“Unk’ ’Bram, I shum duh smoke, but uh nebbuh t’ink ’e bu’n bad ’nuf fuh hot you.”
“Co’se ’e didn’ bu’n bad ’nuf fuh hot me, but ef uh yent bin had sense ’nuf fuh smell’um en’ know suh somebody’ foot duh bu’n, ’e might uh bu’n off, en’ you seddown duh fiah en’ look ’puntop my foot duh bu’n en’ nubbuh tell me. Sike, oonuh binnuh seddown duh fiah duh look ’puntop my foot duh bu’n, hukkuh you nubbuh tell me?”
“Me nebbuh shum, suh, uh binnuh sleep.”
“Meself binnuh sleep. Enty uh smell somebody’ foot duh bu’n en’ mek me fuh wake? Oonuh boy’ grow up sence freedum, oonuh ent wut!”
The herrings were broiled and eaten with the hardtack, the spoils were slung around the shoulders of the hunters, the fire beaten out, the torches relit, and a short cut taken for home. As old Abram relieved his substitute at the watchfire in the barnyard, his voice rumbled through his beard like the muttering of slow and distant thunder, “Uh done tell Mas’ Rafe suh dese’yuh nigguh’ grow’ up sence freedum, dem ent wut! Dem good fuh nutt’n’ debble’ub’uh no’count boy, dem seddown duh fiah duh look ’puntop my foot duh bu’n en’ dem nubbuh tell me suh my foot duh bu’n. Dem nubbuh tell me!”
THE TURKEY HUNTER
Sabey, a queer, misshapen mulatto, almost an albino, with green eyes and yellow wool lighting and thatching a shrewd and twisted, though good-natured, monkey face, lived, a few years after the war, on Pon Pon. His wife, Bess, a good-looking black girl, was devoted to him as a good husband and a first-rate provider. When twitted by the other negro women with her husband’s lack of personal pulchritude, she was always ready with a retort.
“Mekso you marri’d monkey fuh man, Bess?”
“Sabey oagly en’ him look lukkuh monkey fuh true, but him iz uh good puhwiduh en’ no odduh man haffuh come een him house fuh feed him wife, en’ Stepney nebbuh come een needuh.”
Sabey lived in a cabin at the edge of the woods, far away from the other plantation settlements, seldom mixing with the other negroes, who rather feared him, having a vague sort of belief in his ability to throw spells. When not hunting, he worked, but he was usually hunting in winter, and hunting successfully, for although his piece was one of the condemned army muskets carried by so many low-country negroes after Freedom, he was a good shot and possessed infinite patience and considerable woodcraft. Energetic, too, his twisted legs carried him for miles through the forests and along the backwaters and abandoned ricefields where, creeping on all-fours and worming his way through cane-brakes and briars, he frequently surprised summer ducks, and occasionally mallard and teal, feeding on the grass seeds along the margins, or the rich acorns from the live-oaks whose far-flung boughs stretched over the canals, and Sabey was an economist and seldom wasted shot on a single bird. On frosty mornings when he peeped over the embankments and saw green-wing teal strung upon a floating log basking in the first rays of the wintry sun, he would maneuver and crawl around, regardless of bogs or briars, until he got into a position where he could line them up, when, after his old “muskick” had spoken, he would sometimes gather up a dozen or more, which he sold to “de buckruh” on the plantations, or at the railway station; but it was as a turkey hunter that Sabey achieved distinction in the community.