Family friends would always say how devoted Jesse Munroe was to my uncle. And Jesse himself would tell me sometimes what he would do to anybody who harmed a hair on “that white gentleman’s head.” The poor fellow was much too humorless and lived much too much in the past—or in some other kind of removal from the present—to reflect that Uncle Andrew no longer had a hair on his head to be harmed. While he was telling me the things he would do, I’d often burst out laughing at the very thought of my uncle’s baldness. Or that was what I told myself I was laughing about. At any rate, my outbursts didn’t bother Jesse. He always went right ahead with his description of the violence he would do Uncle Andrew’s assailant. And I, watching his obscene gestures and reminding myself of all the scrapes he had been in and of the serious trouble my uncle had got him out of twenty years back, I could almost believe he would do the things he said. More than one time, in fact, his delineations became so real and convincing it took my best fit of laughter to conceal the shudders he sent through me.
He was a naturally fierce-looking little man with purplish black skin and thick wiry hair which he wore not clipped short like most Negro men’s hair but long and bushed up on his head. It was intended to give him height, I used to suppose. But it contributed instead to a general sinister effect, just as his long, narrow sideburns did; and my Uncle Andrew would always insist that it was this effect Jesse strived for. He wasn’t, actually, such a little man. He was of medium height. It was because he was so stoop-shouldered and was so often seen beside my Uncle Andrew that we, my aunt and I, thought of him as little. He was extremely stoop-shouldered, though, and his neck was so short that the lobes of his overlarge ears seemed to reach almost to the collar of his white linen jacket. Probably it was this peculiarity along with his bushy hair and his perpetually blood-shot eyes that made me say at first he was naturally fierce looking.
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