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Chapter3 The Negro Brakeman! Where You Will See the Effect Caused to Him by Seeing Me When He Least Expected B efore we ventured through the streets of that crowded city, my friend Pérez and I made sure we would have a decent place to stay. After we did that, we went out to visit a family, friends of ours, who lived there in Houston and whom we had previously visited. This family lived on the other side of the bridge not too far from the paying car where I had collected my money. We had already crossed the bridge when, to our surprise , we met up with—whom do you think, dear readers, we met? Well, we met the darn Negro brakeman who had run me off of the cargo train the night before near the town of Sublin [Sublime]. As soon as I saw him, I recognized him, and my guts started to boil in anger. Right away I told Desiderio about the incident and what the man had forced me to do. By coincidence my friend Desiderio knew this Negro very well and addressed him by his name: “Say, Crow, did you ever see this man before?” The Negro acted as if he had never seen me before and said so. But my friend Pérez insisted that he knew me. In addition, he said to him in English, “This is the man you ran off that cargo train last night about 10 this side of Sublin [Sublime] on the curve.” “I don’t know him,” the Negro answered, “and, besides, the passenger train that he could have taken does not arrive until seven.” “Nevertheless,” repeated Pérez, “this is the man who begged you last night not to force him off the train and the one who told you he was not a hobo as you thought but a good man who was on his way to collect money the com- pany owed him. But you would not listen and instead went out to get a pistol to kill him, according to what he told me. Then you threatened him by ordering him to jump, exposing him to be killed either that way or else by you. You could have let him ride and later reimburse you for the fare because he told you he would have money as soon as he got to Houston that same day.” As Desiderio was talking to the Negro, I put my hand in my pocket and grabbed a fistful of gold coins and showed them to him. Desiderio continued saying, “He would gladly have paid you, and you would have gained a good new friend. Your action would have been approved by the good Lord,” Pérez said, pointing toward the sky. Dick, as the Anglos called Desiderio, knew that black people were very superstitious and the words he had been using would have some kind of effect, and so they did. The perverse Negro asked Pérez to please forgive him and to beg me to forgive him as well for his bad deed. He never intended to kill me but only to scare me and if he had understood that I was going to collect my pay, he would have let me stay on the train. Once again he asked for forgiveness for his mean action and more so after he found out I had arrived in Houston on a special train. Finally , after much begging for forgiveness for what he had done, we told him he was forgiven, provided he never did anything like that again. After that the Negro went on his way, and we went on ours. 54 MIS MEMORIAS (My Memories) ...

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