Today he was ready. All he had to do was push one foot in front of the other until he got to the door and down the steps. Once down the steps, he would get out of the neighborhood. Once out of it, he would hail a taxicab and go to the freight yards. Some bum would help him onto a car. Once he got in the freight car, he would lie down and rest. During the night the train would start south, and the next day or the morning after, dead or alive, he would be home. Dead or alive. It was being there that mattered; the dead or alive did not.
If he had had good sense he would have gone the day after he arrived; better sense and he would not have arrived. He had not got desperate until two days ago when he had heard his daughter and son-in-law taking leave of each other after breakfast. They were standing in the front door, she seeing him off for a three-day trip. He drove a long distance moving van. She must have handed him his leather headgear. “You ought to get you a hat,” she said, “a real one.”
“And sit all day in it,” the son-in-law said, “like him in there. Yah! All he does is sit all day with that hat on. Sits all day with that damn black hat on his head. Inside!”
“Well you don’t even have you a hat,” she said. “Nothing but that leather cap with flaps. People that are somebody wear hats. Other kinds wear those leather caps like you got on.”
“People that are somebody!” he cried. “People that are somebody! That kills me! That really kills me!” The son-in-law had a stupid muscular face and a Yankee voice to go with it.
“My daddy is here to stay,” his daughter said. “He ain’t going to last long. He was somebody when he was somebody. He never worked for nobody in his life but himself and had people—other people—working for him.”
“Yah? Niggers is what he had working for him,” the son-in-law said. “That’s all. I’ve worked a nigger or two myself.”
“Those were just nawthun niggers you worked,” she said, her voice suddenly going lower so that Tanner had to lean forward to catch the words. “It takes brains to work a real nigger. You got to know how to handle them.”
“Yah so I don’t have brains,” the son-in-law said.
One of the sudden, very occasional, feelings of warmth for the daughter came over Tanner. Every now and then she said something that might make you think she had a little sense stored away somewhere for safe keeping.
“You got them,” she said. “You don’t always use them.”
“He has a stroke when he sees a nigger in the building,” the son-in-law said, “and she tells me . . .”
“Shut up talking so loud,” she said. “That’s not why he had the stroke.”
There was a silence. “Where you going to bury him?” the son-in-law asked, taking a different tack.
“Bury who?”
“Him in there.”
“Right here in New York,” she said. “Where do you think? We got a lot. I’m not taking that trip down there again with nobody.”
“Yah. Well I just wanted to make sure,” he said.
When she returned to the room, Tanner had both hands gripped on the chair arms. His eyes were trained on her like the eyes of an angry corpse. “You promised you’d bury me there,” he said. “Your promise ain’t any good. Your promise ain’t any good. Your promise ain’t any good.” His voice was so dry it was barely audible. He began to shake, his hands, his head, his feet. “Bury me here and burn in hell!” he cried and fell back into his chair.
The daughter shuddered to attention. “You ain’t dead yet!” She threw out a ponderous sigh. “You got a long time to be worrying about that.” She turned and began to pick up parts of the newspaper scattered on the floor. She had gray hair that hung to her shoulders and a round face, beginning to wear. “I do every last living thing for you,” she muttered, “and this is the way you carry on.” She stuck the papers under her arm and said, “And don’t throw hell at me. I don’t believe in it. That’s a lot of hard shell Baptist hooey.” Then she went into the kitchen.
He kept his mouth stretched taut, his top plate gripped between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Still the tears flooded down his cheeks; he wiped each one furtively on his shoulder.
Her voice rose from the kitchen. “As bad as having a child. He wanted to come and now he’s here, he don’t like it.”
He had not wanted to come.
“Pretended he didn’t but I could tell. I said if you don’t want to come I can’t make you. If you don’t want to live like decent people there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“As for me,” her higher voice said, “when I die that ain’t the time I’m going to start getting choosey. They can lay me in the nearest spot. When I pass from this world I’ll be considerate of them that stay in it. I won’t be thinking of just myself.”
“Certainly not,” the other voice said, “You never been that selfish. You’re the kind that looks out for other people.”
“Well I try,” she said, “I try.”
He laid his head on the back of the chair for a moment and the hat tilted down over his eyes. He had raised three boys and her. The three boys were gone, two in the war and one to the devil and there was nobody left who felt a duty toward him but her, married and childless, in New York City like Mrs. Big and ready when she came back and found him living the way he was to take him back with her. She had put her face in the door of the shack and had stared, expressionless, for a second. Then all at once she had screamed and jumped back.
“What’s that on the floor?”
“Coleman,” he said.
The old Negro was curled up on a pallet asleep at the foot of Tanner’s bed, a stinking skin full of bones, arranged in what seemed vaguely human form. When Coleman was young, he had looked like a bear; now that he was old he looked like a monkey. With Tanner it was the opposite; when he was young he had looked like a monkey but when he got old, he looked like a bear.
