The Outsider

by Richard Wright

  “They’re coming tonight.”

  “I’ll talk to them,” he said.

  She rested quietly against him on the bed and he could feel the heavy, slow beat of her heart. He would try to scare those crooks into giving her her money back, and then he would move at once. He feared getting involved; it was possible that something would go wrong and he would be questioned by the police and his identity would come out. And under no conceivable conditions could he allow his fingerprints to be taken; if that happened, he was lost, for his prints were on file in the Post Office in Chicago and in Washington.

  The doorbell rang and Hattie locked her arms about his neck.

  “That’s them now,” she whispered.

  “Let’s go down,” he said.

  She rose and went to the mirror and began rearranging her hair, tucking stray curls into their accustomed niches. She turned to him and asked coyly:

  “Do I look all right?”

  “You’re wonderful,” he assured her.

  “You’re so kind to me,” she said with eyes round with gratitude. “Come on.”

  He followed her down the stairs and was standing behind her when she opened the door.

  “Good evening, my lady,” a tall black man called.

  “How are you, Mrs. Turner?” a short brown man boomed.

  “Come in,” Hattie said. When the men were in the hallway, Hattie gestured toward the tall black man and said:

  “Mr. Jordan, this is Mr. White.”

  “How are you?” Cross asked.

  “Fine,” White said, eyeing Cross intently. “You’re a friend of Mrs. Turner?”

  “Sort of,” Cross said, turning to the brown man. “And you’re Mr. Mills, I take it?”

  “That’s right,” Mills came out with a hearty voice; but his eyes were cold and watchful.

  “Come into the living room and sit down, won’t you?” Hattie asked them.

  “We’d like to speak to you alone, if it’s all right, Mrs. Turner,” White said, smiling at Hattie.

  “But Mr. Jordan wants to ask you some questions about my business,” Hattie told them.

  “I’m looking after her, gentlemen,” Cross said.

  There was a split-second silence. The eyes of White and Mills were directly on the face of Cross.

  “Sure, sure,” White said suddenly, entering the living room.

  “Why not?” Mills said, following White in.

  Cross knew that he had two tough men on his hands and he had no stomach for the job. White and Mills sat, their overcoats still on, their hats on their knees, their eyes never straying from Cross’s face. Hattie stood in the doorway, demure and anxious. Cross lingered in the center of the room, cleared his throat and waded in.

  “Let’s get to the point,” he began. “I’m wise to the game. You want to cough up her money and call it quits?”

  “Who in hell are you?” White shot at him.

  “Does it matter?” Cross countered.

  “Are you interested in real estate?” Mills asked him.

  Cross knew that Mills was asking if he would be their partner in cheating Hattie.

  “No deals,” Cross said. “Can we settle this between ourselves?” He found himself referring obliquely to the police long before he had wanted to. “Where’s the money you took from her?”

  White turned to Hattie and asked:

  “Mrs. Turner, are you letting him horn in on this? He’s after money, that’s all! Is this the man who walked in one morning with a suitcase? Haven’t we been fair with you? Are you out of your senses?”

  Hattie blinked and Cross knew that she was already influenced by White’s words.

  “I don’t want her money,” Cross said. “I advised her to get a lawyer. Then she can make any deal she likes. Where’s her money?”

  “In a bank,” Mills said flatly and laughed. “You think I carry money like that around on me at night?”

  “When can you give her her money?” Cross demanded.

  “If she wants to drop the deal,” Mills said, “she can. She can have her money in four days—”

  “She wants it now,” Cross said. “Look, you were going to tell her that the blind man ran off with her money, or some such tale. And you’re here tonight to see how she’s feeling. Four days from now, you’ll be in California…”

  Mills rose and stood before him, his eyes hard and his lips flexed with anger. Cross grasped the gun in his pocket.

  “Don’t accuse me of being a thief,” Mills warned. “I know a thing or two. I’ve got police connections here in Harlem—”

  “You’re no cop,” Cross shot at him.

  “No cop, hunh? Listen, I can have you put on ice ’til this deal is cleaned up! Now, get wise!”

