“She hollered, ‘No-ooo-oo-o! Hallelujah, no! It cannot tear your soul. Sometimes the devil comes in human form,’ yelled Aunt Lucy, ‘sometimes it be’s born right into your own family. Sometimes the devil be’s your own flesh and kin—and he try your soul—but your soul he cannot tear! Sometimes you be’s forced to tear his hide before he tears your soul. Amen!’

“Now, Aunt Lucy were talking about me that morning when she said ‘devil.’ That is what I started to tell you.”

“Talking about you, why?” I asked.

“Because I had been up to some devilment, and she had done said she was gonna whip me come Monday. Aunt Lucy were so Christian she did not believe in whipping nobody on a Sunday.”

“What had you done?”

“Oh, I had just taken one of her best laying hens and give it to a girl who didn’t even belong to our church; to roast for her Sunday school picnic, because this old girl said she was aiming to picnic me—except that she didn’t have nothing good to eat to put in her basket. I was trying to jive this old gal, you know—I was young—so I just took one of Aunt Lucy’s hens and give her.”

“Why didn’t you pick out a pullet that wasn’t laying?”

“That hen was the biggest, fattest chicken in the pen—and I wanted that girl to have plenty to pull out of her basket at that picnic so folks would make a great big admiration over her and me.”

“How did your Aunt Lucy find out about the hen?”

“Man, you know womenfolks can’t keep no secret! That girl told another girl, the other girl told her cousin, the cousin told her mama, her mama told Aunt Lucy—and Aunt Lucy woke me up Sunday morning with a switch in her hand.”

“Weren’t you too old to be whipped by then?”

“Of course, I was too old to whip—sixteen going on seventeen, big as a ox. But Aunt Lucy did not figure I was grown yet. And she took her duty hard—because she always said the last thing my mother told her when she died was to raise me right.”

“What did you do when you saw the switch?”

“Oh, I got all mannish, man. I said, ‘Aunt Lucy, you ain’t gonna whip me no more. I’s a man—and you ain’t gonna whip me.’