“Nora Conner and I live out on Walnut Street. That’s near Crystal Lake.”
“My name’s Alice Groves and I’m having lunch with three nurses. Would you like to eat with us? I’ll buy the lunch.”
Nora hardly bothered to consider the fact that Alice Groves was colored and so were the other three women she said were nurses. She had a vague feeling that perhaps some people would not approve if they saw her eating in the White Elephant window with four colored ladies, but Nora privately thought the majority of colored adults were a good deal more interesting than nearly any grown white people. She accepted.
They introduced themselves. It seemed they were all trained nurses at the Mildred Tatum Infirmary, which Nora knew about, and Miss Groves was head of the whole thing. They were off duty, Christmas shopping, and having lunch here at the White Elephant.
“Order anything you like, dear,” Miss Groves urged.
Studying the menu, Nora thought that colored people got lower wages, so she skipped the blue plates and main dishes. “Would it be all right if I had two sardine sandwiches and then waffles?” That came to ninety-five cents, a good deal.
One of the nurses—her name was Rebecca—laughed quite hard.
Alice Groves said, “It would be perfectly all right.”
Besides that, they gave her the best seat. There was one seat from which you could watch a man across the street on the flagpole on the top edge of the building which, Nora determined by counting the windows, was only a paltry fifteen stories high.
He was interesting to watch because he was more like a bug up there than a person. And while they had lunch, he came down, riding a kind of horizontal ladder on ropes. As he crossed the sidewalk to a small truck he had parked there, she could see he was lame. On the truck was painted, not in real lettering but just homemade letters, “Steeplejack Sam—Your High Repair Man.”