The Outsider

by Richard Wright

  “Don’t, Sarah,” he protested good-naturedly.

  “You bastard! You’re making fun of me! I could kill you, kill you…I swear, I could! You hear, I could kill you…” She paused, thinking, blinked her eyes. “Maybe you did kill them like Menti said…”

  “It’s you who’re talking about killing me,” he reminded her. “When did I ever say I wanted to kill somebody?”

  “You’re laughing, but you can’t fool me,” she said, her eyes lit with intuition. “I saw something crazy in you the first time…”

  “Oh, no!” Cross protested, chuckling. “You laughed at me. Remember how you laughed?”

  “I didn’t know you then—”

  “My dear, you don’t know me now,” Cross told her. “But look, in all seriousness, I tell you that you ought to go back to your church. You need it.”

  She did not know what to think. She saw that Cross was both serious and amused. The expression on her face told him that thoughts were clashing violently in her mind. Her mouth hung open, then her lips became compressed.

  “You are a devil!” she burst out bitterly. “You’re making fun of me and it ain’t right! It ain’t good to laugh at people for things like that… You like to see suffering…”

  “I do not,” he said.

  “You do; I see it in you—”

  “Sarah, what I feel does not concern you; forget it,” he told her. “You asked my advice; I say you ought to go back to God.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  “Nothing,” he said simply, quietly, looking at her with eyes that twinkled for the first time in many weeks.

  She gazed at him, then looked away. She went to the door, pivoted; her mind was made up.

  “I don’t like you!” she shouted in a sudden rage and went out, slamming the door.

  Yes, Sarah was going back to the church. What did it matter that the church had no answer for the ills of this earth? The priests could at least tell her to stop hoping for anything in this life, to curb and deny her desires, to forget her humiliating color consciousness, her poverty, that all of that was as nothing in the eyes of an eternal God. And for those who were weak, was that not right, fitting, necessary? Was it such a bad world, after all? The only trouble was that he and his kind were restlessly envious of the priests, the churches, the Communists, the Fascists, the men of power…That was it. He would have to live without that green foam of jealousy welling into his eyes and blinding him to how weak he was in relation to their organized strength. Render unto church that which is the church’s, and render unto the Party that which is the Party’s…But where would he stand? Was there no neutral ground?

  He sat on the bed, looking at his suitcase. He ought to pack his things. Yes…He moved about listlessly, absent-minded, slowly filling the suitcase without conviction that he would ever have the right to move about again in freedom. Oh, yes; there was something he really wanted to do; he would take Eva’s diaries with him, keep them as a memento…He pulled out the dresser drawer and saw that they were not there. He looked through all the drawers, under the bed, in the clothes closet. Now, where had he put them? Maybe Eva had taken them back when she had heard the Party’s suspicions? But he did not believe that she would have done that without first telling him; it was not like Eva’s transparent honesty. Then where were they? The Party! He would bet his life that Menti had taken them…Goddamn him! He had wanted those diaries…Well, if Menti had stolen them, they were gone. To argue with the Party about them was useless.

  Through the closed door of his room came the faint tinkling of the front doorbell. He stood still, waiting, wondering whom it could be. Was it Menti again with his everlasting Hank? He placed his ear to the door panel and listened.

  “Is Lane or Damon in?”

  It was Houston’s voice. Had he dug up any new evidence against him? Was he coming finally to arrest him?

  Sarah’s voice sounded cold and clipped: “He’s in his room…There…”

  Houston’s footsteps echoed down the hallway and died in front of his door. Cross sank upon the bed. He would let Houston take the initiative. Eva was dead and there was no fight in him. A series of sharp knocks sounded on the door.

  “Come in,” he called.

