The Ways of White Folks

by Langston Hughes

  The first evening, the party went on until late in the night. Some people left at dawn. Others slept awhile and left in the afternoon. Some were house guests, and on the second night there was a party again. But that night everybody was pretty tired. And got pretty drunk, too, mostly. The Colonel was very gay and very drunk; but his little wife cried, and went to bed. She was mighty touchy, all the Negroes knew. Always poutin’ and spattin’ and actin’ funny with the Colonel.

  Wonder why? Wonder why?

  There was a party in the Quarters among the Negroes, too, that second night. Livonia was there, dancing fit to kill. And the music was wild. In the heat of the night, Cora went out of the barn where the party was, out into the moonlight, and looked up at the lights of the Big House on the rise. She stretched, and breathed in the warm night air, and walked through the trees toward the road that ran to town. She made a big circle about the Big House, wondering a little what was going on there. When she got to the road, she sat down under a huge live oak tree. She could hear the laughter and clapping of the Negroes down on the edge of the cotton fields. But in the Big House, where it should have been gay, too, it was mighty quiet. Sometimes a loud and quarrelsome voice could be heard. Probably the men were gambling, and the ladies gone to bed.

  The trees cast great shadows across the road in the warm light of the moon. Cora stretched, breathed deeply again, and got up to go, when she saw very near her a figure walking in the silvery dusk, a tall thin young white man walking in the cotton. Suddenly he called her.

  “Who’re you?” It was young Norwood speaking.

  “I’s Coralee Lewis, Aunt Tobie Lewis’ daughter.”

  The white man came up to her, took her brown face in his hands and lifted it at the moon. “You’re out mighty late,” he said.

  Cora’s body trembled. Her mouth opened. In the shadow of the live oak tree there by the road, thirty years ago, in a night of moon.…

  III

  When the first child, Willie, was in her, she told her mother all about it. The old woman was glad. “It’s better’n slavin’ in the cotton fields,” she said. “I’s known colored women what’s wore silk dresses and lived like queens on plantations right here in Georgy.…”

  Even before the young Mrs. Norwood died (she did die—and childless) Cora was working in the Big House. And after Mrs. Norwood’s death, Cora came there to sleep.

  Now the water where the plums were felt cool to her hands this spring afternoon many years later as the Colonel went into the house leaving their youngest boy dazed in front of her; and the nigger-voices all around her humming and chattering into loudness and laughter.

  IV

  “Listen hyar,” brother Willie said to Bert on the way from the Junction to the plantation that morning his brother arrived. “Listen hyar, I hopes you don’t expect to go around all dressed up like you is now after you gets out to de place, ’cause de Colonel won’t ’low it. He made Sis put away all them fine clothes she brought hyar last year—till she left.”

  “Tell him to kiss my behind,” Bert said.

  Willie bucked his eyes, stuttered, then kept quiet. His brother was the same Bert as he had been as a child. Crazy! Trouble coming. William made up his mind not to be in it, himself, one way or another. Though he was eight years older, he had always been afraid of Bert with a fear worse than physical, afraid of the things that happened around Bert.

  From the new Ford, Bert looked out at the straggling streets of the village of the Junction, at the Negroes lounging in front of stores, at the red-necked crackers, at the unkempt women. He heard the departing train whistle as it went deeper into Georgia, into Alabama. As they rode, he looked at the wide fields of young cotton stretching on either side, at the cabins of the share croppers, at the occasional house of a white owner or overseer. Then he saw the gradual rise of the Norwood plantation, the famous Big House, surrounded by its live oaks and magnolias and maples, and its many acres of cotton. And he knew he was nearing home.

  Six years away. Kid of fourteen when he left, wearing his first long trousers bought in the commissary store, feeling funny out of overalls, feeling very proud going away to school. Only the Lewis niggers (old man Norwood’s kids by Cora) went away to school in these parts. And with the going of Sallie, the youngest, the little county school at Norwood’s Crossroads closed up, and didn’t open any more. Sallie was the Colonel’s last child—no other niggers needed a school.

