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The Half-Pint Flask

By DuBose Heyward

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I picked up the book and regarded it with interest. Even its format suggested the- author: the practical linen covered boards, the compact and exact paragraphing. I opened the volume at random. There he was again: “There can be no doubt;” “An undeniable fact,” “I am prepared to assert.” A statement in the preface leaped from the context and arrested my gaze:

“The primitive American Negro is of a deeply religious nature, demonstrating in his constant attendance at church, his fervent prayers, his hymns, and his frequent mention of the Deity that he has cast aside the last vestiges of his pagan background, and has unreservedly espoused the doctrine of Christianity.”

I spun the pages through my fingers until a paragraph in the last chapter brought me up standing:

“I was hampered in my investigations by a sickness contracted on the island that was accompanied by a distressing insomnia, and, in its final stages, extreme delirium. But I already had sufficient evidence in hand to enable me to prove ”

Yes, there it was, fact upon fact. I was overwhelmed by the permanence, the unanswerable word of the printed page. In the face of it my own impressions became fantastic, discredited even in my own mind. In an effort at self-justification I commenced to rehearse my impressions of that preposterous month as opposed to Barksdale’s facts; my feeling for effects and highly developed fiction writer’s imagination on the one hand; and on the other, his cold record of a tight, three dimensional world as reported by his five good senses.

Sitting like a crystal gazer, with the book in my hand, I sent my memory back to a late afternoon in August, when, watching from the shore near the landing on Ediwander Island, I saw the “General Stonewall Jackson” slide past a frieze of palmetto trees, shut off her steam, and nose up to the tenuous little wharf against the ebb.

Two bare-footed Negroes removed a section of the rail and prepared to run out the gang plank. Behind them gathered the passengers for Ediwander landing: ten or a dozen Negroes back from town with the proceeds of a month’s labor transformed into flaming calico, amazing bonnets, and new flimsy, yellow luggage; and trailing along behind them, the single white passenger.

I would have recognized my guest under more difficult circumstances and I experienced that inner satisfaction that comes from having a new acquaintance fit neatly into a preconceived pattern. The obstinacy of which I had been warned was evident in the thin immobile line of the mouth over the prognathous jaw. The eyes behind his thick glasses were a bright hard blue and moved methodically from object to object, allowing each its allotted time for classification then passing unhurriedly on to the next. He was so like the tabloid portrait in the letter of the club member who had sent him down that I drew the paper from my pocket and refreshed my memory with a surreptitious glance.

“He’s the museum, or collector type,” Spencer had written; spends his time collecting facts—some he sells—some he keeps to play with. Incidentally his hobby is American glass, and he has the finest private collection in the state.”

We stood eyeing each other over the heads of the noisy landing party without enthusiasm. Then when the last Negro had come ashore he picked up his bag with a meticulousness that vaguely exasperated me, and advanced up the gang plank.

Perfunctory introductions followed: “Mr. Courtney?” from him, with an unnecessarily rising inflection; and a conventional “Mr. Barksdale, I presume,” from me in reply.

The buckboard had been jogging along for several minutes before he spoke.

“Very good of Mr. Spencer to give me this opportunity,” he said in a close clipped speech. “I am doing a series of articles m Negroid Primates, and I fancy the chances for observation are excellent here.”

“Negroid Primates!” The phrase annoyed me. Uttered in mat dissecting voice, it seemed to strip the human from the hundred or more Negroes who were my only company except during the duck season when the club members dropped down for the shooting.

“There are lots of Negroes here,” I told him a little stiffly. “Their ancestors were slaves when the island was the largest rice plantation in South Carolina, and isolation from modern life has kept them primitive enough, I guess.”

“Good!” he exclaimed. “I will commence my studies at once. Simple souls, I fancy. I should have my data within a month.”

We had been traveling slowly through deep sand ruts that dragged at the wheels like an undertow. On either side towered serried ranks of virgin long-leaf pine. Now we topped a gentle rise. Before us was the last outpost of the forest crowning a diminishing ridge. The straight columned trees were bars against a released splendor of sunset sky and sea.

