One spring the negroes began to dig long trenches through the streets to lay water pipes through the town. The white people were having water hydrants put into their gardens and houses, the water to be pumped from a reservoir which was being made between two hills far up in the farms above the town. In the houses bathrooms were erected at the ends of back porches or upper hallways. There was work for every black laborer in the building of the dam and the digging of the trenches through the streets and roads. The negroes at the picks would sing now and then, not in unison, but each one would cry out his song, a phrase or a rhyme, timed to the regular throb of the body as it hammered with the tool upon the beaten earth, the song falling an instant behind the blow of the arm in half-humorous comment.
Whe-en I me-a-rry the-en I will
Ma-ake my ho-ome in E-evansville....
The song was always heard to the steady fall of the pick or the rise of the shovel, syncopated so that it set the shovel apart from itself and but half-owned its rhythms, or rather as if it accepted its confines and then escaped from them by the witty loophole of a quarter-beat. The men who worked were the strong men of the town, brown men or yellow, men who worked as teamsters, handlers of stone, lumber, coal, brick. They were named Wade Spalding, Ben MacVeigh, Ross, Tom Rusty, and there was a man called Gluco. Joe Davis was among them, a man prodigious of strength. Ross was a large man, young at that time, brown-skinned and broad in shoulders. All of them were willing, if they were paid well and well watched, to do a day’s work. A song would cry out from beneath the throb of the picks, escaped from the hard rhythm of the labor.
Chicken in the tree
Nobody there but me....
A wailing minor slurred through infinite intervals from tone to tone, sliding on the word “there” down four semitones of the scale by gradations unknown to established song. As a sequel to this some other voice would offer, after a space with the thud of the picks, the deeply intoned fatalism, swifter than the last, major, without wailing.
Hounds on my track
Chicken on my back.
Ross was a tall broad young negro, not over-sized, but well-knit and strong, his weight about one hundred and sixty pounds. He maintained a rivalry with Wade Spalding at the business of the picks, neither of them deigning to outdo himself but each taking pride in what he could achieve, foot by foot, by using as little of his strength as he might. Each negro used but the cream of his vitality on the labor, working relaxed, saving himself for life and her uses. A song, called out quickly,