Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 12
XII
In a blind alley leading out of Hammond Street, Roxbury—which section shelters most of Boston's negro population of close to twenty thousand—some dozen or fifteen dusky folk, that night, were gathered together in a house that reeked of fetid air, gaslight, sweat, tobacco smoke, and the peculiar aroma of the African.
“I tell you 'twas the skull that done it!” Andrew Todd was affirming. “I drove old man Lockwood an' that there perfessor all the way to Charleston, South Ca'lina, and I knows what I knows!”
“An' what do you know?” demanded a greasy mulatto buck, sitting fatly with his hands on his hips, and a cigar gripped in his projecting teeth. “Some folks knows a whole lot as ain't so!”
“You callin' me a liar, are you?” retorted Andrew, his drug-narrowed eyes ugly, his face hard-set. “If you are—”
“There now, Andy!” cut in Irene Jackson, Lockwood's maid, anxious to keep her “steady” out of a broil that might finish in the Roxbury police court—for Andrew carried a razor and brass knuckles. “Don't you get fussin' and scrappin' none to-night! I won't have it!”
“Let Mr. Todd tell what he saw an' what he knows,” directed another, with an air of authority.
A saffron-hued man this was, thin, wiry, and furtive—a man whom we have not seen since the night in Charleston when Lockwood found his daughter. This saffron personage spoke with a marked English accent, which was not surprising in view of the fact that he was, as he often boasted, “a British objeck—yes, sah, from Kingston, Jamaica!”
Now he sat leaning forward, his forearm on his lean thigh, while the rest of the group turned eager and respectful looks on him. Like Veazie, he called himself a professor—a professor of hypnotism and allied sciences. “Professor Cromwell Jeffries St. Clair, the world-renowned mystic marvel,” his hand-bills always stated.
When Professor St. Clair could get engagements, he gave demonstrations in low-grade museums and theaters, or at summer resort parks. Just at present the sun of his glory was diminished, in the abeyance of almost total eclipse. A cataleptic subject of his—a white man—whom he had billed to sleep for a week in a drug store window at Altoona, Pennsylvania, had failed to wake up; and the professor had vanished, to escape a charge of manslaughter. His prestige among “the race,” however, had been only enhanced by this slight contretemps. For a colored man to have put a white one so thoroughly asleep that only Gabriel's trump could ever waken him—was not this something of a spectacular achievement?
“Let the gen'leman tell what he pussonally observed and had cognization of,” repeated Professor St. Clair. “He mentioned something of this to me in Charleston, and I vouch for the accuracy of the results. The authenticity of the psychic and hyponotic phenomenar as demonstrified by spirit controls in the form of imanimate objecks are indis-putably authenticized. Just what did you observe, Mr. Todd?”
“I see that there skull on a table in a hotel room down to Oxford, No'th Ca'lina—that's what!” declared Andrew, swollen with importance by this scientific backing. “I peek under a window shade, an' I see it. I see old Lockwood settin' like here, on this side; an' Perfessor Veazie settin' like there, on that side; an' the perfessor with his eyes shut, talkin' to the skull—yes, sir!”
“Just like I see it, too,” affirmed Irene, “up to the big house on Beacon Street!”
“Yes, sir,” continued Andrew, blowing cigarette smoke, “an' I see that there skull answerin' him!”
“Answerin'?” quavered a spectacled gentleman, whose profession was that of tonsorial artist.
A communal shudder ran through the group, and for a moment smoldering silence fell. Hag-ridden with dark superstitions that no centuries of education could eradicate, they stared at Andrew. From an obscure corner some one murmured:
“Oh, Lawd, come by here!”
“Answerin'—yes, sir!” the chauffeur affirmed. “I hear a queer voice comin' from it, an'—”
“What the voice elucidate,” queried Professor St. Clair, “by way of warnin' or information?”
“It tell the old man how he's goin' find his daughter down to Cha'leston—an', what's more, he find her! Now, what you make o' that?”
“He find her, ladies an' gen'lemen,” Professor St. Clair corroborated. “It's a fack; an' if that ain't the gen-uine psychological phenomenar, what is?”
There was another brief silence, broken only by a low crooning from the corner where one had called upon the Lord.
