slave again Niggers knows they is onpleasant to a white man’s olfunctionary narves and that’ar makes ’em sorter meek like A Seessioner as iz alluz used to slingin’ his orders round permisc’us ruther have a nigger he kin cuss as a white man that can do his own cusssin’ Us po’ men is ’bout the most independent people ever was I reckon and they can’t feather their beds off of that goose without gettin’ some squawkin’' They found out that ’ar when some of ’em tried to make us lick out the skillets in the army' jest as they used to their niggers and some of ’em seed lightnin’ too when: the war the was done ended for that ar’ very circum' wages stance” Jf) 7 want to “But they all say see the negroes sent out of the South” “Well you’ve heerd a skeeteron a bull’s horn befo’ now I reckon They want niggers to stay bad enough and mo’ no hain’t for use ve most of ’em got po’ men tlian a hog has for Sunday That’s what makes niggers such a cuss to us And any furriner as pomes h’yur in regard of benefitin’ of hisseif he’s' cornin’ to a ass fur to get wool If the niggers alone wuz agin’ us we could wallop ’em but Secession ers and niggers both — that ar’s too many coons for the pup You can’t have two blackbirds a pickin the nits off of one sow and so ’long as the niggers is ’round us po’ men’s not gwine' to get now-the- : any work” J ' I think you poor men and the “But negroes can both find enough to 'do” ‘ “I reckon thar’ s enough but niggers work cheaper anwhow Niggers live iesfc on corn bread and meat and no white man can’t do that ’twoulcLbnrn him out He wants a change clear as a pump log as the b’ar said when he waztired of man-meA white man’s' got to have sass at |