“Well, it just seems to me,” said Ken, finally, “that that’s maybe putting it too simply—like you’re blaming the white man for everything.”
“I’m not blaming you,” Christopher said. “You had a good thing going for you. You’d done already killed off most of the Indians and you’d robbed them of their land and now you had all these blacks working for you for nothing and you didn’t want no black cat from Walla Walla being able to talk to no black cat from Boola Boola. If they could have talked to each other, they might have figured out a way of chopping off your heads, and getting rid of you.” He smiled. “Dig it.” He took a swallow of his drink. “So you gave us Jesus. And told us it was the Lord’s will that we should be toting the barges and lifting the bales while you all sat on your big, fat, white behinds and got rich.” He took another sip of his drink, and squatted on his heels in the middle of the floor. “That’s what happened, and you all is still the same. You ain’t changed at all, except to get worse. You want to tell me different?”
“I don’t think I want to tell you anything,” said Bennett, and turned back to the window. “I don’t think you can listen.”
“Try me,” Christopher said, and he winked at me again.
“My,” said Barbara’s mother, and patted her husband’s knee, “you don’t have to talk to us this way. You don’t know how many colored friends we have down where we come from. If you ever get down that way, why we’d be happy to make you welcome. Why, Barbie can tell you. We don’t care about the color of a person’s skin—we never have done! My daddy would have skinned me alive had he ever heard of me mistreating a colored person, or calling them out of their name. And I never have. I loved my daddy too much. My daddy used to say, God made us all. We’re all here for some reason. Barbie can tell you. Tell him, Barbie.” She had been leaning forward, toward Christopher; now, she leaned back. “Why, Barbie grew up with colored folks. She’ll tell you that herself. She looked at me and smiled and sipped her drink. “He’ll learn,” she assured me. “He’s young.” She looked at her husband, looked at Ken, glanced at Barbara, who was now in the kitchen, on the other side of the bar. “Now, let’s just talk about something else. Mr. Proudhammer—where did you go to school?”
Christopher snorted, but delicately, and rose from the floor and joined Barbara in the kitchen. His laugh rang out across the room, then hers. Ken and Bennett and Barbara’s father looked toward the kitchen; but they did not move.
“I went to high school,” I said, “here in New York.”
“You didn’t go to college? My!”
“And you made it, all right, didn’t you?” Bennett asked. “Why, I bet you make more money than I do—I know you make more money than I do,” and he chuckled. “And I bet you didn’t do it sitting around, feeling sorry for yourself, did you?”
“Hell, no,” Ken said. “He just made his own way. And anybody can make his way in this country, no matter what color he is.”
I thought, Great God, I’m not going to be able to take this much longer, even if it is Barbara’s family. And, in a minute, Christopher’s going to throw everything in the kitchen out here on these defenseless heads, and we’re all going to end up in jail.
Barbara said, “That’s pure bullshit, Ken, and you know it. None of those boys who work for you are going to make their own way, you’ve seen to that—you’ve helped to see to that—they can’t even join a union. So, don’t you sit here and talk to Leo as though you had something to do with the fact that Leo’s still alive. You didn’t have a damn thing to do with it. Leo’s tough. That’s all. And you’re a no-good bastard. I’ve told you that before.”
“And I’ve told you before,” he said, turning red and wet, “to hold your tongue—to mind your tongue in front of your mother.”
“The way,” said Barbara, “that you’ve always minded yours in front of me? Don’t give me any of your shit, Ken, I know you.”
“Hush, children,” said Mrs. King, “we didn’t come here to fight. Why, we’re embarrassing Mr. Proudhammer.” And she finished her drink, and set it down; the old girl could drink. I rose to give her a refill. I said, “You’re not embarrassing me. But there’s no point in pretending that Negroes are treated like white people in this country because they’re not, and we all know that.”
