Black Boy

  “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 it 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 hair-breadth 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 ax, 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 cat 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 pool-rooms, 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 t
o 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 fro
m 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 naïvely, 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.