The faintest sound came to him, as a sigh, as an indrawn breath. My imagination again, he thought. But all at once he felt understood. He moved in agitation on the chair.
“I am a man, with a man’s human nature. That human nature is denied me, not by those who ignorantly hate me, but by those who pretend, or believe, they ‘love’ me. But they don’t love me as Paul Winsor, a man, with their own organs and blood and sinews and spirit and hopes and despairs. They ‘love’ me as a Symbol. A Symbol of their own perverted and inverted hatred!
“That’s what it is: hatred. You and I, we know there is little difference between hate and love; the line is very thin. But I don’t want to be hated or loved! I don’t want to be the scapegoat for those whom James Baldwin called the ‘white, liberal bastards.’ I don’t want to be their pretty sacrifice for the perverse self-hatred they hold in themselves, and through which they would like to purge themselves. They heap their perversities on me, their lies, their hypocrisies; they touch me with their obscene hands, as they wouldn’t do their own kind. Pawing me, soothing me! I don’t need to be soothed. I want my human nature to be recognized, not with ‘love,’ but with objectivity. Is that too much to ask?”
“No,” said the grave voice in his ear. He started. “But it appears too much for almost all men in these awful days,” said the imagined voice.
My God, my imagination, thought Paul Winsor. He looked down at his beautiful hands, his molded black hands, the hands of a sensitive artist, but firm and strong and sinewy.
“What is it that is so frightful in most men these days that they must pretend to ‘love’ others?” asked Paul. “Never was the world so loveless as it is now, so degraded, so full of hate. Yet, you can’t go anywhere but that you hear love, love, love. A steamy bath of it. A miasma. It is particularly smothering for my people. They are choking in it, especially in the North. But it isn’t really love, is it? It is hatred. It is the self-righteousness of the cruel Pharisee.”
He turned his head as if choking, his strong and well-marked head with the gleaming black skin, the crisply curling hair, the dimpled chin and the shining cheekbones.
He said, in a gasping voice, “But who are my people? All mankind is my people. I am a man; if others are men, then they are men with me. Those who deny my human nature, which I share with them, deny me my rights as a spirit, as a mind, as an aspiring man.”
He got to his feet in his increasing agitation. “But you don’t understand! You refuse to me, like your own race, my human nature, my human nature as a person which is precious to me! What does it matter that my skin is darker than yours, that I have a remote African ancestry? Am I not a man, and do I not bleed as you bleed, and do I not love as you love, and suffer as you suffer? I am a man! Until recently I was known as a man. Now I am only a Problem, a Symbol, to those who ‘love’ me and try to exploit me and relegate me outside of humanity, for their own secret and perverted objectives. As a white man, how can you understand me, and my outrage that I am denied my human nature?”
He ran to the curtain and struck it with his fist. It seemed, in spite of its soft texture, to be made of iron. He did not know he was sobbing dryly. Then he saw the button near it, informing him that if he wished to see the man who had listened to him he had only to press it.
He said, in a bitter voice, “I don’t want to see your white face, and to hear you call me ‘son,’ and to listen to your lies. I don’t want your soothing ‘love.’ You won’t talk to me as a man to a man. You aren’t interested. You’ll talk to me seriously about ‘racism,’ until I squirm with shame for you, and for myself. You won’t say a word about our mutual human interests and our common humanity.”
His hand was clenched again. He struck the button with it. The curtains moved aside, heavily, as if pain were concealed behind them. And then, in the glow of soft pale light he saw the man who had listened to him, the agonized, loving man who gazed at him with pain and passionate comprehension.
Paul slowly lifted his hand and covered his mouth with it, his shaking mouth.
“No,” he whispered. “I don’t believe in you. I don’t believe a word you are saying—My father did. He died of starvation, slow starvation. He loved you; he said you were a man as he was a man. Is that how you repaid him?”
He turned away and went back to the chair. He stood beside it, with his hand on the back. His eyes met those of the man who had listened to all his agony. For a long time they contemplated each other in silence. Paul averted his head.
