Black Boy

  “You are not an example to me; you could never be,” I spat at him. “You’re a warning. Your life isn’t so hot that you can tell me what to do.” He repaired chairs for a living now, since he had retired from teaching. “Do you think I want to grow up and weave the bottoms of chairs for people to sit in?”

  He twitched violently, trying to control himself.

  “You’ll be sorry you said that,” he mumbled.

  He turned his tall, lean, bent body and walked slowly up the steps. I sat on the porch a long time, waiting for my emotions to ebb. Then I crept cautiously into the house, got my hat, coat, books, and went to work, went to face the whims of the white folks.

  7

  Summer. Bright hot days. Hunger still a vital part of my consciousness. Passing relatives in the hallways of the crowded home and not speaking. Eating in silence at a table where prayers are said. My mother recovering slowly, but now definitely crippled for life. Will I be able to enter school in September? Loneliness. Reading. Job hunting. Vague hopes of going north. But what would become of my mother if I left her in this queer house? And how would I fare in a strange city? Doubt. Fear. My friends are buying long-pants suits that cost from seventeen to twenty dollars, a sum as huge to me as the Alps! This was my reality in 1924.

  Word came that a near-by brickyard was hiring and I went to investigate. I was frail, not weighing a hundred pounds. At noon I sneaked into the yard and walked among the aisles of damp, clean-smelling clay and came to a barrow full of wet bricks just taken from the machine that shaped them. I caught hold of the handles of the barrow and was barely able to lift it; it weighed perhaps four times as much as I did. If I were only stronger and heavier!

  Later I asked questions and found that the water boy was missing; I ran to the office and was hired. I walked in the hot sun lugging a big zinc pail from one laboring gang of black men to another for a dollar a day; a man would lift the tin dipper to his lips, take a swallow, rinse out his mouth, spit, and then drink in long, slow gulps as sweat dripped into the dipper. And off again I would go, chanting:

  “Water!”

  And somebody would yell:

  “Here, boy!”

  Deep into wet pits of clay, into sticky ditches, up slippery slopes I would struggle with the pail. I stuck it out, reeling at times from hunger, pausing to get my breath before clambering up a hill. At the end of the week the money sank into the endless expenses at home. Later I got a job in the yard that paid a dollar and a half a day, that of bat boy. I went between the walls of clay and picked up bricks that had cracked open; when my barrow was full, I would wheel it out onto a wooden scaffold and dump it into a pond.

  I had but one fear here: a dog. He was owned by the boss of the brickyard and he haunted the clay aisles, snapping, growling. The dog had been wounded many times, for the black workers were always hurling bricks at it. Whenever I saw the animal, I would take a brick from my load and toss it at him; he would slink away, only to appear again, showing his teeth. Several of the Negroes had been bitten and had been ill; the boss had been asked to leash the dog, but he had refused. One afternoon I was wheeling my barrow toward the pond when something sharp sank into my thigh. I whirled; the dog crouched a few feet away, snarling. I had been bitten. I drove the dog away and opened my trousers; teeth marks showed deep and red.

  I did not mind the stinging hurt, but I was afraid of an infection. When I went to the office to report that the boss’s dog had bitten me, I was met by a tall blonde white girl.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I want to see the boss, ma’am.”

  “For what?”

  “His dog bit me, ma’am, and I’m afraid I might get an infection.”

  “Where did he bite you?”

  “On my leg,” I lied, shying from telling her where the bite was.

  “Let’s see,” she said.

  “No, ma’am. Can’t I see the boss?”

  “He isn’t here now,” she said, and went back to her typing.

  I returned to work, stopping occasionally to examine the teeth marks; they were swelling. Later in the afternoon a tall white man wearing a cool white suit, a Panama hat, and white shoes came toward me.

  “Is this the nigger?” he asked a black boy as he pointed at me.

  “Yes, sir,” the black boy answered.

  “Come here, nigger,” he called me.

  I went to him.

  “They tell me my dog bit you,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  I pulled down my trousers and he looked.

  “Humnnn,” he grunted, then laughed. “A dog bite can’t hurt a nigger.”

  “It’s swelling and it hurts,” I said.

  “If it bothers you, let me know,” he said. “But I never saw a dog yet that could really hurt a nigger.”

  He turned and walked away and the black boys gathered to watch his tall form disappear down the aisles of wet bricks.

  “Sonofabitch!”

  “He’ll get his someday!”

  “Boy, their hearts are hard!”

  “Lawd, a white man’ll do anything!”

  “Break up that prayer meeting!” the white straw boss yelled.

  The wheelbarrows rolled again. A boy came close to me.

