Vincent, Trinidad, or Guadalupe, individuals defying
classification. But the chief reward for denying myself a holiday
were the "back-calls" in the town itself which I was able to check
out of my field-book. Many a long-sought negro I roused from his
holiday siesta, dashing past the tawdry calico curtains to pound
him awake--mere auricular demonstration having only the effect of
lulling him into deeper child-like slumber. The surest and often
only effective means was to tickle the slumberer gently on the
soles of the bare feet with some airy, delicate instrument such as
my tack-hammer, or a convenient broom-handle or flat-iron.
Frequently I came upon young negro men of the age and type that in
white skins would have been loafing on pool-room corners, reading
to themselves in loud and solemn voices from the Bible, with a
far-away look in their eyes; always I was surrounded by a never-
broken babble of voices, for the West Indian negro can let his
face run unceasingly all the day through, and the night, though he
have never a word to say.
Thus my "enumerated" tags spread further and wider over the city
of Empire. I reached in due time the hodge-podge shops and stores
of Railroad Avenue. Chinamen began to drift into the rolls, there
appeared such names as Carmen Wah Chang, cooks and waitresses
living in darksome back cupboards must be unearthed, negro
shoemakers were caught at their stands on the sidewalks, shiny-
haired bartenders gave up their biographies in nasal monosyllables
amid the slop of "suds" and the scrape of celluloid froth-
eradicators.
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