The Intruder

by Charles Beaumont

  After what seemed like hours, Joey, Joseph Dupuy, and Archie Vaughan were seated in a large, green room. It smelled of dust and chalk, very much the way the room at Lincoln High had smelled. At the front was the teacher’s desk, and behind it, the large blackboard—now hopelessly gray. Battered erasers lay on their five felt spines, along with new chalk. There was a bowl of flowers on a table by the window, which was open.

  The teacher rose and smiled at the group. Joey tried not to think of the others, of the white children, or even of his situation; he looked ahead, trying to force everything but the first day at school from his head. He sat at attention.

  “I am Miss Angoff,” the teacher said, in a rather high-pitched voice. “You will learn English in this room, which will also serve as your base of operations, so to speak. Will those of you who have been with me previously please raise your hands?”

  There was a showing of hands.

  “Those who are new? Your hands, please?”

  Joey raised his; Archie and Joseph followed suit. There were seven others.

  “Now may I have your names? Beginning with the first row, left.”

  The new students spoke their names: Edward Haycraft, Julius Matthews, Neil Jay Hummert, Lucy Egan, George Lee Robinson, Ina Peters, Archibald Vaughan, Daniel Humboldt, Joseph Dupuy (“Doo-pwee,” he said, carefully; and there was a ripple of laughter), Joseph Green.

  “I am very glad to meet you,” Miss Angoff said. “I hope you’ll be glad to have met me.” She took great care not to gaze at any student in particular. “I think we have a mutual obligation, class—and those of you who have heard this little speech will, I hope, bear with me. I mean to say, you all expect certain things of me. You expect me to be a good teacher, to know my subject, to express myself in such a way that you will all learn. On the other hand, I expect you to be good students. You’re young, as I once was, and attention tends to wander, I know; therefore, I don’t require you to concentrate solely on your lessons. That would be asking too much.”

  Another ripple of laughter—nervous, dutiful.

  “However,” the teacher went on, “I do think I have a right to expect the very best you’re capable of. Whatever you may have thought about English up to now, however deadly dull you may have considered it, I think you’re going to change your minds. For I happen to believe that English is not only one of the most important subjects in the world, but also—”

  “Niggers get the hell out!”

  The voice filtered in sharply through the open window. Miss Angoff stiffened, but went on. Joey watched her.

  “Sentence construction will be abandoned in this course, and we will instead concentrate on—”

  “Harley Paton’s a no-good nigger-lovin son of a bitch!”

  Miss Angoff paused; then, calmly, she walked to the window, closed it, and returned to her place by the desk.

  Her voice was a bit strained now, and forced. “We will concentrate instead on usage. Correct usage.”

  Joey gripped the edge of the desk and said nothing. His blood was on fire, but he said nothing.

  If this woman could control herself, so could he.

  For a while, anyway. . . .

  Tom McDaniel returned to the Messenger office in a hurry. He opened the door and walked over to the old man who’d worked in the building as long as there had been a building.

  “Jack.”

  The room looked more like a stationery store than a news­paper office. There were two glass display cases, each containing pen and pencil sets, erasers, maps of the town, rulers, typewriters. Tom’s den was in a small room to the right. The secretaries worked behind the store.

  “You have a customer this morning?” Tom asked.

  Jack Allardyce looked up. “What?”

  “Did you have a customer today?”

  “Yeah. Young fella. He was waiting when I opened.”

  “Young fella. With dark hair, a dark suit on?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “What’d he buy?”

  “Why—some poster paper, I think. Yes. And some ink. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Tom said. He wheeled and walked quickly into his den.

  He moved the mountainous debris on his desk aside, inserted a yellow sheet of paper into the typewriter, and thought for a moment. Then he typed: The Way We Look At It. And paused again.

  He ripped the paper out, spinning the platen, and crushed it into a yellow ball in his hands.

  He lit a cigarette.