The daughter stepped back onto the porch. There were the bottoms of two cane chairs tilted against the clapboard but she declined to take a seat. She stepped out about ten feet from the house as if it took that much space to clear the odor. Then she had spoken her piece.
“If you don’t have any pride I have and I know my duty and I was raised to do it. My mother raised me to do it if you didn’t. She was from plain people but not the kind that likes to settle in with niggers.”
At that point the old Negro roused up and slid out the door, a doubled-up shadow which Tanner just caught sight of gliding away.
She had shamed him. He shouted so they both could hear. “Who you think cooks? Who you think cuts my firewood and empties my slops? He’s paroled to me. That no-good scoundrel has been on my hands for thirty years. He ain’t a bad nigger.”
She was unimpressed. “Whose shack is this anyway?” she had asked. “Yours or his?”
“Him and me built it,” he said. “You go on back up there. I wouldn’t come with you for no million dollars or no sack of salt.”
“It looks like him and you built it. Whose land is it on?”
“Some people that live in Florida,” he said evasively. He had known then that it was land up for sale but he thought it was too sorry for anyone to buy. That same afternoon he had found out different. He had found out in time to go back with her. If he had found out a day later, he might still be there, squatting on the doctor’s land.
When he saw the brown porpoise-shaped figure striding across the field that afternoon, he had known at once what had happened; no one had to tell him. If that nigger had owned the whole world except for one runty rutted pea field and he acquired it, he would walk across it that way, beating the weeds aside, his thick neck swelled, his stomach a throne for his gold watch and chain. Doctor Foley. He was only part black. The rest was Indian and white.
He was everything to the niggers—druggist and undertaker and general counsel and real estate man and sometimes he got the evil eye off them an
d sometimes he put it on. Be prepared, he said to himself, watching him approach, to take something off him, nigger though he be. Be prepared, because you ain’t got a thing to hold up to him but the skin you come in, and that’s no more use to you now than what a snake would shed. You don’t have a chance with the government against you.
He was sitting on the porch in the piece of straight chair tilted against the shack. “Good evening, Foley,” he said and nodded as the doctor came up and stopped short at the edge of the clearing, as if he had only just that minute seen him though it was plain he had sighted him as he crossed the field.
“I be out here to look at my property,” the doctor said. “Good evening.” His voice was quick and high.
Ain’t been your property long, he said to himself. “I seen you coming,” he said.
“I acquired this here recently,” the doctor said and proceeded without looking at him again to walk around to one side of the shack. In a moment he came back and stopped in front of him. Then he stepped boldly to the door of the shack and put his head in. Coleman was in there that time too, asleep. He looked for a moment and then turned aside. “I know that nigger,” he said. “Coleman Parrum—how long does it take him to sleep off that stump liquor you all make?”
Tanner took hold of the knobs on the chair bottom and held them hard. “This shack ain’t in your property. Only on it, by my mistake,” he said.
The doctor removed his cigar momentarily from his mouth. “It ain’t my mis-take,” he said and smiled.
He had only sat there, looking ahead.
“It don’t pay to make this kind of mis-take,” the doctor said.
“I never found nothing that paid yet,” he muttered.
“Everything pays,” the Negro said, “if you knows how to make it,” and he remained there smiling, looking the squatter up and down. Then he turned and went around the other side of the shack. There was a silence. He was looking for the still.
Then would have been the time to kill him. There was a gun inside the shack and he could have done it as easy as not, but, from childhood, he had been weakened for that kind of violence by the fear of hell. He had never killed one, he had always handled them with his wits and with luck. He was known to have a way with niggers. There was an art to handling them. The secret of handling a nigger was to show him his brains didn’t have a chance against yours; then he would jump on your back and know he had a good thing there for life. He had had Coleman on his back for thirty years.
Tanner had first seen Coleman when he was working six of them at a sawmill in the middle of a pine forest fifteen miles from nowhere. They were as sorry a crew as he had worked, the kind that on Monday they didn’t show up. What was in the air had reached them. They thought there was a new Lincoln elected who was going to abolish work. He managed them with a very sharp penknife. He had had something wrong with his kidney then that made his hands shake and he had taken to whittling to force that waste motion out of sight. He did not intend them to see that his hands shook of their own accord and he did not intend to see it himself or to countenance it. The knife had moved constantly, violently, in his quaking hands and here and there small crude figures—that he never looked at again and could not have said what they were if he had—dropped to the ground. The Negroes picked them up and took them home; there was not much time between them and darkest Africa. The knife glittered constantly in his hands. More than once he had stopped short and said in an off-hand voice to some half-reclining, head-averted Negro, “Nigger, this knife is in my hand now but if you don’t quit wasting my time and money, it’ll be in your gut shortly.” And the Negro would begin to rise—slowly, but he would be in the act—before the sentence was completed.
