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I paid the bill for our lunch, and Jacob left two bits for Miss Fanny. Then he headed off up Commerce Street to help Wylie frame a new roof for the front porch of the town hall.
An old black man stepped off the sidewalk as Jacob passed, not to avoid a collision, but simply making the customary show of respect. Black men of all ages had been stepping down off sidewalks to get out of my way since I was five years old.
I rode the bicycle back to Maybelle’s, changed my shirt, and set off on foot for the Eudora Quarters. On my way out, I made sure to tell Maybelle I had some interviews to attend to.
I considered trying to hire a horse and buggy, and couldn’t think of anywhere in town to do such a thing. My father had three perfectly good horses in his barn, of course, but I was determined to do what I came to do without him.
ABRAHAM CROSS, EUDORA QUARTERS said the slip of paper the president had given me.
It was time for me to meet this Mr. Cross.
Chapter 32
I KNEW THE STREETS of the Quarters almost as well as I knew the rest of Eudora. I knew the history of how it came to be. After the war, the slaves from all the plantations and farms in the vicinity of Eudora had been freed. Most of them had either left their previous lodgings or been turned out by masters who no longer wanted to provide housing for people they didn’t own.
So the freed slaves built their homes where no one else wanted to live, in a swampy, muddy, mosquito-ridden low place half
a mile north of the center of Eudora.
They gathered fallen logs from the woods and lumber from derelict barns to build their little houses. They laid boards across the swampy, pestilential ground to keep their children’s feet out of the mud. They stuffed rags and old newspapers in the chinks in the walls to keep out the wind in winter.
They ate squirrel and possum, poke sallet and dandelion greens. They ate weeds from the field, horse corn, the leftover parts of a pig, and whatever else they could get their hands on.
Walking along there now, as the neighborhood changed from poor white to poorer black, I saw a colored man sitting on the porch of a shack painted a gay shade of blue. He nodded at me.
I returned his nod. “Pardon me, do you know a man by the name of Cross? Abraham Cross?”
He never blinked. His eyes didn’t move from mine, but I had the feeling he was deciding whether or not I was worthy of the information I sought.
“Yes, suh,” he finally said. “If you just keep walkin’, you will come on a house with a strong smell of onions. That will be Abraham’s house.”
The sight of a white man walking on this street was not a welcome one for most of the people I came across. They kept their eyes down as they passed, which seemed to be customary now in Eudora but had not been the case when I was a boy.
Within minutes I caught the sharp tang of onions on the air. I saw thick patches of the familiar blue-green stalks in the yard of a small red house.
Suddenly, from the space between two houses, one little boy came running, followed by two more, and two more in pursuit.
“He gonna snatch you and eat you,” the lead boy shouted.
Then I saw what was chasing them—a wild pig, huge and hairy and grunting, bearing down on the boys with a pair of very bad-looking tusks.
“That ain’t the most beautiful animal in the world,” said a colored man standing on the porch of the red house.
I answered, “That is a face not even a mother could love.”
I looked closer. The man was taller than me, by at least three inches, and older, by at least fifty years.
“But she sure is beautiful when she’s angry,” he said.
We both laughed.
Then he said, “Begging your pardon, sir, but I get the idea you might be looking for someone.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I am looking for a man. His name is Abraham Cross.”
“Yes, sir. You lookin’ at him.”
I must have appeared surprised.
