Songs of the Jailbird: Adventures of a Ballad Hunter

by JOHN A. LOMAX

1

I FIRST saw Iron Head, convict No. 3610, late one afternoon when I was recording Negro folk tunes in the hospital of the Central Farm of the Texas Penitentiary System near Sugarland, Texas. Captain Gotch, the Captain of the white guards, had told me that Mexico, a Negro convict and steward of the hospital, was the best singer on the farm. Only two or three convalescents were in the hospital, so the recording machine could be set up in the quiet of their large bedroom. Among the curious faces pressed against the window bars while Mexico was singing, a short solidly built Negro listened intently. This man beckoned to me.

“I’se Iron Head, I’se a trusty,” he said. “I know lots of jumped-up, sinful songs — more than any of these niggers.”

That night and throughout the long day following, Iron Head proved that he did know the work songs of the black men. He and his pardner, Clear Rock, turn and turn about, sang rhythmic, surging songs of labor; cotton-picking songs; songs of the jailbird; songs of the “bloodhoun’s” tracking the fleeing Negro through the river bottom; songs of angry “Cap’n”; songs of loneliness and the dismal monotony of life in the penitentiary; songs of pathetic longing for his “doney,” his woman; songs of the bold black desperado with his trusty “fo’tyfo’” in his hand, with his enemy lying dead in the smoke pouring from its barrel; songs of his woman, dressed in “green, lavender, and red,” who waited hopefully outside the prison walls for her man, and many another, including English ballads found in the Child collection.

Few of these songs were gay in tone. Most of them were dominated by brooding sadness. Here was no studied art. The words, the music, the rhythm, were simple, the natural emotional outpouring of the black man in confinement. The listener found himself swept along with the primitive emotions aroused and, despite himself, discovered his own body swaying in unison with the urge of Iron Head’s melodies.

“De roughest nigger what ever walked de streets of Dallas. In de pen off an’ on fo’ thirty-fo’ years.” He was sixty-three years old and had been six times convicted. “I’se a H.B.C. — habitual criminal, you know,” he explained proudly. “Not even Ma Ferguson can pardon me.” Iron Head failed to look the part. Only some deeply graven and grim lines about his mouth and eyes made you stop and wonder if any tenderness had ever touched his life. He had a quiet dignity and reserve. Amid the clamor of a room full of black convicts, hearing for the first time their voices coming from the recording machine, he preserved his composure.

“Sing ‘Shorty George,’ Iron Head,” begged his companions. “Shorty George” told about the short passenger train that ran from Houston to the farm once a month on a Sunday, bringing visiting wives and sweethearts. The men were sad when they saw the train depart; —

The convicts insisted and urged him until Iron Head’s quiet negative flamed into an outburst of anger: “You niggers know dat song always tears me to pieces. I won’t sing it.” And he walked away from the crowd to the iron-barred door, where he stood, leaning against the jamb, looking out into the soft Texas moonlight. Soon he motioned to me.

“I’ll sing dat song low for you,” he said, as if in apology for his outburst. “It makes me restless to see my woman. I’se a trusty an’ I has a easy job. I could run down one o’ dem corn rows an’ git away, any day. But when de law caught me, dey would put me back in de line wid de fiel’ han’s. I’se too ol’ for dat hard work.”

Then he sang the story of the convict who gets a letter that he can’t read for crying. It tells him that his “woman ain’t dead but she’s slowly dyin’.” The convict breaks out of the penitentiary and goes home to his wife’s funeral, as the song relates. When Iron Head reached the last couplet, his lowtoned voice swept along with lyric power into the tragic finale: —

Then Iron Head, a perpetual jailbird, a condemned prisoner for life, broke down and sobbed aloud.

I put my hand on his shoulder: “Some men lose their wives forever, Iron Head. They can never see them again. Your woman is alive.” Iron Head looked out-of-doors over broad fields of tall corn shimmering and whispering in the moonlight. Bitterness came back to his voice: “She might as well be dead; I can’t go to her an’ she’s scared to come to me.”

