The Angry Ones

by Williams, John A. ;

  In a way it was fitting that a man like Crispus could not see his work for what it really was, nothing.

  I joined Rollie and Crispus. Rollie had it set up so I could preview for Crispus all the publicity and promotion that would take place when his book came out. I laid it on pretty thick, and I suspected Rollie was really getting his jollies underneath.

  I couldn’t avoid looking closely at Crispus while I was talking. I stood there pretending there was nothing between us, making believe that it wasn’t his kind that had jabbed a sprong of a pitchfork through my father’s shoulder when he was down in Hinds County with my mother to see me born on the old soil she insisted upon returning to. I remember my father saying how still he was in that pile of hay with all those crackers running around in the goddam dark looking for him because he didn’t say “Sir” to one of them. My father said that was when he just forgot about God, because God had forgot about him and let him lie in that stinking hay like an animal. He only kept on going to church because of my mother.

  Hadrian Crispus. I looked at him again. Yet he was a man like other men. I recalled that the Germans too were not the killing machines we’d read about, but men. But Crispus hated, and I hated him because I was the target of his hatred and I had done nothing to him. Maybe he hated because he had done it all to me. Consider the fears behind his actions? I couldn’t. I could only think of the effect of them.

  Southerners are this way to me:

  The Germans had left snipers in Viareggio. Not a single street was safe, especially one corner near the edge of town. And the Germans never missed. There had been the usual friction between Negro and white troops, but it was intensified when some Southern boys moved into town. As long as Negro troops were on the street, the white Southern boys walked across that intersection where the snipers never missed. They wouldn’t run. They walked as though they were making it through a park or something, and all of us loitered in doorways to watch them. Shaking in their white skins, those crackers stepped from cover. Bang! His fellows ran out and dragged him in. Another cracker boy would have to cross the street. He would look from cover to see how many of us were in the doors and windows watching, and when he saw, he would walk out. Bang! They would rather die than be afraid in front of a Negro, and we gathered along the walls and in the doors and windows every day to make sure at least a few of them and their Southern pride died.

  I guess nothing of what I felt got in the way of my promotion spiel, because when I finished Crispus said, “That’s mighty fine, Hill.”

  “I’m glad you liked it, Crispus.”

  I left them then. I was a little disgusted with myself—I had a persecution complex, I figured. But was it really a complex, I wondered the next minute, when the things actually were happening to me and to every other Negro in America without letup the moment we stepped into the street each morning? Some of the things were even printed in the daily papers. But the waste was never mentioned—the inexcusable, senseless, horrible waste of lives and talent.

  Complex? No.

  I was doing all this musing over a milk shake and a ham sandwich. Rollie and Crispus had gone out for lunch, each urging the other through the door first, and Crispus finally going first, his loud voice booming out his thanks. Now Rollie was back.

  Rollie shook his head in disgust. “I don’t think he’s got any money. He kept asking me, ‘How much does this cost, how much does that cost?’ I sent him off to Radio City. I think he came up here to borrow some money from his brother.” Rollie shook his head again.

  “Well, we have ours,” Sarah reminded him.

  “Yes, but that’s not all,” Rollie said.

  “Oh, no?” Sarah said. “He’s not coming back to help push the book?”

  Rollie began laughing, then said, “Oh, yes!”

  Sarah laughed with him, and even Anne, just back from lunch, smiled a little. When the laughter subsided, Rollie said, “I guess we’d better put Steve’s plan into operation. How much was that, Steve?”

  When Rollie and I had first gone into doing a bit more for our authors, I suggested setting aside a percentage of the total publication charge for use in promotion and publicity. Three per cent was what Rollie had arrived at.

  “Two hundred and forty bucks,” I said.

  Rollie and Sarah looked at one another. Rollie shrugged. They would, I was sure, whittle it down to about a hundred dollars. Some of our authors, the ones who paid nine hundred dollars for a thin little volume of poetry, only got twenty-seven dollars for promotion.

