Black Boy

  There was the yearning for identification loosed in me by the sight of a solitary ant carrying a burden upon a mysterious journey.

  There was the disdain that filled me as I tortured a delicate, blue-pink crawfish that huddled fearfully in the mudsill of a rusty tin can.

  There was the aching glory in masses of clouds burning gold and purple from an invisible sun.

  There was the liquid alarm I saw in the blood-red glare of the sun’s afterglow mirrored in the squared panes of whitewashed frame houses.

  There was the languor I felt when I heard green leaves rustling with a rainlike sound.

  There was the incomprehensible secret embodied in a whitish toadstool hiding in the dark shade of a rotting log.

  There was the experience of feeling death without dying that came from watching a chicken leap about blindly after its neck had been snapped by a quick twist of my father’s wrist.

  There was the great joke that I felt God had played on cats and dogs by making them lap their milk and water with their tongues.

  There was the thirst I had when I watched clear, sweet juice trickle from sugar cane being crushed.

  There was the hot panic that welled up in my throat and swept through my blood when I first saw the lazy, limp coils of a blue-skinned snake sleeping in the sun.

  There was the speechless astonishment of seeing a hog stabbed through the heart, dipped into boiling water, scraped, split open, gutted, and strung up gaping and bloody.

  There was the love I had for the mute regality of tall, moss-clad oaks.

  There was the hint of cosmic cruelty that I felt when I saw the curved timbers of a wooden shack that had been warped in the summer sun.

  There was the saliva that formed in my mouth whenever I smelt clay dust potted with fresh rain.

  There was the cloudy notion of hunger when I breathed the odor of new-cut, bleeding grass.

  And there was the quiet terror that suffused my senses when vast hazes of gold washed earthward from star-heavy skies on silent nights…

  One day my mother told me that we were going to Memphis on a boat, the Kate Adams, and my eagerness thereafter made the days seem endless. Each night I went to bed hoping that the next morning would be the day of departure.

  “How big is the boat?” I asked my mother.

  “As big as a mountain,” she said.

  “Has it got a whistle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does the whistle blow?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “When the captain wants it to blow.”

  “Why do they call it the Kate Adams?”

  “Because that’s the boat’s name.”

  “What color is the boat?”

  “White.”

  “How long will we be on the boat?”

  “All day and all night.”

  “Will we sleep on the boat?”

  “Yes, when we get sleepy, we’ll sleep. Now, hush.”

  For days I had dreamed about a huge white boat floating on a vast body of water, but when my mother took me down to the levee on the day of leaving, I saw a tiny, dirty boat that was not at all like the boat I had imagined. I was disappointed and when time came to go on board I cried and my mother thought that I did not want to go with her to Memphis, and I could not tell her what the trouble was. Solace came when I wandered about the boat and gazed at Negroes throwing dice, drinking whisky, playing cards, lolling on boxes, eating, talking, and singing. My father took me down into the engine room and the throbbing machines enthralled me for hours.

  In Memphis we lived in a one-story brick tenement. The stone buildings and the concrete pavements looked bleak and hostile to me. The absence of green, growing things made the city seem dead. Living space for the four of us—my mother, my brother, my father, and me—was a kitchen and a bedroom. In the front and rear were paved areas in which my brother and I could play, but for days I was afraid to go into the strange city streets alone.

  It was in this tenement that the personality of my father first came fully into the orbit of my concern. He worked as a night porter in a Beale Street drugstore and he became important and forbidding to me only when I learned that I could not make noise when he was asleep in the daytime. He was the lawgiver in our family and I never laughed in his presence. I used to lurk timidly in the kitchen doorway and watch his huge body sitting slumped at the table. I stared at him with awe as he gulped his beer from a tin bucket, as he ate long and heavily, sighed, belched, closed his eyes to nod on a stuffed belly. He was quite fat and his bloated stomach always lapped over his belt. He was always a stranger to me, always somehow alien and remote.

  One morning my brother and I, while playing in the rear of our flat, found a stray kitten that set up a loud, persistent meowing. We fed it some scraps of food and gave it water, but it still meowed. My father, clad in his underwear, stumbled sleepily to the back door and demanded that we keep quiet. We told him that it was the kitten that was making the noise and he ordered us to drive it away. We tried to make the kitten leave, but it would not budge. My father took a hand.

  “Scat!” he shouted.

  The scrawny kitten lingered, brushing itself against our legs, and meowing plaintively.

  “Kill that damn thing!” my father exploded. “Do anything, but get it away from here!”

  He went inside, grumbling. I resented his shouting and it irked me that I could never make him feel my resentment. How could I hit back at him? Oh, yes…He had said to kill the kitten and I would kill it! I knew that he had not really meant for me to kill the kitten, but my deep hate of him urged me toward a literal acceptance of his word.

  “He said for us to kill the kitten,” I told my brother.

  “He didn’t mean it,” my brother said.

  “He did, and I’m going to kill ’im.”

  “Then he will howl,” my brother said.