2

MY SON Alan and I had been attracted to this man because he knew many folk songs which he sang well. We always stopped to see him when we passed by Central State Farm No. 1. He was unlike the ordinary Negro convict; he confessed that he was guilty of other crimes than those that had put him in prison. “Mos’ of de times dey didn’t catch me,” he modestly admitted. He had no complaints against his Captain and the guards; he wanted to be free again, but he offered no extravagant promises of reform. “I’se foun’ out dat I cain’t beat de law,” he said quietly, “an’ I ain’t gonna try no mo’.” Meanwhile he had become a trusty. In a little house set aside for him he worked all day, weaving from corn shucks the collars worn by the mules on the farm, as well as cleverly contrived door mats.

There were no serious charges of prison misconduct against him. He had served more than eight years of his last sentence, to which had been added a credit of six years for good conduct. Captain Flanagan had already spoken a good word for him to the Board of Pardons. When I went to them, asking that he be paroled to me, my request was granted.

“Good Gawd A’mighty, de Lawd will provide!” Iron Head exclaimed when Captain Gotch of the Central State Farm read to him a four months’ parole which I had brought down from Governor Allred. Iron Head, the friendless life-termer, a daytime burglar in the homes of his own people, was to have his chance. Iron Head was not the forgotten man. No one had ever cared enough about him to know him and forget him. No one could forget him, for no one had ever given him a thought. Even the Houston judge who had tried him last and the attorney who had prosecuted him were unable to recall him. No letter had come to him in ten years.

He had pleaded guilty to all the charges that had sent him to the penitentiary six times. “I wuz stealin’ all de time. No use tryin’ to beg off.” Yet, in less than an hour, he sat smiling in my car, speeding to my home in Austin, two hundred miles away. Presently I saw his lips moving.

“What are you saying?”

“Prayin’,” said Iron Head.

“Say it out loud,” I instructed; so he began: —

“I ask de good Lawd while me an’ Mistuh Lomax went round through diff’rent parts of de country that He may go with us an’ throw roun’ us de strong arm of His protection what keeps us from all harm, hurt, or danger. Move all hinderin’ causes, all stumblin’ blocks; make our hilly ways level an’ our crooked paths straight. An’ take care of his dear-loved companion an’ also dear-loved daughter an’ son an’ de cook, an’, 0 Lawd, I humbly ‘seech Thee, deliver him back safe an’ soun’ in physical health. An’ when time is ended an* we cain’t go no mo’, ‘ceive an’ save us somewhere in Heaven. My prayer, Christ our ’Deemer’s sake, Amen an’ thank Gawd.

“I always said my prayers in de penitentiary,” said Iron Head, the expert crapshooter, a cooncan player much feared.

The next day in Austin, Governor Allred asked him, “How did you get the name of Iron Head?”

“I wuz cuttin’ wood on de Ramsey State Farm at Angleton at a place called de ‘lifetime cut.’ A live-oak tree fell down dat I wuzn’t ‘spectin’. Some limbs hit my head, an’ it broke ‘em off; didn’t knock me down, an’ it didn’t stop me from workin’. De boys name me Iron Head.”

Thus I picked this Negro singer of English ballads, of “Ol’ Hannah,” the song of a three-o’clock sun, “Little John Henry,” “The Gray Goose,” “Black Betty,” “Shorty George,” “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” “The OP Lady,” and other “sinful songs,” to be my chauffeur and companion on a hunt for folk songs among the Southern penitentiaries and remote Negro communities. Iron Head’s singing was to inspire other Negro songsters to strive to excel him. If he went straight I would ask the Governor to extend his parole or to pardon him. Should he fall back into thievery, I was under contract to deliver him back to Sugarland and to Captain Gotch, who doubtless would again put him to work weaving, with skillful fingers, collars for the mules who pull the plows and wagons of the Texas Penitentiary System.

