“All right, son. I’ll tell you one last story. It has to do with me. But also with Mill. You’ll understand, when it’s over, why I didn’t — don’t — want you digging around too deeply in Baltimore. I haven’t gotten along with Mill, haven’t talked to her, but she’s still my sister, and I’m still bound to protect her. You have to promise not to tell Mill that you know this.”
“I already know that Mill was a prostitute.”
“I can’t believe she told you.”
“She didn’t. I found it out by going through some boxes.” “You mustn’t tell her that you know. You mustn’t embarrass her with this.”
“You don’t have to tell me that.”
“She hated reading when she was a child, hated schools — especially the segregated school in Baltimore we attended. She dropped out of high school, moved out of the house at too young an age, obviously couldn’t support herself, and the next thing you know, she’d become a prostitute. She got out of it, eventually, not long after the war.”
“So what’s the story?” “Here it comes. The story takes place in the States, during World War II, around 1945.”
Private Langston Cane the Fourth lifted the handbag up the steps into the last car of the train. He had never imagined a bag could weigh so much. It could have been filled with stones. It looked like a bag that lawyers carried out of court: tan leather, strong and supple, its solid, rectangular base a foot long and six inches wide, its sides bulging out like the hull of a ship and drawn back together under two thick handles. A tongue-like leather strap closed the bag. From near the top of one side, the strap had been stretched over the mouth with some force and been made to clip into the other side.
Langston took a seat at the back of the car, where he could see all the passengers and any conductors or military police coming in. He put the bag on its side and tried to slide it under the seat in front of him. It wouldn’t fit. He could have put it up on the rack over his head, but he wanted it close at hand, so he spread his army boots and stood the bag between them.
“Don’t open the bag,” the sergeant had said, just before Langston had boarded the train. Langston had nodded, and the sergeant stood back on the platform, motionless, looking as thick and uncompromising as a tree stump.
The car jolted into motion, stopped, and pulled ahead slowly. Langston listened to the noisy clacking over tracks merge into a steady tremor as the train reached its running speed.
He waited for the conductor to come by to check his ticket. He wiped the sweat off his forehead. He’d been tricked by his own sergeant, and it served him right. Langston had wanted this pass too badly. Never want anything so badly that someone else can exploit you, his father had told him. But that was exactly what he had done. And what was more natural than wanting to see his sister? He was stationed at Camp Lee, Virginia, just a couple of hours by train from Baltimore, where Mill had caught the dose who knew how many times by now. This time, her pimp had beaten her up so badly that her right retina had been detached. She had written Langston, asking for brotherly comforting and spare cash. Don’t tell our old man. I’ve put him through enough already. Stationed this close, Langston had to see her. He could be shipped overseas any time.
The sergeant had given Langston instructions, all oral, not one word written down. So, you got a sister in Baltimore? Whaddya know? I got one, too. I’ll be giving you a small package for her. The sergeant had made him walk off the base, walk three miles in the sun. Then he’d met him on the road, picked him up off the shoulder, and driven him to the train station. That should have made him realize what was going on. But Langston, foolishly, had seen it in another light. He had seen it in the same light as the other games of the sergeant, who was always making his men do unexpected things and preaching about how men at war had to predict the unpredictable. The sergeant was low-class. Uneducated. He hated university boys like Langston, and would hate them till he died. For a scuff mark on a boot, he had once made Langston dig a three-foot hole under the noon-day sun, toss in a penny, fill up the hole, dig it out again, find the penny, and fill up the hole again. Midway through the job, he had given Langston half a cup of water. The sergeant strove to make life more miserable for his company — men of his own race — than could any white officer.
Up until the last minute, Langston had believed that the sergeant had made him walk off the base simply to make life hard for him. To make him work for his three-day pass. How stupid to have been so blind. It hadn’t crossed his mind that the sergeant, who seemed to enjoy being hated by every man in the company, was lying to him. I’ll be giving you a small package. Perfume or chocolates, Langston had imagined, although he now knew that was ridiculous. The sergeant was the last man on earth to give a sister a sentimental gift. But he had said a package, not a bag. And he hadn’t said a bag as heavy as a bucket of stones. He had driven Langston to a rural train station north of Petersburg and had stayed with him in the waiting room, not talking, not looking at him, not even sitting with him, just standing ten feet away and looking out the window. And then, out on the platform, just before the train departed, instead of opening the handbag to pull out a package for his sister, the sergeant had turned over the whole thing.
“Off you go,” the sergeant had said, nodding firmly, which, Langston knew, was his way of letting it be known that Pearl Harbor would pale by comparison, that the tentacles of hell would show no mercy, if Langston let anything happen to the bag. The sergeant had walked away to look off the edge of the platform. Langston, hesitating, had seen there was nothing out there but parched grass under sunlight so withering that it made the creosote stink on the railway ties. Langston realized that he should have refused on the train platform. There still had been time. Sorry, Sergeant, I can’t carry this bag for you. Damn. Langston should have been thinking.