“No. No. No.”
He felt a presence in the room, enveloping, strong, manly. A father’s presence.
He said, “They denied your human nature too, didn’t they? You were either a symbol for their maudlin love, or you were not a man at all. You were removed from humanity entirely, or you did not exist. Just as I am, these days, removed from humanity or denied my existence as a legitimate American with a black skin. A symbol, or a nothing. An object of unhealthy love—an insult to my intelligence—or a mark for contempt.”
It was the coolness in the room, of course, which was making his eyes wet. He wiped them, simply, with the back of his hand, like a hurt child.
“My wife, Kathleen, and my children. My children, especially. What is going to happen to them? They were never treated in their young lives as I was treated in Georgia, as a human being. They may move North, where they will be glorified as something ‘super,’ until their blatant human nature asserts itself—when they will be hated for daring to be human! Neither in the South now, nor in the North, will they be simply accepted as human, good and bad, bright or stupid, aspiring or dull. Just accepted. As a human being, punished if they are evil, rewarded if they are worthy. Not coddled, not given special sly privilege, not listened to abjectly, but not rejected when they display that which is human in them, common to all men.”
He looked again at the man who heard him and who was regarding him with both agony and mighty love.
“You and I, we have a lot in common, haven’t we? We have an immortal spirit, and we have our human nature, bound up in one. Mankind rejects one part of us, forever, doesn’t it? Why can’t they accept us? Simply, honestly?”
“At some time. Perhaps,” said the deep and manly voice.
His ridiculous imagination. The man who had listened had not moved at all, had not really spoken. Had he?
But all at once Paul Winsor felt a rise in him, a gift of brotherhood, a lift of the spirit, a community of being. He got to his feet slowly and went to the man. He himself was tall, and he had to stand on tiptoe to touch the man’s cheek.
“Brother,” he said. He waited. The great eyes smiled on him. “Brother,” he said again.
Then, “Brother!” For the first time in his life Paul felt that the word was significant and not part of the cant which other men used toward him, no humiliating lie, no fawning assertion which rose out of shamed hatred, no condescension from the mouth of a white man who pretended to “equality” and “brotherly love,” because he was a liar.
Here was one who accepted him from love, as one man to another, worthy of love as a human being, as a human soul. The man loved him, not as a Cain disguised as an Abel for his own evil purposes. He loved him for what they shared together, body and spirit, with an immortal destiny.
“Dear God,” said Paul. “Dear God. With Your help I will endure. We, together, will outlive false love and furious hatred, and lies and hypocrisies. We shall endure together, for eternity. And perhaps, in some far time, our brothers will talk to us as brothers, and will finally know us for what we are.”
SOUL FIVE
“Only a Kid”
“Gird up your loins and answer Me.”
Job 38:3
SOUL FIVE
He came smiling rosily into the waiting room, walking with his usual boyish insolence and waiting for every eye to turn on him indulgently and every woman’s eye to warm. But no one seemed to know he had entered. His smile faded, and he scowled. Just as he suspected: old
bags and crumpled old men—except for that youngish woman over there in the smart summer dress. He sat down near her, his smile ready, moistening his glowing teeth of which he was very proud. The woman did not look at him. It was not that he was deliberately ignored, he saw to his amazement. They had simply not cared to turn their heads in his direction. He stared at the women and thought: Pigs. He glared at the men and thought: Slugs. Several young women and girls had told him he was magnetic, and that he attracted instant attention. If so, his charm wasn’t working today. They were all tied in knots, that’s what the trouble with them was. Selfish animals. Selfish old animals. The sooner they were dead the better. They’d make room for kids like himself. What was it some famous writer had written about old folks’ homes? “I’d like to take a machine gun and clear them all out, for the kids.” Right.
