I will venture merely to assert that when noon-time came I
was not well started on the second house, yet carried away more
than sixty filled-out cards.
More than two days that single row of houses endured, varied by
nights spent with "the boss" in the labor-camps of Lirio, Culebra
way. Then one morning I tramped far out the highway to the old
Scotchman's farm-house that bounds Empire on the north and began
the 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.
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