From Gene’s Notebook

Twenty two Afro-American men, just-released prisoners from a southern Illinois jail, are in the bank-turned-into-bus-station in a treeless and deserted section of St. Louis, just across the river from the jail. They wear grey swears and white tee shirts, and they are carrying small bags.

Soon, they board the Greyhound for Chicago, going into the back to sit together, and they fall silent, but when the six-hour ride to Chicago gets into that city’s Afro-American Southside, they begin to loudly talk, and in fifteen minutes the bus stops at South 94th Street, and the men get off, and they’re home ….

Pedro knocks on the door; he’s been away almost a year with a daughter in Arizona. He wants to cut the yard, but we’re letting it “jungle.” so Pedro lights a cigarette and goes away, and I recall driving him home when rain caught him when mowing, Pedro in the front, the mower in the back, Pedro to his by-the-alley home.

Two men drive down from Hidalgo County and try to sell watermelons - fat green-pig looking - and tell me the striped melons are from West Texas; I want to believe them, and while deciding to buy three, two for friends, one man pulls out a long knife and cuts off a red sweet seedy chuck, and gives it to me and I am hooked - West Texas melons in early October, watered, the men say, by pumps that suck up ground water.

The Chicago men, home. Bus gone.

Pedro, home. Bicycle locked.

The watermelon men, home, by dusk. Engine off.

Eugene “Gene” Novagrodsky
October 2, 2008