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

by Irvin S. Cobb

The constable hurried stiffly up the short gravel path to the jail and rapped on the door and called out something. The deputy sheriff reached in under the buggy top and hauled out a little negro, skinny and slight and seemingly not over eighteen years old. He hauled him out as though he was handling a sack of grits, and the negro came out like a sack of grits and fell upon his face on the pavement, almost between the buggy wheels. His wrists were held together by a pair of iron handcuffs heavy enough to fetter a bear, and for further precaution his legs had been hobbled with a plowline, and his arms were tied back with another length of the plowline that passed through his elbows and was knotted behind. The deputy stooped, took a grip on the rope across the prisoner's back and heaved him up to his feet. He was ragged, barefooted and bareheaded and his face was covered with a streaky clayish-yellow caking, where the sweat had run down and wetted the dust layers. Through this muddy mask his pop-eyes stared with a dulled animal terror.

Thus yanked upright the little negro swayed on his feet, shrinking up his shoulders and lurching in his tethers. Then his glazed stare fell on the barred windows and the hooded door of the jail, and he realized where he had been brought and hurried toward it as toward a welcome haven, stretching his legs as far as the ropes sawing on his naked ankles would let him. Willing as he was, however, he collapsed altogether as he reached the door and lay on his face kinking and twisting up in his bonds like a stricken thing. The deputy and the constable dragged him up roughly, one lifting him by his arm bindings and the other by the ropes on his legs, and they pitched him in flat on the floor of the little jail office. He wriggled himself under a table and lay there, sniffling out his fear and relief. His tongue hung out of his mouth like the tongue of a tied calf, and he panted with choky, slobbering sounds.

The deputy sheriff and the constable left him lying and went to a water bucket in the corner and drank down brimming dippers, turn and turn about, as though their thirst was unslakable. It was Dink Bynum, the deputy jailer, who had admitted them and in the absence of his superior he was in charge solely. He waited until the two had lowered the water line in the cedar bucket by a matter of inches.

“Purty quick work, boys,” he said professionally, “if this is the right nigger.”

“I guess there ain't much doubt about him bein' the right one,” said the constable, whose name was Quarles. “Is there, Gus?” he added.

“No doubt at all in my mind,” said the deputy. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, which smeared the dust across his face in a sort of pattern.

“How'd you fellers come to git him?” asked Bynum.

“Well,” said the deputy, “we got out to the Hampton place about dinner time I reckin it was. Every man along the creek and every boy that was big enough to tote a gun was out scourin' the woods and there wasn't nobody round the place exceptin' a passel of the womenfolks. Just over the fence where the nigger was s'posed to have crossed we found his old wool hat layin' right where he'd run out from under it and we let the dogs smell of it, and inside of five minutes they'd picked up a trail and was openin' out on it. It was monstrous hot going through them thick bottoms afoot, and me and Quarles here outrun the sheriff and the others. Four miles back of Florence Station, and not more'n a mile from the river, we found this nigger treed up a hackberry with the dogs bayin' under him. I figure he'd been hidin' out in the woods all night and was makin' for the river, aimin' to cross, when the dogs fetched up behind him and made him take to a tree.”

“Did you carry him back for the girl to see?”

“No,” said the deputy sheriff. “Me and Quarles we talked it over after we'd got him down and had him roped up. In the first place she wasn't in no condition to take a look at him, and besides we knowed that them Massac people jest natchelly wouldn't listen to nothin' oncet they laid eyes on him. They'd 'a' tore him apart bodily.”