Garrett Hongo
June 2007

Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai'i, in 1951. He is the author of two books of poetry: The River of Heaven, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Yellow Light. His most recent book is Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i. He is also editor of The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America and Under Western Eyes: Essays from Asian America. Forthcoming are the non-fiction book Passion Flower: A Sound Odyssey and The North Shore, a collection of poems. He is currently Distinguished Professor of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

           
The Mirror Diary

When I was twenty, I decided to dedicate myself to the study of art and literature.  It would be as if I were an apprentice in some religious practice, laying down the foundation of learning in letters and values both spiritual and moral that I would draw upon in later days.   My yearning was intense, I thought, and my devotion almost absolute.  I read and I read and I read, only and all the time.  I was away at college, of course, and I was overjoyed.  I had escaped the noisy house of my upbringing in Gardena, a post-war Levittown of Los Angeles, a neighborhood crowded with loneliness and working-class anger.  I read fiction in the afternoons out on the porches and lawns and poetry in my room after supper in the dining halls. After midnight with the company of a cup of wine I practiced calligraphy.  In the mornings, I studied languages and read as little as possible in my science texts—the explanations and charts therein befuddled me.  I was for literature and that was it.  On Botany field trips, I took Shakespeare’s comedies and read them on the bus as we swayed along small roadways through the California foothills, spring lupines, purple brushes of salvia, and yellow buttercups burgeoning under the oaks and in the fields around us.  Strolling the dusty campgrounds at night, I recited the love lyrics of Sir Thomas Campion and made eyes at the fires of my own learning.

It was, alas, a somewhat hermetic experience.  I began to long for things: for companionship, of course, the true thing always elusive—“They flye from me who sometyme did me seeke…”; but also, and in the most earnest way, for ancestry, for a sense of descent from noble things, not only from a people, as was being chronicled for me in the novels of Faulkner, but from a tradition of thought, of speech without desperation or the angry pollutions of human affairs.  I who was so filial to the texts of my studies, so observant of the mores and principles both articulated and implied in Boethius and John Gower, was beginning to reflect on the contradiction that I was in no direct way tied to them, to that English cultural tradition.  My own people came from Southern Japan—in 1888 my grandfather always said, talking about his father’s passage.   The family came from Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Satsuma, and Wakayama.   They were laborers and strike leaders on the sugar plantations in Hawai`i.  They were a dancer, a tea-house owner, a country storekeeper, and drivers of mules in the cane fields.   They were a kind of golden mystery to me at the time.  There was no brief of their passage.  No record that I knew of that marked their stories down for me to inscribe myself within them as the living image of their ancestral shadows.

And so, before long, I invented a book.  In secret.  At first, I told no one, but I wrote that it was so in a diary of my own dreaming, as if it were a memory, though I knew I had not lived it, that the book did not exist.  But I convinced myself that it did.  I found it, I wrote, when I was five or six, rummaging around in the basement garage of my grandfather’s house on Kamehameha Highway on the island of O`ahu near the town of Hau`ula.  I had been exploring in the shelves alongside the polished green Chevy, careful to climb up on the floorboards, step on the seat, and push quickly with my bare foot from the dashboard and lowered passenger window on up so I could reach the high shelves crowded with things.  My grandfather kept boxes full of sparkplugs, rayon lure skirts, seashells, and beach-washed glass up there out of which he fashioned curios for the tourists.  A crèche of toy hula girls in the polished half-shell of a coconut.  A kind of Cornell-box with opihi, chips of colored glass, spotted cowries, and a starfish.

There were a few books up there too, mildewing and coated with a fine, powdery black rot: high school yearbooks with teenage pictures of my mother and aunts in them, paperback adventure novels—westerns mostly, and some with fake leather covers in red and green.  Their titles were embossed in gold.  For Whom the Bell Tolls.  The Great Gatsby.  Anna Karenina.   The Wisdom of the East.  But, among these, the legacy of my father’s post-war subscription to a Reader’s Digest Book Club, I told myself I found a storekeeper’s ledger—a book made for accounts and balances, for inventories and expenditures, for profits and debts.  Yet when I opened it, shaking off its dust, what I discovered instead was a journal—the diary of my learned, Neo-Confucian grandfather’s—written in so-shyo, Japanese calligraphy, a brush-written script like floating lotuses and reeds twisting in a swift stream, beautiful to apprehend but impossible for a child, or any modern, to decipher.  I turned page after page, running my fingers down each neat, ribboning column, and I knew that this was sacred, a book of profound secrets.

