“Huh!” Hitch Diamond bellowed. “I wouldn’t be skeart to-day even ef de Revun Dr. Sentelle hadn’t made us such a purty speech. I done separated my idears from my habits!”
“I ain’t skeart, neider!” Vinegar Atts whooped. “Nobody ain’t gwine pat me in de face wid a spadeful of dirt!”
Christmas baskets came to every cabin; pickaninnies ran the streets, their pockets filled with pennies, and their hats laden with oranges, bananas, and cheap candy; children, white and black, cluttered up the few asphalt pavements with every sort of Christmas toys, until the careless pedestrian was in danger of tripping over some contraption and breaking every leg he had; and negro women gadded the streets dressed in finery which was very suggestive to the white folks of dresses they had seen earlier in the year in the drawing-rooms of their women.
By nightfall the Hen-Scratch saloon was filled with negro men, all perfectly sober, and all laughing, and all happy beyond the dreams of angels.
Figger Bush thrummed a banjo; Pap Curtain had a fiddle; Mustard Prophet blew a cornet; while every man exhausted the vocal treasury of his throat for sounds to add to the volume of music:
I’s as crazy as a loon,
Fer I gib a silber spoon
To a yeller she-coon,
On dis here Chris’mus day.
But a white woman owned it,
An’ said she never loaned it,
An’ de cotehouse kotch me right away!
Vinegar Atts pushed through the crowd, shaking hands cordially, smiling like a big, fat baby, and bellowing his congratulations:
“Merry Chris’mus, niggers! Us is done fell from amazin’ grace to a floatin’ opportunity!”
“Bless Gawd!” Skeeter Butts squealed. “I’s shore glad us ain’t refawmed no more! Less all j’ine hands in a circuous-ring an’ sing dat good ole favoryte toon, ‘De Star-Spangled Banana’!”
“Naw!” Vinegar Atts bawled. “We is done loss all our good sense! Less go an’ pay our manners to de white folks!”