THE ECLIPSE
Ben Field
FOR WHITES ONLY
A
GAS STATION,
a general store, and a row of yellow cabins. A white
couple drive in early evening. They jerk down window shades and drive
off midnight leaving their skins shed on the cabin steps.
On the other side of the road cotton. A Negro cropper and his wife
plodding down the fencerow behind a mule with floppy ears and hipbones
you could catch a hoople on. A Negro lad raking pcahay. A truck with
cedar logs bumps on the road, full of sweated lusty dark hands. White
women and their stringy men squat in the store, gossiping and gesturing
against the flies. On the piazza the loafing planter with the local paper
published by his friend who has risen from printer's devil to devil's printer,
sucking his teeth over the essay on Magnolias and Cabins in the Moon–
light. A scabby pig snorts in his yard. The earth basks in the last sun
like a cob.
Then blotting out magnolias and moonlit cabins, the sign on the
outhouse, "FOR WHITES ONLY." The filthy little outhouse for
pin-assed creatures. Blotting out everything. Like the knotted rope
dug around the neck, the chains eaten into the limbs, the shotgun punched
into the heart, the horsewhip screaming above 10,000,000 Negro heads,
"FOR WHITES ONLY!"
THE SHIP CANAL
ON
THE HILL
overlooking the canal the Negro longshoreman smokes
his cigarette. Kaplan sits on a stone and gazes at the clustered masts and
the smokeless funnels.
A couple of miles off on the other side of the canal is thc park where
the Negro soldiers were shot down right after the war for ilJutinying
against Jim Crow.
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