Guardian by Julius Lester Page A

likeyou’re taking their money. Smile, and they’ll feel like they’re giving it to you.”
    â€œBut that’s not honest,” Ansel had insisted.
    Bert smiled. “It is if you’re running a business!”
    Ansel turns away from the door and goes over to his father, who is seated behind the counter.
    â€œPapa? Do you need me and Willie for anything?”
    Bert looks at his son. He remembers what it was like when he was fourteen and stood looking out the screen door on a day like today thinking he was going to die of boredom. He would not have minded closing the store and going home, but if he did, as sure as he was breathing, somebody would come to town wanting something.
    â€œI reckon not. You and Willie going to do a little fishing?”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œY’all can go on. But tomorrow’s Wednesday. You and Willie have to take groceries and supplies out to Miz Esther’s first thing.”
    â€œYes, sir. Thanks, Papa.” Ansel runs eagerly to the storage room at the back of the store where Willie is.
    Bert frowns as he hears the two excited voices.
    He had hired Willie for the summer because Esther Davis had asked him to. As far as Bert was concerned, a nigger boy like that ought to be out working in the field, but his mama was Esther’s cook and housekeeper, and his father was crazy. There wasn’t anybody he could work in the fields with.
    Bert didn’t need the boy, but he couldn’t refuse to do something a Davis asked, even one as eccentric as Esther.
    He had to admit that the boy worked hard keeping the storage room neat and organized, shelving goods, and packing groceries. Him doing what Ansel would normally be doing had given Bert the opportunity to start teaching his son the business—how to do the ordering, from whom and for what, how to keep track of inventory, and how to total up the receipts at the end of each day.
    But if Bert had known Ansel and the nigger would take to each other like the brother neither one of them had, he would not have hired him. He kept looking for an excuse to fire him, but the boy never gave him one.
    It was all right to have a nigger as a friend whenyou were little, but at fourteen it was time for Ansel to understand what it meant to be white, and past time for Willie to understand what it meant to be a nigger. Next summer there wouldn’t be any work at the store for Willie, no matter how much Esther begged him.
    Bert walks from behind the counter and goes to stand in the doorway where Ansel had been. He stares idly at the statue of the Confederate soldier at the head of the concrete island, his rifle pointed at anyone coming into town. He doesn’t have to see the base to remember the words carved there: “To our Confederate Army dead who struggled valiantly to preserve our way of life.”
    They might have lost the war, but their way of life hadn’t really changed, at least not in Davis. A nigger didn’t speak until spoken to; he looked down at his feet when talking to a white person—man, woman, or child; he stepped off the sidewalk and walked in the street when he saw a white person coming toward him or heard one behind him; and he’d better not even look like he was thinking about being equal to a white man.
    Maureen didn’t like him referring to them as niggers. He didn’t call them that to their faces,unlike every other white person in town. But he didn’t address them as “Mister” or “Miz,” either. He addressed them by name. He’d learned that from his father.
    But also like his father, when Bert was around other whites, at church or wherever, he said “nigger.” Everybody would have looked at him suspiciously if he referred to them as “colored” or “Negro.” Hell, even Reverend Dennis called them “niggers,” and if the preacher did it, there wasn’t nothing wrong with it.
    Recently Maureen had