Cry of Angels

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36 THE STRAGGLING EXODUS CONTINUED FROM THE LITTLE TIN-ROOFED houses on the sloping acreage surrounding Teague's store. Once, sometimes twice a week one of the poor black families could be seen loading their belongings into a pickup or one of the trucks from Bobo's mill and descending the winding dirt road to the raw, hastily constructed little shacks on the south side of the hollow, many of them merely shells, still unfinished on the inside when their occupants moved in. "I don't like it," said Em, as we stopped to watch Speck Turner, the black plumber, loading his household goods into the back of his van. His girlfriend came down the steps lugging a trunk. "I don't like what's brewin' down there." "From what I hear, them that's got to move don't like it much either," I said. It was no secret that many of them, especially those who had spent years scraping money from their subsistence-level wages at Bobo's mill to pay off their little clapboard homes, were bitter about being 309 A C R Y O F A N G E L S moved to the baking, treeless red ridges of the opposite slope, to become renters again. Bobo was selling no more Ape Yard property. There were grumblings. But in the end they sold and moved. No one said no to Doc Bobo. "What you movin' away for, Byrd?" Mr. Teague asked a retired mill foreman who had lived down the road from him for more than twenty years. The elderly black man bit off a plug of Brown Mule and looked away. "Doc Bobo made me a good price." He hesitated. There was something else. Finally he fumbled out his stringy wallet. "Better pay up my bill while I'm here." "In the middle of the month? Hellfire, you ain't movin' out of the state, you know. Come on back over when you get your pension check." The other man looked at the floor. "I don't 'spect I be comin' back," he said. "You unnerstan'." Mr. Teague understood. And as the days went by, he became aware with growing alarm that it was to be the same with the others. Business slowed to a trickle. There was one other white man with a vested interest, and that was Paulie Mangum, who lived in the decrepit mill shanty next door. And, of course, he was champing at the bit to sell. "Damnit all, Alvah, I got fifty by a hunerd foot on that rock. Wasn't worth a tinker's damn before, but you know what he's offered me for it?" "Probably a lot more'n he's offered the others," said Mr. Teague. "But he says it ain't worthwhile to buy ours unless you sell, too. Now, you know I can't pass up the chance to get out of here! Tell you what, you match his offer and I'll sell to you. Druther, in fact, than to that nigger." "I wouldn't want your property even if I had the money, which I don't. And I sure couldn't match his offer 'cause bein' the only other white man, naturally you'd get a blowed-up figure to help put the pressure on me. So you make a few dollars on the sale—at the same time everybody else stands to lose—includin' me. Bring me one witness to say you're worth it, you drunken lint head, and I'll make the deal!" "That's spite talk," said Paulie, " 'cause you and me's had words from time to time; I'm talkin' business here, Alvah." "I'm talkin' business! My business! One I've spent fifty years buildin' up. The question is whether I'm to give up my business so 310 B O O K T H R E E another man can make a profit. His is big business, mine is small, does that mean I have less rights? The chains ain't done it, neither is Bobo and the tombstone people—nobody's going to eat me up!" Mr. Teague pulled a bill off the spike. "Now, unless you want to catch a little sump'n on your account, we got no further business to talk about." One afternoon when Em and I arrived at the shop on a supper invitation from...