He crossed his knees and folded his powerful arms across his chest, seeing himself pleasantly in the mirror of himself. A big kid, with broad shoulders and narrow hips, handsomely dressed in a fine cashmere sports jacket, a deep and lustrous blue, and with slacks of a lighter blue. Blue silk socks, handmade black loafers, blue and white striped sports shirt and no tie. He had a broad pink face with dimples he pretended to deplore, a strong and belligerent nose, a full mouth and eyes the color of his jacket and all crowned by a tousled mop of bright gold hair. His whole body was flushed and tanned by the sun. He loved himself in swim-trunks, and surfing. He loved himself swimming strongly. He loved himself dressing and undressing, eating and drowsing, playing and laughing. In short he loved himself. He knew it. He saw no reason to deny it. After all, he was a handsome kid and the world had been made exclusively for the young. He pursed his lips soundlessly as if whistling. A roaring beat of modern music pounded pleasingly in his head and he tapped his foot on the thick blue rug which covered the white marble floor. Kookie place, he thought with great amusement. A nut farm. He heard a chiming and he saw an elderly man rising and going to another door. The door closed after him. So that was where the headshrinker was, tinkling his stupid bell for the pigs and the slugs who went in there to tell him about their complexes and inferiorities and frustrations. Thank God he didn’t have any. But he’d given Sally his word that he’d come here; that was the only way he could get a divorce out of her. He couldn’t lie to her either; she’d been here, herself, and she knew exactly what it was like and all about the kook who listened in there, so he couldn’t fool her.
It wasn’t a hell of a lot to pay for a divorce. After all, he was only a kid and she had almost raped him into marrying her. She was a mature woman, and he was still practically a teen-ager.
The outer door opened and a young girl in a green dress came in, a lovely young girl not more than twenty, if that old, with a mass of fine black hair on her shoulders, a clear fair face and beautiful big black eyes. Johnnie Martin looked at her with intense admiration. A babe. Now, that was more his kind of dish. He watched her openly as she sat down and neatly crossed her ankles and folded her white-gloved hands in her lap. She made Sally look as old as his grandmother, and he felt the freshness of her youth and stared at the full redness of her mouth. Now what in hell had brought that kid here, a kid like himself? Maybe she had an old slob for a husband and wanted to get rid of him, too. The girl lifted the white lids of her eyes and saw him admiring her. She studied him. Then her lip, incredibly, lifted in disdain and she reached to a table and took a magazine.
Johnnie was astounded. Girls never brushed him off like that! He was also angry. Deliberately, then, he stood and went to the girl and sat down beside her. She read the magazine. He bent his head and whispered, “What’s a doll like you doing in this menagerie?”
She did not answer for a few seconds and then she said, still not looking at him, “What’re you doing here?”
He grinned. “Getting advice on how to get rid of an old bag.”
“Your mother?” she asked, looking at him now with intentness. He was pleased. He smiled and his huge white teeth flashed, as he knew they would flash. He had expected that question.
“Believe it or not, my wife,” he said, and waited for her expression of disbelief. It did not come. Instead she only studied him thoughtfully.
“She’s a lot older than me,” he said, a slight petulance in his rich voice.
The girl smiled. He could not dig that smile; it was very odd.
“I was only a kid when I married her,” he said. The room was very cool and pleasant and he began to relax and enjoy himself. He did not notice or did not care that the other occupants of the room were giving him glances of dull displeasure.
The girl smiled again. “How long have you been married?”
He hesitated, and she saw it. “To Sally? Three years.”
Her black eyes, which had appeared so distant and sad when she had entered, began to sparkle. She made a rounded cherry of her mouth. “Oh? Are you planning to get an annulment? For being under-age?”
He beamed at her, delighted. He scratched his head to make his hair more tousled than before. “Well, you could just about say that! But, not quite.”
The girl stopped smiling. “I thought not,” she said, and stood up and left him for another section of the room. He watched her go. The delight in his eyes was replaced by rage and hate. Little tramp! Probably made a “mistake” and was looking for the name of an abortionist. She was just the kind, with her dress tight across the rump. Legs too fat, too. He hated girls with heavy legs. Cows. In a few years she’d be a bag, like Sally. Some of the others in the room had noticed all this, in spite of their misery, and they could not help smiling a little, understanding. This made him angrier than ever. His face flushed a deeper pink and his straw-colored brows tightened over his eyes. He’d get the hell out of here.
