“I likes it,” said Willie-Mae.

“Me too,” the little boy agreed.

“Naturally you would—none o’ you-all’s converted yet,” countered the old woman to the children as she settled back against the pump to listen to some more.

The music rose hoarse and wild:

I wonder where ma easy rider’s gone?
He done left me, put ma new gold watch in pawn.

It was Harriett’s voice in plaintive moan to the night sky. Jimboy had taught her that song, but a slight, clay-colored brown boy who had hopped bells at the Clinton Hotel for a couple of months, on his way from Houston to Omaha, discovered its meaning to her. Puppy-love, maybe, but it had hurt when he went away, saying nothing. And the guitar in Jimboy’s hands echoed that old pain with an even greater throb than the original ache itself possessed.

Approaching footsteps came from the front yard.

“Lord, I can hear you-all two blocks away!” said Annjee, coming around the house, home from work, with a bundle of food under her left arm. “Hello! How are you, daddy? Hello, ma! Gimme a kiss Sandy.... Lord, I’m hot and tired and most played out. This late just getting from work! . . . Here, Jimboy, come on in and eat some of these nice things the white folks had for supper.” She stepped across her husband’s outstretched legs into the kitchen. “I brought a mighty good piece of cold ham for you, hon’, from Mis’ Rice’s.”

“All right, sure, I’ll be there in a minute,” the man said, but he went on playing Easy Rider, and Harriett went on singing, while the food was forgotten on the table until long after Annjee had come outdoors again and sat down in the cool, tired of waiting for Jimboy to come in to her.

Off and on for nine years, ever since he had married Annjee, Jimboy and Harriett had been singing together in the evenings. When they started, Harriett was a little girl with braided hair, and each time that her roving brother-in-law stopped in Stanton, he would amuse himself by teaching her the old Southern songs, the popular rag-time ditties, and the hundreds of varying verses of the blues that he would pick up in the big dirty cities of the South. The child, with her strong sweet voice (colored folks called it alto) and her racial sense of rhythm, soon learned to sing the songs as well as Jimboy. He taught her the parse me la, too, and a few other movements peculiar to Southern Negro dancing, and sometimes together they went through the buck and wing and a few taps. It was all great fun, and innocent fun except when one stopped to think, as white folks did, that some of the blues lines had, not only double, but triple meanings, and some of the dance steps required very definite movements of the hips. But neither Harriett nor Jimboy soiled their minds by thinking. It was music, good exercise—and they loved it.