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

So it went. There was a Board of Trade with two hundred names of members, and half of them, at least, were new names, and the president was a spry new comer from Ohio. A Republican mayor had actually been elected – and that, if you knew the early politics of our town, was the most revolutionary thing of all. Apartment houses – regular flat buildings, with elevator service and all that – shoved their aggressive stone and brick faces up to the pavement line of a street where before old white houses with green shutters and fluted porch pillars had snuggled back among hack berries and maples like a row of broody old hens under a hedge. The churches had caught the spirit too; there were new churches to replace the old ones. Only that stronghold of the ultra conservatives, the Independent Presbyterian, stood fast on its original site, and even the Independent Presbyterian had felt the quickening finger of progress. Under its gray pillared front were set ornate stone steps, like new false teeth in the mouth of a stem old maid, and the new stained glass memorial windows at either side were as paste earrings for her ancient virginal ears. The spinster had traded her blue stockings for doctrinal half hose of a livelier pattern, and these were the outward symbols of the change.

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 per cent by the last census – but by the darkies from all the lesser tributary towns for seventy-five miles around. It was not their own emancipation that they really celebrated; Lincoln’s Proclamation I believe was issued of a January morning, but January is no fit time for the holidaying of a race to whom heat means comfort and the more heat the greater the comfort. So away back, a selection had been made of the anniversary of the freeing of the slaves in Hayti or San Domingo or somewhere and indeed it was a most happy selection. By the Eighth of August the watermelons are at their juiciest and ripest, the frying size pullet of the spring has attained just the rightful proportions for filling one skillit all by itself, and the sun may be reliably counted upon to offer up a satisfactory temperature of anywhere from ninety in the shade to one hundred and two. Once it went to one hundred and four and a pleasant time was had by all.

Right after one Eighth the celebrants began laying by their savings against the coming of the next Eighth. It was Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July crowded into the compass of one day – a whole year of anticipation packed in and tamped down into twenty-four hours of joyous realization. There never were enough excursion trains to bring all those from a distance who wanted to come in for the Eighth. Some, travelers, the luckier ones, rode in state on packed day coaches and the others, as often as not, came from clear down below the Tennessee line, on flat cars, shrieking with nervous joy as the engine jerked them around the sharp curves, they being meantime oblivious alike to the sun shining with midsummer fervor upon their unprotected heads, and the coal cinders, as big as buttons, that rained down in gritty showers. There was some consolation then in having a complexion that neither sun could tan nor cinders blacken.

For that one day out of the three hundred and sixty-five and a fourth, the town was a town of dark joy. The city authorities made special provision for the comfort and the accommodation of the invading swarms and the merchants wore pleased looks for days beforehand and for weeks afterward – to them one good Eighth of August was worth as much as six Court Mondays and a couple of circus days. White people kept indoors as closely as possible, not for fear of possible race clashes, because we didn’t have such things; but there wasn’t room, really, for anybody except the celebrants. The Eighth was one day when the average white family ate a cold snack for dinner and when family buggies went undrivered and family washing went unwashed.

On a certain Eighth of August which I have in mind, Judge Priest spent the simmering day alone in his empty house and in the evening when he came out of Clay Street into Jefferson, he revealed himself as the sole pedestrian of his color in sight. Darkies, though, were everywhere – town darkies with handkerchiefs tucked in at their necks in the vain hope of saving linen collars from the wilting-down process; cornfield darkies whose feet were cramped, cabin’d, cribb’d and confined, as the saying goes, inside of stiff new shoes and sore besides from much pelting over unwontedly hard footing; darkies perspiry and rumpled; darkies gorged and leg weary, but still bent on draining the cup of their yearly joy to its delectable dregs. Rivers of red pop had already flowed, Niagaras of lager beer and stick gin had been swallowed up, breast works of parched goobers had been shelled flat, and blade forests of five cent cigars had burned to the water’s edge; and yet here was the big night just getting fairly started. Full voiced bursts of laughter and yells of sheer delight assaulted the old Judge’s ears. Through the yellowish dusk one hired livery stable rig after another went streaking by, each containing an unbleached Romeo and his pastel-shaded Juliet.

