Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  My uncle and aunt had brought Jesse with them to Memphis when Uncle Andrew moved his office there from out at Braxton, which is the country town our family comes from. He was the only local Negro they brought with them, and since this was right after Jesse had received a suspended sentence for an alleged part in the murder of Aunt Margaret’s washwoman’s husband, it was assumed in Braxton that there had been some sensible understanding arrived at between Andrew Nelson and the presiding judge. Jesse was to have a suspended sentence; Uncle Andrew was to get him out of Braxton and keep him out. . . . Be that as it may, Jesse came away with them to Memphis and during the first year he hardly set foot outside their house and yard.

  He was altogether too faithful and too hardworking to be tolerated by any of the trifling servants Aunt Margaret was able to hire in Memphis. For a while she couldn’t keep a cook on the place. Then one finally came along who discovered how to get Jesse’s goat, and this one stayed the normal time for a Memphis cook—that is, four or five years. She was Jesse’s ruin, I suppose. She discovered the secret of how to get his goat, and passed it on to the maid and the furnace boy and the part-time chauffeur that Uncle Andrew kept. And they passed it on to those who came after them. They teased him unmercifully, made life a misery for him. What they said to him was that he was a country boy in the city, scared to go out on the street. Now, there is a story, seemingly known to all Negro citizens of Memphis, of a Mississippi country boy who robs his old grandmother and comes to town prepared to enjoy life. He takes a hotel room and sits in the window looking down at the crowds. But he can’t bring himself to go down and “mix with ’em.” The story has several versions, but usually it ends with the boy’s starving to death in his room because he is scared to go down and take his chances on Beale Street. And this was how they pictured Jesse. They went so far, even, as to ridicule him that way in front of my aunt and uncle.

  As a matter of fact, Jesse couldn’t have been much more than a boy in those days. And his nature may really have been a timid one. Whatever other reasons there were for his behavior, probably it was due partly to his being a timid country boy. There was always something of the puritan in him, too. I could see this when I was only fifteen. I never once heard him use any profanity, or any rough language at all except when he was indicating what he would do to my uncle’s imaginary attacker—and then it was more a matter of gestures than of words. When the cook my aunt had during the time I was there would sometimes make insinuating remarks about the dates I began having and about the hours I kept toward the end of my stay, Jesse would say, “You oughtn’t talk that way before this white boy.” If I sometimes seemed to enjoy the cook’s teasing and even egged her on a little, he would get up and leave the room. Perhaps the most old-fashioned and country thing about him was that he still wore his long underwear the year round. On Mondays, when he generally had a terrible hangover and was tapering off from the weekend, he would work all day in the garden. I would see him out there even on the hottest July day working with his shirt off but still wearing his long-sleeved undershirt. The other servants took his long underwear as another mark of his primness, and whenever they talked about the light he kept burning in his room all night they would say he never put it out except once a week when he took his bath and changed his long johns.

  Yet no matter how much fun they made of him to his face, when Jesse wasn’t present the other servants admitted they would hate to run into him while he was off on one of his sprees, and they assured me that they didn’t hang around the kind of places that he did. And laugh at him though they did, they respected him for the amount of work he could turn out and for the quality of it. He was a perfectionist in his work both in the house and in the yard, and especially in my uncle’s vegetable garden.

  The cook who found out how to get Jesse’s goat shouldn’t be blamed too much. She couldn’t have known the harm she was doing. And surely Jesse couldn’t have gone on forever never leaving the house. The time had to come. And once that teasing had started, Jesse had to show them. He didn’t tell anyone when he first began going out. The other servants didn’t live on the place regularly, and my uncle only discovered Jesse’s absence by chance late one night when he wanted him for some trifle. He went out in the backyard and called up to his room above the garage. The light was on, but there was no answer. Uncle climbed the rickety outside stairs that went up to the room and banged the door to wake him. Then he came down the stairs again and went in the house and conferred with Aunt Margaret. They were worried about Jesse, thinking something might have happened to him, and so Uncle Andrew went up and forced the lock on the door to Jesse’s room.

  The light was burning—a little twenty-watt bulb on a cord hanging in the middle of the room—and the room was as neat as a pin. But there was no Jesse. My aunt, who can always remember every detail of a moment like that, said that from the backdoor she could hear Uncle Andrew’s footstep out there in the room above the garage. For a time that was all she heard. But then finally she heard Uncle Andrew break out into a kind of laughter that was characteristic of him. It expressed all the good nature in his being and at the same time a certain hateful spirit, too. From her description I am sure it was just like his laughter when he caught you napping at Russian bank or checkers or when he saw he had you beaten and began slapping down his cards or pushing his kings around.

  Presently he came out on the stoop at the head of the stairs and, still chuckling in his throat, called down to Aunt Margaret, “Our chick has left the nest.” Then, closing the door, he took out his pocketknife and managed to screw the lock in place again. When he joined Aunt Margaret at the kitchen door he told her not to say anything about the incident to Jesse, that it was none of their business if he wanted a night out now and again.