  “He can’t howl if he’s dead,” I said.

  “He didn’t really say kill ’im,” my brother protested.

  “He did!” I said. “And you heard him!”

  My brother ran away in fright. I found a piece of rope, made a noose, slipped it about the kitten’s neck, pulled it over a nail, then jerked the animal clear of the ground. It gasped, slobbered, spun, doubled, clawed the air frantically; finally its mouth gaped and its pink-white tongue shot out stiffly. I tied the rope to a nail and went to find my brother. He was crouching behind a corner of the building.

  “I killed ’im,” I whispered.

  “You did bad,” my brother said.

  “Now Papa can sleep,” I said, deeply satisfied.

  “He didn’t mean for you to kill ’im,” my brother said.

  “Then why did he tell me to do it?” I demanded.

  My brother could not answer; he stared fearfully at the dangling kitten.

  “That kitten’s going to get you,” he warned me.

  “That kitten can’t even breathe now,” I said.

  “I’m going to tell,” my brother said, running into the house.

  I waited, resolving to defend myself with my father’s rash words, anticipating my enjoyment in repeating them to him even though I knew that he had spoken them in anger. My mother hurried toward me, drying her hands upon her apron. She stopped and paled when she saw the kitten suspended from the rope.

  “What in God’s name have you done?” she asked.

  “The kitten was making noise and Papa said to kill it,” I explained.

  “You little fool!” she said. “Your father’s going to beat you for this!”

  “But he told me to kill it,” I said.

  “You shut your mouth!”

  She grabbed my hand and dragged me to my father’s bedside and told him what I had done.

  “You know better than that!” my father stormed.

  “You told me to kill ’im,” I said.

  “I told you to drive him away,” he said.

  “You told me to kill ’im,” I countered po
sitively.

  “You get out of my eyes before I smack you down!” my father bellowed in disgust, then turned over in bed.

  I had had my first triumph over my father. I had made him believe that I had taken his words literally. He could not punish me now without risking his authority. I was happy because I had at last found a way to throw my criticism of him into his face. I had made him feel that, if he whipped me for killing the kitten, I would never give serious weight to his words again. I had made him know that I felt he was cruel and I had done it without his punishing me.

  But my mother, being more imaginative, retaliated with an assault upon my sensibilities that crushed me with the moral horror involved in taking a life. All that afternoon she directed toward me calculated words that spawned in my mind a horde of invisible demons bent upon exacting vengeance for what I had done. As evening drew near, anxiety filled me and I was afraid to go into an empty room alone.

  “You owe a debt you can never pay,” my mother said.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled.

  “Being sorry can’t make that kitten live again,” she said.

  Then, just before I was to go to bed, she uttered a paralyzing injunction: she ordered me to go out into the dark, dig a grave, and bury the kitten.

  “No!” I screamed, feeling that if I went out of doors some evil spirit would whisk me away.

  “Get out there and bury that poor kitten,” she ordered.

  “I’m scared!”

  “And wasn’t that kitten scared when you put that rope around its neck?” she asked.

  “But it was only a kitten,” I explained.

  “But it was alive,” she said. “Can you make it live again?”

  “But Papa said to kill it,” I said, trying to shift the moral blame upon my father.

  My mother whacked me across my mouth with the flat palm of her hand.

  “You stop that lying! You knew what he meant!”

  “I didn’t!” I bawled.

  She shoved a tiny spade into my hands.

  “Go out there and dig a hole and bury that kitten!”

  I stumbled out into the black night, sobbing, my legs wobbly from fear. Though I knew that I had killed the kitten, my mother’s words had made it live again in my mind. What would that kitten do to me when I touched it? Would it claw at my eyes? As I groped toward the dead kitten, my mother lingered behind me, unseen in the dark, her disembodied voice egging me on.

  “Mama, come and stand by me,” I begged.

  “You didn’t stand by that kitten, so why should I stand by you?” she asked tauntingly from the menacing darkness.

  “I can’t touch it,” I whimpered, feeling that the kitten was staring at me with reproachful eyes.

  “Untie it!” she ordered.

  Shuddering, I fumbled at the rope and the kitten dropped to the pavement with a thud that echoed in my mind for many days and nights. Then, obeying my mother’s floating voice, I hunted for a spot of earth, dug a shallow hole, and buried the stiff kitten; as I handled its cold body my skin prickled. When I had completed the burial, I sighed and started back to the flat, but my mother caught hold of my hand and led me again to the kitten’s grave.

  “Shut your eyes and repeat after me,” she said.

  I closed my eyes tightly, my hand clinging to hers.

  “Dear God, our Father, forgive me, for I knew not what I was doing…”

  “Dear God, our Father, forgive me, for I knew not what I was doing,” I repeated.

  “And spare my poor life, even though I did not spare the life of the kitten…”

  “And spare my poor life, even though I did not spare the life of the kitten,” I repeated.

