The Conjure Woman, Charles W. Chesnutt [reading women txt] 📗

to visit the other end of the vineyard shortly after Julius had gone shambling down the yard toward the barn. I left word that the constable should be asked to wait until my return. I was detained longer than I expected, and when I came back I asked if the officer had arrived.

“Yes,” my wife replied, “he came.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Why, he’s gone.”

“Did he take the chicken-thief?”

“I’ll tell you, John,” said my wife, with a fine thoughtful look, “I’ve been thinking more or less about the influence of heredity and environment, and the degree of our responsibility for the things we do, and while I have not been able to get everything reasoned out, I think I can trust my intuitions. The constable came a while after you left, but I told him that you had changed your mind, and that he might send in his bill for time lost and you would pay for it.”

“And what am I going to do with Sam Jones?” I asked.

“Oh,” she replied, “I told Julius he might unlock the smokehouse and let him go.”

Tobe’s Tribulations

About half a mile from our house on the North Carolina sand-hills there lay, at the foot of a vine-clad slope, and separated from my scuppernong vineyard by a rail fence, a marsh of some extent. It was drained at a somewhat later date, but at the time to which I now refer spread for half a mile in length and a quarter of a mile in breadth. Having been planted in rice many years before, it therefore contained no large trees, but was grown up chiefly in reeds and coarse grasses, with here and there a young sycamore or cypress. Though this marsh was not visible from our house, nor from any road that we used, it was nevertheless one of the most prominent features of our environment. We might sometimes forget its existence in the daytime, but it never failed to thrust itself upon our attention after night had fallen.

It may be that other localities in our neighborhood were infested with frogs; but if so, their vocal efforts were quite overborne by the volume of sound that issued nightly from this particular marsh. As soon as the red disk of the sun had set behind the pines the performance would begin, first perhaps with occasional shrill pipings, followed by a confused chattering; then, as the number of participants increased, growing into a steady drumming, punctuated every moment by the hoarse bellowing note of some monstrous bullfrog. If the day had perchance been rainy, the volume of noise would be greater. For a while after we went to live in the neighborhood, this ceaseless, strident din made night hideous, and we would gladly have dispensed with it. But as time wore on we grew accustomed to our nocturnal concert; we began to differentiate its notes and to distinguish a sort of rude harmony in these voices of the night; and after we had become thoroughly accustomed to it, I doubt whether we could have slept comfortably without their lullaby.

But I had not been living long in the vicinity of this frog-pond before its possibilities as a source of food-supply suggested themselves to my somewhat practical mind. I was unable to learn that any of my white neighbors indulged in the delicate article of diet which frogs’ legs might be made to supply; and strangely enough, among the Negroes, who would have found in the tender flesh of the batrachian a toothsome and bountiful addition to the coarse food that formed the staple of their diet, its use for that purpose was entirely unknown.

One day I went frog-fishing and brought home a catch of half a dozen. Our colored cook did not know how to prepare them, and looked on the whole proceeding with ill-concealed disgust. So my wife, with the aid of a cookbook, dressed the hind legs quite successfully in the old-fashioned way, and they were served at supper. We enjoyed the meal very much, and I determined that thereafter we would have the same dish often.

Our supper had been somewhat later than usual, and it was dusk before we left the table and took our seats on the piazza. We had been there but a little while when old Julius, our colored coachman, came around the house and approaching the steps asked for some instructions with reference to the stable-work. As the matter required talking over, I asked him to sit down. When we had finished our talk the old man did not go away immediately, and we all sat for a few moments without speaking. The night was warm but not sultry; there was a sort of gentle melancholy in the air, and the chorus from the distant frog-pond seemed pitched this night in something of a minor key.

“Dem frogs is makin’ dey yuzh’al racket ternight,” observed the old man, breaking the silence.

“Yes,” I replied, “they are very much in evidence. By the way, Annie, perhaps Julius would like some of those frogs’ legs. I see Nancy hasn’t cleared the table yet.”

“No ma’m,” responded Julius quickly, “I’s much obleedzd, but I doan eat no frog-laigs; no, suh, no ma’m, I doan eat no frog-laigs, not ef I knows w’at I’s eatin’!”

“Why not, Julius?” I asked. “They are excellent eating.”

“You listen right close, suh,” he answered, “en you’ll heah a pertic’ler bull-frog down yander in dat ma’sh. Listen! Dere he goes now⁠—callin’, callin’, callin’! sad en mo’nful, des lak somebody w’at’s los’ somewhar, en can’t fin’ de way back.”

“I hear it distinctly,” said my wife after a moment. “It sounds like the lament of a lost soul.”

I had never heard the vocal expression of a lost soul, but I tried, without success, to imagine that I could distinguish one individual croak from another.

“Well, what is there about that frog, Julius,” I inquired, “that makes it any different from the others?”

“Dat’s po’ Tobe,” he responded solemnly, “callin’ Aun’ Peggy⁠—po’ ole Aun’ Peggy w’at’s