Coming in with the evening shift was a white-mustached white man who wore a black suit and a plug hat instead of overalls. He dressed like a country preacher, but Jeff Pinkard had never set eyes on any preacher who looked so low-down mean.
He strode up to Pinkard and Cunningham as if he owned the walkway, then stopped right in front of them, so they either had to stop or run into him. "Do somethin' for you?" Pinkard asked, not much deference in his voice: by his clothes and bearing, the stranger had more money than he was ever likely to see, but so what? One white man was as good as another- that was what the Confederate States were all about.
The stranger said, "Where's your hiring office?"
"Back over yonder." Pinkard pointed to a long, low clapboard building that got whitewashed about once a week in a never-ending battle against the soot Sloss Foundry and the rest of the Birmingham steel mills poured into the air. To get a little of his own back for the fellow's arrogant attitude, Pinkard added, "Lookin' for work, are you?"
"You ain't as cute as you think you are." By the way a cigar twitched in the stranger's mouth, he was about ready to bite it in two. "I got me seven prime buck niggers done run off my plantation this past two weeks, lookin' for city jobs, and I aim to get 'em back, every damn one."
"Good luck, friend," Pinkard said as the man stomped past him. He and Bedford Cunningham exchanged glances. As soon as the irascible stranger was out of earshot, Pinkard said, "He ain't ever gonna see them niggers again."
"Bet your ass he ain't," Cunningham agreed. "Hiring office, they don't care what a nigger's passbook says, not these days. They just want to know if he's got the muscle to do the job. If he's a prime cotton-pickin' nigger, strong like that, they'll fix his passbook so it looks the way it ought to."
"Yeah." Pinkard walked on another couple of steps, then said, "That ain't the right way to do things, you know. Not even close."
"I know," Cunningham said. "But what are you gonna do, Jeff? This place has been jumpin' out of its tree ever since it looked like the war was comin'. When we went to three shifts, we had to get the bodies from some-wheres, you know what I mean? Hell, we was runnin' tight for two, way things was. Night shift, I hear tell they got niggers doin' white man's work, on account of they just can't get enough whites."
"I heard that, too," Pinkard said, "an' I seen it when we come on shift in the mornin'. An' that ain't right, neither."
"What are you gonna do?" Cunningham repeated, shrugging. "They don't pay 'em like they was white, but even so, if you're chopping cotton for seventy-five cents a day, a dollar an' a half in the foundry looks like big money."
"Yeah, an' when they get enough niggers trained, you know what's gonna happen next?" Pinkard said. "They're gonna turn around and tell us, 'We'll pay you a dollar an' a half a day, too, an' if you don't like it, Julius Caesar here'll take your job.' Mark my words, that day's comin'."
"It's the damn war," Cunningham said mournfully. "Plant's gotta make the steel, no matter what. You complain about it even a little bit, they say you ain't a patriot and somebody else has your job, even if it ain't a nigger. What the hell can we do? We're stuck, is all."
The conversation had carried them out of the Sloss Furnace grounds and into the company housing that surrounded them. The Negro workers lived to the right of the railroad tracks, in cabins painted oxide red. The paint, like the cabins, was cheap.
Pinkard and Cunningham lived side by side in identical yellow cottages on the white men's side of the tracks. Cunningham's was closer to the foundry. He waved to Pinkard as he went up the walk toward his veranda. "See you in the mornin'," he called.
Nodding, Pinkard headed for his own house. The windows were open and so was the front door, to let some air into the place. A delicious aroma floated out. Pinkard tossed his cap onto a chair and fetched his dinner pail into the kitchen. "Lord, that smells good," he said, slipping an arm around the waist of his wife, Emily.
She turned and kissed him on the tip of the nose. The motion made her blue cotton skirt swirl away from the floor so he got a glimpse of her trim ankles. "Chicken and dumplings and okra," she said. "Cornbread biscuits already baked."
Spit flooded into his mouth. He thumped himself in the belly. "And it wasn't even your cooking I married you for," he exclaimed.
"Oh?" Something that looked like ignorant innocence, but wasn't, sparkled in her blue eyes. "What did you marry me for, then?"
Instead of answering with words, he gave her a long, deep kiss. Even though she wasn't wearing a corset, he could almost have spanned her waist with his two hands. She wore her strawberry-blond hairalmost the color of flames, really- in a braid that hung halfway down her back. She even smelled and tasted sweet to him.
When they broke apart, she said, "You still haven't answered my question."
He poked her in the ribs, which made her squeak. "On account of you were the prettiest gal I ever saw, an' you look better to me now than you did five years ago. How's that?" They didn't have any children yet. He wondered how that was, too. Not from lack of trying, that was for certain.
Emily smiled at him. "You always were a sweet-talkin' man. Probably why I fell for you. Why don't you get a couple of bottles of beer out of the icebox? Supper should be ready in about two shakes."
The beer was homebrew; Alabama had gone dry a couple of years before, which meant they didn't ship Jax up from New Orleans any more. As he yanked the corks out of the bottles, Pinkard supposed going dry was a good thing for a lot of people. But a beer every now and then didn't seem to him like drinking-and it went awful well with chicken and dumplings.
He handed one bottle to Emily, then cautiously swigged from the other. With homebrew, you never could tell what you'd get till you got it. He nodded in satisfaction and took a longer pull. "Old Homer, he did this batch pretty good."
Emily drank, too. "He's done worse, I'll tell you that," she agreed. "Why don't you go sit down, and I'll bring out supper."
The chicken was falling-off-the-bone tender. He used the cornmeal biscuits to sop up the gravy on his plate. As he ate, he told Emily about the planter who'd come to the foundry looking for his field hands. "We got more work to do now than we got people to do it, a lot more," he said, and mentioned how Negroes were doing white men's work on the night shift.
She paused before answering. It wasn't a full-mouth pause; she was thinking something over. At last, she said, "I went into town today to get some groceries- so much cheaper than the company commissary, when we've got the cash money to pay for things right there- and they were talkin' about that same kind of thing, about how there's so much work and not enough hands. It's not just the foundry. It's all over the place. Grocer Edwards, he was grumbling how he'd had to raise his clerk's pay twice since the war started to keep him from goin' off and workin' in one o' them ammunition plants."
"Wish somebody'd go an' raise my pay," Jeff said. "Way things look, they're liable to end up cuttin' it instead." Once more, he summarized part of what he and Bedford Cunningham had said.
"They aren't hiring niggers to work at the ammunition plants here abouts- I know that for a fact," Emily said. She paused again, so long that Jeff wondered if something was really wrong. Then, instead of going on, she got up, carried the plates to the sink, and lighted the kerosene lamp that hung not far from the table. Only after that did she continue, in a rush: "I hear tell they are hiring women, though. Dotty Lanchester- I ran into her at the grocer's- she says she's gonna start next week. She says they really want women: what with sewin' and everything, we're good with little parts an' stuff, an' shells have 'em, I guess, even if you wouldn't think it to look at 'em."