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“Didn’t I tell you right, Pa?”
    “Hush up, you Dude,” Ada scowled. “Can’t you see your Pa ain’t got no time to talk about nothing?”
    Jeeter thrust his chin over the top of the sack and looked straight at Lov. Lov’s eyes were bulging and blood-shot. He thought of the seven and a half miles he had walked that morning, all the way to the other side of Fuller and back again, and what he saw now made him sick.
    Ellie May was doing her best to pull Lov back where he had been. He was trying to get away so he could protect his turnips and keep the Lesters out of the sack. The very thing he had at first been so careful to guard against when he stopped at the house had happened so quickly he did not know what to think about it. That, however, had been before Ellie May began sliding her bare bottom over the sandy yard towards him. He realized now what a fool he had been—to lose his head, and his turnips, too.
    The three negroes were straining their necks to see everything. They had watched Ellie May and Lov with growing enthusiasm until Jeeter suddenly descended upon the sack, and now they were trying to guess what would happen next in the yard.
    Ada and the old grandmother found two large and heavy sticks, and tried to pry Lov over on his back so Ellie May could reach him again. Lov was doing everything in his power to protect his sack, because he knew full well that if Jeeter once got twenty steps ahead of him, he would never be able to catch him before all the turnips were eaten. Jeeter was old, but he could run like a rabbit when he had to.
    “Don’t be scared of Ellie May, Lov,” Ada said. “Ellie May ain’t going to hurt you. She’s all excited, but she ain’t the rough kind at all. She won’t hurt you.”
    Ada prodded him with the stick and made him stop wiggling away from Ellie May. She jabbed him in the ribs as hard as she could, biting her lower lip between her teeth.
    “Them niggers look like they is going to come in the yard and help Lov out,” Dude said. “If they come in here, I’ll bust them with a rock. They ain’t got no business helping Lov.”
    “They ain’t thinking of coming in here,” Ada said. “Niggers has got more sense than trying to interfere with white-folks’ business. They don’t dare come.”
    The colored men did not come any closer. They would have liked to help Lov, because they were friends of his, but they were more interested in waiting to see what Ellie May was going to do than they were in saving the turnips.
    Ellie May was sweating like a plow-hand. Lov had got sand all over him, and she was trying to wipe it off with a corner of her gingham mother-hubbard, and to get to him again. Lov made a final and desperate plunge for the sack, and although he succeeded in getting nearly a foot closer to it, Ada hit him on the head with the blackjack stick so hard he slumped helpless on the ground with a weak groan. Ellie May was upon him in a single plunge; her excited, feline agility frightening him almost out of his mind. His breath had first been knocked from him by the force of Ellie May’s weight falling on his unprotected stomach, and her knees digging into him with the pain of a mule’s kick kept him from being able to breathe without sharp pains in his lungs. He was defenseless in her hold. While Ellie May held him, his arms pinned to the ground, Ada stood over him with her heavy blackjack pole, prepared to strike him on the head if he again tried to get up or to turn over on his stomach. The old grandmother waited on the other side with her stick held high and menacing above her head. She muttered under her breath all the time, but no one paid any attention to what she was trying to say.
    “Has these turnips got them damn-blasted green-gutted worms in them, Lov?” Jeeter said. “By God and by Jesus, if they’re wormy, I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. I been so sick of eating wormy turnips, I declare I almost lost my religion. It’s a shame