SECOND PART
THE RAILROAD
X
OVER the heart of the vast gray Pennsylvania country the huge black animal snorted and roared, with sounding rods and couplings, pulling a long chain of dull-brown boxes packed with people and things, trailing on the blue-cold air its white masses of breath.
Hell was playing in the hot square hole of a pantry and the coffin-shaped kitchen of the dining-car. The short, stout, hard-and-horny chef was terrible as a rhinoceros. Against the second, third, and fourth cooks he bellied his way up to the little serving door and glared at the waiters. His tough, aproned front was a challenge to them. In his oily, shining face his big white eyes danced with meanness. All the waiters had squeezed into the pantry at once, excitedly snatching, dropping and breaking things.
“Hey, you there! You mule!”1 The chef shouted at the fourth waiter. “Who told you to snitch that theah lamb chops outa the hole?”
“I done think they was the one I ordered ——”
“Done think some hell, you down-home black fool. Ain’t no thinking to be done on here ——”
“Chef, ain’t them chops ready yet?” a waiter asked.
“Don’t rush me, nigger,” the chef bellowed back. “Wha’ yu’all trying to do? Run me up a tree? Kain’t run this here chef up no tree. Jump off ef you kain’t ride him.” His eyes gleamed with grim humor. “Jump off or lay down. This heah white man’s train service ain’t no nigger picnic.”
The second cook passed up a platter of chops. The chef rushed it through the hole and licked his fingers.
“There you is, yaller. Take it away. Why ain’t you gone yet? Show me some service, yaller, show me some service.” He rocked his thick, tough body sideways in a sort of dance, licked the sweat from his brow with his forefinger and grunted with aggressive self-satisfaction. Then he bellied his way back to the range and sent the third cook up to the serving window.
“Tha’s the stuff to hand them niggers,” he told the third cook. “Keep ’em up a tree all the time, but don’t let ’em get you up there.”
Jake, for he was the third cook, took his place by the window and handed out the orders. It was his first job on the railroad, but from the first day he managed his part perfectly. He rubbed smoothly along with the waiters by remaining himself and not trying to imitate the chef nor taking his malicious advice.
Jake had taken the job on the railroad just to break the hold that Harlem had upon him. When he quitted Rose he felt that he ought to get right out of the atmosphere of Harlem. If I don’t git away from it for a while, it’ll sure git me, he mused. But not ship-and-port-town life again. I done had enough a that here and ovah there. . . . So he had picked the railroad. One or two nights a week in Harlem. And all the days on the road. He would go on like that until he grew tired of that rhythm. . . .
The rush was over. Everything was quiet. The corridors of the dining-car were emptied of their jam of hungry, impatient guests. The “mule” had scrubbed the slats of the pantry and set them up to dry. The other waiters had put away silver and glasses and soiled linen. The steward at his end of the car was going over the checks. Even the kitchen work was finished and the four cooks had left their coffin for the good air of the dining-room. They sat apart from the dining-room boys. The two grades, cooks and waiters, never chummed together, except for gambling. Some of the waiters were very haughty. There were certain light-skinned ones who went walking with pals of their complexion only in the stop-over cities. Others, among the older men, were always dignified. They were fathers of families, their wives moved in some sphere of Harlem society, and their movements were sometimes chronicled in the local Negro newspapers.
Sitting at one of the large tables, four of the waiters were playing poker. Jake wanted to join them, but he had no money. One waiter sat alone at a small table. He was reading. He was of average size, slim, a smooth pure ebony with straight features and a suggestion of whiskers. Jake shuffled up to him and asked him for the loan of two dollars. He got it and went to play. . . .
Jake finished playing with five dollars. He repaid the waiter and said: “Youse a good sport. I’ll always look out for you in that theah hole.”
The waiter smiled. He was very friendly. Jake half-sprawled over the table. “Wha’s this here stuff you reading? Looks lak Greek to me.” He spelled the title, “S-A-P-H-O, Sapho.”
