I remembered the one time in all our life together when we had really spoken to each other.
It was on a Sunday and it must have been shortly before I left home. We were walking, just the two of us, in our usual silence, to or from church. I was in high school and had been doing a lot of writing and I was, at about this time, the editor of the high school magazine. But I had also been a Young Minister and had been preaching from the pulpit. Lately, I had been taking fewer engagements and preached as rarely as possible. It was said in the church, quite truthfully, that I was “cooling off.”
My father asked me abruptly, “You’d rather write than preach, wouldn’t you?”
I was astonished at his question—because it was a real question. I answered, “Yes.”
That was all we said. It was awful to remember that that was all we had ever said.
The casket now was opened and the mourners were being led up the aisle to look for the last time on the deceased. The assumption was that the family was too overcome with grief to be allowed to make this journey alone and I watched while my aunt was led to the casket and, muffled in black, and shaking, led back to her seat. I disapproved of forcing the children to look on their dead father, considering that the shock of his death, or, more truthfully, the shock of death as a reality, was already a little more than a child could bear, but my judgment in this matter had been overruled and there they were, bewildered and frightened and very small, being led, one by one, to the casket. But there is also something very gallant about children at such moments. It has something to do with their silence and gravity and with the fact that one cannot help them. Their legs, somehow, seem exposed, so that it is at once incredible and terribly clear that their legs are all they have to hold them up.
I had not wanted to go to the casket myself and I certainly had not wished to be led there, but there was no way of avoiding either of these forms. One of the deacons led me up and I looked on my father’s face. I cannot say that it looked like him at all. His blackness had been equivocated by powder and there was no suggestion in that casket of what his power had or could have been. He was simply an old man dead, and it was hard to believe that he had ever given anyone either joy or pain. Yet, his life filled that room. Further up the avenue his wife was holding his newborn child. Life and death so close together, and love and hatred, and right and wrong, said something to me which I did not want to hear concerning man, concerning the life of man.
After the funeral, while I was downtown desperately celebrating my birthday, a Negro soldier, in the lobby of the Hotel Braddock, got into a fight with a white policeman over a Negro girl. Negro girls, white policemen, in or out of uniform, and Negro males—in or out of uniform—were part of the furniture of the lobby of the Hotel Braddock and this was certainly not the first time such an incident had occurred. It was destined, however, to receive an unprecedented publicity, for the fight between the policeman and the soldier ended with the shooting of the soldier. Rumor, flowing immediately to the streets outside, stated that the soldier had been shot in the back, an instantaneous and revealing invention, and that the soldier had died protecting a Negro woman. The facts were somewhat different—for example, the soldier had not been shot in the back, and was not dead, and the girl seems to have been as dubious a symbol of womanhood as her white counterpart in Georgia usually is, but no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly. It is just as well to remember that people are always doing this. Perhaps many of those legends, including Christianity, to which the world clings began their conquest of the world with just some such concerted surrender to distortion. The effect, in Harlem, of this particular legend was like the effect of a lit match in a tin of gasoline. The mob gathered before the doors of the Hotel Braddock simply began to swell and to spread in every direction, and Harlem exploded.
The mob did not cross the ghetto lines. It would have been easy, for example, to have gone over Morningside Park on the west side or to have crossed the Grand Central railroad tracks at 125th Street on the east side, to wreak havoc in white neighborhoods. The mob seems to have been mainly interested in something more potent and real than the white face, that is, in white power, and the principal damage done during the riot of the summer of 1943 was to white business establishments in Harlem. It might have been a far bloodier story, of course, if, at the hour the riot began, these establishments had still been open. From the Hotel Braddock the mob fanned out, east and west along 125th Street, and for the entire length of Lenox, Seventh, and Eighth avenues. Along each of these avenues, and along each major side street—116th, 125th, 135th, and so on—bars, stores, pawnshops, restaurants, even little luncheonettes had been smashed open and entered and looted—looted, it might be added, with more haste than efficiency. The shelves really looked as though a bomb had struck them. Cans of beans and soup and dog food, along with toilet paper, corn flakes, sardines and milk tumbled every which way, and abandoned cash registers and cases of beer leaned crazily out of the splintered windows and were strewn along the avenues. Sheets, blankets, and clothing of every description formed a kind of path, as though people had dropped them while running. I truly had not realized that Harlem had so many stores until I saw them all smashed open; the first time the word wealth ever entered my mind in relation to Harlem was when I saw it scattered in the streets. But one’s first, incongruous impression of plenty was countered immediately by an impression of waste. None of this was doing anybody any good. It would have been better to have left the plate glass as it had been and the goods lying in the stores.
