“How is your eye now?” Mr. Catti asked.
“Almost completely closed.”
“It’s a bloody shame!”
“It’s been a wonderful evening though,” he said. “One of the best I’ve ever spent.”
“I’m glad you came,” Mr. Catti said. “And so are the boys. They can tell that you appreciate the music, and they’re pleased.”
“Here’s to singing,” he toasted.
“To singing,” said Mr. Catti.
“By the way, let me lend you my torch to find your way back. Just return it to Heath’s Bookstore. Anyone will direct you.”
“But you’ll need it yourself.”
Mr. Catti placed the light upon the table. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m at home. I know the city like my own palm.”
“Thanks,” he said with feeling. “You’re very kind.”
When the opening bars were struck, he saw the others pushing back their chairs and standing, and he stood, understanding even as Mr. Catti whispered, “Our national anthem.”
There was something in the music and in the way they held their heads that was strangely moving. He hummed beneath his breath. When it was over he would ask for the words.
But even while he heard the final triumphal chord still sounding, the piano struck up “God Save the King.” It was not nearly so stirring. Then swiftly modulating they swept into the “Internationale,” to words about an international army. He was carried back to when he was a small boy marching in the streets behind the bands that came to his southern town.…
Mr. Catti had nudged him. He looked up, seeing the conductor looking straight at him, smiling. They were all looking at him. Why, was it his eye? Were they playing a joke? And suddenly he recognized the melody and felt that his knees would give way. It was as though he had been pushed into the horrible foreboding country of dreams and they were enticing him into some unwilled and degrading act, from which only his failure to remember the words would save him. It was all unreal, yet it seemed to have happened before. Only now the melody seemed charged with some vast new meaning which that part of him that wanted to sing could not fit with the old familiar words. And beyond the music he kept hearing the soldiers’ voices, yelling as they had when the light struck his eye. He saw the singers still staring, and as though to betray him he heard his own voice singing out like a suddenly amplified radio:
“… Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there …”
It was like the voice of another, over whom he had no control. His eye throbbed. A wave of guilt shook him, followed by a burst of relief. For the first time in your whole life, he thought with dreamlike wonder, the words are not ironic. He stood in confusion as the song ended, staring into the men’s Welsh faces, not knowing whether to curse them or to return their good-natured smiles. Then the conductor was before him, and Mr. Catti was saying, “You’re not such a bad singer yourself, Mr. Parker. Is he now, Mr. Morcan?”
“Why, if he’d stay in Wales, I wouldn’t rest until he joined the club,” Mr. Morcan said. “What about it, Mr. Parker?”
But Mr. Parker could not reply. He held Mr. Catti’s flashlight like a club and hoped his black eye would hold back the tears.
Flying Home
From Cross Section, 1944
When Todd came to, he saw two faces suspended above him in a sun so hot and blinding that he could not tell if they were black or white. He stirred, feeling a pain that burned as though his whole body had been laid open to the sun, which glared into his eyes. For a moment an old fear of being touched by white hands seized him. Then the very sharpness of the pain began slowly to clear his head. Sounds came to him dimly. He done come to. Who are they? he thought. Now he ain’t, I coulda sworn he was white. Then he heard clearly:
“You hurt bad?”
Something within him uncoiled. It was a Negro sound.
“He’s still out,” he heard.
“Give ’im time.… Say, son, you hurt bad?”
Was he? There was that awful pain. He lay rigid, hearing their breathing and trying to weave a meaning between them and his being stretched painfully upon the ground. He watched them warily, his mind traveling back over a painful distance. Jagged scenes, swiftly unfolding as in a movie trailer, reeled through his mind, and he saw himself piloting a tailspinning plane and landing and falling from the cockpit and trying to stand. Then, as in a great silence, he remembered the sound of crunching bone and, now, looking up into the anxious faces of an old Negro man and a boy from where he lay in the same field, the memory sickened him and he wanted to remember no more.
“How you feel, son?”
Todd hesitated, as though to answer would be to admit an unacceptable weakness. Then, “It’s my ankle,” he said.
“Which one?”
“The left.”
With a sense of remoteness he watched the old man bend and remove his boot, feeling the pressure ease.
“That any better?”
“A lot. Thank you.”
He had the sensation of discussing someone else, that his concern was with some far more important thing, which for some reason escaped him.
“You done broke it bad,” the old man said. “We have to get you to a doctor.”
He felt that he had been thrown into a tailspin. He looked at his watch; how long had he been here? He knew there was but one important thing in the world, to get the plane back to the field before his officers were displeased.
“Help me up,” he said. “Into the ship.”
“But it’s broke too bad …”
“Give me your arm!”
“But, son …”
Clutching the old man’s arm, he pulled himself up, keeping his left leg clear, thinking, I’d never make him understand, as the leather-smooth face came parallel with his own.
“Now, let’s see.”
He pushed the old man back, hearing a bird’s insistent shrill. He swayed, giddily. Blackness washed over him, like infinity.
“You best sit down.”
“No, I’m okay.”
