Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment

[132] have been a caravan upon the desert. Soon we debouched upon the “Shell Road,” the wagon-train drew on one side into the fog, and by the time the sun appeared the music ceased, the men took the “route step,” and the fun began.

The “route step” is an abandonment of all military strictness, and nothing is required of the men but to keep four abreast, and not lag behind. They are not required to keep step, though, with the rhythmical ear of our soldiers, they almost always instinctively did so; talking and singing are allowed, and of this privilege, at least, they eagerly availed themselves. On this day they were at the top of exhilaration. There was one broad grin from one end of the column to the other; it might soon have been a caravan of elephants instead of camels, for the ivory and the blackness; the chatter and the laughter almost drowned the tramp of feet and the clatter of equipments. At cross-roads and plantation gates the colored people thronged to see us pass; every one found a friend and a greeting. “How you do, aunty?” “Huddy (how d'ye), Budder Benjamin?” “How you find yourself dis mornin‘, Tittawisa (Sister Louisa)?” Such salutations rang out to everybody, known or unknown. In return, venerable, kerchiefed matrons courtesied laboriously to every one, with an unfailing “Bress de Lord, budder.” Grave little boys, blacker than ink, shook hands with our laughing and utterly unmanageable drummers, who greeted them with this sure word of prophecy, “Dem's de drummers for de nex‘ war” Pretty mulatto girls ogled and coquetted, and made eyes, as Thackeray would say, at half the young fellows in the battalion. Meantime the singing was brisk along the whole column, and when I sometimes