XIV ONE JASPER DAY IN THE SPRING TIME OF 1878
The Story of a Spectator
The paper which follows is a composite, embodying many incidents and facts connected with the Jasper sensation, and designed to reflect, so far as possible, the impression made by the fiery old philosopher upon those who though out of sympathy with his astronomical notions fell as helpless victims beneath the spell of his eloquence and honesty.
For quite a while the Jasper sensation had grown acute in Richmond. Beginning as a freak, it bloomed into a fad, got in the air, and actually invaded private homes. It was a pentecost for the curious, a juicy apple for the hard-driven reporter, a festival for the scoffer, and a roaring financial bonanza for the saints of Sixth Mount Zion.
I confess that, for my part, it struck me as a ridiculous business at best, the big bubble of an hour, and that if not caught at the exact moment it would speedily disappear, and while I was a sprig of a reporter it was the sort of thing which did not come my way. Being, however, of a prying and curious turn of mind I determined to take one glimpse at the black elephant. It took time, however, to get my purpose into working order, but my day came in due course. I awoke one morning to find the Saturday papers “festering” with Jasper. He was in the advertisements, in the communications, and in the local columns, and the show was to come off the next day. They told once more of his astronomical absurdities, as I believed them to be, and informed me that the exhibition would come off at 3 P. M. on the next afternoon. At noon, I dropped into Reugers’ for my lunch, and a table of hayseed legislators were filling the room, with noisy gabble about Jasper and his planetary crochets. I found that some of them had signed a paper asking for the approaching Jasperian exhibition, and others of them were twitting and punching them for their folly; but I found that both sides of them were going.
Later in the day, I got into a West Main Street car and found a seat next to three ladies who evidently had a serious attack of Jasper, and they, too, were bargaining to go. At the supper table in my boarding-house that evening I found a sickly old Yankee minister loafing in Richmond for his health, in a swivet of excitement about Jasper and his coming oration. My landlady’s fourteen year old boy told me that his mother had promised that he should go to hear Jasper, on the hampering condition that he could get some gentleman to go with him, and his appeal for my company would have beaten Jasper in the point of passionate eloquence. To me, it all seemed a stew of folly, and yet I found myself gratified to have this earnest lad as an excuse in favour of my going.
I finally bargained with the eager youngster that I would waylay him the next morning on his early escape from the Sunday-school, and we would stroll out into the vicinity of the Sixth Mount Zion Church, and make a preliminary reconnaissance of the general situation. We did not find it quite a well-odoured stroll at all points, particularly as we got in the neighbourhood of the church, for we encountered a tangle of streets and alleys some of which were not in the best condition.
Not long after crossing Broad Street we began to run afoul of squads and groups of coloured people, and the total strain of their chat was Jasper and what was coming later on. The nearer we came to the church, the combat, as the poet said, deepened, that is, the groups multiplied and the Jasperian element grew. A huge negro woman hanging on a side-gate on Clay Street was shouting in a piping voice about Jasper and the sun, and telling to several dumb listeners that “she wuz gwine ter be dar ef de Lord ‘sparred’ her an’ it wuz de las’ thing she done on de yerth.”
I observed also several of those Virginia solons already mentioned,—those big footed, badly shaven, and consequential legislators,—prowling in the neighbourhood of the church, as if they were studying and planning for burglaries. As we meandered the crooked streets which admitted us to a sight of the great Sixth Mount Zion, we saw in every direction the sign of a prodigious expectancy. Front yards, streets, and alleys had their contingents, and you could not get within ear-shot without getting some novel and surprising hints as to John Jasper and the Solar System. We could hear singing in the church, and we assumed that something in the way of worship was in process. That, however, was not IT. That was a tame and pithless performance, and if Jasper was in it at all he was evidently resting his better forces for the bigger battle at three o’clock in the impending afternoon.