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Elizabeth Madox Roberts 237 Ben Lucien Burman “Cumberland Justice,” from It’s a Big Country: America off the Highways Ben Lucien Burman was born in 1895 in Covington, Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. He was a traveler and an adventurer and seemed to live more than one life. In his eighty-eight years he wrote twenty-two books, most of them based on his love for rivers and his travels around the world. During World War II he covered the Free French forces in Africa; that experience resulted in Miracle on the Congo and his being awarded the French Legion of Honor. Late in his career he began a hugely popular series of children’s books set in Catfish Bend, a mythical spot on the lower Mississippi River inhabited by such talking animals as Doc Raccoon and Judge Black, a vegetarian blacksnake. Several of his books were made into films, including Mississippi and Steamboat Round the Bend, which starred Will Rogers. The book that is closest to his Kentucky roots is The Four Lives of Mundy Tolliver (1953), which features a mountain protagonist from Coal Creek, Kentucky, who has just been released from the service after World War II and is hitchhiking in the Deep South in search of maturity, love, and happiness. About a year before Burman died (in New York in 1984), I received a card he’d sent me from Brazil, where he had been living with a tribe of headhunters. It read, “Getting marvelous material for a new Catfish Bend book here in the Amazon jungle, the most exciting place I’ve struck since the Congo in 1941.” “Cumberland Justice” is a seriocomic vignette about how justice was served, home-style, in the Kentucky mountains of yore. h “It’s what you call mountain justice,” said Judge Honey. We were sitting in his court at the little town of Manchester, deep in the Kentucky Cumberlands. Every American has his own picture of the Kentucky mountains. It is usually a comic strip idea of a rural people who are among America’s finest citizens. But nothing is known to the world outside of what is perhaps the most remarkable feature of the mountain culture— the methods of the mountain judges as they sit on their worn benches, and the execution of the mountain law. An officer who was at once the Manchester police chief and the entire police force came into the little courtroom with an overalled farmer in tow. Judge Honey studied the newcomer a moment. He spoke with deep regret. “Honey. I hate to do this to you. But you been drunk. It’ll be twelve fifty, honey.” 237 238 The Kentucky Anthology The farmer grew troubled. His lean hands searched in vain through his pockets. “Judge, looks like I sure ain’t got no money. Kin I pay you after I sell my tobacco?” Judge Honey became thoughtful. He had earned the nick-name from his habit of addressing any offender before him by this term of affection on the theory that it made the punishment easier to bear. “Be all right with me, honey. But the city council’s kind of hard right now about money. I got to have something stronger than after the tobacco, honey.” The police chief stepped forward as though to take the prisoner back to jail. The farmer’s voice choked with emotion. “That tobacco’s sure going to rot if I git locked up again, Judge. And it’s the prettiest patch of tobacco between here and Lexington.” Judge Honey shifted his stoutish body in his chair and looked out the window. The courtroom was on the second floor. Below us the life of the little town flowed steadily past, the coal trucks rumbling in from a near-by mineshaft with a blackened miner sitting beside the driver, the jeeps crowded with mountain families come to do their shopping, the occasional hillman on horseback. Judge Honey turned to the prisoner again. “If I let you go out in town and talk to people, you think you can get some body who’ll go on your bond for the $12.50?” The farmer brightened. “I figure maybe I kin, Judge.” “All right. You do it, honey. I know what it is to have nice tobacco.” I watched the farmer go down the stairs and thought how letting a prisoner wander off to find his own bond would have horrified a jurist in a city court...

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