And that word love. I found it difficult to keep my eyes away from my father.
“I met Laura Kincaid at the library today,” I heard my father say.
“Was she able to get a copy of the play?” my mother asked.
“Two of them,” he said, munching. “I still think Streetcar Named Desire is pretty ambitious for you girls to put on.”
“The Women’s Auxiliary knows no fear of Tennessee Williams,” my mother said in that exaggerated voice she uses when she’s kidding around.
“You know, that’s funny, Dad,” I heard myself saying. “I saw you in the library this afternoon and was wondering what you were doing there.”
“Oh? I didn’t see you, Mike.”
“He was supposed to pick up the play on my library card. But then Laura Kincaid came by …” That was my mother explaining it all, although I barely made out the words.
I won’t go into the rest of the scene and I won’t say that my appetite suddenly came back and that I devoured the steak. Because I didn’t. That was two days ago and I still feel funny about it all. Strange I mean. That’s why I’m writing this, putting it all down, all the evidence I gathered. That first time in the park when he was sitting there. The telephone call. That book of poetry he reads late at night, “To Jimmy, I’ll never forget you. Muriel.” Laura Kincaid in the library. Not much evidence, really. Especially when I look at him and see how he’s my father all right.
Last night, I came downstairs after finishing my homework and he had just turned off the television set. “Cloudy tomorrow, possible showers,” he said, putting out the lights in the den.
We stood there in the half-darkness.
“Homework done, Mike?”
“Yes.”
“Hey, Dad.”
“Yes, Mike?” Yawning.
I didn’t plan to ask him. But it popped out. “I was looking through a book of yours the other day. Poetry by some guy named Fearing or Nearing or something.” I couldn’t see his face in the half dark. Keeping my voice light, I said: “Who’s this Muriel who gave you the book, anyway?”
His laugh was a playful bark. “Boy, that was a long time ago. Muriel Stanton.” He closed the kitchen window. “I asked her to go the Senior Prom but she went with someone else. We were friends. I mean—I thought we were more than friends until she went to the prom with someone else. And so she gave me a gift—of friendship—at graduation.” We walked into the kitchen together. “That’s a lousy swap, Mike. A book instead of a date with a girl you’re crazy about.” He smiled ruefully. “Hadn’t thought of good old Muriel for years.”
You see? Simple explanations for everything. And if I exposed myself as a madman and asked him about the other stuff, the park and the telephone call, I knew there would be perfectly logical reasons. And yet. And yet. I remember that day in the library, when Laura Kincaid walked away from him. I said that I couldn’t see his face, not clearly anyway, but I could see a bit of his expression. And it looked familiar but I couldn’t pin it down. And now I realized why it was familiar: it reminded me of my own face when I looked into the mirror the day I hung up the phone after talking to Sally Bettencourt. All kind of crumpled up. Or was that my imagination? Hadn’t my father been all the way across the library courtyard, too far away for me to tell what kind of expression was on his face?
Last night, standing in the kitchen, as I poured a glass of milk and he said: “Doesn’t your stomach ever get enough?” I asked him: “Hey, Dad. You get lonesome sometimes? I mean: that’s a crazy question, maybe. But I figure grownups, like fathers and mothers—you get to feeling down sometimes, don’t you?”
I could have sworn his eyes narrowed and something leaped in them, some spark, some secret thing that had suddenly come out of hiding.
“Sure, Mike. Everybody gets the blues now and then. Even fathers are people. Sometimes, I can’t sleep and get up and sit in the dark in the middle of the night. And it gets lonesome because you think of …”
“What do you think of, Dad?”
He yawned. “Oh, a lot of things.”
That’s all. And here I am sitting up in the middle of the night writing this, feeling lonesome, thinking of Sally Bettencourt, and how I haven’t a chance with her and thinking, too, of Muriel Stanton who wouldn’t go to the Senior Prom with my father. How he gets lonesome sometimes. And sits up in the night, reading poetry. I think of his anguished face at the library and the afternoon at Bryant Park, and all the mysteries of his life that show he’s a person. Human.
