The store was almost clear of people, but its air was still thick with the acrid smell of hot sweaty bodies. Breeze knew few of the things offered for sale, for the rickety shelves were crammed with much besides cloth and shoes. He recognized the gay paper-covered tin cans of salmon, but the little bottles of cologne labeled “Hoyt’s German” were strangers to him. He couldn’t read, so he couldn’t tell that paper covers on a big batch of china jars claimed in emphatic black words that they held a cure for the darkness of dusky skins, or that the few bottles left on a shelf that was lately full would straighten the kinks out of crinkly hair.
Heavy sacks of green coffee berries were piled high between paunchy barrels of moist brown sugar, and smaller, neater barrels of pure white flour. Bolts of scarlet flannel waited to make garments that would keep the cold from old painful knees and shoulders. Rolls of gay outing and checked homespun for dresses were out on the counter. Piles of strong brogans were only a few steps away from boxes of Sunday shoes. Kits of chewing tobacco stood near a lot of little cloth bags full of Bull Durham. Cakes with pink and white icing, and red-striped sticks of candy were under a glass case along with black and white ball thread and needles and fish-hooks.
The big kerosene lamp, tied with a wire to a rafter overhead, filled the room with a pale yellow flare of light that showed the floor, whitened with cornmeal, and spattered with stains of greasy salt that fell on it whenever fat chunks of cured hog-meat were taken out of the barrels and passed over the counter to the customers.
When at last nobody else was in the store, Big Sue reached down in her pocket and got out her letter. “Please, suh, read em fo’ me. I’m ravin’ to know who’s wrote me a letter,” she asked. The storekeeper was a kind-looking white man with blue eyes and red skin, and a mouth stained at both corners with tobacco. He wiped his hand on his trousers, then took the letter and tore it open and took out a single sheet covered with pencil writing.
“It’s from Silas Locust. He’s your own husband, isn’t he?”
“Great Gawd!” Big Sue fairly panted. She put the fat hand up to her breast and held it there for a minute before she could get breath enough to say, “Do hurry, suh. Tell me wha’ dat nigger is writin’ to me ’bout.”
The letter said Silas was in Wilmington, North Carolina. He was a preacher now, and married to a big fine-looking yellow woman, who had three nice children for him. But lately his mind kept turning back to Big Sue and Blue Brook Plantation. He wanted to see them. He was coming home, in short. Big Sue repeated the words “in short” two or three times. She seemed to have no feeling against Silas at all, or against the fine-looking yellow woman he had married.
When the storekeeper handed the letter back to her, saying, “You may as well get married, too, now that Silas has a wife,” she gave a shamefaced giggle at the idea and said she couldn’t marry, not with a living husband. The storekeeper said she needn’t laugh, she’d do it yet, and she owned that she had thought about it a little.
The last time she went on an excursion to town, a man who had a nice restaurant took her to ride in a painted hack, and said he’d buy her an organ if she’d marry him. They could run the restaurant together. (She giggled again.) But now she was glad she hadn’t done it, since Silas was a preacher, and he’d be a-coming to see her, in short. Her sides shook, and her round eyes rolled, until a serious thought came to her mind, and she inquired, soberly, “Did Silas say if he’s Runnin’ Water Baptist, or a Stale Water?” The storekeeper said Silas hadn’t mentioned either one, and Big Sue pondered over it until the white man asked her if Silas came back what she’d do with all her other beaux. Jake and Uncle Bill and Uncle Isaac, too, and what about the foreman, April?
“Great Gawd! Do hush!” Big Sue shouted with clamorous laughter, as each name was mentioned. “You make me too shame. I don’ care nothin’ ’bout none o’ dem old mens! Not me! An’ April just got me to fetch dis li’l’ boy here to Blue Brook. E’s April’s own, by a ’oman on Sandy Island.”