Black Boy

  “But I heard a man talking,” I said.

  “You didn’t,” she said. “You were sleeping.”

  “But I saw a man. He was in the front room.”

  “You were dreaming,” my mother said.

  I learned a part of the secret of the night visits one Sunday morning when Aunt Maggie called me and my brother to her room and introduced us to the man who was going to be our new “uncle,” a Professor Matthews. He wore a high, snow-white collar and rimless eyeglasses. His lips were thin and his eyelids seemed never to blink. I felt something cold and remote in him and when he called me I would not go to him. He sensed my distrust and softened me up with the gift of a dime, then knelt and prayed for us two “poor fatherless young men,” as he called us. After prayer Aunt Maggie told us that she and Professor Matthews were leaving soon for the North. I was saddened, for I had grown to feel that Aunt Maggie was another mother to me.

  I did not meet the new “uncle” again, though each morning I saw evidences of his having been in the house. My brother and I were puzzled and we speculated as to what our new “uncle” could be doing. Why did he always come at night? Why did he always speak in so subdued a voice, hardly above a whisper? And how did he get the money to buy such white collars and such nice blue suits? To add to our bewilderment, our mother called us to her one day and cautioned us against telling anyone that “uncle” ever visited us, that people were looking for “uncle.”

  “What people?” I asked.

  “White people,” my mother said.

  Anxiety entered my body. Somewhere in the unknown the white threat was hovering near again.

  “What do they want with him?” I asked.

  “You never mind,” my mother said.

  “What did he do?”

  “You keep your mouth shut or the white folks’ll get you too,” she warned me.

  Knowing that we were frightened and baffled about our new “uncle,” my mother—I guess—urged Aunt Maggie to tell “uncle” to bribe us into silence and trust. Every morning now was like Christmas; we would climb out of bed and race to the kitchen and look on the table to see what “uncle” had left for us. One morning I found that he had brought me a little female poodle, upon which I bestowed the name of Betsy and she became my pet and companion.

  Strangely, “uncle” began visiting us in the daytime now, but when he came all the shades in the house were drawn and we were forbidden to go out of doors until he left. I asked my mother a thousand whispered questions about the silent, black, educated “uncle” and she always replied:

  “It’s something you can’t know. Now keep quiet and go play.”

  One night the sound of sobbing awakened me. I got up and went softly to the front room and peeped around the jamb of the door; there was “uncle” sitting on the floor by the window, peering into the night from under the lifted curtain. My mother was bent over a small trunk, packing hurriedly. Fear gripped me. Was my mother leaving? Why was Aunt Maggie crying? Were the white people coming after us?

  “Hurry up,” “uncle” said. “We must get out of here.”

  “Oh, Maggie,” my mother said. “I don’t know if you ought to go.”

  “You keep out of this,” “uncle” said, still peering into the dark street.

  “But what did you do?” Aunt Maggie asked.

  “I’ll tell you later,” “uncle” said. “We got to get out of here before they come!”

  “But you’ve done something terrible,” Aunt Maggie said. “Or you wouldn’t be running like this.”

  “The house is on fire,” “uncle” said. “And when they see it, they’ll know who did it.”

  “Did you set the house afire?” my mother asked.

  “There was nothing else to do,” “uncle” said impatiently. “I took the money. I had hit her. She was unconscious. If they found her, she’d tell. I’d be lost. So I set the fire.”

  “But she’ll burn up,” Aunt Maggie said, crying into her hands.

  “What could I do?” “uncle” asked. “I had to do it. I couldn’t just leave her there and let somebody find her. They’d know somebody hit her. But if she burns, nobody’ll ever know.”

  Fear filled me. What was happening? Were white people coming after all of us? Was my mother going to leave me?

  “Mama!” I wailed, running into the room.

  “Uncle” leaped to his feet; a gun was in his hand and he was pointing it at me. I stared at the gun, feeling that I was going to die at any moment.

  “Richard!” my mother whispered fiercely.

  “You’re going away!” I yelled.

  My mother rushed to me and clapped her hand over my mouth.

  “Do you want us all to be killed?” she asked, shaking me.

  I quieted.

  “Now you go back to sleep,” she said.

  “You’re leaving,” I said.

  “I’m not.”

  “You are leaving. I see the trunk!” I wailed.

  “You stop that noise,” my mother said; and she caught my arms in so tight a grip of fury that my crying ceased because of the pain. “Now you get back in bed.”

  She led me back to bed and I lay awake, listening to whispers, footsteps, doors creaking in the dark, and the sobs of Aunt Maggie. Finally I heard the sound of a horse and buggy rolling up to the house; I heard the scraping of a trunk being dragged across the floor. Aunt Maggie came into my room, crying softly; she kissed me and whispered good-bye. She kissed my brother, who did not even waken. Then she was gone.

  The next morning my mother called me into the kitchen and talked to me for a long time, cautioning me that I must never mention what I had seen and heard, that white people would kill me if they even thought I knew.

  “Know what?” I could not help but ask.

