she—hunh!—was too young—hunh! Lawd, I wish’d I’d—hunh!—never seen her—hunh! An’ I wish’d she’d—hunh!—never been bawn—hunh! Well, I led her—hunh!—to de altar—hunh! An’ de preacher—hunh!—made us one—hunh! An’ she swore by—hunh!—God that’d made her—hunh! She’d never love hunh!—another man—hunh!
Mimi’s heart beat faster and faster as she watched and listened. She sensed that the song carried the toilers far above their miserable lot. For them the toil and sweat, the louring guards who shouted staccato commands or flung crisp oaths when one of the convicts slackened or appeared to slacken in his labour, did not exist. She began to comprehend the thing Carl had said to her of the “over-soul” the Negro possessed. …
“Look at some of these coloured folks around you,” he had said to her, “most of them poor, having to work like dogs for a meagre living, deprived of practically every ordinary outlet in the way of amusement. Are they depressed, morbid, bitter? Not on your life! They can find amusement where nobody else can. But look at the white folks who are just about as bad off financially—they’re grouchy and morose, hating everybody on earth and themselves most of all though they don’t know it.”
Mimi could see, though as yet with some difficulty, just what Carl had meant. She wondered if she were in such a plight as these convicts if she could have had the courage to sing. She was afraid she would not have been that optimistic—she doubted that she could have used song even as an opiate to forget hard circumstance as these men were doing. She marvelled at their toughness of fibre which seemed to be a racial characteristic, which made them able to live in the midst of a highly mechanized civilization, enjoy its undoubted advantages, and yet keep free that individual and racial distinctiveness which did not permit the surrender of individuality to the machine.