After Beaugosse had gone, N’Deye Touti walked back to the street fountain. Arame, seeing her approach, came over to join her.
‘Still no water,’ she said, and then added abruptly, ‘You know, you should say yes.’
‘Say yes to what?’
‘For your wedding.’
‘You have a screw loose somewhere, my girl.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘I read it in a book,’ N’Deye said. ‘It means that you have something missing up here.’ She tapped a finger against her forehead.
The two girls joined the women who were gathered around the fountain, weary with waiting. In the days before the strike the trip to the fountain for water had been the occasion for an exchange of all kinds of gossip, for the spreading of news, and even for arguments; but now there was only a gloomy silence, a stillness that was a reflection of impatience worn down by fatigue. There was also a sullen kind of fear, mingled with hatred of this instrument the white men could shut off whenever they wished. The whole system belonged to them, from the water-purification plant through the labyrinth of pipes to the faucet on the fountain itself.
Suddenly they heard a little gurgling sound, followed by a deep moaning in the pipes. There was a general rustle of movement, and the child Anta hurriedly turned the knob of the pump. Nothing happened.
‘Another false alarm,’ said a woman who was chewing on a toothpick. ‘The toubabs are trying to kill us, little by little. There isn’t a drop of water from here to Pikine.’
All of the women were now crowded around the fountain, holding out pots and jugs, clutching at the babies on their backs to prevent them from falling. Their mouths hung open, and their eyes were fixed hungrily on a single drop of water which had appeared on the spout of the faucet, like a pearl held in the beak of a bird. From somewhere within the fountain they heard the gurgling sound again – was it water or only air – then there was a little sucking noise, and after that silence.
‘Let Anta climb up and see if she can hear anything,’ the woman with the toothpick said, and the child was lifted to the top of the stone column.
‘Can you feel anything? Is there water coming through the pipe?’
‘I can feel something – it feels like it was turning – but I think it’s just my stomach. Yes, it is – it’s just the rumbling of my stomach.’
Once again the women relapsed into silence, and the brief hope that had flickered in their eyes disappeared. They were roused by the sight of Houdia M’Baye running toward them, sweating and out of breath, her flaccid breasts jogging frantically up and down.
‘Why on earth are you running like that?’ Ramatoulaye demanded. ‘Have you gone crazy?’
‘Kaye, kaye,’ Houdia M’Baye stammered. ‘Come with me – come and see!’
‘See what?’
‘Just come and see!’
In spite of Houdia’s urging, Ramatoulaye took her time, pausing on the way to rebuke N’Deye Touti and Oulymata, one of El Hadji Mabigué’s wives, who were arguing over a place in the queue.
‘N’Deye,’ she said, ‘stop arguing with this woman at once; and you, Oulymata, stay in your place. If your husband didn’t tell lies to the toubabs about us, the fountains would not be turned off. So hold your peace!’
Ramatoulaye walked home calmly enough, but the spectacle she beheld on entering the house almost made her choke with fury. In the smaller courtyard a few grains of dirty rice and the remains of the earthnut cakes were strewn across the ground, and fragments of gourds were scattered everywhere. In the kitchen, all of the cooking pots on the unused stove had been overturned. Ramatoulaye’s enormous nostrils quivered, and words came from her throat as though she were strangling.
‘Who did this?’ she finally managed to ask.
‘It was Vendredi,’ Houdia M’Baye said.
‘Vendredi, Vendredi! Where is he?’
‘He was still here when I ran out to find you.’
At this moment, from somewhere near at hand, they heard the animal bleating. Ramatoulaye, who rarely hurried, raced into the larger courtyard like an avenging fury. From the veranda of the main house she saw the ram coming out of Bineta’s cabin, chewing contentedly on a piece of red and white striped material. Ramatoulaye tightened her waistcloth around her hips and knotted the handkerchief on her head firmly in place.
‘Stay right where you are, all of you!’ she called to the women and children, who had gathered around her. ‘Abdou, bring me the big knife! And hurry! No one in this house will go to bed hungry tonight – if you don’t have ram’s meat to eat, there will at least be mine!’
The boy brought her a rusty old kitchen knife, scarred with use, and Ramatoulaye walked down the steps, staring fixedly at the animal. Seeing her approach, Vendredi moved warily backward, drawing his head down between his shoulders, so that the long hairs from his chin dragged on the ground and his curling horns pointed directly forward. He stopped chewing on the piece of cloth, his eyes glittered wickedly, and his hind legs bent and stiffened, ready to propel himself forward like an uncoiled spring.
