A Moment in the Sun Read Online Free PDF

who was naked with him. “That’s why the man look at you so careful, cause they already got all their suits and they only want them what fits in em.”
    Royal sits and nobody talks for a while, the sounds drifting in from deep-voiced men calling cadence as they drill. They were a sight all right, just like Junior told him they’d be, colored men of all shades and ages marching in squared-off groups with their blue shirts dazzling in the afternoon sun, tall as pines with their rifles held just so over their shoulders. He thought that there would be a stockade wall, but no, just a huge open rectangle of a parade ground surrounded by wooden buildings, sitting by the river at the base of evergreen-covered mountains.
    Fort Missoula.
    He pictures himself standing in that blue uniform in the parlor at Junior’s house, Dr. Lunceford’s hard eye digging into him and her, Jessie, standing behind, seeing him like it’s the first time. Not the same Royal.
    But only they choose him. If they take Junior and send him away that is all there is to it, go back to Wilmington and press cotton at Sprunt’s, forget about Jessie. If they take him and not Junior—but that won’t happen.
    Another colored soldier steps into the hallway, darker and older than Little Earl who shoved the stool along, this one with more yellow stripes on his arm, standing wide-legged and hands on hips, looking down on them like he owns it all.
    “On your feet.”
    He doesn’t shout, doesn’t talk loud at all but the men jump up. He reads off a list.
    “Hazzard, Drinkwater, Lunceford—” he reads and Royal hears a small gasp of relief from Junior, “—Brewster and Scott, stay here. The rest of you go out that door and get back to where you come from.”
    It takes a while for the ones they don’t want to mumble out, disappointed. Royal wonders if some have come from as far as him, all the way up here where they still got Indians who wear deer hide on their feet, a half-dozen of them smoking and looking you over when you walk through the post gate.
    “Lunceford,” says the older one.
    “Yes sir!”
    Junior sings it out. He has had Royal practicing his Yes sir and No sir which is how he says you got to answer everybody above you even if they’re not old or a white man.
    “Step forward.”
    Junior steps forward smart and stands with his eyes locked ahead. Junior is not so filled in as the others they picked, chicken-chested with skinny pins, but his clothes are nice and he’s lighter complected and carries himself high.
    “You been to school, Lunceford.” The soldier says it as a fact.
    “Yes sir. Hampton Institute and then half this year at Fisk.”
    “Anything you learn there, you gone have to forget it.”
    There is something in his friend’s eyes Royal has never seen before, hesitating before he speaks.
    “Yes sir,” says Junior in a quiet voice. “I’ll try to do that sir.”
    “You call me Sergeant.”
    “Yes Sergeant.”
    “Get back in line.”
    Junior steps straight back two steps without looking and ends up square with the other four. Royal wonders if he’s practiced that too.
    “I am Sergeant Jacks,” says the dark man evenly, the man with the stripes on his arm. “And you sorry niggers have the good fortune to be selected to join the 25th Infantry.”
    Royal jumps off the branch.

IN THE TEMPLE
    In the last few years it has been the Italians, Guglielmo Tell mostly, or Un Ballo in Maschera , or something new by Puccini. Diosdado stands smoking with a group of his classmates outside the Teatro Zorilla, slightly rumpled in their white linen as students are expected to be, positioned to watch the daughters of the wealthy and their dueñas alight from their closed carriages, each one opening like a box of bombones to reveal the delicacy within, girls in satin and taffeta and silk and the occasional butterfly in a balintawak , sleeves like delicate, transparent wings, their hair shining with oil and up in combs, bestowing their