“The quiet one, the sad one. I tell you what!” Eliza shook her head, unable to speak. Her eyes too were wet.
They thought of sons and lovers: they drew closer in their communion, they drank the cup of their twin slavery as they thought of the Gant men who would always know hunger, the strangers on the land, the unknown farers who had lost their way. O lost!
The hands of women were hungry for his crisp hair. When they came to the paper office to insert advertisements they asked for him. Frowning gravely, he leaned upon the counter with feet crossed, reading, in a somewhat illiterate monotone, what they had written. His thin hairy wrists slatted leanly against his starched white cuffs, his strong nervous fingers, ivoried by nicotine, smoothed out the crumples. Scowling intently, he bent his fine head, erasing, arranging. Emphatic lady-fingers twitched. “How’s that?” Answers vague-voiced, eyes tangled in crisp hair. “Oh, much better, thank you.”
Wanted: frowning boy-man head for understanding fingers of mature and sympathetic woman. Unhappily married. Address Mrs. B. J. X., Box 74. Eight cents a word for one insertion. “Oh, [tenderly] thank you, Ben.”
“Ben,” said Jack Eaton, the advertising manager, thrusting his plump face into the city editor’s office, “one of your harem’s out there. She wanted to murder me when I tried to take it. See if she’s got a friend.”
“Oh, listen to this, won’t you?” Ben snickered fiercely to the City Editor. “You missed your calling, Eaton. What you want is the endman’s job with Honeyboy Evans.”
Scowling, he cast the cigarette from his ivory hand, and loped out into the office. Eaton remained a moment to laugh with the City Editor. O rare Ben Gant!
Sometimes, returning late at night to Woodson Street, in the crowded summer season, he slept with Eugene in the front room upstairs where they had all been born. Propped high on pillows in the old cream-colored bed, painted gaily at head and foot with round medals of clustering fruit, he read aloud in a quiet puzzled
