literature assignments

Assignment 1

 

Both Hurston and Faulkner are Southern writers who use the local vernacular throughout their stories. Compare and contrast what you noticed about the language used in the stories. What affect did this have? Please point to specific examples from both stories and analyze. 

250 word minimum, include the word count. 

Assignment 2

 

Remember, free writes are informal writing that work as a means for us to get to know each other better. Give yourself three minutes, and answer the prompt below. Don’t worry about if you get off-topic. Just write!

How would you describe the way you speak? Do you have an accent? What are some special words that you use that are significant to you and your culture? For example, I’m from the South, so we say “ya’ll” a lot. How does the way we speak affect us in every day life? What does it say about us? What kind of false impressions might one perceive based on how we speak? Do you change the way you speak depending on who your audience is? In what ways? 

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Barn Burning

by William Faulkner

The store in which the justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on
his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he
could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose
labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils
and the silver curve of fish – this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his
intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other
constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce
pull of blood. He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father’s
enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!) stood, but he
could hear them, the two of them that is, because his father had said no word yet:

“But what proof have you, Mr. Harris?”

“I told you. The hog got into my corn. I caught it up and sent it back to him. He had no fence that would
hold it. I told him so, warned him. The next time I put the hog in my pen. When he came to get it I gave
him enough wire to patch up his pen. The next time I put the hog up and kept it. I rode down to his house
and saw the wire I gave him still rolled on to the spool in his yard. I told him he could have the hog when
he paid me a dollar pound fee. That evening a nigger came with the dollar and got the hog. He was a
strange nigger. He said, ‘He say to tell you wood and hay kin burn.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘That whut he say to
tell you,’ the nigger said. ‘Wood and hay kin burn.’ That night my barn burned. I got the stock out but I lost
the barn.”

“Where is the nigger? Have you got him?”

“He was a strange nigger, I tell you. I don’t know what became of him.”

“But that’s not proof. Don’t you see that’s not proof?”

“Get that boy up here. He knows.” For a moment the boy thought too that the man meant his older brother
until Harris said, “Not him. The little one. The boy,” and, crouching, small for his age, small and wiry like
his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair and
eyes gray and wild as storm scud, he saw the men between himself and the table part and become a lane
of grim faces, at the end of which he saw the justice, a shabby, collarless, graying man in spectacles,
beckoning him. He felt no floor under his bare feet; he seemed to walk beneath the palpable weight of the
grim turning faces. His father, stiff in his black Sunday coat donned not for the trial but for the moving, did
not even look at him. He aims for me to lie, he thought, again with that frantic grief and despair. And I will
have to do hit.

“What’s your name, boy?” the justice said.

“Colonel Sartoris Snopes,” the boy whispered.

“Hey?” the Justice said. “Talk louder. Colonel Sartoris? I reckon anybody named for Colonel Sartoris in
this country can’t help but tell the truth, can they?” The boy said nothing. Enemy! Enemy! he thought; for a
moment he could not even see, could not see that the justice’s face was kindly nor discern that his voice
was troubled when he spoke to the man named Harris: “Do you want me to question this boy?” But he
could hear, and during those subsequent long seconds while there was absolutely no sound in the
crowded little room save that of quiet and intent breathing it was as if he had swung outward at the end of

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a grape vine, over a ravine, and at the top of the swing had been caught in a prolonged instant of
mesmerized gravity, weightless in time.

“No!” Harris said violently, explosively. “Damnation! Send him out of here!” Now time, the fluid world,
rushed beneath him again, the voices coming to him again through the smell of cheese and sealed meat,
the fear and despair and the old grief of blood:

“This case is closed. I can’t find against you, Snopes, but I can give you advice. Leave this country and
don’t come back to it.”

His father spoke for the first time, his voice cold and harsh, level, without emphasis: “I aim to. I don’t figure
to stay in a country among people who…” he said something unprintable and vile, addressed to no one.

“That’ll do,” the Justice said. “Take your wagon and get out of this country before dark. Case dismissed.”

His father turned, and he followed the stiff black coat, the wiry figure walking a little stiffly from where a
Confederate provost’s man’s musket ball had taken him in the heel on a stolen horse thirty years ago,
followed the two backs now, since between the two lines of grim-faced men and out of the store and
across the worn gallery and down the sagging steps and among the dogs and half-grown boys in the mild
May dust, where as he passed a voice hissed:

“Barn burner!”

Again he could not see, whirling; there was a face in a red haze, moonlike, bigger than the full moon, the
owner of it half again his size, he leaping in the red haze toward the face, feeling no blow, feeling no
shock when his head struck the earth, scrabbling up and leaping again, feeling no blow this time either
and tasting no blood, scrabbling up to see the other boy in full flight and himself already leaping into
pursuit as his father’s hand jerked him back, the harsh, cold voice speaking above him: “Go get in the
wagon.”

It stood in a grove of locusts and mulberries across the road. His two hulking sisters in their Sunday
dresses and his mother and her sister in calico and sunbonnets were already in it, sitting on and among
the sorry residue of the dozen and more movings which even the boy could remember the battered stove,
the broken beds and chairs, the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at some
fourteen minutes past two o’clock of a dead and forgotten day and time, which had been his mother’s
dowry. She was crying, though when she saw him she drew her sleeve across her face and began to
descend from the wagon. “Get back,” the father said.

“He’s hurt. I got to get some water and wash his…”

His older brother had appeared from somewhere in the crowd, no taller than the father but thicker,
chewing tobacco steadily,

“Get back in the wagon,” his father said. He got in too, over the tail-gate. His father mounted to the seat
where the older brother already sat and struck the gaunt mules two savage blows with the peeled willow,
but without heat. It was not even sadistic; it was exactly that same quality which in later years would
cause his descendants to over-run the engine before putting a motor car into motion, striking and reining
back in the same movement. The wagon went on, the store with its quiet crowd of grimly watching men
dropped behind; a curve in the road hid it. Forever he thought. Maybe he’s done satisfied now, now that
he has … stopping himself, not to say it aloud even to himself. His mother’s hand touched his shoulder.

“Does hit hurt?” she said.

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“Naw,” he said. “Hit don’t hurt. Lemme be.”

“Can’t you wipe some of the blood off before hit dries?”

“I’ll wash to-night,” he said. “Lemme be, I tell you.”

The wagon went on. He did not know where they were going. None of them ever did or ever asked,
because it was always somewhere, always a house of sorts waiting for them a day or two days or even
three days away. Likely his father had already arranged to make a crop on another farm before he…
Again he had to stop himself. He (the father) always did. There was something about his wolflike
independence and even courage when the advantage was at least neutral which impressed strangers, as
if they got from his latent ravening ferocity not so much a sense of dependability as a feeling that his
ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions would be of advantage to all whose interest lay
with his.

That night they camped in a grove of oaks and beeches where a spring ran. The nights were still cool and
they had a fire against it, of a rail lifted from a nearby fence and cut into lengths – a small fire, neat,
niggard almost, a shrewd fire; such fires were his father’s habit and custom always, even in freezing
weather. Older, the boy might have remarked this and wondered why not a big one; why should not a
man who had not only seen the waste and extravagance of war, but who had in his blood an inherent
voracious prodigality with material not his own, have burned everything in sight? Then he might have
gone a step farther and thought that that was the reason: that niggard blaze was the living fruit of nights
passed during those four years in the woods hiding from all men, blue or gray, with his strings of horses
(captured horses, he called them). And older still, he might have divined the true reason: that the element
of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his father’s being, as the element of steel or of powder spoke to
other men, as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity, else breath were not worth the breathing,
and hence to be regarded with respect and used with discretion.

