Pigs were crying in the chute. All day Paul D, Stamp Paid and twenty more had pushed andprodded them from canal to shore to chute to slaughterhouse. Although, as grain farmers movedwest, St. Louis and Chicago now ate up a lot of the business, Cincinnati was still pig port in theminds of Ohioans. Its main job was to receive, slaughter and ship up the river the hogs thatNortherners did not want to live without. For a month or so in the winter any stray man had work,if he could breathe the stench of offal and stand up for twelve hours, skills in which Paul D wasadmirably trained. A little pig shit, rinsed from every place he could touch, remained on his boots,and he was conscious of it as he stood there with a light smile of scorn curling his lips. Usually heleft his boots in the shed and put his walking shoes on along with his day clothes in the cornerbefore he went home. A route that took him smack dab through the middle of a cemetery as old assky, rife with the agitation of dead Miami no longer content to rest in the mounds that coveredthem. Over their heads walked a strange people; through their earth pillows roads were cut; wellsand houses nudged them out of eternal rest. Outraged more by their folly in believing land washoly than by the disturbances of their peace, they growled on the banks of Licking River, sighed inthe trees on Catherine Street and rode the wind above the pig yards. Paul D heard them but hestayed on because all in all it wasn't a bad job, especially in winter when Cincinnati reassumed itsstatus of slaughter and riverboat capital. The craving for pork was growing into a mania in everycity in the country. Pig farmers were cashing in, provided they could raise enough and get themsold farther and farther away. And the Germans who flooded southern Ohio brought and developedswine cooking to its highest form. Pig boats jammed the Ohio River, and their captains' holleringat one another over the grunts of the stock was as common a water sound as that of the ducksflying over their heads. Sheep, cows and fowl too floated up and down that river, and all a Negrohad to do was show up and there was work: poking, killing, cutting, skinning, case packing andsaving offal.
A hundred yards from the crying pigs, the two men stood behind a shed on Western Row and it was clear why Stamp had been eyeing Paul D this last week of work; why he paused when theevening shift came on, to let Paul D's movements catch up to his own. He had made up his mind toshow him this piece of paper — newspaper — with a picture drawing of a woman who favoredSethe except that was not her mouth. Nothing like it.
Paul D slid the clipping out from under Stamp's palm. The print meant nothing to him so he didn'teven glance at it. He simply looked at the face, shaking his head no. No. At the mouth, you see.And no at whatever it was those black scratches said, and no to whatever it was Stamp Paid wantedhim to know. Because there was no way in hell a black face could appear in a newspaper if thestory was about something anybody wanted to hear. A whip of fear broke through the heartchambers as soon as you saw a Negro's face in a paper, since the face was not there because theperson had a healthy baby, or outran a street mob. Nor was it there because the person had beenkilled, or maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped orcheated, since that could hardly qualify as news in a newspaper. It would have to be something outof the ordinary — something whitepeople would find interesting, truly different, worth a fewminutes of teeth sucking if not gasps. And it must have been hard to find news about Negroesworth the breath catch of a white citizen of Cincinnati.