“Cornfess yo’ sins!” Vinegar Atts bellowed. “Cornfess up!”
Negroes sprang up all over the house and bawled their iniquities into the ears of the people, but each negro was too intent on thinking of his own transgression to listen to the vices of his fellow, who spoke as a dying man to dying men!
When the rising sun dissolved the last lurking shadow, the all-night revival came to an end in this manner:
Hitch Diamond arose, holding in his hand the sheet of paper which contained the rules of reform devised in the Hen-Scratch saloon.
“I motions befo’ we turns out dat all of us promise to keep de rules wroted down on dis paper!” he bellowed.
After he had read the list the congregation unanimously adopted this new code of conduct and dispersed. The people walked home in groups, looking fearfully behind them at intervals, lifting their feet high like turkeys walking through mud, ready at an instant for precipitate flight.
The sudden reform among the negroes of Tickfall caused a sensation among the white people of the village.
As a general thing, a white man was accustomed to spending four days hunting for a negro willing to do half a day’s work; he secured promises from ten darkies to “be dar early in de mawnin’.” Then he waited ten days, and went out and did the work himself.
But by nine o’clock on this day, the Tickfall bank was crowded with negroes who wished to see Marse Tom Gaitskill about getting a job. Every merchant in the town was beset by applications for labor. Darkies walked from house to house, seeking employment, and every chance pedestrian upon the street was accosted with a greeting which after a while almost shattered the nerves of the white inhabitants of the village: