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Updated: June 9, 2025
Now, as he stood looking at it, he wondered how human beings lived there at all. He wondered if Ida May used water from the Niggertown well. He turned to ask old Caroline, but checked himself with a man's instinctive avoidance of mentioning his intimacies to his mother. At that moment, oddly enough, the old negress brought up the topic herself. "Ida May wuz 'quirin' 'bout you las' night, Peter."
A quiver went along his spine. His nostrils widened unconsciously as he calculated a leap and a blow at Tump's gun. The soldier took a step backward, at the same time bringing the barrel to a ready. "Naw you don't," he warned sharply. "You turn roun' an' march on to Niggertown." "What for?" Peter still tried to be casual, but his voice held new overtones.
Ordinarily, he ran a pressing-shop in the Niggertown crescent, but occasionally he impressed all the dramatic talent of Niggertown and really did take the road with a minstrel company. These barn-storming expeditions reached down into Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Sometimes they proved a great success, and the darkies rode back several hundred dollars ahead. Sometimes they tramped back.
Peter caught glimpses of him among the wretched alleyways and vacant lots that lie east of Main Street. The boy was still running toward Niggertown. By this time Peter was just opposite the watchers on the corner. He lifted his voice and asked them the matter, but at the moment they began an excited talking, and no one heard him.
That was the very tar of shame. Peter knew that in the moral categories of Niggertown Cissie would suffer more from such a rebuff than if she had lied or committed theft and adultery every day in the calendar. She had been refused marriage. All the folk-ways of Niggertown were utterly topsyturvy. It was a crazy-house filled with the most grotesque moral measures.
It seemed best to marry Cissie at once and go North. Further time in this place would not be good for the girl. Even if he could not lift all Niggertown, he could at least help Cissie. He had had no idea, when he first planned his work, what a tremendous task he was essaying.
And life being problematic and uncertain as it is, and prone to wind about in the strangest way, no one may say with certitude that young Sam did not make a promising start. Tump Pack became almost a mythical figure in Niggertown. Jim Pink Staggs composed a saga relating the soldier's exploits in France, his assault on the jail to liberate Cissie, and his death.
At the sight of old Caroline's motionless body they lifted their voices through the night. The lamentation carried far beyond the confines of Niggertown. The last gamblers in the cedar glade heard it, and it broke up their gaming and drinking. White persons living near the black crescent were waked out of their sleep and listened to the eerie sound.
It filled Peter with a sudden violent questioning of the whole white régime. His thoughts danced along in peculiar excitement. At the turn of the hill the trio came in sight of the squalid semicircle of Niggertown. Here and there from a tumbledown chimney a feather of pale wood smoke lifted into the chill sunshine.
Peter began admiring it at once, and, negro fashion, rather overstepped the limits white beaux set to their praise, as he leaned close to her. At the moment the two were passing one of the oddest houses in Niggertown. It was a two-story cabin built in the shape of a steamboat. A little cupola represented a pilot-house, and two iron chimneys served for smoke-stacks.
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