But he did not think this now and he had seen those same niggard blazes all his life. He merely ate his
supper beside it and was already half asleep over his iron plate when his father called him, and once
more he followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless limp, up the slope and on to the starlit road where,
turning, he could see his father against the stars but without face or depth-a shape black, flat, and
bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat which had not been made for him, the
voice harsh like tin and without heat like tin:

“You were fixing to tell them. You would have told him.” He didn’t answer. His father struck him with the
flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules at
the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a horse fly, his voice still
without heat or anger: “You’re getting to be a man. You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own
blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you. Do you think either of them, any man there this
morning would? Don’t you know all they wanted was a chance to get at me because they knew I had
them beat? Eh?” Later, twenty years later, he was to tell himself, “If I had said they wanted only truth,
justice, he would have hit me again.” But now he said nothing. He was not crying. He just stood there.
“Answer me,” his father said.

“Yes,” he whispered. His father turned.

“Get on to bed. We’ll be there to-morrow.”

To-morrow they were there. In the early afternoon the wagon stopped before a paintless two-room house
identical almost with the dozen others it had stopped before even in the boy’s ten years, and again, as on
the other dozen occasions, his mother and aunt got down and began to unload the wagon, although his
two sisters and his father and brother had not moved.

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“Likely hit ain’t fitten for hawgs,” one of the sisters said.

“Nevertheless, fit it will and you’ll hog it and like it,” his father said. “Get out of them chairs and help your
Ma unload.”

The two sisters got down, big, bovine, in a flutter of cheap ribbons; one of them drew from the jumbled
wagon bed a battered lantern, the other a worn broom. His father handed the reins to the older son and
began to climb stiffly over the wheel. “When they get unloaded, take the team to the barn and feed them.”
Then he said, and at first the boy thought he was still speaking to his brother: “Come with me.”

“Me?” he said.

“Yes,” his father said. “You.”

“Abner,” his mother said. His father paused and looked back – the harsh level stare beneath the shaggy,
graying, irascible brows.

“I reckon I’ll have a word with the man that aims to begin to-morrow owning me body and soul for the next
eight months.”

They went back up the road. A week ago – or before last night, that is – he would have asked where they
were going, but not now. His father had struck him before last night but never before had he paused
afterward to explain why; it was as if the blow and the following calm, outrageous voice still rang,
repercussed, divulging nothing to him save the terrible handicap of being young, the light weight of his
few years, just heavy enough to prevent his soaring free of the world as it seemed to be ordered but not
heavy enough to keep him footed solid in it, to resist it and try to change the course of its events.

Presently he could see the grove of oaks and cedars and the other flowering trees and shrubs where the
house would be, though not the house yet. They walked beside a fence massed with honeysuckle and
Cherokee roses and came to a gate swinging open between two brick pillars, and now, beyond a sweep
of drive, he saw the house for the first time and at that instant he forgot his father and the terror and
despair both, and even when he remembered his father again (who had not stopped) the terror and
despair did not return. Because, for all the twelve movings, they had sojourned until now in a poor
country, a land of small farms and fields and houses, and he had never seen a house like this before.
Hit’s big as a courthouse he thought quietly, with a surge of peace and joy whose reason he could not
have thought into words, being too young for that: They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part
of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch, he no more to them than a buzzing wasp: capable of
stinging for a little moment but that’s all; the spell of this peace and dignity rendering even the barns and
stable and cribs which belong to it impervious to the puny flames he might contrive … this, the peace and
joy, ebbing for an instant as he looked again at the stiff black back, the stiff and implacable limp of the
figure which was not dwarfed by the house, for the reason that it had never looked big anywhere and
which now, against the serene columned backdrop, had more than ever that impervious quality of
something cut ruthlessly from tin, depthless, as though, sidewise to the sun, it would cast no shadow.
Watching him, the boy remarked the absolutely undeviating course which his father held and saw the stiff
foot come squarely down in a pile of fresh droppings where a horse had stood in the drive and which his
father could have avoided by a simple change of stride. But it ebbed only for a moment, though he could
not have thought this into words either, walking on in the spell of the house, which he could even want but
without envy, without sorrow, certainly never with that ravening and jealous rage which unknown to him
walked in the iron like black coat before him. Maybe he will feel it too. Maybe it will even change him now
from what maybe he couldn’t help but be.

They crossed the portico. Now he could hear his father’s stiff foot as it came down on the boards with
clocklike finality, a sound out of all proportion to the displacement of the body it bore and which was not
dwarfed either by the white door before it, as though it had attained to a sort of vicious and ravening

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minimum not to be dwarfed by anything – the flat, wide, black hat, the formal coat of broadcloth which had
once been black but which had now the friction-glazed greenish cast of the bodies of old house flies, the
lifted sleeve which was too large, the lifted hand like a curled claw. The door opened so promptly that the
boy knew the Negro must have been watching them all the time, an old man with neat grizzled hair, in a
linen jacket, who stood barring the door with his body, saying, “Wipe yo foots, white man, fo you come in
here. Major ain’t home nohow.”

“Get out of my way, nigger,” his father said, without heat too, flinging the door back and the Negro also
and entering, his hat still on his head. And now the boy saw the prints of the stiff foot on the doorjamb and
saw them appear on the pale rug behind the machinelike deliberation of the foot which seemed to bear
(or transmit) twice the weight which the body compassed. The Negro was shouting “Miss Lula! Miss Lula!”
somewhere behind them, then the boy, deluged as though by a warm wave by a suave turn of carpeted
stair and a pendant glitter of chandeliers and a mute gleam of gold frames, heard the swift feet and saw
her too, a lady – perhaps he had never seen her like before either – in a gray, smooth gown with lace at
the throat and an apron tied at the waist and the sleeves turned back, wiping cake or biscuit dough from
her hands with a towel as she came up the hall, looking not at his father at all but at the tracks on the
blond rug with an expression of incredulous amazement.

“I tried,” the Negro cried. “I tole him to…”

“Will you please go away?” she said in a shaking voice. “Major de Spain is not at home. Will you please
go away?”

His father had not spoken again. He did not speak again. He did not even look at her. He just stood stiff in
the center of the rug, in his hat, the shaggy iron-gray brows twitching slightly above the pebble-colored
eyes as he appeared to examine the house with brief deliberation. Then with the same deliberation he
turned; the boy watched him pivot on the good leg and saw the stiff foot drag round the arc of the turning,
leaving a final long and fading smear. His father never looked at it, he never once looked down at the rug.
The Negro held the door. It closed behind them, upon the hysteric and indistinguishable woman-wail. His
father stopped at the top of the steps and scraped his boot clean on the edge of it. At the gate he stopped
again. He stood for a moment, planted stiffly on the stiff foot, looking back at the house. “Pretty and white,
ain’t it?” he said. “That’s sweat. Nigger sweat. Maybe it ain’t white enough yet to suit him. Maybe he
wants to mix some white sweat with it.”

