Listen again."
To clapping of hands in unison, the following words were sung:
"New-come buckra,
He get sick,
He tak fever,
He be die;
He be die.
New-come buckra--"
"Well, it may be a chant of the plague, but it's lacking in poetry," she
remarked. "Doesn't it seem so to you?"
"No, I certainly shouldn't go so far as that. Think of how much of a
story is crowded into those few words. No waste, nothing thrown away.
It's all epic, or that's my view, anyhow," said the governor. "If you
look out on those who are singing it, you'd see they are resting from
their labours; that they are fighting the ennui which most of us feel
when we rest from our labours. Let us look at them."
The governor stood up and came to the open French windows that faced the
fields of sugar-cane. In the near distance were clumps of fruit trees,
of hedges of lime and flowering shrubs, rows of orange trees, mangoes,
red and purple, forbidden-fruit and grapefruit, the large scarlet fruit
of the acqui, the avocado-pear, the feathering bamboo, and the Jack-fruit
tree, with its enormous fruit like pumpkins.
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