NEGRO TALES
By JOSEPH S. COTTER

NEW YORK
THE COSMOPOLITAN PRESS
1912

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY
The Cosmopolitan Press

CONTENTS

THE AUTHOR

The Author is one of a race that has given scarcely anything of literature to the world. His modest tender of some Christmas verses to me led to an inquiry which revealed his story of unpretentious but earnest and conscientious toil. He is wholly self-taught in English literature and composition. The obstacles which he has surmounted were undreamed of by Burns and other sons of song who struggled up from poverty, obscurity, and ignorance to glory.

Joseph Seamon Cotter was born in Nelson County, Kentucky, in 1861, but has spent practically all his life in Louisville. He had the scantiest opportunity for schooling in childhood, though he could read before he was four years old. He was put to work early, and from his eighth to his twenty-fourth year earned his living by the roughest and hardest labor, first in a brick yard, then in a distillery, and finally as a teamster. At twenty-two his scholarship was so limited that when he entered the first one of Louisville's night schools for colored pupils he had to begin in the primary department. His industry and capacity were so great that at the end of two sessions of five months each he began to teach. He has persevered in his calling, educating himself while at work, and is now Principal of the Tenth Ward Colored School, at Thirteenth and Green streets. The man whose advice and encouragement at the beginning chiefly enabled him to accomplish this was Prof. W. T. Peyton, a well-known colored educator of this city, whom he regards as his greatest benefactor.—Thomas G. Watkins, Financial Editor Louisville Courier-Journal.

NEGRO TALES

CALEB

Patsy and Benjamin, her husband, were talking about their first and second weddings, and of Caleb, their son. They were also thinking of Rahab, Caleb's teacher.

"We have been blessed in the number of our weddings," said she.

"Yes; but cursed in Caleb," he replied.

"Our last wedding, as free people, was not equal to the first as slaves."

"That was because Caleb came in between."

"How many ex-slaves have considered the significance of these second weddings?"

"How many fathers and mothers have been cursed by only sons?"

Caleb entered the room as his father uttered these words, and struck him violently over the heart. The old man straightened up, gasped spasmodically, clutched at his breast wildly, and then fell heavily to the floor. Caleb, with a parting sneer, left the room, while Patsy ran to the aid of her husband. She turned him on his back, opened his shirt at the neck, but her efforts were of no avail. Benjamin was dead.

Patsy did not report Caleb for the murder of his father, but went on thinking her own theology and asking Rahab to explain.

"A thirty-dollar coffin? No, no, undertaker! A five-dollar robe? No, no, undertaker! Four carriages? No, no, undertaker! Think you the living have no rights? Cold, rigid dignity will suffice the dead, but the living must have money. He was my father, and I am his heir; therefore, speedy