CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Well, he done met just about everybody,” Viney said to Charlotte, when she came back into the kitchen. “And I reckon’d I’m go’n be heading on home.”
“So soon?” Charlotte said.
“Yes. Put this old self to bed,” Viney said. “If I don’t see you ’fore Sunday, I’ll be seeing you at church.”
“Yes, I’ll be there,” Charlotte said.
“Good night,” Viney said, and went back into the living room.
“Ain’t you hungry, Jackson?” Charlotte asked him.
“Not right now,” he said. “Right now I’m trying to cool off.”
“No wonder you hot,” Charlotte said. “That coat and tie on—but I reckon’d that’s what they teach y’all, though.”
Jackson moved toward the screen door but did not go outside. An old woman sitting at the table raised a spoonful of gumbo to her mouth and looked at him. She drank a swallow of beer, but did not take her eyes off Jackson.
“Well, Jackson?” she said.
He looked over his shoulder for the person who had spoken to him. He recognized her immediately and came to the table where she was.
“Madame Bayonne,” he said, smiling.
“Sit down,” she told him.
He pulled out a chair and sat across from her. She was a tall, slim, black woman, with the sharp features of the Caucasian race. She might have been seventy years old, she might have been older. She wore a small black hat on a pile of gray hair. And she had been Jackson’s teacher before he left for California.
“You are grown,” she said.
“I’ve grown some.”
“You are a man now.”
“I’m twenty-two.”
She looked at him closely and admiringly. He had always been her favorite student.
“You look very well yourself,” he said.
“I manage to get along.”
“Do you want to eat now, Jackson?” Charlotte asked him.
“Yes.”
She turned away, and he heard her dishing the food; then she was back again.
“You want something to drink with it?” she asked, setting the plate before him. “Got all kinds o’ soft drinks there.”
“I’ll take a beer,” he said, looking at Madame Bayonne. But Madame Bayonne wanted no part of it, and she looked away.
“A beer?” Charlotte said.
“I drink,” Jackson said, looking up at her.
“Is that nice?” Charlotte said. “And in front of the children, too?”
Jackson looked around, but saw no children watching him. He looked at Charlotte again. He could tell by her face that she was still against his drinking the beer.
“A Coke’ll do,” he said.
She opened a bottle of Coke for him and set the bottle and a glass on the table. She went back to the stove, and he could hear her saying something to Mary Louise about him. Both of them looked at him and Madame Bayonne sitting at the table.
“When are you going back?” Madame Bayonne asked, looking at him. Not exactly at him, he felt, but through him. She could always tell what you were feeling or thinking before you knew yourself.
How do you know I’m going back, he said with his eyes, when all the others seem to think I’ve come here to stay?
She did not say any more, she did not have to. She made a sound in her throat as if to assure him that he had no other choice. She raised the bottle up to her mouth, still looking through him.
“About a month,” he said.
“When are you going to tell her?”
“I don’t know,” he said, eating. “I didn’t know she expected me to come here to stay.”
“You were supposed to come back,” she said. She said it as though it was a vow he had broken—as though he had promised a girl he would marry her, and after she had waited ten years, he decided to back out of it.
“That was a long time ago.”
“People like that never change. She remembered you said a long time ago that you would come back. She doesn’t pay any attention to what is happening around her. These things mean nothing. The only important thing in her life was that you were coming back here one day.”
“It’s been so long since I said it.”
“But you did say it. And she has been living in that dream ever since. Now you must tell her the truth.”
“How?” he said.
“It’s going to be hard, but you must. Do you want me to do it for you?”
“No. I’ll do it myself.”
“She wouldn’t believe me, anyhow.”
“Will she believe me?”
Madame Bayonne nodded her head. She continued looking at him—not only at him, but through him. Those eyes know everything, he thought.
“Yes, she will believe you,” she said. “And it will be the worst moment of her life.”
“Am I to blame for that?”
“Yes,” she said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When they were through eating, they sat at the table talking a while. The people continued to come into the kitchen, but no one went to the table where Jackson and Madame Bayonne were sitting. They wanted to meet Jackson—for Charlotte’s sake at least; but even for Charlotte’s sake, none of them would go near Madame Bayonne. Madame Bayonne had very little to do with the people in the quarters now that she had retired from teaching, and the people, though they respected her very much, looked upon her as an eccentric old woman from whom they kept their distance. Even Brother, who got along with everybody, stood by the window with his bowl of gumbo. He had looked forward to eating at the table with Jackson, but when he saw Madame Bayonne sitting there, he had told Mary Louise that she could put his food on the shelf in the window. Mary Louise had understood, smiled, dished up the food—a bowl of rice and gumbo that could have fed three people Brother’s size—and set it on the shelf before him. When the food had cooled enough so that Brother could hold the bowl in his hand, he turned away from the window with the bowl and looked at Madame Bayonne and Jackson.
