JO: I got to be alert to your needs, too. I think.
LYLE: Don’t you go starting to imagine things. I just been over to the store. That’s all.
JO: Till three and four o’clock in the morning?
LYLE: Well, I got plans for the store, I think I’m going to try to start branching out, you know, and I been—making plans.
JO: You thinking of branching out now? Why, Lyle, you know we ain’t hardly doing no business now. Weren’t for the country folks come to town every Saturday, I don’t know where we’d be. This ain’t no time to be branching out. We barely holding on.
LYLE: Shoot, the niggers’ll be coming back, don’t you worry. They’ll get over this foolishness presently. They already weary of having to drive forty-fifty miles across the state line to get their groceries—a lot of them ain’t even got cars.
JO: Those that don’t have cars have friends with cars.
LYLE: Well, friends get weary, too. Joel come in the store a couple of days ago—
JO: Papa D.? He don’t count. You can always wrap him around your little finger.
LYLE: Listen, will you? He come in the store a couple of days ago to buy a sack of flour and he told me, he say, The niggers is tired running all over creation to put some food on the table. Ain’t nobody going to keep on driving no forty-fifty miles to buy no sack of flour—what you mean when you say Joel don’t count?
JO: I don’t mean nothing. But there’s something wrong with anybody when his own people don’t think much of him.
LYLE: Joel’s got good sense, is all. I think more of him than I think of a lot of white men, that’s a fact. And he knows what’s right for his people, too.
JO (Puts son in crib): Well. Selling a sack of flour once a week ain’t going to send this little one through college, neither. (A pause) In what direction were you planning to branch out?
LYLE: I was thinking of trying to make the store more—well, more colorful. Folks like color—
JO: You mean, niggers like color.
LYLE: Dammit, Jo, I ain’t in business just to sell to niggers! Listen to me, can’t you? I thought I’d dress it up, get a new front, put some neon signs in—and, you know, we got more space in there than we use. Well, why don’t we open up a line of ladies’ clothes? Nothing too fancy, but I bet you it would bring in a lot more business.
JO: I don’t know. Most of the ladies I know buy their clothes at Benton’s, on Decatur Street.
LYLE: The niggers don’t—anyway, we could sell them the same thing. The white ladies, I mean—
JO: No. It wouldn’t be the same.
LYLE: Why not? A dress is a dress.
JO: But it sounds better if you say you got it on Decatur Street! At Benton’s. Anyway—where would you get the money for this branching out?
LYLE: I can get a loan from the bank. I’ll get old Parnell to co-sign with me, or have him get one of his rich friends to co-sign with me.
JO: Parnell called earlier—you weren’t at the store today.
LYLE: What do you mean, I wasn’t at the store?
JO: Because Parnell called earlier and said he tried to get you at the store and that there wasn’t any answer.
LYLE: There wasn’t any business. I took a walk.
JO: He said he’s got bad news for you.
LYLE: What kind of bad news?
JO: He didn’t say. He’s coming by here this evening to give it to you himself.
LYLE: What do you think it is?
JO: I guess they’re going to arrest you?
LYLE: No, they ain’t. They ain’t gone crazy.
JO: I think they might. We had so much trouble in this town lately and it’s been in all the northern newspapers—and now, this—this dead boy—
LYLE: They ain’t got no case.
JO: No. But you was the last person to see that crazy boy—alive. And now everybody’s got to thinking again—about that other time.
LYLE: That was self defense. The Sheriff said so himself. Hell, I ain’t no murderer. They’re just some things I don’t believe is right.
JO: Nobody never heard no more about the poor little girl—his wife.
LYLE: No. She just disappeared.
JO: You never heard no more about her at all?
LYLE: How would I hear about her more than anybody else? No, she just took off—I believe she had people in Detroit somewhere. I reckon that’s where she went.
JO: I felt sorry for her. She looked so lost those last few times I saw her, wandering around town—and she was so young. She was a pretty little thing.
LYLE: She looked like a pickaninny to me. Like she was too young to be married. I reckon she was too young for him.
