Black Boy

“Good-bye, grandpa,” I whispered.

  “Good-bye, son,” he spoke hoarsely. “Rejoice, for God has picked out my s-s-e…in-in h-heaven…”

  His voice died. I had not understood what he had said and I wondered if I should ask him to repeat it. But Granny took my hand and led me from the room. The house was quiet; there was no crying. My mother sat silent in her rocking chair, staring out the window; now and then she would lower her face to her hands. Granny and Aunt Addie moved silently about the house. I sat mute, waiting for Grandpa to die. I was still puzzled about what he had tried to say to me; it seemed important that I should know his final words. I followed Granny into the kitchen.

  “Granny, what did Grandpa say? I didn’t quite hear him,” I whispered.

  She whirled and gave me one of her back-handed slaps across my mouth.

  “Shut up! The angel of death’s in the house!”

  “I just wanted to know,” I said, nursing my bruised lips.

  She looked at me and relented.

  “He said that God had picked out his seat in heaven,” she said. “Now you know. So sit down and quit asking fool questions.”

  When I awakened the next morning my mother told me that Grandpa had “gone home.”

  “Get on your hat and coat,” Granny said.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Quit asking questions and do what you are told,” she said. I dressed for the outdoors.

  “Go to Tom and tell him that Papa’s gone home. Ask him to come here and take charge of things,” Granny said.

  Tom, her eldest son, had recently moved from Hazelhurst to Jackson and lived near the outskirts of town. Feeling that I was bearing an important message, I ran every inch of the two miles; I thought that news of a death should be told at once. I came in sight of my uncle’s house with a heaving chest; I bounded up the steps and rapped on the door. My little cousin, Maggie, opened the door.

  “Where’s Uncle Tom?” I asked.

  “He’s sleeping,” she said.

  I ran into his room, went to his bed, and shook him.

  “Uncle Tom, Granny says to come at once. Grandpa’s dead,” I panted.

  He stared at me a long time.

  “You certainly are a prize fool,” he said quietly. “Don’t you know that that’s no way to tell a person that his father’s dead?”

  I stared at him, baffled, panting.

  “I ran all the way out here,” I gasped. “I’m out of breath. I’m sorry.”

  He rose slowly and began to dress, ignoring me; he did not utter a word for five minutes.

  “What’re you waiting for?” he asked me.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  I walked home slowly, asking myself what on earth was the matter with me, why it was I never seemed to do things as people expected them to be done. Every word and gesture I made seemed to provoke hostility. I had never been able to talk to others, and I had to guess at their meanings and motives. I had not intentionally tried to shock Uncle Tom, and yet his anger at me seemed to outweigh his sorrow for his father. Finding no answer, I told myself that I was a fool to worry about it, that no matter what I did I would be wrong somehow as far as my family was concerned.

  I was not allowed to go to Grandpa’s funeral; I was ordered to stay home “and mind the house.” I sat reading detective stories until the family returned from the graveyard. They told me nothing and I asked no questions. The routine of the house flowed on as usual; for me there was sleep, mush, greens, school, study, loneliness, yearning, and then sleep again.

  My clothing became so shabby that I was ashamed to go to school. Many of the boys in my class were wearing their first long-pants suits. I grew so bitter that I decided to have it out with Granny; I would tell her that if she did not let me work on Saturdays I would leave home. But when I opened the subject, she would not listen. I followed her about the house, demanding the right to work on Saturday. Her answer was no and no and no.

  “Then I’ll quit school,” I declared.

  “Quit then. See how much I care,” she said.

  “I’ll go away from here and you’ll never hear from me!”

  “No, you won’t,” she said tauntingly.

  “How can I ever learn enough to get a job?” I asked her, switching my tactics. I showed her my ragged stockings, my patched pants. “Look, I won’t go to school like this! I’m not asking you for money or to do anything. I only want to work!”

