Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  But a week went by and Sana quit mentioning Irvin, and everybody knew she was living with Jake. Jake quit his job and stayed around her house to answer questions that people came and asked.

  The sun had beat down on Port Gibson without rest during that July. The nigger churches were all having special meetings to pray for rain and for Irvin Thomas. One congregation offered to come over and work his cotton patch for Sana. But she had thanked them and the next morning set Jake Roberts to working the patch.

  He finished working it about noon just when the sky began to cloud up a little. It began drizzling about two o’clock and rained a little off and on all afternoon.

  Sana came in about seven o’clock and said that Sarah had come home early and fed Elijah his supper and was going back and do the dishes and stay with Miss Beatrice while Mr. Ernest was at his office. The rain started pouring down in a little while. It seemed to get harder and harder. Everyone said it was a cloud burst, but it lasted too long for that.

  It poured and beat and poured until eleven o’clock. Then it suddenly stopped short, without gradually drizzling off the way rain does. Ernest had come home earlier, so Sarah decided to try to make it to her house before the rain started again. She took a newspaper with her and the jar of sweet pickles Beatrice had given her.

  As Sarah turned off the square toward nigger town a few drops of cool rain began to fall and she started running. She decided that it would be shorter to cut through the backs of the houses on Pierce Street and go in the back way of her own house.

  By the time she got in back of Aunt Easter Sellars’ old cabin the drops were falling steadily, so Sarah hurried still faster over the fence stile into Sana Thomas’ cotton patch. The rain kept falling harder and she was running against the rows of cotton. Suddenly she stumbled over something. And she fell in the mud there in Sana’s cotton patch. She was wet and dirty and tired and she reached for a cotton stalk to raise herself up by. Her hand hit on human flesh.

  She looked beside her and saw that she held in her own brown hand a black foot and leg. Then she saw the half burned head of Irvin Thomas. The rain was beating fiercely down on her and on the parts of the body.

  Pulling her newspaper over her head, the soaked, shaking little nigger headed back for Mr. Ernest’s house through all the murderous rain.

  “M’st’ Ernest! M’st’ Ernest!” came the desperate cries to Beatrice’s half sleeping ears. And there was pounding, pounding, pounding on the wet front door. She was down stairs in ten seconds and had flung the door open. Sarah rushed in past her, still holding the paper over her head, and threw herself at the feet of Ernest, then standing at the foot of the stairs.

  “I found Irvin Thomas,” she wailed. “I found his legs and his arms and his body and his haid in Sana’s cotton patch. All cut up! The rain, the rain’s done washed ’im up.” And she lay there on the floor weeping and beating on the floor and praying while Ernest went up stairs and put his clothes on over his pajamas. And he went out in that rain and cranked the car and drove to the sheriff’s office.

  The rain was beating murderously down on the slick black shingles of Sana’s unpainted house. A wind had blown up from the north and the hanging baskets of Wandering Jew on Sana’s porch were swinging in the wind. Sana’s house was dark and there was only the sound of the rain thumping on the roof.

  Ernest and the sheriff and three other men hopped out of the Ford with the black curtains. Ernest and the sheriff ran up the wooden plank walk to the porch with the hanging baskets. The three other men who wore long, black rain coats and rain hats and carried shovels trotted in the mud around the side of the house. All of the men held great, strong flashlights that shone through the thick falling rain.

  “Sana Thomas, open this door in the name of the law!” the sheriff called out in his robust voice. He thought the rain would drown it out from the ears of the neighbors. But the lights in all the houses in that end of nigger town began to flicker on and off like lightning bugs in the rain. And half-dressed niggers swarmed the mud street beneath umbrellas and rain coats and newspapers.

  The latch on the thin door broke easily under the pushing shoulders of the two white men. Ernest fell forward and the ray of his light lit on a glazed two-color print of Judas Iscariot selling out to the chief priests. He turned the light about the hall between the two rooms of the house. It now lit on a glazed two-color print of Judas hanging over a cliff from the bough of a tree. He turned it still again and it lit on the third print. This was Jesus forgiving the woman taken in adultery.

  The sheriff’s robust voice was commanding again. He stood in the doorway to Sana’s bedroom shining his white light in their black faces. Ernest stepped in the doorway beside him and shone his light on the piteous couple.

  Jake was propped up on his elbows and the white sheet had slipped down and exposed his broad, black, hairy chest. The muscle in his big left arm quivered and he chewed on the right side of his lower lip.

  Sana lay on her stomach hugging Jake’s left arm. Her face was hidden in the pillow. She was crying and praying softly and monotonously. Ernest thought she sounded like his Catholic grandmother the day she died. He could not hear what she was mumbling, but he knew she was praying.

  “I reckon maybe y’all better get somethin’ on and come along with me,” the sheriff said casually.

  Sana looked around over her brown shoulder at the blinding light. She could not see who was with the sheriff. He handed Ernest his pistol, went over and dragged her from her bed with Jake and wrapped a dirty wool kimono around her.

  “Ernest, you bring Jake, will you?” he said.

  The face of Sana Thomas had been fixed and resigned. But when she heard the name “Ernest” every muscle in it seemed to break loose and she broke loose from the tall white man and ran toward her master. The sheriff did not understand her move. He followed her and held her arms behind her while she screamed up into Ernest’s face.

  “Mist’ Ernest, I ain’t a bad nigger. You know that. Jake and me had to have each other. We just had to. White folks don’t know what that means. But honest to Gord we did—we had to. Irv wouldn’t let us. He said he’d kill us if he found us together—and he would ’ave. So we killed him with that ax and tried to burn him, but we couldn’t so we buried him out there!”

  She looked out the back window and saw the flashlights of two of the men in the cotton patch.

  Ernest motioned to the sheriff to let her arms go.

  “It was us or him, Mist’ Ernest! Jake and me was gonna have each other. We had to.”

  Ernest looked into her big twitching eyes. “What do you want me to do, Sana?”

  “Deefend us! Don’t let ’em hang us,” she screamed, and she took hold of his left sleeve.

  The sheriff smiled and told Jake to get his clothes on. Ernest looked out into the hall. One of the other men had come in and lit the kerosene lamp. Ernest looked at the picture of Judas Iscariot selling out and at that of the woman taken in adultery being forgiven.

  Beatrice didn’t go to the trial at all. But of course there was so much talk about it that she knew everything that went on, though Ernest would never discuss it after her begging him not to take the case. Her friends would come to her and ask why her husband had defended that low-down pair. Beatrice would gossip with them about it and say she didn’t understand it and say what a good nigger Irvin had been. Most of the women were indignant and said that Ernest was almost condemning all of the virtuous black and white women in the town, that it was really a reflection on Beatrice. But Beatrice only smiled vaguely and said she didn’t think it was that serious and that Ernest had just gotten interested in the case was all.

  The Life Before

  ON THE corner of two of those old streets down town that have never been widened but on which street cars and motor busses clank and barely manage to turn the corners without scraping the parked automobiles the great, square “Hotel Hensely” was still standing with its eight story plaster facade of Gothic arches
now the shade of a grey alley cat. This part of town had not sunk to the status of a slum section. People would just say that there was nothing down there anymore. On the corner diagonally across from the hotel was what was once known as the Confederate Bank Building, now, with all the white marble torn out, a wholesale poultry store. On one of the other corners of the intersection was a Jewish costumer’s shop. The little store space on the fourth corner changed occupants so often that it would be laborious to ascribe any particular business to it. And up each street ran a row of second hand book shops, restaurants, and cheap clothing stores.