A few days later Iron Head and I headed out of Dallas, bound for the Mississippi Delta and Parchman, where is located the 16,000-acre convict farm with more than two thousand inmates. Throughout the first day and on past Marshall, Texas, where we spent the first night in a tourist camp, Iron Head talked and sang gay tunes: —

Always he smiled. He wondered “what dem niggers down at Sugarlan’ would think if they could see me ridin’ in a spang-new Primer [Plymouth] car, settin’ up ‘side a big white man like he wuz somebody.” We passed by farms that were “too po’ to raise a fuss on.” A speeding car that passed us was driven by a man whose “wife had run away an’ he wuz tryin’ to ketch her.” Of a young Negro woman dressed in red, whom we met on the highway, he said, “She’s got a figger that won’t wait.” Proud of his ability to read, he shouted out the words on billboards as we dashed past: “Ambassado’ Hotel, Grill in Connection.” The word “Ambassador” floored him. After I prompted, he repeated, “Ambassador Hotel, Girls in Connection!” Then: “Dey furnishes girls in dat hotel. Is dat whar we’s gwine to stop tonight, Boss?”

For two days we camped on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River just south of Vicksburg. After supper Iron Head started on a “ramble,” claiming he wanted to see the “big river” running far below. Soon he came back. “I couldn’t see nothin’ but dark,” he said. “I always has to be keerful of de dark.” During the day we watched thirty roustabouts unload from the Tennessee Belle, just up from New Orleans. I had hoped to catch some of the river tunes that Mark Twain wrote about. But no sound came from the men as they shuffled up and down the gangplank in a long, ever moving line. Not one river “holler” did I hear.

“They never sing any more,” the Captain told me. “They don’t have life enough.”

The river songs indeed seemed gone, for I had already searched the New Orleans docks. Soon the gang songs of the black men would follow suit, as a part of the advance of the machine age. On the penitentiary farms, where Negro labor must be done in groups, the plantation “hollers” yet live.

3

IRON HEAD once had explained to me why he first became a thief: “Dem Jew merchants on Deep Ellum in Dallas had so many goods dey piles ‘em out on the sidewalks. I jes’ took what I wanted. I never done no work. My grandma raised me. Ev’ry day she giv’ me my dinner in a bucket an’ sent me to school. I never got there. But mos’ly I stole from niggers. De law don’t pay no ‘tention when niggers lose their things. I’d watch a house till de womenfolks go away. Den I’d go in an’ take what I wanted.”

During our trip, when Iron Head’s singing brought him some money, I suggested that he save it, go back to Dallas, and restore the value of the stolen goods. He rejected the idea: “Dey has money. Dey never miss what I took.” He often expressed a wish to hunt for some stolen jewelry that he had buried in a Dallas back yard. “I dug up de whole yard an’ couldn’t fin’ de place no mo’.”

Iron Head often paraded his virtues. We were leaving a tourist camp in South Carolina, where he had made his pallet on the floor by the side of my bed. On other occasions, when such an arrangement was impossible, he would sleep in the automobile and have me lock him inside the car, as a terrible fear seemed to harass him when darkness fell. He could get out but an intruder could not get in.

As we drove away from the South Carolina camp that morning, he said: “Boss, you don’t think I notices, but I watches ev’ything. I knows where you keep yo’ money. You leaves it all in yo’ pocket an’ hangs yo’ clothes in de closet, an’ you goes off to sleep while I stays awake. I could git up any night an’ knock you in de haid an’ take yo’ money. You wouldn’t know nothin’ about it. Then I could take de car an’ drive away. I ain’t never killed you yet, now has I?”

Despite his threat to drive off in the car some night, I could never teach him to manage the automobile. After many trials I had him take the wheel one day in Florida, where the road ran straight for ten miles. There was no traffic. I let him drive until I happened to see his hands trembling as he grasped the wheel. When we swapped places, Iron Head staggered as he walked around the car. “My laigs feel funny,” he complained. Thereafter I became the permanent chauffeur.

