Thrown-away Child

talking about being a minister?” Violet asked. She took God seriously, and therefore believed that self-glorifying preachers of the gospel were no more anointed by the Lord Almighty than circus clowns. “Zeb Tilton? That chubby little hoo-doo man?”
    Miss Hassie, eyes bulged and her body stiffened with the shock of Violet’s sacrilege, said, “Well now, ue is the Most Reverend Zebediah Tilton!”
    “Ask me and the bartender up to Shug’s and even the Lord Himself, and we all tell you the same: Zeb’s the least reverent Most Reverend anybody ever did see. Minister Tilton—shoo! He ain’t even got a church, Hassie. ’Less you call that ratty little root shop of his a church.”
    “He’ll have his proper church one day.”
    “When pigs fly. Meanwhile, Zeb’s nothing but a pork chop learned how to walk.”
    “Oh, La! You best keep a respectful tongue. Minis-] ter Tilton, he knows the mysteries.”
    Hassie’s eyes rolled as she said this. Violet wanted to laugh straight in her horse face but she did not, for she was charitable with ignorant people. Especially! Hassie, poor homely thing. Violet felt sorry for her living in the back room of the cottage the way she did, arguing all the time with her sister.
    “Zebediah Tilton aims to have this whole lane some fine day, one way’r other,” Hassie babbled on. “He’s going to get you yet, my sweet Miss Ma’am—one way’r other.”
    Violet thought, Wait ’til Willis hears this! She would make a whooping joke of it all, mocking the way Miss Hassie’s eyes grew round as plates and how her voice trembled and how she waggled her bony hands when she said, “He knows the mysteries.” But then she thought again, realizing how her husband might not appreciate the joke. And so Violet kept it to herself.
    But anyway, one day Miss Hassie bumped into Willis up on Jackson Avenue and was pleased to hang the black crêpe all over again. This rattled Willis so badly he had to slip into Shug’s and have a few drinks ‘ to calm himself. Then he went home and had a tiff with Violet over her deliberate failure to relay Hassie’s sentiments on their real estate holdings.
    “I don’t know why you want to be paying mind to that ugly-hearted toad,” Violet said in her own defense. “Hassie a miserable woman. She got nothing to do but spread poison about everyone around her, even her sister and that man she want to marry. If I was her sister I’d get out of that miserable cottage right fast. Day that happens, then Hassie be miserable and lonesome.”
    “Gott-damn, but the woman’s right, ain’t she, Vi? We never took account of Zeb Tilton.”
    “What’s he got to do with it? You telling me you spooked by Zeb?”
    “Ain’t spooked. Only saying now we got our pride we don’t need trouble from nobody.”
    The pride of the Flaggs was brief.
    One Saturday morning in July of 1948, the Orleans Parish assistant tax assessor came calling. He was a huge, slow-moving, sweaty, talkative young white lawyer with the florid name of Hippocrates Beauregard Giradoux.
    Giradoux wore a panama hat and an unpressed seersucker suit with an oval of perspiration on the back of his open coat and two more circular stains below the armpits. His shirt collar was unbuttoned because his neck was too fat. His necktie advertised eggs for breakfast. He had a runty red nose and blue eyes set deep beneath an almost prehistoric brow. Belying his bloated and generally decrepit appearance, Giradoux owned a sunny disposition; he was courtly and he smiled quite a lot, and the smiles seemed genuine.
    He stood at the top of the front steps insured against demons, smiling as Willis Flagg came to answer his lightly insistent knock. Giradoux explained himself in a chicken-fried drawl, “Just a trifling matter of some homeowner business, sir.” When Violet appeared at the door behind her husband, Assessor Giradoux removed his hat, which in the year of 1948 in the state of Louisiana was as rare a sign of respect given to a Negro lady as calling a Negro gentleman
    But Giradoux had done both these respectful things. And now for several seconds all that Violet and Willis Flagg could manage was to stare at the smiling white fat man on their doorstep, holding his panama and sopping his forehead with a seersucker sleeve.
    Finally, Assessor Giradoux was invited inside, where he shook Willis’s hand just as easy as he would a white man’s and said “Thank you so kindly” to Violet’s offer of lemonade.