  The door swung open and there was Houston and behind him loomed a tall, blue-coated officer. Under Houston’s arm was a bulky package wrapped in brown paper. Houston turned to the officer and said: “Wait down the hall.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The officer left and Houston came in and closed the door softly behind him. He approached Cross, smiling vaguely. Houston had a relaxed, confident air and Cross felt that his time had come. He knows now…All right; if this was the end, then he did not care…Houston looked around, found a chair, dragged it to the bed and eased his deformed body on to it, some two feet from Cross. Cross felt sweat breaking out over his chest and he cursed himself for being unable to control his physical reactions. Well, why didn’t the hunchback sonofabitch speak? Why did he sit there with that goddamn gloating smirk on his face? He longed for his gun; if he had it in his hands he would shoot the hell out of that little triumphant god even if he burned for it…All right; he had lost, but Houston would see that he could take his defeat without flinching.

  “Damon, I’ve solved it. You’re guilty. You killed Blount, Herndon, and Hilton…”

  Houston’s voice rang with finality. Cross waited; his role was to say nothing. Let Houston carry the ball. Slowly Houston unwrapped the brown package and there lay the set of thin angular notebooks: the diaries of Eva…

  “You’re a lucky, blundering fool,” Houston spat at him. “The only witness I could have put in the box against you was Eva Blount, and she’s dead. If she hadn’t leaped from that window, you’d be on your way to the electric chair…If she had lived, she would have told me what you told her, and what you told her made her kill herself. I’ve found out that much, Damon.” Houston rubbed his hands nervously across his eyes. “Goddammit, I was your unwitting accomplice for seventy-two hours! I just couldn’t bring myself to admit what I knew in my heart to be true! And no doubt you were banking on just that. What made that girl kill herself was what made me unable to admit that you were guilty. I wonder if you planned it like that? No; I don’t think you did. It was too perfect to be planned. You depended upon the human heart rejecting a horror of that magnitude and you were almost right, almost successful…”

  “How did you get those diaries?” Cross asked him. “From the Party?”

  “No. An officer took them from this room when you and the others were in the police station,” Houston said. “I’ve read them and I understand it all now.”

  “Did she mention me in there?” he asked, feeling that he had to know at once.

  “Only a little, toward the end—What she said did not matter. It was what she was that mattered,” Houston told him. “She said that she loved you, but that was all. But what a victim was that Eva Blount!”

  Houston carelessly tossed the notebooks upon the bed, at Cross’s side. Cross was surprised, wondering why Houston was returning the books to him.

  “It was all very simple when at last I’d found the key,” Houston began in a slow, measured tone. “And the key was this deceived woman, Eva Blount…Look Damon, I’m an honest man; I’m not going to brag or lie to you. Right off I want to confess that I was haywire in the beginning. That damned Communist Party pushed me off on the wrong track. That paranoiac Blimin was at my office day and night, demanding action, yelling that you had killed Blount and Herndon because of Eva…The Party claimed at first that you were a Trotskyite, then they swore that you were a government spy. In the end they screamed that you saw an opportunity to kill Blount and take his wife and you took it…Funny, isn’t it, how they misread things? Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires. The Party shouted at me: ‘He sold out to get the girl!’ Their own slogans blinded them. They argued that you had to kill Herndon because Herndon h
ad seen you kill Blount; further, they claimed that Hilton had found out somehow and that you then had to kill him…Despite the fact that they could not offer any evidence in support of this, I, at first, felt that it did sound rather plausible. But deep down I was worried; it was too pat; it did not suit your character, did not fit what you told me that morning on the train. Remember? ‘Man’s nothing in particular…’

  “What a baffling chase you gave us! In the first place, you seemed so innocent, too innocent; we made only the most perfunctory investigations…When we began to feel that you must know something, we checked your draft card and, lo and behold, a fire had destroyed the records! I wonder if you could have had anything to do with that? You won’t answer? All right; it isn’t important…Then, for twenty-four hours, we made no new moves against you. But Hilton’s death told us that we were up against something sinister. We decided to track down every lead, no matter how trivial…

