“Goddammit! Say something, somebody!”
“I’m in,” Jack said again.
“I’ll go if the rest goes,” G.H. said.
Gus stood without speaking and Bigger felt a curious sensation—half-sensual, half-thoughtful. He was divided and pulled against himself. He had handled things just right so far; all but Gus had consented. The way things stood now there were three against Gus, and that was just as he had wanted it to be. Bigger was afraid of robbing a white man and he knew that Gus was afraid, too. Blum’s store was small and Blum was alone, but Bigger could not think of robbing him without being flanked by his three pals. But even with his pals he was afraid. He had argued all of his pals but one into consenting to the robbery, and toward the lone man who held out he felt a hot hate and fear; he had transferred his fear of the whites to Gus. He hated Gus because he knew that Gus was afraid, as even he was; and he feared Gus because he felt that Gus would consent and then he would be compelled to go through with the robbery. Like a man about to shoot himself and dreading to shoot and yet knowing that he has to shoot and feeling it all at once and powerfully, he watched Gus and waited for him to say yes. But Gus did not speak. Bigger’s teeth clamped so tight that his jaws ached. He edged toward Gus, not looking at Gus, but feeling the presence of Gus over all his body, through him, in and out of him, and hating himself and Gus because he felt it. Then he could not stand it any longer. The hysterical tensity of his nerves urged him to speak, to free himself. He faced Gus, his eyes red with anger and fear, his fists clenched and held stiffly to his sides.
“You black sonofabitch,” he said in a voice that did not vary in tone. “You scared ’cause he’s a white man.”
“Don’t cuss me, Bigger,” Gus said quietly.
“I am cussing you!”
“You don’t have to cuss me,” Gus said.
“Then why don’t you use that black tongue of yours?” Bigger asked. “Why don’t you say what you going to do?”
“I don’t have to use my tongue unless I want to!”
“You bastard! You scared bastard!”
“You ain’t my boss,” Gus said.
“You yellow!” Bigger said. “You scared to rob a white man.”
“Aw, Bigger. Don’t say that,” G.H. said. “Leave ’im alone.”
“He’s yellow,” Bigger said. “He won’t go with us.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t go,” Gus said.
“Then, for Chrissakes, say what you going to do,” Bigger said.
Gus leaned on his cue stick and gazed at Bigger and Bigger’s stomach tightened as though he were expecting a blow and were getting ready for it. His fists clenched harder. In a split second he felt how his fist and arm and body would feel if he hit Gus squarely in the mouth, drawing blood; Gus would fall and he would walk out and the whole thing would be over and the robbery would not take place. And his thinking and feeling in this way made the choking tightness rising from the pit of his stomach to his throat slacken a little.
“You see, Bigger,” began Gus in a tone that was a compromise between kindness and pride. “You see, Bigger, you the cause of all the trouble we ever have. It’s your hot temper. Now, how come you want to cuss me? Ain’t I got a right to make up my mind? Naw: that ain’t your way. You start cussing. You say I’m scared. It’s you who’s scared. You scared I’m going to say yes and you’ll have to go through with the job….”
“Say that again! Say that again and I’ll take one of these balls and sink it in your Goddamn mouth,” Bigger said, his pride wounded to the quick.
“Aw, for Chrissakes,” Jack said.
“You see how he is,” Gus said.
“Why don’t you say what you going to do?” Bigger demanded.
“Aw, I’m going with you-all,” Gus said in a nervous tone that sought to hide itself; a tone that hurried on to other things. “I’m going, but Bigger don’t have to act like that. He don’t have to cuss me.”
“Why didn’t you say that at first?” Bigger asked; his anger amounted almost to frenzy. “You make a man want to sock you!”
“…I’ll help on the haul,” Gus continued, as though Bigger had not spoken. “I’ll help just like I always help. But I’ll be Goddamn if I’m taking orders from you, Bigger! You just a scared coward! You calling me scared so nobody’ll see how scared you is!”
Bigger leaped at him, but Jack ran between them. G.H. caught Gus’s arm and led him aside.
“Who’s asking you to take orders?” Bigger said. “I never want to give orders to a piss-sop like you!”
“You boys cut out that racket back there!” Doc called.
They stood silently about the pool table. Bigger’s eyes followed Gus as Gus put his cue stick in the rack and brushed chalk dust from his trousers and walked a little distance away. Bigger’s stomach burned and a hazy black cloud hovered a moment before his eyes, and left. Mixed images of violence ran like sand through his mind, dry and fast, vanishing. He could stab Gus with his knife; he could slap him; he could kick him; he could trip him up and send him sprawling on his face. He could do a lot of things to Gus for making him feel this way.
“Come on, G.H.,” Gus said.
“Where we going?”
“Let’s walk.”
“O.K.”
“What we gonna do?” Jack asked. “Meet here at three?”
“Sure,” Bigger said. “Didn’t we just decide?”
“I’ll be here,” Gus said, with his back turned.
