Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked them over indifferently as they drove toward Harlem hospital. A typical Sunday morning sight, come sun or come rain.

Old white-haired sisters bundled up like bales of cotton against the bitter cold; their equally white-haired men, stumbling along in oversize galoshes like the last herd of Uncle Toms, toddling the last mile toward salvation on half-frozen feet.

Middle-aged couples and their broods, products of the postwar generation, the prosperous generation, looking sanctimonious in their good warm clothes, going to praise the Lord for the white folks’ blessings.

Young men who hadn’t yet made it, dressed in lightweight suits and topcoats sold by color instead of quality or weight in the credit stores, with enough brown wrapping paper underneath their pastel shirts to keep them warm, laughing at the strange words of God and making like Solomon at the pretty brownskin girls.

Young women who were sure as hell going to make it or drop dead in the attempt, ashy with cold, clad in the unbelievable colors of cheap American dyes, some at that very moment catching the pneumonia which would take them before that God they were on their way to worship.

From all over town they came.

To all over town they went.

The big churches and little churches, stone churches and store-front churches, to their own built churches and to hand-me-down churches.

To Baptist churches and African Methodist Episcopal churches and African Methodist Episcopal Zionist churches; to Holy Roller churches and Father Divine churches and Daddy Grace churches, Burning Bush churches, and churches of God and Christ.

To listen to their preachers preach the word of God: fat black preachers and tall yellow preachers; straightened-haired preachers and bald-headed preachers; family preachers and playboy preachers; men preachers and lady preachers and children preachers.

To listen to any sermon their preacher cared to preach. But on this cold day it had better be hot.

Grave Digger and Coffin Ed parked their wreck in front of the Harlem Hospital and went inside to the reception desk.

They asked to speak with Casper Holmes.

The cool, young colored nurse at the desk lifted a telephone and spoke some words. She put it down and gave them a cool, remote smile. “I am sorry, but he is still in a coma,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry for us, be sorry for him,” Coffin Ed said.

Her smile froze as though the insect had talked back.

“Tell him it’s Digger Jones and Ed Johnson,” Grave Digger lisped.

She stared at the movement of his swollen lips with horrified fascination.

“Tell him we’re just ahead of the Confederates,” he went on. “Maybe that will get him out of his coma.”

Her face twisted as though she had swallowed something disagreeable.

“Confederates,” she murmured.

“You know who the Confederates are,” Coffin Ed said. “They’re the people who fought to keep us slaves.”

She smiled tentatively to prove she wasn’t sensitive about slavery jokes.

They stared at her, grave and unsmiling.