  “It was not until we, almost as an afterthought, tried to verify your birth certificate that we began to think of you seriously as a possible murderer. What a joke that certificate was! In Newark the clerks in the Bureau of Vital Statistics remembered you, but we thought that we were surely on the wrong track when we heard their description of you! Boy, what an actor you are! You should have been on the stage…When at last we were certain that you were Lionel Lane and that Lionel Lane was dead, we were back where we started from. It was decided that you had assumed this man’s name, and we swung then toward thinking that you were in some Communist opposition group. But that fizzled. No political group in America had ever heard of you…

  “Then we began checking your fingerprints and we ran into another stone wall. For the second time we discovered that you were dead…Cross Damon, Negro postal clerk of Chicago: dead… Killed in a subway accident. The FBI flew to Chicago to make sure. They reported to me that you were no more…They even exhumed the other Negro’s body, but that didn’t tell us anything. Then the police started checking with the Missing Persons Bureau. We found that a man of your height and description had been reported missing the day after you were supposed to have been killed…Who was this man? He was a cleaner and dresser of chickens in a meat market…

  “Finally we had to rely on comparing descriptions of you that we got from Chicago with what we could observe of you here in New York, then we knew that we had the right man. We knew you were Cross Damon, no matter how many dead men you were hiding behind…

  “But was it possible that Cross Damon was doing all of this killing. But why? That was the most baffling aspect of all. You’ll never know how I struggled against accepting your guilt. I didn’t want to believe it. After having isolated you, identified you, we faced a riddle. Nothing in your entire background had touched politics. Then I had a brainstorm. I wired Chicago to send me a list of the titles of the books you’d left behind in your room and when they wired back a long list I was delighted…That was the first real clue. Your Nietzsche, your Hegel, your Jaspers, your Heidegger, your Husserl, your Kierkegaard, and your Dostoevsky were the clues…I said to myself that we are dealing with a man who has wallowed in guilty thought. But the more I pondered this thing, the sorrier I felt for you. I began to feel as though I’d killed Blount, Herndon, and Hilton myself…

  “And when I read those diaries and saw into the deceived heart of this little Eva, I knew damn well that you did not kill to get her. She was hysterically waiting for some man to ask her to run off from that impossible Blount and his Party…I visited her studio and looked at those powerful projections of nonobjective horror she had painted; then I read her diaries and I knew you’d love her, understand her; she was a sensitive artist and represented in her life and work a quality of suffering that would move a heart like yours. In spirit, Eva was your sister. Both of you were abandoned, fearful, without a form or discipline for living; and, therefore, you were both a prey to compulsions. In the face of life, she shrank, but you advanced. But here, attack or retreat, is a form of fear. No; you didn’t kill to get her; you didn’t have to. You’d want to lead her, remake her, save her, and at bottom you’d be wanting, in doing this, to save yourself…And she was ripe to respond on the same basis; she wanted to help you…

  “Damon, last night you said something that hurt me. When I had the cops pick you up and bring you to my office, when I was putting the heat on you, you told me—Well, you implied that I was a kind of monster for confronting you with your wife and children—No, Damon, I’m not that kind of a man. If I were a sadist, I could have had you locked up in the Tombs days ago for investigation, but I didn’t.” Houston smiled ironically. “I wouldn’t deliberately torture anything or anybody on this earth. But, of course, I do so live that I find myself in situations where people are suffering. After all, why did I become a District Attorney? But, hell, that’s another story.

  “No; I wasn’t torturing you last night. I was trying to identify you; I had to be absolutely certain that you were Cross Damon, postal clerk of Chicago, supposedly dead, married, etc. But there was another thing I wanted to know. I had to see how you would react when I told you of your mother’s death, how you would react when you saw your sons…I’m a District Attorney, Damon; I was tracking down emotional clues; I was doing my police work…