“But, son. You jus gonna make it worse …”
It was a fact that everything in him cried out to deny, even against the flaming pain in his ankle. He would have to try again.
“You mess with that ankle they have to cut your foot off,” he heard.
Holding his breath, he started up again. It pained so badly that he had to bite his lips to keep from crying out and he allowed them to help him down with a pang of despair.
“It’s best you take it easy. We gon git you a doctor.”
Of all the luck, he thought. Of all the rotten luck, now I have done it. The fumes of high-octane gasoline clung in the heat, taunting him.
“We kin ride him into town on old Ned,” the boy said.
Ned? He turned, seeing the boy point toward an ox team, browsing where the buried blade of a plow marked the end of a furrow. Thoughts of himself riding an ox through the town, past streets full of white faces, down the concrete runways of the airfield, made swift images of humiliation in his mind. With a pang he remembered his girl’s last letter. “Todd,” she had written, “I don’t need the papers to tell me you had the intelligence to fly. And I have always known you to be as brave as anyone else. The papers annoy me. Don’t you be contented to prove over and over again that you’re brave or skillful just because you’re black, Todd. I think they keep beating that dead horse because they don’t want to say why you boys are not yet fighting. I’m really disappointed, Todd. Anyone with brains can learn to fly, but then what. What about using it, and who will you use it for? I wish, dear, you’d write about this. I sometimes think they’re playing a trick on us. It’s very humiliating.…” He whipped cold sweat from his face, thinking, What does she know of humiliation? She’s never been down South. Now the humiliation would come. When you must have them judge you, knowing that they never accept your mistakes as your own but hold it against your whole race—that was humiliation. Yes, a
nd humiliation was when you could never be simply yourself; when you were always a part of this old black ignorant man. Sure, he’s all right. Nice and kind and helpful. But he’s not you. Well, there’s one humiliation I can spare myself.
“No,” he said. “I have orders not to leave the ship.…”
“Aw,” the old man said. Then turning to the boy, “Teddy, then you better hustle down to Mister Graves and get him to come.…”
“No, wait!” he protested before he was fully aware. Graves might be white. “Just have him get word to the field, please. They’ll take care of the rest.”
He saw the boy leave, running.
“How far does he have to go?”
“Might’ nigh a mile.”
He rested back, looking at the dusty face of his watch. By now they know something has happened, he thought. In the ship there was a perfectly good radio, but it was useless. The old fellow would never operate it. That buzzard knocked me back a hundred years, he thought. Irony danced within him like the gnats circling the old man’s head. With all I’ve learned, I’m dependent upon this “peasant’s” sense of time and space. His leg throbbed. In the plane, instead of time being measured by the rhythms of pain and a kid’s legs, the instruments would have told him at a glance. Twisting upon his elbows, he saw where dust had powdered the plane’s fuselage, feeling the lump form in his throat that was always there when he thought of flight. It’s crouched there, he thought, like the abandoned shell of a locust. I’m naked without it. Not a machine, a suit of clothes you wear. And with a sudden embarrassment and wonder he whispered, “It’s the only dignity I have.…”
He saw the old man watching, his torn overalls clinging limply to him in the heat. He felt a sharp need to tell the old man what he felt. But that would be meaningless. If I tried to explain why I need to fly back, he’d think I was simply afraid of white officers. But it’s more than fear … a sense of anguish clung to him like the veil of sweat that hugged his face. He watched the old man, hearing him humming snatches of a tune as he admired the plane. He felt a furtive sense of resentment. Such old men often came to the field to watch the pilots with childish eyes. At first it had made him proud; they had been a meaningful part of a new experience. But soon he realized they did not understand his accomplishments and they came to shame and embarrass him, like the distasteful praise of an idiot. A part of the meaning of flying had gone, then, and he had not been able to regain it. If I were a prize-fighter I would be more human, he thought. Not a monkey doing tricks, but a man. They were pleased simply that he was a Negro who could fly, and that was not enough. He felt cut off from them by age, by understanding, by sensibility, by technology, and by his need to measure himself against the mirror of other men’s appreciation. Somehow he felt betrayed, as he had when as a child he grew to discover that his father was dead. Now, for him, any real appreciation lay with his white officers; and with them he could never be sure. Between ignorant black men and condescending whites, his course of flight seemed mapped by the nature of things away from all needed and natural landmarks. Under some sealed orders, couched in ever more technical and mysterious terms, his path curved swiftly away from both the shame the old man symbolized and the cloudy terrain of white man’s regard. Flying blind, he knew but one point of landing and there he would receive his wings. After that the enemy would appreciate his skill and he would assume his deepest meaning, he thought sadly, neither from those who condescended nor from those who praised without understanding, but from the enemy who would recognize his manhood and skill in terms of hate.…
He sighed, seeing the oxen making queer, prehistoric shadows against the dry brown earth.
“You just take it easy, son,” the old man soothed. “That boy won’t take long. Crazy as he is about airplanes.”
“I can wait,” he said.
“What kinda airplane you call this here’n?”
