Washington street: a brown man, he had never found comfort in the black and white world of the South. Now a black woman was possibly going to change that.

THE PREVIOUS EVENING, George drank too much moonshine whiskey. He woke up with a lingering drunkenness and blinding headache. He washed but did not feel clean, and off the Mississippi came a nauseating smell, a mixture of salt and mud and decay, a smell that sometimes reminded him of the sea but not this morning. He drank his watery coffee and wondered why he'd opened a tailoring shop instead of a dry goods shop. The town had enough dry goods shops, but he could have opened one to serve the Blacks, one where they would not have to wait for the whites to finish before entering the store. The Blacks needed dry goods as much as whites, but they didn't need tailoring. Their women did the tailoring and did it very well, for free. The dry goods shop for Blacks would have been a good idea, but he didn't know enough at the time.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Still, he had several hours of sewing ahead of him, with blurred vision and sluggish hands. Sometimes he wanted to let the shop go. Burn it to the ground and go, maybe to Canada. As difficult as those days were, he missed those years of drifting through Mexico and Texas and Louisiana. When his brother, Daniel, was still with him and still merciful.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

He could not see properly out the front window of the shop. The sun bleached the street, and the glass reflected a white light, turning the window into a screen of dancing shadows. He stared at a ghostly figure that moved slowly, like an insect trapped in molasses. He could see it was a woman, but her features were indistinguishable through the glare. Eventually she moved to the door, and it dawned on George that she had come to see him. He unlocked the door and pushed it open, and watched her step back towards the road, so that he had to follow her outside. Despite the breeze, the morning air was already thick and hot.

He hooded his eyes to get a better look at the woman. She was very young, still perhaps a girl, except that her eyes had a womanly depth to them. Under her hat he could see that her face was quite dark, with a scar across one cheek, a twig-shaped blemish of raised, bluish gray skin. When she spoke, she looked at his shoes.

It took him a long time, because of his headache or her accent, to understand that she was asking him for a job. "I can sew very fast, and my eyes are sharp."

"Why do you mention about the eyes?" he asked. It was the first thing he said to her after she had spoken for some time. His eyes bothered him a great deal lately, enough to cause a simmering panic.

"Well, the needle is hard on the eyes. Some folks need spectacles in order to sew."

George agreed.

"I have always been told how fine my stitches are. I enjoy sewing on top of it."

Since Daniel left, he had never considered hiring help for the shop. There was rarely enough work and certainly no money to pay anyone.

"I'm a good worker. I am," she continued. "I can read and write on top of it."

He stepped toward her and looked up the sloping street that led to the Negro quarter. His shop was at the very end of the main commercial thoroughfare called Washington Street, built along the highest hill of Vicks-burg. At the crest of the hill was a soda factory, closed and boarded up last month. This was the horizon line to the town's white residents. Beyond it, out of sight, lay the rows of clapboard cottages inhabited by the majority of the town's Black population, and on that side their center of commerce, China Street, tumbled down to the riverbank. George had not visited that area in over a year.

"I could take you for a day. For today, but after that, I cannot say."

She smiled. "With wages?"

"I can give you a day's wages."

"I could do with a day's wages. I'm staying with Miss Virginia on Rensen Street. Do you know her?"

George shook his head.

"I been here but two days, but it would be grand if I could give her a little something to show I'm good for my word. I could give her half my day's wages, and that would really be something."

"I understand."

Propping the front door open, he gestured to her to come inside, where the heat and darkness and smell reminded him of his headache. In the back room, he opened the door, and drew the curtains to let the insignificant breeze find its way in. The ceiling fan turned slowly, and he switched on one more electric fan that sat on a desk under the window. Beyond this room there was another, a small cube with a bed and table and stove and an icebox. He closed the door so that the young woman could not see into it. He had seen her eyes dart in that direction.

She looked with some terror at the sewing machine.

"You know how to use it, surely?"

She opened her mouth and closed it promptly.

"You may take off your hat," he said.

As she unpinned her hat, she told him that she could sew with her fingers faster than any machine.

"You will have to use the machine," he said. "I will show you."

He fought a sinking feeling about the girl while slowly gathering the materials she could work on. It was piecework, easy to put together, but there was a lot of it. He took out the thread and rethreaded the machine so that she could see how it was done. He did a sample sleeve that would be attached later and had her try the machine on a scrap of fabric so that she could understand how much pressure to apply with her foot to get a clean stitch that did not pinch the fabric or hover limply above it. After some time, he was able to leave her alone with the work. Fifty sleeves that would be attached to fifty shirts. It was the only order he had gotten after visiting ten establishments in the area needing uniforms--a desperate act after his custom tailoring clientele dwindled to three individuals without the means to pay him.

He worked haphazardly on his books in the front of the shop. He went outside several times to smoke, and watch the street. Perhaps ten people walked by every hour. There was more bustle on the east end of Washington Street. Still, not what it used to be.

He did not ask her name until she finished just before sundown. She emerged from the back room looking weary, weighed down with perspiration, and he guiltily handed her a dollar. There was nothing more he could give her.

