The Outsider

by Richard Wright

  He rode down in the elevator with Buck who was grumbling: “Jesus! Why can’t that bitch leave me alone?” He spoke to no one in particular. “She keeps yapping at me about Joe, Joe…What the hell do I care about Joe? It ain’t my job to keep track of her damn men! These whores make me sick. Let a bobby pin get lost, and they come running to me.”

  “Don’t let ’em break you down,” Cross told him.

  “You damn right I won’t,” Buck seethed with anger. “I don’t do my day’s work at night, like they do, flat on their backs. Man, a woman’d make a man jump out of a window; she would!”

  Cross walked from the lobby on legs he did not feel. He knew that Buck knew nothing about how Joe had died, but his talking of jumping from a window had almost paralyzed him. His body was seized with ague and he felt so weak that he went into an alleyway and sank down upon an empty wooden soda water case under the spreading glare of a street lamp. He started when a door opened and an aproned man came out with a garbage can and dumped its contents near him; the man glanced curiously at Cross, then went back inside, slamming the door and bolting it securely. Cross rested his wrists on his knees and his eyes traveled without purpose over the steaming pile of refuse, the top of which was crowned with a mound of wet, black coffee grounds that gleamed in the light of the street lamp; some of the grounds spilled over a bloodstained Kotex which still retained the curving shape of having fitted tightly and recently against the lips of some vagina; there was a flattened grapefruit hull whose inner pulpy fibres held a gob of viscous phlegm; there was the part of a fried sausage with grease congealed white in the porous grains of meat; there was the crumpled cellophane wrapping from a pack of cigarettes glittering with tiny beads of moisture; there was a brass electric socket still holding its delicate filigreed web of wires even though its glass globe had been shattered; there was a bone from a piece of roast beef still holding traces of red and grey meat; there was a lemon rind molded to a light green color; there was a clump of cigarette butts whose ends were blackened and whose tips were stained red from the rouge of a woman’s lips; there was a limp wad of lettuce whose leaves glistened with a fine film of oil; there was a clean piece of wood jutting out with a shining nail bent at the end of it; there were several egg shells showing bits of yellow yolk; there was the stump of a cigar bearing the marks of a man’s teeth; and there was a clump of fluffy dust freshly gathered from some floor…

  His blood felt chilled. He had to shake off this dead weight and move on. He pulled to his feet and took a cab to La Salle Street Railroad Station and went directly to the reservation window.

  “Have you any sleeping accommodations for New York?”

  “For tonight?” the clerk asked.

  “For the earliest possible train,” Cross said.

  “Just a minute,” the clerk said.

  Cross waited nervously while the clerk telephoned.

  “We have one, a lower 13,” the clerk informed him.

  “Okay. Fix it up. When does the train leave?”

  “At six on track eight, sir.”

  He paid, received the tickets, then rushed by cab to the Greyhound Bus Terminal and bought two tickets to Denver. Back in the hotel, he settled his bill in full and rode up in the elevator to the eighth floor. Jenny was waiting for him at the door of his room with her suitcase. She smiled warmly, but there was nervousness in her manner. When they were inside, he handed her her ticket for the bus.

  “Where’s your ticket?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Here,” he said, showing it to her. He had thought that she would ask that; it was why he had bought two tickets. The extra money he had paid for his ticket was his insurance that she would believe in him long enough for him to take the six o’clock train to New York. When Joe’s body was discovered or when any word was ever raised about the identification of that body found in the subway wreck, nothing of him must come into the mind of Jenny.

  “You know where the Greyhound Bus Terminal is?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “The bus leaves at eight. I’ve got to see some people; I’ll be gone about an hour.” He looked at his watch. “It’s five now. I’ll be back at six. We’ll eat and then we’re off. Now, give me your suitcase and I’ll check it at the Bus Terminal.”

  With his suitcase and hers, he got into a cab, checked her suitcase at the Bus Terminal and then rode over to the La Salle Street Railroad Station. A porter guided him to his coach. He showed his reservation and ticket to the conductor, got on, and, when he was in his compartment, he locked the door.

  He cursed softly: That damn fool Joe…! And Jenny did not know how lucky she was. From now on he had to cope with this impulse of his to confide. If circumstances had been just a little different, he would have had to kill Jenny too, or give up the game. He had thought he was free. But was he? He was free from everything but himself. Loneliness had driven him to confess to Jenny, and fear could have made him kill her as he had killed Joe. He kept his fists tightly clenched as he waited impatiently for the train to pull out. At last he heard the distant calling:

  “Alll aboooooard…!”

  He stood at the window as the train began to move. A light snow was raining softly down upon the world. Two hours from now Jenny would be searching frantically for him at the bus station. And she would never know that he had done her the greatest favor of her life.

  But what was he to do with this conflict of his? This urge to confide and the fear of the danger of confiding? The outside world had fallen away from him now and he was alone at the center of the world of the laws of his own feelings. And what was this world he was?

