The Sharecropper Prodigy (13 page)

             
“Well, if you’d just give us a chance,” I said, my voice giving away dejection, “we’d show you what we can do. If you don’t like it you can let us go.”

             
“That’s where you’re wrong, son,” he said. “The governments got all kinds of dumb-assed regulations on this project. Once we hire somebody, we can’t fire ‘em for anything short of murder.” He looked at the gang huddled around one of the burning barrels. “Damn government got us into this mess,” he mumbled to himself.

             
“I agree with that,” Ben said. “The government needs to leave everything alone and let the free market system do what it does best. Those politicians in Washington have got everything as screwed up as a can of worms.” Ben was about to get on a roll and I couldn’t stop him. If there was ever a chance of us getting hired it was about to go up in smoke now.

             
“I bet they put quotas on you about hiring a certain number of men of certain ages, and you have to fill out forms in triplicate to order material you need in a hurry,” Ben said, as if he were an expert on government run projects.

             
“You’ve got that right,” the foreman answered. “If I could hire and fire who I wanted to and didn’t have to fill out a knee-high stack of paper every time somebody took a shit, we’d be twice as far along with this project.”

             
The foreman looked at Ben with a grin that only showed on half his face. “Tell you boys what I’ll do. I’ve got a concrete circle drive I’ve got to pour in a couple of days. I didn’t have a man on the job that could tell me how many cubic yards of concrete it would take to pour it. Didn’t know myself until I called a friend of mine that’s a professor in the mathematics department over at Georgia Tech, and he told me how to figure it. If you can sit down over there and figure out how many yards it will take, I’ll give both of you a shot.” He looked at his watch, “Let’s see now. It’s eight-fifteen now. I’ll give you ‘til nine o’clock to come up with an answer.”

             
Ben pulled a pencil and a small notepad from his coat pocket. “What are the dimensions, sir?” he asked the foreman as he flipped to clean sheet of paper.

             
“The diameter is a hundred and twenty feet and the drive will be twenty feet wide beyond that.”

             
Ben jotted the numbers down. “And how thick will the slab be?” he asked.

             
“Oh, yeah,” the foreman said scratching his head, “the slab will be six inches thick.” I didn’t know if he had forgotten to give Ben that information or if he was just testing him to see if he even knew where to start. I knew I sure didn’t. I remembered the formula for calculating the circumference of a circle, but that was as far as I could go.

             
The foreman said something to the man that had been holding the rod and he hurried back to his place where they were laying out the footing. The foreman then turned his attention to the transit again, motioning for his assistant to move this way or that way.

             
“A hundred thirty-nine and a half yards, sir,” Ben yelled out. “But you’d better order a couple of extra yards to allow for waste.”

             
The foreman jerked his head around so quickly he had to grab his hat to keep it from falling off. He looked at Ben like somebody had painted him a different color. “How did you do that so fast?” he asked, his voice full of disbelief.

             
“Well, sir. All the dimensions you gave me were in even numbers. I didn’t have any decimals to contend with, so it was simple.”

             
“Come over here,” the foreman snapped, pulling a tape measure from his leather tool pouch. He pulled the tape out several feet and arbitrarily picked a spot with his index finger. “Tell me what this measurement reads.”

             
Ben looked to where his finger was pointing. “If you’re fingers pointing to where I think it is, it’s eight-foot seven and thirteen-sixteenths. But I could be off by as much as an eighth of an inch due to the thickness of your finger.”

             
The foreman took off his hat and scratched his head. “Alright. Do you think you two can lay out footings?”

             
“Sure can,” Ben said.

             
“Can you learn to read civil blueprints in a hurry if I help you get started?”

             
I looked at Ben and then at the foreman. “Sir, I don’t mind telling you I ain’t as smart as Ben. I don’t know anybody who is, and doubt that you do. I promise you whatever you tell him or show him you’ll only have to do it once. And what you don’t show him, he’ll figure out on his own.”

             
“Well, we’ll see about that. I can already tell he’s smarter than anybody I’ve hired so far. I guess both of you are hired. You can start now. I’ll start you out at sixty cents an hour. We work forty-five hours a week. That’s all the damn government will allow us to work.”

             
“That’s twenty-seven dollars a week,” Ben whispered to me, but loud enough that the foreman heard it.

             
“You’re good with numbers, boy. I need a bunch more like you.” He stuck out his hand. “Max McGee’s the name. You may hate that name before this job is done, but I try my best to be fair as long as a man gives me an honest days work.” He paused and looked over at some of the other workers. “Ben, you’re the first negro I’ve hired and some of the other men will probably give you a hard time. If that happens, or hell,
when
it happens, just let me know and I’ll set their asses straight.”

*****

              New Years Day, 1940, came in with little fanfare for me and Ben. The only perceptible differences was that we didn’t have to work and the supper Mrs. Walker made that night. We had hog jowls and black-eyed peas, which traditionally was supposed to bring good luck for the coming year, or at least that’s what folks in the south believed. Me and Ben ate all we could hold. Our luck had definitely changed for the better, even if we were both homesick. Mrs. Walker had a telephone, so I’d called my Uncle Joe at the store and told him to give my Aunt Mary Kate and Ben’s sister, Nellie, the number so they could reach us if they needed us. By the end of January, Aunt Mary Kate had already called a dozen times and Nellie had called Ben a few times. Everything at home seemed to be fine.

