The Short Stories by Hughes Langston(Author)

Author:Hughes, Langston(Author)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TeX output 2002.04.09:1557
Published: 2002-04-09T15:57:40+00:00

Tain’t So

Miss Lucy Cannon was a right nice old white woman, so Uncle Joe always stated, except that she really did not like colored folks, not even after she come out West to California. She could never get over certain little Southern ways she had, and long as she knowed my Uncle Joe, who hauled her ashes for her, she never would call him Mister—nor any other colored man Mister neither for that matter, not even the minister of the Baptist Church who was a graduate of San Jose State College.

Miss Lucy Cannon just wouldn’t call colored folks Mister nor Missus, no matter who they was, neither in Alabama nor in California.

She was always ailing around, too, sick with first one thing and then another. Delicate, and ever so often she would have a fainting spell, like all good Southern white ladies. Looks like the older she got, the more she would be sick and couldn’t hardly get around—that is, until she went to a healer and got cured.

And that is one of the funniest stories Uncle Joe ever told me, how old Miss Cannon got cured of her heart and hip in just one cure at the healer’s.

Seems like for three years or more she could scarcely walk—even with a cane—had a terrible bad pain in her right leg from her knee up. And on her left side, her heart was always just about to give out. She was in bad shape, that old Southern lady, to be as spry as she was, always giving teas and dinners and working her colored help to death.

Well, Uncle Joe says, one New Year’s Day in Pasadena a friend of hers, a Northern lady who was kinda old and retired also and had come out to California to spend her last days, too, and get rid of some parts of her big bank full of money—this old lady told Miss Cannon, “Darling, you just seem to suffer so all the time, and you say you’ve tried all the doctors, and all kinds of baths and medicines. Why don’t you try my way of overcoming? Why don’t you try faith?”

“Faith, honey?” says old Miss Lucy Cannon, sipping her jasmine tea.

“Yes, my dear,” says the Northern white lady. “Faith! I have one of the best faith-healers in the world.”

“Who is he?” asked Miss Lucy Cannon.

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“She’s a woman, dear,” said old Miss Northern white lady. “And she heals by power. She lives in Hollywood.”

“Give me her address,” said Miss Lucy, “and I’ll go to see her. How much do her treatments cost?”

Miss Lucy warn’t so rich as some folks thought she was.

“Only Ten Dollars, dearest,” said the other lady. “Ten Dollars a treatment. Go, and you’ll come away cured.”

“I have never believed in such things,” said Miss Lucy, “nor disbelieved, either. But I will go and see.” And before she could learn any more about the healer, some other friends came in and interrupted the conversation.

A few days later, however, Miss Lucy took

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