  “So much?” Sarah said.

  I did something then—I don’t know what it was, but it conveyed my disgust for Sarah—and as I went back to my desk, her brown little animal eyes followed me. I’d have to watch it, I realized. Things might get out of control. I’d have to keep real cool.

  At the end of the day I went to the john down the hall and came back to the office. Sarah and Rollie must have thought I’d gone for the night—I guess they didn’t hear me return. I was staying late to clean up some work. There was a helluva lot of it on my desk. When I finished that, I planned to write to Grace in longhand. It’s a nice change when you live all day on a typewriter.

  Rollie and Sarah were talking softly. I think they would have lowered their voices if they’d been alone in the middle of the Sahara Desert. I heard my name mentioned. As they went out, Sarah said, “Why give him a raise, Roland? Why? Who else would hire a Negro for a job like this, publicity director?” She grunted. “He likes being dressed when he comes to work, Roland. He is not in the street, a bum. He likes being at a desk with a telephone and a girl to buzz him. Raise? Hah! Put the money in the business. Maybe later you’ll give him a raise.”

  The door closed and they were gone, Sarah’s voice echoing the irrefutable truths of an economic trap.

  And Rollie, who no doubt had been hoping to get me the raise to ease the stiffness between us, now couldn’t.

  My appetite was gone and I found I couldn’t get any work done. I thought about their voices all the way home, and I imagined what their faces must have been like there in the after-five shadows of the office, in the silence of the building which comes suddenly after about five-fifteen. By the time I arrived home, my face, I felt, was all frozen in a frown, and I knew the moment I walked into my place that I would call Lois.

  “Where have you been?” she said.

  “Going in early, working late,” I said. I felt the need to be curt with her, even to hurt a little. We talked for a long time about her job, her parents, her doctor, the plays and art movies she’d seen. We talked about newspaper and magazine articles and the weather, and when there seemed to be nothing else to say, I said, “I’d like to see you.”

  “Do you think it wise? We were carried away before.”

  “I don’t care. I want to see you.” I waited.

  “I have wanted to see you,” she blurted out. “I’ve waited around in the street to see you. I do want to see you, Steve.”

  “Very much?” I asked.

  “Very, very much,” she said softly.

  Then I said, and I know it sounds crazy, “Second thought. I have something I have to take care of. I’d forgotten it.”

  “Oh, Steve.”

  “Sorry,” I said, not sure that I really meant it.

  “Can’t it wait—just a little while?”

  “Can’t, Lois.”

  “Will it take long?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Steve, do it tomorrow.”

  “I can’t, Lois. I have to do it now.”

  “Bastard. You are a bastard.”

  I hung up. Later I wrote to Grace and as I got ready for bed, I thought back over the conversation with Lois, and I realized I felt better about the miserable day I’d had.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I redoubled my efforts to get a decent job. I even went back to the employment agencies. I went to one—I remember it especially because it left me with a helpless feeling—where the interviewer, a dr
ied prune of a woman, said after she looked at my resumé, “You’ve shifted about terribly, haven’t you?”

  “Getting experience,” I said.

  “I see.” She looked at me coldly.

  “Have you had any difficulty placing Negroes?” I asked. I thought I would give her the chance to say yes and be done with it.

  She said, “Heavens, no.” She shook her head vigorously. “Only yesterday we placed George Jones. Do you know him?”

  I was stunned by the question. There are nearly one million Negroes in New York City. Why in the hell should I know George Jones, any George Jones? I guess because old George Jones was Negro, like me, and we’re all supposed to know one another.

  “What sort of job did you place him in?” I asked.

  “Chauffeur.”

  Rising, I said, “I take it you don’t have anything for me now.”

  “Let us call you, Mr. Hill. We get so many calls during the day—we’d really prefer you didn’t call us.”

  Then there was the interview on Wall Street. I went down on a lunch hour, certain by the conversation I’d had with the woman on the phone that the job was mine. When I walked in, a woman of about thirty-five snapped, “Why don’t you leave the package on the table?”

