Richmond Press, Inc.                          Richmond, VA                          1938

Crazy Bill

Who remembers Crazy Bill, one of the characters of old-time Richmond?

He was a mulatto, a man of middle age, or inclining to be elderly, at the time of which we write, and was the most friendly and inoffensive of persons. He would sometimes, as he was going along the street, if he saw out of the corner of his eye that he was observed, jump into the air and cry out, in comic wrath: "Ill take a cow-hide and I'll cowhide myself; I'm able to do it."

His principal locale was around Fourteenth Street, Mayo's Bridge, Mayo's Island, and the Dock. And especially during the fishing season in springtime, when thousands, both amateur and professional fishers, were thronging to those parts. At the time of the great freshet of 1877, when several spans of the bridge were carried away, he was so greatly concerned that he shed tears.

"Aw, me!" he would say. "Mr. May's bridge done washed away. Aw, Me! What Mr. Mayo gwine do now?"

He was very good friends with the boys and was known to every boy in town, as well as to many of their elders. One day, however, a group of boys were teasing him, though they did not get much of a rise out of him. At length one of them asked him, flippantly, something about his mother.

"My mother was a good woman," he said, earnestly. "Aw, yes; my mother was a good woman; my mother was a good woman."

Where is your mother now, Bill?" one of them asked him, pertly.

Bill looked at him a moment. Then a look of solemnity came over his face and he pointed upward.

"She is up there," he said, with a calm dignity that abashed them. "Up there with her God!"

There was no more teasing of Bill by that crowd.