Say! it’s a limit, the way a guy has got to get through this life;
He gets in a scrape if he’s single, and it’s hell to get on with a wife.
I’m just like one of a thousand that are into a tangle now,
I’d like to get out of it, Gawd knows, yes, but really I don’t know how.
In two little rooms on Fourteenth street, things are away askew,
Two little brown kiddies their daddy meet, an’ a brown girl
white clear through,
Wait at the door and wonder why I ain’t like I used to be,
While on my heart there’s an awful load, that I try not to let her see.
The Colonel says that we guys must go; we ain’t needed here no more;
Dredges now are doin’ the work that the shovels done before.
An’ I ain’t got a cent of the money saved; I sent it all to the wife,
Who went out West with a guy she loved; ’twas that one blighted my life.
Five years ago I landed here; I was broke an’ feelin’ sick,
An’ the brown girl took an’ loved me up, an’ stuck to me like a brick;
An’ now I find it an effort to stick to her likewise;
Say! any kind of a female is better than us male guys.
Say, lady! don’t you remember them words that Shakespeare said
About a feller’s sex settin’ boldly on his head?
Why didn’t Gawd make us different when He put us here below;
Why did He give me a conscience? That’s what I’d like to know.
There’s Loring, an’ Ives an’ Phelan, in the same sort of mess as me;
Loring is handsome an’ bad clear through, an’ he laughs an’
says it’s a spree.
He laughed last night when he came to the park, an’ sat with
me on a bench,
An’ he said: “Cut out that mopin’, kid; she’s only a nigger wench.”
“But what about them kids?” says I, “ain’t they part of my
flesh and blood?”
“It’s been that way with us guys,” says he, “since the time
of the ark an’ flood.
If you take the bunch to New Orleans, you’ll all get landed in gaol
For a crime that ain’t no crime at all, an’ ye can’t get out on bail.
Leave her on Fourteenth street,” says he, with a laugh that
was loud an’ rude,
“An’ some old Dutch guy will blow in some day an’ will take
care of the whole darn brood.”
But I know that she’ll curse me if I go, an’ I know that them curses fall;
God knows in my life there’s enough of woe; an’ she’s human, after all.