An Incident at the Hoe-Cake Cafe, Chapter II

Everything was calm at the Hoe-Cake Café until the day young Up-And-At-'Em Annie showed up. It was a Sunday in October 1933, just after the repeal of Prohibition. She rolled onto the cindered side lot astride a red Indian motorcycle with half a dozen other girls from Ma James's ... well, establishment ... in Alfalfa Junction, all of them on red Indian motorcycles, too. One with a taste for Wagnerian music and Teutonic legend might have called it a latter-day Ride of the Valkyries. Caldonius came out to meet them, wiping his hands on one of little Lizzie's diapers -- a clean one. They came in handy as rags in his workshop, and Lizzie didn't hardly need them no more. The water wheel was turning and the Café was thump-thumping its heartbeat over the thrum of the motorcycle engines. "Hey, nigger. Shine mah shoes." Annie swung off the Indian and shoved an engineer-booted foot at Caldonius. He regarded it for a moment without comment, then raised his eyes and met Annie's stare. The other girls stood in a loose circle around the two. Several of them struck wooden matches on the seats of their dungaree britches and lit Lucky Strikes which they then pasted to their lower lips with spit so they hung insolently from the corners of their mouths. "Well, now, ma'am, I ain't what you'd call a proper bootblack, so I can't oblige you with a shoeshine." Caldonius stuffed the diaper in his back pocket and fingered the handle of the wooden mallet in his apron pouch. During the Depression years, the rural portions of the Susquehannica valley, along the River Road from Alfalfa Junction to Dixon's Ferry, were a string of somnolent hamlets in a neutral zone between the virulent racial hatreds of the South and the more subtle prejudices of the North. People had called Caldonius a nigger all his life, so the word had lost – never really had – any power to shock or offend him. On the other hand, he'd carried a rifle in the mud of France and fought alongside troops of all the Allied nations and had come to believe it should not be any black man's lot in life to look at his feet and mumble "Yassuh" whenever a white man chose to call him a nigger. He'd fought alongside the best and the worst of them. The bullets and the gas and the shrapnel and the enemy bayonets had not discriminated in winnowing the ranks. It didn't matter whether he'd fought well or was just lucky – most likely, it was a bit of both – Caldonius Chisholm from Ashepoo, South Carolina, had lived to participate in the triumph of the forces which had fought to end all wars. By the time he was mustered out of the 341st Infantry Battalion at Camp Dix in 1921, he was no longer willing to think of himself as a nigger, nig, nigra, coon, shine, darky, spade, jig, jigaboo or any of the myriad other names some people seemed to have bestowed upon others because of differences in skin pigmentation. Caldonius smiled at Annie. "No, ma'am. I can't shine your shoes. But my wife's cookin' up some mighty fine flapjacks inside. You and your friends be most welcome to join the folks eatin' 'em." MORE TO COME