The Pinch

1878.

Once upon a bone-dry July afternoon, a solitary pack peddler by the name of Pinchas Pinsker came down the road.  Pushing a wooden handcart, which he leaned against at an angle almost parallel to the ground, he turned into an avenue of oaks that led toward a colonnaded plantation house.  His cart was a low, two-wheeled affair that had recently belonged to a greengrocer in Crab Orchard, Kentucky, and for it Pinchas had swapped a quantity of sateen ticking that the man’s wife had admired.  He pushed the contraption by a pair of spindled handstaffs that he hoped one day to hitch to a horse’s flanks.  The cart contained the tarp-covered contents of a small racket store: razors, carpet slippers, snuffboxes, and tobacco; there were spectacles, kitchen utensils, candles, oilcloth, dress patterns, and yard goods; dolls for the children, kickshaws for the ladies.  Though he wasn’t born to this profession, when he removed the tarp from his merchandise, Pinchas—a short, bespectacled man with a nap of sandy hair under his bowler hat–felt like a conjuror revealing treasures.

As he neared the broad-portico’d house, he anticipated the servants and children coming out to greet him. That’s what he was accustomed to.  The occupants of sharecroppers’ shacks and planters’ mansions alike would trickle forth from their habitations to welcome the Jew peddler and sample his wares.  It was why he’d been drawn to the South in the first place, having heard that the population viewed the Hebrew with reverence as a person of the Book. ...