E. K. Means / Is This a Title? It Is Not. It Is the Name of a Writer of Negro Stories, Who Has Made Himself So Completely the Writer of Negro Stories That His Book Needs No Title

by E. K. Means

If our friends had been experienced boatmen, they would have landed when they heard those two signals, tied their boat, crawled over on the far side of the levee, and engaged in earnest prayer for the safety of their craft.

Both boats had whistled for the bend.

One was the Federal, a government tug, which was forbidden to pass the city of New Orleans at a speed exceeding twenty miles an hour on account of the damage done to the shipping and the levees; the tug-boat was now splitting the Mississippi River wide open at forty miles an hour, and the swell of the rollers in its wake lashed the levees like the breaking of sea-billows on a rock-bound coast.

The other boat was the big river steamer Nackitosh, whose wash was known and cursed by river fishermen and rafters from St. Louis to the Gulf.

The two boats passed each other in the bend, and then the Mud Hen found herself in the middle of the river, which rocked like a storm at sea.

Skeeter Butts clung desperately to the pilot-wheel, slapping around it like a dish-rag waving in the wind; Hitch and Vinegar, who had been lying flat on their backs on deck, began to roll and scratch and claw at the deck to keep from falling overboard into the river; Figger Bush fell into the coal-pile near the furnace, scrambled like a cat in an ash-barrel, and kicked lumps of coal all over the boat.

There is nothing which can roughhouse a little boat as shamefully as two big boats; from the government tug there came a fan-shaped stern-wave four feet high, rode under the Mud Hen, hoisted her nearly end on end, and let her down. Then the wash from the side-wheel steamboat met the tug’s stern-wave, rode over it like a petrel, and came aboard the Mud Hen for a friendly call on the new owners.

Four hundred barrels of nice, wet Mississippi River water sat down in the laps of the terrified Tickfall quartet and embraced them lovingly.

Then this colored quartet sang a scale of ninety or one hundred assorted yells never before introduced in any musical composition. In fact, they put their souls in their voices with such surprising effect that it introduced them to sounds from their throats which they did not know up to that time they possessed.

The Mud Hen turned completely around three times, tossed on the current like a match-box, stood on first one end and then the other, and pretty nearly straight down.