Two hours later the boy was chopping wood behind the house within which his mother and aunt and the
two sisters (the mother and aunt, not the two girls, he knew that; even at this distance and muffled by
walls the flat loud voices of the two girls emanated an incorrigible idle inertia) were setting up the stove to
prepare a meal, when he heard the hooves and saw the linen-clad man on a fine sorrel mare, whom he
recognized even before he saw the rolled rug in front of the Negro youth following on a fat bay carriage
horse – a suffused, angry face vanishing, still at full gallop, beyond the corner of the house where his
father and brother were sitting in the two tilted chairs; and a moment later, almost before he could have
put the axe down, he heard the hooves again and watched the sorrel mare go back out of the yard,
already galloping again.

Then his father began to shout one of the sisters’ names, who presently emerged backward from the
kitchen door dragging the rolled rug along the ground by one end while the other sister walked behind it.

“If you ain’t going to tote, go on and set up the wash pot,” the first said.

“You, Sarty!” the second shouted, “Set up the wash pot!” His father appeared at the door, framed against
that shabbiness, as he had been against that other bland perfection, impervious to either, the mother’s
anxious face at his shoulder.

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“Go on,” the father said. “Pick it up.” The two sisters stooped, broad, lethargic; stooping, they presented
an incredible expanse of pale cloth and a flutter of tawdry ribbons.

“If I thought enough of a rug to have to git hit all the way from France I wouldn’t keep hit where folks
coming in would have to tromp on hit,” the first said. They raised the rug.

“Abner,” the mother said. “Let me do it.”

“You go back and git dinner,” his father said. “I’ll tend to this.”

From the woodpile through the rest of the afternoon the boy watched them, the rug spread flat in the dust
beside the bubbling wash-pot, the two sisters stooping over it with that profound and lethargic reluctance,
while the father stood over them in turn, implacable and grim, driving them though never raising his voice
again. He could smell the harsh homemade lye they were using; he saw his mother come to the door
once and look toward them with an expression not anxious now but very like despair; he saw his father
turn, and he fell to with the axe and saw from the corner of his eye his father raise from the ground a
flattish fragment of field stone and examine it and return to the pot, and this time his mother actually
spoke: “Abner. Abner. Please don’t. Please, Abner.”

Then he was done too. It was dusk; the whippoorwills had already begun. He could smell coffee from the
room where they would presently eat the cold food remaining from the mid-afternoon meal, though when
he entered the house he realized they were having coffee again probably because there was a fire on the
hearth, before which the rug now lay spread over the backs of the two chairs. The tracks of his father’s
foot were gone. Where they had been were now long, water-cloudy scoriations resembling the sporadic
course of a lilliputian mowing machine.

It still hung there while they ate the cold food and then went to bed, scattered without order or claim up
and down the two rooms, his mother in one bed, where his father would later lie, the older brother in the
other, himself, the aunt, and the two sisters on pallets on the floor. But his father was not in bed yet. The
last thing the boy remembered was the depthless, harsh silhouette of the hat and coat bending over the
rug and it seemed to him that he had not even closed his eyes when the silhouette was standing over
him, the fire almost dead behind it, the stiff foot prodding him awake. “Catch up the mule,” his father said.

When he returned with the mule his father was standing in the black door, the rolled rug over his
shoulder. “Ain’t you going to ride?” he said.

“No. Give me your foot.”

He bent his knee into his father’s hand, the wiry, surprising power flowed smoothly, rising, he rising with it,
on to the mule’s bare back (they had owned a saddle once; the boy could remember it though not when
or where) and with the same effortlessness his father swung the rug up in front of him. Now in the
starlight they retraced the afternoon’s path, up the dusty road rife with honeysuckle, through the gate and
up the black tunnel of the drive to the lightless house, where he sat on the mule and felt the rough warp of
the rug drag across his thighs and vanish.

“Don’t you want me to help?” he whispered. His father did not answer and now he heard again that stiff
foot striking the hollow portico with that wooden and clocklike deliberation, that outrageous overstatement
of the weight it carried. The rug, hunched, not flung (the boy could tell that even in the darkness) from his
father’s shoulder struck the angle of wall and floor with a sound unbelievably loud, thunderous, then the
foot again, unhurried and enormous; a light came on in the house and the boy sat, tense, breathing
steadily and quietly and just a little fast, though the foot itself did not increase its beat at all, descending
the steps now; now the boy could see him.

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“Don’t you want to ride now?” he whispered. “We kin both ride now,” the light within the house altering
now, flaring up and sinking, He’s coming down the stairs now, he thought. He had already ridden the mule
up beside the horse block; presently his father was up behind him and he doubled the reins over and
slashed the mule across the neck, but before the animal could begin to trot the hard, thin arm came round
him, the hard, knotted hand jerking the mule back to a walk.

In the first red rays of the sun they were in the lot, putting plow gear on the mules. This time the sorrel
mare was in the lot before he heard it at all, the rider collarless and even bareheaded, trembling,
speaking in a shaking voice as the woman in the house had done, his father merely looking up once
before stooping again to the hame he was buckling, so that the man on the mare spoke to his stooping
back:

“You must realize you have ruined that rug. Wasn’t there anybody here, any of your women…” he
ceased, shaking, the boy watching him, the older brother leaning now in the stable door, chewing,
blinking slowly and steadily at nothing apparently. “It cost a hundred dollars. But you never had a hundred
dollars. You never will. So I’m going to charge you twenty bushels of corn against your crop. I’ll add it in
your contract and when you come to the commissary you can sign it. That won’t keep Mrs. de Spain quiet
but maybe it will teach you to wipe your feet off before you enter her house again.”

Then he was gone. The boy looked at his father, who still had not spoken or even looked up again, who
was now adjusting the logger-head in the hame.

“Pap,” he said. His father looked at him – the inscrutable face, the shaggy brows beneath which the gray
eyes glinted coldly. Suddenly the boy went toward him, fast, stopping as suddenly. “You done the best
you could!” he cried. “If he wanted hit done different why didn’t he wait and tell you how? He won’t git no
twenty bushels! He won’t git none! We’ll gether hit and hide hit! I kin watch…”

“Did you put the cutter back in that straight stock like I told you?”

“No sir,” he said.

“Then go do it.”

That was Wednesday. During the rest of that week he worked steadily, at what was within his scope and
some which was beyond it, with an industry that did not need to be driven nor even commanded twice; he
had this from his mother, with the difference that some at least of what he did he liked to do, such as
splitting wood with the half-size axe which his mother and aunt had earned, or saved money somehow, to
present him with at Christmas. In company with the two older women (and on one afternoon, even one of
the sisters), he built pens for the shoat and the cow which were a part of his father’s contract with the
landlord, and one afternoon, his father being absent, gone somewhere on one of the mules, he went to
the field,

They were running a middle buster now, his brother holding the plow straight while he handled the reins,
and walking beside the straining mule, the rich black soil shearing cool and damp against his bare ankles,
he thought Maybe this is the end of it. Maybe even that twenty bushels that seems hard to have to pay for
just a rug will be a cheap price for him to stop forever and always from being what he used to be; thinking,
dreaming now, so that his brother had to speak sharply to him to mind the mule: Maybe he even won’t
collect the twenty bushels. Maybe it will all add up and balance and vanish – corn, rug, fire; the terror and
grief, the being pulled two ways like between two teams of horses – gone, done with for ever and ever.

