Three Days Before the Shooting ... (24 page)

Then they were laughing, and someone said, “He’d be surprised. Oh, but wouldn’t he be surprised….” “Hush, Doris,” someone said, and Mother said, “Then if you’re manly, really manly as I know you are, darling, go ahead and show these ladies your little man—Here, I’ll help you,” and she left me no time to think it through and I felt her hand go away and stood looking through the window past the honeysuckle vine above the porch and on past the yellow light into the blue of the sky. She was working with my buttons and then I felt the air and she said, “There now, there, it’s done so now you can show the ladies.” And they came forward, gathering around with a closeness of perfume and powder and rouge and eyes. Then I was looking into the sky and it was between my finger and thumb; hearing, “That’s fine, darling; Oh, that’s lovely. I knew you’d oblige
.

Now wait, don’t go, just a moment longer. See what happens here, ladies? Now, darling, turn him over. There, so the ladies can see the beautiful stitches. Isn’t that marvelous, ladies?” And they were looking at him silently and I could hear them breathing and the large lady was fanning herself with a pink handkerchief. “It’s hygienic and absolutely beautiful,” Mother said. “And did it hurt much, Welborn?” Mrs. Mayfield said, and my neck was stiff. “Go on, Gladys,” Mother said, “Touch him; I’m sure Wel wouldn’t mind.” “Oh, thank you, no,” Mrs. Mayfield said. “But didn’t it hurt even the tiniest bit?” “No,” Mother said. “But he’s so young,” Mrs. Mayfield said. “Absolutely not,” Mother said. “I discussed it with Mr. McIntyre, and he says that it’s done absolutely without pain and that Welborn will be thankful and very happy later on when he assumes the pleasures and responsibilities of the, er, marital state, ladies; you understand, marriage and all that,” and I was thinking, Marriage, I will never get married, never, never, never, and through the shimmer I could see their faces go away, smiling as they talked on as though I was no longer there. “Thank you, darling,” Mother said. “You can go now.” And I was gone. “What took you so long?” Jimmy said. “Hey, you’re crying.” “No, I’m not crying,” I said. “Yes, you are.” “Oh, no, I ain’t,” I said. “Then what took you so long?” “Oh, I had to do something for Mother. Let’s go play.” But I could see their eyes
, and then I was looking into that strange, dark, yet familiar, face again, hearing my voice blurting, “Mrs. Johnson, I’ve come to tell you that Laura and I have to get married,” and seeing her shoot up in her chair.

“You have got to do
what!
With
my
daughter—boy, who do you think you’re talking to?”

“But, Mrs. Johnson—” I began, but already she was up and leaning through the doorway, calling into the hall.

“Laura Jean, git up here this very minute!”

“What is it, Mother?” I heard Laura’s distant voice reply. Thinking her at the college, I was surprised.

“Gal, don’t stand back there asking me what is it; git up here!”

Laura’s hair was in curlers and she wore a blue bathrobe.

When she saw me she stopped short.

“Oh, my God,” she cried.

“Gal, who is this—this
white man?
Is he telling me the truth?”

“Oh, Mother, this is awful. You shouldn’t use such a tone! That’s Welborn. I love him!”

“Love him,”
Mrs. Johnson said. “What you mean is you been laying around with this white boy after I brought you all the way up here in order to get away from that kind of stuff down South! Who is he, anyway? Where’d you find him?” Her voice was a plea, a cry of despair, a scream emitting beneath a tumbling structure.

“Oh, I know he’s a poor one. He looks poor! He
smells
poor! In fact, he looks poor and acts trashy! Coming in here without any warning, talking about marrying my daughter! You been sleeping around with him and his
people are probably some of those old foreigners who think they’re better than us because the first words they learned when they hopped off the boat were ‘dirty nigger’— Answer me, you slut; I say, who is this peckerwood?”

Laura broke into tears, and I wanted to sink through the floor.

“Mama, please don’t do this to me,” she cried. “This is Welborn McIntyre. I’ve told you about him. He’s no foreigner. He’s none of those things you say.”

“Far as I’m concerned, they’re
all
foreigners,” Mrs. Johnson shouted. “Is what he says true?”

“Yes, Mama, but not like you make it sound.”

Mrs. Johnson’s hands flew to her hips. “I say, is it true that you have to git married?”

