Black Boy

  A few days later—after we had arrived at Granny’s—I was playing alone in a wild field, digging in the ground with an old knife. Suddenly a strange rhythmic sound made me turn my head. Flowing threateningly toward me over the crest of a hill was a wave of black men draped in weird mustard-colored clothing. Unconsciously I jumped to my feet, my heart pounding. What was this? Were these men coming after me? Line by line, row by row, the fantastic men in their wild colors were descending straight at me, trotting, their feet pounding the earth like someone beating a vast drum. I wanted to fly home but, as in a dream, I could not move. I cast about wildly for a clue to tell me what this was, but I could find nothing. The wall of men was drawing closer. My heart was beating so strongly that it shook my body. Again I tried to run, but I could not budge. My mother’s name was on the tip of my tongue and I opened my mouth to scream, but no words came, for now the surging men, each looking exactly like the other, parted and poured around me, jarring the earth, their feet stomping in unison. As they flooded past I saw that their black faces were looking at me and that some of them were smiling. Then I noticed that each man was holding a long, dark, heavy, sticklike object upon his shoulder. One of the men yelled something at me which I did not understand. They were past me now, disappearing in a great cloud of brown dust that looked like a part of their clothing, that made them seem akin to the elemental earth itself. As soon as they were far enough away for me to conquer my fear, I dashed home and babbled to my mother what I had seen, asking her who the strange men were.

  “Those were soldiers,” she said.

  “What are soldiers?” I asked.

  “Men who fight in wars.”

  “Why do they fight?”

  “Because their country tells them to.”

  “And what are those long black sticks they have on their shoulders?”

  “Rifles.”

  “What’s a rifle?”

  “It’s a gun that shoots a bullet.”

  “Like a pistol?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would the bullet kill you?”

  “Yes, if it hits you in the right place.”

  “Who are they going to shoot?”

  “Germans.”

  “Who are Germans?”

  “They are the enemy.”

  “What’s an enemy?”

  “The people who want to kill you and take your country away from you.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “’Way across the sea,” my mother explained. “Don’t you remember that I told you that war has been declared?”

  I remembered; but when she had told me, it had not seemed at all important. I asked my mother what the war was about and she spoke of England, France, Russia, Germany, of men dying, but the reality of it was too vast and alien for me to be moved or further interested.

  Upon another day I was playing out of doors in front of the house and I accidentally looked down the road and saw what seemed to me to be a herd of elephants coming slowly toward me. There was in me this time none of that naked terror I had felt when I had seen the soldiers, for these strange creatures were moving slowly, silently, with no suggestion of threat. Yet I edged cautiously toward the steps of the house, holding myself ready to run if they should prove to be more violent than they appeared. The strange elephants were a few feet from me now and I saw that their faces were like the faces of men! I stared, my mind trying to adjust memory to reality. What kind of men were these? I saw that there were two lines of creatures that looked like men on either side of the road; that there were a few white faces and a great many black faces. I saw that the white faces were the faces of white men and they were dressed in ordinary clothing; but the black faces were men wearing what seemed to me to be elephant’s clothing. As the strange animals came abreast of me I saw that the legs of the black animals were held together by irons and that their arms were linked with heavy chains that clanked softly and musically as they moved. The black creatures were digging a shallow ditch on each side of the road, working silently, grunting as they lifted spades of earth and flung them into the middle of the roadway. One of the strange, striped animals turned a black face upon me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked in a whisper, not knowing if one actually spoke to elephants.

  He shook his head and cast his eyes guardedly back at a white man, then dug on again. Suddenly I noticed that the white men were holding the long, heavy black sticks—rifles!—on their shoulders. After they had passed I ran breathlessly into the house.

  “Mama!” I yelled.

  “What?” she answered from the kitchen.

  “There are elephants in the street!”

  She came to the kitchen door and stared at me.

  “Elephants?” she asked.

  “Yes. Come and see them. They’re digging in the street.”

  My mother dried her hands on her apron and rushed to the front door. I followed, wanting her to interpret the baffling spectacle I had seen. She looked out of the door and shook her head.

  “Those are not elephants,” she said.

  “What are they?”

  “That’s a chain gang.”

  “What’s a chain gang?”

  “It’s just what you see,” she said. “A gang of men chained together and made to work.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’ve done something wrong and they’re being punished.”

  “What did they do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But why do they look like that?”

  “That’s to keep them from running away,” she said. “You see, everybody’ll know that they’re convicts because of their stripes.”

  “Why don’t the white men wear stripes?”

  “They’re the guards.”

  “Do white men ever wear stripes?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Did you ever see any?”

  “No.”

  “Why are there so many black men wearing stripes?”

  “It’s because…Well, they’re harder on black people.”

  “The white people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why don’t all the black men fight all the white men out there? There are more black men than white men…”

  “But the white men have guns and the black men don’t,” my mother said. She looked at me and asked: “What made you call them elephants?”

