Vocabulary from "The Good Lord Bird"(excerpt) by James McBride

Most of his clothing was junk he found, or items he stole off dead white folks on the prairie killed off from dropsy or aired out on account of some dispute or other.

"Your Ma was the only woman in the world man enough to hear my holy thoughts," Pa boasted, "for I'm a man of many parts."

He's a'comin' to gnash out your teeth and tear out your hair!" then fling hisself into a crowd of the meanest, low-down, piss-drunk Missouri rebels you ever saw.

And while they mostly clubbed him to the floor and kicked out his teeth, them white fellers didn't no more blame my Pa for flinging hisself at them in the name of the Holy Ghost than if a tornado was to come along and toss him across the room, for the Spirit of the Redeemer Who Spilt His Blood was serious business out on the prairie in them days, and your basic white pioneer weren't no stranger to the notion of hope.

Most of 'em was fresh out of that commodity, having come west on a notion that hadn't worked out the way it was drawed up anyway, so anything that helped them outta bed to kill off Indians and not drop dead from ague and rattlesnakes was a welcome change.

It helped too that Pa made some of the best rotgut in Kansas Territory—though he was a preacher, Pa weren't against a taste or three—and like as not, the same gunslingers who tore out his hair and knocked him cold would pick him up afterward and say "Let's liquor," and the whole bunch of 'em would wander off and howl at the moon, drinking Pa's giddy sauce.

Them poor settlers had enough to worry 'bout what with rattlers popping up from the floorboards and breechloaders that fired for nothing and building chimneys the wrong way that choked 'em to death, without having to fret 'bout a Negro flinging hisself at them in the name of our Great Redeemer Who Wore the Crown.

It served as a kind of post office, courthouse, rumor mill, and gin house for Missouri rebels who come across the Kansas line to drink, throw cards, tell lies, frequent whores, and holler to the moon 'bout niggers taking over the world and the white man's constitutional rights being throwed in the outhouse by the Yankees and so forth.

But come spring, talk in Dutch's circled 'round a certain murderous white scoundrel named Old John Brown, a Yank from back east who'd come to Kansas Territory to stir up trouble with his gang of sons called the Pottawatomie Rifles.

Old John Brown burned homesteads.

Old John Brown raped women and hacked off heads.

Old John Brown done this, and Old John Brown done that, and why, by God, by the time they was done with him, Old John Brown sounded like the most onerous, murderous, low-down son of a bitch you ever saw, and I resolved that if I ever was to run across him, why, by God, I would do him in myself, just on account of what he done or was gonna do to the good white people I knowed.