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Title: Black Boy. A Record of Childhood and Youth.
Author: Wright, Richard [Richard Nathaniel] (1908-1960)
Author [introductory note]: Fisher, Dorothy Canfield (1879-1958)
Date of first publication: 1945
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Harper & Brothers, undated
Date first posted: 10 February 2020
Date last updated: 10 February 2020
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1668

This ebook was produced by
Al Haines, Chuck Greif, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.






BLACK BOY
A Record of Childhood and Youth


by Richard Wright




   _They meet with darkness in the daytime_
   _And they grope at noonday as in the night..._

   --JOB




   For

   ELLEN and JULIA

   who live always in my heart




INTRODUCTORY NOTE


More than eighty-five years ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes nobly said: "It
is so much easier to consign a soul to perdition or to say prayers to
save it, than to take the blame on ourselves for letting it grow up in
neglect and run to ruin. The English law began, only in the late
eighteenth century, to get hold of the idea that crime is not
necessarily a sin. The limitations of human responsibility have never
been properly studied."

If Dr. Holmes were alive now, he would be proud, as I am proud, of the
chance to help bring to the thoughtful attention of intelligent, morally
responsible Americans, the honest, dreadful, heart-breaking story of a
Negro childhood and youth, as set down by that rarely gifted American
author, Richard Wright.


DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER

Arlington, Vermont




BLACK BOY




CHAPTER I


One winter morning in the long-ago, four-year-old days of my life I
found myself standing before a fireplace, warming my hands over a mound
of glowing coals, listening to the wind whistle past the house outside.
All morning my mother had been scolding me, telling me to keep still,
warning me that I must make no noise. And I was angry, fretful, and
impatient. In the next room Granny lay ill and under the day and night
care of a doctor and I knew that I would be punished if I did not obey.
I crossed restlessly to the window and pushed back the long fluffy white
curtains--which I had been forbidden to touch--and looked yearningly out
into the empty street. I was dreaming of running and playing and
shouting, but the vivid image of Granny's old, white, wrinkled, grim
face, framed by a halo of tumbling black hair, lying upon a huge feather
pillow, made me afraid.

The house was quiet. Behind me my brother--a year younger than I--was
playing placidly upon the floor with a toy. A bird wheeled past the
window and I greeted it with a glad shout.

"You better hush," my brother said.

"You shut up," I said.

My mother stepped briskly into the room and closed the door behind her.
She came to me and shook her finger in my face.

"You stop that yelling, you hear?" she whispered. "You know Granny's
sick and you better keep quiet!"

I hung my head and sulked. She left and I ached with boredom.

"I told you so," my brother gloated.

"You shut up," I told him again.

I wandered listlessly about the room, trying to think of something to
do, dreading the return of my mother, resentful of being neglected. The
room held nothing of interest except the fire and finally I stood before
the shimmering embers, fascinated by the quivering coals. An idea of a
new kind of game grew and took root in my mind. Why not throw something
into the fire and watch it burn? I looked about. There was only my
picture book and my mother would beat me if I burned that. Then what? I
hunted around until I saw the broom leaning in a closet. That's it....
Who would bother about a few straws if I burned them? I pulled out the
broom and tore out a batch of straws and tossed them into the fire and
watched them smoke, turn black, blaze, and finally become white wisps of
ghosts that vanished. Burning straws was a teasing kind of fun and I
took more of them from the broom and cast them into the fire. My brother
came to my side, his eyes drawn by the blazing straws.

"Don't do that," he said.

"How come?" I asked.

"You'll burn the whole broom," he said.

"You hush," I said.

"I'll tell," he said.

"And I'll hit you," I said.

My idea was growing, blooming. Now I was wondering just how the long
fluffy white curtains would look if I lit a bunch of straws and held it
under them. Would I try it? Sure. I pulled several straws from the broom
and held them to the fire until they blazed; I rushed to the window and
brought the flame in touch with the hems of the curtains. My brother
shook his head.

"Naw," he said.

He spoke too late. Red circles were eating into the white cloth; then a
flare of flames shot out. Startled, I backed away. The fire soared to
the ceiling and I trembled with fright. Soon a sheet of yellow lit the
room. I was terrified; I wanted to scream but was afraid. I looked
around for my brother; he was gone. One half of the room was now ablaze.
Smoke was choking me and the fire was licking at my face, making me
gasp.

I made for the kitchen; smoke was surging there too. Soon my mother
would smell that smoke and see the fire and come and beat me. I had done
something wrong, something which I could not hide or deny. Yes, I would
run away and never come back. I ran out of the kitchen and into the back
yard. Where could I go? Yes, under the house! Nobody would find me
there. I crawled under the house and crept into a dark hollow of a brick
chimney and balled myself into a tight knot. My mother must not find me
and whip me for what I had done. Anyway, it was all an accident; I had
not really intended to set the house afire. I had just wanted to see
how the curtains would look when they burned. And neither did it occur
to me that I was hiding under a burning house.

Presently footsteps pounded on the floor above me. Then I heard screams.
Later the gongs of fire wagons and the clopping hoofs of horses came
from the direction of the street. Yes, there was really a fire, a fire
like the one I had seen one day burn a house down to the ground, leaving
only a chimney standing black. I was stiff with terror. The thunder of
sound above me shook the chimney to which I clung. The screams came
louder. I saw the image of my grandmother lying helplessly upon her bed
and there were yellow flames in her black hair. Was my mother afire?
Would my brother burn? Perhaps everybody in the house would burn! Why
had I not thought of those things before I fired the curtains? I yearned
to become invisible, to stop living. The commotion above me increased
and I began to cry. It seemed that I had been hiding for ages, and when
the stomping and the screaming died down I felt lonely, cast forever out
of life. Voices sounded near-by and I shivered.

"Richard!" my mother was calling frantically.

I saw her legs and the hem of her dress moving swiftly about the back
yard. Her wails were full of an agony whose intensity told me that my
punishment would be measured by its depth. Then I saw her taut face
peering under the edge of the house. She had found me! I held my breath
and waited to hear her command me to come to her. Her face went away;
no, she had not seen me huddled in the dark nook of the chimney. I
tucked my head into my arms and my teeth chattered.

"Richard!"

The distress I sensed in her voice was as sharp and painful as the lash
of a whip on my flesh.

"Richard! The house is on fire. Oh, find my child!"

Yes, the house was afire, but I was determined not to leave my place of
safety. Finally I saw another face peering under the edge of the house;
it was my father's. His eyes must have become accustomed to the shadows,
for he was now pointing at me.

"There he is!"

"Naw!" I screamed.

"Come here, boy!"

"Naw!"

"The house is on fire!"

"Leave me 'lone!"

He crawled to me and caught hold of one of my legs. I hugged the edge of
the brick chimney with all of my strength. My father yanked my leg and I
clawed at the chimney harder.

"Come outta there, you little fool!"

"Turn me loose!"

I could not withstand the tugging at my leg and my fingers relaxed. It
was over. I would be beaten. I did not care any more. I knew what was
coming. He dragged me into the back yard and the instant his hand left
me I jumped to my feet and broke into a wild run, trying to elude the
people who surrounded me, heading for the street. I was caught before I
had gone ten paces.

From that moment on things became tangled for me. Out of the weeping and
the shouting and the wild talk, I learned that no one had died in the
fire. My brother, it seemed, had finally overcome enough of his panic to
warn my mother, but not before more than half the house had been
destroyed. Using the mattress as a stretcher, Grandpa and an uncle had
lifted Granny from her bed and had rushed her to the safety of a
neighbor's house. My long absence and silence had made everyone think,
for a while, that I had perished in the blaze.

"You almost scared us to death," my mother muttered as she stripped the
leaves from a tree limb to prepare it for my back.

I was lashed so hard and long that I lost consciousness. I was beaten
out of my senses and later I found myself in bed, screaming, determined
to run away, tussling with my mother and father who were trying to keep
me still. I was lost in a fog of fear. A doctor was called--I was
afterwards told--and he ordered that I be kept abed, that I be kept
quiet, that my very life depended upon it. My body seemed on fire and I
could not sleep. Packs of ice were put on my forehead to keep down the
fever. Whenever I tried to sleep I would see huge wobbly white bags,
like the full udders of cows, suspended from the ceiling above me.
Later, as I grew worse, I could see the bags in the daytime with my eyes
open and I was gripped by the fear that they were going to fall and
drench me with some horrible liquid. Day and night I begged my mother
and father to take the bags away, pointing to them, shaking with terror
because no one saw them but me. Exhaustion would make me drift toward
sleep and then I would scream until I was wide awake again; I was afraid
to sleep. Time finally bore me away from the dangerous bags and I got
well. But for a long time I was chastened whenever I remembered that my
mother had come close to killing me.

Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly
revealed their coded meanings. There was the wonder I felt when I first
saw a brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-and-white horses clopping
down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay.

There was the delight I caught in seeing long straight rows of red and
green vegetables stretching away in the sun to the bright horizon.

There was the faint, cool kiss of sensuality when dew came on to my
cheeks and shins as I ran down the wet green garden paths in the early
morning.

There was the vague sense of the infinite as I looked down upon the
yellow, dreaming waters of the Mississippi River from the verdant bluffs
of Natchez.

There were the echoes of nostalgia I heard in the crying strings of wild
geese winging south against a bleak, autumn sky.

There was the tantalizing melancholy in the tingling scent of burning
hickory wood.

There was the teasing and impossible desire to imitate the petty pride
of sparrows wallowing and flouncing in the red dust of country roads.

There was the yearning for identification loosed in me by the sight of a
solitary ant carrying a burden upon a mysterious journey.

There was the disdain that filled me as I tortured a delicate, blue-pink
crawfish that huddled fearfully in the mudsill of a rusty tin can.

There was the aching glory in masses of clouds burning gold and purple
from an invisible sun.

There was the liquid alarm I saw in the blood-red glare of the sun's
afterglow mirrored in the squared panes of whitewashed frame houses.

There was the languor I felt when I heard green leaves rustling with a
rainlike sound.

There was the incomprehensible secret embodied in a whitish toadstool
hiding in the dark shade of a rotting log.

There was the experience of feeling death without dying that came from
watching a chicken leap about blindly after its neck had been snapped by
a quick twist of my father's wrist.

There was the great joke that I felt God had played on cats and dogs by
making them lap their milk and water with their tongues.

There was the thirst I had when I watched clear, sweet juice trickle
from sugar cane being crushed.

There was the hot panic that welled up in my throat and swept through my
blood when I first saw the lazy, limp coils of a blue-skinned snake
sleeping in the sun.

There was the speechless astonishment of seeing a hog stabbed through
the heart, dipped into boiling water, scraped, split open, gutted, and
strung up gaping and bloody.

There was the love I had for the mute regality of tall, moss-clad oaks.

There was the hint of cosmic cruelty that I felt when I saw the curved
timbers of a wooden shack that had been warped in the summer sun.

There was the saliva that formed in my mouth whenever I smelt clay dust
potted with fresh rain.

There was the cloudy notion of hunger when I breathed the odor of
new-cut, bleeding grass.

And there was the quiet terror that suffused my senses when vast hazes
of gold washed earthward from star-heavy skies on silent nights....

One day my mother told me that we were going to Memphis on a boat, the
_Kate Adams_, and my eagerness thereafter made the days seem endless.
Each night I went to bed hoping that the next morning would be the day
of departure.

"How big is the boat?" I asked my mother.

"As big as a mountain," she said.

"Has it got a whistle?"

"Yes."

"Does the whistle blow?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"When the captain wants it to blow."

"Why do they call it the _Kate Adams_?"

"Because that's the boat's name."

"What color is the boat?"

"White."

"How long will we be on the boat?"

"All day and all night."

"Will we sleep on the boat?"

"Yes, when we get sleepy, we'll sleep. Now, hush."

For days I had dreamed about a huge white boat floating on a vast body
of water, but when my mother took me down to the levee on the day of
leaving, I saw a tiny, dirty boat that was not at all like the boat I
had imagined. I was disappointed and when time came to go on board I
cried and my mother thought that I did not want to go with her to
Memphis, and I could not tell her what the trouble was. Solace came when
I wandered about the boat and gazed at Negroes throwing dice, drinking
whisky, playing cards, lolling on boxes, eating, talking, and singing.
My father took me down into the engine room and the throbbing machines
enthralled me for hours.

In Memphis we lived in a one-story brick tenement. The stone buildings
and the concrete pavements looked bleak and hostile to me. The absence
of green, growing things made the city seem dead. Living space for the
four of us--my mother, my brother, my father, and me--was a kitchen and
a bedroom. In the front and rear were paved areas in which my brother
and I could play, but for days I was afraid to go into the strange city
streets alone.

It was in this tenement that the personality of my father first came
fully into the orbit of my concern. He worked as a night porter in a
Beale Street drugstore and he became important and forbidding to me only
when I learned that I could not make noise when he was asleep in the
daytime. He was the lawgiver in our family and I never laughed in his
presence. I used to lurk timidly in the kitchen doorway and watch his
huge body sitting slumped at the table. I stared at him with awe as he
gulped his beer from a tin bucket, as he ate long and heavily, sighed,
belched, closed his eyes to nod on a stuffed belly. He was quite fat and
his bloated stomach always lapped over his belt. He was always a
stranger to me, always somehow alien and remote.

One morning my brother and I, while playing in the rear of our flat,
found a stray kitten that set up a loud, persistent meowing. We fed it
some scraps of food and gave it water, but it still meowed. My father,
clad in his underwear, stumbled sleepily to the back door and demanded
that we keep quiet. We told him that it was the kitten that was making
the noise and he ordered us to drive it away. We tried to make the
kitten leave, but it would not budge. My father took a hand.

"Scat!" he shouted.

The scrawny kitten lingered, brushing itself against our legs, and
meowing plaintively.

"Kill that damn thing!" my father exploded. "Do anything, but get it
away from here!"

He went inside, grumbling. I resented his shouting and it irked me that
I could never make him feel my resentment. How could I hit back at him?
Oh, yes.... He had said to kill the kitten and I would kill it! I knew
that he had not really meant for me to kill the kitten, but my deep hate
of him urged me toward a literal acceptance of his word.

"He said for us to kill the kitten," I told my brother.

"He didn't mean it," my brother said.

"He did, and I'm going to kill 'im."

"Then he _will_ howl," my brother said.

"He can't howl if he's dead," I said.

"He didn't really say kill 'im," my brother protested.

"He did!" I said. "And you heard him!"

My brother ran away in fright. I found a piece of rope, made a noose,
slipped it about the kitten's neck, pulled it over a nail, then jerked
the animal clear of the ground. It gasped, slobbered, spun, doubled,
clawed the air frantically; finally its mouth gaped and its pink-white
tongue shot out stiffly. I tied the rope to a nail and went to find my
brother. He was crouching behind a corner of the building.

"I killed 'im," I whispered.

"You did bad," my brother said.

"Now Papa can sleep," I said, deeply satisfied.

"He didn't mean for you to kill 'im," my brother said.

"Then why did he _tell_ me to do it?" I demanded.

My brother could not answer; he stared fearfully at the dangling kitten.

"That kitten's going to get you," he warned me.

"That kitten can't even breathe now," I said.

"I'm going to tell," my brother said, running into the house.

I waited, resolving to defend myself with my father's rash words,
anticipating my enjoyment in repeating them to him even though I knew
that he had spoken them in anger. My mother hurried toward me, drying
her hands upon her apron. She stopped and paled when she saw the kitten
suspended from the rope.

"What in God's name have you done?" she asked.

"The kitten was making noise and Papa said to kill it," I explained.

"You little fool!" she said. "Your father's going to beat you for this!"

"But he told me to kill it," I said.

"You shut your mouth!"

She grabbed my hand and dragged me to my father's bedside and told him
what I had done.

"You know better than that!" my father stormed.

"You told me to kill 'im," I said.

"I told you to drive him away," he said.

"You told me to kill 'im," I countered positively.

"You get out of my eyes before I smack you down!" my father bellowed in
disgust, then turned over in bed.

I had had my first triumph over my father. I had made him believe that I
had taken his words literally. He could not punish me now without
risking his authority. I was happy because I had at last found a way to
throw my criticism of him into his face. I had made him feel that, if he
whipped me for killing the kitten, I would never give serious weight to
his words again. I had made him know that I felt he was cruel and I had
done it without his punishing me.

But my mother, being more imaginative, retaliated with an assault upon
my sensibilities that crushed me with the moral horror involved in
taking a life. All that afternoon she directed toward me calculated
words that spawned in my mind a horde of invisible demons bent upon
exacting vengeance for what I had done. As evening drew near, anxiety
filled me and I was afraid to go into an empty room alone.

"You owe a debt you can never pay," my mother said.

"I'm sorry," I mumbled.

"Being sorry can't make that kitten live again," she said.

Then, just before I was to go to bed, she uttered a paralyzing
injunction: she ordered me to go out into the dark, dig a grave, and
bury the kitten.

"No!" I screamed, feeling that if I went out of doors some evil spirit
would whisk me away.

"Get out there and bury that poor kitten," she ordered.

"I'm scared!"

"And wasn't that kitten scared when you put that rope around its neck?"
she asked.

"But it was only a kitten," I explained.

"But it was alive," she said. "Can you make it live again?"

"But Papa said to kill it," I said, trying to shift the moral blame upon
my father.

My mother whacked me across my mouth with the flat palm of her hand.

"You stop that lying! You knew what he meant!"

"I didn't!" I bawled.

She shoved a tiny spade into my hands.

"Go out there and dig a hole and bury that kitten!"

I stumbled out into the black night, sobbing, my legs wobbly from fear.
Though I knew that I had killed the kitten, my mother's words had made
it live again in my mind. What would that kitten do to me when I touched
it? Would it claw at my eyes? As I groped toward the dead kitten, my
mother lingered behind me, unseen in the dark, her disembodied voice
egging me on.

"Mama, come and stand by me," I begged.

"You didn't stand by that kitten, so why should I stand by you?" she
asked tauntingly from the menacing darkness.

"I can't touch it," I whimpered, feeling that the kitten was staring at
me with reproachful eyes.

"Untie it!" she ordered.

Shuddering, I fumbled at the rope and the kitten dropped to the pavement
with a thud that echoed in my mind for many days and nights. Then,
obeying my mother's floating voice, I hunted for a spot of earth, dug a
shallow hole, and buried the stiff kitten; as I handled its cold body my
skin prickled. When I had completed the burial, I sighed and started
back to the flat, but my mother caught hold of my hand and led me again
to the kitten's grave.

"Shut your eyes and repeat after me," she said.

I closed my eyes tightly, my hand clinging to hers.

"Dear God, our Father, forgive me, for I knew not what I was doing...."

"Dear God, our Father, forgive me, for I knew not what I was doing," I
repeated.

"And spare my poor life, even though I did not spare the life of the
kitten...."

"And spare my poor life, even though I did not spare the life of the
kitten," I repeated.

"And while I sleep tonight, do not snatch the breath of life from
me...."

I opened my mouth but no words came. My mind was frozen with horror. I
pictured myself gasping for breath and dying in my sleep. I broke away
from my mother and ran into the night, crying, shaking with dread.

"No," I sobbed.

My mother called to me many times, but I would not go to her.

"Well, I suppose you've learned your lesson," she said at last.

Contrite, I went to bed, hoping that I would never see another kitten.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hunger stole upon me so slowly that at first I was not aware of what
hunger really meant. Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow
when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger
standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly. The hunger I had known
before this had been no grim, hostile stranger; it had been a normal
hunger that had made me beg constantly for bread, and when I ate a crust
or two I was satisfied. But this new hunger baffled me, scared me, made
me angry and insistent. Whenever I begged for food now my mother would
pour me a cup of tea which would still the clamor in my stomach for a
moment or two; but a little later I would feel hunger nudging my ribs,
twisting my empty guts until they ached. I would grow dizzy and my
vision would dim. I became less active in my play, and for the first
time in my life I had to pause and think of what was happening to me.

"Mama, I'm hungry," I complained one afternoon.

"Jump up and catch a kungry," she said, trying to make me laugh and
forget.

"What's a _kungry_?"

"It's what little boys eat when they get hungry," she said.

"What does it taste like?"

"I don't know."

"Then why do you tell me to catch one?"

"Because you said that you were hungry," she said, smiling.

I sensed that she was teasing me and it made me angry.

"But I'm hungry. I want to eat."

"You'll have to wait."

"But I want to eat now."

"But there's nothing to eat," she told me.

"Why?"

"Just because there's none," she explained.

"But I want to eat," I said, beginning to cry.

"You'll just have to wait," she said again.

"But why?"

"For God to send some food."

"When is He going to send it?"

"I don't know."

"But I'm hungry!"

She was ironing and she paused and looked at me with tears in her eyes.

"Where's your father?" she asked me.

I stared in bewilderment. Yes, it was true that my father had not come
home to sleep for many days now and I could make as much noise as I
wanted. Though I had not known why he was absent, I had been glad that
he was not there to shout his restrictions at me. But it had never
occurred to me that his absence would mean that there would be no food.

"I don't know," I said.

"Who brings food into the house?" my mother asked me.

"Papa," I said. "He always brought food."

"Well, your father isn't here now," she said.

"Where is he?"

"I don't know," she said.

"But I'm hungry," I whimpered, stomping my feet.

"You'll have to wait until I get a job and buy food," she said.

As the days slid past the image of my father became associated with my
pangs of hunger, and whenever I felt hunger I thought of him with a deep
biological bitterness.

My mother finally went to work as a cook and left me and my brother
alone in the flat each day with a loaf of bread and a pot of tea. When
she returned at evening she would be tired and dispirited and would cry
a lot. Sometimes, when she was in despair, she would call us to her and
talk to us for hours, telling us that we now had no father, that our
lives would be different from those of other children, that we must
learn as soon as possible to take care of ourselves, to dress ourselves,
to prepare our own food; that we must take upon ourselves the
responsibility of the flat while she worked. Half frightened, we would
promise solemnly. We did not understand what had happened between our
father and our mother and the most that these long talks did to us was
to make us feel a vague dread. Whenever we asked why father had left,
she would tell us that we were too young to know.

One evening my mother told me that thereafter I would have to do the
shopping for food. She took me to the corner store to show me the way. I
was proud; I felt like a grownup. The next afternoon I looped the
basket over my arm and went down the pavement toward the store. When I
reached the corner, a gang of boys grabbed me, knocked me down, snatched
the basket, took the money, and sent me running home in panic. That
evening I told my mother what had happened, but she made no comment; she
sat down at once, wrote another note, gave me more money, and sent me
out to the grocery again. I crept down the steps and saw the same gang
of boys playing down the street. I ran back into the house.

"What's the matter?" my mother asked.

"It's those same boys," I said. "They'll beat me."

"You've got to get over that," she said. "Now, go on."

"I'm scared," I said.

"Go on and don't pay any attention to them," she said.

I went out of the door and walked briskly down the sidewalk, praying
that the gang would not molest me. But when I came abreast of them
someone shouted.

"There he is!"

They came toward me and I broke into a wild run toward home. They
overtook me and flung me to the pavement. I yelled, pleaded, kicked, but
they wrenched the money out of my hand. They yanked me to my feet, gave
me a few slaps, and sent me home sobbing. My mother met me at the door.

"They b-beat m-me," I gasped. "They t-t-took the m-money."

I started up the steps, seeking the shelter of the house.

"Don't you come in here," my mother warned me.

I froze in my tracks and stared at her.

"But they're coming after me," I said.

"You just stay right where you are," she said in a deadly tone. "I'm
going to teach you this night to stand up and fight for yourself."

She went into the house and I waited, terrified, wondering what she was
about. Presently she returned with more money and another note; she also
had a long heavy stick.

"Take this money, this note, and this stick," she said. "Go to the store
and buy those groceries. If those boys bother you, then fight."

I was baffled. My mother was telling me to fight, a thing that she had
never done before.

"But I'm scared," I said.

"Don't you come into this house until you've gotten those groceries,"
she said.

"They'll beat me; they'll beat me," I said.

"Then stay in the streets; don't come back here!"

I ran up the steps and tried to force my way past her into the house. A
stinging slap came on my jaw. I stood on the sidewalk, crying.

"Please, let me wait until tomorrow," I begged.

"No," she said. "Go now! If you come back into this house without those
groceries, I'll whip you!"

She slammed the door and I heard the key turn in the lock. I shook with
fright. I was alone upon the dark, hostile streets and gangs were after
me. I had the choice of being beaten at home or away from home. I
clutched the stick, crying, trying to reason. If I were beaten at home,
there was absolutely nothing that I could do about it; but if I were
beaten in the streets, I had a chance to fight and defend myself. I
walked slowly down the sidewalk, coming closer to the gang of boys,
holding the stick tightly. I was so full of fear that I could scarcely
breathe. I was almost upon them now.

"There he is again!" the cry went up.

They surrounded me quickly and began to grab for my hand.

"I'll kill you!" I threatened.

They closed in. In blind fear I let the stick fly, feeling it crack
against a boy's skull. I swung again, lamming another skull, then
another. Realizing that they would retaliate if I let up for but a
second, I fought to lay them low, to knock them cold, to kill them so
that they could not strike back at me. I flayed with tears in my eyes,
teeth clenched, stark fear making me throw every ounce of my strength
behind each blow. I hit again and again, dropping the money and the
grocery list. The boys scattered, yelling, nursing their heads, staring
at me in utter disbelief. They had never seen such frenzy. I stood
panting, egging them on, taunting them to come on and fight. When they
refused, I ran after them and they tore out for their homes, screaming.
The parents of the boys rushed into the streets and threatened me, and
for the first time in my life I shouted at grownups, telling them that I
would give them the same if they bothered me. I finally found my grocery
list and the money and went to the store. On my way back I kept my stick
poised for instant use, but there was not a single boy in sight. That
night I won the right to the streets of Memphis.

Of a summer morning, when my mother had gone to work, I would follow a
crowd of black children--abandoned for the day by their working
parents--to the bottom of a sloping hill whose top held a long row of
ramshackle, wooden outdoor privies whose opened rear ends provided a raw
and startling view. We would crouch at the foot of the slope and look
up--a distance of twenty-five feet or more--at the secret and fantastic
anatomies of black, brown, yellow, and ivory men and women. For hours we
would laugh, point, whisper, joke, and identify our neighbors by the
signs of their physiological oddities, commenting upon the difficulty or
projectile force of their excretions. Finally some grownup would see us
and drive us away with disgusted shouts. Occasionally children of two
and three years of age would emerge from behind the hill with their
faces smeared and their breath reeking. At last a white policeman was
stationed behind the privies to keep the children away and our course in
human anatomy was postponed.

To keep us out of mischief, my mother often took my brother and me with
her to her cooking job. Standing hungrily and silently in a corner of
the kitchen, we would watch her go from the stove to the sink, from the
cabinet to the table. I always loved to stand in the white folks'
kitchen when my mother cooked, for it meant that I got occasional scraps
of bread and meat; but many times I regretted having come, for my
nostrils would be assailed with the scent of food that did not belong to
me and which I was forbidden to eat. Toward evening my mother would take
the hot dishes into the dining room where the white people were seated,
and I would stand as near the dining-room door as possible to get a
quick glimpse of the white faces gathered around the loaded table,
eating, laughing, talking. If the white people left anything, my brother
and I would eat well; but if they did not, we would have our usual bread
and tea.

Watching the white people eat would make my empty stomach churn and I
would grow vaguely angry. Why could I not eat when I was hungry? Why did
I always have to wait until others were through? I could not understand
why some people had enough food and others did not.

I now found it irresistible to roam during the day while my mother was
cooking in the kitchens of the white folks. A block away from our flat
was a saloon in front of which I used to loiter all day long. Its
interior was an enchanting place that both lured and frightened me. I
would beg for pennies, then peer under the swinging doors to watch the
men and women drink. When some neighbor would chase me away from the
door, I would follow the drunks about the streets, trying to understand
their mysterious mumblings, pointing at them, teasing them, laughing at
them, imitating them, jeering, mocking, and taunting them about their
lurching antics. For me the most amusing spectacle was a drunken woman
stumbling and urinating, the dampness seeping down her stockinged legs.
Or I would stare in horror at a man retching. Somebody informed my
mother about my fondness for the saloon and she beat me, but it did not
keep me from peering under the swinging doors and listening to the wild
talk of drunks when she was at work.

One summer afternoon--in my sixth year--while peering under the swinging
doors of the neighborhood saloon, a black man caught hold of my arm and
dragged me into its smoky and noisy depths. The odor of alcohol stung my
nostrils. I yelled and struggled, trying to break free of him, afraid of
the staring crowd of men and women, but he would not let me go. He
lifted me and sat me upon the counter, put his hat upon my head and
ordered a drink for me. The tipsy men and women yelled with delight.
Somebody tried to jam a cigar into my mouth, but I twisted out of the
way.

"How do you feel, setting there like a man, boy?" a man asked.

"Make 'im drunk and he'll stop peeping in here," somebody said.

"Let's buy 'im drinks," somebody said.

Some of my fright left as I stared about. Whisky was set before me.

"Drink it, boy," somebody said.

I shook my head. The man who had dragged me in urged me to drink it,
telling me that it would not hurt me. I refused.

"Drink it; it'll make you feel good," he said.

I took a sip and coughed. The men and women laughed. The entire crowd in
the saloon gathered about me now, urging me to drink. I took another
sip. Then another. My head spun and I laughed. I was put on the floor
and I ran giggling and shouting among the yelling crowd. As I would pass
each man, I would take a sip from an offered glass. Soon I was drunk.

A man called me to him and whispered some words into my ear and told me
that he would give me a nickel if I went to a woman and repeated them to
her. I told him that I would say them; he gave me the nickel and I ran
to the woman and shouted the words. A gale of laughter went up in the
saloon.

"Don't teach that boy that," someone said.

"He doesn't know what it is," another said.

From then on, for a penny or a nickel, I would repeat to anyone
whatever was whispered to me. In my foggy, tipsy state the reaction of
the men and women to my mysterious words enthralled me. I ran from
person to person, laughing, hiccoughing, spewing out filth that made
them bend double with glee.

"Let that boy alone now," someone said.

"It ain't going to hurt 'im," another said.

"It's a shame," a woman said, giggling.

"Go home, boy," somebody yelled at me.

Toward early evening they let me go. I staggered along the pavements,
drunk, repeating obscenities to the horror of the women I passed and to
the amusement of the men en route to their homes from work.

To beg drinks in the saloon became an obsession. Many evenings my mother
would find me wandering in a daze and take me home and beat me; but the
next morning, no sooner had she gone to her job than I would run to the
saloon and wait for someone to take me in and buy me a drink. My mother
protested tearfully to the proprietor of the saloon, who ordered me to
keep out of his place. But the men--reluctant to surrender their
sport--would buy me drinks anyway, letting me drink out of their flasks
on the streets, urging me to repeat obscenities.

I was a drunkard in my sixth year, before I had begun school. With a
gang of children, I roamed the streets, begging pennies from passers-by,
haunting the doors of saloons, wandering farther and farther away from
home each day. I saw more than I could understand and heard more than I
could remember. The point of life became for me the times when I could
beg drinks. My mother was in despair. She beat me; then she prayed and
wept over me, imploring me to be good, telling me that she had to work,
all of which carried no weight to my wayward mind. Finally she placed me
and my brother in the keeping of an old black woman who watched me every
moment to keep me from running to the doors of the saloons to beg for
whisky. The craving for alcohol finally left me and I forgot the taste
of it.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the immediate neighborhood there were many school children who, in
the afternoons, would stop and play en route to their homes; they would
leave their books upon the sidewalk and I would thumb through the pages
and question them about the baffling black print. When I had learned to
recognize certain words, I told my mother that I wanted to learn to read
and she encouraged me. Soon I was able to pick my way through most of
the children's books I ran across. There grew in me a consuming
curiosity about what was happening around me and, when my mother came
home from a hard day's work, I would question her so relentlessly about
what I had heard in the streets that she refused to talk to me.

One cold morning my mother awakened me and told me that, because there
was no coal in the house, she was taking my brother to the job with her
and that I must remain in bed until the coal she had ordered was
delivered. For the payment of the coal, she left a note together with
some money under the dresser scarf. I went back to sleep and was
awakened by the ringing of the doorbell. I opened the door, let in the
coal man, and gave him the money and the note. He brought in a few
bushels of coal, then lingered, asking me if I were cold.

"Yes," I said, shivering.

He made a fire, then sat and smoked.

"How much change do I owe you?" he asked me.

"I don't know," I said.

"Shame on you," he said. "Don't you know how to count?"

"No, sir," I said.

"Listen and repeat after me," he said.

He counted to ten and I listened carefully; then he asked me to count
alone and I did. He then made me memorize the words twenty, thirty,
forty, etc., then told me to add one, two, three, and so on. In about an
hour's time I had learned to count to a hundred and I was overjoyed.
Long after the coal man had gone I danced up and down on the bed in my
nightclothes, counting again and again to a hundred, afraid that if I
did not keep repeating the numbers I would forget them. When my mother
returned from her job that night I insisted that she stand still and
listen while I counted to one hundred. She was dumfounded. After that
she taught me to read, told me stories. On Sundays I would read the
newspapers with my mother guiding me and spelling out the words.

I soon made myself a nuisance by asking far too many questions of
everybody. Every happening in the neighborhood, no matter how trivial,
became my business. It was in this manner that I first stumbled upon the
relations between whites and blacks, and what I learned frightened me.
Though I had long known that there were people called "white" people, it
had never meant anything to me emotionally. I had seen white men and
women upon the streets a thousand times, but they had never looked
particularly "white." To me they were merely people like other people,
yet somehow strangely different because I had never come in close touch
with any of them. For the most part I never thought of them; they simply
existed somewhere in the background of the city as a whole. It might
have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as "white"
people came from the fact that many of my relatives were "white"-looking
people. My grandmother, who was white as any "white" person, had never
looked "white" to me. And when word circulated among the black people of
the neighborhood that a "black" boy had been severely beaten by a
"white" man, I felt that the "white" man had had a right to beat the
"black" boy, for I navely assumed that the "white" man must have been
the "black" boy's father. And did not all fathers, like my father, have
the right to beat their children? A paternal right was the only right,
to my understanding, that a man had to beat a child. But when my mother
told me that the "white" man was not the father of the "black" boy, was
no kin to him at all, I was puzzled.

"Then why did the 'white' man whip the 'black' boy?" I asked my mother.

"The 'white' man did not _whip_ the 'black' boy," my mother told me. "He
_beat_ the 'black' boy."

"But why?"

"You're too young to understand."

"I'm not going to let anybody beat me," I said stoutly.

"Then stop running wild in the streets," my mother said.

I brooded for a long time about the seemingly causeless beating of the
"black" boy by the "white" man and the more questions I asked the more
bewildering it all became. Whenever I saw "white" people now I stared at
them, wondering what they were really like.

I began school at Howard Institute at a later age than was usual; my
mother had not been able to buy me the necessary clothes to make me
presentable. The boys of the neighborhood took me to school the first
day and when I reached the edge of the school grounds I became
terrified, wanted to return home, wanted to put it off. But the boys
simply took my hand and pulled me inside the building. I was frightened
speechless and the other children had to identify me, tell the teacher
my name and address. I sat listening to pupils recite, knowing and
understanding what was being said and done, but utterly incapable of
opening my mouth when called upon. The students around me seemed so sure
of themselves that I despaired of ever being able to conduct myself as
they did.

On the playground at noon I attached myself to a group of older boys and
followed them about, listening to their talk, asking countless
questions. During that noon hour I learned all the four-letter words
describing physiological and sex functions, and discovered that I had
known them before--had spoken them in the saloon--although I had not
known what they meant. A tall black boy recited a long, funny piece of
doggerel, replete with filth, describing the physiological relations
between men and women, and I memorized it word for word after having
heard it but once. Yet, despite my retentive memory, I found it
impossible to recite when I went back into the classroom. The teacher
called upon me and I rose, holding my book before my eyes, but I could
make no words come from me. I could feel the presence of the strange
boys and girls behind me, waiting to hear me read, and fear paralyzed
me.

Yet when school let out that first day I ran joyously home with a brain
burdened with racy and daring knowledge, but not a single idea from
books. I gobbled my cold food that had been left covered on the table,
seized a piece of soap and rushed into the streets, eager to display all
I had learned in school since morning. I went from window to window and
printed in huge soap-letters all my newly acquired four-letter words. I
had written on nearly all the windows in the neighborhood when a woman
stopped me and drove me home. That night the woman visited my mother and
informed her of what I had done, taking her from window to window and
pointing out my inspirational scribblings. My mother was horrified. She
demanded that I tell her where I had learned the words and she refused
to believe me when I told her that I had learned them at school. My
mother got a pail of water and a towel and took me by the hand and led
me to a smeared window.

"Now, scrub until that word's gone," she ordered.

Neighbors gathered, giggling, muttering words of pity and astonishment,
asking my mother how on earth I could have learned so much so quickly. I
scrubbed at the four-letter soap-words and grew blind with anger. I
sobbed, begging my mother to let me go, telling her that I would never
write such words again; but she did not relent until the last soap-word
had been cleaned away. Never again did I write words like that; I kept
them to myself.

       *       *       *       *       *

After my father's desertion, my mother's ardently religious disposition
dominated the household and I was often taken to Sunday school where I
met God's representative in the guise of a tall, black preacher. One
Sunday my mother invited the tall, black preacher to a dinner of fried
chicken. I was happy, not because the preacher was coming but because of
the chicken. One or two neighbors also were invited. But no sooner had
the preacher arrived than I began to resent him, for I learned at once
that he, like my father, was used to having his own way. The hour for
dinner came and I was wedged at the table between talking and laughing
adults. In the center of the table was a huge platter of golden-brown
fried chicken. I compared the bowl of soup that sat before me with the
crispy chicken and decided in favor of the chicken. The others began to
eat their soup, but I could not touch mine.

"Eat your soup," my mother said.

"I don't want any," I said.

"You won't get anything else until you've eaten your soup," she said.

The preacher had finished his soup and had asked that the platter of
chicken be passed to him. It galled me. He smiled, cocked his head this
way and that, picking out choice pieces. I forced a spoonful of soup
down my throat and looked to see if my speed matched that of the
preacher. It did not. There were already bare chicken bones on his
plate, and he was reaching for more. I tried eating my soup faster, but
it was no use; the other people were now serving themselves chicken and
the platter was more than half empty. I gave up and sat staring in
despair at the vanishing pieces of fried chicken.

"Eat your soup or you won't get anything," my mother warned.

I looked at her appealingly and could not answer. As piece after piece
of chicken was eaten, I was unable to eat my soup at all. I grew hot
with anger. The preacher was laughing and joking and the grownups were
hanging on his words. My growing hate of the preacher finally became
more important than God or religion and I could no longer contain
myself. I leaped up from the table, knowing that I should be ashamed of
what I was doing, but unable to stop, and screamed, running blindly from
the room.

"That preacher's going to eat _all_ the chicken!" I bawled.

The preacher tossed back his head and roared with laughter, but my
mother was angry and told me that I was to have no dinner because of my
bad manners.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I awakened one morning my mother told me that we were going to see
a judge who would make my father support me and my brother. An hour
later all three of us were sitting in a huge crowded room. I was
overwhelmed by the many faces and the voices which I could not
understand. High above me was a white face which my mother told me was
the face of the judge. Across the huge room sat my father, smiling
confidently, looking at us. My mother warned me not to be fooled by my
father's friendly manner; she told me that the judge might ask me
questions, and if he did I must tell him the truth. I agreed, yet I
hoped that the judge would not ask me anything.

For some reason the entire thing struck me as being useless; I felt that
if my father were going to feed me, then he would have done so
regardless of what a judge said to him. And I did not want my father to
feed me; I was hungry, but my thoughts of food did not now center about
him. I waited, growing restless, hungry. My mother gave me a dry
sandwich and I munched and stared, longing to go home. Finally I heard
my mother's name called; she rose and began weeping so copiously that
she could not talk for a few moments; at last she managed to say that
her husband had deserted her and her two children, that her children
were hungry, that they stayed hungry, that she worked, that she was
trying to raise them alone. Then my father was called; he came forward
jauntily, smiling. He tried to kiss my mother, but she turned away from
him. I only heard one sentence of what he said.

"I'm doing all I can, Your Honor," he mumbled, grinning.

It had been painful to sit and watch my mother crying and my father
laughing and I was glad when we were outside in the sunny streets. Back
at home my mother wept again and talked complainingly about the
unfairness of the judge who had accepted my father's word. After the
court scene, I tried to forget my father; I did not hate him; I simply
did not want to think of him. Often when we were hungry my mother would
beg me to go to my father's job and ask him for a dollar, a dime, a
nickel.... But I would never consent to go. I did not want to see him.

My mother fell ill and the problem of food became an acute, daily agony.
Hunger was with us always. Sometimes the neighbors would feed us or a
dollar bill would come in the mail from my grandmother. It was winter
and I would buy a dime's worth of coal each morning from the corner
coalyard and lug it home in paper bags. For a time I remained out of
school to wait upon my mother, then Granny came to visit us and I
returned to school.

At night there were long, halting discussions about our going to live
with Granny, but nothing came of it. Perhaps there was not enough money
for railroad fare. Angered by having been hauled into court, my father
now spurned us completely. I heard long, angrily whispered conversations
between my mother and grandmother to the effect that "that woman ought
to be killed for breaking up a home." What irked me was the ceaseless
talk and no action. If someone had suggested that my father be killed, I
would perhaps have become interested; if someone had suggested that his
name never be mentioned, I would no doubt have agreed; if someone had
suggested that we move to another city, I would have been glad. But
there was only endless talk that led nowhere and I began to keep away
from home as much as possible, preferring the simplicity of the streets
to the worried, futile talk at home.

Finally we could no longer pay the rent for our dingy flat; the few
dollars that Granny had left us before she went home were gone. Half
sick and in despair, my mother made the rounds of the charitable
institutions, seeking help. She found an orphan home that agreed to
assume the guidance of me and my brother provided my mother worked and
made small payments. My mother hated to be separated from us, but she
had no choice.

The orphan home was a two-story frame building set amid trees in a wide,
green field. My mother ushered me and my brother one morning into the
building and into the presence of a tall, gaunt, mulatto woman who
called herself Miss Simon. At once she took a fancy to me and I was
frightened speechless; I was afraid of her the moment I saw her and my
fear lasted during my entire stay in the home.

The house was crowded with children and there was always a storm of
noise. The daily routine was blurred to me and I never quite grasped it.
The most abiding feeling I had each day was hunger and fear. The meals
were skimpy and there were only two of them. Just before we went to bed
each night we were given a slice of bread smeared with molasses. The
children were silent, hostile, vindictive, continuously complaining of
hunger. There was an over-all atmosphere of nervousness and intrigue, of
children telling tales upon others, of children being deprived of food
to punish them.

The home did not have the money to check the growth of the wide
stretches of grass by having it mown, so it had to be pulled by hand.
Each morning after we had eaten a breakfast that seemed like no
breakfast at all, an older child would lead a herd of us to the vast
lawn and we would get to our knees and wrench the grass loose from the
dirt with our fingers. At intervals Miss Simon would make a tour of
inspection, examining the pile of pulled grass beside each child,
scolding or praising according to the size of the pile. Many mornings I
was too weak from hunger to pull the grass; I would grow dizzy and my
mind would become blank and I would find myself, after an interval of
unconsciousness, upon my hands and knees, my head whirling, my eyes
staring in bleak astonishment at the green grass, wondering where I was,
feeling that I was emerging from a dream....

During the first days my mother came each night to visit me and my
brother, then her visits stopped. I began to wonder if she, too, like my
father, had disappeared into the unknown. I was rapidly learning to
distrust everything and everybody. When my mother did come, I asked her
why had she remained away so long and she told me that Miss Simon had
forbidden her to visit us, that Miss Simon had said that she was
spoiling us with too much attention. I begged my mother to take me away;
she wept and told me to wait, that soon she would take us to Arkansas.
She left and my heart sank.

Miss Simon tried to win my confidence; she asked me if I would like to
be adopted by her if my mother consented and I said no. She would take
me into her apartment and talk to me, but her words had no effect. Dread
and distrust had already become a daily part of my being and my memory
grew sharp, my senses more impressionable; I began to be aware of myself
as a distinct personality striving against others. I held myself in,
afraid to act or speak until I was sure of my surroundings, feeling most
of the time that I was suspended over a void. My imagination soared; I
dreamed of running away. Each morning I vowed that I would leave the
next morning, but the next morning always found me afraid.

One day Miss Simon told me that thereafter I was to help her in the
office. I ate lunch with her and, strangely, when I sat facing her at
the table, my hunger vanished. The woman killed something in me. Next
she called me to her desk where she sat addressing envelopes.

"Step up close to the desk," she said. "Don't be afraid."

I went and stood at her elbow. There was a wart on her chin and I stared
at it.

"Now, take a blotter from over there and blot each envelope after I'm
through writing on it," she instructed me, pointing to a blotter that
stood about a foot from my hand.

I stared and did not move or answer.

"Take the blotter," she said.

I wanted to reach for the blotter and succeeded only in twitching my
arm.

"Here," she said sharply, reaching for the blotter and shoving it into
my fingers.

She wrote in ink on an envelope and pushed it toward me. Holding the
blotter in my hand, I stared at the envelope and could not move.

"Blot it," she said.

I could not lift my hand. I knew what she had said; I knew what she
wanted me to do; and I had heard her correctly. I wanted to look at her
and say something, tell her why I could not move; but my eyes were fixed
upon the floor. I could not summon enough courage while she sat there
looking at me to reach over the yawning space of twelve inches and blot
the wet ink on the envelope.

"Blot it!" she spoke sharply.

Still I could not move or answer.

"Look at me!"

I could not lift my eyes. She reached her hand to my face and I twisted
away.

"What's wrong with you?" she demanded.

I began to cry and she drove me from the room. I decided that as soon as
night came I would run away. The dinner bell rang and I did not go to
the table, but hid in a corner of the hallway. When I heard the dishes
rattling at the table, I opened the door and ran down the walk to the
street. Dusk was falling. Doubt made me stop. Ought I go back? No;
hunger was back there, and fear. I went on, coming to concrete
sidewalks. People passed me. Where was I going? I did not know. The
farther I walked the more frantic I became. In a confused and vague way
I knew that I was doing more running _away_ from than running _toward_
something. I stopped. The streets seemed dangerous. The buildings were
massive and dark. The moon shone and the trees loomed frighteningly. No,
I could not go on. I would go back. But I had walked so far and had
turned too many corners and had not kept track of the direction. Which
way led back to the orphan home? I did not know. I was lost.

I stood in the middle of the sidewalk and cried. A "white" policeman
came to me and I wondered if he was going to beat me. He asked me what
was the matter and I told him that I was trying to find my mother. His
"white" face created a new fear in me. I was remembering the tale of the
"white" man who had beaten the "black" boy. A crowd gathered and I was
urged to tell where I lived. Curiously, I was too full of fear to cry
now. I wanted to tell the "white" face that I had run off from an orphan
home and that Miss Simon ran it, but I was afraid. Finally I was taken
to the police station where I was fed. I felt better. I sat in a big
chair where I was surrounded by "white" policemen, but they seemed to
ignore me. Through the window I could see that night had completely
fallen and that lights now gleamed in the streets. I grew sleepy and
dozed. My shoulder was shaken gently and I opened my eyes and looked
into a "white" face of another policeman who was sitting beside me. He
asked me questions in a quiet, confidential tone, and quite before I
knew it he was not "white" any more. I told him that I had run away from
an orphan home and that Miss Simon ran it.

It was but a matter of minutes before I was walking alongside a
policeman, heading toward the home. The policeman led me to the front
gate and I saw Miss Simon waiting for me on the steps. She identified me
and I was left in her charge. I begged her not to beat me, but she
yanked me upstairs into an empty room and lashed me thoroughly. Sobbing,
I slunk off to bed, resolved to run away again. But I was watched
closely after that.

My mother was informed upon her next visit that I had tried to run away
and she was terribly upset.

"Why did you do it?" she asked.

"I don't want to stay here," I told her.

"But you must," she said. "How can I work if I'm to worry about you? You
must remember that you have no father. I'm doing all I can."

"I don't want to stay here," I repeated.

"Then, if I take you to your father...."

"I don't want to stay with him either," I said.

"But I want you to ask him for enough money for us to go to my sister's
in Arkansas," she said.

Again I was faced with choices I did not like, but I finally agreed.
After all, my hate for my father was not so great and urgent as my hate
for the orphan home. My mother held to her idea and one night a week or
so later I found myself standing in a room in a frame house. My father
and a strange woman were sitting before a bright fire that blazed in a
grate. My mother and I were standing about six feet away, as though we
were afraid to approach them any closer.

"It's not for me," my mother was saying. "It's for your children that
I'm asking you for money."

"I ain't got nothing," my father said, laughing.

"Come here, boy," the strange woman called to me.

I looked at her and did not move.

"Give him a nickel," the woman said. "He's cute."

"Come here, Richard," my father said, stretching out his hand.

I backed away, shaking my head, keeping my eyes on the fire.

"He is a cute child," the strange woman said.

"You ought to be ashamed," my mother said to the strange woman. "You're
starving my children."

"Now, don't you-all fight," my father said, laughing.

"I'll take that poker and hit you!" I blurted at my father.

He looked at my mother and laughed louder.

