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