The entire story of the casual laborer will, of course, have to be told elsewhere in thorough studies of migration and case studies of many individuals. It is a remarkable story, sometimes unbelievable. It is not the purpose of this chapter to go into the matter of causes, but to present a picture of the workaday songster as a sort of cumulative example of the whole story of this volume. It is true that his early home life, his training, his experience, his relation to the whites, have all influenced him greatly. It is true also that there is often slack work, poor conditions of housing and work, little recreation, small wages, and always a call to some better place. But we are concerned with these here only as they are a part of the background of the picture. Here is a type perhaps more representative of the Negro common man than any other. Now a youngster of eight, father and mother dead, off to Texas to an uncle, then--“po’ mistreated boy”--he goes to Louisiana, then to Mississippi, then to Georgia, across South Carolina, back home to North Carolina, then off to Philadelphia, to Pittsburg, to Ohio, to Chicago, then back to the East and Harlem and back South again. He is typical of a part of the Negro movement of the decade. But there is continuously a stream of moving laborers from country to town, from town to town, from city to city, from state to state, from South to North. Here is hardship, but withal adventure, romance, and blind urge for survival. As an example of this worker and songster we present John Wesley Gordon, alias Left Wing[86] Gordon, commonly called “Wing.” He is very real, and one could scarcely imagine a better summary of the lonesome road, if made to order. Recent popular volumes portraying the _species hobo_ show no wanderers arrayed like these black men of the lonesome road. Walt Whitman’s Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road Healthy and free, the world before me, The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose would seem a gentle taunt to Left Wing Gordon on the red roads of Georgia or on the Seaboard rods in “sweet ol’ Alabam’.” He had, at the last writing, given excellent tale of working, loafing, singing his way through thirty-eight states of the union, with such experience and adventure as would make a white man an epic hero. “You see, boss, I started travelin’ when I wus ’leven years ol’ an’ now I’ll be thirty this comin’ August 26th. I didn’t have no father an’ mother, so I jes’ started somewheres. I’d work fer folks, an’ they wouldn’t treat me right, so I moved on. An’, Lawd, cap’n, I ain’t stopped yet.” And so he hadn’t, for when on the morrow we came to put the finishing touches on his story, a fellow laborer said, “Law’, boss, Wing done gone to Philadelphia.” [86] So called because he had lost his right arm.