THE SALE OF UNCLE RASTUS
Aunt Milly’s cabin was brightly illuminated. Crude tallow dips in the necks of cracked jugs and bottles spangled a dark clothless table, a slanting heap of blazing logs filled the wide rock-and-mud chimney, and a bonfire of pine knots at the “wash-place” near the door outside threw a red light far down the road which led past a row of cabins to the residence of Aunt Milly’s owner, Mr. Herbert Putnam.
The season’s crop of corn had been hauled up from the fields to the cribs. Frost had come; persimmons were ripe, and Aunt Milly was going to give the first opossum supper of the fall. Her two boys, Len and Cæsar, had caught two fat opossums the night before, and she had dressed the game and left it in a couple of pans out on the roof—“ter let de fros’ bite de wil’ taste out ’n it en tender it up ‘fo’ bilin’ en bakin’.” She had given this explanation to her husband, Uncle Rastus, who had been irritated by her rising two or three times in the night “ter see ef dem cats wuzn’t atter dat meat.”
Uncle Rastus was sick; he had taken a severe cold, which had settled on his lungs and given him a cough. Hearing the negroes singing as they came through the fields from the neighboring plantations, he left his bed in the lean-to shed and hobbled slowly into the glare of candlelight. He sniffed the aroma of coffee and baked meat and intently surveyed the preparations his wife had made.
“I heer um—dat Nelse’s tenor en Montague’s bass; dey all comin’. I never heer sech er racket!” As he spoke he put a quilt down on the floor in the chimney-corner and lay down and pushed out his long bare feet to the fire.
“I reckon I got my heerin’,” she replied, eying him reprovingly. “Look a-heer, Rastus, who seh you might git up? You know you gwine hat er wuss achin’ dan ever in yo’ ches’ ef you lie dar over dem cracks des atter you got out ’n dat warm bed.”
“Lemme ‘lone,” he said, in an offhand tone; “you reckon I ain’t gwine be at yo’ ’possum supper, en mebby it de las’ night on dis yer plantation—huh?”
His words evoked no reply, for the guests were now near the door, and she had advanced to meet them. Nelse and Montague, two tall, lank negroes, slouched in and dropped their hats on the floor. They were followed by Aunt Winnie and her husband and a crowd of negroes of all ages and sizes. As the guests filed in at the door and huddled round the fire and Rastus’s perpendicular feet, each put a silver quarter into a bowl on the end of the table.
“I don’t ‘grudge you mine, Aunt Milly,” said Aunt Winnie, feelingly. “My goodness, you is hat ernough trouble, wid yo’ marster bein’ so po’ en Une’ Rastus so sickly en y’all gwine be put up on de auction-block ter-morrer en no idee whar you gwine nex’. How much y’ reckin you gwine ter fetch, Aunt Milly?”