Tales of the Jazz Age | Page 3

Age into the hands of those who read as they run and
run as they read.

MY LAST FLAPPERS

THE JELLY-BEAN.
Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an
appealing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you
on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine
three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during
Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the
Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line.
Now if you call a Memphis man a Jelly-bean he will quite possibly pull
a long sinewy rope from his hip pocket and hang you to a convenient
telegraph-pole. If you Call a New Orleans man a Jelly-bean he will
probably grin and ask you who is taking your girl to the Mardi Gras
ball. The particular Jelly-bean patch which produced the protagonist of
this history lies somewhere between the two--a little city of forty
thousand that has dozed sleepily for forty thousand years in southern
Georgia occasionally stirring in its slumbers and muttering something
about a war that took place sometime, somewhere, and that everyone
else has forgotten long ago.
Jim was a Jelly-bean. I write that again because it has such a pleasant
sound--rather like the beginning of a fairy story--as if Jim were nice. It
somehow gives me a picture of him with a round, appetizing face and

all sort of leaves and vegetables growing out of his cap. But Jim was
long and thin and bent at the waist from stooping over pool-tables, and
he was what might have been known in the indiscriminating North as a
corner loafer. "Jelly-bean" is the name throughout the undissolved
Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in
the first person singular--I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.
Jim was born in a white house on a green corner, It had four
weather-beaten pillars in front and a great amount of lattice-work in the
rear that made a cheerful criss-cross background for a flowery
sun-drenched lawn. Originally the dwellers in the white house had
owned the ground next door and next door to that and next door to that,
but this had been so long ago that even Jim's father, scarcely
remembered it. He had, in fact, thought it a matter of so little moment
that when he was dying from a pistol wound got in a brawl he
neglected even to tell little Jim, who was five years old and miserably
frightened. The white house became a boarding-house run by a
tight-lipped lady from Macon, whom Jim called Aunt Mamie and
detested with all his soul.
He became fifteen, went to high school, wore his hair in black snarls,
and was afraid of girls. He hated his home where four women and one
old man prolonged an interminable chatter from summer to summer
about what lots the Powell place had originally included and what sorts
of flowers would be out next. Sometimes the parents of little girls in
town, remembering Jim's. mother and fancying a resemblance in the
dark eyes and hair, invited him to parties, but parties made him shy and
he much preferred sitting on a disconnected axle in Tilly's Garage,
rolling the bones or exploring his mouth endlessly with a long straw.
For pocket money, he picked up odd jobs, and it was due to this that he
stopped going to parties. At his third party little Marjorie Haight had
whispered indiscreetly and within hearing distance that he was a boy
who brought the groceries sometimes. So instead of the two-step and
polka, Jim had learned to throw, any number he desired on the dice and
had listened to spicy tales of all the shootings that had occurred in the
surrounding country during the past fifty years.

He became eighteen. The war broke out and he enlisted as a gob and
polished brass in the Charleston Navy-yard for a year. Then, by way of
variety, he went North and polished brass in the Brooklyn Navy-yard
for a year.
When the war was over he came home, He was twenty-one, has
trousers were too short and too tight. His buttoned shoes were long and
narrow. His tie was an alarming conspiracy of purple and pink
marvellously scrolled, and over it were two blue eyes faded like a piece
of very good old cloth, long exposed to the sun.
In the twilight of one April evening when a soft gray had drifted down
along the cottonfields and over the sultry town, he was a vague figure
leaning against a board fence, whistling and gazing at the moon's rim
above the lights of Jackson Street. His mind was working persistently
on a problem that had held his attention for