Nicholas Tate and Berry Allen pulled up two chairs and invited a visitor to sit in the shade outside Allen’s Huntsville business and hear the two men’s story. Tate didn’t need a chair. He’s been in a wheelchair for 6 years with both legs amputated.

Baugh Art, Allen’s business and Tate’s employer, sits in a gravel alley between Walker Avenue and Howe Street in one of Huntsville’s downtown historic districts. Tree-shaded, almost-hidden alleys like these are among the if-you-know, you-know, things about old Southern cities.

Allen is a graduate of the University of Mississippi with a degree in Fine Arts. Tate is a graduate of a lifetime of work with his hands. Their friendship and mutual respect are two other things that might surprise some people about the South.

Allen is a lean, tanned, white man whose business focuses on large metal sculptures with side work in custom curtain and bathroom hardware for the large homes rising in Huntsville and along the lakeshores nearby. He has customers and interior designers calling regularly for special requests.

Tate is a large Black man whose focus is working hard every day and mastering the task at hand. He’s gone from asking Tate three times for a job as his wheelchair rolled by on the street to having his own workshop and his own daily schedule.

Allen said he tried to hire people before Tate. “Everyone wanted too much or didn’t know what they were doing,” Allen said. “I needed them punctual and functional.”

”I quickly felt comfortable enough to give him a key and a (job) list while I went out looking for work,” Allen said of Tate.

Tate started working in Huntsville 37 years ago as a brick mason. He had to give that up after the first leg amputation following an infection that caused his “doctor’s eyes to get big” when she saw it, he said. Losing the leg “was the hardest thing I ever had to do,” Tate said, until he had to do it again after the same infection developed in his other leg.

Tate has had jobs around town over the years and he didn’t get hired by some companies worried about his legs. “They wouldn’t hire me for fear of lawsuits,” he said.

”If anybody has a reason to have an attitude, it’s this man here,” Allen said of Tate. “And I don’t want him or anybody to think I gave him a job because he’s a charity case. I said ‘no’ three times.”

Today, Tate has his own key to the business. “I just need to know the No. 1 priority (for the day),” he said. That priority will get done.

Sitting a few feet away is another example of what you can learn from hard work and paying attention: a 40-foot metal Celtic cross across two sawhorses. It was saved from a church coming down in Huntsville and donated to the Christian counseling center The Vine. It needed a new coat of rust protection before it could move to its new home.

Tate offered to do it. Allen asked, “You know how to do that?” He was a leery because this is another one of those jobs that are harder than they seem. Spray-on coatings must be applied on all sides in an even covering thick enough to do the job, but not thick enough to drip or bubble.

Tate did it perfectly, Allen said. From his wheelchair. In a grassy lot. Until the cross moves, it’ll be there for visitors and prospective customers to see. In the meantime, Allen and Tate will be scheduling what jobs are next.