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Sorghum
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Helen: “What are the morals of this town like?” Gertrude: “Excellent. So good in fact that several of our sewing societies have failed for want of a scandal to talk about.”
Hamilton had a courthouse and several small stores, and that’s about it. There was an artesian well coming from a plain pipe in front of the court house with three drinking spouts. Nobody thought about building a wall or foun- tain to dramatize it. One day Mr. Mixon, the hardware store owner, tapped a well at his house and the artesian well stopped spouting at the courthouse. No one complained, and I got to swim in the pool and fish in the lake that Mr. Mixon built from his well.
Every now and then a black minstrel show would come through. Other times there’d be white people pretending to be black by putting soot on their faces. They’d make clean jokes about race, and play banjos and violins. One of Dad’s clean, “black” jokes went:
The colored church had secured a new preacher. “How do you like the new preacher?” Sam asked. “We likes him just