A corner down town, where the two branches of the car lines fused into one, was the noisiest spot yet. Here Ben Boyd and Bud Dobson, acknowledged to be the two loudest mouthed darkies in town, contended as business rivals. Each wore over his shoulder the sash of eminence and bore on his breast the badge of much honor. Ben Boyd had a shade the stronger voice, perhaps, but Bud Dobson excelled in native eloquence. On opposite sidewalks they stood, sweating like brown stone china ice pitchers, wide mouthed as two bull-alligators.

“Come on, you niggers, dis way to de-real show,” Ben Boyd would bellow unendingly, “Remember de grand free balloom ascension teks place at eight o’clock,” and Ben would wave his long arms like a flutter mill.

“Don’t pay no ‘tention, friends, to dat cheap nigger,” Bud Dobson would vociferously plead, “an’ don’t furgit de grand fire works display at mah park! Ladies admitted free, widout charge! Dis is de only place to go! Tek de green car fur de grand annual outin’ an’ ball of de Sisters of the Mysterious Ten!”

Back it would come in a roar from across the way:

“Tek de red car – dat’s de one, dat’s de one, folks! Dis way fur de big gas balloom!” Both of them were lying – there was no balloon to go up, no intention of admitting anybody free to anything. The pair expanded their fictions, giving to their work the spontaneous brilliancy of the born romancer. Like straws caught in opposing cross currents, their victims were pulled two ways at once. A flustered group would succumb to Bud’s blandishments and he would shoo them aboard a green car. But the car had to be starting mighty quick, else Bud Dobson’s siren song would win them over and trailing after their leader, who was usually a woman, like blade sheep behind a bell wether they would pile off and stampede over to where the red car waited. Some changed their minds half a dozen times before they were finally borne away.

These were the country darkies, though – the town bred celebrants knew exactly where they were going and what they would do when they got there. They moved with the assured bearing of cosmopolitans, stirred and exhilarated by the clamor but not confused by it. Grand in white dresses, with pink sashes and green headgear, the Imperial Daughters of the Golden Star rolled by in a furniture van. The Judge thought he caught a chocolate-colored glimpse of Aunt Dilsey, his cook, enthroned on a front seat, as befitting the Senior Grand Potentate of the lodge; anyhow, he knew she must be up front there somewhere. If any cataclysm of Providence had descended upon that furniture van that night many a kitchen beside his would have mourned a biscuit maker par excellence. Sundry local aristocrats of the race – notably the leading town barber, a high school teacher and a shiny black undertaker in a shiny high hat – passed in an automobile, especially loaned for the occasion by a white friend and customer of the leading barber. It was the first time an automobile had figured in an Eighth of August outing; its occupants bore themselves accordingly.

Further along, in the centre of the business district, the Judge had almost to shove a way for himself through crowds that were nine-tenths black. There was no actual disorder, but there was an atmosphere of unrestrained race exultation. You couldn’t put your hand on it, nor express it in words perhaps, but it was there surely. Turning out from the lit-up and swarming main thoroughfare into the quieter reaches of a side street, Judge Priest was put to it to avoid a collision with an onward rush of half grown youths, black, brown, and yellow. Whooping, they clattered on by him and never looked back to see who it was they had almost run over.

In this side street the Judge was able to make a better headway; the rutted sidewalk was almost untraveled and the small wholesale houses which mainly lined it, were untenanted and dark. Two-thirds of a block along, he came to a somewhat larger building where an open entry way framed the foot of a flight of stairs mounting up into a well of pitchy gloom. Looking up the stairs was like looking up to a sooty chimney, except that a chimney would have shown a dim opening at the top and this vista was walled in blankness and ended in blankness. Judge Priest turned in here and began climbing upward, feeling the way for his feet, cautiously.

Once upon a time, a good many years before this, Kamleiter’s Hall had been in the centre of things municipal. Nearly all the lodges and societies had it then for their common meeting place; but when the new and imposing Fraternity Building was put up, with its elevator, and its six stories and its electric lights, and all, the Masons and the Odd Fellows and the rest moved their belongings up there. Gideon K. Irons Camp alone remained faithful. The members of the Camp had held their first meeting in Kamleiter’s Hall back in the days when they were just organizing and Kamleiter’s was just built. They had used its assembly room when there were two hundred and more members in good standing, and with the feeble persistency of old men who will cling to the shells of past things, after the pith of the substance is gone, they still used it.

