In the store the boy with thin arms took her oil can and said, “A dime’s worth?” and set the can aside to wait until the man came with the key to the oil house. She stood beside the old black man who was buying a nickel’s worth of meal and a dime’s worth of bacon, her eyes on the hurrying clerk whose arms reached here and there above the barrels and weighed the sugar as it poured in a stream into a sack. She enjoyed the crowding of the store and the pageant of buying. A heroic freedom surrounded the man, old Anthony Bell, who bought lavishly, never asking the price, calling over the heads of the others, “A hundred pounds of sugar. Send it up tomorrow.” He had stepped lightly in at the doorway, a lifted head, the large gesture of shouting and the lifted cane, “Send it up tomorrow,” and then his exit while the piece went forward, the play enhanced.
Moll Peters, the negress, came heavily in at the door and stood beyond Luce, waiting her turn. She was large and fat and the belt of her apron sank into the rolls of her body and was lost from sight. She would buy freely as long as her money lasted, buying for her children on Hill Street; she cooked at the hotel and had no need to buy food for herself. “Ol’ Hog Mouth, what-all you a-buyen?” she said to a tall man who stood beyond her, a tall yellow man whose clothes were white with plaster. “You ain’t treated Moll this whole enduren year.” Her voice came from her mouth with a clatter of low half-musical squawks and softly blurred vowels delicately stressed.
“Aw, go on,” the man said. He kept in a good humor.
“It’s a God’s truth, now. Whenever did you-all ever treat Moll? Pocket full o’ money. Ol’ Stingy! Buy Moll some candy.”
“Aw go on. Buy your own candy.”
“It’s a God’s own truth, now. Whenever did you ever buy Moll any candy? Go and buy me some candy.”
“I ain’t got no money. I swear I’m got to ask credit till Sat’day for a little meal and lard. I swear.”
“Aw, buy me some candy.”
Moll was trying to make up with the yellow man. The grocer’s clerk came back with the can of oil and Luce dumped the money, a nickel and five coppers, into his large hand and turned quickly toward the door, remembering now that she must fill the lamp. She ran home through the twilight. The lamp-lighter had gone from the street now and all the lights glimmered faintly, broadly, because they had not yet been concentrated into points by the dark. They marched unevenly up the street, far past the Baptist Church, past the Seminary gate.