It would have been better, but it would also have been intolerable, for Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need. Most of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other, and themselves. But as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a moment when these outlets do not work. That summer, for example, it was not enough to get into a fight on Lenox Avenue, or curse out one’s cronies in the barber shops. If ever, indeed, the violence which fills Harlem’s churches, pool halls, and bars erupts outward in a more direct fashion, Harlem and its citizens are likely to vanish in an apocalyptic flood. That this is not likely to happen is due to a great many reasons, most hidden and powerful among them the Negro’s real relation to the white American. This relation prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and satisfactory as pure hatred. In order really to hate white people, one has to blot so much out of the mind—and the heart—that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one’s own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black. One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene. Amputation is swift but time may prove that the amputation was not necessary—or one may delay the amputation too long. Gangrene is slow, but it is impossible to be sure that one is reading one’s symptoms right. The idea of going through life as a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally unbearable is the risk of swelling up slowly, in agony, with poison. And the trouble, finally, is that the risks are real even if the choices do not exist.
“But as for me and my house,” my father had said, “we will serve the Lord.” I wondered, as we drove him to his resting place, what this line had meant for him. I had heard him preach it many times. I had preached it once myself, proudly giving it an interpretation different from my father’s. Now the whole thing came back to me, as though my father and I were on our way to Sunday school and I were memorizing the golden text: And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom you will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that we
re on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. I suspected in these familiar lines a meaning which had never been there for me before. All of my father’s texts and songs, which I had decided were meaningless, were arranged before me at his death like empty bottles, waiting to hold the meaning which life would give them for me. This was his legacy: nothing is ever escaped. That bleakly memorable morning I hated the unbelievable streets and the Negroes and whites who had, equally, made them that way. But I knew that it was folly, as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.
It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.
WILLIAM OWENS (1905-1990)
Born in Blossom, Texas, William Owens attended Southern Methodist University, and took his Ph.D. at Iowa State University. He taught English at Texas A&M University from 1937 to 1947.
During World War II he was a member of the U.S. Army’s Counter-intelligence Corps in the Philippines and received the Legion of Merit. Owens later became a professor of English at Columbia University, retiring in 1974.
His memoir, This Stubborn Soil, published in 1966, received the Texas Institute of Letters Award. In this extract, Maggie is his older sister.
from THIS STUBBORN SOIL
Looking for a job in January was worse than I thought it could be, going from building to building, walking in cold or rain, hearing again and again that no more applications would be taken till spring, or that I did not have enough education and experience to apply. The money in my pocket ran out and I had to draw on the savings I had put away for Commerce. Some mornings I would have stayed at home but Maggie would not let me. Anybody staying at her house had to be out working, or out looking for work.
“You’re eighteen,” she said. “You’ve got to make out like you’re a man.”
Other mornings I went straight to the library, after telling myself that a job would not turn up that day.
In the middle of January there was a letter from Pat Swindle, mailed from Texarkana, the first word I had heard from him since the day he walked off from the cotton patch. He had a job with a lumber company in Texarkana, working on a timber crew in the woods of Arkansas. He wanted me to come and work with him.
“I’ll meet you at the post office in Texarkana January 22. You’ve got to be there. You cain’t let me down.”
I looked at the calendar and studied his letter. If I left the next day, I would have four days to meet him in Texarkana. It was warm outside, the sun bright. It would be a good thing to hit the road and meet him, to get a job on my own and not have to tell anybody how much money I was making or what I was going to do with it. Pat was a good friend to me. I would be as good a friend to him.