So the Judge should have known those steps by the feel of them under his shoe soles, he had been climbing up and down them so long. Yet it seemed to him they had never before been so steep and so many and so hard to climb, certainly they had never been so dark. Before he reached the top he was helping himself along with the aid of a hand pressed against the plastered wall and he stopped twice to rest his legs and get his breath. He was panting hard when he came to the final landing on the third floor. He fumbled at a door until his fingers found the knob and turned it. He stood a moment, getting his bearings in the blackness. He scratched a match and by its flare located the rows of iron gas jets set in the wall, and he went from one to another, turning them on and touching the match flame to their stubbed rubber tips.

It was a long bare room papered in a mournful gray paper, that was paneled off with stripings of a dirty white. There were yellow, wooden chairs ranged in rows and all facing a small platform that had desks and chairs on it, and an old fashioned piano. On the wall, framed uniformly in square black wooden frames and draped over by strips of faded red and white bunting, were many enlarged photographs and crayon portraits of men either elderly or downright aged. Everything spoke of age and hard usage. There were places where gussets of the wall paper had pulled away from the paste and hung now in loose triangles like slatted jib sails.

In corners, up against the ceiling, cobwebs hung down in separate tendrils or else were netted up together in little gray hammocks to catch the dust. The place had been baking under a low roof all day and the air was curdled with smells of varnish and glue drawn from the chairs and the mould from old oil cloth, with a lingering savor of coal oil from somewhere below. The back end of the hall was in a gloom, and it only lifted its mask part-way even after the Judge had completed his round and lit all the jets and was reaching for his pocket handkerchief. Maybe it was the poor light with its flickery shadows and maybe it was the effect of the heat, but standing there mopping his forehead, the old Judge looked older than common. His plump figure seemed to have lost some of its rotundness and under his eyes the flesh was pouchy and sagged. Or at least, that was the impression which Ed Gafford got. Ed Gafford was the odd jobs man of Kamleiter’s Hall and he came now, and was profuse with apologies for his tardiness.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Judge Priest,” he began, “for bein’ a little late about gettin’ down here to light up and open up. You see, this bein’ the Eighth of August and it so hot and ever’thing, I sort of jumped at the conclusion that maybe there wouldn’t be none of your gentlemen show up here tonight.”

“Oh, I reckin there’ll be quite a lot of the boys comin’ along pretty soon, son,” said Judge Priest. “It’s a regular monthly meetin’, you know, and besides there’s a vacancy to be filled – we’ve got a color bearer to elect tonight. I should say there ought to be a purty fair crowd, considerin’. You better make a light on them stairs, – they’re as black as a pocket.”

“Right away, Judge,” said Gafford, and departed.

Left alone, the Judge sat down in the place of the presiding officer on the little platform. Laboriously he crossed one fat leg on the other, and looked out over the rows of empty wooden chairs, peopling them with the images of the men who wouldn’t sit in them ever again. The toll of the last few months had been a heavy one. The old Judge cast it up in his mind: There was old Colonel Horace Farrell, now, the Nestor of the county bar to whom the women and men of his own State had never been just plain women and men, but always noble womanhood and chivalric manhood, and who thought in rounded periods and even upon his last sick bed had dealt in well measured phrases and sonorous metaphor in his farewell to his assembled children and grandchildren. The Colonel had excelled at memorial services and monument unveilings. He would be missed – there was no doubt about that.

Old Professor Lycurgus Reese was gone too; who was principal of the graded school for forty-odd years and was succeeded a mercifully short six months before his death by an abnormally intellectual and gifted young graduate of a normal college from somewhere up in Indiana, a man who never slurred his consonant r’s nor dropped his final g’s, a man who spoke of things as stimulating and forceful, and who had ideas about Boy Scout movements and Native Studies for the Young and all manner of new things, a remarkable man, truly, yet some had thought old Professor Reese might have been retained a little longer anyhow.

