The gang down at the flop house was dazzled by an employment agent, who offered to ship them out into the rice country to work on the levee for a dollar a day and cakes. The men were wild for a square meal and the feel of a dollar in their jeans. So they all shipped out to the river levee and I went along with the gang.
As our train rattled over the trestles and through the cypress swamps the desperate iron workers were singing:
"We'll work a hundred days, And we'll get a hundred dollars, And then go North, And all be rich and happy!"When we reached the dyke-building camp I learned how ignorant Ireally was. I could not do the things the older men could. I was young and familiar only with the tools of an iron puddler. The other men were ten years older and had acquired skill in handling mule-teams and swinging an ax. They saw I couldn't do anything, so they appointed me water carrier. The employing boss was what is now called hard-boiled. He was a Cuban, with the face of a cutthroat. Doubtless he was the descendant of the Spanish-English buccaneers who used to prowl the Caribbean Sea and make headquarters at New Orleans. Beside this pirate ancestry I'll bet he was a direct descendant of Simon Legree. He suspected that Icouldn't do much in a dyking camp, so he swarmed down on me the second week I was there and ordered me to quit the water-carrying job and handle a mule team and a scraper. I saw death put an arm around my neck right then and there. But I wouldn't confess that I couldn't drive a team.
I put the lines over my head, said "Go 'long" as I had heard other muleteers say, and, grasping the handles of the scraper, Iscooped up a slip load of clay. My arms were strong and this was no trick at all. But getting the load was not the whole game. The hardest part was to let go. I guided the lines with one hand and steadied the scraper with the other as I drove up on the dump.
Then I heaved up on the handles, the scraper turned over on its nose and dumped the load. But that isn't all it dumped. The mules shot ahead when the load was released, and the lines around my neck jerked me wrong side up. The handle of the scraper hit me a stunning blow in the face and the whole contraption dragged over my body bruising me frightfully. I staggered to my feet with one eye blinded by the blood that flowed from a gash in my brow.
Simon Legree cursed me handsomely and told me I was fired. Iasked him where I would get my pay, and he told me he was paying me a compliment by letting me walk out of that camp alive. I went to the cook shack and washed the blood off my face. I was a pretty sick boy. The cook was a native and was kind to me.
"Boy, you're liable to get lockjaw from that cut," he said.
"I'll put some of this horse liniment on it and it'll heal up."He then bandaged it with court-plaster.
"It's a long way back to New Orleans," the cook concluded. "And you might as well have something to keep your ribs from hitting together." He cut off a couple of pounds of raw bacon and put it in my pocket together with a "bait" of Plowboy tobacco. And so Ihit the road. When I came to the place where my pals were working, cutting willows along the levee, I told them of my plight.
"Never mind, boy," they said. "You go back to New Orleans and wait for us. After we've worked our hundred days to get a hundred dollars each, we will work a few days more to get a hundred dollars for you. Then we'll all go north and be rich together."I began footing it thirty-five miles to the city. I decided, like Queen Isabella, to pawn my jewels to enable me to discover America again. I had an old ring and I met a darky who had a quarter. He got my ring. After tramping all day I was exhausted.
I came to a negro cabin and went in and offered the "mammy" a pound of bacon for a pound of corn pone. I further bargained to give the first half of my other pound of bacon if she'd cook the second half for me to eat. She cooked my share of the bacon and set it and the corn bread on the table. I ate heartily for a while, but after two or three slices of the bacon, I was fed up on it. She hadn't cooked enough of the grease out of it. I began feeding this bacon to a pickininny who sat beside me.
"Man, don't give away your meat," the mammy said. I told her that I had had all I wanted. Then she said to the pickininny:
"Child, doan eat that meat. Save it foh you papa when he come home."When I got into New Orleans the next morning, I traded my Plowboy tobacco for a bar of laundry soap. With my twenty-five cents I bought a cotton undershirt. Then I went into the "jungle"at Algiers, a town across the river from New Orleans, and built a fire in the jungle (a wooded place where hoboes camp) and heated some water in an old tin pail I found there. Then I took off all my clothes and threw my underwear away. A negro who stood watching me said:
"White man, are you throwing them clothes away?""I certainly am," I replied.
"Why, them underclothes is northern underelothes. Them's woolen clothes. Them's the kind of underclothes I like.""You wouldn't like that bunch of underclothes," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because if you look in the seams you will find something that is unseemly. I've been out in a levee camp.""Hush mah mouf, white man," laughed the negro. "Them little things would never bother a Louisiana nigger. Why we have them things with us all the time. We just call 'em our little companions."He picked up the garments and walked off proud and happy. Itook my soap and warm water and scrubbed myself from crown to heel. I put my clothing in the pail with more soap and water and boiled the outfit thoroughly.
Then I went back to New Orleans and got my old job in the boarding-house. I saved all my money except my fifteen cents for the nightly flop. A month later my gang came roaring back from the peon camp. They had worked thirty days and had not got a cent. Slave-driver Legree had driven them out when they demanded a reckoning. They were lucky to escape with their lives, their cooties and their appetites. Instead of financing me, I had to finance them again. They finally got cleaned up and we all went back to Birmingham, where the strike was over.
"Show us that spieler," they said, "who told us the wage system was the worst kind of slavery. If daily wages is slavery, God grant that they never set us free again."
