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Updated: June 10, 2025
"And a pore man who wouldn't abuse a gal most white like that, but would respect her an' marry her, too, Levin, they makes laws agin him! Maybe I kin steal Roxy?" Here Jack whistled low, shut one eye with deep knowingness, and grinned behind his bell-crown. "Oh, you simpleton!" Levin said. "Where could you take her to?"
The negro at the corner of the old warehouse, half covered by the willow's shade, peered up with blood-shotten eyes to distinguish the covering on the bird-tamer's head. He saw Jack Wonnell sitting backward on the window-frame, swaying in and out, as he lazily tempted the mocking-bird to sing, and once the bell-crown hat, so singular to view, came in full relief against the gray sky.
"You're a liar!" said Jimmy Phoebus, promptly, catching Jack by the back of the neck, and pushing his bell-crown down till it mashed over his nose and eyes, "What do you mean by tellin' a splurge like that?" "I seen him, Jimmy," was the bell-crowned hero's smothered cry; "if I didn't, hope I may die!" "What did he go there for?" "I can't tell, Jimmy, to save my life!"
"I'll go an' no mistake!" cried Jack Wonnell, who had been taking a drink of pump-water out of his bell-crown. "So will you, Levin." Levin Dennis hesitated; "I want to tell my mother first," he said, "maybe she won't like me fur to go of a Sunday. She'll send Jimmy Phoebus after me."
If he know'd I was in love with little Roxy he'd marry her to a nigger." "What makes him hate you so, Jack?" "Becaze I wears my bell-crowns, and he wears the steeple-top hat. He thinks I'm a-mockin' of him. Levin, I ain't got no other kind of hat to wear. Meshach Milburn needn't wear that air hat, but if I don't wear a bell-crown I must go bareheaded.
But he paid no attention to anybody, until once, at court time, some carousing fellows hired Jack Wonnell to walk up to Meshach Milburn and ask to swap a new bell-crown for the old decrepit steeple-top. Looking at Wonnell sternly in the face, Meshach hissed, "You miserable vagrant! Nature meant you to go bareheaded. Beware when you speak to me again!"
"Who told you, Jack Wonnell," spoke the bay sailor, "that Judge Custis was to be sold out?" "I won't tell you, Jimmy." "I told him," Roxy cried, after an instant's hesitation, while Jimmy Phoebus was grinding the stiff bell-crown hat down on Wonnell's suffocating muzzle. "I did think we was all going to be sold, and had nobody to pity me but that poor white man, and I told him as a friend."
Samson asked. Roxie blushed, and said she had no beau, and never wanted one. "Roxy's beau," says Virgie, "is that poor, helpless Mr. Jack Wonnell. He comes to see her every day. He's devotion itself. Indeed, Samson, if you are going to marry me, and Roxy marry all those bell-crown hats, we shall cure the town of its two greatest afflictions." "Bad ole hats?" asks Samson.
Like most people who frequent auctions, he was not provident, except in hats, and presented a startling appearance in his patched and shrunken raiment when he mounted a bright, new tile, and took to the sidewalk. His name had become, in all grades of society, "Bell-crown." The other eccentric citizen was the subject of a real mystery, and even more burlesque.
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