Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

that sat near his mattress.
    “Here’s yo’ money, Miz Brown, the whole of it.” He opened the door wide enough for the space to frame his six-foot-tall body. John laid two silver dollars and the four quarters into his landlady’s hand.
    Her fingers snapped closed over the money as she tried to look around him and into the room.
    “How much they pay you down there at that smithy shop?” Her wig, that looked more like the tail off a red squirrel, had been put on even more crooked than usual today.
    “I’ve got me ’nuff money to keep the rent up. You don’t need to worry none, Miz Brown.”
    “You don’t work nothin’ but fo’ hours a day down at the smithy shop, but you out every night.” The plump face frowned up worse than a prune. “I told you I don’t allow no gamblin’ peoples to live in my place. I runs a respectable boardinghouse. Why, I got two colored schoolteachers living right here. They…”
    “Miz Brown, ma’am. I works six mornings a week, six o’clock to ten o’clock, cleanin’ up horse sh…horse dumpin’s…at the blacksmith shop. He pays me fifty cents a day. That’s my room and board, and yo’ rent right there.”
    This woman, who liked to set herself front and center in the second-best church pew at the Nashville colored Baptist church every Sunday, didn’t need to know much more than that. John could see that her frown had only deepened. To keep her face from caving upon itself, he decided to give just a little bit more.
    “I gets me a little extra money by running grocery deliveries.” He doled out a hint of one of his patented smiles.
    She didn’t need to know the full truth. Six days a week, from five in the afternoon until one o’clock in the morning, John Welles ran hams, chickens, sides of beef, and just about every other fancy food a colored man could dream of to a certain Nashville address. At the same time, he also ran gin, bourbon, whiskey, and good branch water to Miz Zeola’s whorehouse. For each of his eight- or nine-hour days, he got paid seventy-five cents. Altogether, he earned seven dollars and fifty cents a week.
    “You just keep on bringin’ me my rent every Friday, and you and me will get along just fine.” Miz Brown almost had a smile on her face as she turned toward the three wooden steps that led to the back door and her kitchen.
    Seven-plus dollars a week was a hell of a lot more than John ever earned in Lawnover. By the time that cracker McNaughton got through with his “advances” last year, John had only a three-hundred-dollar share to last him the whole of the next year. And this despite the bumper crop he and Annalaura had brought McNaughton. John and Annalaura had gone over the figuring together, but his wife had been the one to ask, in her most respectful way, for an accounting. McNaughton, thinking the two of them too dumb to understand figures, had rattled off bloated costs for rent, milk from the two cows, meat from one pig, garden seed, clothes, and a little starting food. His “advances” came to almost nine hundred dollars. Hell, the man on the back-forty had only brought in half the tobacco he and Annalaura had gathered, and that family’s share had been two hundred and fifty dollars. That was when John knew he had to leave.
    Closing the door behind him, he slipped in the big padlock that Miz Brown hated, and turned the key. Welles didn’t want that woman snooping around. She wouldn’t bother his money, there was way too little of it for her anyway, but she might put her hands on the pistol that he kept hidden behind a chink in the wall up near the ceiling.
    Now that Miz Brown had awakened him with her rent nonsense, he decided to head off early to his brothel job. In the two months he’d worked there, he’d taken every opportunity to get in the face of the owner. Miz Zeola’s whorehouse was just about the best in Nashville that serviced the workingman colored. Oh, John knew about the fanciest brothel in town with its curly-haired, high-yella gals, but they only serviced the colored doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and it was said in the quarter, more than a few of the richest white faces showed up there, too. But it was Miz Zeola who had the market cornered for the workingman with a decent paying job. And she treated her customers just fine.
    To make up for the lack of looks in her women, Miz Zeola saw to it that her male guests had an extra fine dinner for just a fraction of the cost at a regular restaurant.