The Voice of the People by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
page 56 of 433 (12%)
page 56 of 433 (12%)
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gaze often wandered past the huge sycamore to the family graveyard,
where rank periwinkle grew and mocking-birds nested. Through the long summer not a Sunday passed that he did not take fresh flowers to one of the neatly trimmed mounds where the marble headpiece read: "AMELIA TUCKER, BELOVED WIFE OF THOMAS BATTLE, DIED APRIL 3RD., 18--. '_I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord._'" Sometimes the children were with him, but usually he went alone, and once or twice he returned with red eyelids and asked for a julep. There was little to fill his life now, and he divided it between Bernard and Eugenia, whom he adored, and the negroes, whom he reviled for diversion and spoiled to make amends. "They will break me!" he would declare a dozen times a day. "They will turn me out of house and home. Here's old Sambo's Claudius come back and moved into the quarters. He hasn't a cent to his name, and he's the most no 'count scamp on earth. It's worse than before the war--upon my soul it is! Then they lived on me and I got an odd piece of work out of them. Now they live on me and don't do a damned lick!" |
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