Black Boy

  I disengaged my hand from hers. I looked at her and wanted either to laugh or to slap her. I was about to hurt her and I did not want to. I rose. Oh, hell…This girl’s crazy…I heard her crying and I bent to her.

  “Look,” I whispered. “You don’t know me. Let’s get to know each other better.”

  Her eyes were beaten, baffled. Love was that simple to her; it could be turned on or off in a moment.

  “You just think I’m nothing,” she whimpered.

  I reached out my hand to touch her, to speak to her, to try to tell her of my life, my feelings, my doubts; and she leaped to her feet.

  “I hate you,” she burst out in a passionate whisper and ran out of the room.

  I lit a cigarette and sat for a long time. I had never dreamed that anyone would accept me so simply, so completely, without question or the least hint of personal aggrandizement. The truth was that I had—even though I had fought against it—grown to accept the value of myself that my old environment had created in me, and I had thought that no other kind of environment was possible. My life had changed too suddenly. Had I met Bess upon a Mississippi plantation, I would have expected her to act as she had. But in Memphis, on Beale Street, how could there be such hope, belief, faith in others? I wanted to go to Bess and talk to her, but I knew no words to say to her.

  When I awakened the next morning and recalled Bess’s naïve hopes, I was glad that I had the can of pork and beans. I did not want to face her across the breakfast table. I dressed to go out; then, with my coat and hat on, I sat on the edge of the bed and propped my feet on a chair. Taking puffs from a cigarette, I scooped the beans out of the can with my fingers and ate them. I slipped out of the house and went to the water front and sat on a knoll of earth in the cold wind and sun, looking at the boats on the Mississippi River. Tonight I would begin my new job. I knew how to save money, thanks to my long starvation in Mississippi. My heart was at peace. I was freer than I had ever been.

  A black boy came up to me.

  “Hy,” he said.

  “Hy,” I said.

  “What you doing these days?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Waiting for night. I got a job in a café,” I said.

  “Shucks,” he said. “I’m looking for a buddy.” He was trying to act tough, but I thought that he was lonely. “I wanna hop a freight and go north.”

  “Why not hop one alone?” I asked.

  He grinned nervously.

  “Did you run off from home?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Four years ago,” he said.

  “What have you been doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  That should have warned me, but I was not yet wise in the ways of the world or the road.

  We talked a while longer, then walked down a path toward the river’s edge, skirting high weeds. The boy stopped suddenly and pointed.

  “What’s that?”

  “Looks like a can of some sort,” I said.

  I saw a huge can partially screened by high weeds. We went to it and found that it was full of something heavy. I pulled out the stopper and smelt it.

  “This stuff is liquor,” I said.

  The boy smelt it and his eyes widened.

  “Reckon we can sell it?” he asked.

  “But whose is it?” I asked.

  “Gee, I wish I could sell this stuff,” he said.

  “Maybe somebody’s watching,” I suggested.

  We looked about, but no one was in sight.

  “This belongs to a bootlegger,” I said.

  “Let’s see if we can sell it,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t take that can out of here,” I said. “The cops might see us.”

  “I need money,” the boy said. “This’ll help me on the road.”

  We agreed to look for a white buyer. We went into the streets and looked over the white men who passed. Finally we spotted one sitting alone in his car. We went up to him.

  “Mister,” the boy said, “we found a big can of liquor over there in the weeds. You want to buy it?”

  The man screwed up his eyes and studied us.

  “Is it good liquor?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Go and see it.”

  “You niggers ain’t lying to me, are you?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Come on. I’ll show it to you,” I said.

  We led the white man to the liquor; he unstoppered it and smelt it, then tasted the wetness on the cork.

  “Holy cats,” he said. He looked at us. “Did you really find this here?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” we said.

  “If you two niggers are lying, I’ll kill both of you,” he breathed.

  “We’re telling the truth,” I said.

  The other boy stood awkwardly and looked on. I wondered why he did not say anything. Some vague thought was trying to worm its way into my dense, naïve, childlike mind. But it did not come clear and I brushed it away.

  “You boys bring this can to my car,” the white man said.

  I was afraid. But the other boy was eager and willing. With the white man encouraging us, we lugged the can to his car and put it into the back upon the floor.

  “Here,” the white man said, extending a five-dollar bill to the boy. The car drove off and I could see the white man looking about anxiously, fearing a trap; or so it seemed to me.

  “Gee, let’s get this changed,” the boy said.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll split it.”

  The boy pointed across the street.

  “There’s a store over there,” he said. “I’ll run over and get change.”

  “O.K.,” I said, angel-like.

  I sat on a sloping embankment and waited. He ran off in the direction of the store, but I was so confident that I did not even watch him. I felt amused. I was going to get two and one-half dollars for finding a cache of liquor. I was a hijacker already. Last night a girl had thrown herself at me. And all this had happened within forty-eight hours of my leaving home. I wanted to laugh out loud. Things could happen to one when one was not at home. I looked up, waiting for the boy to return. But I did not see him. He’s sure taking his time, I thought, pushing down other ideas that were trying to bubble into my mind. I waited longer, then rose and went quickly to the store and peered through the window. The boy was not inside. I went in and asked the proprietor if a boy had been in.

