Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/36

14 a comic interlude in dialogue, the ballad from which these two couplets are taken concludes with that varied repetition of the first stanza which we find so effective in the poems of art:

I'd druther be a Nigger, an’ plow ole Beck, Dan a white Hill Billy wid his long red neck.

Song or rhyme was, as ever, heart’s ease to the Negro in every trouble. Here are two rhymes that “pack up” and put away two common troubles:

She writ me a letter As long as my eye. An’ she say in dat letter: “My Honey!—Good-by!”

Dem whitefolks say dat money talk. If it talk lak dey tell, Den ev’ry time it come to Sam, It up an’ say:“Farewell!”

Going to the nursery—it was the one room of the log cabin, or the great out-of-doors—we find the old-time Negro’s head filled with a Mother Goose more enchanting than any printed and pictured one in the “great house” of the white child:

W’en de big owl whoops, An’ de screech owl screeks, An’ de win’ makes a howlin’ sound; You liddle woolly heads Had better kiver up, Caze de “hants” is comin’ ’round.