JO: It happened in the store.
LYLE: Yes.
JO: How people talked! That’s what scares me now.
LYLE: Talk don’t matter. I hope you didn’t believe what you heard.
JO: A lot of people did. I reckon a lot of people still do.
LYLE: You don’t believe it?
JO: No. (A pause) You know—Monday morning—we’ll be married one whole year!
LYLE: Well, can’t nobody talk about us. That little one there ain’t but two months old.
(The door bell rings.)
JO: That’s Parnell.
(Exits.)
(Lyle walks up and down, looks into the crib. Jo and Parnell enter.)
LYLE: It’s about time you showed your face in here, you old rascal! You been so busy over there with the niggers, you ain’t got time for white folks no more. You sure you ain’t got some nigger wench over there on the other side of town? Because, I declare—!
PARNELL: I apologize for your husband, Mrs. Britten, I really do. In fact, I’m afraid I must deplore your taste in men. If I had only seen you first, dear lady, and if you had found me charming, how much suffering I might have prevented! You got anything in this house to drink? Don’t tell me you haven’t, we’ll both need one. Sit down.
LYLE: Bring on the booze, old lady.
(Jo brings ice, glasses, etc.; pours drinks.)
What you been doing with yourself?
PARNELL: Well, I seem to have switched territories. I haven’t been defending colored people this week, I’ve been defending you. I’ve just left the Chief of Police.
LYLE: How is the old bastard?
PARNELL: He seems fine. But he really is an old bastard. Lyle—he’s issuing a warrant for your arrest.
LYLE: He’s going to arrest me? You mean, he believes I killed that boy?
PARNELL: The question of what he believes doesn’t enter into it. This case presents several very particular circumstances and these circumstances force him to arrest you. I think we can take it for granted that he wouldn’t arrest you if he could think of some way not to. He wouldn’t arrest anybody except blind beggars and old colored women if he could think of some way not to—he’s bird-brained and chicken-hearted and big-assed. The charge is murder.
JO: Murder!
LYLE: Murder?
PARNELL: Murder.
LYLE: I ain’t no murderer. You know that.
PARNELL: I also know that somebody killed the boy. Somebody put two slugs in his belly and dumped his body in the weeds beside the railroad track just outside of town. Somebody did all that. We pay several eminent, bird-brained, chicken-hearted, big-assed people quite a lot of money to discourage such activity. They never do, in fact, discourage it, but, still—we must find the somebody who killed that boy. And you, my friend, according to the testimony of Joel Davis, otherwise known as Papa D., were the last person to see the boy alive. It is also known that you didn’t like him—to say the least.
LYLE: Nobody liked him.
PARNELL: Ah. But it isn’t nobody that killed him. Somebody killed him. We must find the somebody. And since you were the last person to see him alive, we must arrest you in order to clear you—or convict you.
LYLE: They’ll never convict me.
PARNELL: As to that, you may be right. But you are going
to be arrested.
LYLE: When?
PARNELL: Monday morning. Of course, you can always flee to Mexico.
LYLE: Why should I run away?
PARNELL: I wasn’t suggesting that you should run away. If you did, I should urge your wife to divorce you at once, and marry me.
JO: Ah, if that don’t get him out of town in a hurry, I don’t know what will! The man’s giving you your chance, honey. You going to take it?
LYLE: Stop talking foolishness. It looks bad for me, I guess. I swear, I don’t know what’s come over the folks in this town!
PARNELL: It doesn’t look good. In fact, if the boy had been white, it would look very, very bad, and your behind would be in the jail house now. What do you mean, you don’t understand what’s come over the people in this town?
LYLE: Raising so much fuss about a nigger—and a northern nigger at that.
PARNELL: He was born here. He’s Reverend Meridian Henry’s son.
LYLE: Well, he’d been gone so long, he might as well have been a northern nigger. Went North and got ruined and come back here to make trouble—and they tell me he was a dope fiend, too. What’s all this fuss about? He probably got killed by some other nigger—they do it all the time—but ain’t nobody even thought about arresting one of them. Has niggers suddenly got to be holy in this town?
