MEMPHIS: You go over there looking for a pine box and walk out with a five-thousand-dollar silver, satin-lined casket, guaranteed to be leak-proof. That’s what get me. For an extra hundred dollars he give you a twenty-year guarantee that the casket ain’t gonna leak and let the water seep in. Now how dumb can anybody get? You gonna dig up the casket twenty years later to see if it’s leaking and go back and tell West and get your hundred dollars back? The first time it rain the water’s liable to drown the corpse. You don’t know. Yet you be surprised at the number of people come out of there talking about their twenty-year guarantee. Then if that ain’t enough he charge you another hundred dollars to get a casket that lock. Like somebody gonna go down there and steal the body if it ain’t locked up. Yet they come out of there clutching this little key he give them. West the only nigger I know who can cheat and rob the people and they be happy to see him. Calling him “Mr. West.” “How you doing, Mr. West?” “Have a nice day, Mr. West.” “Good to see you, Mr. West.” He done cheated them out of four or five hundred dollars and they talking about “Have a nice day, Mr. West.”

WOLF: I don’t want West to bury me. I’ll go anywhere else. Charles. McTurner. Harris. I’ll let anybody bury me but West. Hell, I’m liable to do like the white folks do and get cremated.

MEMPHIS: What you got against West?

WOLF: I ain’t got nothing against him. I just don’t want him standing over me when I’m dead. I’d rather have a stranger standing over me.

HOLLOWAY: You ain’t gonna know nothing about it. What you care who be standing over top of you? You talk foolish. West don’t care nothing about you. The last person West buried that he cared about was his wife. He don’t care nothing about you. You just be another dead nigger to him. I doubt if West can tell one nigger from another. Man got four or five viewing rooms and don’t have no trouble keeping somebody in all of them. I remember one time he had two niggers laid out in the hallway and one on the back porch. Most of them had welfare caskets, but West don’t care cause the government pay on time. He might have to worry his money out of some of them other niggers, but the government pay quicker than the insurance companies.

MEMPHIS: Wasn’t nothing but a pine box with some cloth stretched over it. That’s what the welfare casket was.

WOLF: They ain’t changed. That’s what they is now.