“But look at you,” said Ken. “I don’t know what you make a year, but I can make a pretty shrewd guess. What have you got to complain about? It seems to me that this country’s treated you pretty well. I know a whole lot of white people couldn’t afford to live in this apartment, for example—”
“Of course you do,” said Barbara dryly, “and they work for you, too.”
He threw an exasperated look toward the kitchen, but held his peace, and looked at me. I realized that I was beginning to be angry, but I also realized that it was a perfectly futile anger. I had not been surprised by Christopher, nor had I been in the least surprised by this family. But I was a little surprised by Barbara, who seemed to be paying off old scores. I didn’t care at all what these people felt, or thought. Talking to them was a total waste of time. I just wanted them to get loaded on their Bloody Marys and get out of my house. I was a little angry at Barbara for having brought them here at all. And yet, I was aware, with another part of my mind, that Barbara was showing me something—showing me, perhaps, part of the price she had had to pay for me?—and she was, at the same time, exhibiting her credentials to Christopher. This argued an uneasiness on Barbara’s part which, again, after all these years, surprised me.
The question had been addressed to me, and so I was compelled to answer it, praying that, then, we could let the matter drop. I said, “You can’t imagine my life, and I won’t discuss it. I don’t make as much money as you think I do, and I don’t work as often as I would if I were white. Those are just facts. The point is that the Negroes of this country are treated as none of you would dream of treating a dog or a cat. What Christopher’s trying to tell you is perfectly true. If you don’t want to believe it, well, that’s your problem. And I don’t feel like talking about it anymore, and I won’t.” I looked at Ken. “This is my house.”
They sat in silence, angry themselves now, uneasy, and trapped, and I put on a Billie Holiday record, “Strange Fruit.” Yes, I was being vindictive. I poured myself a refill, and sat down. Mrs. King gave me a reproachful look, but I avoided her eye and lit a cigarette. Christopher, holding a carton of eggs in his hand, leaned over the bar and smiled and said, “What the man just told you is that you’re stuck with your criminal record and he’s not going to be an accomplice to it, or let you feel good about it. How do you all like your eggs?”
And yet, surprisingly enough, it turned out not to be such an awful afternoon, after all. Christopher’s insolence had released him, and, in a curious way, it had released them. Bennett’s pale, vindictive eyes and his busy wet lips conveyed but too vividly what he would have done with Christopher, had he encountered Christopher in his own bailiwick; this not being the case, and since he was now, morally, at least, encircled, he relaxed and proceeded to enjoy the afternoon as though it were a species of vaudeville show and something he would not soon be doing again. Ken, no match for Barbara anyway, contributed anecdotes from their childhood, which Barbara took with wry good grace, and the old lady, knocking back Bloody Marys as though there were no tomorrow, told stories about presidents and governors who had visited her home when she was young. She confessed how upset she had been by Barbara’s choice of a career, and said that Barbara got her stubbornness from her father—which transparent fiction seemed to delight the faceless old man. I watched Christopher watching them from the heights of an unassailable contempt, as they became more and more themselves, more and more human, and less and less attractive. They could not know how much they revealed, how pathetic and tawdry they were—this master race. But they were dangerous, too, unutterably so. They knew nothing about themselves at all. I wondered—but idly—how they had got that way; wondered, but from a great distan
ce, as the sun grew paler in my living room; as Ken grew blander, more shapeless, and by now he was clenching a pipe between his teeth with the energy of the dying; his wife grew more flirtatious, though not with him, exactly; the old lady grew drunker and madder, her husband appeared to be waiting for God knows what dreadful event; and Bennett, licking his nervous lips each time he looked at Christopher, could not have realized that he was a study in lust and bloodlust. But they were not my concern. Christopher was my concern. The problem was how to prevent these Christians from once again destroying this pagan. Barbara sat among her kin, dry and cold, looking very young, and putting me in mind of a living sacrifice. When, at last, they rose to go, and bags and hats and various appurtenances were collected, and the last male left the “little boys’ room,” and we stood chatting in the foyer, I had a splitting headache. Barbara now kissed me on the cheek, and said, “Thanks, Leo. I’ll talk to you later.” Then, very deliberately, she thanked Christopher, and kissed him, too. I kissed the old lady, because she wanted me to, and shook hands with Elena and the men, said I would be happy to be their guest when I came to Kentucky—“Give us a chance!” the old lady cried. “You’ll see we ain’t nearly so bad down there as people up North say we are!”—and allowed Christopher to walk them to the elevator. I closed the door behind them, and walked back into the living room and stretched out on the floor.
