The Nigger Factory Read Online Free Page A

over a six-month period, they married. The railroad rerouted Charles Gilliam soon after, and his route carried him through Sutton and other parts of southern Appomattox County in Virginia. He bought an impressive three-story frame home on Pine Street and started his family. He had been working for the line nearly twenty-six years when he died of a heart attack.
    His wife, Dora, thrived on company. She was a cornerstoneat Mt. Moriah A.M.E. Church and the head of her sewing circle. Soon after her husband’s death she began to take in tenants, mostly for the companionship it provided.
    Earl had made Mrs Gilliam break one of her cardinal rules. She had vowed never to rent rooms to college students. For the most part she considered them to be impolite, disrespectful young men with no idea of the meaning of the word responsibility. Earl was somewhat different. In the first place he was working his way through school and intended to add his summer’s earnings to a partial scholarship. Secondly, he was as polite and mannerly a young man as Mrs Gilliam had ever met. And he had looked so let down when she told him, quite gruffly, that she didn’t rent to college students, that she had had no choice but to invite him in for a cup of coffee to better explain her position. Somehow over coffee the word ‘college’ came to mean more to her than it had meant before. It took on the meaning of her dead husband’s unfulfilled dreams. She found it very easy to overlook the fact that Earl was a student. She even rationalized her decision by pointing out the fact that he wouldn’t be a student during the summer, but when September rolled around there was no mention of Earl moving out.
    As Earl combed his head of thick hair his mind ran through the maze of emotions that gripped him, identifying first one and then the other. Jealousy? Fear? Anger? Anger was the most predominant. He felt as though he had been betrayed. Not betrayed by friends, but by that insidious ‘Brother’ term. MJUMBE subjugated the entire campus into one giant malignancy and classified all constituents under the heading of ‘Brother.’ The word seemed to have less meaning every day. Long ago he had decided that he would not be a part of the group that criticized the hypocrisy without an alternative. Who was sure how it felt to be Black? Maybe running your tongue over the word ‘Brother’ a thousand times a day was a step in the right direction.
    Earl felt the muscles at the hinges of his mouth tighteningto form knots of energy. He looked like a cracker ballplayer on the Baseball Game of the Week with a quarter package of Bull O’ the Woods chewing tobacco poking his mouth out a foot and nowhere to spit.
    He knew he must not allow himself the luxury of rage. He knew he could never accomplish anything that way; barging into the MJUMBE meeting room and screaming, ‘Just what the fuck is everybody tryin’ to pull?’ He decided to play it New York-style. Be cool. They had him by the balls. Everybody knew that. But if he acted as though he didn’t know it or didn’t care he might be able to jive them into a mistake. Then what? He didn’t even know if he wanted them to make a mistake. He couldn’t decide which side of the fence he was on.
    He thought about the election that had taken place the previous spring. When March rolled around and the first signs about nomination procedures were pinned on dormitory bulletin boards he had thought little of it. He had never run for a school office and often thought that the only reason he had been a high school basketball captain was because he was the only returning letterman his senior year. But one afternoon after a heated argument between him and his Political Science teacher he had been halted in the hall by a classmate he knew only by sight.
    ‘Excuse me, brother,’ the other had said. ‘My name is Roy Dean, but people here call me Lawman. I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute.’
    ‘Sure,’ Earl had