Impulsively I called his attention to it:

“Rather splendid, don’t you think?”

He raised his face, and I was immediately cognizant of the keen methodical scrutiny that passed from trees to sea, and from sea back to that last wooded ridge that fell away into the tumble of dunes.

Suddenly I felt his wire-tight grasp about my arm.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing with his free hand. Then with an air of authority, he snapped: “Stop the cart. I’ve got to have a look at it.”

“That won’t interest you. It’s only a Negro burying ground. I’ll take you to the quarters tomorrow, where you can study your ‘live primates.’ ”

But he was over the wheel with surprising alacrity and striding up the slight ascent to the scattered mounds beneath the pines.

The sunset was going quickly, dragging its color from the sky and sea, rolling up leagues of delicately tinted gauze into tight little bales of primary color, then draping these with dark covers for the night. In sharp contrast against the light the burying ground presented its pitiful emblems of the departed. Under the pine needles, in common with all Negro graveyards of the region, the mounds were covered with a strange litter of half-emptied medicine bottles, tin spoons, and other futile weapons that had failed in the final engagement with the last dark enemy.

Barksdale was puttering excitedly about among the graves, peering at the strange assortment of crockery and glass. The sight reminded me of what Spencer had said of the man’s hobby and a chill foreboding assailed me. I jumped from the buckboard.

“Here,” I called, “I wouldn’t disturb those things if I were you!”

But my words went unheeded. When I reached Barksdale’s side, he was holding a small flat bottle, half filled with a sticky black fluid, and was rubbing the earth from it with his coat sleeve. The man was electric with excitement. He held the flask close to his glasses, then spun around upon me.

“Do you know what this is?” he demanded, then rushed on triumphantly with his answer: “It’s a first issue, half pint flask of the old South Carolina state dispensary. It gives me the only complete set in existence. Not another one in America. I had hoped that I might get on the trail of one down here. But to fall upon it like this!”

The hand that held the flask was shaking so violently that the little palmetto tree and single X that marked it described small agitated circles. He drew out his handkerchief and wrapped it up tenderly, black contents and all.

“Come,” he announced, “we’ll go now.”

“Not so fast,” I cautioned him. “You can’t carry that away. It simply isn’t done down here. We may have our moral lapses, but there are certain things that—well—can’t be thought of. The graveyard is one. We let it alone.”

He placed the little linen covered package tenderly in his inside pocket and buttoned his coat with an air of finality; then he faced me truculently.

“I have been searching for this flask for ten years,” he asserted. “If you can find the proper person to whom payment should be made I will give a good price. In the meantime I intend to keep it. It certainly is of no use to anyone, and I shan’t hesitate for a silly superstition,”

I could not thrash him for it and I saw that nothing short of physical violence would remove it from his person. For a second I was tempted to argue with him; tell him why he should not take the thing. Then I was frustrated by my own lack of a reason. I groped with my instinctive knowledge that it was not to be done, trying to embody the abstract into something sufficiently concrete to impress him. And all the while I felt his gaze upon me, hard, very blue, a little mocking, absolutely determined.

Behind the low crest of the ridge sounded a single burst of laughter, and the ring of a trace chain. A strange panic seized me. Taking him by the arm I rushed him across the short distance to the buckboard and into his seat; then leaped across-him and took up the lines.

Night was upon us, crowding forward from the recesses of the forest, pushing out beyond us through the last scattered trees, flowing over the sea and lifting like level smoke into the void of sky. The horse started forward, wrenching the wheels from the clutching sand.

Before us, coming suddenly up in the dusk, a party of field Negroes filled the road. A second burst of laughter sounded, warm now, volatile and disarming. It made me ashamed of my panic. The party passed the vehicle, dividing and flowing by on both sides of the road. The last vestiges of day brought out high lights on their long earth-polished hoes. Teeth were a white accent here and there. Only eyes, and fallen sockets under the brows of the very old, seemed to defy the fading glimmer, bringing the night in them from the woods. Laughter and soft Gullah words were warm in the air about us.

“Howdy, Boss.”

“Ebenin’, Boss.”