  “You better see a doctor,” he whispered.

  “I ain’t got no money,” I said.

  Two days passed and luckily the redness and swelling went away.

  Summer wore on and the brickyard closed; again I was out of work. I heard that caddies were wanted and I tramped five miles to the golf links. I was hired by a florid-faced white man at the rate of fifty cents for nine holes. I did not know the game and I lost three balls in as many minutes; it seemed that my eyes could not trace the flight of the balls. The man dismissed me. I watched the other boys do their jobs and within half an hour I had another golf bag and was following a ball. I made a dollar. I returned home, disgusted, tired, hungry, hating the sight of a golf course.

  School opened and, though I had not prepared myself, I enrolled. The school was far across town and the walking distance alone consumed my breakfast of mush and lard gravy. I attended classes without books for a month, then got a job working mornings and evenings for three dollars a week.

  I grew silent and reserved as the nature of the world in which I lived became plain and undeniable; the bleakness of the future affected my will to study. Granny had already thrown out hints that it was time for me to be on my own. But what had I learned so far that would help me to make a living? Nothing. I could be a porter like my father before me, but what else? And the problem of living as a Negro was cold and hard. What was it that made the hate of whites for blacks so steady, seemingly so woven into the texture of things? What kind of life was possible under that hate? How had this hate come to be? Nothing about the problems of Negroes was ever taught in the classrooms at school; and whenever I would raise these questions with the boys, they would either remain silent or turn the subject into a joke. They were vocal about the petty individual wrongs they suffered, but they possessed no desire for a knowledge of the picture as a whole. Then why was I worried about it?

  Was I really as bad as my uncles and aunts and Granny repeatedly said? Why was it considered wrong to ask questions? Was I right when I resisted punishment? It was inconceivable to me that one should surrender to what seemed wrong, and most of the people I had met seemed wrong. Ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? If the answer was yes, then I knew that I would always be wrong, because I could never do it. Then how could one live in a world in which one’s mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? There were no answers.

  The eighth grade days flowed in their hungry path and I grew more conscious of myself; I sat in classes, bored, wondering, dreaming. One long dry afternoon I took out my composition book and told myself that I would write a story; it was sheer idleness that led me to it. What would the story be about
? It resolved itself into a plot about a villain who wanted a widow’s home and I called it The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre. It was crudely atmospheric, emotional, intuitively psychological, and stemmed from pure feeling. I finished it in three days and then wondered what to do with it.

  The local Negro newspaper! That’s it…I sailed into the office and shoved my ragged composition book under the nose of the man who called himself the editor.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “A story,” I said.

  “A news story?”

  “No, fiction.”

  “All right. I’ll read it,” he said.

  He pushed my composition book back on his desk and looked at me curiously, sucking at his pipe.

  “But I want you to read it now,” I said.

  He blinked. I had no idea how newspapers were run. I thought that one took a story to an editor and he sat down then and there and read it and said yes or no.

  “I’ll read this and let you know about it tomorrow,” he said.

  I was disappointed; I had taken time to write it and he seemed distant and uninterested.

  “Give me the story,” I said, reaching for it.

  He turned from me, took up the book and read ten pages or more.

  “Won’t you come in tomorrow?” he asked. “I’ll have it finished then.”

  I honestly relented.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll stop in tomorrow.”

  I left with the conviction that he would not read it. Now, where else could I take it after he had turned it down? The next afternoon, en route to my job, I stepped into the newspaper office.

  “Where’s my story?” I asked.

  “It’s in galleys,” he said.

  “What’s that?” I asked; I did not know what galleys were.

  “It’s set up in type,” he said. “We’re publishing it.”

  “How much money will I get?” I asked, excited.

  “We can’t pay for manuscript,” he said.

  “But you sell your papers for money,” I said with logic.

  “Yes, but we’re young in business,” he explained.

  “But you’re asking me to give you my story, but you don’t give your papers away,” I said.

  He laughed.

  “Look, you’re just starting. This story will put your name before our readers. Now, that’s something,” he said.

  “But if the story is good enough to sell to your readers, then you ought to give me some of the money you get from it,” I insisted.

  He laughed again and I sensed that I was amusing him.

  “I’m going to offer you something more valuable than money,” he said. “I’ll give you a chance to learn to write.”

  I was pleased, but I still thought he was taking advantage of me.

  “When will you publish my story?”

  “I’m dividing it into three installments,” he said. “The first installment appears this week. But the main thing is this: Will you get news for me on a space rate basis?”

  “I work mornings and evenings for three dollars a week,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Then you better keep that. But what are you doing this summer?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then come to see me before you take another job,” he said. “And write some more stories.”