  Aunt Margaret could never get Jesse to tell her when he was planning an evening out, and later when he began taking an occasional Sunday off he never gave advance warning of that either. Sunday morning would come and he would simply not be on the place. It was still the same when I came there to live. After a Sunday’s absence without leave, Jesse would be working my uncle’s garden all day Monday. It was a big country vegetable garden right on Belvedere Street in Memphis. I have seen my aunt stand for a long period of time at one of the upstairs windows watching Jesse at work down there on a Monday morning, herself not moving a muscle until he looked up at her. Then she would shake her head sadly—exaggerating the shake so that he couldn’t miss it—and turn her back to the window. When my uncle came home in the evening on one of those Mondays he would go straight to the garden and exclaim over the wonderful weeding and chopping the garden had had. Later, in the house, he would say it was worth having Jesse take French leave now and then in order to get that good day’s work in the garden from him.

  His real escapades and the scrapes he got into were in a different category from his occasional weekends. In the first place, they lasted longer. When he had already been missing for three or four days or even a week there would be a telephone call late at night or early some morning. Usually it would be an anonymous call, sometimes a man’s voice, sometimes a woman’s. If a name were given it was one that meant nothing to Uncle Andrew, and when Jesse had been rescued he invariably maintained he had never heard the name of the caller before. He would say he just wished he knew who it was, and always protested that he hadn’t wanted Uncle Andrew to be bothered. The telephone call usually went about like this: “You Mr. Andrew Nelson at Number 212 Belvedere Street?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yo friend Jesse’s in jail and he needs yo help.”

  Then the informer would hang up or, if questioned in time by Uncle Andrew, would give a name like “Henry White” or “Mary Jones” along with some made-up street number and a street nobody ever heard of. One time the voice said only, “Yo friend Jesse’s been pisened. He’s in room Number 9 at the New Charleston Hotel.” Uncle Andrew had gone down to the New Charleston with a policeman, and they found Jesse seriously ill and out of h
is head—probably from getting hold of bad whiskey. They took him to the John Gaston Hospital where he had to stay for nearly a week.

  Usually, though, it wasn’t just a matter of his being on a drunk. According to my aunt, he got into dreadful fights in which he slashed other Negroes with a knife and got cut up himself, though I never saw any of his scars. Probably they were all hidden beneath his long underwear. And besides, by the time I came along they would have been old scars since by then his scrapes had, for a long time, been of a different kind. There had been a number of years when his troubles were all with women. There were women who fought over him, women who fought him, women who got him put in jail for bothering them, and women who got him put in jail for not helping support their children. Then, after this phase, he was involved off and on for several years in the numbers racket and the kind of gang warfare that goes along with that. Uncle Andrew would have to get the police and go down and rescue him from some room above a pool hall where the rival gang had him cornered.

  My account of all this came of course from my aunt since my uncle never revealed the nature of Jesse’s troubles to anyone but Aunt Margaret. She dragged it out of him because she felt she had a right to know. She may have exaggerated it all to me. But I used to think two of the points she made about it were good ones. She pointed out that the nature of his escapades grew successively worse, so that it was harder each time for Uncle Andrew to intervene. And she suspected that that gave Jesse considerable satisfaction. She also said that from the beginning all of Jesse’s degrading adventures had had one thing in common: He never was able or willing to get out of any jam on his own. He would let any situation run on until there was no way he could be saved except through Uncle Andrew’s intervention. “All he seems to want,” she said, “is to have something worse than the time before for his ‘Mr. Andrew’ to save him from and dismiss as a mere nothing.”

  I felt at the time that this was very true, and it tended to make me agree with Uncle Andrew that Jesse Munroe’s scrapes were not very important in themselves, and, in that sense, didn’t “amount to much.” In fact, my aunt’s observation seemed so obviously true that it was hard to think of Jesse as anything but a spoiled child, which, I suppose, is the way Uncle Andrew did think of him.

  The murder that Jesse had gotten mixed up in back in Braxton was as nasty a business as you hear about. Uncle Andrew would not have had a white man living about his garage who had had any connection with such a business. When I finally gave up my room at his house and went to live at the “Y,” it was more because of his disapproval of my friends (and of the hours I kept) than it was because of my aunt’s. And though I couldn’t have said so to a living soul that I knew when I was a boy, I used to wish my uncle could have been half as tolerant of my own father, who was a weak man and got into various kinds of trouble, as he was of Jesse. My father was killed in an automobile crash when I was only a little fellow, but, for several years before, Uncle Andrew had refused to have anything to do with him personally, though he would always help him get jobs as long as they were away from Braxton and, always, on the condition that my mother and I would continue to live in Braxton with my grandparents. I was taught to believe that Uncle Andrew was right about all of this, and I still believe that he was in a way. Jesse hadn’t, after all, had the advantages that my father had, and he may have been a victim of circumstances. But my father was a victim of circumstances, too, I think—as who isn’t, for that matter? Even Uncle Andrew and Aunt Margaret were, in a way.

