As our train rattled over the trestles and through the cypress swamps the desperate iron workers were singing:
“We'll work a hundred days,
And we'll get a hundred dollars,
And then go North,
And all be rich and happy!”
When we reached the dyke-building camp I learned how ignorant I really was. I could not do the things the older men could. I was young and familiar only with the tools of an iron puddler. The other men were ten years older and had acquired skill in handling mule-teams and swinging an ax. They saw I couldn't do anything, so they appointed me water carrier. The employing boss was what is now called hard-boiled. He was a Cuban, with the face of a cutthroat. Doubtless he was the descendant of the Spanish-English buccaneers who used to prowl the Caribbean Sea and make headquarters at New Orleans. Beside this pirate ancestry I'll bet he was a direct descendant of Simon Legree. He suspected that I couldn't do much in a dyking camp, so he swarmed down on me the second week I was there and ordered me to quit the water-carrying job and handle a mule team and a scraper. I saw death put an arm around my neck right then and there. But I wouldn't confess that I couldn't drive a team.
I put the lines over my head, said “Go 'long” as I had heard other muleteers say, and, grasping the handles of the scraper, I scooped up a slip load of clay. My arms were strong and this was no trick at all. But getting the load was not the whole game. The hardest part was to let go. I guided the lines with one hand and steadied the scraper with the other as I drove up on the dump. Then I heaved up on the handles, the scraper turned over on its nose and dumped the load. But that isn't all it dumped. The mules shot ahead when the load was released, and the lines around my neck jerked me wrong side up. The handle of the scraper hit me a stunning blow in the face and the whole contraption dragged over my body bruising me frightfully. I staggered to my feet with one eye blinded by the blood that flowed from a gash in my brow. Simon Legree cursed me handsomely and told me I was fired. I asked him where I would get my pay, and he told me he was paying me a compliment by letting me walk out of that camp alive. I went to the cook shack and washed the blood off my face. I was a pretty sick boy. The cook was a native and was kind to me.
“Boy, you're liable to get lockjaw from that cut,” he said. “I'll put some of this horse liniment on it and it'll heal up.” He then bandaged it with court-plaster.
“It's a long way back to New Orleans,” the cook concluded. “And you might as well have something to keep your ribs from hitting together.” He cut off a couple of pounds of raw bacon and put it in my pocket together with a “bait” of Plowboy tobacco. And so I hit the road. When I came to the place where my pals were working, cutting willows along the levee, I told them of my plight.
“Never mind, boy,” they said. “You go back to New Orleans and wait for us. After we've worked our hundred days to get a hundred dollars each, we will work a few days more to get a hundred dollars for you. Then we'll all go north and be rich together.”
I began footing it thirty-five miles to the city. I decided, like Queen Isabella, to pawn my jewels to enable me to discover America again. I had an old ring and I met a darky who had a quarter. He got my ring. After tramping all day I was exhausted. I came to a negro cabin and went in and offered the “mammy” a pound of bacon for a pound of corn pone. I further bargained to give the first half of my other pound of bacon if she'd cook the second half for me to eat. She cooked my share of the bacon and set it and the corn bread on the table. I ate heartily for a while, but after two or three slices of the bacon, I was fed up on it. She hadn't cooked enough of the grease out of it. I began feeding this bacon to a pickininny who sat beside me.
“Man, don't give away your meat,” the mammy said. I told her that I had had all I wanted. Then she said to the pickininny:
“Child, doan eat that meat. Save it foh you papa when he come home.”