  I could not answer her at the moment. But later, brooding over the black-and-white striped clothing of the black men, I remembered that in Elaine I had had a book that carried the gaudy pictures and names of jungle beasts. What had struck me most vividly were the striped zebras that looked as if someone had painted them. The other animals that had gripped my imagination were the elephants, and by association the zebras and the elephants had become linked and identified in my mind to such an extent that when I had seen the convicts dressed in the white and black stripes of zebras, I had thought they were elephants, beasts of the jungle.

  Again, after an undetermined stretch of time, my mother announced that we were going to move, that we were going back to West Helena. She had grown tired of the strict religious routine of Granny’s home; of the half dozen or more daily family prayers that Granny insisted upon; her fiat that the day began at sunrise and that night commenced at sundown; the long, rambling Bible readings; the individual invocations muttered at each meal; and her declaration that Saturday was the Lord’s Sabbath and that no one who lived in her house could work upon that day. In West Helena we could have a home of our own, a condition that now loomed desirable after a few months of Granny’s anxiety about the state of our souls. Naturally a trip was agreeable to me. Again we packed. Again we said good-bye. Again we rode the train. Again we were in West Helena.

  We rented one half of a double corner house in front of which ran a stagnant ditch carrying sewage. The neighborhood swarmed with rats, cats, dogs, fortune-tellers, cripples, blind men, whores, salesmen, rent collectors, and children. In front of ou
r flat was a huge roundhouse where locomotives were cleaned and repaired. There was an eternal hissing of steam, the deep grunting of steel engines, and the tolling of bells. Smoke obscured the vision and cinders drifted into the house, into our beds, into our kitchen, into our food; and a tarlike smell was always in the air.

  Bareheaded and barefooted, my brother and I, along with nameless and countless other black children, used to stand and watch the men crawl in, out, over, and under the huge black metal engines. When the men were not looking, we would climb into the engineer’s cab and pull our small bodies to the window and lookout, imagining that we were grown and had got a job as an engineer running a train and that it was night and there was a storm and we had a long string of passenger cars behind us, trying to get them safely home.

  “Whooooooooeeeeeeeee!” we would say.

  “Dong! Dong! Dong!”

  “Huff-huff! Huff-huff-huff! Huff-huff-huff-huff!” we would say.

  But our greatest fun came from wading in the sewage ditch where we found old bottles, tin cans that held tiny crawfish, rusty spoons, bits of metal, old toothbrushes, dead cats and dogs, and occasional pennies. We made wooden boats out of cigar boxes, devised wooden paddles to which we twisted pieces of rubber and sent the cigar-box boats sailing down the ditch under their own power. Many evenings the fathers of the children would come out, take off their shoes, and make and sail the boats themselves.

  My mother and Aunt Maggie cooked in the kitchens of white folks and my brother and I were free to wander where we pleased during their working hours. Each day we were left a dime apiece to spend for lunch and all morning we would dream and discuss what we would buy. At ten or eleven o’clock we would go to the corner grocery—owned by a Jew—and buy a nickel’s worth of ginger snaps and a bottle of Coca-Cola; that was lunch as we understood it.

  I had never seen a Jew before and the proprietor of the corner grocery was a strange thing in my life. Until that time I had never heard a foreign language spoken and I used to linger at the door of the corner grocery to hear the odd sounds that Jews made when they talked. All of us black people who lived in the neighborhood hated Jews, not because they exploited us, but because we had been taught at home and in Sunday school that Jews were “Christ killers.” With the Jews thus singled out for us, we made them fair game for ridicule.

  We black children—seven, eight, and nine years of age—used to run to the Jew’s store and shout:

  Jew, Jew, Jew

  What do you chew?

  Or we would form a long line and weave back and forth in front of the door, singing:

  Jew, Jew,

  Two for five

  That’s what keeps

  Jew alive.

  Or we would chant:

  Bloody Christ killers

  Never trust a Jew

  Bloody Christ killers

  What won’t a Jew do?

  To one of the redheaded Jewish boys we sang:

  Red head

  Jewish bread

  Five cents

  A Jewish head.

  To the fat Jewish woman we sneered:

  Red, white, and blue

  Your pa was a Jew

  Your ma a dirty Dago

  What the hell is you?

  And when the baldheaded proprietor would pass by, we black children, poor, half-starved, ignorant, victims of racial prejudice, would sing with a proud lilt:

  A rotten egg

  Never fries

  A cheating dog

  Never thrives.

  There were many more folk ditties, some mean, others filthy, all of them cruel. No one ever thought of questioning our right to do this; our mothers and parents generally approved, either actively or passively. To hold an attitude of antagonism or distrust toward Jews was bred in us from childhood; it was not merely racial prejudice, it was a part of our cultural heritage.

  One afternoon a group of black boys and girls were standing about outside playing, laughing, talking. A black man dressed in overalls went up the steps and into the flat adjoining the one in which I lived.

  “This is Saturday,” a black girl said to me.

  “Yeah. But why you say it?” I asked.

  “They gonna make a lotta money in there today,” she said, pointing to the door through which the man had disappeared.

  “How?”

