Clovis had savored the importance that being Roscoe Elk’s wife gave her, but after she tired of training and bullying their slaves—and they owned many more now than the half a score they had begun with—she admitted to being restless. As Roscoe acquired business property in town, she thought she saw a way of being interestingly occupied and at the same time gaining a measure of independence. She asked Roscoe to give her one of his empty stores and let her open a dress-making shop. Without discussing it, or even directly answering her, he refused with a shake of his head. But when he decided to move into the house in town, he had a sign painted and himself hammered it into the front yard beside the newly repaired brick walkway. It read: DRESSMAKING. This small touch made it all right for Negroes to live there. That no one came to Clovis to have sewing done made no difference. The suggestion had been made that the house was a place of business, not a mere residence. When the townspeople were used to the Elks living there, Roscoe removed the sign.

His sons were grown men, twenty-two and twenty-three years old. Junior, as his eldest was called, had overcome or lost the laziness of his adolescence and entered usefully into Roscoe’s business concerns. But the younger son, Alonzo, was idly inclined, and Roscoe declared that Clovis had babied and spoiled him. When he began to sneak off with low white companions; when his dissolute behavior became more than an occasional wild oat, and the beatings Roscoe had tried were no longer feasible because of the boy’s maturity, Roscoe put him out of the house in town and set him to live on the Anderson Place—no one would call it anything else, and even Roscoe thought of it by its old name—and learn farming. Because it gave him an illusion of freedom, Alonzo went to work, and it began to look as though Roscoe’s idea was a sound one.

Clovis elected one of the older women she had trained to be housekeeper for Alonzo. Maude was a motherly seeming soul, who talked more than she worked, and indeed had a thorough understanding of how to make talk pass as work. Once Clovis left her on her own, she complained to Alonzo that she needed someone to help her. He took the comeliest female slave from her barnyard chores, a girl named Geraldine, and she served as old Maude’s helper and as Alonzo’s mistress. He did not care for her, but she was conveniently there when his flesh felt the need of woman. By alternately consorting in the friendliest way with the people who worked the farm, and then bullying them when he himself had gone too far toward spoiling them with indulgence, he completely confused them and made them despise him.