"You told him to say that," he said.

"Don't say such things, Richard," my mother said.

"You ought to be dead," I said to the strange woman.

The woman laughed and threw her arms about my father's neck. I grew
ashamed and wanted to leave.

"How can you starve your children?" my mother asked.

"Let Richard stay with me," my father said.

"Do you want to stay with your father, Richard?" my mother asked.

"No," I said.

"You'll get plenty to eat," he said.

"I'm hungry now," I told him. "But I won't stay with you."

"Aw, give the boy a nickel," the woman said.

My father ran his hand into his pocket and pulled out a nickel.

"Here, Richard," he said.

"Don't take it," my mother said.

"Don't teach him to be a fool," my father said. "Here, Richard, take
it."

I looked at my mother, at the strange woman, at my father, then into the
fire. I wanted to take the nickel, but I did not want to take it from my
father.

"You ought to be ashamed," my mother said, weeping. "Giving your son a
nickel when he's hungry. If there's a God, He'll pay you back.

"That's all I got," my father said, laughing again and returning the
nickel to his pocket.

We left. I had the feeling that I had had to do with something unclean.
Many times in the years after that the image of my father and the
strange woman, their faces lit by the dancing flames, would surge up in
my imagination so vivid and strong that I felt I could reach out and
touch it; I would stare at it, feeling that it possessed some vital
meaning which always eluded me.

A quarter of a century was to elapse between the time when I saw my
father sitting with the strange woman and the time when I was to see him
again, standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a
sharecropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his
gnarled, veined hands--a quarter of a century during which my mind and
consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered that when I
tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin,
though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an
echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a
different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality. That day
a quarter of a century later when I visited him on the plantation--he
was standing against the sky, smiling toothlessly, his hair whitened,
his body bent, his eyes glazed with dim recollection, his fearsome
aspect of twenty-five years ago gone forever from him--I was overwhelmed
to realize that he could never understand me or the scalding experiences
that had swept me beyond his life and into an area of living that he
could never know. I stood before him, poised, my mind aching as it
embraced the simple nakedness of his life, feeling how completely his
soul was imprisoned by the slow flow of the seasons, by wind and rain
and sun, how fastened were his memories to a crude and raw past, how
chained were his actions and emotions to the direct, animalistic
impulses of his withering body....

From the white landowners above him there had not been handed to him a
chance to learn the meaning of loyalty, of sentiment, of tradition. Joy
was as unknown to him as was despair. As a creature of the earth, he
endured, hearty, whole, seemingly indestructible, with no regrets and no
hope. He asked easy, drawling questions about me, his other son, his
wife, and he laughed, amused, when I informed him of their destinies. I
forgave him and pitied him as my eyes looked past him to the unpainted
wooden shack. From far beyond the horizons that bound this bleak
plantation there had come to me through my living the knowledge that my
father was a black peasant who had gone to the city seeking life, but
who had failed in the city; a black peasant whose life had been
hopelessly snarled in the city, and who had at last fled the city--that
same city which had lifted me in its burning arms and borne me toward
alien and undreamed-of shores of knowing.




CHAPTER II


The glad days that dawned gave me liberty for the free play of impulse
and, from anxiety and restraint, I leaped to license and thoughtless
action. My mother arrived one afternoon with the news that we were going
to live with her sister in Elaine, Arkansas, and that en route we would
visit Granny, who had moved from Natchez to Jackson, Mississippi. As the
words fell from my mother's lips, a long and heavy anxiety lifted from
me. Excited, I rushed about and gathered my ragged clothes. I was
leaving the hated home, hunger, fear, leaving days that had been as dark
and lonely as death.

While I was packing, a playmate came to tell me that one of my shirts
was hanging damp upon the clothesline. Filled more with the sense of
coming freedom than with generosity, I told him that he could have it.
What was a shirt to me now? The children stood about and watched me with
envious eyes as I crammed my things into a suitcase, but I did not
notice them. The moment I had learned that I was to leave, my feelings
had recoiled so sharply and quickly from the home that the children
simply did not exist for me any more. Their faces possessed the power of
evoking in me a million memories that I longed to forget, and instead of
my leaving drawing me to them in communion, it had flung me forever
beyond them.

I was so eager to be gone that when I stood in the front hallway, packed
and ready, I did not even think of saying good-bye to the boys and girls
with whom I had eaten and slept and lived for so many weeks. My mother
scolded me for my thoughtlessness and bade me say good-bye to them.
Reluctantly I obeyed her, wishing that I did not have to do so. As I
shook the dingy palms extended to me I kept my eyes averted, not wanting
to look again into faces that hurt me because they had become so
thoroughly associated in my feelings with hunger and fear. In shaking
hands I was doing something that I was to do countless times in the
years to come: acting in conformity with what others expected of me
even though, by the very nature and form of my life, I did not and could
not share their spirit.

(After I had outlived the shocks of childhood, after the habit of
reflection had been born in me, I used to mull over the strange absence
of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how
lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid
our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking
we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how
shallow was even our despair. After I had learned other ways of life I
used to brood upon the unconscious irony of those who felt that Negroes
led so passional an existence! I saw that what had been taken for our
emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears,
our frenzy under pressure.

(Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America,
I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of
Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And
when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if
clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to
remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities
were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual
from one generation to another.)

Granny's home in Jackson was an enchanting place to explore. It was a
two-story frame structure of seven rooms. My brother and I used to play
hide and seek in the long, narrow hallways, and on and under the stairs.
Granny's son, Uncle Clark, had bought her this home, and its white
plastered walls, its front and back porches, its round columns and
banisters, made me feel that surely there was no finer house in all the
round world.

There were wide green fields in which my brother and I roamed and played
and shouted. And there were the timid children of the neighbors, boys
and girls to whom my brother and I felt superior in worldly knowledge.
We took pride in telling them what it was like to ride on a train, what
the yellow, sleepy Mississippi River looked like, how it felt to sail on
the _Kate Adams_, what Memphis looked like, and how I had run off from
the orphan home. And we would hint that we were pausing for but a few
days and then would be off to even more fabulous places and marvelous
experiences.

To help support the household my grandmother boarded a colored
schoolteacher, Ella, a young woman with so remote and dreamy and silent
a manner that I was as much afraid of her as I was attracted to her. I
had long wanted to ask her to tell me about the books that she was
always reading, but I could never quite summon enough courage to do so.
One afternoon I found her sitting alone upon the front porch, reading.

"Ella," I begged, "please tell me what you are reading."

"It's just a book," she said evasively, looking about with apprehension.

"But what's it about?" I asked.

"Your grandmother wouldn't like it if I talked to you about novels," she
told me.

I detected a note of sympathy in her voice.

"I don't care," I said loudly and bravely.

"Shhh--You mustn't say things like that," she said.

"But I want to know."

"When you grow up, you'll read books and know what's in them," she
explained.

"But I want to know now."

She thought a while, then closed the book.

"Come here," she said.

I sat at her feet and lifted my face to hers.

"Once upon a time there was an old, old man named Bluebeard," she began
in a low voice.

She whispered to me the story of _Bluebeard and His Seven Wives_ and I
ceased to see the porch, the sunshine, her face, everything. As her
words fell upon my new ears, I endowed them with a reality that welled
up from somewhere within me. She told how Bluebeard had duped and
married his seven wives, how he had loved and slain them, how he had
hanged them up by their hair in a dark closet. The tale made the world
around me be, throb, live. As she spoke, reality changed, the look of
things altered, and the world became peopled with magical presences. My
sense of life deepened and the feel of things was different, somehow.
Enchanted and enthralled, I stopped her constantly to ask for details.
My imagination blazed. The sensations the story aroused in me were never
to leave me. When she was about to finish, when my interest was keenest,
when I was lost to the world around me, Granny stepped briskly onto the
porch.

"You stop that, you evil gal!" she shouted. "I want none of that Devil
stuff in my house!"

Her voice jarred me so that I gasped. For a moment I did not know what
was happening.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Wilson," Ella stammered, rising. "But he asked me--"

"He's just a foolish child and you know it!" Granny blazed.

Ella bowed her head and went into the house.

"But, granny, she didn't finish," I protested, knowing that I should
have kept quiet.

She bared her teeth and slapped me across my mouth with the back of her
hand.

"You shut your mouth," she hissed. "You don't know what you're talking
about!"

"But I want to hear what happened!" I wailed, dodging another blow that
I thought was coming.

"That's the Devil's work!" she shouted.

My grandmother was as nearly white as a Negro can get without being
white, which means that she was white. The sagging flesh of her face
quivered; her eyes, large, dark, deep-set, wide apart, glared at me. Her
lips narrowed to a line. Her high forehead wrinkled. When she was angry
her eyelids drooped halfway down over her pupils, giving her a baleful
aspect.

"But I liked the story," I told her.

"You're going to burn in hell," she said with such furious conviction
that for a moment I believed her.

Not to know the end of the tale filled me with a sense of emptiness,
loss. I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breath-taking, almost
painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon
as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and read them
to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigue, for
plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders. So profoundly responsive a
chord had the tale struck in me that the threats of my mother and
grandmother had no effect whatsoever. They read my insistence as mere
obstinacy, as foolishness, something that would quickly pass; and they
had no notion how desperately serious the tale had made me. They could
not have known that Ella's whispered story of deception and murder had
been the first experience in my life that had elicited from me a total
emotional response. No words or punishment could have possibly made me
doubt. I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it,
somehow, someway. I realized that they could not understand what I was
feeling and I kept quiet. But when no one was looking I would slip into
Ella's room and steal a book and take it back of the barn and try to
read it. Usually I could not decipher enough words to make the story
have meaning. I burned to learn to read novels and I tortured my mother
into telling me the meaning of every strange word I saw, not because the
word itself had any value, but because it was the gateway to a forbidden
and enchanting land.

One afternoon my mother became so ill that she had to go to bed. When
night fell Granny assumed the task of seeing that my brother and I
bathed. She set two tubs of water in our room and ordered us to pull off
our clothes, which we did. She sat at one end of the room, knitting,
lifting her eyes now and then from the wool to watch us and direct us.
My brother and I splashed in the water, playing, laughing, trying our
utmost to fling suds into each other's eyes. The floor was getting so
sloppy that Granny scolded us.

"Stop that foolishness and wash yourselves!"

"Yes, ma'am," we answered automatically and proceeded with our playing.

I scooped up a double handful of suds and called to my brother. He
looked and I flung the suds, but he ducked and the white foam spattered
on to the floor.

"Richard, stop that playing and bathe!"

"Yes, ma'am," I said, watching my brother to catch him unawares so that
I could fling more suds at him.

"Come here, you Richard!" Granny said, putting her knitting aside.

I went to her, walking sheepishly and nakedly across the floor. She
snatched the towel from my hand and began to scrub my ears, my face, my
neck.

"Bend over," she ordered.

I stooped and she scrubbed my anus. My mind was in a sort of daze,
midway between daydreaming and thinking. Then, before I knew it,
words--words whose meaning I did not fully know--had slipped out of my
mouth.

"When you get through, kiss back there," I said, the words rolling
softly but unpremeditatedly.

My first indication that something was wrong was that Granny became
terribly still, then she pushed me violently from her. I turned around
and saw that her white face was frozen, that her black, deep-set eyes
were blazing at me unblinkingly. Taking my cue from her queer
expression, I knew that I had said something awful, but I had no notion
at that moment just how awful it was. Granny rose slowly and lifted the
wet towel high above her head and brought it down across my naked back
with all the outraged fury of her sixty-odd-year-old body, leaving an
aching streak of fire burning and quivering on my skin. I gasped and
held my breath, fighting against the pain; then I howled and cringed. I
had not realized the meaning of what I had said; its moral horror was
unfelt by me, and her attack seemed without cause. She lifted the wet
towel and struck me again with such force that I dropped to my knees. I
knew that if I did not get out of her reach she would kill me. Naked, I
rose and ran out of the room, screaming. My mother hurried from her bed.

"What's the matter, mama?" she asked Granny.

I lingered in the hallway, trembling, looking at Granny, trying to speak
but only moving my lips. Granny seemed to have gone out of her mind, for
she stood like stone, her eyes dead upon me, not saying a word.

"Richard, what have you done?" my mother asked.

Poised to run again, I shook my head.

"What's the matter, for God's sake?" my mother asked of me, of Granny,
of my brother, turning her face from one to another.

Granny wilted, half turned, flung the towel to the floor, then burst
into tears.

"He... I was trying to wash him," Granny whimpered, "here," she
continued, pointing, "and... that black little Devil...." Her body was
shaking with insult and rage. "He told me to kiss him there when I was
through."

Now my mother stared without speaking.

"No!" my mother exclaimed.

"He did," Granny whimpered.

"He didn't say _that_," my mother protested.

"He did," Granny sighed.

I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong
that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even
though I ached to nullify them, kill them, turn back time to the moment
before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.
My mother picked up the wet towel and came toward me. I ran into the
kitchen, naked, yelling. She came hard upon my heels and I scuttled
into the back yard, running blindly in the dark, butting my head against
the fence, the tree, bruising my toes on sticks of wood, still
screaming. I had no way of measuring the gravity of my wrong and I
assumed that I had done something for which I would never be forgiven.
Had I known just how my words had struck them, I would have remained
still and taken my punishment, but it was the feeling that anything
could or would happen to me that made me wild with fear.

"Come here, you little filthy fool!" my mother called.

I dodged her and ran back into the house, then again into the hallway,
my naked body flashing frantically through the air. I crouched in a dark
corner. My mother rushed upon me, breathing hard. I ducked, crawled,
stood, and ran again.

"You may as well stand still," my mother said. "I'm going to beat you
tonight if it is the last thing I do on this earth!"

Again she charged me and I dodged, just missing the stinging swish of
the wet towel, and scooted into the room where my brother stood.

"What's the matter?" he asked, for he had not heard what I had said.

A blow fell on my mouth. I whirled. Granny was upon me. She struck me
another blow on my head with the back of her hand. Then my mother came
into the room. I fell to the floor and crawled under the bed.

"You come out of there," my mother called.

"Naw," I cried.

"Come out or I'll beat you to within an inch of your life," she said.

"Naw," I said.

"Call Papa," Granny said.

I trembled. Granny was sending my brother to fetch Grandpa, of whom I
was mortally afraid. He was a tall, skinny, silent, grim, black man who
had fought in the Civil War with the Union Army. When he was angry he
gritted his teeth with a terrifying, grating sound. He kept his army gun
in his room, standing in a corner, loaded. He was under the delusion
that the war between the states would be resumed. I heard my brother
rush out of the room and I knew it was but a matter of minutes before
Grandpa would come. I balled myself into a knot and moaned:

"Naw, naw, naw...."

Grandpa came and ordered me from under the bed. I refused to move.

"Come out of there, little man," he said.

"Naw."

"Do you want me to get my gun?"

"Naw, sir. Please don't shoot me!" I cried.

"Then come out!"

I remained still. Grandpa took hold of the bed and pulled it. I clung to
a bedpost and was dragged over the floor. Grandpa ran at me and tried to
grab my leg, but I crawled out of reach. I rested on all fours and kept
in the center of the bed and each time the bed moved, I moved, following
it.

"Come out and get your whipping!" my mother called.

I remained still. The bed moved and I moved. I did not think; I did not
plan; I did not plot. Instinct told me what to do. There was painful
danger and I had to avoid it. Grandpa finally gave up and went back to
his room.

"When you come out, you'll get your whipping," my mother said. "No
matter how long you stay under there, you're going to get it. And no
food for you tonight."

"What did he do?" my brother asked.

"Something he ought to be killed for," Granny said.

"But what?" my brother asked.

"Shut you up and get to bed," my mother said.

I stayed under the bed far into the night. The household went to sleep.
Finally hunger and thirst drove me out; when I stood up I found my
mother lurking in the doorway, waiting for me.

"Come into the kitchen," she said.

I followed her and she beat me, but she did not use the wet towel;
Grandpa had forbade that. Between strokes of the switch she would ask me
where had I learned the dirty words and I could not tell her; and my
inability to tell her made her furious.

"I'm going to beat you until you tell me," she declared.

And I could not tell her because I did not know. None of the obscene
words I had learned at school in Memphis had dealt with perversions of
any sort, although I might have learned the words while loitering
drunkenly in saloons. The next day Granny said emphatically that she
knew who had ruined me, that she knew I had learned about "foul
practices" from reading Ella's books, and when I asked what "foul
practices" were, my mother beat me afresh. No matter how hard I tried to
convince them that I had not read the words in a book or that I could
not remember having heard anyone say them, they would not believe me.
Granny finally charged Ella with telling me things that I should not
know and Ella, weeping and distraught, packed her things and moved. The
tremendous upheaval that my words had caused made me know that there lay
back of them much more than I could figure out, and I resolved that in
the future I would learn the meaning of why they had beat and denounced
me.

The days and hours began to speak now with a clearer tongue. Each
experience had a sharp meaning of its own.

There was the breathlessly anxious fun of chasing and catching flitting
fireflies on drowsy summer nights.

There was the drenching hospitality in the pervading smell of sweet
magnolias.

There was the aura of limitless freedom distilled from the rolling sweep
of tall green grass swaying and glinting in the wind and sun.

There was the feeling of impersonal plenty when I saw a boll of cotton
whose cup had spilt over and straggled its white fleece toward the
earth.

There was the pitying chuckle that bubbled in my throat when I watched a
fat duck waddle across the back yard.

There was the suspense I felt when I heard the taut, sharp song of a
yellow-black bee hovering nervously but patiently above a white rose.

There was the drugged, sleepy feeling that came from sipping glasses of
milk, drinking them slowly so that they would last a long time, and
drinking enough for the first time in my life.

There was the bitter amusement of going into town with Granny and
watching the baffled stares of white folks who saw an old white woman
leading two undeniably Negro boys in and out of stores on Capitol
Street.

There was the slow, fresh, saliva-stimulating smell of cooking cotton
seeds.

There was the excitement of fishing in muddy country creeks with my
grandpa on cloudy days.

There was the fear and awe I felt when Grandpa took me to a sawmill to
watch the giant whirring steel blades whine and scream as they bit into
wet green logs.

There was the puckery taste that almost made me cry when I ate my first
half-ripe persimmon.

There was the greedy joy in the tangy taste of wild hickory nuts.

There was the dry hot summer morning when I scratched my bare arms on
briers while picking blackberries and came home with my fingers and lips
stained black with sweet berry juice.

There was the relish of eating my first fried fish sandwich, nibbling at
it slowly and hoping that I would never eat it up.

There was the all-night ache in my stomach after I had climbed a
neighbor's tree and eaten stolen, unripe peaches.

There was the morning when I thought I would fall dead from fear after I
had stepped with my bare feet upon a bright little green garden snake.

And there were the long, slow, drowsy days and nights of drizzling
rain....

       *       *       *       *       *

At last we were at the railroad station with our bags, waiting for the
train that would take us to Arkansas; and for the first time I noticed
that there were two lines of people at the ticket window, a "white" line
and a "black" line. During my visit at Granny's a sense of the two races
had been born in me with a sharp concreteness that would never die until
I died. When I boarded the train I was aware that we Negroes were in one
part of the train and that the whites were in another. Navely I wanted
to go and see how the whites looked while sitting in their part of the
train.

"Can I go and peep at the white folks?" I asked my mother.

"You keep quiet," she said.

"But that wouldn't be wrong, would it?"

"Will you keep still?"

"But why can't I?"

"Quit talking foolishness!"

I had begun to notice that my mother became irritated when I questioned
her about whites and blacks, and I could not quite understand it. I
wanted to understand these two sets of people who lived side by side and
never touched, it seemed, except in violence. Now, there was my
grandmother.... Was she white? Just how white was she? What did the
whites think of her whiteness?

"Mama, is Granny white?" I asked as the train rolled through the
darkness.

"If you've got eyes, you can see what color she is," my mother said.

"I mean, do the white folks think she's white?"

"Why don't you ask the white folks that?" she countered.

"But you know," I insisted.

"Why should I know?" she asked. "I'm not white."

"Granny looks white," I said, hoping to establish one fact, at least.
"Then why is she living with us colored folks?"

"Don't you want Granny to live with us?" she asked, blunting my
question.

"Yes."

"Then why are you asking?"

"I want to _know_."

"Doesn't Granny live with us?"

"Yes."

"Isn't that enough?"

"But does she _want_ to live with us?"

"Why didn't you ask Granny that?" my mother evaded me again in a
taunting voice.

"Did Granny become colored when she married Grandpa?"

"Will you stop asking silly questions!"

"But did she?"

"Granny didn't _become_ colored," my mother said angrily. "She was
_born_ the color she is now."

Again I was being shut out of the secret, the thing, the reality I felt
somewhere beneath all the words and silences.

"Why didn't Granny marry a white man?" I asked.

"Because she didn't want to," my mother said peevishly.

"Why don't you want to talk to me?" I asked.

She slapped me and I cried. Later, grudgingly, she told me that Granny
came of Irish, Scotch, and French stock in which Negro blood had
somewhere and somehow been infused. She explained it all in a
matter-of-fact, offhand, neutral way; her emotions were not involved at
all.

"What was Granny's name before she married Grandpa?"

"Bolden."

"Who gave her that name?"

"The white man who owned her."

"She was a slave?"

"Yes."

"And Bolden was the name of Granny's father?"

"Granny doesn't know who her father was."

"So they just gave her any name?"

"They gave her a name; that's all I know."

"Couldn't Granny find out who her father was?"

"For what, silly?"

"So she could know."

"Know for what?"

"Just to know."

"But for _what_?"

I could not say. I could not get anywhere.

"Mama, where did Father get his name?"

"From his father."

"And where did the father of my father get his name?"

"Like Granny got hers. From a white man."

"Do they know who he is?"

"I don't know."

"Why don't they find out?"

"For what?" my mother demanded harshly.

And I could think of no rational or practical reason why my father
should try to find out who his father's father was.

"What has Papa got in him?" I asked.

"Some white and some red and some black," she said.

"Indian, white, and Negro?"

"Yes."

"Then what am I?"

"They'll call you a colored man when you grow up," she said. Then she
turned to me and smiled mockingly and asked: "Do you mind, Mr. Wright?"

I was angry and I did not answer. I did not object to being called
colored, but I knew that there was something my mother was holding back.
She was not concealing facts, but feelings, attitudes, convictions which
she did not want me to know; and she became angry when I prodded her.
All right, I would find out someday. Just wait. All right, I was
colored. It was fine. I did not know enough to be afraid or to
anticipate in a concrete manner. True, I had heard that colored people
were killed and beaten, but so far it all had seemed remote. There was,
of course, a vague uneasiness about it all, but I would be able to
handle that when I came to it. It would be simple. If anybody tried to
kill me, then I would kill them first.

When we arrived in Elaine I saw that Aunt Maggie lived in a bungalow
that had a fence around it. It looked like home and I was glad. I had no
suspicion that I was to live here for but a short time and that the
manner of my leaving would be my first baptism of racial emotion.

A wide dusty road ran past the house and on each side of the road wild
flowers grew. It was summer and the smell of clay dust was everywhere,
day and night. I would get up early every morning to wade with my bare
feet through the dust of the road, reveling in the strange mixture of
the cold dew-wet crust on top of the road and the warm, sun-baked dust
beneath.

After sunrise the bees would come out and I discovered that by slapping
my two palms together smartly I could kill a bee. My mother warned me to
stop, telling me that bees made honey, that it was not good to kill
things that made food, that I would eventually be stung. But I felt
confident of outwitting any bee. One morning I slapped an enormous bee
between my hands just as it had lit upon a flower and it stung me in the
tender center of my left palm. I ran home screaming.

"Good enough for you," my mother commented dryly.

I never crushed any more bees.

Aunt Maggie's husband, Uncle Hoskins, owned a saloon that catered to the
hundreds of Negroes who worked in the surrounding sawmills. Remembering
the saloon of my Memphis days, I begged Uncle Hoskins to take me to see
it and he promised; but my mother said no; she was afraid that I would
grow up to be a drunkard if I went inside of a saloon again while still
a child. Well, if I could not see the saloon, at least I could eat. And
at mealtime Aunt Maggie's table was so loaded with food that I could
scarcely believe it was real. It took me some time to get used to the
idea of there being enough to eat; I felt that if I ate enough there
would not be anything left for another time. When I first sat down at
Aunt Maggie's table, I could not eat until I had asked:

"Can I eat all I want?"

"Eat as much as you like," Uncle Hoskins said.

I did not believe him. I ate until my stomach hurt, but even then I did
not want to get up from the table.

"Your eyes are bigger than your stomach," my mother said.

"Let him eat all he wants to and get used to food," Uncle Hoskins said.

When supper was over I saw that there were many biscuits piled high upon
the bread platter, an astonishing and unbelievable sight to me. Though
the biscuits were right before my eyes, and though there was more flour
in the kitchen, I was apprehensive lest there be no bread for breakfast
in the morning. I was afraid that somehow the biscuits might disappear
during the night, while I was sleeping. I did not want to wake up in the
morning, as I had so often in the past, feeling hungry and knowing that
there was no food in the house. So, surreptitiously, I took some of the
biscuits from the platter and slipped them into my pocket, not to eat,
but to keep as a bulwark against any possible attack of hunger. Even
after I had got used to seeing the table loaded with food at each meal,
I still stole bread and put it into my pockets. In washing my clothes my
mother found the gummy wads and scolded me to break me of the habit; I
stopped hiding the bread in my pockets and hid it about the house, in
corners, behind dressers. I did not break the habit of stealing and
hoarding bread until my faith that food would be forthcoming at each
meal had been somewhat established.

Uncle Hoskins had a horse and buggy and sometimes he used to take me
with him to Helena, where he traded. One day when I was riding with him
he said:

"Richard, would you like to see this horse drink water out of the middle
of the river?"

"Yes," I said, laughing. "But this horse can't do that."

"Yes, he can," Uncle Hoskins said. "Just wait and see."

He lashed the horse and headed the buggy straight for the Mississippi
River.

"Where're you going?" I asked, alarm mounting in me.

"We're going to the middle of the river so the horse can drink," he
said.

He drove over the levee and down the long slope of cobblestones to the
river's edge and the horse plunged wildly in. I looked at the mile
stretch of water that lay ahead and leaped up in terror.

"Naw!" I screamed.

"This horse has to drink," Uncle Hoskins said grimly.

"The river's deep!" I shouted.

"The horse can't drink here," Uncle Hoskins said, lashing the back of
the struggling animal.

The buggy went farther. The horse slowed a little and tossed his head
above the current. I grabbed the sides of the buggy, ready to jump, even
though I could not swim.

"Sit down or you'll fall out!" Uncle Hoskins shouted.

"Let me out!" I screamed.

The water now came up to the hubs of the wheels of the buggy. I tried
to leap into the river and he caught hold of my leg. We were now
surrounded by water.

"Let me out!" I continued to scream.

The buggy rolled on and the water rose higher. The horse wagged his
head, arched his neck, flung his tail about, walled his eyes, and
snorted. I gripped the sides of the buggy with all the strength I had,
ready to wrench free and leap if the buggy slipped deeper into the
river. Uncle Hoskins and I tussled.

"Whoa!" he yelled at last to the horse.

The horse stopped and neighed. The swirling yellow water was so close
that I could have touched the surface of the river. Uncle Hoskins looked
at me and laughed.

"Did you really think that I was going to drive this buggy into the
middle of the river?" he asked.

I was too scared to answer; my muscles were so taut that they ached.

"It's all right," he said soothingly.

He turned the buggy around and started back toward the levee. I was
still clutching the sides of the buggy so tightly that I could not turn
them loose.

"We're safe now," he said.

The buggy rolled onto dry land and, as my fear ebbed, I felt that I was
dropping from a great height. It seemed that I could smell a sharp,
fresh odor. My forehead was damp and my heart thumped heavily.

"I want to get out," I said.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"I want to get out!"

"We're back on land now, boy."

"Naw! Stop! I want to get out!"

He did not stop the buggy; he did not even turn his head to look at me;
he did not understand. I wrenched my leg free with a lunge and leaped
headlong out of the buggy, landing in the dust of the road, unhurt. He
stopped the buggy.

"Are you really that scared?" he asked softly.

I did not answer; I could not speak. My fear was gone now and he loomed
before me like a stranger, like a man I had never seen before, a man
with whom I could never share a moment of intimate living.

"Come on, Richard, and get back into the buggy," he said. "I'll take you
home now."

I shook my head and began to cry.

"Listen, son, don't you trust me?" he asked. "I was born on that old
river. I know that river. There's stone and brick way down under that
water. You could wade out for half a mile and it would not come over
your head."

His words meant nothing and I would not re-enter the buggy.

"I'd better take you home," he said soberly.

I started down the dusty road. He got out of the buggy and walked beside
me. He did not do his shopping that day and when he tried to explain to
me what he had been trying to do in frightening me I would not listen or
speak to him. I never trusted him after that. Whenever I saw his face
the memory of my terror upon the river would come back, vivid and
strong, and it stood as a barrier between us.

Each day Uncle Hoskins went to his saloon in the evening and did not
return home until the early hours of the morning. Like my father, he
slept in the daytime, but noise never seemed to bother Uncle Hoskins. My
brother and I shouted and banged as much as we liked. Often I would
creep into his room while he slept and stare at the big shining revolver
that lay near his head, within quick reach of his hand. I asked Aunt
Maggie why he kept the gun so close to him and she told me that men had
threatened to kill him, white men....

One morning I awakened to learn that Uncle Hoskins had not come home
from the saloon. Aunt Maggie fretted and worried. She wanted to visit
the saloon and find out what had happened, but Uncle Hoskins had
forbidden her to come to the place. The day wore on and dinnertime came.

"I'm going to find out if anything's happened," Aunt Maggie said.

"Maybe you oughtn't," my mother said. "Maybe it's dangerous."

The food was kept hot on the stove and Aunt Maggie stood on the front
porch staring into the deepening dusk. Again she declared that she was
going to the saloon, but my mother dissuaded her once more. It grew dark
and still he had not come. Aunt Maggie was silent and restless.

"I hope to God the white people didn't bother him," she said.

Later she went into the bedroom and when she came out she whimpered:

"He didn't take his gun. I wonder what could have happened?"

We ate in silence. An hour later there was the sound of heavy footsteps
on the front porch and a loud knock came. Aunt Maggie ran to the door
and flung it open. A tall black boy stood sweating, panting, and shaking
his head. He pulled off his cap.

"Mr. Hoskins... he done been shot. Done been shot by a white man," the
boy gasped. "Mrs. Hoskins, he dead."

Aunt Maggie screamed and rushed off the porch and down the dusty road
into the night.

"Maggie!" my mother screamed.

"Don't you-all go to that saloon," the boy called.

"Maggie!" my mother called, running after Aunt Maggie.

"They'll kill you if you go there!" the boy yelled. "White folks say
they'll kill all his kinfolks!"

My mother pulled Aunt Maggie back to the house. Fear drowned out grief
and that night we packed clothes and dishes and loaded them into a
farmer's wagon. Before dawn we were rolling away, fleeing for our lives.
I learned afterwards that Uncle Hoskins had been killed by whites who
had long coveted his flourishing liquor business. He had been threatened
with death and warned many times to leave, but he had wanted to hold on
a while longer to amass more money. We got rooms in West Helena, and
Aunt Maggie and my mother kept huddled in the house all day and night,
afraid to be seen on the streets. Finally Aunt Maggie defied her fear
and made frequent trips back to Elaine, but she went in secret and at
night and would tell no one save my mother when she was going.

There was no funeral. There was no music. There was no period of
mourning. There were no flowers. There were only silence, quiet weeping,
whispers, and fear. I did not know when or where Uncle Hoskins was
buried. Aunt Maggie was not even allowed to see his body nor was she
able to claim any of his assets. Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked
from our midst and we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid
looking into that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere
above us. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my
mind reeled. Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear
that was in her made her slap me into silence.

Shocked, frightened, alone without their husbands or friends, my mother
and Aunt Maggie lost faith in themselves and, after much debate and
hesitation, they decided to return home to Granny and rest, think, map
out new plans for living. I had grown used to moving suddenly and the
prospects of another trip did not excite me. I had learned to leave old
places without regret and to accept new ones for what they looked like.
Though I was nearly nine years of age, I had not had a single, unbroken
year of school, and I was not conscious of it. I could read and count
and that was about as much as most of the people I met could do,
grownups or children. Again our household was torn apart; belongings
were sold, given away, or simply left behind, and we were off for
another long train ride.

A few days later--after we had arrived at Granny's--I was playing alone
in a wild field, digging in the ground with an old knife. Suddenly a
strange rhythmic sound made me turn my head. Flowing threateningly
toward me over the crest of a hill was a wave of black men draped in
weird mustard-colored clothing. Unconsciously I jumped to my feet, my
heart pounding. What was this? Were these men coming after me? Line by
line, row by row, the fantastic men in their wild colors were descending
straight at me, trotting, their feet pounding the earth like someone
beating a vast drum. I wanted to fly home but, as in a dream, I could
not move. I cast about wildly for a clue to tell me what this was, but I
could find nothing. The wall of men was drawing closer. My heart was
beating so strongly that it shook my body. Again I tried to run, but I
could not budge. My mother's name was on the tip of my tongue and I
opened my mouth to scream, but no words came, for now the surging men,
each looking exactly like the other, parted and poured around me,
jarring the earth, their feet stomping in unison. As they flooded past I
saw that their black faces were looking at me and that some of them were
smiling. Then I noticed that each man was holding a long, dark, heavy,
sticklike object upon his shoulder. One of the men yelled something at
me which I did not understand. They were past me now, disappearing in a
great cloud of brown dust that looked like a part of their clothing,
that made them seem akin to the elemental earth itself. As soon as they
were far enough away for me to conquer my fear, I dashed home and
babbled to my mother what I had seen, asking her who the strange men
were.

"Those were soldiers," she said.

"What are soldiers?" I asked.

"Men who fight in wars."

"Why do they fight?"

"Because their country tells them to."

"And what are those long black sticks they have on their shoulders?"

"Rifles."

"What's a rifle?"

"It's a gun that shoots a bullet."

"Like a pistol?"

"Yes."

"Would the bullet kill you?"

"Yes, if it hits you in the right place."

"Who are they going to shoot?"

"Germans."

"Who are Germans?"

"They are the enemy."

"What's an enemy?"

"The people who want to kill you and take your country away from you."

"Where do they live?"

"'Way across the sea," my mother explained. "Don't you remember that I
told you that war has been declared?"

I remembered; but when she had told me, it had not seemed at all
important. I asked my mother what the war was about and she spoke of
England, France, Russia, Germany, of men dying, but the reality of it
was too vast and alien for me to be moved or further interested.

Upon another day I was playing out of doors in front of the house and I
accidentally looked down the road and saw what seemed to me to be a herd
of elephants coming slowly toward me. There was in me this time none of
that naked terror I had felt when I had seen the soldiers, for these
strange creatures were moving slowly, silently, with no suggestion of
threat. Yet I edged cautiously toward the steps of the house, holding
myself ready to run if they should prove to be more violent than they
appeared. The strange elephants were a few feet from me now and I saw
that their faces were like the faces of men! I stared, my mind trying to
adjust memory to reality. What kind of men were these? I saw that there
were two lines of creatures that looked like men on either side of the
road; that there were a few white faces and a great many black faces. I
saw that the white faces were the faces of white men and they were
dressed in ordinary clothing; but the black faces were men wearing what
seemed to me to be elephant's clothing. As the strange animals came
abreast of me I saw that the legs of the black animals were held
together by irons and that their arms were linked with heavy chains
that clanked softly and musically as they moved. The black creatures
were digging a shallow ditch on each side of the road, working silently,
grunting as they lifted spades of earth and flung them into the middle
of the roadway. One of the strange, striped animals turned a black face
upon me.

"What are you doing?" I asked in a whisper, not knowing if one actually
spoke to elephants.

He shook his head and cast his eyes guardedly back at a white man, then
dug on again. Suddenly I noticed that the white men were holding the
long, heavy black sticks--rifles!--on their shoulders. After they had
passed I ran breathlessly into the house.

"Mama!" I yelled.

"What?" she answered from the kitchen.

"There are elephants in the street!"

She came to the kitchen door and stared at me.

"Elephants?" she asked.

"Yes. Come and see them. They're digging in the street."

My mother dried her hands on her apron and rushed to the front door. I
followed, wanting her to interpret the baffling spectacle I had seen.
She looked out of the door and shook her head.

"Those are not elephants," she said.

"What are they?"

"That's a chain gang."

"What's a chain gang?"

"It's just what you see," she said. "A gang of men chained together and
made to work."

"Why?"

"Because they've done something wrong and they're being punished."

"What did they do?"

"I don't know."

"But why do they look like that?"

"That's to keep them from running away," she said. "You see,
everybody'll know that they're convicts because of their stripes."

"Why don't the white men wear stripes?"

"They're the guards."

"Do white men ever wear stripes?"

"Sometimes."

"Did you ever see any?"

"No."

"Why are there so many black men wearing stripes?"

"It's because.... Well, they're harder on black people."

"The white people?"

"Yes."

"Then why don't all the black men fight all the white men out there?
There are more black men than white men...."

"But the white men have guns and the black men don't," my mother said.
She looked at me and asked: "What made you call them elephants?"

I could not answer her at the moment. But later, brooding over the
black-and-white striped clothing of the black men, I remembered that in
Elaine I had had a book that carried the gaudy pictures and names of
jungle beasts. What had struck me most vividly were the striped zebras
that looked as if someone had painted them. The other animals that had
gripped my imagination were the elephants, and by association the zebras
and the elephants had become linked and identified in my mind to such an
extent that when I had seen the convicts dressed in the white and black
stripes of zebras, I had thought they were elephants, beasts of the
jungle.

Again, after an undetermined stretch of time, my mother announced that
we were going to move, that we were going back to West Helena. She had
grown tired of the strict religious routine of Granny's home; of the
half dozen or more daily family prayers that Granny insisted upon; her
fiat that the day began at sunrise and that night commenced at sundown;
the long, rambling Bible readings; the individual invocations muttered
at each meal; and her declaration that Saturday was the Lord's Sabbath
and that no one who lived in her house could work upon that day. In West
Helena we could have a home of our own, a condition that now loomed
desirable after a few months of Granny's anxiety about the state of our
souls. Naturally a trip was agreeable to me. Again we packed. Again we
said good-bye. Again we rode the train. Again we were in West Helena.

We rented one half of a double corner house in front of which ran a
stagnant ditch carrying sewage. The neighborhood swarmed with rats,
cats, dogs, fortunetellers, cripples, blind men, whores, salesmen, rent
collectors, and children. In front of our flat was a huge roundhouse
where locomotives were cleaned and repaired. There was an eternal
hissing of steam, the deep grunting of steel engines, and the tolling of
bells. Smoke obscured the vision and cinders drifted into the house,
into our beds, into our kitchen, into our food; and a tarlike smell was
always in the air.

Bareheaded and barefooted, my brother and I, along with nameless and
countless other black children, used to stand and watch the men crawl
in, out, over, and under the huge black metal engines. When the men were
not looking, we would climb into the engineer's cab and pull our small
bodies to the window and look out, imagining that we were grown and had
got a job as an engineer running a train and that it was night and there
was a storm and we had a long string of passenger cars behind us, trying
to get them safely home.

"Whooooooooeeeeeeeee!" we would say.

"Dong! Dong! Dong!"

"Huff-huff! Huff-huff-huff! Huff-huff-huff-huff!" we would say.

But our greatest fun came from wading in the sewage ditch where we found
old bottles, tin cans that held tiny crawfish, rusty spoons, bits of
metal, old toothbrushes, dead cats and dogs, and occasional pennies. We
made wooden boats out of cigar boxes, devised wooden paddles to which we
twisted pieces of rubber and sent the cigar-box boats sailing down the
ditch under their own power. Many evenings the fathers of the children
would come out, take off their shoes, and make and sail the boats
themselves.

My mother and Aunt Maggie cooked in the kitchens of white folks and my
brother and I were free to wander where we pleased during their working
hours. Each day we were left a dime apiece to spend for lunch and all
morning we would dream and discuss what we would buy. At ten or eleven
o'clock we would go to the corner grocery--owned by a Jew--and buy a
nickel's worth of ginger snaps and a bottle of Coca-Cola; that was lunch
as we understood it.

I had never seen a Jew before and the proprietor of the corner grocery
was a strange thing in my life. Until that time I had never heard a
foreign language spoken and I used to linger at the door of the corner
grocery to hear the odd sounds that Jews made when they talked. All of
us black people who lived in the neighborhood hated Jews, not because
they exploited us, but because we had been taught at home and in Sunday
school that Jews were "Christ killers." With the Jews thus singled out
for us, we made them fair game for ridicule.

We black children--seven, eight, and nine years of age--used to run to
the Jew's store and shout:

    _Jew, Jew, Jew_
      _What do you chew?_

Or we would form a long line and weave back and forth in front of the
door, singing:

    _Jew, Jew,_
      _Two for five_
    _That's what keeps_
      _Jew alive._

Or we would chant:

    _Bloody Christ killers_
      _Never trust a Jew_
    _Bloody Christ killers_
      _What won't a Jew do?_

To one of the redheaded Jewish boys we sang:

    _Red head_
      _Jewish bread_
    _Five cents_
      _A Jewish head._

To the fat Jewish woman we sneered:

    _Red, white, and blue_
      _Your pa was a Jew_
    _Your ma a dirty Dago_
      _What the hell is you?_

And when the baldheaded proprietor would pass by, we black children,
poor, half-starved, ignorant, victims of racial prejudice, would sing
with a proud lilt:

    _A rotten egg_
      _Never fries_
    _A cheating dog_
      _Never thrives._

There were many more folk ditties, some mean, others filthy, all of them
cruel. No one ever thought of questioning our right to do this; our
mothers and parents generally approved, either actively or passively. To
hold an attitude of antagonism or distrust toward Jews was bred in us
from childhood; it was not merely racial prejudice, it was a part of our
cultural heritage.

One afternoon a group of black boys and girls were standing about
outside playing, laughing, talking. A black man dressed in overalls went
up the steps and into the flat adjoining the one in which I lived.

"This is Saturday," a black girl said to me.

"Yeah. But why you say it?" I asked.

"They gonna make a lotta money in there today," she said, pointing to
the door through which the man had disappeared.

"How?"

Another black man went up the steps and into the flat.

"Don't you know?" the girl asked, incredulous.

"Know what?"

"What they selling....?"

"Where?"

"In there where them men went," she said.

"Nobody sells things in there," I said.

"You kidding?" the girl said in honest disbelief.

"I ain't. What they selling? Tell me."

"You know what they selling," she said, looking at me with a teasing
smile.

"They don't sell nothing in there," I said.

"Aw, you just a baby," she said, slapping her dingy palm through the air
at me in a contemptuous gesture.

I was puzzled. Was there something happening next door to where I lived
that I did not know? I thought I had poked my nose into every bit of
conceivable business in the neighborhood; if something was being sold
next door, then I certainly wanted to know about it. The building in
which I lived was a double frame house of one story; the building
originally had been a one-dwelling unit and had been converted into two
flats, for there were doors in our flat that led into the flat
adjoining. These doors had been locked, bolted, and nailed securely. The
family next door seemed quiet; men came and went, but that did not seem
odd to me. But now the girl's hints made me want to know what was
happening over there. I entered our house and locked the door, then put
my ear to the thin wall that divided the two flats and listened. I heard
faint sounds, but could make nothing of them. I listened at a bolted
door and the sounds came a little louder, but I still could understand
nothing.

Quietly I pulled up a chair, placed a box upon it, and climbed up and
peered through a crack at the top of the door. I saw, in the dim shadows
of the room beyond, a naked man and a naked woman upon a bed, the man on
top of the woman. I lost my balance and toppled backwards to the floor.
I lay still, wondering if the man and woman next door had heard me. But
all seemed quiet and my curiosity returned. Just as I had climbed up
again to look, a sharp rapping came on the windowpane behind me; I
turned my head and saw the landlady from next door looking at me. My
heart thumped and I scrambled down. The landlady's black face was
pressed hard against the windowpane; her mouth was moving violently and
her eyes were glaring. I was afraid to stay in the house or go out. Why
had I not thought of lowering the shade? Evidently I had done something
terrible, if the wild anger written on the woman's face was any
indication. Her face went from the window and a moment later a loud
pounding came at the front door.

"Open this door, you boy!"

I trembled and did not answer.

"Open this door or I'll have to break it!"

"My mama ain't here," I said vaguely.

"This is my house and you open this door!" she shouted.

Her voice overpowered me and I opened the door. She rushed in, then
stopped and stared at the clumsy scaffolding I had rigged up to look
into her flat. Why hadn't I taken it down before I opened the door?

"Boy, what do you mean?" she asked.

I could not answer.

"You scared my customers," she said.

"Customers?" I repeated vaguely.

"You little snot!" she blazed. "I got a good mind to beat you!"

"Naw, you won't!" I said.

"I'm gonna make your folks move outta here," she railed. "I got to make
a living and you go and spoil my Saturday for me!"

"I... I was just looking...."

"Looking....?" She smiled suddenly, relenting a little. "Why don't you
come on over like the rest and spend a quarter?"

"I don't want to go to your old house," I told her with my nine-year-old
indignation.

"You're a plague," she said, deciding that I would not be a customer.
"I'm gonna get you outta here!"

When my mother and Aunt Maggie came home that night, there was a
scalding argument. The women shouted at each other over the wooden
railings on the front porch and their voices could be heard for half a
mile. Neighbors listened. Children gathered and gaped. The argument
boiled down to one issue: the landlady demanded that my mother beat me
and, for once, my mother refused.

"You oughtn't have _that_ in your house," my mother told her.

"It's my house and I'll have in it what I damn please," the landlady
said.

"I wouldn't've moved in here if I had thought you were running _that_
kind of business," my mother said.

"Don't talk to me like that, you high-toned bitch!" the landlady
shouted.

"What do you expect children to do when you do _that_?" my mother asked.

"Them bastard brats of yours ain't no angels!" the landlady said.

"You're just a common prostitute!" Aunt Maggie pitched in.

"And what kind of whore is you?" the landlady shouted.

"Don't you talk to my sister like that!" my mother warned.

"Pack up your rags, you black bastards, and get!" the landlady ordered.

It ended with our packing and moving that night into another frame house
on the same street, a few doors away. I still had only a hazy notion of
what the landlady was selling. The boys later told me the name of it,
but I had no exact conception of it in my mind. Though I knew that
others felt it was something terribly bad, I was still curious. In time
I would find out what it was.

Something secret was happening in our house and it had reached a serious
stage before I knew it. Each night, just as I was dozing off to sleep, I
would hear a light tapping on Aunt Maggie's windowpane, a door creaking
open, whispers, then long silences. Once I got out of bed and crept to
the door of the front room and stole a look. There was a well-dressed
black man sitting on the sofa talking in a soft voice to Aunt Maggie.
Why was it that I could not meet the man? I crept back to bed, but was
awakened later by low voices saying good-bye. The next morning I asked
my mother who had been in the house, and she told me that no one had
been there.

"But I heard a man talking," I said.

"You didn't," she said. "You were sleeping."

"But I saw a man. He was in the front room."

"You were dreaming," my mother said.

I learned a part of the secret of the night visits one Sunday morning
when Aunt Maggie called me and my brother to her room and introduced us
to the man who was going to be our new "uncle," a Professor Matthews. He
wore a high, snow-white collar and rimless eyeglasses. His lips were
thin and his eyelids seemed never to blink. I felt something cold and
remote in him and when he called me I would not go to him. He sensed my
distrust and softened me up with the gift of a dime, then knelt and
prayed for us two "poor fatherless young men," as he called us. After
prayer Aunt Maggie told us that she and Professor Matthews were leaving
soon for the North. I was saddened, for I had grown to feel that Aunt
Maggie was another mother to me.

I did not meet the new "uncle" again, though each morning I saw
evidences of his having been in the house. My brother and I were puzzled
and we speculated as to what our new "uncle" could be doing. Why did he
always come at night? Why did he always speak in so subdued a voice,
hardly above a whisper? And how did he get the money to buy such white
collars and such nice blue suits? To add to our bewilderment, our mother
called us to her one day and cautioned us against telling anyone that
"uncle" ever visited us, that people were looking for "uncle."

"What people?" I asked.

"White people," my mother said.

Anxiety entered my body. Somewhere in the unknown the white threat was
hovering near again.

"What do they want with him?" I asked.

"You never mind," my mother said.

"What did he do?"

"You keep your mouth shut or the white folks'll get you too," she warned
me.

Knowing that we were frightened and baffled about our new "uncle," my
mother--I guess--urged Aunt Maggie to tell "uncle" to bribe us into
silence and trust. Every morning now was like Christmas; we would climb
out of bed and race to the kitchen and look on the table to see what
"uncle" had left for us. One morning I found that he had brought me a
little female poodle, upon which I bestowed the name of Betsy and she
became my pet and companion.

Strangely, "uncle" began visiting us in the daytime now, but when he
came all the shades in the house were drawn and we were forbidden to go
out of doors until he left. I asked my mother a thousand whispered
questions about the silent, black, educated "uncle" and she always
replied:

"It's something you can't know. Now keep quiet and go play."

