Seating herself upon a stool, close in front of the desk, she said,
“Let me tell you the story—perhaps you have read it and can give me the name of it. It is about a boy and a girl who had been constant companions since their childhood. They wanted to be together always. But the boy was a Jew and the girl was a gentile. And the boy’s father was terribly opposed to his son marrying out of his own race. He sent the boy off to college. But a short time afterwards, the father died and the son returned and married the girl. They lived together in a few rooms over a small bookshop which had been left to the boy by his father. They would always have been exquisitely happy together except for one thing; the shop provided little more than a living and the girl was ambitious. She adored the boy—but her discontent grew on her and she was continually urging her husband to enter some more profitable business. But the boy was very different from the girl. He loved her so much that he would do anything for her—but he was incapable, somehow, of giving up the shop that had belonged to his parents. You see, the boy was a dreaming, sentimental, strange sort of Jew. And the girl could never quite see things from his angle. Her people—who had died and left her with a widowed aunt—had been French. She had inherited from them great vigor, practicality, and love of the world. After a time, she received an offer from a vaudeville agent to exercise her talent for music upon the stage. Blinded with the glittering prospect of a theatrical career, she decided to accept the proposition of the vaudeville agent. She returned to the bookshop and told her husband that she was going to leave him. He was too proud to make any effort to keep her, but he handed her a key to the shop and told her that she would be wanting it someday—and that he would always be waiting for her. That night she sailed for England with the vaudeville show. Upon a stage in London she had a huge success. She became a famous singer and traveled through all of the great countries of Europe. She lived a wild and a glamorous life, and for long periods she did not think at all of the dreaming Jew who had been her devoted husband, nor of the small, dusty bookshop where they had lived together. But the key to that bookshop, which her husband had given her the night that she left him, remained with her. She couldn’t force herself, somehow, to relinquish it. The key seemed to cling to her, almost with a will of its own. It was an odd-looking key—old fashioned—heavy, and long and black. Her friends laughed at her for always carrying it with her and she laughed with them. But gradually she came to discover her reason for keeping it. The glamor of the new things with which she had filled her life began to fade and to thin, like a fog, and she could see—shining through them—the real and lasting beauty of the things that she had left behind. The memory of her husband and of their life together in the small bookshop came to her mind more and more vividly and hauntingly. At last she knew that she wanted to go back—she wanted to let herself into the bookshop with the key she had been keeping for fifteen years, and find her husband still waiting for her, as he had promised he would.”
The woman had risen from the stool; her body was trembling and she was grasping the desk for support.
There are moments of stillness, stiflingly complete. When the woman spoke again there was a note of terror in her voice. She must have begun to realize what had happened—what had become of the man who had been her husband.
“You remember it—you must remember it—the story of Lila and Jacob?”
She was searching his face desperately, but there was nothing in it but bewilderment. He said at last:
“There is something familiar about the story. I think I have read it somewhere. It seems to me that it is something by Tolstoi.”
From my covert among the bookshelves, I heard a sharp metallic sound that must have been the key dropping upon the floor. And then I heard her stumbling among the jumble of tables and shelves. She must have been hurrying, with a blind frenzy, to get out of the place. I shut my eyes—not daring to see her face and the horror that it must contain—until the door had closed behind her. When I opened them, the man in the back of the room had covered his face again with the large book and had resumed reading with his customary, dreadful quietness. His wife had come back to him and gone away again, and all was so fantastically the same that I might have believed what had occurred a dream, if I had not seen, lying upon the floor, the heavy black key to the bookshop.
1930-31 (Not previously published)
Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll
A gang of Negroes were laying a road south of Jackson, Mississippi. They were breaking rocks. Their picks clanged heavily, monotonously. A hot wind, sweeping at intervals like the spasmodic breath of some monster with a belly of fire, crouching upon the other side of the level cotton fields, brought swirls of yellow dust from the parched ground and groans and curses from the lips of the rock-breakers.