  In that murder of Aunt Margaret’s washwoman’s husband I believe Jesse was accused of being an accessory after the fact. I don’t think anyone accused him of having anything to do with the actual killing. The washwoman and a boyfriend of hers named Cleveland Blakemore had done in her husband without help from anyone. They did it in a woods lot behind a roadhouse on the outskirts of town, where the husband found them together. At the trial I think the usual blunt instrument was produced as the murder weapon. Then they had transported the body to the washwoman’s house where they dismembered it and attempted to burn the parts in the chimney. But it was a rainy night and the flue wouldn’t draw. They ended by pulling out the charred remains and burying them in a cotton patch behind the washwoman’s house, not in one grave but in a number of graves scattered about the cotton patch. (You may wonder why I bring in these awful details of the murder, and I wonder myself. I tell them out of some kind of compulsion and because I have known them ever since I was a small child in Braxton. I couldn’t have told the story without somehow bringing them in. I find I have only been waiting for the right moment. And it seems to me now that I would never have had the interest I did in Jesse except that he was someone connected with those gory details of a crime I had heard about when I was very young and which had stuck in my mind during all the years when I was growing up in the house with my pretty, gentle mother and my aged grandparents.) At any rate, it was on a rainy winter morning just a few weeks after the murder that a Negro girl, hurrying to work, took a shortcut through that cotton patch. In her haste she stumbled and fell into a hole where the pigs had rooted up what was left of the victim’s left forearm and hand.

  In the trial it was proved that Jesse had provided the transportation for the corpse from the woods lot to the washwoman’s house. His defense contended that he just happened to be at the roadhouse that night, driving a funeral car which he had borrowed, without permission, from the undertaker’s parlor where he worked as janitor, and sometimes as driver. (You can hear the voice of the prosecution: “It was the saddest funeral that car ever went to.”) He was paid in advance for the trip, and it was represented to him (according to his defense) that the washwoman’s husband was only dead drunk.

  It was never proved conclusively that Jesse had any part in the dismemberment or in the efforts at burning. Witnesses who testified they had seen two men coming and going from the house to the cotton patch (in the heavy rain on that autumn night) were not reliable ones. Yet the testimony that Jesse’s borrowed car was parked in front of the house during most of the night was given by Negro men and women of the highest character. Even Jesse’s defense never denied his presence in there. But to me it seems quite as likely that, as his defense maintained, he was kept there at knife’s point, or at least by the fear that if he attempted to go he might meet the same fate that the washwoman’s husband had, as that he willingly took part in what went on. My uncle of course felt that there was no question about it, that Jesse was an innocent country boy drawn into the business by the washwoman and her friend, Cleveland Blakemore (who no doubt guessed he had taken the undertaker’s car without permission), and that he wasn’t to be blamed. Uncle Andrew even served as a character witness for Jesse at the trial, because he had known him before the murder when Jesse was janitor at his office as well as at the undertaker’s.

  I never heard any talk about the murder from Uncle Andrew and Aunt Margaret themselves. In private Aunt Margaret would tell me about some of the other troubles Jesse had been in and about how narrowly he had escaped long jail sentences. Only Uncle Andrew’s ever widening connections among influential people in Memphis had been able to prevent those sentences. She said that my uncle was such a modest man that he naturally minimized Jesse’s scrapes so as not to put too much importance on the things he was able to do to get him out of them.

  But my uncle knew his wife well enough to know what she would have told me. Without ever giving me his version of any of the incidents he would say to me now and then that Aunt Margaret was much too severe and that she set too high standards for Jesse. And I did find it painful to hear the way she spoke to Jesse and to see the way she looked at him even after one of his milder weekends. In those days, so soon after my mother died, Aunt Margaret was always so kind and so considerate of my feelings and of my every want that it seemed out of character for her to be harsh and severe with anyone. Before that day I packed my things and moved out of her house, however, I came to doubt that it was so entirely out of
character. If I had stayed there a day longer, I might have had even greater doubts. I think it is fortunate I left when I did. Our quarrel didn’t amount to a lot. It was about my staying out all night one time without ever being willing to explain where I was. As soon as I was a little older and began to settle down to work and behave myself we made it up. Nowadays I’m on the best of terms with her and Uncle Andrew. And whenever I’m over at their place for a meal things seem very much the way they used to. Even the talk about Jesse goes very much the way it did when he was on the scene and in easy earshot.

  When they talked about him together in the old days, especially when there was company around, it was all about his loyalty and devotion to Uncle Andrew. I agreed with every word they said on the subject, and if someone had said to me then that it was Aunt Margaret whom Jesse was most dependent upon and whose attention he most needed I would have said that person was crazy. How could anyone have supposed such a thing? And if I should advance such a theory nowadays to my uncle and aunt or to their friends they would imagine that I was expressing some long-buried resentment against Uncle Andrew. Any new analysis made in the light of what happened to Jesse after he went to work in my uncle’s Front Street office would not interest them. They wouldn’t be able to reverse a view based upon the impressions of all those years when Jesse was with them, a view based upon impressions received before any of them ever knew Jesse, impressions inherited from their own uncles and aunts and parents and grandparents.