  Another black man went up the steps and into the flat.

  “Don’t you know?” the girl asked, incredulous.

  “Know what?”

  “What they selling…?”

  “Where?”

  “In there where them men went,” she said.

  “Nobody sells things in there,” I said.

  “You kidding?” the girl said in honest disbelief.

  “I ain’t. What they selling? Tell me.”

  “You know what they selling,” she said, looking at me with a teasing smile.

  “They don’t sell nothing in there,” I said.

  “Aw, you just a baby,” she said, slapping her dingy palm through the air at me in a contemptuous gesture.

  I was puzzled. Was there something happening next door to where I lived that I did not know? I thought I had poked my nose into every bit of conceivable business in the neighborhood; if something was being sold next door, then I certainly wanted to know about it. The building in which I lived was a double frame house of one story; the building originally had been a one-dwelling unit and had been converted into two flats, for there were doors in our flat that led into the flat adjoining. These doors had been locked, bolted, and nailed securely. The family next door seemed quiet; men came and went, but that did not seem odd to me. But now the girl’s hints made me want to know what was happening over there. I entered our house and locked the door, then put my ear to the thin wall that divided the two flats and listened. I heard faint sounds, but could make nothing of them. I listened at a bolted door and the sounds came a little louder, but I still could understand nothing.

  Quietly I pulled up a chair, placed a box upon it, and climbed up and peered through a crack at the top of the door. I saw, in the dim shadows of the room beyond, a naked man and a naked woman upon a bed, the man on top of the woman. I lost my balance and toppled backwards to the floor. I lay still, wondering if the man and woman next door had heard me. But all seemed quiet and my curiosity returned. Just as I had climbed up again to look, a sharp rapping came on the windowpane behind me; I turned my head and saw the landlady from next door looking at me. My heart thumped and I scrambled down. The landlady’s black face was pressed hard against the windowpane; her mouth was moving violently and her eyes were glaring. I was afraid to stay in the house or go out. Why had I not thought of lowering the shade? Evidently I had done something terrible, if the wild anger written on the woman’s face was any indication. Her face went from the window and a moment later a loud pounding came at the front door.

  “Open this door, you boy!”

  I trembled and did not answer.

  “Open this door or I’ll have to break it!”

  “My mama ain’t here,” I said vaguely.

  “This is my house and you open this door!” she shouted.

  Her voice overpowered me and I opened the door. She rushed in, then stopped and stared at the clumsy scaffolding I had rigged up to look into her flat. Why hadn’t I taken it down before I opened the door?

  “Boy, what do you mean?” she asked.

  I could not answer.

  “You scared my customers,” she said.

  “Customers?” I repeated vaguely.

  “You little snot!” she blazed. “I got a good mind to beat you!”

  “Naw, you won’t!” I said.

  “I’m gonna make your folks move outta here,” she railed. “I got to make a living and you go and spoil my Saturday for me!”

  “I…I was just looking…”

  “Looking…?” She smiled suddenly, relenting a little. “Why don’t you come on over like the rest and spend a quarter?”

&nbs
p; “I don’t want to go to your old house,” I told her with my nine-year-old indignation.

  “You’re a plague,” she said, deciding that I would not be a customer. “I’m gonna get you outta here!”

  When my mother and Aunt Maggie came home that night, there was a scalding argument. The women shouted at each other over the wooden railings on the front porch and their voices could be heard for half a mile. Neighbors listened. Children gathered and gaped. The argument boiled down to one issue: the landlady demanded that my mother beat me and, for once, my mother refused.

  “You oughtn’t have that in your house,” my mother told her.

  “It’s my house and I’ll have in it what I damn please,” the landlady said.

  “I wouldn’t’ve moved in here if I had thought you were running that kind of business,” my mother said.

  “Don’t talk to me like that, you high-toned bitch!” the landlady shouted.

  “What do you expect children to do when you do that?” my mother asked.

  “Them bastard brats of yours ain’t no angels!” the landlady said.

  “You’re just a common prostitute!” Aunt Maggie pitched in.

  “And what kind of whore is you?” the landlady shouted.

  “Don’t you talk to my sister like that!” my mother warned.

  “Pack up your rags, you black bastards, and get!” the landlady ordered.

  It ended with our packing and moving that night into another frame house on the same street, a few doors away. I still had only a hazy notion of what the landlady was selling. The boys later told me the name of it, but I had no exact conception of it in my mind. Though I knew that others felt it was something terribly bad, I was still curious. In time I would find out what it was.

  Something secret was happening in our house and it had reached a serious stage before I knew it. Each night, just as I was dozing off to sleep, I would hear a light tapping on Aunt Maggie’s windowpane, a door creaking open, whispers, then long silences. Once I got out of bed and crept to the door of the front room and stole a look. There was a well-dressed black man sitting on the sofa talking in a soft voice to Aunt Maggie. Why was it that I could not meet the man? I crept back to bed, but was awakened later by low voices saying good-bye. The next morning I asked my mother who had been in the house, and she told me that no one had been there.