However untidy an Italian woman might be I always found a heart in her bosom, and that her hands were ready to help. This one, while talking, jerked up a milk-pail and held it bottom upward over a cup. Not a drop. How greedy her children were! If only they had left a few swallows for her to heat and give the janitor’s baby. Then scooping up a panful of coals she hurried after me and into the janitor’s flat.
Turning the pan of coals over to the little girl, she followed me to the bedside. Crooning half under her breath she bent over the still little figure. At first it seemed almost gone, its breathing was so faint.
Throwing at me a swift glance of consternation, the woman turned on the little girl. She must get on her coat—the poor, half-frozen little mite was wearing the only coat she possessed—and run down to the grocery. While talking she snatched the pan of coals from the child’s hands and proceeded to gouge down into one of her stockings.
As the Italian woman drew a crumpled bill from her stocking the door of the flat opened, and in stepped the janitor. Her face was wreathed in smiles, and both hands concealed by the ends of her shawl. The Italian woman, extending her hand, demanded the milk.
The janitor, throwing aside her shawl, displayed a short fat candle. She had been to church, she explained complacently, had burned a candle and prayed to Saint Somebody—I did not write the name of the saint to whom she prayed in my diary—for her baby. Her baby would get well. Oh, yes, it would surely get well, for she had spent the balance of her money for another candle.
Then without so much as a glance at the dying child, she hurried into her front room, and having lit the candle, placed it before the gaily colored picture of another saint. While she was doing this the last breath fluttered away from her baby.
When the Italian woman told her, convinced her that the baby was dead, such shrieks! Shriek after shriek. She alarmed the entire house, and persons passing in the street stopped to ask the reason.
I know negroes by the hundreds. I have known and lived among them all my life. Of them all, hundreds, there was only one who would have done such a thing, pinned her faith to a burning candle. That one was an old, old negress. She used to try to hoodoo persons.
Once, about twenty years ago, under the steps of the ironing-room at home, we, my brother and I and the negro children about the yard, found a conjure-bag of her making. It contained the claw of a ground-mole, a few hairs, said to be off a dog’s tail, two cow-peas, and a scrap of bacon rind.
How the negroes laughed at that old woman! Young and middle-aged they jeered her. They asked her what she thought she was going to do by such foolishness. Who did she think was afraid of her conjure-bag? When she mumbled angrily back at them they only laughed the louder.