The Outsider

by Richard Wright

  “You’re crazy!”

  “I’ll get you for that!” she shouted. “I will!”

  “If you keep shouting at me, I’ll hang up!”

  “I will shout at you!”

  He hesitated, then slammed the receiver on to the hook. Damn her! He was trembling. He’d not wanted to call her because he’d known that it’d go like this and he’d be unnerved for the rest of the day. He fumbled for the bottle and took a deep swallow. Yes; he had to get some sleep or go mad. He went out of the telephone booth and waved good-bye to Doc and kept on out of the door and walked along the snow-piled sidewalks. He caught a trolley and rode standing on the platform, swaying as much from the rocking of the car as from the influence of alcohol. He alighted in front of his apartment building, groped for his key, and let himself in. Fifteen minutes later he was undressed and in bed. He was so tired that he could scarcely feel the sensations of his body and he could not relax. He stared wakefully in the semi-darkness and wondered what he could do about Dot…

  What a messy life he was living! It was crazy; it was killing him; it was senseless; and he was a fool to go on living it. What a stinking botch he’d made out of everything he had touched! Why? He didn’t know. I could be teaching school, he told himself. He’d dropped out of the university right after he’d married Gladys and after that nothing had gone right.

  He lay still, his bloodshot eyes staring blankly before him, and drifted into dreams of his problems, compulsively living out dialogues, summing up emotional scenes with his mother, reliving the reactions of his wife, Dot, and his friends. Repeatedly he chided himself to go to sleep, but it did no good, for he was hungry for these waking visions that depicted his dilemmas, yet he knew that such brooding did not help; in fact, he was wasting his waning strength, for into these unreal dramas he was putting the whole of his ardent being. The long hours of the day dragged on.

  He twisted on his crumpled bed, reshaped his lumpy pillow until his head nestled into it exactly right; and, for the hundredth time, he closed his eyes and lay still, trying to purge his mind of anxiety, beseeching sleep. He felt his numbed limbs slowly shedding tension and for a moment he floated toward a world of dreams, seesawing softly between sleeping and waking. Then, convulsively, his entire body jerked rigidly to stem a fearful feeling of falling through space. His rebellious nerves twanged with a terror that his mind sought desperately to deny. He shook his head, his body seething with hate against himself and the world.

  He checked his watch: two o’clock. A grey day showed through the curtained window and from the snowy street rose the din of traffic. Today was like yesterday and he knew that tomorrow would be the same. And it had been like this now for many months. Each morning he’d come from work and crawl wearily into bed and toss for hours, yearning for the mercy of a sleep that was not his and at last he realized that his search for surcease was hopeless. He sighed, stood, crossed to the dresser and took another pull from the bottle. At six o’clock he’d report to work and for eight long hours he’d sway upon his feet, drugged with fatigue, straining against collapse, sorting mail like a sleepwalker. He moistened his lips with his tongue. He had not eaten all day and, as the alcohol deadened the raw nerves of his twitching stomach, he thought: I’ll do it now; I’ll end this farce…He hunched determinedly forward and his crinkled pyjamas bagged about his gaunt body and the muscles of his neck bulged. He’d not crawl like a coward through stupid days; to act quickly was the simplest way of jumping through a jungle of problems that plagued him from within and from without. A momentary dizziness swamped him; his throat tightened; his vision blurred; his chest heaved and he was defenseless against despair. He sprang to the dresser and yanked open a drawer and pulled forth his gun. Trembling, feeling the cold blue steel touching his sweaty palm, he lifted the glinting barrel to his right temple, then paused. His feelings were like tumbling dice…He wilted, cursed, his breath expiring through parted lips. Choked with self-hate, he flung himself on the bed and buried his face in his hands.

  Broken thus in will, he relaxed for the first time in weeks; he could rest only when he was too drained of energy to fret further. At length he lifted his head and the fingers of his right hand pressed nervously against his lower lip, then tapped his knee as though to still the writhing of his spirit. He was despairingly aware of his body as an alien and despised object over which he had no power, a burden that was always cheating him of the fruits of his thought, mocking him with its stubborn and supine solidity.

