Hot bands of light streamed murkily from the doors and windows of the office. From the press-room downstairs there was an ascending roar as the big press mounted to its capacity. As he entered the office and drank in the warm tides of steel and ink that soaked the air, he awoke suddenly, his light-drugged limbs solidifying with a quick shock, as would some aerial spirit, whose floating body corporealizes the instant it touches earth. The carriers, waiting in a boisterous line, filed up to the circulation manager’s desk, depositing their collections, cold handfuls of greasy coin. Seated beneath a green-shaded light, he ran swiftly down their books, totalling up their figures and counting nickels, dimes, and pennies into little spooned trays of a drawer. Then he gave to each a scrawled order for his morning quota.
They ran downstairs, eager as whippets to be off, brandishing their slips at a sullen counter whose black fingers galloped accurately across the stiff ridges of a great sheaf. He allowed them two “extras.” If the carrier was not scrupulous, he increased his number of spare copies by keeping on his book the names of a half-dozen discontinued subscribers. These surplus copies were always good for coffee and pie with the lunchman, or as tribute to a favorite policeman, fireman, or motorman.
In the press-pit Harry Tugman loafed under their stare comfortably, a fat trickle of cigarette smoke coiling from his nostrils. He glanced over the press with professional carelessness, displaying his powerful chest with its thick bush, which lay a dark blot under his sweat-wet undershirt. An assistant pressman climbed nimbly among roaring pistons and cylinders, an oilcan and a bunch of waste in his hand. A broad river of white paper rushed constantly up from the cylinder and leaped into a mangling chaos of machinery whence it emerged a second later, cut, printed, folded and stacked, sliding along a board with a hundred others in a fattening sheaf.
Machine-magic! Why not men, like that? Doctor, surgeon, poet, priest—stacked, folded, printed.
Harry Tugman cast away his wet fragment of cigarette with a luxurious grimace. The carriers eyed him reverently. Once he had knocked a sub-pressman down for sitting in his chair. He was Boss. He got $55 a week. If he was not pleased he could get work at any time on the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Louisville Courier Journal, the Atlanta Constitution, the Knoxville Sentinel, the Norfolk Pilot. He could travel.
In a moment more they were out on the streets, hobbling along rapidly under the accustomed weight of the crammed canvas bags.
He was most desperately afraid of failure. He listened with constricted face to Eliza’s admonition.
“Spruce up, boy! Spruce up! Make them think you are somebody!”
He had little confidence in himself; he recoiled in advance from the humiliation of dismissal. He feared the sabre-cut of language, and before his own pride he drew back and was afraid.
For three mornings he accompanied the retiring carrier, gathering his mind to focal intensity while he tried to memorize each stereotyped movement of the delivery, tracing again and again the labyrinthine web of Niggertown, wreaking his plan out among the sprawled chaos of clay and slime, making incandescent those houses to which a paper was delivered, and forgetting the others. Years later, alone in darkness, when he had forgotten the twisted anarchy of that pattern, he still remembered a corner where he left his bag while he climbed a spur of hill, a bank down which he clambered to three rotting shacks, a high porched house into which accurately he shot his folded block of news.
The retiring carrier was a robust country boy of seventeen who had been given better employment at the paper office. His name was Jennings Ware. He was tough, good-humored, a little cynical, and he smoked a great many cigarettes. He was clothed in vitality and comfort. He taught his pupil when and where to expect the prying face of “Foxy,” how to escape discovery under the lunchroom counter, and how to fold a paper and throw it with the speed and accuracy of a ball.
In the fresh prenatal morning they began their route, walking down the steep hill of Valley Street into tropical sleep, past the stabled torpor of black sleepers, past all the illicit loves, the casual and innumerable adulteries of Niggertown. As the stiff block of paper thudded sharply on the flimsy porch of a shack, or smacked the loose boarding of a door, they were answered by a long sullen moan of discontent. They sniggered.
“Check this one off,” said Jennings Ware, “if you can’t collect next time. She owes for six weeks now.”
“This one,” he said, flipping a paper quietly on a door mat, “is good pay. They’re good niggers. You’ll get your money every Wednesday.”
“There’s a High Yaller in here,” he said, hurling the paper against the door with a whizzing smack and smiling, as a young full-meated woman’s yell of indignation answered, a thin devil’s grin. “You can have that if you want it.”
A wan smile of fear struggled across Eugene’s mouth. Jennings Ware looked at him shrewdly, but did not press him. Jennings Ware was a good-hearted boy.
“She’s a pretty good old girl,” he said. “You’ve got a right to a few deadheads. Take it out in trade.”
They walked on down the dark unpaved street, folding papers rapidly during the intervals between delivery.
“It’s a hell of a route,” said Jennings Ware. “When it rains it’s terrible. You’ll go into mud up to your knees. And you can’t collect from half the bastards.” He hurled a paper viciously.
“But, oh man,” he said, after a moment. “If you want Jelly Roll you’ve come to the right place. I ain’t kidding you!”
“With—with niggers?” Eugene whispered, moistening his dry lips.
Jennings Ware turned his red satirical