Langston looked out the train window. At the edge of a cornfield, he saw a mongrel digging a hole. The one thing about the army, he had written to his sister, was that they told you exactly what you had to do. All that remained was to follow orders, and you were laughing. Langston now understood how wrong he had been. You could peel whole vats of potatoes without nicking yourself and clean latrines without throwing up and manage to stay alert for guard duty and strip and rebuild your.45 automatic while the sergeant eyed his ticking stopwatch — and still, even if you did it all perfectly, you weren’t really going anywhere at all. All you were doing was keeping out of trouble. There still remained ample opportunity to be boxed in and ruined by a colored sergeant who didn’t like you because — well, because he didn’t like you.
The train rolled north through Virginia. Still no sign of a conductor. Langston stood up and left his bag on the floor and walked to the toilet at the end of his car. Locked. He pulled open another door and walked into the next car. Its toilet, at the far end, was so putrid that it almost drove him away. Coming out of that toilet, Langston bumped into the conductor, who was punching holes in passengers’ tickets. He was a gray-haired, square-jawed, well-built man who looked as if he had once played football. He straightened up as Langston mumbled an apology.
“Where you going, boy?”
“I am not a boy. I am a soldier.”
The conductor looked at the single inverted V on Langston’s sleeve. “Jesus Christ. Now I’ve heard it all. A private putting on airs. A nigger private who’s probably cleaned more latrines than guns.”
“If you’ve completed your personal speculations, I’ll just go on my —”
“Where’s your ticket, Private?” Langston pulled it from his shirt pocket. The conductor took it. “This ticket says car thirteen. You’re in car twelve.”
“I’m going back there now.”
“I could have you thrown off the train. You’re not allowed to leave your car.”
“As I said, I’m going back there now. I just had to use the —”
“I hope you’re on authorized leave, Private, and that you have the papers to show it. Military police often ride this trai
n. Why don’t you go on back and sit down?” The conductor punched a hole in the ticket and handed it back.
The encounter made Langston worry about the bag. He shouldn’t have left it. To find a toilet, he had already violated the sergeant’s edict. Don’t take your eyes off the bag. But it was heavy, this handbag. Thirty pounds, maybe more. There was no way Langston was going to attract attention by lugging that bag down the aisle and into some can where there wouldn’t be a clean place to put it anyway. It was unfortunate that Langston had had to leave the bag, and even more unfortunate that he’d run into the conductor, who would now probably tell a military police officer, if he saw one on the train, that he ought to check out a mouthy nigger in car thirteen. The military man, if he came Langston’s way, would ask what was in the bag. That was his job, after all. He had to make sure soldiers weren’t AWOL, and that they weren’t carrying contraband.
What would Langston say to that? That he didn’t know? Inconceivable. That he was ordered not to look? That he would be pleased to open it up for the military police officer? Absolutely not. Just yesterday, the sergeant had said, “Never expose yourself to the enemy.”
“The enemy?” Langston had asked.
“The enemy! Don’t you know your enemy, Cane?”
“Sergeant?”
“I’m your enemy! I’m your enemy and don’t you forget it. My ambition in life is to trip you up. To make your life so intolerable that you just give up and die. Who else is your enemy, Private?”
“The Japs, Sergeant?” “Yeah, but you may never see them. Everybody is your enemy. I am. They are. Every private in my company is your enemy. Every one of them would kick the gold fillings outa your mouth if nobody was standing watch over your corpse. Do you understand that, Private?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“You understand?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“I said, do you understand?”
“YES, SERGEANT!”
That was the conversation they’d had, all because Langston had knocked on the sergeant’s door. Who in hell knocked on their enemy’s door, the sergeant had said. After the enemy speech, variations of which Langston had heard daily in the four months that he had been at Camp Lee, the sergeant had taken the unlit cigar stump from his mouth and folded his forearms. They were bulging and muscled and covered with black hairs as wiry and taut as coiled springs.
“What do you want, Private?”
“I come from a good family, Sergeant. My father was a second lieutenant in World War I. He trained in a colored officers’ training camp in Iowa and served with distinction in France.”
“That’s America, Private. You come from a good family, I come from a bad one. But I still get to boss you around. I can still make you do pretty near anything I want. Now get to the point.”
“I’d like to have a weekend pass to visit my sister in Baltimore.”
“Private, don’t you know I don’t give my men passes?”
“I have heard that, Sergeant, but …”
“No buts. Dismissed.”
“May I write you a letter about it?” “Why?”
“To submit my request formally, so that you may consider it again?”
“Private, if I get some pain-in-the-ass letter that I have to explain to Lieutenant Gudarsky, I will assume that you have time to spare. And I will find ways to occupy you. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Dismissed, again, Private.”
“Thank you, Sergeant.”
“Don’t thank me. You hate me. I hate you. Don’t take it personally. I hate all privates and powerless human beings.”
“All right. I won’t thank you. If you prefer, I’ll hate you. After all, in the big picture, you don’t have a whole lot of power either.”
“You were doing just fine until you said that, Private. So watch your lip. Before you go, tell me again why you want this pass.”
“To visit my sister in Baltimore.”
“What part of the city does she live in?”