“But Mother, it’s all right, I love him—”

“Love?”
Mrs. Johnson whirled completely around, her eyes blazing. “You mean to stand there and talk to me about loving this peckerwood—you, my own daughter? Loving him when even if he ain’t a foreigner, he’s probably the kind who sucks a black woman’s tit from the minute he’s born and lets her change his didies and feeds him and teaches him his manners and protects him, and then, when he’s fourteen and feeling himself, he calls her a ‘nigger bitch’ and proceeds to hop on top of the first young black gal he can get to catch his devilment. You been knowing this ever since you were thirteen years old and still you can talk to me about loving a peckerwood—
any
peckerwood?”

Laura was suddenly calm. “Yes, Mother,” she said, “I can, and do. I love him very much and what he says is true. But he’s not a peckerwood and I’m not forcing him. It was as much my fault as his. I didn’t even know that he was coming up here because I meant to tell you myself. He came on his own accord and wasn’t forced—”

“Forced?” Mrs. Johnson said. “You’re mighty right, you’re not forcing him. And long as I have something to say about it, there ain’t going to
be
any forcing. You just wait until your daddy comes in off the road, he’ll be fit to be tied. After all our hopes and scheming and sacrifices, and you think that we’re going to let you get tied up with the first poor-white-trash peckerwood that comes along, then I have raised a fool!”

“No, Mother,” Laura said quietly. “Let’s talk this out—”

Mrs. Johnson swung around, filling the door. “Talk,” she said, “that’s a good idea, because my mama taught me a long time ago the right way for a black woman to talk to a peckerwood about her daughter.”

Then she was gone and I was looking at Laura, who pleaded with me with her eyes. Then Mrs. Johnson filled the doorway again, holding a shotgun.

“Now
I’m ready to talk,” she said. “Mr. McIntyre, you’ve done had your little talk, and you’ve told me what it is you
want to
do. All right, so now I’m
telling you what you’re
going to
do: You are going to git out of this apartment, and you’re going to git on back downtown, and you’re going to forgit that you ever knew my daughter along with whatever it is she’s been fool enough to let you git her with. That’s right! Because if I ever see or hear of you two being together again,
I’m
going to kill you both and go to hell and pay for it—Now you git!”

I stood, moving forward like one in a trance. She was blocking the doorway.

“Mrs. Johnson,” I said, “I’m not Southern, I came here to ask your permission to marry—”

“Oh, no, you didn’t! You came up here to brag and try to impress Laura Jean. You don’t want to do good, you just want to
look
good. Well, I’m telling you now that you can forgit it—Now ain’t you glad? I just told you what you want to hear: All your troubles with your black woman are over!”

“But that’s not it at all, Mrs. Johnson.”

“Oh, yes, it is, and don’t think I’m going to change my mind. And neither will Stone, except he’s liable to kill you. We can take care of our own, Mr. McIntyre, and don’t think I don’t know what I’m saying! It’ll be
ours
, black or white, red or green. You hear? It’ll be
ours
, not y’all’s, and it’ll have to live
our
life, so it might as well get started from the beginning. You have broke your own rules, and you have shamed us, Mr. McIntyre, but one thing you haven’t near ‘bout done is beatin’ us. Oh, no! Laura Jean is going to go South to her grandmother, and we’ll all pull together and make the best of this mess. So now you go, and thank the Lord that you came on a day when Stone, Laura Jean’s father, is out on the road.”

My legs flowed toward the woman with the shotgun and stopped, seeing her turn aside, her face grim as I pressed myself past.

“Please, Welborn, don’t leave,” Laura called. “Not this way. Don’t let her do this to us. Don’t go in this way that’ll leave you, oh, so ashamed later on. Welborn, please, Wel—born!”

I left, trying to shut out the sound of her tears. I was unable to look back to Laura even to make an affirmation with my eyes as I went out and down through the fishy air and out into the cold blast of the street. I felt wet and limp, a sharp odor issued from within the upturned collar of my overcoat.

