J. Poindexter, ColoredCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
General
J. Poindexter, Colored
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
African Americans -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
It's got a kind of a private road so's carriages can drive in under
shelter off the sidewalk and 'way back inside is a round piece of ground
all fixed up with solid marble benches and little cedar trees and
flowerbeds, like a cemetery. I thinks to myself that maybe this here is
the private burying-plot for the owner's family; but still there ain't
no tombstones in sight excepting one over the front door with words cut
on it, and since I figures I has done showed ignorance enough for one
day, I don't ask no fool questions about it. The help here also wears
fancy clothes, but is my own color. I'm glad of that because I counts
now on having some black folks to get acquainted with and to talk to;
but just as soon as one of 'em opens his mouth and speaks I knows they
is not my kind even if they is my complexion. Because he don't talk like
no white folks ever I knowed and yet he don't talk like none of the
black folks does at home. Still, just from his conversation I can place
him. There was two just like him which was brought along once by a
Northern family staying in our town but they didn't linger long amongst
us. They didn't like the place and no more the place didn't like them.
They claimed they was genuine West Indians, whatever that is, and they
made their brags constant that they also was British subjects. But Aunt
Dilsey Turner she always said they looked more like objects to her. Aunt
Dilsey, which she was Judge Priest's cook for going on twenty years, is
mighty plain-spoken about folks and things which she don't fancy. And
she did not fancy these two none whatsomever.
When we gets upstairs to our section I'm sort of disappointed in it. The
furniture ain't new and shiny like what I naturally expected 'twould be.
Most of it is kind of old and dingy and hacked-up-looking. The curtains
at the setting-room windows is all frayed-like and mighty near wore
through in spots. And the Sublette family must a-run out of money before
they got round to buying the carpets because they is not no carpets at
all but only a passel of old faded rugs scattered about the floor here
and there. Some of the chairs--the best company chairs, too--is so old
they is actually decrepit. I'd say that by rights they belonged in a
second-hand store, or leastways up in the attic. Moreover, they ain't no
upstairs to our department nor yet there is not no downstairs nor no
cellar, but instead, everything, kitchen, pantry, and the rooms for the
help and all, runs on one floor. But Mr. Dallas he deports himself like
he is satisfied and it ain't for me to be finding fault if he sees
fitten not to find any.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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