It was late afternoon. The white boss, a giant of an Irishman, wet and fiery red as if he had just been dipped into a tub of blood, had a brown jug of corn “likker” under a clump of weeds somewhere up the road. He had trudged up to it every hour or so during the long day, and now he had begun to stagger a bit; his cursing voice had gotten thick. He was after the men like a mad devil. They gave him no back talk. They kept their eyes away from him. They all knew that he had once burst a Negro’s head open for calling him a name, and that he had gotten away with it.
Rhythmically, heavily, they heaved themselves up and down, nothing behind their picks, now, but the weight of their exhausted bodies. Song that usually sticks in the Negro throat as long, almost, as breath, had grown weak and sporadic. And for long periods there was nothing to be heard along the blistering road but the scuffling and thick cursing of the white boss, the murmur of the yellow-hot wind in the cotton, the clanging of the picks upon the rocks, as heavy and as monotonous as Time.
Then a thing happened which had happened often before, but which had nevertheless, an effect that was always startling. One of the men flung his pick violently upon the top of a pile of rocks. He tore his blue shirt open to the waist, laying bare the gleaming black arch of his chest. He flung his muscular arms high above his up-thrust head and uttered a savage, booming cry.
“YOW-OW. YOW-OW-W-W.”
There was a break in the clanging of the picks, even in the staggered cursing and parading of the white boss. This was a cry that could have been duplicated by no other throat. It was a huge, towering cry, beginning upon a deep growling note and veering flame-like into a ululating peak, high enough and sharp enough, it seemed, to split open the sky. A human cry? It seemed, rather, the voice of the flat and blistering land. It was elemental, epical, like a challenge and like a prayer flung at Life.
The clanging of the picks began again. The white boss continued his staggered cursing and parading. But that cry had penetrated and quickened the minds of the rock-breakers; it had shaken them from their torpor.
“Ole Big Black—there he goes agin!” they had said. They had looked at each other and grinned. The aching of their backs and arms, the soreness of their feet, were less acute. Their miseries seemed to have found expression in Big Black’s vast utterance and to be accordingly relieved. In a few moments they had caught up a song.
Big Black was six feet and five inches tall. He was prodigiously, repulsively ugly. His great, round face was like that of the “nigger” in the revolving circle of wooden dummies at which baseballs are cast for Kewpie doll prizes at carnivals and amusement parks. His shoulders and his arms were gargantuan. He had, probably, more lifting, and pounding, and dragging power than any two men in the gang. He exulted in the use of that power. When he hoisted to his shoulder some great weight which the strongest of his fellow workmen could barely have raised from the ground, his eyes gleamed triumphantly, like those of a wrestler who has thrown an opponent. He worked feverishly. Work was Big Black’s meat, said the men in the gang. And it was a good analogy, for Big Black gorged work as though he were famished for it— as though he could never get enough of it. When he had finished breaking his own pile of rocks, he would shov
e a neighboring workman roughly aside, and start in upon his. That was why the white boss, who never dared to curse the gigantic Negro, tolerated him in the gang.
And yet Big Black was not a popular character among the men of the gang. He was too strange, savage, inarticulate. He never joined in the songs or bantering conversation. He never shot craps, told vastly Rabelaisian jokes, went into town on Saturdays to drink “likker” and visit a woman. He never chased after the cotton-picking girls or told tall tales when he was off the road, or lay with his belly in the hot-soft dust and laughed with The Love of Life Returning After Toil. He was a black beast that had taken grotesque human form and had no voice but that terrible ululating cry…
It was quitting time now. “Quittin’ Time!” the drunken red Irishman bawled. He was lurching widely; he would sprawl into the shadowed weedy ditch, now that it was quitting time, and there he would sleep for several hours, grunting, still muttering curses, his blue shirt clinging black with sweat to his red barrel chest, flies settling upon his bare throat, wet and bright red as blood, and upon his arms, red hams covered with a fuzz of white-bleached hair.