  “Hotel Hensely,” or The Hensely House as natives, despite its electrical sign reading “Hotel Hensely,” still called it with some affection and pride, had seen its last day of fashion nearly twenty years before when the new hotels over on the capital square had climbed fifteen and sixteen stories into the skyline. Now old men in shirtsleeves and galluses filled the green benches on the sidewalk before the hotel, and the doorman was a negro in similar attire. Through the lobby moved weary strangers carrying their own shabby baggage, and the clerk at the desk was a fat, bald-headed man that welcomed the guests with no smile, often pointing out to them with his pen a notice that read: Advance Payment Preferred.

  Around the lobby ran the colonnade of stout marble pillars, and half way up was the little used and ill-lighted gallery. At five in the afternoon the transient guest in the lobby might notice the unfriendly clerk gazing up at this balcony. Finally he could see him nod at the figure of a woman who came out of the shadows up there and took her seat by the balustrade. And so generous a smile would come over his face that it seemed he had been hoarding something in his nature to give it all to this smile. It wasn’t the sort of smile that he gave to the new girls in the pool room at the end of the lobby. It was the sort that a guest could never suspect his hard physiognomy capable of softening into. And there was but one other time at which this smile could be seen on the face of the clerk. That would be some ten or fifteen minutes later when a soft featured man in his fifties, wearing a black felt hat and a dark suit, would appear in the doorway of the lobby where he waited for the woman on the gallery to join him. When the couple had passed through the revolving door out into the street, the smile would fade from the face of the clerk; and he would again be the merciless clerk pointing to the notice: Advance Payment Preferred.

  When the couple would return at seven or eight in the evening, their presence in the lobby was the cause of no such metamorphosis in the night clerk’s face. He was a younger man, and he gave up the key to Room 416 as impersonally as he would any other key and answered with abruptness the gentleman’s usual question as to whether or not there were a package for Mr. or Mrs. Powell.

  If there were a package for Mr. or Mrs. Powell, it was always a book or perhaps two books together in a publisher’s mailing box. And the couple would leave the desk examining together the new book which one of them would review on the literary page of the Sunday edition of The Herald-Democrat. Sometimes they would laugh over the book. Again one would read the first page aloud to the other as they waited for the elevator. Sometimes they would bring the book back to the desk and together plot a curt, sometimes saucy note for the Sunday Editor and leave a dime with the night clerk, asking that a bellboy return the book to the Herald-Democrat office “the first thing” in the morning.

  Mr. and Mrs. Powell had the old Governor’s Suite on the fourth floor. Beside the little vestibule with the straight chair and the old-fashioned card table with one leaf propped against the wall their apartment consisted of three square rooms and a bath. One, the corner room, was their parlor. The other big room was their bed room, and the small room was furnished as a study, a room which they never used. The apartment had stood in disuse for a decade before it was assigned to the Powells by the clerk. He had assigned it to them as a surprise, as a wedding gift, at the time when Mr. Powell had brought his bride to The Hensely House.

  Mr. Powell had lived, a bachelor, at The Hensely House for ten years before his marriage. And, excepting his year of courtship, he had kept, as a bachelor, approximately the same hours that he and Mrs. Powell now kept and entertained as few friends in his room. He had come here to live as a young man in his early thirties when The Hensely House was only beginning to “slip.” He had come back then, not to his native city but to the largest town in his native state, from a six-year stay abroad. He had set up at The Hensely House because, being of a well-to-do Southern family, he had never thought of stopping at another place; and until the time of his marriage he simply never thought of moving out.

  During his first ten years there he might have watched, had he been one of the guests who spent his evenings in the lobby, a continuous decline in the quality of the patronage that the old hotel received. As it was, the changes came to him as a series of shocks. They would be brought to his attention by incidents in the elevator, by the appearance of characters especially typical of their level of society, and finally by a fight between two salesmen in the lobby over a woman who he was told was “upstairs.” And the decline would be brought to his attention by notices in the newspaper of the hotel’s changing hands again and again.