The women curtsied in their high tucked up skirts; the men touched hat brims. Several mules followed, grotesque and incredible in the thickening dark, their trace chains dangling and chiming faintly.

The party topped the rise, then dropped behind it.

Silence, immediate and profound, as though a curtain had been run down upon the heels of the last.

“A simple folk,” clipped out my companion. “I rather envy them starting out at zero, as it were, with everything to learn from our amazing civilization.”

“Zero, hell!” I flung out. “They had created a Congo art before our ancestors drugged and robbed their first Indian.”

Barksdale consigned me to limbo with his mocking, intolerable smile.

The first few days at the club were spent by my guest in going through the preliminary routine of the systematic writer. Books were unpacked and arranged in the order of study, loose-leaf folders were laid out, and notes made for the background of his thesis. He was working at a table in his bedroom which adjoined my own, and as I also used my sleeping apartment as a study for the fabrication of the fiction which, with my salary as manager of the club, discharged my financial obligations, I could not help seeing something of him.

On the morning of the second day I glanced in as I passed his door, and surprised him gloating over his find. It was placed on the table before him, and he was gazing fixedly at it. Unfortunately, he looked up; our glances met and, with a self-consciousness that smote us simultaneously, remained locked. Each felt that the subject had better remain closed—yet there the flask stood evident and unavoidable.

After a strained space of time I managed to step into the room, pick up a book and say casually:

“I am rather interested in Negroes myself. Do you mind if I see what you have here?”

While I examined the volume he passed behind me and put

the flask away, then came and looked at the book with me. “ ‘African Religions and Superstitions,’ ” he said, reading the title aloud; then supplemented:

“An interesting mythology for the American Negro, little more. The African Gullah Negro, from whom these are descended, believed in a God, you know, but he only created, then turned his people adrift to be preyed upon by malign spirits conjured up by their enemies. Really a religion, or rather a superstition, of senseless terror.”

“I am not so sure of the complete obsoleteness of the old rites and superstitions,” I told him, feeling as I proceeded that I was engaged in a useless mission. “I know these Negroes pretty well. For them, Plat-eye, for instance, is a very actual presence. If you will notice the cook you will see that she seems to get along without a prayer book, but when she goes home after dark she sticks a Sulphur match in her hair. Sulphur is a charm against Plat-eye.”

“Tell me,” he asked with a bantering light in his hard eyes, “just what is Plat-eye?”

I felt that I was being laughed at and floundered ahead at the subject, anxious to be out of it as soon as possible.

“Plat-eye is a spirit which takes some form which will be particularly apt to lure its victims away. It is said to lead them into danger or lose them in the woods and, stealing their wits away, leave them to die alone.”

He emitted a short acid laugh.

“What amusing rot. And I almost fancy you believe it.”

“Of course I don’t,” I retorted but I experienced the feeling that my voice was over-emphatic and failed to convince.

“Well, well,” he said, “I’m not doing folk lore but religion. So that is out of my province. But it is amusing and I’ll make a note of it. Plat-eye, did you say?”

The next day was Thursday. I remember that distinctly because, although nearly a week’s wages were due, the last servant failed to arrive for work in the morning. The club employed three of them; two women and a man. Even in the off season this was a justifiable expense, for a servant could be hired on Ediwander for four dollars a week. When I went to order breakfast the kitchen was closed, and the stove cold.

After a makeshift meal I went out to find the yard boy.

There were only a few Negroes in the village and these were women hoeing in the small garden patches before the cabins. There were the usual swarms of lean mongrel hounds, and a big sow lay nourishing her young in the warm dust of the road. The women looked up as I passed. Their soft voices, as they raised their heads one after another to say “Mornin’, Boss,” seemed like emanations from the very soil, so much a part of the earth did they appear.

But the curs were truculent that morning: strange, canny, candid little mongrels. If you want to know how you stand with a Negro, don’t ask him—pat his dog.

I found Thomas, the hired boy, sitting before his cabin watching a buzzard carve half circles in the blue.

“When are you coming to work?” I demanded. “The day’s half done.”

