Benson flushed. “Because I’be rich? Because I’be got a little money in the bank?” It occurred to him that that was not exactly true.
Nuper glanced at him—just a flick of the eyes—then away. “Oh come on,” he said. “Let’s forget it.” It was a gesture of charity, Benson would know later. Nuper was a pro at this kind of thing, Benson merely a passionate ignoramus.
“Young people,” Benson sneered. He hunched his shoulders and cut his Spam into tiny pieces as if it were Nuper’s heart. “They think they ode the world. They think the whole world odes them a living. Eat, dring, add be merry, that’s all they do. Run aroudd half-naked and dance rock-n-roll and complain about the Goverdment and take drugs and have riots and whine about the Atom Bobb and play guitars—”
“Walter!” Marguerite said.
He chewed angrily.
There was a silence, and then both Nuper and Walter Benson spoke at once.
They both broke off, and each of them waited for the other one to speak first. They were both still staring straight ahead in white-hot fury, chewing, forking in the food.
“Would someone please pass the rolls?” Marguerite said.
They both reached. Nuper deferred.
Nuper said in a conciliating tone, “Actually, if one looks closely at the school districts in Buffalo—if one examines the character of each school—one makes the discovery that the schools are monolithic. That is to say, segregated. As the Supreme Court has stated in no uncertain terms, separate but equal is a logical contradiction. Do you believe a Negro child has a right to an education?”
Benson sulked.
“Well he’s not getting one in Buffalo, I’ll tell you that.”
“You’ll get hib killed, that’s what you’ll do with all your signs,” Benson said.
“Really,” Marguerite said. “Why can’t we eat supper in peace?” She was close to tears.
“The city’s been warned,” Nuper said. His eyes got a curious glint. It made you think of a man watching a building burning down.
“I dode know about all that. Pass the potatoes.”
“But it doesn’t keep you from talking.” Nuper smiled.
“I’be a peaceful man, and I live in a peaceful city. Add I’ll tell you something.”
“Sure, by keeping the nigger in his place.”
“I’m not against niggers—”
“Then how come you call them that?”
“You called them—”
“Boys, boys, boys!” Her face was all pulled out of shape with grief and fright.
“I was imitating you.”
“I haddn’t said it yed!”
“Well, you would have.”
Benson slammed the table with his fist. “There are ways add ways of doing these things. And the way you people dake, starting riots and getting wibben add children killed—”
“And men.” Again he sounded conciliatory, and it threw Benson off.
Benson said, “I’m for peace. I believe when a city has a probleb—”
“It should face it.” Nuper smiled and chewed.
“No.”
“It should not face it.” He leaned back and winked at Marguerite, and it was that, that horrible, sneaky, filthy—(words failed him)—wink that drove Benson wild. He leaped to his feet and slammed the table so hard his milk tipped over.
“You dode care, do you! You just dode care. It dode matter to you who’s ride or wrong, you just win whatever way you can. You’re like all of them. Irresponsible! What have you god to lose? You dode have to live here. You just cub in and stir up trouble and have your fun and then you’re gone, and we’re the ones do the cleaning up. Citizens like me. You cub here—” He spluttered, red-faced, eyes bulging. “You cub in—a city like Buffalo—you rile up—you, you rile up the niggers, the Negroes—you throw bobbs around and start frights in the street.” He stopped himself. He was shaking all over, and Nuper was sitting cool as a cucumber, eating his lettuce with sugar on it, and Marguerite was pushing back her chair with a look of witless grief and rage, leaving for the kitchen. Benson tried to make himself calm and, bristling, watched Marguerite leave.
Benson said, voice steely, “I dode like the way you argue.”
Again, Nuper smiled. His upper lip went out of sight and his teeth showed, teeth like some kind of an animal’s, tiny and yellow. After a moment he said, “I’m sorry I made you angry, Mr. Benson. And I’m sorry your wife—”
“Dode you talk to me about my wife,” Benson said. He spit the words out so fast, with such rage, that Nuper looked at him and went white for a moment.