             
Nellie told Ben to stop sending so much money home and save some for his education. She said they had all they needed and were even about to get indoor plumbing in the little shack. She also said that all her brothers were putting on weight since they were eating better than they ever had. I wish I could have said the same thing for Ben. If anything he had lost weight, and it was more noticeable because he was growing taller. Ben had very little time to waste on things like eating and sleeping. He had almost killed himself learning everything he could about reading blueprints and the construction business. Mack McGee knew he could never make Ben a crew boss even though Ben now knew about as much as he did. So instead, he made me one, even though Ben was the one calling all the shots. I gave Ben half the raise I received. I tried to give him the whole thing, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

             
Fortune had smiled on Ben in another way. A way that he considered much better than the accomplishments he had made on the job. It turned out that Mrs. Walker was raised in Boston by a prominent family and had graduated from Radcliffe College. That was how she had met her husband, Herman, who was a graduate of Harvard. Her library was much more extensive than Mr. Winston’s, and what she didn’t have, she could get. She and Ben had become the best of friends and were inseparable when Ben wasn’t at work. She had become his new Rachel, though nobody would ever be able to replace the old one in his heart. She had even insisted that Ben and I both start calling her by her given name, which was Abby, short for Abigail. Abby was amazed at Ben’s erudition and was constantly calling him a
prodigy.
“There are not one in one-hundred thousand like Ben,” she told me. “Probably not one in a million. He could easily make it through the curriculum at Radcliffe or even Harvard. Herman made it through Harvard and he wasn’t a third as intelligent as Ben on any subject. I thought he was just daydreaming when he talked about enrolling at Morehouse, but he would have no trouble at all with the entrance exam.” 

             
The men at work, with the exception of two or three troublemakers, had accepted Ben as almost an equal. The fact that he was ten times smarter than any of them still didn’t quite bring him up to their level. But most of the men admired him because he never flaunted his intelligence and was quick to give other men credit for something that had been his idea all along. There wasn’t anybody, including myself, who worked harder and was more conscientious than Ben. He took pride in even the most menial tasks and never shirked his duty, no matter how hard or how dirty it was.

*****

              The troublemakers who didn’t like Ben, or more appropriately, hated him, were not much good for anything else, except making excuses. They were hard drinkers and would show up for work either hung over or still half drunk from the night before. They knew if they tried to do anything to Ben at work, that half the men would pounce on them as quick as lightning striking. There only chance was to lay for him either in the morning or evening when he was going to or from work. Since they always felt like hammered shit in the morning, they decided evening would be best.

             
The fourteenth day of February had been a fairly warm day that had ended a week long cold snap. Me and Ben were on our way home and he was in a hurry, as usual. Abby had found him a new book on physics and he was like a kid getting his first pony ride. We were joking as we talked about it being Valentine’s Day and neither of us having a sweetheart. I had one, its just that her, or nobody else on earth, knew it. I had even contemplated sending her some candy or something, but chickened out.

             
The old alley we past by everyday always had a smell like stale piss and week old sweat. The sun was going down and casting long shadows on the sides of the frame houses and brick buildings and made the alley look as dark as a water well.

             
From somewhere in the darkness, the nasally voice of Pete Ward called out, “Hey, nigger. Who said you could walk by our alley and not pay us a toll? You’re in white man territory now, smart boy.”

             
Then the one with five or six rotten teeth, whose name I could never remember, yelled, “What does it feel like to be the only nigger in the world who can read?” Pete and the third man, whose name was Ronald, started laughing hysterically. Ronald said, “Them scientists could prob’ly train a monkey to read. I think they already did, boy, ’cause you look an awful lot like a monkey.”

             
Ben looked at me and said, “Let’s just keep walkin’. Ain’t no use in even acknowledging them drunken rednecks.”

             
We picked up our pace but we didn’t run. I wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction of seeing me or Ben run. Just as we were about to turn the corner I heard something whiz by my ear and heard a sickening thud. The brick had hit Ben squarely in the back of the head. He dropped to his knees like a sack of salt, then fell on his face on the dirty pavement. I kneeled down beside him and saw that he had been knocked as cold as a wedge. I jumped up and grabbed the brick the cowardly bastard had thrown, intending on beating them within an inch of their miserable lives with it. They had started running when they saw Ben fall, probably thinking they had hurt him badly or even killed him.

             
“I’m gonna beat the livin’ hell out of all three of y’all!” I yelled. “You son-of-a-bitches better not show up at work tomorrow. I’ll find you wherever you go, you bastards!”

             
I squatted back down and saw that Ben was breathing. His head was bleeding from the wound, but not badly. There was a giant knot that had swelled up on the back of his head, however. I started slapping his face gently and he began to moan.

             
“Ben. Ben, can you hear me? I asked quietly, though I’m not sure why I was trying to stay quiet after the way I’d just yelled.

             
“R..Rachel,” Ben groaned.

             
“No, it’s Tom, Ben. Are you alright?”

             
“What…what happened? Where did those rednecks go?”

             
“The cowards ran off. You just lie still and let me get help.”

             
Ben raised up and sat on his butt. “No, I..I’m alright. Just help me up. Who hit me?”

             
“One of them threw a brick. I’m gonna stomp their asses if they show up at work tomorrow.”

             
Ben finally got to his feet, but he was unsteady. I put my arm around him and we started walking slowly toward home. I knew Abby would take care of him and call a doctor once we got there.

             
“Why do people always want to hurt me, Tom? I try as hard as I can to be good to everybody.”