One night the sound of sobbing awakened me. I got up and went softly to
the front room and peeped around the jamb of the door; there was "uncle"
sitting on the floor by the window, peering into the night from under
the lifted curtain. My mother was bent over a small trunk, packing
hurriedly. Fear gripped me. Was my mother leaving? Why was Aunt Maggie
crying? Were the white people coming after us?

"Hurry up," "uncle" said. "We must get out of here."

"Oh, Maggie," my mother said, "I don't know if you ought to go."

"You keep out of this," "uncle" said, still peering into the dark
street.

"But what did you do?" Aunt Maggie asked.

"I'll tell you later," "uncle" said. "We got to get out of here before
they come!"

"But you've done something terrible," Aunt Maggie said. "Or you wouldn't
be running like this."

"The house is on fire," "uncle" said. "And when they see it, they'll
know who did it."

"Did you set the house afire?" my mother asked.

"There was nothing else to do," "uncle" said impatiently. "I took the
money. I had hit her. She was unconscious. If they found her, she'd
tell. I'd be lost. So I set the fire."

"But she'll burn up," Aunt Maggie said, crying into her hands.

"What could I do?" "uncle" asked. "I had to do it. I couldn't just leave
her there and let somebody find her. They'd know somebody hit her. But
if she burns, nobody'll ever know."

Fear filled me. What was happening? Were white people coming after all
of us? Was my mother going to leave me?

"Mama!" I wailed, running into the room.

"Uncle" leaped to his feet; a gun was in his hand and he was pointing it
at me. I stared at the gun, feeling that I was going to die at any
moment.

"Richard!" my mother whispered fiercely.

"You're going away!" I yelled.

My mother rushed to me and clapped her hand over my mouth.

"Do you want us all to be killed?" she asked, shaking me.

I quieted.

"Now you go back to sleep," she said.

"You're leaving," I said.

"I'm not."

"You are leaving. I see the trunk!" I wailed.

"You stop that noise," my mother said; and she caught my arms in so
tight a grip of fury that my crying ceased because of the pain. "Now you
get back in bed."

She led me back to bed and I lay awake, listening to whispers,
footsteps, doors creaking in the dark, and the sobs of Aunt Maggie.
Finally I heard the sound of a horse and buggy rolling up to the house;
I heard the scraping of a trunk being dragged across the floor. Aunt
Maggie came into my room, crying softly; she kissed me and whispered
good-bye. She kissed my brother, who did not even waken. Then she was
gone.

The next morning my mother called me into the kitchen and talked to me
for a long time, cautioning me that I must never mention what I had seen
and heard, that white people would kill me if they even thought I knew.

"Know what?" I could not help but ask.

"Never you mind, now," she said. "Forget what you saw last night."

"But what did 'uncle' do?"

"I can't tell you."

"He killed somebody," I ventured timidly.

"If anybody heard you say that, you'll die," my mother said.

That settled it for me; I would never mention it. A few days later a
tall white man with a gleaming star on his chest and a gun on his hip
came to the house. He talked with my mother a long time and all I could
hear was my mother's voice:

"I don't know what you're talking about. Search the house if you like."

The tall white man looked at me and my brother, but he said nothing to
us. For weeks I wondered what it was that "uncle" had done, but I was
destined never to know, not even in all the years that followed.

       *       *       *       *       *

With Aunt Maggie gone, my mother could not earn enough to feed us and my
stomach kept so consistently empty that my head ached most of the day.
One afternoon hunger haunted me so acutely that I decided to try to sell
my dog Betsy and buy some food. Betsy was a tiny, white, fluffy poodle
and when I had washed, dried, and combed her, she looked like a toy. I
tucked her under my arm and went for the first time alone into a white
neighborhood where there were wide clean streets and big white houses. I
went from door to door, ringing the bells. Some white people slammed the
door in my face. Others told me to come to the rear of the house, but
pride would never let me do that. Finally a young white woman came to
the door and smiled.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"Do you want to buy a pretty dog?" I asked.

"Let me see it."

She took the dog into her arms and fondled and kissed it.

"What's its name?"

"Betsy."

"She is cute," she said. "What do you want for her?"

"A dollar," I said.

"Wait a moment," she said. "Let me see if I have a dollar."

She took Betsy into the house with her and I waited on the porch,
marveling at the cleanliness, the quietness of the white world. How
orderly everything was! Yet I felt out of place. I had no desire to live
here. Then I remembered that these houses were the homes in which lived
those white people who made Negroes leave their homes and flee into the
night. I grew tense. Would someone say that I was a bad nigger and try
to kill me here? What was keeping the woman so long? Would she tell
other people that a nigger boy had said something wrong to her? Perhaps
she was getting a mob? Maybe I ought to leave now and forget about
Betsy? My mounting anxieties drowned out my hunger. I wanted to rush
back to the safety of the black faces I knew.

The door opened and the woman came out, smiling, still hugging Betsy in
her arms. But I could not see her smile now; my eyes were full of the
fears I had conjured up.

"I just love this dog," she said, "and I'm going to buy her. I haven't
got a dollar. All I have is ninety-seven cents."

Though she did not know it, she was now giving me my opportunity to ask
for my dog without saying that I did not want to sell her to white
people.

"No, ma'am," I said softly. "I want a dollar."

"But I haven't got a dollar in the house," she said.

"Then I can't sell the dog," I said.

"I'll give you the other three cents when my mother comes home tonight,"
she said.

"No, ma'am," I said, looking stonily at the floor.

"But, listen, you said you wanted a dollar...."

"Yes, ma'am. A dollar."

"Then here is ninety-seven cents," she said, extending a handful of
change to me, still holding on to Betsy.

"No, ma'am," I said, shaking my head. "I want a dollar."

"But I'll give you the other three cents!"

"My mama told me to sell her for a dollar," I said, feeling that I was
being too aggressive and trying to switch the moral blame for my
aggressiveness to my absent mother.

"You'll get a dollar. You'll get the three cents tonight."

"No, ma'am."

"Then leave the dog and come back tonight."

"No, ma'am."

"But what could you want with a dollar _now_?" she asked.

"I want to buy something to eat," I said.

"Then ninety-seven cents will buy you a lot of food," she said.

"No, ma'am. I want my dog."

She stared at me for a moment and her face grew red.

"Here's your dog," she snapped, thrusting Betsy into my arms. "Now, get
away from here! You're just about the craziest nigger boy I ever did
see!"

I took Betsy and ran all the way home, glad that I had not sold her. But
my hunger returned. Maybe I ought to have taken the ninety-seven cents?
But it was too late now. I hugged Betsy in my arms and waited. When my
mother came home that night, I told her what had happened.

"And you didn't take the money?" she asked.

"No, ma'am."

"Why?"

"I don't know," I said uneasily.

"Don't you know that ninety-seven cents is _almost_ a dollar?" she
asked.

"Yes, ma'am," I said, counting on my fingers. "Ninety-eight,
ninety-nine, one hundred. But I didn't want to sell Betsy to white
people."

"Why?"

"Because they're white," I said.

"You're foolish," my mother said.

A week later Betsy was crushed to death beneath the wheels of a coal
wagon. I cried and buried her in the back yard and drove a barrel
staving into the ground at the head of her grave. My mother's sole
comment was:

"You could have had a dollar. But you can't eat a dead dog, can you?"

I did not answer.

Up or down the wet or dusty streets, indoors or out, the days and nights
began to spell out magic possibilities.

If I pulled a hair from a horse's tail and sealed it in a jar of my own
urine, the hair would turn overnight into a snake.

If I passed a Catholic sister or mother dressed in black and smiled and
allowed her to see my teeth, I would surely die.

If I walked under a leaning ladder, I would certainly have bad luck.

If I kissed my elbow, I would turn into a girl.

If my right ear itched, then something good was being said about me by
somebody.

If I touched a hunchback's hump, then I would never be sick.

If I placed a safety pin on a steel railroad track and let a train run
over it, the safety pin would turn into a pair of bright brand-new
scissors.

If I heard a voice and no human being was near, then either God or the
Devil was trying to talk to me.

Whenever I made urine, I should spit into it for good luck.

If my nose itched, somebody was going to visit me.

If I mocked a crippled man, then God would make me crippled.

If I used the name of God in vain, then God would strike me dead.

If it rained while the sun was shining, then the Devil was beating his
wife.

If the stars twinkled more than usual on any given night, it meant that
the angels in heaven were happy and were flitting across the floors of
heaven; and since stars were merely holes ventilating heaven, the
twinkling came from the angels flitting past the holes that admitted air
into the holy home of God.

If I broke a mirror, I would have seven years of bad luck.

If I was good to my mother, I would grow old and rich.

If I had a cold and tied a worn, dirty sock about my throat before I
went to bed, the cold would be gone the next morning.

If I wore a bit of asafetida in a little bag tied about my neck, I would
never catch a disease.

If I looked at the sun through a piece of smoked glass on Easter Sunday
morning, I would see the sun shouting in praise of a Risen Lord.

If a man confessed anything on his deathbed, it was the truth; for no
man could stare death in the face and lie.

If you spat on each grain of corn that was planted, the corn would grow
tall and bear well.

If I spilt salt, I should toss a pinch over my left shoulder to ward off
misfortune.

If I covered a mirror when a storm was raging, the lightning would not
strike me.

If I stepped over a broom that was lying on the floor, I would have bad
luck.

If I walked in my sleep, then God was trying to lead me somewhere to do
a good deed for Him.

Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything
to be possible.... Because I had no power to make things happen outside
of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my
environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited
potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy
yearning.

A dread of white people now came to live permanently in my feelings and
imagination. As the war drew to a close, racial conflict flared over the
entire South, and though I did not witness any of it, I could not have
been more thoroughly affected by it if I had participated directly in
every clash. The war itself had been unreal to me, but I had grown able
to respond emotionally to every hint, whisper, word, inflection, news,
gossip, and rumor regarding conflicts between the races. Nothing
challenged the totality of my personality so much as this pressure of
hate and threat that stemmed from the invisible whites. I would stand
for hours on the doorsteps of neighbors' houses listening to their talk,
learning how a white woman had slapped a black woman, how a white man
had killed a black man. It filled me with awe, wonder, and fear, and I
asked ceaseless questions.

One evening I heard a tale that rendered me sleepless for nights. It was
of a Negro woman whose husband had been seized and killed by a mob. It
was claimed that the woman vowed she would avenge her husband's death
and she took a shotgun, wrapped it in a sheet, and went humbly to the
whites, pleading that she be allowed to take her husband's body for
burial. It seemed that she was granted permission to come to the side of
her dead husband while the whites, silent and armed, looked on. The
woman, so went the story, knelt and prayed, then proceeded to unwrap the
sheet; and, before the white men realized what was happening, she had
taken the gun from the sheet and had slain four of them, shooting at
them from her knees.

I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was
emotionally true because I had already grown to feel that there existed
men against whom I was powerless, men who could violate my life at will.
I resolved that I would emulate the black woman if I were ever faced
with a white mob; I would conceal a weapon, pretend that I had been
crushed by the wrong done to one of my loved ones; then, just when they
thought I had accepted their cruelty as the law of my life, I would let
go with my gun and kill as many of them as possible before they killed
me. The story of the woman's deception gave form and meaning to confused
defensive feelings that had long been sleeping in me.

My imaginings, of course, had no objective value whatever. My
spontaneous fantasies lived in my mind because I felt completely
helpless in the face of this threat that might come upon me at any time,
and because there did not exist to my knowledge any possible course of
action which could have saved me if I had ever been confronted with a
white mob. My fantasies were a moral bulwark that enabled me to feel I
was keeping my emotional integrity whole, a support that enabled my
personality to limp through days lived under the threat of violence.

These fantasies were no longer a reflection of my reaction to the white
people, they were a part of my living, of my emotional life; they were a
culture, a creed, a religion. The hostility of the whites had become so
deeply implanted in my mind and feelings that it had lost direct
connection with the daily environment in which I lived; and my reactions
to this hostility fed upon itself, grew or diminished according to the
news that reached me about the whites, according to what I aspired or
hoped for. Tension would set in at the mere mention of whites and a vast
complex of emotions, involving the whole of my personality, would be
aroused. It was as though I was continuously reacting to the threat of
some natural force whose hostile behavior could not be predicted. I had
never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as
conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a
thousand lynchings.

I lived in West Helena an undeterminedly long time before I returned to
school and took up regular study. My mother luckily secured a job in a
white doctor's office at the unheard-of wages of five dollars per week
and at once she announced that her "sons were going to school again." I
was happy. But I was still shy and half paralyzed when in the presence
of a crowd, and my first day at the new school made me the laughingstock
of the classroom. I was sent to the blackboard to write my name and
address; I knew my name and address, knew how to write it, knew how to
spell it; but standing at the blackboard with the eyes of the many girls
and boys looking at my back made me freeze inside and I was unable to
write a single letter.

"Write your name," the teacher called to me.

I lifted the white chalk to the blackboard and, as I was about to write,
my mind went blank, empty; I could not remember my name, not even the
first letter. Somebody giggled and I stiffened.

"Just forget us and write your name and address," the teacher coaxed.

An impulse to write would flash through me, but my hand would refuse to
move. The children began to twitter and I flushed hotly.

"Don't you know your name?" the teacher asked.

I looked at her and could not answer. The teacher rose and walked to my
side, smiling at me to give me confidence. She placed her hand tenderly
upon my shoulder.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Richard," I whispered.

"Richard what?"

"Richard Wright."

"Spell it."

I spelled my name in a wild rush of letters, trying desperately to
redeem my paralyzing shyness.

"Spell it slowly so I can hear it," she directed me.

I did.

"Now, can you write?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then write it."

Again I turned to the blackboard and lifted my hand to write, then I was
blank and void within. I tried frantically to collect my senses, but I
could remember nothing. A sense of the girls and boys behind me filled
me to the exclusion of everything. I realized how utterly I was failing
and I grew weak and leaned my hot forehead against the cold blackboard.
The room burst into a loud and prolonged laugh and my muscles froze.

"You may go to your seat," the teacher said.

I sat and cursed myself. Why did I always appear so dumb when I was
called upon to perform something in a crowd? I knew how to write as well
as any pupil in the classroom, and no doubt I could read better than any
of them, and I could talk fluently and expressively when I was sure of
myself. Then why did strange faces make me freeze? I sat with my ears
and neck burning, hearing the pupils whisper about me, hating myself,
hating them; I sat still as stone and a storm of emotion surged through
me.

While sitting in class one day I was startled to hear whistles blowing
and bells ringing. Soon the bedlam was deafening. The teacher lost
control of her class and the girls and boys ran to the windows. The
teacher left the room and when she returned she announced:

"Everybody, pack your things and go home!"

"Why?"

"What's happened?"

"The war is over," the teacher said.

I followed the rest of the children into the streets and saw that white
and black people were laughing and singing and shouting. I felt afraid
as I pushed through crowds of white people, but my fright left when I
entered my neighborhood and saw smiling black faces. I wandered among
them, trying to realize what war was, what it meant, and I could not. I
noticed that many girls and boys were pointing at something in the sky;
I looked up too and saw what seemed to be a tiny bird wheeling and
sailing.

"Look!"

"A plane!"

I had never seen a plane.

"It's a bird," I said.

The crowd laughed.

"That's a plane, boy," a man said.

"It's a bird," I said. "I see it."

A man lifted me upon his shoulder.

"Boy, remember this," he said. "You're seeing man fly."

I still did not believe it. It still looked like a bird to me. That
night at home my mother convinced me that men could fly.

Christmas came and I had but one orange. I was hurt and would not go out
to play with the neighborhood children who were blowing horns and
shooting firecrackers. I nursed my orange all of Christmas Day; at
night, just before going to bed, I ate it, first taking a bite out of
the top and sucking the juice from it as I squeezed it; finally I tore
the peeling into bits and munched them slowly.




CHAPTER III


Having grown taller and older, I now associated with older boys and I
had to pay for my admittance into their company by subscribing to
certain racial sentiments. The touchstone of fraternity was my feeling
toward white people, how much hostility I held toward them, what degrees
of value and honor I assigned to race. None of this was premeditated,
but sprang spontaneously out of the talk of black boys who met at the
crossroads.

It was degrading to play with girls and in our talk we relegated them to
a remote island of life. We had somehow caught the spirit of the role of
our sex and we flocked together for common moral schooling. We spoke
boastfully in bass voices; we used the word "nigger" to prove the tough
fiber of our feelings; we spouted excessive profanity as a sign of our
coming manhood; we pretended callousness toward the injunctions of our
parents; and we strove to convince one another that our decisions
stemmed from ourselves and ourselves alone. Yet we frantically concealed
how dependent we were upon one another.

Of an afternoon when school had let out I would saunter down the street,
idly kicking an empty tin can, or knocking a stick against the palings
of a wooden fence, or whistling, until I would stumble upon one or more
of the gang loitering at a corner, standing in a field, or sitting upon
the steps of somebody's house.

"Hey." Timidly.

"You eat yet?" Uneasily trying to make conversation.

"Yeah, man. I done really fed my face." Casually.

"I had cabbage and potatoes." Confidently.

"I had buttermilk and black-eyed peas." Meekly informational.

"Hell, I ain't gonna stand near you, nigger!" Pronouncement.

"How come?" Feigned innocence.

"'Cause you gonna smell up this air in a minute!" A shouted accusation.

Laughter runs through the crowd.

"Nigger, your mind's in a ditch." Amusingly moralistic.

"Ditch, nothing! Nigger, you going to break wind any minute now!"
Triumphant pronouncement creating suspense.

"Yeah, when them black-eyed peas tell that buttermilk to move over, that
buttermilk ain't gonna wanna move and there's gonna be war in your guts
and your stomach's gonna swell up and bust!" Climax.

The crowd laughs loud and long.

"Man, them white folks oughta catch you and send you to the zoo and keep
you for the next war!" Throwing the subject into a wider field.

"Then when that fighting starts, they oughta feed you on buttermilk and
black-eyed peas and let you break wind!" The subject is accepted and
extended.

"You'd win the war with a new kind of poison gas!" A shouted climax.

There is high laughter that simmers down slowly.

"Maybe poison gas is something good to have." The subject of white folks
is associationally swept into the orbit of talk.

"Yeah, if they hava race riot round here, I'm gonna kill all the white
folks with my poison." Bitter pride.

Gleeful laughter. Then silence, each waiting for the other to contribute
something.

"Them white folks sure scared of us, though." Sober statement of an old
problem.

"Yeah, they send you to war, make you lick them Germans, teach you how
to fight and when you come back they scared of you, want to kill you."
Half boastful and half complaining.

"My mama says that old white woman where she works talked 'bout slapping
her and Ma said: 'Miz Green, if you slaps me, I'll kill you and go to
hell and pay for it!'" Extension, development, sacrificial boasting.

"Hell, I woulda just killed her if she hada said that to me." An angry
grunt of supreme racial assertion.

Silence.

"Man, them white folks sure is mean." Complaining.

"That's how come so many colored folks leaving the South."
Informational.

"And, man, they sure hate for you to leave." Pride of personal and
racial worth implied.

"Yeah. They wanna keep you here and work you to death."

"The first white sonofabitch that bothers me is gonna get a hole knocked
in his head!" Nave rebellion.

"That ain't gonna do you no good. Hell, they'll catch you." Rejection of
nave rebellion.

"Ha-ha-ha.... Yeah, goddammit, they really catch you, now." Appreciation
of the thoroughness of white militancy.

"Yeah, white folks set on their white asses day and night, but leta
nigger do something, and they get every bloodhound that was ever born
and put 'em on his trail." Bitter pride in realizing what it costs to
defeat them.

"Man, you reckon these white folks is ever gonna change?" Timid,
questioning hope.

"Hell, no! They just born that way." Rejecting hope for fear that it
could never come true.

"Shucks, man. I'm going north when I get grown." Rebelling against
futile hope and embracing flight.

"A colored man's all right up north." Justifying flight.

"They say a white man hit a colored man up north and that colored man
hit that white man, knocked him cold, and nobody did a damn thing!"
Urgent wish to believe in flight.

"Man for man up there." Begging to believe in justice.

Silence.

"Listen, you reckon them buildings up north is as tall as they say they
is?" Leaping by association to something concrete and trying to make
belief real.

"They say they gotta building in New York forty stories high!" A thing
too incredible for belief.

"Man, I'd be scareda them buildings!" Ready to abandon the now
suppressed idea of flight.

"You know, they say that them buildings sway and rock in the wind."
Stating a miracle.

"Naw, nigger!" Utter astonishment and rejection.

"Yeah, they say they do." Insisting upon the miracle.

"You reckon that could be?" Questioning hope.

"Hell, naw! If a building swayed and rocked in the wind, hell, it'd
fall! Any fool knows that! Don't let people maka fool outta you, telling
you them things!" Moving body agitatedly, stomping feet impatiently, and
scurrying back to safe reality.

Silence. Somebody would pick up a stone and toss it across a field.

"Man, what makes white folks so mean?" Returning to grapple with the old
problem.

"Whenever I see one I spit." Emotional rejection of whites.

"Man, ain't they ugly?" Increased emotional rejection.

"Man, you ever get right close to a white man, close enough to smell
'im?" Anticipation of statement.

"They say we stink. But my ma says white folks smell like dead folks."
Wishing the enemy was dead.

"Niggers smell from sweat. But white folks smell all the time." The
enemy is an animal to be killed on sight.

And the talk would weave, roll, surge, spurt, veer, swell, having no
specific aim or direction, touching vast areas of life, expressing the
tentative impulses of childhood. Money, God, race, sex, color, war,
planes, machines, trains, swimming, boxing, anything.... The culture of
one black household was thus transmitted to another black household, and
folk tradition was handed from group to group. Our attitudes were made,
defined, set, or corrected; our ideas were discovered, discarded,
enlarged, torn apart, and accepted. Night would fall. Bats would zip
through the air. Crickets would cry from the grass. Frogs would croak.
The stars would come out. Dew would dampen the earth. Yellow squares of
light would glow in the distance as kerosene lamps were lit in our
homes. Finally, from across the fields or down the road a long slow yell
would come:

"Youuuuuuuu, Daaaaaaaavee!"

Easy laughter among the boys, but no reply.

"Calling the hogs."

"Go home, pig."

Laughter again. A boy would slowly detach himself from the gang.

"Youuuuuuu, Daaaaaaaavee!"

He would not answer his mother's call, for that would have been a sign
of dependence.

"I'll do you-all like the farmer did the potato," the boy would say.

"How's that?"

"Plant you now and dig you later!"

The boy would trot home slowly and there would be more easy laughter.
More talk. One by one we would be called home to fetch water from the
hydrant in the back yard, to go to the store and buy greens and meal for
tomorrow, to split wood for kindling.

On Sundays, if our clothes were presentable, my mother would take me
and my brother to Sunday school. We did not object, for church was not
where we learned of God or His ways, but where we met our school friends
and continued our long, rambling talks. Some of the Bible stories were
interesting in themselves, but we always twisted them, secularized them
to the level of our street life, rejecting all meanings that did not fit
into our environment. And we did the same to the beautiful hymns. When
the preacher intoned:

    _Amazing grace, how sweet it sounds_

we would wink at one another and hum under our breath:

    _A bulldog ran my grandma down_

We were now large enough for the white boys to fear us and both of us,
the white boys and the black boys, began to play our traditional racial
roles as though we had been born to them, as though it was in our blood,
as though we were being guided by instinct. All the frightful
descriptions we had heard about each other, all the violent expressions
of hate and hostility that had seeped into us from our surroundings,
came now to the surface to guide our actions. The roundhouse was the
racial boundary of the neighborhood, and it had been tacitly agreed
between the white boys and the black boys that the whites were to keep
to the far side of the roundhouse and we blacks were to keep to our
side. Whenever we caught a white boy on our side we stoned him; if we
strayed to their side, they stoned us.

Our battles were real and bloody; we threw rocks, cinders, coal, sticks,
pieces of iron, and broken bottles, and while we threw them we longed
for even deadlier weapons. If we were hurt, we took it quietly; there
was no crying or whimpering. If our wounds were not truly serious, we
hid them from our parents. We did not want to be beaten for fighting.
Once, in a battle with a gang of white boys, I was struck behind the ear
with a piece of broken bottle; the cut was deep and bled profusely. I
tried to stem the flow of blood by dabbing at the cut with a rag and
when my mother came from work I was forced to tell her that I was hurt,
for I needed medical attention. She rushed me to a doctor who stitched
my scalp; but when she took me home she beat me, telling me that I must
never fight white boys again, that I might be killed by them, that she
had to work and had no time to worry about my fights. Her words did not
sink in, for they conflicted with the code of the streets. I promised my
mother that I would not fight, but I knew that if I kept my word I would
lose my standing in the gang, and the gang's life was my life.

       *       *       *       *       *

My mother became too ill to work and I began to do chores in the
neighborhood. My first job was carrying lunches to the men who worked in
the roundhouse, for which I received twenty-five cents a week. When the
men did not finish their lunches, I would salvage what few crumbs
remained. Later I obtained a job in a small caf carting wood in my arms
to keep the big stove going and taking trays of food to passengers when
trains stopped for a half hour or so in a near-by station. I received a
dollar a week for this work, but I was too young and too small to
perform the duties; one morning while trying to take a heavily loaded
tray up the steps of a train, I fell and dashed the tray of food to the
ground.

Inability to pay rent forced us to move into a house perched atop high
logs in a section of the town where flood waters came. My brother and I
had great fun running up and down the tall, shaky steps.

Again paying rent became a problem and we moved nearer the center of
town, where I found a job in a pressing shop, delivering clothes to
hotels, sweeping floors, and listening to Negro men boast of their sex
lives.

Yet again we moved, this time to the outskirts of town, near a wide
stretch of railroad tracks to which, each morning before school, I would
take a sack and gather coal to heat our frame house, dodging in and out
between the huge, black, puffing engines.

My mother, her health failing rapidly, spoke constantly now of Granny's
home, of how ardently she wanted to see us grow up before she died.
Already there had crept into her speech a halting, lisping quality that,
though I did not know it, was the shadow of her future. I was more
conscious of my mother now than I had ever been and I was already able
to feel what being completely without her would mean. A slowly rising
dread stole into me and I would look at my mother for long moments, but
when she would look at me I would look away. Then real fear came as her
illness recurred at shorter intervals. Time stood still. My brother and
I waited, hungry and afraid.

One morning a shouting voice awakened me.

"Richard! Richard!"

I rolled out of bed. My brother came running into the room.

"Richard, you better come and see Mama. She's very sick," he said.

I ran into my mother's room and saw her lying upon her bed, dressed, her
eyes open, her mouth gaped. She was very still.

"Mama!" I called.

She did not answer or turn her head. I reached forward to shake her, but
drew back, afraid that she was dead.

"Mama!" I called again, my mind unable to grasp that she could not
answer.

Finally I went to her and shook her. She moved slightly and groaned. My
brother and I called her repeatedly, but she did not speak. Was she
dying? It seemed unthinkable. My brother and I looked at each other; we
did not know what to do.

"We better get somebody," I said.

I ran into the hallway and called a neighbor. A tall, black woman
bustled out of a door.

"Please, won't you come and see my mama? She won't talk. We can't wake
her up. She's terribly sick," I told her.

She followed me into our flat.

"Mrs. Wright!" she called to my mother.

My mother lay still, unseeing, silent. The woman felt my mother's hands.

"She ain't dead," she said. "But she's sick, all right. I better get
some more of the neighbors."

Five or six of the women came and my brother and I waited in the hallway
while they undressed my mother and put her to bed. When we were allowed
back in the room, a woman said:

"Looks like a stroke to me."

"Just like paralysis," said another.

"And she's so young," someone else said.

My brother and I stood against a wall while the bustling women worked
frantically over my mother. A stroke? Paralysis? What were those things?
Would she die? One of the women asked me if there was any money in the
house; I did not know. They searched through the dresser and found a
dollar or two and sent for a doctor. The doctor arrived. Yes, he told
us, my mother had suffered a stroke of paralysis. She was in a serious
condition. She needed someone with her day and night; she needed
medicine. Where was her husband? I told him the story and he shook his
head.

"She'll need all the help that she can get," the doctor said. "Her
entire left side is paralyzed. She cannot talk and she will have to be
fed."

Later that day I rummaged through drawers and found Granny's address; I
wrote to her, pleading with her to come and help us. The neighbors
nursed my mother day and night, fed us and washed our clothes. I went
through the days with a stunned consciousness, unable to believe what
had happened. Suppose Granny did not come? I tried not to think of it.
She _had_ to come. The utter loneliness was now terrifying. I had been
suddenly thrown emotionally upon my own. Within an hour the
half-friendly world that I had known had turned cold and hostile. I was
too frightened to weep. I was glad that my mother was not dead, but
there was the fact that she would be sick for a long, long time, perhaps
for the balance of her life. I became morose. Though I was a child, I
could no longer feel as a child, could no longer react as a child. The
desire for play was gone and I brooded, wondering if Granny would come
and help us. I tried not to think of a tomorrow that was neither real
nor wanted, for all tomorrows held questions that I could not answer.

When the neighbors offered me food, I refused, already ashamed that so
often in my life I had to be fed by strangers. And after I had been
prevailed upon to eat I would eat as little as possible, feeling that
some of the shame of charity would be taken away. It pained me to think
that other children were wondering if I were hungry, and whenever they
asked me if I wanted food, I would say no, even though I was starving. I
was tense during the days I waited for Granny, and when she came I gave
up, letting her handle things, answering questions automatically,
obeying, knowing that somehow I had to face things alone. I withdrew
into myself.

I wrote letters that Granny dictated to her eight children--there were
nine of them, including my mother--in all parts of the country, asking
for money with which "to take Ella and her two little children to our
home." Money came and again there were days of packing household
effects. My mother was taken to the train in an ambulance and put on
board upon a stretcher. We rode to Jackson in silence and my mother was
put abed upstairs. Aunt Maggie came from Detroit to help nurse and
clean. The big house was quiet. We spoke in lowered voices. We walked
with soft tread. The odor of medicine hung in the air. Doctors came and
went. Night and day I could hear my mother groaning. We thought that
she would die at any moment.

Aunt Cleo came from Chicago. Uncle Clark came from Greenwood,
Mississippi. Uncle Edward came from Carters, Mississippi. Uncle Charles
from Mobile, Alabama. Aunt Addie from a religious school in Huntsville,
Alabama. Uncle Thomas from Hazelhurst, Mississippi. The house had an
expectant air and I caught whispered talk of "what is to become of her
children?" I felt dread, knowing that others--strangers even though they
were relatives--were debating my destiny. I had never seen my mother's
brothers and sisters before and their presence made live again in me my
old shyness. One day Uncle Edward called me to him and he felt my skinny
arms and legs.

"He needs more flesh on him," he commented impersonally, addressing
himself to his brothers and sisters.

I was horribly embarrassed, feeling that my life had somehow been full
of nameless wrong, an unatonable guilt.

"Food will make him pick up in weight," Granny said.

Out of the family conferences it was decided that my brother and I would
be separated, that it was too much of a burden for any one aunt or uncle
to assume the support of both of us. Where was I to go? Who would take
me? I became more anxious than ever. When an aunt or an uncle would come
into my presence, I could not look at them. I was always reminding
myself that I must not do anything that would make any of them feel they
would not want me in their homes.

At night my sleep was filled with wild dreams. Sometimes I would wake up
screaming in terror. The grownups would come running and I would stare
at them, as though they were figures out of my nightmare, then go back
to sleep. One night I found myself standing in the back yard. The moon
was shining bright as day. Silence surrounded me. Suddenly I felt that
someone was holding my hand. I looked and saw an uncle. He was speaking
to me in a low, gentle voice.

"What's the matter, son?"

I stared at him, trying to understand what he was saying. I seemed to be
wrapped in a kind of mist.

"Richard, what are you doing?"

I could not answer. It seemed that I could not wake up. He shook me. I
came to myself and stared about at the moon-drenched yard.

"Where are we going?" I asked him.

"You were walking in your sleep," he said.

Granny gave me fuller meals and made me take naps in the afternoon and
gradually my sleepwalking passed. The uneasy days and nights made me
resolve to leave Granny's home as soon as I was old enough to support
myself. It was not that they were unkind, but I knew that they did not
have money enough to feed me and my brother. I avoided going into my
mother's room now; merely to look at her was painful. She had grown very
thin; she was still speechless, staring, quiet as stone.

One evening my brother and I were called into the front room where a
conference of aunts and uncles was being held.

"Richard," said an uncle, "you know how sick your mother is?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, Granny's not strong enough to take care of you two boys," he
continued.

"Yes, sir," I said, waiting for his decision.

"Well, Aunt Maggie's going to take your brother to Detroit and send him
to school."

I waited. Who was going to take me? I had wanted to be with Aunt Maggie,
but I did not dare contest the decision.

"Now, where would you like to go?" I was asked.

The question caught me by surprise; I had been waiting for a fiat, and
now a choice lay before me. But I did not have the courage to presume
that anyone wanted me.

"Anywhere," I said.

"Any of us are willing to take you," he said.

Quickly I calculated which of them lived nearest to Jackson. Uncle Clark
lived in Greenwood, which was but a few miles distant.

"I'd like to live with Uncle Clark, since he's close to the home here,"
I said.

"Is that what you really want?"

"Yes, sir."

Uncle Clark came to me and placed his hand upon my head.

"All right. I'll take you back with me and send you to school. Tomorrow
we'll go and buy clothes."

My tension eased somewhat, but stayed with me. My brother was happy. He
was going north. I wanted to go, but I said nothing.

A train ride and I was in yet another little southern town. Home in
Greenwood was a four-room bungalow, comprising half of a double house
that sat on a quiet shady road. Aunt Jody, a medium-sized, neat, silent,
mulatto girl, had a hot supper waiting on the table. She baffled me with
her serious, reserved manner; she seemed to be acting in conformity with
a code unknown to me, and I assumed that she regarded me as a "wrong
one," a boy who for some reason did not have a home; I felt that in her
mind she would push me to the outskirts of life and I was awkward and
self-conscious in her presence. Both Uncle Clark and Aunt Jody talked to
me as though I were a grownup and I wondered if I could do what was
expected of me. I had always felt a certain warmth with my mother, even
when we had lived in squalor; but I felt none here. Perhaps I was too
apprehensive to feel any.

During supper it was decided that I was to be placed in school the next
day. Uncle Clark and Aunt Jody both had jobs and I was told that at noon
I would find lunch on the stove.

"Now, Richard, this is your new home," Uncle Clark said.

"Yes, sir."

"After school, bring in wood and coal for the fireplaces."

"Yes, sir."

"Split kindling and lay a fire in the kitchen stove."

"Yes, sir."

"Bring in a bucket of water from the yard so that Jody can cook in the
mornings."

"Yes, sir."

"After your chores are done, you may spend the afternoon studying."

"Yes, sir."

I had never been assigned definite tasks before and I went to bed a
little frightened. I lay sleepless, wondering if I should have come,
feeling the dark night holding strange people, strange houses, strange
streets. What would happen to me here? How would I get along? What kind
of woman was Aunt Jody? How ought I act around her? Would Uncle Clark
let me make friends with other boys? I awakened the next morning to see
the sun shining into my room; I felt more at ease.

"Richard!" my uncle was calling me.

I washed, dressed, and went into the kitchen and sat wordlessly at the
table.

"Good morning, Richard," Aunt Jody said.

"Oh, good morning," I mumbled, wishing that I had thought to say it
first.

"Don't people say good morning where you come from?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am."

"I thought they did," she said pointedly.

Aunt Jody and Uncle Clark began to question me about my life and I grew
so self-conscious that my hunger left me. After breakfast, Uncle Clark
took me to school, introduced me to the principal. The first half of the
school day passed without incident. I sat looking at the strange reading
book, following the lessons. The subjects seemed simple and I felt that
I could keep up. My anxiety was still in me; I was wondering how I would
get on with the boys. Each new school meant a new area of life to be
conquered. Were the boys tough? How hard did they fight? I took it for
granted that they fought.

At noon recess I went into the school grounds and a group of boys
sauntered up to me, looked at me from my head to my feet, whispering
among themselves. I leaned against a wall, trying to conceal my
uneasiness.

"Where you from?" a boy asked abruptly.

"Jackson," I answered.

"How come they make you people so ugly in Jackson?" he demanded.

There was loud laughter.

"You're not any too good-looking yourself," I countered instantly.

"Oh!"

"Aw!"

"You hear what he told 'im?"

"You think you're smart, don't you?" the boy asked, sneering.

"Listen, I ain't picking a fight," I said. "But if you want to fight,
I'll fight."

"Hunh, hard guy, ain't you?"

"As hard as you."

"Do you know who you can tell that to?" he asked me.

"And you know who you can tell it back to?" I asked.

"Are you talking about my mama?" he asked, edging forward.

"If you want it that way," I said.

This was my test. If I failed now, I would have failed at school, for
the first trial came not in books, but in how one's fellows took one,
what value they placed upon one's willingness to fight.

"Take back what you said," the boy challenged me.

"Make me," I said.

The crowd howled, sensing a fight. The boy hesitated, weighing his
chances of beating me.

"You ain't gonna take what that new boy said, is you?" someone taunted
the boy.

The boy came close. I stood my ground. Our faces were four inches apart.

"You think I'm scared of you, don't you?" he asked.

"I told you what I think," I said.

Somebody, eager and afraid that we would not fight, pushed the boy and
he bumped into me. I shoved him away violently.

"Don't push me!" the boy said.

"Then keep off me!" I said.

He was pushed again and I struck out with my right and caught him in the
mouth. The crowd yelled, milled, surging so close that I could barely
lift my arm to land a blow. When either of us tried to strike the other,
we would be thrown off balance by the screaming boys. Every blow landed
elicited shouts of delight. Knowing that if I did not win or make a good
showing I would have to fight a new boy each day, I fought tigerishly,
trying to leave a scar, seeking to draw blood as proof that I was not a
coward, that I could take care of myself. The bell rang and the crowd
pulled us apart. The fight seemed a draw.

"I ain't through with you!" the boy shouted.

"Go to hell!" I answered.

In the classroom the boys asked me questions about myself; I was someone
worth knowing. When the bell rang for school to be dismissed, I was set
to fight again; but the boy was not in sight.

On my way home I found a cheap ring in the streets and at once I knew
what I was going to do with it. The ring had a red stone held by tiny
prongs which I loosened, took the stone out, leaving the sharp tiny
prongs jutting up. I slid the ring on to my finger and shadow boxed.
Now, by God, let a goddamn bully come and I would show him how to fight;
I would leave a crimson streak on his face with every blow.

But I never had to use the ring. After I had exhibited my new weapon at
school, a description of it spread among the boys. I challenged my enemy
to another fight, but he would not respond. Fighting was not now
necessary. I had been accepted.

No sooner had I won my right to the school grounds than a new dread
arose. One evening, before bedtime, I was sitting in the front room,
reading, studying. Uncle Clark, who was a contracting carpenter, was at
his drawing table, drafting models of houses. Aunt Jody was darning.
Suddenly the doorbell rang and Aunt Jody admitted the next-door
neighbor, the owner of the house in which we lived and its former
occupant. His name was Burden; he was a tall, brown, stooped man and
when I was introduced to him I rose and shook his hand.

"Well, son," Mr. Burden told me, "it's certainly a comfort to see
another boy in this house."

"Is there another boy here?" I asked eagerly.

"My son was here," Mr. Burden said, shaking his head. "But he's gone
now."

"How old is he?" I asked.

"He was about your age," Mr. Burden mumbled sadly.

"Where did he go?" I asked stupidly.

"He's dead," Mr. Burden said.

"Oh," I said.

I had not understood him. There was a long silence. Mr. Burden looked at
me wistfully.

"Do you sleep in there?" he asked, pointing to my room.

"Yes, sir."

"That's where my boy slept," he said.

"In _there_?" I asked, just to make sure.

"Yes, right in there."

"On _that_ bed?" I asked.

"Yes, that was his bed. When I heard that you were coming, I gave your
uncle that bed for you," he explained.

I saw Uncle Clark shaking his head vigorously at Mr. Burden, but he was
too late. At once my imagination began to weave ghosts. I did not
actually believe in ghosts, but I had been taught that there was a God
and I had given a kind of uneasy assent to His existence, and if there
was a God, then surely there must be ghosts. In a moment I built up an
intense loathing for sleeping in the room where the boy had died.
Rationally I knew that the dead boy could not bother me, but he had
become alive for me in a way that I could not dismiss. After Mr. Burden
had gone, I went timidly to Uncle Clark.

"I'm scared to sleep in there," I told him.

"Why? Because a boy died in there?"

"Yes, sir."

"But, son, that's nothing to be afraid of."

"I know. But I am scared."

"We all must die someday. So why be afraid?"

I had no answer for that.

"When you die, do you want people to be afraid of _you_?"

I could not answer that either.

"This is nonsense," Uncle Clark went on.

"But I'm scared," I told him.

"You'll get over it."

"Can't I sleep somewhere else?"

"There's nowhere else for you to sleep."

"Can I sleep here on the sofa?" I asked.

"_May_ I sleep here on the sofa?" Aunt Jody corrected me in a mocking
tone.

"May I sleep here on the sofa?" I repeated after her.

"No," Aunt Jody said.

I groped into the dark room and fumbled for the bed; I had the illusion
that if I touched it I would encounter the dead boy. I trembled. Finally
I jumped roughly into the bed and jerked the covers over my face. I did
not sleep that night and my eyes were red and puffy the next morning.

"Didn't you sleep well?" Uncle Clark asked me.

"I can't sleep in that room," I said.

"You slept in it before you heard of that boy who died in there, didn't
you?" Aunt Jody asked me.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then why can't you sleep in it now?"

"I'm just scared."

"You stop being a baby," she told me.

The next night was the same; fear kept me from sleeping. After Uncle
Clark and Aunt Jody had gone to bed, I rose and crept into the front
room and slept in a tight ball on the sofa, without any cover. I
awakened the next morning to find Uncle Clark shaking me.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked.

"I'm scared to sleep in there," I said.

"You go back into that room and sleep tonight," he told me. "You've got
to get over this thing."

I spent another sleepless, shivering night in the dead boy's room--it
was not my room any longer--and I was so frightened that I sweated. Each
creak of the house made my heart stand still. In school the next day I
was dull. I came home and spent another long night of wakefulness and
the following day I went to sleep in the classroom. When questioned by
the teacher, I could give no answer. Unable to free myself from my
terror, I began to long for home. A week of sleeplessness brought me
near the edge of nervous collapse.

Sunday came and I refused to go to church and Uncle Clark and Aunt Jody
were astonished. They did not understand that my refusal to go to church
was my way of silently begging them to let me sleep somewhere else. They
left me alone in the house and I spent the entire day sitting on the
front steps; I did not have enough courage to go into the kitchen to
eat. When I became thirsty, I went around the house and drank water from
the hydrant in the back yard rather than venture into the house.
Desperation made me raise the issue of the room again at bedtime.

"Please, let me sleep on the sofa in the front room," I pleaded.

"You've got to get out of that fear," my uncle said.

I made up my mind to ask to be sent home. I went to Uncle Clark, knowing
that he had incurred expense in bringing me here, that he had thought he
was helping me, that he had bought my clothes and books.

"Uncle Clark, send me back to Jackson," I said.

He was bent over a little table and he straightened and stared at me.

"You're not happy here?" he asked.

"No, sir," I answered truthfully, fearing that the ceiling would crash
down upon my head.

"And you really want to go back?"

"Yes, sir."

"Things will not be as easy for you at home as here," he said. "There's
not much money for food and things."

"I want to be where my mother is," I said, trying to strengthen my plea.

"It's really about the room?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, we tried to make you happy here," my uncle said, sighing. "Maybe
we didn't know how. But if you want to go back, then you may go."

"When?" I asked eagerly.

"As soon as school term has ended."

"But I want to go now!" I cried.

"But you'll break up your year's schooling," he said.

"I don't mind."

"You will, in the future. You've never had a single year of steady
schooling," he said.

"I want to go home," I said.

"Have you felt this way a long time?" he asked.

"Yes, sir."

"I'll write Granny tonight," he said, his eyes lit with surprise.

Daily I asked him if he had heard from Granny only to learn that there
had been no word. My sleeplessness made me feel that my days were a hot,
wild dream and my studies suffered at school. I had been making high
marks and now I made low ones and finally began to fail altogether. I
was fretful, living from moment to moment.

One evening, in doing my chores, I took the water pail to the hydrant in
the back yard to fill it. I was half asleep, tired, tense, all but
swaying on my feet. I balanced the handle of the pail on the jutting tip
of the metal faucet and waited for it to fill; the pail slipped and
water drenched my pants and shoes and stockings.

"That goddamn lousy bastard sonofabitching bucket!" I spoke in a whisper
of hate and despair.

"Richard!" Aunt Jody's amazed voice sounded in the darkness behind me.

I turned. Aunt Jody was standing on the back steps. She came into the
yard.

"What did you say, boy?" she asked.

"Nothing," I mumbled, looking contritely at the ground.

"Repeat what you said!" she demanded.

I did not answer. I stooped and picked up the pail. She snatched it from
me.

"What did you say?" she asked again.

I still kept my head down, vaguely wondering if she were intimidating me
or if she really wanted me to repeat my curses.

"I'm going to tell your uncle on you," she said at last.

I hated her then. I thought that hanging my head and looking mutely at
the ground was a kind of confession and a petition for forgiveness, but
she had not accepted it as such.

"I don't care," I said.

She gave me the pail, which I filled with water and carried to the
house. She followed me.

"Richard, you are a very bad, bad boy," she said.

"I don't care," I repeated.

I avoided her and went to the front porch and sat. I had had no
intention of letting her hear me curse, but since she had heard me and
since there was no way to appease her, I decided to let things develop
as they would. I would go home. But where was home? Yes, I would run
away.

Uncle Clark came and called me into the front room.

"Jody says that you've been using bad language," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"You admit it?"

"Yes, sir."

"Why did you do it?"

"I don't know."

"I'm going to whip you. Pull off your shirt."

Wordlessly I bared my back and he lashed me with a strap. I gritted my
teeth and did not cry.

"Are you going to use that language again?" he asked me.

"I want to go home," I said.

"Put on your shirt."

I obeyed.

"I want to go home," I said again.

"But this is your home."

"I want to go to Jackson."

"You have no home in Jackson."

"I want to go to my mother."

"All right," he relented. "I'll send you home Saturday." He looked at me
with baffled eyes. "Tell me, where did you learn those words Jody heard
you say?"

I looked at him and did not answer; there flashed through my mind a
quick, running picture of all the squalid hovels in which I had lived
and it made me feel more than ever a stranger as I stood before him. How
could I have told him that I had learned to curse before I had learned
to read? How could I have told him that I had been a drunkard at the age
of six?

When he took me to the train that Saturday morning, I felt guilty and
did not want to look at him. He gave me my ticket and I climbed hastily
aboard the train. I waved a stiff good-bye to him through the window as
the train pulled out. When I could see his face no longer, I wilted,
relaxing. Tears blurred my vision. I leaned back and closed my eyes and
slept all the way.

       *       *       *       *       *

I was glad to see my mother. She was much better, though still abed.
Another operation had been advised by the doctor and there was hope for
recovery. But I was anxious. Why another operation? A victim myself of
too many hopes that had never led anywhere, I was for letting my mother
remain as she was. My feelings were governed by fear and I spoke to no
one about them. I had already begun to sense that my feelings varied too
far from those of the people around me for me to blab about what I felt.

I did not re-enter school. Instead, I played alone in the back yard,
bouncing a rubber ball off the fence, drawing figures in the soft clay
with an old knife, or reading what books I found about the house. I
ached to be of an age to take care of myself.

Uncle Edward arrived from Carters to take my mother to Clarksdale for
the operation; at the last moment I insisted upon being taken with them.
I dressed hurriedly and we went to the station. Throughout the journey I
sat brooding, afraid to look at my mother, wanting to return home and
yet wanting to go on. We reached Clarksdale and hired a taxi to the
doctor's office. My mother was jolly, brave, smiling, but I knew that
she was as doubtful as I was. When we reached the doctor's waiting room
the conviction settled in me that my mother would never be well again.
Finally the doctor came out in his white coat and shook hands with me,
then took my mother inside. Uncle Edward left to make arrangements for a
room and a nurse. I felt crushed. I waited. Hours later the doctor came
to the door.

"How's my mother?"

"Fine!" he said.

"Will she be all right?"

"Everything'll clear up in a few days."

"Can I see her now?"

"No, not now."

Later Uncle Edward returned with an ambulance and two men who carried a
stretcher. They entered the doctor's office and brought out my mother;
she lay with closed eyes, her body swathed in white. I wanted to run to
the stretcher and touch her, but I could not move.

"Why are they taking mama that way?" I asked Uncle Edward.

"There are no hospital facilities for colored, and this is the way we
have to do it," he said.

I watched the men take the stretcher down the steps; then I stood on the
sidewalk and watched them lift my mother into the ambulance and drive
away. I knew that my mother had gone out of my life; I could feel it.

Uncle Edward and I stayed at a boardinghouse; each morning he went to
the rooming house to inquire about my mother and each time he returned
gloomy and silent. Finally he told me that he was taking my mother back
home.

"What chance has mama, really?" I asked him.

"She's very sick," he said.

We left Clarksdale; my mother rode on a stretcher in the baggage car
with Uncle Edward attending her. Back home, she lay for days, groaning,
her eyes vacant. Doctors visited her and left without making any
comment. Granny grew frantic. Uncle Edward, who had gone home, returned
and still more doctors were called in. They told us that a blood clot
had formed on my mother's brain and that another paralytic stroke had
set in.