Then it was Saturday; he looked up from beneath the mule he was harnessing and saw his father in the
black coat and hat. “Not that,” his father said. “The wagon gear.” And then, two hours later, sitting in the
wagon bed behind his father and brother on the seat, the wagon accomplished a final curve, and he saw
the weathered paintless store with its tattered tobacco and patent-medicine posters and the tethered

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wagons and saddle animals below the gallery. He mounted the gnawed steps behind his father and
brother, and there again was the lane of quiet, watching faces for the three of them to walk through. He
saw the man in spectacles sitting at the plank table and he did not need to be told this was a Justice of
the Peace; he sent one glare of fierce, exultant, partisan defiance at the man in collar and cravat now,
whom he had seen but twice before in his life, and that on a galloping horse, who now wore on his face
an expression not of rage but of amazed unbelief which the boy could not have known was at the
incredible circumstance of being sued by one of his own tenants, and came and stood against his father
and cried at the justice: “He ain’t done it! He ain’t burnt…”

“Go back to the wagon,” his father said.

“Burnt?” the Justice said. “Do I understand this rug was burned too?”

“Does anybody here claim it was?” his father said. “Go back to the wagon.” But he did not, he merely
retreated to the rear of the room, crowded as that other had been, but not to sit down this time, instead, to
stand pressing among the motionless bodies, listening to the voices:

“And you claim twenty bushels of corn is too high for the damage you did to the rug?”

“He brought the rug to me and said he wanted the tracks washed out of it. I washed the tracks out and
took the rug back to him.”

“But you didn’t carry the rug back to him in the same condition it was in before you made the tracks on it.”

His father did not answer, and now for perhaps half a minute there was no sound at all save that of
breathing, the faint, steady suspiration of complete and intent listening.

“You decline to answer that, Mr. Snopes?” Again his father did not answer. “I’m going to find against you,
Mr. Snopes, I’m going to find that you were responsible for the injury to Major de Spain’s rug and hold you
liable for it. But twenty bushels of corn seems a little high for a man in your circumstances to have to pay.
Major de Spain claims it cost a hundred dollars. October corn will be worth about fifty cents. I figure that if
Major de Spain can stand a ninety-five dollar loss on something he paid cash for, you can stand a five-
dollar loss you haven’t earned yet. I hold you in damages to Major de Spain to the amount of ten bushels
of corn over and above your contract with him, to be paid to him out of your crop at gathering time. Court
adjourned.”

It had taken no time hardly, the morning was but half begun. He thought they would return home and
perhaps back to the field, since they were late, far behind all other farmers. But instead his father passed
on behind the wagon, merely indicating with his hand for the older brother to follow with it, and he crossed
the road toward the blacksmith shop opposite, pressing on after his father, overtaking him, speaking,
whispering up at the harsh, calm face beneath the weathered hat: “He won’t git no ten bushels neither. He
won’t git one. We’ll…” until his father glanced for an instant down at him, the face absolutely calm, the
grizzled eyebrows tangled above the cold eyes, the voice almost pleasant, almost gentle:

“You think so? Well, we’ll wait till October anyway.”

The matter of the wagon – the setting of a spoke or two and the tightening of the tires – did not take long
either, the business of the tires accomplished by driving the wagon into the spring branch behind the shop
and letting it stand there, the mules nuzzling into the water from time to time, and the boy on the seat with
the idle reins, looking up the slope and through the sooty tunnel of the shed where the slow hammer rang
and where his father sat on an upended cypress bolt, easily, either talking or listening, still sitting there
when the boy brought the dripping wagon up out of the branch and halted it before the door.

9

“Take them on to the shade and hitch,” his father said. He did so and returned. His father and the smith
and a third man squatting on his heels inside the door were talking, about crops and animals; the boy,
squatting too in the ammoniac dust and hoof-parings and scales of rust, heard his father tell a long and
unhurried story out of the time before the birth of the older brother even when he had been a professional
horse trader. And then his father came up beside him where he stood before a tattered last year’s circus
poster on the other side of the store, gazing rapt and quiet at the scarlet horses, the incredible poisings
and convolutions of tulle and tights and the painted leer of comedians, and said, “It’s time to eat.”

But not at home. Squatting beside his brother against the front wall, he watched his father emerge from
the store and produce from a paper sack a segment of cheese and divide it carefully and deliberately into
three with his pocket knife and produce crackers from the same sack. They all three squatted on the
gallery and ate, slowly, without talking; then in the store again, they drank from a tin dipper tepid water
smelling of the cedar bucket and of living beech trees. And still they did not go home. It was a horse lot
this time, a tall rail fence upon and along which men stood and sat and out of which one by one horses
were led, to be walked and trotted and then cantered back and forth along the road while the slow
swapping and buying went on and the sun began to slant westward, they – the three of them – watching
and listening, the older brother with his muddy eyes and his steady, inevitable tobacco, the father
commenting now and then on certain of the animals, to no one in particular.

It was after sundown when they reached home. They ate supper by lamplight, then, sitting on the
doorstep, the boy watched the night fully accomplished, listening to the whippoorwills and the frogs, when
he heard his mother’s voice: “Abner! No! No! Oh, God. Oh, God. Abner!” and he rose, whirled, and saw
the altered light through the door where a candle stub now burned in a bottle neck on the table and his
father, still in the hat and coat, at once formal and burlesque as though dressed carefully for some shabby
and ceremonial violence, emptying the reservoir of the lamp back into the five-gallon kerosene can from
which it had been filled, while the mother tugged at his arm until he shifted the lamp to the other hand and
flung her back, not savagely or viciously, just hard, into the wall, her hands flung out against the wall for
balance, her mouth open and in her face the same quality of hopeless despair as had been in her voice.
Then his father saw him standing in the door.

“Go to the barn and get that can of oil we were oiling the wagon with,” he said. The boy did not move.
Then he could speak.

“What…” he cried “What are you…”

“Go get that oil,” his father said. “Go.”

Then he was moving, running outside the house, toward the stable: this the old habit, the old blood which
he had not been permitted to choose for himself, which had been bequeathed him willy nilly and which
had run for so long (and who knew where, battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust) before it
came to him. I could keep on, he thought. I could run on and on and never look back, never need to see
his face again. Only I can’t. I can’t, the rusted can in his hand now, the liquid sploshing in it as he ran back
to the house and into it, into the sound of his mother’s weeping in the next room, and handed the can to
his father.

“Ain’t you going to even send a nigger?” he cried. “At least you sent a nigger before!”

This time his father didn’t strike him. The hand came even faster than the blow had, the same hand which
had set the can on the table with almost excruciating care flashing from the can toward him too quick for
him to follow it, gripping him by the back of the shirt and on to tiptoe before he had seen it quit the can,
the face stooping at him in breathless and frozen ferocity, the cold, dead voice speaking over him to the
older brother who leaned against the table, chewing with that steady, curious, sidewise motion of cows:

“Empty the can into the big one and go on. I’ll ketch up with you.”

10

“Better tie him to the bedpost,” the brother said.

“Do like I told you,” the father said. Then the boy was moving, his bunched shirt and the hard, bony hand
between his shoulder-blades, his toes just touching the floor, across the room and into the other one, past
the sisters sitting with spread heavy thighs in the two chairs over the cold hearth, and to where his mother
and aunt sat side by side on the bed, the aunt’s arms about his mother’s shoulders.