  Calm down, he told himself. What are you getting so excited about? You expected a display, didn’t you? A bigger one than this. It was perfectly orderly, wasn’t it?

  Calm down.

  Just a little reaction, nothing else to it. Never write when you’re mad. Think things out. Then write.

  Everything’s fine. . . .

  In a short while he was breathing regularly again. Then Jack Allardyce poked his thatched head in. “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “What? Oh. A little shouting, that’s all. It went all right.”

  “It did, huh? I’ll be damned.”

  The old man stood poised between rooms. “You gonna want to send me to that meeting tonight?” he said. “Or what?”

  “Meeting?”

  “Yeah, you know, that fella—he’s holding some kind of a thing in front of the courthouse, seven o’clock. Don’t know what it’s about.”

  Tom reached for his cigarette. He stubbed it out against the side of the metal wastebasket, took a breath.

  “Well,” he said, slowly, “it probably won’t amount to a damn thing. But I don’t have much to do tonight. I’ll cover it myself.”

  10

  When the bell in the steeple rang to mark the half hour that had passed since six p.m., Caxton wore the same tired face that it always wore in the summer. The heat of the afternoon throbbed on. Cars moved up and down George Street like painted turtles, and the people moved slowly, too: all afraid of the motion that would send the perspiration coursing, the heart flying.

  Adam Cramer sat in the far booth at Joan’s Cafe, feeling grateful for the heat, trying to eat the soggy ham sandwich he had ordered. He knew the effect of heat on the emotions of people: Summer had a magic to it, a magic way of frying the nerve ends, boiling the blood, drying the brain. Perhaps it made no sense logically but it was true, nonetheless. Crimes of violence occurred with far greater frequency in hot climates than in cold. You would find more murders, more robberies, more kidnapings, more unrest in the summer than at any other time.

  It was the season of mischief, the season of slow movements and sudden explosions, the season of violence.

  Adam looked out at the street, then at the thermometer that hung behind the cash register. He could see the line of red reaching almost to the top.

  How would The Man on Horseback have fared, he wondered, if it had been twenty below zero?

  How would Gerald L. K. go over in Alaska?

  He pulled his sweat-stained shirt away from his body and smiled. Even the weather was helping him!

  He forced the last of the sandwich down, slid a quarter beneath the plate, and paid for his meal; then he went outside.

  It was a furnace.

  A dark, quiet furnace.

  He started for the courthouse, regretting only that Max Blake could not be here. Seeing his old teacher in the crowd, those dark eyes snapping with angry pleasure, that cynical mouth twitching at the edges—damn!

  Well, I’ll write you about it, he thought. That’ll be almost as good.

  The picture of the man who had set his mind free blurred and vanished and Adam walked faster.

  The Reverend Lorenzo Niesen was the first to arrive. His felt hat was sodden, the inner band caked with filth; his suspenders hung loosely over his two-dollar striped shirt; his trousers were shapeless—yet he was proud of his appearance, and it was a vicious, thrusting pride. Were someone to hand him a check for five thousand dollars, he would not alter any part of his attire. It was country-hone
st, as he himself was. Whoever despised dirt despised likewise the common people, God’s favorites.

  Was there soap in Bethlehem?

  Did the Apostles have nail files and lotions?

  He sat down on the grass, glared at the bright lights of the Reo motion picture theatre across the street, and began to fan himself with his hat. Little strands of silver hair lifted and fell, lifted and fell, as he fanned.

  At six thirty-five, Bart Carey and Phillip Dongen appeared. They nodded at Lorenzo and sat down near him.

  “Well, it’s hot.”

  Others drifted into the area, some singly, some in groups.

  “Hot!”

  By six forty, over one hundred and fifty residents of Caxton were standing on the cement walk or sitting on the grass, waiting.

  “You see ’em this morning?”

  Fifty more showed up in the next ten minutes.

  “Christ, yes.”

  At seven a bell was struck and a number of cars screeched, halted, discharging teen-age children. They crowded at the steps of the courthouse.

