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In certain parts of the city, often at a considerable distance from the
warehouse and factory sections, one may occasionally catch upon the
breeze the faint, spicy fragrance of tobacco; and should one trace these
pleasant scents to their sources, one would come to a region of
factories in which rich brown leaves are transformed into pipe tobacco,
plug tobacco, or cigarettes. In the simpler processes of this work,
negro men and women are employed, and these with their natural
picturesqueness of pose and costume, and their singing, in the setting
of an old shadowy loft, make a tobacco factory a fascinating place. In
one loft you will see negro men and boys handling the tobacco leaves
with pitchforks, much as farm hands handle hay; in another, negro women
squatting upon boxes, stemming the leaves, or "pulling up ends," their
black faces blending mysteriously with the dark shadows of beams and
rafters. Here the air is laden not only with the sweet tobacco smell,
mixed with a faint scent of licorice and of fruit, but is freighted also
with a fine brown dust which is revealed where bars of sunlight strike
in through the windows, and which seems, as it shifts and sparkles, to
be a visible expression of the smell.

In the busy season "street niggers" are generally used for stemming,
which is, perhaps, the leading part of the tobacco industry in Richmond,
and these "street niggers," a wild yet childlike lot, who lead a
hand-to-mouth existence all year round, bring to the tobacco trade a
wealth of semi-barbaric color. To give us an idea of the character of a
Richmond "street nigger" the gentleman who took my companion and me
through the factory told us of having wanted a piece of light work done,
and having asked one of these negroes: "Want to earn a quarter?"

To which the latter replied without moving from his comfortable place
beside a sun-baked brick wall: "No, boss, Ah _got_ a quahtah."

The singing of the negroes is a great feature of the stemming department
in a tobacco factory. Some of the singers become locally famous; also, I
was told by the superintendent, they become independent, and for that
reason have frequently to be dismissed. The wonderful part of this
singing, aside from the fascinating harmonies made by the sweet,
untrained negro voices, is the utter lack of prearrangement that there
is about it. Now there will be silence in the loft; then there will come
a stran