1940's

—Describing Market Square in the postwar 1940's in his novel “Bijou” (1974) —

Lucius enjoyed passing through the ancient three-storey, block-long, brick Market House, its arched ceiling looming over them, a line of rough little tables running down the spine of the building where country women sold eggs, shelled walnuts, jams, and honey. Permanent butcher and flower and fruit stalls and restaurants and lunch counters along each side. They walked along the sidewalks flanking the Market House where produce and flower trucks, mostly canvas-covered Ford pickups of the thirties, were parked, backed up to the curbs, their overladen tailgates hanging heavy, the country folks standing ready to sack up some pole beans or okra. The police loved to park at each end of the Market House, where the ornate fountains attached to the sooty brick walls were dry.

Up one side and down the other of Market Square, past the stones—and the Ritz and the Jewel and the vegetable and flower trucks lining the curbs. And through the enormous cave of the Market House, up one side and down the other. Lucius had to argue to make Duke stop long enough for him to buy some good ol' country butter with an eagle imprint made by a wooden imprint the old lady, her hand stained from shelling walnuts, showed him, letting him touch and smell Mammy's origins in the mountains. But Duke said he wouldn't walk with Lucius if he bought a big mayonnaise jar of fresh churned buttermilk to carry back home.

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