Clutching the knife in her hand, Ramatoulaye kept her eyes on the animal’s massive neck. Sweat oozed from every pore of her body, and yet her blood seemed to have turned to ice. She could feel the nerve ends pulsing against the drum-taut flesh of her stomach.
Houdia M’Baye and the children were completely stunned. Wide-eyed and openmouthed, they could only stare helplessly, first at the woman and then at the ram. The frightened cat thrust its head between the crooked legs of little N’Dole.
Vendredi pawed briefly at the ground with his hoofs, and then he charged. His horns and head seemed to bury themselves in Ramatoulaye’s body, and animal and woman hurtled against the wall of one of the cabins, shattering a wooden panel with the force of their impact. Ramatoulaye succeeded in linking her arms around the ram’s neck, and he wheeled viciously, tossing his head in a violent attempt to shake her off, but she clung desperately to her hold, managing to get one leg across his back, while the other dragged along the ground. The knife had fallen from her hand, and most of the clothing had been torn from her body.
Houdia M’Baye, seeing her almost naked, sent the children into the house, just as Bineta arrived in the courtyard. At the sight of the eldest member of the family struggling with the ram, and covered with blood and dirt, her hands went to her mouth and she cried, ‘Lah ilaha ilaha,’ but she had the presence of mind to gather up Ramatoulaye’s clothes and cover her nakedness.
‘Get the knife, Bineta!’ Ramatoulaye gasped. ‘Get me the knife! I won’t die from being naked!’
Bineta found the weapon, but then she just stood there, her eyes bulging fearfully.
‘What are you waiting for? Cut open his throat!’
Bineta managed, somehow, to plunge the knife into the animal’s side and then recoiled in horror as blood spurted from the open wound. The knife dangled uselessly in her hand, and she seemed rooted to the spot. The ram lurched forward and fell, almost at her feet.
‘Give me the knife, Bineta,’ Ramatoulaye said and called out, ‘Abdou, Abdou!’
Houdia M’Baye opened the door of the house, and the boy ran out to the old woman.
‘Hold him by the hoofs,’ Ramatoulaye said, and when he had done as she ordered she plunged the knife three times into the ram’s neck. The blood spurted out again, spraying over the trembling figure of Bineta. Ramatoulaye wiped the blade clean on the animal’s heavy fleece and stood up at last. There was neither pride nor arrogance in her attitude, but just a kind of satisfaction, as if what she had done had been only a duty she could not avoid. For the first time she seemed to notice that she was bleeding, and she turned and went silently into the house.
Although the scene had lasted only a matter of minutes, the neighbors had already begun to gather, and there was even a rumor that Vendredi had killed Ramatoulaye. Now, as men and women came into the courtyard and saw the carcass of the ram, they dipped their fingers in its blood and marked their foreheads with a little circle of red. El Hadji Mabigué was no better liked by the people of the district than he was by his own relatives, and it was generally agreed that someone should have killed Vendredi before this, instead of allowing him to grow fat at their expense. In the midst of the discussion, a voice called out, ‘Let us cut him up properly, and everyone will have a share.’
The two Sow brothers volunteered to skin and butcher the animal, and the woman with the toothpick said, ‘God’s goodness is unbounded. This morning we could hope for nothing – not even a handful of rice – and now there is fresh meat for all. Mame Sofi, you will even be able to put some away for the children.’
‘Providence has indeed been kind,’ Mame Sofi said, ‘but everyone must have his proper share. Send the children and fetch all the water you can, because there is none here. Empty everything you have – we will need lots of water. We’ll boil the meat, and that way there will be both food and drink.’
When she went into the big house, Mame Sofi found Bineta, who was trying to wipe the blood from her face with a cloth.
‘I told you this morning that we would baptize Strike today,’ she said triumphantly. ‘Now we will do it with a feast of mutton.’
She went over to Ramatoulaye, who was stretched out on the mattress, but did not seem to be suffering badly. She had pains in her stomach – from the shock, she said – but the cuts and scratches on her body were not serious. Houdia M’Baye was weeping and sniffling at her side, and the terrified cat was cowering so close to its mistress’s side that only its head could be seen.
