Andy Duncan - Lincoln in Frogmore

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Lincoln in Frogmore

by Andy Duncan

Andy Duncan, a native of Batesburg, South Carolina, lives in Northport,

Alabama, with his wife, Sydney, and works in nearby Tuscaloosa as senior

editor of a business magazine. His fascination with “outsider art” springs

from a traveling exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh,

where he first saw the Sam Doyle painting that inspired this story. Recent

publications include stories in Starlight 3 and The Year’s Best Fantasy and

Horror: 14th Annual Collection (St. Martin’s). His first book, Beluthahatchie

and Other Stories, was recently published by Golden Gryphon Press.

* * * *

From the Federal Writers’ Project interview with Shad Alston at his home

on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, September 21, 1936. Interviewer: Miss

Jordan Matthews.

Younguns these days, they don’t want to hear bout no slavery, they don’t

want to hear bout Mr. Lincoln. And he was just down the road a piece here, in that

swamp yonder. I saw him with my own eyes, and they were good eyes then. You’d

think it’d all happened to a bunch of strange niggers up in Philly-Me-York, stead of

to their own blood kin, their own folks.

I start telling bout Mr. Lincoln coming down here, and what do I get? “You

lying like the crossties, Mr. Shad. You lying up a nation.” “Shame on you, Mr. Shad.

You done quit lying and gone to flying.” Huh!

Anybody ain’t got sense enough to know what slavery was, won’t be able to

see it coming back, will they? Be slaves again and not even know it.

Now I’m gone tell you a true thing. I’ll tell you bout Mr. Lincoln, just the way

it happened, and you can put it in your book. That’s how true it is, now: True

enough for a book.

“Once upon a time was a good old time,

Bit by a gator he’d spit turpentine.”

That’s how we’d start a tale when I was a youngun. I don’t rightly know how

old I was when it happened, but I was bout that high up against the doorframe, and

all longleggedy like a granddaddy spider, and fast! I could outrun a coach whip. And

you better believe I sure hit it a lick that evening when Maum Hannah called me from

the house.

“Shad! You, Shad! You better give it the book back on here to this yard, boy,

or I’ll be all over you like gravy over rice.”

When I heard that, I was in the edge of the woods, holding up a bright green

gopher turtle in the air real still-like, to see would it think it was back on the ground,

and poke its head outen its shell. But my arm had gone numb on me, and I reckon

that gopher woulda outlast me even if Maum Hannah hadn’t gone to fussing. I put

the gopher back down in the bresh where I got him and beat it on back. Maum

Hannah didn’t move so quick, you see, and her voice took some working before it

got loud enough to carry, so I knew if she was already on the porch and yelling loud

enough for me to hear in the woods, she’d done been calling for ten minutes and

was hot as a pine knot. Man! Believe me, I hauled the fast mail.

“You, Shad! I swear I’ll put the water in your eyes, boy. I’ll whip your sorry

head to the red.”

When I got to the yard she was on the porch, a-sitting on the far end of the

joggling-board ‘cause she was too heavy for the middle, she’d hit the planks and

couldn’t get up. She had her pipe in one hand and her walking stick in the other and

blue smoke all around. She had her head down to her knees, like she’d wore herself

out, but was just opening her mouth to tune up again when I cried, “Here I am,

Maum Hannah, I come just as quick as I could.”

“Child,” she said, “where you been?” She stuck the pipe back in her mouth

and sucked on it loud. I was bout to tell her when she went on, “I know you ain’t

been fooling with crawling varmints down in them tick-filled woods that I told you to

stay outen.”

“No, ma’am, I ain’t,” I said, sitting down real careful on the far end of the

joggling-board, past the reach of her stick. I hadn’t figured on her blocking off the

truth like that, and leaving me to think up a lie with no notice at all hardly.

“Well, thank the wonder-working God for that,” she said, all cast-down and

quiet again. Maum Hannah was a big old gal when she was hollering, but when she

was done she’d fold back down like all her air was gone, and look small. Lately she

was looking smaller and smaller when she was quiet, but maybe I was just getting

biggedy. Anyways, I knew she wasn’t gone take a lick at me now. I eased on down

the board toward the middle, started joggling up and down. Maum Hannah closed

her eyes like the joggles was making her tired, but I ask you, what’s the good of a

joggling-board if you ain’t joggling? Might’s well have a rocking chair without a

rock, a swing with no swang.

“I got to go on a errand this evening,” Maum Hannah said, joggling there on

the end of the board, her eyes closed, her knobby hands working the end of her

stick. “May be I won’t get back till dark, may be black dark. You stay here in the

house, child, you got me? Not in the yard, in the house.” She thumped the porch

with her stick, and our fice dog run out from underneath, carrying something in its

mouth, into the bresh. “The roads and the woods are too dangerous these nights,

you hear me?”

“Yes, Maum Hannah,” I said, straining to see what it was the fice had got.

She was right, too—those were dangerous days, for white or colored, slave or

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Andy Duncan - Lincoln in Frogmore

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