Earlier tonight, I saw him in his chair, reading the paper, and I said, “Goodnight, Dad,” and he looked up and smiled, but an absent kind of smile, as if he was thinking of something else, long ago and far away, and, for some ridiculous feeling, I felt like kissing him goodnight. But didn’t, of course. Who kisses his father at sixteen?
My First Negro
INTRODUCTION
“My First Negro” is the third story in this collection to use the Great Depression as background, but with far varying purposes than “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” and “Protestants Cry, Too.”
The mood in which I wrote “My First Negro” was both nostalgic and rueful, and there was probably guilt mixed in with it too. We are often prisoners of time and circumstance and for a while in the turbulent Sixties, I felt that way. At that time, I served as wire editor of the Fitchburg Sentinel, which meant that I edited and wrote headlines on the wire-service stories arriving in the newsroom on the teletype. For a length of time, I was immersed in stories about civil rights activities, the violent eruptions in the South; and such names as Selma and King and Meredith became familiar ingredients of my day as I worked to fit them into headlines of different sizes and types. I would shoehorn words like police dogs, fire hoses, street beatings into, say, three lines of type confined to one column. The words became seared into my memory.
I realized at the time how black people had played only a small role in my life. I had grown up in a French Canadian section of town and as a boy seldom came in contact with a black person, or a Protestant, for that matter. In high school and later, the few blacks I encountered seemed no different from anyone else. The black families in town seemed to move easily in local circles, and if there was stress or prejudice, I was unaware of it.
As the headlines accelerated, I found myself haunted by that ancient question: What if? What if racial strife came to a city much like Leominster, in the heart of New England? Could it happen? How could it happen? I began to write a novel, an act of pure imagination. In the course of writing it, I spoke at length to a black woman who had lived in the city all her life and brought up a large family. (My wife, who had been her neighbor as a child, brought us together.) The woman took me into her confidence and told me that, yes, she and her family and other blacks had encountered prejudice and bias during their lifetime, often a subtle and insidious kind of prejudice. I was appalled, and my novel began to burn within me as I wrote. The novel never found a publisher.
I also wrote a short story during that period in which I went back to my boyhood days and pondered how I might have handled a relationship with a black boy my own age. What would have happened? Would there be heroes in it or villains? Or would there be a necessity for heroes and villains?
That is what I set out to explore in “My First Negro.” I wanted to capture also the essence of boyhood as I remembered it—the days of garden raids, of discovering books and that someone else loved books too. Happily, the story was published.
As to the details, there was no Alphabet Soup district in the town. Blacks were Negroes then, although some, like the fictional Jean-Paul in the story, called them “niggers.” My grandfather called them “Les Noirs”—prophetic, perhaps, because noir is French for black, and years later black came into prominence.
My First Negro
That was the summer of the long layoff at the comb shop and my father’s deep silence, and Haile Selassie on the Pathe newsreel at the Globe Theater addressing the Leag
ue of Nations, and Hector Langvier having a finger blown off by a homemade cherry bomb on the night before the Fourth, and the exploits of the Midnight Raiders (although we seldom stayed out later than ten o’clock or so), and, of course, Jefferson Johnson Stone. Yes, Jefferson.
As far as I was concerned, the Midnight Raiders were the most important of all. Jean-Paul LaChapelle had chosen me for two vital duties—Scout and Tomato Man. Tomatoes were highly prized—they were actually a fruit, not a vegetable at all, according to Oscar Courier, who always made the honor roll—and it was important, as you squirmed through a garden on your stomach, to be able to pick out tomatoes that were just right, not too green and not too ready for plucking but tomatoes that were on the verge of being picked by the owner in the next day or so. Jean-Paul himself was Light Man. It was his duty, shortly before the raid, to aim a rock at the nearest street light and shatter the bulb, making the area of the garden dark as midnight. Then the raiders, in the shelter of the sudden darkness, would slip and slither through the pungent rows, filling up the empty sugar sacks we had obtained at Gonthier’s Meat Market.