‘Why did you do it?’ Mame Sofi demanded. ‘You might have been killed. Vaï! – if there was nothing to eat today, we would have eaten tomorrow. Our friends haven’t yet let us die of hunger.’
‘I knew that God was with me,’ Ramatoulaye said, ‘and I knew that it is possible to die of hunger, and that Houdia M’baye had no more milk. God knows all of these things, too … I told my brother Mabigué this morning that I would kill Vendredi, but God is my witness that it was not because of that I did it. It was because we were hungry – we were all too hungry for it to go on. The men know it, too, but they go away in the morning and don’t come back until the night has come and they do not see … Being the head of a family is a heavy burden – too heavy for a woman. We must have help.’
Ramatoulaye was silent for a moment, and the women around her were silent, too, listening to her words as though they were hearing a confession.
‘When you know that the life and the spirit of others depend on your life and your spirit, you have no right to be afraid – even when you are terribly afraid. In the cruel times we are living through we must find our own strength, somehow, and force ourselves to be hard. If Vendredi had not destroyed the only hope we had for today he would still be alive; and if he had killed me, you would have wept – but in weeping you might have forgotten your hunger, at least for today. Oh yes. God knows that these times are hard and strange!’
For a long time there was silence in the room, broken only by Houdia M’Baye’s weeping, and then N’Deye Touti said, ‘I’ll go to the post office and try to telephone Alioune. He should be told. Lend me ten francs, will you, Houdia M’Baye?’
Houdia M’Baye reached into her blouse and brought out a coin from a little sack hung around her neck like an amulet.
‘Don’t tell him too much of what happened,’ Ramatoulaye said feebly, ‘but say that we will send them some boiled meat tonight. They need it, too.’
Just as N’Deye was leaving the room, another woman came in seeming very agitated. She had come to tell them that Mabigué had heard the news and had gone in search of the police.
‘Well,’ Mame Sofi said, ‘if that’s the case, let us get ready to receive them,’ and she began to fill an empty bottle with sand. The other women were soon busy, copying her, and in the courtyard the men hastened to complete their work of butchering the carcass of the ram.
*
At the union office, Deune was joking carelessly with Arona, while he opened some letters that had just come in. There was nothing very much for them to do, and Arona had already leafed through the pages of the newspaper at least a dozen times. Seated at the table, Alioune was drawing up a situation report, his heavy lips drawn so tight in concentration that from time to time a soft, whistling sound came through them. Across from him, Idrissa was counting money, squinting over the coins and bits of paper brought in by the collectors appointed for that day.
‘It’s beginning to add up,’ he announced happily. ‘People are tired of contributing, but they do it just the same. There was even a toubab – I didn’t dare to ask him, and he gave me a hundred francs … That makes eleven thousand francs for today. Enough to buy some sacks of rice.’
‘Three sacks of rice exactly,’ Deune laughed, ‘and it’s a damned good thing, because Arona made a bet that he could eat twenty pounds all by himself.’
Idrissa tried to focus his nearsighted eyes on Arona’s belly. ‘It’s too bad that I don’t have a sou,’ he said. ‘I would have taken that bet, and you would have lost.’
At this moment the door opened, and Beaugosse came in. He placed his hat carefully on top of the coat rack and greeted the others absentmindedly, over his shoulder.
‘I was beginning to be afraid you had been picked up by the police,’ Alioune said. ‘There has been another raid at M’Bott.’
‘No, I was at home.’
‘Have you had anything to eat?’
‘Yes; and I saw Houdia M’Baye and N’Deye Touti. Everything is all right with them.’
‘Everything is all right, except that there is no water, you mean. We’ve got to do something about that. I’ve written to Doudou, to Lahbib, and to Bakayoko, explaining the situation.’
A shadow seemed to fall across Beaugosse’s face at the mention of Bakayoko’s name. ‘I’ve been wanting to tell you something, Alioune,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in the past few days. You’ve been very good to me since I got out of the trade school, but sometimes it hasn’t been easy for me – with the other workmen, I mean. They know all about the how and the why of this strike, but I …’
‘What do you mean, this strike?’
Abdoulaye, the director of the regional office of the French trade union federation – the C.G.T. – had just come into the room and interrupted Beaugosse. ‘You always seem to be grumbling. I can never come into this place without hearing somebody talking about “this strike”. Aren’t you satisfied with the help you’ve been getting from the C.G.T. in France?’
