Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

all the daylight hours six days a week, twelve months a year. During the busy times, like right after the money came in for harvest and when supplies were needed to set up the hired hands for planting, Bobby Lee would take on extra help from some of the poor whites down by the tracks.
    Bobby Lee only allowed colored to come in two at a time and that was only a man and a woman, or two women together, but never two colored men at once. No matter how many niggers were lined up outside, and sometimes there might be a dozen or more, or how many were inside, Alex knew they had to step aside when he walked up to the counter. Even if the colored woman had her calico yard goods already cut for her and her coins on the countertop ready to push to Bobby Lee’s wife, careful not to let black hands touch white, she would have to stand aside ’til he got his business done.
    Between his and the Thornton farms, the Lawnover store was the only buying place for five miles around, for either colored or white. Every farmer in the area had to stop by Bobby Lee’s at least once a month for supplies. It hadn’t been two weeks since he brought Eula by to pick up some lard and some sugar while he went to the blacksmith shop to repair the rein for the gray.
    Tonight, it was after dark and the main business at the Lawnover store was over. The front door was closed and latched. Once he dropped off the hired man at the McNaughton barn, Alex switched over to Eula’s horse and rig. Coaxing the buckboard and the wheezing horse around back of Bobby Lee’s, he led the animal to the water trough. Inside the store he heard the guffaws.
    On just about every Friday and Saturday night when it wasn’t harvest or planting time, Bobby Lee opened up his back room for poker games. Most game nights, five or six of the farmers would gather. But the first day of planting was special. After all that planting and praying, the men needed to end the evening with a little fun. Bobby Lee might have twelve or fifteen farmers in the store tonight. If he did, he would put the overflow into the store’s main room. Only the regulars like Ben Roy got the use of the back room.
    While Eula’s horse was taking in water, Alex walked across the way from the hitching post to the log-hewn building. The light from the lamps shone through all three windows, even though curtains covered only the one in the back gaming room.
    It took Alex a few seconds after he opened the back door to spot Ben Roy through the brown cloud of cigar, cigarette, and pipe smoke. The kerosene lamp sitting on a highboy right over Ben Roy’s left shoulder shone directly at the back door and at any newcomer. Those already in the room knew who had entered long before the late arrival could make out the outlines of the pork and pickle barrels lining the walls.
    “Alex, ’bout time you got yo’ ass over here. Come on and set a spell.” Ben Roy had left the planting party at his own home no more than thirty minutes before Alex, yet he was already halfway into a tall Mason jar of Tennessee whiskey. His eyes finally adjusting to the glare, Alex made out the uncovered planked wood table set in the center of the room surrounded by boxes and barrels piled shoulder-high to the timbered ceiling. He made his way around a big barrel of sweet-smelling sorghum molasses and another of pickling hog heads. Ben Roy, Wiley George, two other Thornton kin, a farmer from down county, and Bobby Lee were already sitting around the table, with Ben Roy fumbling with a deck of cards. Bobby Lee grabbed a Mason jar of whiskey as he scuffed his chair backward to stand. Clapping Alex on the back, he almost pushed him into the vacated chair.
    “Here’s hopin’ your new hired nigger sticks it out this time.” Bobby Lee reached for the first in a line of empty Mason jars standing next to the kerosene lamp behind Ben Roy’s head. Bobby Lee handed the container to Alex. “If that nigger don’t work out, I got another one been ’round here beggin’ fo’ a place to farm.” Bobby Lee took a swig of his own homegrown mash liquor and walked through the door into the front of the store where, judging from the cursing, spitting, and laughing, the second poker game was heating up.
    “We’re playin’ five-card stud, no deuces wild.” Ben Roy tapped the table. A mound of greenbacks lay in the center.
    Alex frowned. Big money like that usually was gambled only after harvest. Planting time most oft en meant quarters and half