After that he did not like to go to church. Still, his mother would make him go every Sunday morning; and since he was only thirteen and very obedient, he could find no excuse not to leave the house. But after leaving with his brother Edward, he would not go all the way to church again. He would make Edward, who was a year younger, leave him at a certain corner a few blocks away from the church where Saturday-night drunks were sleeping or waiting in misery for the bars to open on Monday morning. His own father had been that way and Thomas knew that the waiting was very hard. He felt good toward the men, being almost one of them, and liked to listen to them curse and threaten each other lazily in the hot Georgia sun. He liked to look into their faces and wonder what was in their minds that made them not care about anything except the bars opening on Monday morning. He liked to try to distinguish the different shades of black in their hands and arms and faces. And he liked the smell of them. But most of all he liked it when they talked to him and gave him an excuse for not walking down the street two blocks to the Baptist Church.

“Don’ you ever get married, boy,” Arthur, one of the meaner drunks with a missing eye, told him on several occasions.

The first time he had said it the boy had asked: “Why not?”

“Cause a bitch ain’t shit, man. You mind you don’ get married now, hear? A bitch’ll take all yo’ money and then throw you out in the street!”

“Damn straight!” Leroy, another drunk much darker than Arthur and a longshoreman, said. “That’s all they fit for, takin’ a man’s money and runnin’ around.”

Thomas would sit on the stoop of an old deserted house with the men lying on the ground below him, too lazy to brush away the flies that came at them from the urine-soaked dirt on the hot Sunday mornings, and he would look and listen and consider. And after a few weeks of this he found himself very afraid of girls.