When we finished our work among the Negroes, I proposed to send Iron Head back to Austin, where, according to promise, I was to set him up in the business of weaving rugs from corn shucks. He was bitterly resentful and hinted at reprisals on my family. Neither was he willing to find a job and work in Washington. So I bought a ticket, gave him money, and sent him back to Texas.

He never reported at my home in Austin. A friend found work for him in the country. But he couldn’t stay away from Austin honky-tonks and low company. Finally, I learned, he had deserted his job on the farm and become a street-corner bum. Then quickly followed the “pen” for the seventh time — and life.

Less than a year after the Governor set him free, I found Iron Head in the garden squad of the Ramsey State Convict Farm in Texas. He peered past me through the iron bars of his cell. Once more he was a convict longing for the “free world.” I asked him what had happened.

“Well, I got hard up, an’ I did a little mo’ porchclimbin’.”

When I last saw him it was a sad meeting and a sad separation. Ramsey Farm is the state’s home for the long-termers and the incorrigibles. I should have left him at Sugarland to weave from corn shucks horse collars and rugs for Captain Gotch and Captain Flanagan.

4

GIMME room, niggers, gimme room. Let me git at dat singin’ machine. I’se de out-singin’est nigger on dis here plantation. I’se been in de pen fortynine years off an’ on, an’ I ought to know all de songs. Git out o’ my way!”

I saved the microphone of the recording machine from being overturned by the big, eager, confident, self-important copper-colored man as he pushed through the throng of Negro convicts.

“Wait, Clear Rock,” I said. “Later we will try you out.”

“Ready right now,” he insisted, and I hardly had time to start the machine before he plunged into a patting song, “Dat’s All Right, Honey,” where his big hands helped to carry the melody: —

The crowd cheered, for the tune was catchy. Where he got the words and tune he did not know. I have not found the song elsewhere.

Afterward when I talked alone with Clear Rock, I asked him what brought him to the penitentiary as a life-termer.

“I th’owed three niggers.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, I got three of them. I got ‘em with rocks. That’s why they calls me Clear Rock.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you killed three people with rocks?”

“No, boss, I th’owed three when a bunch come at me. [A Negro doesn’t like to say “kill.”] I used to be a powerful rock th’ower. I th’owed three, an’ the law sont me to the pen. Then the Governor pardoned me.”

“And the second time?” I inquired.

“I was jes’ misfortunate, boss, jes’ misfortunate. It might ‘a’ happened to anybody.”

A buxom yellow girl; some question of her age; an enemy or two; and here was Clear Rock, a seventy-one-year-old water boy, a satisfied prisoner for life. Unable to read or write, he afterward sang “‘Bobby’ Allen,” as he called the old English ballad, true to tune, but hopelessly mixed with a famous cowboy song entitled “The Streets of Laredo.” His song buried “Miss Allen” in a desert of New Mexico with six pretty maidens all dressed in white for her pallbearers, though there seemed water aplenty for a rose and a briar to grow over her head till they met and “got twined in a knot and couldn’t grow no higher.” In another rendition he buried “Bobby” Allen out of Dallas with the mourners “hollerin’ and a-squallin’.”

Clear Rock seemed to have caught in his capacious memory the floating folk songs that had been current among the thousands of black convicts who had been his companions for so many years. He had a store equal in continuous length to the Iliad. If he ever forgot (I could not discover), his quick invention supplied a word or line without a moment’s pause and in the spirit and rhythm of the song he was singing.

He sang a new version of “The Old Chisholm Trail,” an endless ballad describing the experiences of a band of cowboys driving a herd of longhorn cattle from Texas to Montana. One of the cowboys in his song, riding an unruly horse, was thrown high and left hanging on a limb of a tree along the trail. Clear Rock sang four stanzas describing this incident and then ended his song.

“That’s rather hard on that cowboy,” I suggested, “to go on up the trail and leave him sprawling on a limb in what is doubtless an uncomfortable position.”

