“And I have revised the old rule, to read, ‘In Rome, do as the Romans do, but you don’t have to claim that you invented it.’”
* * * * *
Then the race-talk became a little hysterical, to Neil a little confusing. It was broken by the arrival of Sugar Gowse, with lunch-pail.
Sugar had been born to the Louisiana canefields, but he had picked up a knowledge of tools and lathes. He was on his way now to the Wargate plant, where he was a machinist on the graveyard shift. Since his work was faultless, he believed that Wargate’s would keep him on in peace time and, as naive as Ash Davis, he had bought a two-room shack where he “bached it” with his motherless son, Bobby, the fleet-footed and antic dancer, the boogie-woogie wizard of the Five Points.
His Black Belt accent was like blackjack molasses and Neil could but half understand him. He looked like an Indian, with thin lips, thin black hawk nose; tall and straight; an impression of Judge Cass Timberlane cut in basalt. He was wearing now the blue-denim blouse and overalls that were romantic as all work-clothes are.
When they tried to drag him into the race-talk, Sugar said, no, he knew nothing about discrimination, except that here or any other place, the colored folks were always the last to be hired and the first to be fired, so why worry?
Neil wondered, “But can you stand our cold winters?”
“Mister, it’s colder in a Louisiana shack, full of holes, at forty above than it is here in my plastered house at forty below.”
“Sugar just wants room to rest his hat. He’s sensible enough not to have the constant feeling of insecurity and futility that gets Martha and me down,” said Ash.
“You educated fellows are too touchy, Doc. You don’t know how a worker feels,” said Sugar.
“Worker!” Ash protested. “When I got out of college, I was cook on a private car—that ineffable official and his booze!—and when I finished graduate work in chemistry, my first job was in a patent-medicine dump, where I packed boxes and loaded ‘em on trucks when I wasn’t making up formulae.”
Clem Brazenstar argued with Sugar, “You get touchy, too, when some woman changes her seat because you sit next to her in a bus. Sophie! My eagle!”
A brownskin girl had slipped into the room, and Mary announced to Neil, “This is Sophie Concord. She’s a district nurse…. Mr. Kingsblood, a new friend.”
“I’ve seen Mr. Kingsblood in the bank,” said Sophie, and added, as though she was trying not to, “being efficient and handsome!” She looked at him with no signs of anesthesia, and he was certain that she was the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen and the least frigid.
* * * * *