  “I have nothing to do with whether you go to school or not,” she said. “You left the church and you are on your own. You are with the world. You’re dead to me, dead to Christ.”

  “That old church of yours is messing up my life,” I said.

  “Don’t you say that in this house!”

  “It’s true and you know it!”

  “God’s punishing you,” she said. “And you’re too proud to ask Him for help.”

  “I’m going to get a job anyway.”

  “Then you can’t live here,” she said.

  “Then I’ll leave,” I said, trembling violently.

  “You won’t leave,” she repeated.

  “You think I’m joking, don’t you?” I asked, determined to make her know how I felt. “I’ll leave this minute!”

  I ran to my room, got a battered suitcase, and began packing my ragged clothes. I did not have a penny, but I was going to leave. She came to the door.

  “You little fool! Put that suitcase down!”

  “I’m going where I can work!”

  She snatched the suitcase out of my hands; she was trembling.

  “All right,” she said. “If you want to go to hell, then go. But God’ll know that it was not my fault. He’ll forgive me, but He won’t forgive you.”

  Weeping, she rushed from the door. Her humanity had triumphed over her fear. I emptied the suitcase, feeling spent. I hated these emotional outbursts, these tempests of passion, for they always left me tense and weak. Now I was truly dead to Granny and Aunt Addie, but my mother smiled when I told her that I had defied them. She rose and hobbled to me on her paralytic legs and kissed me.

  6

  The next day at school I inquired among the students about jobs and was given the name of a white family who wanted a boy to do chores. That afternoon, as soon as school had let out, I went to the address. A tall, dour white woman talked to me. Yes, she needed a boy, an honest boy. Two dollars a week. Mornings, evenings, and all day Saturdays. Washing dishes. Chopping wood. Scrubbing floors. Cleaning the yard. I would get my breakfast and dinner. As I asked timid questions, my eyes darted about. What kind of food would I get? Was the place as shabby as the kitchen indicated?

  “Do you want this job?” the woman asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, afraid to trust my own judgment.

  “Now, boy, I want to ask you one question and I want you to tell me the truth,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, all attention.

  “Do you steal?” she asked me seriously.

  I burst into a laugh, then checked myself.

  “What’s so damn funny about that?” she asked.

  “Lady, if I was a thief, I’d never tell anybody.”

  “What do you mean?” she blazed with a red face.

  I had made a mistake during my first five minutes in the white world. I hung my head.

  “No, ma’am,” I mumbled. “I don’t steal.”

  She stared at me, trying to make up her mind.

  “Now, look, we don’t want a sassy nigger around here,” she said.

  “No, ma’am,” I assured her. “I’m not sassy.”

  Promising to report the next morning at six o’clock, I walked home and pondered on what could possibly have been in the woman’s mind to have made her ask me point-blank if I stole. Then I recalled hearing that white people looked upon Negroes as a variety of children, and it was only in the light of that that her question made any sense. If I had been planning to murder her, I certainly would not have told her an
d, rationally, she no doubt realized it. Yet habit had overcome her rationality and had made her ask me: “Boy, do you steal?” Only an idiot would have answered: “Yes, ma’am. I steal.”

  What would happen now that I would be among white people for hours at a stretch? Would they hit me? Curse me? If they did, I would leave at once. In all my wishing for a job I had not thought of how I would be treated, and now it loomed important, decisive, sweeping down beneath every other consideration. I would be polite, humble, saying yes sir and no sir, yes ma’am and no ma’am, but I would draw a line over which they must not step. Oh, maybe I’m just thinking up trouble, I told myself. They might like me…

  The next morning I chopped wood for the cook stove, lugged in scuttles of coal for the grates, washed the front porch and swept the back porch, swept the kitchen, helped wait on the table, and washed the dishes. I was sweating. I swept the front walk and ran to the store to shop. When I returned the woman said:

  “Your breakfast is in the kitchen.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  I saw a plate of thick, black molasses and a hunk of white bread on the table. Would I get no more than this? They had had eggs, bacon, coffee…I picked up the bread and tried to break it; it was stale and hard. Well, I would drink the molasses. I lifted the plate and brought it to my lips and saw floating on the surface of the black liquid green and white bits of mold. Goddamn…I can’t eat this, I told myself. The food was not even clean. The woman came into the kitchen as I was putting on my coat.