Soon, the door slammed behind Christopher, and he came padding in. He stretched out on the floor beside me, and rubbed his hand over the back of my neck. “Wow! Baby, are they for real?” He sat up, clasping his knees. “Damn. They really fucked up. That old lady should be in an asylum some place.” He laughed. “No wonder Barbara split—she took one look at them people and she started making it—she hauled ass, baby!” He laughed again, and stretched out on the floor again. “Wow!” Then, “Barbara’s tough. I didn’t know a white chick could be so tough.”
I said, “She’s tough, all right.”
He said, “She’s really for real. She’s something.” He looked over at me. “You must be tired, Big Daddy. You want to take a nap?”
“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
“If they hadn’t stayed so long, I was thinking about maybe going to a movie. There’s a couple of movies in town I wanted you to see. But, now, I don’t think I feel up to it, and I know you don’t.”
“No,” I said. “I guess I don’t.”
He put his head on my chest. I held it there.
“Christopher—something I’ve been meaning to ask you—what do you want to do?—with your life, I mean.”
He laughed, his head bouncing up and down against my chest.
“I already told you. I want to be an astronaut.”
“Come on. Be serious.”
“I am serious. I think I might dig going to the moon—or Mars—you know—”
“Come on. You know that’s not about to happen soon. You’re going to be earth-bound for awhile. So, what do you want to do on earth while they’re figuring out whether or not they’re going to let you on the moon?”
“Well”—thoughtfully—“I guess I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in that shoe store.” He had a job in a shoe store in Spanish Harlem. “I don’t know. I’m a high school dropout, Leo—you’ve heard of cats like me, who drop out of school? And I’ve got a record, baby. It’s not so easy for me to tell you what I want to do.”
“Well, I think we can fix all the legal shit. But what do you think you want to do?”
He was silent. “I could learn a lot just working for you.”
“That’s cool. But that’s not enough.”
Silence again. His breath came and went against my chest. “Why not? You don’t want me to work for you?”
“Come on, now, don’t be coy—”
He leaned up, smiling. “What does that word mean—coy?”
“It means that you know damn well that I’ll be glad to have you with me all the time, and you just want to hear me say so. That’s being coy.”
He grinned. “Oh. Thanks.” He put his head on my chest again. “I don’t know, Leo. I want to learn—everything I can. That might sound funny, coming from me, but I really do. But”—he leaned up, looking at me very earnestly—“this is no cop-out, believe me, but—what I really want to learn—it doesn’t look like it’s being taught. I mean—I don’t want to learn all that shit they teach you here. That’s not where it’s at. I don’t want to be like these people. I know kids in the street who know a hell of a lot more than—all those people in school. I don’t know—I always feel like they trying to cut my balls off. You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do.” I put my hand over my forehead.
“You got a headache?”
“A little. It’ll go away.”
“Should I get you some aspirin?”
“No. Finish what you were saying.”
“Well. That’s it. I like the people in the streets, there’s a whole lot of beauty in the streets, Leo, and I’d like to help, I’d like to teach, but somebody’s got to teach me.”
I watched his face. His face made me want to smile. “Well. First things first. We’ll try to make you ready.”
He looked down, then looked into my eyes again. “You know something?”
“What?”
“I got a birthday coming soon.”
I laughed. “And what do you want for your birthday?”
He laughed, too. “Would you get me a camera? Just a simple, ordinary camera. I thought I might fool around with that for awhile—you know, maybe I can at least make a kind of record of what’s happening. And I can go a whole lot of places where no camera’s ever been.”