Once, in the night, my mother called me to her bed and told me that she
could not endure the pain, that she wanted to die. I held her hand and
begged her to be quiet. That night I ceased to react to my mother; my
feelings were frozen. I merely waited upon her, knowing that she was
suffering. She remained abed ten years, gradually growing better, but
never completely recovering, relapsing periodically into her paralytic
state. The family had stripped itself of money to fight my mother's
illness and there was no more forthcoming. Her illness gradually became
an accepted thing in the house, something that could not be stopped or
helped.

My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself
all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling,
hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking,
the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the
endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life, colored
the men and women I was to meet in the future, conditioned my relation
to events that had not yet happened, determined my attitude to
situations and circumstances I had yet to face. A somberness of spirit
that I was never to lose settled over me during the slow years of my
mother's unrelieved suffering, a somberness that was to make me stand
apart and look upon excessive joy with suspicion, that was to make me
self-conscious, that was to make me keep forever on the move, as though
to escape a nameless fate seeking to overtake me.

At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal
schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever
erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever
gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as
to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that
the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a
meaning out of meaningless suffering.

At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure,
that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive,
that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything,
tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me
insight into the sufferings of others, made me gravitate toward those
whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told
me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and
peaceful.

It made me want to drive coldly to the heart of every question and lay
it open to the core of suffering I knew I would find there. It made me
love burrowing into psychology, into realistic and naturalistic fiction
and art, into those whirlpools of politics that had the power to claim
the whole of men's souls. It directed my loyalties to the side of men in
rebellion; it made me love talk that sought answers to questions that
could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling
sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which
is hidden by the external drama of life.




CHAPTER IV


Granny was an ardent member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and I
was compelled to make a pretense of worshiping her God, which was her
exaction for my keep. The elders of her church expounded a gospel
clogged with images of vast lakes of eternal fire, of seas vanishing, of
valleys of dry bones, of the sun burning to ashes, of the moon turning
to blood, of stars falling to the earth, of a wooden staff being
transformed into a serpent, of voices speaking out of clouds, of men
walking upon water, of God riding whirlwinds, of water changing into
wine, of the dead rising and living, of the blind seeing, of the lame
walking; a salvation that teemed with fantastic beasts having multiple
heads and horns and eyes and feet; sermons of statues possessing heads
of gold, shoulders of silver, legs of brass, and feet of clay; a cosmic
tale that began before time and ended with the clouds of the sky rolling
away at the Second Coming of Christ; chronicles that concluded with the
Armageddon; dramas thronged with all the billions of human beings who
had ever lived or died as God judged the quick and the dead....

While listening to the vivid language of the sermons I was pulled toward
emotional belief, but as soon as I went out of the church and saw the
bright sunshine and felt the throbbing life of the people in the streets
I knew that none of it was true and that nothing would happen.

Once again I knew hunger, biting hunger, hunger that made my body
aimlessly restless, hunger that kept me on edge, that made my temper
flare, hunger that made hate leap out of my heart like the dart of a
serpent's tongue, hunger that created in me odd cravings. No food that I
could dream of seemed half so utterly delicious as vanilla wafers. Every
time I had a nickel I would run to the corner grocery store and buy a
box of vanilla wafers and walk back home, slowly, so that I could eat
them all up without having to share them with anyone. Then I would sit
on the front steps and dream of eating another box; the craving would
finally become so acute that I would force myself to be active in order
to forget. I learned a method of drinking water that made me feel full
temporarily whether I had a desire for water or not; I would put my
mouth under a faucet and turn the water on full force and let the stream
cascade into my stomach until it was tight. Sometimes my stomach ached,
but I felt full for a moment.

No pork or veal was ever eaten at Granny's, and rarely was there meat of
any kind. We seldom ate fish and then only those that had scales and
spines. Baking powder was never used; it was alleged to contain a
chemical harmful to the body. For breakfast I ate mush and gravy made
from flour and lard and for hours afterwards I would belch it up into my
mouth. We were constantly taking bicarbonate of soda for indigestion. At
four o'clock in the afternoon I ate a plate of greens cooked with lard.
Sometimes on Sundays we bought a dime's worth of beef which usually
turned out to be uneatable. Granny's favorite dish was a peanut roast
which she made to resemble meat, but which tasted like something else.

My position in the household was a delicate one; I was a minor, an
uninvited dependent, a blood relative who professed no salvation and
whose soul stood in mortal peril. Granny intimated boldly, basing her
logic on God's justice, that one sinful person in a household could
bring down the wrath of God upon the entire establishment, damning both
the innocent and the guilty, and on more than one occasion she
interpreted my mother's long illness as the result of my faithlessness.
I became skilled in ignoring these cosmic threats and developed a
callousness toward all metaphysical preachments.

But Granny won an ally in her efforts to persuade me to confess her God;
Aunt Addie, her youngest child, had just finished the Seventh-Day
Adventist religious school in Huntsville, Alabama, and came home to
argue that if the family was compassionate enough to feed me, then the
least I could do in return was to follow its guidance. She proposed
that, when the fall school term started, I should be enrolled in the
religious school rather than a secular one. If I refused, I was placing
myself not only in the position of a horrible infidel but of a
hardhearted ingrate. I raised arguments and objections, but my mother
sided with Granny and Aunt Addie and I had to accept.

The religious school opened and I put in a sullen attendance. Twenty
pupils, ranging in age from five to nineteen and in grades from primary
to high school, were crowded into one room. Aunt Addie was the only
teacher and from the first day an acute, bitter antagonism sprang up
between us. This was the first time she had ever taught school and she
was nervous, self-conscious because a blood relative of hers--a relative
who would not confess her faith and who was not a member of her
church--was in her classroom. She was determined that every student
should know that I was a sinner of whom she did not approve, and that I
was not to be granted consideration of any kind.

The pupils were a docile lot, lacking in that keen sense of rivalry
which made the boys and girls who went to public school a crowd in which
a boy was tested and weighed, in which he caught a glimpse of what the
world was. These boys and girls were will-less, their speech flat, their
gestures vague, their personalities devoid of anger, hope, laughter,
enthusiasm, passion, or despair. I was able to see them with an
objectivity that was inconceivable to them. They were claimed wholly by
their environment and could imagine no other, whereas I had come from
another plane of living, from the swinging doors of saloons, the
railroad yard, the roundhouses, the street gangs, the river levees, an
orphan home; had shifted from town to town and home to home; had mingled
with grownups more than perhaps was good for me. I had to curb my habit
of cursing, but not before I had shocked more than half of them and had
embarrassed Aunt Addie to helplessness.

As the first week of school drew to a close, the conflict that smoldered
between Aunt Addie and me flared openly. One afternoon she rose from her
desk and walked down the aisle and stopped beside me.

"You know better than that," she said, tapping a ruler across my
knuckles.

"Better than what?" I asked, amazed, nursing my hand.

"Just look at that floor," she said.

I looked and saw that there were many tiny bits of walnut meat scattered
about; some of them had been smeared into grease spots on the clean,
white pine boards. At once I knew that the boy in front of me had been
eating them; my walnuts were in my pocket uncracked.

"I don't know anything about that," I said.

"You know better than to eat in the classroom," she said.

"I haven't been eating," I said.

"Don't lie! This is not only a school, but God's holy ground," she said
with angry indignation.

"Aunt Addie, my walnuts are here in my pocket...."

"I'm Miss Wilson!" she shouted.

I stared at her, speechless, at last comprehending what was really
bothering her. She had warned me to call her Miss Wilson in the
classroom, and for the most part I had done so. She was afraid that if I
called her Aunt Addie I would undermine the morale of the students. Each
pupil knew that she was my aunt and many of them had known her longer
than I had.

"I'm sorry," I said, and turned from her and opened a book.

"Richard, get up!"

I did not move. The room was tense. My fingers gripped the book and I
knew that every pupil in the room was watching. I had not eaten the
nuts; I was sorry that I had called her Aunt Addie; but I did not want
to be singled out for gratuitous punishment. And, too, I was expecting
the boy who sat in front of me to devise some lie to save me, since it
was really he who was guilty.

"I asked you to get up!" she shouted.

I still sat, not taking my eyes off my book. Suddenly she caught me by
the back of my collar and yanked me from the seat. I stumbled across the
room.

"I spoke to you!" she shouted hysterically.

I straightened and looked at her; there was hate in my eyes.

"Don't you look at me that way, boy!"

"I didn't put those walnuts on the floor!"

"Then who did?"

My street gang code was making it hard for me. I had never informed upon
a boy in the public school, and I was waiting for the boy in front of me
to come to my aid, lying, making up excuses, anything. In the past I had
taken punishment that was not mine to protect the solidarity of the
gang, and I had seen other boys do the same. But the religious boy, God
helping him, did not speak.

"I don't know who did it," I said finally.

"Go to the front of the room," Aunt Addie said.

I walked slowly to her desk, expecting to be lectured; but my heart
quickened when I saw her go to the corner and select a long, green,
limber switch and come toward me. I lost control of my temper.

"I haven't done anything!" I yelled.

She struck me and I dodged.

"Stand still, boy!" she blazed, her face livid with fury, her body
trembling.

I stood still, feeling more defeated by the righteous boy behind me than
by Aunt Addie.

"Hold out your hand!"

I held out my hand, vowing that never again would this happen to me, no
matter what the price. She stung my palm until it was red, then lashed
me across my bare legs until welts rose. I clamped my teeth to keep from
uttering a single whimper. When she finished I continued to hold out my
hand, indicating to her that her blows could never really reach me, my
eyes fixed and unblinking upon her face.

"Put down your hand and go to your seat," she said.

I dropped my hand and turned on my heels, my palm and legs on fire, my
body taut. I walked in a fog of anger toward my desk.

"And I'm not through with you!" she called after me.

She had said one word too much; before I knew it, I had whirled and was
staring at her with an open mouth and blazing eyes.

"Through with me?" I repeated. "But what have I done to you?"

"Sit down and shut up!" Aunt Addie bellowed.

I sat. I was sure of one thing: I would not be beaten by her again. I
had often been painfully beaten, but almost always I had felt that the
beatings were somehow right and sensible, that I was in the wrong. Now,
for the first time, I felt the equal of an adult; I knew that I had been
beaten for a reason that was not right. I sensed some emotional problem
in Aunt Addie other than her concern about my eating in school. Did my
presence make her feel so insecure that she felt she had to punish me in
front of the pupils to impress them? All afternoon I brooded, wondering
how I could quit the school.

The moment Aunt Addie came into the house--I reached home before she
did--she called me into the kitchen. When I entered, I saw that she was
holding another switch. My muscles tightened.

"You're not going to beat me again!" I told her.

"I'm going to teach you some manners!" she said.

I stood fighting, fighting as I had never fought in my life, fighting
with myself. Perhaps my uneasy childhood, perhaps my shifting from town
to town, perhaps the violence I had already seen and felt took hold of
me, and I was trying to stifle the impulse to go to the drawer of the
kitchen table and get a knife and defend myself. But this woman who
stood before me was my aunt, my mother's sister, Granny's daughter; in
her veins my own blood flowed; in many of her actions I could see some
elusive part of my own self; and in her speech I could catch echoes of
my own speech. I did not want to be violent with her, and yet I did not
want to be beaten for a wrong I had not committed.

"You're just mad at me for something!" I said.

"Don't tell me I'm mad!"

"You're too mad to believe anything I say."

"Don't speak to me like that!"

"Then how can I talk to you? You beat me for throwing walnuts on the
floor! But I didn't do it!"

"Then who did?"

Since I was alone now with her, and desperate, I cast my loyalties aside
and told her the name of the guilty boy, feeling that he merited no
consideration.

"Why didn't you tell me before?" she asked.

"I don't want to tell tales on other people."

"So you lied, hunh?"

I could not talk; I could not explain how much I valued my code of
solidarity.

"Hold out your hand!"

"You're not going to beat me! I didn't do it!"

"I'm going to beat you for lying!"

"Don't, don't hit me! If you hit me I'll fight you!"

For a moment she hesitated, then she struck at me with the switch and I
dodged and stumbled into a corner. She was upon me, lashing me across
the face. I leaped, screaming, and ran past her and jerked open the
kitchen drawer; it spilled to the floor with a thunderous sound. I
grabbed up a knife and held it ready for her.

"Now, I told you to stop!" I screamed.

"You put down that knife!"

"Leave me alone or I'll cut you!"

She stood debating. Then she made up her mind and came at me. I lunged
at her with the knife and she grasped my hand and tried to twist the
knife loose. I threw my right leg about her legs and gave her a shove,
tripping her; we crashed to the floor. She was stronger than I and I
felt my strength ebbing; she was still fighting for my knife and I saw a
look on her face that made me feel she was going to use it on me if she
got possession of it. I bit her hand and we rolled, kicking, scratching,
hitting, fighting as though we were strangers, deadly enemies, fighting
for our lives.

"Leave me alone!" I screamed at the top of my voice.

"Give me that knife, you boy!"

"I'll kill you! I'll kill you if you don't leave me alone!"

Granny came running; she stood thunderstruck.

"Addie, what are you doing?"

"He's got a knife!" she gasped. "Make 'im put it down!"

"Richard, put down that knife!" Granny shouted.

My mother came limping to the door.

"Richard, stop it!" she shouted.

"I won't! I'm not going to let her beat me!"

"Addie, leave the boy alone," my mother said.

Aunt Addie rose slowly, her eyes on the knife, then she turned and
walked out of the kitchen, kicking the door wide open before her as she
went.

"Richard, give me that knife," my mother said.

"But, mama, she'll beat me, beat me for nothing," I said. "I'm not going
to let her beat me; I don't care what happens!"

"Richard, you are bad, bad," Granny said, weeping.

I tried to explain what had happened, but neither of them would listen.
Granny came toward me to take the knife, but I dodged her and ran into
the back yard. I sat alone on the back steps, trembling, emotionally
spent, crying to myself. Grandpa came down; Aunt Addie had told him what
had happened.

"Gimme that knife, mister," he said.

"I've already put it back," I lied, hugging my arm to my side to conceal
the knife.

"What's come over you?" he asked.

"I don't want her to beat me," I said.

"You're a child, a boy!" he thundered.

"But I don't want to be beaten!"

"What did you do?"

"Nothing."

"You can lie as fast as a dog can trot," Grandpa said. "And if it wasn't
for my rheumatism, I'd take down your pants and tan your backside good
and proper. The very idea of a little snot like you threatening somebody
with a knife!"

"I'm not going to let her beat me," I said again.

"You're bad," he said. "You better watch your step, young man, or you'll
end up on the gallows."

I had long ceased to fear Grandpa; he was a sick old man and he knew
nothing of what was happening in the house. Now and then the womenfolk
called on him to throw fear into someone, but I knew that he was feeble
and was not frightened of him. Wrapped in the misty memories of his
young manhood, he sat his days out in his room where his Civil War rifle
stood loaded in a corner, where his blue uniform of the Union Army lay
neatly folded.

Aunt Addie took her defeat hard, holding me in a cold and silent
disdain. I was conscious that she had descended to my own emotional
level in her effort to rule me, and my respect for her sank. Until she
married, years later, we rarely spoke to each other, though we ate at
the same table and slept under the same roof, though I was but a skinny,
half-frightened boy and she was the secretary of the church and the
church's day-school teacher. God blessed our home with the love that
binds....

I continued at the church school, despite Aunt Addie's never calling
upon me to recite or go to the blackboard. Consequently I stopped
studying. I spent my time playing with the boys and found that the only
games they knew were brutal ones. Baseball, marbles, boxing, running
were tabooed recreations, the Devil's work; instead they played a
wildcat game called popping-the-whip, a seemingly innocent diversion
whose excitement came only in spurts, but spurts that could hurl one to
the edge of death itself. Whenever we were discovered standing idle on
the school grounds, Aunt Addie would suggest that we pop-the-whip. It
would have been safer for our bodies and saner for our souls had she
urged us to shoot craps.

One day at noon Aunt Addie ordered us to pop-the-whip. I had never
played the game before and I fell in with good faith. We formed a long
line, each boy taking hold of another boy's hand until we were stretched
out like a long string of human beads. Although I did not know it, I was
on the tip end of the human whip. The leading boy, the handle of the
whip, started off at a trot, weaving to the left and to the right,
increasing speed until the whip of flesh was curving at breakneck
gallop. I clutched the hand of the boy next to me with all the strength
I had, sensing that if I did not hold on I would be tossed off. The whip
grew taut as human flesh and bone could bear and I felt that my arm was
being torn from its socket. Suddenly my breath left me. I was swung in a
small, sharp arc. The whip was now being popped and I could hold on no
more; the momentum of the whip flung me off my feet into the air, like a
bit of leather being flicked off a horsewhip, and I hurtled headlong
through space and landed in a ditch. I rolled over, stunned, head
bruised and bleeding. Aunt Addie was laughing, the first and only time
I ever saw her laugh on God's holy ground.

In the home Granny maintained a hard religious regime. There were
prayers at sunup and sundown, at the breakfast table and dinner table,
followed by a Bible verse from each member of the family. And it was
presumed that I prayed before I got into bed at night. I shirked as many
of the weekday church services as possible, giving as my excuse that I
had to study; of course, nobody believed me, but my lies were accepted
because nobody wanted to risk a row. The daily prayers were a torment
and my knees became sore from kneeling so long and often. Finally I
devised a method of kneeling that was not really kneeling; I learned,
through arduous repetition, how to balance myself on the toes of my
shoes and rest my head against a wall in some convenient corner. Nobody,
except God, was any the wiser, and I did not think that He cared.

Granny made it imperative, however, that I attend certain all-night
ritualistic prayer meetings. She was the oldest member of her church and
it would have been unseemly if the only grandchild in her home could not
be brought to these important services; she felt that if I were
completely remiss in religious conformity it would cast doubt upon the
stanchness of her faith, her capacity to convince and persuade, or
merely upon her ability to apply the rod to my backside.

Granny would prepare a lunch for the all-night praying session, and the
three of us--Granny, Aunt Addie, and I--would be off, leaving my mother
and Grandpa at home. During the passionate prayers and the chanted hymns
I would sit squirming on a bench, longing to grow up so I could run
away, listening indifferently to the theme of cosmic annihilation,
loving the hymns for their sensual caress, but at last casting furtive
glances at Granny and wondering when it would be safe for me to stretch
out on the bench and go to sleep. At ten or eleven I would munch a
sandwich and Granny would nod her permission for me to take a nap. I
would awaken at intervals to hear snatches of hymns or prayers that
would lull me to sleep again. Finally Granny would shake me and I would
open my eyes and see the sun streaming through stained-glass windows.

Many of the religious symbols appealed to my sensibilities and I
responded to the dramatic vision of life held by the church, feeling
that to live day by day with death as one's sole thought was to be so
compassionately sensitive toward all life as to view all men as slowly
dying, and the trembling sense of fate that welled up, sweet and
melancholy, from the hymns blended with the sense of fate that I had
already caught from life. But full emotional and intellectual belief
never came. Perhaps if I had caught my first sense of life from the
church I would have been moved to complete acceptance, but the hymns and
sermons of God came into my heart only long after my personality had
been shaped and formed by uncharted conditions of life. I felt that I
had in me a sense of living as deep as that which the church was trying
to give me, and in the end I remained basically unaffected.

My body grew, even on mush and lard gravy, a miracle which the church
certainly should have claimed credit for. I survived my twelfth year on
a diet that would have stunted an average-sized dog, and my glands began
to diffuse through my blood, like sap rising upward in trees in spring,
those strange chemicals that made me look curiously at girls and women.
The elder's wife sang in the choir and I fell in love with her as only a
twelve-year-old can worship a distant and unattainable woman. During the
services I would stare at her, wondering what it was like to be married
to her, pondering over how passionate she was. I felt no qualms about my
first lust for the flesh being born on holy ground; the contrast between
budding carnal desires and the aching loneliness of the hymns never
evoked any sense of guilt in me.

It was possible that the sweetly sonorous hymns stimulated me sexually,
and it might have been that my fleshy fantasies, in turn, having as
their foundation my already inflated sensibility, made me love the
masochistic prayers. It was highly likely that the serpent of sin that
nosed about the chambers of my heart was lashed to hunger by hymns as
well as dreams, each reciprocally feeding the other. The church's
spiritual life must have been polluted by my base yearnings, by the
leaping hunger of my blood for the flesh, because I would gaze at the
elder's wife for hours, attempting to draw her eyes to mine, trying to
hypnotize her, seeking to communicate with her with my thoughts. If my
desires had been converted into a concrete religious symbol, the symbol
would have looked something like this: a black imp with two horns; a
long, curving, forked tail; cloven hoofs, a scaly, naked body; wet,
sticky fingers; moist, sensual lips; and lascivious eyes feasting upon
the face of the elder's wife....

A religious revival was announced and Granny felt that it was her last
chance to bring me to God before I entered the precincts of sin at the
public school, for I had already given loud and final notice that I
would no longer attend the church school. There was a discernible
lessening in Aunt Addie's hostility; perhaps she had come to the
conclusion that my lost soul was more valuable than petty pride. Even my
mother's attitude was: "Richard, you ought to know God through _some_
church."

The entire family became kind and forgiving, but I knew the motives that
prompted their change and it drove me an even greater emotional distance
from them. Some of my classmates--who had, on the advice of their
parents, avoided me--now came to visit and I could tell in a split
second that they had been instructed in what to say. One boy, who lived
across the street, called on me one afternoon and his self-consciousness
betrayed him; he spoke so navely and clumsily that I could see the bare
bones of his holy plot and hear the creaking of the machinery of
Granny's maneuvering.

"Richard, do you know we are all worried about you?" he asked.

"Worried about me? Who's worried about me?" I asked in feigned surprise.

"All of us," he said, his eyes avoiding mine.

"Why?" I asked.

"You're not saved," he said sadly.

"I'm all right," I said, laughing.

"Don't laugh, Richard. It's serious," he said.

"But I tell you that I'm all right."

"Say, Richard, I'd like to be a good friend of yours."

"I thought we were friends already," I said.

"I mean true brothers in Christ," he said.

"We know each other," I said in a soft voice tinged with irony.

"But not in Christ," he said.

"Friendship is friendship with me."

"But don't you want to save your soul?"

"I simply can't feel religion," I told him in lieu of telling him that I
did not think I had the kind of soul he thought I had.

"Have you really tried to feel God?" he asked.

"No. But I know I can't feel anything like that."

"You simply can't let the question rest there, Richard."

"Why should I let it rest?"

"Don't mock God," he said.

"I'll never feel God, I tell you. It's no use."

"Would you let the fate of your soul hang upon pride and vanity?"

"I don't think I have any pride in matters like this."

"Richard, think of Christ's dying for you, shedding His blood, His
precious blood on the cross."

"Other people have shed blood," I ventured.

"But it's not the same. You don't understand."

"I don't think I ever will."

"Oh, Richard, brother, you are lost in the darkness of the world. You
must let the church help you."

"I tell you, I'm all right."

"Come into the house and let me pray for you."

"I don't want to hurt your feelings...."

"You can't. I'm talking for God."

"I don't want to hurt God's feelings either," I said, the words slipping
irreverently from my lips before I was aware of their full meaning.

He was shocked. He wiped tears from his eyes. I was sorry.

"Don't say that. God may never forgive you," he whispered.

It would have been impossible for me to have told him how I felt about
religion. I had not settled in my mind whether I believed in God or not;
His existence or nonexistence never worried me. I reasoned that if there
did exist an all-wise, all-powerful God who knew the beginning and the
end, who meted out justice to all, who controlled the destiny of man,
this God would surely know that I doubted His existence and He would
laugh at my foolish denial of Him. And if there was no God at all, then
why all the commotion? I could not imagine God pausing in His guidance
of unimaginably vast worlds to bother with me.

Embedded in me was a notion of the suffering in life, but none of it
seemed like the consequences of original sin to me; I simply could not
feel weak and lost in a cosmic manner. Before I had been made to go to
church, I had given God's existence a sort of tacit assent, but after
having seen His creatures serve Him at first hand, I had had my doubts.
My faith, such as it was, was welded to the common realities of life,
anchored in the sensations of my body and in what my mind could grasp,
and nothing could ever shake this faith, and surely not my fear of an
invisible power.

"I'm not afraid of things like that," I told the boy.

"Aren't you afraid of God?" he asked.

"No. Why should I be? I've done nothing to Him."

"He's a jealous God," he warned me.

"I hope that He's a kind God," I told him.

"If _you_ are kind to Him, He is a kind God," the boy said. "But God
will not look at you if you don't look at Him."

During our talk I made a hypothetical statement that summed up my
attitude toward God and the suffering in the world, a statement that
stemmed from my knowledge of life as I had lived, seen, felt, and
suffered it in terms of dread, fear, hunger, terror, and loneliness.

"If laying down my life could stop the suffering in the world, I'd do
it. But I don't believe anything can stop it," I told him.

He heard me but he did not speak. I wanted to say more to him, but I
knew that it would have been useless. Though older than I, he had
neither known nor felt anything of life for himself; he had been
carefully reared by his mother and father and he had always been told
what to feel.

"Don't be angry," I told him.

Frightened and baffled, he left me. I felt sorry for him.

Immediately following the boy's visit, Granny began her phase of the
campaign. The boy had no doubt conveyed to her my words of blasphemy,
for she talked with me for hours, warning me that I would burn forever
in the lake of fire. As the day of the revival grew near, the pressure
upon me intensified. I would go into the dining room upon some petty
errand and find Granny kneeling, her head resting on a chair, uttering
my name in a tensely whispered prayer. God was suddenly everywhere in
the home, even in Aunt Addie's scowling and brooding face. It began to
weigh upon me. I longed for the time when I could leave. They begged me
so continuously to come to God that it was impossible for me to ignore
them without wounding them. Desperately I tried to think of some way to
say no without making them hate me. I was determined to leave home
before I would surrender.

Then I blundered and wounded Granny's soul. It was not my intention to
hurt or humiliate her; the irony of it was that the plan I conceived had
as its purpose the salving of Granny's frustrated feelings toward me.
Instead, it brought her the greatest shame and humiliation of her entire
religious life.

One evening during a sermon I heard the elder--I took my eyes off his
wife long enough to listen, even though she slumbered in my senses all
the while--describe how Jacob had seen an angel. Immediately I felt that
I had found a way to tell Granny that I needed proof before I could
believe, that I could not commit myself to something I could not feel or
see. I would tell her that if I were to see an angel I would accept
that as infallible evidence that there was a God and would serve Him
unhesitatingly; she would surely understand an attitude of that sort.
What gave me courage to voice this argument was the conviction that I
would never see an angel; if I had ever seen one, I had enough common
sense to have gone to a doctor at once. With my bright idea bubbling in
my mind, wishing to allay Granny's fears for my soul, wanting to make
her know that my heart was not all black and wrong, that I was actually
giving serious thought to her passionate pleadings, I leaned to her and
whispered:

"You see, granny, if I ever saw an angel like Jacob did, then I'd
believe."

Granny stiffened and stared at me in amazement; then a glad smile lit up
her old wrinkled white face and she nodded and gently patted my hand.
That ought to hold her for a while, I thought. During the sermon Granny
looked at me several times and smiled. Yes, she knows now that I'm not
dismissing her pleas from my mind.... Feeling that my plan was working,
I resumed my worship of the elder's wife with a cleansed conscience,
wondering what it would be like to kiss her, longing to feel some of the
sensuous emotions of which my reading had made me conscious. The service
ended and Granny rushed to the front of the church and began talking
excitedly to the elder; I saw the elder looking at me in surprise. Oh,
goddamn, she's telling him! I thought with anger. But I had not guessed
one-thousandth of it.

The elder hurried toward me. Automatically I rose. He extended his hand
and I shook it.

"Your grandmother told me," he said in awed tones.

I was speechless with anger.

"I didn't want her to tell you that," I said.

"She says that you have seen an angel." The words literally poured out
of his mouth.

I was so overwhelmed that I gritted my teeth. Finally I could speak and
I grabbed his arm.

"No.... N-nooo, sir! No, sir!" I stammered. "I didn't say that. She
misunderstood me."

The last thing on earth I wanted was a mess like this. The elder blinked
his eyes in bewilderment.

"What did you tell her?" he asked.

"I told her that if I ever saw an angel, then I would believe," I said,
feeling foolish, ashamed, hating and pitying my believing granny. The
elder's face became bleak and stricken. He was stunned with
disappointment.

"You... you didn't see an angel?" he asked.

"No, sir!" I said emphatically, shaking my head vigorously so that there
could be no possible further misunderstanding.

"I see," he breathed in a sigh.

His eyes looked longingly into a corner of the church.

"With God, you know, anything is possible," he hinted hopefully.

"But I didn't see _anything_," I said. "I'm sorry about this."

"If you pray, then God will come to you," he said.

The church grew suddenly hot. I wanted to bolt out of it and never see
it again. But the elder took hold of my arm and would not let me move.

"Elder, this is all a mistake. I didn't want anything like this to
happen," I said.

"Listen, I'm older than you are, Richard," he said. "I think that you
have in your heart the gift of God." I must have looked dubious, for he
said: "Really, I do."

"Elder, please don't say anything to anybody about this," I begged.

Again his face lit with vague hope.

"Perhaps you don't want to tell me because you are bashful?" he
suggested. "Look, this is serious. If you saw an angel, then tell me."

I could not deny it verbally any more; I could only shake my head at
him. In the face of his hope, words seemed useless.

"Promise me you'll pray. If you pray, then God will answer," he said.

I turned my head away, ashamed for him, feeling that I had unwittingly
committed an obscene act in rousing his hopes so wildly high, feeling
sorry for his having such hopes. I wanted to get out of his presence. He
finally let me go, whispering:

"I want to talk to you sometime."

The church members were staring at me. My fists doubled. Granny's wide
and innocent smile was shining on me and I was filled with dismay. That
she could make such a mistake meant that she lived in a daily atmosphere
that urged her to expect something like this to happen. She had told the
other members and everybody knew it, including the elder's wife! There
they stood, the church members, with joyous astonishment written on
their faces, whispering among themselves. Perhaps at that moment I could
have mounted the pulpit and led them all; perhaps that was to be my
greatest moment of triumph!

Granny rushed to me and hugged me violently, weeping tears of joy. Then
I babbled, speaking with emotional reproof, censuring her for having
misunderstood me; I must have spoken more loudly and harshly than was
called for--the others had now gathered about me and Granny--for Granny
drew away from me abruptly and went to a far corner of the church and
stared at me with a cold, set face. I was crushed. I went to her and
tried to tell her how it had happened.

"You shouldn't've spoken to me," she said in a breaking voice that
revealed the depths of her disillusionment.

On our way home she would not utter a single word. I walked anxiously
beside her, looking at her tired old white face, the wrinkles that lined
her neck, the deep, waiting black eyes, and the frail body, and I knew
more than she thought I knew about the meaning of religion, the hunger
of the human heart for that which is not and can never be, the thirst of
the human spirit to conquer and transcend the implacable limitations of
human life.

Later, I convinced her that I had not wanted to hurt her and she
immediately seized upon my concern for her feelings as an opportunity to
have one more try at bringing me to God. She wept and pleaded with me to
pray, really to pray, to pray hard, to pray until tears came....

"Granny, don't make me promise," I begged.

"But you must, for the sake of your soul," she said.

I promised; after all, I felt that I owed her something for
inadvertently making her ridiculous before the members of her church.

Daily I went into my room upstairs, locked the door, knelt, and tried to
pray, but everything I could think of saying seemed silly. Once it all
seemed so absurd that I laughed out loud while on my knees. It was no
use. I could not pray. I could never pray. But I kept my failure a
secret. I was convinced that if I ever succeeded in praying, my words
would bound noiselessly against the ceiling and rain back down upon me
like feathers.

My attempts at praying became a nuisance, spoiling my days; and I
regretted the promise I had given Granny. But I stumbled on a way to
pass the time in my room, a way that made the hours fly with the speed
of the wind. I took the Bible, pencil, paper, and a rhyming dictionary
and tried to write verses for hymns. I justified this by telling myself
that, if I wrote a really good hymn, Granny might forgive me. But I
failed even in that; the Holy Ghost was simply nowhere near me....

One day while killing my hour of prayer, I remembered a series of
volumes of Indian history I had read the year before. Yes, I knew what I
would do; I would write a story about the Indians.... But what about
them? Well, an Indian girl.... I wrote of an Indian maiden, beautiful
and reserved, who sat alone upon the bank of a still stream, surrounded
by eternal twilight and ancient trees, waiting.... The girl was keeping
some vow which I could not describe and, not knowing how to develop the
story, I resolved that the girl had to die. She rose slowly and walked
toward the dark stream, her face stately and cold; she entered the water
and walked on until the water reached her shoulders, her chin; then it
covered her. Not a murmur or a gasp came from her, even in dying.

"And at last the darkness of the night descended and softly kissed the
surface of the watery grave and the only sound was the lonely rustle of
the ancient trees," I wrote as I penned the final line.

I was excited; I read it over and saw that there was a yawning void in
it. There was no plot, no action, nothing save atmosphere and longing
and death. But I had never in my life done anything like it; I had made
something, no matter how bad it was; and it was mine.... Now, to whom
could I show it? Not my relatives; they would think I had gone crazy. I
decided to read it to a young woman who lived next door. I interrupted
her as she was washing dishes and, swearing her to secrecy, I read the
composition aloud. When I finished she smiled at me oddly, her eyes
baffled and astonished.

"What's that for?" she asked.

"Nothing," I said.

"But why did you write it?"

"I just wanted to."

"Where did you get the idea?"

I wagged my head, pulled down the corners of my mouth, stuffed my
manuscript into my pocket and looked at her in a cocky manner that said:
Oh, it's nothing at all. I write stuff like this all the time. It's
easy, if you know how. But I merely said in an humble, quiet voice:

"Oh, I don't know. I just thought it up."

"What're you going to do with it?"

"Nothing."

God only knows what she thought. My environment contained nothing more
alien than writing or the desire to express one's self in writing. But I
never forgot the look of astonishment and bewilderment on the young
woman's face when I had finished reading and glanced at her. Her
inability to grasp what I had done or was trying to do somehow gratified
me. Afterwards whenever I thought of her reaction I smiled happily for
some unaccountable reason.




CHAPTER V


No longer set apart for being sinful, I felt that I could breathe again,
live again, that I had been released from a prison. The cosmic images of
dread were now gone and the external world became a reality, quivering
daily before me. Instead of brooding and trying foolishly to pray, I
could run and roam, mingle with boys and girls, feel at home with
people, share a little of life in common with others, satisfy my hunger
to be and live.

Granny and Aunt Addie changed toward me, giving me up for lost; they
told me that they were dead to the world, and those of their blood who
lived in that world were therefore dead to them. From urgent solicitude
they dropped to coldness and hostility. Only my mother, who had in the
meantime recovered somewhat, maintained her interest in me, urging me to
study hard and make up for squandered time.

Freedom brought problems; I needed textbooks and had to wait for months
to obtain them. Granny said that she would not buy worldly books for me.
My clothes were a despair. So hostile did Granny and Aunt Addie become
that they ordered me to wash and iron my own clothes. Eating was still
skimpy, but I had now adjusted myself to the starch, lard, and greens
diet. I went to school, feeling that my life depended not so much upon
learning as upon getting into another world of people.

Until I entered Jim Hill public school, I had had but one year of
unbroken study; with the exception of one year at the church school,
each time I had begun a school term something happened to disrupt it.
Already my personality was lopsided; my knowledge of feeling was far
greater than my knowledge of fact. Though I was not aware of it, the
next four years were to be the only opportunity for formal study in my
life.

The first school day presented the usual problem and I was emotionally
prepared to meet it. Upon what terms would I be allowed to remain upon
the school grounds? With pencil and tablet, I walked nonchalantly into
the schoolyard, wearing a cheap, brand-new straw hat. I mingled with the
boys, hoping to pass unnoticed, but knowing that sooner or later I would
be spotted for a newcomer. And trouble came quickly. A black boy bounded
past me, thumping my straw hat to the ground, and yelling:

"Straw katy!"

I picked up my hat and another boy ran past, slapping my hat even
harder.

"Straw katy!"

Again I picked up my hat and waited. The cry spread. Boys gathered
around, pointing, chanting:

"Straw katy! Straw katy!"

I did not feel that I had been really challenged so far; no particular
boy had stood his ground and taunted me. I was hoping that the teasing
would cease, and tomorrow I would leave my straw hat at home. But the
boy who had begun the game came close.

"Mama bought me a straw hat," he sneered.

"Watch what you're saying," I warned him.

"Oh, look! He talks!" the boy said.

The crowd howled with laughter, waiting, hoping.

"Where you from?" the boy asked me.

"None of your business," I said.

"Now, look, don't you go and get sassy, or I'll cut you down," he said.

"I'll say what I please," I said.

The boy picked up a tiny rock and put in on his shoulder and walked
close again.

"Knock it off," he invited me.

I hesitated for a moment, then acted; I brushed the rock from his
shoulder and ducked and grabbed him about the legs and dumped him to the
ground. A volcano of screams erupted from the crowd. I jumped upon the
fallen boy and started pounding him. Then I was jerked up. Another boy
had begun to fight me. My straw hat had been crushed and forgotten.

"Don't you hit my brother!" the new boy yelled.

"Two fighting one ain't fair!" I yelled.

Both of them now closed in on me. A blow landed on the back of my head.
I turned and saw a brick rolling away and I felt blood oozing down my
back. I looked around and saw several brickbats scattered about. I
scooped up a handful. The two boys backed away. I took aim as they
circled me; I made a motion as if to throw and one of the boys turned
and ran. I let go with the brick and caught him in the middle of his
back. He screamed. I chased the other halfway around the schoolyard. The
boys howled their delight; they crowded around me, telling me that I had
fought with two bullies. Then suddenly the crowd quieted and parted. I
saw a woman teacher bearing down upon me. I dabbed at the blood on my
neck.

"Was it you who threw that brick?" she asked.

"Two boys were fighting me," I told her.

"Come," she said, taking my hand.

I entered school escorted by the teacher, under arrest. I was taken to a
room and confronted with the two brothers.

"Are these the boys?" she asked.

"Both of 'em fought me," I said. "I had to fight back."

"He hit me first!" one brother yelled.

"You're lying!" I yelled back.

"Don't you use that language in here," the teacher said.

"But they're not telling the truth," I said. "I'm new here and they tore
up my hat."

"He hit me first," the boy said again.

I reached around the teacher, who stood between us, and smacked the boy.
He screamed and started at me. The teacher grabbed us.

"The very idea of you!" the teacher shouted at me. "You are trying to
fight right in school! What's the matter with you?"

"He's not telling the truth," I maintained.

She ordered me to sit down; I did, but kept my eyes on the two brothers.
The teacher dragged them out of the room and I sat until she returned.

"I'm in a good mind not to let you off this time," she said.

"It wasn't my fault," I said.

"I know. But you hit one of those boys right in here," she said.

"I'm sorry."

She asked me my name and sent me to a room. For a reason I could not
understand, I was assigned to the fifth grade. Would they detect that I
did not belong there? I sat and waited. When I was asked my age I called
it out and was accepted.

I studied night and day and within two weeks I was promoted to the sixth
grade. Overjoyed, I ran home and babbled the news. The family had not
thought it possible. How could a bad, bad boy do that? I told the family
emphatically that I was going to study medicine, engage in research,
make discoveries. Flushed with success, I had not given a second's
thought to how I would pay my way through a medical school. But since I
had leaped a grade in two weeks, anything seemed possible, simple, easy.

I was now with boys and girls who were studying, fighting, talking; it
revitalized my being, whipped my senses to a high, keen pitch of
receptivity. I knew that my life was revolving about a world that I had
to encounter and fight when I grew up. Suddenly the future loomed
tangibly for me, as tangible as a future can loom for a black boy in
Mississippi.

Most of my schoolmates worked mornings, evenings, and Saturdays; they
earned enough to buy their clothes and books, and they had money in
their pockets at school. To see a boy go into a grocery store at noon
recess and let his eyes roam over filled shelves and pick out what he
wanted--even a dime's worth--was a hairbreadth short of a miracle to me.
But when I broached the idea of my working to Granny, she would have
none of it; she laid down the injunction that I could not work on
Saturdays while I slept under her roof. I argued that Saturdays were the
only days on which I could earn any worth-while sum, and Granny looked
me straight in the eyes and quoted Scripture:

_But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou
shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy
manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of
thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy
manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou...._

And that was the final word. Though we lived just on the borders of
actual starvation, I could not bribe Granny with a promise of half or
two-thirds of my salary; her answer was no and never. Her refusal
wrought me up to a high pitch of nervousness and I cursed myself for
being made to live a different and crazy life. I told Granny that she
was not responsible for my soul, and she replied that I was a minor,
that my soul's fate rested in her hands, that I had no word to say in
the matter.

To protect myself against pointed questions about my home and my life,
to avoid being invited out when I knew that I could not accept, I was
reserved with the boys and girls at school, seeking their company but
never letting them guess how much I was being kept out of the world in
which they lived, valuing their casual friendships but hiding it,
acutely self-conscious but covering it with a quick smile and a ready
phrase. Each day at noon I would follow the boys and girls into the
corner store and stand against a wall and watch them buy sandwiches,
and when they would ask me: "Why don't you eat a lunch?" I would answer
with a shrug of my shoulders: "Aw, I'm not hungry at noon, ever." And I
would swallow my saliva as I saw them split open loaves of bread and
line them with juicy sardines. Again and again I vowed that someday I
would end this hunger of mine, this apartness, this eternal difference;
and I did not suspect that I would never get intimately into their
lives, that I was doomed to live with them but not of them, that I had
my own strange and separate road, a road which in later years would make
them wonder how I had come to tread it.

I now saw a world leap to life before my eyes because I could explore
it, and that meant not going home when school was out, but wandering,
watching, asking, talking. Had I gone home to eat my plate of greens,
Granny would not have allowed me out again, so the penalty I paid for
roaming was to forfeit my food for twelve hours. I would eat mush at
eight in the morning and greens at seven or later at night. To starve in
order to learn about my environment was irrational, but so were my
hungers. With my books slung over my shoulder, I would tramp with a gang
into the woods, to rivers, to creeks, into the business district, to the
doors of poolrooms, into the movies when we could slip in without
paying, to neighborhood ball games, to brick kilns, to lumberyards, to
cottonseed mills to watch men work. There were hours when hunger would
make me weak, would make me sway while walking, would make my heart give
a sudden wild spurt of beating that would shake my body and make me
breathless; but the happiness of being free would lift me beyond hunger,
would enable me to discipline the sensations of my body to the extent
that I could temporarily forget.

In my class was a tall, black, rebellious boy who was bright in his
studies and yet utterly fearless in his assertion of himself; he could
break the morale of the class at any moment with his clowning and the
teacher never found an adequate way of handling him. It was he who
detected my plaguing hunger and suggested to me a way to earn some
money.

"You can't sit in school all day and not eat," he said.

"What am I going to eat?" I asked.

"Why don't you do like me?"

"What do you do?"

"I sell papers."

"I tried to get a paper route, but they're all full," I said. "I'd like
to sell papers because I could read them. I can't find things to read."

"You too?" he asked, laughing.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"That's why I sell papers. I like to read 'em and that's the only way I
can get hold of 'em," he explained.

"Do your parents object to your reading?" I asked.

"Yeah. My old man's a damn crackpot," he said.

"What papers are you selling?"

"It's a paper published in Chicago. It comes out each week and it has a
magazine supplement," he informed me.

"What kind of a paper is it?"

"Well, I never read the newspaper. It isn't much. But, boy, the magazine
supplement! What stories.... I'm reading the serial of Zane Grey's
_Riders of the Purple Sage_."

I stared at him in complete disbelief.

"_Riders of the Purple Sage_!" I exclaimed.

"Yes."

"Do you think I can sell those papers?"

"Sure. I make over fifty cents a week and have stuff to read," he
explained.

I followed him home and he gave me a copy of the newspaper and the
magazine supplement. The newspaper was thin, ill-edited, and designed to
circulate among rural, white Protestant readers.

"Hurry up and start selling 'em," he urged me. "I'd like to talk to you
about the stories."

I promised him that I would order a batch of them that night. I walked
home through the deepening twilight, reading, lifting my eyes now and
then from the print in order not to collide with strangers. I was
absorbed in the tale of a renowned scientist who had rigged up a mystery
room made of metal in the basement of his palatial home. Prompted by
some obscure motive, he would lure his victims into this room and then
throw an electric switch. Slowly, with heart-racking agony, the air
would be sucked from the metal room and his victims would die, turning
red, blue, then black. This was what I wanted, tales like this. I had
not read enough to have developed any taste in reading. Anything that
interested me satisfied me.

Now, at last, I could have my reading in the home, could have it there
with the approval of Granny. She had already given me permission to sell
papers. Oh, boy, how lucky it was for me that Granny could not read! She
had always burned the books I had brought into the house, branding them
as worldly; but she would have to tolerate these papers if she was to
keep her promise to me. Aunt Addie's opinion did not count, and she
never paid any attention to me anyway. In her eyes, I was dead. I told
Granny that I planned to make some money by selling papers and she
agreed, thinking that at last I was becoming a serious, right-thinking
boy. That night I ordered the papers and waited anxiously.

The papers arrived and I scoured the Negro area, slowly building up a
string of customers who bought the papers more because they knew me than
from any desire to read. When I returned home at night, I would go to my
room and lock the door and revel in outlandish exploits of outlandish
men in faraway, outlandish cities. For the first time in my life I
became aware of the life of the modern world, of vast cities, and I was
claimed by it; I loved it. Though they were merely stories, I accepted
them as true because I wanted to believe them, because I hungered for a
different life, for something new. The cheap pulp tales enlarged my
knowledge of the world more than anything I had encountered so far. To
me, with my roundhouse, saloon-door, and river-levee background, they
were revolutionary, my gateway to the world.

I was happy and would have continued to sell the newspaper and its
magazine supplement indefinitely had it not been for the racial pride of
a friend of the family. He was a tall, quiet, sober, soft-spoken black
man, a carpenter by trade. One evening I called at his home with the
paper. He gave me a dime, then looked at me oddly.

"You know, son," he said, "I sure like to see you make a little money
each week."

"Thank you, sir," I said.

"But tell me, who told you to sell these papers?" he asked.

"Nobody."

"Where do you get them from?"

"Chicago."

"Do you ever read 'em?"

"Sure. I read the stories in the magazine supplement," I explained. "But
I never read the newspaper."

He was silent a moment.

"Did a white man ask you to sell these papers?" he asked.

"No, sir," I answered, puzzled now. "Why do you ask?"

"Do your folks know you are selling these papers?"

"Yes, sir. But what's wrong?"

"How did you know where to write for these papers?" he asked, ignoring
my questions.

"A friend of mine sells them. He gave me the address."

"Is this friend of yours a white man?"

"No, sir. He's colored. But why are you asking me all this?"

He did not answer. He was sitting on the steps of his front porch. He
rose slowly.

"Wait right here a minute, son," he said. "I want to show you
something."

Now what was wrong? The papers were all right; at least they seemed so
to me. I waited, annoyed, eager to be gone on my rounds so that I could
have time to get home and lie in bed and read the next installment of a
thrilling horror story. The man returned with a carefully folded copy of
the newspaper. He handed it to me.

"Did you see this?" he asked, pointing to a lurid cartoon.

"No, sir," I said. "I don't read the newspaper; I only read the
magazine."

"Well, just look at that. Take your time and tell me what you think," he
said.

It was the previous week's issue and I looked at the picture of a huge
black man with a greasy, sweaty face, thick lips, flat nose, golden
teeth, sitting at a polished, wide-topped desk in a swivel chair. The
man had on a pair of gleaming yellow shoes and his feet were propped
upon the desk. His thick lips nursed a big, black cigar that held white
ashes an inch long. In the man's red-dotted tie was a dazzling horseshoe
stickpin, glaring conspicuously. The man wore red suspenders and his
shirt was striped silk and there were huge diamond rings on his fat
black fingers. A chain of gold girded his belly and from the fob of his
watch a rabbit's foot dangled. On the floor at the side of the desk was
a spittoon overflowing with mucus. Across the wall of the room in which
the man sat was a bold sign, reading:

    THE WHITE HOUSE

Under the sign was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the features distorted
to make the face look like that of a gangster. My eyes went to the top
of the cartoon and I read:

    The only dream of a nigger is to be president and to sleep
    with white women! Americans, do we want this in our fair land?
    Organize and save white womanhood!

I stared, trying to grasp the point of the picture and the captions,
wondering why it all seemed so strange and yet familiar.

"Do you know what this means?" the man asked me.

"Gee, I don't know," I confessed.

"Did you ever hear of the Ku Klux Klan?" he asked me softly.

"Sure. Why?"

"Do you know what the Ku Kluxers do to colored people?"

"They kill us. They keep us from voting and getting good jobs," I said.

"Well, the paper you're selling preaches the Ku Klux Klan doctrines," he
said.

"Oh, no!" I exclaimed.

"Son, you're holding it in your hands," he said.

"I read the magazine, but I never read the paper," I said vaguely,
thoroughly rattled.