“Lemme git him down, boss; I’ll git him down!” And at once he sang in perfect tune: —

“Could you let me have a quarter, boss? I jes’ lef’ my crap game to help you out. I wants to fade one of dese biggety town niggers who thinks he knows how to roll de bones.” And Clear Rock, whistling cheerily, started away as I handed him half a dollar. He quickly readjusted himself. He hadn’t expected more than a dime.

“Boss, can’t you make it a dollar? I could ‘a’ made lots more money than that if I hadn’t stopped shooting craps.” Once, he told me, he had won the spending money of all the men in the camp, two hundred convicts. “Cleaned ‘em spang out,” boasted Clear Rock. The total amount was $27.85.

On our second visit to Clear Rock and his crew, late one wintry Saturday afternoon, Alan and I stopped at Sugarland, and took from the express office a new recording machine that had just come in from New York City. Then we drove on out to the Central Farm. After supper about a dozen Negro trusties who were to sing for us helped unload and unbox our machine and carry it into the farm blacksmith shop, which stood some distance away from the main group of buildings. The men crowded around eager and curious as a bunch of children as they watched Alan test the connections, adjust the gadgets and doodads, and unwrap and set up the microphone.

“Now we are ready for a singer,” Alan said as he turned on the electric current and set the turntable spinning. “Oh, I forgot — where is the cutting needle?” This minute steel plug, with a diamond set in the smaller end to cut the line of sound in the aluminum disk, could not be found. We turned over every scrap of wrapping paper, shook out the excelsior, and looked carefully into the cracks and crannies of the boxes and machinery. No cutting needle. Without it no records could be made.

“The singing tonight is off, boys.”

Our eager songsters showed their disappointment as Alan and I discussed telegrams to New York City and the chance of finding in Houston some substitute for the lost cutting needle. But tomorrow was Sunday, and no shops would be open either in Houston or in New York. We might be in for a long delay.

“Well, boys,” I said, “the men who shipped this machine probably would not trust a diamond in an express package, but, instead, doubtless sent it by registered mail. We didn’t ask at the post office. We’ll get it in the morning and record songs all day Sunday. Let ‘s tell stories. How many of you believe in ghosts? Have any of you ever seen a ghost?”

By that time a steady rain was pouring down on the sheet-iron roof above us. Outside, black darkness; inside, the white-clad Negroes sat around on empty nail kegs. The dirt-floored shop, with its anvil and old-fashioned bellows, piles of rusty iron in the corners, a blackened workman’s bench, showed dim from a single dust-covered light globe. It was a gloomy place; a dark and dismal night.

When I said “ghosts” the black men stopped their chatter. They looked at each other and no one spoke. Finally, Burn Down, the big blacksmith, said, “ Well, suh, I don’t exactly believe in ghosts. I never seen one. But when I’se out in de fields by myself nights an’ has to come by dat lonesome little graveyard where dem convict boys is buried what didn’t have no friends to come an’ git ‘em when they died, I jes don’t come dat way. I takes a wide roundance. Dem white lumber tombstones seem like dey is runnin’ along in de dark behin’ me. Yassuh!”

Nobody laughed. But tongues were loosened, and for more than an hour Alan and I heard stories to rival those of Gulliver and Munchausen.

5

CLEAR ROCK from “Taylortown,” Texas (“Been in de pen forty-nine years goin’ on fifty”) told stories.

“One time,” Clear Rock said, “ ‘fo’ I got in de pen, I wuz livin’ out in de country close to Bastrop, Texas. In dem days I wuz sort o’ jack-leg Baptis’ preacher. Well, over ‘cross de road fum where I live there wuz a sick man come from Georgy. He wuz sick fur a long time. Dat day some wimmens fum de house come over an’ say dat de sick man wuz daid. Dey ask me to he’p wid de settin’ up wid de corpse, ‘cause dey had to set up wid de corpse until de man’s kinfolks could come fum Georgy to moan over him an’ see him buried. I, bein’ as I was ‘greeable, I went over to de house where de daid man wuz at.

