Vicksburg negroes. Whether drowsing in the sun, doing a little stroke of work, or sitting gabbling on the curbstone, they were upon the whole as cheerful and comical a lot of people as I ever saw
"Wha' you-all goin' to?" I heard a negro ask a group of mulatto women, in clean starched gingham dresses, who went flouncing by him on the street one Saturday afternoon.
"Oh," returned one of the women, with the elaborate superiority of a member of the class of idle rich, "we're just serenadin' 'round."
"Serenading," as she used the word, meant a promenade about the town.
Perhaps the happiness of the negro, here, has to do with the lazy life of the river. The succulent catfish is easily obtainable for food, and the wages of the roustabout—or "rouster," as he is called for short—are good.
The rouster, in his red undershirt, with a bale hook hung in his belt, is a figure to fascinate the eye. When he works—which is to say, when he is out of funds—he works hard. He will swing a two-hundred-pound sack to his back and do fancy steps as he marches with it up the springy gangplank to the river steamer's deck, uttering now and then a strange, barbaric snatch of song. He has no home, no family, no responsibilities. An ignorant deck hand can earn from forty to one hundred dollars a month. Pay him off at the end of the trip, let him get ashore with his money, and he is gone. Without deck hands the steamer cannot move. For many years there has been known to river captains a simple way out of this difficulty. Pay the rousters off a few hours before the end of the trip. Say there are twenty of them, and that each is given twenty dollars. They clear a space on deck and begin shooting craps. No one interferes. By the time the trip ends most of the money has passed into the hands of four or five; the rest are "broke" and therefore remain at work. Yet despite the ingenuity of those who have the negro labor problem to contend with, Marse Harris tells me that there have been times when the levee was lined with steamers, full-loaded, but unable to depart for want of a crew. Not that there was any lack of roustabouts in town, but that, money being plentiful, they would not work. In such times perishable freight rots and is thrown overboard.
I am conscious of a tendency, in writing of Vicksburg, to dwell continually upon the negro and the river for the reason that the two form an enchanting background for the whole life of the place. This should not, however, be taken to indicate that Vicksburg is not a city of agreeable homes and pleasant society, or that its only picturesqueness is to be found in the river and negro life.
The point is that Vicksburg is a patchwork city. The National Park Hotel, its chief hostelry, is an unusually good hotel for a city of this size, and Washington Street, in the neighborhood of the hotel, has the look of a busy city street; yet on the same square with the hotel, on the street below, nearer the river, is an unwholesome negro settlement. So it is all over the city; the "white folks" live on the hills, while the "niggers" inhabit the adjacent bottoms. Nor is that the only sense in which the town is patched together. Some of the most charming of the city's old homes are tucked away where the visitor is not likely to see them without deliberate search. Such a place, for example, is the old Klein house, standing amid lawns and old-fashioned gardens, on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi. This house was built long before the railroad came to Vicksburg, cutting off its grounds from the river. A patch in the paneling of the front door shows where a cannon ball passed through at the time of the bombardment, and the ball itself may still be seen embedded in the woodwork of one of the rooms within.