Caked in mud, merely a silhouette against the westering sun, a ragged figure ascended the rise and looked over the murky vista splayed out before him.

“N*gger, don't let the sun go down on you here.” Words hung thick in the air. The figure pressed down the shallow slope in a half-run, driven on.

The bayou rattled and shook with the sights and sounds of the Southern swamp. The soft splash of crawdads scampering through the brackish waters, the cry of some game bird, the  holler of a woman in some field away, the deep ribbit of the bullfrogs; Robert ground his stumpy teeth and walked down a trail toward lights between the ghostly cypresses.

The son of a half-blind sharecropper and an emancipated house maid, Robert's protruding eyes constantly moved, watching every shadow, never forgetting the gruesome reminder of Southern cruelty despite emancipation. His bloated lips sucked at the air, his voice distorted by a blocked nose. Roughly-shorn, his frizzled hair mimicked the mossy, green-and-grey-stained curtains hanging from the cypresses.

Mmm, hot food, ain't nothin' like it. Smells like Mama's old cookin'. A pervasive aroma of herbs and spices and crawfish boil rose up the slope, drifting and tearing through the stunted grasses that lived on the low rises where dry land found a place between the sloughs and salt marshes. The glimmer of lanterns and rushlights became closer, and so too the laughter and song of happy men.

“Oi!” came a holler, “quit yo' twangin'!” A choking silence followed, before a grunt and the sound of laughing men followed.

Robert walked slowly as he might, with all the quiet and subtlety of a backwater dweller. A couple of men noticed him and they yelled him over. The crowd shuffled around bonfires and rushlights, all Negroes, taking drinks of their moonshine and eating pots of rice and crawdads. “My... My name is Robert,” he said, dusting off his ragged garb to make himself feel impressionable. Someone shoved a cup of 'shine and a pot of something into his hands. With glazed, eager eyes he began to devour the food put before him and squatted on a stump, watching two characters in prettier clothes with gratitude and wonder.

“Now, now as his twangin' is gone,” began one of the well-dressed types, pushing his guitar-wielding partner into the laughing crowd, “I'm goin' to play you'se some real music, like I'se heard on the Missi' Delta. You Louisiana types don't know that too well, as I hear.” His voice was deep, gruff and wild. His face constantly changed expressions, his fat, 'shine-wet lips puckering and rolling and flexing.

Robert watched more carefully now, eyes darting for the reactions of every man in the crowd.

“Oh-yeah... Woah-yeah! Whoo-hoo... Hoo-hoo-hoo, hmm, hmm, hmm, whoo-ooo...” What's this? Robert settled down on the stump with a relaxed stance. His raw, dry lips were relaxed, his thin, sinewy arms no longer taut or tense but easy at his sides.

Then, with five minutes' anticipation coming to a climax, the fancy man in front put his lips to a harmonica and blasted away into the night. It was a dangerous, threatening roar which spurned delicacy for pure strength. Ah, its home... Just, just like it was... Sittin' on the cotton-field with nothin' but pianas and guitars 'n' harmonicas to keep us happy. The food was dirty, the water was dirty, the work was cripplin'.