"Listen, son," he said. "Listen. You're a black boy and you're trying to
make a few pennies. All right. I don't want to stop you from selling
these papers, if you want to sell 'em. But I've read these papers now
for two months and I know what they're trying to do. If you sell 'em,
you're just helping white people to kill you."

"But these papers come from Chicago," I protested navely, feeling
unsure of the entire world now, feeling that racial propaganda surely
could not be published in Chicago, the city to which Negroes were
fleeing by the thousands.

"I don't care where the paper comes from," he said. "Just you listen to
this."

He read aloud a long article in which lynching was passionately
advocated as a solution for the problem of the Negro. Even though I
heard him reading it, I could not believe it.

"Let me see that," I said.

I took the paper from him and sat on the edge of the steps; in the
paling light I turned the pages and read articles so brutally anti-Negro
that goose pimples broke out over my skin.

"Do you like that?" he asked me.

"No, sir," I breathed.

"Do you see what you are doing?'

"I didn't know," I mumbled.

"Are you going to sell those papers now?"

"No, sir. Never again."

"They tell me that you are smart in school, and when I read those papers
you were selling I didn't know what to make of it. Then I said to
myself that that boy doesn't know what he's selling. Now, a lot of folks
wanted to speak to you about these papers, but they were scared. They
thought you were mixed up with some white Ku Kluxers and if they told
you to stop you would put the Kluxers on 'em. But I said, shucks, that
boy just don't know what he's doing."

I handed him his dime, but he would not take it.

"Keep the dime, son," he said. "But for God's sake, find something else
to sell."

I did not try to sell any more of the papers that night; I walked home
with them under my arm, feeling that some Negro would leap from a bush
or fence and waylay me. How on earth could I have made so grave a
mistake? The way I had erred was simple but utterly unbelievable. I had
been so enthralled by reading the serial stories in the magazine
supplement that I had not read a single issue of the newspaper. I
decided to keep my misadventure secret, that I would tell no one that I
had been unwittingly an agent for pro-Ku Klux Klan literature. I tossed
the papers into a ditch and when I reached home I told Granny, in a
quiet, offhand way, that the company did not want to send me any more
papers because they already had too many agents in Jackson, a lie which
I thought was an understatement of the actual truth. Granny did not care
one way or the other, since I had been making so little money in selling
them that I had not been able to help much with household expenses.

The father of the boy who had urged me to sell the papers also found out
their propagandistic nature and forbade his son to sell them. But the
boy and I never discussed the subject; we were too ashamed of ourselves.
One day he asked me guardedly:

"Say, are you still selling those papers?"

"Oh, no. I don't have time," I said, my eyes avoiding his.

"I'm not either," he said, pulling down the corners of his mouth. "I'm
too busy."

       *       *       *       *       *

I burned at my studies. At the beginning of the school term I read my
civics and English and geography volumes through and only referred to
them when in class. I solved all my mathematical problems far in
advance; then, during school hours, when I was not called on to recite,
I read tattered, secondhand copies of _Flynn's Detective Weekly_ or the
_Argosy All-Story Magazine_, or dreamed, weaving fantasies about cities
I had never seen and about people I had never met.

School ended. I could not get a job that would let me rest on Granny's
holy Sabbath. The long hot idle summer days palled on me. I sat at home
brooding, nursing bodily and spiritual hunger. In the afternoons, after
the sun had spent its force, I played ball with the neighborhood boys.
At night I sat on the front steps and stared blankly at the passing
people, wagons, cars....

On one such lazy, hot summer night Granny, my mother, and Aunt Addie
were sitting on the front porch, arguing some obscure point of religious
doctrine. I sat huddled on the steps, my cheeks resting sullenly in my
palms, half listening to what the grownups were saying and half lost in
a daydream. Suddenly the dispute evoked an idea in me and, forgetting
that I had no right to speak without permission, I piped up and had my
say. I must have sounded reekingly blasphemous, for Granny said, "Shut
up, you!" and leaned forward promptly to chastise me with one of her
casual, back-handed slaps on my mouth. But I had by now become adept at
dodging blows and I nimbly ducked my head. She missed me; the force of
her blow was so strong that she fell down the steps, headlong, her aged
body wedged in a narrow space between the fence and the bottom step. I
leaped up. Aunt Addie and my mother screamed and rushed down the steps
and tried to pull Granny's body out. But they could not move her.
Grandpa was called and he had to tear the fence down to rescue Granny.
She was barely conscious. They put her to bed and summoned a doctor.

I was frightened. I ran to my room and locked the door, fearing that
Grandpa would rend me to pieces. Had I done right or had I done wrong?
If I had held still and let Granny slap me, she would not have fallen.
But was it not natural to dodge a blow? I waited, trembling. But no one
came to my room. The house was quiet. Was Granny dead? Hours later I
unlocked the door and crept downstairs. Well, I told myself, if Granny
died, I would leave home. There was nothing else to do. Aunt Addie
confronted me in the hallway with burning, black eyes.

"You see what you've done to Granny," she said.

"I didn't touch her," I said. I had wanted to ask how Granny was, but my
fear made me forget that.

"You were trying to kill her," Aunt Addie said.

"I didn't touch Granny, and you know it!"

"You are evil. You bring nothing but trouble!"

"I was trying to dodge her. She was trying to hit me. I had done nothing
wrong...."

Her lips moved silently as she sought to formulate words to place me in
a position of guilt.

"Why do you butt in when grown people are talking?" she demanded,
finding her weapon at last.

"I just wanted to talk," I mumbled sullenly. "I sit in this house for
hours and I can't even talk."

"Hereafter, you keep your mouth shut until you're spoken to," she
advised me.

"But Granny oughtn't always be hitting at me like that," I said as
delicately as possible.

"Boy, don't you stand there and say what Granny _ought_ to do," she
blazed, finding her ground of accusation. "If you don't keep your mouth
shut, then _I'll_ hit you!" she continued.

"I'm only trying to explain why Granny fell," I said.

"Shut up, now! Or I'll wring your neck, you fool!"

"You're another fool!" I came back at her, angry now.

She trembled with fury.

"I'll fix you this night!" she said, rushing at me.

I dodged her and ran into the kitchen and grabbed the long bread knife.
She followed me and I confronted her. I was so hysterical that I was
crying.

"If you touch me, I'll cut you, so help me," I said in gasps. "I'm going
to leave here as soon as I can work and make a living. But as long's I'm
here, you better not touch me."

We stood looking into each other's eyes, our bodies trembling with hate.

"I'm going to get you for this," she vowed in a low, serious voice.
"I'll get you when you haven't got a knife."

"I'll always keep a knife for you," I told her.

"You've got to sleep at night," she whimpered with rage. "I'll get you
then."

"If you touch me when I'm sleeping, I'll kill you," I told her.

She walked out of the kitchen, kicking the door open before her as she
went. Aunt Addie had a habit of kicking doors; she always paused before
a partly opened door and kicked it open; if the door swung in, she flung
it back with her foot; or, if the door was shut, she opened it with her
hand for an inch or two, then opened it the rest of the way with her
foot; she acted as though she wanted to get a glimpse into the room
beyond before she entered it, perhaps to see if it contained anything
dreadful or unholy.

For a month after that I took a kitchen knife to bed with me each night,
hiding it under my pillow so that when Aunt Addie came I could protect
myself. But she never came. Perhaps she prayed.

Granny was abed for six weeks; she had wrenched her back when her slap
missed me.

There were more violent quarrels in our deeply religious home than in
the home of a gangster, a burglar, or a prostitute, a fact which I used
to hint gently to Granny and which did my cause no good. Granny bore the
standard for God, but she was always fighting. The peace that passes
understanding never dwelt with us. I, too, fought; but I fought because
I felt I had to keep from being crushed, to fend off continuous attack.
But Granny and Aunt Addie quarreled and fought not only with me, but
with each other over minor points of religious doctrine, or over some
imagined infraction of what they chose to call their moral code.
Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one
individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will
to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn.

       *       *       *       *       *

As summer waned I obtained a strange job. Our next-door neighbor, a
janitor, decided to change his profession and become an insurance agent.
He was handicapped by illiteracy and he offered me the job of
accompanying him on trips into the delta plantation area to write and
figure for him, at wages of five dollars a week. I made several trips
with Brother Mance, as he was called, to plantation shacks, sleeping on
shuck mattresses, eating salt pork and black-eyed peas for breakfast,
dinner, and supper; and drinking, for once, all the milk I wanted.

I had all but forgotten that I had been born on a plantation and I was
astonished at the ignorance of the children I met. I had been pitying
myself for not having books to read, and now I saw children who had
never read a book. Their chronic shyness made me seem bold and
city-wise; a black mother would try to lure her brood into the room to
shake hands with me and they would linger at the jamb of the door,
peering at me with one eye, giggling hysterically. At night, seated at a
crude table, with a kerosene lamp spluttering at my elbow, I would fill
out insurance applications, and a sharecropper family, fresh from
laboring in the fields, would stand and gape. Brother Mance would pace
the floor, extolling my abilities with pen and paper. Many of the nave
black families bought their insurance from us because they felt that
they were connecting themselves with something that would make their
children "write 'n speak lak dat pretty boy from Jackson."

The trips were hard. Riding trains, autos, or buggies, moving from
morning till night, we went from shack to shack, plantation to
plantation. Exhausted, I filled out applications. I saw a bare, bleak
pool of black life and I hated it; the people were alike, their homes
were alike, and their farms were alike. On Sundays Brother Mance would
go to the nearest country church and give his sales talk, preaching it
in the form of a sermon, clapping his hands as he did so, spitting on
the floor to mark off his paragraphs, and stomping his feet in the spit
to punctuate his sentences, all of which captivated the black
sharecroppers. After the performance the walleyed yokels would flock to
Brother Mance, and I would fill out applications until my fingers ached.

I returned home with a pocketful of money that melted into the
bottomless hunger of the household. My mother was proud; even Aunt
Addie's hostility melted temporarily. To Granny, I had accomplished a
miracle and some of my sinful qualities evaporated, for she felt that
success spelled the reward of righteousness and that failure was the
wages of sin. But God called Brother Mance to heaven that winter and,
since the insurance company would not accept a minor as an agent, my
status reverted to a worldly one; the holy household was still burdened
with a wayward boy to whom, in spite of all, sin somehow insisted upon
clinging.

School opened and I began the seventh grade. My old hunger was still
with me and I lived on what I did not eat. Perhaps the sunshine, the
fresh air, and the pot liquor from greens kept me going. Of an evening I
would sit in my room reading, and suddenly I would become aware of
smelling meat frying in a neighbor's kitchen and would wonder what it
was like to eat as much meat as one wanted. My mind would drift into a
fantasy and I would imagine myself a son in a family that had meat on
the table at each meal; then I would become disgusted with my futile
daydreams and would rise and shut the window to bar the torturing scent
of meat.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I came downstairs one morning and went into the dining room for my
bowl of mush and lard gravy I felt at once that something serious was
happening in the family. Grandpa, as usual, was not at the table; he
always had his meals in his room. Granny nodded me to my seat; I sat and
bowed my head. From under my brows I saw my mother's tight face. Aunt
Addie's eyes were closed, her forehead furrowed, her lips trembling.
Granny buried her face in her hands. I wanted to ask what had happened,
but I knew that I would not get an answer.

Granny prayed and invoked the blessings of God for each of us, asking
Him to guide us if it was His will, and then she told God that "my poor
old husband lies sick this beautiful morning" and asked God, if it was
His will, to heal him. That was how I learned of Grandpa's final
illness. On many occasions I learned of some event, a death, a birth, or
an impending visit, some happening in the neighborhood, at her church,
or at some relative's home, first through Granny's informative prayers
at the breakfast or dinner table.

Grandpa was a tall, black, lean man with a long face, snow-white teeth,
and a head of woolly white hair. In anger he bared his teeth--a habit,
Granny said, that he had formed while fighting in the trenches of the
Civil War--and hissed, while his fists would clench until the veins
swelled. In his rare laughs he bared his teeth in the same way, only now
his teeth did not flash long and his body was relaxed. He owned a sharp
pocketknife--which I had been forbidden to touch--and sat for long hours
in the sun, whittling, whistling quietly, or maybe, if he was feeling
well, humming some strange tune.

I had often tried to ask him about the Civil War, how he had fought,
what he had felt, had he seen Lincoln, but he would never respond.

"You, git 'way frum me, you young'un," was all that he would ever say.

From Granny I learned--over a course of years--that he had been wounded
in the Civil War and had never received his disability pension, a fact
which he hugged close to his heart with bitterness. I never heard him
speak of white people; I think he hated them too much to talk of them.
In the process of being discharged from the Union Army, he had gone to a
white officer to seek help in filling out his papers. In filling out the
papers, the white officer misspelled Grandpa's name, making him Richard
Vinson instead of Richard Wilson. It was possible that Grandpa's
southern accent and his illiteracy made him mispronounce his own name.
It was rumored that the white officer had been a Swede and had had a
poor knowledge of English. Another rumor had it that the white officer
had been a Southerner and had deliberately falsified Grandpa's papers.
Anyway, Grandpa did not discover that he had been discharged in the
name of Richard Vinson until years later; and when he applied to the War
Department for a pension, no trace could be found of his ever having
served in the Union Army under the name of Richard Wilson.

I asked endless questions about Grandpa's pension, but information was
always denied me on the grounds that I was too young to know what was
involved. For decades a long correspondence took place between Grandpa
and the War Department; in letter after letter Grandpa would recount
events and conversations (always dictating these long accounts to
others); he would name persons long dead, citing their ages and
descriptions, reconstructing battles in which he had fought, naming
towns, rivers, creeks, roads, cities, villages, citing the names and
numbers of regiments and companies with which he had fought, giving the
exact day and the exact hour of the day of certain occurrences, and send
it all to the War Department in Washington.

I used to get the mail early in the morning and whenever there was a
long, businesslike envelope in the stack, I would know that Grandpa had
got an answer from the War Department and I would run upstairs with it.
Grandpa would lift his head from the pillow, take the letter from me and
open it himself. He would stare at the black print for a long time, then
reluctantly, distrustfully hand the letter to me.

"Well?" he would say.

And I would read him the letter--reading slowly and pronouncing each
word with extreme care--telling him that his claims for a pension had
not been substantiated and that his application had been rejected.
Grandpa would not blink an eye, then he would curse softly under his
breath.

"It's them goddamn rebels," he would hiss.

As though doubting what I had read, he would dress up and take the
letter to at least a dozen of his friends in the neighborhood and ask
them to read it to him; finally he would know it from memory. At last he
would put the letter away carefully and begin his brooding again, trying
to recall out of his past some telling fact that might help him in
getting his pension. Like "K" of Kafka's novel, _The Castle_, he tried
desperately to persuade the authorities of his true identity right up to
the day of his death, and failed.

Often, when there was no food in the house, I would dream of the
Government's sending a letter that would read something like this:

     Dear Sir:

     Your claim for a pension has been verified. The matter of your name
     has been satisfactorily cleared up. In accordance with official
     regulations, we are hereby instructing the Secretary of the
     Treasury to compile and compute and send to you, as soon as it is
     convenient, the total amount of all moneys past due, together with
     interest, for the past ______ years, the amount being $______.

     We regret profoundly that you have been so long delayed in this
     matter. You may be assured that your sacrifice has been a boon and
     a solace to your country.

But no letter like that ever came, and Grandpa was so sullen most of the
time that I stopped dreaming of him and his hopes. Whenever he walked
into my presence I became silent, waiting for him to speak, wondering if
he were going to upbraid me for something. I would relax when he left.
My will to talk to him gradually died.

It was from Granny's conversations, year after year, that the meager
details of Grandpa's life came to me. When the Civil War broke out, he
ran off from his master and groped his way through the Confederate lines
to the North. He darkly boasted of having killed "mo'n mah fair share of
them damn rebels" while en route to enlist in the Union Army. Militantly
resentful of slavery, he joined the Union Army to kill southern whites;
he waded in icy streams; slept in mud; suffered, fought.... Mustered
out, he returned to the South and, during elections, guarded ballot
boxes with his army rifle so that Negroes could vote. But when the Negro
had been driven from political power, his spirit had been crushed. He
was convinced that the war had not really ended, that it would start
again.

And now as we ate breakfast--we ate in silence; there was never any talk
at our table; Granny said that talking while eating was sinful, that God
might make the food choke you--we thought of Grandpa's pension. During
the days that followed letters were written, affidavits were drawn up
and sworn to, conferences were held, but nothing came of it all. (It was
my conviction, supported by no evidence save my own emotional fear of
whites, that Grandpa had been cheated out of his pension because of his
opposition to white supremacy.)

I came in from school one afternoon and Aunt Addie met me in the
hallway. Her face was trembling and her eyes were red.

"Go upstairs and say good-bye to your grandpa," she said.

"What's happened?"

She did not answer. I ran upstairs and was met by Uncle Clark, who had
come from Greenwood. Granny caught my hand.

"Come and say good-bye to your grandpa," she said.

She led me to Grandpa's room; he was lying fully dressed upon the bed,
looking as well as he ever looked. His eyes were open, but he was so
still that I did not know if he was dead or alive.

"Papa, here's Richard," Granny whispered.

Grandpa looked at me, flashed his white teeth for a fraction of a
second.

"Good-bye, grandpa," I whispered.

"Good-bye, son," he spoke hoarsely. "Rejoice, for God has picked out my
s-s-e... in-in h-heaven...."

His voice died. I had not understood what he had said and I wondered if
I should ask him to repeat it. But Granny took my hand and led me from
the room. The house was quiet; there was no crying. My mother sat silent
in her rocking chair, staring out the window; now and then she would
lower her face to her hands. Granny and Aunt Addie moved silently about
the house. I sat mute, waiting for Grandpa to die. I was still puzzled
about what he had tried to say to me; it seemed important that I should
know his final words. I followed Granny into the kitchen.

"Granny, what did Grandpa say? I didn't quite hear him," I whispered.

She whirled and gave me one of her back-handed slaps across my mouth.

"Shut up! The angel of death's in the house!"

"I just wanted to know," I said, nursing my bruised lips.

She looked at me and relented.

"He said that God had picked out his seat in heaven," she said. "Now you
know. So sit down and quit asking fool questions."

When I awakened the next morning my mother told me that Grandpa had
"gone home."

"Get on your hat and coat," Granny said.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

"Quit asking questions and do what you are told," she said.

I dressed for the outdoors.

"Go to Tom and tell him that Papa's gone home. Ask him to come here and
take charge of things," Granny said.

Tom, her eldest son, had recently moved from Hazelhurst to Jackson and
lived near the outskirts of town. Feeling that I was bearing an
important message, I ran every inch of the two miles; I thought that
news of a death should be told at once. I came in sight of my uncle's
house with a heaving chest; I bounded up the steps and rapped on the
door. My little cousin, Maggie, opened the door.

"Where's Uncle Tom?" I asked.

"He's sleeping," she said.

I ran into his room, went to his bed, and shook him.

"Uncle Tom, Granny says to come at once. Grandpa's dead," I panted.

He stared at me a long time.

"You certainly are a prize fool," he said quietly. "Don't you know that
that's no way to tell a person that his father's dead?"

I stared at him, baffled, panting.

"I ran all the way out here," I gasped. "I'm out of breath. I'm sorry."

He rose slowly and began to dress, ignoring me; he did not utter a word
for five minutes.

"What're you waiting for?" he asked me.

"Nothing," I said.

I walked home slowly, asking myself what on earth was the matter with
me, why it was I never seemed to do things as people expected them to be
done. Every word and gesture I made seemed to provoke hostility. I had
never been able to talk to others, and I had to guess at their meanings
and motives. I had not intentionally tried to shock Uncle Tom, and yet
his anger at me seemed to outweigh his sorrow for his father. Finding no
answer, I told myself that I was a fool to worry about it, that no
matter what I did I would be wrong somehow as far as my family was
concerned.

I was not allowed to go to Grandpa's funeral; I was ordered to stay home
"and mind the house." I sat reading detective stories until the family
returned from the graveyard. They told me nothing and I asked no
questions. The routine of the house flowed on as usual; for me there was
sleep, mush, greens, school, study, loneliness, yearning, and then sleep
again.

       *       *       *       *       *

My clothing became so shabby that I was ashamed to go to school. Many of
the boys in my class were wearing their first long-pants suits. I grew
so bitter that I decided to have it out with Granny; I would tell her
that if she did not let me work on Saturdays I would leave home. But
when I opened the subject, she would not listen. I followed her about
the house, demanding the right to work on Saturday. Her answer was no
and no and no.

"Then I'll quit school," I declared.

"Quit then. See how much I care," she said.

"I'll go away from here and you'll never hear from me!"

"No, you won't," she said tauntingly.

"How can I ever learn enough to get a job?" I asked her, switching my
tactics. I showed her my ragged stockings, my patched pants. "Look, I
won't go to school like this! I'm not asking you for money or to do
anything. I only want to work!"

"I have nothing to do with whether you go to school or not," she said.
"You left the church and you are on your own. You are with the world.
You're dead to me, dead to Christ."

"That old church of yours is messing up my life," I said.

"Don't you say that in this house!"

"It's true and you know it!"

"God's punishing you," she said. "And you're too proud to ask Him for
help."

"I'm going to get a job anyway."

"Then you can't live here," she said.

"Then I'll leave," I said, trembling violently.

"You won't leave," she repeated.

"You think I'm joking, don't you?" I asked, determined to make her know
how I felt. "I'll leave this minute!"

I ran to my room, got a battered suitcase, and began packing my ragged
clothes. I did not have a penny, but I was going to leave. She came to
the door.

"You little fool! Put that suitcase down!"

"I'm going where I can work!"

She snatched the suitcase out of my hands; she was trembling.

"All right," she said. "If you want to go to hell, then go. But God'll
know that it was not my fault. He'll forgive me, but He won't forgive
you."

Weeping, she rushed from the door. Her humanity had triumphed over her
fear. I emptied the suitcase, feeling spent. I hated these emotional
outbursts, these tempests of passion, for they always left me tense and
weak. Now I was truly dead to Granny and Aunt Addie; but my mother
smiled when I told her that I had defied them. She rose and hobbled to
me on her paralytic legs and kissed me.




CHAPTER VI


The next day at school I inquired among the students about jobs and was
given the name of a white family who wanted a boy to do chores. That
afternoon, as soon as school had let out, I went to the address. A tall,
dour white woman talked to me. Yes, she needed a boy, an honest boy. Two
dollars a week. Mornings, evenings, and all day Saturdays. Washing
dishes. Chopping wood. Scrubbing floors. Cleaning the yard. I would get
my breakfast and dinner. As I asked timid questions, my eyes darted
about. What kind of food would I get? Was the place as shabby as the
kitchen indicated?

"Do you want this job?" the woman asked.

"Yes, ma'am," I said, afraid to trust my own judgment.

"Now, boy, I want to ask you one question and I want you to tell me the
truth," she said.

"Yes, ma'am," I said, all attention.

"Do you steal?" she asked me seriously.

I burst into a laugh, then checked myself.

"What's so damn funny about that?" she asked.

"Lady, if I was a thief, I'd never tell anybody."

"What do you mean?" she blazed with a red face.

I had made a mistake during my first five minutes in the white world. I
hung my head.

"No, ma'am," I mumbled. "I don't steal."

She stared at me, trying to make up her mind.

"Now, look, we don't want a sassy nigger around here," she said.

"No, ma'am," I assured her. "I'm not sassy."

Promising to report the next morning at six o'clock, I walked home and
pondered on what could possibly have been in the woman's mind to have
made her ask me point-blank if I stole. Then I recalled hearing that
white people looked upon Negroes as a variety of children, and it was
only in the light of that that her question made any sense. If I had
been planning to murder her, I certainly would not have told her and,
rationally, she no doubt realized it. Yet habit had overcome her
rationality and had made her ask me: "Boy, do you steal?" Only an idiot
would have answered: "Yes, ma'am. I steal."

What would happen now that I would be among white people for hours at a
stretch? Would they hit me? Curse me? If they did, I would leave at
once. In all my wishing for a job I had not thought of how I would be
treated, and now it loomed important, decisive, sweeping down beneath
every other consideration. I would be polite, humble, saying yes sir and
no sir, yes ma'am and no ma'am, but I would draw a line over which they
must not step. Oh, maybe I'm just thinking up trouble, I told myself.
They might like me....

The next morning I chopped wood for the cook stove, lugged in scuttles
of coal for the grates, washed the front porch and swept the back porch,
swept the kitchen, helped wait on the table, and washed the dishes. I
was sweating. I swept the front walk and ran to the store to shop. When
I returned the woman said:

"Your breakfast is in the kitchen."

"Thank you, ma'am."

I saw a plate of thick, black molasses and a hunk of white bread on the
table. Would I get no more than this? They had had eggs, bacon,
coffee.... I picked up the bread and tried to break it; it was stale and
hard. Well, I would drink the molasses. I lifted the plate and brought
it to my lips and saw floating on the surface of the black liquid green
and white bits of mold. Goddamn.... I can't eat this, I told myself. The
food was not even clean. The woman came into the kitchen as I was
putting on my coat.

"You didn't eat," she said.

"No, ma'am," I said. "I'm not hungry."

"You'll eat at home?" she asked hopefully.

"Well, I just wasn't hungry this morning, ma'am," I lied.

"You don't like molasses and bread," she said dramatically.

"Oh, yes, ma'am, I do," I defended myself quickly, not wanting her to
think that I dared criticize what she had given me.

"I don't know what's happening to you niggers nowadays," she sighed,
wagging her head. She looked closely at the molasses. "It's a sin to
throw out molasses like that. I'll put it up for you this evening."

"Yes, ma'am," I said heartily.

Neatly she covered the plate of molasses with another plate, then felt
the bread and dumped it into the garbage. She turned to me, her face lit
with an idea.

"What grade are you in school?"

"Seventh, ma'am."

"Then why are you going to school?" she asked in surprise.

"Well, I want to be a writer," I mumbled, unsure of myself; I had not
planned to tell her that, but she had made me feel so utterly wrong and
of no account that I needed to bolster myself.

"A what?" she demanded.

"A writer," I mumbled.

"For what?"

"To write stories," I mumbled defensively.

"You'll never be a writer," she said. "Who on earth put such ideas into
your nigger head?"

"Nobody," I said.

"I didn't think anybody ever would," she declared indignantly.

As I walked around her house to the street, I knew that I would not go
back. The woman had assaulted my ego; she had assumed that she knew my
place in life, what I felt, what I ought to be, and I resented it with
all my heart. Perhaps she was right; perhaps I would never be a writer;
but I did not want her to say so.

Had I kept the job I would have learned quickly just how white people
acted toward Negroes, but I was too nave to think that there were many
white people like that. I told myself that there were good white people,
people with money and sensitive feelings. As a whole, I felt that they
were bad, but I would be lucky enough to find the exceptions.

Fearing that my family might think I was finicky, I lied to them,
telling them that the white woman had already hired a boy. At school I
continued to ask about jobs and was directed to another address. As soon
as school was out I made for the house. Yes, the woman said that she
wanted a boy who could milk a cow, feed chickens, gather vegetables,
help serve breakfast and dinner.

"But I can't milk a cow, ma'am," I said.

"Where are you from?" she asked incredulously.

"Here in Jackson," I said.

"You mean to stand there, nigger, and tell me that you live in Jackson
and don't know how to milk a cow?" she demanded in surprise.

I said nothing, but I was quickly learning the reality--a Negro's
reality--of the white world. One woman had assumed that I would tell her
if I stole, and now this woman was amazed that I could not milk a cow,
I, a nigger who dared live in Jackson.... They were all turning out to
be alike, differing only in detail. I faced a wall in the woman's mind,
a wall that she did not know was there.

"I just never learned," I said finally.

"I'll show you how to milk," she said, as though glad to be charitable
enough to repair a nigger's knowledge on that score. "It's easy."

The place was large; they had a cow, chickens, a garden, all of which
spelled food and that decided me. I told her that I would take the job
and I reported for work the next morning. My tasks were simple but many;
I milked the cow under her supervision, gathered eggs, swept, and was
through in time to serve breakfast. The dining-room table was set for
five; there were eggs, bacon, toast, jam, butter, milk, apples.... That
seemed promising. The woman told me to bring the food in as they called
for it, and I familiarized myself with the kitchen so that I could act
quickly when called upon. Finally the woman came into the dining room
followed by a pale young man who sat down and stared at the food.

"What the hell!" he snarled. "Every morning it's these damn eggs for
breakfast."

"Listen, you sonofabitch," the woman said, sitting too, "you don't have
to eat 'em."

"You might try serving some dirt," he said, and forked up the bacon.

I felt that I was dreaming. Were they like that all the time? If so, I
would not stay here. A young girl came and flopped into her chair.

"That's right, you bitch," the young man said. "Knock the food right out
of my goddamn mouth."

"You know what you can do," the girl said.

I stared at them so intently that I was not aware that the young man was
watching me.

"Say, what in hell are you glaring at me for, you nigger bastard?" he
demanded. "Get those goddamn biscuits off that stove and put 'em on the
table."

"Yes, sir."

Two middle-aged men came in and sat down. I never learned who was in the
family, who was related to whom, or if it was a family. They cursed each
other in an amazingly offhand manner and nobody seemed to mind. As they
hurled invectives, they barely looked at each other. I was tense each
moment, trying to anticipate their wishes and avoid a curse, and I did
not suspect that the tension I had begun to feel that morning would lift
itself into the passion of my life. Perhaps I had waited too long to
start working for white people; perhaps I should have begun earlier,
when I was younger--as most of the other black boys had done--and
perhaps by now the tension would have become an habitual condition,
contained and controlled by reflex. But that was not to be my lot; I was
always to be conscious of it, brood over it, carry it in my heart, live
with it, sleep with it, fight with it.

The morning was physically tiring, but the nervous strain, the fear that
my actions would call down upon my head a storm of curses, was even more
damaging. When the time came for me to go to school, I was emotionally
spent. But I clung to the job because I got enough to eat and no one
watched me closely and measured out my food. I had rarely tasted eggs
and I would put hunks of yellow butter into a hot skillet and hurriedly
scramble three or four eggs at a time and gobble them down in huge
mouthfuls so that the woman would not see me. And I would take tumblers
of milk behind a convenient door and drain them in a swallow, as though
they contained water.

Though the food I ate strengthened my body, I acquired another problem:
I had fallen down in my studies at school. Had I been physically
stronger, had not my new tensions sapped my already limited energy, I
might have been able to work mornings and evenings and still carry my
studies successfully. But in the middle of the day I would grow groggy;
in the classroom I would feel that the teacher and the pupils were
receding from me and I would know that I was drifting off to sleep. I
would go to the water fountain in the corridor and let cold water run
over my wrists, chilling my blood, hoping in that way to keep awake.

But the job had its boon. At the midday recess I would crowd gladly into
the corner store and eat sandwiches with the boys, slamming down my own
money on the counter for what I wanted, swapping descriptions of the
homes of white folks in which we worked. I used to divert them with
vivid word pictures of the cursing family, their brooding silences,
their indifference toward one another. I told them of the food I managed
to eat when the woman's back was turned, and they were filled with
friendly envy.

The boys would now examine some new article of clothing I had bought;
none of us allowed a week to pass without buying something new, paying
fifty cents down and fifty cents per week. We knew that we were being
cheated, but we never had enough cash to buy in any other way.

       *       *       *       *       *

My mother began a rapid recovery. I was happy when she expressed the
hope that someday soon we might have a home of our own. Though Granny
was angry and disgusted, my mother began to attend a Methodist church in
the neighborhood, and I went to Sunday school, not because my mother
begged me to--which she did--but to meet and talk with my classmates.

In the black Protestant church I entered a new world: prim, brown,
puritanical girls who taught in the public schools; black college
students who tried to conceal their plantation origin; black boys and
girls emerging self-consciously from adolescence; wobbly-bosomed black
and yellow church matrons; black janitors and porters who sang proudly
in the choir; subdued redcaps and carpenters who served as deacons;
meek, blank-eyed black and yellow washerwomen who shouted and moaned and
danced when hymns were sung; jovial, potbellied black bishops; skinny
old maids who were constantly giving rallies to raise money; snobbery,
clannishness, gossip, intrigue, petty class rivalry, and conspicuous
displays of cheap clothing.... I liked it and I did not like it; I
longed to be among them, yet when with them I looked at them as if I
were a million miles away. I had been kept out of their world too long
ever to be able to become a real part of it.

Nevertheless, I was so starved for association with people that I
allowed myself to be seduced by it all, and for a few months I lived the
life of an optimist. A revival began at the church and my classmates at
school urged me to attend. More because I liked them than from any
interest in religion, I consented. As the services progressed night
after night, my mother tried to persuade me to join, to save my soul at
last, to become a member of a responsible community church. Despite the
fact that I told them I could never feel any religion, the boys of my
gang begged me to "come to God."

"You believe in God, don't you?" they asked.

I evaded the question.

"But this is a new day," they said, pulling down the corners of their
lips. "We don't holler and moan in church no more. Come to church and be
a member of the community."

"Oh, I don't know," I said.

"We don't want to push you," they said delicately, implying that if I
wanted to associate with them I would have to join.

On the last night of the revival, the preacher asked all those who were
members of the church to stand. A good majority of those present rose.
Next the preacher called upon the Christians who were not members of any
church to stand. More responded. There remained now but a few young men
who, belonging to no church and professing no religion, were scattered
sheepishly about the pews. Having thus isolated the sinners, the
preacher told the deacons to prevail upon those who lived "in darkness
to discuss the state of their souls with him." The deacons sped to their
tasks and asked us to go into a room and talk with a man "chosen and
anointed of God." They held our arms and smiled as they bent and talked
to us. Surrounded by people I knew and liked, with my mother's eyes
looking pleadingly into mine, it was hard to refuse. I followed the
others into a room where the preacher stood; he smiled and shook our
hands.

"Now, you young men," he began in a brisk, clipped tone, "I want all of
you to know God. I'm not asking you to join the church, but it's my duty
as a man of God to tell you that you are in danger. Your peril is great;
you stand in the need of prayer. Now, I'm going to ask each of you a
personal favor. I want you to let the members of this church send up a
prayer to God for you. Now, is there any soul here so cold, so hard, so
lost, that he would say no to that? Can you refuse to let the good
people of this community pray for you?"

He paused dramatically and no one answered. All the techniques of his
appeal were familiar to me and I sat there feeling foolish, wanting to
leap through the window and go home and forget about it. But I sat
still, filled more with disgust than sin.

"Would any man in this room dare fling no into God's face?" the preacher
asked.

There was silence.

"Now, I'm going to ask all of you to rise and go into the church and
take a seat on the front bench," he said, edging on to more definite
commitments. "Just stand up," he said, lifting his hands, palms up, as
though he had the power to make us rise by magic. "That's it, young
man," he encouraged the first boy who rose.

I followed them and we sat like wet ducks on a bench facing the
congregation. Some part of me was cursing. A low, soft hymn began.

    _This may be the last time, I don't know...._

They sang it, hummed it, crooned it, moaned it, implying in sweet,
frightening tones that if we did not join the church then and there we
might die in our sleep that very night and go straight to hell. The
church members felt the challenge and the volume of song swelled. Could
they sing so terrifyingly sweet as to make us join, burst into tears and
drop to our knees? A few boys rose and gave their hands to the preacher.
A few women shouted and danced with joy. Another hymn began.

    _It ain't my brother, but it's me, Oh, Lord,_
    _Standing in the need of prayer...._

During the singing the preacher tried yet another ruse; he intoned
mournfully, letting his voice melt into the singing, yet casting his
words above it:

"How many mothers of these young men are here tonight?"

Among others, my mother rose and stood proudly.

"Now, good sweet mothers, come right down in front here," said the
preacher.

Hoping that this was the night of my long-deferred salvation, my mother
came forward, limping, weeping, smiling. The mothers ringed their sons
around, whispering, pleading.

"Now, you good sweet mothers, symbols of Mother Mary at the tomb, kneel
and pray for your sons, your only sons," the preacher chanted.

The mothers knelt. My mother grabbed my hands and I felt hot tears
scalding my fingers. I tried to stifle my disgust. We young men had been
trapped by the community, the tribe in which we lived and of which we
were a part. The tribe, for its own safety, was asking us to be at one
with it. Our mothers were kneeling in public and praying for us to give
the sign of allegiance. The hymn ended and the preacher launched into a
highly emotional and symbolic sermon, recounting how our mothers had
given birth to us, how they had nursed us from infancy, how they had
tended us when we were sick, how they had seen us grow up, how they had
watched over us, how they had always known what was best for us. He then
called for yet another hymn, which was hummed. He chanted above it in a
melancholy tone:

"Now, I'm asking the first mother who really loves her son to bring him
to me for baptism!"

Goddamn, I thought. It had happened quicker than I had expected. My
mother was looking steadily at me.

"Come, son, let your old mother take you to God," she begged. "I brought
you into the world, now let me help to save you."

She caught my hand and I held back.

"I've been as good a mother as I could," she whispered through her
tears.

"God is hearing every word," the preacher underscored her plea.

This business of saving souls had no ethics; every human relationship
was shamelessly exploited. In essence, the tribe was asking us whether
we shared its feelings; if we refused to join the church, it was
equivalent to saying no, to placing ourselves in the position of moral
monsters. One mother led her beaten and frightened son to the preacher
amid shouts of amen and hallelujah.

"Don't you love your old crippled mother, Richard?" my mother asked.
"Don't leave me standing here with my empty hands," she said, afraid
that I would humiliate her in public.

It was no longer a question of my believing in God; it was no longer a
matter of whether I would steal or lie or murder; it was a simple,
urgent matter of public pride, a matter of how much I had in common with
other people. If I refused, it meant that I did not love my mother, and
no man in that tight little black community had ever been crazy enough
to let himself be placed in such a position. My mother pulled my arm and
I walked with her to the preacher and shook his hand, a gesture that
made me a candidate for baptism. There were more songs and prayers; it
lasted until well after midnight. I walked home limp as a rag; I had not
felt anything except sullen anger and a crushing sense of shame. Yet I
was somehow glad that I had got it over with; no barriers now stood
between me and the community.

"Mama, I don't feel a thing," I told her truthfully.

"Don't you worry; you'll grow into feeling it," she assured me.

And when I confessed to the other boys that I felt nothing, they too
admitted that they felt nothing.

"But the main thing is to be a member of the church," they said.

The Sunday of the baptism arrived. I dressed in my best and showed up
sweating. The candidates were huddled together to listen to a sermon in
which the road of salvation was mapped out from the cradle to the
grave. We were then called to the front of the church and lined up. The
preacher, draped in white robes, dipped a small branch of a tree in a
huge bowl of water and hovered above the head of the first candidate.

"I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,"
he pronounced sonorously as he shook the wet branch. Drops trickled down
the boy's face.

From one boy to another he went, dipping the branch each time. Finally
my turn came and I felt foolish, tense; I wanted to yell for him to
stop; I wanted to tell him that all this was so much nonsense. But I
said nothing. The dripping branch was shaken above my head and drops of
water wet my face and scalp, some of it rolling down my neck and wetting
my back, like insects crawling. I wanted to squirm, but I held still.
Then it was over. I relaxed. The preacher was now shaking the branch
over another boy's head. I sighed. I had been baptized.

Even after receiving the "right hand of fellowship," Sunday school bored
me. The Bible stories seemed slow and meaningless when compared to the
bloody thunder of pulp narrative. And I was not alone in feeling this;
other boys went to sleep in Sunday school. Finally the boldest of us
confessed that the entire thing was a fraud and we played hooky from
church.

       *       *       *       *       *

As summer neared, my mother suffered yet another stroke of paralysis and
again I had to watch her suffer, listen to her groans, powerless to
help. I used to lie awake nights and think back to the early days in
Arkansas, tracing my mother's life, reliving events, wondering why she
had apparently been singled out for so much suffering, meaningless
suffering, and I would feel more awe than I had ever felt in church. My
mind could find no answer and I would feel rebellious against all life.
But I never felt humble.

Another change took place at home. We needed money badly and Granny and
Aunt Addie decided that we could no longer share the entire house, and
Uncle Tom and his family were invited to live upstairs at a nominal
rental. The dining room and the living room were converted into bedrooms
and for the first time we were squeezed for living space. We began to
get on each other's nerves. Uncle Tom had taught school in country towns
for thirty years and as soon as he was under the roof he proceeded to
tell me what was wrong with my life. I ignored him and he resented it.

Rattling pots and pans in the kitchen would now awaken me in the
mornings and I would know that Uncle Tom and his family were getting
breakfast. One morning I was roused by my uncle's voice calling gently
but persistently. I opened my eyes and saw the dim blob of his face
peering from behind the jamb of the kitchen door.

"What time have you?" I thought he asked me, but I was not sure.

"Hunh?" I mumbled sleepily.

"What time have you got?" he repeated.

I lifted myself on my elbow and looked at my dollar watch, which lay on
the chair at the bedside.

"Eighteen past five," I mumbled.

"Eighteen past five?" he asked.

"Yes, sir."

"Now, is that the right time?" he asked again.

I was tired, sleepy; I did not want to look at the watch again, but I
was satisfied that, on the whole, I had given him the correct time.

"It's right," I said, snuggling back down into my pillow. "If it's a
little slow or fast, it's not far wrong."

There was a short silence; I thought he had gone.

"What on earth do you mean, boy?" he asked in loud anger.

I sat up, blinking, staring into the shadows of the room, trying to see
the expression on his face.

"What do I mean?" I asked, bewildered. "I mean what I said." Had I given
him the wrong time? I looked again at my watch. "It's twenty past now."

"Why, you impudent black rascal!" he thundered.

I pushed back the covers of the bed, sensing trouble.

"What are you angry about?" I asked.

"I never heard a sassier black imp than you in all my life," he
spluttered.

I swung my feet to the floor so that I could watch him.

"What are you talking about?" I asked. "You asked me the time and I told
you."

"'If it's a little fast or slow, it's not far wrong,'" he said,
imitating me in an angry, sarcastic voice. "I've taught school for
thirty years, and by God I've never had a boy say anything like that to
me."

"But what's wrong with what I said?" I asked, amazed.

"Shut up!" he shouted. "Or I'll take my fist and ram it down your sassy
throat! One more word out of you, and I'll get a limb and teach you a
lesson."

"What's the matter with you, Uncle Tom?" I asked. "What's wrong with
what I said?"

I could hear his breath whistling in his throat; I knew that he was
furious.

"This day I'm going to give you the whipping some man ought to have
given you long ago," he vowed.

I got to my feet and grabbed my clothes; the whole thing seemed unreal.
I had been confronted so suddenly with struggle that I could not pull
all the strings of the situation together at once. I did not feel that I
had given him cause to say I was sassy. I had spoken to him just as I
spoke to everybody. Others did not resent my words, so why should he? I
heard him go out of the kitchen door and I knew that he had gone into
the back yard. I pulled on my clothes and ran to the window; I saw him
tearing a long, young, green switch from the elm tree. My body
tightened. I was damned if he was going to beat me with it. Until a few
days ago he had never lived near me, had never had any say in my rearing
or lack of rearing. I was working, eating my meals out, buying my own
clothes, giving what few pennies I could to Granny to help out in the
house. And now a strange uncle who felt that I was impolite was going to
teach me to act as I had seen the backward black boys act on the
plantations, was going to teach me to grin, hang my head, and mumble
apologetically when I was spoken to.

My senses reeled in protest. No, that could not be. He would not beat
me. He was only bluffing. His anger would pass. He would think it over
and realize that it was not worth all the bother. Dressed, I sat on the
edge of the bed and waited. I heard his footsteps come onto the back
porch. I felt weak all over. How long was this going to last? How long
was I going to be beaten for trifles and less than trifles? I was
already so conditioned toward my relatives that when I passed them I
actually had a nervous tic in my muscles, and now I was going to be
beaten by someone who did not like the tone of voice in which I spoke. I
ran across the room and pulled out the dresser drawer and got my pack of
razor blades; I opened it and took a thin blade of blue steel in each
hand. I stood ready for him. The door opened. I was hoping desperately
that this was not true, that this dream would end.

"Richard!" he called me in a cold, even tone.

"Yes, sir!" I answered, striving to keep my tension out of my voice.

"Come here."

I walked into the kitchen, my eyes upon him, my hands holding the razors
behind my back.

"Now, Uncle Tom, what do you want with me?" I asked him.

"You need a lesson in how to live with people," he said.

"If I do need one, you're not going to give it to me," I said.

"You'll swallow those words before I'm through with you," he vowed.

"Now, listen, Uncle Tom," I said, "you're not going to whip me. You're a
stranger to me. You don't support me. I don't live with you."

"You shut that foul mouth of yours and get into the back yard," he
snapped.

He had not seen the razors in my hand. I ducked out the kitchen door and
jumped lightly off the porch to the ground. He ran down the steps and
advanced with the lifted switch.

"I've got a razor in each hand!" I warned in a low, charged voice. "If
you touch me, I'll cut you! Maybe I'll get cut too, but I'll cut you, so
help me God!"

He paused, staring at my lifted hands in the dawning light of morning. I
held a sharp blue edge of steel tightly between thumb and forefinger of
each fist.

"My God," he gasped.

"I didn't mean to hurt your feelings this morning," I told him. "You
insist I did. Now, I'll be damned if I'm going to be beaten because of
your hurt feelings."

"You're the worst criminal I ever saw," he exclaimed softly.

"If you want to fight, I'll fight. That's the way it'll be between us,"
I told him.

"You'll never amount to anything," he said, shaking his head and
blinking his eyes in astonishment.

"I'm not worried about that," I said. "All I want you to do is keep away
from me, now and always...."

"You'll end on the gallows," he predicted.

"If I do, you'll have nothing to do with it," I said.

He stared at me in silence; evidently he did not believe me, for he took
a step forward to test me.

"Put those razors down," he commanded.

"I'll cut you! I'll cut you!" I said, hysteria leaping into my voice, my
hands slicing out with points of steel as I backed away.

He stopped; he had never in his life faced a person more grimly
determined. Now and then he blinked his eyes and shook his head.

"You fool!" he bellowed suddenly.

"I'll make you bloody if you hit me!" I warned him.

His chest heaved and his body seemed to droop.

"Somebody will yet break your spirit," he said.

"It won't be you!"

"You'll get yours someday!"

"You won't be the one to give it to me!"

"And you've just been baptized," he said heavily.

"The hell with that," I said.

We stood in the early morning light and a touch of sun broke on the
horizon. Roosters were crowing. A bird chirped near-by somewhere.
Perhaps the neighbors were listening. Finally Uncle Tom's face began to
twitch. Tears rolled down his cheeks. His lips trembled.

"Boy, I'm sorry for you," he said at last.

"You'd better be sorry for yourself," I said.

"You think you're a man," he said, dropping his arm and letting the
switch drag in the dust of the yard. His lips moved as he groped for
words. "But you'll learn, and you'll learn the hard way. I wish I could
be an example to you...."

I knew that I had conquered him, had rid myself of him mentally and
emotionally; but I wanted to be sure.

"You are not an example to me; you could never be," I spat at him.
"You're a _warning_. Your life isn't so hot that you can tell me what to
do." He repaired chairs for a living now, since he had retired from
teaching. "Do you think I want to grow up and weave the bottoms of
chairs for people to sit in?"

He twitched violently, trying to control himself.

"You'll be sorry you said that," he mumbled.

He turned his tall, lean, bent body and walked slowly up the steps. I
sat on the porch a long time, waiting for my emotions to ebb. Then I
crept cautiously into the house, got my hat, coat, books, and went to
work, went to face the whims of the white folks.




CHAPTER VII


Summer. Bright hot days. Hunger still a vital part of my consciousness.
Passing relatives in the hallways of the crowded home and not speaking.
Eating in silence at a table where prayers are said. My mother
recovering slowly, but now definitely crippled for life. Will I be able
to enter school in September? Loneliness. Reading. Job hunting. Vague
hopes of going north. But what would become of my mother if I left her
in this queer house? And how would I fare in a strange city? Doubt.
Fear. My friends are buying long-pants suits that cost from seventeen to
twenty dollars, a sum as huge to me as the Alps! This was my reality in
1924.

Word came that a near-by brickyard was hiring and I went to investigate.
I was frail, not weighing a hundred pounds. At noon I sneaked into the
yard and walked among the aisles of damp, clean-smelling clay and came
to a barrow full of wet bricks just taken from the machine that shaped
them. I caught hold of the handles of the barrow and was barely able to
lift it; it weighed perhaps four times as much as I did. If I were only
stronger and heavier!

Later I asked questions and found that the water boy was missing; I ran
to the office and was hired. I walked in the hot sun lugging a big zinc
pail from one laboring gang of black men to another for a dollar a day;
a man would lift the tin dipper to his lips, take a swallow, rinse out
his mouth, spit, and then drink in long, slow gulps as sweat dripped
into the dipper. And off again I would go, chanting:

"Water!"

And somebody would yell:

"Here, boy!"

Deep into wet pits of clay, into sticky ditches, up slippery slopes I
would struggle with the pail. I stuck it out, reeling at times from
hunger, pausing to get my breath before clambering up a hill. At the end
of the week the money sank into the endless expenses at home. Later I
got a job in the yard that paid a dollar and a half a day, that of bat
boy. I went between the walls of clay and picked up bricks that had
cracked open; when my barrow was full, I would wheel it out onto a
wooden scaffold and dump it into a pond.