When night came, showing that the coolness of a moon and stars could still exist above the sun-tortured earth, he would slowly rouse himself; he would vomit; after a while he would drag himself out of the stinking, weedy ditch, go lurching down the road, beginning to sing. He would retrieve the half-emptied jug from the clump of weeds, see that it was securely corked, and then he would go on staggering, and singing louder and more cheerfully, till he came to his Ford, parked beside a fallen tree; cranking and cursing; then a wild spluttering; and then back to town, singing, veering crazily upon the bumpy road, shooting up clouds of dust in the white moonlight, thinking blithely of the things that waited for him at home—a big Irish supper on a checkered table cloth, a big Irish woman on a brass bed…
It was quitting time. The Negroes trudged over the flat dusty fields, toward the row of cabins which housed them. They trudged wearily, yet their voices were loud and mirthful. The Love of Life Returning after Toil was in them. The scent of suppers seeped over the fields, cotton-picking girls stood in the doorways, their hands on their hips, their white teeth flashing. Snatches of song and laughter, as free as birds, danced into the air. There was the rattling churn of a pump, the joyous bark of hounds to returning masters, the mooing of a cow, the frantic clucking of a hen seeking to evade its executioner, the blaze of the day dying out, the white moon turning yellow. Banjos twanged mellowly—tomorrow was Sunday—Life was forgiven its trespasses— hugged close hot black bodies. Life—having its way…
Big Black did not go with them. There was no one waiting for him in the cabins. And it would be hotter in them than it was upon the road. There would be the stench of sweating bodies, sizzle of frying foods; too many people, too many voices, and none of them for him. He preferred to be by himself. A huge, black figure, a black beast in grotesque human form, he trudged down the road. Where was he going? He didn’t know. He kept on down the road; he passed the white boss’s Ford beside the fallen tree; he passed a rusted tin sign picturing a bottle of medicine, a cat killed by dogs lying in the ditch, an automobile tire worn smooth and white with frayed edges. He came at length to the wooden bridge that crossed the small river. Up a ways he saw a patch of wooded land upon the shore of the river. The sun hadn’t fallen or lost its heat. His body was tired after its orgy of labor on the road. It would feel good lying in the shade—maybe he would bathe himself in the river. It was over half a mile to the clump of trees. But when he got there, the shade was good. He dropped to the ground among some bushes. He groaned, stretched himself, closed his burning eyes. He was too tired to bathe in the river—too tired…
His mind was about to sink into sleep when, not far distant, there came the sound of splashing in the river. He re-opened his eyes. He raised himself slightly, and peered between the bushes in the direction of the splashing. Through the tangled leaves and branches he caught a glimpse of white arms flashing above the brown surface of the water. He lifted himself quickly upon his hands and knees, quickly but silently. Like a great black animal, he crouched behind the bushes, peered at the naked girl bathing up there. The river was thickly interwoven with light and shade from the slowly sinking sun. He could see her for a moment; and then she was gone; and then she appeared again. He could see now an arm, now a shoulder, and now her face; once she dove into the shallow water and the fleeting glimpse of her white body curving sinuously above the dark brown stream, catching the sunlight like wet ivory, made him quiver. The mind behind those glistening animal eyes worked slowly, precisely. She was by herself. She was very young—not more than a child. She must have come from the poor white folks’ camp on the other side of the river.
The feverish ache left Big Black’s body. He felt cool and tense with excitement. He crawled, noiseless as a snake, through the tall grass, behind the thick screen of bushes, till he had come to a point alongside the bathing girl. Watching her from his bushy covert, his breath came so thick and so loud that he feared she might hear it. She was now standing near the opposite bank, only knee-deep in the stream. Her body was just ripening into womanhood; it was delicately beautiful. The low sun, shining through her hair wet by the stream, touched it with prismatic color. Her skin was gleaming white like the inner surface of a wet shell. Big Black devoured her with his eyes, clenched his fists, stiffened in every muscle, felt sick with desire of her.
