Produced by hekula03, Wayne Hammond and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) [Transcriber’s Note: Text delimited by equal signs is bold. Text delimited by underscores is italic. Character preceeded by a caret is superscript.] [Illustration: Drawn by E. W. Kemble. “Boo-hoo,” Scootie wailed. “Aw! shut up,” the old man snapped. (_See page 12._)] E. K. MEANS _Is this a title? It is not. It is the name of a writer of negro stories, who has made himself so completely =the= writer of negro stories that his book needs no title._ ILLUSTRATED BY KEMBLE G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press 1918 COPYRIGHT, 1918 BY E. K. MEANS The Knickerbocker Press, New York To ROBERT H. DAVIS WHO TAUGHT ME HOW AND “ITTU” WHO KEPT ME AT IT. Foreword. The stories in this volume were written simply because of my interest in the stories themselves and because of a whimsical fondness for the people of that Race to whom God has given two supreme gifts,--Music and Laughter. For the benefit of the curious, I may say that many of the incidents in these tales are true and many of the characters and places mentioned actually exist. The Hen-Scratch saloon derived its name from the fact that many of its colored habitués played “craps” on the ground under the chinaberry trees until the soil was marked by their scratching finger-nails like a chicken-yard. The name Tickfall is fictitious, but the locality will be easily recognized by the true names of the negro settlements, Dirty-Six, Hell’s-Half-Acre, Shiny, Tinrow,--lying in the sand around that rich and aristocratic little town like pigs around their dam and drawing their sustenance therefrom. Skeeter Butts’s real name is Perique. Perique is also the name of Louisiana’s famous homegrown tobacco, and as Skeeter is too diminutive to be named after a whole cigar, his white friends have always called him Butts. Vinegar Atts is a well-known colored preacher of north Louisiana, whose “swing-tail prancin’-albert coat” has been seen in many pulpits, and whose “stove-pipe, preachin’ hat” has been the target of many a stone thrown from a mischievous white boy’s hand. Hitch Diamond is known at every landing place on the Mississippi River as “Big Sandy.”