"The Half-Pint Flask" (1927) by DuBose Heyward
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Bar the Doors: Terror Stories (1946)
Readers who are unfamiliar with Bar the Doors: Terror Stories may wish read my notes only after reading the anthology.
1927. In the United States: Jim Crow segregation and the color line, lynch law and the n-word.
"The Half-Pint Flask" takes place on an island turned over to agribusiness in South Carolina.
[....] “Mr. Courtney?” from him, with an unnecessarily rising inflection; and a conventional “Mr. Barksdale, I presume,” from me in reply.
In addition to being a race “scientist,” Barksdale is a collector of glass.
“I am doing a series of articles on Negroid Primates, and I fancy the chances for observation are excellent here.”
“Negroid Primates!” The phrase annoyed me. Uttered in that dissecting voice, it seemed to strip the human from the hundred or more Negroes who were my only company except during the duck season when the club members dropped down for the shooting. “There are lots of Negroes here,” I told him a little stiffly. “Their ancestors were slaves when the island was the largest rice plantation in South Carolina, and isolation from modern life has kept them primitive enough, I guess.”
“Good!” he exclaimed. “I will commence my studies at once. Simple souls, I fancy. I should have my data within a month.”
Barksdale soon runs afoul of something that makes his stay a living hell. This state is shared by Courtney.
The sunset was going quickly, dragging its color from from the sky and sea, rolling up leagues of delicately tinted gauze into tight little bales of primary color, then draping these with dark covers for the night. In sharp contrast against the light the burying ground presented its pitiful emblems of the departed. Under the pine needles, in common with all Negro graveyards of the region, the mounds were covered with a strange litter of half-emptied medicine bottles, tin spoons, and other futile weapons that had failed in the final engagement with the last dark enemy.
Barksdale was puttering excitedly about among the graves, peering at the strange assortment of crockery and glass. The sight reminded me of what Spencer had said of the man’s hobby and a chill foreboding as sailed me. I jumped from the buckboard.
“Here,” I called, “I wouldn’t disturb those things if I were you!”
But my words went unheeded. When I reached Barksdale’s side, he was holding a small flat bottle, half filled with a sticky black fluid, and was rubbing the earth from it with his coat sleeve. The man was electric with excitement. He held the flask close to his glasses, then spun around upon me.
“Do you know what this is?” he demanded, then rushed on triumphantly with his answer: “It’s a first issue, half-pint flask of the old South Carolina state dispensary. It gives me the only complete set in existence. Not another one in America. I had hoped that I might get on the trail of one down here. But to fall upon it like this!”
The hand that held the flask was shaking so violently that the little palmetto tree and single X that marked it described small agitated circles. He drew out his handkerchief and wrapped it up tenderly, black contents and all.
“Come,” he announced, “we’ll go now.”
“Not so fast,” I cautioned him. “You can’t carry that away. It simply isn’t done here. We may have our moral lapses, but there are certain things that—well can’t be thought of. The graveyard is one. We let it alone.”
Barksdale is not one of life's let-it-aloners.
Wrath and guileful comeuppance ensue.
Jay
18 October 2024
Cf. https://youtu.be/zpG5D54ybjI?si=xsv3AhYwlS0MbW8L
