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“Yes, sir,” he went on “The blackpeaceable with the whitehis job away from him”

He paused a moment, then leaned in to tap the side of er A smile spread over his face

“And if the black man don’t come to understand this,” he said, “why, I reckon we’ll just have to wipe him out”

Chapter 21

HOME AGAIN

Home to the tohere I learned to read, write, and do my multiplication tables Home to the tohere my mama fell ill, stayed ill forknown as “the only honest judge in Pike County”

My town, a little over three thousand souls, where I once set the Mississippi state record for the hundred-yard dash, shortly before I brokein a fall fro our doorbell and personally presentedI’d been accepted at Harvard

The last time I’d been hoo I re startled at the ti to as-poweredposts

> Many other things had changed since that last mournful journey to my birthplace But on this day, while I waited for Eudora Station’s one ancient porter to suy to unload my trunk, I found myself amazed to see how much this lazy little town resembled the one I knehen I was a boy

The early-su as I re under its gaze The First Bank, Sanders’ General Store, the Purina feed and seed, the Slide Inn Café—everything was just the same

Eudora Town Hall still featured an oversized Confederate stars-and-bars hanging in the second-floorabove the portico The same faded red-and-white-striped barber’s pole stood outside the shop with the sign that said “Hair Cuts, Shaves, & Tooth Extractions”—although no one had gone to Ezra Newcomb for a bad tooth since the first real dentist moved to tohen I was eleven

One difference I noticed immediately was that many of the doorways—at the depot, at the little vaudeville theater, at the Slide Inn—now bore signscertain entrances as “White” or “Colored” When I was a boy, everyone knehich places were for whites and which for Negroes

At last the porter approached with er The porter asked, “Will we be taking these to your father’s house, Mr Corbett?”

I frowned “How’d you know my name?”

“Well, suh, the statione Corbett’s boy with his trunk, so I purt’ ured it out from there”