The Justice sighed. An elective judiciary has its trials, like the rest of us. It is hard to commit a voter of your own party for Special Sessions. However—“I’ll drive him over to Court in the morning,” said the little Justice.
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I was sitting on my verandah that afternoon, reading. Hearing my name softly spoken, I looked up and saw the largest and oldest negress I had ever met. She was at least six feet tall, well-built but not fat, full black, with carefully dressed gray hair. I knew at once from her neat dress, her well-trained manner, the easy deference of the curtsey she dropped me, that she belonged to the class that used to be known as “house darkeys”—in contradistinction to the field hands.
“I understand, seh,” she said, in a gentle, low voice, “that you gentlemen have got Cunnle Bre’eton jailed?”
She had evidently been brought up among educated Southerners, for her grammar was good and her pronunciation correct, according to Southern standards. Only once or twice did she drop into negro talk.
I assented.
“How much will it be, seh, to get him out?” She produced a fat roll of twenty and fifty dollar bills. “I do fo’ Cunnle Bre’eton,” she explained: “I have always done fo’ him. I was his Mammy when he was a baby.”
I made her sit down—when she did there was modest deprecation in her attitude—and I tried to explain the situation to her.