  Claimed at last by the needs of the hour, he proceeded to bathe and dress. Again he drank from the bottle and was grateful for the sense of depression caused by the alcohol which made him feel less of pleasure, pain, anxiety, and hope. Could he get through the night without collapsing? Suddenly he was filled with an idea: He would take the gun with him! And if the pressure from within or without became too great he would use it; his gun would be his final protection against the world as well as against himself…And if he was ever so unlucky as to be found sprawled from nervous collapse upon some frozen sidewalk or upon the floor of the Post Office, it would be manfully better to let others see a bloody hole gaping in his temple than to present to the eyes of strangers a mass of black flesh stricken by stupor. His decision renewed his courage; if he had not thought of the gun, he doubted if he could have gone to work.

  He pulled on his overcoat and stood hesitantly by the door; he knew now that even the gun sagging in his pocket did not convince him that he was fit to work. During the past month he had been absent so often on excuses of illness that he did not dare telephone and report himself on the sick list. He would master his tricky sensations; he would force himself to carry on till he dropped. He usually found that he did not really collapse even when he had the consciousness of being about to pitch forward on his face…

  He yearned to talk to someone; he felt his mere telling his story would have helped. But to whom could he talk? To his mother? No; she would only assure him that he was reaping the wages of sin and his sense of dread would deepen. Could he talk to his wife with whom he was not living? God, no! She’d laugh bitterly and say, “I told you so!” There was Dot, his sweetheart, but she was not capable of understanding anything. Moreover, she was partly the cause of his present state. And there was not a single man to whom he cared to confess the nightmare that was his life. He had sharp need of a confidant, and yet he knew that if he had had an ideal confidant before whom he could lay his whole story, he would have instantly regretted it, would have murdered his confidant the moment after he had confided to him his shame. How could he have gone on living knowing that someone else knew how things were with him? Cross was proud.

  His hand touched the doorknob and the telephone shrilled. Now, who in hell could that be? Was it Dot? Or Gladys? He turned the doorknob and the telephone rang again. Hell! Anger flashed through him at some vague someone who was trying to snatch him from his futile wrestling with his problem, trying to pry him loose from the only thing that made his life possess meaning even though it made him suffer. Impatiently he picked up the receiver.

  “Cross? Is that you?” It was his mother’s quavering, high-pitched voice singing uncertainly over the wire.

  “How are you, Ma?”

  “Fine, Cross, I reckon,” she said querulously, like those who are over sixty and who feel uncommonly well but are too superstitious to admit it. “Can I see you, Cross? Sometime today…?”

  He bridled, trying to slap away the clutch of his mother’s wrinkled hand as it reached invisibly for him.

  “Anything wrong, Ma?”

  “I want to see you,” she said, evading his question.

  His teeth clamped; he did not want to see her, certainly not now with this mood of bleak dread in him.

  “Ma, I’m trying to sleep,” he lied, speaking reprovingly.

  Silence. He felt he had hurt her and he grew angry. He waited for her to speak further, but only the metallic hum of the line came to his ear.

  “Ma,” he call
ed softly. “You’re still there?”

  “Yes, Cross.” A note of firm patience in her voice frightened him.

  “What is it, Ma? I work nights and I’ve got to get some rest.”

  Again silence.

  “Is it about money?” he asked, trying to hasten it.

  Another silence; then his mother’s voice came clearly: “Cross, that Dot girl was just by here to see me…”

  Her tone, charged and precise, was filled with a multitude of accusations that evoked a vast, hot void in him. His mother was still talking, but he did not hear her. His eyes darted like those of a bayed animal. Oh, God! Why had Dot done that? He had not kept his promise to see her this morning and she had gotten into a panic; that was it. But she had sworn to consult him before acting on her own, and now…His life was a delicate bridge spanning a gaping chasm and hostile hands were heaping heavy loads upon that bridge and it was about to crack and crash downward.

