A Foot Too Deep — An Original Short Story by Don McDonald

HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories

This episode presents an original short story set in 19th-century New Orleans involving a clash between the wealthy aristocrat Bernard de Ma

Key takeaways

• Bernard de Marigny was a feared New Orleans aristocrat known for his wealth and dueling history.
• James Humble was a seven-foot-tall blacksmith and a distant ancestor of the host, Don McDonald.
• The conflict began when Humble compared Marigny's political argument to a 'horseshoe nailed on backward.'
• As the challenged party, Humble held the sole privilege to name the weapons and the ground for the duel.
• Humble proposed fighting in six feet of water at Lake Pontchratrain using sledgehammers.

Main topics

• 19th Century American History
• New Orleans Dueling Culture
• Genealogy

Notable quotes

The gentleman's argument is a horseshoe nailed on backward, looks handsome on the bench, lames the horse a mile down the road.

Conclusion

The story serves as a testament to how wit and ingenuity can disarm ev

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) From short story verses, this is Humorous Stories. We know you like your humor for free. But, and there's always a but, here's ours. Speaker 1 (0:26) I'm Don McDonald. I have always been fascinated by 19th century America. And not because I imagine it as a simpler or a better time, but because it feels both distant and strangely familiar. It was a country still inventing itself, filled with outsized personalities, unsettled customs, and stories that have survived because someone thought them too good to let disappear. I love those old stories. especially the ones found outside the grand sweep of history. An odd incident preserved by a local account, a family anecdote passed from one generation to the next, or a name buried in a document that suddenly turns a legend into a human being. This is one reason I began researching my own genealogy. Somewhere along the way, I discovered that James Humble, a nearly seven-foot blacksmith remembered for answering a deadly challenge, with one wonderfully absurd proposal, was my distant uncle. The central incident in this story has long been a part of New Orleans dueling lore. Some of its details have shifted in the telling, as old stories tend to do, and I have imagined portions of the world surrounding it. But the remarkable choice James Humble made, the choice that allowed wit to defeat violence, has been preserved. This is his story. I call it A Foot Too Deep. ...the city of its young men. There was scarcely a gentleman in New Orleans who had not stood at least once at the oaks before breakfast, in the wet grass under the moss, and waited there to learn whether he would walk back to his carriage or be carried to it. The dueling ground kept its own green hush even at noon. Men went out to it to settle the small unbearable things. A look held a beat too long. A card laid down wrong. A word about a man's sister, his horse, his honor, his vote. The code that governed the whole bloody sacrament was older than the colony and observed more faithfully than the mass. And like the mass, It ran on forms that nobody thought to question, because the forms were the entire substance of the thing. Bernard de Marigny knew those forms the way other men knew their own names. He had been born to seven millions and a coat of arms, and he was spending both with the serene carelessness of a man who believed the supply to be a law of nature. He gambled. He danced. He christened the streets of his own Forberg after the things he loved. which were dice and desire and the duels themselves, so that a man could stand on the corner of craps and desire and read the whole merinese character without being taught his letters. He had once for a wager lit a cigar with a banknote worth more than a working man saw in a year, and he had watched the working men watch him do it, and the watching, you understand, was the entire point of the exercise. He stood in his stockings well under six feet. He was thin as a foil. He had gone out to fifteen separate mornings at the Oaks, and more than fifteen by some tellings, and had walked back to his own carriage