Here the air is laden not only with the sweet tobacco smell,
mixed with a faint scent of licorice and of fruit, but is freighted also
with a fine brown dust which is revealed where bars of sunlight strike
in through the windows, and which seems, as it shifts and sparkles, to
be a visible expression of the smell.
In the busy season "street niggers" are generally used for stemming,
which is, perhaps, the leading part of the tobacco industry in Richmond,
and these "street niggers," a wild yet childlike lot, who lead a
hand-to-mouth existence all year round, bring to the tobacco trade a
wealth of semi-barbaric color. To give us an idea of the character of a
Richmond "street nigger" the gentleman who took my companion and me
through the factory told us of having wanted a piece of light work done,
and having asked one of these negroes: "Want to earn a quarter?"
To which the latter replied without moving from his comfortable place
beside a sun-baked brick wall: "No, boss, Ah _got_ a quahtah."
The singing of the negroes is a great feature of the stemming department
in a tobacco factory. Some of the singers become locally famous; also, I
was told by the superintendent, they become independent, and for that
reason have frequently to be dismissed. The wonderful part of this
singing, aside from the fascinating harmonies made by the sweet,
untrained negro voices, is the utter lack of prearrangement that there
is about it.
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