  Cross’s ardor suddenly waned. Mills was no policeman, but he could slip a ten-dollar bill to a cop and he could be picked up and put in the Tombs for investigation. The police could always say that he resembled somebody they were looking for. His fingerprints would be taken…He looked at Hattie who was waiting for him to save her and he cursed himself. He would stall for time, coach Hattie to talk to the police, and then vanish. He plotted his next move, hating himself. He had to make Hattie think that he was not backing down and, at the same time, he had to appear to compromise with White and Mills.

  “You can get her money in four days?” he asked, feeling that self-loathing would choke him.

  White looked at Mills; they were uncertain.

  “Sure,” Mills said, trying to hide his surprise.

  “Will you give her that in writing?” Cross asked.

  “Sure; why not?” White agreed, but he was baffled. He took out his fountain pen and a sheet of paper and began writing.

  “Oh, I’m so glad,” Hattie sighed.

  Cross dared not look at her. Mills backed off into a corner and stared appraisingly at Cross. Cross knew that the man was trying to figure him out.

  “Why don’t you come in on this deal with us?” Mills asked again.

  “I’d feel safe then,” Hattie said.

  “No,” Cross growled. He longed to be as far from this dopey Hattie and these wily crooks as space could take him.

  “Are you on the level?” Mills asked.

  “Are you?” Cross countered cynically.

  Hattie suspected nothing. Of what use was pity? Did not pity only choke up your life and make it into something which others ought to pity? White handed him a slip of paper which he did not bother to read, for he knew that it was worthless; he handed the paper to Hattie and watched her eyes devour it.

  “Thank you,” she breathed.

  “Is everything all right?” Mills asked.

  “Of course,” Hattie said, smiling sweetly.

  “Well, I suppose we’ll be getting on,” White said.

  “Yes,” Mills said. “We’re late now.”

  “I’ll see you Thursday?” Hattie asked.

  “Of course; good night,” White said.

  The door closed and Cross watched them rush down the steps to the sidewalk. They paused, looked back, all round them, then hailed a taxi and climbed in; the taxi, no doubt at their bidding, shot off wildly down the snow-covered street.

  “They seemed to be in a hurry,” Hattie sighed.

  He saw her eyes grow thoughtful and he wondered what processes of ratiocination were transpiring in her brain.

  “You think maybe they were honest after all?” she asked.

  If one good smack on her chin could have awakened her to the truth, he would have given it. Instead he pushed her violently from him.

  “Get away from me,” he growled.

  She backed off, trembling. “What’s the matter? I don’t understand you,” she gasped. “You helped me, then you turn wild!”

  He saw her bleak face and relented. What good was there in punishing this irresponsible creature?

  “I’m sorry,” he breathed.

  She waited to see if danger had gone out of him, then she circled his waist with her plump a
rm and led him toward the stairs.

  “Are you angry with me?”

  “No.”

  “I could go for you,” she crooned, regaining confidence and hugging him tightly. “You saved me. Say, how about a drink?”

  “God, yes; I need one,” he said.

  “Go to your room. I’ll bring up a bottle.”

  He was lying on his bed when she came with a bottle and two glasses. He had a big swig and felt the whiskey numbing his stomach; he felt better. He saw her moist, round, giving eyes.

  “Why are you so blue?” she asked.

  “I’m thinking,” he said.

  “About me?”

  “How could anybody be with you and not think about you?”

  She bent forward and kissed him. He smelt the odor of her hair and wondered what could one do with a woman like this but love her even when one did not love her? She was woman as body of woman for him now and he wanted her. He laid her on the bed and she struggled up.