  “You were so inhuman that I would not have believed it unless I’d seen it. Today many sociologists say that the American Negro, having been stripped of his African tribal culture, has not had time to become completely adjusted to our mores, that the life of the family of the Western World has not had time to sink in, etc. But with you, you are adjusted and more…You’ve grown up and gone beyond our rituals. I knew that you were beyond organized religion, but I didn’t suspect that you were already beyond the family. Last night you stood there in my office and committed the greatest and last crime of all. You did not bat your eye when I told you that your mother was dead. It hurt you, yes; I could see it, but you rode it out. Boy, you had killed your mother long, long ago…You must have known your mother well, understood her both emotionally and intellectually; and when one can see and weigh one’s mother like that, well, she’s dead to one…And when you saw those three fine sons of yours! They tugged at your heart and memory and you were wildly angry and ashamed; but you rode out that too; you overcame it…And I said to myself: ‘This man could have killed Blount, Herndon, and Hilton…Only he could have done it. He has the emotional capacity—or lack of it!—to do it.’

  “Then I sat down and thought. After all, Damon, as I told you on the train that morning, I’m close enough to you, being a hunchback, being an outsider, to know how some of your feelings and thought processes must go. In a sense, I’m your brother…We men are not complete strangers on this earth. The world changes, but men are always the same. And especially the various basic types of men—and you are an ancient, fundamental type—run the same.

  “When I first talked to you in the Blount apartment, how you must have laughed at me! I walked all around you and could not see you! And then Hilton started his crazy, class-conscious pressure. Strange, the Communists had access to this insight as well as I and they didn’t want to see…”

  Cross was still. Yes; he was caught. But where was the proof? Eva could not witness against him. Had Houston, then, some hidden evidence? If this was the best that Houston could do, why, he would simply walk into court and keep his damned mouth shut and let him see if he could convict him.

  “Damon, you are an atheist,” Houston resumed, “and that is the heart of this matter. You know what convinced me that you were guilty? No; I didn’t find any clues you’d left behind…It was in a realm far afield that I found conclusive proof. Where?” Houston lifted his arm toward the window. “Right out there in those teeming streets…Damon, you act individually just like modern man lives in the mass each day.

  “You see, hopeful men seize upon every tiny incident and read the dreams of their hearts into them. Each hour of the day men are asking: ‘Do you think we’ll have peace? Don’t you think w
hat General So-and-So said means we’ll have war? Don’t you think that the White House pronouncement means that prices will be lower?’ Or maybe he observes that his neighbor is reading a radical book and comes to the conclusion that he is a spy and ought to be killed? And, Damon, that was the way you were living. The only difference was that your compulsions were negative, had no direction…

  “In the old days we were concerned with mobs, with thousands of men running amuck in the streets. The mob has conquered completely. When the mob has grown so vast that you cannot see it, then it is everywhere. Today the compulsive acts of the lynching mobs have become enthroned in each individual heart…Every man now acts as a criminal, a policeman, a judge, and an executioner…

  “But to come back to this individual mob-you who is called Cross Damon. What an atheist you are! You know, real atheists are rare, really. A genuine atheist is a real Christian turned upside down; God descends from the sky and takes up abode, so to speak, behind the fleshy bars of his heart! Men argue about their not believing in God and the mere act of doing so makes them believers. It is only when they do not feel the need to deny Him that they really do not believe in Him.” Houston rose in his excitement and paced the floor, as though he had forgotten the existence of Cross. “You went all the way! You have drawn all the conclusions and deductions that could be drawn from the atheistic position and you have inherited the feelings that only real atheists can have. At first I didn’t believe it, but when you stared so unfeelingly at your sons, when you laughed when your poor wife could not summon enough strength to identify you, I knew that you were beyond the pale of all the little feelings, the humble feelings, the human feelings…I knew that you could do anything! Not in a towering rage, not to save falling mankind, not to establish social justice, not for glory…But just because you happen to feel like that one day…

  “You are a free man. Ideas do not knock you off your feet, make you dizzy, make you fall down and serve others. You always suspect that ideas are in the service of other people…Oh, I know you, boy! Blimin told me about your ideas.”