Black Boy

  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, second-hand 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 naïve 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 lake data 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 from 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.