“She will cross the river,” he said to himself, “and then I will get her.”
For several minutes she stood in the same position in the unshadowed patch of water, as though she were drinking into her body the dying warmth of the sun. Then she waded deeper into the river and started swimming slowly, gracefully toward the bank upon which Big Black was crouching.
He waited until she was within a foot of the shore; then he plunged through the bushes, dove over the low bank into the water. With his huge hand he throttled her first cry. For a few moments the feel of her wet, struggling body in his arms intoxicated him. He swayed back and forth, clasping her, and uttered low, guttural sounds like a hungry animal tearing at a fresh kill. Then of a sudden the ecstasy fell away from him. Horror replaced it. His eyes fastened upon his black hand clasping the white, terrified face of the girl. Its great spatulate fingers spread wide, gripping the white face, it looked like a hideous, huge black spider. It was ugly—ugly. The ugliness of it sickened him. Still clasping her writhing body, but now standing quite still, all of the desire gone out of him, he stared with fierce loathing at that black hand of his, and he muttered bitterly to himself,
“You big black devil! You big—black—devil!”
He raised the screaming girl high over his head, flung her into the middle of the stream. Then he scrambled madly up the bank and through the bushes. As he ran along, panting, stumbling, for all the world like some great hunted beast, he wondered dazedly what he should do. He couldn’t return to the cabins. That evening, as soon as the girl had reported his assault, they would be scouring the country for him. He turned back to the river, dove over the low bank—there was a current in the middle—it bore him away—away…
A gang of Negroes were laying a road south of Savannah, Georgia. Their picks clanged upon the rocks, as heavy and monotonous as Time. The wind blew yellow swirls of dust, the men groaned and cursed. Among them was a black monster of a Negro. He was prodigiously big, prodigiously ugly. He worked with a fury, as though he could never get enough of it. They called him Big Black, the strongest, ugliest “nigger” that ever worked for a white man.
Big Black paused for a moment in his orgy of labor to spit upon the pile of rocks. He watched the brown stream of tobacco juice trickling over their white surface, the flies settling avidly upon it. It was ugly, ugly. And as he watched it, a picture flashed sickeningly into his mind of a black hand, like a huge and hideous spider, gripping the white face of a girl! Ugliness seizing upon Beauty—Beauty that never could be seized!…
&nbs
p; Big Black tore his blue shirt open to the waist, arched his huge black chest, flung his sweating arms above his head, and uttered a savage, booming cry.
“Yow-Ow! YOW-OW-W!”
It began upon a deep growling note, veered flame-like into a ululating peak, high enough, and sharp enough, it seemed, to split open the sky. It was elemental, epical. It was like a prayer and like a challenge flung at Life.
There was a break in the clanging of the picks; wet ebon faces grinned at one another.
“There goes ole Big Black agin!”
In a few moments they had caught up a song.
1931-32 (Not previously published)
The Accent of a Coming Foot
She felt the eyes of the sisters appraising enviously her city clothes, the spring hat of dark blue straw trimmed with red cherries, the gaily printed crepe dress, the brand-new slippers of black suede with silk bows only slightly mud-flecked from the walk across town since she had walked so carefully, taking very huge or tiny steps to avoid the streaming cracks and puddles.
“I can’t understand how Bud happened to miss you at the station,” Mrs. Hamilton was still lamenting, “he left in plenty of time.”
Catharine’s lips were dry and she could feel them trembling. Every step of the long walk from the station had been like a relentless crank winding up inside of her some cruelly sharp steel spring whose release would certainly whirl her to pieces. But the release had not come. Bud wasn’t waiting on the other side of any door in this house. There were only his mother and his sisters. So the spring had to go on winding itself still tighter till heaven knows what might happen.