Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/83

 "PAP" SINGLETON 69

mus in the fall of 1877 too late to make crops that year, and in consequence there was considerable suffering during the follow- ing winter. Most of the early settlers of Nicodemus were from Kentucky, They had a song all their own called "Nicodemus." The allusion is obscure, though it may be said that some igno- rant negroes believed that the biblical character (Nicodemus) was "Nigger Demus," that is, a negro. The first verse and the chorus were :

Nicodemus was a slave of African birth,

And was bought for a bag full of gold.

He was reckoned a part of the salt of the earth,

But he died years ago, very old.

Chorus — Good time coming, good time coming. Long, long time on the way; Run and tell Elijah to hurry up Pomp To meet us under the cottonwood tree. In the Great Solomon Valley, At the first break of day."

The year 1878 marks the close of the second period of Singleton's activity as a "Moses of the negro race." By the end of the year he had brought to Kansas, so he claimed, 7,432 negroes.^*^ Nearly all of these were doing fairly well — certainly as well as could have been expected during a period of readjustment, and better than they would have done in Tennessee, because they worked harder and were more frugal. In addition to the colonies named above, there were many negroes about the larger towns ; "Tennessee Town," the negro suburb of Topeka, was growing; a few had settled in Crawford County in southeastern Kansas, just above Cherokee; and numbers had stopped on the way, at Kansas City, St. Louis, and other Missouri towns.

In the early spring of 1879 began what the entire country soon knew as the "negro exodus" from the Egypt of the south- ern states to the Kansas Canaan. The remote but f unda-

" Singleton's Scrapbook, p. 28 ; pamphlet, July 2, 1877. Nicodemus was in the valley of the Great Solomon River. Most of the adult negroes of that time sang at their occupations or their pleasures.

" Senate Report No. 693, Pt. 3, p. 379.