INTERLUDE #1 

An interlude is a literary device where the author breaks from the narrative to insert a story that somehow connects to the theme of the novel. Twelve times through DEVIL MAKE A THIRD,  the author breaks the flow of the narrative to give the reader an intimate conversation between two railroad brakemen, Jake Willis and Bascom Wooten. This first interlude is concurrent with the plot but moves the action forward 16 months.

From their first conversation we learn that the past year has been a lucrative one for young Buck Bannon's after-hours loan business @ Green's Store. By charging 25 % interest per week on a $2 loan, Buck spends his time making Aven's citizens his loan customers instead of making them his friends. In the case of Jake and Bascom, both of their lives of debt peonage to Buck Bannon began the day they were broke before payday but wanted to go the whorehouse. By pawning their watches and borrowing two bucks from Buck so they could go see Aven's girls, each one of the pair, in the words of Tennessee Ernie Ford, "sold his soul to the company store"; "The company store" in this case being a nineteen-year-old entrepreneur who only wants his loan customers to ignore their mounting debt and to cover their loan's interest every payday, insuring that they live the rest of their lives making Buck Bannon a profit.

Both of these brakemen feel like idiots when they have to give this new kid in town money every payday but Bascom has the added guilt of knowing "I'm the damned fool that started it all. 'F I hadn't borrowed the first dollar from Buck Bannon, he'd never o' made a loan. I was itchin' to get to Mabe's place and didn't have a copper. By God, I had to tell him how much interest to charge, and I offered to put up my watch."

Buck Bannon's missed out on attending a university's school of commerce so the dusty streets of Aven became his classroom and every railroad payday found him marking his account book, collecting his loan payments and "figurin' how much us railroaders own him. Been there ever' payday for over a year." Buck's successful first year living in town taught him many tricks of his new trade but he also learned to acquire some of same habits that afflicted his loan customers. Jake and Bascom took satisfaction in knowing that they were there when Buck, the green country boy who just walked out of the piney woods, was introduced to Aven's sketchy adult entertainment provided by the whores down at Mabe's Place. As they laugh about the memory, Jake imitates Buck's slow drawl as he stood goggling the curtains and mirrors inside the fancy foyer of Mabe's place, "Jake, them's white girls."

With this first mention of the race of Mabe's prostitutes, the author lets the reader know that Aven is a segregated society and during the course of the novel, the author never makes comments nor condemns Aven's discriminatory customs which condemned many of its residents to a life of toil for which they received little compensation. There are no strong Black characters in the novel and in the twenty or so places where Blacks make an appearance, they work in menial jobs such as waiters, bellboys, cooks, shoe shine boys, maids, cooks, chauffeurs, or farm laborers. The closest the author gets to an enterprising Black character is a street corner preacher who has some goats to sell. The legacy of slavery is mentioned only once and that was part of an elaborate rationalization concerning his rich former father-in-law Buck which brings up to justify his own greed, "I got no guilty feelings. Maybe I've squeezed a mortgage too close and maybe I've shaved off a little for myself when I bought for the city. Folks forget anyhow. They've forgot how old Longshore's folks trafficked in slaves so they could raise him in a big white house in the middle of ten thousand acres of sandy loam. Maybe forty-fifty years from now, some Bannon'll be oozin' religion at the church door and folks won't remember that Buck turned his eyes off while his hands gathered a crop they didn't make."

In this first two chapters and the interlude, Dougie Bailey establishes all the characters from which all of the novel's action will emerge and gives the reader a vivid portrait the commercial environment of a booming railroad town which produces all of the obstacles that the character of Buck Bannon will conquer. There's no idealism or striving for social justice in Devil Make A Third. It is a down-to-earth story of how one country boy leaves home to move to a strange place armed only with a $20 gold coin and an optimism which allows him to confront every obstacle to his progress and to overcome each one.