  Several years before his marriage he noticed what he believed to be the last step in the degradation of the hotel. It lay in the appointment of a man who had once carried trunks in the hotel and later been in charge of the pool room to the position of manager and clerk. Heretofore the hotel had retained, if not the old-fashioned obsequious, at least a moderately courteous clerk at the desk. Now management and clerkship in the hotel required physical force; and Mr. Powell knew from where the new power had been drawn. As he came and went through the lobby he could but notice the rough treatment that guests received, and he one day saw the new clerk personally eject a drunken couple and order their luggage to be locked in the storage room. Therefore he carefully avoided any conversation with the former porter.

  One afternoon, however, he had been forced to ask the clerk to call his room the moment a package came from The Herald-Democrat. And the clerk had replied so courteously that Mr. Powell, who had fixed his eyes on the elevator, quickly looked at the man before him and said with real gratitude, “You’re very kind.”

  The clerk had not let it go at that. He told Mr. Powell that this was no service at all and that any service that the management could do him was a pleasure. And he took that opportunity to ask Mr. Powell if he remembered him around the hotel through the years. It delighted the clerk that Mr. Powell recalled that he had carried his trunk the day he moved to the hotel. To make amends for his negligence of the clerk whom he had thought so inhuman he told him that he was due respect for having risen from the bottom to the top “in the establishment.”

  “I’m afraid not,” said the clerk. “When I was a boy around here I used to think I would push myself up to the running of this hotel. That is, when it was full of the likes of you. But it’s more like ‘the establishment’ has come down to my size,” he said.

  Mr. Powell smiled sympathetically, shook his head and started slowly toward the elevator. But the clerk moved behind the counter along with him. He was still talking, and talking as though it were his one chance to speak this. Mr. Powell stopped, and the clerk told him that his presence sometimes made it possible to imagine that he hadn’t “missed the boat, after all.”

  Half an hour later Mr. Powell’s books were delivered to his room; and though the clerk never spoke his feelings to him again, by his very smile Mr. Powell was never allowed to forget the difference between himself and the other guests at the hotel.

  Mr. Powell’s enquiry regarding larger quarters in the hotel was answered with courtesy and without show of surprise at the desk. But the night he brought home Mrs. Powell they both recognized their apartment as the famous old Governor’s Suite with the fourposter bed and the green drapes. They very easily reached the agreement that there was nothing to do but to accept their “sumptuous” quarters. They had considered several other
places in town within their price range but had at last decided on The Hensely House as the most convenient to their pursuits in life and as, what was of admittedly great importance to each, the most private. Consequently they settled there to what Mrs. Powell’s spinster sister and her only at-all-intimate friend together described as “an obscure, if comfortable, old age” before either was yet forty-five.

  The callers that the couple generally received in the first years of married life were five. There was first Mrs. Powell’s spinster sister who died a few years after their marriage, thus adding a little to their small income. There was the elderly state librarian and his wife; but the librarian, too, had died, and they soon lost contact with his aging wife. The Sunday Editor of The Herald-Democrat, a comfortably-fixed Jew, called several times a year and promised to bring his wife with him the next time, and his daughter who was an artist. And finally and always there was the one intimate friend that Mrs. Powell had at the time of her marriage, a tall red-headed woman who managed the city’s only large auditorium, still called The Opera House. She was the most infrequent caller of them all (though she lasted through the years), but she always sent to them complimentary tickets to whatever performance was at her Opera House.

  Most of Mrs. Powell’s mornings were spent in the New City Academy of Art where she was allowed space for her work. Some, however, she spent in the City Library doing her research. When she had first met Mr. Powell she had told him that she was the missing link between the days of heraldry and these days of machinery. “I dress myself,” she had said, “on the money I make discovering and copying the ancient coats of arms for those on top in town each year.” Then with her hand and her smile she had called his attention to the simple dress she wore as evidence of the very modest returns of her business. He had looked with honest approval at the dress and remarked on its pleasing pattern and the taste with which she wore her jewelry.