“Well, I think I’ll be going,” Madame Bayonne said.
“Why so early?” Jackson said.
“I’ve seen you,” Madame Bayonne said. “That’s what I came for.”
She leaned over to get her walking cane that lay on the floor under the table. She could not reach it, and Jackson had to get it for her.
“I’ll walk with you,” he said.
“No. You ought to stay. This is your party.”
“I need the fresh air,” he said, standing up with her. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Aunt Charlotte,” he said to his aunt.
Charlotte nodded her head, but everyone in the kitchen could see that she did riot like the idea of his leaving the house. She had given the party for him, to celebrate his homecoming, and he should have showed consideration by staying there. He and Madame Bayonne went through the front room toward the porch.
“You have a nice crowd,” Madame Bayonne said, when they were in the road.
“I’m sure they didn’t all come to see me,” Jackson said.
“They did,” Madame Bayonne said, “if only to talk about it tomorrow. That’s human nature.”
“What’s happening around here, Madame Bayonne?” he asked.
“In what way do you mean?”
“I don’t know. In every way. The people, what are they doing?”
“Nothing. Now that the Cajuns have just about taken over. Nothing.”
“What is this about the Cajuns taking over?”
“Just as I said. They have taken over the plantation. They have wrangled and wrangled until they have gotten everybody else to quit farming. Now those five cousins have it in their hands.”
“Didn’t Bud Grover—he’s still alive, isn’t he?”
“He’s alive.”
“Didn’t he have anything to do with it?”
“Bud Grover is so lazy and drinks so much, I doubt if he knows where he is half of the times.”
&
nbsp; “But how did they make the people quit?”
“They kept asking for more land. Each year they showed Bud Grover where they needed more land. Bud Grover took the land from the Negroes and gave it to them.”
“But why, when the Negroes were sharecropping just like the Cajuns, why?”
“White is still white, Jackson,” Madame Bayonne said. “And white still sticks with white. But there are other reasons, too. This uprising by these young Negroes now is one of them. He’s proving to them that they need him much more than he needs them. The other reason, of course, is that the Cajuns have always made more crop for Bud Grover than the Negroes have. They’ve always had the best land—being white they got that from the start; and they have organization. That Villon bunch has always worked together. Having the best land and being able to work it all together, they grew twice as much. When you make twice as much, you can afford to buy more equipment, better equipment. Once they got the equipment, they wanted more land to work. So Bud Grover gave them the land—acre by acre until the Negro’s farm was too small to support him. He quits, and the Cajuns get it all. The next year another one quits; the next year another one. Now, they’ve all quit. All but one.”
“Raoul?”
“Yes. They’re letting him run for a while—the way you play with a fish before jerking him out of the water.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s killing himself working, trying to keep up with them. Besides he’s neither white nor black; he’s not standing on a soapbox preaching against the treatment he’s getting.”
“If he did?”
“He and his kind never will; you ought to know that.”
Jackson looked at the big, old house that they were now passing. A light burned in one of the rooms, but the rest of the house was in darkness. He looked at the trees in the yard and he remembered how he and Catherine and Mark used to play behind the trees. He remembered how he would have to leave before Raoul came home because Raoul did not like dark people. Then, when he got home, Charlotte would whip him if she knew he had been down there, because she knew how Raoul felt, and she was afraid that Raoul would hurt him if he ever caught him there.
“I saw Catherine today,” he said.
He could feel Madame Bayonne looking at him. “Did you?”
“Yes.”
She was still looking at him. “You all had anything to talk about?”
“Not much.”
“I’m afraid she has her hands full there,” Madame Bayonne said.
“How’s that?”
“You seem interested?”
“No, it’s nothing,” he said.
Madame Bayonne looked at him a long moment before going on. “She has two of them on her hands, three when that other one is there,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s a long story.”
“How’s Mrs. Della?” he asked, after they had gone a little farther.
“She’s there, but that’s about all that you can say for her,” Madame Bayonne said. “Catherine just about runs things now.”
“Mrs. Della shouldn’t be that old?”
“By years, no. But life has been hard on her. She’s defeated. Finished. You remember the boy.”
“Yes. He was killed just before I left.”
“His memory is as fresh in that house today as it was the day it happened. Neither Raoul nor his people will ever let her forget it. I doubt if she really wants to forget him. She loved him just as much as Raoul loves Catherine. I’m sure you remember him.”
“Yes.”
“You fought for him enough.”
“I liked his sister.”
“You liked her a lot, didn’t you? Or I should say you two liked each other a lot.”
“I suppose so,” he said, looking down at the ground—remembering.
“And now?”
“You can like a person so long,” he said, but still keeping his eyes down on the ground.