I had but one fear here: a dog. He was owned by the boss of the
brickyard and he haunted the clay aisles, snapping, growling. The dog
had been wounded many times, for the black workers were always hurling
bricks at it. Whenever I saw the animal, I would take a brick from my
load and toss it at him; he would slink away, only to appear again,
showing his teeth. Several of the Negroes had been bitten and had been
ill; the boss had been asked to leash the dog, but he had refused. One
afternoon I was wheeling my barrow toward the pond when something sharp
sank into my thigh. I whirled; the dog crouched a few feet away,
snarling. I had been bitten. I drove the dog away and opened my
trousers; teeth marks showed deep and red.

I did not mind the stinging hurt, but I was afraid of an infection. When
I went to the office to report that the boss's dog had bitten me, I was
met by a tall blonde white girl.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"I want to see the boss, ma'am."

"For what?"

"His dog bit me, ma'am, and I'm afraid I might get an infection."

"Where did he bite you?"

"On my leg," I lied, shying from telling her where the bite was.

"Let's see," she said.

"No, ma'am. Can't I see the boss?"

"He isn't here now," she said, and went back to her typing.

I returned to work, stopping occasionally to examine the teeth marks;
they were swelling. Later in the afternoon a tall white man wearing a
cool white suit, a Panama hat, and white shoes came toward me.

"Is this the nigger?" he asked a black boy as he pointed at me.

"Yes, sir," the black boy answered.

"Come here, nigger," he called me.

I went to him.

"They tell me my dog bit you," he said.

"Yes, sir."

I pulled down my trousers and he looked.

"Humnnn," he grunted, then laughed. "A dog bite can't hurt a nigger."

"It's swelling and it hurts," I said.

"If it bothers you, let me know," he said. "But I never saw a dog yet
that could really hurt a nigger."

He turned and walked away and the black boys gathered to watch his tall
form disappear down the aisles of wet bricks.

"Sonofabitch!"

"He'll get his someday!"

"Boy, their hearts are hard!"

"Lawd, a white man'll do anything!"

"Break up that prayer meeting!" the white straw boss yelled.

The wheelbarrows rolled again. A boy came close to me.

"You better see a doctor," he whispered.

"I ain't got no money," I said.

Two days passed and luckily the redness and swelling went away.

Summer wore on and the brickyard closed; again I was out of work. I
heard that caddies were wanted and I tramped five miles to the golf
links. I was hired by a florid-faced white man at the rate of fifty
cents for nine holes. I did not know the game and I lost three balls in
as many minutes; it seemed that my eyes could not trace the flight of
the balls. The man dismissed me. I watched the other boys do their jobs
and within half an hour I had another golf bag and was following a ball.
I made a dollar. I returned home, disgusted, tired, hungry, hating the
sight of a golf course.

School opened and, though I had not prepared myself, I enrolled. The
school was far across town and the walking distance alone consumed my
breakfast of mush and lard gravy. I attended classes without books for a
month, then got a job working mornings and evenings for three dollars a
week.

I grew silent and reserved as the nature of the world in which I lived
became plain and undeniable; the bleakness of the future affected my
will to study. Granny had already thrown out hints that it was time for
me to be on my own. But what had I learned so far that would help me to
make a living? Nothing. I could be a porter like my father before me,
but what else? And the problem of living as a Negro was cold and hard.
What was it that made the hate of whites for blacks so steady, seemingly
so woven into the texture of things? What kind of life was possible
under that hate? How had this hate come to be? Nothing about the
problems of Negroes was ever taught in the classrooms at school; and
whenever I would raise these questions with the boys, they would either
remain silent or turn the subject into a joke. They were vocal about the
petty individual wrongs they suffered, but they possessed no desire for
a knowledge of the picture as a whole. Then why was I worried about it?

Was I really as bad as my uncles and aunts and Granny repeatedly said?
Why was it considered wrong to ask questions? Was I right when I
resisted punishment? It was inconceivable to me that one should
surrender to what seemed wrong, and most of the people I had met seemed
wrong. Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that
that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I
would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one
live in a world in which one's mind and perceptions meant nothing and
authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.

       *       *       *       *       *

The eighth grade days flowed in their hungry path and I grew more
conscious of myself; I sat in classes, bored, wondering, dreaming. One
long dry afternoon I took out my composition book and told myself that I
would write a story; it was sheer idleness that led me to it. What would
the story be about? It resolved itself into a plot about a villain who
wanted a widow's home and I called it _The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre_.
It was crudely atmospheric, emotional, intuitively psychological, and
stemmed from pure feeling. I finished it in three days and then wondered
what to do with it.

The local Negro newspaper! That's it.... I sailed into the office and
shoved my ragged composition book under the nose of the man who called
himself the editor.

"What is that?" he asked.

"A story," I said.

"A news story?"

"No, fiction."

"All right. I'll read it," he said.

He pushed my composition book back on his desk and looked at me
curiously, sucking at his pipe.

"But I want you to read it _now_." I said.

He blinked. I had no idea how newspapers were run. I thought that one
took a story to an editor and he sat down then and there and read it and
said yes or no.

"I'll read this and let you know about it tomorrow," he said.

I was disappointed; I had taken time to write it and he seemed distant
and uninterested.

"Give me the story," I said, reaching for it.

He turned from me, took up the book and read ten pages or more.

"Won't you come in tomorrow?" he asked. "I'll have it finished then."

I honestly relented.

"All right," I said. "I'll stop in tomorrow."

I left with the conviction that he would not read it. Now, where else
could I take it after he had turned it down? The next afternoon, en
route to my job, I stepped into the newspaper office.

"Where's my story?" I asked.

"It's in galleys," he said.

"What's that?" I asked; I did not know what galleys were.

"It's set up in type," he said. "We're publishing it."

"How much money will I get?" I asked, excited.

"We can't pay for manuscript," he said.

"But you sell your papers for money," I said with logic.

"Yes, but we're young in business," he explained.

"But you're asking me to give you my story, but you don't give your
papers away," I said.

He laughed.

"Look, you're just starting. This story will put your name before our
readers. Now, that's something," he said.

"But if the story is good enough to sell to your readers, then you ought
to give me some of the money you get from it," I insisted.

He laughed again and I sensed that I was amusing him.

"I'm going to offer you something more valuable than money," he said.
"I'll give you a chance to learn to write."

I was pleased, but I still thought he was taking advantage of me.

"When will you publish my story?"

"I'm dividing it into three installments," he said. "The first
installment appears this week. But the main thing is this: Will you get
news for me on a space rate basis?"

"I work mornings and evenings for three dollars a week," I said.

"Oh," he said. "Then you better keep that. But what are you doing this
summer?"

"Nothing."

"Then come to see me before you take another job," he said. "And write
some more stories."

A few days later my classmates came to me with baffled eyes, holding
copies of the _Southern Register_ in their hands.

"Did you really write that story?" they asked me.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted to."

"Where did you get it from?"

"I made it up."

"You didn't. You copied it out of a book."

"If I had, no one would publish it."

"But what are they publishing it for?"

"So people can read it."

"Who told you to do that?"

"Nobody."

"Then why did you do it?"

"Because I wanted to," I said again.

They were convinced that I had not told them the truth. We had never had
any instruction in literary matters at school; the literature of the
nation or the Negro had never been mentioned. My schoolmates could not
understand why anyone would want to write a story; and, above all, they
could not understand why I had called it _The Voodoo of Hell's
Half-Acre_. The mood out of which a story was written was the most alien
thing conceivable to them. They looked at me with new eyes, and a
distance, a suspiciousness came between us. If I had thought anything in
writing the story, I had thought that perhaps it would make me more
acceptable to them, and now it was cutting me off from them more
completely than ever.

At home the effects were no less disturbing. Granny came into my room
early one morning and sat on the edge of my bed.

"Richard, what is this you're putting in the papers?" she asked.

"A story," I said.

"About what?"

"It's just a story, granny."

"But they tell me it's been in three times."

"It's the same story. It's in three parts."

"But what is it about?" she insisted.

I hedged, fearful of getting into a religious argument.

"It's just a story I made up," I said.

"Then it's a lie," she said.

"Oh, Christ," I said.

"You must get out of this house if you take the name of the Lord in
vain," she said.

"Granny, please.... I'm sorry," I pleaded. "But it's hard to tell you
about the story. You see, granny, everybody knows that the story isn't
true, but...."

"Then why write it?" she asked.

"Because people might want to read it."

"That's the Devil's work," she said and left.

My mother also was worried.

"Son, you ought to be more serious," she said. "You're growing up now
and you won't be able to get jobs if you let people think that you're
weak-minded. Suppose the superintendent of schools would ask you to
teach here in Jackson, and he found out that you had been writing
stories?"

I could not answer her.

"I'll be all right, mama," I said.

Uncle Tom, though surprised, was highly critical and contemptuous. The
story had no point, he said. And whoever heard of a story by the title
of _The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre_? Aunt Addie said that it was a sin
for anyone to use the word "hell" and that what was wrong with me was
that I had nobody to guide me. She blamed the whole thing upon my
upbringing.

In the end I was so angry that I refused to talk about the story. From
no quarter, with the exception of the Negro newspaper editor, had there
come a single encouraging word. It was rumored that the principal wanted
to know why I had used the word "hell." I felt that I had committed a
crime. Had I been conscious of the full extent to which I was pushing
against the current of my environment, I would have been frightened
altogether out of my attempts at writing. But my reactions were limited
to the attitude of the people about me, and I did not speculate or
generalize.

I dreamed of going north and writing books, novels. The North symbolized
to me all that I had not felt and seen; it had no relation whatever to
what actually existed. Yet, by imagining a place where everything was
possible, I kept hope alive in me. But where had I got this notion of
doing something in the future, of going away from home and accomplishing
something that would be recognized by others? I had, of course, read my
Horatio Alger stories, my pulp stories, and I knew my Get-Rich-Quick
Wallingford series from cover to cover, though I had sense enough not
to hope to get rich; even to my nave imagination that possibility was
too remote. I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of
black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go
somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.

I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of
the South had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that
the state of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars to make sure that
I would never feel; I was becoming aware of the thing that the Jim Crow
laws had been drafted and passed to keep out of my consciousness; I was
acting on impulses that southern senators in the nation's capital had
striven to keep out of Negro life; I was beginning to dream the dreams
that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were
taboo.

Had I been articulate about my ultimate aspirations, no doubt someone
would have told me what I was bargaining for; but nobody seemed to know,
and least of all did I. My classmates felt that I was doing something
that was vaguely wrong, but they did not know how to express it. As the
outside world grew more meaningful, I became more concerned, tense; and
my classmates and my teachers would say: "Why do you ask so many
questions?" Or: "Keep quiet."

I was in my fifteenth year; in terms of schooling I was far behind the
average youth of the nation, but I did not know that. In me was shaping
a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of
life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the
penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern
night my life had switched onto the wrong track and, without my knowing
it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep
slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that
blinked all about me, the sirens and the bells and, the screams that
filled the air.




CHAPTER VIII


Summer again. The old problem of hunting for a job. I told the woman for
whom I was working, a Mrs. Bibbs, that I needed an all-day job that
would pay me enough money to buy clothes and books for the next school
term. She took the matter up with her husband, who was a foreman in a
sawmill.

"So you want to work in the mill, hunh?" he asked.

"Yes, sir."

He came to me and put his hands under my arms and lifted me from the
floor, as though I were a bundle of feathers.

"You're too light for our work," he said.

"But maybe I could do _something_ there," I said.

"That's the problem," he said soberly. "The work's heavy and dangerous."
He was silent and I knew that he considered the matter closed. That was
the way things were between whites and blacks in the South; many of the
most important things were never openly said; they were understated and
left to seep through to one. I, in turn, said nothing; but I did not
leave the room; my standing silent was a way of asking him to
reconsider, telling him that I wanted ever so much to try for a job in
his mill. "All right," he said finally. "Come to the mill in the
morning. I'll see what I can do. But I don't think that you'll like it."

I was at the mill at dawn the next morning and saw men lifting huge logs
with tackle blocks. There were scores of buzzing steel saws biting into
green wood with loud whines.

"Watch out!" somebody yelled.

I looked around and saw a black man pointing above my head; I glanced
up. A log was swinging toward me. I scrambled out of its path. The black
man came to my side.

"What do you want here, boy?"

"Mr. Bibbs, the foreman, told me to look around. I'm looking for a job,"
I said.

The man gazed at me intently.

"I wouldn't try for this if I was you," he said. "If you know this game,
all right. But this is dangerous stuff for a guy that's green." He held
up his right hand from which three fingers were missing. "See?"

I nodded and left.

Empty days. Long days. Bright hot days. The sun heated the pavements
until they felt like the top of an oven. I spent the mornings hunting
for jobs and I read during the afternoons. One morning I was walking
toward the center of town and passed the home of a classmate, Ned
Greenley. He was sitting on his porch, looking glum.

"Hello, Ned. What's new?" I asked.

"You've heard, haven't you?" he asked.

"About what?"

"My brother, Bob?"

"No, what happened?"

Ned began to weep softly.

"They killed him," he managed to say.

"The white folks?" I asked in a whisper, guessing.

He sobbed his answer. Bob was dead; I had met him only a few times, but
I felt that I had known him through his brother.

"What happened?"

"Th-they t-took him in a c-car.... Out on a c-country road.... Th-they
shot h-him," Ned whimpered.

I had heard that Bob was working at one of the hotels in town.

"Why?"

"Th-they said he was fooling with a white prostitute there in the
hotel," Ned said.

Inside of me my world crashed and my body felt heavy. I stood looking
down the quiet, sun-filled street. Bob had been caught by the white
death, the threat of which hung over every male black in the South. I
had heard whispered tales of black boys having sex relations with white
prostitutes in the hotels in town, but I had never paid any close
attention to them; now those tales came home to me in the form of the
death of a man I knew.

I did not search for a job that day; I returned home and sat on my porch
too, and stared. What I had heard altered the look of the world, induced
in me a temporary paralysis of will and impulse. The penalty of death
awaited me if I made a false move and I wondered if it was worth-while
to make any move at all. The things that influenced my conduct as a
Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of
them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my
consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a
more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew. The actual
experience would have let me see the realistic outlines of what was
really happening, but as long as it remained something terrible and yet
remote, something whose horror and blood might descend upon me at any
moment, I was compelled to give my entire imagination over to it, an act
which blocked the springs of thought and feeling in me, creating a sense
of distance between me and the world in which I lived.

A few days later I sought out the editor of the local Negro newspaper
and found that he could not hire me. I had doubts now about my being
able to enter school that fall. The empty days of summer rolled on.
Whenever I met my classmates they would tell me about the jobs they had
found, how some of them had left town to work in summer resorts in the
North. Why did they not tell me of these jobs? I demanded of them. They
said that they simply had not thought of it, and as I heard the words
fall from their lips my sense of isolation became doubly acute. But,
after all, what would make them think of me in connection with jobs when
for years I had encountered them only casually in the classroom? I had
had no association with them; the religious home in which I lived, my
mush-and-lard-gravy poverty had cut me off from the normal processes of
the lives of black boys my own age.

One afternoon I made a discovery in the home that stunned me. I was
talking to my cousin, Maggie, who was a few months younger than I, when
Uncle Tom entered the room. He paused, stared at me with silent
hostility, then called his daughter. I gave the matter no thought. A few
moments later I rose from my chair, where I had been reading, and was on
my way down the hall when I heard Uncle Tom scolding his daughter. I
caught a few phrases:

"Do you want me to break your neck? Didn't I tell you to stay away from
him? That boy's a dangerous fool, I tell you! Then why don't you keep
away from him? And make the other children keep away from him! Ask me no
questions, but do as I tell you! Keep away from him, or I'll skin you!"

And I could hear my cousin's whimpering replies. My throat grew tight
with anger. I wanted to rush into the room and demand an explanation,
but I held still. How long had this been going on? I thought back over
the time since Uncle Tom and his family had moved into the house, and I
was filled with dismay as I recalled that on scarcely any occasion had
any of his children ever been alone with me. Be careful now, I told
myself; don't see what isn't there.... But no matter how carefully I
weighed my memories, I could recall no innocent intimacy, no games, no
playing, none of the association that usually exists between young
people living in the same house. Then suddenly I was reliving that early
morning when I had held Uncle Tom at bay with my razors. Though I must
have seemed brutal and desperate to him, I had never thought of myself
as being so, and now I was appalled at how I was regarded. It was a
flash of insight which revealed to me the true nature of my relations
with my family, an insight which altered the entire course of my life. I
was now definitely decided upon leaving home. But I would remain until
the ninth grade term had ended. There were many days when I spoke to no
one in the home except my mother. My life was falling to pieces and I
was acutely aware of it. I was poised for flight, but I was waiting for
some event, some word, some act, some circumstance to furnish the
impetus.

I returned to my job at Mrs. Bibbs's and bought my schoolbooks; my
clothing remained little better than rags. Luckily the studies in the
ninth--my last year at school--were light; and, during a part of the
term the teacher turned over the class to my supervision, an honor that
helped me emotionally and made me hope faintly. It was even hinted that,
if I kept my grades high, it would be possible for me to teach in the
city school system.

During that winter my brother came home from Chicago; I was glad to see
him, though we were strangers. But it was not long before I felt that
the affection shown him by the family was far greater than that which I
had ever had from them. Slowly my brother grew openly critical of me,
taking his cue from those about him, and it hurt. My loneliness became
organic. I felt walled in and I grew irritable. I associated less and
less with my classmates, for their talk was now full of the schools they
planned to attend when the term was over. The cold days dragged
mechanically; up early and to my job, splitting wood, carrying coal,
sweeping floors, then off to school and boredom.

The school term ended. I was selected as valedictorian of my class and
assigned to write a paper to be delivered at one of the public
auditoriums. One morning the principal summoned me to his office.

"Well, Richard Wright, here's your speech," he said with smooth
bluntness and shoved a stack of stapled sheets across his desk.

"What speech?" I asked as I picked up the papers.

"The speech you're to say the night of graduation," he said.

"But, professor, I've written my speech already," I said.

He laughed confidently, indulgently.

"Listen, boy, you're going to speak to both _white_ and colored people
that night. What can you alone think of saying to them? You have no
experience...."

I burned.

"I know that I'm not educated, professor," I said. "But the people are
coming to hear the students, and I won't make a speech that you've
written."

He leaned back in his chair and looked at me in surprise.

"You know, we've never had a boy in this school like you before," he
said. "You've had your way around here. Just how you managed to do it, I
don't know. But, listen, take this speech and say it. I know what's best
for you. You can't afford to just say _anything_ before those white
people that night." He paused and added meaningfully: "The
superintendent of schools will be there; you're in a position to make a
good impression on him. I've been a principal for more years than you
are old, boy. I've seen many a boy and girl graduate from this school,
and none of them was too proud to recite a speech I wrote for them."

I had to make up my mind quickly; I was faced with a matter of
principle. I wanted to graduate, but I did not want to make a public
speech that was not my own.

"Professor, I'm going to say my own speech that night," I said.

He grew angry.

"You're just a young, hotheaded fool," he said. He toyed with a pencil
and looked up at me. "Suppose you don't graduate?"

"But I passed my examinations," I said.

"Look, mister," he shot at me, "I'm the man who says who passes at this
school."

I was so astonished that my body jerked. I had gone to this school for
two years and I had never suspected what kind of man the principal was;
it simply had never occurred to me to wonder about him.

"Then I don't graduate," I said flatly.

I turned to leave.

"Say, you. Come here," he called.

I turned and faced him; he was smiling at me in a remote, superior sort
of way.

"You know, I'm glad I talked to you," he said. "I was seriously thinking
of placing you in the school system, teaching. But, now, I don't think
that you'll fit."

He was tempting me, baiting me; this was the technique that snared black
young minds into supporting the southern way of life.

"Look, professor, I may never get a chance to go to school again," I
said. "But I like to do things right."

"What do you mean?"

"I've no money. I'm going to work. Now, this ninth-grade diploma isn't
going to help me much in life. I'm not bitter about it; it's not your
fault. But I'm just not going to do things this way."

"Have you talked to anybody about this?" he asked me.

"No, why?"

"Are you sure?"

"This is the first I've heard of it, professor," I said, amazed again.

"You haven't talked to any white people about this?"

"No, sir!"

"I just wanted to know," he said.

My amazement increased; the man was afraid now for his job!

"Professor, you don't understand me." I smiled.

"You're just a young, hot fool," he said, confident again. "Wake up,
boy. Learn the world you're living in. You're smart and I know what
you're after. I've kept closer track of you than you think. I know your
relatives. Now, if you play safe," he smiled and winked, "I'll help you
to go to school, to college."

"I want to learn, professor," I told him. "But there are some things I
don't want to know."

"Good-bye," he said.

I went home, hurt but determined. I had been talking to a "bought" man
and he had tried to "buy" me. I felt that I had been dealing with
something unclean. That night Griggs, a boy who had gone through many
classes with me, came to the house.

"Look, Dick, you're throwing away your future here in Jackson," he said.
"Go to the principal, talk to him, take his speech and say it. I'm
saying the one he wrote. So why can't you? What the hell? What can you
lose?"

"No," I said.

"Why?"

"I know only a hell of a little, but my speech is going to reflect
that," I said.

"Then you're going to be blacklisted for teaching jobs," he said.

"Who the hell said I was going to teach?" I asked.

"God, but you've got a will," he said.

"It's not will. I just don't want to do things that way," I said.

He left. Two days later Uncle Tom came to me. I knew that the principal
had called him in.

"I hear that the principal wants you to say a speech which you've
rejected," he said.

"Yes, sir. That's right," I said.

"May I read the speech you've written?" he asked.

"Certainly," I said, giving him my manuscript.

"And may I see the one that the principal wrote?"

I gave him the principal's speech too. He went to his room and read
them. I sat quiet, waiting. He returned.

"The principal's speech is the better speech," he said.

"I don't doubt it," I replied. "But why did they ask me to write a
speech if I can't deliver it?"

"Would you let me work on your speech?" he asked.

"No, sir."

"Now, look, Richard, this is your future...."

"Uncle Tom, I don't care to discuss this with you," I said.

He stared at me, then left. The principal's speech was simpler and
clearer than mine, but it did not say anything; mine was cloudy, but it
said what I wanted to say. What could I do? I had half a mind not to
show up at the graduation exercises. I was hating my environment more
each day. As soon as school was over, I would get a job, save money, and
leave.

Griggs, who had accepted a speech written by the principal, came to my
house each day and we went off into the woods to practice orating; day
in and day out we spoke to the trees, to the creeks, frightening the
birds, making the cows in the pastures stare at us in fear. I memorized
my speech so thoroughly that I could have recited it in my sleep.

The news of my clash with the principal had spread through the class and
the students became openly critical of me.

"Richard, you're a fool. You're throwing away every chance you've got.
If they had known the kind of fool boy you are, they would never have
made you valedictorian," they said.

I gritted my teeth and kept my mouth shut, but my rage was mounting by
the hour. My classmates, motivated by a desire to "save" me, pestered me
until I all but reached the breaking point. In the end the principal had
to caution them to let me alone, for fear I would throw up the sponge
and walk out.

I had one more problem to settle before I could make my speech. I was
the only boy in my class wearing short pants and I was grimly determined
to leave school in long pants. Was I not going to work? Would I not be
on my own? When my desire for long pants became known at home, yet
another storm shook the house.

"You're trying to go too fast," my mother said.

"You're nothing but a child," Uncle Tom pronounced.

"He's beside himself," Granny said.

I served notice that I was making my own decisions from then on. I
borrowed money from Mrs. Bibbs, my employer, made a down payment on a
pearl-gray suit. If I could not pay for it, I would take the damn thing
back after graduation.

On the night of graduation I was nervous and tense; I rose and faced the
audience and my speech rolled out. When my voice stopped there was some
applause. I did not care if they liked it or not; I was through.
Immediately, even before I left the platform, I tried to shunt all
memory of the event from me. A few of my classmates managed to shake my
hand as I pushed toward the door, seeking the street. Somebody invited
me to a party and I did not accept. I did not want to see any of them
again. I walked home, saying to myself: The hell with it! With almost
seventeen years of baffled living behind me, I faced the world in 1925.




CHAPTER IX


My life now depended upon my finding work, and I was so anxious that I
accepted the first offer, a job as a porter in a clothing store selling
cheap goods to Negroes on credit. The shop was always crowded with black
men and women pawing over cheap suits and dresses. And they paid
whatever price the white man asked. The boss, his son, and the clerk
treated the Negroes with open contempt, pushing, kicking, or slapping
them. No matter how often I witnessed it, I could not get used to it.
How can they accept it? I asked myself. I kept on edge, trying to stifle
my feelings and never quite succeeding, a prey to guilt and fear because
I felt that the boss suspected that I resented what I saw.

One morning, while I was polishing brass out front, the boss and his son
drove up in their car. A frightened black woman sat between them. They
got out and half dragged and half kicked the woman into the store. White
people passed and looked on without expression. A white policeman
watched from the corner, twirling his night stick; but he made no move.
I watched out of the corner of my eyes, but I never slackened the
strokes of my chamois upon the brass. After a moment or two I heard
shrill screams coming from the rear room of the store; later the woman
stumbled out, bleeding, crying, holding her stomach, her clothing torn.
When she reached the sidewalk, the policeman met her, grabbed her,
accused her of being drunk, called a patrol wagon and carted her away.

When I went to the rear of the store, the boss and his son were washing
their hands at the sink. They looked at me and laughed uneasily. The
floor was bloody, strewn with wisps of hair and clothing. My face must
have reflected my shock, for the boss slapped me reassuringly on the
back.

"Boy, that's what we do to niggers when they don't pay their bills," he
said.

His son looked at me and grinned.

"Here, hava cigarette," he said.

Not knowing what to do, I took it. He lit his and held the match for me.
This was a gesture of kindness, indicating that, even if they had beaten
the black woman, they would not beat me if I knew enough to keep my
mouth shut.

"Yes, sir," I said.

After they had gone, I sat on the edge of a packing box and stared at
the bloody floor until the cigarette went out.

The store owned a bicycle which I used in delivering purchases. One day,
while returning from the suburbs, my bicycle tire was punctured. I
walked along the hot, dusty road, sweating and leading the bicycle by
the handle bars.

A car slowed at my side.

"What's the matter there, boy?" a white man called.

I told him that my bicycle was broken and that I was walking back to
town.

"That's too bad," he said. "Hop on the running board."

He stopped the car. I clutched hard at my bicycle with one hand and
clung to the side of the car with the other.

"All set?"

"Yes, sir."

The car started. It was full of young white men. They were drinking. I
watched the flask pass from mouth to mouth.

"Wanna drink, boy?" one asked.

The memory of my six-year-old drinking came back and filled me with
caution. But I laughed, the wind whipping my face.

"Oh, no!" I said.

The words were barely out of my mouth before I felt something hard and
cold smash me between the eyes. It was an empty whisky bottle. I saw
stars, and fell backwards from the speeding car into the dust of the
road, my feet becoming entangled in the steel spokes of the bicycle. The
car stopped and the white men piled out and stood over me.

"Nigger, ain't you learned no better sense'n that yet?" asked the man
who hit me. "Ain't you learned to say sir to a white man yet?"

Dazed, I pulled to my feet. My elbows and legs were bleeding. Fists
doubled, the white man advanced, kicking the bicycle out of the way.

"Aw, leave the bastard alone. He's got enough," said one.

They stood looking at me. I rubbed my shins, trying to stop the flow of
blood. No doubt they felt a sort of contemptuous pity, for one asked:

"You wanna ride to town now, nigger? You reckon you know enough to ride
now?"

"I wanna walk," I said simply.

Maybe I sounded funny. They laughed.

"Well, walk, you black sonofabitch!"

Before they got back into their car, they comforted me with:

"Nigger, you sure ought to be glad it was us you talked to that way.
You're a lucky bastard, 'cause if you'd said that to some other white
man, you might've been a dead nigger now."

I was learning rapidly how to watch white people, to observe their every
move, every fleeting expression, how to interpret what was said and what
left unsaid.

Late one Saturday night I made some deliveries in a white neighborhood.
I was pedaling my bicycle back to the store as fast as I could when a
police car, swerving toward me, jammed me into the curbing.

"Get down, nigger, and put up your hands!" they ordered.

I did. They climbed out of the car, guns drawn, faces set, and advanced
slowly.

"Keep still!" they ordered.

I reached my hands higher. They searched my pockets and packages. They
seemed dissatisfied when they could find nothing incriminating. Finally,
one of them said:

"Boy, tell your boss not to send you out in white neighborhoods at this
time of night."

"Yes, sir," I said.

I rode off, feeling that they might shoot at me, feeling that the
pavement might disappear. It was like living in a dream, the reality of
which might change at any moment.

Each day in the store I watched the brutality with growing hate, yet
trying to keep my feelings from registering in my face. When the boss
looked at me I would avoid his eyes. Finally the boss's son cornered me
one morning.

"Say, nigger, look here," he began.

"Yes, sir."

"What's on your mind?"

"Nothing, sir," I said, trying to look amazed, trying to fool him.

"Why don't you laugh and talk like the other niggers?" he asked.

"Well, sir, there's nothing much to say or smile about," I said,
smiling.

His face was hard, baffled; I knew that I had not convinced him. He
whirled from me and went to the front of the store; he came back a
moment later, his face red. He tossed a few green bills at me.

"I don't like your looks, nigger. Now, get!" he snapped.

I picked up the money and did not count it. I grabbed my hat and left.

       *       *       *       *       *

I held a series of petty jobs for short periods, quitting some to work
elsewhere, being driven off others because of my attitude, my speech,
the look in my eyes. I was no nearer than ever to my goal of saving
enough money to leave. At times I doubted if I could ever do it.

One jobless morning I went to my old classmate, Griggs, who worked for a
Capitol Street jeweler. He was washing the windows of the store when I
came upon him.

"Do you know where I can find a job?" I asked.

He looked at me with scorn.

"Yes, I know where you can find a job," he said, laughing.

"Where?"

"But I wonder if you can hold it," he said.

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Where's the job?"

"Take your time," he said. "You know, Dick, I know you. You've been
trying to hold a job all summer, and you can't. Why? Because you're
impatient. That's your big fault."

I said nothing, because he was repeating what I had already heard him
say. He lit a cigarette and blew out smoke leisurely.

"Well," I said, egging him on to speak.

"I wish to hell I could talk to you," he said.

"I think I know what you want to tell me," I said.

He clapped me on the shoulder; his face was full of fear, hate, concern
for me.

"Do you want to get killed?" he asked me.

"Hell, no!"

"Then, for God's sake, learn how to live in the South!"

"What do you mean?" I demanded. "Let white people tell me that. Why
should you?"

"See?" he said triumphantly, pointing his finger at me. "There it is,
_now_! It's in your face. You won't let people tell you things. You rush
too much. I'm trying to help you and you won't let me." He paused and
looked about; the streets were filled with white people. He spoke to me
in a low, full tone. "Dick, look, you're black, black, _black_, see?
Can't you understand that?"

"Sure. I understand it," I said.

"You don't act a damn bit like it," he spat.

He then reeled off an account of my actions on every job I had held that
summer.

"How did you know that?" I asked.

"White people make it their business to watch niggers," he explained.
"And they pass the word around. Now, my boss is a Yankee and he tells me
things. You're marked already."

Could I believe him? Was it true? How could I ever learn this strange
world of white people?

"Then tell me how must I act?" I asked humbly. "I just want to make
enough money to leave."

"Wait and I'll tell you," he said.

At that moment a woman and two men stepped from the jewelry store; I
moved to one side to let them pass, my mind intent upon Griggs's words.
Suddenly Griggs reached for my arm and jerked me violently, sending me
stumbling three or four feet across the pavement. I whirled.

"What's the matter with you?" I asked.

Griggs glared at me, then laughed.

"I'm teaching you how to get out of white people's way," he said.

I looked at the people who had come out of the store; yes, they were
_white_, but I had not noticed it.

"Do you see what I mean?" he asked. "White people want you out of their
way." He pronounced the words slowly so that they would sink into my
mind.

"I know what you mean," I breathed.

"Dick, I'm treating you like a brother," he said. "You act around white
people as if you didn't know that they were white. And they see it."

"Oh, Christ, I can't be a slave," I said hopelessly.

"But you've got to eat," he said.

"Yes, I got to eat."

"Then start acting like it," he hammered at me, pounding his fist in his
palm. "When you're in front of white people, _think_ before you act,
_think_ before you speak. Your way of doing things is all right among
_our_ people, but not for _white_ people. They won't stand for it."

I stared bleakly into the morning sun. I was nearing my seventeenth
birthday and I was wondering if I would ever be free of this plague.
What Griggs was saying was true, but it was simply utterly impossible
for me to calculate, to scheme, to act, to plot all the time. I would
remember to dissemble for short periods, then I would forget and act
straight and human again, not with the desire to harm anybody, but
merely forgetting the artificial status of race and class. It was the
same with whites as with blacks; it was my way with everybody. I sighed,
looking at the glittering diamonds in the store window, the rings and
the neat rows of golden watches.

"I guess you're right," I said at last. "I've got to watch myself, break
myself...."

"No," he said quickly, feeling guilty now. Someone--a white man--went
into the store and we paused in our talk. "You know, Dick, you may think
I'm an Uncle Tom, but I'm not. I hate these white people, hate 'em with
all my heart. But I can't show it; if I did, they'd kill me." He paused
and looked around to see if there were any white people within hearing
distance. "Once I heard an old drunk nigger say:

    _All these white folks dressed so fine_
    _Their ass-holes smell just like mine...."_

I laughed uneasily, looking at the white faces that passed me. But
Griggs, when he laughed, covered his mouth with his hand and bent at the
knees, a gesture which was unconsciously meant to conceal his excessive
joy in the presence of whites.

"That's how I feel about 'em," he said proudly after he had finished his
spasm of glee. He grew sober. "There's an optical company upstairs and
the boss is a Yankee from Illinois. Now, he wants a boy to work all day
in summer, mornings and evenings in winter. He wants to break a colored
boy into the optical trade. You know algebra and you're just cut out for
the work. I'll tell Mr. Crane about you and I'll get in touch with you."

"Do you suppose I could see him now?" I asked.

"For God's sake, take your _time_!" he thundered at me.

"Maybe that's what's wrong with Negroes," I said. "They take too much
time."

I laughed, but he was disturbed. I thanked him and left. For a week I
did not hear from him and I gave up hope. Then one afternoon Griggs came
to my house.

"It looks like you've got a job," he said. "You're going to have a
chance to learn a trade. But remember to keep your head. Remember you're
black. You start tomorrow."

"What will I get?"

"Five dollars a week to start with; they'll raise you if they like you,"
he explained.

My hopes soared. Things were not quite so bad, after all. I would have a
chance to learn a trade. And I need not give up school. I told him that
I would take the job, that I would be humble.

"You'll be working for a Yankee and you ought to get along," he said.

The next morning I was outside the office of the optical company long
before it opened. I was reminding myself that I must be polite, must
think before I spoke, must think before I acted, must say "yes sir, no
sir," that I must so conduct myself that white people would not think
that I thought I was as good as they. Suddenly a white man came up to
me.

"What do you want?" he asked me.

"I'm reporting for a job, sir," I said.

"O.K. Come on."

I followed him up a flight of steps and he unlocked the door of the
office. I was a little tense, but the young white man's manner put me at
ease and I sat and held my hat in my hand. A white girl came and began
punching the typewriter. Soon another white man, thin and gray, entered
and went into the rear room. Finally a tall, red-faced white man
arrived, shot me a quick glance and sat at his desk. His brisk manner
branded him a Yankee.

"You're the new boy, eh?"

"Yes, sir."

"Let me get my mail out of the way and I'll talk with you," he said
pleasantly.

"Yes, sir."

I even pitched my voice to a low plane, trying to rob it of any
suggestion or overtone of aggressiveness.

Half an hour later Mr. Crane called me to his desk and questioned me
closely about my schooling, about how much mathematics I had had. He
seemed pleased when I told him that I had had two years of algebra.

"How would you like to learn this trade?" he asked.

"I'd like it fine, sir. I'd like nothing better," I said.

He told me that he wanted to train a Negro boy in the optical trade; he
wanted to help him, guide him. I tried to answer in a way that would let
him know that I would try to be worthy of what he was doing. He took me
to the stenographer and said:

"This is Richard. He's going to be with us."

He then led me into the rear room of the office, which turned out to be
a tiny factory filled with many strange machines smeared with red dust.

"Reynolds," he said to a young white man, "this is Richard."

"What you saying there, boy!" Reynolds grinned and boomed at me.

Mr. Crane took me to the older man.

"Pease, this is Richard, who'll work with us."

Pease looked at me and nodded. Mr. Crane then held forth to the two
white men about my duties; he told them to break me in gradually to the
workings of the shop, to instruct me in the mechanics of grinding and
polishing lenses. They nodded their assent.

"Now, boy, let's see how clean you can get this place," Mr. Crane said.

"Yes, sir."

I swept, mopped, dusted, and soon had the office and the shop clean. In
the afternoons, when I had caught up with my work, I ran errands. In an
idle moment I would stand and watch the two white men grinding lenses on
the machines. They said nothing to me and I said nothing to them. The
first day passed, the second, the third, a week passed and I received my
five dollars. A month passed. But I was not learning anything and nobody
had volunteered to help me. One afternoon I walked up to Reynolds and
asked him to tell me about the work.

"What are you trying to do, get smart, nigger?" he asked me.

"No, sir," I said.

I was baffled. Perhaps he just did not want to help me. I went to Pease,
reminding him that the boss had said that I was to be given a chance to
learn the trade.

"Nigger, you think you're white, don't you?"

"No, sir."

"You're acting mighty like it," he said.

"I was only doing what the boss told me to do," I said.

Pease shook his fist in my face.

"This is a _white_ man's work around here," he said.

From then on they changed toward me; they said good morning no more.
When I was just a bit slow in performing some duty, I was called a lazy
black sonofabitch. I kept silent, striving to offer no excuse for
worsening of relations. But one day Reynolds called me to his machine.

"Nigger, you think you'll ever amount to anything?" he asked in a slow,
sadistic voice.

"I don't know, sir," I answered, turning my head away.

"What do niggers think about?" he asked.

"I don't know, sir," I said, my head still averted.

"If I was a nigger, I'd kill myself," he said.

I said nothing. I was angry.

"You know why?" he asked.

I still said nothing.

"But I don't reckon niggers mind being niggers," he said suddenly and
laughed.

I ignored him. Mr. Pease was watching me closely; then I saw them
exchange glances. My job was not leading to what Mr. Crane had said it
would. I had been humble, and now I was reaping the wages of humility.

"Come here, boy," Pease said.

I walked to his bench.

"You didn't like what Reynolds just said, did you?" he asked.

"Oh, it's all right," I said smiling.

"You didn't like it. I could see it on your face," he said.

I stared at him and backed away.

"Did you ever get into any trouble?" he asked.

"No, sir."

"What would you do if you got into trouble?"

"I don't know, sir."

"Well, watch yourself and don't get into trouble," he warned.

I wanted to report these clashes to Mr. Crane, but the thought of what
Pease or Reynolds would do to me if they learned that I had "snitched"
stopped me. I worked through the days and tried to hide my resentment
under a nervous, cryptic smile.

The climax came at noon one summer day. Pease called me to his
workbench; to get to him I had to go between two narrow benches and
stand with my back against a wall.

"Richard, I want to ask you something," Pease began pleasantly, not
looking up from his work.

"Yes, sir."

Reynolds came over and stood blocking the narrow passage between the
benches; he folded his arms and stared at me solemnly. I looked from one
to the other, sensing trouble. Pease looked up and spoke slowly, so
there would be no possibility of my not understanding.

"Richard, Reynolds here tells me that you called me Pease," he said.

I stiffened. A void opened up in me. I knew that this was the showdown.

He meant that I had failed to call him Mr. Pease. I looked at Reynolds;
he was gripping a steel bar in his hand. I opened my mouth to speak, to
protest, to assure Pease that I had never called him simply _Pease_, and
that I had never had any intention of doing so, when Reynolds grabbed me
by the collar, ramming my head against a wall.

"Now, be careful, nigger," snarled Reynolds, baring his teeth. "I heard
you call 'im _Pease_. And if you say you didn't, you're calling me a
liar, see?" He waved the steel bar threateningly.

If I had said: No, sir, Mr. Pease, I never called you _Pease_, I would
by inference have been calling Reynolds a liar; and if I had said: Yes,
sir, Mr. Pease, I called you _Pease_, I would have been pleading guilty
to the worst insult that a Negro can offer to a southern white man. I
stood trying to think of a neutral course that would resolve this
quickly risen nightmare, but my tongue would not move.

"Richard, I asked you a question!" Pease said. Anger was creeping into
his voice.

"I don't remember calling you _Pease_, Mr. Pease," I said cautiously.
"And if I did, I sure didn't mean...."

"You black sonofabitch! You called me _Pease_, then!" he spat, rising
and slapping me till I bent sideways over a bench.

Reynolds was up on top of me demanding:

"Didn't you call him _Pease_? If you say you didn't, I'll rip your gut
string loose with this f-k-g bar, you black granny dodger! You can't
call a white man a liar and get away with it!"

I wilted. I begged them not to hit me. I knew what they wanted. They
wanted me to leave the job.

"I'll leave," I promised. "I'll leave right now!"

They gave me a minute to get out of the factory, and warned me not to
show up again or tell the boss. Reynolds loosened his hand on my collar
and I ducked out of the room. I did not see Mr. Crane or the
stenographer in the office. Pease and Reynolds had so timed it that Mr.
Crane and the stenographer would be out when they turned on the terror.
I went to the street and waited for the boss to return. I saw Griggs
wiping glass shelves in the jewelry store and I beckoned to him. He came
out and I told him what had happened.

"Then what are you standing there like a fool for?" he demanded. "Won't
you ever learn? Get home! They might come down!"

I walked down Capitol Street feeling that the sidewalk was unreal, that
I was unreal, that the people were unreal, yet expecting somebody to
demand to know what right I had to be on the streets. My wound went
deep; I felt that I had been slapped out of the human race. When I
reached home, I did not tell the family what had happened; I merely told
them that I had quit, that I was not making enough money, that I was
seeking another job.

That night Griggs came to my house; we went for a walk.

"You got a goddamn tough break," he said.

"Can you say it was my fault?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"Well, what about your goddamn philosophy of meekness?" I asked him
bitterly.

"These things just happen," he said, shrugging.

"They owe me money," I said.

"That's what I came about," he said. "Mr. Crane wants you to come in at
ten in the morning. Ten sharp, now, mind you, because he'll be there and
those guys won't gang up on you again."

The next morning at ten I crept up the stairs and peered into the office
of the optical shop to make sure that Mr. Crane was in. He was at his
desk. Pease and Reynolds were at their machines in the rear.

"Come in, Richard," Mr. Crane said.

I pulled off my hat and walked into the office; I stood before him.

"Sit down," he said.

I sat. He stared at me and shook his head.

"Tell me, what happened?"

An impulse to speak rose in me and died with the realization that I was
facing a wall that I would never breech. I tried to speak several times
and could make no sounds. I grew tense and tears burnt my cheeks.

"Now, just keep control of yourself," Mr. Crane said.

I clenched my fists and managed to talk.

"I tried to do my best here," I said.

"I believe you," he said. "But I want to know what happened. Which one
bothered you?"

"Both of 'em," I said.

Reynolds came running to the door and I rose. Mr. Crane jumped to his
feet.

"Get back in there," he told Reynolds.

"That nigger's lying!" Reynolds said. "I'll kill 'im if he lies on me!"

"Get back in there or get out," Mr. Crane said.

Reynolds backed away, keeping his eyes on me.

"Go ahead," Mr. Crane said. "Tell me what happened."

Then again I could not speak. What could I accomplish by telling him? I
was black; I lived in the South. I would never learn to operate those
machines as long as those two white men in there stood by them. Anger
and fear welled in me as I felt what I had missed; I leaned forward and
clapped my hands to my face.

"No, no, now," Mr. Crane said. "Keep control of yourself. No matter what
happens, keep control...."

"I know," I said in a voice not my own. "There's no use of my saying
anything."

"Do you want to work here?" he asked me.

I looked at the white faces of Pease and Reynolds; I imagined their
waylaying me, killing me. I was remembering what had happened to Ned's
brother.

"No, sir," I breathed.

"Why?"

"I'm scared," I said. "They would kill me."

Mr. Crane turned and called Pease and Reynolds into the office.

"Now, tell me which one bothered you. Don't be afraid. Nobody's going to
hurt you," Mr. Crane said.

I stared ahead of me and did not answer. He waved the men inside. The
white stenographer looked at me with wide eyes and I felt drenched in
shame, naked to my soul. The whole of my being felt violated, and I knew
that my own fear had helped to violate it. I was breathing hard and
struggling to master my feelings.

"Can I get my money, sir?" I asked at last.

"Just sit a minute and take hold of yourself," he said.

I waited and my roused senses grew slowly calm.

"I'm awfully sorry about this," he said.

"I had hoped for a lot from this job," I said. "I'd wanted to go to
school, to college...."

"I know," he said. "But what are you going to do now?"

My eyes traveled over the office, but I was not seeing.

"I'm going away," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm going to get out of the South," I breathed.

"Maybe that's best," he said. "I'm from Illinois. Even for me, it's hard
here. I can do just so much."

He handed me my money, more than I had earned for the week. I thanked
him and rose to leave. He rose. I went into the hallway and he followed
me. He reached out his hand.

"It's tough for you down here," he said.

I barely touched his hand. I walked swiftly down the hall, fighting
against crying again. I ran down the steps, then paused and looked back
up. He was standing at the head of the stairs, shaking his head. I went
into the sunshine and walked home like a blind man.




CHAPTER X


For weeks after that I could not believe in my feelings. My personality
was numb, reduced to a lumpish, loose, dissolved state. I was a non-man,
something that knew vaguely that it was human but felt that it was not.
As time separated me from the experience, I could feel no hate for the
men who had driven me from the job. They did not seem to be individual
men, but part of a huge, implacable, elemental design toward which hate
was futile. What I did feel was a longing to attack. But how? And
because I knew of no way to grapple with this thing, I felt doubly cast
out.

I went to bed tired and got up tired, though I was having no physical
exercise. During the day I overreacted to each event, my banked emotions
spilling around it. I refused to talk to anyone about my affairs,
because I knew that I would only hear a justification of the ways of the
white folks and I did not want to hear it. I lived carrying a huge
wound, tender, festering, and I shrank when I came near anything that I
thought would touch it.

But I had to work because I had to eat. My next job was that of a helper
in a drugstore, and the night before I reported for work I fought with
myself, telling myself that I had to master this thing, that my life
depended upon it. Other black people worked, got along somehow, then I
must, _must_, MUST get along until I could get my hands on enough money
to leave. I would make myself fit in. Others had done it. I would do it.
I had to do it.

I went to the job apprehensive, resolving to watch my every move. I
swept the sidewalk, pausing when a white person was twenty feet away. I
mopped the store, cautiously waiting for the white people to move out of
my way in their own good time. I cleaned acres of glass shelving,
changing my tempo now to work faster, holding every nuance of reality
within the focus of my consciousness. Noon came and the store was
crowded; people jammed to the counters for food. A white man behind the
counter ran up to me and shouted:

"A jug of Coca-Cola, quick, boy!"

My body jerked taut and I stared at him. He stared at me.

"What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing," I said.

"Well, move! Don't stand there gaping!"

Even if I had tried, I could not have told him what was wrong. My
sustained expectation of violence had exhausted me. My preoccupation
with curbing my impulses, my speech, my movements, my manner, my
expressions had increased my anxiety. I became forgetful, concentrating
too much upon trivial tasks. The men began to yell at me and that made
it worse. One day I dropped a jug of orange syrup in the middle of the
floor. The boss was furious. He caught my arm and jerked me into the
back of the drugstore. His face was livid. I expected him to hit me. I
was braced to defend myself.

"I'm going to deduct that from your pay, you black bastard!" he yelled.

Words had come instead of blows and I relaxed.

"Yes, sir," I said placatingly. "It was my fault."

My tone whipped him to a frenzy.

"You goddamn right it was!" he yelled louder.

"I'm new at this," I mumbled, realizing that I had said the wrong thing,
though I had been striving to say the right.

"We're only trying you out," he warned me.

"Yes, sir. I understand," I said.

He stared at me, speechless with rage. Why could I not learn to keep my
mouth shut at the right time? I had said just one short sentence too
many. My words were innocent enough, but they indicated, it seemed, a
consciousness on my part that infuriated white people.

Saturday night came and the boss gave me my money and snapped: "Don't
come back. You won't do."

I knew what was wrong with me, but I could not correct it. The words and
actions of white people were baffling signs to me. I was living in a
culture and not a civilization and I could learn how that culture worked
only by living with it. Misreading the reactions of whites around me
made me say and do the wrong things. In my dealing with whites I was
conscious of the entirety of my relations with them, and they were
conscious only of what was happening at a given moment. I had to keep
remembering what others took for granted; I had to think out what others
felt.

I had begun coping with the white world too late. I could not make
subservience an automatic part of my behavior. I had to feel and think
out each tiny item of racial experience in the light of the whole race
problem, and to each item I brought the whole of my life. While standing
before a white man I had to figure out how to perform each act and how
to say each word. I could not help it. I could not grin. In the past I
had always said too much, now I found that it was difficult to say
anything at all. I could not react as the world in which I lived
expected me to; that world was too baffling, too uncertain.

