This is my take on this song.
This story starts in the American south in the late 1940s… I is about a poor Afro-American teenager who has a natural talent for boxing. “When I left my home and family I was no more than a boy” some rednecks come looking for trouble and find it… He has to escape through the woods with the KKK after him.
That is why he is “In the company of strangers in the quiet of the railway station running scared” this is a railway station a few counties away from his home, hoping they do not catch him. Waiting to board a train that will eventually take him to New York.
Once in the city he goes to Harlem … where there is already a lot of Afro – Americans ,making their homes there “Laying low seeking out the poorer quarters where the ragged people go, seeking out the places only they would know” a place to sleep, a meal maybe some work.
“Asking only work mans wages I come looking for a job but I get no offers” The racism of the time was involved here. “Just a come on from the whores on 7th Avenue, I do declare there were times I was so lonesome I took some comfort there” I feel there was a friendship between him and some of the working girls … giving him advice .
Now the Mafia controlled professional boxing…and became interested in the young man. The KKK was active in every state, but the Mafia would have told them to back off . This young man would have no choice but to work for the Mafia” I am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told, I have squandered my resistance for a pocket full of mumbles such are promises ,all lies and jest, but a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”.
This describes his career as a boxer… a hard way to make a living” In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade, and he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down or cut him , till he cried out in his anger and his shame, I am leaving I am leaving but the fighter still remains”. He will always have a reputation as a fighter long after he has retired.
Many years later he has retired from boxing…. “laying out my winter clothes and wishing I was gone going home where the New York winters aren’t bleeding me ,leading me going home…” He has saved enough money to retire on, maybe working as a bouncer for a nightclub. He cannot go home ,everyone he knew has died or moved on…. it is not his home any more.
Geoffrey Totton
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