“An Advanced Trainer,” he said, seeing the old man smile. His fingers were like gnarled dark wood against the metal as he touched the low-slung wing.
“ ’Bout how fast can she fly?”
“Over two hundred an hour.”
“Lawd! That’s so fast I bet it don’t seem like you moving!”
Holding himself rigid, Todd opened his flying suit. The shade had gone and he lay in a ball of fire.
“You mind if I take a look inside? I was always curious to see …”
“Help yourself. Just don’t touch anything.”
He heard him climb upon the metal wing, grunting. Now the questions would start. Well, so you don’t have to think to answer.…
He saw the old man looking over into the cockpit, his eyes bright as a child’s.
“You must have to know a lot to work all these here things.”
Todd was silent, seeing him step down and kneel beside him.
“Son, how come you want to fly way up there in the air?”
Because it’s the most meaningful act in the world … because it makes me less like you, he thought.
But he said: “Because I like it, I guess. It’s as good a way to fight and die as I know.”
“Yeah? I guess you right,” the old man said. “But how long you think before they gonna let you all fight?”
He tensed. This was the question all Negroes asked, put with the same timid hopefulness and longing that always opened a greater void within him than that he had felt beneath the plane the first time he had flown. He felt lightheaded. It came to him suddenly that there was something sinister about the conversation, that he was flying unwillingly into unsafe and uncharted regions. If he could only be insulting and tell this old man who was trying to help him to shut up!
“I bet you one thing …”
“Yes?”
“That you was plenty scared coming down.”
He did not answer. Like a dog on a trail the old man seemed to smell out his fears, and he felt anger bubble within him.
“You sho scared me. When I seen you coming down in that thing with it a-rollin’ and a-jumpin’ like a pitchin’ hoss, I thought sho you was a goner. I almost had me a stroke!”
He saw the old man grinning. “Ever’thin’s been happening round here this morning, come to think of it.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“Well, first thing I know, here come two white fellers looking for Mister Rudolph, that’s Mister Graves’ cousin. That got me worked up right away.…”
“Why?”
“Why? ’Cause he done broke outa the crazy house, that’s why. He liable to kill somebody,” he said. “They oughta have him by now though. Then here you come. First I think it’s one of them white boys. Then doggone if you don’t fall outa there. Lawd, I’d done heard about you boys but I haven’t never seen one o’ you all. Caint tell you how it felt to see somebody what look like me in a airplane!”
The old man talked on, the sound streaming around Todd’s thoughts like air flowing over the fuselage of a flying plane. You were a fool, he thought, remembering how before the spin the sun had blazed, bright against the billboard signs beyond the town, and how a boy’s blue kite had bloomed beneath him, tugging gently in the wind like a strange, odd-shaped flower. He had once flown such kites himself and tried to find the boy at the end of the invisible cord. But he had been flying too high and too fast. He had climbed steeply away in exultation. Too steeply, he thought. And one of the first rules you learn is that if the angle of thrust is too steep the plane goes into a spin. And then, instead of pulling out of it and going into a dive you let a buzzard panic you. A lousy buzzard!
“Son, what made all that blood on the glass?”
“A buzzard,” he said, remembering how the blood and feathers had sprayed back against the hatch. It had been as though he had flown into a storm of blood and blackness.
“Well, I declare! They’s lots of ’em around here. They after dead things. Don’t eat nothing what’s alive.”
“A little bit more and he would have made a meal out of me,” Todd said gr
imly.
“They had luck all right. Teddy’s got a name for ’em, calls ’em jimcrows,” the old man laughed.
“It’s a damned good name.”
“They the damnedest birds. Once I seen a hoss all stretched out like he was sick, you know. So I hollers, ‘Gid up from there, suh!’ Just to make sho! An’, doggone, son, if I don’t see two old jimcrows come flying right up outa that hoss’s insides! Yessuh! The sun was shinin’ on ’em and they couldn’ta been no greasier if they’d been eating barbecue!”
Todd thought he would vomit; his stomach quivered.
“You made that up,” he said.
“Nawsuh! Saw him just like you.”
“Well, I’m glad it was you.”
“You see lots a funny things down here, son.”
“No, I’ll let you see them,” he said.
“By the way, the white folks round here don’t like to see you boys up there in the sky. They ever bother you?”
“No.”
“Well, they’d like to.”
“Someone always wants to bother someone else,” Todd said. “How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“Well,” he said defensively, “no one has bothered us.”
Blood pounded in his ears as he looked away into space. He tensed, seeing a black spot in the sky, and strained to confirm what he could not clearly see.
“What does that look like to you?” he asked excitedly.
“Just another bad luck, son.”
Then he saw the movement of wings with disappointment. It was gliding smoothly down, wings outspread, tail feathers gripping the air, down swiftly—gone behind the green screen of trees. It was like a bird he had imagined there, only the sloping branches of the pines remained, sharp against the pale stretch of sky. He lay barely breathing and stared at the point where it had disappeared, caught in a spell of loathing and admiration. Why did they make them so disgusting and yet teach them to fly so well? It’s like when I was up in heaven, he heard, starting.