I'll have this one fixed when I do." I reached my hand.
"Better leave it now."
"I'll bring it back later." He gave me the watch.
I put it in my pocket.
I couldn't hear it now, above all the others. "I'm much obliged to you.
I hope I haven't taken up your time."
"That's all right.
Bring it in when you are ready.
And you better put off this celebration until after we win that boat race."
"Yes, sir.
I reckon I had."
I went out, shutting the door upon the ticking.
I looked back into the window.
He was watching me across the barrier.
There were about a dozen watches in the window, a dozen different hours and each with the same assertive and contradictory assurance that mine had, without any hands at all.
Contradicting one another.
I could hear mine, ticking away inside my pocket, even though nobody could see it, even though it could tell nothing if anyone could.
And so I told myself to take that one.
Because Father said clocks slay time.
He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind.
Holding all I used to be sorry about like the new moon holding water, niggers say.
The jeweller was working again, bent over his bench, the tube tunnelled into his face.
His hair was parted in the center. The part ran up into the bald spot, like a drained marsh in December.
I saw the hardware store from across the street.
I didn't know you bought flat-irons by the pound.
"Maybe you want a tailor's goose," the clerk said. "They weigh ten pounds."
Only they were bigger than I thought. So I got two six-pound little ones, because they would look like a pair of shoes wrapped up.
They felt heavy enough together, but I thought again how Father had said about the reducto absurdum of human experience, thinking how the only opportunity I seemed to have for the application of Harvard.
Maybe by next year; thinking maybe it takes two years in school to learn to do that properly.
But they felt heavy enough in the air.
A car came.
I got on.
I didn't see the placard on the front.
It was full, mostly prosperous looking people reading newspapers.
The only vacant seat was beside a nigger.
He wore a derby and shined shoes and he was holding a dead cigar stub.
I used to think that a Southerner had to be always conscious of niggers.
I thought that Northerners would expect him to.
When I first came East I kept thinking You've got to remember to think of them as colored people not niggers, and if it hadn't happened that I wasn't thrown with many of them, I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.
That was when I realisedthat a Digger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.
But I thought at first that I ought to miss having a lot of them around me because I thought that Northerners thought I did, but I didn't know that I really had missed Roskus and Dilsey and them until that morning in Virginia.
The train was stopped when I waked and I raised the shade and looked out.
The car was blocking a road crossing, where two white fences came down a hill and then sprayed outward and downward like part of the skeleton of a horn, and there was a nigger on a mule in the middle of the stiff ruts, waiting for the train to move.
How long he had been there I didn't know, but he sat straddle of the mule, his head wrapped in a piece of blanket, as if they had been built there with the fence and the road, or with the hill, carved out of the hill itself, like a sign put there saying You are home again.
He didn't have a saddle and his feet dangled almost to the ground.
The mule looked like a rabbit.
I raised the window.
"Hey, Uncle," I said.
"Is this the way?"