The pages were yellowed on the edges and blackened near the spine where the stitching was, and they were soft, swollen with moisture from the nearby sea.  The writing, composed of stylized ideograms and a linked syllabary, looked to me vaguely like the sutra scrolls the Buddhist priest chanted over at Kahuku temple, only finer, less like rows of black spiders and more like the surface swirls and eddies of Hau`ula Stream as it raced under the WPA Bridge.   Another time I took it out, it looked like the banners draped over the sacrifice of sake barrels and shoyu on festival days, the headbands and flowing sleeves of the evening, fire lit dancers on Bon Odori, the Day of the Dead.  The book crackled with esoteric energy. 

I stole it. And I kept it with me throughout my days.  

From that time in childhood when I snatched it from the garage shelf, through the move from Hawai`i to the Mainland, through Boy Scouts and juvenile gangs, football and girls, I kept it.  I called it the kagami nikki, a title I invented from what I knew from my rudimentary studies of Japanese literature.  It meant “The Mirror Diary” and had the ring of Medieval essay collections and Tokugawa travel diaries I loved so much.  My vow was to become scholarly enough to read it one day.  And, when I did, when I had trained myself properly and was ready, it would tell me, like the murmuring ghost of my own grandfather standing behind me in the bedroom’s full-length mirror, the unshared secret of who I was and from whom I came.

*          *          *

This was, quite simply, a profound rage for story, for a master tale that justifies, in the powerful way that literatures do, my own presence in my own time in history.  Obviously, I had realized that the literature I was studying could not account for that, that I was not being given “a national tale,” a cultural identity that spoke to the convergence of global histories making me a fourth-generation American.  Unlike the child in John Steinbeck’s Salinas story “The Leader of the People,” I could not be ushered into the sweet fiction that my grandfather had come West, leading the wagon trains along the Oregon Trail.  And, with little direct knowledge, with almost nothing then available in the archive to study and learn from about we peoples who came from Asia to America, I fabricated my own legend of this grandfather’s journal, this invented archive and pioneer’s diary, so that I could be, so that I would be worthy of the wisdom of a literature that spoke directly of my own people and not the gross, uncouth, child-of-immigrants Caliban I was afraid I was without it.  So, like a lonely child inventing an imaginary friend, I had my book, my ancestral literature after all.

It consoled me for the short while I needed to finish a literature degree in college.  I traveled to and lived in a temple in Japan for a year.  I did graduate studies in Japanese at a great university, leaving without a degree.  I started a theater company in Seattle dedicated to the production of Asian American scripts.  I spent a while in Hollywood and hated it.  I entered graduate school again, this time to study poetry.  I was beginning to write poems of my own and I forgot about “The Mirror Diary.”

*          *          *

I went out from Tanaka Store, kimi, and took a long survey of the workers in the fields, as if for the first time.  What drew me was seeing the black plume of smoke from the locomotive and then, when I got closer, the commotion of a mule team dragging the gang plow behind it, kicking up dust and chaff from the old sugar cane lying all over the opened ground.  Every day I see these tableaux from the back window of the store whenever I stack boxes or pull them out.  Smoke and then dust, whistle and then whipcracks and the braying of animals.  But, this time, something within me said I had to go back to the burning fields that I thought I’d left far behind me, witness the labor that I swore at every day that I was made to do it, that my father and mother swore at every day they did theirs.  Six days a week, ten hours per day in the hot fields, twelve hours in the sugar mill that was even more hot, sweating over the vats, stacking the cane, grinding them in the machines.  Monthly wages—twelve dollah, fifteen dollah.  Whistles, bells, sirens.  I remember them, kimi.  Work-work, they say, faster-faster.  Then Rest, five minutes.  Then work-work again, wiki-wiki.  “Hully up,” the lunas shout, whipping us with their words.  I walk the dirt pathways, step on planking thrown over the sluices and flumes, and hear a worker sing this angry song:

                                                            For our homelands,
                                                The far islands of the Rising Sun,
                                                            We try to soldier on,
                                                Carrying the hoe on our sore shoulders
                                                            Instead of rifles,
                                                Machetes and cane knives in our belts
                                                            Instead of short swords,
                                                Hate brimming in our hearts
                                                            Instead of love.

