“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 naïve 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 café,” 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, naïve, 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 naïve girl. This morning I had been a naïve boy.
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 café 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 hap
pened 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 their 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 naïve 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. Shortly 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
I 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 split. 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.)