"I said one barrel or two, nigger?" repeated the saw mill foreman.

"Get that outa here," yelled Snowy. "There'll be no shooting in this pharmacy."

"You gonna serve a nigger?"

"You ain't messing up this place with that double barrel."

"And you ain't gonna serve no nigger."

"Hey, Mr. Snowy," came an out-of-breath voice from the door of the drugstore. "It's a girl."

"If you think I'm gonna allow bloodshed in here the day my wife gives me a daughter, you're out of your cotton-pickin' head there," said Snowy. "Put that double barrel away, and let's all go to my place for a little real refreshment. I'm closing the pharmacy."

"All" of course did not include Reverend Powell. But in the general joy, he did get his cup of coffee, with no barrels.

"Just for this occasion," said the saw mill foreman, pointing the shotgun at the cup. "It ain't gonna be no regular thing."

But the South was changing all over, and it did become a regular thing for the blacks in Jason to eat at the same counters and to go to the same movie theaters and to drink from the same fountains, and twenty years later, if anyone asked whether a black, least of all the Reverend Mr. Powell of Mt. Hope Baptist Church, could get a cup of coffee at Snowy's, a resident of Jason would have looked at the questioner as if he should be committed to an insane asylum.

Now, as the ox cart creaked by him on a foreign road in India, Reverend Powell remembered that long-ago day in Jason. He could see bodies dangling limbs from the cart in a looseness no living person could duplicate. Bellies swelled forward but ribs protruded, cheeks sunk beneath vacant eyes staring out into eternity, never to blink again.

The road smelled of human excrement, and the morning had no coolness to it, just a smothering heat that would become unbearable when the sun rose to its full powers.