Humorous stories, American; Short stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
The faithful old servant is gone! We shall never see him more until
he turns up again. He has closed his long and splendid career of
dissolution, for the present, and sleeps peacefully, as only they sleep
who have earned their rest. He was in all respects a remarkable man. He
held his age better than any celebrity that has figured in history; and
the longer he lived the stronger and longer his memory grew. If he lives
to die again, he will distinctly recollect the discovery of America.
The above resume of his biography I believe to be substantially correct,
although it is possible that he may have died once or twice in obscure
places where the event failed of newspaper notoriety. One fault I find
in all the notices of his death I have quoted, and this ought to be
corrected. In them he uniformly and impartially died at the age of 95.
This could not have been. He might have done that once, or maybe twice,
but he could not have continued it indefinitely. Allowing that when he
first died, he died at the age of 95, he was 151 years old when he died
last, in 1864. But his age did not keep pace with his recollections.
When he died the last time, he distinctly remembered the landing of the
Pilgrims, which took place in 1620. He must have been about twenty years
old when he witnessed that event, wherefore it is safe to assert that
the body-servant of General Washington was in the neighborhood of
two hundred and sixty or seventy years old when he departed this life
finally.
Having waited a proper length of time, to see if the subject of his
sketch had gone from us reliably and irrevocably, I now publish his
biography with confidence, and respectfully offer it to a mourning
nation.
P.S.--I see by the papers that this infamous old fraud has just died
again, in Arkansas. This makes six times that he is known to have died,
and always in a new place. The death of Washington's body-servant has
ceased to be a novelty; it's charm is gone; the people are tired of
it; let it cease. This well-meaning but misguided negro has now put six
different communities to the expense of burying him in state, and has
swindled tens of thousands of people into following him to the grave
under the delusion that a select and peculiar distinction was being
conferred upon them. Let him stay buried for good now; and let that
newspaper suffer the severest censure that shall ever, in all the future
time, publish to the world that General Washington's favorite colored
body-servant has died again.
WIT INSPIRATIONS OF THE “TWO-YEAR-OLDS”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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