I kept the letter from them and did not tell them what I meant to do. I knew Maggie would try to stop me, and I did not want to be stopped.
The next morning I went to look for a job but came back to the house in the middle of the day, when I knew they would all be out at work. I put on clean overalls and shirt, work shoes and socks, my black coat and cap. I could send for the rest after I got a job. I wanted to go without leaving a word, but could not. I wrote a note telling them I had gone to meet Pat. I did not say when or where. Then, with the two dollars I had left, I walked out the Santa Fe tracks away from Dallas.
It was a bright winter afternoon, just cool enough to make me feel good walking. For some miles I stayed on the Santa Fe track, stepping on crossties, singing old songs I had learned at Pin Hook. “Send me a letter, Send it by mail.” All at once I was happier than I had been for months. What I was doing was right. I would go where I pleased, work when I pleased, and move on when I got tired of working. Pat was the right one to go with. He was younger, but he had been hoboing for months and knew how to get along.
When I came to where the highway crossed the tracks at Rinehart, I took the pavement. Better to try catching rides on the highway than riding the rods, when I had never been on the rods. I took the road and walked along, flagging rides, and glad for the ones I got. I knew that Paris was not on the direct road to Texarkana, but at the first turning off place I went toward Paris.
At sundown I walked into the town of Wylie, knowing I could not get another ride that night. I ate a bowl of chili in a café and went to the railroad station. When the stationmaster left, I stretched out on a bench by a warm coal stove and slept through the night.
The next day I made it to Paris and then to Blossom. It was late in the day when I walked past the Blossom school and the line of stores. I saw people I knew but they did not know me. It was hard not to ask them for something to eat and a place to stay all night. “Don’t steal, don’t beg.” My mother’s words came to mind. It was harder to pass the road to Pin Hook and not turn down it. Somebody else lived in our house at Pin Hook. Somebody else would have to give me grub and bed if I went there.
The next morning I was on the road again, after sleeping at the house of people who had been our neighbors when we lived at Blossom, with eighty miles ahead of me to Texarkana and a day and a half to make it in. The skies were gray with clouds and I was beginning to get a cold. There were a few cars on the road between Blossom and Clarksville, but not many. By the middle of the day I was catching rides on wagons when I could, walking when I could not, and beginning to feel dragged down by the cold.
Out of Clarksville I missed the road and in the late afternoon came to English, a place with store and school and houses at the edge of the pine woods. At the store, men told me the road was too boggy for a wagon all the way to Avery. At the school I stopped to rest and watch the end of a basketball game. The school was like Pin Hook but bigger. When the game was over I walked along the road with children ahead of me, children behind me till the last ones stopped at a house out in a field. There was nothing left for me but to keep on walking.
It was late at night when I got to Avery. The last mile or so was on gravel. It rattled under my shoes but was easier to walk in than the bogging clay. The town was asleep and dark, and dogs barked at me from house to house as I went along. I looked for a place to buy supper but everything was closed. Almost to the other side of town I saw a light burning on a porch and a sign: “Rooms, Fifty Cents.” Hungry, worried about my cold, I stood at the edge of the porch and yelled “Hello” till an old man came with a coal oil lamp.
“You want a room?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Four bits, cash.”
I gave him half a dollar and he took me to a room in another house. He set the lamp on a washstand and went to the door.
“Privy’s out back,” he said.
“Any grub anywhere?”
“No grub tonight.”
After he had gone I went to bed with my clothes on and wrapped the thin quilts around me, with a layer over my head. I needed to breathe warm air to stop coughing. I slept some, but was awakened in between by the sound of wind and rain on the tin roof over me.
I l
eft Avery in gray daylight, before anything had opened. There was a heavy cloud to the north and a strong wind was blowing from the northeast. In January that meant bad weather and I was still forty miles from Texarkana. In a few hours Pat would be waiting for me at the post office.
At the edge of town a touring car with the curtains up stopped beside me. A young man unbuttoned a curtain on the driver’s side and looked out.