“Oh, we won’t tell, and we’re much obliged to you for your good intentions but we don’t scare worth a cent, after all.”
Uncle Jesse left the office, and the other men walked down to the railroad station to meet the through train going north.
“What do you think of the old man’s story?” asked Watta.
“I don’t think much of it. He has maintained such an equivocal attitude that it is hard to tell whose hands he is playing into. He has been on one side and then on the other—with the colored people and then with the whites, till there is no telling where he is now.”
“Elly, you are unfair. That man is just as true as steel; he is solid gold all through. He is with the side that is right, that is all, only he has more courage to speak out than some of us have. I reckon the fact is that the right hasn’t always been the colored side. I’m afraid it hasn’t, though we’ve had so much the worst chance since we’ve had a chance at all, and such an outrageous list of grievances to remember, and to bear, that it isn’t an ordinary man that can look at things fairly here.”
Now, I have a mind to think there is something serious in this matter, and that there will be more and more as election approaches. The white men at Baconsville are awful mad, because our Militia Company has been reorganized lately, and has been preparing for the centennial Fourth of July. One would think they expected to be massacred in their beds; and so they go to work and do things that might make every nigger mad at them. Sensible, isn’t it?
“They are just raving, the white men are, some of them, and they do talk dreadfully. Old man Bob Baker there, gets into a passion whenever he sees us drilling on Market street. He hates to see a nigger he has hunted in the swamps before the war, and his dogs couldn’t catch, or could, practicing the use of arms with a State gun in his hands, and the Union flag over his head. He is like a mad bull, and “the stars and stripes” is the red rag that sets him a roaring and tearing up the ground.”
Here Watta, the speaker, slapped his companion’s shoulder, and both broke into a loud laugh.
“He has got an idea,” he resumed, “that all the roads within five miles of his plantation belong to him, I reckon, by the way he swears whenever he meets or passes the Company. I tell the boys to give the flag an extra spread whenever he is in sight, and we have it out.”
“It is the flag of the Union that you carry, and you are the National Guards of South Carolina, too,” replied Elly.