1 The people moved uneasily in their seats as John rose to reply.
2 The strong, hard face of the mother, with its wilderness of hair, rose before me.
3 Beggars and vulgar speculators rose to rule over them, and their children went astray.
4 Then, as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and turned his closed eyes toward the Sea.
5 If cotton rose in price, the rent rose even higher; if cotton fell, the rent remained or followed reluctantly.
6 But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs.
7 So when a tall, light-haired young man and a little talkative lady came by, he rose half hesitatingly and followed them.
8 He heard the hateful clank of their chains; he felt them cringe and grovel, and there rose within him a protest and a prophecy.
9 When cotton rose to ten cents last fall, the shrewd merchants of Dougherty County sold a thousand buggies in one season, mostly to black men.
10 He had been nettled all day, and now at this he rose with a half-smothered oath, took his hat and cane, and walked straight to the schoolhouse.
11 He leaned back and smiled toward the sea, whence rose the strange melody, away from the dark shadows where lay the noise of horses galloping, galloping on.
12 Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.
13 He quivered, swayed, and bent; then rose aloft in perfect majesty, till the people moaned and wept, wailed and shouted, and a wild shrieking arose from the corners where all the pent-up feeling of the hour gathered itself and rushed into the air.
14 John rose gloomily as the train stopped, for he was thinking of the "Jim Crow" car; he stepped to the platform, and paused: a little dingy station, a black crowd gaudy and dirty, a half-mile of dilapidated shanties along a straggling ditch of mud.
15 And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall and winter, and the full flush of the long Southern spring, till the hot winds rolled from the fetid Gulf, till the roses shivered and the still stern sun quivered its awful light over the hills of Atlanta.
16 Thus, as bard, physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under him the first church was not at first by any means Christian nor definitely organized; rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the members of each plantation, and roughly designated as Voodooism.