‘Yes,’ Alioune said, ‘we are very grateful to them. We have also received help from Dahomey, and a letter from Guinea, saying that they were going to do something.’
‘Well, then – what’s wrong?’
‘We have still had absolutely nothing from here – and that’s the important thing.’
‘I’ve been thinking about it; I’ve been thinking about it … But it would require a meeting of all of the unions … Oh, while I think about it; Dejean and his people are probably going to consent to see you very soon. Did you know about it?’
‘Yes, I did.’
Arona and Deune leaped to their feet at this news, and Idrissa squinted thoughtfully at Abdoulaye.
‘I don’t suppose you will be needing me at the meeting,’ Abdoulaye said, but it was clear from his tone that he hoped to be asked to be a member of the delegation.
‘I haven’t heard anything from Thiès about that,’ Alioune replied, ‘but I do have a message for you, from your friend Bakayoko.’ He drew a crumpled letter from his pocket. ‘Wait a minute, here it is: “Tell Abdoulaye that nothing is more damaging to our cause than a worker who plays at being an intellectual and patronizes his own comrades …”’
In spite of the fact that his features were already so black that it would have been almost impossible for them to change color, Abdoulaye’s face seemed to grow darker. Beaugosse bit his lip, as if Bakayoko’s words had been meant for him, but the others understood little of what had been said or what was meant.
The telephone that hung on the wall of the corridor outside the office began to ring, and Abdoulaye hurriedly went out to answer it, relieved that the necessity for a reply had been removed. In just a moment, however, he thrust his head back around the door. ‘It’s N’Deye Touti on the line. She’s saying something about Ramatoulaye, but I can’t understand her very well. Do you want to talk to her?’
As soon as Alioune had left the room, Arona burst out joyfully, ‘Did you hear that, Deune? Dejean is going to see the delegation at last!’
‘Eskaï Allah!’ Idrissa said. ‘We’ll have the pension plan, all of our back pay and a raise, the family allowances, and the four thousand auxiliaries!’ He punctuated each item of the list by pounding happily on the table.
‘I’d like to be in the delegation that goes to Thiès for the meeting,’ Deune said, slapping Beaugosse on the shoulder. ‘You’ll probably go, Beaugosse – yes, you’ll surely go, and then you will meet Bakayoko, my Bambara friend. It’s been a damned hard fight, but now we have won!’
Beaugosse was standing by the window, looking out at the street. ‘Oh, shut up!’ he said, without turning around. ‘Even if you get everything you asked for, I’m leaving!’
But before he could say anything else, or the others could recover from their surprise, Alioune came running back into the room.
‘Idrissa, Beaugosse!’ he cried. ‘Get over to N’Diayène right away! Ramatoulaye has killed Vendredi, Mabigué’s ram.’
‘What?’ Deune demanded, in bewilderment. ‘How did she do that?’
‘I don’t know the details – that’s not important. Beaugosse, take four or five men with you. Go by the Sandaga market and you’ll probably find Dème, the taxi driver. Tell him I sent you and he’ll take you there. But hurry!’
*
From the four corners of the sky, an army of shadows invaded the city as the day drew to a close. In the small courtyard at N’Diayène, the women had brought out the great stewing pot that was used for feast days and celebrations and were filling it with chunks of meat. Whenever someone threw a fresh log into the embers beneath the pot there was a little explosion of sparks, and the flames, leaping high again, lighted the hungry faces of the children. For the moment, they had almost forgotten the gnawing pains in their stomachs, because they knew that soon the meat would be cooked and they would eat again.
It was then that the police arrived in the big central courtyard. The women had never really believed that there was any danger, and in their concern with the preparation of the food they had ceased to think about it, so that now the sudden appearance of armed men in their midst spread panic among them. Some, bewildered and frightened, ran out into the street, but even here there were men in uniform. Mame Sofi tightened the knot on her waistcloth and took up the two bottles, filled with hard sand, which she had prepared for an emergency. Bineta, Houdia M’Baye, and several of the others did the same.
The native policeman who acted as interpreter for the white officers came toward them. “We want to see Ramatoulaye,’ he announced, in the tone of a man who was accustomed to being obeyed, ‘and we will take back the ram.’