  “Wait,” she murmured. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  She kissed him and went quickly out of the room. A moment later he heard water running in the bathroom. He leaped from the bed, grabbed his suitcase and softly groped his way out, tiptoeing. In the hallway he heard the sound of water still coming from the bathroom and he could see a light shining from beneath the sill. He crept down the stairs to the front door and paused; he opened it and saw a bluish haze hanging in the dim streets. It was late, far past midnight; the world was wrapped in silence. He scampered over the snow to the sidewalk with Hattie hovering as a poignant image in his mind. He reached Seventh Avenue, walked to Lexington and ducked into a subway, relieved that he was free, free to wrestle again with the tyranny of himself. The fear induced in him by the cheap threat of White and Mills drove home to him the unreal nature of his life; he was defenseless. He had to break out of this dream. Hattie was already the melancholy memory of a woman he had tried to help and failed. He felt that his fleeing was best for her, not the best that could be for her, but his best.

  Cross’s opportunistic rejection of his former life had been spurred by his shame at what a paltry man he had made of himself. What little external pressure had compelled him to this stance was also a part of that self which he had rejected, for he alone had been responsible for what he had done to Gladys and Dot. His consciousness of the color of his skin had played no role in it. Militating against racial consciousness in him were the general circumstances of his upbringing which had somewhat shielded him from the more barbaric forms of white racism; also the insistent claims of his own inner life had made him too concerned with himself to cast his lot wholeheartedly with Negroes in terms of racial struggle. Practically he was with them, but emotionally he was not of them. He felt keenly their sufferings and would have battled desperately for any Negro trapped in a racial conflict, but his character had been so shaped that his decisive life struggle was a personal fight for the realization of himself.

  What really obsessed him was his nonidentity which negated his ability to relate himself to others. He realized that what was happening to him now had been buried implicitly all along in his past life, had slumbered there in the form of a habit of acute reflection, in the guise of a propensity toward a certain coldness in judging even those closest to him, in a manner of forgetting too quickly what had been a long time in or with him, all because none of it really interested him.

  He had long yearned to be free of all responsibilities of a certain sort, but that did not imply that he had no capacity for responsibility in general. What irked him about his past responsibilities had been their dullness, their tenuity, their tendency simply to bore him. What he needed, demanded, was the hardest, the most awful responsibility, something that would test him and make him feel his worth. And his South Side Chicago environment had held forth no hope of his ever being able to find any such responsibility in it.

  Where could he find such experiences, such spheres of existence? In the main he accepted the kind of world that the Bible claimed existed; but, for the sufferings, terrors, accidental births, and meaningless deaths of that world, he rejected the Biblical prescriptions of repentance, prayer, faith, and grace. He was persuaded that what started on this earth had to be rounded off and somehow finished here.

  He had reckoned that his getting rid of the claims of others would have automatically opened up to him what he wanted, but it had merely launched him to live in the empty possibility of action whose spell, by purging reality of its aliveness, had bound him more securely in foolish drifting that he had experienced in all the past. The world became distant, opaque; he was not related to it and could find no way of becoming so.

  It was this static dreamworld that had elicited from him those acts of compulsion, those futile attempts to coerce reality to his emotional demands. There was in him a need for a stabilization of his surroundings. The world of most men is given to them by their culture, and, in choosing to make his own world, Cross had chosen to do that which was more daringly dangerous than he had thought.

  One walks along a street and strays unknowingly from one’s path; one then looks up suddenly for those familiar landmarks of orientation, and, seeing none, one feels lost. Panic drapes the look of the world in strangeness, and the more one stares blankly at that world, the stranger it looks, the more hideously frightening it seems. There is then born in one a wild, hot wish to project out upon that alien world the world that one is seeking. This wish is a hunger for power, to be in command of one’s self. Because Cross had lied, killed, and fled, it was to a sense of guilt that his heart leaped when he looked about him and felt his lostness…

  Toward the ideology of Communism his attitude was ambivalent; he found as much in it to hate as to admire. He knew the imperialistic wars of the Western World far too well to be snared into believing that Stalin was the historic essence of the Satanic; even if Stalin had personally eaten fifteen million human beings, it did not cancel the destructions of entire civilizations and the barbarous slaughter of countless millions by the arms of the Western World during the past four hundred years. Further, he was constrained by logic to accept Marxism as an intellectual instrument whose absence from the human mind would reduce the picture of the processes of modern industrial society to a meaningless ant heap. He was also compelled by facts to accept the Communist notion that one form of social consciousness, designated as bourgeois, had been outlived, but he emphatically spurned the slavish class consciousness with which the Communists sought to replace it. Above all he loathed the Communist attempt to destroy human subjectivity; for him, his subjectivity was the essence of his life, and for him to deny it was as impossible as it would have been for him to deny himself the right to live.

