Melanctha Herbert wanted very much to know and yet she feared the knowledge.  As she grew older she often stayed a good deal longer, and sometimes it was almost a balanced struggle, but she always made herself escape.

Next to the railroad yard it was the shipping docks that Melanctha loved best when she wandered.  Often she was alone, sometimes she was with some better kind of black girl, and she would stand a long time and watch the men working at unloading, and see the steamers do their coaling, and she would listen with full feeling to the yowling of the free swinging negroes, as they ran, with their powerful loose jointed bodies and their childish savage yelling, pushing, carrying, pulling great loads from the ships to the warehouses.

The men would call out, “Say, Sis, look out or we’ll come and catch yer,” or “Hi, there, you yaller girl, come here and we’ll take you sailin’.”  And then, too, Melanctha would learn to know some of the serious foreign sailors who told her all sorts of wonders, and a cook would sometimes take her and her friends over a ship and show where he made his messes and where the men slept, and where the shops were, and how everything was made by themselves, right there, on ship board.

Melanctha loved to see these dark and smelly places.  She always loved to watch and talk and listen with men who worked hard.  But it was never from these rougher people that Melanctha tried to learn the ways that lead to wisdom.  In the daylight she always liked to talk with rough men and to listen to their lives and about their work and their various ways of doing, but when the darkness covered everything all over, Melanctha would meet, and stand, and talk with a clerk or a young shipping agent who had seen her watching, and so it was that she would try to learn to understand.

And then Melanctha was fond of watching men work on new buildings.  She loved to see them hoisting, digging, sawing and stone cutting.  Here, too, in the daylight, she always learned to know the common workmen.  “Heh, Sis, look out or that rock will fall on you and smash you all up into little pieces.  Do you think you would make a nice jelly?” And then they would all laugh and feel that their jokes were very funny.  And “Say, you pretty yaller girl, would it scare you bad to stand up here on top where I be?  See if you’ve got grit and come up here where I can hold you.  All you got to do is to sit still on that there rock that they’re just hoistin’, and then when you get here I’ll hold you tight, don’t you be scared Sis.”

Sometimes Melanctha would do some of these things that had much danger, and always with such men, she showed her power and her break neck courage.  Once she slipped and fell from a high place.  A workman caught her and so she was not killed, but her left arm was badly broken.

All the men crowded around her.  They admired her boldness in doing and in bearing pain when her arm was broken.  They all went along with her with great respect to the doctor, and then they took her home in triumph and all of them were bragging about her not squealing.