Free Georgia Boy by Erskine Caldwell Page B

the shed and took it down.”
    “Where’s Handsome’s banjo now?” she asked.
    “That’s something I can’t say truthfully, Martha,” he answered, standing first on one foot and then on the other. “I was walking along the street downtown last night with it under my arm and a strange colored fellow I never saw before in my life asked me how much I’d take for it. I told him a dollar, because I sort of halfway didn’t expect him to have a dollar but, sure enough, he had the money right in his pocket, and so I couldn’t honestly back out of the deal since I’d come right out and named the price.”
    “You go find the darkey you sold Handsome’s banjo to and get it back,” Ma said.
    “I couldn’t do that,” Pa said right away.
    “Why couldn’t you?” she asked him.
    “How in the world am I to know what darkey it was I sold it to?” he said. “It was pitch-black on the street, and I couldn’t begin to see the darkey’s face. I wouldn’t know him now from a million other colored people.”
    Ma was so mad by that time that it was all she could do to keep from picking up the broom and hitting my old man with it. I guess she didn’t want me standing around listening to what she was saying to my old man, because she turned around and called me.
    “William,” she said, “go downtown right away and start asking people if any of them has seen Handsome Brown. He couldn’t have been swallowed up in a hole in the ground. Somebody surely has seen him,”
    “All right, Ma,” I told her. “I’ll go.”
    I ran down the street, leaving Ma and my old man standing on the back porch staring at each other, and went as fast as I could to the ice house where Handsome sometimes went on a hot day to cool off on the wet sawdust. When I got there, I asked Mr. Harry Thompson, who owned the ice house, if he had seen Handsome, but Mr. Thompson said he hadn’t seen him in two or three days. I was about to leave and go down to the back door of Mrs. Calhoun’s fish market where Handsome went sometimes to get one of the mullets that were too small to sell, when one of the Negro boys who sawed ice for Mr. Thompson told me that Handsome had gone up the street about an hour before to where the carnival had put up the show tents that morning. Everybody knew the carnival was coming to town, and that was why my old man had sold Handsome’s banjo for a dollar. I had heard him try to borrow fifty cents from Handsome, but Handsome didn’t have any money, and Pa had decided right then and there that the only way he could get enough money to go to the carnival was to sell the banjo. Pa had spent the dollar before he got home with it, though.
    I ran back home as fast as I could to let Ma know where Handsome was. When I got there, she and my old man were still standing on the back porch arguing. They stopped what they were saying to each other as soon as I opened the gate and ran up the steps.
    “Handsome’s gone to the carnival!” I told Ma. “He’s up there right now!”
    Ma thought a minute before she said anything. My old man moved away from her sideways until he was a good distance out of her reach.
    “Morris,” she said finally, “I’m going to trust you this one time more. Go up to that carnival and bring Handsome home before anything dreadful happens to him. I’ll never be able to make my peace with the Good Lord and die with a clear conscience if anything should happen to that poor innocent darkey.”
    My old man started down the steps.
    “Can I go, too, Pa?” I asked him.
    Before he could say anything, Ma spoke up.
    “You go along with your father, William,” she told me. “I want somebody to keep an eye on him.”
    “Come on, son,” he said, waving at me. “Let’s hurry!”
    We hurried down the street, across the railroad tracks, and straight to the carnival lot where the weeds were still growing knee-high in some places.
    There were dozens of tents strewn all over the lot, and people were already milling