In his songs—and Jim Pink had composed a good many—the minstrel instinctively avoided humor. He always improvised them to the sobbing of a guitar, and they were as invariably sad as the poetry of adolescents. It was called "Tump Pack's Lament." The negroes of Hooker's Bend learned it from Jim Pink, and with them it drifted up and down the three great American rivers, and now it is sung by the roustabouts, stevedores, and underlings of our strange black American world.
This song commemorating Tump Pack's bravery and faithfulness to his love may very well take the place of the Congressional medal which, unfortunately, was lost on the night the soldier was killed. Between the two, there is little doubt that the accolade of fame bestowed in the buffoon's simple melody is more vital and enduring than that accorded by special act of the Congress of the United States of America.
When Cissie Dildine returned from jail, she and her mother arranged the Dildine-Siner wedding as nearly according to white standards in similar circumstances as they could conceive. They agreed that it should be a simple, quiet home wedding. However, as every soul in Niggertown, a number of colored friends in Jonesboro, and a contingent from up-river villages meant to attend, it became necessary to hold the service in the church.
The officiating minister was not Parson Ranson after all, but a Reverend Cleotus Haidus, the presiding elder of that circuit of the Afro-American Methodist Church, whose duties happened to call him to Hooker's Bend that day. So, notwithstanding Cissie's efforts at simplicity, the wedding, after all, was resolved into an affair.
Once, in one of her moments of clairvoyance, Cissie said to Peter:
"Our trouble is, Peter, we are trying to mix what I have learned in Nashville and what you have learned in Boston with what we both feel in Hooker's Bend. I—I'm almost ashamed to say it, but I don't really feel sad and plaintive at all, Peter. I feel glad, gloriously glad. Oh, my dear, dear Peter!" and she flung her arms around Peter's neck and held him with all her might against her ripening bosom.
To Cissie her theft, her jail sentence, her pregnancy, were nothing more than if she had taken a sip of water. However, with the imitativeness of her race and the histrionic ability of her sex, she appeared pensive and subdued during the elaborate double-ring ceremony performed by the Reverend Cleotus Haidus. Nobody in the packed church knew how tremendously Cissie's heart was beating except Peter, who held her hand.
The ethical engine that Peter had patiently builded in Harvard almost ceased to function in this weird morality of Niggertown. Whether he were doing right or doing wrong, Peter could not determine. He lost all his moorings. At times he felt himself walking according to the ethnological law, which is the Harvard way of saying walking according to the will of God; but at other times he felt party to some unpardonable obscenity. So deeply was he disturbed that out of the dregs of his mind floated up old bits of the Scriptures that he was unaware of possessing: "There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death." And Peter wondered if he were not in that way.
