“Ain’t no use trying to fight it,” Uncle T. Boone told Doc in the crew car one night, “the black waiter is doomed. Look at all the good restaurants, the class restaurants in Chicago. You can’t work in them. Them white waiters got those jobs sewed up fine.”

“I can be a waiter anywhere,” says Doc. “I know the business and I like it and I can do it anywhere.”

“The black waiter is doomed,” Uncle T. says again. “The whites is taking over the service in the good places. And when they run you off of here, you won’t have no place to go.”

“They won’t run me off of here,” says Doc. “As long as I give the right service they can’t touch me.”

“You’re a goddamn fool!” says Uncle T. “You’re a nigger and you ain’t got no rights except what the Union says you have. And that ain’t worth a damn because when the Commissary finally gets you, those niggers won’t lift a finger to help you.”

“Leave off him,” I say to Boone. “If anybody ought to be put off it’s you. You ain’t had your back straight for thirty years. You even make the crackers sick the way you keep bowing and folding your hands and saying, ‘Thank you, Mr. Boss.’ Fifty years ago that would of got you a bigger tip,” I say, “but now it ain’t worth a shit. And every time you do it the crackers hate you. And every time I see you serving with that skullcap on I hate you. The Union said we didn’t have to wear them eighteen years ago! Why can’t you take it off?”

Boone just sat on his bunk with his skullcap in his lap, leaning against his big belly. He knew I was telling the truth and he knew he wouldn’t change. But he said: “That’s the trouble with the Negro waiter today. He ain’t got no humility. And as long as he don’t have humility, he keeps losing the good jobs.”

Doc had climbed into the first waiter’s bunk in his longjohns and I got in the second waiter’s bunk under him and lay there. I could hear him breathing. It had a hard sound. He wasn’t well and all of us knew it.

“Doc?” I said in the dark.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t mind Boone, Doc. He’s a dead man. He just don’t know it.”

“We all are,” Doc said.

“Not you,” I said.

“What’s the use? He’s right. They’ll get me in the end.”

“But they ain’t done it yet.”

“They’ll get me. And they know it and I know it. I can even see it in old Crouse’s eyes. He knows they’re gonna get me.”

“Why don’t you get a woman?”