“De wimmens an’ de mens wuz all settin’ scrooched up roun’ de fire, mighty sleepy. Dey wuz plum wo’ out fum settin’ up wid de sick man so long. Dat dere man wuz lyin’ over in de corner on his coolin’ board wid a white rag wropt roun’ his jaws. It was a mighty cold, lonesome night.

‘“Clear Rock,’ de wimmens says, ‘we’s all tired out an ‘ we’s gonna lay down. Dere is about a waggin load o’ yam pertaters in de corner by de chimbly. Ef you gits hungry, you might cook you some.’

“Den de wimmens huddle demselves togedder down in de middle ob de flo’ and kivers up wid a ragged quilt. De mens was sittin’ befo’ de fireplace in deir cheers, leanin’ back, noddin’ an’ bowin’, dey was so sleepy.

“I picked me out three o’ dem yam pertaters, about so long an’ so wide [measuring with his big hands] — jes’ good eatin’-size yams, an’ I stuck ‘em in de ashes an’ kivers ‘em up wid de emmels [embers]. Den I lean my head on de back o’ my cheer an’ try to sleep. Well, I was sort o’ nappin’ ‘long, noddin’ an’ nappin’, till lastly I did fall asleep. Long ‘way in de night I wakes up an’ looks roun’ de room. All de mens was settin’ in deir cheers sound asleep, wid deir haids th’owed back an’ deir mouths open. De wimmens was huddled up on de flo’, ‘cause it was so cold. Dey was all scrooched up asleep, kivered up wid dat ragged quilt. Dat daid man, he was jes’ layin’ over in de corner on de coolin’ board wid a white rag wropt roun’ his jaws.

“‘Clear Rock,’ I says, “spec dem yams o’ yo’s is done.’ So I retcht in de emmels an’ took out one o’ dem yams. You know, when you cook a young yam, de sap comes out all over it an’ de ashes sticks to it. So I takes my foot an’ whacks de yam again’ it, ‘whock, whock, whock,’ so de ashes would come off. Den de man dat was daid, layin’ over in de corner on de coolin’ board wid a white rag wropt roun’ his jaws, he raise up an’ he say: ‘Is dey done?’

“I say, ‘I don’ know whedder dey is done or not, but I’se done wid dis place!’ De do’ was too fur away, so I went out th’oo de winduh. My feet was itchin’ an’ my body was honin’ to move on. As I was a-purceedin’ up de big road, I pass by one dem German schoolhouses where de mens was practicin’ music. ‘Bout de time I pass by deir house, one o’ dem mens poked a big brass horn out de winduh on de side where I was at an’ blowed ‘da-ti-da-da-ti-do!’ [Clear Rock imitates taps.] I wasn’t expectin’ nothin’ like dat an’ I leaned over, an’ when I riz up I was in Ardmore, Oklahoma, fo’ hundred miles away! My eyes was stickin’ out an’ shinin’ like de spyglass on a locomobile. I was goin’ so fas’, splat-splattin’ it down on de asphalt, dat when I crossed de T.P. tracks in Fort Worth my shirttail ketch afire an’ make me run faster. Dat’s what I calls runnin’ yo’sef lost. Befo’ I could perteck myself I had run outa Texas clean over into Oklahoma.”

