And he met the grief-stricken and the celebratory, the quilters and choristers. He met people at weddings and football games and pasture track meets and at barbecues under voluminous oaks by blackwater rivers where the smell of slow-roasting pork filled the woods with its sweetness. He met peddlers and dodgemen offering burial and life insurance for pennies a week and truck drivers and higglers; and he met preachers, jolly ones and severe ones and ones who told funny jokes at dinner and ones whose speech was so filled with extraordinary locutions that he wondered if it was a special language taught only to preachers and understood only by them; he met schoolteachers and doctors and barbers and lodgekeepers and tinners and ragpickers and butter and egg men and grifters and ex-bindlestiffs turned shouters, and a sightless wanderer who liked to fondle the porphyry necklaces. In Tarbitha, Alabama, he watched a silky-haired copperbright woman throw back a glass of red wine punch and thought his heart would stop. He met africano policemen wearing cracked Sam Browne belts and met house painters and a writer of tall tales that he said were better than the Uncle Remus stories that newspaperman Harris had stolen from the colored folks over there in Georgia. He met undertakers and talked shop with them and by way of the undertaker railroad you might call it sent messages to Oliver, telling him he was on a mighty adventure.

2