He must think of himself as a warrior for Japan, somehow, working so far away in this Owhyee for such few wages.  These contract laborers earn only enough to get by, bango tags around their necks, making a man a number.  They hunker for meals on a patch of cleared caneland.  They eat Japan rice and boiled burdock roots, sea salt and limu for flavor.  The singer takes his pride from Japan, from a story of warriors, poor thing.  Only the nation when one is so bereft.

Yet, last night, while I was wandering through Camp 7, I heard someone else sing a different tune, with different words, something more mournful—gentle.  He must have improvised the words on a teahouse song he heard in town or on the ship on his way over from Yokohama:

                                                I grunt like an animal from Hell
                                    While I hack and slash through the canes
                                                And trample them under my boots.
                                    But, evenings, when I hear the plaintive song of crickets,
                                                I think to leave, just for them,
                                    An island of stalks uncut and whispering
                                                In the soft, tropical winds.

I suppose even a humble worker dressed in denim can express tender feelings like a gentleman poet in hakama.  Kimi, it is amazing, but I have those feelings too.

While they work, the women sing as well, stripping the drying cane of their leaves, hore-hore.  In gingham dresses and aprons, they flail with hoes and machetes, straw hats like baskets covering their faces, thick workgloves drenched with sap and oil on their hands.  When I look down a row of cane, a hippari-man, the pace-setter, hired by the plantation, rushes angrily down it, calling this nagging, scolding song full of insult to the women, who call back from their own rows of cane:

                                                            Faster, faster, you whores,
                                                            And stop your goddamn grousing.
                                                            You can’t do honest work
                                                            With your mouth!

When they chant back, the proud women throw chaff and sticks over the tops of the cane at the hippari-man, trying to slow him down.  Not gentle, the insult they sing back to him is sly, but direct:

                                                            Why should we keep up
                                                            With a sellout like you?
                                                            It’s you who gets paid
                                                            For working your mouth.
                                                                        Not us.

*           *          *

It can never be simple for me to try and recall that I wanted, for so long, to be able read from this book, borne out of a youth’s desperate wish to hear from the silenced voices of our ancestral history in America.  The wishing of it, over the years, was gradually displaced with concern over minor travails, an autobiography of mainstreaming and errands run, a certain professional and middle-class standing accomplished.  What “The Mirror Diary” chronicles felt a long ways away sometimes, like it never happened or happened to other people—not my family.  But then, some chance, discomfiting encounter will throw me back to that feeling I always had when I was younger, in my teens, hanging around the house in Gardena, doing chores or escaping homework.  Rage.  I’d snap on the television and Hop Sing would be there in living color, on “Bonanza,” doing his chop suey English thing, catering to his bosses the ruling Cartwrights, making a damn fool of himself—and me too, I thought.   Oriental minstrelsy, chop-chop.  Or Peter Tong would come on in “Bachelor Father” with his houseboy act, garbling phone messages, Ikallupusutay, gooneying for the camera.  This was the early Sixties, and being Asian was a joke in America—a sidekicking, demeaning one. 

I’d want a story about my grandfather then.  I’d ask my mother or my aunt when she was visiting—they were always both in a better mood whenever they got together, laughing and carrying on and talking pidgin and remembering the old days in Hawai`i.  “What was Papa like back then?” I’d ask, using the name they called him.  What were his routines?  How did he know calligraphy?   How come he kept so many Japanese books?   What did they say?  What were they about?”

“We don’t remember,” they would answer, inevitably.  “It was a long time ago.  Who cares about that stuff, anyway?”

*          *          *

Sometimes, kimi, the comfort women would come through the labor camps all in a wagon together.  We would not know much ahead of time if this was to occur, but once word spread, there would be lots of rattling in the tents and shanties—men gathering their coins in tin cans, shaking them at night in anticipation.  And the men would gamble, play hanafuda all night long, those flower cards, trying to amass the cash to pay for an evening of favor.  A man would win and sing this song to the lunas, the foremen, and the losers:

                                    Bossman, there is gambling going on right under your nose,
                                                And booze brewing out in the far fields,
                                    And whores doing business by the mountain stream in Camp 9.
                                                But you’re laying stiff and alone in the dark,
                                    And you can’t put a shine on your nose, can you?
                                                Pumping your hands, kissing the air. . .

