ur meat," the mammy said. I told her that I had
had all I wanted. Then she said to the pickininny:

"Child, doan eat that meat. Save it foh you papa when he come home."

When I got into New Orleans the next morning, I traded my Plowboy
tobacco for a bar of laundry soap. With my twenty-five cents I bought
a cotton undershirt. Then I went into the "jungle" at Algiers, a town
across the river from New Orleans, and built a fire in the jungle (a
wooded place where hoboes camp) and heated some water in an old tin pail
I found there. Then I took off all my clothes and threw my underwear
away. A negro who stood watching me said:

"White man, are you throwing them clothes away?"

"I certainly am," I replied.

"Why, them underclothes is northern underclothes. Them's woolen clothes.
Them's the kind of underclothes I like."

"You wouldn't like that bunch of underclothes," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because if you look in the seams you will find something that is
unseemly. I've been out in a levee camp."

"Hush mah mouf, white man," laughed the negro. "Them little things would
never bother a Louisiana nigger. Why we have them things with us all the
time. We just call 'em our little companions."

He picked up the garments and walked off proud and happy. I took my soap
and warm water and scrubbed myself from crown to heel. I put my clothing
in the pail with more soap and water and boiled the outfit thoroughly.

Then I went back to New Orleans and got my old job in the
boarding-house. I saved all my money except my fifteen cents for the
nightly flop. A month later my gang came roaring back from the peon
camp. They had worked thirty days and had not got a cent. Slave-driver
Legree had driven them out when they demanded a reckoning. They were
lucky to escape with their lives, their cooties and their appetites.
Instead of financing me, I had to finance them again. They finally got
cleaned up and we all went back to Birmingham, where the strike was
over.

"Show us that spieler," they said, "who told us the wage system was the
worst kind of slavery. If daily wages is slavery, God grant that they
never set us free again."

CHAPTER XXIX. A SICK, EMACIATED SOCIAL SYSTEM

The hard times I have been describing were in the early nineties. The
year before there had been a financial crash. Nobody seemed to know what
was the matter at the time, but it has since been learned that the hard
times were the fruit of crop failures, if on