When Gus and G.H. had gone Bigger sat down and felt cold sweat on his skin. It was planned now and he would have to go through with it. His teeth gritted and the last image he had seen of Gus going through the door lingered in his mind. He could have taken one of the cue sticks and gripped it hard and swung it at the back of Gus’s head, feeling the impact of the hard wood cracking against the bottom of the skull. The tight feeling was still in him and he knew that it would remain until they were actually doing the job, until they were in the store taking the money.
“You and Gus sure don’t get along none,” Jack said, shaking his head.
Bigger turned and looked at Jack; he had forgotten that Jack was still there.
“Aw, that yellow black bastard,” Bigger said.
“He’s all right,” Jack said.
“He’s scared,” Bigger said. “To make him ready for a job, you have to make him scared two ways. You have to make him more scared of what’ll happen to him if he don’t do the job than of what’ll happen to him if he pulls the job.”
“If we going to Blum’s today, we oughtn’t fuss like this,” Jack said. “We got a job on our hands, a real job.”
“Sure. Sure, I know,” Bigger said.
Bigger felt an urgent need to hide his growing and deepening feeling of hysteria; he had to get rid of it or else he would succumb to it. He longed for a stimulus powerful enough to focus his attention and drain off his energies. He wanted to run. Or listen to some swing music. Or laugh or joke. Or read a Real Detective Story Magazine. Or go to a movie. Or visit Bessie. All that morning he had lurked behind his curtain of indifference and looked at things, snapping and glaring at whatever had tried to make him come out into the open. But now he was out; the thought of the job at Blum’s and the tilt he had had with Gus had snared him into things and his self-trust was gone. Confidence could only come again now through action so violent that it would make him forget. These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger—like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible force. Being this way was a need of his as deep as eating. He was like a strange plant blooming in the day and wilting at night; but the sun that made it bloom and the cold darkness that made it wilt were never seen. It was his own sun and darkness, a private and personal sun and darkness. He was bitterly proud of his swiftly changing moods and boasted when he had to suffer the results of them. It was the way he was, he would s
ay; he could not help it, he would say, and his head would wag. And it was his sullen stare and the violent action that followed that made Gus and Jack and G.H. hate and fear him as much as he hated and feared himself.
“Where you want to go?” Jack asked. “I’m tired of setting.”
“Let’s walk,” Bigger said.
They went to the front door. Bigger paused and looked round the poolroom with a wild and exasperated expression, his lips tightening with resolution.
“Goin’?” Doc asked, not moving his head.
“Yeah,” Bigger said.
“See you later,” Jack said.
They walked along the street in the morning sunshine. They waited leisurely at corners for cars to pass; it was not that they feared cars, but they had plenty of time. They reached South Parkway smoking freshly lit cigarettes.
“I’d like to see a movie,” Bigger said.
“Trader Horn’s running again at the Regal. They’re bringing a lot of old pictures back.”
“How much is it?”
“Twenty cents.”
“O.K. Let’s see it.”
They walked six blocks in silence. It was eleven-thirty when they reached Forty-seventh Street and South Parkway and the Regal was just opening. They bought tickets and walked into the darkened movie and took seats. The picture had not yet started and they sat listening to the pipe organ playing low and soft. Bigger moved restlessly and his breath quickened; he looked round in the shadows to see if any attendant was near, then slouched far down in his seat. He glanced at Jack and saw that Jack was watching him out of the corners of his eyes. They both laughed.
“You at it again?” Jack asked.
“I’m polishing my nightstick,” Bigger said.
They giggled.
“I’ll beat you,” Jack said.
“Go to hell.”
The organ played for a long moment on a single note, then died away.
“I’ll bet you ain’t even hard yet,” Jack whispered.
“I’m getting hard.”
“Mine’s like a rod,” Jack said with intense pride.
“I wished I had Bessie here now,” Bigger said.
“I could make old Clara moan now.”
They sighed.
“I believe that woman who passed saw us.”
“So what?”
“If she comes back I’ll throw it in her.”
“You a killer.”
“If she saw it she’d faint.”
“Or grab it, maybe.”
“Yeah.”
Bigger saw Jack lean forward and stretch out his legs, rigidly.
“You gone?”
“Yee-eeah….”
“You pull off fast….”
Again they were silent. Then Bigger leaned forward, breathing hard.
“I’m gone…. God…. damn….”
They sat still for five minutes, slumped down in their seats. Finally, they straightened.
“I don’t know where to put my feet now,” Bigger said, laughing. “Let’s take another seat.”
“O.K.”
They moved to other seats. The organ still played. Now and then they glanced back up to the projector’s room high in the rear of the theatre. They were impatient for the picture to start. When they spoke again their voices were throaty, drawling, tinged with uneasiness.
“You reckon it’ll go all right?” Bigger asked.
“Maybe.”
“I’d just as soon go to jail as take that relief job.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I don’t give a damn.”
“Let’s think about how we’ll do it, not about how we’ll get caught.”
“Scared?”
“Hell, naw.”