“If I’ve offended—” he said.
Benson sat down and put his hands in his lap to hide the shaking. He was frightened. It wasn’t like him to speak out like that, lash out as if tomorrow would never come. He could give himself a heart attack that way, or get the neighbors down on him, and they might call the police, and the police might have a picture, or there might be some cop from out of town. … He sat with his shoulders tightly hunched, his hands pressed together tight between his knees.
After a long time Nuper said, “Mr. Benson, you have the wrong idea about me. Seriously.” He spoke gently, all apology. “I realize you don’t approve of my activities, any more than I approve of yours …”
Benson looked at him, alarmed.
“But I think you should judge me without prejudice. We must all follow the dictates of our conscience, don’t you agree?”
The names of towns came into Benson’s head. He tried to listen, in spite of them, to Nuper’s talk. He found himself concentrating on the way Nuper’s chin ran into his throat, the way his ears peeked through his thin, rumpled hair, the way his upper gums showed when he talked. His nose was really amazingly like a sheep’s.
“Mr. Benson, how do you explain the poverty of the Negro?”
Benson’s lips twitched inward but he said nothing.
“Be frank. Do you think it’s because they’re lazy, or stupid, or—as you say—irresponsible?” He held up his long yellow hand. “It’s all right, you don’t need to answer. Let me tell you something that may surprise you. I agree with you. You expect me to ask, ‘But what made them lazy and stupid and irresponsible?’ and you expect me to answer, ‘The system! Environment! And so on.’” Nuper leaned forward, smiling, showing his tiny teeth, his eyelids halfway lowered. “Well I say nothing of the kind. I say what every white man knows in his heart: it’s because they’re closer to the ape!” He sat back, triumphant, smiling broadly, with his lips pressed together.
Walter Benson stared, slightly confused.
When he was satisfied that he’d made his effect, Nuper raised his eyebrows into a long inverted V and opened his hands, the heels pointing inward. He looked, for an instant, like Jesus at the Last Supper. “I don’t like them, you see. I don’t like them at all. But I like them better than civilized people, if you understand my meaning.”
Marguerite stood in the kitchen doorway, wringing her fingers and sniffling. “Please, Walter,” she said. “Why can’t we watch TV or something? Why do we have to argue.”
He ignored her and stared intently at Nuper, waiting for what he was saying to come clear. He wanted with all his heart and soul to answer him. The hunger to shout him down, make a fool of him, even physically tear him limb from limb made all Benson’s muscles tense, but he could not make out yet what Nuper was saying. Olean, he thought involuntarily. Endicott. It was as if Boyle were taking his body and brain away from him, creeping up insidiously inside.
“What is civilization?” Nuper asked softly, rhetorically. “Civilization, honestly defined, is the enslavement of the many by the few. Put it this way. What do we think of when we think of a civilized man? A man who understands paintings and music and litiracha—a man who plays chess or polo or what-have-you. A man who does no work. Now, how does such a man come into existence?” He waited. “You know as well as I do, Mr. Benson. He corners some market. Usually he corners land, Russia under the Czar. South Ame
rica. Even the United States—though here it’s tricky. Here everybody had land at first, but little by little Bell Telephone and Heath Candybar and the rest are taking over. With the Government’s help, of course—tax cuts and so on. All right then. There’s your civilized man, your man of endless leisure. In the old days it used to be that every minute he spent in his hammock or his kidney-shaped swimming pool was a minute he stole from you or me. Not now. Now he has machines, he can make his mint without even giving you the satisfaction of earning your broth and bread. He can kill you, Mr. Benson. But he doesn’t. That’s what’s terrible. He throws you sops. Poverty programs. Handouts. Social security. He can keep you just well enough fed that you rest contented in your shanty. And there, my capitalist friend, is where the Blacks come in.”
