Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/427

Rh a pleasure to hear, with all their souls and with all their bodies in unison. For their bodies wagged, their heads nodded, their feet stamped, their knees shook, their elbows and their hands beat time to the tune and the words which they sang with evident delight. One must see these people singing, if one is rightly to understand their life. I have seen their imitators, the so-called “Sable Singers,” who travel about the country painted up as negroes and singing negro songs in the negro manner, and with negro gestures, as it is said: but nothing can be more radically unlike; for the most essential part of the resemblance fails—namely, the life.

One of my pleasures here has been to talk with an old negro called Romeo, who lives in a little house in a garden near, and which said garden he takes care of, or rather neglects, according to his pleasure. He is the most good-tempered, merriest old man that anyone can imagine, and he has a good deal of natural wit. He was, in the prime of his life, stolen from Africa and brought hither, and he tells stories about that event in the most naïve manner. I asked him one day, what the people in his native land believed respecting life after death! He replied “that the good would go to the God of Heaven who made them.” “And what of the bad?” asked I. “They go out into the wind,” and he blew with his mouth around him on all sides.

I got him to sing me an Ethiopian death- song, which seemed to consist of a monotone vibrating upon three semitones; and after that an African love-song, which seemed to be tolerably rude, and which convulsed the old fellow with laughter. I have his portrait in my album, but he laughed and was so shame-faced while I made the sketch, that it was difficult for me to catch the likeness. He is dressed in his slave garments, grey clothes and knitted woollen cap.

The negro people and the primeval forest have made a