“I gots de toot’ ache, Boss. I can’t git ober ’fore termorrer.” The boy knew that I did not believe him. He also knew that I would not take issue with him on the point. No Negro on the island will say “no” to a white man. Call it “good form” if you will, but what Thomas had said to me was merely the code for “I’m through.” I did not expect him and I was not disappointed.

Noon of the following day I took the buckboard, crossed the ferry to the mainland, and returned at dark with a cheerful wholesome Negress, loaned to me by a plantation owner, who answered for her faithfulness and promised that she would cook for us during the emergency. She got us a capital supper, retired to the room adjoining the kitchen that I had prepared for her, as I did not wish her to meet the Negroes in the village, and in the morning had vanished utterly. She must have left immediately after supper, for the bed was undisturbed.

I walked straight from her empty room to Barksdale’s sanctum, entered, crossed to the closet where he had put the flask, and threw the door wide. The space was empty. I spun around and met his amused gaze.

“Thought I had better put it away carefully. It is too valuable to leave about.”

Our glances crossed like the slide of steel on steel. Then suddenly my own impotence to master the situation arose and over-

whelmed me. I did not admit it even to myself, but that moment saw what amounted to my complete surrender.

We entered upon the haphazard existence inevitable with two preoccupied men unused to caring for their own comfort: impossible makeshift meals, got when we were hungry; beds made when we were ready to get into them; with me, hours put into work that had to be torn up and started over the next day; with Barksdale, regular tours of investigation about the island and two thousand words a day, no more, no less, written out in longhand and methodically filed. We naturally saw less and less of each other—a fact which was evidently mutually agreeable.

It was therefore a surprise to me one night in the second week to leap from sleep into a condition of lucid consciousness and find myself staring at Barksdale who had opened the door between our rooms. There he stood like a bird of ill omen, tall and slightly stooping, with his ridiculous nightshirt and thin slightly bowed shanks.

“I’ll leave this open if you don’t mind,” he said with a new note of apology in his voice. “Haven’t been sleeping very well for a week or so, and thought the draft through the house might cool the air.”

Immediately I knew that there was something behind the apparently casual action of the man. He was the type who could lie through conviction; adopt some expedient point of view, convince himself that it was the truth, then assert it as a fact; but he was not an instinctive liar, and that new apologetic note gave him away. For a while after he went back to bed, I lay wondering what was behind his request.

Then for the first time I felt it; but hemmed in by the appalling limitations of human speech, how am I to make the experience plain to others!

Once I was standing behind the organ of a great cathedral when a bass chord was pressed upon the keys; suddenly the air about me was all sound and movement. The demonstration that night was like this a little, except that the place of the sound was taken by an almost audible silence, and the vibrations were so violent as to seem almost a friction against the nerve terminals. The wave of movement lasted for several minutes, then it abated slowly. But this was the strange thing about it: the agitation was not dissipated into the air; rather it seemed to settle slowly, heavily, about my body, and to move upon my skin like the multitudinous crawling of invisible and indescribably loathsome vermin.

I got up and struck a light. The familiar disorder of the room sprang into high relief, reassuring me, telling me coolly not to be a fool. I took the lamp into Barksdale’s room. There he lay, his eyes wide and fixed, braced in his bed with every muscle tense. He gave me the impression of wrenching himself out of invisible bonds as he turned and sat up on the edge of his bed.

“Just about to get up and work,” he said in a voice that he could not manage to make casual. “Been suffering from insomnia for a week, and it’s beginning to get on my nerves.”

The strange sensation had passed from my body but the thought of sleep was intolerable. We went to our desks leaving the door ajar, and wrote away the four hours that remained until daylight.

And now a question arises of which due cognizance must be taken even though it may weaken my testimony. Is a man quite sane who has been without sleep for ten days and nights? Is he a competent witness? I do not know. And yet the phenomena that followed my first startled awakening entered into me and became part of my life experience. I live them over shudderingly, when my resistance is low and memory has its way with me. I know that they transpired with that instinctive certainty which lies back of human knowledge and is immune from the skepticism of the cynic.