I was idle for weeks. The summer waned. Hope for school was now
definitely gone. Autumn came and many of the boys who held jobs returned
to school. Jobs were now numerous. I heard that hall-boys were needed at
one of the hotels, the hotel in which Ned's brother had lost his life.
Should I go there? Would I, too, make a fatal slip? But I had to earn
money. I applied and was accepted to mop long white tiled hallways that
stretched around the entire perimeter of the office floors of the
building. I reported each night at ten, got a huge pail of water, a
bushel of soap flakes and, with a gang of moppers, I worked. All the
boys were Negroes and I was happy; at least I could talk, joke, laugh,
sing, say what I pleased.

I began to marvel at how smoothly the black boys acted out the roles
that the white race had mapped out for them. Most of them were not
conscious of living a special, separate, stunted way of life. Yet I knew
that in some period of their growing up--a period that they had no doubt
forgotten--there had been developed in them a delicate, sensitive
controlling mechanism that shut off their minds and emotions from all
that the white race had said was taboo. Although they lived in an
America where in theory there existed equality of opportunity, they knew
unerringly what to aspire to and what not to aspire to. Had a black boy
announced that he aspired to be a writer, he would have been
unhesitatingly called crazy by his pals. Or had a black boy spoken of
yearning to get a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, his friends--in
the boy's own interest--would have reported his odd ambition to the
white boss.

There was a pale-yellow boy who had gonorrhea and was proud of it.

"Say," he asked me one night, "you ever have the clap?"

"God, no," I said. "Why do you ask?"

"I got it," he said matter-of-factly. "I thought you could tell me
something to use."

"Haven't you been to a doctor?" I asked.

"Aw, hell. Them doctors ain't no good."

"Don't be foolish," I said.

"What's the matter with you?" he demanded of me. "You talk like you'd be
'shamed of the clap."

"I would," I said.

"Hell, you ain't a man 'less you done had it three times," he said.

"Don't brag about it," I said.

"'Tain't nothing worse'n a bad cold," he said.

But I noticed that when he urinated he would grab hold of a steam pipe,
a doorjamb, or a window sill and strain with tear-filled eyes and a
tortured face, as though he were attempting to lift the hotel up from
its foundations. I laughed to cover my disgust.

When I was through mopping, I would watch the never-ending crap games
that went on in the lockers, but I could never become interested enough
to participate. Gambling had never appealed to me. I could not conceive
of any game holding more risks than the life I was living. Curses and
sex stories sounded round the clock and blue smoke choked the air. I
would sit listening for hours, wondering how on earth they could laugh
so freely, trying to grasp the miracle that gave their debased lives the
semblance of a human existence.

Several Negro girls were employed as maids in the hotel, some of whom I
knew. One night when I was about to go home I saw a girl who lived in my
direction and I fell in beside her to walk part of the distance
together. As we passed the white night watchman, he slapped her
playfully on her buttocks. I turned around, amazed. The girl twisted out
of his reach, tossed her head saucily, and went down the hallway. I had
not moved from my tracks.

"Nigger, you look like you don't like what I did," he said.

I could not move or speak. My immobility must have seemed a challenge to
him, for he pulled his gun.

"Don't you like it, nigger?"

"Yes, sir," I whispered with a dry throat.

"Well, talk like it, then, goddammit!"

"Oh, yes, sir!" I said with as much heartiness as I could muster.

I walked down the hall, knowing that the gun was pointed at me, but
afraid to look back. When I was out of the door, my throat felt as
though it were swelling and bursting with fire. The girl was waiting for
me. I walked past her. She caught up with me.

"God, how could you let him do that?" I exploded.

"It don't matter. They do that all the time," she said.

"I wanted to do something," I said.

"You woulda been a fool if you had," she said.

"But how must you feel?"

"They never get any further with us than that, if we don't want 'em to,"
she said dryly.

"Yes, I would've been a fool," I said, but she did not catch the point.

I was afraid to go to work the following night. What would the watchman
think? Would he decide to teach me a lesson? I walked slowly through the
door, wondering if he would continue his threat. His eyes looked at and
through me. Evidently he considered the matter closed, or else he had
had so many experiences of that kind that he had already forgotten it.

Out of my salary I had begun to save a few dollars, for my determination
to leave had not lessened. But I found the saving exasperatingly slow. I
pondered continuously ways of making money, and the only ways that I
could think of involved transgressions of the law. No, I must not do
that, I told myself. To go to jail in the South would mean the end. And
there was the possibility that if I were ever caught I would never reach
jail.

This was the first time in my life that I had ever consciously
entertained the idea of violating the laws of the land. I had felt that
my intelligence and industry could cope with all situations, and, until
that time, I had never stolen a penny from anyone. Even hunger had never
driven me to appropriate what was not my own. The mere idea of stealing
had been repugnant. I had not been honest from deliberate motives, but
being dishonest had simply never occurred to me.

Yet, all about me, Negroes were stealing. More than once I had been
called a "dumb nigger" by black boys who discovered that I had not
availed myself of a chance to snatch some petty piece of white property
that had been carelessly left within my reach.

"How in hell you gonna git ahead?" I had been asked when I had said that
one ought not steal.

I knew that the boys in the hotel filched whatever they could. I knew
that Griggs, my friend who worked in the Capitol Street jewelry store,
was stealing regularly and successfully. I knew that a black neighbor of
mine was stealing bags of grain from a wholesale house where he worked,
though he was a stanch deacon in his church and prayed and sang on
Sundays. I knew that the black girls who worked in white homes stole
food daily to supplement their scanty wages. And I knew that the very
nature of black and white relations bred this constant thievery.

No Negroes in my environment had ever thought of organizing, no matter
in how orderly a fashion, and petitioning their white employers for
higher wages. The very thought would have been terrifying to them, and
they knew that the whites would have retaliated with swift brutality.
So, pretending to conform to the laws of the whites, grinning, bowing,
they let their fingers stick to what they could touch. And the whites
seemed to like it.

But I, who stole nothing, who wanted to look them straight in the face,
who wanted to talk and act like a man, inspired fear in them. The
southern whites would rather have had Negroes who stole, work for them
than Negroes who knew, however dimly, the worth of their own humanity.
Hence, whites placed a premium upon black deceit; they encouraged
irresponsibility; and their rewards were bestowed upon us blacks in the
degree that we could make them feel safe and superior.

My objections to stealing were not moral. I did not approve of it
because I knew that, in the long run, it was futile, that it was not an
effective way to alter one's relationship to one's environment. Then,
how could I change my relationship to my environment? Almost my entire
salary went to feed the eternally hungry stomachs at home. If I saved a
dollar a week, it would take me two years to amass a hundred dollars,
the amount which for some reason I had decided was necessary to stake me
in a strange city. And, God knows, anything could happen to me in two
years....

I did not know when I would be thrown into a situation where I would say
the wrong word to the wrong white man and find myself in trouble. And,
above all, I wanted to avoid trouble, for I feared that if I clashed
with whites I would lose control of my emotions and spill out words that
would be my sentence of death. Time was not on my side and I had to make
some move. Often, when perplexed, I longed to be like the smiling, lazy,
forgetful black boys in the noisy hotel locker rooms, with no torrential
conflicts to resolve. Many times I grew weary of the secret burden I
carried and longed to cast it down, either in action or in resignation.
But I was not made to be a resigned man and I had only a limited choice
of actions, and I was afraid of all of them.

A new anxiety was created in me by my desire to leave quickly. I had
now seen at close quarters the haughty white men who made the laws; I
had seen how they acted, how they regarded black people, how they
regarded me; and I no longer felt bound by the laws which white and
black were supposed to obey in common. I was outside those laws; the
white people had told me so. Now when I thought of ways to escape from
my environment I no longer felt the inner restraint that would have made
stealing impossible, and this new freedom made me lonely and afraid.

My feelings became divided; in spite of myself I would dream of a locked
cupboard in a near-by neighbor's house where a gun was kept. If I stole
it, how much would it bring? When the yearning to leave would become
strong in me, I could not keep out of my mind the image of a storehouse
at a near-by Negro college that held huge cans of preserved fruits. Yet
fear kept me from making any move; the idea of stealing floated
tentatively in me. My inability to adjust myself to the white world had
already shattered a part of the structure of my personality and had
broken down the inner barriers to crime; the only thing that now stood
in the way was lack of immediate opportunity, a final push of
circumstance. And that came.

I was promoted to bellboy, which meant a small increase in income. But I
soon learned that the substantial money came from bootlegging liquor to
the white prostitutes in the hotel. The other bellboys were taking these
risks, and I fell in. I learned how to walk past a white policeman with
contraband upon my hip, sauntering, whistling like a nigger ought to
whistle when he is innocent. The extra dollars were coming in, but
slowly. How, how, how could I get my hands on more money before I was
caught and sent to jail for some trivial misdemeanor? If I were going to
violate the law, then I ought to get something out of it. My larcenous
aims were modest. A hundred dollars would give me, temporarily, more
freedom of movement than I had ever known in my life. I watched and
waited, living with the thought.

While waiting for my chance to grab and run, I grew used to seeing the
white prostitutes naked upon their beds, sitting nude about their rooms,
and I learned new modes of behavior, new rules in how to live the Jim
Crow life. It was presumed that we black boys took their nakedness for
granted, that it startled us no more than a blue vase or a red rug. Our
presence awoke in them no sense of shame whatever, for we blacks were
not considered human anyway. If they were alone, I would steal sidelong
glances at them. But if they were receiving men, not a flicker of my
eyelids would show.

A huge, snowy-skinned blonde took a room on my floor. One night she rang
for service and I went to wait upon her. She was in bed with a thickset
man; both were nude and uncovered. She said that she wanted some liquor,
and slid out of bed and waddled across the floor to get her money from
the dresser drawer. Without realizing it, I watched her.

"Nigger, what in hell are you looking at?" the white man asked, raising
himself upon his elbows.

"Nothing, sir," I answered, looking suddenly miles deep into the blank
wall of the room.

"Keep your eyes where they belong if you want to be healthy!"

"Yes, sir."

I would have continued at the hotel until I left had not a shortcut
presented itself. One of the boys at the hotel whispered to me one night
that the only local Negro movie house wanted a boy to take tickets at
the door.

"You ain't never been in jail, is you?" he asked me.

"Not yet," I answered.

"Then you can get the job," he said. "I'd take it, but I done six months
and they know me."

"What's the catch?"

"The girl who sells tickets is using a system," he explained. "If you
get the job, you can make some good gravy."

If I stole, I would have a chance to head northward quickly; if I
remained barely honest, piddling with pints of bootleg liquor, I merely
prolonged my stay, increased my chances of being caught, exposed myself
to the possibility of saying the wrong word or doing the wrong thing and
paying a penalty that I dared not think of. The temptation to venture
into crime was too strong, and I decided to work quickly, taking
whatever was in sight, amass a wad of money, and flee. I knew that
others had tried it before me and had failed, but I was hoping to be
lucky.

My chances for getting the job were good; I had no past record of
stealing or violating the laws. When I presented myself to the Jewish
proprietor of the movie house I was immediately accepted. The next day I
reported for duty and began taking tickets. The boss man warned me:

"Now, look, I'll be honest with you if you'll be honest with me. I don't
know who's honest around this joint and who isn't. But if you are
honest, then the rest are bound to be. All tickets will pass through
your hands. There can be no stealing unless you steal."

I gave him a pledge of my honesty, feeling absolutely no qualms about
what I intended to do. He was white, and I could never do to him what he
and his kind had done to me. Therefore, I reasoned, stealing was not a
violation of my ethics, but of his; I felt that things were rigged in
his favor and any action I took to circumvent his scheme of life was
justified. Yet I had not convinced myself.

During the first afternoon the Negro girl in the ticket office watched
me closely and I knew that she was sizing me up, trying to determine
when it would be safe to break me into her graft. I waited, leaving it
to her to make the first move.

I was supposed to drop each ticket that I took from a customer into a
metal receptacle. Occasionally the boss would go to the ticket window
and look at the serial number on the roll of unsold tickets and then
compare that number with the number on the last ticket I had dropped
into the receptacle. The boss continued his watchfulness for a few days,
then began to observe me from across the street; finally he absented
himself for long intervals.

A tension as high as that I had known when the white men had driven me
from the job at the optician's returned to live in me. But I had learned
to master a great deal of tension now; I had developed, slowly and
painfully, a capacity to contain it within myself without betraying it
in any way. Had this not been true, the mere thought of stealing, the
risks involved, the inner distress would have so upset me that I would
have been in no state of mind to calculate coldly, would have made me so
panicky that I would have been afraid to steal at all. But my inner
resistance had been blasted. I felt that I had been emotionally cast out
of the world, had been made to live outside the normal processes of
life, had been conditioned in feeling _against_ something daily, had
become accustomed to living on the side of those who watched and waited.

While I was eating supper in a near-by caf one night, a strange Negro
man walked in and sat beside me.

"Hello, Richard," he said.

"Hello," I said. "I don't think I know you."

"But I know _you_," he said, smiling.

Was he one of the boss's spies?

"How do you know me?" I asked.

"I'm Tel's friend," he said, naming the girl who sold the tickets at the
movie.

I looked at him searchingly. Was he telling me the truth? Or was he
trying to trap me for the boss? I was already thinking and feeling like
a criminal, distrusting everybody.

"We start tonight," he said.

"What?" I asked, still not admitting that I knew what he was talking
about.

"Don't be scared. The boss trusts you. He's gone to see some friends.
Somebody's watching him and if he starts back to the movie, they'll
phone us," he said.

I could not eat my food. It lay cold upon the plate and sweat ran down
from my armpits.

"It'll work this way," he explained in a low, smooth tone. "A guy'll
come to you and ask for a match. You give him five tickets that you'll
hold out of the box, see? We'll give you the signal when to start
holding out. The guy'll give the tickets to Tel; she'll resell them all
at once, when a crowd is buying at the rush hour. You get it?"

I did not answer. I knew that if I were caught I would go to the chain
gang. But was not my life already a kind of chain gang? What, really,
did I have to lose?

"Are you with us?" he asked.

I still did not answer. He rose and clapped me on the shoulder and left.
I trembled as I went back to the theater. Anything might happen, but I
was used to that. Had I not felt that same sensation when I lay on the
ground and the white men towered over me, telling me that I was a lucky
nigger? Had I not felt it when I walked home from the optical company
that morning with my job gone? Had I not felt it when I walked down the
hallway of the hotel with the night watchman pointing a gun at my back?
Had I not felt it all a million times before? I took the tickets with
sweaty fingers. I waited. I was gambling: freedom or the chain gang.
There were times when I felt that I could not breathe. I looked up and
down the street; the boss was not in sight. Was this a trap? If it were,
I would disgrace my family. Would not all of them say that my attitude
had been leading to this all along? Would they not rake up the past and
find clues that had led to my fate?

The man I had met in the caf came through the door and put a ticket in
my hand.

"There's a crowd at the box office," he whispered. "Save ten, not five.
Start with this one."

Well, here goes, I thought. He gave me the ticket and sat looking at
the moving shadows upon the screen. I held on to the ticket and my body
grew tense, hot as fire; but I was used to that too. Time crawled
through the cells of my brain. My muscles ached. I discovered that crime
means suffering. The crowd came in and gave me more tickets. I kept ten
of them tucked into my moist palm. No sooner had the crowd thinned than
a black boy with a cigarette jutting from his mouth came up to me.

"Gotta match?"

With a slow movement I gave him the tickets. He went out and I kept the
door cracked and watched. He went to the ticket office and laid down a
coin and I saw him slip the tickets to the girl. Yes, the boy was
honest. The girl shot me a quick smile and I went back inside. A few
moments later the same tickets were handed to me by other customers.

We worked it for a week and after the money was split four ways, I had
fifty dollars. Freedom was almost within my grasp. Ought I risk any
more? I dropped the hint to Tel's friend that maybe I would quit; it was
a casual hint to test him out. He grew violently angry and I quickly
consented to stay, fearing that someone might turn me in for revenge, or
to get me out of the way so that another and more pliable boy could have
my place. I was dealing with cagey people and I would be cagey.

I went through another week. Late one night I resolved to make that week
the last. The gun in the neighbor's house came to my mind, and the cans
of fruit preserves in the storehouse of the college. If I stole them and
sold them, I would have enough to tide me over in Memphis until I could
get a job, work, save, and go north. I crept from bed and found the
neighbor's house empty. I looked about; all was quiet. My heart beat so
fast that it ached. I forced a window with a screwdriver and entered and
took the gun; I slipped it in my shirt and returned home. When I took it
out to look at it, it was wet with sweat. I pawned it under an assumed
name.

The following night I rounded up two boys whom I knew to be ready for
adventure. We broke into the college storehouse and lugged out cans of
fruit preserves and sold them to restaurants.

Meanwhile I bought clothes, shoes, a cardboard suitcase, all of which I
hid at home. Saturday night came and I sent word to the boss that I was
sick. Uncle Tom was upstairs. Granny and Aunt Addie were at church. My
brother was sleeping. My mother sat in her rocking chair, humming to
herself. I packed my suitcase and went to her.

"Mama, I'm going away," I whispered.

"Oh, no," she protested.

"I've got to, mama. I can't live this way."

"You're not running away from something you've done?"

"I'll send for you, mama. I'll be all right."

"Take care of yourself. And send for me quickly. I'm not happy here,"
she said.

"I'm sorry for all these long years, mama. But I could not have helped
it."

I kissed her and she cried.

"Be quiet, mama. I'm all right."

I went out the back way and walked a quarter of a mile to the railroad
tracks. It began to rain as I tramped down the crossties toward town. I
reached the station soaked to the skin. I bought my ticket, then went
hurriedly to the corner of the block in which the movie house stood.
Yes, the boss was there, taking the tickets himself. I returned to the
station and waited for my train, my eyes watching the crowd.

An hour later I was sitting in a Jim Crow coach, speeding northward,
making the first lap of my journey to a land where I could live with a
little less fear. Slowly the burden I had carried for many months lifted
somewhat. My cheeks itched and when I scratched them I found tears. In
that moment I understood the pain that accompanied crime and I hoped
that I would never have to feel it again. I never did feel it again, for
I never stole again; and what kept me from it was the knowledge that,
for me, crime carried its own punishment.

Well, it's my life, I told myself. I'll see now what I can make of
it....




CHAPTER XI


I arrived in Memphis on a cold November Sunday morning, in 1925, and
lugged my suitcase down quiet, empty sidewalks through winter sunshine.
I found Beale Street, the street that I had been told was filled with
danger: pickpockets, prostitutes, cutthroats, and black confidence men.
After walking several blocks, I saw a big frame house with a sign in the
window: ROOMS. I slowed, wondering if it was a rooming house or a
whorehouse. I had heard of the foolish blunders that small-town boys
made when they went to big cities and I wanted to be very cautious. I
walked past the house to the end of the block, then turned and walked
slowly past it again. Well, whatever it was, I would stay in it for a
day or two, until I found something I was certain of. I had nothing
valuable in my suitcase. My money was strapped to my body; in order for
anyone to get it, they would have to kill me.

I walked up the steps and was about to ring the bell when I saw a big
mulatto woman staring at me through the window. Oh, hell, I thought.
This _is_ a whorehouse.... I stopped. The woman smiled. I turned around
and went back down the walk. As I neared the street, I looked back in
time to see the woman's face leave the window. A moment later she
appeared in the doorway.

"Come here, boy!" she called to me.

I hesitated. Goddamn, I've run into a whore right off....

"Come here, boy," she commanded loudly. "I'm not going to hurt you."

I turned and walked slowly toward her.

"Come inside," she said.

I stared at her a moment, then stepped into a warm hallway. The woman
smiled, turned on a light, and looked at me from my head to my feet.

"How come you was walking past this house so many times?" she asked.

"I was looking for a room," I said.

"Didn't you see the sign?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then how come you didn't come in?"

"Well, I don't know. You see, I'm a stranger here...."

"Lord, and don't I know it!" She dropped heavily into a chair and went
into a gale of laughter that made her big bosom shake as though it were
going to fly off. "Anybody could tell that." She gasped, giggled, and
grew quiet. She said: "I'm Mrs. Moss."

I told her my name.

"That's a real nice name," she said after a moment's serious thought.

I blinked. What the hell kind of place was this? And who was this woman?
I stood with my suitcase in my hand, poised to leave.

"Boy, Lord, this ain't no whorehouse," she said at last. "Folks get the
craziest notions about Beale Street. I own this place; this is my home.
I'm a church member. I got a daughter seventeen years old, and, by God,
I sure make her walk a straight chalk line. Sit down, son. You in safe
hands here."

I laughed and sat.

"Where might you be from?" she asked.

"Jackson, Mississippi."

"You act mighty bright to be from there," she commented.

"There are bright people in Jackson," I said.

"If there is, I got yet to see some of 'em. Most of 'em can't talk. They
just stand with their heads down, with one foot on top of the other and
you have to guess at what they're trying to say."

I was at ease now. I liked her.

"My husband works in a bakery," she rattled on pleasantly, openly, as
though she had known me for years. "We take in roomers to help out. We
just simple people here. You can call this home, if you got a mind to.
The rent's three dollars."

"That's a little high," I said.

"Then give me two dollars and a half till you get yourself a job," she
said.

I accepted and she showed me my room. I set my suitcase down.

"You run off, didn't you?" she asked.

I jerked in surprise.

"How did you know?"

"Boy, your heart's like an open book," she said. "I know things. Lotta
boys run off to Memphis from little towns. They think they gonna find
it easy here, but they don't." She looked at me searchingly. "You
drink?"

"Oh, no, ma'am."

"Didn't mean no harm, son," she said. "Just wanted to know. You can
drink here, if you like. Just don't make a fool of yourself. You can
bring your girl here too. Do anything you want, but be decent."

I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her in amazement. It was on
reputedly disreputable Beale Street in Memphis that I had met the
warmest, friendliest person I had ever known, that I discovered that all
human beings were not mean and driving, were not bigots like the members
of my family.

"You can eat dinner with us when we come from church," she said.

"Thank you. I'd like to."

"Maybe you want to come to church with us?"

"Well...." I hedged.

"Naw, you're tired," she said, closing the door.

I lay on the bed and reveled in the delightful sensation of living out a
long-sought dream. I had always flinched inwardly from the lonely terror
that I had thought I would feel in a strange city, and now I had found a
home with friendly people. I relaxed completely and dozed off to sleep,
for I had not slept much for many nights. Later I came awake with a
sudden start, remembering the fright and tension that had accompanied my
foray into crime. Well, all that was gone now. I could start anew. I did
not like to feel tension and fear. I wanted something else, to be human,
to be caught up in something meaningful. But I must first get a job.

Late that afternoon Mrs. Moss called me for dinner and introduced me to
her daughter, Bess, whom I liked at once. She was young, simple, sweet,
and brown. Mrs. Moss apologized for her husband, who was still at work.
Why was she treating me so kindly? It made me self-conscious. We were
eating dessert when Bess spoke.

"Mama's done told me all about you," she said.

"I'm afraid that there isn't much to tell," I said.

"She said you was walking up and down in the street in front of the
house, and didn't know whether to come in," Bess said, giggling. "What
kind of place did you think this was?"

I hung my head and smiled. Mrs. Moss went into a storm of laughter and
left the room.

"Mama says she said to herself soon's she saw you out there on that
street with your suitcase, 'That boy's looking for a clean home to live
in,'" Bess said. "Mama's good about knowing what folks feel."

"She seems to be," I said, helping Bess to wash the dishes.

"You can eat with us any time you like," Bess said.

"Thanks," I said. "But I couldn't do that."

"How come?" Bess asked. "We got a plenty."

"I know. But a man ought to pay his own way."

"Mama said you'd be like that," Bess said with satisfaction.

Mrs. Moss returned to the kitchen.

"Bess's going to be married soon," she announced.

"Congratulations!" I said. "Who's the lucky man?"

"Oh, I ain't got nobody yet," Bess said.

I was puzzled. Mrs. Moss laughed and nudged me.

"I say gals oughta marry young," she said. "Now, if Bess found a nice
young man like _you_, Richard...."

"Mama!" Bess wailed, hiding her face in the dishcloth.

"I mean it," Mrs. Moss said. "Richard's a heap better'n them old
ignorant nigger boys you been running after at school."

I gaped at one and then the other. What was happening here? They barely
knew me; I had been in the house but a few hours.

"The minute I laid eyes on that boy in the street this morning," Mrs.
Moss said, "I said to myself, 'That's the kind of boy for Bess.'"

Bess came to me and leaned her head on my shoulder. I was stunned. How
on earth could she act like this?

"Mama, don't," Bess pleaded teasingly.

"I mean it," Mrs. Moss said. "Richard, I'm worried about whose hands
this house is going to fall into. I ain't too long for this old world."

"Bess'll find a boy who'll love her," I said uneasily.

"I ain't so sure," Mrs. Moss said, shaking her head.

"I'm going up front," Bess said, giggling, burying her face in her
hands, and running out.

Mrs. Moss came close to me and spoke confidently.

"A gal's a funny thing," she said, laughing. "They has to be tamed. Just
like wild animals."

"She's all right," I said, wiping the table, thinking furiously, not
wanting to become involved too deeply with the family.

"You like Bess, Richard?" Mrs. Moss asked me suddenly.

I stared at her, doubting my ears.

"I've been in the house only a couple of hours," I said hesitantly.
"She's a fine girl."

"Now. I mean do you _like_ her? Could you _love_ her?" she asked
insistently.

I stared at Mrs. Moss, wondering if something was wrong with Bess. What
kind of people were these?

"You people don't know me. I didn't exist for you five hours ago," I
said seriously. Then I shot at her: "I could be a robber or a burglar
for all you know."

"Son, I know you," she said emphatically.

Oh, Christ, I thought. I'll have to leave this place.

"You go on up front with Bess," Mrs. Moss said.

"Look, Mrs. Moss, I'm just a poor nobody," I said.

"You got something in you I like," she said. "Money ain't everything.
You got a good Christian heart and everybody ain't got that."

I winced and turned my head away. Her nave simplicity was overwhelming.
I felt as though I had been accused of something.

"I worked twenty years and bought this house myself," she went on. "I'd
be happy when I died if I thought Bess had a husband like you."

"Oh, mama!" Bess shrieked with protesting laughter from the front room.

I went into a warm, cozy front room and sat on the sofa. Bess was
sitting on a little bench, looking out the window. How must I act toward
this girl? I did not want to be drawn into something I did not want, and
neither did I wish to wound anybody's feelings.

"Don't you wanna set here with me?" Bess said.

I rose and sat with her. Neither of us spoke for a long time.

"I'm the same age as you," Bess said. "I'm seventeen."

"Do you go to school?" I asked to make conversation.

"Yes," she said. "Wanna see my books?"

"I'd like to."

She rose and brought her schoolbooks to me. I saw that she was in the
fifth grade.

"I ain't so good in school," she said, tossing her head. "But I don't
care."

"Well, school's kind of important, you know," I said cautiously.

"Love is the important thing," she countered strongly.

I wondered if she were demented. The behavior of the mother and the
daughter ran counter to all I had ever seen or known. Mrs. Moss came
into the room.

"I think I'll go out and look for a job," I said, wanting to escape
them.

"On a Sunday!" Mrs. Moss exclaimed. "Wait till in the morning."

"But I can learn the streets tonight anyway," I said.

"That's really a good thought," Mrs. Moss said after a moment's
reflection. "You see, Bess? That boy thinks."

I felt awkward, embarrassed, called upon to say something.

"I'll be glad to help you with your lessons, Bess," I said.

"You think you can?" she asked, doubting.

"Well, I used to take charge of classes at school last year," I said.

"Now ain't that nice?" Mrs. Moss said in a honeyed tone.

I went to my room and lay on the bed and tried to fathom out the kind of
home I had come to. That they were serious, I had no doubt. Would they
be angry with me when they learned that my life was a million miles from
theirs? How could I avoid that? Was it wise to remain here with a
seventeen-year-old girl eager for marriage and a mother equally anxious
to have her marry me? What on earth had they seen in me to have made
them act toward me as they had? My clothes were not good. True, I had
manners, manners that had been drilled into me at home, at school,
manners that had been kicked into me on jobs; but anybody could have
manners. I had learned to know these people better in five hours than I
had learned to know my own family in five years.

Later, after I had grown to understand the peasant mentality of Bess and
her mother, I learned the full degree to which my life at home had cut
me off, not only from white people but from Negroes as well. To Bess and
her mother, money was important, but they did not strive for it too
hard. They had no tensions, unappeasable longings, no desire to do
something to redeem themselves. The main value in their lives was
simple, clean, good living and when they thought they had found those
same qualities in one of their race, they instinctively embraced him,
liked him, and asked no questions. But such simple unaffected trust
flabbergasted me. It was impossible.

I walked down Beale Street and into the heart of Memphis. My body was
thin, my overcoat shabby, and each gust of wind chilled my blood. On
Main Street I saw a sign in a caf window:

    DISH WASHER WANTED

I went in and spoke to the manager and was hired to come to work the
following night. The salary was ten dollars for the first week and
twelve thereafter.

"Don't hire anyone else," I told him. "I'll be here."

I would get two meals at the caf. But how would I eat in the daytime? I
went into a store and bought a can of pork and beans and a can opener.
Well, that problem was solved. I would pay two dollars and a half a week
for my room and I would save the balance for my trip to Chicago. All my
thoughts and movements were dictated by distant hopes.

Mrs. Moss was astonished when I told her that I had a job.

"You see, Bess," she said. "That boy's got a job his first day here.
That's get-up for you. He's going somewhere. He just don't sit and gab.
He moves."

Bess smiled at me. It seemed that every move I made captivated her. Mrs.
Moss went upstairs to bed. I was uneasy.

"Lemme rest your coat," Bess said.

She took my coat and felt the can in the pocket.

"What you got in there?" she asked.

"Oh, nothing," I mumbled, trying to take the coat from her.

She pulled out the beans and the can opener. Her eyes widened with pity.

"Richard, you hungry, ain't you?" she asked me.

"Naw," I mumbled.

"Then let's eat some chicken," she said.

"Oh, all right," I said.

Bess ran to the stairway.

"Mama!" she called.

"Don't disturb her," I said, knowing that she was going to tell Mrs.
Moss about my wanting to eat out of a can and feeling my heart fill with
shame. My muscles flexed to hit her.

Mrs. Moss came down in her house robe.

"Mama, look what Richard was gonna do," Bess said, showing the can. "He
was gonna eat this in his room."

"Lord, boy," Mrs. Moss said. "You don't have to do that."

"I'm used to it," I said. "I've got to save money."

"I just won't let you eat out of a can in my house," she said. "You
don't have to pay me to eat. Go in the kitchen and eat. That's all."

"But I wouldn't dirty your room with the can," I said.

"It ain't that, son," Mrs. Moss said. "Why do you want to eat out of a
can when you can set at the table with us?"

"I don't want to be a burden to anybody," I said.

Mrs. Moss stared at me, then hung her head and cried. I was stunned. It
was incredible that what I did or the way I lived could evoke tears from
anyone. Then my shame made me angry.

"You just ain't never had no home life," she said. "I'm sorry for you."

I stiffened. I did not like that. She was reaching into my inner life,
where it was sore, and I did not want anyone there.

"I'm all right," I mumbled.

Mrs. Moss shook her head and went upstairs. I sighed. I was afraid that
the family was getting too good a hold on me. Bess and I ate chicken,
but I did not have much appetite. Bess was looking at me with melting
eyes. We went back to the front room.

"I wanna get married," she whispered to me.

"You have a lot of time yet for that," I said, tense and uneasy.

"I wanna get married now. I wanna love," she said.

I had never met anyone like her, so direct, so easy in the expression of
her feelings.

"Do you know what this means?" she asked me as she rose and went to a
table and picked up a comb and came and stood before me.

I stared at the comb, then at her.

"What're you talking about?" I asked.

She did not answer. She smiled, then came close to me and reached out
with the comb and touched my head. I drew back.

"What're you doing?"

She laughed and drew the comb through my hair. I stared at her,
completely baffled.

"But my hair doesn't need combing," I said.

"I know it," she said, still combing.

"But why are you doing this?"

"Because I want to."

"What does it mean?"

She laughed again. I tried to get up and she caught hold of my arm and
held me in the chair.

"You have nice hair," she said.

"It's just common nigger hair," I said.

"It's nice hair," she repeated.

"But why are you combing my hair?" I asked again.

"You know," she said.

"I don't."

"'Cause I like you," she purred.

"Is this your way of telling me that?"

"It's a custom," she said. "You just fooling me. You know that.
Everybody knows that. When a girl likes a man, she combs his hair."

"You're young. Give yourself a chance," I said.

"Don't you like me?" she asked.

"I do," I said. "We're friends."

"But I want more'n a friend," she sighed.

Her simplicity frightened me. The girls I had known had been hard and
calculating, those who had worked at the hotel and those whom I had met
at school. We were silent for a while.

"Say, what's them books in your room?" she asked.

"Were you in my room?" I asked with soft pointedness.

"Sure," she said without batting an eye. "I looked through your
suitcase."

What could I do with a girl like this? Was I dumb or was she dumb? I
felt that it would be easy to have sex relations with her and I was
tempted. But what would happen? Love simply did not come to me that
quickly and easily. And she was talking of marriage. Could I ever talk
to her about what I felt, hoped? Could she ever understand my life? What
had I above sex to share with her, and what had she? But I knew that
such questions did not bother her. I did not love her and did not want
to marry her. The prize of the house did not tempt me. Yet I sat beside
her, feeling the attraction of her body increasing and deepening for me.
What if I made her pregnant? I was sure that the fear of becoming
pregnant did not bother her. Perhaps she would have liked it. I had come
from a home where feelings were never expressed, except in rage or
religious dread, where each member of the household lived locked in his
own dark world, and the light that shone out of this child's heart--for
she was a child--blinded me.

She leaned over and kissed me. What the hell, I thought. Have it out
with her, and if anything happens, leave.... I kissed and petted her.
She was warm, eager, childish, pliable. She threw her arms and legs
about me and hugged me fiercely. I began to wonder how old she was.

"What would your mother say?" I asked in a whisper.

"She's sleeping."

"But what if she saw us?"

"I don't care."

She was crazy. Plainly she would have married me that instant, knowing
no more about me than she did.

"Let's go to my room," I said.

"Naw. Mama wouldn't like that," she said.

She would let me do anything to her in her own front room, but she did
not want me to do it to her in my room. It was crazy, utterly crazy.

"Mama's sleeping," she observed.

I began to suspect that she had had every boy in the block.

"You love me?" she asked in a whisper.

I stared at her, becoming more aware each minute of the terrible
simplicity of her life. That was life for her, simple, direct. She just
did not attach to words the same meanings I did. She caught my hands in
a viselike grip. I looked at her and could not believe in her existence.

"I love you," she said.

"Don't say that," I said, then was sorry that I had said it.

"But I do love you," she said again.

Her voice had come so clearly that I could no longer doubt her. For
Christ's sake, I said to myself. The girl was astoundingly simple, yet
vital in a way that I had never known. What kind of life had I lived
that made the reality of this girl so strange? I sat thinking of Aunt
Addie, her stern face, her forbidding nature, her caution, her
restraint, her keen struggle to be good and holy.

"I'd make a good wife," she said.

I disengaged my hand from hers. I looked at her and wanted either to
laugh or to slap her. I was about to hurt her and I did not want to. I
rose. Oh, hell.... This girl's crazy.... I heard her crying and I bent
to her.

"Look," I whispered. "You don't know me. Let's get to know each other
better."

Her eyes were beaten, baffled. Love was that simple to her; it could be
turned on or off in a moment.

"You just think I'm nothing," she whimpered.

I reached out my hand to touch her, to speak to her, to try to tell her
of my life, my feelings, my doubts; and she leaped to her feet.

"I hate you," she burst out in a passionate whisper and ran out of the
room.

I lit a cigarette and sat for a long time. I had never dreamed that
anyone would accept me so simply, so completely, without question or the
least hint of personal aggrandizement. The truth was that I had--even
though I had fought against it--grown to accept the value of myself that
my old environment had created in me, and I had thought that no other
kind of environment was possible. My life had changed too suddenly. Had
I met Bess upon a Mississippi plantation, I would have expected her to
act as she had. But in Memphis, on Beale Street, how could there be such
hope, belief, faith in others? I wanted to go to Bess and talk to her,
but I knew no words to say to her.

When I awakened the next morning and recalled Bess's nave hopes, I was
glad that I had the can of pork and beans. I did not want to face her
across the breakfast table. I dressed to go out; then, with my coat and
hat on, I sat on the edge of the bed and propped my feet on a chair.
Taking puffs from a cigarette, I scooped the beans out of the can with
my fingers and ate them. I slipped out of the house and went to the
water front and sat on a knoll of earth in the cold wind and sun,
looking at the boats on the Mississippi River. Tonight I would begin my
new job. I knew how to save money, thanks to my long starvation in
Mississippi. My heart was at peace. I was freer than I had ever been.

A black boy came up to me.

"Hy," he said.

"Hy," I said.

"What you doing these days?" he asked.

"Nothing. Waiting for night. I got a job in a caf," I said.

"Shucks," he said. "I'm looking for a buddy." He was trying to act
tough, but I thought that he was lonely. "I wanna hop a freight and go
north."

"Why not hop one alone?" I asked.

He grinned nervously.

"Did you run off from home?" I asked.

"Yeah. Four years ago," he said.

"What have you been doing?"

"Nothing."

That should have warned me, but I was not yet wise in the ways of the
world or the road.

We talked a while longer, then walked down a path toward the river's
edge, skirting high weeds. The boy stopped suddenly and pointed.

"What's that?"

"Looks like a can of some sort," I said.

I saw a huge can partially screened by high weeds. We went to it and
found that it was full of something heavy. I pulled out the stopper and
smelt it.

"This stuff is liquor," I said.

The boy smelt it and his eyes widened.

"Reckon we can sell it?" he asked.

"But whose is it?" I asked.

"Gee, I wish I could sell this stuff," he said.

"Maybe somebody's watching," I suggested.

We looked about, but no one was in sight.

"This belongs to a bootlegger," I said.

"Let's see if we can sell it," he said.

"I wouldn't take that can out of here," I said. "The cops might see us."

"I need money," the boy said. "This'll help me on the road."

We agreed to look for a white buyer. We went into the streets and looked
over the white men who passed. Finally we spotted one sitting alone in
his car. We went up to him.

"Mister," the boy said, "we found a big can of liquor over there in the
weeds. You want to buy it?"

The man screwed up his eyes and studied us.

"Is it good liquor?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "Go and see it."

"You niggers ain't lying to me, are you?" he asked suspiciously.

"Come on. I'll show it to you," I said.

We led the white man to the liquor; he unstoppered it and smelt it, then
tasted the wetness on the cork.

"Holy cats," he said. He looked at us. "Did you really find this here?"

"Oh, yes, sir," we said.

"If you two niggers are lying, I'll kill both of you," he breathed.

"We're telling the truth," I said.

The other boy stood awkwardly and looked on. I wondered why he did not
say anything. Some vague thought was trying to worm its way into my
dense, nave, childlike mind. But it did not come clear and I brushed it
away.

"You boys bring this can to my car," the white man said.

I was afraid. But the other boy was eager and willing. With the white
man encouraging us, we lugged the can to his car and put it into the
back upon the floor.

"Here," the white man said, extending a five-dollar bill to the boy. The
car drove off and I could see the white man looking about anxiously,
fearing a trap; or so it seemed to me.

"Gee, let's get this changed," the boy said.

"All right," I said. "We'll split it."

The boy pointed across the street.

"There's a store over there," he said. "I'll run over and get change."

"O.K.," I said, angel-like.

I sat on a sloping embankment and waited. He ran off in the direction of
the store, but I was so confident that I did not even watch him. I felt
amused. I was going to get two and one-half dollars for finding a cache
of liquor. I was a hijacker already. Last night a girl had thrown
herself at me. And all this had happened within forty-eight hours of my
leaving home. I wanted to laugh out loud. Things could happen to one
when one was not at home. I looked up, waiting for the boy to return.
But I did not see him. He's sure taking his time, I thought, pushing
down other ideas that were trying to bubble into my mind. I waited
longer, then rose and went quickly to the store and peered through the
window. The boy was not inside. I went in and asked the proprietor if a
boy had been in.

"Yeah," he said. "A nigger boy came in here, looked around, then went
out of the back door. He went like a light. Did he have something of
yours?"

"Yes," I said.

"Well, you'll never see that nigger again," the man said.

I walked along the streets in the winter sun, thinking: Well, that's
good enough for you, you fool. You had no business monkeying in that
liquor business anyway. Then I stopped in my tracks. _They had been
together!_ The white man and the black boy had seen me loitering in the
vicinity of their liquor and had thought I was a hijacker; and they had
used me in disposing of their liquor.

Last night I had found a nave girl. This morning I had been a nave
boy.




CHAPTER XII


While wandering aimlessly about the streets of Memphis, gaping at the
tall buildings and the crowds, killing time, eating bags of popcorn, I
was struck by an odd and sudden idea. If I had attempted to work for an
optical company in Jackson and had failed, why should I not try to work
for an optical company in Memphis? Memphis was not a small town like
Jackson; it was urban and I felt that no one would hold the trivial
trouble I had had in Jackson against me.

I looked for the address of a company in a directory and walked boldly
into the building, rode up in the elevator with a fat, round, yellow
Negro of about five feet in height. At the fifth floor I stepped into an
office. A white man rose to meet me.

"Pull off your hat," he said.

"Oh, yes, sir," I said, jerking off my hat.

"What do you want?"

"I was wondering if you needed a boy," I said. "I worked for an optical
company for a short while in Jackson."

"Why did you leave?" he asked.

"I had a little trouble there," I said honestly.

"Did you steal something?"

"No, sir," I said. "A white boy there didn't want me to learn the
optical trade and ran me off the job."

"Come and sit down."

I sat and recounted the story from beginning to end.

"I'll write Mr. Crane," he said. "But you won't get a chance to learn
the optical trade here. That's not our policy."

I told him that I understood and accepted his policy. I was hired at
eight dollars per week and promised a raise of a dollar a week until my
wages reached ten. Though this was less than I had been offered for the
caf job, I accepted it. I liked the open, honest way in which the man
talked to me; and, too, the place seemed clean, brisk, businesslike.

I was assigned to run errands and wash eyeglasses after they had come
from the rouge-smeared machines. Each evening I had to take sacks of
packages to the post office for mailing. It was light work and I was
fast on my feet. At noon I would forgo my lunch hour and run errands for
the white men who were employed in the shop. I would buy their lunches,
take their suits out to have them pressed, pay their light, telephone,
and gas bills, and deliver notes for them to their stenographer girl
friends in near-by office buildings. The first day I made a dollar and a
half in tips. I deposited the money I had left from my trip and resolved
to live off my tips.

I was now rapidly learning to contain the tension I felt in my relations
with whites, and the people in Memphis had an air of relative urbanity
that took some of the sharpness off the attitude of whites toward
Negroes. There were about a dozen white men in the sixth-floor shop
where I spent most of my time; they varied from Ku Klux Klanners to
Jews, from theosophists to just plain poor whites. Although I could
detect disdain and hatred in their attitudes, they never shouted at me
or abused me. It was fairly easy to contemplate the race issue in the
shop without reaching those heights of fear that devastated me. A
measure of objectivity entered into my observations of white men and
women. Either I could stand more mental strain than formerly or I had
discovered deep within me ways of handling it.

When I returned to Mrs. Moss's that Monday night, she was surprised that
I had changed my plans and had taken a new job. I showed her my bankbook
and told her my plan for saving money and bringing my mother to Memphis.
As I talked to her I tried to tell from her manner if Bess had said
anything about what had happened between us, but Mrs. Moss was bland and
motherly as always.

Bess avoided me, refusing to speak when we were alone together; but when
her mother was present, she was polite. A few days later Mrs. Moss came
to me with a baffled look in her eyes.

"What's happened between you and Bess?" she asked.

"Nothing," I lied, burning with shame.

"She don't seem to like you no more," she said. "I wanted you-all to
kinda hit it off." She looked at me searchingly. "Don't you like her
none?"

I could not answer or look at her; I wondered if she had told Bess to
give herself to me.

"Well," she drawled, sighing, "I guess folks just have to love each
other naturally. You can't make 'em." Tears rolled down her cheeks.
"Bess'll find somebody."

I felt sick, filled with a consciousness of the woman's helplessness, of
her nave hope. Time and again she told me that Bess loved me, wanted
me. She even suggested that I "try Bess and see if you like her. Ain't
no harm in that." And her words evoked in me a pity for her that had no
name.

Finally it became unbearable. One night I returned home from work and
found Mrs. Moss sitting by the stove in the hall, nodding. She blinked
her eyes and smiled.

"How're you, son?" she asked.

"Pretty good," I said.

"Ain't you and Bess got to be friends or something yet?"

"No, ma'am," I said softly.

"How come you don't like Bess?" she demanded.

"Oh, I don't know." I was becoming angry.

"It's 'cause she ain't so bright?"

"No, ma'am. Bess's bright," I lied.

"Then how come?"

I still could not tell her.

"You and Bess could have this house for your home," she went on.
"You-all could bring up your children here."

"But people have to find their own way to each other," I said.

"Young folks ain't got no sense these days," she said at last. "If
somebody had fixed things for me when I was a gal, I sure would've taken
it."

"Mrs. Moss," I said, "I think I'd better move."

"Move then!" she exploded. "You ain't got no sense!"

I went to my room and began to pack. A knock came at the door. I opened
it. Mrs. Moss stood in the doorway, weeping.

"Son, forgive me," she said. "I didn't mean it. I wouldn't hurt you for
nothing. You just like a son to me."

"That's all right," I said. "But I'd better move."

"No!" she wailed. "Then you ain't forgive me! When a body asks
forgiveness, they means it!"

I stared. Bess appeared in the doorway.

"Don't leave, Richard," she said.

"We won't bother you no more," Mrs. Moss said.

I wilted, baffled, sorry, ashamed. Mrs. Moss took Bess's hand and led
her away.

I centered my attention now upon making enough money to send for my
mother and brother. I saved each penny I came by, stinting myself on
food, walking to work, eating out of paper bags, living on a pint of
milk and two sweet rolls for breakfast, a hamburger and peanuts for
lunch, and a can of beans which I would eat at night in my room. I was
used to hunger and I did not need much food to keep me alive.

I now had more money than I had ever had before, and I began patronizing
secondhand bookstores, buying magazines and books. In this way I became
acquainted with periodicals like _Harper's Magazine_, the _Atlantic
Monthly_, and the _American Mercury_. I would buy them for a few cents,
read them, then resell them to the bookdealer.

Once Mrs. Moss questioned me about my reading.

"What you reading all them books for, boy?"

"I just like to."

"You studying for law?"

"No, ma'am."

"Well, I reckon you know what you doing," she said.

Though I did not have to report for work until nine o'clock each
morning, I would arrive at eight and go into the lobby of the downstairs
bank--where I knew the Negro porter--and read the early edition of the
Memphis _Commercial Appeal_, thereby saving myself five cents each day,
which I spent for lunch. After reading, I would watch the black porter
perform his morning ritual: he would get a mop, bucket, soap flakes,
water, then would pause dramatically, roll his eyes to the ceiling and
sing out:

"Lawd, today! Ahm still working for white folks!"

And he would mop until he sweated. He hated his job and talked
incessantly of leaving to work in the post office.

The most colorful of the Negro boys on the job was Shorty, the round,
yellow, fat elevator operator. He had tiny, beady eyes that looked out
between rolls of flesh with a hard but humorous stare. He had the
complexion of a Chinese, a short forehead, and three chins.
Psychologically he was the most amazing specimen of the southern Negro I
had ever met. Hardheaded, sensible, a reader of magazines and books, he
was proud of his race and indignant about its wrongs. But in the
presence of whites he would play the role of a clown of the most debased
and degraded type.

One day he needed twenty-five cents to buy his lunch.

"Just watch me get a quarter from the first white man I see," he told me
as I stood in the elevator that morning.

A white man who worked in the building stepped into the elevator and
waited to be lifted to his floor. Shorty sang in a low mumble, smiling,
rolling his eyes, looking at the white man roguishly.

"I'm hungry, Mister White Man. I need a quarter for lunch."

The white man ignored him. Shorty, his hands on the controls of the
elevator, sang again:

"I ain't gonna move this damned old elevator till I get a quarter,
Mister White Man."

"The hell with you, Shorty," the white man said, ignoring him and
chewing on his black cigar.

"I'm hungry, Mister White Man. I'm dying for a quarter," Shorty sang,
drooling, drawling, humming his words.

"If you don't take me to my floor, you will die," the white man said,
smiling a little for the first time.

"But this black sonofabitch sure needs a quarter," Shorty sang,
grimacing, clowning, ignoring the white man's threat.

"Come on, you black bastard, I got to work," the white man said,
intrigued by the element of sadism involved, enjoying it.

"It'll cost you twenty-five cents, Mister White Man; just a quarter,
just two bits," Shorty moaned.

There was silence. Shorty threw the lever and the elevator went up and
stopped about five feet shy of the floor upon which the white man
worked.

