VI.
“I’ll give you a quarter if you’ll throw Mary in!” shouted one of the passengers from the rail of our ship to a great powerful negro, the bully among bullies of a crowd of blacks which swarmed as thick as bees on the pier close to our moorings.
“Mary” was one of several hundred negro girls who had been coaling our ship since early morning. All day long, the endless procession of short-skirted, straight-backed, flat-hipped, bare-legged, bandannaed negresses, carrying on their heads the baskets of coal to be emptied through the coal-chutes or into a barge, had gone on amidst deafening roars of laughter, insane oaths, and noiseless tread. The barge, when filled, was towed alongside the vessel and unloaded into our starboard coal-bunkers. The port bunkers were filled direct from the dock by similar baskets of coal dumped into the port coal-chutes.
We were watching the black children from the deck, and Paterfamilias turning to me, said, in a wholly justified tone: “There, now, my reformer, you see a practical working example of equal rights for women! It means equal or greater labour, as well, and a sad breaking down of all womanliness. The women do the work and the men loaf around at home to spend the money.” “Do you mean to infer, my dear, that if we women in America had equal suffrage, you men would stay at home and wait for the money we earn? Surely I’d never believe it of our American men—never!”
Whatever other men would do, the negroes of St. Thomas certainly did not do the work, as far as we could see. There were a few fellows who helped with the barge, and who handled the shore boats, but the heavy loads were borne on the heads of the women, and they appeared to be in every way equal to the occasion. We were witnessing a marvellous exhibition of endurance, for the sun was by no means gentle, and the baskets of coal weighed well up toward a hundred pounds each, but they were carried with the ease of so many feathers, with a light, active step, from morning until evening, without cessation.