When I got into New Orleans the next morning, I traded my Plowboy tobacco for a bar of laundry soap. With my twenty-five cents I bought a cotton undershirt. Then I went into the “jungle” at Algiers, a town across the river from New Orleans, and built a fire in the jungle (a wooded place where hoboes camp) and heated some water in an old tin pail I found there. Then I took off all my clothes and threw my underwear away. A negro who stood watching me said:
“White man, are you throwing them clothes away?”
“I certainly am,” I replied.
“Why, them underclothes is northern underclothes. Them's woolen clothes. Them's the kind of underclothes I like.”
“You wouldn't like that bunch of underclothes,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because if you look in the seams you will find something that is unseemly. I've been out in a levee camp.”
“Hush mah mouf, white man,” laughed the negro. “Them little things would never bother a Louisiana nigger. Why we have them things with us all the time. We just call 'em our little companions.”
He picked up the garments and walked off proud and happy. I took my soap and warm water and scrubbed myself from crown to heel. I put my clothing in the pail with more soap and water and boiled the outfit thoroughly.
Then I went back to New Orleans and got my old job in the boarding-house. I saved all my money except my fifteen cents for the nightly flop. A month later my gang came roaring back from the peon camp. They had worked thirty days and had not got a cent. Slave-driver Legree had driven them out when they demanded a reckoning. They were lucky to escape with their lives, their cooties and their appetites. Instead of financing me, I had to finance them again. They finally got cleaned up and we all went back to Birmingham, where the strike was over.