“Look-it, there’ll be plenty of work, plenty land—all the work and all the land them niggers was taking up. We’ll be doing right well soon as we get arranged.” Stewart was sweating now, as he always did, drinking or no, hot weather or cold, and pulled his handkerchief from his pocket.

“But there might be too much work and too much land.” Loomis pushed his hat forward on his brow and tilted his chair back against the wall of the building. “We might not have enough folks to do it all. That’s some economics I learned upstate. That means we won’t have enough food. There’ll be a parcel of land nobody can use. There’s always been enough land for everybody, leastways enough to break your back on. This ain’t jap-an; you don’t see nobody planting up on the sides of the Ridge, using a rope to keep him from falling off.”

“We’ll still be better off.” Stewart turned around, squinting to make out Loomis in the shadows of the porch. “Take Thomason there. He’s running the only store in Sutton now. Before, there was two; that nigger up there, he had a store. Now Thomason’s got all the business.”

Loomis shook his head. “Yes, but there’s less than half the customers.”

He could not stop Stewart. “And look at Undertaker Hagaman. He’s the only undertaker around now. We all got to get buried one day. I hear tell how even some white folks in Sutton used that nigger undertaker.”

“I just ain’t sure it’s all to the good. You never had no WHITE folks sweeping around in stores, only colored. You getting a job sweeping now, Stewart? That’s the only job you really good for.”

Some of the men laughed.

Bobby-Joe snapped his fingers; the sound carried, echoed. “That’s it!”

They all turned toward him. He had not been talking, though he had taken a few drinks. He sat with his feet planted at the edge of the Highway, resting one elbow on the naked knee showing through a hole in his coveralls. “I told you-all there was more to it than that.”

“Look there, Loomis. Bobby-Joe’s talking to hisself already and he ain’t had but a couple swallows.” Thomason was sitting on a chair he had carried out of the store. “Son, you shouldn’t drink if you can’t hold your liquor no better than that.”

“Shut up!” Bobby-Joe was savage. “You too drunk or stupid to see what’s really going on around here.” He paused. “Now, what you suppose he doing down here if it ain’t to carry in all this trouble? That’s it! I knowed there was more to it than that.”