  In his weighing of ideas, Fascism possessed the same vitally negative merit of Communism in sensing the imminent end of a system of economic domination in the Western World, but what revulsed him in the fascist doctrine was its boast that it needed no ideological justification for its desire to rule. Life was denuded of all meaning when a Hitler could kill millions of men by an efficiently scientific method of mass industrial extermination simply because he did not like the color of their skins or the shape of their nostrils.

  All of these rejections, plus that of himself and his past, were behind the man Cross as he walked up the exit of the stairway of the 116th Street subway station the night he had fled from Hattie and started looking again for a room in which to hide and try to think out his future. When he reached the sidewalk the weather had turned to sleet and it was bitter cold. Lugging his suitcase through the slush underfoot, he leaned against the stinging wind and squinted his eyes, seeking a FOR RENT sign. He was tired; it was after two o’clock in the morning. Now and then he felt the pavement beneath his feet trembling from the rush of underground trains. Ahead he saw faint blobs of traffic lights wink from red to green and back again. Here and there a few neon signs glowed, half lost in murkiness. He went into a little bar that was almost empty and ordered a
whiskey.

  As he sipped his drink, his eyes fell upon a series of crude signs on the dingy walls. He smiled as he read: IF YOU SPIT ON THE FLOOR AT HOME, YOU MAY DO SO HERE. Under the wording was a drawing of a coarse-faced man in a nicely furnished room reclining in an easy chair; his legs were stretched out and his feet rested upon a sofa. He was expectorating upon the floor, much to the horror of his long-suffering wife who was on her hands and knees with a scrub rag trying to keep the floor clean.

  Another sign read: NO PROFANITY IN HERE, PLEASE. IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD, THEN WHY DO YOU CURSE HIM ALL THE TIME? Cross gave a silent laugh and studied the drawing illustrating the philosophical profundity of that question. There was a drunkard at a bar with a half-filled bottle before him and he was represented as giving forth a string of vile oaths whose meaning was conveyed by exclamation points, question marks, and asterisks.

  There was still another sign which read: DO NOT ASK FOR MR. CREDIT. HE DIED A LONG TIME AGO AND WE BURIED HIM. Under this drawing was the picture of a neglected grave in a hideously dilapidated cemetery. Engraved on the headstone was: MR. BROKE, BORN APRIL 1, 1949—DIED APRIL 2, 1949.

  Cross wondered who thought up such legends. Oh, yes…That image of the grave! That reminded him that he was supposed to be dead! How fantastic it seemed! How did his grave look? And where was it? He did not even know the name of the cemetery…He sighed and closed his eyes. Wonder what did Gladys engrave on my tombstone…? He visualized big words hewn into marble:

  CROSS DAMON

  1924—1950

  In Loving Memory

  Would Gladys say more than that? Hell, would she even say that much…? Perhaps she might; people had a way of forgiving you when you were dead. And why not? You could not hurt them then and maybe their forgiving you was an expression of their joy at your being dead…?

  He downed his last drop of whiskey, then held his breath, caught in the grip of a paralyzing idea. Good God! Why in the name of all that was reasonable had he not thought of it before? It was too easy, that’s why. He had often read about such things in newspapers; it had been reliably reported that underground Communists had established new identities by such methods. Why not? It more than answered his problem. Sure; all he had to do was to go to a cemetery and find the name of a man born on his birthday or any birthday that would make his present age and appearance seem normal! Why, if he were clever about it, he could even have a birth certificate! He had been pounding his brain for days for a new identity, and all he had to do was go to a graveyard and copy down a name. And there might be a hell of a wide choice; he could even afford to be critical about whose name he took. First thing in the morning he would go. He was excited.