The Scrap Dealer Laughed When a Black Boy Chose the Stone Rice Mill — Then Harvest Season Began
Chapter 2
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Elijah spent an hour with a wire brush. There was no maker's plate anywhere. On the gear housing where one should have been, he found four rivet holes in a neat rectangle. Somebody had pried it off long ago. He sent Nolan the picture.Nolan texted back two words: "Coming Thursday."Before Thursday, Elijah drove to Whitmore Delta Milling to book his fall toll milling slot and ask about the broken rice price. The plant sat on the edge of town like its own small city of silos, conveyors, truck scales, and a control room behind tinted glass.A clerk frowned at the size of his lot and went to find someone. The someone turned out to be Eleanor Whitmore, the company's president, on her way between meetings. She was polite and fast: during peak harvest, small toll lots went behind contract customers. Broken rice would be bought back at last year's price."That's not much," Elijah said."It's a byproduct. We pull it out so the premium product stays premium. If growers kept it, and did what with it?""Ground it."She smiled like she'd heard the joke before. "Mr. Brooks, this plant mills more rice before lunch than you could handle in a month.""Yeah, I didn't say I'd handle what you handle."She checked her watch. "Then let me be clear so there's no confusion in September. If harvest runs like last year, we can't rearrange a line for a few thousand pounds."On his way out, Elijah passed a row of machines screaming under their housings. A tech in a gray Whitmore shirt was holding a temperature gun to a bearing housing and writing the reading on a clipboard. He didn't look happy with the number.Nolan showed up Thursday in a truck older than Elijah. He was 68, wiry, and he didn't laugh at the mill. He walked around it twice, then tapped each stone with a rubber mallet, listening.Elijah pointed at a dark line across the top stone. "That crack worried me.""That's not a crack." Nolan ran his thumb along it. "That's a joint, and those are dress lines. Somebody cut those furrows on purpose. These stones have years left in them."He lifted the old hopper lid down onto the bench, and under a crust of paint, Elijah's putty knife scraped across brass. He worked it clean:Delta Community Grain Cooperative. Below that, the year 1958.Nolan nodded slowly. When he was young, he said, little co-ops like that ran up and down the Delta. A lot of the members were black families farming 40 or 60 acres. The big mills wouldn't take their small lots, or took them at a price that hurt, so they pooled what they had and bought their own equipment. Most of them closed when the big mills consolidated.A rusted steel box was bolted beside the frame. Inside, wrapped in a feed sack, was a chart of stone settings penciled in by hand: cornmeal, grits, and one line Elijah read twice—broken rice flour. Under the chart lay a thin member ledger. He paged through it and stopped at a name:S. Brooks.His grandfather, Samuel, had been gone six years. Elijah took a picture of the page and didn't say anything for a while.