The streets of Baltimore city can be deathly chilling on a late February night. Bells draped from Joe's harnessing sound more like metallic walnut hulls than the gay, welcoming "tink-tingle, tink-tingle" of pony bells city people sometimes hear on warm day. The steel rims of the wagon wheels grate along macadam streets now frozen harsh in winter, soon to be softened in the coming spring. Joe's gait is rhythmic and easy, providing the only melodic line in an otherwise strangely hollow urban symphony. Huddled on the wagon seat is Paul Diggs, "Sonny" to just about everyone who knows him, a Baltimore arabber.

(According to "Sonny," White people used the term "huckster" when he was a boy, but Black people always referred to vendors and traders who worked from a horse or pony-drawn cart as an arab (pronounced ay-rab) or an arabber. The verb is to arab.)

Responding to the warmth of Joe's gaited meter, "Sonny" Diggs launches into an extemporaneous recitative that chronicles the feelings, the passing thoughts, the strong sense of personal worth this singular man experiences in a multitudinous urban environment.