“What’s it all about?” Jake demanded, flattening down the book on the table with his friendly paw. The waiter was reading the scene between Fanny and Jean when the lover discovers the letters of his mistress’s former woman friend and exclaims: “Ah Oui . . . Sapho . . . toute la lyre. . . .”
“It’s a story,” he told Jake, “by a French writer named Alphonse Daudet. It’s about a sporting woman who was beautiful like a rose and had the soul of a wandering cat. Her lovers called her Sapho. I like the story, but I hate the use of Sapho for its title.”
“Why does you?” Jake asked.
“Because Sappho was a real person. A wonderful woman, a great Greek poet ——”
“So theah is some Greek in the book!” said Jake.
The waiter smiled. “In a sense, yes.”
And he told Jake the story of Sappho, of her poetry, of her loves and her passion for the beautiful boy, Phaon. And of her leaping into the sea from the Leucadian cliff because of her love for him.
“Her story gave two lovely words to modern language,” said the waiter.
“Which one them?” asked Jake.
“Sapphic and Lesbian . . . beautiful words.”
“What is that there Leshbian?”
“. . . Lovely word, eh?”
“Tha’s what we calls bulldyker in Harlem,” drawled Jake. “Them’s all ugly womens.”
“Not all. And that’s a damned ugly name,” the waiter said. “Harlem is too savage about some things. Bulldyker,” the waiter stressed with a sneer.
Jake grinned. “But tha’s what they is, ain’t it?”
He began humming:
“And there is two things in Harlem I don’t understan’ It is a bulldyking woman and a faggoty man. . . .”
Charmingly, like a child that does not know its letters, Jake turned the pages of the novel. . . .
“Bumbole! This heah language is most different from how they talk it.”
“Bumbole” was now a popular expletive for Jake, replacing such expressions as “Bull,” “bawls,” “walnuts,” and “blimey.” Ever since the night at the Congo when he heard the fighting West Indian girl cry, “I’ll slap you bumbole,” he had always used the word. When his friends asked him what it meant, he grinned and said, “Ask the monks.”
“You know French?” the waiter asked.
“Parlee-vous? Mademoiselle, un baiser, s’il vous plait. Voilà! I larned that much offn the froggies.”
“So you were over there?”
“Au oui, camarade,” Jake beamed. “I was way, way ovah there after Democracy and them boches, and when I couldn’t find one or the other, I jest turned mah black moon from the A. E. F. . . . But you! How come you jest plowing through this here stuff lak that? I could nevah see no light at all in them print, chappie. Eh bien. Mais vous compris beaucoup.”
“C’est ma langue maternelle.”
“Hm!” Jake made a face and scratched his head. “Comprendre pas, chappie. Tell me in straight United States.”
“French is my native language. I ——”
“Don’t crap me,” Jake interrupted. “Ain’tchu—ain’tchu one of us, too?”
“Of course I’m Negro,” the waiter said, “but I was born in Hayti and the language down there is French.”
“Hayti . . . Hayti,” repeated Jake. “Tha’s where now? Tha’s ——”
“An island in the Caribbean—near the Panama Canal.”
Jake sat like a big eager boy and learned many facts about Hayti before the train reached Pittsburgh. He learned that the universal spirit of the French Revolution had reached and lifted up the slaves far
away in that remote island; that Black Hayti’s independence was more dramatic and picturesque than the United States’ independence and that it was a strange, almost unimaginable eruption of the beautiful ideas of the “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” of Mankind, that shook the foundations of that romantic era.
For the first time he heard the name Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black slave and leader of the Haytian slaves. Heard how he fought and conquered the slave-owners and then protected them; decreed laws for Hayti that held more of human wisdom and nobility than the Code Napoleon; defended his baby revolution against the Spanish and the English vultures; defeated Napoleon’s punitive expedition; and how tragically he was captured by a civilized trick, taken to France, and sent by Napoleon to die broken-hearted in a cold dungeon.
“A black man! A black man! Oh, I wish I’d been a soldier under sich a man!” Jake said, simply.
