Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

by Irvin S. Cobb

“Well now,” the Squire would say, “It tis and it taint. It's clear now but you can't never tell when it'll cloud up.”

He owned a little grocery store out in the edge of town and had his magistrate's office in a back room behind it. On a crowded Saturday when the country rigs were standing three deep outside and the two clerks were flying about measuring and weighing and counting up and drawing off, a waiting customer might be moved to say:

“Business pretty good, ain't it Squire?”

“It's good,” the Squire would say, licking off the corn-cob stopper of a molasses jug and driving it with a sticky plop into its appointed orifice, “And then agin it's bad. Some things air sellin' off very well and some things ain't hardly sellin' off a'tall.”

The Squire was no great shakes of a talker, but as a listener he was magnificent. He would sit silently hour after hour with his hands laced over his paunch, only occasionally spitting over the banisters with a strident tearing sound.

Nor was the assemblage complete without Captain Shelby Woodward. Captain Shelby Woodward's specialty in conversation was the Big War. From him I first heard the story of how Lieutenant Gracey of the County Battery floated down the river on a saw log and single handed, captured the Yankee gunboat and its sleepy-headed crew. From him I learned the why and wherefore of how our town although located right on the border of North and South, came in '61 to be called the Little Charleston, and from him also I got the tale of that lost legion of Illinois men, a full battalion of them, who crossing out of their own State by stealth were joyously welcomed into ours, and were mustered into the service and thereafter for four years fought their own kinspeople and neighbors—the only organized command, so Captain Shelby Woodward said, that came to the army from the outside. Frequently he used to tell about Miss Em. Garrett, who when Grant came up from Cairo on his gunboats, alone remembered what all the rest of the frightened town forgot—that the silken flag which the women had made with loving hands, was still floating from its flag pole in front of the engine house; and she drove her old rock-away down to the engine house and made her little negro house boy shin up the pole and bring the flag down to her, he greatly fearing the shells from the gunboats that whistled past his head, but fearing much more his mistress, standing down below and looking up at his bare legs with her buggy whip.

“So then,” Captain Woodward would go on, “she put the flag under her dress and drove on home. But some Union sympathizer told on her when the troops landed and a crowd of them broke away and went out to her place and called on her to give it up. She was all alone except for the darkeys, but she wasn't scared, that old woman. They sassed her and she sassed 'em back, and they were swearing they'd burn the house down over her head, and she was daring 'em to do it, when an officer came up and drove 'em off. And afterwards when the warehouses and the churches and the Young Ladies' Seminary were chuck full of sick and wounded, brought down from Donaldson and Shiloh, she turned in and nursed them all alike, not caring which side they'd fought on. And so, some of the very men that had threatened her, used to salute when she passed them on the street.

“And sir, she wore that flag under her skirts for four years, and she kept it always and when she died it was her shroud. You remember, Billy,—you were one of the pall bearers?” he would say, turning to Judge Priest.

And Judge Priest would say he remembered mighty well and the talk would go swinging back and forth, but generally back, being concerned mainly with people that were dead and things that were done years and years before I was born.

Major J. Q. A. Pickett was apt to be of the company, dapper and as jaunty as his game leg would let him be, always in black with a white tube rose in his buttonhole. The Major was a born boulevaidier without a boulevard, a natural man about town without the right kind of a town to be about in, and a clubman by instinct, yet with no club except the awnings under Soule's drug store, and the screening of dishrag vines and balsam apples on Priest's front porch. Also in a far corner somewhere, little Mr. Herman Felsburg of Felsburg Brothers, our leading clothiers, might often be found. Mr. Felsburg's twisted sentences used to tickle me. I was nearly grown before I learned, by chance, what Mr. Felsburg himself never mentioned—that he, a newly landed immigrant, enlisted at the first call and had fought in half a dozen hard battles before he properly knew the English for the commands of his captain. But my favorite story-teller of them all, was old Cap'n Jasper Lawson, and he was old—old even to these other old men, older by a full twenty years than the oldest of them, a patriarch of the early times, a Forty-niner, and a veteran of two wars and an Indian Campaign. For me he linked the faded past to the present and made it glow again in vivid colors. Wherever he was, was an Arabian Nights Entertainment for me.