Home to My Valley by Paul Green

Author:Paul Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1970-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Big John

There are many tales told about Big John and his gluttony and laziness, and I have heard them from different sources. I copied down one Aunt Fanny McDade told me about the old rapscallion. Aunt Fanny was a pride-ful Negro who owned her own home in Chapel Hill, at the corner of Cameron Avenue and Graham Street, and lived to be a hundred and four years old. She died in 1964. She used to say to her friends with a chuckle, “I come in with Lincoln but I didn’t go out with him.” She was for a long time a favorite with the university people and her recollections went far back to Mrs. Spencer, Presidents Battle, Winston, and others and on up to recent days. I copied down many of the things she told me about Chapel Hill, and in one of my notebooks I wrote down her story of Big John.

“Yessuh, yessuh, Mr. Green,” she said one day as she lifted her heavy sadiron off the lacy dress she was ironing for one of the university wives and peering over her steel-rimmed spectacles at me, “put this tight in your noggin. There are plenty of people in this world who holler Lord and follow devil. And they make a lot of squeal and little wool as this same old Satan said when he sheared his hogs. And Big John was like that, a hypocrite from way back, in the old days. Yessuh, he was a lazy and good-for-nothing old scoundrel, that’s what he was. And there was nothing he liked better than to lie up and snooze whilst his wife and children did all the hard work. And there in his bed he kept saying and pretending he was sicker’n he was and that he wouldn’t be long for this world and soon would be flapping his wings at the pearly gates. And he had one speech which he kept calling out—‘Old Moster in Heaven, come down quick and take me, take me whole soul and body, away to thy mansion in the skies.’ And that’s the kind of tune he kept a-going.

“And people passing along the road, the neighbors, could hear this old nigger lying up there in his featherbed a-pray-ing and a-talking this good holy talk. And the folks brought him plenty of good things to eat, seeing as how he was so close to God they thought. But it was all a blind. For that old devil wasn’t any more interested in religion than a goat in a diadem. As I said, it was just his excuse to laze and do nothing and eat the good things his wife and children worked out for him and the neighbors brought in.

“It may be easy to fool the niggers, Mr. Green, but you take it from me, you can’t fool the good white folks, not for long. They’ve got brains—even like you and the other ‘fessors that teach in the university here. So it was that good old Moster Landlord, the white man, was on to old Big John.

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