Old Judge Priest

by Irvin S. Cobb

“Whut I wants to go to work fur, Mist' W'ite Man? I got 'most two dollars lef.' Come round to see me w'en all dat's done spent and mebbe we kin talk bus'ness 'en.”

The above statement, made by a truant grading hand to an inquiring grading boss, was typical of a fairly common point of view on the side of Labour. And this one, below, which sprang from the exasperated soul of a visiting contractor, was just as typical, for it was the cry of outraged Capital:

“It takes two white men, standing over every black man, to make the black man work—and then he won't! I never was a Southern sympathiser before, but I am now—you bet!”

The camel's back broke entirely at the end of the third week. It was a green paymaster from the Chicago offices who furnished the last straw. He tried to pay off with paper money. Since those early postbellum days, when the black brother, being newly freed from servitude and innocently devoid of the commercial instinct, thought the white man's money, whether stamped on metal disks or printed on parchment rectangulars, was always good money, and so accepted much Confederate currency, to his sorrow at the time and to his subsequent enlightenment, he has nourished a deep suspicion of all cash except the kind that jingles; in fact, it is rarely that he will accept any other sort.

Give him the hard round silver and he is well-content. That is good money—money fit to buy things with. He knows it is, because it rattles in the pocket and it rings on the bar; but for him no greenbacks, if you please. So when this poor ignorant paymaster opened up his satchel and spread out his ones and his twos, his fives and his tens, his treasury certificates and his national bank notes, there was a riot.

Then the contractors just fired the whole outfit bodily; and they suspended operations, leaving the fills half-filled and the cuts half-dug until they could fetch new shifts of labourers from the North. They fetched them—a trainload of overalled Latins, and some of these were tall and swarthy men, and more were short, fair men; but all were capable of doing a full day's work.

Speedily enough, the town lost its first curious interest in the newcomers. Indeed, there was about them nothing calculated to hold the public interest long. They played no guitars, wore no handkerchief headdresses, offered to kidnap no small children, and were in no respect a picturesque race of beings. They talked their own outlandish language, dined on their own mysterious messes, slept in their bunks in the long barracks the company knocked together for them in the hollow down by the Old Fort, hived their savings, dealt with their employers through a paid translator, and beautifully minded their own business, which was the putting through of the Boaz Ridge Extension. Sundays a few came clunking in their brogans to early mass in Father Minor's church; the rest of the time they spent at the doing of their daily stint or in camp at their own peculiar devices.

Tony Palassi, who ran the biggest fruit stand in town, paid them one brief visit—and one only—and came away, spitting his disgust on the earth. It appeared that they were not his kind of people at all, these being but despised Sicilians and he by birth a haughty Roman, and by virtue of naturalisation processes a stalwart American; but everybody knew already, without being told, that there was a difference, and a big difference. A blind man could see it.

Tony, now, was a good fellow—one with sporting blood in his veins. Tony was a member of the Elks and of the Knights of Columbus. He owned and he drove one of the smartest trotting horses in the county. He played a brisk game of poker. Once a month he sent a barrel of apples or a bunch of bananas or a box of oranges, as a freewill offering, to the children out at the Home for the Friendless—in short, Tony belonged. Nobody ever thought of calling Tony a Dago, and nobody ever had—more than once; but these other fellows, plainly, were Dagos and to be regarded as such. For upward of a month now their presence in the community had meant little or nothing to the community, one way or the other, until one of them so far forgot himself as to carve up Beaver Yancy.

The railroad made a big mistake when it hired Northern bosses to handle black natives; it made another when it continued to retain Beaver Yancy, of our town, in its employ after the Sicilians came, he being a person long of the arm and short of the temper. Even so, things might have gone forward to a conclusion without misadventure had it not been that on the day before the snow fell the official padrone of the force, who was likewise the official interpreter, went North on some private business of his own, leaving his countrymen without an intermediary during his absence. It came to pass, therefore, that on the December morning when this account properly begins, Beaver Yancy found himself in sole command of a battalion whose tongue he did not speak and whose ways he did not know.