“Do you think there’s any chance of that?”
“The governor is a man of compassion and a Christian gentleman. His record in granting commutations is better than average among southern governors, in cases where there has been a miscarriage of justice. And this is the worst miscarriage of justice you can imagine.”
“Then you think there is something wrong with the law as it stands?”
“I think there is something inherently evil in a law which inflicts the death penalty upon a man for sexual intercourse, even when it is not consensual. When in fact it was forced. I do not pretend my client is a saint. Mr. Mason is admittedly guilty of rape but not of murder or even a degree of manslaughter. Furthermore, Mr. Mason is about to suffer the supreme punishment for a crime for which no white man in Virginia has ever been executed. This is a moral obscenity.”
I felt a spinal tingle as I realized that, almost at the same time, my ears had experienced two “firsts”: the scabrous phrase “sexual intercourse,” which I’d never heard spoken on the radio before, and the simpler word “mister,” an honorific so rarely preceding a Negro’s surname that it sounded like a joke. Meanwhile Isabel, attracted by the voice of Rabinowitz, had moved toward the breakfast nook and now stood with her head tilted for the interview. Her face wore a look of grim disapproval, and I immediately regretted that the garrulous lawyer with his blunt heresies might get her goat again, thus disturbing the morning’s ticklish composure, the balance of our delicate accord. I had the vain impulse to turn the radio off.
“Listen,” Rabinowitz was saying, “I keep insisting that the guilt of my client is not in dispute. In a reasonable disposition of Mr. Mason’s case he would be given a very long term of incarceration which would satisfy the Commonwealth. Rape is not countenanced lightly in any state in the Union. But I don’t want to hide the fact that aside from the aforementioned miscarriage of justice there are matters of principle involved here. We are determined to break down historical prejudices which for centuries have kept Negro men chained in fear. Since the time of slavery the sexuality of white women has been used as a way to tyrannize Negroes—”
Had Rabinowitz’s words been poisoned darts soaring across the ether from Richmond to embed themselves in Isabel’s broad face she could not have reacted with more instantaneous pain and outrage. “He’s a liar!” she shrilled. “What tyranny? Everyone knows the truth about nigra men! This Mason is a perfect example! I mean, the little Jew’s client! He flat-out admits that this Mason just cynically and brutally had sex with that poor woman, whatever her name is—thank God they never reveal it—just to get back at her for some imagined insult! He admits it and in the same breath implies that white women are at fault for their own victimization—”
“Isabel!” I intercepted. “He’s right!” Thinking even as I spoke: I’ve got to get the fuck out of this house. “He’s trying to emphasize a larger truth, don’t you see? He’s not trying to get Mason off the hook; he says that over and over. Nor is he blaming white women. He’s merely trying to say that there’s a horrible, unbearable tragedy taking place down here in the South in 1946, and Negroes are getting crucified as usual for sins committed by white people.” Suddenly I let my mouth get away with me. “Why in the hell can’t you be a little more tolerant!”
She was glaring at me. Her eyes were naturally protuberant and whenever she became roiled, as she was now, they appeared close to popping from their sockets. When I got so utterly fed up with her (and I was really getting fed up) I felt grateful that she was not beautiful; as it was, a small but real upwelling of pity, pity for the blotched and homely face she presented to the world, tended to moderate my rage and prevent the showdown that might have ensued had the old man hooked a broad a bit more attractive. And a showdown was what I desperately wanted to avoid. God, I didn’t want a showdown. Thus the solemn liberal piety I had just uttered, even with its severe coda, was really a quickly contrived substitute for the massive verbal bludgeon which had in truth nearly escaped my mouth, scarily.
