'thout any heads on. You know they's an awful wicked man buried down
there in the woods, an' the sperrits of them he's inju'ed ha'nts the
thicket every night. There isn't anybody, that I know of, that 'ud go
down there aftah dark for anything on this livin' yearth."

"Then who sees 'em?" asked John Jay, with a skeptical grin.

"Who sees 'em?" repeated Mammy wrathfully, angry because of the doubt
implied by his question and his face. "Who sees 'em? They've been seen
by generations of them as is dead and gone. Who is you, I'd like to
know, standin' up there a-mockin' at me so impident and a-askin' 'Who
sees 'em?'"

She turned to begin her dish washing, with a scornful air that seemed to
say that he was beneath any further notice. Still, no sooner had she
piled the dishes up in the pan than she turned to him again, with her
hands on her hips.

"Go down and ask Uncle Mose," she said, still indignant. "He can tell
you tales that'll send cole chills up an' down yo' spine. He saw an
awful thing in there once with his own eyes. 'Twan't a gandah, but
somethin' long an slim flyin' low in the bushes--he reckoned it was
twenty feet long. It had a little thin head like a snake, an' yeahs that
stuck up like rabbit's. It was all white, an' had fo' little short legs
an' two little short wings, an' it was moah'n flesh an' blood could
stand, he say, to see that long, slim, white thing runnin' an' a-flyin'
at the same time through the bushes, low down neah the groun'. You jus'
go ask him."

John Jay swung his buckets irresolutely. "I don't believe I'll go down
there aftah berries," he said. "I don't know what to do. They isn't any
moah anywhere else."

Mammy wished that she had not gone to such pains to convince him.
"Nothin' evah comes around in the daytime," she insisted, "an' I reckon
berries is mighty plentiful, too," she added, persuasively. "Nobody evah
saw anything down there in the daylight, honey. I'd go if I was you."

John Jay stood on one foot. He was afraid of the headless ganders, but
he did want those berries. He walked out through the door, hesitated,
and stood on one foot again. Then he went slowly down the hill. Mammy,
standing in the door with her apron flung over her head, watched him
climb up on the fence and sit there to consider. Finally, he dropped
down to the other side, and started in the direction of the gander
thicket.

It was a place that the negroes had been afraid of since her earliest
recollecti