After that first night the house was filled with the vibrations. I closed the door to Barksdale’s room, hoping a superstitious hope that I would be immune. After an hour I opened it again, glad for even his companionship. Only while I was wide awake and driving my brain to its capacity did the agitation cease. At the first drowsiness it would commence faintly, then swell up and up, fighting sleep back from the tortured brain, working under leaden eyelids upon the tired eyes.

Ten days and nights of it! Terrible for me: devastating for Barksdale. It wasted him like a jungle fever.

Once when I went near him and his head had dropped forward on his desk in the vain hope of relief, I made a discovery. He was the center. The moment I bent over him my nerve terminals seemed to become living antennae held out to a force that frayed and wasted them away. In my own room it was better. I went there and sat where I could still see him for what small solace there was in that.

I entreated him to go away, but with his insane obstinacy he would not hear of it. Then I thought of leaving him, confessing myself a coward—bolting for it. But again, something deeper than logic, some obscure tribal loyalty, held me bound. Two members of the same race; and out there the palmetto jungle, the village with its fires bronze against the midnight trees, the malign, the beleaguering presence. No, it could not be done.

But I did slip over to the mainland and arrange to send a wire to Spencer telling him to come and get Barksdale, that the man was ill.

During that interminable ten days and nights the fundamental difference between Barksdale and myself became increasingly evident. He would go to great pains to explain the natural causes of our malady.

“Simple enough,” he would say, while his bloodshot eyes, fixed on me, shouted the lie to his words. “One of those damn swamp fevers. Livingstone complained of them, you will remember, and so did Stanley. Here in this sub-tropical belt we are evidently subject to the plague. Doubtless there is a serum. I should have inquired before coming down.”

To this I said nothing, but I confess now, at risk of being branded a coward, that I had become the victim of a superstitious terror. Frequently when Barksdale was out I searched for the flask without finding the least trace of it. Finally I capitulated utterly and took to carrying a piece of Sulphur next to my skin. Nothing availed.

The strange commotion in the atmosphere became more and more persistent. It crowded over from the nights into the days. It came at noon; any time that drowsiness fell upon our exhausted bodies it was there, waging a battle with it behind the closed lids. Only with the muscles tense and the eyes wide could one inhabit a static world. After the first ten days I lost count of time. There was a nightmare quality to its unbreakable continuity.

I remember only the night when I saw her in Barksdale’s doorway, and I think that it must have been in the third week. There was a full moon, I remember, and there had been unusual excitement in the village. I have always had a passion for moonlight and I stood long on the piazza watching the great disc change from its horizon copper to gold, then cool to silver as it swung up into the immeasurable tranquility of the southern night. At first I thought that the Negroes must be having a dance, for I could hear the syncopation of sticks on a cabin floor, and the palmettos and moss-draped live oaks that grew about the buildings could be seen the full quarter of a mile away, a ruddy bronze against the sky from a brush fire. But the longer I waited listening the less sure I became about the nature of the celebration. The rhythm became strange, complicated; and the chanting that rose and fell with the drumming rang with a new, compelling quality, and lacked entirely the abandon of dancers.

Finally I went into my room, stretched myself fully dressed on the bed, and almost achieved oblivion. Then suddenly I was up again, my fists clenched, my body taut. The agitation exceeded anything that I had before experienced. Before me, across Barksdale’s room, were wide open double doors letting on the piazza. They molded the moonlight into a square shaft that plunged through the darkness of the room, cold, white, and strangely substantial among the half-obliterated familiar objects. I had the feeling that it could be touched. That hands could be slid along its bright surface. It possessed itself of the place. It was the one reality in a swimming, nebulous cube. Then it commenced to tremble with the vibrations of the apartment.

And now the incredible thing happened. Incredible because belief arises in each of us out of the corroboration of our own life experience; and I have met no other white man who has beheld Plat-eye. I have no word, no symbol, which can awaken recognition. But who has not seen heat shaking upward from hot asphalt, shaking upward until the things beyond it wavered and quaked? That is the nearest approach in the material world. Only the thing that I witnessed was colored a cold blue, and it was heavy with the perfume of crushed jasmine flowers.