  “Yeah,” he said. “A nigger boy came in here, looked around, then went out of the back door. He went like a light. Did he have something of yours?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, you’ll never see that nigger again,” the man said.

  I walked along the streets in the winter sun, thinking: Well, that’s good enough for you, you fool. You had no business monkeying in that liquor business anyway. Then I stopped in my tracks. They had been together! The white man and the black boy had seen me loitering in the vicinity of their liquor and had thought I was a hijacker; and they had used me in disposing of their liquor.

  Last night I had found a naïve girl. This morning I had been a naïve boy.

  12

  While wandering aimlessly about the streets of Memphis, gaping at the tall buildings and the crowds, killing time, eating bags of popcorn, I was struck by an odd and sudden idea. If I had attempted to work for an optical company in Jackson and had failed, why should I not try to work for an optical company in Memphis? Memphis was not a small town like Jackson; it was urban and I felt that no one would hold the trivial trouble I had had in Jackson against me.

  I looked for the address of a company in a directory and walked boldly into the building, rode up in the elevator with a fat, round, yellow Negro of about five feet in height. At the fifth floor I stepped into an office. A white man rose to meet me.

  “Pull off your hat,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, sir,” I said, jerking off my hat.

  “What do you want?”

  “I was wondering if you needed a boy,” I said. “I worked for an opt
ical company for a short while in Jackson.”

  “Why did you leave?” he asked.

  “I had a little trouble there,” I said honestly.

  “Did you steal something?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “A white boy there didn’t want me to learn the optical trade and ran me off the job.”

  “Come and sit down.”

  I sat and recounted the story from beginning to end.

  “I’ll write Mr. Crane,” he said. “But you won’t get a chance to learn the optical trade here. That’s not our policy.”

  I told him that I understood and accepted his policy. I was hired at eight dollars per week and promised a raise of a dollar a week until my wages reached ten. Though this was less than I had been offered for the café job, I accepted it. I liked the open, honest way in which the man talked to me; and, too, the place seemed clean, brisk, businesslike.

  I was assigned to run errands and wash eyeglasses after they had come from the rouge-smeared machines. Each evening I had to take sacks of packages to the post office for mailing. It was light work and I was fast on my feet. At noon I would forgo my lunch hour and run errands for the white men who were employed in the shop. I would buy their lunches, take their suits out to have them pressed, pay their light, telephone, and gas bills, and deliver notes for them to their stenographer girl friends in near-by office buildings. The first day I made a dollar and a half in tips. I deposited the money I had left from my trip and resolved to live off my tips.

  I was now rapidly learning to contain the tension I felt in my relations with whites, and the people in Memphis had an air of relative urbanity that took some of the sharpness off the attitude of whites toward Negroes. There were about a dozen white men in the sixth-floor shop where I spent most of my time; they varied from Ku Klux Klanners to Jews, from theosophists to just plain poor whites. Although I could detect disdain and hatred in their attitudes, they never shouted at me or abused me. It was fairly easy to contemplate the race issue in the shop without reaching those heights of fear that devastated me. A measure of objectivity entered into my observations of white men and women. Either I could stand more mental strain than formerly or I had discovered deep within me ways of handling it.

  When I returned to Mrs. Moss’s that Monday night, she was surprised that I had changed my plans and had taken a new job. I showed her my bankbook and told her my plan for saving money and bringing my mother to Memphis. As I talked to her I tried to tell from her manner if Bess had said anything about what had happened between us, but Mrs. Moss was bland and motherly as always.

  Bess avoided me, refusing to speak when we were alone together; but when her mother was present, she was polite. A few days later Mrs. Moss came to me with a baffled look in their eyes.

  “What’s happened between you and Bess?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I lied, burning with shame.

  “She don’t seem to like you no more,” she said. “I wanted you-all to kinda hit it off.” She looked at me searchingly. “Don’t you like her none?”

  I could not answer or look at her; I wondered if she had told Bess to give herself to me.

  “Well,” she drawled, sighing, “I guess folks just have to love each other naturally. You can’t make ’em.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Bess’ll find somebody.”

  I felt sick, filled with a consciousness of the woman’s helplessness, of her naïve hope. Time and again she told me that Bess loved me, wanted me. She even suggested that I “try Bess and see if you like her. Ain’t no harm in that.” And her words evoked in me a pity for her that had no name.

  Finally it became unbearable. One night I returned home from work and found Mrs. Moss sitting by the stove in the hall, nodding. She blinked her eyes and smiled.

  “How’re you, son?” she asked.

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  “Ain’t you and Bess got to be friends or something yet?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said softly.

  “How come you don’t like Bess?” she demanded.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I was becoming angry.

  “It’s ’cause she ain’t so bright?”

  “No, ma’am. Bess’s bright,” I lied.

  “Then how come?”

  I still could not tell her.

  “You and Bess could have this house for your home,” she went on. “You-all could bring up your children here.”