Sometimes fights would break out, men would argue and rough each other up, steal the kitty and kick dirt over the weak one who was abused.    I heard there would be lines of men sometimes, waiting their turn standing outside a single shanty where the women would be, love sounds inspiring not modesties, but ardor and impatience, the men stamping their feet, rattling coins in their coffee cans, making fun, shouting wiki-wiki! at the grunting and tadaima! at the climax calls.  But the women ever were silent in their suffering and I never knew even one of their names myself.  I rented extra blankets from the store those weeks, gave out packets of aspirin powders and ginseng root to the ladies when I saw them. 

After the comfort women left, a few of the plantation women would sometimes get a notion to run off, ha-alele-hana, and start working that way for themselves:

                                    Why slave in the cane for pennies
                                    When I can make a dollar for being on my back,
                                    Fucking the pake man,
                                    Fucking the Portagee?

I confess I once gave in to acting strangely myself, though not with comfort women.  Some years ago, there was a servant woman who would come to the store after she’d lost her job doing her maid work for the wives of the plantation bosses.  She would stand a long time in the aisles, looking through the shelves and bins, pulling buckets from underneath, going through the brooms she didn’t need and cast iron cookware I knew she couldn’t afford.  She would dress herself a bit too neatly, as if she were going out to the baths at night—cotton yukata, sash, nice slippers.   She would never come dirty after work like the field hands.  I never saw cane dust or pitch on her once, of course, though I knew—everyone knew—work like that was to be in her future.  She’d been accused of stealing or something, and the foreman’s wife had let her go.   She’d have to start work in the fields again soon, was what people were saying, but maybe not on Kahuku Plantation.  She’d have to leave, go to Wai`alua, or Kaneohe.  But she was married, her husband a water-man, working the irrigation of the fields, inspecting and repairing sluices and flumes.  I’d run into him from time to time, during my saunters.    He was tough but small, bandy-legged, and he grew a big moustache.  He’d be walking fast along a levee bank, head down, looking at the channel of running water, rubbing mud from his gloved hands, silent and scowling.  When I passed him, he’d look up for an instant, ready to accuse, but then see it was me and turn away, without so much as a nod.  I was the storekeeper, and though he knew I didn’t belong there out in the cane, he couldn’t order me.   I was beyond his authority, and he depended on my goodwill if he wanted to keep buying food and supplies on credit.  I think his name was Kurosawa—“Black Swamp”—a fitting name for a water-man.

One day, while I was stocking the shelves with canned salmon and tuna, I heard a woman’s voice, quite softly, singing a little tune unlike the harsh work-songs I was used to by then, not mournful or chantlike either, but like a sake-drinking song, light and full of breath and whimsy.  I wasn’t listening carefully at first, but only picked out stray words here and there.  But then I heard her sing the word wai, the Hawaiian for “ditch,” sung roughly and out of rhythm, but punning, cannily, on the wet channel on the body of a woman.   I paid more attention.  The sun streamed through the bamboo blinds at the front of the store, cane dust danced in the rays streaming through the slats, and I heard this distinctly, a trickle of sweat springing from my neck and flowing down my chest as she sang:

                                    Tomorrow is Sunday, storekeeper.
                                   Come for my kisses and my hips,
                        While my husband works the wai and waters the cane.
                                    I’ll be home by myself soon,
                                    And my lips will be wet for you.

It was hard not to repeat an evil done once, kimi.  I kept it up with her for a while, but I did not steal her.  She was gone before the New Year, off to the teahouses in Honolulu a salesman from there said.   I do not believe I was the only one to hear her singing. 

It is hot and wearying to walk the fields again, especially after my long absence from the woe of it.  When I bent my back, I didn’t feel sorrow, only resolve.  And thanks that I had strength and a plan.  I never wanted to stay cutting cane—no one does.  Some want a plot of their own to plant from seed and tend to themselves after pauhana, work is over.  Then, in two years, the company weighs the crop, deducts advance for expenses, and gives you market price.  Maybe they still cheat you, but you end up ahead anyway—way ahead than pure labor.