The women repeated his words among themselves, as if they had no idea of what he meant. Those who were closest to the fire managed to stamp it out, and then they began taking pieces of the meat from the pot, wrapping them in leaves and throwing them over the wall into the courtyard of the Sow brothers’ house. Some of the children imitated them, bawling loudly.
‘Silence!’ the interpreter shouted. ‘Where is Ramatoulaye? We want to see her at once.’
‘She doesn’t live here, white gentleman,’ one of the women said in French, speaking to the European officer who commanded the detachment of police.
‘They’re lying,’ the interpreter said, and just at that moment Ramatoulaye appeared on the veranda. She was obviously still shaken by her encounter with the ram, and she came down the steps very slowly.
‘That’s her, chief,’ the interpreter said, and six of the policemen moved toward Ramatoulaye. The eyes of everyone present were on the figure of the old woman.
‘You must give us back the ram, and come with us to the police station,’ the interpreter told her.
‘Where is N’Deye Touti?’ Ramatoulaye asked the women nearest her.
‘She went to telephone the union office and hasn’t come back yet,’ Houdia M’Baye answered.
The interpreter had heard her and understood what she said. He went back to the white officer and murmured something to him in French. The officer called one of the policemen, gave him an order, and the man left the courtyard, running.
‘We want the ram,’ the interpreter repeated to Ramatoulaye.
‘Tell him that the ram will stay here. If you want me, here I am, but the ram ate all of our rice …’
‘He says that you must come – and with the ram!’
‘Tell him that we are eating the meat of the ram, tonight!’
The interpreter changed his tactics. He had translated only part of what Ramatoulaye said, in an effort to soften its tone, and now he tried to persuade her. ‘Come with us, and bring the ram – or the meat of the ram, in any case. They won’t keep you there – you’ll just have to sign a paper. I know the chief; he’s a good man. He isn’t like the other toubabs …’
‘What others? I don’t know any others – they are all alike! The only good ones were born dead. The meat will stay here!’
‘What is she saying?’ the officer demanded.
‘This is a bad woman. She doesn’t want to come with us.’
‘Tell her that we’ll just take the meat now, and that she can come tomorrow. Tell her that I mean her no harm …’
‘Harm, no harm?’ Ramatoulaye interrupted, in halting French. ‘I don’t know about harm. I know Vendredi does not leave here. He ate our rice; I killed him. The children were hungry; Vendredi ate the children’s rice. I’ll come with you, but Vendredi does not come. Vendredi will be eaten.’
Then, turning to the women who had gathered behind her, she said, ‘Be quiet, all of you. What are you weeping about, Houdia M’Baye? You act as if there had been a death in the house.’
In the silence that ensued, a confused rumbling could be heard in the streets. The officer, sensing Ramatoulaye’s defiance, looking into the hatred that flamed in her eyes, began to grow angry himself. The women were on the verge of panic. They scarcely recognized the woman beside them as the Ramatoulaye they had always known, and they asked themselves where she had found this new strength. She had always been quiet and unassuming and gentle with the children; at the street fountain she never took part in the arguments, and she never spoke badly of her neighbors. Where, then, had this violence been born? What was the source of this energy so suddenly unleashed? It was not the war; Ramatoulaye was not a man and knew nothing of the rancors that well up in soldiers on the march. It was not the factory; she had never been subject to the inhuman dictatorship of machines. It was not even in the too frequent association of men; she had known only those of her own family. Where, then? The answer was as simple as the woman herself. It had been born beside a cold fireplace, in an empty kitchen.
She took a step toward the white officer.
‘Go away now,’ she said in French. ‘This is a house for us, not a house for white men. Vendredi ate the children’s rice. I killed Vendredi, and now the children can eat again. We are even.’
On all sides of her the other women began brandishing bottles filled with sand, flatirons, and clubs of all shapes and sizes. In a few minutes the group of policemen was completely encircled.
The interpreter tried to say something, but Ramatoulaye would not let him speak. ‘I have nothing more to say to you. It’s only because of the toubab that you haven’t yet been struck down.’
In the street, however, the reinforcements the officer had sent for had arrived – more policemen, and soldiers with them. And it was in the street that the battle between the women and the police began, though no one knew exactly how.
‘For a piece of mutton!’ the woman with the toothpick said. ‘Well, if they want him they will have to pay! We’ll sell him dearly.’
