Page:The New Negro.pdf/323

Rh Now, this living is offered with interest and a new birth of liberty. Will the colored man live up to his side of the bargain?” The clinching argument was free transportation. George Horton's grievance was in politics. He already earned a comfortable living and could decline the free ride as a needless charity. But his place contributed forty men. The next year the Hattiesburg settlement in Chicago brought up their pastor.

And there was Joshua Ward, who had prayed for these times and now saw God cursing the land and stirring up his people. He would invoke his wrath no longer.

Rosena Shephard's neighbor's daughter, with a savoury record at home, went away. Silence, for the space of six weeks. Then she wrote that she was earning $2 a day packing sausages. “If that lazy, good-for-nothing gal kin make $2 a day, I kin make four,” and Mrs. Shephard left.

Clem Woods could not tolerate any fellow's getting ahead of him. He did not want to leave his job and couldn't explain why he wanted to go North and his boss proved to him that his chances were better at home. But every departure added to his restlessness. One night a train passed through with two coaches of men from New Orleans, Said one of them: "Good-by, bo, I'm bound for the promised land,” and Clem got aboard.

Jefferson Clemons in De Ridder, Louisiana, was one of “1,800 of the colored race” who paid $2 to a "white gentleman” to get to Chicago on the 15th of March. By July he had saved enough to pay his fare and left "bee cars," as he confided, "he was tired of bein' dog and beast.”

Mrs. Selina Lennox was slow to do anything, but she was by nature a social creature. The desolation of her street wore upon her. No more screaming, darting children, no more bustle of men going to work or coming home. The familiar shuffle and loud greetings of shopping matrons, the scent of boiled food—all these were gone. Mobile Street, the noisy, was clothed in an ominous quiet, as if some disaster impended. Now and then the Italian storekeeper, bewildered and forlorn, would walk to the middle of the street and look first up and