  “What did you say, Ma?” He pretended that he had not heard.

  How much did she know? Perhaps everything! That crazy Dot! He could wring her neck for this! She had no right to tell tales to his mother! Women had no sense of…

  “You know what I’m talking about, boy,” his mother scolded him sternly. “That girl’s in trouble—”

  “Who are you talking about, Ma?” He still stalled for time.

  “Stop acting foolish, Cross! That girl’s blaming you—”

  “Blaming me for what?” he asked. He knew that he was acting silly, but he could not easily change his attitude now.

  “She’s in a family way, Cross,” his mother spoke boldly, a woman lodging woman’s ancient complaint against man. “And she says it’s you! She’s worried sick. She had to talk to somebody, so she came to me. Son, what have you done?” There came the sound of a sob being choked back. “You’re married. You’ve three children. What’re you going to do?”

  “Just a sec. Somebody’s at the door,” he lied for respite.

  Like always, he had doubled his burdens; he heard his mother’s tirades and at the same time he pretended that he was not reacting to them, and this dual set of responses made him frantic. That harebrained Dot! Trying to save herself and ruining me, the only one who can save her…Dot’s panic had made her deal him a dirty blow. He brought the receiver to his mouth.

  “Is she still there, Ma?” His tone of voice confessed that he now knew what it was all about.

  “Hunh? No; she’s gone,” his mother said. “She’s gone to see Gladys…Cross, that girl’s young, a child. She can get you into serious trouble…”

  Dot was talking to his wife! This was the end! The void in him grew hotter. A widening circle of people were becoming acquainted with his difficulties. He knew that Gladys would do her damndest now; she would be merciless. Her knowing about Dot would redouble her hate for him. She would bare the details of his private blunderings before the domestic courts…He had to try to stop her. But could he? Maybe it was already too late?

  “I’ll be right over,” he said, hanging up abruptly.

  He took another drink and went out of the door. As he descended the stairs, his mother’s scolding intensified his mood of self-loathing, a mood that had been his longer than he could recall, a mood that had been growing deeper with the increasing complexity of the events of his life. He knew himself too well not to realize the meaning of what he was feeling; yet his self-knowledge, born of a habit of incessant reflection, did not enable him to escape the morass in which his feelings were bogged. His insight merely augmented his emotional conflicts. He was aware, intimately and bitterly, that his dread had been his mother’s first fateful gift to him. He had been born of her not only physically but emotionally too. The only psychological difference between them was that he was aware of having received this dark gift from her at a time when he was too young to reject it, and she had given it to him in a period of her life when her intense grief over the death of her husband had rendered her incapable of realizing the full import of what she had been doing. And he could never speak to her about this difference in emotional similarity; he could only pretend that it did not exist, for not only did his deep love of her forbid it, but he did not possess enough emotional detachment from her for that to happen. As her son, he was much too far from her and at the same time much too close, much too warm toward her and much too cold. To keep her life from crushing his own, he had slain the sense of her in his heart and at the same time had clung frantically to his memory of that sense. His feelings for her were widely distant: flight and embrace…

  From the vestibule he stepped into a frozen world lit by a lemon-colored sun whose glare sparkled on mounds of ice. The snow had stopped and the sky stretched pale and blue; the air was dry and bitter cold. The sun disclosed in sharp detail the red brick buildings, glinted on the slow moving trolleys, and cast into the windowpanes liquid reflections that stung his eyes. His shoulders hunched forward and he shivered and clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering, his breath steaming against the freezing air.

