A Tidewater Morning by William Styron Page A

Not a candy bar, not a bag of potato chips, nor even the pack of peanut butter crackers (“Nibble a NAB for a Nickel”) I would snatch off its filthy shelf when, some Friday evening, my stomach growled with unpropitiated hunger. He would be waiting. Down would go Mr. Quigley’s pencil in his notebook, marking my tiny debit, and as I glanced up at the pinched, small, satisfied face I made a rapid calculation and realized that on this payday I’d take home less than half my salary, or around $1.15.
    There were a couple of Quigley offspring, a boy and a girl, but I had never seen them; they were considerably older than I and had already dropped out of high school. But nearly always present was Mrs. Quigley, a tough old graying slattern who chain-smoked corktipped Raleigh cigarettes and slapped around in bedroom slippers with red feather pompons as she served beer and pigs’ feet and tried to cheer up the disconsolate rednecks. Sometimes she wore hair curlers all day long. Her jokes were dirty and they made me cringe a little, while I listened with one ear and folded my newspapers. I wasn’t really a prude, since I had recently passed from the relative purity of grammar school into high school, where the common lingo swarmed with obscenities. Yet Mrs. Quigley was almost the first adult and certainly the only woman I knew out of whose mouth flowed, with the liquid ease of ordinary discourse, a stream of four-letter words. “Hey, Brighteyes,” she’d say to one of the sadder beer guzzlers, “let go of your dick and have another Schlitz.” I was torn between shock and enchantment, but often my giggles prevailed, since her slovenly good cheer was an antidote to her husband’s ill nature; more than once she slipped me a Mounds bar or a tepid ginger ale. In the end she was the only colorful spot in these dismal afternoons and Sunday mornings, and I may even have developed, before my labors ended, a distant crush, finding irresistible the way she belched, loud and with blowsy relish, or the moment when she raised her rayon shift and displayed to the gaping Carolinians a heavy blue-veined thigh tattooed with a fading red poinsettia.
    Then there was Ralph, the store drudge. He pushed boxes around and did the heavy lifting in the back room and cleaned up the tables after the customers left. Ralph worked long hours, but I figured he was paid not much more than our newsboys’ coolie wages. Whatever he was paid, Mr. Quigley prized him for the sport he provided, this dim-witted Negro, ginger-colored and freckled, pear-shaped with a slue-footed waddle and a high, fluting voice like a castrato’s . His trouble was, I suspect, glandular, but Mr. Quigley exploited it as a sideshow attraction for the group gathered around the steel-topped tables; Ralph complied, in fact cooperated, as many a black man—some much brighter than Ralph—did in that era, when it was smarter to be Stepin Fetchit or Rochester than a smartass. “Ralph,” he would say, “did you know that you are about the weirdest-goddamned-sounding Knee-grow there is?” “Yassah,” Ralph would pipe. Then, hurt: “Nawsuh.”
    Then “Yassah” again, with a grin frozen in a desire to please. “You sound like a goddamned dickeybird.” “Yassah.” “Or a tree toad.” “Yassah.” I lived in a racist society and had been inoculated so early against the idea of equality that a part of me supinely went along with the prevailing view that Negroes were a lesser breed of human being. But parental enlightenment and my own conscience—I would like to think it was no more complicated than Huck Finn’s—caused me to know otherwise. My skin crawled at Mr. Quigley’s loutish treatment of Ralph; it troubled me only slightly more than Ralph’s tame, grinning submission. “Ralph,” he would announce in an aside to the customers, “is the world’s goosiest burrhead.” A low hum from the group, and a single cackle. “I'm gone show you all something truly amazing.”