  “Never you mind, now,” she said. “Forget what you saw last night.”

  “But what did ‘uncle’ do?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “He killed somebody,” I ventured timidly.

  “If anybody heard you say that, you’ll die,” my mother said.

  That settled it for me; I would never mention it. A few days later a tall white man with a gleaming star on his chest and a gun on his hip came to the house. He talked with my mother a long time and all I could hear was my mother’s voice:

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Search the house if you like.”

  The tall white man looked at me and my brother, but he said nothing to us. For weeks I wondered what it was that “uncle” had done, but I was destined never to know, not even in all the years that followed.

  With Aunt Maggie gone, my mother could not earn enough to feed us and my stomach kept so consistently empty that my head ached most of the day. One afternoon hunger haunted me so acutely that I decided to try to sell my dog Betsy and buy some food. Betsy was a tiny, white, fluffy poodle and when I had washed, dried, and combed her, she looked like a toy. I tucked her under my arm and went for the first time alone into a white neighborhood where there were wide clean streets and big white houses. I went from door to door, ringing the bells. Some white people slammed the door in my face. Others told me to come to the rear of the house, but pride would never let me do that. Finally a young white woman came to the door and smiled.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Do you want to buy a pretty dog?” I asked.

  “Let me see it.”

  She took the dog into her arms and fondled and kissed it.

  “What’s its name?”

  “Betsy.”

  “She is cute,” she said. “What do you want for her?”

  “A dollar,” I said.

  “Wait a moment,” she said. “Let me see if I have a dollar.”

  She took Betsy into the house with her and I waited on the porch, marveling at the cleanliness, the quietness of the white world. How orderly everything was! Yet I felt out of place. I had no desire to live here. Then I remembered that these houses were the homes in
which lived those white people who made Negroes leave their homes and flee into the night. I grew tense. Would someone say that I was a bad nigger and try to kill me here? What was keeping the woman so long? Would she tell other people that a nigger boy had said something wrong to her? Perhaps she was getting a mob? Maybe I ought to leave now and forget about Betsy? My mounting anxieties drowned out my hunger. I wanted to rush back to the safety of the black faces I knew.

  The door opened and the woman came out, smiling, still hugging Betsy in her arms. But I could not see her smile now; my eyes were full of the fears I had conjured up.

  “I just love this dog,” she said, “and I’m going to buy her. I haven’t got a dollar. All I have is ninety-seven cents.”

  Though she did not know it, she was now giving me my opportunity to ask for my dog without saying that I did not want to sell her to white people.

  “No, ma’am,” I said softly. “I want a dollar.”

  “But I haven’t got a dollar in the house,” she said.

  “Then I can’t sell the dog,” I said.

  “I’ll give you the other three cents when my mother comes home tonight,” she said.

  “No, ma’am,” I said, looking stonily at the floor.

  “But, listen, you said you wanted a dollar…”

  “Yes, ma’am. A dollar.”

  “Then here is ninety-seven cents,” she said, extending a handful of change to me, still holding on to Betsy.

  “No, ma’am,” I said, shaking my head. “I want a dollar.”

  “But I’ll give you the other three cents!”

  “My mama told me to sell her for a dollar,” I said, feeling that I was being too aggressive and trying to switch the moral blame for my aggressiveness to my absent mother.

  “You’ll get a dollar. You’ll get the three cents tonight.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then leave the dog and come back tonight.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “But what could you want with a dollar now?” she asked.

  “I want to buy something to eat,” I said.

  “Then ninety-seven cents will buy you a lot of food,” she said.

  “No, ma’am. I want my dog.”

  She stared at me for a moment and her face grew red.

  “Here’s your dog,” she snapped, thrusting Betsy into my arms. “Now, get away from here! You’re just about the craziest nigger boy I ever did see!”

  I took Betsy and ran all the way home, glad that I had not sold her. But my hunger returned. Maybe I ought to have taken the ninety-seven cents? But it was too late now. I hugged Betsy in my arms and waited. When my mother came home that night, I told her what had happened.

  “And you didn’t take the money?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said uneasily.

  “Don’t you know that ninety-seven cents is almost a dollar?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, counting on my fingers. “Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred. But I didn’t want to sell Betsy to white people.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re white,” I said.

  “You’re foolish,” my mother said.

  A week later Betsy was crushed to death beneath the wheels of a coal wagon. I cried and buried her in the back yard and drove a barrel staving into the ground at the head of her grave. My mother’s sole comment was:

  “You could have had a dollar. But you can’t eat a dead dog, can you?”

  I did not answer.

  Up or down the wet or dusty streets, indoors or out, the days and nights began to spell out magic possibilities.

  If I pulled a hair from a horse’s tail and sealed it in a jar of my own urine, the hair would turn overnight into a snake.

  If I passed a Catholic sister or mother dressed in black and smiled and allowed her to see my teeth, I would surely die.

  If I walked under a leaning ladder, I would certainly have bad luck.

  If I kissed my elbow, I would turn into a girl.