From the street, the commotion spread instantly to the courtyard. Mame Sofi, Bineta, and Houdia M’Baye led the attack, and the rest of the women followed, seizing upon anything that could be used as a weapon. Even the cat put out its claws and spat.
*
Along the whole length of the Dakar-Niger line – almost a thousand miles of steel, linking together a million square miles of the African continent – the men were beginning to have enough of talking about the strike. They were still determined not to return to work, but they had to find some means of killing the time, and of cheating their hunger. In some way they had to use up all of these Sundays which followed each other relentlessly, week after week; they had to occupy all of these hours of idleness, which at first they had tasted with delight and now had drunk to their bitter dregs.
For a time they played at being on holiday. Clothed in whatever was left to them after all the trips to the moneylenders, they left their homes in the early morning and descended on the markets and all of the big and little squares and meeting places of the city, forming noisy, celebrating groups and wandering from shop to shop, from stall to stall, picking up anything that did not require payment. God himself seemed to have joined the party. He had swept His anterooms clean, and His sky contained not a single cloud. Above the trees and the mountains there was just an immense blue void, unsoiled by even the slender columns of smoke which normally waved from the rooftops.
Ceremonies that went back to time immemorial were revived, and pageants that had long been forgotten. Men armed with staffs or cudgels performed the saber duels whose ritual dated from the reign of El Mami Samori Touré. Women dyed their hands and their feet with henna enriched with the black of burnt rubber and colored their lips with antimony. The young girls wore incredibly complicated hairdos of elaborately combed and braided tresses and strolled gracefully through the streets, abandoning themselves to the rhythms of the Bambara dances that were playing on every corner.
But such revels could not go on indefinitely. An intangible sense of loss weighed on everyone: the loss of the machine. In the beginning the men had announced pridefully that they had ‘put an end to the smoke of the savanna’, but now they remembered the time when not a day had passed without the sight of that smoke, rising above the fields, the houses, and the trees of the brush. They remembered when not a night had run its course without the sight of the flickering colored lanterns of the teams at work in the marshaling yards, or the sounds of steel against steel, of the shock of buffer against buffer as the cars came together, and of the far-off whistling of the locomotives. All that had been their life. They thought of it constantly now, but they kept their thoughts jealously to themselves, even as they spied on each other, as if they were afraid that their secret thoughts might somehow become known. Even in the midst of their confusion, however, they were conscious that the machine was the source of their common welfare, and they sensed that the frustration they felt in these dark days was also common to them all.
Like rejected lovers returning to a trysting place, they kept coming back to the areas surrounding the stations. Then they would just stand there, motionless, their eyes fixed on the horizon, scarcely speaking to each other. Sometimes a little block of five or six men would detach itself from the larger mass and drift off in the direction of the tracks. For a few minutes they would wander along the rails and then, suddenly, as though seized with panic, they would hasten back to the safety of the group they had left. Then again they would just stand there, or squat down in the shade of a sand hill, their eyes fixed on the two endless parallels, following them out until they joined and lost themselves in the brush. Something was being born inside them, as if the past and the future were coupling to breed a new kind of man, and it seemed to them that the wind was whispering a phrase they had often heard from Bakayoko: ‘The kind of man we were is dead, and our only hope for a new life lies in the machine, which knows neither a language nor a race.’ They said nothing, though, and only their eyes betrayed an inner torment brought on by the mounting terror of famine and an inconsolable loneliness for the machine.
Sometimes, as they watched, a storm came up, and in the distance they could see the tops of great trees bending before the wind. Then, when the rains came down, little rivers formed in the cracks the sun had made in the cement slabs of the station roofs, and water poured over the verandas. Beneath the force of the wind, the doors of the deserted railway cars flew open, grinding and clashing on their unoiled hinges, revealing a yawning emptiness. And the trespass by the forces of nature into the land of the machine tore at the men’s hearts and left them humbled.
Only once each week did the ‘smoke of the savanna’ rise above the brush, from the trains run by the Europeans. On those days the strikers would stop whatever they were doing and turn their heads to listen, like hunted animals startled by an unwonted sound. For a moment, the passage of the locomotive would calm the torment in their hearts, because their fellowship with the machine was deep and strong; stronger than the barriers which separated them from their employers, stronger even than the obstacle which until now had been insurmountable – the color of their skin.
Then the smoke would disappear, and there would be only silence again, or the sighing of the wind.