She still glared at me. And I, sending back a prolonged counterglare, set down my coffee cup, wheeled about, and strode again to the front porch. My mouth was parched. I felt all my limbs quivering, and the stress had sent an aching jolt of adrenaline to my kidneys. The porch was like a steam bath. While once more I strove to calm myself I spied my father’s binoculars; I began to scan the harbor, more as a diversion, an escape from Isabel, than anything else. The Missouri swam into sight, so clear now and well-defined that I could see the white caps bobbing on the heads of the sailors swarming along the decks. Farther north, toward the entrance to the bay, a freighter churned sedately seaward; it was a Danish vessel, I could tell from the large white MAERSK emblazoned on its side. The bold letters were not all that common on merchant ships, and for a moment I was put into mind of another ship with a vivid startling emblem, cruising across the harbor many years before. As I walked with my father along the seawall my eyes had picked out a bright red globe on the side of a freighter; even at ten I knew that a ship riding so high was carrying no cargo, and I pointed it out to my father with a question. “It’s a Japanese merchantman,” he said, and his voice was edged with contempt, or perhaps anger. “That’s what they call the Rising Sun on the side. That ship’s going up the James to Hopewell and take on a load of scrap iron, or maybe nitrate, or both. Either way, it’s a crime.” I asked him to explain and he replied: “The nitrate they’ll use to make gunpowder, the scrap iron they’ll use to make guns. And both of these they’ll use on American boys someday, when we’re at war. It’s a crime, son.” I remember him pulling me close. “I got half a mind to write our congressman, tell him we’re supplying the enemy.” Could he have been thinking, even then, that his only offspring might someday meet the Japanese in battle?
Prescient though he was, I doubt that he actually foresaw his little boy grown up to be a marine leading his troop of doomed warriors into some distant Armageddon; still, he had a good amateur historian’s nose for future catastrophe and was aware, as most of his fellow office workers were not, that the gray behemoths he helped build and that had begun, at almost yearly intervals, to slide down the ways into the muddy James were not meant for show but would someday be floating platforms to launch aerial raids on the wicked troublemakers of Europe and Asia. He was hardly an intellectual, but he had read much about war and its politics; for thirty years his involvement with the making of warfare’s potent machinery had led him to the conviction that such expensive gear couldn’t be allowed to rust. And on the dreadful day of Pearl Harbor, when I called him excitedly from boarding school, I was struck by the dark sorrow in his voice but also by the absence of surprise.
When I set the binoculars down I glimpsed close by, hurrying down the sidewalk bordering the beach, a familiar figure: moving briskly in the heat, it was a phantom from yesteryear. Good God, I said out loud, it’s Florence. Diminutive, hunched over in a white hospital uniform, she was trudging along at surprising speed, and I was a little breathless after I hustled down the porch steps and finally caught up with her. “Flo,” I said. “Flo! It’s Paul, remember me?”
She stopped and turned about, an old Negro with gray hair gone almost white, her expression a little perplexed, the yellowish eyes soft and ruminant. Tiny blisters of sweat covered the black brow. Suddenly, recognition washed across her face like light. “Paul, Paul!” she exclaimed, and then gave a glorious whoop of laughter. “Lawd have mercy, it’s really you!” We fell into each other’s arms.
“Let me hug you, sweetie!” she said in a muffled voice, then drew back to appraise me. “I can’t believe it’s really my little Paul.”
“It’s me, Flo,” I said, “it’s me. Come back to the land of the living. It’s so good to see you! What on earth are you doing in those white clothes?”
“I started workin’ at de hospital last week,” she replied, jerking her head toward the red brick building down the harbor. “I gits off de bus on Locust Avenue and I walks by yo’ hou
se every day. I only works mornins. Ain’t a day goes by I don’t think of you, passin’ by de house.” She looked me up and down. “My my, you is some big boy now. I always thinks of you as jes’ a little skinny ol’ thing. But Lawd, chile, you has growed!” She hugged me again, clasping me to her warm and nurturing self as she had so often during the ten years and more of my boyhood when, laboring in the house during my mother’s long illness, she had acquired the mantle of my mother’s surrogate, feeding me—sumptuously—keeping me clean, acting as nursemaid and benign disciplinarian, as quick to chastise me for truly rotten behavior as she was to loyally connive at my minor wrongs, sheltering me from parental anger with artful lies. Florence—or Flo, as I called her—had toiled six days a week (excepting only Thursday afternoon) from early morning until far past dark, when she joined the throng of shabbily dressed Negro women stomping down kitchen stoops all over the town, each clutching paper bags of supper leftovers or a can of Campbell’s soup (in a process called “totin’”) that augmented their weekly salary of three dollars.
