Uncle Bud scratched his head again. 'Wal, suh, I'd buy me a brand new waggin. An' then I reckon I'd go to Africa,' he said, adding underneath his breath: 'Where wouldn't any white mother-rapers like you be flicking with me all the time.'
Naturally the cops didn't hear the last, but they laughed at the first and drove on.
Uncle Bud found a spot beside an abandoned truck down by the river and went to sleep. When he awakened the sun was high. At about the same time Barry Waterfield was approaching Colonel Calhoun on Seventh Avenue, he was approaching the junkyard alongside the river south of the bridge.
It was a fenced-in enclosure about piles of scrap iron and dilapidated wooden sheds housing other kinds of junk. Uncle Bud stopped before a small gate at one side of the main office building, a one-storey wooden box fronting on the street. A big black hairless dog the size of a Great Dane came silently to the gate and stared at him through yellow eyes.
'Nice doggie,' Uncle Bud said through the wire gate.
The dog didn't blink.
A shabbily dressed, unshaven white man came from the office and led the dog away and chained it up. Then he returned and said, 'All right, Uncle Bud, what you got there?'
Uncle Bud looked at the white man through the corners of his eyes. 'A bale of cotton, Mr Goodman.'
Mr Goodman was startled. 'A bale of cotton?'
'Yassuh,' Uncle Bud said proudly as he uncovered the bale. 'Genuwine Mississippi cotton.'
Mr Goodman unlocked the gate and came outside to look at it. Most of the cotton was obscured by the burlap covering. But he pulled out a few shreds from the seams and smelled it. 'How do you know it's Mississippi cotton?'
'I'd know Mississippi cotton anywhere I seed it,' Uncle Bud stated flatly. 'Much as I has picked.'
'Ain't much of this to be seen,' Mr Goodman observed.
'I can smell it,' Uncle Bud said. 'It smell like nigger-sweat.'
Mr Goodman sniffed at the cotton again. 'Anything special about that?'
'Yassuh, makes it stronger.'
Two colored workmen in overalls came up. 'Cotton!' one exclaimed. 'Lord, lord.'
'Makes you homesick, don't it?' the other one said.
'Homesick for your mama,' the first one said, looking at him sidewise.
'Watch out, man, I don't play the dozzens,' the second one said.
Mr Goodman knew they were just kidding. 'All right, get it on the scales,' he ordered.
The bale weighed four hundred and eighty-seven pounds.
'I'll give you five dollars for it,' Mr Goodman said.
'Five bones!' Uncle Bud exclaimed indignantly. 'Why, dis cotton is worth thirty-nine cents a pound.'
'You're thinking about the First World War,' Mr Goodman said. 'Nowadays they're giving cotton away.'
The two workmen exchanged glances silently.
'I ain't giving dis away,' Uncle Bud said.
'Where can I sell a bale of cotton?' Mr Goodman said. 'Who wants unprocessed cotton? Not even good for bullets no more. Nowadays they shoot atoms. It ain't like as if it was drugstore cotton.'
Uncle Bud was silent.
'All right, ten dollars then,' Mr Goodman said.
'Fifty dollars,' Uncle Bud countered.
' Mein Gott, he wants fifty dollars yet!' Mr Goodman appealed to his colored workmen. 'That's more than I'd pay for brass.'
The colored workmen stood with their hands in their pockets, blank-faced and silent. Uncle Bud kept a stubborn silence. All three colored men were against Mr Goodman. He felt trapped and guilty, as though he'd been caught taking advantage of Uncle Bud.
'Since it's you, I'll give you fifteen dollars.'
'Forty,' Uncle Bud muttered.
Mr Goodman gestured eloquently. 'What am I, your father, to give you money for nothing?' the three colored men stared at him accusingly. 'You think I am Abraham Lincoln instead of Abraham Goodman?' The colored men didn't think he was funny. 'Twenty,' Mr Goodman said desperately and turned towards the office.
'Thirty,' Uncle Bud said.
The colored workmen shifted the bale of cotton as though asking whether to take it in or put it back.
'Twenty-five,' Mr Goodman said angrily. 'And I should have my head examined.'
'Sold,' Uncle Bud said.
About that time the Colonel had finished his interview with Barry and was having his breakfast. It had been sent from a 'home-cooking' restaurant down the street. The Colonel seemed to be demonstrating to the colored people outside, many of whom were now peeking through the cracks between the posters covering most of the window, what they could be eating for breakfast if they signed up with him and went back south.
He had a bowl of grits, swimming with butter; four fried eggs sunny side up; six fried home-made sausages; six down-home biscuits, each an inch thick, with big slabs of butter stuck between the halves; and a pitcher of sorghum molasses. The Colonel had brought his own food with him and merely paid the restaurant to cook it. Alongside his heaping plate stood a tall bourbon whisky highball.
The colored people, watching the Colonel shovel grits, eggs and sausage into his mouth and chomp off a hunk of biscuit, felt nostalgic. But when they saw him cover all his food with a thick layer of sorghum molasses, many felt absolutely homesick.
'I wouldn't mind going down home for dinner ever day,' one joker said. 'But I wouldn't want to stay overnight.'
'Baby, seeing that scoff makes my stomach feel lak my throat is cut,' another replied.
Bill Davis, the clean-cut young man who was Reverend O'Malley's recruiting agent, entered the Back-to-the- Southland office as Colonel Calhoun was taking an oversize mouthful of grits, eggs and sausage mixed with molasses. He paused before the Colonel's desk, erect and purposeful.
'Colonel Calhoun, I am Mister Davis,' he said. 'I represent the Back-to-Africa movement of Reverend O'Malley's. I want a word with you.'
The Colonel looked up at Bill Davis through cold blue eyes, continuing to chew slowly and deliberately like a camel chewing its cud. But he took much longer in his appraisal than he had done with Barry Waterfield. When he had finished chewing, he washed his mouth with a sip from his bourbon highball, cleared his throat and said, 'Come back in half an hour, after I've et my breakfast.'
'What I have to say to you I'm going to say now,' Bill Davis said.
The Colonel looked up at him again. The blond young man who had been standing in the background moved closer. The young colored men at their desks in the rear became nervous.
'Well, what can I do for you… er… what did you say your name was?' the Colonel said.
'My name is Mister Davis, and I'll make it short and sweet. Get out of town! '
The blond young man started around the desk and Bill Davis got set to hit him, but the Colonel waved him back.
'Is that all you got to say, my boy?'
'That's all, and I'm not your boy,' Bill Davis said.
'Then you've said it,' the Colonel said and deliberately began eating again.
When Bill emerged, the black people parted to let him pass. They didn't know what he had said to the Colonel, but whatever it was they were for him. He had stood right up to that ol' white man and tol' him something to his teeth. They respected him.
A half-hour later the pickets moved in. They marched up and down Seventh Avenue, holding aloft a Back-to- Africa banner and carrying placards reading: Goddamn White Man GO! GO! GO! Black Man STAY! STAY! STAY! There were twenty-five in the picket line and two or three hundred followers. The pickets formed a circle in front of the Back-to-the-Southland office and chanted as they marched, 'Go, white man, go while you can… Go, white man, go while you can… ' Bill Davis stood to one side between two elderly colored men.
Colored people poured into the vicinity from far and wide, overflowed the sidewalks and spilled into the street. Traffic was stopped. The atmosphere grew tense, pregnant with premonition. A black youth ran forward
