Free The Sleeping Night by Barbara Samuel Page A

lodgings in separate areas and give pubs over to one race or the other. White Southerners had forced it.
    In spite of all that, Isaiah had liked the Army. He didn’t complain about the building they did, because building had always been his dream. Building roads and runways might not be glamorous work, but he gained valuable education doing it.
    And in England, he had met Sergeant Owens, a black man with a big mind and a need to talk. It had been Owens who had given Isaiah the books he now held in his hands.
    He looked down at the volumes of poetry and novels, all of them written by black men.
    Black men.
    His initial reaction upon reading the words of black poets had been fury—how had he lived to the age of twenty without ever knowing there were poets of his own color?
    Why had no one ever told him?
    But the fury was replaced with excitement. If those men could write and publish their words, it was possible that he could fulfill his own dreams.
    The covers were worn now, the pages soiled with repeated readings in battlefields and ditches and farmhouses. They’d kept him company through the worst of everything, when it seemed he’d spent a whole year in the same smelly uniform. There was never a chance to bathe or change and, like the other soldiers around him, he trudged along doing his job as bombs and mortar exploded and bullets flew.
    Not his own bullets, naturally. White soldiers were the infantry, gaining glory. Colored mainly did the dirty work. They were mine sweeps and grave diggers, called by every name but soldier. Later, as the mortality counts rose, colored soldiers had got their guns, all right, been pressed into service in the desperate need for cannon fodder, Isaiah among them.
    During those long, grim days the poetry had become to him like the Bible others toted with them, the only comfort he could find, outside Angel’s letters.
    “ I’m so tired and weary, so tired of the endless fight, ” he read now. “ So weary of waiting the dawn and finding endless night.”
    The words had been penned by Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., but they echoed Isaiah’s thoughts this night, seemed to embody the fat woman on his shoulders, seemed to echo in the blues floating on the mild night air and the hush of endlessly waiting lower Gideon. The people waited here in this little town like they’d waited in the villages in Europe.
    But no army was marching to free Gideon. There would be no liberation, no dawn to break the endless night. For the first time, he understood what had driven his father to protest so loudly, so long—until he’d protested right into his grave. Parker and Jordan had seen things in the first war that had triggered the same restlessness in them that Isaiah felt now.
    Isaiah had seen the futility of Jordan’s fight, and Parker’s. If he were to make use of this life, it wouldn’t be in Gideon.
    Tossing away his cigarette, he went inside to the comfort of his family. Perhaps the chatter of voices he knew and understood could drown his sorrow for one more night.
    Monday, Angel rose at five to prepare the morning offerings before the sun rose. In addition to dry goods and the sundry items any five and dime would carry, the store sold soda pop and doughnuts and pie, coffee or iced tea for a nickel. A sprinkling of colored women had made it a habit to stop by with dawn’s light to have a bit of the richly brewed coffee before heading off to other women’s homes to make breakfast and scour floors. There were five with positions in the homes of upper Gideon, and they were highly prized situations—long term and good pay.
    But the moments at Corey’s store were often the only moments of silence they found in a day, the companionable silence of women united by the tasks ahead. Here, for a moment or two, they were free of husbands and children and employers, could speak their minds in some semblance of truth.
    It had always been Angel’s project to open the store early. As long as she could