The tribe moves. They hunt food, as a grazing herd will track down rich forage. There are forty or fifty blacks in this camp. Dinner has been eaten. Children, back from the day-care center, stand, taken by surprise, with that illimitable, peculiar capacity for staring, as if my strangeness, like pendulum-swung watches, had hypnotized them into bliss. There are full families; half-families; bachelors and single women. And a headman, a patriarch: the crew leader who has based them here from Florida. Nomad clan structure in semi-suburban, September New York state.
Time, too, is harvested. Music shouts from a room; I can touch its beat in the wood under my palm. Seven men and women play keno, two bits per board. The place will recall a YMCA camp my son attended one summer: three long dormitory buildings exposure-grey yet firm, stashed in forest. “We work by order: pick only what the boss man can sell. We was in the field three hours today, ten hours yesterday. Got a lot of time on our hands—it isn’t always easy—we play cards, play the piccolo, dance. Try to make old time fly.”
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