  “You didn’t eat,” she said.

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”

  “You’ll eat at home?” she asked hopefully.

  “Well, I just wasn’t hungry this morning, ma’am,” I lied.

  “You don’t like molasses and bread,” she said dramatically.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am, I do,” I defended myself quickly, not wanting her to think that I dared criticize what she had given me.

  “I don’t know what’s happening to you niggers nowadays,” she sighed, wagging her head. She looked closely at the molasses. “It’s a sin to throw out molasses like that. I’ll put it up for you this evening.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said heartily.

  Neatly she covered the plate of molasses with another plate, then felt the bread and dumped it into the garbage. She turned to me, her face lit with an idea.

  “What grade are you in school?”

  “Seventh, ma’am.”

  “Then why are you going to school?” she asked in surprise.

  “Well, I want to be a writer,” I mumbled, unsure of myself; I had not planned to tell her that, but she had made me feel so utterly wrong and of no account that I needed to bolster myself.

  “A what?” she demanded.

  “A writer,” I mumbled.

  “For what?”

  “To write stories,” I mumbled defensively.

  “You’ll never be a writer,” she said. “Who on earth put such ideas into your nigger head?”

  “Nobody,” I said.

  “I didn’t think anybody ever would,” she declared indignantly.

  As I walked around her house to the street, I knew that I would not go back. The woman had assaulted my ego; she had assumed that she knew my place in life, what I felt, what I ought to be, and I resented it with all my heart. Perhaps she was right; perhaps I would never be a writer; but I did not want her to say so.

  Had I kept the job I would have learned quickly just how white people acted toward Negroes, but I was too naïve to think that there were many white people like that. I told myself that there were good white people, people with money and sensitive feelings. As a whole, I felt that they were bad, but I would be lucky enough to find the exceptions.

  Fearing that my family might think I was finicky, I lied to them, telling them that the white woman had already hired a boy. At school I continued to ask about jobs and was directed to another address. As soon as school was out I made for the house. Yes, the woman said that she wanted a boy who could milk a cow, feed chickens, gather vegetables, help serve breakfast and dinner.

  “But I can’t milk a cow, ma’am,” I said.

  “Where are you from?” she asked incredulously.

  “Here in Jackson,” I said.

  “You mean to stand there, nigger, and tell me that you live in Jackson and don’t know how to milk a cow?” she demanded in surprise.

  I said nothing, but I was quickly learning the reality—a Negro’s reality—of the white world. One woman had assumed that I would tell her if I stole, and now this woman was amazed that I could not milk a cow, I, a nigger who dared live in Jackson…They were all turning out to be alike, differing only in detail. I faced a wall in the woman’s mind, a wall that she did not know was there.

  “I just never learned,” I said finally.

  “I’ll show you how to milk,” she said, as though glad to be charitable enough to repair a nigger’s knowledge on that score. “It’s easy.”

  The place was large; they had a cow, chickens, a garden, all of which spelled food and that decided me. I told her that I would take the job and I reported for work the next morning. My tasks were simple but many; I milked the cow under her supervision, gathered eggs, swept, and was through in time to serve breakfast. The dining-room table was set for five; there were eggs, bacon, toast, jam, butter, milk, apples…That seemed promising. The woman told me to bring the food in as they called for it, and I familiarized myself with the kitchen so that I could act quickly when called upon. Finally the woman came into the dining room followed by a pale young man who sat down and stared at the food.

  “What the hell!” he snarled. “Every morning it’s these damn eggs for breakfast.”

  “Listen, you sonofabitch,” the woman said, sitting too, “you don’t have to eat ’em.”