They listened to the pipe organ. It was humming so low that it could scarcely be heard. There were times when it seemed to stop altogether; then it would surge forth again, mellow, nostalgic, sweet.
“We better take our guns this time,” Bigger said.
“O.K. But we gotta be careful. We don’t wanna kill nobody.”
“Yeah, but I’ll feel safer with a gun this time.”
“Gee, I wished it was three now. I wished it was over.”
“Me too.”
The organ stopped and the screen flashed with the rhythm of moving shadows. Bigger sat looking at the first picture; it was a newsreel. As the scenes unfolded his interest was caught and he leaned forward. He saw images of smiling, dark-haired white girls lolling on the gleaming sands of a beach. The background was a stretch of sparkling water. Palm trees stood near and far. The voice of the commentator ran with the movement of the film: Here are the daughters of the rich taking sunbaths in the sands of Florida! This little collection of debutantes represents over four billion dollars of America’s wealth and over fifty of America’s leading families….
“Some babies,” Jack said.
“Yeah, man!”
“I’d like to be there.”
“You can,” Bigger said. “But you’d be hanging from a tree like a bunch of bananas….”
They laughed softly and easily, listening to the commentator’s voice. The scene shifted to and fro over the glittering sands. Then Bigger saw in close-up the picture of a slight, smiling white girl whose waist was encircled by the arms of a man. He heard the commentator’s voice: Mary Dalton, daughter of Chicago’s Henry Dalton, 4605 Drexel Boulevard, shocks society by spurning the boys of La Salle Street and the Gold Coast and accepting the attentions of a well-known radical while on her recent winter vacation in Florida…. The close-up showed the smiling girl kissing the man, who lifted her up and swung her round from the camera.
“Say, Jack?”
“Hunh?”
“That gal…. That gal there in that guy’s arms…. That’s the daughter of the guy I’m going to work for. They live at 4605 Drexel…. That’s where I’m going tonight to see about that job….”
“For real?”
“Sure!”
The close-up faded and the next scene showed only the girl’s legs running over the sparkling sands; they were followed by the legs of the man running in pursuit. The words droned on: Ha! He’s after her! There! He’s got her! Oh, boy, don’t you wish you were down here in Florida? The close-up faded and another came, showing two pairs of legs standing close together. Oh, boy! said the voice. Slowly, the girl’s legs strained upward until only the tips of her toes touched the sand. Ah, the naughty rich! There was a slow fade-out, while the commentator’s voice ran on: Shortly after a scene like this, shocked Mama and Papa Dalton summoned Mary home by wire from her winter vacation and denounced her Communist friend.
“Say, Jack?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s a Communist?”
“Damn if I know. It’s a race of people who live in Russia, ain’t it?”
“That guy who was kissing old man Dalton’s daughter was a Communist and her folks didn’t like it.”
“Rich people don’t like Communists.”
“She was a hot-looking number, all right.”
“Sure,” said Jack. “When you start working there you gotta learn to stand in with her. Then you can get everything you want, see? These rich folks do their dirt on the sly. I bet the reason the old man was so mad about that Communist was ’cause his gal was too open about it….”
“Yeah; maybe so,” said Bigger.
“Shucks, my ma use to work for rich white folks and you ought to hear the tales she used to tell….”
“What kind of tales?” Bigger asked eagerly.
“Ah, them rich white women’ll go to bed with anybody, from a poodle on up. They even have their chauffeurs. Say,” Jack said, punching Bigger in the ribs, “if you run across anything too much for you to handle at that place, let me know.”
They laughed. Bigger turned his eyes to the screen, but he did not look. He was filled with a sense of excitement about his new job. Was what he had heard about rich white people really true? Was he going to work for people l
ike you saw in the movies? If he were, then he’d see a lot of things from the inside; he’d get the dope, the low-down. He looked at Trader Horn unfold and saw pictures of naked black men and women whirling in wild dances and heard drums beating and then gradually the African scene changed and was replaced by images in his own mind of white men and women dressed in black and white clothes, laughing, talking, drinking and dancing. Those were smart people; they knew how to get hold of money, millions of it. Maybe if he were working for them something would happen and he would get some of it. He would see just how they did it. Sure, it was all a game and white people knew how to play it. And rich white people were not so hard on Negroes; it was the poor whites who hated Negroes. They hated Negroes because they didn’t have their share of the money. His mother had always told him that rich white people liked Negroes better than they did poor whites. He felt that if he were a poor white and did not get his share of the money, then he would deserve to be kicked. Poor white people were stupid. It was the rich white people who were smart and knew how to treat people. He remembered hearing somebody tell a story of a Negro chauffeur who had married a rich white girl and the girl’s family had shipped the couple out of the country and had supplied them with money.
Yes, his going to work for the Daltons was something big. Mr. Dalton was a millionaire. Maybe Mary Dalton was a hot kind of girl; maybe she spent lots of money; maybe she’d like to come to the South Side and see the sights sometimes. Or maybe she had a secret sweetheart and only he would know about it because he would have to drive her around; maybe she would give him money not to tell.
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