“Hold him,” the father said. The aunt made a startled movement. “Not you,” the father said. “Lennie. Take
hold of him. I want to see you do it.” His mother took him by the wrist. “You’ll hold him better than that. If
he gets loose don’t you know what he is going to do? He will go up yonder.” He jerked his head toward
the road. “Maybe I’d better tie him.”

“I’ll hold him,” his mother whispered.

“See you do then.” Then his father was gone, the stiff foot heavy and measured upon the boards, ceasing
at last.

Then he began to struggle. His mother caught him in both arms, he jerking and wrenching at them. He
would be stronger in the end, he knew that. But he had no time to wait for it. “Lemme go!” he cried. “I
don’t want to have to hit you!”

“Let him go!” the aunt said. “If he don’t go, before God, I am going up there myself!”

“Don’t you see I can’t?” his mother cried. “Sarty! Sarty! No! No! Help me, Lizzie!”

Then he was free. His aunt grasped at him but was too late. He whirled, running, his mother stumbled
forward on to her knees behind him, crying to the nearer sister: “Catch him, Net! Catch him!” But that was
too late too, the sister (the sisters were twins, born at the same time, yet either of them now gave the
impression of being, encompassing as much living meat and volume and weight as any other two of the
family) not yet having begun to rise from the chair, her head, face, alone merely turned, presenting to him
in the flying instant an astonishing expanse of young female features untroubled by any surprise even,
wearing only an expression of bovine interest. Then he was out of the room, out of the house, in the mild
dust of the starlit road and the heavy rifeness of honeysuckle, the pale ribbon unspooling with terrific
slowness under his running feet, reaching the gate at last and turning in, running, his heart and lungs
drumming, on up the drive toward the lighted house, the lighted door. He did not knock, he burst in,
sobbing for breath, incapable for the moment of speech; he saw the astonished face of the Negro in the
linen jacket without knowing when the Negro had appeared.

“De Spain!” he cried, panted. “Where’s…” then he saw the white man too emerging from a white door
down the hall. “Barn!” he cried. “Barn!”

“What?” the white man said. “Barn?”

“Yes!” the boy cried. “Barn!”

“Catch him!” the white man shouted.

But it was too late this time too. The Negro grasped his shirt, but the entire sleeve, rotten with washing,
carried away, and he was out that door too and in the drive again, and had actually never ceased to run
even while he was screaming into the white man’s face.

Behind him the white man was shouting, “My horse! Fetch my horse!” and he thought for an instant of
cutting across the park and climbing the fence into the road, but he did not know the park nor how high

11

the vine-massed fence might be and he dared not risk it. So he ran on down the drive, blood and breath
roaring; presently he was in the road again though he could not see it. He could not hear either: the
galloping mare was almost upon him before he heard her, and even then he held his course, as if the
urgency of his wild grief and need must in a moment more find him wings, waiting until the ultimate instant
to hurl himself aside and into the weed-choked roadside ditch as the horse thundered past and on, for an
instant in furious silhouette against the stars, the tranquil early summer night sky which, even before the
shape of the horse and rider vanished, strained abruptly and violently upward: a long, swirling roar
incredible and soundless, blotting the stars, and he springing up and into the road again, running again,
knowing it was too late yet still running even after he heard the shot and, an instant later, two shots,
pausing now without knowing he had ceased to run, crying “Pap! Pap!,” running again before he knew he
had begun to run, stumbling, tripping over something and scrabbling up again without ceasing to run,
looking backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees,
panting, sobbing, “Father! Father!”

At midnight he was sitting on the crest of a hill. He did not know it was midnight and he did not know how
far he had come. But there was no glare behind him now and he sat now, his back toward what he had
called home for four days anyhow, his face toward the dark woods which he would enter when breath
was strong again, small, shaking steadily in the chill darkness, hugging himself into the remainder of his
thin, rotten shirt, the grief and despair now no longer terror and fear but just grief and despair. Father. My
father, he thought. “He was brave!” he cried suddenly, aloud but not loud, no more than a whisper: “He
was! He was in the war! He was in Colonel Sartoris’ cav’ry!” not knowing that his father had gone to that
war a private in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving
fidelity to no man or army or flag, going to war as Malbrouck himself did: for booty – it meant nothing and
less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own.

The slow constellations wheeled on. It would be dawn and then sun-up after a while and he would be
hungry. But that would be to-morrow and now he was only cold, and walking would cure that. His
breathing was easier now and he decided to get up and go on, and then he found that he had been
asleep because he knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over. He could tell that from the
whippoorwills. They were everywhere now among the dark trees below him, constant and inflectioned
and ceaseless, so that, as the instant for giving over to the day birds drew nearer and nearer, there was
no interval at all between them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would
the cold, and soon there would be the sun. He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which
the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing – the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and
quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back.

Sweat
by Zora Neale Hurston

It was eleven o’clock of a Spring night in Florida. It was Sunday. Any other night, Delia Jones
would have been in bed for two hours by this time. But she was a wash-woman, and Monday
morning meant a great deal to her. So she collected the soiled clothes on Saturday when she
returned the clean things. Sunday night after church, she sorted them and put the white things to
soak. It saved her almost a half day’s start. A great hamper in the bedroom held the clothes that
she brought home. It was so much neater than a number of bundles lying around.

She squatted in the kitchen floor beside the great pile of clothes, sorting them into small heaps
according to color, and humming a song in a mournful key, but wondering through it all where
Sykes, her husband, had gone with her horse and buckboard.

Just then something long, round, limp and black fell upon her shoulders and slithered to the floor
beside her. A great terror took hold of her. It softened her knees and dried her mouth so that it
was a full minute before she could cry out or move. Then she saw that it was the big bull whip
her husband liked to carry when he drove.

She lifted her eyes to the door and saw him standing there bent over with laughter at her fright.
She screamed at him.

“Sykes, what you throw dat whip on me like dat? You know it would skeer me–looks just like a
snake, an’ you knows how skeered Ah is of snakes.”

“Course Ah knowed it! That’s how come Ah done it.” He slapped his leg with his hand and
almost rolled on the ground in his mirth. “If you such a big fool dat you got to have a fit over a
earth worm or a string, Ah don’t keer how bad Ah skeer you.”

“You aint got no business doing it. Gawd knows it’s a sin. Some day Ah’m goin’ tuh drop dead
from some of yo’ foolishness. ‘Nother thing, where you been wid mah rig? Ah feeds dat pony. He
aint fuh you to be drivin’ wid no bull whip.”

“You sho is one aggravatin’ nigger woman!” he declared and stepped into the room. She resumed
her work and did not answer him at once. “Ah done tole you time and again to keep them white
folks’ clothes outa dis house.”

He picked up the whip and glared down at her. Delia went on with her work. She went out into
the yard and returned with a galvanized tub and set it on the washbench. She saw that Sykes had
kicked all of the clothes together again, and now stood in her way truculently, his whole manner
hoping, praying, for an argument. But she walked calmly around him and commenced to re-sort
the things.

“Next time, Ah’m gointer kick ’em outdoors,” he threatened as he struck a match along the leg of
his corduroy breeches.

Delia never looked up from her work, and her thin, stooped shoulders sagged further.

“Ah aint for no fuss t’night Sykes. Ah just come from taking sacrament at the church house.”