He plied his instructor with questions. Heard of Dessalines, who carried on the fight begun by Toussaint L’Ouverture and kept Hayti independent. But it was incredible to Jake that a little island of freed slaves had withstood the three leading European powers. The waiter told him that Europe was in a complex state of transition then, and that that wonderful age had been electrified with universal ideas—ideas so big that they had lifted up ignorant people, even black, to the stature of gods.
“The world doesn’t know,” he continued, “how great Toussaint L’Ouverture really was. He was not merely great. He was lofty. He was good. The history of Hayti today might have been different if he had been allowed to finish his work. He was honored by a great enigmatic poet of that period. And I honor both Toussaint and the poet by keeping in my memory the wonderful, passionate lines.”
He quoted Wordsworth’s sonnet.
“Toussaint, the most unhappy Man of Men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;—
Oh miserable Chieftain! Where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen Thyself never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee, air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and Man’s unconquerable Mind.”
Jake felt like one passing through a dream, vivid in rich, varied colors. It was revelation beautiful in his mind. That brief account of an island of savage black people, who fought for collective liberty and was struggling to create a culture of their own. A romance of his race, just down there by Panama. How strange!
Jake was very American in spirit and shared a little of that comfortable Yankee contempt for poor foreigners. And as an American Negro he looked askew at foreign niggers. Africa was jungle, and Africans bush niggers, cannibals. And West Indians were monkey-chasers. But now he felt like a boy who stands with the map of the world in colors before him, and feels the wonder of the world.
The waiter told him that Africa was not jungle as he dreamed of it, nor slavery the peculiar rôle of black folk. The Jews were the slaves of the Egyptians, the Greeks made slaves of their conquered, the Gauls and Saxons were slaves of the Romans. He told Jake of the old destroyed cultures of West Africa and of their vestiges, of black kings who struggled stoutly for the independence of their kingdoms: Prempreh of Ashanti, Tofa of Dahomey, Gbehanzin of Benin, Cetawayo of Zulu-Land, Menelik of Abyssinia. . . .
Had Jake ever heard of the little Republic of Liberia, founded by American Negroes? And Abyssinia, deep-set in the shoulder of Africa, besieged by the hungry wolves of Europe? The only nation that has existed free and independent from the earliest records of history until today! Abyssinia, oldest unconquered nation, ancient-strange as Egypt, persistent as Palestine, legendary as Greece, magical as Persia.
There was the lovely legend of her queen who visited the court of the Royal Rake of Jerusalem, and how he fell in love with her. And her beautiful black body made the Sage so lyrical, he immortalized her in those wonderful pagan verses that are sacred to the hearts of all lovers—even the heart of the Church. . . . The catty ladies of the court of Jerusalem were jealous of her. And Sheba reminded them that she was black but beautiful. . . . And after a happy period she left Jerusalem and returned to her country with the son that came of the royal affair. And that son subsequently became King of Abyssinia. And to this day the rulers of Abyssinia carry the title, Lion of Judah, and trace their descent direct from the liaison of the Queen of Sheba with King Solomon.
First of Christian nations also is the claim of this little kingdom! Christian since the time when Philip, the disciple of Jesus, met and baptized the minister of the Queen of Abyssinia and he returned to his country and converted the court and people to Christianity.
Jake listened, rapt, without a word of interruption.
“All the ancient countries have been yielding up the buried secrets of their civilizations,” the waiter said. “I wonder what Abyssinia will yield in her time? Next to the romance of Hayti, because it is my native country, I should love to write the romance of Abyssinia . . . Ethiopia.”
“Is that theah country the same Ethiopia that we done l’arned about in the Bible?” asked Jake.
“The same. The Latin peoples still call it Ethiopia.”
“Is you a professor?”
“No, I’m a student.”
“Whereat? Where did you l’arn English?”
“Well, I learned English home in Portau-Prince. And I was at Howard. You know the Negro university at Washington. Haven’t even finished there yet.”
“Then what in the name of mah holy rabbit foot youse doing on this heah white man’s chuh-chuh? It ain’t no place foh no student. It seems to me you’ place down there sounds a whole lot better.”