She curled her fingers around it. "Mr...."

"Cassar."

"Mr. Cassar, I learned fast. Didn't I?"

"Yes."

"You'll see I did a good job on those pieces. I'm a good worker and always grateful for learning."

"I can see that you are."

Her name was Marie.

AT NIGHT HE DRANK AGAIN and thought of the girls in Beirut. How he missed the girls of Beirut. Their silky hair and their chestnut skin and their nipples like chocolate medallions. He never dreamed that in fifteen years he would not see a single girl of Beirut turn into a woman. He promised one that he would be back, with enough money for a lavish wedding. It was a dream, standing under the fig tree in her garden, himself still a boy, saying goodbye to her. He had no photos of himself at that time, no proof that he existed in another part of the world as that boy. Now he was nearly the age of his father when he last saw him, looking more like him every day. His hair was falling out, leaving two half-moon patches of skin from his temples to the tips of his ears. To him, his oiled hair lay like a black tongue on top of his head, and un-oiled it sprung up towards the sky. He had come here, brought Daniel here, where there were no others like them, where he thought they could thrive.

George spent his evenings alone. He was not like Daniel, who made friends with the whites here easily. Despite his large nose and dark eyes, they seemed to like Daniel and accept him as a Christian. He could talk like them, dress like them, keep himself covered from the sun so that he could pass for one of them ... he never went out without his hat. And he shared with them a hatred for the Blacks to whom they lived so dangerously close.

At first George thought he was pretending, in order to fit in, but he came to know that for Daniel it was a consuming passion. In time they came to an impasse. Daniel came home late one night, smelling of blood and kerosene, and hysterically George pressed him for the truth while Daniel smiled with a chilling arrogance. That night he put his brother's things out and told him to go and find his own way, God help him. For the first time, Daniel obeyed.

MARIE DID NOT COME BACK the next day, or the day after, and on the third day he thought of finding her but could not remember the name of the woman or street she had mentioned. He thought she must have found work in a home somewhere and had given up on ever seeing her again, when she appeared after the weekend, looking more sheepish and tentative and defeated than the first time. He had gone out the previous week and solicited an order of workman's uniforms for the prison farm, counting on the chance that she would help with some of it. He was happy when he saw her, but he looked at her stoically, not wanting to give away how desperately he needed her help.

"You have anything for me today, Mr. Cassar?"

He looked back towards his workroom and sighed. "I think so. Yes, I think today I can keep you busy."

"Only today?" she asked.

"Two or three days," he conceded.

They worked side by side that day, with her at the machine and him pinning and pressing. The following day, she pressed while he packaged the uniforms. He was going that day to buy an old truck from a Black farmer who owned his own small plot of land. The man was destitute, in severe debt, selling everything he could spare without giving up his land. George wanted to give him something for the truck, some amount that would help him.

With the truck, he could make the delivery to the warden himself and demand the payment on delivery, as they had agreed. With a truck, they would know he was serious.

He returned disappointed, with a new truck but only half the payment for the order and no new order. Marie was waiting for him. She had straightened up the back room and dusted the front. "I ought to be going before dark."

"Thank you, Marie." He did not look at her. He did not want to pay her yet, nor did he especially want her to go. "I cannot pay you until tomorrow." But he would not be able to pay her tomorrow and better or worse than he could pay her now.

She kept her eyes to the floor as she put on her hat.

"All right, Mr. Cassar. Tomorrow."

She was dressed to go, but she hesitated. "Miss Virginia told me I mustn't come back here," she said.

"Why would she say such a thing?"

"She said you had a brother with the devil in him."

He wanted to offer some defense, at least on his own behalf if not for Daniel, but there was nothing he could say.

"I told her, I come all the way from New Orleans, and if I ain't learned how to tell the good from the wicked by now, I guess I won't ever learn it."

He stared silently at her scar, grateful that she was not looking at him. He felt an ache surge through his body, a feeling like the walls of his veins and arteries were being stretched with air. He did not want her to see how much her words affected him.

"Thank you," he said, but it was only a whisper.

She met his eyes and continued. "She said you were a Jew, and you know what I told her? I told her I'd rather work for a Jew than a false Christian anytime. The world is full of false Christians. I know because I come from a pious home for orphans in New Orleans. And that was a wicked, wicked place."

"Did you say all of that, Marie?"

"No, sir, not all of it. But I said it to myself, before I went to sleep, while I was thinking on what to do."

George smiled. Should he tell her he was not a Jew? Perhaps the truth now would embarrass her.

"I have no defense for my brother. I put him out long ago."

She frowned and picked up her bag. "You put him out?"

He could not guess why she frowned.

The only thing she made clear now was that it was time for her to go.

"I have the truck now," he said. He could not finish the thought.

"Oh, I'll be back, Mr. Cassar. I turned down a job at the Herbert mansion. Did you know that?"

"I did not."

"Too many people minding my business."

George wished to say something to make her stay a bit longer, but she said good night and walked out the door.

He drank some more. He went to bed. He lay awake for half the night, thinking of Marie.