And life being problematic and uncertain as it is, and
prone to wind about in the strangest way, no one may say with certitude
that young Sam did not make a promising start.
Certainly, over the affair the Knights of the Round Table launched many
a quip and jest, but that simply proved the fineness of their sentiments
toward a certain delicate human relation which forms mankind's single
awful approach to the creative and the holy.
Tump Pack became almost a mythical figure in Niggertown. Jim Pink Staggs
composed a saga relating the soldier's exploits in France, his assault
on the jail to liberate Cissie, and his death.
In his songs--and Jim Pink had composed a good many--the minstrel
instinctively avoided humor. He always improvised them to the sobbing of
a guitar, and they were as invariably sad as the poetry of adolescents.
It was called "Tump Pack's Lament." The negroes of Hooker's Bend learned
it from Jim Pink, and with them it drifted up and down the three great
American rivers, and now it is sung by the roustabouts, stevedores, and
underlings of our strange black American world.
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