Throw yo’ arms around me, baby.
Like de circle round de sun!
Baby, throw yo’ arms around me
Like de circle round de sun,
An’ tell yo’ pretty papa
How you want yo’ lovin’ done!

Jimboy was home. All the neighborhood could hear his rich low baritone voice giving birth to the blues. On Saturday night he and Annjee went to bed early. On Sunday night Aunt Hager said: “Put that guitar right up, less’n it’s hymns you plans on playin’. An’ I don’t want too much o’ them, ’larmin’ de white neighbors.”

But this was Monday, and the sun had scarcely fallen below the horizon before the music had begun to float down the alley, over back fences and into kitchen-windows where nice white ladies sedately washed their supper dishes.

Did you ever see peaches
Growin’ on a watermelon vine?
Says did you ever see peaches
On a watermelon vine?
Did you ever see a woman
That I couldn’t get for mine?

Long, lazy length resting on the kitchen-door-sill, back against the jamb, feet in the yard, fingers picking his sweet guitar, left hand holding against its fingerboard the back of an old pocketknife, sliding the knife upward, downward, getting thus weird croons and sighs from the vibrating strings:

O, I left ma mother
An’ I cert’ly can leave you.
Indeed I left ma mother
An’ I cert’ly can leave you,
For I’d leave any woman
That mistreats me like you do.

Jimboy, remembering brown-skin mamas in Natchez, Shreveport, Dallas; remembering Creole women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

O, yo’ windin’ an’ yo’ grindin’
Don’t have no effect on me,
Babe, yo’ windin’ an’ yo’ grindin’
Don’t have no ’fect on me,
’Cause I can wind an’ grind
Like a monkey round a coconut-tree!

Then Harriett, standing under the ripening apple-tree, in the backyard, chiming in:

Now I see that you don’t want me,
So it’s fare thee, fare thee well!
Lawd, I see that you don’t want me,
So it’s fare⁠—thee⁠—well!
I can still get plenty lovin’.
An’ you can go to⁠—Kansas City!

“O, play it, sweet daddy Jimboy!” She began to dance.

Then Hager, from her seat on the edge of the platform covering the well, broke out: “Here, madam! Stop that prancin’! Bad enough to have all this singin’ without turnin’ de yard into a show-house.” But Harriett kept on, her hands picking imaginary cherries out of the stars, her hips speaking an earthly language quite their own.

“You got it, kid,” said Jimboy, stopping suddenly, then fingering his instrument for another tune. “You do it like the stage women does. You’ll be takin’ Ada Walker’s place if you keep on.”

“Wha! Wha!⁠ ⁠… You chillen sho can sing!” Tom Johnson shouted his compliments from across the yard. And Sarah, beside him on the bench behind their shack, added: “Minds me o’ de ole plantation times, honey! It sho do!”

“Unhuh! Bound straight fo’ de devil, that’s what they is,” Hager returned calmly from her place beside the pump. “You an’ Harriett both⁠—singin’ an’ dancin’ this stuff befo’ these chillens here.” She pointed to Sandy and Willie-Mae, who sat on the ground with their backs against the chicken-box. “It’s a shame!”

“I likes it,” said Willie-Mae.

“Me too,” the little boy agreed.

“Naturally you would⁠—none o’ you-all’s converted yet,” countered the old woman to the children as she settled back against the pump to listen to some more.

The music rose hoarse and wild:

I wonder where ma easy rider’s gone?
He done left me, put ma new gold watch in pawn.

It was Harriett’s voice in plaintive moan to the night sky. Jimboy had taught her that song, but a slight, clay-colored brown boy who had hopped bells at the Clinton Hotel for a couple of months, on his way from Houston to Omaha, discovered its meaning to her. Puppy-love, maybe, but it had hurt when he went away, saying nothing. And the guitar in Jimboy’s hands echoed that old pain with an even greater throb than the original ache itself possessed.

Approaching footsteps came from the front yard.

“Lord, I can hear you-all two blocks away!” said Annjee, coming around the house, home from work, with a bundle of food under her left arm. “Hello! How are you, daddy? Hello, ma! Gimme a kiss Sandy.⁠ ⁠… Lord, I’m hot and tired and most played out. This late just getting from work!⁠ ⁠… Here, Jimboy, come on in and eat some of these nice things the white folks had for supper.” She stepped across her husband’s outstretched legs into the kitchen. “I brought a mighty good piece of cold ham for you, hon’, from Mis’ Rice’s.”

