November 22

The Magnolia was closed. As I was walking back towards the St. Francisville Inn, looking for a place to eat or in which I could get information about such, I passed a barbershop. I needed a haircut. I went in, and there was a man in the chair and two waiting. I asked about restaurants, and they suggested several places, all of which were at least three miles away. The sun had set, it was close to 6:00 PM;

I explained that I was traveling by bicycle. They came up with a fried fish place about a block away. Not being the sharpest knife in the drawer, it did not occur to me that there might be significance in the fact that this was not one of the first four places recommended. I was about to leave and then asked the barber what time he closed, and he said six, and I said I'll wait. I sit down and they asked, and I told them, about my trip. The conversation turned to football, and I listened. I didn't know so much could be known by four men about football. It took the barber almost an hour to do two and a half haircuts: I noticed that he charged $10, and was given at least a two dollar tip. I listened carefully to their conversation, and enjoyed their humor, and their diction, but I still don't know much about football. When I got in the chair the barber and I were alone, and the conversation changed to the kinds of people I had met: he wanted to know who were the rudest. The rudest remark I had heard so for was from a girl in a car that had pulled up beside me at a stoplight in Poughkeepsie. She wanted to know if I had escaped from the old people's home. I told the barber about that. Then he wanted to know who had treated me the best. I told him about the people in the gas station in Baton Rouge, and told him that Dave had said it was a rough area. "Scotlandville?" the barber asked, and I said, that's right. I had already figured out, from his accent mainly, that he was Cajun, and when he recommended a place across the street, now closed, for lunch the next day if I liked spicy food, I said would that be Benoit's, pronouncing it ben-wah's, and told him that there were a lot of Acadians in Nova Scotia. That was news to him. He wanted to know about dangerous people next, and told me a story about a friend who had been accosted in Scotlandville, by a nigger, and I told him about being accosted by the guy outside the gas station, and the results of it, we talked about something else until he finished cutting my hair. I gave him a twenty and he gave me fifteen dollars change and wouldn't accept a tip.

You and I would be mistaken to draw universalistic conclusions from these anecdotes. But let me add one more, that occurred this afternoon, when I was doing my laundry in Simmesport, LA. The Laundromat was unstaffed and had no vending machine for soap. There were eight people in the place, four of them small boys and the other four really big, if not necessarily tall, women. Three of the women were black and the other was a Chicana. They were all talking loudly and angrily, to each other and the boys, except the Chicana who was talking loudly and angrily in Spanish on a cell phone. I interrupted one of the black women, the youngest, who was yelling at the two black boys, to ask where I could buy some soap. She said one of the other black women would sell me some, so I asked her. She was the oldest and the biggest. There was some discussion about what I was doing (just one load of wash) and how much soap powder I needed, and what machine I was going to use, and how come my clothes weren't in it, and she told the youngest black woman to put a cup of soap in my machine. And would not accept any payment for it. I said, "Oh, come on. I'd have to pay a dollar for that much if they had a machine in here," but she adamantly refused payment. I got today as far as I expected to. Tomorrow is thanksgiving.