  He was conscious of himself as a frail object which had to protect itself against a pending threat of annihilation. This frigid world was suggestively like the one which his mother, without her having known it, had created for him to live in when he had been a child. Though she had loved him, she had tainted his budding feelings with a fierce devotion born of her fear of a life that had baffled and wounded her. His first coherent memories had condensed themselves into an image of a young woman whose hysterically loving presence had made his imagination conscious of an invisible God—Whose secret grace granted him life—hovering oppressively in space above him. His adolescent fantasies had symbolically telescoped this God into an awful face shaped in the form of a huge and crushing NO, a terrifying face which had, for a reason he could never learn, created him, had given him a part of Himself, and yet had threateningly demanded that he vigilantly deny another part of himself which He too had paradoxically given him. This God’s NO-FACE had evoked in his pliable boy’s body an aching sense of pleasure by admonishing him to shun pleasure as the tempting doorway opening blackly on to hell; had too early awakened in him a sharp sense of sex by thunderingly denouncing sex as the sin leading to eternal damnation; had posited in him an unbridled hunger for the sensual by branding all sensuality as the monstrous death from which there was no resurrection; had made him instinctively choose to love himself over and against all others because he felt himself menaced by a mysterious God Whose love seemed somehow like hate. Mother love had cleaved him in twain: a wayward sensibility that distrusted itself, a consciousness that was conscious of itself. Despite this, his sensibilities had not been repressed by God’s fearful negations as represented by his mother; indeed, his sense of life had been so heightened that desire boiled in him to a degree that made him afraid. Afraid of what? Nothing exactly, precisely…And this constituted his sense of dread.

  As he neared his mother’s rooming house, he could already feel the form of her indictment, could divine the morally charged words she would hurl at him. And he knew that his reaction would be one of sullen and guilty anger. Why, then, was he going to see her? Because he really wanted her to rail at him, denounce him, and he would suffer, feel his hurt again, and, in doing so, would know intuitively that somewhere in the depths of his raw wound lay the blood of his salvation or the pus of his disaster. This obscure knowledge had stayed his finger on the trigger of the gun whose barrel had touched his temple this morning…

  He entered a dilapidated building, went down a dark hallway and tapped upon a door. Sounds of muffled movement came to him; the door opened and framed his mother’s solemnly lined face, the white hair pulled severely back from a wide forehead, a gnarled right hand holding a woolen shawl about stooped shoulders. Her mouth was a tight, flat slit and her eyes peered through cloudy spectacles.

  “Hi, Ma.”

  Without answering, she widened the door and he walked past her into a tiny, shabby room that smelt of a sweetish odor of
decaying flesh that seemed to cling to the aged who are slowly dying while still living.

  He noticed, as he did each time he visited her, that she appeared to have shrunken a bit more; and he knew that it was her chronic fretting, her always tearing at her emotions that was whitening the hairs of her head, deepening the lines in her face, and accentuating the stoop of her back. His mother could no more relax than he could. Like me, she’s using up herself too fast, and she’s just a little over sixty…If she cared for herself more, judged life less severely, time would deal easier with her…Why were some people fated, like Job, to live a never-ending debate between themselves and their sense of what they believed life should be? Why did some hearts feel insulted at being alive, humiliated at the terms of existence? It was as though one felt that one had been promised something and when that promise had not been kept, one felt a sense of loss that made life intolerable; it was as though one was angry, but did not know toward what or whom the anger should be directed; it was as though one felt betrayed, but could never determine the manner of the betrayal. And this was what was making his mother old before her time…

  He smoked, looked about vacantly, avoiding her accusing eyes, and was already fighting down a feeling of defensive guilt. She turned and began rummaging aimlessly in a dresser drawer and he knew that she was deliberately making him wait before she spoke, attempting to reduce him again to the status of a fearfully impressionable child. Before pronouncing her condemnations, she would make him feel that she was weighing him in the scales of her drastic judgment and was finding, to her horror, that he was a self-centered libertine ruthlessly ridden by this lust for pleasure, an irresponsible wastrel thoughtlessly squandering his life’s substance. And afterwards he would listen with a face masked in indifference and he would know that she was right; but he would also know that there was nothing that neither he nor she could do about it, that there was no cure for his malady, and, above all, that this dilemma was the meaning of his life.