“‘I’m comin’; I’m comin’; and my head is thank ye ma’am ...
‘I hear dem darky voices calling: Yes mum-ma’am.’”
He never hesitated to take liberties with the English language in order to preserve the meter; for he had the keen sense of rhythm that characterizes his race. Also, for all the ravages of age, his voice was sweet and true. He sang endlessly, so that his songs were half medley, half monologue; and his banjo would all but speak for him.
No one ever saw Eph about the streets in the day time. He appeared at dusk; and it was known that he sometimes remained at his post, singing and picking at his banjo, long after the ways were empty of pedestrians. Sometimes, in those middle hours between night and morning, when there was no one near, the songs he sang became ineffably sad and mournful; he crooned them, under his breath, to the banjo that he hugged against his breast, and his sweet old voice was like a low lament. Once Walter Ragan, the patrolman on the beat, passed at four in the morning of a late fall day and heard Eph singing, over and over....
“Tramp, tramp, tramp! De boys is marching....”
Eph repeated this song so long and so sorrowfully that Ragan came up quietly behind him and asked:
“What’s the matter, Eph?”
The old negro looked up, and Ragan saw that there were tears on his black and wrinkled cheeks. But the darky grinned cheerfully at sight of the policeman.
“Jes’ thinkin’ on de old times, Miste’ Ragan. Thinkin’ on de old times, suh,” said Eph.
Ragan was half inclined to laugh, and half inclined to cry. He felt so sorry for the old man that he ordered him gruffly to get up and go home and go to bed. And Eph got up, and bowed, and brushed the paving with his cap, so deep was his obeisance. “Yas, suh, Miste’ Ragan,” he promised. “Yas, suh, I’m goin’ right along....”
And he tucked the banjo under his arm, and crossed the street, and started up Beacon Hill. Ragan knew where he dwelt, down in the swarming hive beneath the Hill. He watched old Eph go, watched the shuffling, splay feet, and the bent shoulders, and the twisted, crooked little body....