  Old Aunt Tobie, the grandma, before she died, used to keep on saying that the Lewis young ’uns ought to appreciate what the Colonel was doing for ’em. No white man she ever heard of cared anything ’bout educatin’ his tar-brush chillun. But the Colonel did. Somehow ’nother Cora was able to put it in the Colonel’s mind and keep it there until the last child, Sallie, got sent off to Atlanta.

  In Atlanta, Bert had entered the same run-down Negro boarding school, the Institute, that brother Willie and his oldest sister, Bertha, had attended. But Willie, several years before, hadn’t stayed there long, being a dumb boy who liked the plantation better. Bertha had gone up North once with the Spiritual Jubilee Singers, and liked it so well that she remained to work in Chicago. Now, little sister Sallie, seventeen, went to the Institute also, but had come home this spring ahead of Bert, who fooled around Atlanta a week or so before leaving, not wanting to come home really.

  “Home, hell!”

  Bert didn’t want to come home. He felt he had no home. A brown mother, and a white father; bed for him in a nigger cabin down on the edge of the cotton fields. Soon as Cora’s kids stopped nursing they went to live outside the Big House. Aunt Tobie, the grandmother, had really raised them, until she died. Then a cousin of Cora’s brought up Sallie.

  “Hell of a way to live,” Bert thought, the night before his arrival, sitting in the Jim Crow car bound for south Georgia. During the long ride, he had turned over in his mind incidents of his childhood on the Big House Plantation. Sitting in the smoky half-coach allotted to Negroes (the other half being a baggage car) he thought of what it meant growing up as one of Colonel Norwood’s yard-niggers (a term used by field hands for the mulatto children of a white planter).

  “It’s hell,” Bert thought.

  Not that Cora’s other kids had found it hell. Only he had found it so, strangely enough. “The rest of ’em are too dumb, except little Sallie, and she don’t say nothing—but it’s hell to her, too, I reckon,” the boy thought to himself as the train rocked and rumbled over the road. “Willie don’t give a damn so long as his belly’s full. And Bertha’s got up North away from it all. I don’t know what she really thought.… But I wish it hadn’t happened to me.”

  With the self-pity of bewildered youth, he began to think about himself. Always, he had known the Colonel was his father, from the earliest he could remember. For one thing, Bert had been lighter than any of the other colored children on the plantation—a sort of ivory white. And as a small child, his hair had been straight and brown, his eyes grey, like Norwood’s. His grandma, old Aunt Tobie, used to refer to them all, Willie and Bertha and Bert and Sallie, not without pride, as Colonel Tom’s children. (There had been another brother who died.) Bert noticed early in life that all the other kids in the Quarters were named after their fathers, whereas he and his brother and sisters bore the mother’s name, Lewis. He was Bert Lewis—not Bert Norwood. His mother slept in the Big House—but the children lived outside with Aunt Tobie or Cousin Betty. Those things puzzled little Bert.

  As he grew up, he used to hear folks remarking on how much he looked like Colonel Tom, and how little like Cora. Nearly light enough to pass for white, folks said, spittin’ image of his father, too. Bert had a temper and ways like white folks, too. Indeed, “You needn’t act so much like quality with me,” was one of Aunt Tobie’s favorite ways of reprimanding him when she wanted to take him down a peg or two.

  He was always getting into mischief, playing pranks and worrying his mother at the backdoor of the Big House. There was a time once when the Colone
l seemed to get pleasure out of letting little Bert trail around at his heels, but that period didn’t last very long, for young Bert sassed the Colonel, too, just as though he were colored. And somehow, he had acquired that way of referring to Norwood as papa. The Colonel told him, sternly and seriously, “Boy, don’t you use that word to me.” But still, forgetful little devil that he was, he had come running up to the Colonel that day in the stables yelling, “Papa, dinner’s ready.”

  The slap that he received made him see stars and darkness, Bert remembered. As though he were brushing a fly out of the way, the Colonel had knocked him down under the feet of the horses, and went on talking to his guests. After the guests had gone, he switched Bert mercilessly.

  Can’t nobody teach you nothin’ but a switch, nohow,” said old Aunt Tobie afterwards. “I tole you ’bout gittin’ familiar wid that white man.”

