Free Mississippi Bridge by Mildred D. Taylor Page B

in it.”
    Miz Hattie took the hat and placed it on that mop of red hair of hers. She pinned it down with a huge stickpin. Rudine and her mama were still in the store. I seen them watching.
    “Now ain’t that fine?” said Mr. Wallace. “Makes you look like a schoolgirl.”
    “Well, it sure is pretty all right,” confessed Miz Hattie, primping at herself in the mirror. “It surely is. . . .”
    While Miz Hattie was making up her mind about whether or not she was going to buy that hat, I seen Josias Williams coming up the road carrying a small bundle in his hand and all dressed up in his Sunday-go-to-meetingclothes. Josias was a full-grown man, some ten or more years over, but he wasn’t yet married. He said he just ain’t found his woman yet. Said, too, that was just as well ’cause there were so many mouths already to feed in his family, and that was sure enough the truth. There was a bunch of them living on a fourteen-acre spot of sharecropping land near to our place. ’Cause they were so close, Josias and me, sometimes we gone fishing down on the water Rosa Lee together. Josias and me, we was friends.
    “’Ey, Josias!” I called.
    He seen me and he smiled that wide-toothed grin of his. “Wet ’nough for ya?” he asked, stepping onto the porch.
    I asserted it was and he laughed. “Keep it up ’round here and we gonna hafta start building ourselves an ark, just like ole Noah!”
    I smiled up at him, then took note of his bundle and asked straight out, “You travelin’ today, Josias?”
    “Yes, suh! Got me a chance to get myself a job. Gonna go lumberin’ ’long on the Trace. Man say I be there today, I’m gonna have me a job!”
    “Well, I sho’ do hope you make it, Josias.”
    “Oh, I’m gonna make it all right. Spite all this here rain, Lord smilin’ on me today! I knows He is!” Then he laughed and gone on in the store.
    I got up and I gone in after him.
    “Well, there, Josias,” greeted Mr. John Wallace, “what got you all dressed up on a rainy weekday like this?”
    “Well, suh, Mister John, I’m gonna take myself a trip!”
    “That a fact?”
    “Yes, suh!”
    “Now where you get money to go takin’ a trip, boy?”
    “Scraped together ever’ penny I could lay my hands on. Had to borrow a little bit, but it’s gonna be worth it, ’cause I got a job waitin’ on me!”
    Pa began thumping the table with his fingers. Most times he done that when things ain’t set too right with him. “Now, Josias,” he said, “what kinda job you figure waitin’ on you?”
    Josias turned to Pa. “Well, Mr. Charlie, got a letter from my cousin doin’ some lumberin’ down long the Natchez Trace. He said I come on down, man’d hire me on and pay me cash money, so I’m sure ’nough goin’!”
    Pa frowned. A lot of men were going begging for jobs these days.
White men
. And here Josias was talking about taking on a lumbering job along the Natchez Trace.
    “What ’bout your plantin’, boy?” asked Mr. John Wallace. “Ain’t you got land to crop?”
    “Ah, Mr. John, you know they’s plenty of hands at home for that. They ain’t gonna miss me none. Be better I’m off workin’ makin’ some cash money.”
    Pa thumped the table again. “What you doin’ talkin’ ’bout cash money, nigger? White men ain’t hardly gettin’ no cash money these days. What? You think you better’n a white man?”
    The smile that had been shining all cross Josias’s face sure gone quick. His eyes got big and I know’d he was scared. I had done seen that look before. “Why . . . why, no suh, Mr. Charlie. Ain’t . . . ain’t never thought such a thing.”
    “Then what you doin’ standin’ up there bald-faced lyin’ for, sayin’ you done got yourself a job?”
    “Why, no suh, I . . . I ain’t lyin’—”
    “Then you sayin’ you can get a job when a white man can’t?”
    Poor Josias, he ain’t know’d what to say. I’d’ve been him, I’d’ve been in the same fix. Pa was a