Isabel Wilkerson by The Warmth of Other Suns

Author:The Warmth of Other Suns
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780679604075
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-04T05:00:00+00:00

A man with a trunk boarded at a tiny station somewhere near Abbeville, South Carolina, bound for New York. George saw him and jumped down from the train.

“I need some help with my bag,” the man said.

George reached down to grab the trunk and fell trying to lift it.

“Hey, man,” George said. “What do you have in this bag?”

“Clothes, daddy, clothes,” the man said. “You know I been down here for two weeks. I had to have something to change in.”

“Yeah,” George said. “Okay, then, if you want your clothes up on this train, you better give me a hand with this bag. ’Cause I can’t lift it off the ground.”

Together they pushed it up the steps and shoved it onto the train. The train rocked from side to side as George struggled to drag the trunk down the aisle.

It was dark by now, and George managed to push the trunk to the back. He held up one end by the handle to position it in a corner away from the other passengers. Then he dropped it.

“And when it hit the floor, the latches flew off,” George said.

And out came the contents.

“The potatoes rolled out that bag, and the engineer is hitting these curves,” George said, “and you could hear ’em rolling all over the floor.”

The man whose trunk it was got alarmed.

“Hey, daddy, you gotta flashlight?” he asked.

“I don’t have no flashlight that’s gonna last long enough for you to find all your clothes,” George said. “ ’Cause they rolling all over the train. And I need my flashlight. I’m sorry, man.”

The train lurched from side to side and from one curve into the next and with each curve came the rumbling sound of mud-caked Carolina sweet potatoes. The colored car was in an uproar, the man’s trunk flung open, its latch broken, the man running down the aisle in the dark after the contents, and the fifty-one other passengers rolling with laughter and very likely helping themselves to sweet potatoes they hadn’t managed to bring aboard themselves but that would make a nice sweet potato pie once they got back to Harlem.

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