"Can't go no more, Mister White Man, unless I get my quarter," he said
in a tone that sounded like crying.

"What would you do for a quarter?" the white man asked, still gazing
off.

"I'll do anything for a quarter," Shorty sang.

"What, for example?" the white man asked.

Shorty giggled, swung around, bent over, and poked out his broad, fleshy
ass.

"You can kick me for a quarter," he sang, looking impishly at the white
man out of the corners of his eyes.

The white man laughed softly, jingled some coins in his pocket, took out
one and thumped it to the floor. Shorty stooped to pick it up and the
white man bared his teeth and swung his foot into Shorty's rump with all
the strength of his body. Shorty let out a howling laugh that echoed up
and down the elevator shaft.

"Now, open this door, you goddamn black sonofabitch," the white man
said, smiling with tight lips.

"Yeeeess, siiiiir," Shorty sang; but first he picked up the quarter and
put it into his mouth. "This monkey's got the peanuts," he chortled.

He opened the door and the white man stepped out and looked back at
Shorty as he went toward his office.

"You're all right, Shorty, you sonofabitch," he said.

"I know it!" Shorty screamed, then let his voice trail off in a gale of
wild laughter.

I witnessed this scene or its variant at least a score of times and felt
no anger or hatred, only disgust and loathing. Once I asked him:

"How in God's name can you do that?"

"I needed a quarter and I got it," he said soberly, proudly.

"But a quarter can't pay you for what he did to you," I said.

"Listen, nigger," he said to me, "my ass is tough and quarters is
scarce."

I never discussed the subject with him after that.

Other Negroes worked in the building: an old man whom we called Edison;
his son, John; and a night janitor who answered to the name of Dave. At
noon, when I was not running errands, I would join the rest of the
Negroes in a little room at the front of the building overlooking the
street. Here, in this underworld pocket of the building, we munched our
lunches and discussed the ways of white folks toward Negroes. When two
or more of us were talking, it was impossible for this subject not to
come up. Each of us hated and feared the whites, yet had a white man put
in a sudden appearance we would have assumed silent, obedient smiles.

To our minds the white folks formed a kind of superworld: what was said
by them during working hours was rehashed and weighed here; how they
looked; what they wore; what moods they were in; who had outdistanced
whom in business; who was replacing whom on the job; who was getting
fired and who was getting hired. But never once did we openly say that
we occupied none but subordinate positions in the building. Our talk was
restricted to the petty relations which formed the core of life for us.

But under all our talk floated a latent sense of violence; the whites
had drawn a line over which we dared not step and we accepted that line
because our bread was at stake. But within our boundaries we, too, drew
a line that included our right to bread regardless of the indignities or
degradations involved in getting it. If a white man had sought to keep
us from obtaining a job, or enjoying the rights of citizenship, we would
have bowed silently to his power. But if he had sought to deprive us of
a dime, blood might have been spilt. Hence, our daily lives were so
bound up with trivial objectives that to capitulate when challenged was
tantamount to surrendering the right to life itself. Our anger was like
the anger of children, passing quickly from one petty grievance to
another, from the memory of one slight wrong to another.

"You know what the bastard Olin said to me this morning?" John would
ask, biting into a juicy hamburger.

"What?" Shorty would ask.

"Well, I brought him his change from paying his gas bill and he said:
'Put it here in my pocket; my hands are dirty,'" John said. "Hunh.... I
just laid the money on the bench besides him. I ain't no personal slave
to him and I'll be damned if I'll put his _own_ money in his _own_
pocket."

"Hell, you're right," Shorty would say.

"White folks just don't think," old man Edison would say.

"You sure got to watch 'em," Dave, the night janitor, would say. (He
would have slept in the room on a cot after his night's cleaning; he
would be ready now to keep a date with some girl friend.)

"Falk sent me to have his suit pressed," I would say. "He didn't give me
a penny. Told me he would remember it on payday."

"Ain't that some nerve?" John would say.

"You can't eat his memories," Shorty would say.

"But you got to keep on doing them favors," old man Edison would say.
"If you don't, they won't like you."

"I'm going north one of these days," Shorty would say.

We would all laugh, knowing that Shorty would never leave, that he
depended too much upon the whites for the food he ate.

"What would you do up north?" I would ask Shorty.

"I'd pass for Chinese," Shorty would say.

And we would laugh again. The lunch hour would pass and we would go back
to work, but there would be in our faces not one whit of the sentiment
we had felt during the hour of discussion.

       *       *       *       *       *

One day I went to the optical counter of a department store to deliver a
pair of eyeglasses. The counter was empty of customers and a tall,
florid-faced white man looked at me curiously. He was unmistakably a
Yankee, for his physical build differed sharply from that of the lanky
Southerner.

"Will you please sign for this, sir?" I asked, presenting the account
book and the eyeglasses.

He picked up the book and the glasses, but his eyes were still upon me.

"Say, boy, I'm from the North," he said quietly.

I held very still. Was this a trap? He had mentioned a tabooed subject
and I wanted to wait until I knew what he meant. Among the topics that
southern white men did not like to discuss with Negroes were the
following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro
soldiers fared while there; Frenchwomen; Jack Johnson; the entire
northern part of the United States; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U.
S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican
party; slavery; social equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th, 14th,
and 15th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for
positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro. The
most accepted topics were sex and religion. I did not look at the man or
answer. With one sentence he had lifted out of the silent dark the race
question and I stood on the edge of a precipice.

"Don't be afraid of me," he went on. "I just want to ask you one
question."

"Yes, sir," I said in a waiting, neutral tone.

"Tell me, boy, are you hungry?" he asked seriously.

I stared at him. He had spoken one word that touched the very soul of
me, but I could not talk to him, could not let him know that I was
starving myself to save money to go north. I did not trust him. But my
face did not change its expression.

"Oh, no, sir," I said, managing a smile.

I was hungry and he knew it; but he was a white man and I felt that if I
told him I was hungry I would have been revealing something shameful.

"Boy, I can see hunger in your face and eyes," he said.

"I get enough to eat," I lied.

"Then why do you keep so thin?" he asked me.

"Well, I suppose I'm just that way, naturally," I lied.

"You're just scared, boy," he said.

"Oh, no, sir," I lied again.

I could not look at him. I wanted to leave the counter, yet he was a
white man and I had learned not to walk abruptly away from a white man
when he was talking to me. I stood, my eyes looking away. He ran his
hand into his pocket and pulled out a dollar bill.

"Here, take this dollar and buy yourself some food," he said.

"No, sir," I said.

"Don't be a fool," he said. "You're ashamed to take it. God, boy, don't
let a thing like that stop you from taking a dollar and eating."

The more he talked the more it became impossible for me to take the
dollar. I wanted it, but I could not look at it. I wanted to speak, but
I could not move my tongue. I wanted him to leave me alone. He
frightened me.

"Say something," he said.

All about us in the store were piles of goods; white men and women went
from counter to counter. It was summer and from a high ceiling was
suspended a huge electric fan that whirred. I stood waiting for the
white man to give me the signal that would let me go.

"I don't understand it," he said through his teeth. "How far did you go
in school?"

"Through the ninth grade, but it was really the eighth," I told him.
"You see, our studies in the ninth grade were more or less a review of
what we had in the eighth grade."

Silence. He had not asked me for this long explanation, but I had spoken
at length to fill up the yawning, shameful gap that loomed between us; I
had spoken to try to drag the unreal nature of the conversation back to
safe and sound southern ground. Of course, the conversation was real; it
dealt with my welfare, but it had brought to the surface of day all the
dark fears I had known all my life. The Yankee white man did not know
how dangerous his words were.

(There are some elusive, profound, recondite things that men find hard
to say to other men; but with the Negro it is the little things of life
that become hard to say, for these tiny items shape his destiny. A man
will seek to express his relation to the stars; but when a man's
consciousness has been riveted upon obtaining a loaf of bread, that loaf
of bread is as important as the stars.)

Another white man walked up to the counter and I sighed with relief.

"Do you want the dollar?" the man asked.

"No, sir," I whispered.

"All right," he said. "Just forget it."

He signed the account book and took the eyeglasses. I stuffed the book
into my bag and turned from the counter and walked down the aisle,
feeling a physical tingling along my spine, knowing that the white man
knew I was really hungry. I avoided him after that. Whenever I saw him I
felt in a queer way that he was my enemy, for he knew how I felt and the
safety of my life in the South depended upon how well I concealed from
all whites what I felt.

       *       *       *       *       *

One summer morning I stood at a sink in the rear of the factory washing
a pair of eyeglasses that had just come from the polishing machines
whose throbbing shook the floor upon which I stood. At each machine a
white man was bent forward, working intently. To my left sunshine poured
through a window, lighting up the rouge smears and making the factory
look garish, violent, dangerous. It was nearing noon and my mind was
drifting toward my daily lunch of a hamburger and a bag of peanuts. It
had been a routine day, a day more or less like the other days I had
spent on the job as errand boy and washer of eyeglasses. I was at peace
with the world, that is, at peace in the only way in which a black boy
in the South can be at peace with a world of white men.

Perhaps it was the mere sameness of the day that soon made it different
from the other days; maybe the white men who operated the machines felt
bored with their dull, automatic tasks and hankered for some kind of
excitement. Anyway, I presently heard footsteps behind me and turned my
head. At my elbow stood a young white man, Mr. Olin, the immediate
foreman under whom I worked. He was smiling and observing me as I
cleaned emery dust from the eyeglasses.

"Boy, how's it going?" he asked.

"Oh, fine, sir!" I answered with false heartiness, falling quickly into
that nigger-being-a-good-natured-boy-in-the-presence-of-a-white-man
pattern, a pattern into which I could now slide easily; although I was
wondering if he had any criticism to make of my work.

He continued to hover wordlessly at my side. What did he want? It was
unusual for him to stand there and watch me; I wanted to look at him,
but was afraid to.

"Say, Richard, do you believe that I'm your friend?" he asked me.

The question was so loaded with danger that I could not reply at once. I
scarcely knew Mr. Olin. My relationship to him had been the typical
relationship of Negroes to southern whites. He gave me orders and I
said, "Yes, sir," and obeyed them. Now, without warning, he was asking
me if I thought that he was my friend; and I knew that all southern
white men fancied themselves as friends of niggers. While fishing for an
answer that would say nothing, I smiled.

"I mean," he persisted, "do you think I'm your friend?"

"Well," I answered, skirting the vast racial chasm between us, "I hope
you are."

"I am," he said emphatically.

I continued to work, wondering what motives were prompting him. Already
apprehension was rising in me.

"I want to tell you something," he said.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"We don't want you to get hurt," he explained. "We like you round here.
You act like a good boy."

"Yes, sir," I said. "What is wrong?"

"You don't deserve to get into trouble," he went on.

"Have I done something that somebody doesn't like?" I asked, my mind
frantically sweeping over all my past actions, weighing them in the
light of the way southern white men thought Negroes should act.

"Well, I don't know," he said and paused, letting his words sink
meaningfully into my mind. He lit a cigarette. "Do you know Harrison?"

He was referring to a Negro boy of about my own age who worked across
the street for a rival optical house. Harrison and I knew each other
casually, but there had never been the slightest trouble between us.

"Yes, sir," I said. "I know him."

"Well, be careful," Mr. Olin said. "He's after you."

"After me? For what?"

"He's got a terrific grudge against you," the white man explained. "What
have you done to him?"

The eyeglasses I was washing were forgotten. My eyes were upon Mr.
Olin's face, trying to make out what he meant. Was this something
serious? I did not trust the white man, and neither did I trust
Harrison. Negroes who worked on jobs in the South were usually loyal to
their white bosses; they felt that that was the best way to ensure their
jobs. Had Harrison felt that I had in some way jeopardized his job? Who
was my friend: the white man or the black boy?

"I haven't done anything to Harrison," I said.

"Well, you better watch that nigger Harrison," Mr. Olin said in a low,
confidential tone. "A little while ago I went down to get a Coca-Cola
and Harrison was waiting for you at the door of the building with a
knife. He asked me when you were coming down. Said he was going to get
you. Said you called him a dirty name. Now, we don't want any fighting
or bloodshed on the job."

I still doubted the white man, yet thought that perhaps Harrison had
really interpreted something I had said as an insult.

"I've got to see that boy and talk to him," I said, thinking out loud.

"No, you'd better not," Mr. Olin said. "You'd better let some of us
white boys talk to him."

"But how did this start?" I asked, still doubting but half believing.

"He just told me that he was going to get even with you, going to cut
you and teach you a lesson," he said. "But don't you worry. Let me
handle this."

He patted my shoulder and went back to his machine. He was an important
man in the factory and I had always respected his word. He had the
authority to order me to do this or that. Now, why would he joke with
me? White men did not often joke with Negroes, therefore what he had
said was serious. I was upset. We black boys worked long hard hours for
what few pennies we earned and we were edgy and tense. Perhaps that
crazy Harrison was really after me. My appetite was gone. I had to
settle this thing. A white man had walked into my delicately balanced
world and had tipped it and I had to right it before I could feel safe.
Yes, I would go directly to Harrison and ask what was the matter, what I
had said that he resented. Harrison was black and so was I; I would
ignore the warning of the white man and talk face to face with a boy of
my own color.

At noon I went across the street and found Harrison sitting on a box in
the basement. He was eating lunch and reading a pulp magazine. As I
approached him, he ran his hand into his pocket and looked at me with
cold, watchful eyes.

"Say, Harrison, what's this all about?" I asked, standing cautiously
four feet from him.

He looked at me a long time and did not answer.

"I haven't done anything to you," I said.

"And I ain't got nothing against you," he mumbled, still watchful. "I
don't bother nobody."

"But Mr. Olin said that you came over to the factory this morning,
looking for me with a knife."

"Aw, naw," he said, more at ease now. "I ain't been in your factory all
day." He had not looked at me as he spoke.

"Then what did Mr. Olin mean?" I asked. "I'm not angry with you."

"Shucks, I thought _you_ was looking for me to cut me," Harrison
explained. "Mr. Olin, he came over here this morning and said you was
going to kill me with a knife the moment you saw me. He said you was mad
at me because I had insulted you. But I ain't said nothing about you."
He still had not looked at me. He rose.

"And I haven't said anything about you," I said.

Finally he looked at me and I felt better. We two black boys, each
working for ten dollars a week, stood staring at each other, thinking,
comparing the motives of the absent white man, each asking himself if he
could believe the other.

"But why would Mr. Olin tell me things like that?" I asked.

Harrison dropped his head; he laid his sandwich aside.

"I... I...." he stammered and pulled from his pocket a long, gleaming
knife; it was already open. "I was just waiting to see what you was
gonna do to me...."

I leaned weakly against a wall, feeling sick, my eyes upon the sharp
steel blade of the knife.

"You were going to cut me?" I asked.

"If you had cut me, I was gonna cut you first," he said. "I ain't taking
no chances."

"Are you angry with me about something?" I asked.

"Man, I ain't mad at nobody," Harrison said uneasily.

I felt how close I had come to being slashed. Had I come suddenly upon
Harrison, he would have thought I was trying to kill him and he would
have stabbed me, perhaps killed me. And what did it matter if one nigger
killed another?

"Look here," I said. "Don't believe what Mr. Olin says."

"I see now," Harrison said. "He's playing a dirty trick on us."

"He's trying to make us kill each other for nothing."

"How come he wanna do that?" Harrison asked.

I shook my head. Harrison sat, but still played with the open knife. I
began to doubt. Was he really angry with me? Was he waiting until I
turned my back to stab me? I was in torture.

"I suppose it's fun for white men to see niggers fight," I said, forcing
a laugh.

"But you might've killed me," Harrison said.

"To white men we're like dogs or cocks," I said.

"I don't want to cut you," Harrison said.

"And I don't want to cut you," I said.

Standing well out of each other's reach, we discussed the problem and
decided that we would keep silent about our conference. We would not let
Mr. Olin know that we knew that he was egging us to fight. We agreed to
ignore any further provocations. At one o'clock I went back to the
factory. Mr. Olin was waiting for me, his manner grave, his face
serious.

"Did you see that Harrison nigger?" he asked.

"No, sir," I lied.

"Well, he still has that knife for you," he said.

Hate tightened in me. But I kept a dead face.

"Did you buy a knife yet?" he asked me.

"No, sir," I answered.

"Do you want to use mine?" he asked. "You've got to protect yourself,
you know."

"No, sir. I'm not afraid," I said.

"Nigger, you're a fool," he spluttered. "I thought you had some sense!
Are you going to just let that nigger cut your heart out? His boss gave
_him_ a knife to use against _you_! Take this knife, nigger, and stop
acting crazy!"

I was afraid to look at him; if I had looked at him I would have had to
tell him to leave me alone, that I knew he was lying, that I knew he was
no friend of mine, that I knew if anyone had thrust a knife through my
heart he would simply have laughed. But I said nothing. He was the boss
and he could fire me if he did not like me. He laid an open knife on the
edge of his workbench, about a foot from my hand. I had a fleeting urge
to pick it up and give it to him, point first into his chest. But I did
nothing of the kind. I picked up the knife and put it into my pocket.

"Now, you're acting like a nigger with some sense," he said.

As I worked Mr. Olin watched me from his machine. Later when I passed
him he called me.

"Now, look here, boy," he began. "We told that Harrison nigger to stay
out of this building and leave you alone, see? But I can't protect you
when you go home. If that nigger starts at you when you are on your way
home, you stab him before he gets a chance to stab you, see?"

I avoided looking at him and remained silent.

"Suit yourself, nigger," Mr. Olin said. "But don't say I didn't warn
you."

I had to make my round of errands to deliver eyeglasses and I stole a
few minutes to run across the street to talk to Harrison. Harrison was
sullen and bashful, wanting to trust me, but afraid. He told me that Mr.
Olin had telephoned his boss and had told him to tell Harrison that I
had planned to wait for him at the back entrance of the building at six
o'clock and stab him. Harrison and I found it difficult to look at each
other; we were upset and distrustful; We were not really angry at each
other; we knew that the idea of murder had been planted in each of us by
the white men who employed us. We told ourselves again and again that we
did not agree with the white men; we urged ourselves to keep faith in
each other. Yet there lingered deep down in each of us a suspicion that
maybe one of us was trying to kill the other.

"I'm not angry with you, Harrison," I said.

"I don't wanna fight nobody," Harrison said bashfully, but he kept his
hand in his pocket on his knife.

Each of us felt the same shame, felt how foolish and weak we were in the
face of the domination of the whites.

"I wish they'd leave us alone," I said.

"Me too," Harrison said.

"There are a million black boys like us to run errands," I said. "They
wouldn't care if we killed each other."

"I know it," Harrison said.

Was he acting? I could not believe in him. We were toying with the idea
of death for no reason that stemmed from our own lives, but because the
men who ruled us had thrust the idea into our minds. Each of us depended
upon the whites for the bread we ate, and we actually trusted the whites
more than we did each other. Yet there existed in us a longing to trust
men of our own color. Again Harrison and I parted, vowing not to be
influenced by what our white boss men said to us.

The game of egging Harrison and me to fight, to cut each other, kept up
for a week. We were afraid to tell the white men that we did not believe
them, for that would have been tantamount to calling them liars or
risking an argument that might have ended in violence being directed
against us.

One morning a few days later Mr. Olin and a group of white men came to
me and asked me if I was willing to settle my grudge with Harrison with
gloves, according to boxing rules. I told them that, though I was not
afraid of Harrison, I did not want to fight him and that I did not know
how to box. I could feel now that they knew I no longer believed them.

When I left the factory that evening, Harrison yelled at me from down
the block. I waited and he ran toward me. Did he want to cut me? I
backed away as he approached. We smiled uneasily and sheepishly at each
other. We spoke haltingly, weighing our words.

"Did they ask you to fight me with gloves?" Harrison asked.

"Yes," I told him. "But I didn't agree."

Harrison's face became eager.

"They want us to fight four rounds for five dollars apiece," he said.
"Man, if I had five dollars, I could pay down on a suit. Five dollars is
almost half a week's wages for me."

"I don't want to," I said.

"We won't hurt each other," he said.

"But why do a thing like that for white men?"

"To get that five dollars."

"I don't need five dollars that much."

"Aw, you're a fool," he said. Then he smiled quickly.

"Now, look here," I said. "Maybe you _are_ angry with me...."

"Naw, I'm not." He shook his head vigorously.

"I don't want to fight for white men. I'm no dog or rooster."

I was watching Harrison closely and he was watching me closely. Did he
really want to fight me for some reason of his own? Or was it the money?
Harrison stared at me with puzzled eyes. He stepped toward me and I
stepped away. He smiled nervously.

"I need that money," he said.

"Nothing doing," I said.

He walked off wordlessly, with an air of anger. Maybe he will stab me
now, I thought. I got to watch that fool....

For another week the white men of both factories begged us to fight.
They made up stories about what Harrison had said about me; and when
they saw Harrison they lied to him in the same way. Harrison and I were
wary of each other whenever we met. We smiled and kept out of arm's
reach, ashamed of ourselves and of each other.

Again Harrison called to me one evening as I was on my way home.

"Come on and fight," he begged.

"I don't want to and quit asking me," I said in a voice louder and
harder than I had intended.

Harrison looked at me and I watched him. Both of us still carried the
knives that the white men had given us.

"I wanna make a payment on a suit of clothes with that five dollars,"
Harrison said.

"But those white men will be looking at us, laughing at us," I said.

"What the hell," Harrison said. "They look at you and laugh at you every
day, nigger."

It was true. But I hated him for saying it. I ached to hit him in his
mouth, to hurt him.

"What have we got to lose?" Harrison asked.

"I don't suppose we have anything to lose," I said.

"Sure," he said. "Let's get the money. We don't care."

"And now they know that we know what they tried to do to us," I said,
hating myself for saying it. "And they hate us for it."

"Sure," Harrison said. "So let's get the money. You can use five
dollars, can't you?"

"Yes."

"Then let's fight for 'em."

"I'd feel like a dog."

"To them, both of us are dogs," he said.

"Yes," I admitted. But again I wanted to hit him.

"Look, let's fool them white men," Harrison said. "We won't hurt each
other. We'll just pretend, see? We'll show 'em we ain't dumb as they
think, see?"

"I don't know."

"It's just exercise. Four rounds for five dollars. You scared?"

"No."

"Then come on and fight."

"All right," I said. "It's just exercise. I'll fight."

Harrison was happy. I felt that it was all very foolish. But what the
hell. I would go through with it and that would be the end of it. But I
still felt a vague anger that would not leave.

When the white men in the factory heard that we had agreed to fight,
their excitement knew no bounds. They offered to teach me new punches.
Each morning they would tell me in whispers that Harrison was eating raw
onions for strength. And--from Harrison--I heard that they told him I
was eating raw meat for strength. They offered to buy me my meals each
day, but I refused. I grew ashamed of what I had agreed to do and
wanted to back out of the fight, but I was afraid that they would be
angry if I tried to. I felt that if white men tried to persuade two
black boys to stab each other for no reason save their own pleasure,
then it would not be difficult for them to aim a wanton blow at a black
boy in a fit of anger, in a passing mood of frustration.

The fight took place one Saturday afternoon in the basement of a Main
Street building. Each white man who attended the fight dropped his share
of the pot into a hat that sat on the concrete floor. Only white men
were allowed in the basement; no women or Negroes were admitted.
Harrison and I were stripped to the waist. A bright electric bulb glowed
above our heads. As the gloves were tied on my hands, I looked at
Harrison and saw his eyes watching me. Would he keep his promise? Doubt
made me nervous.

We squared off and at once I knew that I had not thought sufficiently
about what I had bargained for. I could not pretend to fight. Neither
Harrison nor I knew enough about boxing to deceive even a child for a
moment. Now shame filled me. The white men were smoking and yelling
obscenities at us.

"Crush that nigger's nuts, nigger!"

"Hit that nigger!"

"Aw, fight, you goddamn niggers!"

"Sock 'im in his f-k-g piece!"

"Make 'im bleed!"

I lashed out with a timid left. Harrison landed high on my head and,
before I knew it, I had landed a hard right on Harrison's mouth and
blood came. Harrison shot a blow to my nose. The fight was on, was on
against our will. I felt trapped and ashamed. I lashed out even harder,
and the harder I fought the harder Harrison fought. Our plans and
promises now meant nothing. We fought four hard rounds, stabbing,
slugging, grunting, spitting, cursing, crying, bleeding. The shame and
anger we felt for having allowed ourselves to be duped crept into our
blows and blood ran into our eyes, half blinding us. The hate we felt
for the men whom we had tried to cheat went into the blows we threw at
each other. The white men made the rounds last as long as five minutes
and each of us was afraid to stop and ask for time for fear of receiving
a blow that would knock us out. When we were on the point of collapsing
from exhaustion, they pulled us apart.

I could not look at Harrison. I hated him and I hated myself. I clutched
my five dollars in my fist and walked home. Harrison and I avoided each
other after that and we rarely spoke. The white men attempted to arrange
other fights for us, but we had sense enough to refuse. I heard of other
fights being staged between other black boys, and each time I heard
those plans falling from the lips of the white men in the factory I
eased out of earshot. I felt that I had done something unclean,
something for which I could never properly atone.




CHAPTER XIII


One morning I arrived early at work and went into the bank lobby where
the Negro porter was mopping. I stood at a counter and picked up the
Memphis _Commercial Appeal_ and began my free reading of the press. I
came finally to the editorial page and saw an article dealing with one
H. L. Mencken. I knew by hearsay that he was the editor of the _American
Mercury_, but aside from that I knew nothing about him. The article was
a furious denunciation of Mencken, concluding with one, hot, short
sentence: Mencken is a fool.

I wondered what on earth this Mencken had done to call down upon him the
scorn of the South. The only people I had ever heard denounced in the
South were Negroes, and this man was not a Negro. Then what ideas did
Mencken hold that made a newspaper like the _Commercial Appeal_
castigate him publicly? Undoubtedly he must be advocating ideas that the
South did not like. Were there, then, people other than Negroes who
criticized the South? I knew that during the Civil War the South had
hated northern whites, but I had not encountered such hate during my
life. Knowing no more of Mencken than I did at that moment, I felt a
vague sympathy for him. Had not the South, which had assigned me the
role of a non-man, cast at him its hardest words?

Now, how could I find out about this Mencken? There was a huge library
near the riverfront, but I knew that Negroes were not allowed to
patronize its shelves any more than they were the parks and playgrounds
of the city. I had gone into the library several times to get books for
the white men on the job. Which of them would now help me to get books?
And how could I read them without causing concern to the white men with
whom I worked? I had so far been successful in hiding my thoughts and
feelings from them, but I knew that I would create hostility if I went
about this business of reading in a clumsy way.

I weighed the personalities of the men on the job. There was Don, a
Jew; but I distrusted him. His position was not much better than mine
and I knew that he was uneasy and insecure; he had always treated me in
an offhand, bantering way that barely concealed his contempt. I was
afraid to ask him to help me to get books; his frantic desire to
demonstrate a racial solidarity with the whites against Negroes might
make him betray me.

Then how about the boss? No, he was a Baptist and I had the suspicion
that he would not be quite able to comprehend why a black boy would want
to read Mencken. There were other white men on the job whose attitudes
showed clearly that they were Kluxers or sympathizers, and they were out
of the question.

There remained only one man whose attitude did not fit into an
anti-Negro category, for I had heard the white men refer to him as a
"Pope lover." He was an Irish Catholic and was hated by the white
Southerners. I knew that he read books, because I had got him volumes
from the library several times. Since he, too, was an object of hatred,
I felt that he might refuse me but would hardly betray me. I hesitated,
weighing and balancing the imponderable realities.

One morning I paused before the Catholic fellow's desk.

"I want to ask you a favor," I whispered to him.

"What is it?"

"I want to read. I can't get books from the library. I wonder if you'd
let me use your card?"

He looked at me suspiciously.

"My card is full most of the time," he said.

"I see," I said and waited, posing my question silently.

"You're not trying to get me into trouble, are you, boy?" he asked,
staring at me.

"Oh, no, sir."

"What book do you want?"

"A book by H. L. Mencken."

"Which one?"

"I don't know. Has he written more than one?"

"He has written several."

"I didn't know that."

"What makes you want to read Mencken?"

"Oh, I just saw his name in the newspaper," I said.

"It's good of you to want to read," he said. "But you ought to read the
right things."

I said nothing. Would he want to supervise my reading?

"Let me think," he said. "I'll figure out something."

I turned from him and he called me back. He stared at me quizzically.

"Richard, don't mention this to the other white men," he said.

"I understand," I said. "I won't say a word."

A few days later he called me to him.

"I've got a card in my wife's name," he said. "Here's mine."

"Thank you, sir."

"Do you think you can manage it?"

"I'll manage fine," I said.

"If they suspect you, you'll get in trouble," he said.

"I'll write the same kind of notes to the library that you wrote when
you sent me for books," I told him. "I'll sign your name."

He laughed.

"Go ahead. Let me see what you get," he said.

That afternoon I addressed myself to forging a note. Now, what were the
names of books written by H. L. Mencken? I did not know any of them. I
finally wrote what I thought would be a foolproof note: _Dear Madam:
Will you please let this nigger boy_--I used the word "nigger" to make
the librarian feel that I could not possibly be the author of the
note--_have some books by H. L. Mencken_? I forged the white man's name.

I entered the library as I had always done when on errands for whites,
but I felt that I would somehow slip up and betray myself. I doffed my
hat, stood a respectful distance from the desk, looked as unbookish as
possible, and waited for the white patrons to be taken care of. When the
desk was clear of people, I still waited. The white librarian looked at
me.

"What do you want, boy?"

As though I did not possess the power of speech, I stepped forward and
simply handed her the forged note, not parting my lips.

"What books by Mencken does he want?" she asked.

"I don't know, ma'am," I said, avoiding her eyes.

"Who gave you this card?"

"Mr. Falk," I said.

"Where is he?"

"He's at work, at the M---- Optical Company," I said. "I've been in here
for him before."

"I remember," the woman said. "But he never wrote notes like this."

Oh, God, she's suspicious. Perhaps she would not let me have the books?
If she had turned her back at that moment, I would have ducked out the
door and never gone hack. Then I thought of a bold idea.

"You can call him up, ma'am," I said, my heart pounding.

"You're not using these books, are you?" she asked pointedly.

"Oh, no, ma'am. I can't read."

"I don't know what he wants by Mencken," she said under her breath.

I knew now that I had won; she was thinking of other things and the race
question had gone out of her mind. She went to the shelves. Once or
twice she looked over her shoulder at me, as though she was still
doubtful. Finally she came forward with two books in her hand.

"I'm sending him two books," she said. "But tell Mr. Falk to come in
next time, or send me the names of the books he wants. I don't know what
he wants to read."

I said nothing. She stamped the card and handed me the books. Not daring
to glance at them, I went out of the library, fearing that the woman
would call me back for further questioning. A block away from the
library I opened one of the books and read a title: _A Book of
Prefaces_. I was nearing my nineteenth birthday and I did not know how
to pronounce the word "preface." I thumbed the pages and saw strange
words and strange names. I shook my head, disappointed. I looked at the
other book; it was called _Prejudices_. I knew what that word meant; I
had heard it all my life. And right off I was on guard against Mencken's
books. Why would a man want to call a book _Prejudices_? The word was so
stained with all my memories of racial hate that I could not conceive of
anybody using it for a title. Perhaps I had made a mistake about
Mencken? A man who had prejudices must be wrong.

When I showed the books to Mr. Falk, he looked at me and frowned.

"That librarian might telephone you," I warned him.

"That's all right," he said. "But when you're through reading those
books, I want you to tell me what you get out of them."

That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my
can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened _A Book of Prefaces_ and
began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean,
sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write
like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen,
consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything
European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God,
authority. What was this? I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay
behind the meaning of the words.... Yes, this man was fighting, fighting
with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use
a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes, for here they were. Then,
maybe, perhaps, I could use them as a weapon? No. It frightened me. I
read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth
anybody had the courage to say it.

Occasionally I glanced up to reassure myself that I was alone in the
room. Who were these men about whom Mencken was talking so passionately?
Who was Anatole France? Joseph Conrad? Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood
Anderson, Dostoevski, George Moore, Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant,
Tolstoy, Frank Harris, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Stephen
Crane, Zola, Norris, Gorky, Bergson, Ibsen, Balzac, Bernard Shaw, Dumas,
Poe, Thomas Mann, O. Henry, Dreiser, H. G. Wells, Gogol, T. S. Eliot,
Gide, Baudelaire, Edgar Lee Masters, Stendhal, Turgenev, Huneker,
Nietzsche, and scores of others? Were these men real? Did they exist or
had they existed? And how did one pronounce their names?

I ran across many words whose meanings I did not know, and I either
looked them up in a dictionary or, before I had a chance to do that,
encountered the word in a context that made its meaning clear. But what
strange world was this? I concluded the book with the conviction that I
had somehow overlooked something terribly important in life. I had once
tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude
imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of
me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new
ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or
disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being
affected by something that made the look of the world different.

As dawn broke I ate my pork and beans, feeling dopey, sleepy. I went to
work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring
everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white men
were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how
they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book I felt
vaguely guilty. Would I, filled with bookish notions, act in a manner
that would make the whites dislike me?

I forged more notes and my trips to the library became frequent. Reading
grew into a passion. My first serious novel was Sinclair Lewis's _Main
Street_. It made me see my boss, Mr. Gerald, and identify him as an
American type. I would smile when I saw him lugging his golf bags into
the office. I had always felt a vast distance separating me from the
boss, and now I felt closer to him, though still distant. I felt now
that I knew him, that I could feel the very limits of his narrow life.
And this had happened because I had read a novel about a mythical man
called George F. Babbitt.

The plots and stories in the novels did not interest me so much as the
point of view revealed. I gave myself over to each novel without
reserve, without trying to criticize it; it was enough for me to see and
feel something different. And for me, everything was something
different. Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in
which I lived for days. But I could not conquer my sense of guilt, my
feeling that the white men around me knew that I was changing, that I
had begun to regard them differently.

Whenever I brought a book to the job, I wrapped it in newspaper--a habit
that was to persist for years in other cities and under other
circumstances. But some of the white men pried into my packages when I
was absent and they questioned me.

"Boy, what are you reading those books for?"

"Oh, I don't know, sir."

"That's deep stuff you're reading, boy."

"I'm just killing time, sir."

"You'll addle your brains if you don't watch out."

I read Dreiser's _Jennie Gerhardt_ and _Sister Carrie_ and they revived
in me a vivid sense of my mother's suffering; I was overwhelmed. I grew
silent, wondering about the life around me. It would have been
impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels,
for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. All my life had
shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel, and I
could not read enough of them.

Steeped in new moods and ideas, I bought a ream of paper and tried to
write; but nothing would come, or what did come was flat beyond telling.
I discovered that more than desire and feeling were necessary to write
and I dropped the idea. Yet I still wondered how it was possible to know
people sufficiently to write about them? Could I ever learn about life
and people? To me, with, my vast ignorance, my Jim Crow station in life,
it seemed a task impossible of achievement. I now knew what being a
Negro meant. I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.
But to feel that there were feelings denied me, that the very breath of
life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else hurt,
wounded me. I had a new hunger.

In buoying me up, reading also cast me down, made me see what was
possible, what I had missed. My tension returned, new, terrible, bitter,
surging, almost too great to be contained. I no longer _felt_ that the
world about me was hostile, killing; I _knew_ it. A million times I
asked myself what I could do to save myself, and there were no answers.
I seemed forever condemned, ringed by walls.

I did not discuss my reading with Mr. Falk, who had lent me his library
card; it would have meant talking about myself and that would have been
too painful. I smiled each day, fighting desperately to maintain my old
behavior, to keep my disposition seemingly sunny. But some of the white
men discerned that I had begun to brood.

"Wake up there, boy!" Mr. Olin said one day.

"Sir!" I answered for the lack of a better word.

"You act like you've stolen something," he said.

I laughed in the way I knew he expected me to laugh, but I resolved to
be more conscious of myself, to watch my every act, to guard and hide
the new knowledge that was dawning within me.

If I went north, would it be possible for me to build a new life then?
But how could a man build a life upon vague, unformed yearnings? I
wanted to write and I did not even know the English language. I bought
English grammars and found them dull. I felt that I was getting a better
sense of the language from novels than from grammars. I read hard,
discarding a writer as soon as I felt that I had grasped his point of
view. At night the printed page stood before my eyes in sleep.

Mrs. Moss, my landlady, asked me one Sunday morning:

"Son, what is this you keep on reading?"

"Oh, nothing. Just novels."

"What you get out of 'em?"

"I'm just killing time," I said.

"I hope you know your own mind," she said in a tone which implied that
she doubted if I had a mind.

I knew of no Negroes who read the books I liked and I wondered if any
Negroes ever thought of them. I knew that there were Negro doctors,
lawyers, newspapermen, but I never saw any of them. When I read a Negro
newspaper I never caught the faintest echo of my preoccupation in its
pages. I felt trapped and occasionally, for a few days, I would stop
reading. But a vague hunger would come over me for books, books that
opened up new avenues of feeling and seeing, and again I would forge
another note to the white librarian. Again I would read and wonder as
only the nave and unlettered can read and wonder, feeling that I
carried a secret, criminal burden about with me each day.

That winter my mother and brother came and we set up housekeeping,
buying furniture on the installment plan, being cheated and yet knowing
no way to avoid it. I began to eat warm food and to my surprise found
that regular meals enabled me to read faster. I may have lived through
many illnesses and survived them, never suspecting that I was ill. My
brother obtained a job and we began to save toward the trip north,
plotting our time, setting tentative dates for departure. I told none of
the white men on the job that I was planning to go north; I knew that
the moment they felt I was thinking of the North they would change
toward me. It would have made them feel that I did not like the life I
was living, and because my life was completely conditioned by what they
said or did, it would have been tantamount to challenging them.

I could calculate my chances for life in the South as a Negro fairly
clearly now.

I could fight the southern whites by organizing with other Negroes, as
my grandfather had done. But I knew that I could never win that way;
there were many whites and there were but few blacks. They were strong
and we were weak. Outright black rebellion could never win. If I fought
openly I would die and I did not want to die. News of lynchings were
frequent.

I could submit and live the life of a genial slave, but that was
impossible. All of my life had shaped me to live by my own feelings and
thoughts. I could make up to Bess and marry her and inherit the house.
But that, too, would be the life of a slave; if I did that, I would
crush to death something within me, and I would hate myself as much as I
knew the whites already hated those who had submitted. Neither could I
ever willingly present myself to be kicked, as Shorty had done. I would
rather have died than do that.

I could drain off my restlessness by fighting with Shorty and Harrison.
I had seen many Negroes solve the problem of being black by transferring
their hatred of themselves to others with a black skin and fighting
them. I would have to be cold to do that, and I was not cold and I could
never be.

I could, of course, forget what I had read, thrust the whites out of my
mind, forget them; and find release from anxiety and longing in sex and
alcohol. But the memory of how my father had conducted himself made that
course repugnant. If I did not want others to violate my life, how could
I voluntarily violate it myself?

I had no hope whatever of being a professional man. Not only had I been
so conditioned that I did not desire it, but the fulfillment of such an
ambition was beyond my capabilities. Well-to-do Negroes lived in a world
that was almost as alien to me as the world inhabited by whites.

What, then, was there? I held my life in my mind, in my consciousness
each day, feeling at times that I would stumble and drop it, spill it
forever. My reading had created a vast sense of distance between me and
the world in which I lived and tried to make a living, and that sense of
distance was increasing each day. My days and nights were one long,
quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety. I
wondered how long I could bear it.




CHAPTER XIV


The accidental visit of Aunt Maggie to Memphis formed a practical basis
for my planning to go north. Aunt Maggie's husband, the "uncle" who had
fled from Arkansas in the dead of night, had deserted her; and now she
was casting about for a living. My mother, Aunt Maggie, my brother, and
I held long conferences, speculating on the prospects of jobs and the
cost of apartments in Chicago. And every time we conferred, we defeated
ourselves. It was impossible for all four of us to go at once; we did
not have enough money.

Finally sheer wish and hope prevailed over common sense and facts. We
discovered that if we waited until we were prepared to go, we would
never leave, we would never amass enough money to see us through. We
would have to gamble. We finally decided that Aunt Maggie and I would go
first, even though it was winter, and prepare a place for my mother and
brother. Why wait until next week or next month? If we were going, why
not go at once?

Next loomed the problem of leaving my job cleanly, smoothly, without
arguments or scenes. How could I present the fact of leaving to my boss?
Yes, I would pose as an innocent boy; I would tell him that my aunt was
taking me and my paralyzed mother to Chicago. That would create in his
mind the impression that I was not asserting my will; it would block any
expression of dislike on his part for my act. I knew that southern
whites hated the idea of Negroes leaving to live in places where the
racial atmosphere was different.

It worked as I had planned. When I broke the news of my leaving two days
before I left--I was afraid to tell it sooner for fear that I would
create hostility on the part of the whites with whom I worked--the boss
leaned back in his swivel chair and gave me the longest and most
considerate look he had ever given me.

"Chicago?" he repeated softly.

"Yes, sir."

"Boy, you won't like it up there," he said.

"Well, I have to go where my family is, sir," I said.

The other white office workers paused in their tasks and listened. I
grew self-conscious, tense.

"It's cold up there," he said.

"Yes, sir. They say it is," I said, keeping my voice in a neutral tone.

He became conscious that I was watching him and he looked away, laughing
uneasily to cover his concern and dislike.

"Now, boy," he said banteringly, "don't you go up there and fall into
that lake."

"Oh, no, sir," I said, smiling as though there existed the possibility
of my falling accidentally into Lake Michigan.

He was serious again, staring at me. I looked at the floor.

"You think you'll do any better up there?" he asked.

"I don't know, sir."

"You seem to've been getting along all right down here," he said.

"Oh, yes, sir. If it wasn't for my mother's going, I'd stay right here
and work," I lied as earnestly as possible.

"Well, why not stay? You can send her money," he suggested.

He had trapped me. I knew that staying now would never do. I could not
have controlled my relations with the whites if I had remained after
having told them that I wanted to go north.

"Well, I want to be with my mother," I said.

"You want to be with your mother," he repeated idly. "Well, Richard, we
enjoyed having you with us."

"And I enjoyed working here," I lied.

There was silence; I stood awkwardly, then moved to the door. There was
still silence; white faces were looking strangely at me. I went
upstairs, feeling like a criminal. The word soon spread through the
factory and the white men looked at me with new eyes. They came to me.

"So you're going north, hunh?"

"Yes, sir. My family's taking me with 'em."

"The North's no good for your people, boy."

"I'll try to get along, sir."

"Don't believe all the stories you hear about the North."

"No, sir. I don't."

"You'll come back here where your friends are."

"Well, sir. I don't know."

"How're you going to act up there?"

"Just like I act down here, sir."

"Would you speak to a white girl up there?"

"Oh, no, sir. I'll act there just like I act here."

"Aw, no, you won't. You'll change. Niggers change when they go north."

I wanted to tell him that I was going north precisely to change, but I
did not.

"I'll be the same," I said, trying to indicate that I had no imagination
whatever.

As I talked I felt that I was acting out a dream. I did not want to lie,
yet I had to lie to conceal what I felt. A white censor was standing
over me and, like dreams forming a curtain for the safety of sleep, so
did my lies form a screen of safety for my living moments.

"Boy, I bet you've been reading too many of them damn books."

"Oh, no, sir."

I made my last errand to the post office, put my bag away, washed my
hands, and pulled on my cap. I shot a quick glance about the factory;
most of the men were working late. One or two looked up. Mr. Falk, to
whom I had returned my library card, gave me a quick, secret smile. I
walked to the elevator and rode down with Shorty.

"You lucky bastard," he said bitterly.

"Why do you say that?"

"You saved your goddamn money and now you're gone."

"My problems are just starting," I said.

"You'll never have any problems as hard as the ones you had here," he
said.

"I hope not," I said. "But life is tricky."

"Sometimes I get so goddamn mad I want to kill everybody," he spat in a
rage.

"You can leave," I said.

"I'll never leave this goddamn South," he railed. "I'm always saying I
am, but I won't.... I'm lazy. I like to sleep too goddamn much. I'll die
here. Or maybe they'll kill me."

I stepped from the elevator into the street, half expecting someone to
call me back and tell me that it was all a dream, that I was not
leaving.

This was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which
I fled.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next day when I was already in full flight--aboard a northward bound
train--I could not have accounted, if it had been demanded of me, for
all the varied forces that were making me reject the culture that had
molded and shaped me. I was leaving without a qualm, without a single
backward glance. The face of the South that I had known was hostile and
forbidding, and yet out of all the conflicts and the curses, the blows
and the anger, the tension and the terror, I had somehow gotten the idea
that life could be different, could be lived in a fuller and richer
manner. As had happened when I had fled the orphan home, I was now
running more away from something than toward something. But that did not
matter to me. My mood was: I've got to get away; I can't stay here.

But what was it that always made me feel that way? What was it that made
me conscious of possibilities? From where in this southern darkness had
I caught a sense of freedom? Why was it that I was able to act upon
vaguely felt notions? What was it that made me feel things deeply enough
for me to try to order my life by my feelings? The external world of
whites and blacks, which was the only world that I had ever known,
surely had not evoked in me any belief in myself. The people I had met
had advised and demanded submission. What, then, was I after? How dare I
consider my feelings superior to the gross environment that sought to
claim me?

It had been only through books--at best, no more than vicarious cultural
transfusions--that I had managed to keep myself alive in a negatively
vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me,
I had clutched at books; consequently, my belief in books had risen more
out of a sense of desperation than from any abiding conviction of their
ultimate value. In a peculiar sense, life had trapped me in a realm of
emotional rejection; I had not embraced insurgency through open choice.
Existing emotionally on the sheer, thin margin of southern culture, I
had felt that nothing short of life itself hung upon each of my actions
and decisions; and I had grown used to change, to movement, to making
many adjustments.

In the main, my hope was merely a kind of self-defence, a conviction
that if I did not leave I would perish, either because of possible
violence of others against me, or because of my possible violence
against them. The substance of my hope was formless and devoid of any
real sense of direction, for in my southern living I had seen no looming
landmark by which I could, in a positive sense, guide my daily actions.
The shocks of southern living had rendered my personality tender and
swollen, tense and volatile, and my flight was more a shunning of
external and internal dangers than an attempt to embrace what I felt I
wanted.

It had been my accidental reading of fiction and literary criticism that
had evoked in me vague glimpses of life's possibilities. Of course, I
had never seen or met the men who wrote the books I read, and the kind
of world in which they lived was as alien to me as the moon. But what
enabled me to overcome my chronic distrust was that these books--written
by men like Dreiser, Masters, Mencken, Anderson, and Lewis--seemed
defensively critical of the straitened American environment. These
writers seemed to feel that America could be shaped nearer to the hearts
of those who lived in it. And it was out of these novels and stories and
articles, out of the emotional impact of imaginative constructions of
heroic or tragic deeds, that I felt touching my face a tinge of warmth
from an unseen light; and in my leaving I was groping toward that
invisible light, always trying to keep my face so set and turned that I
would not lose the hope of its faint promise, using it as my
justification for action.

The white South said that it knew "niggers," and I was what the white
South called a "nigger." Well, the white South had never known me--never
known what I thought, what I felt. The white South said that I had a
"place" in life. Well, I had never felt my "place"; or, rather, my
deepest instincts had always made me reject the "place" to which the
white South had assigned me. It had never occurred to me that I was in
any way an inferior being. And no word that I had ever heard fall from
the lips of southern white men had ever made me really doubt the worth
of my own humanity. True, I had lied. I had stolen. I had struggled to
contain my seething anger. I had fought. And it was perhaps a mere
accident that I had never killed.... But in what other ways had the
South allowed me to be natural, to be real, to be myself, except in
rejection, rebellion, and aggression?

Not only had the southern whites not known me, but, more important
still, as I had lived in the South I had not had the chance to learn who
I was. The pressure of southern living kept me from being the kind of
person that I might have been. I had been what my surroundings had
demanded, what my family--conforming to the dictates of the whites above
them--had exacted of me, and what the whites had said that I must be.
Never being fully able to be myself, I had slowly learned that the South
could recognize but a part of a man, could accept but a fragment of his
personality, and all the rest--the best and deepest things of heart and
mind--were tossed away in blind ignorance and hate.

I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown, to meet other
situations that would perhaps elicit from me other responses. And if I
could meet enough of a different life, then, perhaps, gradually and
slowly I might learn who I was, what I might be. I was not leaving the
South to forget the South, but so that some day I might understand it,
might come to know what its rigors had done to me, to its children. I
fled so that the numbness of my defensive living might thaw out and let
me feel the pain--years later and far away--of what living in the South
had meant.

Yet, deep down, I knew that I could never really leave the South, for my
feelings had already been formed by the South, for there had been slowly
instilled into my personality and consciousness, black though I was, the
culture of the South. So, in leaving, I was taking a part of the South
to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it
could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the
warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom... And if that miracle ever
happened, then I would know that there was yet hope in that southern
swamp of despair and violence, that light could emerge even out of the
blackest of the southern night. I would know that the South too could
overcome its fear, its hate, its cowardice, its heritage of guilt and
blood, its burden of anxiety and compulsive cruelty.

With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I
headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with
dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that
men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that
if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming
meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.






[End of Black Boy, by Richard Wright]