  The dreary stretches of Chicago passed before his window; it was a dim, dead, dumb, sleeping city wrapped in a dream, a dream born of his frozen impulses. Could he awaken this world from its sleep? He recalled that pile of steaming garbage, the refuse the world had rejected; and he had rejected himself and was bowed, like that heap of garbage, under the weight of endurance and time.

  As the train wheels clicked through the winter night, he knew where his sense of dread came from; it was from within himself, within the vast and mysterious world that was his and his alone, and yet not really known to him, a world that was his own and yet unknown. And it was into this strange but familiar world that he was now plunging…

  BOOK TWO

  DREAM

  As silent as a mirror is believed Realities plunge in silence by…

  —HART CRANE

  CROSS’S WORLD was now sunk in sleep and, in his compulsiveness to rouse it from its slumber, the moments of his life became a dream of anxiety. He had lied, killed, and fled to get shunt of his old hated consciousness and now he was dismayed to find it redoubled in its density and still with him. He had merely shifted his cares from without to within him, from that which he could deny to that which he could not. Imprisoned he was in a state of consciousness that was so infatuated by its own condition that it could not dominate itself; so swamped was he by himself with himself that he could not break forth from behind the bars of that self to claim himself.

  During the nightmarish weeks that followed his heightened sensibilities became responsive beyond his control. His turbulent mind developed a million mental eyes that ceaselessly hunted down non-existent dangers; and his tense emotions started in terror at the most casual phrases falling from the lips of strangers.

  He found that he had been deprived of the will to make decisions, that he had, by his flight, abandoned himself to be tossed and buffeted by the tyranny of daily minutia. Thrust thus back upon himself, his actions were snared in a web of self-love that made the images of his mind assume a hypnotic sway over his body that was more decisive than the food he ate to sustain himself.

  The train had been plunging through the wintry night for some hours before his memory of the happenings of the last days in Chicago had dimmed in his consciousness enough for him to feel somewhat relaxed. Whenever he recalled the past there returned to him not only the mere constellations o
f events through which he had lived, but also a psychological grasp of the role that his desires, hates, hopes, or loves had played in them. What helped him most was that he possessed the lucky capacity of reducing and referring his memories to an intense and personal basis, and could, therefore, once he was emotionally free of the concrete context from which they had sprung, live with them without a too-crushing sense of guilt.

  His memory of his relationship with Dot was not only a recollection of a man’s sensual affair with a pretty girl whom he had forsaken in the trouble he had brought upon her; but, above all, Dot had been to him an alluring representation of a personal hunger which he had projected out of his heart upon her and, the two of them—Dot and what she subjectively meant to him—had been something he had not been able to cope with with satisfaction to himself and honor to her. There had been no element of sadism in his love for Dot, and he would have gladly, if such had been possible, taken upon himself in a spirit of atonement the hurt she had sustained. But who can reverse time? What was done was done and the only part of the past that he could alter was that portion lingering on in his melancholy heart. The mirage of desire that he had sought so pathetically was still his to mull over in regretful recollection.

  In breaking his life in two he had left his baffled mother to fend for herself as best she could, but that baleful gift of the sense of dread which she had, out of her life’s hysteria, conferred upon him in his childhood, was still his beyond his right to surrender. More definitely than ever her fateful gift was shaping and toning his hours even now on this fleeing train, was subtly sculpturing the contours of his destiny, staining all the future that he was to embrace even to that lonely grave which he would some day have to fill alone.

  His being quit of Gladys was infinitely more than his shedding a vindictive wife; it was his inheritance to the full of an insight into those quicksands of appalling loneliness that had sucked him into her waiting arms in the first place. He did not remember her in a way that made him yearn to return to her; his memory assumed the form of an intense appropriation of that intimate part of himself which had seduced him into embracing her, and toward that part of his being he had now a change of heart of not wanting ever again to seek fulfillment of desire in that direction.

  He was, however, far from being resigned; an urge to launch again into life was still strong in him. His sorrow for Dot, his mother, and Gladys originated in his knowing that they had hoped for something from him which he did not possess; his pity for them was his knowledge of himself, a regret for his ever having allowed them to build their dreams upon the mercurial instabilities of his emotions.

  His memory of the death of Joe was of greater simplicity. His killing of Joe had been dictated by his fear of exposure, and he knew that what had happened with Joe could happen again under conditions whose advent he could not gainsay or choose. Given a situation of danger and the dreaded tension that went with it, his impulse to save himself would sweep him toward what horizons? He knew that his being able to reflect coolly upon this did not mean that he was free of it, that to see was not to control, that self-understanding was far short of self-mastery. He was afraid of himself.

  Had they discovered Joe’s body yet? Or would that snowdrift on the roof hide it for a few days longer? He would keep track by reading the Chicago newspapers…But he had no real fear of his ever being accused of killing Joe, for his relation to Joe had been twice removed and no apparent motive for his having killed him could be easily deduced. For days the Chicago police would no doubt sniff about aimlessly in the hotel corridors, accusing first this whore and that, and, in the end, they would probably mark it down either as suicide or death at the hands of parties unknown…Or maybe they’d conclude that his death had been accidental…?