  If my right ear itched, then something good was being said about me by somebody.

  If I touched a hunchback’s hump, then I would never be sick.

  If I placed a safety pin on a steel railroad track and let a train run over it, the safety pin would turn into a pair of bright brand-new scissors.

  If I heard a voice and no human being was near, then either God or the Devil was trying to talk to me.

  Whenever I made urine, I should spit into it for good luck.

  If my nose itched, somebody was going to visit me.

  If I mocked a crippled man, then God would make me crippled.

  If I used the name of God in vain, then God would strike me dead.

  If it rained while the sun was shining, then the Devil was beating his wife.

  If the stars twinkled more than usual on any given night, it meant that the angels in heaven were happy and were flitting across the doors of heaven; and since stars were merely holes ventilating heaven, the twinkling came from the angels flitting past the holes that admitted air into the holy home of God.

  If I broke a mirror, I would have seven years of bad luck.

  If I was good to my mother, I would grow old and rich.

  If I had a cold and tied a worn, dirty sock about my throat before I went to bed, the cold would be gone the next morning.

  If I wore a bit of asafetida in a little bag tied about my neck, I would never catch a disease.

  If I looked at the sun through a piece of smoked glass on Easter Sunday morning, I would see the sun shouting in praise of a Risen Lord.

  If a man confessed anything on his deathbed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.

  If you spat on each grain of corn that was planted, the corn would grow tall and bear well.

  If I spilt salt, I should toss a pinch over my left shoulder to ward off misfortune.

  If I covered a mirror when a storm was raging, the lightning would not strike me.

  If I stepped over a broom that was lying on the floor, I would have bad luck.

  If I walked in my sleep, then God was trying to lead me somewhere to do a good deed for Him.

  Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible…Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.

  A dread of white people now came to live permanently in my feelings and imagination. As the war drew to a close, racial conflict flared over the entire South, and though I did not witness any of it, I could not have been more thoroughly affected by it if I had participated directly in every clash. The war itself had been unreal to me, but I had grown able to respond emotionally to every hint, whisper, word, inflection, news, gossip, and rumor regarding conflicts between the races. Nothing challenged the totality of my personality so much as this pressure of hate and threat that stemmed from the invisible whites. I would stand for hours on the doorsteps of neighbors’ houses listening to their talk, learning how a white woman had slapped a black woman, how a white man had killed a black man. It filled me with awe, wonder, and fear, and I asked ceaseless questions.

  One evening I heard a tale that rendered me sleepless for nights. It was of a Negro woman whose husband had been seized and killed by a mob. It was claimed that the woman vowed she would avenge her husband’s death and she took a shotgun, wrapped it in a sheet, and went humbly to the whites, pleading that she be allowed to take her husband’s body for burial. It seemed that she was granted permission to come to the side of her dead husband while the whites, silent and armed, looked on. The woman, so went the story, knelt and prayed, then proceeded to unwrap the sheet; and, before the white men realized what was happening, she had taken the gun from the sheet and had slain four of them, shoot
ing at them from her knees.

  I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true because I had already grown to feel that there existed men against whom I was powerless, men who could violate my life at will. I resolved that I would emulate the black woman if I were ever faced with a white mob; I would conceal a weapon, pretend that I had been crushed by the wrong done to one of my loved ones; then, just when they thought I had accepted their cruelty as the law of my life, I would let go with my gun and kill as many of them as possible before they killed me. The story of the woman’s deception gave form and meaning to confused defensive feelings that had long been sleeping in me.

  My imaginings, of course, had no objective value whatever. My spontaneous fantasies lived in my mind because I felt completely helpless in the face of this threat that might come upon me at any time, and because there did not exist to my knowledge any possible course of action which could have saved me if I had ever been confronted with a white mob. My fantasies were a moral bulwark that enabled me to feel I was keeping my emotional integrity whole, a support that enabled my personality to limp through days lived under the threat of violence.

  These fantasies were no longer a reflection of my reaction to the white people, they were a part of my living, of my emotional life; they were a culture, a creed, a religion. The hostility of the whites had become so deeply implanted in my mind and feelings that it had lost direct connection with the daily environment in which I lived; and my reactions to this hostility fed upon itself, grew or diminished according to the news that reached me about the whites, according to what I aspired or hoped for. Tension would set in at the mere mention of whites and a vast complex of emotions, involving the whole of my personality, would be aroused. It was as though I was continuously reacting to the threat of some natural force whose hostile behavior could not be predicted. I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.

  I lived in West Helena an undeterminedly long time before I returned to school and took up regular study. My mother luckily secured a job in a white doctor’s office at the unheard-of-wages of five dollars per week and at once she announced that her “sons were going to school again.” I was happy. But I was still shy and half paralyzed when in the presence of a crowd, and my first day at the new school made me the laughingstock of the classroom. I was sent to the blackboard to write my name and address; I knew my name and address, knew how to write it, knew how to spell it; but standing at the blackboard with the eyes of the many girls and boys looking at my back made me freeze inside and I was unable to write a single letter.