PARNELL: Oh, Lyle, I’m not here to discuss the sanctity of niggers. I just came to tell you that a warrant’s being issued for your arrest. You may think that a colored boy who gets ruined in the North and then comes home to try to pull himself together deserves to die—I don’t.
LYLE: You sound like you think I got something against colored folks—but I don’t. I never have, not in all my life. But I’ll be damned if I’ll mix with them. That’s all. I don’t believe in it, and that’s all. I don’t want no big buck nigger lying up next to Josephine and that’s where all this will lead to and you know it as well as I do! I’m against it and I’ll do anything I have to do to stop it, yes, I will!
PARNELL: Suppose he—my godson there—decides to marry a Chinese girl. You know, there are an awful lot of Chinese girls in the world—I bet you didn’t know that. Well, there are. Let’s just say that he grows up and looks around at all the pure white women, and—saving your presence, ma’am—they make him want to puke and he decides to marry a pure Chinese girl instead. What would you do? Shoot him in order to prevent it? Or would you shoot her?
LYLE: Parnell, you’re my buddy. You’ve always been my buddy. You know more about me than anybody else in the world. What’s come over you? You—you ain’t going to turn against me, are you?
PARNELL: No. No, I’ll never turn against you. I’m just trying to make you think.
LYLE: I notice you didn’t marry no Chinese girl. You just never got married at all. Women been trying to saddle old Parnell for I don’t know how long—I don’t know what you got, old buddy, but I’ll be damned if you don’t know how to use it! What about this present one—Loretta—you reckon you going to marry her?
PARNELL: I doubt it.
JO: Parnell, you’re just awful. Awful!
PARNELL: I think I’m doing her a favor. She can do much better than me. I’m just a broken-down newspaper editor—the editor of a newspaper which nobody reads—in a dim, grim backwater.
LYLE: I thought you liked it here.
PARNELL: I don’t like it here. But I love it here. Or maybe I don’t. I don’t know. I must go.
LYLE: What’s your hurry? Why don’t you stay and have pot-luck with us?
PARNELL: Loretta is waiting. I must have pot-luck with her. And then I have errands on the other side of town.
LYLE: What they saying over there? I reckon they praying day and night for my ass to be put in a sling, ain’t they? Shoot, I don’t care.
PARNELL: Don’t. Life’s much simpler that way. Anyway, Papa D.’s the only one doing a whole lot of talking.
JO: I told you he wasn’t no good, Lyle, I told you!
LYLE: I don’t know what’s got into him! And we been knowing each other all these years! He must be getting old. You go back and tell him I said he’s got it all confused—about me and that boy. Tell him you talked to me and that I said he must have made some mistake.
PARNELL: I’ll drop in tomorrow, if I may. Good night, Jo, and thank you. Good night, Lyle.
LYLE: Good night, old buddy.
JO: I’ll see you to the door.
(Jo and Parnell exit. Lyle walks up and down.)
LYLE: Well! Ain’t that something! But they’ll never convict me. Never in this world. (Looks into crib) Ain’t that right, old pisser?
(BLACKTOWN: The church, as before.)
LORENZO: And when they bring him to trial, I’m going to be there every day—right across the street in that courthouse—where they been dealing death out to us for all these years.
MOTHER HENRY: I used to hate them, too, son. But I don’t hate them no more. They too pitiful.
MERIDIAN: No witnesses.
JUANITA: Meridian. Ah, Meridian.
MOTHER HENRY: You remember that song he used to like so much?
MERIDIAN: I sing because I’m happy.
JUANITA: I sing because I’m free.
PETE: For his eye is on the sparrow—
LORENZO: And I know he watches—me.
(Music, very faint)
JUANITA: There was another song he liked—a song about a prison and the light from a train that shone on the prisoners every night at midnight. I can hear him now: Lord, you wake up in the morning. You hear the ding-dong ring—
MOTHER HENRY: He had a beautiful voice.
LORENZO: Well, he was pretty tough up there in New York—till he got busted.
MERIDIAN: And came running home.
