IN WHICH I MOUNT THE FIRST RUNG OF THE LADDER
As I passed through the gate and turned down Franklin Street under a great sycamore that grew midway of the pavement, I vowed passionately in my heart that I would remain "a common boy" no longer. With the plum cake in my hand, and the delicious taste of it in my mouth, I placed my basket on the ground and leaned against the silvery body of the tree, with my eyes on Samuel, sitting very erect, with his paws held up, his tail wagging, and his expectant gaze on my face.
"What can we do about it, Samuel? How can we begin? Are we common to the bone, I wonder? and how are we going to change?"
But Samuel's thoughts were on the last bit of cake, and when I gave it to him, he stopped begging like a wise dog that has what he wanted, and lay down on the sidewalk with his eyes closed and his nose between his outstretched paws.
A gentle wind stirred overhead, and I smelt the sharp sweet fragrance of the sycamore, which cast a delicate lace-work of shadows on the crooked brick pavement. Not only the great sycamore and myself and Samuel, but the whole blossoming city appeared to me in a dream; and as I glanced down the quiet street, over which the large, slow shadows moved to and fro, I saw through a mist the blurred grey-green foliage in the Capitol Square. In the ground the seeds of the new South, which was in truth but the resurrected spirit of the old, still germinated in darkness. But the air, though I did not know it, was already full of the promise of the industrial awakening, the constructive impulse, the recovered energy, that was yet to be, and in which I, leaning there a barefooted market boy, was to have my part.
An aged negress, in a red bandanna turban, with a pipe in her mouth, stopped to rest in the shadow of the sycamore, placing her basket, full of onions and tomatoes, on the pavement beside my empty one.
"Do you know who lives in that grey house, Mammy?" I asked.
Twisting the stem of her pipe to the corner of her mouth, she sat nodding at me, while the wind fluttered the wisps of grizzled hair escaping from beneath her red and yellow head-dress.
"Go 'way, chile, whar you done come f'om?" she demanded suspiciously. "Ain't you ever hyern er Marse Bland? He riz me."
I shook my head, sufficiently humbled by my plebeian ignorance.