Our work was easy, but insipid.  We stood about and watched overdressed people gorge.  For the most part we were treated like furniture and were supposed to act the wooden part.  I watched the waiters even more than the guests.  I saw that it paid to amuse and to cringe.  One particular black man set me crazy.  He was intelligent and deft, but one day I caught sight of his face as he served a crowd of men; he was playing the clown,—­crouching, grinning, assuming a broad dialect when he usually spoke good English—­ah! it was a heartbreaking sight, and he made more money than any waiter in the dining-room.

I did not mind the actual work or the kind of work, but it was the dishonesty and deception, the flattery and cajolery, the unnatural assumption that worker and diner had no common humanity.  It was uncanny.  It was inherently and fundamentally wrong.  I stood staring and thinking, while the other boys hustled about.  Then I noticed one fat hog, feeding at a heavily gilded trough, who could not find his waiter.  He beckoned me.  It was not his voice, for his mouth was too full.  It was his way, his air, his assumption.  Thus Caesar ordered his legionaries or Cleopatra her slaves.  Dogs recognized the gesture.  I did not.  He may be beckoning yet for all I know, for something froze within me.  I did not look his way again.  Then and there I disowned menial service for me and my people.

I would work my hands off for an honest wage, but for “tips” and “hand-me-outs,” never!  Fortson was a pious, honest fellow, who regarded “tips” as in the nature of things, being to the manner born; but the hotel that summer in other respects rather astonished even him.  He came to us much flurried one night and got us to help him with a memorial to the absentee proprietor, telling of the wild and gay doings of midnights in the rooms and corridors among “tired” business men and their prostitutes.  We listened wide-eyed and eager and wrote the filth out manfully.  The proprietor did not thank Fortson.  He did not even answer the letter.

When I finally walked out of that hotel and out of menial service forever, I felt as though, in a field of flowers, my nose had been held unpleasantly long to the worms and manure at their roots.

* * * * *

“Cursed be Canaan!” cried the Hebrew priests.  “A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”  With what characteristic complacency did the slaveholders assume that Canaanites were Negroes and their “brethren” white?  Are not Negroes servants? Ergo!  Upon such spiritual myths was the anachronism of American slavery built, and this was the degradation that once made menial servants the aristocrats among colored folk.  House servants secured some decencies of food and clothing and shelter; they could more easily reach their master’s ear; their personal abilities of character became known and bonds grew between slave and master which strengthened from friendship to love, from mutual service to mutual blood.