© Copyright 1999 James David Pearce
THE DOCTORS SAY I'M GETTING BETTER
Boweaver was smart. He was so smart in grammar school that they had to make up a special award for him when he was promoted to high school.
That made a real impression on the publisher of the local newspaper, who had been called on to make a few remarks at the occasion. A couple of months earlier, he had given Boweaver a part-time job at the print shop, outside of school hours.
The first hour on the job, the publisher, J. Mayon Parker, took the boy into his office for a talk, stressing that Boweaver was going to be a "printer's devil," but that he was there basically to "learn," and "work" was going to be secondary.
He cautioned Boweaver never to pick up a broom in the newspaper office – there were others around to do the sweeping. And he laid out a course of "study" for the new "devil," with emphasis first on learning the location of the letters in the type cases and the location of the letters on the Linotype keyboard.
Thus elevated, Boweaver went to work with a will. On the second day on the job, he met Rudolph Washington.
Rudolph was a 25-year-old black man. The sweeping task was his, along with just about every other odd job that came to hand.
He worked harder and made less money than any other man in the place, casting lead plates, running the hand-mailer, carrying pages to the press, changing ink rollers, and sweeping up. That last task had to be accomplished after everybody else had gone for the day.
He also had a shoeshine stand, and after five days in the print shop, he'd set up his stand by the train tracks on No-Man's Land, off Main Street, and shine shoes all day Saturday and Sunday.
Boweaver had one after-hours chore, one that couldn't be done while the Linotypes were in use. He stayed late to clean the steel spacers for the Linotype machines. It wasn't a hard job, but it was tedious and like everything else around the print shop, it did tend to get your hands dirty.
These after-shift stay-overs brought him and Rudolph into closer contact, and they began to fall into discussions about print shops, shoeshine stands and life in general.
When there was no talking to be done, Rudolph would sing, but Boweaver thought he was being joshed when his friend claimed he could play a piano. So Rudolph decided to prove that he could play.
They went to Robert L. Vann School, the "colored" school, late one Friday afternoon, and Boweaver followed Rudolph through a broken furnace-room window and up to the auditorium, where there were two pianos.
Boweaver was really impressed. Rudolph played without reading music, but left no doubt that he was a musician. Boweaver marveled at the irony of the musically talented black man who shined shoes and swept floors for a living.
Then he learned that Rudolph had a real problem. Tuberculosis.
Every month or so, Rudolph went to the doctor and a needle was put into his bad lung to drain out fluid. When he came back from these doctor visits, he was weak and shaky, but he kept plugging away at the print shop and the shoeshine stand.
Finally he got so bad off he had to go to a sanitarium.
Boweaver sent him a card, with a little note to try to cheer his friend, and Rudolph replied with what for him must have been a long letter. He had a neat, flowing style of writing.
The interesting thing about Rudolph's letter was the way he never used punctuation or paragraph. Between each sentence or thought, he inserted the word "smile" with a circle around it, and it took some concentration for Boweaver to make out what he was saying:
"~smile~ you are my best friend ~smile~ one day soon I am coming home ~smile~ you and I will go to the school and play the piano and sing ~smile~ my wife wrote me that my mother died ~smile~ I hope nobody takes away my shoeshine stand ~smile~ I want to see you real bad ~smile~ the doctors say I'm getting better ~smile~ they won't tell me when I can come home ~smile~"
That was the only letter Boweaver ever got from Rudolph.
One day some weeks later, Rudolph's wife came by the print shop to tell Boweaver that Rudolph was dead. He had been buried in a field at the sanitarium.
~~~
No-Man's Land, Ahoskie, 2001 ~ In the early 1940s,
Rudolph set up a shoeshine stand here
every Saturday and Sunday
~~~~~~~~~
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