  A few days later my classmates came to me with baffled eyes, holding copies of the Southern Register in their hands.

  “Did you really write that story?” they asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to.”

  “Where did you get it from?”

  “I made it up.”

  “You didn’t. You copied it out of a book.”

  “If I had, no one would publish it.”

  “But what are they publishing it for?”

  “So people can read it.”

  “Who told you to do that?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  “Because I wanted to,” I said again.

  They were convinced that I had not told them the truth. We had never had any instruction in literary matters at school; the literature of the nation or the Negro had never been mentioned. My schoolmates could not understand why anyone would want to write a story; and, above all, they could not understand why I had called it The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre. The mood out of which a story was written was the most alien thing conceivable to them. They looked at me with new eyes, and a distance, a suspiciousness came between us. If I had thought anything in writing the story, I had thought that perhaps it would make me more acceptable to them, and now it was cutting me off from them more completely than ever.

  At home the effects were no less disturbing. Granny came into my room early one morning and sat on the edge of my bed.

  “Richard, what is this you’re putting in the papers?” she asked.

  “A story,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “It’s just a story, granny.”

  “But they tell me it’s been in three times.”

  “It’s the same story. It’s in three parts.”

  “But what is it about?” she insisted.

  I hedged, fearful of getting into a religious argument.

  “It’s just a story I made up,” I said.

  “Then it’s a lie,” she said.

  “Oh, Christ,” I said.

  “You must get out of this house if you take the name of the Lord in vain,” she said.

  “Granny, please…I’m sorry,” I pleaded. “But it’s hard to tell you about the story. You see, granny, everybody knows that the story isn’t true, but…”

  “Then why write it?” she asked.

  “Because people might want to read it.”

  “That’s the Devil’s work,” she said and left.

  My mother also was worried.

  “Son, you ought to be more serious,” she said. “You’re growing up now and you won’t be able to get jobs if you let people think that you’re weak-minded. Suppose the superintendent of schools would ask you to teach here in Jackson, and he found out that you had been writing stories?”

  I could not answer her.

  “I’ll be all right, mama,” I said.

  Uncle Tom, though surprised, was highly critical and contemptuous. The story had no point, he said. And whoever heard of a story by the title of The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre? Aunt Addie said that it was a sin for anyone to use the word “hell” and that what was wrong with me was that I had nobody to guide me. She blamed the whole thing upon my upbringing.

  In the end I was so angry that I refused to talk about the story. From no quarter, with the exception of the Negro newspaper editor, had there come a single encouraging word. It was rumored that the principal wanted to know why I had used the word “hell.” I felt that I had committed a crime. Had I been conscious of the full extent to which I was pushing against the current of my environment, I would have been frightened altogether out of my attempts at writing. But my reactions were limited to the attitude of the people about me, and I did not speculate or generalize.

  I dreamed of going north and writing books, novels. The North symbolized to me all that I had not felt and seen; it had no relation whatever to what actually existed. Yet, by imagining a place where everything was possible, I kept hope alive in me. But where had I got this notion of doing something in the future, of going away from home and accomplishing something that would be recognized by others? I had, of course, read my Horatio Alger stories, my pulp stories, and I knew my Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford series from cover to cover, though I had sense enough not to hope to get rich; even to my naïve imagination that possibility was too remote. I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.

  I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the Sout
h had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars to make sure that I would never feel; I was becoming aware of the thing that the Jim Crow laws had been drafted and passed to keep out of my consciousness; I was acting on impulses that southern senators in the nation’s capital had striven to keep out of Negro life; I was beginning to dream the dreams that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were taboo.

  Had I been articulate about my ultimate aspirations, no doubt someone would have told me what I was bargaining for; but nobody seemed to know, and least of all did I. My classmates felt that I was doing something that was vaguely wrong, but they did not know how to express it. As the outside world grew more meaningful, I became more concerned, tense; and my classmates and my teachers would say: “Why do you ask so many questions?” Or: “Keep quiet.”

  I was in my fifteenth year; in terms of schooling I was far behind the average youth of the nation, but I did not know that. In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and, without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the bells and the screams that filled the air.

  8

  Summer again. The old problem of hunting for a job. I told the woman for whom I was working, a Mrs. Bibbs, that I needed an all-day job that would pay me enough money to buy clothes and books for the next school term. She took the matter up with her husband, who was a foreman in a sawmill.

  “So you want to work in the mill, hunh?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He came to me and put his hands under my arms and lifted me from the floor, as though I were a bundle of feathers.

  “You’re too light for our work,” he said.

  “But maybe I could do something there,” I said.