Benson had listened closely, waiting to pounce. His muscles felt so tight he had a feeling he couldn’t untie himself if he tried. He felt monstrously cheated. It was a mistake to listen to people like Nuper, he’d always known that. He knew what Nuper was, all right. He knew that, for all his fine arguments, the man was a lying, cheating, slimy … Again he could find no words. Suddenly and loudly, as if inspired, Benson said, “I dode feel that the house I live in is a shanty.”
“Ah!” Nuper said. “And yet it is, isn’t it. A shanty compared to what the Kennedys live in. A shanty compared to—”
Marguerite said, offended, “The Kennedys have all those children.”
Nuper exploded into laughter.
“Stop that!” Benson roared. The sudden exertion loosened the stuff in his nose and he hastily covered his lip with one hand and fished for the handkerchief with the other. He blew his nose.
“I’m sorry,” Nuper said. “I apologize. But really, for heaven’s sakes—” He laughed again. “Forgive me, Mrs. Benson.”
She pursed her lips, deeply hurt, and her chin was as big as Nuper’s whole head.
“We better get these dishes washed,” Benson said petulantly.
He got up, blew his nose again, and picked up his plate and silverware to take them to the kitchen.
Nuper said, “I really didn’t mean to get into all this. I really am sorry.” Again, infuriatingly, he was laughing, “—all those children,” he said. He laughed again.
Marguerite said tearfully, “If you feel this house is a shanty, you ought to leave.”
“Dear God, Mrs. Benson!” Nuper said. He shook with laughter.
“Get out of here,” Benson said. “I suggest you go to your riot.”
Nuper laughed and laughed and laughed.
I’ll kill him, Benson thought, raising his eyebrows, startled. This is my house.
When he came back from the kitchen for more dishes, Ollie Nuper was standing up, shaking and snorting.
“Get out of here,” Benson hissed. He took a step nearer. “Get out of my house.”
He was standing at the sink washing dishes in his suitpants and white shirt when Ollie Nuper went out to his car with the signs. Benson scowled into the soapsuds, not thinking, his mind a perfect blank. Like a man in a trance, he wiped his hands on the dish-towel and went into the dining room for his suitcoat.
“Where are you going, Walter?” Marguerite said.
“Business,” he said.
He heard Ollie Nuper’s car start up.
Marguerite’s lips were trembling. He ignored it and hurried to his car.
3
On one side stood an old, dirty church of reddish stone, with an enormous stained-glass window, lighted, some of the pieces of glass broken out long ago and replaced with something that did not let the light through; on the other side, a brick school that had an abandoned look, a playground surrounded by cyclone fence with barbed wire at the top. The park between was small, crowded with people. Some of the trees were dead and the swings had no seats in them. He had never seen so many Negroes gathered together in one place. Some of them looked poor—old men whose trousers hung low at the crotch and whose shoes were lumpy; old, fat women wearing two or three sweaters and kerchiefs over their heads; boys in T-shirts that were badly stretched out of shape at the neck and trousers with flies that no longer buttoned; young women with enormous rear ends and cheap, shiny shoes that let most of their feet show through—but most of them didn’t look poor, in fact they looked rich, to Benson, rich and directly dangerous: a man just ahead of him with a goat’s beard and the curved dark glasses murderers wear on television; a group of fat young Negroes a little to the right of him, black as coal in their white shirts and thin little ties; a huge black man in a striped winter suit who kept wiping his forehead and neck with a great white handkerchief. The old people were mostly to the back of the crowd, around Benson—he was not in the crowd at all, in fact, but on the street, well out of range of most of them—and the younger boys, too, kept to the back. They seemed hardly interested, darting in and out among the old people, calling to each other, sometimes cuffing each other in a way that might or might not be playful, Benson couldn’t tell. The people at the heart of the crowd were college age or a little older, and more of them than he would have expected were women, loud, belligerent girls of a kind he had never known existed: they had the pretty faces of the girls who waited on him in restaurants or sat reading quietly on buses, and they had the sweet voices of the girls he heard singing on the television with Mitch Miller and the rest, but tonight their pretty faces were full of authority and dire intent, and the sweetness of their voices was irrelevant to their calls and shouts. The young women were the ones, or so it seemed to Benson, who ruled the crowd. It was one of them, a tall, flat-chested girl with large and radiant teeth, who first got up on the speaker’s platform. She held up her hands and after a long time the crowd became silent. She raised the microphone, then lowered it a little. Someone on the ground in front of the platform tried to help.
