John Barleycorn to do with such strenuous, Stoic toil of a lad
just turned fifteen? He had everything to do with it. Let me show
you. I asked myself if this were the meaning of life--to be a
work-beast? I knew of no horse in the city of Oakland that worked
the hours I worked. If this were living, I was entirely
unenamoured of it. I remembered my skiff, lying idle and
accumulating barnacles at the boat-wharf; I remembered the wind
that blew every day on the bay, the sunrises and sunsets I never
saw; the bite of the salt air in my nostrils, the bite of the salt
water on my flesh when I plunged overside; I remembered all the
beauty and the wonder and the sense-delights of the world denied
me. There was only one way to escape my deadening toil. I must
get out and away on the water. I must earn my bread on the water.
And the way of the water led inevitably to John Barleycorn. I did
not know this. And when I did learn it, I was courageous enough
not to retreat back to my bestial life at the machine.

I wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew. And the winds
of adventure blew the oyster pirate sloops up and down San
Francisco Bay, from raided oyster-beds and fights at night on
shoal and flat, to markets in the morning against city wharves,
where peddlers and saloon-keepers came down to buy. Every raid on
an oyster-bed was a felony. The penalty was State imprisonment,
the stripes and the lockstep. And what of that? The men in
stripes worked a shorter day than I at my machine. And there was
vastly more romance in being an oyster pirate or a convict than in
being a machine slave. And behind it all, behind all of me with
youth abubble, whispered Romance, Adventure.

So I interviewed my Mammy Jennie, my old nurse at whose black