  “But he didn’t need to scar him all up,” Bert remembered Cora’s saying when she saw the black and blue marks on his back. “I ain’t bearin’ him children for to beat ’em to death.… You stay way from him, son, you hear?”

  From that time on, between Bert and the Colonel, there had been a barrier of fear—a fear that held a certain mysterious fascination for Bert’s sense of defiance, a fear that Bert from afar was continually taunting and baiting. For instance, the Colonel had a complex, Bert recalled, that all the Negroes knew, about the front door of the Big House. His orders were that no Negroes go in and out of that door, or cross his front porch. When the old house-man, Sam, wanted to sweep off the porch, he would have to go out the back and come all the way around. It was as absurd as that. Yet Bert, as a child, in the Big House visiting or helping Cora, would often dart out the front way when he thought the Colonel was in town or down in the South Field, or asleep in his library. Cora used to spank him for it, but it was a habit he kept up until he went away, a big boy, to Atlanta.

  Bert, home-bound now, smiled to himself in the stuffy Jim Crow car, and wondered if the Colonel were still as tall and stern and stiff-fronted as he used to be. No wonder his young white wife had died years ago—having to live with him—although, according to Aunt Tobie’s version, the Colonel had humored her in every way. He really loved her, folks said, and had sworn after her death that he would never marry again. He hadn’t—he had taken Cora.

  And here Bert’s mind balked and veered away from speculating about the intimate life of this old man and his mother. Bert knew that in a sense the white man had been kind to her. He remembered as a child the extra little delicacies that came down to Aunt Tobie and Cousin Betty and Cora’s other relatives in the Quarters, especially at Christmas. He remembered how he had always known that the little colored school had not been there before Cora’s children were born, and that it was no longer at the Cross Roads now. (For the Colonel and Mr. Higgins, being political powers in the county, were in charge of education, and their policy was to let Negroes remain unlettered. They worked better.) Bert knew, too, that it was his mother’s influence that had got her children sent off to the Institute in Atlanta. But it was the Colonel’s dislike of Bert that had kept him there, summer and winter, until now. Not that Bert minded. Summer school was fun, too. And tennis. And the pleasures of the town. And he was never homesick for the plantation—but he did wish sometimes that he had a home, and that the Colonel would treat him like a son.

  Tall and light and good-looking, as Bert was now at twenty, he could have a very good time in Atlanta. Colored society had taken him up. He went around with the sons and daughters of Negro doctors and dentists and insurance brokers and professors. He had his hands full of pretty girls. Lots of cream-colored girls, chocolate brown girls, velvet-soft night-shade girls all liked Bert. And already he had been involved in a scandal with a doctor’s wife.

  To add to his good looks, Bert was an excellent athlete. He had been as far north as Washington with Institute teams, and had seen colored people at the Capitol riding in street cars where there had been no Jim Crow signs, and getting on trains that had no coaches especially for Negroes. Bert made up his mind to come North to live, as soon as he finished school. He had one more year. And this last summer, Cora wanted him to spend with her—because she sensed he might never come back to the plantation again.

  Sallie, his sister, three classes behind him at the Institute, was frankly worried about his going home. She was afraid. “Colonel Tom’s getting old. He ain’t nice a-tall like he kinder used to be. He’s getting more and more touchy,” Sallie said to her brother. “And I know he ain’t gonna like the looks of you. You don’t look a bit like a Georgia boy any more.”

  “To hell with him,” said Bert.

  “I wouldn’t even know you and Willie were brothers,” Sallie said. For Sallie went home every summer and worked in the Big House with her mother, and saw Willie, and knew how things were on the plantation. Willie and the Colonel got along fine, because Willie was docile and good-natured and nigger-like, bowing and scraping and treating white folks like they expected to be treated. “But Bert, you ain’t a bit like that.”

  “Why should I be?” Bert asked. “I’m the old man’s son, ain’t I? Got white blood in me, too.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “But what?” Bert said. “Let old knotty-headed Willie go on being a white-folks’ nigger if he wants to, I won’t!”