It was Flo and her sisterhood that often waited patiently in pouring rain to deposit three pennies in the trolley car’s coin box or, later, when buses began their routes, a nickel, to reach the ramshackle enclave whose boundaries were made evident as soon as concrete and asphalt gave way to rutted dirt. It was only quite recently, in the creeping dawn of a new social awareness, that the section more or less ceased being called Niggertown. She’d been born in the past century on a long-gone-to-seed Tidewater plantation, the ninth daughter of ex-slaves and the thirteenth child born out of twenty, and to me it had always been a miracle that, having had no schooling, she had learned to read reasonably well and even to write, her scrawled messages possessing both a mannerist charm and a hilariously cryptic profundity. All of a sudden, staring into that lively wrinkled face, I was swept by two emotions in excruciating conflict: love, intense love for this sweet shepherdess of my childhood, and shame—shame that in the many months of my homecoming I had neglected to seek her out.
“I was three years in the Marine Corps, Flo,” I said. “They put some weight on a guy.”
“I heard you was a marine,” she replied. “Dat is some bunch of brave boys. Did you git yo’self hurt?”
“No,” I said, “nothing happened to me. But I was a long long way from home and I really got lonesome.”
“Did dey feed you good? Bet you didn’t get no fried chicken with giblet gravy like Flo used to fix you!” She grabbed my arm and squeezed it, with a tickled hoot. “When you was little you could tuck away mo’ fried chicken an’ rice than three grown-ups. Je-sus!”
“I kept dreaming of that chicken. I was on this island out in the Pacific called Saipan. Not a day went by that I didn’t think about your fried chicken.”
“How’s yo’ daddy?” she asked, and her eyes grew filmy and tender.
“Oh, he’s fine. Still working in the shipyard. Still keeping up the same old grind. He likes what he’s doing, you know, Flo. He loves his ships.”
“I misses Mr. Jeff. I misses yo’ daddy.” Her words gripped me with a feeling of loss, and also resentment. Once again—Isabel. For after my mother’s death Isabel’s arrival on the domestic scene had guaranteed Flo’s almost immediate exit; it was an abrupt vacuum that created in me near bereavement when, returning from boarding school one Thanksgiving, I discovered that my beloved mammy (if I dared use the obsolescent word) was banished forever. “A hopeless personality clash, Isabel versus Florence,” my father had explained, trying to comfort me. “Each of them just too set in their ways.”
Now I should have known better than to bring up her name. “He seems happy with Isabel, Flo. She knows how to take care of him.”
Flo glowered suddenly and there was acid in her voice. “Hmpf. Dat lady ain’t got no soul, chile. No soul at all. You lucky you was a marine.”
I changed the subject. “So what are you doing at the hospital?”
“Ise an attendant for de old folks,” she replied with a slight air of mockery. “I does de bedpans and I cleans up de barf. Dem old folks is always barfin’ everywhere. But I has to make some money. My two boys is over in Portsmouth at de navy yard, and dey gives me some money but it ain’t much.” As she spoke I felt pain at the thought of her comedown in dignity—the truly inspired culinary artist, the onetime chatelaine of a tiny but contented household brought so low, squatting on her hands and knees upon a grungy floor, swabbing up barf. “But I makes do,” she added.
“Well listen, Flo, I hope to see you sometime, I really do. I have thought of you so often and I just failed—” I broke off in embarrassment. “Maybe we could get together.”
“Oh Lawd, chile, I’d love to see you. Ise home every day excep’ de mornins. Same old house. I ain’t got nothin’ to do except listen to de radio. I loves my soap operas. Life Can Be Beautiful, Guidin’ Light, Right to Happiness, all of dem.” She gave a giggle. “Ise a soap opera fiend.”
I hugged her again and then she turned and was gone toward the hospital, leaving me in a fierce momentary tussle with anger and the blues and dealing with a crowd of memories. Then I gave thought again to my morning schedule.
