“Lead de way! Lead de way!” a chorus of voices answered. “Us follers right at yo’ hip!”
Weep and howl, ye dwellers in the East and West and North, because ye were not in Tickfall on that Christmas night! Your negroes have cast aside the supreme gifts which make us love them in the South—humor, pathos, laughter, and music!
You listen to your phonographs and try to imagine what real music is like; you go to grand opera and think you hear it; but reserve your judgment until you hear a marching column of negro men, each of their throats having the range and capacity of a pipe-organ, and all of their songs set to a sweet minor, which is characteristic of the music of all enslaved people since that far distant day when the whip-driven Israelites “hung their harps on the willows.”
On the Christmas following the close of the Civil War, the impoverished white people of Tickfall sent Christmas baskets to their ex-slaves, who were as poor and hungry as themselves. That night those ex-slaves, as an expression of their gratitude to their old masters, formed in a body and walked from house to house, singing the songs of the old plantation days. White women came out upon the porticoes, leaned their quivering shoulders against the big columns, and wept uncontrollably in memory of other and happier days.
White men stumped out upon those same porches with crutches and canes, or with wooden legs, and listening, visualized the smoke-fogged battlefields, the blood-drenched ground, the clash and onsets of the great war, and beyond the acrid smoke of that holocaust they beheld a magnificent civilization which rose in beauty like a dream, and then vanished forever more. For over half a century this custom had been observed every Christmas. It survived the horrors of the Reconstruction Era when Northern carpet-baggers sought to lead the black race astray and turn them against their former masters.
And now that marching column had formed again, two hundred strong, two abreast, with Vinegar Atts and Hitch Diamond in the lead.
All over Tickfall the white people were waiting for this, the day’s supreme event. The negroes knew the favorite songs of all the older citizens. Rev. Dr. Sentelle listened to “Dixie,” and “Jesus Lover of my Soul.” Bowing his acknowledgments, Dr. Sentelle said:
“Boys, when I die, I want you to sing both of those songs at my funeral!”
And a few years later they did it!
Marse Tom Gaitskill, being a Kentuckian, listened to “My Old Kentucky Home,” and to “Darling Nellie Gray”——