  “I’m not a messenger,” I said wearily. “My name’s Steve Hill and I have an appointment with Miss Tennet.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You’re Mr. Hill.”

  So I was dead right there and I knew it and she knew it, but the rules say you’ve got to play the game and we did. She wasn’t embarrassed. She stood up and stuck her arm out in the stiff, awkward way women do when they want to give you a man’s handshake. We sat down and went through the travesty of the details of the job and salary, and then she said, “We have a few more people to see. Thanks so much for coming.”

  Another day I stopped to see a girl I’d met through Bobbie. She worked in an employment agency and she said she had something for me. But when I stopped by, she took me into the hall and with a red face told me:

  “I was going to tell you the boss got someone else for the job, but that’s not right.” She took a deep breath. “I asked him not to give this job out because I was saving it for a friend. He asked me about you. Steve, I’m only here because I can’t get a part. This is not my life, not this sort of thing. I never knew that—”

  “What’d he say, your boss?”

  “No dice.”

  “Why?” I pressed.

  “You know why.”

  “Why did you tell him?”

  “I didn’t make a point of it, Steve. It just came out.” She looked down at the floor. “Why did I have to mention it?”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake,” I said, angrily, “it’s not as if I had leprosy. I’m only black.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I cooled down. “Hell, forget it.”

  “Let’s still be friends?” she said. Her name was Maude.

  “Sure, Maude. Friends.”

  I left there. Friend, hell. I don’t need anyone for a friend who can for a single second forget what the hell’s happening out here or who can pretend for that same second that all’s hunky-damn-dory.

  I felt way down walking to the subway. Something in me was going up and down. Anger and repression; repression and anger. I stood on the platform, close to the edge, my toes sticking just over the yellow line. You could hear the train rounding a curve. It rocketed nearer, pushing a deadening sound before it. Heat slid swiftly through the tunnel.

  For just one vivid second I pictured myself jumping off the platform in front of the train, being ground beneath it, feeling the weight and the heat of it, feeling maybe an arm being ripped off, and a leg, and blood, blood all over the place. Now the train rushed up, a big, black monster. I could see the dim outline of the engineer swaying in the front cabin window. I began to waver. The sound of the train filled everything and seemed to draw me forward. Our eyes met, the engineer’s and mine, and his body moved suddenly as I wavered again, then drew back behind the yellow line weak and half faint as the train screeched to a halt, then coasted a few feet forward.

  It took me a long time to go to sleep that night.

  My fists battered furiously against the brown pine panels. My teeth were grinding so that my jaws ached. I could feel that my face was contorted with anger and frustration. I swung against the pine panels with all my strength and they shattered suddenly and the edges where they had broken loose were stark white. I began to swing again.

  And I was still swinging when I woke, tears hot and thick gushing from my eyes. I was crying, “Bastards!” I halted my moving arms with some effort and looked at them. I was surprised. I placed my fingers to my eyes and felt the tears.

  “Aw, hell,” I said, “Aw, hell.” It was what I said when I was a kid when trouble was imminent.

  I was glad the next day was Saturday. Perhaps I could work off the uneasy feeling I had by Monday. I got a letter from Grace that day. She said she was coming to see me soon if I didn’t stop the foolishness and get back up to Albany to see her. The letter made me feel pretty good. Obie called and wanted to know if we couldn’t do something. He sounded discouraged.

  When he came in, however, he was restless for some kind of action. He kept shifting around. We started drinking beer. I played some records. I dug out a weed I’d tucked away after I’d gotten over the cop scare and we blew that while we listened to music. It helped calm him down a little. We talked about women and music, about everything except what was bothering us most. I was still ashamed to tell him about Rollie. I couldn’t let him know that I’d been that afraid of losing my job.

  Obie patted his stomach. “Let’s eat, man.”