Parked on the street outside the house was my father’s Pontiac. The car, which was at my disposal most of the time, was central to the routine I’d established for myself that summer. Most mornings I’d drive up to a pleasant neglected park on the James River, a quiet place where enormous hovering sycamores provided a dappled shade for some rickety but functional picnic tables. There in this nearly deserted space I’d sit with a yellow legal pad and a bunch of sharpened pencils and scribble away at what I deemed to be my “creative writing”; the awkward but heatedly felt short stories I was setting to paper were the result of the authorial virus I had contracted my first year in college, leaving me with a chronic fever that plainly was not about to subside. I’d been emboldened to further effort—no, it was sometimes a quiet delirium, so high were my hopes—by the not quite acceptance of a sketch I’d submitted to Story magazine, that paragon among short-fiction outlets, whose reader had appended to my rejection slip the electrifying postscript Do try us again! How intoxicating to me were the exclamation point and the imperative quality of that superfluous “do”; for days I repeated the words like a mantra. I took novels along with me—Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Cather, Wolfe. Alternating writing and reading made the mornings pass quickly, and there was always the mesmerizing prospect of the James, six miles wide here at its mouth and a river so much a part of an essential chapter of American history that even I, who all my young life had swum in it, sailed upon it, caught crabs in its shallows, even once nearly drowned beneath its brackish waves, could find myself freshly amazed at the fantasy it evoked.
There was scarcely a time, gazing out on that expanse (too sluggish and muddy to qualify as majestic but still a serious waterway), that the freighters and tankers lumbering upstream didn’t vanish before my sight and a single tiny vessel float into view: that Dutch galleon tacking against the wind, heading for Jamestown with its chained black cargo. In a classroom moment I would never forget I listened to Miss Thomas, our distant and opaque sixth-grade teacher, blurt out part of a history text (In 1619, known as the Red Letter Year at the new English settlement, a shipment of slaves arrived, transported from Africa …), never taking her eyes from the book, her voice a mechanical mumble, the bland-faced spinster completely oblivious of the great stream just outside the window which had borne this craft to its cosmic destination. Wasn’t it right out there? I called out suddenly, interrupting her, startling my classmates. Wasn’t what? she replied, startled too. The Dutch ship that brought the slaves. For an instant I’d seen it, the galleon, its cumbersome hull high in the stern, dingy, sails set, wallowing westward through the river’s undulant swells. Why yes, she said firmly, I suppose so. I suppose it was out there. She returned to her page, obviously annoyed. The kids whispered together, eyeing me suspiciously. I felt a sudden flush of embarrassment, wondering a
t the apparition on the river, and at the reckless, almost angry compulsion that had caused me to try to make my dull-witted teacher come alive to the spirit of the past spooking this ancient shoreline.
I couldn’t explain why, but Negroes and their teeming presence in my boyhood—the whole conundrum of color and slavery’s cruel bequest—had begun to absorb me, battering on my imagination and forcing me to express the mighty grip that black people had on my heart and mind, moving me to scratch it all down in the apprentice stories I sweated over day after summer day at the picnic table by the James. I had just embarked on a trip to Faulknerland—Light in August was my first exposure to his stormy rhetoric, and I was smitten. My God! I saw immediately how riven by the torment of race this writer must have been, from the very dawn of his life. He intimidated me with his talent, to the point of making me wince as I marveled at his incantatory rhythms; I knew I could never approximate his gifts, or the surging energy, but the great tragic themes he tackled—of race and mingled blood and the guilt imprinted on the souls of white southerners—were ones that challenged me, too.
I’d work for three or four hours on my raw little tales—about Lawrence, my favorite black barber, or the wisdom of Florence; or once, in an essay in horror far beyond my depth, about a lynching in North Carolina my father had witnessed as a boy—and then by early afternoon it would be time to call it quits. Time to collect my yellow sheets and my two dozen pencils worn down to the wood, to clean up the cigarette butts I’d left in a litter around the picnic table (compulsive tidiness—“policing the area”—fostered by the Marine Corps), to recap the thermos of coffee I always brought along to help jog up my brain cells—all this before driving downtown to the Palace Café for a bite to eat and the pleasure that was, quite simply, my greediest anticipation.
I loved the Palace Café. And I loved getting drunk there. Its therapy lay in the power of the four or five beers that I guzzled to ease, almost after the first half bottle, the racking misery of my time in the Pacific. That time was never entirely absent from my thoughts, creating a constant gripe in my psyche like a throbbing gut; the effect of a few swallows of the good suds was as analgesic as a shot of morphine. It was what the rustic folk of the Tidewater called a “high lonesome,” this daily bender of mine. It was a gentle, civilized bender, solitary, introspective, mildly (not maniacally) euphoric, and always cut short before the onset of confusion or incoherence. I prided myself on a certain drinker’s discipline.