  The next morning, as the train neared New York, he made his way apprehensively into the dining car for breakfast. He was afraid that his preoccupation with his burden of non-identity and his fear of sudden surprises would distract him to the point of robbing reality of its naturalness and innocence. The serried white faces floating above the tables about him were signs whose meanings he had to decipher in terms of wondering if they suspected him. Or could he find with them some basis of relationship to still the howling loneliness of his heart?

  Seating himself circumspectly at a vacant table, he looked about for the waiter. Coming from the front of the dining car, grinning broadly, holding aloft in his right palm a tray of steaming food, was a short, nervous, brown-skinned man who winked smilingly at Cross and kept on looking at him as he passed. The waiter had given him an innocent, racially fraternal greeting common among Negroes and Cross knew that most whites never dreamed that their behavior towards Negroes had bred in them, especially when Negroes were in the presence of whites, a situationally defensive solidarity that possessed no validity save that occasioned by the latent pressure of white hostility. He idly observed the waiter’s movements as the brown hand deftly placed succulent dishes under the impassive faces of whites. Having emptied his tray, the waiter turned, paused at Cross’s table, dusted his napkin at imaginary bread crumbs on the white table cloth, and whispered: “How you, guy?”

  “Fine,” Cross answered. “And you?”

  “Just dragging my black ass, serving these white sonsofbitches,” the waiter said in a sniggling whisper. “Be with you in a sec. I’m the only waiter in this car. My pal took sick and got off in Cleveland. So I got my hands full of white shit.” The waiter clapped his hands over his mouth and widened his eyes at Cross in a sign-language laugh.

  “Take your time,” Cross told him. “I’m in no hurry.”

  “Wish these white monkeys felt like you do,” the waiter whispered in appreciation. He handed Cross a folded newspaper. “Want the paper?”

  “Thanks,” Cross mumbled.

  He gave Cross another wink and moved swiftly on between the crowded tables. Cross opened the paper and glanced at the headlines. Was there any news of Joe? It was not until he had reached the bottom of page four that he saw a small caption:

  POSTAL CLERK’S BODY FOUND

  He lowered the paper quickly, reading:

  The almost nude body of a Negro postal clerk, Joe Thomas, 39, of 3433 St. Lawrence Avenue, was found dead early this morning on the near South Side by an emergency line repairman. The body was lying clad only in a bathrobe in a deep snowdrift atop the roof of a four-story dwelling.

  The victim had apparently been drunk and it has not been determined if Thomas leaped, was pushed, or died from exposure.

  That was all. Could they trace Joe’s death to him? But how could they discover that he, Cross Damon, had been in the hotel? He felt safe. He looked through the moisture-streaked window at the sunny fields of snow glittering and turning slowly outside. The train rumbled on clicking wheels of steel. Ice-encrusted telegraph wires shot past, rising and dipping like strings plucked by invisible fingers. It was a normal world whose events flowed intelligibly and each object had a sharp, precise meaning. He looked in the direction of the waiter and was surprised to see the waiter looking at him, winking, smiling…

  Out of a void, anxiety rose and captured his senses; he could feel the reality of the dining car falling away as alien powers claimed his consciousness, projecting menacing meanings upon the look of the world. He fought against it feebly, but in the end he succumbed, trembling and embracing what he dreaded. Was he being followed on this train? Was not that waiter being especially friendly to allay any fears he might have that he was being watched? Had not that waiter cursed the white folks with the idea of inducing in him a false notion of security? His grasp of reality became confounded…

  He had no objective evidence that anything extraordinary was happening in the dining car, but this rational perception did not down his fear. His mood sought restlessly for proof to feed his beast of terror. Why was that tall white man staring at him? And why had he looked off when his eyes met his? In vain his mind protested this mood of delusive reference that was stealing his sani
ty away…

  Passing to get another tray of food, the waiter again paused at Cross’s table, grinning, whispering: “These white bastards think they’re smart, hunh? But one of these days we’ll show ’em, won’t we, boy?”

  The waiter knew and was teasing him! He had spotted him for the police and was so sure of himself that he could joke about it! Cross blinked and fought to control the sensations of his body; he had the illusion of something crawling over the surface of his skin. When the waiter finally came to take his order, he was so confused that he kept his eyes on the menu and mumbled what he wanted to eat. He was conscious of the irrational nature of what was transpiring, but he could not master it. His sensibilities clamored to believe in this delusion; his emotions needed the certainty of this transparent fantasy; yet, in the end, his mind was tough enough to cling to its anchorage in the hard ambiguities of normal reality. When his bacon and eggs came, he had no desire to eat. But would not that make him conspicuous? He picked up his knife and fork and forced himself, praying for this spell to pass.

  He was loading his fork with a bit of bacon and a part of egg yolk when a stretch of black cloth appeared before him. He lifted his eyes and saw a Catholic priest: tall, heavy, florid of face, and with a white, turned-about collar.

  “Good morning,” the priest said, smiling.

  “Good morning,” Cross answered.