“’Possum it is!” exclaimed that genial gentleman. “In season or out of season, I’ll never refuse it.”
“Well, suh,” said Harbert, “ef de talk gwine ter fall on ’possum, I’m bleeds ter go, kase when I hear folks talkin’ ’bout’possum hit make me dribble at de mouf.” The negro went off laughing loudly.
CHAPTER IV—SHADOWS OF THE WAR
What with the books in the library and the life out of doors in the afternoons, Joe Maxwell grew very fond of his new home. His work at the printers’ case was not a task, but a pleasure. He grew to be an expert in type-setting and won unstinted praise from Mr. Snelson. Sometimes he wrote little paragraphs of his own, crediting them to “The Countryman’s Devil,” and the editor was kind enough to make no objection, and this fact was very encouraging to the lad, who was naturally shy and sensitive.
Only the echoes of the war were heard at the Turner place; but once the editor returned from Hillsborough with some very sad news for a lady who lived near The Countryman office with her father, Her husband had been killed in one of the great battles, and her screams when the editor told her of it, and the cries of her little daughter, haunted Joe Maxwell for many a long day. Sometimes he lay awake at night thinking about it, and out of the darkness it seemed to him that he could build a grim mirage of war, vanishing and reappearing like an ominous shadow, and devouring the people.
The war was horrible enough, distant as it was, but the people who were left at home—the women and children, the boys, the men who were exempt, the aged and the infirm—had fears of a fate still more terrible. They were fears that grew out of the system of slavery, and they grew until they became a fixed habit of the mind. They were the fears of a negro insurrection. The whites who were left at home knew that it was in the power of the negroes to rise and in one night sweep the strength and substance of the Southern Confederacy from the face of the earth. Some of the more ignorant whites lived in constant terror.
Once it was whispered around that the blacks were preparing to rise, and the fears of the people were so ready to confirm the rumor that the plantations were placed in a state of siege. The patrol—called by the negroes “patter-rollers”—was doubled, and for a time the negro quarters in all parts of the country were visited nightly by the guard. But Joe Maxwell noticed that the patrol never visited the Turner plantation, and he learned afterward that they had been warned off. The editor of The Countryman had the utmost confidence in his negroes, and he would not allow them to be disturbed at night by the “patter-rollers.” He laughed at the talk of a negro uprising, and it was a favorite saying of his that the people who treated their negroes right had nothing to fear from them.