  “You might try serving some dirt,” he said, and forked up the bacon.

  I felt that I was dreaming. Were they like that all the time? If so, I would not stay here. A young girl came and flopped into her chair.

  “That’s right, you bitch,” the young man said. “Knock the food right out of my goddamn mouth.”

  “You know what you can do,” the girl said.

  I stared at them so intently that I was not aware that the young man was watching me.

  “Say, what in hell are you glaring at me for, you nigger bastard?” he demanded. “Get those goddamn biscuits off that stove and put ’em on the table.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Two middle-aged men came in and sat down. I never learned who was in the family, who was related to whom, or if it was a family. They cursed each other in an amazingly offhand manner and nobody seemed to mind. As they hurled invectives, they barely looked at each other. I was tense each moment, trying to anticipate their wishes and avoid a curse, and I did not suspect that the tension I had begun to feel that morning would lift itself into the passion of my life. Perhaps I had waited too long to start working for white people; perhaps I should have begun earlier, when I was younger—as most of the other black boys had done—and perhaps by now the tension would have become an habitual condition, contained and controlled by reflex. But that was not to be my lot; I was always to be conscious of it, brood over it, carry it in my heart, live with it, sleep with it, fight with it.

  The morning was physically tiring, but the nervous strain, the fear that my actions would call down upon my head a storm of curses, was even more damaging. When the time came for me to go to school, I was emotionally spent. But I clung to the job because I got enough to eat and no one watched me closely and measured out my food. I had rarely tasted eggs and I would put hunks of yellow butter into a hot skillet and hurriedly scramble three or four eggs at a time and gobble them down in huge mouthfuls so that the woman would not see me. And I would take tumblers of milk behind a convenient door and drain them in a swallow, as though they contained water.

  Though the food I ate strengthened my body, I acquired another proble
m: I had fallen down in my studies at school. Had I been physically stronger, had not my new tensions sapped my already limited energy, I might have been able to work mornings and evenings and still carry my studies successfully. But in the middle of the day I would grow groggy; in the classroom I would feel that the teacher and the pupils were receding from me and I would know that I was drifting off to sleep. I would go to the water fountain in the corridor and let cold water run over my wrists, chilling my blood, hoping in that way to keep awake.

  But the job had its boon. At the midday recess I would crowd gladly into the corner store and eat sandwiches with the boys, slamming down my own money on the counter for what I wanted, swapping descriptions of the homes of white folks in which we worked. I used to divert them with vivid word pictures of the cursing family, their brooding silences, their indifference toward one another. I told them of the food I managed to eat when the woman’s back was turned, and they were filled with friendly envy.

  The boys would now examine some new article of clothing I had bought; none of us allowed a week to pass without buying something new, paying fifty cents down and fifty cents per week. We knew that we were being cheated, but we never had enough cash to buy in any other way.

  My mother began a rapid recovery. I was happy when she expressed the hope that someday soon we might have a home of our own. Though Granny was angry and disgusted, my mother began to attend a Methodist church in the neighborhood, and I went to Sunday school, not because my mother begged me to—which she did—but to meet and talk with my classmates.

  In the black Protestant church I entered a new world; prim, brown, puritanical girls who taught in the public schools; black college students who tried to conceal their plantation origin; black boys and girls emerging self-consciously from adolescence; wobbly-bosomed black and yellow church matrons; black janitors and porters who sang proudly in the choir; subdued redcaps and carpenters who served as deacons; meek, blank-eyed black and yellow washerwomen who shouted and moaned and danced when hymns were sung; jovial, pot-bellied black bishops; skinny old maids who were constantly giving rallies to raise money; snobbery, clannishness, gossip, intrigue, petty class rivalry, and conspicuous displays of cheap clothing…I liked it and I did not like it; I longed to be among them, yet when with them I looked at them as if I were a million miles away. I had been kept out of their world too long ever to be able to become a real part of it.