TuesdayâMidafternoon
Summer 1946.
Davis, a small town in the deep South of the United States.
Fourteen-year-old Ansel Anderson stands by the screen door in the entrance of the store his grandfather started, the store where Anselâs father worked beside his father when he was a boy, the store where Ansel now works beside his father.
It is late afternoon. The heat is as heavy as a broken heart.
Nothing moves, not the leaves on the large oak tree at the end of the concrete island in the middle of the main street, not the three men sitting on a bench in the treeâs shade, not even a bird.
On the other side of the street, the clothing,shoe, and drug stores are as empty of customers as Andersonâs.
Long before Ansel was born, when his grandfather ran Andersonâs General Store, they carried clothes, shoes, and remedies in addition to the groceries, rifles, ammunition, and fishing equipment they carried now. Bert, Anselâs father, took over the store after his father dropped dead behind the counter from a heart attack because, Bert believed, the store had tried to be everything to everybody. That was a good way to give yourself a heart attack, not run a business. Bert was only eighteen when his father died, but he consolidated the inventory and increased profitability.
Ansel has worked in the store since he can remember. One day it will be his. He is not sure he will be as good at it as his father is.
Bert is a congenial and handsome man with curly, dark hair, blue eyes, and a smile that could steal honey from bees.
Many people, especially women, come to the store as much for his smile as to buy what they need. Bert knows people need a smile as much as they need to buy milk.
People almost always leave the store feeling better than when they came in, and all because Bert smiled at them.
Ansel is more like his motherâshort, dark straight hair, dark eyes. She looks younger than her thirty-two years, and he certainly looks younger than his fourteen.
His mother, Maureen, used to work in the store every day after she and Bert married six months before Ansel was born. But she only works Saturdays now. Thatâs when Zeph Davis, or Capân Davis, as everyone, white and colored, calls him, brings his Negroes into town.
They donât have money. They work on shares. He takes care of all their needsâa shack to live in, clothes to wear, food to eat, cottonseed, and everything else they might need. In the fall when they pick the cotton and bring it to Capân Davis to be weighed, he deducts their expenses from what he would have paid them for the cotton, and their expenses include the cheese and crackers and sodas they buy at Andersonâs every Saturday. Their expenses are always greater than what Capân Davis pays them for the cotton they grow, so each year they end up deeper in debt to himthan they were the year before. It is another form of slavery.
Anselâs mother is the one who writes in the big ledger book what the Negroes buy and how much it costs.
There is a dour seriousness about her and Ansel. Both mother and son are cloaked in melancholy, a sadness arising, perhaps, from the land in which the sorrowing trees spread their roots, a despair that their lives have as little meaning as the dust stirred up by a passing car.
It worries Bert that Ansel is so much like his mother. The boy canât seem to grasp a simple thing like how important it is to smile at customers. âPeople buy as much because they like you as because they need something.â
âWhat if I donât feel like smiling?â Ansel asked his father once.
Bert had gotten angry. âThere ainât no place for feelings in business. Your job is to see to it that people who come in for one thing leave with two, three, or four. The only thing you should be feeling is how you can get somebody to believe he needs something, whether he does or not. People donât want to feel
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