“Who skull yo' reckon dat 'ar am?” an aged, snowy-wooled woman presently demanded. Old Sara, her name was—a sea island negro from St. Helena on the Carolina coast, now living with her up-to-date grandson, a Roxbury grocer. Her pipe gripped in her toothless gums, she glanced about with rheumy eyes wherein glinted strange memories. Once a slave, with Gullah lore still lurking at the back of her mind, jungle traditions from black swamps where apes chattered among the ragged fronds of palm trees, far echoes of voodoo stirred old Sara's feeble pulses. “Whar dat 'ar skull come f'm? Dat a buckra skull, or one o' de race?”
“Race man's skull, I reckon,” affirmed Andrew, immensely important in the eyes of all.
“That's right!” Irene added. “I heard somethin' "bout its bein' from Africa or somewhere—helongin' to some big chief, over there. That was a long time ago.”
“Lockwood, he fetch it from Africa,” the chauffeur declared, tossing away his cigarette butt and lighting another. “From Africa—that's a fack!”
“You know the name an' entitlements of that there colored potentate?” Professor St. Clair asked Irene.
“I hear 'em once, perfessor.”
“State an' rehearse 'em over, if you'll be so 'commodatin'.”
“Well, perfessor, I maybe can't get 'em just right, but it's somethin' like Borem Gow, o' the Massamber tribe.”
“H-m-m-m!” grunted the world-famous psychic, and thereafter fell broodingly silent.
His lips tightened. He sat with a keen and musing look on that pale saffron mask of his.
Murmurs ran through the tense group. Gaslight flicked oily or bronzed gleams from black and “high yaller” skins, from shining eyeballs, from teeth parted in nervous laughter. A fat woman murmured words of prayer.
“Come on, Sam—le's be goin' home!” urged a brash young flapper, tugging at her honey's sleeve. She worked by day in a beauty parlor on Kendall Street, where kinky hair was made straight. Her own was straight and bobbed, and her cheeks were calcareous with powder. Very modern, she—a long way from the primal heritage of Angola. “This here's gettin' too much for me!”
“Wait!” commanded the professor. “Don't let's break the harmonious continuity of this here gatherin' till we discovers more about the pussonality an' powers of this here cranium bone. Borem Gow, you say, miss?”
“Yes, perfessor,” Irene “Somethin' like that, anyhow.”
“An' what old man Lockwood do with it, after discoverin' and manifestatin' his daughter?”
“He take it back home with him,” put in Andrew. “He bring it back to Boston in the car.”
“Where that ossified relict now?”
“In Lockwood's house on Beacon Street,” the maid explained.
“What part o' the house?”
“In the lib'ary—in a wooden box, top of a bookcase.”
“Lib'ary, eh? What's the locality an' specifications of the lib'ary?”
“I's a ole, ole 'ooman now, an' no can gnam ma bittle,” put in the aged Aunt Sara from the sea islands. She removed her pipe and displayed her naked gums, to prove that she could indeed no longer chew. “But when I been young gal in de rice fiel', long afo' oonah bawn, perfessor, I yeah tell o' dat skull. 'E en't Borem Gow—nassah! 'E Burrum Gao, o' de Massabambas. Dat 'ar been great voodoo maker, dat skull been. If yo' got him—Lawdy, Lawdy, w'at t'ing yo' kin mek!”
Some of the negroes there, knowing no word of Gullah dialect, hardly grasped the ancient crone's meaning; but the professor grasped it. He understood.
“How you get to that 'ar lib'ary?” he sharply demanded. “You, gal—how you get to it?”
“It's on the second story,” explained Irene, “back o' the house. There's an L in back there, an' the roof of it comes up near the winders. Why you want to know, perfessor?”
“Oh, jus' by way of gen'ral information an' cognizance—that's all.”
Again the Jamaican fell to brooding, while for a moment heavy silence throttled the group in that smoky, stifling room.
“I'm goin' home!” the beauty parlor flapper all at once declared, starting for the door. “You comin', Sam, or have I got to walk home alone? I've heard enough o' skull, an' such. Boo! They gives me the creepycraw's—an' besides, they're all nonsense!”
Four or five of the younger breed took their departure, among them Andrew and Irene, of the house of Lockwood. The elders, however, stayed on. Till long after midnight the gaslight burned in that reeking, sweltering room. Strange things were told by snowy-wooled Aunt Sara, while the others, crouching close, crooned and listened—strange things indeed, rooted far in the soil of black and fetid jungles, across broad seas in Africa.