Word: serf
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...sheriff's investigation revealed a medieval oligarchy in northern Arkansas. Two intermarrying, farm-owning clans on Dry and Cagin Creeks hold baronial sway over their hilly domain. With hickory whips and squirrel rifles they drive indigent, illiterate citizens to farm work at serf's wages. Claiming seigniorial "first right" to all women of the community, the clansmen had exerted their claim on the Ruminer girl, killed Franklin for defying them...
...lives in fat little Mrs. Posilipo's lodging house and works in a bakery. So does handsome Teena, representing the Latins. Her lips and dress are red. Her eyes and teeth flash against the swarthy background of her skin. Jencic, in a big, slow, dumb, serf-like way, wants her. Because the girls at the bakery dared her to, she took Jencic's hand one day and told him she liked him. When he humbly tries to follow this up, she turns on him angrily with: "I'm not so hard up I got to walk with...
...Russian" army in Jugoslavia (TIME, Dec. 27), has just published most illuminating, if somewhat bloodcurdling memoirs.* He proceeds from his childhood (circa 1855) when a neighboring Count Visapur went unrestrained although he used to decorate his garden with pedestals on which stood all day statues improvised out of living serfs, stripped and painted white. In that era, Baron Wrangel's Aunt Jeanne would say, if anyone asked her the time, "Thank God, I have never been compelled to learn that!" and would display her watch to a serf who would announce the hour...
Polykushka, however, is showing. Its simple story is the tragedy of a 19th Century serf, a drunkard and a petty thief. His mistress forgives him a serious larceny, provided he swear on the Cross to mend his ways. This the poor wretch solemnly does, whereupon, to prove her faith in him, the benefactress despatches him to bring a purse of rubles from the village. In the course of the errand, the money is accidentally lost. The miserable serf hangs himself from a rafter in the barn, while an honest traveler returns the money found along the roadside, to the owner...