A large black loose-jointed Negro, twice his own size, had begun hanging around the edge of the sawmill, watching the others work and when he was not watching, sleeping, in full view of them, sprawled like a gigantic bear on his back. “Who is that?” he had asked. “If he wants to work, tell him to come here. If he don’t, tell him to go. No idlers are going to hang around here.”
None of them knew who he was. They knew he didn’t want to work. They knew nothing else, not where he had come from, nor why, though he was probably brother to one, cousin to all of them. He had ignored him for a day; against the six of them he was one yellow-faced scrawny white man with shaky hands. He was willing to wait for trouble, but not forever. The next day the stranger came again. After the six Tanner worked had seen the idler there for half the morning, they quit and began to eat, a full thirty minutes before noon. He had not risked ordering them up. He had gone to the source of the trouble.
The stranger was leaning against a tree on the edge of the clearing, watching with half-closed eyes. The insolence on his face barely covered the wariness behind it. His look said, this ain’t much of a white man so why he come on so big, what he fixing to do?
He had meant to say, “Nigger, this knife is in my hand now but if you ain’t out of my sight . . .” but as he drew closer he changed his mind. The Negro’s eyes were small and bloodshot. Tanner supposed there was a knife on him somewhere that he would as soon use as not. His own penknife moved, directed solely by some intruding intelligence that worked in his hands. He had no idea what he was carving, but when he reached the Negro, he had already made two holes the size of half dollars in the piece of bark.
The Negro’s gaze fell on his hands and was held. His jaw slackened. His eyes did not move from the knife tearing recklessly around the bark. He watched as if he saw an invisible power working on the wood.
He looked himself then and, astonished, saw the connected rims of a pair of spectacles.
He held them away from him and looked through the holes past a pile of shavings and on into the woods to the edge of the pen where they kept their mules.
“You can’t see so good, can you, boy?” he said and began scraping the ground with his foot to turn up a piece of wire. He picked up a small piece of haywire; in a minute he found another, shorter piece and picked that up. He began to attach these to the bark. He was in no hurry now that he knew what he was doing. When the spectacles were finished, he handed them to the Negro. “Put these on,” he said. “I hate to see anybody can’t see good.”
There was an instant when the Negro might have done one thing or another, might have taken the glasses and crushed them in his hand or grabbed the knife and turned it on him. He saw the exact instant in the muddy liquor-swollen eyes when the pleasure of having a knife in this white man’s gut was balanced against something else, he could not tell what.
The Negro reached for the glasses. He attached the bows carefully behind his ears and looked forth. He peered this way and that with exaggerated solemnity. And then he looked directly at Tanner and grinned, or grimaced, Tanner could not tell which, but he had an instant’s sensation of seeing before him a negative image of himself, as if clownishness and captivity had been their common lot. The vision failed him before he could decipher it.
“Preacher,” he said, “what you hanging around here for?” He picked up another piece of bark and began, without looking at it, to carve again. “This ain’t Sunday.”
“This here ain’t Sunday?” the Negro said.
“This is Friday,” he said. “That’s the way it is with you preachers—drunk all week so you don’t know when Sunday is. What you see through those glasses?”
“See a man.”
“What kind of a man?”
“See the man make theseyer glasses.”
“Is he white or black?”
“He white!” the Negro said as if only at that moment was his vision sufficiently improved to detect it. “Yessuh, he white!” he said.
“Well, you treat him like he was white,” Tanner said. “What’s your name?”
“Name Coleman,” the Negro said.
And he had not got rid of Coleman since. You make a monkey out of on
e of them and he jumps on your back and stays there for life, but let one make a monkey out of you and all you can do is kill him or disappear. And he was not going to hell for killing a nigger. Behind the shack he heard the doctor kick over a bucket. He sat and waited.
In a moment the doctor appeared again, beating his way around the other side of the house, whacking at scattered clumps of Johnson grass with his cane. He stopped in the middle of the yard, about where that morning the daughter had delivered her ultimatum.
“You don’t belong here,” he began. “I could have you prosecuted.”
Tanner remained there, dumb, staring across the field.
“Where’s your still?” the doctor asked.
“If it’s a still around here, it don’t belong to me,” he said and shut his mouth tight.
The Negro laughed softly. “Down on your luck, ain’t you?” he murmured. “Didn’t you used to own a little piece of land over acrost the river and lost it?”
He had continued to study the woods ahead.
“If you want to run the still for me, that’s one thing,” the doctor said. “If you don’t, you might as well had be packing up.”
“I don’t have to work for you,” he said. “The governmint ain’t got around yet to forcing the white folks to work for the colored.”
The doctor polished the stone in his ring with the ball of his thumb. “I don’t like the governmint no bettern you,” he said. “Where you going instead? You going to the city and get you a soot of rooms at the Biltmo’ Hotel?”
Tanner said nothing.
“The day coming,” the doctor said, “when the white folks IS going to be working for the colored and you mights well to git ahead of the crowd.”
“That day ain’t coming for me,” Tanner said shortly.