Once I could clearly see the green cliffs of the Ko`olau mountains, jutting walls of rain-worn lavas covered in mosses, I knew it was time to turn back from my survey.  From deep within the canefields, I could hear old mule-driver’s calls, sung as jokes between work crews, the mule long-gone as a work animal, the crews themselves the mules these days.  When I crossed what was left of a burn, stepping over a few stray stalks of stripped and charred cane strewn on the ground, specks of ash afloat in the air like big winter snowflakes in Japan, I heard one last song, this one from a young man, I thought, looking forward to rest and seeing his wife at the end of the day:

                                                Only in this Kingdom of Hell
                                                Are our lives counted by the clock.
                                                But when I come home to you at night,
                                                I cross the River of Heaven
                                                And enter the Domain of Dreams.

*           *          *

I’ve been told that it’s a practice among native peoples to reflect on ancestral spirits before making any important decision—particularly things like marriage, accepting a job, quitting one, adopting a child.   And I have a friend in Hawai`i who goes to a spot on the seashore to chant his ancestral line each time he’s about to make any kind of life change.  He says it’s to ask their permission, to ensure his choice is in harmony with them, that what he does reflects what they have done.  If this sounds corny or romantic, perhaps it’s because so many of us, as children of diaspora and citizens of adopted nations, are removed from a knowledge of our predecessors.  Ancestral lives are misty, unconnected to the daily news and our current mortgage rates.  Or so we suppose.

That I wanted this chronicle and fantasized a legacy of story had to do with something of a wish for a similar sort of harmony to my friend’s with his forbears, and it has even more to do with wishing for a personal dignity in my own time.  The world I grew up in made me feel terribly diminished because of race and my lack of history, or, rather, the lack of disseminated knowledge about that history in the minds of most others around me.  “The Mirror Diary” was my youthful talisman against the constant cultural white noise of prejudice and ridicule.  It was my private claim of legitimacy in a world that declared me, like Edmund in Lear, a bastard of history.  It was about being fathered in my own era, sponsored by predecessors I could pretend were illustrious, epic in a way.

Yet, I suspect that, had I been deprived of this effort of near lifelong imagining, if I could have, at any time, merely plucked this volume from my study’s bookshelf, read from it casually, and then returned it to its place amidst other like volumes, I might have been enacting a colonialist mimicry of Victorian privilege and manners, an absurd Masterpiece Theater scene of self-hosting and false welcome of an audience expecting an ethnic entertainment.   That the history is terrible rather than noble, that the book does not exist, my ancestors never wrote and no one much bothered with them enough to transcribe their lives into writing, provides me with the dark watermark of an absence that my current writing must fill.  Whatever images I have I inherit from a few photographs of the period—of cane workers arrayed around a locomotive, of my great-grandparents fresh off the boat in Honolulu Bay, of a rainstorm drenching a village of thatched huts amidst an ocean of sugarcane.   Whatever words there are of theirs come to me in the real snatches of only a few songs that have survived the cane fields, huli-huli bushi, the Hawaiian-Japanese blues borne of unchronicled sufferings, sung by an artist with a creole-Hawaiian name.  Like “The Mirror Diary, he is my invention too.  I call him Blind-Boy Lilikoi, and, between songs, he swigs a schnapps of passion fruit from a bottle placed beside him on the stage.  He plays alternately a shamisen, a Dobro, and Hawaiian lap-steel guitar.  There is, behind him, a painted backdrop of faded ads for lye-soap and fish markets.  He sings the accompaniment to our early history in this country, the music and meriyasu for a walking tour through the ghostly rectangles of old labor camps in the midst of stands of abandoned cane, along the spit of a sandy promontory, half-eaten by the sea, studded with wooden grave markers, broken and rotting with a century of age.

“You no write diss,” the she-ghosts say, the voices of aged aunts heard in the rasp of the door hinge in the back of my grandfather’s old store.  “Diss secret, on’y for zah fam-ree.”

There was a long stretch when I forgot about “The Mirror Diary.”  I was building a life, raising a family, trying to make my way.   And, as I’d go through my days of teaching classes, running errands, joining my soul to the grocery line and crowds at the movie theaters and fall football games, I found a kind of ephemeral contentment.  I married a girl I met in college.  I moved from California to Missouri, Missouri to Hawai`i, Hawai`i to Oregon.  I collaborated with the other fathers at the tee-ball practices, tossing soft grounders to the boys assembled on the infield in the neighborhood park.  I bought an outdoor grill and burned sauce-spackled meats to a sugary crisp.  I divorced.  My sons grew into tall, jokey adolescents, rowed crew and put the shot, did passably well in schools.  I fell in love with a sassy Southerner whose own folk come from the diaspora of the Dust Bowl.  I wrote poems of my own and books of my own, but the ghost of the old book that was my necessary history, my invented pride, had slipped quietly away, without thought, as if it were a companion’s hand I had just let go of after we’d swum out from shore to reef, and he was drifting now, fairly quickly, caught by the swiftly receding tide and being pulled out to the deepest seas, swept along with all my lost possessions and forgotten errantry. 