  It was quiet.

  Ten minutes passed. Then, a young man in a dark suit walked across the empty street. He nodded at the people, made his way through the aisle that parted for him, and climbed to the top step. He stood there with his back to the courthouse door.

  “That him?” Phil Dongen whispered.

  Bart Carey said, “Yeah.”

  Lorenzo Niesen was silent. He studied the young man, trying to decide whether or not he approved. Awful green, he thought. Too good of a clothes on him. Like as not a Northerner.

  I don’t know.

  The crowd’s voice rose to a murmuring, then fell again as the young man in the dark suit lifted his hands in the air.

  “Folks,” he said, in a soft, almost gentle voice, “my name is Adam Cramer. Some of you know me by now and you know what I’m here for. To those I haven’t had a chance to talk with yet, let me say this: I’m from Washington, D.C., the Capital, and I’m in Caxton to help the people fight the trouble that’s come up.”

  He smiled suddenly and took off his coat. “I only wish one thing, though,” he said. “I wish school started in January. I mean, it is hot. Aren’t you hot?”

  Hesitant, cautious laughter followed.

  “Well,” Adam Cramer said, dropping his smile, “it’s going to get hotter, for a whole lot of people. I’ll promise you that. This here little town is going to burn, what I mean; it’s going to burn the conscience of the country, now, and put out a light that everyone and everybody will see and feel. This town, I’m talking about. Caxton!” He paused. “People, something happened today. You’ve all heard about it by now. Some of you saw it with your own eyes. What happened was: Twelve Negroes went to the Caxton high school and sat with the white children there. Nobody stopped them, nobody turned them out. And, friends, listen; that makes today the most important day in the history of the South. Why? Because it marks the real beginning of integration. That’s right. It’s been tried other places, but you know what they’re saying? They’re saying, Well, if it works in Caxton, it’ll work all over, because Caxton is a typical Southern town. If the people don’t want integration, they’ll do something about it! If they don’t do something about it, that means they want it! Two plus two equals four!

  “Except there’s one thing wrong. They’re saying you all don’t give a darn whether the whites mix with the blacks because you haven’t really got down to fighting; but I ask you, how can somebody fight what he doesn’t see? They’ve kept the facts away from you; they’ve cheated and deceived every one of you, and filled your heads with filthy lies. It has all been a calculated campaign to keep you in the dark, so that when you finally do wake up, Why, we’re sorry, it’s just too late!

  “All right; I’m associated with the Society of National American Patriots, which is an organization dedicated to giving the people the truth about desegregation. We’ve been studying this situation here ever since January, when Judge Silver made his decision, and I’m going to give that situation to you. Of course, many present now are fully aware of it. Many have done what they consider their best to prevent it from happening. But there are quite a few who simply do not know the facts; who don’t know either what led up to that black little parade into the school today, or what real significance it has for everyone in the country.

  “I ask you to bear with me, folks, but I give you fair warning now. When you do know the truth, you’re going to be faced with a decision. You don’t think you’ve got one now, but you do, all right, and you’ll see it. And it’ll get inside your blood and make it boil and you won’t be able to run away from it! Because I’m going to show you that the way this country is going to go depends entirely and wholly and completely on you!”

  Tom McDaniel put away his note-pad and walked over to his friend, the lawyer James Wolfe. Wolfe, he noticed, was staring, strained and curious and expectant, like all the others. And, for some reason, this annoyed him. “Sound familiar?” he said.

  Wolfe started. “Oh—Tom. Yes, he seems to be a pretty smart kid.”

  “But a phony,” Tom said.

  “Oh?”

  “Absolutely. The accent’s fake; I talked with him earlier. He thinks it’s going to work!”

  “What?”

  “The plain-folks routine.”

  “And you don’t?” Wolfe nodded toward the crowd. “I can’t say I entirely agree.”

  “Do you think it’s trouble, Jim?”

  “No,” Wolfe said, glancing away from Tom. “The time for trouble’s over.”

