Hez never saw any landlord come around. He figured that she had just squatted there. He slept on a pallet in an alcove she called the sewing room. He found night work baking bricks at a local plant. A minister Moena had known helped get him enrolled in the divinity college.
It was rougher going than he’d anticipated. He’d sit in the furnace room at the plant reading Latin and Greek and Hebrew all night. At dawn he’d go home and bathe. Then he’d head for class. On Sundays he’d go out with one or two other students and preach at poor country churches.
The others invariably kept their sermons strictly to expansions on Scripture. Hez always wrapped the meaning of the Scriptures around the plight of the poor and downtrodden. On one occasion he made the Book of Isaiah sound as though it prophesied the long awaited uprising of black Americans.
More than one member of the congregation was heard to whisper after the service that if the wrong white man ever heard one of Hez’s sermons, they’d lynch him for sure.
