At times he struggled against his lethargy.  When he awoke in the morning and found the sun shining on his dusty primers and examination papers, he would think that he ought to go back to his old task; but he never did.  In his heart grew a conviction that he would never teach school at Hooker’s Bend.

He would rise and dress slowly in the still cabin, thinking he must soon make new plans and take up some work.  He never decided precisely what work; his thoughts trailed on in vague, idle designs.

In fact, during Peter’s reaction to his shock there began to assert itself in him that capacity for profound indolence inherent in his negro blood.  To a white man time is a cumulative excitant.  Continuous and absolute idleness is impossible; he must work, hunt, fish, play, gamble, or dissipate,—­do something to burn up the accumulating sugar in his muscles.  But to a negro idleness is an increasing balm; it is a stretching of his legs in the sunshine, a cat-like purring of his nerves; while his thoughts spread here and there in inconsequences, like water without a channel, making little humorous eddies, winding this way and that into oddities and fantasies without ever feeling that constraint of sequence which continually operates in a white brain.  And it is this quality that makes negroes the entertainers of children par excellence.

Peter Siner’s mental slackening made him understandable, and gave him a certain popularity in Nigger-town.  Black men fell into the habit of dropping in at the Siner cabin, where they would sit outdoors, with chairs propped against the wall, and philosophize on the desultory life of the crescent.  Sometimes they would relate their adventures on the river packets and around the docks at Paducah, Cairo, St. Joe, and St. Louis; usually a recountal of drunkenness, gaming, fighting, venery, arrests, jail sentences, petty peculations, and escapes.  Through these Iliads of vagabondage ran an irresponsible gaiety, a non-morality, and a kind of unbrave zest for adventure.  They told of their defeats and flights with as much relish and humor as of their charges and victories.  And while the spirit was thoroughly pagan, these accounts were full of the cliches of religion.  A roustabout whom every one called the Persimmon confided to Peter that he meant to cut loose some logs in a raft up the river, float them down a little way, tie them up again, and claim the prize-money for salvaging them, God willing.

The Persimmon was so called from a scar on his long slanting head.  A steamboat mate had once found him asleep in the passageway of a lumber pile which the boat was lading, and he waked the negro by hitting him in the head with a persimmon bolt.  In this there was nothing unusual or worthy of a nickname.  The point was, the mate had been mistaken:  the Persimmon was not working on his boat at all.  In time this became one of the stock anecdotes which pilots and captains told to passengers traveling up and down the river.