THOMAS BROWN GOT HIS FIRST JOB when he was thirteen. Both he and his brother worked at the Feinberg Super Market, owned by Milton Feinberg and his sister, Sarah Feinberg. Between the two of them they made a good third of a man’s salary. Thomas had worked himself up from carry-out boy and was now in the Produce Department, while Edward, who was still new, remained a carry-out boy. Thomas enjoyed the status he had over the other boys. He enjoyed not having to be put outside on the street like the other boys up front whenever business was slow and Milton Feinberg wanted to save money. He enjoyed being able to work all week after school while the boys up front had to wait for weekends when there would be sales and a lot of shoppers. He especially liked being a regular boy because then he had to help mop and wax the floors of the store every Sunday morning and could not go to church. He knew that his mother was not pleased when he had been taken into the mopping crew because now he had an excuse not to attend church. But being on the crew meant making an extra three dollars and he knew that she was pleased with the money. Still, she made him pray at night, and especially on Sunday.

His job was bagging potatoes. It was very simple. Every day after school and all day Saturday he would come in the air-conditioned produce room, put on a blue smock, take a fifty-pound sack of potatoes off a huge stack of sacks, slit open the sack and let the potatoes fall into a shopping cart next to a scale, and proceed to put them into five- and ten-pound plastic bags. It was very simple; he could do it in his sleep. Then he would spend the rest of the day bagging potatoes and looking out of the big window, which separated the produce room from the rest of the store, at the customers. They were mostly white, and he had finally learned why they did not speak to him in the street. He had learned that after he came to the supermarket and now he did not mind going to the bathroom, knowing, when he did go, that all of them had to go, just as he did, in the secret places they called home. They had been speaking to him for a long time now, on this business level, and he had formed some small friendships grounded in this.