long intricate
journey through the private-owned town itself. It was like attending a
congress of the nations, a museum exhibition of all the shapes and hues
in which the human vegetable grows. Tenements and wobbly-kneed shanties
swarming with exhibits monopolized the landscape; strange the room that
did not yield up at least a man and woman and three or four children.
Day after blazing day I sat on rickety chairs, wash-tubs,
ironing-boards, veranda railings, climbing creaking stairways, now and
again descending a treacherous one in unintentional haste and
ungraceful posture, burrowing into blind but inhabited cubby-holes,
hunting out squatters' nests of tin cans and dry-goods boxes hidden
away behind the legitimate buildings, shouting questions into
dilapidated ear-drums, delving into the past of every human being who
fell in my way. West Indian negroes easily kept the lead of all other
nationalities combined; negroes blacker than the obsidian cutlery of
the Aztecs, blonde negroes with yellow hair and blue eyes whose race
was betrayed only by eyelids and the dead whiteness of skin, and whom
one could not set down as such after enrolling swarthy Spaniards as
"white" without a smile.

They lived chiefly in windowless, six-by-eight rooms, always a cheap,
dirty calico curtain dividing the three-foot parlor in front from the
five-foot bedroom behind, the former cluttered with a van-load of
useless junk, dirty blankets, decrepit furniture, glittering gewgaws, a
black baby squirming naked in a basket of rags with an Episcopal
prayerbook under its pillow--relic of the old demon-scaring
superstitions of Voodoo worship. Every inch of the walls was
"decorated," after the artistic temperament of the race, with pages of
illustrated magazines or newspapers, half-tones of all things
conceivable with no small amount of text in sundry languages, many a
page purely of advertising matter, the muscular, imbruted likeness of a
certain black champion rarely missing, frequently with a Bible laid
reverently beneath it. Outside, before each room, a tin fireplace for
cooking precariously bestrided the veranda rail.

Often a tumble-down hovel where three would seem a crowd yielded up
more than a dozen inmates, many of whom, being at work, must be looked
for later--the "back-calls" that is the bete-noire of the census
enumerator. West Indians, however, are for the most part well
acquainted with the affairs of friends and room-mates, and enrolm