§ 106 The Forethoughted Widow
In an unthoughted moment a colored woman in a North Carolina town contracted a matrimonial alliance. But the honeymoon ended tragically. Just two weeks after the wedding ceremony the happy bridegroom was fooling about the railroad yards and a switch engine ran over him—on the bias—and he, being of a fleshy build, was distributed for a considerable distance along the right of way becoming, to all intents and purposes, a total loss.
Yet it was immediately to develop that in a deceased state, he had a financial standing which had been denied him in the flesh. For, with that desire to do justice speedily which ever marks the legal profession, a claim agent of the railroad got hold of the widow before any other lawyer could reach her and hurried her to his office and there showed her five hundred dollars in shiny new bills, which was more money that she thought there was in the world. With one eager hand she reached for this incredible fortune and with the other, using haste lest the beneficent white gentleman should recover from his impulses of generosity, she signed on the dotted line A of the quit claim.
Another colored woman who had come with her to witness this triumph and who was standing behind her, perfectly pop-eyed with envy and admiration, said:
“Clarissa, whut you reckin you goin’ do now, sence you had all dis luck?”
Before the widow answered she lifted a rustling twenty from off the top of the delectable heap and fanned herself with it and inhaled its fragrance; and then she said:
“I don’t know ez I shall do anything—fur a spell. I got to wait till time is healed my wounds an’ I’s spent dis yere money. Of co’se in the yeahs to come I may marry ag’in an’ then ag’in I may not—who kin tell? But, gal, I tells you right now, ef ever I does marry ag’in my second husband is suttinly goin’ be a railroad man.”