And Father Minor, who was a winged devil of Morgan’s cavalry by all accounts, but a most devoted shepherd of a struggling flock after he donned the cloth, and old Peter J. Galloway, the lame blacksmith, with his impartial Irish way of cursing all Republicans as Black Radicals – they were all gone. Yes, and a dozen others besides; but the latest to go was Corporal Jake Smedley, color bearer of the Camp from the time that there was a Camp.

The Judge had helped bury him a week before. There had been only eight of the members who turned out in the dust and heat of mid-summer for the funeral, just enough to form the customary complement of honorary pallbearers, but the eight had not walked to the cemetery alongside the hearse. Because of the weather, they had ridden in hacks. It was a new departure for the Camp to ride in hacks behind a dead comrade, and that had been the excuse – the weather. It came to Judge Priest, as he sat there now, that it would be much easier hereafter to name offhand those who were left, than to remember those who were gone. He flinched mentally, his mind shying away from the thought.

Ten minutes passed – fifteen. Judge Priest shuffled his feet and fumed a little. He hauled out an old silver watch, bulky as a turnip, with the flat silver key dangling from it by a black string and consulted its face. Then he heard steps on the stairs and he straightened himself in his chair and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby entered, alone. The Sergeant carried his coat over his arm and he patted himself affectionately on his left side and dragged his feet a little. As Commander of the Camp, the Judge greeted him with all due formality.

“Don’t know what’s comin’ over this here town,” complained the sergeant, when he had got his wind back. “Mob of these here crazy country niggers mighty near knocked me off the sidewalk into the gutter. Well, if they hadn’t been movin’ tolerable fast, I bet you I’d a lamed a couple of ‘em,” he added, his imagination in retrospect magnifying the indignant swipe he made at unresisting space a good half minute after the collision occurred. The Sergeant soothed his ruffled feelings by ft series of little wheezing grunts and addressed the chair with more composure:

“Seems like you and me are the first ones here, Judge.”

“Yes,” said the Judge soberly, “and I hope we ain’t the last ones too – that’s what I’m hopin’. What with the weather bein’ so warm and darkies thick everywhere” – he broke off short. “It’s purty near nine o’clock now.”

“You don’t say so?” said the Sergeant. “Then we shorely oughter be startin’ purty soon. Was a time when I could set up half the night and not feel it scarcely. But here lately I notice I like to turn in sort of early. I reckin it must be the weather affectin’ me.”

“That must be it,” assented the Judge, “I feel it myself – a little; but look here, Sergeant, we never yet started off a regular meetin’ without a little music. I reckin we might wait a little while on Herman to come and play Dixie for us. The audience will be small but appreciative, as the feller says.” A smile flickered across his face. “Herman manages to keep younger and spryer than a good many of the boys.”

“Yes, that’s so too,” said the Sergeant, “but jest yestiddy I heared he was fixin’ to turn over his business to his son and that nephew of his and retire.”

“That’s no sign he’s playin’ out,” challenged Judge Priest rather quickly, “no sign at all. I reckin Herman jest wants to knock round amongst his friends more.”

Sergeant Bagby nodded as if this theory was a perfectly satisfactory one to him. A little pause fell. The Sergeant reached backward to a remote and difficult hip pocket and after two unsuccessful efforts, he fished out what appeared to be a bit of warped planking.

“They’re tearing away the old Sanders place,” he confessed somewhat sheepishly, “and I stopped in by there as I come down and fetched away this here little piece of clapboard for a sort of keepsake. You recollect, Judge, that was where Forrest made his headquarters that day when we raided back into town here? Lawsy, what a surprise old Bedford did give them Yankees. But shucks, that was Bedford’s specialty – surprises.” He stopped and cocked his whity-gray head toward the door hopefully.

“Listen yonder, that must be Herman Felsburg comin’ up the steps now. Maybe Doctor Lake is with him. Weather or no weather, niggers or no niggers, it’s mighty hard to keep them two away from a regular meetin’ of the Camp.”

But the step outside was too light a step and too peart for Mr. Felsburg’s. It was Ed Gafford who shoved his head in.

“Judge Priest,” he stated, “you’re wanted on the telephone right away. They said they had to speak to you in person.”

