Jimboy was home. All the neighborhood could hear his rich low baritone voice giving birth to the blues. On Saturday night he and Annjee went to bed early. On Sunday night Aunt Hager said: “Put that guitar right up, less’n it’s hymns you plans on playin’. An’ I don’t want too much o’ them, ’larmin’ de white neighbors.”

But this was Monday, and the sun had scarcely fallen below the horizon before the music had begun to float down the alley, over back fences and into kitchen-windows where nice white ladies sedately washed their supper dishes.

Did you ever see peaches
Growin’ on a watermelon vine?
Says did you ever see peaches
On a watermelon vine?
Did you ever see a woman
That I couldn’t get for mine?

Long, lazy length resting on the kitchen-door-sill, back against the jamb, feet in the yard, fingers picking his sweet guitar, left hand holding against its finger-board the back of an old pocket-knife, sliding the knife upward, downward, getting thus weird croons and sighs from the vibrating strings:

O, I left ma mother
An’ I cert’ly can leave you.
Indeed I left ma mother
An’ I cert’ly can leave you,
For I’d leave any woman
That mistreats me like you do.

Jimboy, remembering brown-skin mamas in Natchez, Shreveport, Dallas; remembering Creole women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

O, yo’ windin’ an’ yo’ grindin’
Don’t have no effect on me,
Babe, yo’ windin’ an’ yo’ grindin’
Don’t have no ’fect on me,
’Cause I can wind an’ grind
Like a monkey round a coconut-tree!

Then Harriett, standing under the ripening apple-tree, in the back yard, chiming in:

Now I see that you don’t want me,
So it’s fare thee, fare thee well!
Lawd, I see that you don’t want me,
So it’s fare—thee—well!
I can still get plenty lovin’,
An’ you can go to—Kansas City!

“O, play it, sweet daddy Jimboy!” She began to dance.

Then Hager, from her seat on the edge of the platform covering the well, broke out: “Here, madam! Stop that prancin’! Bad enough to have all this singin’ without turnin’ de yard into a show-house.” But Harriett kept on, her hands picking imaginary cherries out of the stars, her hips speaking an earthly language quite their own.

“You got it, kid,” said Jimboy, stopping suddenly, then fingering his instrument for another tune. “You do it like the stage women does. You’ll be takin’ Ada Walker’s place if you keep on.”

“Wha! Wha! . . . You chillen sho can sing!” Tom Johnson shouted his compliments from across the yard. And Sarah, beside him on the bench behind their shack, added: “Minds me o’ de ole plantation times, honey! It sho do!”

“Unhuh! Bound straight fo’ de devil, that’s what they is,” Hager returned calmly from her place beside the pump. “You an’ Harriett both—singin’ an’ dancin’ this stuff befo’ these chillens here.” She pointed to Sandy and Willie-Mae, who sat on the ground with their backs against the chicken-box. “It’s a shame!”