CHAPTER XL
THE ROAD TO ARCADY
Before we saw the train which was to take us from Birmingham to Columbus, Mississippi, we began to sense its quality. When we attempted to purchase parlor car seats of the ticket agent at the Union Station and were informed by him that our train carried no parlor car, it seemed to us that his manner was touched with cynicism, and this impression was confirmed by his reply to our further timid inquiry as to a dining car:
"Where do you gentlemen reckon you're a-goin' to, anyhow?"
Presently we passed through the gate and better understood the nature of the ticket agent's thoughts. The train consisted of several untidy day coaches, the first a Jim Crow car, the others for white people. The negro car was already so full that many of its occupants had to stand in the aisle, but this did not seem to trouble them, for all were gabbling happily, and the impression one got, in glancing through the door, was of many sets of handsome white teeth displayed in as many dark grinning faces. There are innumerable things for which we cannot envy the negro, but neither his teeth nor his good nature are among them.
It was Saturday afternoon, and the two or three other cars, though not overcrowded, were well filled with people from the neighboring mining towns who were going home after having spent the morning shopping in the city. Almost all our fellow passengers carried packages, many had infants with them, and we were struck with the fact that the complexions of these people suggested a diet of pie—fried pie, if there be such a thing—that a peculiarly high percentage of them suffered from diseases of the eye, and that the pervading smell of the car in which we sat was of oranges, bananas, babies, and overheated adults.
A young mother in the seat in front of us had with her three small children, the youngest an infant in arms. She was feeding a banana to the second child, who looked about two years old. Behind us a clean, capable-looking woman talked in a broad Scottish dialect with another housewife whose jargon was that of the mountaineers.
The region through which the train presently began to wind its way was green and hilly, and there were many stops at villages, all of them mining camps apparently, made up of shabby little cabins scattered helter-skelter upon the hillsides. In many of the cabin doorways mothers lingered with their broods watching the train, and on all the station platforms stood crowds of idlers—men, women, and children, negro and white—many of the men stamped, by their coal-begrimed faces, their stained overalls, and the lamps above the visors of their caps, as mine workers.
After a time my companion and I moved to the exceedingly dirty smoking room at the end of the car, where we sat and listened to the homely conversation of a group of men who seemed not only to know one another, but to know the same people in towns along the line. Between stations they gossiped, smoked, chewed, spat, and swore together like so many New England crossroad sages, but when the train stopped they gave encouraging attention to the droll performances of one of their number, a shaggy, unshaven, rawboned man, of middle age, gray-haired and collarless, who sat near the window and uttered convincing imitations of the sounds made by chickens, roosters, pigs, goats, and crows.