“Uncle Sam put me here.”
“Whadye mean Uncle Sam?” cried Jake. “Don’t hand me that bull.”
“Let me tell you about it,” the waiter said. “Maybe you don’t know that during the World War Uncle Sam grabbed Hayti. My father was an official down there. He didn’t want Uncle Sam in Hayti and he said so and said it loud. They told him to shut up and he wouldn’t, so they shut him up in jail. My brother also made a noise and American marines killed him in the street. I had nobody to pay for me at the university, so I had to get out and work. Voilà!”
“And you ain’t gwine to study no moh?”
“Never going to stop. I study now all the same when I get a little time. Every free day I have in New York I spend at the library downtown. I read there and I write.”
Jake shook his head. “This heah work is all right for me, but for a chappie like you. . . . Do you like waiting on them ofays? ’Sall right working longshore or in a kitchen as I does it, but to be rubbing up against them and bowing so nice and all a that. . . .”
“It isn’t so bad,” the waiter said. “Most of them are pretty nice. Last trip I waited on a big Southern Senator. He was perfectly gentlemanly and tipped me half a dollar. When I have the blues I read Dr. Frank Crane.”
Jake didn’t understand, but he spat and said a stinking word. The chef called him to do something in the kitchen.
“Leave that theah professor and his nonsense,” the chef said. . . .
The great black animal whistled sharply and puff-puffed slowly into the station of Pittsburgh.
1 The fourth waiter on the railroad is nick-named “mule” because he works under the orders of the pantry-man.
SNOWSTORM IN PITTSBURGH
XI
IN THE middle of the little bridge built over the railroad crossing he was suddenly enveloped in a thick mass of smoke spouted out by an in-rushing train. That was Jake’s first impression of Pittsburgh. He stepped off the bridg
e into a saloon. From there along a dull-gray street of grocery and fruit shops and piddling South-European children. Then he was on Wiley Avenue, the long, gray, uphill street.
Brawny bronze men in coal-blackened and oil-spotted blue overalls shadowed the door-ways of saloons, pool-rooms, and little basement restaurants. The street was animated with dark figures going up, going down. Houses and men, women, and squinting cats and slinking dogs, everything seemed touched with soot and steel dust.
“So this heah is the niggers’ run,” said Jake. “I don’t like its ’pearance, nohow.” He walked down the street and remarked a bouncing little chestnut-brown standing smartly in the entrance of a basement eating-joint. She wore a knee-length yellow-patterned muslin frock and a white-dotted blue apron. The apron was a little longer than the frock. Her sleeves were rolled up. Her arms were beautiful, like smooth burninshed bars of copper.
Jake stopped and said, “Howdy!”
“Howdy again!” the girl flashed a row of perfect teeth at him.
“Got a bite of anything good?”
“I should say so, Mister Ma-an.”
She rolled her eyes and worked her hips into delightful free-and-easy motions. Jake went in. He was not hungry for food. He looked at a large dish half filled with tapioca pudding. He turned to the pie-case on the counter.
“The peach pie is the best,” said the girl, her bare elbow on the counter; “it’s fresh.” She looked straight in his eyes. “All right, I’ll try peach,” he said, and, magnetically, his long, shining fingers touched her hand. . . .
In the evening he found the Haytian waiter at the big Wiley Avenue pool-room. Quite different from the pool-rooms in Harlem, it was a sort of social center for the railroad men and the more intelligent black workmen of the quarter. Tobacco, stationery, and odds and ends were sold in the front part of the store. There was a table where customers sat and wrote letters. And there were pretty chocolate dolls and pictures of Negroid types on sale. Curious, pathetic pictures; black Madonna and child; a kinky-haired mulatto angel with African lips and Nordic nose, soaring on a white cloud up to heaven; Jesus blessing a black child and a white one; a black shepherd carrying a white lamb—all queerly reminiscent of the crude prints of the great Christian paintings that are so common in poor religious homes.
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