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2

He snorted scornfully. “Yeah, you just come from de church house on a Sunday night, but heah
you is gone to work on them clothes. You ain’t nothing but a hypocrite. One of them amen-
corner Christians–sing, whoop, and shout, then come home and wash white folks clothes on the
Sabbath.”

He stepped roughly upon the whitest pile of things, kicking them helter-skelter as he crossed the
room. His wife gave a little scream of dismay, and quickly gathered them together again.

“Sykes, you quit grindin’ dirt into these clothes! How can Ah git through by Sat’day if Ah don’t
start on Sunday?”

“Ah don’t keer if you never git through. Anyhow, Ah done promised Gawd and a couple of other
men, Ah aint gointer have it in mah house. Don’t gimme no lip neither, else Ah’ll throw ’em out
and put mah fist up side yo’ head to boot.”

Delia’s habitual meekness seemed to slip from her shoulders like a blown scarf. She was on her
feet; her poor little body, her bare knuckly hands bravely defying the strapping hulk before her.

“Looka heah, Sykes, you done gone too fur. Ah been married to you fur fifteen years, and Ah
been takin’ in washin’ for fifteen years. Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat,
pray and sweat!”

“What’s that got to do with me?” he asked brutally.

“What’s it got to do with you, Sykes? Mah tub of suds is filled yo’ belly with vittles more times
than yo’ hands is filled it. Mah sweat is done paid for this house and Ah reckon Ah kin keep on
sweatin’ in it.”

She seized the iron skillet from the stove and struck a defensive pose, which act surprised him
greatly, coming from her. It cowed him and he did not strike her as he usually did.

“Naw you won’t,” she panted, “that ole snaggle-toothed black woman you runnin’ with aint
comin’ heah to pile up on mah sweat and blood. You aint paid for nothin’ on this place, and Ah’m
gointer stay right heah till Ah’m toted out foot foremost.”

“Well, you better quit gittin’ me riled up, else they’ll be totin’ you out sooner than you expect.
Ah’m so tired of you Ah don’t know whut to do. Gawd! how Ah hates skinny wimmen!”

A little awed by this new Delia, he sidled out of the door and slammed the back gate after him.
He did not say where he had gone, but she knew too well. She knew very well that he would not
return until nearly daybreak also. Her work over, she went on to bed but not to sleep at once.
Things had come to a pretty pass!

She lay awake, gazing upon the debris that cluttered their matrimonial trail. Not an image left
standing along the way. Anything like flowers had long ago been drowned in the salty stream
that had been pressed from her heart. Her tears, her sweat, her blood. She had brought love to the
union and he had brought a longing after the flesh. Two months after the wedding, he had given
her the first brutal beating. She had the memory of his numerous trips to Orlando with all of his

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3

wages when he had returned to her penniless, even before the first year had passed. She was
young and soft then, but now she thought of her knotty, muscled limbs, her harsh knuckly hands,
and drew herself up into an unhappy little ball in the middle of the big feather bed. Too late now
to hope for love, even if it were not Bertha it would be someone else. This case differed from the
others only in that she was bolder than the others. Too late for everything except her little home.
She had built it for her old days, and planted one by one the trees and flowers there. It was lovely
to her, lovely.

Somehow, before sleep came, she found herself saying aloud: “Oh well, whatever goes over the
Devil’s back, is got to come under his belly. Sometime or ruther, Sykes, like everybody else, is
gointer reap his sowing.” After that she was able to build a spiritual earthworks against her
husband. His shells could no longer reach her. Amen. She went to sleep and slept until he
announced his presence in bed by kicking her feet and rudely snatching the covers away.

“Gimme some kivah heah, an’ git yo’ damn foots over on yo’ own side! Ah oughter mash you in
yo’ mouf fuh drawing dat skillet on me.”

Delia went clear to the rail without answering him. A triumphant indifference to all that he was
or did.

*****

The week was as full of work for Delia as all other weeks, and Saturday found her behind her
little pony, collecting and delivering clothes.

It was a hot, hot day near the end of July. The village men on Joe Clarke’s porch even chewed
cane listlessly. They did not hurl the cane-knots as usual. They let them dribble over the edge of
the porch. Even conversation had collapsed under the heat.

“Heah come Delia Jones,” Jim Merchant said, as the shaggy pony came ’round the bend of the
road toward them. The rusty buckboard was heaped with baskets of crisp, clean laundry.

“Yep,” Joe Lindsay agreed. “Hot or col’, rain or shine, jes ez reg’lar ez de weeks roll roun’ Delia
carries ’em an’ fetches ’em on Sat’day.”

“She better if she wanter eat,” said Moss. “Syke Jones aint wuth de shot an’ powder hit would tek
tuh kill ’em. Not to huh he aint. ”

“He sho’ aint,” Walter Thomas chimed in. “It’s too bad, too, cause she wuz a right pritty lil trick
when he got huh. Ah’d uh mah’ied huh mahseff if he hadnter beat me to it.”

Delia nodded briefly at the men as she drove past.

“Too much knockin’ will ruin any ‘oman. He done beat huh ‘nough tuh kill three women, let ‘lone
change they looks,” said Elijah Moseley. “How Syke kin stommuck dat big black greasy Mogul
he’s layin’ roun wid, gits me. Ah swear dat eight-rock couldn’t kiss a sardine can Ah done
throwed out de back do’ ‘way las’ yeah.”

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4

“Aw, she’s fat, thass how come. He’s allus been crazy ’bout fat women,” put in Merchant. “He’d
a’ been tied up wid one long time ago if he could a’ found one tuh have him. Did Ah tell yuh
’bout him come sidlin’ roun’ mah wife–bringin’ her a basket uh pecans outa his yard fuh a
present? Yessir, mah wife! She tol’ him tuh take ’em right straight back home, cause Delia works
so hard ovah dat washtub she reckon everything on de place taste lak sweat an’ soapsuds. Ah jus’
wisht Ah’d a’ caught ‘im ‘dere! Ah’d a’ made his hips ketch on fiah down dat shell road.”

“Ah know he done it, too. Ah sees ‘im grinnin’ at every ‘oman dat passes,” Walter Thomas said.
“But even so, he useter eat some mighty big hunks uh humble pie tuh git dat lil ‘oman he got. She
wuz ez pritty ez a speckled pup! Dat wuz fifteen yeahs ago. He useter be so skeered uh losin’
huh, she could make him do some parts of a husband’s duty. Dey never wuz de same in de
mind.”

“There oughter be a law about him,” said Lindsay. “He aint fit tuh carry guts tuh a bear.”

Clarke spoke for the first time. “Taint no law on earth dat kin make a man be decent if it aint in
‘im. There’s plenty men dat takes a wife lak dey do a joint uh sugar-cane. It’s round, juicy an’
sweet when dey gits it. But dey squeeze an’ grind, squeeze an’ grind an’ wring tell dey wring
every drop uh pleasure dat’s in ’em out. When dey’s satisfied dat dey is wrung dry, dey treats ’em
jes lak dey do a cane-chew. Dey throws em away. Dey knows whut dey is doin’ while dey is at it,
an’ hates theirselves fuh it but they keeps on hangin’ after huh tell she’s empty. Den dey hates huh
fuh bein’ a cane-chew an’ in de way.”