  “But people have to find their own way to each other,” I said.

  “Young folks ain’t got no sense these days,” she said at last. “If somebody had fixed things for me when I was a gal, I sure would’ve taken it.”

  “Mrs. Moss,” I said, “I think I’d better move.”

  “Move then!” she exploded. “You ain’t got no sense!”

  I went to my room and began to pack. A knock came at the door. I opened it. Mrs. Moss stood in the doorway, weeping.

  “Son, forgive me,” she said. “I didn’t mean it. I wouldn’t hurt you for nothing. You just like a son to me.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “But I’d better move.”

  “No!” she wailed. “Then you ain’t forgive me! When a body asks forgiveness, they means it!”

  I stared. Bess appeared in the doorway.

  “Don’t leave, Richard,” she said.

  “We won’t bother you no more,” Mrs. Moss said.

  I wilted, baffled, sorry, ashamed. Mrs. Moss took Bess’s hand and led her away.

  I centered my attention now upon making enough money to send for my mother and brother. I saved each penny I came by, stinting myself on food, walking to work, eating out of paper bags, living on a pint of milk and two sweet rolls for breakfast, a hamburger and peanuts for lunch, and a can of beans which I would eat at night in my room. I was used to hunger and I did not need much food to keep me alive.

  I now had more money than I had ever had before, and I began patronizing secondhand bookstores, buying magazines and books. In this way I became acquainted with periodicals like Harper’s Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and the American Mercury. I would buy them for a few cents, read them, then resell them to the bookdealer.

  Once Mrs. Moss questioned me about my reading.

  “What you reading all them books for, boy?”

  “I just like to.”

  “You studying for law?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Well, I reckon you know what you doing,” she said.

  Though I did not have to report for work until nine o’clock each morning, I would arrive at eight and go into the lobby of the downstairs bank—where I knew the Negro porter—and read the early edition of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, thereby saving myself five cents each day, which I spent for lunch. After reading, I would watch the black porter perform his morning ritual: he would get a mop, bucket, soap flakes, water, then would pause dramatically, roll his eyes to the ceiling and sing out:

  “Lawd, today! Ahm still working for white folks!”

  And he would mop until he sweated. He hated his job and talked incessantly of leaving to work in the post office.

  The most colorful of the Negro boys on the job was Shorty, the round, yellow, fat elevator operator. He had tiny, beady eyes that looked out between rolls of flesh with a hard but humorous stare. He had the complexion of a Chinese, a short forehead, and three chins. Psychologically he was the most amazing specimen of the southern Negro I had ever met. Hardheaded, sensible, a reader of magazines and books, he was proud of his race and indignant about its wrongs. But in the presence of whites he would play the role of a clown of the most debased and degraded type.

  One day he needed twenty-five cents to buy his lunch.

  “Just watch me get a quarter from the first white man I see,” he told me as I stood in the elevator that morning.

  A white man who worked in the building stepped into the elevator and waited to be lifted to his floor. Shorty sang in a low mumble, smiling, rolling his eyes, looking at the white man roguishly.
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  “I’m hungry, Mister White Man. I need a quarter for lunch.”

  The white man ignored him. Shorty, his hands on the controls of the elevator, sang again:

  “I ain’t gonna move this damned old elevator till I get a quarter, Mister White Man.”

  “The hell with you, Shorty,” the white man said, ignoring him and chewing on his black cigar.

  “I’m hungry, Mister White Man. I’m dying for a quarter,” Shorty sang, drooling, drawling, humming his words.

  “If you don’t take me to my floor, you will die,” the white man said, smiling a little for the first time.

  “But this black sonofabitch sure needs a quarter,” Shorty sang, grimacing, clowning, ignoring the white man’s threat.

  “Come on, you black bastard, I got to work,” the white man said, intrigued by the element of sadism involved, enjoying it.

  “It’ll cost you twenty-five cents, Mister White Man; just a quarter, just two bits,” Shorty moaned.

  There was silence. Shorty threw the lever and the elevator went up and stopped about five feet shy of the floor upon which the white man worked.

  “Can’t go no more, Mister White Man, unless I get my quarter,” he said in a tone that sounded like crying.

  “What would you do for a quarter?” the white man asked, still gazing off.

  “I’ll do anything for a quarter,” Shorty sang.

  “What, for example?” the white man asked.

  Shorty giggled, swung around, bent over, and poked out his broad, fleshy ass.

  “You can kick me for a quarter,” he sang, looking impishly at the white man out of the corners of his eyes.

  The white man laughed softly, jingled some coins in his pocket, took out one and thumped it to the floor. Shortly stooped to pick it up and the white man bared his teeth and swung his foot into Shorty’s rump with all the strength of his body. Shorty let out a howling laugh that echoed up and down the elevator shaft.

  “Now, open this door, you goddamn black sonofabitch,” the white man said, smiling with tight lips.

  “Yeeeess, siiiiir,” Shorty sang; but first he picked up the quarter and put it into his mouth. “This monkey’s got the peanuts,” he chortled.

  He opened the door and the white man stepped out and looked back at Shorty as he went toward his office.