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 TitleMeans, E. K. (Eldred Kurtz)
General
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
Means, E. K. (Eldred Kurtz)
African Americans -- Fiction; Short stories, American
Just at that moment Tucky Sugg fought his way through the tangle of
human arms and legs and sprang into the open window. Then he went
screaming downward to his death as a bullet from the sheriff’s pistol
went with him, pocketed in the murderer’s heart!
Then, as if the crack of the sheriff’s pistol was her cue to enter,
another woman came up-stage and stood in the blazing light of battle.
She weighed four hundred and ten pounds, and resembled a balloon
divided in the middle by an apron string. She was conducted by Dainty
Blackum and a strange young negro man, and her name was Ginny Babe Chew.
Inside the railing, she picked up a heavy iron cuspidor, and walked
over to the table where, earlier in the morning, the district attorney
had sat.
“He’p me up on dis here table, honey!” she grunted, hugging the heavy
cuspidor in her arms.
The district attorney lay unconscious under the table on which Ginny
stood.
Ginny announced her position by a loud bellow. She raised the large
iron cuspidor above her head with her fat arms, and every pound of her
monstrous weight was quivering with unspeakable hate.
“Git outen my way, Hitchie!” she whooped. “Gimme room accawdin’ to my
fat, sonny! Let yo’ mammy put somepin acrost!”
For more than a minute Sheriff Flournoy had been fingering his pistol,
waiting for a chance to shoot without killing Hitch Diamond. Ginny Babe
Chew’s remarkable stunt gave him pause and caused him to lower his gun
with astonishment.
Hitch reeled and stumbled backward. His eyes were glazing, his right
arm hung broken and useless at his side, he was one bloody mass of
wounds.
Dinner Gaze, his clothes torn from him until he was bare to the waist,
his whole body screaming with pain from countless injuries, slowly
followed Hitch in his retreat, chopping at him with weakening arms,
still fighting with the broken table-leg.
“Look up, Dinner Gaze!” Ginny Babe Chew bawled. “Dis is yo’ la-ast time
to see de hoodoo face!”
Unconsciously responding to the command, Dinner Gaze raised his
pain-shot eyes upward, and looked into the fat face, through whose
rolls of flesh two green pig eyes gleamed upon him with a serpent’s
venom and deadly malignity.
The heavy iron cuspidor came down with a crash. It crushed the
criminal’s head like an egg-shell. It bounced, fell on its rounded
edge, and rolled slowly across the floor.
Dinner Gaze fell face downward, kicked the floor three times with the
toes of his shoes, and died.
“Dar--_now_!” Ginny Babe Chew whooped.
Then she held out a fat hand to the slim young girl standing beside the
table and said:
“Gimme yo’ hand an’ he’p me down offen dis table, honey! Dis here duck
is too dang fat to be roostin’ so high!”
XVIII
THE HOODOO FACE SMILES.
The panic and outflow of negroes from the trial chamber in the Tickfall
courthouse started a riot-call in the town.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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