A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines

He comes in just before sundown every day for his two Jack Daniels on the rocks. He talks sometimes; most times he’s quiet and moody. The rest of the customers, no matter how long they’ve known him, won’t start a conversation unless he speaks first. He has his own place, in the corner by the cigarette machine. From that corner he can look at the door where the nigger room used to be. He took that spot years ago so he could tell when one of his niggers came into the nigger room, and he would nod for me to go serve him something—beer, wine, whatever he wanted. Well, the nigger room’s been closed now some fifteen, seventeen years. Happened when all that desegregation crap was going on—niggers didn’t want to be segregated no more, so they stopped going in there. They would come to the store now and get their bottle and go squat against the wall outside to drink it, but they wouldn’t go into their own little private room no more. And surely they wouldn’t come in here round my white customers. Oh, once or twice, couple of them got up the nerve to try it, but from the way my white customers looked at them, and from the way I served them (shoving them their drinks and slopping some on the bar), they soon found out they wasn’t welcomed. So they quit trying to desegregate the white drinking room, and just bought their bottle out of the store, and went outside or in their cars or took the bottle back home to drink it. You see, this here ain’t no Marriott, and it ain’t no Holiday Inn, either—not yet, and I doubt if it ever will be. This here ain’t nothing but a little old bitty combination grocery store and liquor store setting in the fork of a road between a bayou and a river, where you got a room for white customers and another little private room for black customers, and that’s all there is to it. When they refused, some fifteen, seventeen years ago, to come into their own little bitty room, why I just sold them their bottle from behind the counter in the grocery store and let them take it on the outside, or anywhere else they wanted to drink it, didn’t make me no never mind, long as they wasn’t in here bumping up against my white customers. You can call me anything you want, but that’s how things are in little places like this. This ain’t no Baton Rouge and it ain’t no New Orleans, and it ain’t no Marriott and it ain’t no Holiday Inn—not yet, and God I doubt if it ever will be. Say what you want, I don’t care.

But he still looks that way, toward the nigger room, each day when he comes in for his two bourbons on the rocks. Like I said, the place been closed down these past fifteen, maybe even seventeen years, and I’m using the room now for my stockroom, but he still looks there when he’s drinking. Anything could be on television—football, baseball, basketball, Jap volleyball, Chinaman Ping-Pong, niggers and white boys running all over the place, nigger fags and white fags throwing little white pom-pom girls up in the air—anything. Still he looks toward that door. I wonder if he’s hearing ghosts in there. I wonder if he’s hearing singing coming out of there.