  “And while I sleep tonight, do not snatch the breath of life from me…”

  I opened my mouth but no words came. My mind was frozen with horror. I pictured myself gasping for breath and dying in my sleep. I broke away from my mother and ran into the night, crying, shaking with dread.

  “No,” I sobbed.

  My mother called to me many times, but I would not go to her.

  “Well, I suppose you’ve learned your lesson,” she said at last.

  Contrite, I went to bed, hoping that I would never see another kitten.

  Hunger stole upon me so slowly that at first I was not aware of what hunger really meant. Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly. The hunger I had known before this had been no grim, hostile stranger; it had been a normal hunger that had made me beg constantly for bread, and when I ate a crust or two I was satisfied. But this new hunger baffled me, scared me, made me angry and insistent. Whenever I begged for food now my mother would pour me a cup of tea which would still the clamor in my stomach for a moment or two; but a little later I would feel hunger nudging my ribs, twisting my empty guts until they ached. I would grow dizzy and my vision would dim. I became less active in my play, and for the first time in my life I had to pause and think of what was happening to me.

  “Mama, I’m hungry,” I complained one afternoon.

  “Jump up and catch a kungry,” she said, trying to make me laugh and forget.

  “What’s a kungry?”

  “It’s what little boys eat when they get hungry,” she said.

  “What does it taste like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then why do you tell me to catch one?”

  “Because you said that you were hungry,” she said, smiling.

  I sensed that she was teasing me and it made me angry.

  “But I’m hungry. I want to eat.”

  “You’ll have to wait.”

  “But I want to eat now.”

  “But there’s nothing to eat,” she told me.

  “Why?”

  “Just because there’s none,” she explained.

  “But I want to eat,” I said, beginning to cry.

  “You’ll just have to wait,” she said again.

  “But why?”

  “For God to send some food.”

  “When is He going to send it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But I’m hungry!”

  She was ironing and she paused and looked at me with tears in her eyes.

  “Where’s your father?” she asked me.

  I stared in bewilderment. Yes, it was true that my father had not come home to sleep for many days now and I could make as much noise as I wanted. Though I had not known why he was absent, I had been glad that he was not there to shout his restrictions at me. But it had never occurred to me that his absence would mean that there would be no food.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Who brings food into the house?” my mother asked me.

  “Papa,” I said. “He always brought food.”

  “Well, your father isn’t here now,” she said.

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “But I’m hungry,” I whimpered, stomping my feet.

  “You’ll have to wait until I get a job and buy food,” she said.

  As the days slid past the image of my father became associated with my pangs of hunger, and whenever I felt hunger I thought of him with a deep biological bitterness.

  My mother finally went to work as a cook and left me and my brother alone in the flat each day with a loaf of bread and a pot of tea. When she returned at evening she would be tired and dispirited and would cry a lot. Sometimes, when she was in despair, she would call us to her and talk to us for hours, telling us that we now had no father, that our lives would be different from those of other children, that we must learn as soon as possible to take care of ourselves, to dress ourselves, to prepare our own food; that we must take upon ourselves the responsibility of the flat while she worked. Half frightened, we would promise solemnly. We did not understand what had happened between our father and our mother and the most that these long talks did to us was
to make us feel a vague dread. Whenever we asked why father had left, she would tell us that we were too young to know.

  One evening my mother told me that thereafter I would have to do the shopping for food. She took me to the corner store to show me the way. I was proud; I felt like a grownup. The next afternoon I looped the basket over my arm and went down the pavement toward the store. When I reached the corner, a gang of boys grabbed me, knocked me down, snatched the basket, took the money, and sent me running home in panic. That evening I told my mother what had happened, but she made no comment; she sat down at once, wrote another note, gave me more money, and sent me out to the grocery again. I crept down the steps and saw the same gang of boys playing down the street. I ran back into the house.

  “What’s the matter?” my mother asked.

  “It’s those same boys,” I said. “They’ll beat me.”

  “You’ve got to get over that,” she said. “Now, go on.”

  “I’m scared,” I said.

  “Go on and don’t pay any attention to them,” she said.

  I went out of the door and walked briskly down the sidewalk, praying that the gang would not molest me. But when I came abreast of them someone shouted.

  “There he is!”

  They came toward me and I broke into a wild run toward home. They overtook me and flung me to the pavement. I yelled, pleaded, kicked, but they wrenched the money out of my hand. They yanked me to my feet, gave me a few slaps, and sent me home sobbing. My mother met me at the door.

  “They b-beat m-me,” I gasped. “They t-t-took the m-money.”

  I started up the steps, seeking the shelter of the house.

  “Don’t you come in here,” my mother warned me.

  I froze in my tracks and stared at her.

  “But they’re coming after me,” I said.

  “You just stay right where you are,” she said in a deadly tone. “I’m going to teach you this night to stand up and fight for yourself.”

  She went into the house and I waited, terrified, wondering what she was about. Presently she returned with more money and another note; she also had a long heavy stick.

  “Take this money, this note, and this stick,” she said. “Go to the store and buy those groceries. If those boys bother you, then fight.”