At first, we raided the gardens for thrills, as a diversion in a summer that was somber and slumbering, and ended up gulping down the juicy tomatoes and chewing the stinging cucumbers and then having a vegetable fight, flinging the remnants at each other in desperate abandon. One evening, we saw Pamphille Rouleau passing by—he was an ancient, timid bachelor who lived alone in a small room on Third Street. As he passed, we pummeled him with our leftovers, and he danced a pathetic, pitiful jig of terror until we allowed him to scramble away. I suddenly felt sick from all I had eaten; acid burned in my chest.
“I’m getting tired of raiding gardens,” Joe-Joe Toussaint said when we’d settled down in Jean-Paul’s backyard to get our breaths.
I agreed with him.
Jean-Paul snapped his fingers in sudden decision. He was quick, always eager to conjure up excitement. Tall and blond and confident, he was easily our leader. Moonlight turned him silver as he asked: “Know what’s the matter?”
“What?” Roger Gonthier inquired.
“We don’t have a purpose,” Jean-Paul said, as if reminding us of something he had repeated a million times. “We have to have a reason for raiding gardens, besides the adventure.” His fingers clicked again. “I know—we’ll help the poor!”
“The poor,” Joe-Joe snickered.
I understood the reason for his snicker: we were all poor. Poverty had different levels, of course. There were the comfortable poor like Roger’s father, who ran the market. Mr. Gonthier was a harassed, round-shouldered man hounded by something called credit. I’d heard my father say: “Poor Gonthier—he’s got more credit on the books than he’ll ever collect. Someday, the store’s going to collapse on him.” Yet, Roger and his family were always well dressed and there was dessert at every meal. Then, there were the regular poor like my own family, victims of the Depression and the seasonal tides of the comb shop. The layoffs occurred at regular times of the year, but their possible length haunted my father. That year, the summer shutdown began in June as usual, but it wore on through the Fourth of July and burned toward August. My father was always subdued during the layoffs, his huge laugh missing, and now he sank into a painful silence and stopped drinking beer as if it were Lent. We were better off, naturally, than the relief poor, families who journeyed to City Hall for small slips of paper which allowed them to stand in line and obtain plain-labeled cans and parcels of food at the commissary on Main Street. I think now that that was my father’s secret dread: going on relief. At the bottom of the scale were the destitute poor, those who lived in the ramshackle buildings at the end of Frenchtown, beyond the junkyard and the city dump, in an area we called Alphabet Soup, because the streets were called simply by initials—A and B and C. The children of Alphabet Soup didn’t attend St. Jude’s Parochial School or even Sixth Street School, for that matter. The people there were not French or Irish or even Yankee. They seemed to be nothing: drifters, transients, rootless, and unattached.
“Alphabet Soup,” Jean-Paul declared. “Tomorrow night, we raid the big Toussaint garden on Seventh Street and take the loot to Alphabet Soup. Leave it on the doorsteps there.”
“Hey,” Joe-Joe Toussaint said. “That’s my pépère’s garden. I can’t raid my own grandfather’s place.”
“It’s for a good cause,” Jean-Paul pointed out.
“Like Robin Hood and his gang,” Roger said. “Rob the rich to help the poor.”
“My pépère isn’t rich,” Joe-Joe said.
As the argument wore on, I sank back into my own thoughts, dreading a Robin Hood’s visit to Alphabet Soup for reasons that my friends would never guess. In fact, they would be startled to realize that, in some respects, I felt more at home there than I did in Frenchtown—and all because of Jefferson Johnson Stone. It had begun early in the summer when I had walked through the Soup, taking a shortcut from the dump, where I’d gone to collect tinfoil from empty cigarette packages along with copper wire, both of which could be sold to Jakie the Junkman, who came around every other Saturday.
“Hey, kid,” a voice had called.
I turned to see a red-headed giant of a boy regarding me from twenty feet away, menace in his spread-legged stance, challenge in his yellow eyes.
My voice squeaked treacherously as I asked, “What?” I knew instantly that I was in danger.