“Can you hear me?” she said.
The crowd murmured, and the loudspeaker made a high, droning noise, then quieted again.
She began to speak, but at the same moment a high voice right at Benson’s elbow asked, “You got a light, boss?”
Benson jumped, then hunted through his pockets nervously. The man was short, and his face was like a blackened skull. He had a red straw hat with a wide white band, far back on his head. He held a cigarette between two long purple fingers.
“Ah,” Benson said.
The man took them without touching Benson’s fingers. “Whoo,” he said.
Benson said, as nervous as ever, “What’s all this about?”
The man shook his head, held the lighted match to his cigarette, and blew upward. “I ’on’t know, man. Shit, man, Ine jis’ passin’ thoo.” He grinned.
Benson took the matches back, put them in his pocket, and folded his hands to listen. He could feel the black man looking at his ear.
The girl was saying: “—much to be grateful for. In Chicago they throw rocks at us, in Mississippi they throw bombs in our churches and shoot at us from passing cars, but not here, not in Buffalo, New York.”
The crowd murmured. Someone yelled, “Tell ’em!”
“In Alabama they have to use the State Police to see that black children can walk to school without being shot at, and in Wisconsin they have to use tear gas to keep the blacks and the whites from murdering each other—but not here. And you want to know why?” She leaned close to the microphone and spoke softly. “Because we’re not moving yet, in Buffalo, New York. We’re still darkies, here. We stay in our place, like lizards under the porch, and we stand in line when they tell us to stand in line, and if they happen to step on our toes, we apologize.”
The crowd cheered, except for the people in back. The old people merely stood there.
“That CORE, man,” the Negro at Benson’s elbow said, “they muthuhfuckuhs every one of ’em, and the same thing for SNCC. Shoo.” His breath smelled of whiskey. He tipped up his head and blew smoke.
Benson said, “What are they meeting about? Are they going to demonstrate?”
The man
smiled with ominous teeth and rolled his eyes. “Man, Ine jist passin’ thoo.”
He tried to see Nuper, but he was nowhere in sight. He was somewhere up near the speakers’ platform—at least that was where Benson had lost sight of him.
The girl was saying, “—but they don’t want your child to matriculate with their children up here in Buffalo either, make no mistake about it! And they don’t want your face in their neighborhood! They want your money and your sweat and your blood in Vietnam, and after that—they—want—you—dead.”
The crowd roared.
There was a police car coming around the corner, cruising slowly, seemingly indifferent to the crowd. The policemen were Negroes. When they came up to Benson and the man at his elbow, one of the policemen said, “Don’t stand in the street, buddy.”
“Sorry,” Benson said.
The Negro in the red straw hat looked at them with his head tipped back and one leg thrown forward. The cigarette between his fingers was burned down to the last half-inch. The car moved away. Another great roar came from the crowd.
“We’d better move back,” Benson said.
The Negro shrugged. He dropped the cigarette and stamped on it, making a little dance of it, then touched his red straw hat cocking it forward, and started across the street toward the side away from the crowd. Benson pursed his lips, then followed. When he came to the sidewalk he took a place a few feet away from the Negro. There were people standing here watching, leaning up against the sooty, scarred buildings and observing the meeting as casually as they’d have observed a crew of construction men at work. The crowd in the park began singing. Someone on the platform had a banjo. Now Ollie Nuper was on the platform too, clapping his hands and nodding up and down. And now the Negro with the red straw hat was at Benson’s elbow again, standing on tiptoe, saying, “You thirsdy, brother?” Benson turned, and the man pointed with his thumb at the green padded leather door directly behind them.
“I don’t drink,” Benson said.
“Me neither,” the Negro said. “But sometime I do take a Coke and a liddle bitta rum.” He smiled.