  “Everything,” Adam Cramer was saying, “has got to have a beginning. And the beginning to what you saw today was almost seventeen years ago. In 1940, a Negro woman named Charlotte Green, and her husband, let it be known that they didn’t care much for the equal facilities that were being offered to their children. No sooner were the words out of their mouths but the NAACP swooped down. You all know about this organization, I imagine. The so-called National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is now and has always been nothing but a Communist front, headed by a Jew who hates America and doesn’t make any bones about it, either. They’ve always operated on the ‘martyr’ system, which is: They pick out trouble spots or create them where they never existed, and start putting out publicity. Like take the Emmet Till case. A nigger tries to rape a white woman and tells her husband he’ll keep on trying and nobody is going to stop him. The husband can’t go to the police with just a threat, so he makes sure, like any of us would, that no nigger is going to rape his wife. Now those are the facts. But what happens? The NAACP moves in and says that the white man is a murderer! Yeah, for protecting his own wife! And you know the bitter tears was shed over that poor, mistreated little colored boy, poor little Emmet Till whose only crime was being dark! Any of you read about it?” Adam Cramer shook his head in mock consternation. “The coon was made into a martyr, what they call, and things were rolling along real good, until somebody with some brains showed how Emmet Till’s Hero Daddy—you remember how they said that’s what he was, and he died in line of duty overseas?—was hanged and given a dishonorable discharge for, see if you can guess it: rape! Uh-huh! Of course, the jury wasn’t hoodwinked and declared those men who taught the nigger boy a lesson (and it wasn’t ever even proved they’d done anything more!) innocent. But the old N-double-A-C-P almost had it knocked.

  “Anyway, that’s how those guys work. For all I know, they hired this Green woman (she lives on Simon’s Hill) to stir things up in the first place. They put the pressure on between 1940 and 1949, pretending that all they wanted, you see, was really equal separate facilities. Farragut County said all right and helped the Negroes send their kids to an accredited school, Lincoln High, in Farragut. I visited this school, friends, and there isn’t a thing wrong with it. It’s a whole sight cleaner and neater than any place these nigger kids ever saw before, like as not; and that’s for sure! But the Commie group tipped its hand right then a
nd showed, for all to see, that it was after something different. Does September 1950 mean anything to you people? Well, it was the second big step toward today. In September 1950 a bunch of Negro boys tried to enroll in Caxton High! Remember?”

  There was a murmuring from the crowd.

  “Why?” Adam Cramer asked, modulating his voice to its original softness. “Do you think it was something they thought up by themselves? Would any Southern Negro have that much gall? No, sir. No. The NAACP engineered the whole operation, knowing in advance what would happen! The students were turned away; the county board of education refused to let them in—putting it on the line—and the usual arrangements were made for the Negroes to attend Lincoln. Then, three full months later, five of these kids—with the full backing of the NAACP—filed suit against the Farragut County School Board. And that’s when the ball really got rolling. The Plaintiffs, these Negroes, claimed that the out-of-county arrangements didn’t meet the county’s obligation to furnish equal facilities. The District Court said they were crazy and ruled accordingly. All during 1952 and 1954 the case, which had been appealed, was held in abeyance, pending the United States Supreme Court’s action in five school segregation cases under consideration at the same time.

  “Well, the Commies didn’t waste a second. They had most of the world, but America was a pocket of resistance to them. They couldn’t attack from outside, so, they were attacking from inside. They knew only too well, friends, that the quickest way to cripple a country is to mongrelize it. So they poured all the millions of dollars the Jews could get for them into this one thing: desegregation.

  “In August of 1955, the NAACP demanded a final judgment. Judge Silver, who is a Jew and is known to have leftist leanings—”

  “Who says so?” a voice cried.

  “The record says so,” Adam Cramer said tightly. “Look it up. Abraham Silver belongs, for one thing, to the Quill and Pen Society, which receives its funds indirectly from Moscow.”