I stood, muscle locked to muscle by terror.

The center of the shaft darkened; the air bore upon me as though some external force exerted a tremendous pressure in an effort to render an abstraction concrete: to mold moving unstable elements into something that could be seen—touched.

Suddenly it was done—accomplished. I looked—I saw her.

The shock released me, and I got a flare from several matches struck at once. Yellow light bloomed on familiar objects. I got the fire to a lamp wick, then looked again.

The shaft of moonlight was gone. The open doors showed only a deep blue vacant square. Beyond them something moved. The lamplight steadied, grew. It warmed the room like fire. It spread over the furniture, making it real again. It fell across Barksdale’s bed, dragging my gaze with it. The bed was empty.

I got to the piazza just as he disappeared under a wide armed live oak. The Spanish moss fell behind him like a curtain. The place was a hundred yards away. When I reached it, all trace of him had vanished.

I went back to the house, built a rousing fire, lit all the lamps, and stretched myself in a deep chair to wait until morning.

Then! an automobile horn on Ediwander Island. Imagine that! I could not place it at first. It crashed through my sleep like the trump of judgment. It called me up from the abysses into which I had fallen. It infuriated me. It reduced me to tears. Finally it tore me from unutterable bliss, and held me blinking in the high noon, with my silly lamps still burning palely about me.

“You’re a hell of a fellow,” called Spencer. “Think I’ve got nothing to do but come to this jungle in summer to nurse you and Barksdale.”

He got out of a big muddy machine and strode forward laughing. “Oh, well,” he said, “I won’t row you. It gave me a chance to try out the new bus. That’s why I’m late. Thought I’d motor down. Had a hell of a time getting over the old ferry; but it was worth it to see the niggers when I started up on Ediwander. Some took to trees—one even jumped overboard.”

He ended on a hearty burst of laughter. Then he looked at me and broke off short. I remember how his face looked then, close to mine, white and frightened.

“My God, man!” he exclaimed, “what’s wrong? You aren’t going to die on me, are you?”

“Not today,” I told him. “We’ve got to find Barksdale first.” We could not get a Negro to help us. They greeted Spencer, who had always been popular with them, warmly. They laughed their deep laughter—were just as they had always been with him. Mingo, his old paddler, promised to meet us in half an hour with a gang. They never showed up; and later, when we went to the village to find them, there was not a human being on the premises. Only a pack of curs there that followed us as closely as they dared and hung just out of boot reach, snapping at our heels.

We had to go it alone: a stretch of jungle five miles square, a large part of it accessible only with bush hooks and machetes. We dared not take time to go to the mainland and gather a party of whites. Barksdale had been gone over twelve hours when we started and he would not last long in his emaciated condition.

The chances were desperately against us. Spencer, though physically a giant, was soft from office life. I was hanging on to consciousness only by a tremendous and deliberate effort. We took food with us, which we ate on our feet during breathing spells, and we fell in our tracks for rest when we could go no farther.

At night, when we were eating under the high, white moon, he told me more of the man for whom we were searching.

“I ought to have written you more fully at the start. You’d have been sorry for him then, not angry with him. He does not suggest Lothario now, but he was desperately in love once.

“She was the most fantastically imaginative creature, quick as light, and she played in circles around him. He was never dull in those days. Rather handsome, in the lean Gibson manner; but he was always—well—matter of fact. She had all there was of him the first day, and it was hers to do as she pleased with. Then one morning she saw quite plainly that he would bore her. She had to have someone who could play. Barksdale could have died for her, but he could not play. Like that,” and Spencer gave a snap of his fingers, “she jugged him. It was at a house party. I was there and saw it. She was the sort of surgeon who believes in amputation and she gave it to Barksdale there without an anesthetic and with the crowd looking on.

“He changed after that. Wouldn’t have anything he couldn’t feel, see, smell. He had been wounded by something elusive, intangible. He was still scarred; and he hid behind the defenses of his five good senses. When I met him five years later he had gone in for facts and glass.”

