Under the spell of the music other doors opened one by one. This time it was an expansive field covered with white blossoms brilliant against the dusty green foliage of the cotton plants. Black figures bent low while near them stood with watchful eye and ready whip an overseer.
Another time it was at the “big house”; another, at muscle-wearying and spirit-crushing toil of another kind. But from them all there came these same weirdly sweet notes which now were being voiced by the slender dark figure on the platform yonder. A world of motion and of labour was caught up and held immobile in the tenuous, reluctant notes. Over them hovered that overtone of hope too great for extinction by whatever hardship or sorrow which might come to the singers. It was the personification of faith, a faith strong and immovable, a faith unshakable, a faith which made a people great. Against that faith, Mimi felt, contumely, brutality, oppression, scorn could do naught but dash and break like angry waves against huge granite cliffs.
To her sitting there in the semidarkness came a vision of her own people which made her blood run fast. Whatever other faults they might possess, her own people had not been deadened and dehumanized by bitter hatred of their fellow men. The venom born of oppression practiced upon others weaker than themselves had not entered their souls. These songs were of peace and hope and faith, and in them she felt and knew the peace which so long she had been seeking and which so long had cluded her grasp.
Tears crept unnoticed to Mimi’s eyes and made little cascades down her cheeks. A line of verse sprang to her mind with poignant appropriateness: “The music yearning like a God in pain.” She knew she had found the answer to the riddle which had puzzled her. She looked at Jimmie as he gruffly cleared his throat, ashamed of the emotion which too had seized him. He seemed alien, a total stranger. She marvelled that she had married this man, had lived with him, he whom she did not