No. He’d have to see that headshrinker in there. He must be some kind of a nut, to listen for free to every yapper who came in to see him. Didn’t charge a cent, either. What did he do? Make sex-reports? On these old pigs and slugs sitting around here, waiting? The idea made him grin nastily. He could imagine the reports these dirty old men could make, if they had the nerve! With bold insolence he watched them stand up one by one at the chiming, and leave the room. He wanted them to glance at him just once; he’d let them know he knew all about them. They did not look at him. The distant girl was reading; he was sure she was not, for she did not turn a page. Her eyes appeared fixed on the print, but did not stir and hardly appeared to blink. A junkie? Probably. She had the color for it, too fair; no healthy tan; no vitality; no hint of sensuality. Then he saw something which freshly delighted him. She wasn’t as young as he had thought. There were the slightest hints of crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. A bag. An old bag. At least twenty-eight; an old bag.
The girl was clutching her composure to her heart. I must be calm, she was thinking. I must hold on to myself. This thing happens to millions of people every year, people much younger than I am. Girls much younger. I’ve got to keep my head for Tom’s sake; I must remember not to tell him until the very, very last. Dear Tom. If only she and Tom could really talk together; but they’d had so much fun these six years of their marriage. There had never been any time for serious conversation; Tom’s life had always been too serious, anyway. She hoped she had brought into it all the fun and laughter and joy he deserved. But now—
In her misery she involuntarily lifted her head and turned it and saw Johnnie Martin staring at her with open disgust. She was not disturbed. She could only compare him with Tom, who must be younger. This man must be at least thirty, if not older. But he dressed and acted like a kid, a silly, grinning, worthless kid. There were so many of him around now; she was always seeing them and comparing them with Tom. Aging juveniles, perpetual teen-agers, men who refused to grow up. Didn’t he realize how old he was? She wondered, pityingly, about his wife. Whatever “Sally” was she was getting a good deal if she could get rid of him. She hoped that the man who listened in there would tell this idiot to run, not walk, to the nearest divorce cou
rt, for “Sally’s” sake. Ugh! she thought. How could the poor thing have married him in the first place?
Johnnie Martin could not believe that he was seeing that old bag’s black eyes sparkling with disgust and unsheathed contempt at him. Her red lips had parted and he saw how small and white her teeth were. He detested little teeth; he liked huge flaring teeth in a woman, wet and shining. “Horse’s teeth,” Sally had said once. She had little teeth like this old bag. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed that before he had married her; it would have put him off right at the beginning. Everything about Sally was wrong for him; she was not tall, not slender, not fascinating, not sexy, not even pretty. Her hair was only brown, and her eyes also. She had a round sober face, with one deep dimple in her left cheek, and a tilted nose. She had been his mother’s friend, and he had known for some time that it was his mother who had engineered his disastrous marriage—his dead mother.
“Sally’s such a wonderful girl,” his mother had said, his dying mother. “She’ll be the very best for the children, and be the mother to them that they’ve never had.”
Throwing up his two previous marriages to him, as if they’d been his fault! He’d been only a kid, and they’d practically forced him to marry them, he, only a youngster, the first marriage when he was only twenty-four, hardly out of his teens and not dry behind the ears yet, and the second at twenty-eight—he had been only a youth, still a kid. Isn’t that what the judges called kids his age? Youths. Some of them wanted Youth Courts to handle boys and girls up to the age of thirty-one; they realized they were only kids, after all. Dad had understood that, that little guy. Even when his son had topped him by seven inches and was a sophomore in college, he would stand back on his heels and look up at his son’s face and say rebukingly to his wife, “He’s just a little kid, Ann, just a little kid. What else can you call him?” Yes, what else? But his mother had been like Sally; they were a pair.