He stopped speaking for a moment. The August dark crowded closer, pressing its low, insistent nocturne against our ears. Then he resumed in a musing voice: “Strange the obsession that an imaginative woman can exercise over an unimaginative man. It is the sort of thing that can follow a chap to the grave Celia’s living in Europe now, married—children—but I believe that if she called him today he’d go. She was very beautiful, you know.”

“Yes,” I replied, “I know. Very tall, blonde, with hair fluffed and shining about her head like a madonna’s halo. Odd way of standing too, with head turned to one side so that she might look at one over her shoulder. Jasmine perfume, heavy, almost druggy.”

Spencer was startled: “You’ve seen her!”

“Yes, here. She came for Barksdale last night. I saw her as plainly as I see you.”

“But she’s abroad, I tell you.”

I turned to Spencer with a sudden resolve: “You’ve heard the Negroes here talk of Plat-eye?”

He nodded.

“Well, I’ve got to tell you something whether you believe it or not. Barksdale got in wrong down here. Stole a flask from the graveyard. There’s been hell turned loose ever since: fires and singing every night in the village and a lot more. I am sure now what it all meant—conjuring, and Plat-eye, of course, to lead Barksdale away and do him in, at the same time emptying the house so that it could be searched for the flask.”

“But Celia; how could they know about her?”

“They didn’t. But Barksdale knew. They had only to break him down and let his old obsession call her up. I probably saw her on the reflex from him, but I’ll swear she was there.”

Spencer was leaning toward me, the moon shining full upon his face. I could see that he believed.

“Thank God you see it,” I breathed. “Now you know why we’ve got to find him soon.”

In the hour just before dawn we emerged from the forest at the far side of the island. The moon was low and reached long fingers of pale light through the trees. The east was a swinging nebula of half-light and vapor. A flight of immense blue heron rose suddenly into the air before us, hurling the mist back into our faces from their beating wings. Spencer, who was ahead of me, gave a cry and darted forward, disappearing behind a palmetto thicket.

I grasped my machete and followed.

Our quest had ended. Barksdale lay face downward in the marsh with his head toward the east. His hands flung out before him were already awash in the rising tide.

We dragged him to high ground. He was breathing faintly in spasmodic gasps, and his pulse was a tiny thread of movement under our finger tips. Two saplings and our coats gave us a makeshift litter, and three hours of stumbling, agonizing labor brought us with our burden to the forest’s edge.

I waited with him there, while Spencer went for his car and some wraps. When he returned his face was a study.

“Had a devil of a time finding blankets,” he told me, as we bundled Barksdale up for the race to town. “House looks as though a tornado had passed through it; everything out on the piazza, and in the front yard.”

With what strength I had left I turned toward home. Behind me lay the forest, dark even in the summer noon; before me, the farthest hill, the sparse pines, and the tumble of mounds in the graveyard.

I entered the clearing and looked at the mound from which Barksdale had taken the flask. There it was again. While it had been gone the cavity had filled with water; now this had flooded but when the bottle had been replaced and still glistened grey on the sand, black on the pine needles.

I regained the road and headed for the club.

Up from the fields came the hands, dinner bound; fifteen or twenty of them; the women taking the direct sun indifferently upon their bare heads. Bright field hoes gleamed on shoulders. The cot noon stirred to deep laughter, soft Gullah accents:

“Mornin’, Boss—howdy, Boss.”

They divided and flowed past me, women curtsying, men touching hat brims. On they went; topped the ridge; dropped from view.

Silence, immediate and profound.

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Host Commentary

I’m Alex, Co-Editor of Pseudopod, your host this week. Warning up front: this week and next will benefit from a critical and thoughtful approach. Consider the differences between authorial voice and character voice. There’s one hard R in here and some other words that have aged poorly. Also, place this week’s work in its context of a 1927 publication date. This was written during the same time period when The Birth of a Nation was the first film screened in the White House. I hear the White House has an anniversary screening scheduled for later this year.