“Come here.”
I turned and ran. I arrowed between buckling buildings and shot through a slanting alleyway, my feet thudding under me and my heart throbbing inside. Behind me, I could hear the sound of my pursuer’s swift feet. Looking back once to see him gaining, I pulled my ball of tinfoil from a pocket and dropped it, hoping the booty might halt his dogged chase. But he kept coming, and I knew that eventually I would be caught. Finally, as I climbed a sagging fence, hands clawed my shirt, dragging me down. I fell to the ground and looked up at him. His evil eyes smiled.
“Nutsy!”
The voice exploded like a two-inch salute in the air. My assailant hesitated.
“Nutsy, stop it.”
Nutsy turned, and I followed his eyes. A figure emerged from a loose slat in a fence. I immediately thought of a Hershey bar. With almonds. He was small and thin and brown, wearing loose, lumpy, threadbare clothes. He advanced toward us, and the hostility in his manner was worse than Nutsy’s potential violence. Marching with a stiff kind of dignity, he seemed to be part of an invisible parade.
“I wasn’t doing anything, Jeff,” Nutsy whined. “I just wanted to scare this Canuck a little.”
Scowling, the newcomer waved Nutsy away with contempt. Then he directed his attention to me. I had never known a Negro, had never seen one up close, had only occasional glimpses of them uptown or in the movies—Farina in the Our Gang comedies and the perpetually frightened Negro rolling his eyes in all those Charlie Chan movies. My father referred to them as Les Noirs, although there were few occasions to mention Negroes. In our small New England city, they were virtually nonexistent, and in Frenchtown they were completely absent.
All of this flashed through my mind as the Negro stood over me. “What’s you doing here?” he asked harshly as Nutsy faded away.
Scrambling to my feet, I answered, “I was just taking a shortcut, and that crazy kid started chasing me.”
We stared at each other. His color confounded me: I would have to tell my father that Les Noirs was an inaccurate description. He wasn’t black at all.
I realized I owed him a debt for saving me from the young maniac with the red hair. Brushing myself off, I muttered, “Thanks.”
“What did you say?” he asked, the defiance still in his voice. Although he was possibly a year younger than I, as well as thin and scrawny, I felt that he would be a dangerous adversary.
“I said thanks.” Impatience made my own voice harsh. I checked my pocket to see if my loop of copper was safe.
“What’s that?” he asked.
I explain
ed about the copper and the dump and Jakie the Junkman.
He held out his hand. I was astonished to see the pink palm, a pale island in a sea of dark flesh. Sighing, I resigned myself to the idea of highway robbery. And the wire was worth at least twenty cents.
He studied the wire for a moment or two and handed it back to me. I shoved it in my pocket, turning away, eager to leave Alphabet Soup and return to the security of my own streets.
“Know what?” he called.
“What?” I asked over my shoulder, not really interested.
“Sometimes people come down here and stare at us like we in a zoo or something,” he said, the softest voice I’d ever heard, like caramel being poured lazy and sweet, skipping verbs now and then because they were too much trouble to bother with.
“You ought to get Nutsy to chase them away,” I said.
“He does.”
Remembering my recent close call, we both burst into laughter. To be friends, people must laugh together and later cry together, my father had often said.
“What’s a Canuck?” the Negro asked, his voice suddenly childlike as he approached.
“Everybody knows what a Canuck is,” I said suspiciously.
“I don’t.”
I explained to him about the French Canadians and how they had left the stricken, starving farms that were drying up like puddles in the sun to seek their destinies in the glorious United States of America. Seeing his interest, I added the dubious story of how my pépère had sneaked one of his nephews across the border, in a sack thrown over his shoulder.
“How about you?” I asked finally.
As we walked through the neglected, debris-strewn streets, he told me that his name was Jefferson Johnson Stone, and I was awed by the splendor of the name issuing from someone so steeped in squalor. With a name like that, he should own the world and stride the streets like a king.
Remembering the history books in school, I longed to ask if his people had been slaves. But I didn’t want to insult him.