We got four Negroes on the council now and Doc Booker was mayor twicet before me. We got Negroes on the police force, and colored and white mix in the hotel and in the whorehouses. The Justice Clarion claimed Annadel is like “Sodom and Gomorrah, a den of violence, drunkenness, depravity, and miscegenation.” Last couple of years they added “radicalism” to their list. What they don’t like is that this here is the one place in all these coalfields where a man can be free, speak his mind, do like he pleases. Sure we got problems. The police is busy most nights breaking up fights, and Doc does a lots of business on people that been shot. But it beats what happens other places.

One thing I tried to teach Rondal is to respect the coloreds and the foreigners. He was raised up wrong that way. And I’ll say this for Isom, it don’t make no difference to him the color of a man’s skin, nor how much money he has. Isom likes everybody.

Doc Booker tends the colored people at Jenkinjones as well as Annadel. The coal camp doctor at Jenkinjones won’t see Negroes, and Lytton Davidson didn’t want to pay for a doctor just for coloreds. That is the only reason Doc Booker is allowed to hang around Jenkinjones.

Winter of 1904 when they was real bad cholera, Doc begged medicine from my drugstore for his patients at Jenkinjones. Later on, when the danger was over, he took me on his rounds to meet some of the folks I’d helped.

When we got off the train at Jenkinjones, a mine guard stopped us. The brown handle of a pistol showed at his belt.

“What was you doin on the nigger car?” he demanded.

“Dont I look nigger?” I held my hand close to his face. “See them half-moons under my fingernails? That means nigger blood.”

“What?” He glared at me suspiciously.

“Aint you never heard that? Ask Doc here.”

“That’s right.” Doc nodded his head solemnly. “You got one drop of Negro blood and it show up in your fingernails.”

We left the man anxiously studying his own hands and hiked up the creek toward colored row. The massive brick company store blocked our way, straddled the narrow holler like a setting hen squatted down to guard a nest full of eggs. We passed it on a path that rimmed the creek bed.

I sat on rickety chairs, in little rooms whose walls were blackened with soot from stove chimneys, while Doc pressed his stethoscope to chests that heaved patiently. Sometimes he would look at me while he listened and raise his eyebrows. His eyes, what you call the whites of the eyes, was actually yellow, like they was stained with tobacco juice.

“What this boy been havin to eat?” he would ask.

“Cornbread and gravy. He spit it up.”

“Can you git a soup bone?”