“We oughter take Syke an’ dat stray ‘oman uh his’n down in Lake Howell swamp an’ lay on de
rawhide till they cain’t say Lawd a’ mussy.’ He allus wuz uh ovahbearin’ niggah, but since dat
white ‘oman from up north done teached ‘im how to run a automobile, he done got too biggety to
live–an’ we oughter kill ‘im,” Old Man Anderson advised.

A grunt of approval went around the porch. But the heat was melting their civic virtue, and
Elijah Moseley began to bait Joe Clarke.

“Come on, Joe, git a melon outa dere an’ slice it up for yo’ customers. We’se all sufferin’ wid de
heat. De bear’s done got me!”

“Thass right, Joe, a watermelon is jes’ whut Ah needs tuh cure de eppizudicks,” Walter Thomas
joined forces with Moseley. “Come on dere, Joe. We all is steady customers an’ you aint set us
up in a long time. Ah chooses dat long, bowlegged Floridy favorite.”

“A god, an’ be dough. You all gimme twenty cents and slice way,” Clarke retorted. “Ah needs a
col’ slice m’self. Heah, everybody chip in. Ah’ll lend y’ll mah meat knife.”

The money was quickly subscribed and the huge melon brought forth. At that moment, Sykes
and Bertha arrived. A determined silence fell on the porch and the melon was put away again.

Merchant snapped down the blade of his jackknife and moved toward the store door.

“Come on in, Joe, an’ gimme a slab uh sow belly an’ uh pound uh coffee–almost fuhgot ’twas
Sat’day. Got to git on home.” Most of the men left also.

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5

Just then Delia drove past on her way home, as Sykes was ordering magnificently for Bertha. It
pleased him for Delia to see.

“Git whutsoever yo’ heart desires, Honey. Wait a minute, Joe. Give huh two bottles uh
strawberry soda-water, uh quart uh parched ground-peas, an’ a block uh chewin’ gum.”

With all this they left the store, with Sykes reminding Bertha that this was his town and she
could have it if she wanted it.

The men returned soon after they left, and held their watermelon feast.

“Where did Syke Jones git da ‘oman from nohow?” Lindsay asked.

“Ovah Apopka. Guess dey musta been cleanin’ out de town when she lef’. She don’t look lak a
thing but a hunk uh liver wid hair on it.”

“Well, she sho’ kin squall,” Dave Carter contributed. “When she gits ready tuh laff, she jes’ opens
huh mouf an’ latches it back tuh de las’ notch. No ole grandpa alligator down in Lake Bell ain’t
got nothin’ on huh.”

*****

Bertha had been in town three months now. Sykes was still paying her room rent at Della Lewis’-
-the only house in town that would have taken her in. Sykes took her frequently to Winter Park
to “stomps.” He still assured her that he was the swellest man in the state.

“Sho’ you kin have dat lil’ ole house soon’s Ah kin git dat ‘oman outa dere. Everything b’longs
tuh me an’ you sho’ kin have it. Ah sho’ ‘bominates uh skinny ‘oman. Lawdy, you sho’ is got one
portly shape on you! You kin git anything you wants. Dis is mah town an’ you sho’ kin have it.”

Delia’s work-worn knees crawled over the earth in Gethsemane and up the rocks of Calvary
many, many times during these months. She avoided the villagers and meeting places in her
efforts to be blind and deaf. But Bertha nullified this to a degree, by coming to Delia’s house to
call Sykes out to her at the gate.

Delia and Sykes fought all the time now with no peaceful interludes. They slept and ate in
silence. Two or three times Delia had attempted a timid friendliness, but she was repulsed each
time. It was plain that the breaches must remain agape.

The sun had burned July to August. The heat streamed down like a million hot arrows, smiting
all things living upon the earth. Grass withered, leaves browned, snakes went blind in shedding
and men and dogs went mad. Dog days!

Delia came home one day and found Sykes there before her. She wondered, but started to go on
into the house without speaking, even though he was standing in the kitchen door and she must
either stoop under his arm or ask him to move. He made no room for her. She noticed a soap box
beside the steps, but paid no particular attention to it, knowing that he must have brought it there.
As she was stooping to pass under his outstretched arm, he suddenly pushed her backward,
laughingly.

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6

“Look in de box dere Delia, Ah done brung yuh somethin’!”

She nearly fell upon the box in her stumbling, and when she saw what it held, she all but fainted
outright.

“Syke! Syke, mah Gawd! You take dat rattlesnake ‘way from heah! You gottuh. Oh, Jesus, have
mussy!”

“Ah aint gut tuh do nuthin’ uh de kin’–fact is Ah aint got tuh do nothin’ but die. Taint no use uh
you puttin’ on airs makin’ out lak you skeered uh dat snake–he’s gointer stay right heah tell he
die. He wouldn’t bite me cause Ah knows how tuh handle ‘im. Nohow he wouldn’t risk breakin’
out his fangs ‘gin yo’ skinny laigs.”

“Naw, now Syke, don’t keep dat thing ‘roun’ heah tuh skeer me tuh death. You knows Ah’m even
feared uh earth worms. Thass de biggest snake Ah evah did see. Kill ‘im Syke, please.”

“Doan ast me tuh do nothin’ fuh yuh. Goin’ roun’ trying’ tuh be so damn asterperious. Naw, Ah
aint gonna kill it. Ah think uh damn sight mo’ uh him dan you! Dat’s a nice snake an’ anybody
doan lak ‘im kin jes’ hit de grit.”

The village soon heard that Sykes had the snake, and came to see and ask questions.

“How de hen-fire did you ketch dat six-foot rattler, Syke?” Thomas asked.

“He’s full uh frogs so he caint hardly move, thass how. Ah eased up on ‘m. But Ah’m a snake
charmer an’ knows how tuh handle ’em. Shux, dat aint nothin’. Ah could ketch one eve’y day if
Ah so wanted tuh.”

“Whut he needs is a heavy hick’ry club leaned real heavy on his head. Dat’s de bes ‘way tuh
charm a rattlesnake.”

“Naw, Walt, y’ll jes’ don’t understand dese diamon’ backs lak Ah do,” said Sykes in a superior
tone of voice.

The village agreed with Walter, but the snake stayed on. His box remained by the kitchen door
with its screen wire covering. Two or three days later it had digested its meal of frogs and
literally came to life. It rattled at every movement in the kitchen or the yard. One day as Delia
came down the kitchen steps she saw his chalky-white fangs curved like scimitars hung in the
wire meshes. This time she did not run away with averted eyes as usual. She stood for a long
time in the doorway in a red fury that grew bloodier for every second that she regarded the
creature that was her torment.

That night she broached the subject as soon as Sykes sat down to the table.

“Syke, Ah wants you tuh take dat snake ‘way fum heah. You done starved me an’ Ah put up
widcher, you done beat me an Ah took dat, but you done kilt all mah insides bringin’ dat varmint
heah.”

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7

Sykes poured out a saucer full of coffee and drank it deliberately before he answered her.

“A whole lot Ah keer ’bout how you feels inside uh out. Dat snake aint goin’ no damn wheah till
Ah gits ready fuh ‘im tuh go. So fur as beatin’ is concerned, yuh aint took near all dat you gointer
take ef yuh stay ‘roun’ me.”