MOTHER HENRY: Don’t blame yourself, honey. Don’t blame yourself!
JUANITA: You go a-marching to the table, you see the same old thing—
JIMMY: All I’m going to tell you: knife, a fork, and a pan—
(Music stronger)
PETE: And if you say a thing about it—
LORENZO: You are in trouble with the man.
(Lights dim in the church. We discover Richard, standing in his room, singing. This number is meant to make vivid the Richard who was much loved on the Apollo Theatre stage in Harlem, the Richard who was a rising New York star.)
MERIDIAN: No witnesses!
(Near the end of the song, Mother Henry enters, carrying a tray with milk, sandwiches, and cake.)
RICHARD: You treating me like royalty, old lady—I ain’t royalty.
I’m just a raggedy-assed, out-of-work, busted musician. But I sure can sing, can’t I?
MOTHER HENRY: You better learn some respect, you know that neither me nor your father wants that kind of language in this house. Sit down and eat, you got to get your strength back.
RICHARD: What for? What am I supposed to do with it?
MOTHER HENRY: You stop that kind of talk.
RICHARD: Stop that kind of talk, we don’t want that kind of talk! Nobody cares what people feel or what they think or what they do—but stop that kind of talk!
MOTHER HENRY: Richard!
RICHARD: All right. All right. (Throws himself on the bed, begins eating in a kind of fury.) What I can’t get over is—what in the world am I doing here? Way down here in the ass-hole of the world, the deep, black, funky South.
MOTHER HENRY: You were born here. You got folks here. And you ain’t got no manners and you won’t learn no sense and so you naturally got yourself in trouble and had to come to your folks. You lucky it wasn’t no worse, the way you go on. You want some more milk?
RICHARD: No, old lady. Sit down.
MOTHER HENRY: I ain’t got time to be fooling with you. (But she sits down.) What you got on your mind?
RICHARD: I don’t know. How do you stand it?
MOTHER HENRY: Stand what? You?
RICHARD: Living down here with all these nowhere people.
MOTHER HENRY: From w
hat I’m told and from what I see, the people you’ve been among don’t seem to be any better.
RICHARD: You mean old Aunt Edna? She’s all right, she just ain’t very bright, is all.
MOTHER HENRY: I am not talking about Edna. I’m talking about all them other folks you got messed up with. Look like you’d have had better sense. You hear me?
RICHARD: I hear you.
MOTHER HENRY: That all you got to say?
RICHARD: It’s easy for you to talk, Grandmama, you don’t know nothing about New York City, or what can happen to you up there!
MOTHER HENRY: I know what can happen to you anywhere in this world. And I know right from wrong. We tried to raise you so you’d know right from wrong, too.
RICHARD: We don’t see things the same way, Grandmama. I don’t know if I really know right from wrong—I’d like to, I always dig people the most who know anything, especially right from wrong!
MOTHER HENRY: You’ve had yourself a little trouble, Richard, like we all do, and you a little tired, like we all get. You’ll be all right. You a young man. Only, just try not to go so much, try to calm down a little. Your Daddy loves you. You his only son.
RICHARD: That’s a good reason, Grandmama. Let me tell you about New York. You ain’t never been North, have you?
MOTHER HENRY: Your Daddy used to tell me a little about it every time he come back from visiting you all up there.
RICHARD: Daddy don’t know nothing about New York. He just come up for a few days and went right on back. That ain’t the way to get to know New York. No ma’am. He never saw New York. Finally, I realized he wasn’t never going to see it—you know, there’s a whole lot of things Daddy’s never seen? I’ve seen more than he has.
MOTHER HENRY: All young folks thinks that.
RICHARD: Did you? When you were young? Did you think you knew more than your mother and father? But I bet you really did, you a pretty shrewd old lady, quiet as it’s kept.
MOTHER HENRY: No, I didn’t think that. But I thought I could find out more, because they were born in slavery, but I was born free.
RICHARD: Did you find out more?
MOTHER HENRY: I found out what I had to find out—to take care of my husband and raise my children in the fear of God.