The man stopped playing, with a deep vibration of the strings that seemed to echo through the whole world. Then he leaned his guitar against the side of the house and lifted straight up in his hairy arms Annjee’s plump, brown-black little body while he kissed her as she wriggled like a stubborn child, her soft breasts rubbing his hard body through the coarse blue shirt.

“You don’t like my old songs, do you, baby? You don’t want to hear me sing ’em,” he said, laughing. “Well, that’s all right. I like you, anyhow, and I like your ham, and I like your kisses, and I like everything you bring me. Let’s go in and chow down.” And he carried her into the kitchen, where he sat with her on his knees as he ate the food she so faithfully had brought him from Mrs. J. J. Rice’s dinner-table.

Outside, Willie-Mae went running home through the dark. And Harriett pumped a cool drink of water for her mother, then helped her to rise from her low seat, Sandy aiding from behind, with both hands pushing firmly in Aunt Hager’s fleshy back. Then the three of them came into the house and glanced, as they passed through the kitchen, at Annjee sitting on Jimboy’s lap with both dark arms tight around his neck.

“Looks like you’re clinging to the Rock of Ages,” said Harriett to her sister. “Be sure you don’t slip, old evil gal.”

But at midnight, when the owl that nested in a tree near the corner began to hoot, they were all asleep—Annjee and Jimboy in one room, Harriett and Hager in another, with Sandy on the floor at the foot of his grandmother’s bed. Far away on the railroad line a whistle blew, lonesome and long.

VI. WORK

The sunflowers in Willie-Mae’s back yard were taller than Tom Johnson’s head, and the hollyhocks in the fence corners were almost as high. The nasturtiums, blood-orange and gold, tumbled over themselves all around Madam de Carter’s house. Aunt Hager’s sweet-william, her pinks, and her tiger-lilies were abloom and the apples on her single tree would soon be ripe. The adjoining yards of the three neighbors were gay with flowers. “Watch out for them dogs!” his grandmother told Sandy hourly, for the days had come when the bright heat made gentle animals go mad. Bees were heavy with honey, great green flies hummed through the air, yellow-black butterflies suckled at the rambling roses . . . and watermelons were on the market.

The Royal African Knights and Ladies of King Solomon’s Scepter were preparing a drill for the September Emancipation celebration, a “Drill of All Nations,” in which Annjee was to represent Sweden. It was not to be given for a month or more, but the first rehearsal would take place tonight.

“Sandy,” his mother said, shaking him early in the morning as he lay on his pallet at the foot of Aunt Hager’s bed, “listen here! I want you to come out to Mis’ Rice’s this evening and help me get through the dishes so’s I can start home early, in time to wash and dress myself to go to the lodge hall. You hears me?”