The four sat at supper. Forgotten were problems other than the immediate one of Kenneth’s in getting his practice under way. Eagerly they talked of his plans, his prospects, his ambitions. Bob said nothing until they began to discuss him and his plans for returning to school the following fall, now that Kenneth was back to complete the settling of the small details that remained in connection with Joe Harper’s estate. …
It was a happy and reasonably prosperous, intelligent family group—one that can be duplicated many, many times in the South.
CHAPTER II
Situated in the heart of the farming section of the State, with its fertile soil, its equable climate, its forests of pine trees, Central City was one of the flourishing towns of South Georgia. Its population was between eight and ten thousand, of which some four thousand were Negroes. The wealth and prosperity of the town depended not so much on the town itself as it did on the farmers of the fertile lands surrounding it. To Central City they came on Saturday afternoons to sell their cotton, their corn, their hogs and cows, and to buy in turn sugar, cloth, coffee, farming-implements, shoes, and amusement. It was divided into four nearly equal sections by the intersection of the tracks of the Central of Georgia Railroad and of the Georgia, Southern and Florida Railway. Drowsy, indolent during the first six days of the week, Central City awoke on Saturday morning for “goin’t town” day with its bustle and excitement and lively trade. Then the broad dustiness of Lee Street was disturbed by the Fords and muddied wagons of farmers, white and black. In the wagons were usually splint-bottom chairs or boards stretched from side to side, occupied by scrawny, lanky “po’ whites” with a swarm of children to match, clad in single-piece garments, once red in colour and now, through many washings with lye soap, an indeterminate reddish brown. Or, if the driver was a Negro, he generally was surrounded by just as many little black offspring, clad also in greyish or reddish-brown garments, and scrambling over the farm products being brought to town for sale or exchange for the simple and few store products needed. And beside him the usually buxom, ample-bodied wife, clad in her finest and most gaudy clothing to celebrate the trip to town looked forward to eagerly all the week.
Crowded were the streets with vehicles and the sidewalks with the jostling, laughing, loudly talking throng of humans. After the noonday whistle had blown signalling release to the hordes of whites working in the cotton mill over beyond the tracks, the crowd was augmented considerably, the new-comers made up of those who had deserted the country districts, discouraged by the hard life of farming, by rainy and unprofitable seasons, by the ravages of the boll weevil and of landlords, both working dire distress on poor white and black alike. Discouraged, they had come to “the city” to work at small wages in the cotton mill.
All the trading done on these days did not take place over the counters of the stores that lined Lee Street. In the dirty little alleyways from off the main street, men with furtive eyes but bold ways dispensed synthetic gin, “real” rye whisky, and more often “white mule,” as the moonshine corn whisky is called. Bottles were tilted and held to the mouth a long time and later the scene would be enlivened by furious but shortlived fights. Guns, knives, all sorts of weapons appeared with miraculous speed—the quarrel was settled, the wounded or killed removed, and the throng forgot the incident in some new joyous and usually commonplace or sordid adventure.
When darkness began to approach, the wagons and Fords, loaded with merchandise for the next week, and with the children clutching sticky and brightly coloured candies, began to rumble countrywards, and Central City by nightfall had resumed its sleepy, indolent, and deserted manner.
From the corner where Oglethorpe Avenue crossed Lee Street and where stood the monument to the Confederate Dead, the business section extended up Lee Street for three blocks. Here the street was dignified with a narrow “park,” some twenty feet in width, which ran the length of the business thoroughfare. Over beyond the monument lay the section of Central City where lived the more well-to-do of its white inhabitants. Georgia Avenue was here the realm of the socially elect. Shaded by elms, it numbered several more or less pretentious homes of two stories, some of brick, the majority of frame structure. Here were the homes of Roy Ewing, president of the local Chamber of Commerce and owner of Ewing’s General Merchandise Emporium; of George Baird, president of the Bank of Central City; of Fred Griswold, occupying the same relation to Central City’s other bank, the Smith County Farmers’ Bank; of Ralph Minor, owner and manager of the Bon Ton Store.
Here too were the wives of these men, busying themselves with their household duties and the minor social life of the community. In the morning they attended to the many details of housekeeping; in the afternoon and early evening they sat on their front porches or visited neighbours or went for a ride. Placid, uneventful, stupid lives they led with no other interests than the petty affairs of a small and unprogressive town.
The young girls of Central City usually in the afternoon dressed in all their small-town finery and strolled down to Odell’s Drug Store where the young men congregated. Having consumed a frothy soda or a gummy, sweetish sundae, they went to the Idle Hour Moving Picture Palace to worship at the celluloid shrine of a favourite film actor, usually of the highly romantic type. Then the stroll homewards, always past the Central City Hotel, a two-storied frame structure located at the corner of Lee Street and Oglethorpe Avenue opposite the Confederate monument. In front were arm-chairs, occupied in warm weather, which was nearly all the year round, by travelling salesmen or other transients. Often a sidelong glance and a fleeting, would-be-coy smile would cause one of the chair-occupants to rise as casually as he could feign, yawn and stretch, and with affected nonchalance stroll down Lee Street in the wake of the smiling one. …