I started for the subway, walking blindly, but found that I couldn’t return downtown. How strange it all was. On my way uptown I would have felt lucky with the prospect of such an easy solution to my problem—even though I believed that I would have rejected it, but now, trudging along in the falling snow, there was no satisfaction within me. No satisfaction and no sorrow, only a deep emptiness, a feeling of defeat and rejection. I felt suddenly older and that I had learned a harsh wisdom not only as to the cost of love but of some precious but untenable vision of life.
And, yes
, I thought, as
I considered the poor people hurrying past me through the streaking snow,
I’ve suffered a defeat of hope. Our love had meant to help them, and now it was broken
. But more confounding, I had been defeated not by my own family ties, or by the codes of my own social background, as I’d feared, but by an outraged, ignorant black woman who wanted no one like me, no one who even
looked
like me, in her family. And what I couldn’t have allowed myself to believe but which she insisted that I secretly hoped: She preferred to have her daughter bear the burden of white bastardy rather than accept me as a son-in-law.

CHAPTER 10

I
STUMBLED THROUGH THE
snow-curtained streets like a man carving a snowbank with a white-hot iron attached to his brow. Everything I thought I had known melted into a hot, scalding contradiction that froze immediately into a chiller form. I walked blindly and so found myself back in her block, approaching her building again, but there I stopped. I hadn’t the heart to face Mrs. Johnson again. Nor was it the shotgun which stopped me but the dread of an ever more final rejection. For a while I stood on the stoop, hoping that Laura would appear, but in vain.

Soon I began to attract attention. Dark faces appeared at the windows, peering out at me. I walked to the corner and southward, then moved east to find myself on Lenox Avenue. People hurried past bundled in their overcoats. Far ahead the streetcars clanged along on 125th Street, rocking slowly across the avenue, a mask of yellow swiftly disappearing from view. The snow fell wetly. There was a strong smell of barbecue in the air, then as I passed an apartment building a gust of wind blew a cloud of sulfurous smoke into the street, and I stood there in the slanting snow, shaken with a fit of coughing that brought tears to my eyes. I cried and cried. Finally it passed and I walked on.

(It’s all still so vivid, after all the years of repression.) Near a corner, standing before a storefront window painted with a garish red-and-green scene of the Crucifixion, a blind man wearing a drab olive-green stocking cap, a frayed soldier’s overcoat, and knitted gloves with missing fingertips, sang sadly as he strummed a battered twelve-string guitar. Flakes of snow sparkled in his moustache as he sang with uplifted head, and I could see the harsh scene of snow, grinding cars, and hurrying people reduced and vividly reflected in the dark lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses.
Damn it all
, I thought.
Damn it all!
Then, walking close, I dropped a quarter into the dented tin cup attached to the neck of his guitar.

He paused. “Thank you, brother,” he said. “For a while there, I thought I was singing to an empty-hearted world.”

I was silent.

“You still there, aren’t you, brother?”

“Still here,” I said with anguished tongue, “and thanks for the song.”

“The pleasure is all mine, brother.”

“It’s getting much colder,” I said. “Don’t you think you should get out of it?”

“Not yet awhile,” he said. “Got to get my cornmeal made.”

“How is it going?”

“Bad, brother. It’s going bad—for the time being, that is. I been working along here for about two hours, and I made all of forty cents, including what you just paid me. And two cents of the rest come from some little kids. Still, the way I see it, a man has to stay on the job and take his chances.”

“Sure, but it’s getting much colder,” I said, “too cold for me, so I must leave. But before I go here’s an advance for the next time we meet.” Listening to the thump of the coin falling into the cup, I walked away.

“Hey there, brother,” he called. “Come back a second. I got something to tell you….”

“Take care,” I called, moving on. What could he have to say?

As I passed a bar the door opened and I could hear voices raised in argument and thought of Laura and Mrs. Johnson, and the image of the bright red and pale green poinsettias glowed in my eyes like a suddenly illuminated neon sign. Back up the street behind me I could hear the blind man’s voice rising once more in strong, clear song:

Every shut eye ain’t sleeping, baby,
And every goodby don’t mean gone,
So you’re bound to think about me, baby,
When those hard, hard times come ‘long…

How strange, I thought, that the song could sound so sad, yet when he’d talked his voice had seemed somehow quite gay.

I went into a bar and ordered a bourbon. Down at the other end of the counter three men were telling tales of Dutch Schultz and someone named “Pompey.” A stuffed owl and the head of a twelve-point buck were fixed to the wall above the back bar. A photograph collection of black prizefighters in pugilistic poses showed in the mirror frame, along with a sign in red letters asking, “WHERE HAVE ALL THE WHITE HOPES GONE?” I drank up, paid, and went out into the cold.