  And that’s the way it was when he came home.

  V

  There are people (you’ve probably noted it also) who have the unconscious faculty of making the world spin around themselves, throb and expand, contract and go dizzy. Then, when they are gone away, you feel sick and lonesome and meaningless.

  In the chemistry lab at school, did you ever hold a test tube, pouring in liquids and powders and seeing nothing happen until a certain liquid or a certain powder is poured in and then everything begins to smoke and fume, bubble and boil, hiss to foam, and sometimes even explode? The tube is suddenly full of action and movement and life. Well, there are people like those certain liquids or powders; at a given moment they come into a room, or into a town, even into a country—and the place is never the same again. Things bubble, boil, change. Sometimes the whole world is changed. Alexander came. Christ. Marconi. A Russian named Lenin.

  Not that there is any comparing Bert to Christ or Lenin. But after he returned to the Big House Plantation that summer, life was never the same. From Bert’s very first day on the place something was broken, something went dizzy. The world began to spin, to ferment, and move into a new action.

  Not to be a white folks’ nigger—Bert had come home with that idea in his head.

  The Colonel sensed it in his out-stretched hand and his tall young body—and had turned his back and walked into the house. Cora with her hands in the cool water where the plums were, suddenly knew in her innermost soul a period of time had closed for her. That first night she prayed, cried in her room, asked the Lord why she had ever let her son come home. In his cabin Willie prayed, too, humble, Lord, humble. The Colonel rocked alone on his front porch sucking a black cigar and cussing bitterly at he knew not what. The hum and laughter of the Negro voices went on as usual on the vast plantation down to the last share-cropper’s cabin, but not quite, not quite the same as they had been in the morning. And never to be the same again.

  “Is you heard about Bert?”

  Not to be a white folks’ nigger!

  Bow down and pray in fear and trembling, go way back in the dark afraid; or work harder and harder; or stumble and learn; or raise up your fist and strike—but once the idea comes into your head you’ll never be the same again. Oh, test tube of life! Crucible of the South, find the right powder and you’ll never be the same again—the cotton will blaze and the cabins will burn and the chains will be broken and men, all of a sudden, will shake hands, black men and white men, like steel meeting steel!

  “The bastard,” Bert said. “Why couldn’t he shake hands with me? I’m a Norwood, too.”

  “Hush, son,” said Cora with the c
ool water from the plums on her hands.

  And the hum of the black voices that afternoon spread to the cabins, to the cotton fields, to the dark streets of the Junction, what Bert had said—Bert with the ivory-yellow skin and the tall proud young body, Bert come home not to be a white folks’ nigger.

  “Lawd, chile, Bert’s come home.…”

  “Lawd, chile, and he said …”

  “Lawd, chile, he said …”

  “Lawd, chile …”

  “Lawd …”

  VI

  July passed, and August. The hot summer sun marched across the skies. The Colonel ordered Bert to work in the fields. Bert had not done so. Talbot, the white foreman, washed his hands of it, saying that if he had his way, “that nigger would be run off the place.”

  For the Colonel, the summer was hectic enough, what with cotton prices dropping on the market; share-croppers restless and moving; one black field-hand beaten half to death by Talbot and the storekeeper because he “talked high” to a neighboring white planter; news of the Scottsboro trials and the Camp Hill shootings exciting black labor.

  Colonel Norwood ordered the colored rural Baptist minister to start a revival and keep it going until he said stop. Let the Negroes sing and shout their troubles away, as in the past. White folks had always found revivals a useful outlet for sullen over-worked darkies. As long as they were singing and praying, they forgot about the troubles of this world. In a frenzy of rhythm and religion, they laid their cross at the feet of Jesus.

  Poor over-worked Jesus! Somehow since the War, he hadn’t borne that cross so well. Too heavy, it’s too heavy! Lately, Negroes seem to sense that it’s not Jesus’ cross, anyhow, it’s their own. Only old people praise King Jesus any more. On the Norwood plantation, Bert’s done told the young people to stop being white folks’ niggers. More and more, the Colonel felt it was Bert who brought trouble into the Georgia summer. The revival was a failure.