o meals (dinner and
supper) and was permitted to carry away from the kitchen all the cooked
food that remained after the guests had eaten. This privilege had grown
out of the custom of the colored help in the South having their "man"
to feed. I had several men to feed. My "gang" was still looking for work
and not finding any. Times were desperate. For five cents a man could
get a glass of beer and floor room to sleep on in a lodging-house for
homeless men. This was called a "Five Cent Flop" house. My pals were not
able at times to raise the five cents a day to buy sleeping quarters. It
was late fall and too cold to sleep in the "jungle" down by the levee.
The poor fellows were able to stave off starvation by visiting various
free lunches during the day. Every night I arrived with my dollar, and
that meant beer and beds for a score. I also brought along a flour sack
half full of biscuits, cold pancakes, corn bread, chicken necks and
wings and scraps of roasts and steaks. These hungry men, with their
schooners of beer, made a feast of these scraps. My loyalty in coming
every night and giving them everything I could scrape together touched
them deeply. They regarded me as deserving special honor, and while they
believed in democracy as a general proposition, they voted that it would
be carrying equality too far if they permitted me to get no more out
of my work than all the rest got. So they decided that I was to have a
fifteen-cent bed each night instead of a five-cent flop with the rest
of them. And I was assigned to the royal suite of that flop house, which
consisted of a cot with a mosquito bar over it.

At this time they were holding "kangaroo" court in the New Orleans
jail. Every vagrant picked up by the police was tried and sentenced and
shipped out to a chain-gang camp. Nearly every man tried was convicted.
And there were plenty of camp bosses ready to "buy" every vagrant the
officers could run in. My bunch down at the flop house was in deadly
terror of being "kangarooed" and sent to a peon camp in the rice swamps.

One day when I was renewing the fuel in the room of a Mrs. Hubbard from
Pittsburgh, I found no one in the apartment and Mrs. Hubbard's pearls
and other jewels lying on the dresser. Immediately I was terrified with
thought of the kangaroo court. I knew that the jewels were valued at
several thousands of dollars. If I went away some one else might come
into the room and possibly steal the jewels, for they