“All right, sure, I’ll be there in a minute,” the man said, but he went on playing “Easy Rider,” and Harriett went on singing, while the food was forgotten on the table until long after Annjee had come outdoors again and sat down in the cool, tired of waiting for Jimboy to come in to her.

Off and on for nine years, ever since he had married Annjee, Jimboy and Harriett had been singing together in the evenings. When they started, Harriett was a little girl with braided hair, and each time that her roving brother-in-law stopped in Stanton, he would amuse himself by teaching her the old Southern songs, the popular ragtime ditties, and the hundreds of varying verses of the blues that he would pick up in the big dirty cities of the South. The child, with her strong sweet voice (colored folks called it alto) and her racial sense of rhythm, soon learned to sing the songs as well as Jimboy. He taught her the parse me la, too, and a few other movements peculiar to Southern Negro dancing, and sometimes together they went through the buck and wing and a few taps. It was all great fun, and innocent fun except when one stopped to think, as white folks did, that some of the blues lines had, not only double, but triple meanings, and some of the dance steps required very definite movements of the hips. But neither Harriett nor Jimboy soiled their minds by thinking. It was music, good exercise⁠—and they loved it.

“Do you know this one, Annjee?” asked Jimboy, calling his wife’s name out of sudden politeness because he had forgotten to eat her food, had hardly looked at her, in fact, since she came home. Now he glanced towards her in the darkness where she sat plump on a kitchen-chair in the yard, apart from the others, with her back to the growing corn in the garden. Softly he ran his fingers, light as a breeze, over his guitar strings, imitating the wind rustling through the long leaves of the corn. A rectangle of light from the kitchen-door fell into the yard striking sidewise across the healthy orange-yellow of his skin above the unbuttoned neck of his blue laborer’s shirt.

“Come on, sing it with us, Annjee,” he said.

“I don’t know it,” Annjee replied, with a lump in her throat, and her eyes on the silhouette of his long, muscular, animal-hard body. She loved Jimboy too much, that’s what was the matter with her! She knew there was nothing between him and her young sister except the love of music, yet he might have dropped the guitar and left Harriett in the yard for a little while to come eat the nice cold slice of ham she had brought him. She hadn’t seen him all day long. When she went to work this morning, he was still in bed⁠—and now the blues claimed him.

In the starry blackness the singing notes of the guitar became a plaintive hum, like a breeze in a grove of palmettos; became a low moan, like the wind in a forest of live-oaks strung with long strands of hanging moss. The voice of Annjee’s golden, handsome husband on the doorstep rang high and far away, lonely-like, crying with only the guitar, not his wife, to understand; crying grotesquely, crying absurdly in the summer night:

I got a mule to ride.
I got a mule to ride.
Down in the South somewhere
I got a mule to ride.

Then asking the question as an anxious, left-lonesome girl-sweetheart would ask it:

You say you goin’ North.
You say you goin’ North.
How ’bout yo’⁠ ⁠… lovin’ gal?
You say you goin’ North.

Then sighing in rhythmical despair:

O, don’t you leave me here.
Babe, don’t you leave me here.
Dog-gone yo’ comin’ back!
Said don’t you leave me here.

On and on the song complained, man-verses and woman-verses, to the evening air in stanzas that Jimboy had heard in the pinewoods of Arkansas from the lumbercamp workers; in other stanzas that were desperate and dirty like the weary roads where they were sung; and in still others that the singer created spontaneously in his own mouth then and there:

O, I done made ma bed,
Says I done made ma bed.
Down in some lonesome grave
I done made ma bed.

It closed with a sad eerie twang.

“That’s right decent,” said Hager. “Now I wish you-all’d play some o’ ma pieces like ‘When de Saints Come Marchin’ In’ or ‘This World Is Not Ma Home’⁠—something Christian from de church.”

“Aw, mama, it’s not Sunday yet,” said Harriett.

“Sing ‘Casey Jones,’ ” called old man Tom Johnson. “That’s ma song.”

So the ballad of the immortal engineer with another mama in the Promised Land rang out promptly in the starry darkness, while everybody joined in the choruses.

“Aw, pick it, boy,” yelled the old man. “Can’t nobody play like you.”