Langston could have told the truth: in a clapboard house one block down from a bar on Thames Street, so close to the boats and the bargemen in Fell’s Point that he worried each day about her living on the edge of such a quick and willing grave. But, to the sergeant, he just said, “Downtown.”
When news had leaked out of Mill’s first brush with syphilis, their father had rushed over to help. He had paid for her injections of arsenic and bismuth, as well as two months in back rent, and had prayed for her and implored her to move back home. Mill had promised to straighten out, but she had refused to leave Fell’s Point. She had got another dose. Their father had sent money, but nobody knew what became of it. He had driven to Fell’s Point one more time, intending to force her into his car. But she had wailed and cursed when he’d started packing her things, and in had come a pimp with one hand in a pocket and had told him to lay off. Their father had asked her if that was what she wanted. Did she want a man who, for money, would usher her to the dead? Did she not prefer her own flesh and blood? Could she not see that she was breaking her mother’s heart? She had told him to get the hell out, and he had never gone back.
“What does she do?” the sergeant had asked.
“She’s a school teacher,” Langston had lied.
“Good enough. You want to go to Baltimore? You want a three-day pass? You want to see your sister and your ailing mother and your dying grandpappy and all the rest of your glorious kin?”
Langston had nodded.
The sergeant had said that Langston could go, no problem, if he made a little delivery first. A little present needed transporting to the sergeant’s own sister, on Druid Hill Avenue. Sure, Langston had said. Sure, I don’t mind at all.
Langston had heard the edict just one time. That was the sergeant’s way. When he had something crucial to say, something that might mean the difference between imprisonment or freedom, punishment or reprieve, he only said it once.
“Don’t open the bag, Private. Don’t even think about it.”
Langston settled back into his seat. The leather bag was as he had left it, on the floor between his boots.
He believed he knew what was in the bag. Nothing else could weigh so much. The sergeant had taken Langston for a perfect sap, a man who wouldn’t dare to defy instructions about exactly when and where to deliver the bag.
What were the alternatives? To leave the bag in the train toilet? Somebody would find it, report it, and Langston could be linked to it. Throw it out the window? Somebody would notice. And, at any rate, if the bag wasn’t delivered, Langston knew the sergeant would hear about it. So what was he to do? Wait for the military police to come by and ask him to open the bag? That would be the first knot in an endless rope of trouble. Who would take his word? The sergeant would deny owning the bag, and would deny having driven Langston to the train station. After all, he had made Langston walk off the base and meet him on the road three miles from the gates.
The train stopped in Washington, D.C., long enough to let off and take on passengers, and then it began rolling north again. Baltimore’s Penn Station was only forty minutes away. If he could just coast for that time, with no military officer in sight or on board, he would be home free. He would get off the train, take a taxi, deliver the bag to the sergeant’s sister, or whoever the hell she really was, and then see his own sister. Later, he could get some liquor and some crab cakes and listen to Ella and Duke on the radio. If only he could get that far.
A porter came along the aisle, selling snacks from a cart. He was Langston’s age, give or take a couple of years, and about as black as a black man could get, except for some pink, scarred flesh the size of a quarter high up on his left cheekbone and, above that, a cloudy eye that held a wisp of dribbling smoke. The porter flashed a V at Langston, sold a Coke and a bag of peanuts to the minister across the aisle, and then turned back to Langston.
“Soft drink, mister? Nuts?” Langston took one of each, paid, and tipped
the man a dime. “If you like,” the porter whispered, “I can pour you a little something in that Coke.”
“What kind of little something?”
“Jamaican rum. The best. In a flask, right here,” he said, tapping his vest.
“No, but thanks anyway.”
“Don’t mention it. I wouldn’t have said anything, but since you’re on leave, I thought you might be looking for a little shot of happiness.”
Langston said nothing.
“I lost my eye in Fort Sill, Oklahoma,” the porter said. “A man in my platoon knew less than my grandma about grenades. Pulled the pin and just tossed the sucker, instead of throwing it. Mushmouth, we called him, although his real name was Winston Everett. Killed himself and woulda killed me if I’d been standing any closer. All I got was a lick of metal in the eye, an honorable discharge, a pension of thirty-eight dollars a month, and a recommendation for this job.”
Langston noticed the porter looking at the bag. “I’m sorry about your eye. Colored people got it bad, in this war. We got it real bad.”
“That’s the truth,” the porter said. “Say, let me put that bag up on the rack.” The porter bent over and grabbed the bag. “No, let me —”
“That’s what they pay me for.” The porter hoisted the bag before Langston could stop him. “What you got in here, soldier?
Hooch?”
Langston forced a polite smile. He saw the minister looking at them. “I’ve got books,” he said. “A stack of books.”
“Uh-huh,” the porter said, grinning. “Books, you say. Doesn’t feel like books to me. Damn, this thing is heavy.” He leaned a little closer. “Hey, man, I won’t tell anybody. I’m your brother.” He popped the bag on the rack overhead. Langston turned his face slightly from the porter’s rancid breath. “You know, Private, you’re a smart or a lucky man to be traveling in the North. If you had been heading south, once you hit Tennessee, they would have Jim Crowed you. Put you in a cattle car. A cattle car, I’m telling you.”