The Sergeant waited, with what patience he could, while the Judge stumped down the long flights, and after a little, stumped back again. His legs were quivering under him and it was quite a bit before he quit blowing and panting. When he did speak, there was a reluctant tone in his voice.

“It’s from Herman’s house,” he said. “He won’t be with us tonight. He – he’s had a kind of a stroke – fell right smack on the floor as he was puttin’ on his hat to come down here. ‘Twas his daughter had me on the telephone – the married one. They’re afraid it’s paralysis – seems like he can’t move one side and only mumbles, sort of tongue tied, she says, when he tried to talk. But I reckin it ain’t nowhere near as serious as they think for.”

“No suh,” agreed the Sergeant, “Herman’s good for twenty year yit. I bet you he jest et something that didn’t agree with him. He’ll be up and goin’ in a week – see if he ain’t. But say, that means Doctor Lake won’t be here neither, don’t it?”

“Well, that’s a funny thing,” said the old Judge, “I pointedly asked her what he said about Herman, and she mumbled something about Doctor Lake’s gittin’ on so in life that she hated to call him out on a hot night like this. So they called in somebody else. She said, though, they aimed to have Lake up the first thing in the momin’ unless Herman is better by then.”

“Well, I’ll say this,” put in Sergeant Bagby, “she better not let him ketch her sayin’ he’s too old to be answerin’ a call after dark. Lew Lake’s got a temper, and he certainly would give that young woman a dressin’ down.”

The old Judge moved to his place on the platform and mounted it heavily. As he sat down, he gave a little grunting sigh. An old man’s tired sigh carries a lot of meaning sometimes; this one did.

“Jimmy,” he said, “if you will act as adjutant and take the desk, we’ll open without music, for this onc’t. This is about the smallest turn-out we ever had for a regular meetin’, but we can go ahead, I reckin.”

Sergeant Bagby came forward and took a smaller desk off at the side of the platform. Adjusting his spectacles, just so, he tugged a warped drawer open and produced a flat book showing signs of long wear and much antiquity. A sheet of heavy paper had been pasted across the cover of this book, but with much use it had frayed away so that the word “Ledger” showed through in faded gilt letters. The Sergeant opened at a place where a row of names ran down the blue lined sheet and continued over upon the next page. Most of the names had dates set opposite them in fresher writing than the original entries. Only now and then was there a name with no date written after it. He cleared his throat to begin.

“I presume,” the Commander was saying, “that we might dispense with the roll call for tonight.”

“That’s agreeable to me,” said the acting adjutant, and he shut up the book.

“There is an election pendin’ to fill a vacancy, but in view of the small attendance present this evenin’ – ”

The Judge cut off his announcement to listen. Some one walking with the slow, uncertain gait of a very tired or a very feeble person was climbing up the stairs. The shuffling sound came on to the top and stopped, and an old negro man stood bareheaded in the door blinking his eyes at the light and winking his bushy white tufts of eyebrows up and down. The Judge shaded his own eyes the better to make out the new comer.

“Why, it’s Uncle Ike Copeland,” he said heartily. “Come right in, Uncle Ike, and set down.”

“Yes, take a seat and make yourself comfortable,” added the Sergeant. In the tones of both the white men was a touch of kindly but none the less measurable condescension – that instinctive turn of inflection by which the difference held firmly to exist between the races was expressed and made plain, but in this case it was subtly warmed and tinctured with an essence of something else – an indefinable, evasive something that would probably not have been apparent in their greetings to a younger negro.

“Thanky, gen’l’men,” said the old man as he came in slowly. He was tall and thin, so thin that the stoop in his back seemed an inevitable inbending of a frame too long and too slight to support its burden. And he was very black. His skin must have been lustrous and shiny in his youth, but now was overlaid with a grayish aspect, like the mould upon withered fruit. His forehead, naturally high and narrow, was deeply indented at the temples and he had a long face with high cheek bones, and a well developed nose and thin lips. The face was Semitic in its suggestion rather than Ethiopian. The whites of his eyes showed a yellow tinge, but the brown pupils were blurred by a pronounced bluish cast. His clothes were old but spotlessly clean, and his shoes were slashed open along the toes and his bare feet showed through the slashed places. He made his way at a hobbling gait toward the back row of chairs.