Colonel Grangerford was a gentleman all over. He was tall and thin, with the blackest eyes, and every day he wore a suit so white it hurt your eyes. He was never loud, and he was as kind as he could be. But when the lightning began to flash from under his eyebrows, you wanted to climb a tree first and find out what the matter was afterwards.
His sons Bob and Tom were tall, handsome men, and his daughters were beautiful: Miss Charlotte, tall and proud, and Miss Sophia, gentle and sweet. Each person in the family had a slave to serve them, Buck too. Mine was called Jack, and he had a very easy time, because I wasn’t used to having anybody do things for me. There used to be three more sons, but they were killed.
There was another rich, proud family near there, the Shepherdsons. One day Buck and I were hunting in the woods when a young man came riding down the road with his gun across his saddle. It was Harney Shepherdson. Buck’s gun went off at my ear, and Harney’s hat fell off. We ran, and Harney didn’t shoot after us. At home the old gentleman’s eyes shone for a minute—with pleasure, mostly, I thought. Then he said gently, “I don’t like that shooting from behind a bush. Why didn’t you step into the road, my boy?” Miss Sophia turned pale, but the color came back when she heard the young man wasn’t hurt.
Later I asked Buck, “What did he ever do to you?”
“Him? Nothing. It’s because of the feud.”
“What’s a feud?”
“Why, where were you raised? A man has a quarrel with another man and kills him. Then that man’s brother kills him. Then the other brothers on both sides go after each other, then the cousins join in, and after a while everybody is killed, and there isn’t any more feud. But it’s kind of slow and takes a long time. This one started thirty years ago or so.”
“What was the trouble about, Buck?”
“I don’t know. Even Pa and the other old people don’t remember now what the quarrel was about in the first place.”
Next Sunday we all rode to church. The men took their guns along and kept them between their knees. The Shepherdsons did the same. The sermon was all about brotherly love, and everybody said it was a good sermon.
That afternoon, while the house was asleep, Miss Sophia took me into her room and shut the door softly. She asked me if I would do something for her and not tell anybody. She had left her Testament at church, she said, and would I go quietly and bring it to her?
On the way back I thought, it isn’t natural for a girl to worry so much about a Testament. So I shook it, and out dropped a little piece of paper with “Half past two” written on it in pencil. I couldn’t make anything of that, so I put it back. When Miss Sophia found the paper, she looked so glad that she gave me a hug and said I was the best boy in the world. She asked me if I could read handwriting, and I said no. Then she said the paper was only something to keep her place in the book.
When I went down to the river, Jack followed me. “Master George,” he said, “if you come down into the swamp, I’ll show you a whole lot of water snakes.” That’s strange, I thought. Nobody loves water snakes enough to go looking for them. But I followed him through the swamp to a little piece of dry land thick with trees and vines. “Go in there a few steps, Master George. That’s where they are.” Then he went away.
I pushed in and found a man lying there asleep. It was my old Jim!
He nearly cried, he was so glad to see me, but he wasn’t surprised. He had swum behind me that night and heard me call, but he didn’t dare to answer, because he didn’t want anybody to catch him. Some slaves had shown him this place, where the dogs couldn’t follow him, and every night they brought him food and news of me.
“And I’ve been fixing the raft at night,” he said.
“What raft, Jim? You mean our old raft wasn’t smashed to pieces?”
“No, it wasn’t. Some of the slaves here found it caught in the bend and hid it in a creek. Now it’s fixed again, almost as good as new.”
I don’t want to talk much about the next day. I woke up at dawn and noticed how still it was. Buck was gone, and there was nobody in the house. Down by the woodpile I met Jack.
“Don’t you know, Master George? Miss Sophia has run away! She ran away in the night to marry young Harney Shepherdson. The colonel and the boys took their guns and rode up the river road to catch that young man and kill him before he could get across the river with her.”
I ran up the river road as fast as I could. Soon I heard guns. Near the steamboat landing I climbed up into a tree and watched. Men on horses were shooting at two young men behind a pile of wood: Buck and his cousin Joe. When the men rode away for a while, I called down to Buck. He began to cry and said his father and his two brothers were killed. Harney and Miss Sophia had got across the river and were safe. I was glad of that.
All of a sudden, bang! bang! bang! The men had come around through the woods on foot. The boys jumped into the river, both of them hurt, and as they swam down with the current, the men ran along the bank shooting at them and shouting, “Kill them, kill them!” It made me so sick that I almost fell out of the tree. I’m not going to tell all that happened. Lots of times I still dream about it.
I stayed in the tree until it began to get dark. I felt it was my fault somehow: I should have told her father about that piece of paper.
When I came down, I found the two bodies at the edge of the water. I pulled them out and covered their faces, and then I got away as fast as I could. I cried a little when I covered Buck’s face, because he was very good to me.
I didn’t go near the house again, but went through the swamp to the creek. The raft was gone! I was so scared I couldn’t breathe. Then I shouted, and a voice very close said:
“Good Lord! Is that you, honey? Don’t make any noise.”
It was Jim’s voice—nothing ever sounded so good. I ran along the bank to the voice and jumped on board, and Jim hugged me, he was so glad. Jack had told him I was probably shot, and he was just getting ready to leave.
“Push off for the big river as fast as you can, Jim,” I said.
I didn’t feel easy until the raft was two miles away, out in the middle of the Mississippi. Then we hung up our lantern and felt free and safe once more. Jim got out some cornbread and buttermilk, pork and cabbage, and while I ate, we talked and had a good time. I was very glad to get away from the feud, and Jim was glad to get away from the swamp. We said there was no home like a raft, after all. Other places feel crowded and closed in, but a raft doesn’t. You feel free and easy and comfortable on a raft.