Page:The New Negro.pdf/144

116 River stakes. Venturing to explore it enterprising kids would slip through. . . plop. . . go down. . . seized by the intense suction. Ugly rescue work.

In time it gave in to the insistence of the sun. White and golden husks shone upon it. Shells; half-shells. It cut, dazed and dazzled you. Queer things, half-seen, on the dry, salty earth. Ghastly white bones; skulls, ear-rings, bangles. Scrambling. Rows. Sea-scum fought and slew each other over them.

As time went on it became a bare, vivid plain. City'd soon spring upon it. Of a Sunday blacks would skip over to the beach to bathe or pick cocoanuts on the banks of the lagoon. On the lagoon. . . a slaughter house and a wireless station. Squeaking down at the flat, low city. Pigs being stuck, the unseeing hoofs of cattle. . . the wireless. ..

stole out of the meridian dusk.

Upon the lake of sea-earth, dusk swept a mantle of majestic coloring

East of The Palm Porch, roared the city of Colon. Hudson Alley, “G” Street. . . coolies, natives, Island blacks swarming to the Canal. All about, nothing but tenements. . . city word for cabins. . . low, soggy, toppling.

Near the sky rose the Ant's Nest. Six stories high and it took up half a city block. One rickety staircase. . . in the rear. No two of its rooms connected. Each sheltered a family of eight or nine. A balcony ringed each floor. Rooms. . . each room. . . opened out upon it. Only one person at a time dared walk along any point of it. The cages of voiceless yellow birds adorned each window. Boards were stretched at the bottom of doors to stop kids from wandering out. . . to the piazza below. Flower-pots. . . fern, mint, thyme, parsley, water cress. . . sat on the scum-moist sills of the balconies.

Over the hot, low city the Ant's Nest lorded it. Reared its mouth to the heavens. Sneered truculently at it. Offensive,