empty milk-bottles, murky and unwashed, and rusty lard-buckets. “I’ll vow!” she said, turning to Mr. Baskett, the Hattiesburg cotton merchant, who grinned down malarially through his scraggly mustaches, “what am I going to do with him? He’s chopped down every stock of corn in the row.”
“Yes,” Mr. Baskett said, peering over, “and missed every weed. Boy,” he added judicially, “you need two months on a farm.”
The bread that I fetch will be eaten by strangers. I carry coal and split up wood for fires to warm them. Smoke. Fuimas fumus. All of our life goes up in smoke. There is no structure, no creation in it, not even the smoky structure of dreams. Come lower, angel; whisper in our ears. We are passing away in smoke and there is nothing to-day but weariness to pay for yesterday’s toil. How may we save ourselves?
He was given the Niggertown route—the hardest and least profitable of all. He was paid two cents a copy for weekly deliveries, given ten per cent of his weekly collections, and ten cents for every new subscription. Thus, he was able to earn four or five dollars a week. His thin undeveloped body drank sleep with insatiable thirst, but it was now necessary for him to get up at half-past three in the morning with darkness and silence making an unreal humming in his drugged ears.
Strange aerial music came fluting out of darkness, or over his slow-wakening senses swept the great waves of symphonic orchestration. Fiend-voices, beautiful and sleep-loud, called down through darkness and light, developing the thread of ancient memory.
Staggering blindly in the whitewashed glare, his eyes, sleep-corded opened slowly as he was born anew, umbilically cut, from darkness.
Waken, ghost-eared boy, but into darkness. Waken, phantom, O into us. Try, try, O try the way. Open the wall of light. Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost? O lost. Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost? O whisper-tongued laughter. Eugene! Eugene! Here, O here, Eugene. Here, Eugene. The way is here, Eugene. Have you forgotten? The leaf, the rock, the wall of light. Lift up