  I staggered up. Another Saturday and high again. “Where?”

  “I dunno. Something Spanish.”

  We went out and got something Spanish, then we stopped in at the Bohemia and caught Art Blakey trying to dominate his group with his snapping, loud beat.

  Then we dashed for the “A” train and got off in Harlem. We whizzed in and out of places like two bottles in search of stoppers. Sugar Ray’s, the Shalimar.

  “The Bandbox!” Obie said. “Let’s make it there.”

  So we did, and after that it was the Red Rooster.

  It was in these places that we saw the middle-class Negro. The women, dressed in what Obie called, “High, white fashion.” and the men in Ivy League, if they were young enough, or Italian-styled clothing. If it hadn’t been for the color of their skins, some of the women, with their red, blonde and streaked hair, might have been taken for sun-tanned white.

  Everyone knew Obie when we walked into these places. He was very popular, and you got a good feeling just being with him. As we moved from spot to spot, Obie would point people out to me.

  “See that guy? He’s cigarettes—Luckies, I think. Over there, that’s beer, Knickerbocker—and that real sharp one just in front of the phone booth? That’s whiskey—Schenley’s.” Obie smiled sadly. “Harlem, that’s where they work, or when they travel they work in other Harlems in other cities. If there were no Harlems there’d be no them. Wooing the—the—”

  “Nigger market?”

  “Yes. The Negro market.”

  I said, “A bitch.” I was busy smiling at a coffee-colored blonde.

  “Indeed, ’tis indeed,” Obie said, clucking.

  I was still watching the blonde. I wouldn’t have liked Grace with her hair dyed. The blonde stopped smiling at me when a white guy came in, all hip and everything, grinning, and bent and kissed her.

  Obie chuckled. “She knows where the money is, man. There isn’t a cat in here that can keep her the way this guy does.”

  “Who is he?”

  He laughed again and told me.

  Somebody played a Miles Davis side and I listened more to the beat than anything. It was like a heartbeat, thudding ringingly against the cymbals every fourth beat. I watched this white man sit at apparent ease there beside the blonde and I
thought, Oh, money and whiteness—just the whiteness gets it.

  Obie had grown quiet. We left and walked along the streets, passing small groups of cops on the corners.

  “How’s it look?” I asked.

  We had stopped in an Eighth Avenue bar. It was a dingy, yellow place. Derelicts shambled in and out, their eyes, as they passed you, snapping open in the hope that you’d give them the price of a glass of port, muscatel or thunderbird. Flies whined off the walls; the floor was dirty-white, unevenly set tile. A huge faded refrigerator sat in a corner, and uncovered pans of ribs and chicken parts, cooked, lay in ugly piles on a warmer. We dug our elbows into the top of the bar.

  “Nothing,” Obie said, “nothing.”

  I wanted Obie to make out well—a new job, the new job—but I wanted one too. I’d feel like hell if he got one and I didn’t. Oh, hell, I guess I wanted him to get a good job. I know lots of guys across this country, and Obie, clown that he was, had more on the ball than any ten of them put together. If Obie Robertson couldn’t get a job, how could I?

  “The thing I hate most,” he was saying, “is the grind, the constant looking for something. Then perhaps a little less than what you wanted in the first place, and later just anything.” He sighed.

  “Thought you were through with compromise.”

  “I am,” he said. “Damned if I’m not through. But lately I’ve been wondering if my mind and stomach would go along with me.” He pulled hard at his cigarette, and a deep crease ran up and down in the center of his forehead; the wrinkle was like a knife wound. “I hate counting pennies and not smoking to save carfare. I hate going to someone’s home at dinner time and being surprised that it’s time for dinner when you’re invited to eat.”

  After a silence I said, “We should have been social workers.”

  “Now there’s security,” he said. “All Negroes make good social workers—they know trouble inside out.”

  “Or teachers,” I said. “I couldn’t be a social worker, man. I couldn’t stand anyone else’s misery. I got enough of my own.”