And Jimboy remembered when he was a lad in Memphis that W. C. Handy had said: “You ought to make your living out of that, son.” But he hadn’t followed it up⁠—too many things to see, too many places to go, too many other jobs.

“What song do you like, Annjee?” he asked, remembering her presence again.

“O, I don’t care. Any ones you like. All of ’em are pretty.” She was pleased and petulant and a little startled that he had asked her.

“All right, then,” he said. “Listen to me:”

Here I is in de mean ole jail.
Ain’t got nobody to go ma bail.
Lonesome an’ sad an’ chain gang bound⁠—
Ever’ friend I had’s done turned me down.

“That’s sho it!” shouted Tom Johnson in great sympathy. “Now, when I was in de Turner County Jail⁠ ⁠…”

“Shut up yo’ mouth!” squelched Sarah, jabbing her husband in the ribs.

The songs went on, blues, shouts, jingles, old hits: “Bon Bon Buddy, the Chocolate Drop”; “Wrap Me in Your Big Red Shawl”; “Under the Old Apple Tree”; “Turkey in the Straw”⁠—Jimboy and Harriett breaking the silence of the small-town summer night until Aunt Hager interrupted:

“You-all better wind up, chillens, ’cause I wants to go to bed. I ain’t used to stayin’ ’wake so late, nohow. Play something kinder decent there, son, fo’ you stops.”

Jimboy, to tease the old woman, began to rock and moan like an elder in the Sanctified Church, patting both feet at the same time as he played a hymn-like, lugubrious tune with a dancing overtone:

Tell me, sister,
Tell me, brother,
Have you heard de latest news?

Then seriously as if he were about to announce the coming of the Judgment:

A woman down in Georgia
Got her two sweet-men confused.

How terrible! How sad! moaned the guitar.

One knocked on de front do’,
One knocked on de back⁠—

Sad, sad⁠ ⁠… sad, sad! said the music.

Now that woman down in Georgia’s
Door-knob is hung with black.

O, play that funeral march, boy! while the guitar laughed a dirge.

An’ de hearse is comin’ easy
With two rubber-tired hacks!

Followed by a long-out, churchlike:

Amen⁠ ⁠… !

Then with rapid glides, groans, and shouts the instrument screamed of a sudden in profane frenzy, and Harriett began to ball-the-jack, her arms flopping like the wings of a headless pigeon, the guitar string whining in ecstasy, the player rocking gaily to the urgent music, his happy mouth crying: “Tack ’em on down, gal! Tack ’em on down, Harrie!”

But Annjee had risen.

“I wish you’d come in and eat the ham I brought you,” she said as she picked up her chair and started towards the house. “And you, Sandy! Get up from under that tree and go to bed.” She spoke roughly to the little fellow, whom the songs had set a-dreaming. Then to her husband: “Jimboy, I wish you’d come in.”

The man stopped playing, with a deep vibration of the strings that seemed to echo through the whole world. Then he leaned his guitar against the side of the house and lifted straight up in his hairy arms Annjee’s plump, brown-black little body while he kissed her as she wriggled like a stubborn child, her soft breasts rubbing his hard body through the coarse blue shirt.

“You don’t like my old songs, do you, baby? You don’t want to hear me sing ’em,” he said, laughing. “Well, that’s all right. I like you, anyhow, and I like your ham, and I like your kisses, and I like everything you bring me. Let’s go in and chow down.” And he carried her into the kitchen, where he sat with her on his knees as he ate the food she so faithfully had brought him from Mrs. J. J. Rice’s dinner-table.

Outside, Willie-Mae went running home through the dark. And Harriett pumped a cool drink of water for her mother, then helped her to rise from her low seat, Sandy aiding from behind, with both hands pushing firmly in Aunt Hager’s fleshy back. Then the three of them came into the house and glanced, as they passed through the kitchen, at Annjee sitting on Jimboy’s lap with both dark arms tight around his neck.

“Looks like you’re clinging to the Rock of Ages,” said Harriett to her sister. “Be sure you don’t slip, old evil gal!”

But at midnight, when the owl that nested in a tree near the corner began to hoot, they were all asleep⁠—Annjee and Jimboy in one room, Harriett and Hager in another, with Sandy on the floor at the foot of his grandmother’s bed. Far away on the railroad line a whistle blew, lonesome and long.