OLE ’STRACTED
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BY THOMAS NELSON PAGE

Thomas Nelson Page (born in Oakland, Virginia, April 23, 1853) represents the generation of Southerners who were too young to fight but not to feel during the Civil War.  In the middle eighties he published a number of stories in the “Century Magazine” which presented with loving sympathy charming views of the old aristocratic regime that it had become a literary fashion sweepingly to condemn.  These tales of courtly ideals on the part of the masters, and affecting loyalty on the side of the slaves, were gathered together and published in 1887 in a volume entitled “In Ole Virginia.”  “Marse Chan,” “Meh Lady” and “Ole ’Stracted” the present selection, are the favorites of the collection.

OLE ’STRACTED
BY THOMAS NELSON PAGE
[Footnote:  This story is reprinted, by permission, from the book
entitled “In Ole Virginia.”  Copyright, 1887, by Charles Scribner’s
Sons.]

“Awe, little Ephum! awe little E-phum! ef you don’ come ’long heah, boy, an’ rock dis chile, I’ll buss you haid open!” screamed the high-pitched voice of a woman, breaking the stillness of the summer evening.  She had just come to the door of the little cabin, where she was now standing, anxiously scanning the space before her, while a baby’s plaintive wail rose and fell within with wearying monotony.  The log cabin, set in a gall in the middle of an old field all grown up in sassafras, was not a very inviting-looking place; a few hens loitering about the new hen-house, a brood of half-grown chickens picking in the grass and watching the door, and a runty pig tied to a “stob,” were the only signs of thrift; yet the face of the woman cleared up as she gazed about her and afar off, where the gleam of green made a pleasant spot, where the corn grew in the river bottom; for it was her home, and the best of all was she thought it belonged to them.

A rumble of distant thunder caught her ear, and she stepped down and took a well-worn garment from the clothes-line, stretched between two dogwood forks, and having, after a keen glance down the path through the bushes, satisfied herself that no one was in sight, she returned to the house, and the baby’s voice rose louder than before.  The mother, as she set out her ironing table, raised a dirge-like hymn, which she chanted, partly from habit and partly in self-defence.  She ironed carefully the ragged shirt she had just taken from the line, and then, after some search, finding a needle and cotton, she drew a chair to the door and proceeded to mend the garment.

“Dis de on’ies’ shut Ole ’Stracted got,” she said, as if in apology to herself for being so careful.

The cloud slowly gathered over the pines in the direction of the path; the fowls carefully tripped up the path, and after a prudent pause at the hole, disappeared one by one within; the chickens picked in a gradually contracting circuit, and finally one or two stole furtively to the cabin door, and after a brief reconnaissance came in, and fluttered up the ladder to the loft, where they had been born, and yet roosted.  Once more the baby’s voice prevailed, and once more the woman went to the door, and, looking down the path, screamed, “Awe, little Ephum! awe, little Ephum!”