“He didn’t git no nigher dat woman dan de eend of a lassoo, an’ when she snuck up behine him wid dat big butcher-knife in her han’, dat white man jes’ nachelly ’vaporated! Yes, suh! Us niggers tried to keep up an’ go along home wid him, but we ain’t never got in sight of Marse Tom till yit—an’ us is plum’ back in town! Dat nigger woman run at us jes’ like a wild hawg—you-all knows how de hawgs pop dey jaws an’ says ‘Whoosh!’ When a wild hawg does dat way, nigger, you better coon up a tree. Well, suh, dat’s jes’ whut she said to us—‘Whoosh!’”
Thus the negroes walked from house to house telling their appalling stories to little groups of pop-eyed listeners, adding something more blood-curdling to the tales with each repetition, until the terrified inhabitants of Shiny, Shoofly, Hell’s Half-Acre, and Dirty Six were as uneasy and fearful as if they were standing in the crumbling crater of a rumbling volcano.
Then the grapevine telephone was put into operation.
There is nothing as mysterious to the white man as the negro’s method of communicating information for long distances and to the remotest cabins of his race. “Word wus sont,” is the negro’s only explanation of how he happened to know twenty minutes after it occurred that a murder had been committed in the woods twenty miles away.
Long before night the town began to fill up with negroes coming in from plantations ten and twelve miles away. They arrived unostentatiously, seeming to spring up from the very sand of the street. They seemed jumpy when they were spoken to, moved about not singly but in groups, and kept looking back over their shoulders.
The white people of the town noticed the anxiety and strain, and it became a contagion. They knew that a wild woman was at large, meditating they knew not what outrage.
The sun set as red as blood, and in a few minutes a heavy, smelly, yellow Gulf fog swept the town, making objects invisible at a distance of twenty feet, almost blotting out the little electric lights which had just enough candle-power to reveal where they were but not sufficient to show where anything else was.
The Reverend Dr. Sentelle stumped his way down to the post office upon his ponderous cane, mailed a letter, and stood for a moment in the doorway puffing a cigar. Several negroes passed, walking down the middle of the street just as the venerable preacher flicked his cigar-stump toward the gutter. The butt whirled round and round and struck the ground with a splash of fire from the lighted end.
What a howl!
The men ran down the street yelping like hound-dogs, their feet pounding upon the sand, their voices trailing off into less audible sounds of woe as they continued their rapid flight.