But, these days, with my sons away at schools, with half a lifetime now behind me, with cousins and college classmates beginning to disappear into the ground and demand their consecrations, this old invented book and legend of an uncompleted self has been returning to me like the rising ghost of a moon that ascends a blank sky in the most brilliant light of day.  I’ve had this need again, to compensate for an absence, to call on the diaries to describe a seashore, divulge a salty rumor, and tell me a make-up story of scandal and contrition.  I want to see Blind-Boy pluck out a tune on his lap-steel on the stage of the Mirror Theater.


On the Origin of Blind-Boy Lilikoi

I came out of Hilo, on the island of Hawai`i,
lap-steel and dobro like outriggers on either side of me,
shamisen strapped to my back as I went up the gangplank
to the City of Tokio running inter-island
to Honolulu and the big, pink hotel on Waikiki
where all the work was back in those days.
I bought a white linen suit on Hotel Street
as soon as I landed, bought a white Panama too,
and put the Jack of Diamonds in my hatband for luck. 
Of my own, I had only one song, “Hilo March,”
and I played it everywhere, to anyone who would listen,
walking all the way from the Aloha Tower to Waikiki,
wearing out my old sandals along the way. 
But that’s okay.  I got to the Banyan Tree
on Kalakaua and played for the tourists there. 
The bartenders didn’t kick me out or ask for much back.  
Zatoh-no-bozu, nah!  I went put on the dark glasses and pretend I blind. 
I played the slack-key, some hulas, an island rag,
and made the tourists laugh singing hapa-haole songs,
half English, half Hawaiian.  Come sundown, though,
I had to shoo—the contract entertainers would be along,
and they didn’t want manini like me
stealing the tips, cockroach the attention. 
I’d ride the trolley back to Hotel Street
and Chinatown then, change in my pocket,
find a dive on Mauna Kea and play chang-a-lang
with the Portagee, paniolo music with Hawaiians,
slack-key with anybody, singing harmonies,
waiting for my chance to bring out the shamisen. 
But there hardly ever was.  Japanee people
no come the bars and brothels like before. 
After a while, I give up and just play whatever,
dueling with ukulele players for fun,
trading licks, make ass, practicing that
happy-go-lucky all the tourists seem to love. 
But smiling no good for me.  I like the stone-face,
the no-emotion-go-show on the face,
all feeling in my singing and playing instead. 
That’s why Japanee style suits me best. 
Shigin and gunka, ballads about warriors
and soldier song in Japanee speech. 
I like the key.  I like the slap and barong of shamisen. 
It make me feel like I galvanize
and the rain go drum on me,
make the steel go ring inside. 
Ass when I feel, you know, ass when I right. 
Ass why me, I like the blues.  Hear ‘em first time
from one kurombo seaman from New Orleans. 
He come off his ship from Hilo Bay, walking downtown
in front the S. Hata General Store
on his way to Manono Street looking for
one crap game or play cards or something. 
I sitting barber shop, doing nothing but reading book.  
He singing, yeah? sounding good but sad. 
And den he bring his funny guitar from case,
all steel and silver with plenty puka holes all over the box. 
Make the tin-kine sound, good for vibrate. 
Make dakine shake innah bones sound,
like one engine innah blood.  Penetrate. 
He teach me all kine songs.  Field hollers, he say,
dakine slave g’on use for call each oddah
from field to field.  Ju’like cane workers. 
And rags and marches and blues all make up
from diss black buggah from Yazoo City,
up-river and a ways, the blues man say. 
Spooky.  No can forget.  Ass how I learn for sing. 

                        Farewell to my baby,
                        Farewell to my love.
                        The guards they taking me,
                        One convict in the rain.
                        I going far across the sea, you know,
                        And I no go’n’ be home again.


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