The Half-Pint Flask was first published in The Bookman, May 1927. Edwin DuBose Heyward, as a child and young man, was frequently ill. He contracted polio when he was 18. Two years later he contracted typhoid fever, and the following year fell ill with pleurisy. Polio and its companions are also scheduled for an anniversary in the White House later this year. DuBose dropped out of high school in his first year at age fourteen but had a lifelong and serious interest in literature. He was able to support himself as he became a successful insurance agent. While confined to his sickbed, he wrote numerous verses and stories. By 1924, Heyward had achieved a measure of financial independence, allowing him to give up business and devote himself full-time to literature. In 1925 he published his novel Porgy, set in the Black community of Charleston. This was popularized by the Gershwin musical folk opera Porgy and Bess. This musical was a vehicle for protest, and ultimately had the first desegregated audience at the National Theatre. One of the memorable points from the campaign last year was VP Harris shopping for records and coming out to show off a soundtrack to Porgy and Bess. You can watch the whole 1959 theatrical adaptation on YouTube.

We raised this week’s lich narrator from the dungeons of PseudoPod Towers. Ben Phillips is a programmer and musician living in New Orleans. He was a chief editor of Pseudopod from 2006-2010. He occasionally writes & records songs as Painful Reminder. Audio production is by Chelsea Davis.

Set down and put on your listening ears, because we have a story for you, and we promise you, it’s all too true.

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“Once I was standing behind the organ of a great cathedral when a bass chord was pressed upon the keys; suddenly the air about me was all sound and movement. The demonstration that night was like this a little, except that the place of the sound was taken by an almost audible silence, and the vibrations were so violent as to seem almost a friction against the nerve terminals.”

I love the depiction of the insomniac claustrophobia. A harrowing that grows progressively worse from a self-inflicted wound. I love how this story inhabits coastal Caroilna. I’ve spent more time in coastal Georgia, just a short hop down the coast, and they are cultural cousins being part of the Gullah-Geechee corridor that runs from southern North Carolina to northern Florida. Savannah and Charleston are gems, and frankly the cities most worth visiting in their respective states. The same beauty as New Orleans, but cleaner. Gullah food is a wonderful contribution to American cuisine. Hoppin’ John has been part of my family’s New Year’s Day traditions for as long as I can remember. Shrimp and Grits is a dish of beauty. There’s some South Carolina family farms that my CSA partners with. I’ve gotten some amazing rice and the closest I’ve ever gotten to fresh peas in a more stable storage format. Being who I am, I also had to get the maple syrup aged in Pappy barrels and their Traffic Jam which is a wonderful blend of fruits I’d not seen before. Low Country Boil is one of the best communal cooking experiences third in my heart only to whole hog barbecue and a crawfish boil.

I wanted to raise a little awareness for some of the current challenges to the Gullah-Geechee community. A lot of Gullah land was owned communally, which is common in West Africa. Unfortunately, it’s diametrically opposed to English Common Law’s property ownership standards. That has allowed developers to use threadbare claims to come along and snatch property so that rich folks can have time shares in condos with names like Magnolia Plantation. I’ll drop a couple links in the show notes if you want to read a little more in depth. All this to highlight that the classism and racism is not dead. In The Half-Pint Flask, it was quite interesting to see a viewport onto three very different manifestations of racism and how those were received by the other characters. The white guilt separate-but-equal racism, the sort of racism that shows up at lynchings, and the sort of racism that posits whether the Other is even human. All neatly framed and all precisely drawn with all their warts on display. We were still dissatisfied by the colonialism baked into this story and the suspicion thrown on the wronged community. So our next story, “James Courtney Goes Home” by Jamie Grimes, explores their view of the thing. Another step in the right direction is a half-million Mellon grant recently awarded to Georgia State University for the preservation and protection of the Gullah-Geechee culture. Neither of these are as much as is needed, but they’re certainly steps in the right direction.

Pseudopod is part of Escape Artists incorporated and is distributed under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives 4.0 international license. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

Pseudopod knows
they tell all you children
The devil’s a villain
But ’tain’t necessarily so

To get into Heaven
Don’t snap for a seven
Live clean, don’t have no fault
Oh, I takes that gospel
Whenever it’s possible
But with a grain of salt