“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 con
viction 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 blod 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.