“Howdy, Popsy!” Figger greeted him cordially, holding out his hand. “Don’t you reckomember me?”
The old man removed his pipe from his mouth, rested his turkey-wing fan upon his lap, reached for his long patriarchal staff as if he were about to rise; then he leaned back in his chair and surveyed Figger a long time.
“Naw, suh, I ain’t never seed yo’ favor befo’,” he quavered.
“I’s little Figger,” Figger informed him ingratiatingly.
“Little Figger is dead,” Popsy answered, looking at Bush with faded eyes, in which the light of doubt and suspicion and a little fear was growing. “I lives wid little Figger’s widder.”
“Dat’s a mistake, Popsy,” Figger protested. “I ain’t died yit. Scootie’s been lyin’ to you ’bout me.”
The old man leaned over and fumbled in the crown of his stove-pipe hat. He brought out his big red handkerchief, and slowly unwrapped the photograph which Scootie had given him when he first entered her home, a photograph of a negro with a woolly head and a shoe-brush mustache. Handing this to Figger, he asked sharply:
“Does you look like dat nigger in dat photygrapht?”
“Naw, suh,” Figger replied with evident reluctance.
“Dat’s de little Figger Bush I mourns,” Popsy said. “Dat’s Scootie’s dead husbunt. You ain’t look like him a bit—you look like a picked geese!”