“Some people like forever,” she said, looking at him.
“I’m afraid I have other things to think about,” he said. But Madame Bayonne thought she detected something false in the way he said it.
They were between two walls of corn now, a patch on either side of the road. It was very dark here, because the moon was behind the patch of corn on the right. Jackson could smell the sweet dry odor of the corn, and it reminded him of a field he had passed earlier that day when the bus had stopped to pick up passengers along the road, and he had opened his window for only a second.
“There was a house there once,” he said, nodding to the left side of the road. “The Washingtons, didn’t they live there?”
“Yes; they moved to Baton Rouge,” Madame Bayonne said. “The house was torn down and everything was plowed up. That also belongs to the Cajuns.
“But it gets worse as you go farther down the quarters,” she said. “Houses don’t sit between houses any more; now they sit between fields. It’s all right at night. It’s quiet at night. But in the day you might have a tractor running up to your fence any time.”
“And the people are leaving more and more?”
“Yes. Going to Baton Rouge, New Orleans. Some who have money go up North. But most of them hang around Baton Rouge and New Orleans.”
“What are they doing there?”
“Whatever they can.”
“There was a house there, too,” he said, nodding to the field on the left again.
“Yes. Robinson. When old Robinson died, the children all moved away. I suppose they were glad he died. They hated the country, anyhow.”
“Why haven’t you left, Madame Bayonne?”
“Why? Moving around is for the young—the restless. I’m old now. My daughter has been trying to get me up North—Seattle. But why should I go? Let them pay me for the service I’ve done for this state.”
“How do you make out? All right?”
“As well as can be expected. I don’t have to pay rent, and I have the privilege of keeping a garden.”
“Does anyone pay rent?”
“No. You can stay here for free. As long as you keep your nose clean. You don’t have your farm any more—no; the Cajuns have taken that. But you can stay here if you want to.”
“As long as you keep your nose clean?”
“Yes—as long as you keep your nose clean. I’m at the age now that these things don’t bother me any more. I have only a few more years left, and I would love to live them in peace.”
“Don’t we all?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Why did you come back, Jackson?” Madame Bayonne asked.
“Pardon me?” he said.
They were in the heart of the quarters now, and he saw what she meant about the houses and the field. Most of the houses on the left had been torn down and had been replaced by patches of corn and sugar cane. The houses that still remained looked so worn and dilapidated that Jackson knew it would be only a matter of time before they would be torn down also.
The right side of the road was different. Not only were there more houses, but they were in better condition. The yards were clean and many of them had flowers. The scent from one of the flowers—jasmine, he thought it was—permeated the air. He had heard voices from the porch as he and Madame Bayonne came up to the yard; but as they came closer, the voices ceased. Then after they had gone, the people began talking again.
“To tell her you could not come back?”
“No, it wasn’t exactly that. And maybe that was part of it.”
“You have finished now?”
“Yes.”
“What are your plans?”
“I haven’t any.”
“You must have something in mind.”
“Nothing concrete, Madame Bayonne.”
“What will you do when you go back?”
“I don’t know.”
They had stopped in front of her house now—a small three-room cottage that looked no better or worse than any of
the others on that side of the road. There were several little trees in the yard—flowers, too, that almost hid the house from a passerby. Madame Bayonne leaned on her walking cane and tilted her head back to look up at Jackson.
“Something is bothering you, isn’t there?”
He was not looking at her; he was looking far away. He frowned and made a sound in his throat as though to say, “Do you have to even ask that?”
“There is, isn’t there?” she said.
“I’m like a leaf, Madame Bayonne, that’s broken away from the tree. Drifting.”
“You are searching for something?”
He nodded; he was still looking away. “Yes. Searching.”
She nodded now. “You were always searching. Always wanted to find something strong—something you call concrete. Always.”
“Always?”
“Always,” she said. “It was the same here when you were small. And even then I was afraid for you. Terribly afraid.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re searching for something, Jackson, that is not there. It isn’t in California, and it isn’t here.”
“Then maybe it’s some place else.”
“No. It isn’t there either. Men, not only black men, but all men, have looked for it, but none have found it. They have found a little of it, but not all. I’m sure some of it is in California, and some of it is here also. But all of it is not in any one place.”
“I must search.”
“It isn’t to be found.”
“I cannot bow, Madame Bayonne.”
“I suppose by bowing, you mean you can’t put up with the things you would have to put up with here.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Then your only alternative is to go back.”
“There’s no place to go back to.”
“What?”
“They promised us, Madame Bayonne, they promised us. They beckoned and beckoned and beckoned. But when we went up there, we found it all a pile of lies. There was no truth in any of it. No truth at all.”
“There must be some truth.”
“There’s no truth. They don’t come dressed in white sheets with ropes. But there’s no truth.”
“That’s why you’re here?”