As she spoke there came the sound of voices singing, and a moment later the wagon jogged heavily round a tuft of stunted cedars which jutted into the long curve of the highway. The wheels crunched a loose stone in the road, and the driver drawled a patient “gee-up” to the horses, as he flicked at a horse-fly with the end of his long rawhide whip. There was about him an almost cosmic good nature; he regarded the landscape, the horses and the rocks in the road with imperturbable ease.
Behind him, in the body of the wagon, the negro women stood chanting the slave's farewell; and as they neared the children, he looked back and spoke persuasively. “I'd set down if I was you all,” he said. “You'd feel better. Thar, now, set down and jolt softly.”
But without turning the women kept up their tremulous chant, bending their turbaned heads to the imaginary faces upon the roadside. They had left their audience behind them on the great plantation, but they still sang to the empty road and courtesied to the cedars upon the way. Excitement gripped them like a frenzy—and a childish joy in a coming change blended with a mother's yearning over broken ties.
A bright mulatto led, standing at full height, and her rich notes rolled like an organ beneath the shrill plaint of her companions. She was large, deep-bosomed, and comely after her kind, and in her careless gestures there was something of the fine fervour of the artist. She sang boldly, her full body rocking from side to side, her bared arms outstretched, her long throat swelling like a bird's above the gaudy handkerchief upon her breast.
The others followed her, half artlessly, half in imitation, mingling with their words grunts of self-approval. A grin ran from face to face as if thrown by the grotesque flash of a lantern. Only a little black woman crouching in one corner bowed herself and wept.
The children had fallen back against the stone wall, where they hung staring.
“Good-by, Dolly!” they called cheerfully, and the woman answered with a long-drawn, hopeless whine:—
“Gawd A'moughty bless you twel we
Meet agin.”
Zeke broke from the group and ran a few steps beside the wagon, shaking the outstretched hands.
The driver nodded peaceably to him, and cut with a single stroke of his whip an intricate figure in the sand of the road. “Git up an' come along with us, sonny,” he said cordially; but Zeke only grinned in reply, and the children laughed and waved their handkerchiefs from the wall. “Good-by, Dolly, and Mirandy, and Sukey Sue!” they shouted, while the women, bowing over the rolling wheels, tossed back a fragment of the song:—