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evening in heaven where with the Baal Shem Tov he studies Torah.” Persisting in his censure, he no longer troubled to translate the words his nephew was gradually becoming acquainted with. Muni was learning as well to take his uncle’s grievances with a grain of salt. Hadn’t he observed how the storekeeper found such frequent excuses to draw the rebbe into religious disputes? True, they tended to be one-sided arguments, since Rabbi Eliakum largely held his peace. The old man seemed bemused by the freethinker’s capacity to remain unbelieving in the face of such practical demonstrations of the indwellingness of the divine. Today, however, after unlocking the front door, Muni was seized by a rogue impulse to call the proprietor’s bluff.
    “So Uncle, why do you stay?”
    Pinchas Pin, né Pinsker, the suffix having dropped off like a vestigial tail since his arrival on North Main, was taken aback. “Stay where?”
    “Here in the Pinch.”
    Pinchas looked at his nephew as if he were mad, and in one of those perplexing statements that Muni was growing so accustomed to, declared, “There ain’t no place else.”
    Shortly after, a colored man entered the store. Despite the caveats of the local Klan lest they set an unseemly precedent, the so-called Jew stores along North Main Street had no policy against trading with Negroes. Business was business. Most of the city’s colored clientele, however, did their shopping south of the Pinch on rowdy Beale Street. So it wasn’t unusual that, when a schwartze came into a North Main establishment, some irate customer might raise an objection. Such was the case this morning, when a pear-shaped matron left off sampling a bolt of percale in order to alert the proprietor to the fact that “there’s a nigra in your store.”
    Pinchas looked up from replacing the drawer of his till, which he closed with a pleasing click-ching. He squinted over his eyeglasses at the black man, who was also wearing spectacles, round ones with smoky lenses, while tapping the floorboards before him with a rattan cane. In a stage whisper the storekeeper replied to the woman, “This one is blind, so maybe he don’t know he’s colored.”
    Shooing the little boy in her charge out the door in front of her, the woman indignantly exited the general store.
    Muni had to laugh, a rare occurrence. During the weeks in his uncle’s employ, he’d seen Pinchas indulge any number of drifters and bindle stiffs, some of whom he invited to stay for a plate of Katie’s glutinous spuds. Muni recalled the Old Country custom of suspecting that every stranger might be the prophet Elijah in disguise, and so entreating him to share a Shabbos meal, but Pinchas was the sworn enemy of all such grandmothers’ tales.
    “What for you can I do?” the storekeeper inquired of the Negro, who had stationed himself between the fabric counter and a flatware rack. He was an old fellow in a floppy hat, his hollow cheeks fretted with cracks like muddy sinkholes. He wore a collarless white shirt gone dun-drab with age and an ancient spiketail coat that gave him the aspect of a draggled crow. Muni, for whom black people were still a novelty, calculated that the man was old enough to have been born into bondage.
    “Do y’all got a mite of catgut?” he asked in his sandpaper voice.
    Pinchas had all kinds of gut, as well as yarn, twine, mason’s and fishing line, kite string and shoestring, plaited rope. He asked the man how much he needed and was told “’bout a footstep,” which the storekeeper proceeded to unwind from a spool and snip with a pair of shears. He held out the curling catgut to the Negro until he remembered the man couldn’t see. Approaching him, he took the cane from his fingers, tucked it under the man’s damp armpit, and folded the gut into his leathery hand. The man thanked him kindly and, clenching the gut between his couple of buff-yellow teeth, reached into the gunnysack he carried in his other hand. He