Delia pushed back her plate and got up from the table. “Ah hates you, Sykes,” she said calmly.
“Ah hates you tuh de same degree dat Ah useter love yuh. Ah done took an’ took till mah belly is
full up tuh mah neck. Dat’s de reason Ah got mah letter fum de church an’ moved mah
membership tuh Woodbridge–so Ah don’t haf tuh take no sacrament wid yuh. Ah don’t wantuh
see yuh ‘roun’ me atall. Lay ‘roun’ wid dat ‘oman all yuh wants tuh, but gwan ‘way fum me an’
mah house. Ah hates yuh lak uh suck-egg dog.”

Sykes almost let the huge wad of corn bread and collard greens he was chewing fall out of his
mouth in amazement. He had a hard time whipping himself up to the proper fury to try to answer
Delia.

“Well, Ah’m glad you does hate me. Ah’m sho’ tiahed uh you hangin’ ontuh me. Ah don’t want
yuh. Look at yuh stringey ole neck! Yo’ rawbony laigs an’ arms is enough tuh cut uh man tuh
death. You looks jes’ lak de devvul’s doll-baby tuh me. You cain’t hate me no worse dan Ah hates
you. Ah been hatin’ you fuh years.”

“Yo’ ole black hide don’t look lak nothin’ tuh me, but uh passle uh wrinkled up rubber, wid yo’
big ole yeahs flappin’ on each side lak uh paih uh buzzard wings. Don’t think Ah’m gointuh be
run ‘way fum mah house neither. Ah’m goin’ tuh de white folks bout you, mah young man, de
very nex’ time you lay yo’ han’s on me. Mah cup is done run ovah.” Delia said this with no signs
of fear and Sykes departed from the house, threatening her, but made not the slightest move to
carry out any of them.

That night he did not return at all, and the next day being Sunday, Delia was glad she did not
have to quarrel before she hitched up her pony and drove the four miles to Woodbridge.

She stayed to the night service–“love feast”–which was very warm and full of spirit. In the
emotional winds her domestic trials were borne far and wide so that she sang as she drove
homeward.

“Jurden water, black an’ col’
Chills de body, not de soul
An’ Ah wantah cross Jurden in uh calm time.”
She came from the barn to the kitchen door and stopped.
“Whut’s de mattah, ol’ satan, you aint kickin’ up yo’ racket?” She addressed the snake’s box.
Complete silence. She went on into the house with a new hope in its birth struggles. Perhaps her
threat to go to the white folks had frightened Sykes! Perhaps he was sorry! Fifteen years of
misery and suppression had brought Delia to the place where she would hope anything that
looked towards a way over or through her wall of inhibitions.

She felt in the match safe behind the stove at once for a match. There was only one there.

8

8

“Dat niggah wouldn’t fetch nothin’ heah tuh save his rotten neck, but he kin run thew whut Ah
brings quick enough. Now he done toted off nigh on tuh haff uh box uh matches. He done had
dat ‘oman heah in mah house, too.”

Nobody but a woman could tell how she knew this even before she struck the match. But she did
and it put her into a new fury.

Presently she brought in the tubs to put the white things to soak. This time she decided she need
not bring the hamper out of the bedroom; she would go in there and do the sorting. She picked up
the pot-bellied lamp and went in. The room was small and the hamper stood hard by the foot of
the white iron bed. She could sit and reach through the bedposts–resting as she worked.

“Ah wantah cross Jurden in uh calm time,” she was singing again. The mood of the “love feast”
had returned. She threw back the lid of the basket almost gaily. Then, moved by both horror and
terror, she sprang back toward the door. There lay the snake in the basket! He moved sluggishly
at first, but even as she turned round and round, jumped up and down in an insanity of fear, he
began to stir vigorously. She saw him pouring his awful beauty from the basket upon the bed,
then she seized the lamp and ran as fast as she could to the kitchen. The wind from the open door
blew out the light and the darkness added to her terror. She sped to the darkness of the yard,
slamming the door after her before she thought to set down the lamp. She did not feel safe even
on the ground, so she climbed up in the hay barn.

There for an hour or more she lay sprawled upon the hay a gibbering wreck.

Finally, she grew quiet, and after that, coherent thought. With this, stalked through her a cold,
bloody rage. Hours of this. A period of introspection, a space of retrospection, then a mixture of
both. Out of this an awful calm.

“Well, Ah done de bes’ Ah could. If things aint right, Gawd knows taint mah fault.”

She went to sleep–a twitch sleep–and woke up to a faint gray sky. There was a loud hollow
sound below. She peered out. Sykes was at the wood-pile, demolishing a wire-covered box.

He hurried to the kitchen door, but hung outside there some minutes before he entered, and stood
some minutes more inside before he closed it after him.

The gray in the sky was spreading. Delia descended without fear now, and crouched beneath the
low bedroom window. The drawn shade shut out the dawn, shut in the night. But the thin walls
held back no sound.

“Dat ol’ scratch is woke up now!” She mused at the tremendous whirr inside, which every
woodsman knows, is one of the sound illusions. The rattler is a ventriloquist. His whirr sounds to
the right, to the left, straight ahead, behind, close under foot–everywhere but where it is. Woe to
him who guesses wrong unless he is prepared to hold up his end of the argument! Sometimes he
strikes without rattling at all.

Inside, Sykes heard nothing until he knocked a pot lid off the stove while trying to reach the
match safe in the dark. He had emptied his pockets at Bertha’s.

9

9

The snake seemed to wake up under the stove and Sykes made a quick leap into the bedroom. In
spite of the gin he had had, his head was clearing now.

“‘Mah Gawd!” he chattered, “ef Ah could on’y strack uh light!”

The rattling ceased for a moment as he stood paralyzed. He waited. It seemed that the snake
waited also.

“Oh, fuh de light! Ah thought he’d be too sick”–Sykes was muttering to himself when the whirr
began again, closer, right underfoot this time. Long before this, Sykes’ ability to think had been
flattened down to primitive instinct and he leaped–onto the bed.

Outside Delia heard a cry that might have come from a maddened chimpanzee, a stricken gorilla.
All the terror, all the horror, all the rage that man possibly could express, without a recognizable
human sound.

A tremendous stir inside there, another series of animal screams, the intermittent whirr of the
reptile. The shade torn violently down from the window, letting in the red dawn, a huge brown
hand seizing the window stick, great dull blows upon the wooden floor punctuating the gibberish
of sound long after the rattle of the snake had abruptly subsided. All this Delia could see and
hear from her place beneath the window, and it made her ill. She crept over to the four-o’clocks
and stretched herself on the cool earth to recover.

She lay there. “Delia. Delia!” She could hear Sykes calling in a most despairing tone as one who
expected no answer. The sun crept on up, and he called. Delia could not move–her legs were
gone flabby. She never moved, he called, and the sun kept rising.

“Mah Gawd!” She heard him moan, “Mah Gawd fum Heben!” She heard him stumbling about
and got up from her flower-bed. The sun was growing warm. As she approached the door she
heard him call out hopefully, “Delia, is dat you Ah heah?”

She saw him on his hands and knees as soon as she reached the door. He crept an inch or two
toward her–all that he was able, and she saw his horribly swollen neck and his one open eye
shining with hope. A surge of pity too strong to support bore her away from that eye that must,
could not, fail to see the tubs. He would see the lamp. Orlando with its doctors was too far. She
could scarcely reach the Chinaberry tree, where she waited in the growing heat while inside she
knew the cold river was creeping up and up to extinguish that eye which must know by now that
she knew.

1926