industrious nature and steady character, or at least recognizing that he carried himself differently than other colored boys his age and taking this for industry. Mr. Marconi, the proprietor of the tobacco shop on Macomb Street, had watched Elwood since he was a baby, squealing in a noisy carriage that was half rust. Elwood’s mother was a slim woman with dark, tired eyes who never moved to quiet her child. She’d buy armfuls of movie magazines and vanish into the street, Elwood howling all the way.
Mr. Marconi left his perch by the register as seldom as possible. Squat and perspiring, with a low pompadour and a thin black mustache, he was inevitably disheveled by evening. The atmosphere at the front of the store was stringent with his hair tonic and he left an aromatic trail on hot afternoons. From his chair, Mr. Marconi observed Elwood grow older and lean toward his own sun, veering away from the neighborhood boys, who carried on and roughhoused in the aisles and slipped Red Hots into their dungarees when they thought Mr. Marconi wasn’t looking. He saw everything, said nothing.
Elwood belonged to the second generation of his Frenchtown customers. Mr. Marconi hung out his shingle a few months after the army base opened in ’42. Negro soldiers took the bus up from Camp Gordon Johnston or from Dale Mabry Army Air Field, raised hell in Frenchtown all weekend, then slumped back to train for war. He had relatives who opened businesses downtown and thrived, but a white man savvy to the economics of segregation could turn a real buck. Marconi’s was a few doors down from the Bluebell Hotel. The Tip Top Bar and Marybelle’s Pool Hall were around the corner. He did a reliable trade in various tobaccos and tins of Romeos prophylactics.
Once the war ended, he moved the cigars to the back of the store, repainted the walls white, and added magazine racks, penny candy, and a soda cooler, which did much to improve the place’s reputation. He hired help. He didn’t need an employee, but his wife liked telling people that he had an employee, and he imagined it made the store more approachable to a genteel segment of black Frenchtown.
Elwood was thirteen when Vincent, the tobacco shop’s longtime stock boy, signed up for the army. Vincent hadn’t been the most attentive employee, but he was prompt and well-groomed, two qualities that Mr. Marconi valued in others if not in himself. On Vincent’s last day, Elwood dawdled at the comics rack, as he did most afternoons. He had a curious habit where he read every comic front to back before he bought it, and he bought every one he touched. Mr. Marconi asked why go through all that if he was going to buy them whether they were good or not, and Elwood said, “Just making sure.” The shopkeeper asked him if he needed a job. Elwood closed the copy of Journey into Mystery and said he’d have to ask his grandmother.
Harriet had a long list of rules for what was acceptable and what was not, and sometimes the only way for Elwood to know how it all worked was to make a mistake. He waited until after dinner, once they’d finished the fried catfish and the sour greens and his grandmother rose to clear. In this case, she held no hidden reservations, despite the fact that her uncle Abe had smoked cigars and look what happened to him, despite Macomb Street’s history as a laboratory of vice, and despite the fact she’d turned her mistreatment by an Italian salesclerk decades ago into a cherished grudge. “They’re probably not related,” she said, wiping her hands. “Or if they are, distant cousins.”
She let Elwood work at the store after school and on weekends, taking half his paycheck at the end of the week for the household and half for college. He’d mentioned going to college the summer prior, casually, with no inkling of the momentousness of his words. Brown v. Board of Education was an unlikely turn, but one of Harriet’s family aspiring to higher education was an actual miracle. Any misgivings over the tobacco shop collapsed before such a notion.
Elwood tidied the newspapers and comic books in the wire racks, wiped dust off the less popular sweets, and made sure that the cigar boxes were arranged according to Marconi’s theories about packaging and how it excited “the happy part of the human brain.” He still hung around the comics,