Before the men quit shouting Clear Rock was off on another story about his ability as a runner: —

“Me an’ a bunch o’ boys one time went to pick cotton out from Taylor. So we walked an’ we walked till we got tired, an’ we hunted for a place to lie down an’ sleep. So we was searchin’ an’ lookin’ for a lodgment place where we could lay down, an’ we come to a’ ol’ vacant house away from the road an’ we laid down on the floor on our cotton sacks. Well, bein’ hungry, I was cookin’ some eggs an’ meat in the fireplace when a black cat pop oulen the chimney into the skillet an’ jump from there over in a corner of the room. His eyes was turnin’ over just like some buggy wheels. Some boys went out the winduh an’ some went out the door, an’ all was hollerin’. I wound up in Floridy, an’ my feets was so sore I had to lay down by an ol’ rotten log. An’ that same ol’ black cat ask me, ‘Didn’t we have a good race?’ An’ I say, ‘Ain’ nothin’ to de race we gwine have! ‘ (At this point, I, who had heard the story before in one of Clear Rock’s innumerable improvisations, remarked that he hadn’t told the story in the same way at all as he had the first time. I reminded the obsequious and delightful Negro that in his previous telling the cat had stood on a little built-in shelf in the corner, a shelf that is typical of the houses of poor country farmers, and that at last it had spat out the fire. Clear Rock, with his never-ending desire to please and his inexhaustible energy, began again at the dramatic entrance of the black cat.)

“ I was cookin’ at the fireplace,” he said, “an’ I look over my shoulder an’ see a li’l black kitten on a little shelf in de corner of the room, an’ dat kitten was turnin’ roun’ an’ roun’. Seem like de mo’ I look the bigger he got, ontil it got de size of a yellin’ [yearling]. An’ he jump down off de shelf an’ come over to de fire an spit it out, ‘whoosh!’ Dat lef’ it all dark in dat place, an’ one o’ de boys, hearin’ me stumblin’ roun’, say, ‘How you cornin’ out?’ And I say, ‘Ain’ cornin’ out, gwine out!’ We was all scramblin’ roun’ in dat place trying to get away from dat cat an’ out de door. So boy holler out, ‘Where’s de door?’ An’ I say, ‘I don’ know, but jes’ follow me and I’ll find daylight somewhere.’

“Dis time I ran to Africy on my hoss and when he cross de Dead Sea, between here an’ Africy, dat hoss wuz goin’ so fas’ he didn’t sink down over his hocks!”

The wind dashed the rain against the thin walls of the blacksmith shop,

“Jes’ one mo’ little one,” begged Clear Rock: —

“One time I went to town huntin’ a job, up in a little old town they call Rogers. An’ so I went to a lady’s house there an’ asked her for some work. She says, ‘Can you cut yards?’ an’ I says, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ She says, ‘Go roun’, go roun’ to de back an’ look under de house, you’ll find a lawn mower there, an’ then begin cuttin’.’ I told her, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ an’ I went roun’ an’ got de lawn mower an’ started on de back cuttin’ grass.

“An’ SO — she had some geese out into a vacant park there, she had. An’ so — under a tree laid a goat. An’ this old geese in de heat of de day raised up an’ said, ‘We’re havin’ a hard time!’ Goat says, ‘Ungh-Ungh.’ So de geese kep’ a-pickin’, an’ they raised up agin an’ says, ‘ We’re havin’ a ha-ard time.’ Goat say, ‘Ungh-ungh!’ An’ so de geese raised up agin an’ says, ‘We’re havin’ a ha-a-ard time.’ An’ de goat says, ‘Ba-a-d managin’!”

Let your imagination picture Clear Rock as his fingers imitated the geese snipping grass, the flock protesting against the hard facts of life, the solemn, taciturn billy goat passing final judgment on the situation!

Some years afterward, resourceful Clear Rock caught the attention of Governor “Ma” Ferguson when she visited the convict camp. He sang about Long John, a runaway Negro, who wore a wonderful shoe: “Had a heel in front and a heel behind, so you never could tell where that nigger was a-gwine.” According to Clear Rock, “One day some of my friends in Taylor heard that Miz Ferguson wuz goin’ down to Central Farm a-visitin’ an’ they sont a car down there with a letter signed by 30,000 peoples; they wuz de names of all de prominent lawyers an’ officers an’ all the other ‘whichocrats’ roun’ Taylor, an’ Miz Ferguson sot me free.”

(To be continued)