God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell

brought in an armful of fat pine knots, and the cook-stove was red hot on top. Everybody was hungry, but it would not take long to boil the grits and make the sweet potatoes with the heat Black Sam had provided. Griselda had sliced half a ham and it was frying on two griddles.
    Everyone forgot about Pluto. Just as Will and Ty Ty were getting up from the table, Darling Jill remembered that he had not had supper, and she ran to find him. She brought him into the dining-room protesting that he did not have time to stay. He kept on saying that he had to get out on the road and canvass the voters before bed-time that night.
    “Now, Pluto,” Ty Ty said, “you just sit and eat. When you finish, we’re going to bring that all-white man up here from the barn and let everybody get a good look at him in the light. He has to come to eat just like the rest of us, and he can eat here just as well as he can in the barn. That’ll give Uncle Felix a breathing spell, because he’s been guarding him ever since we brought him back last night.”
    Buck and Shaw got ready to drive to Marion for some new shovels. Since beginning anew, they had broken one shovel handle, and one blade had bent. Ty Ty wished to get a new shovel for Will, and he himself thought he could dig better with a new one. Buck and Shaw washed and changed their clothes and got ready to leave.
    Ty Ty took Will and Pluto into the living-room while the girls were clearing the table and stacking the dishes in the kitchen for Black Sam to wash. He was eager to tell them how the albino had been captured.
    “Buck saw him first,” Ty Ty began. “He’s right proud of it, and I don’t blame him none, either. We were down in that swamp below Marion waiting for the first sight of him when Buck said he thought he’d go up to a house just off the road and inquire about an all-white man. We drove up there in the car and stopped in the yard, and Buck got out and rapped on the porch. I was looking the other way at the time, thinking maybe I might see some signs of the albino in the distance, and I don’t know what Shaw was doing. But Shaw wasn’t looking the same way Buck was, because before I knew it I heard Buck yell, ‘Here he is!’”
    “Was he in the house, there?” Pluto asked.
    “Was he?” Ty Ty said. “Well, I reckon he was. When I turned around, there he was, big as life, standing in the door looking like a man who’s just been ducked in a flour barrel. He was wearing overalls and a blue work shirt, but he was white everywhere else I could see.”
    “Did he run?”
    “Run nothing! He came out on the porch and asked Buck what we was after. Buck grabbed him around the legs, and Shaw and me jumped out on the ground with the plow-lines. We had him tied up in no time, just like you rope a calf to take to market. He yelled some, and kicked a great deal, but that didn’t cut no ice with the boys and me. Then pretty soon a woman came to the door to see what all the fuss was about. She was like all women, and I mean by that, she wasn’t all-white like the albino was. She said to me, ‘What on earth are you folks doing?’ And she said to the albino, ‘What’s the matter, Dave?’ He didn’t say anything for a while, and that’s how we came to know what his name was. It’s Dave. Directly he said, ‘These sons-of-bitches have got me all roped up.’ Then she started yelling and ran through the house and out the back door into the swamp, and that’s the last I saw or heard of her. She was his wife, I reckon, but I can’t see what an albino has got business of marrying for. It’s a good thing we brought him away. I hate to see a white woman taking up with a coal-black darky, and this was just about as bad, because he is an all-white man.”
    “Now that you’ve got him, what can he do?” Will said.
    “Do? Why, locate the lode for us, Will.”
    “That’s not scientific, like you’ve always talked about being,” Will said. “Now, tell the honest-to-God truth.