I said, watching him, “I’m hip.”
“So it wouldn’t really be a waste of your money.”
I pulled his head onto my chest again. “Don’t sweat it, baby. Everything’s going to be nice.”
“I believe you,” he said, after a moment, and then we lay quietly on the floor, until the sun was long gone, and night filled the room. The street lights pressed against my window. It was very silent. Christopher had fallen fast asleep, snoring and whistling. I lay there, and stroked his kinky hair and thought of my father and mother, and my brother, and of Christopher, and a line suddenly came flying back at me, out of my past, from The Corn Is Green. It made me laugh, and hold my breath and it almost made me cry. It was Bunny’s curtain line: Moffat, my girl, you mustn’t be clumsy this time. You mustn’t be clumsy. Ah. So! I laughed to myself, and stroked Christopher’s hair, laughed perhaps a little sadly and ironically, but without grief. This little light of mine.
“I can explain it, in a way, and, in another way, I can’t,” Barbara said. She stood very straight, walking up and down my living room. It was about three o’clock in the morning. Christopher was God knew where. “If I could have explained it before it happened, then, obviously, it wouldn’t have happened.”
I said, “Barbara, I don’t need any explanations. I really don’t. I don’t feel—whatever you’re supposed to feel when something like this happens. I just don’t. I don’t feel—wronged.” I watched her. Her face hurt me. It was true that I did not feel wronged: what did I feel? An immense fatigue, a sense of going down beneath a burden; of barely holding on. “Don’t you see what I mean? Old Princess?”
She turned away from me, and walked back to my bar and poured herself another drink. I joined her at the bar. My living room was lit by one dim light, and my record player was playing Dinah Washington, very low.
I poured myself a drink, and touched her face. She smiled, and we touched glasses. She sat down on one of the barstools, and lit a cigarette.
“He reminded me of you,” she said, “when we were young. I was reaching backward for you—and for me—I think—reaching backward, over twenty years.” She sipped her drink, and smiled, threw back her head, and sighed. “He was you before our choices had been made. Before we’d become—what we’ve become.” She looked at me, seemed to
try to look into me, her eyes were enormous. “Do you know what I mean?”
“I think I do.” Then, “Do you think what we’ve become is so awful, Barbara?”
“No. Oh, I don’t mean that. But it isn’t—is it?—exactly what we had in mind. I didn’t,” she said at last, “expect to become so lonely.”
“Neither did I,” I said. Then, for a moment, Dinah’s voice was the only sound in the room.
“I think he wanted”—she stopped—“I think he wanted to find out—if love was possible. If it was really possible. I think he had to find out what I thought of his body, by taking mine.” She paused. “It wasn’t like that,” she said, “with you and me.”
“No. It wasn’t like that with you and me.”
“I’m glad for one thing,” she said. “I was afraid that I’d—seduced Christopher, or allowed Christopher to seduce me, only in order to hurt you. I was terribly afraid that I was only acting out of bitterness. And that would have had to mean that I’d been bitter all this time. But it wasn’t that. It was just—you. That’s terrible, in its way, but it’s true. I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I was trying to get back to you. And he realized that, oh, very quickly. Then, he realized that love was possible. I shouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t frighten him.”
“He’ll be back,” I said. “He’ll be back, or I’ll go into the streets to find him. He’s not lost, don’t sweat it. I won’t let him be lost.” She said nothing. “Look. That’s all that matters now, isn’t it—that the kid not be lost?”
“I hope I haven’t wrecked everything,” she said.
“I don’t think you have. But if you have, then we’ll have to face that, too. And if you have, well, I don’t know how I’ll feel then. But I don’t think you have. And now you ought to go home. We’ve both had it.”
“I suppose so,” she said, and rose. She was still very straight and steady. “When he left me—he said he was coming here.”
“It’s only been three days. He’s probably at his sister’s house. He’ll be along.”