Old Josh, in: Sponge, Nelly and Josh (Pure Nigger: 2nd Series))Episdoe #10))

Old Josh, in:
Sponge, Nelly and Josh
(Episode #10)


Sponge (no one ever knew his last name) chewed tobacco, and often took his wife Nelly May down to Goose Creek fishing, eating sandwiches and home made Alabama “Moon” whisky and Josh, his friend for some twenty years, would go along to Goose Creek, build a fired out of driftwood, and catch some catfish. That was back in the late 1860s and early 186070s.
There they’d sit on a Sunday afternoon and talk about the saw-mill, where Sponge worked. He had a half-dozen kids it seemed, Josh lost track of there names, except for Bugs. One day Sponge got his leg cut off at the mill. He had to spend $200—dollars on doctor bills. His oldest boy, Bugs, went onto New Orleans, about a year after that, found a job, and worked for a man named Buck, came back a year later and bought a farm, enough to plant a cornfield. His pa and Ma moved on the small farm with him, and the rest of the kids worked here and there, two of them for Mr. Beck’s son in Dothan (Bugs bought the small farm from Mr. Beck himself, for $5000 dollars, no one knowing where he got the money, I mean, it was a lot of money for a years work in New Orleans for a man with no real skills, and a Blackman at that; Mr. Beck was a neighbor to the Smiley family, and owned a big farm down towards Dothan Alabama. The old man died around 1876, the same year Sponge died.
After Sponge died his old woman (who really wasn’t that old), his wife, sat around the farm not doing much, going fishing down in Goose Creek and catching catfish now and then, and drank her “moon” whiskey quite a lot thereafter. She had never fooled around before, but now when she got bored she got soused, and she found herself in a few unknown beds. She was still a woman of a good shape, and her looks we not too bad, just a tinge old, not as old as Sponge, he was twenty-five years her senior, and Sponge was 71, when he died, so she was in her 40s.
Hank Ritt, the banker came around now and then, to the farm, took a liking for the old black woman, and so did Josh, that was perhaps about 1877 or ‘78. And Josh and she would go catch catfish. But Ritt didn’t care for fishing, he just took the old nigger and laid her on the grass and rapped her, one day when she was drunk. She had a half white child nine months later, and ended up working for Mr. Ritt down in Dothan. And old Josh never did forget her, and after 1879, he never saw her again, but he wrote a poem once for her, never did give it to her, Silas found it after Josh died in August of 1910:

Josh, Ritt and Nelly

Is you here wha’ Nelly say
Wha’ she tell me?
De Ritt come down to de creek
All dress up an’ shave,
An’ Nelly say:
Ritt, you sho’ is a good
Lookin’ man
You de best lookin’
In all de land
“You think so,”
He say…
I reckon the reason
Wuh he rape her
Because she say nothin’
She pass out
He ain’ say nothin’
But he look like somebody
Guin him a bout er medicine.

#1686 2-9-2007

Note: Hank Ritt [1830 to 1896] Banker of Ozark, and land Owner/Lawyer