Collected Stories of Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  "What are you locked up for?" John Henry called. He stood at a little distance from F. Jasmine and he was wearing the jonquil dress, as F. Jasmine had given him all the costumes. She had not wished to take him with her; but he had pleased and pleaded, and finally followed at a distance, anyway. When the criminal did not answer, he called again in a thin, high voice. "Are you going to be hung?"

  "Hush up!" F. Jasmine said. The jail did not frighten her this evening, for this time tomorrow she would be far away. She gave the jail a last glance and then walked on. "How would you like for somebody to holler something like that to you if you were in jail?"

  It was past eight o'clock when she reached Sugarville. The evening was dusty and lavender. Doors of the crowded houses on either side were open, and from some parlors there was the quavered flutter of oil lamps, lighting up the front-room beds and decorated mantelpieces. Voices sounded slurred and from a distance came the jazz of a piano and horn. Children played in alleyways, leaving whorled footsteps in the dust. The people were dressed for Saturday night, and on a corner she passed a group of jesting colored boys and girls in shining evening dresses. There was a party air about the street that reminded her that she, also, could go that very evening to a date at the Blue Moon. She spoke to people on the street and felt again the unexplainable connection between her eyes and other eyes. Mixed with the bitter dust, and smells of privies and suppertime, the smell of a clematis vine threaded the evening air. The house where Berenice lived was on the corner of Chinaberry Street—a two-room house with a tiny front yard bordered by shards and bottle-caps. A bench on the front porch held pots of cool, dark ferns. The door was only partly open and F. Jasmine could see the gold-gray flutters of the lamplight inside.

  "You stay out here," she said to John Henry.

  There was the murmuring of a strong, cracked voice behind the door, and when F. Jasmine knocked, the voice was quiet a second and then asked:

  "Who that? Who is it?"

  "Me," she said, for if she answered her true name, Big Mama would not recognize it. "Frankie."

  The room was close, although the wooden shutter stood open, and there was the smell of sickness and fish. The crowded parlor was neat. One bed stood against the right wall, and on the opposite side of the room were a sewing machine and a pump organ. Over the hearth hung a photograph of Ludie Freeman; the mantelpiece was decorated with fancy calendars, fair prizes, souvenirs. Big Mama lay in the bed against the wall next to the door, so that in the daytime she could look out through the front window onto the ferny porch and street outside. She was an old colored woman, shriveled and with bones like broomsticks; on the left side of her face and neck the skin was the color of tallow, so that part of her face was almost white and the rest copper-colored. The old Frankie used to think that Big Mama was slowly turning to a white person, but Berenice had said it was a skin disease that sometimes happened to colored people. Big Mama had done fancy washing and fluted curtains until the year the misery had stiffened her back so that she took to bed. But she had not lost any faculties; instead, she suddenly found second-sight. The old Frankie had always thought she was uncanny, and when she was a little girl Big Mama was connected in her mind with the three ghosts who lived inside the coalhouse. And even now, a child no longer, she still had an eerie feeling about Big Mama. She was lying on three feather pillows, the covers of which were bordered with crochet, and over her bony legs there was a many-colored quilt. The parlor table with the lamp was pulled up close beside the bed so that she could reach the objects on it: a dream-book, a white saucer, a workbasket, a jellyglass of water, a Bible, and other things. Big Mama had been talking to herself before F. Jasmine came in, as she had the constant habit of telling herself just who she was and what she was doing and what she intended to do as she lay there in the bed. There were three mirrors on the walls which reflected the wavelike light from the lamp that fluttered gold-gray in the room and cast giant shadows; the lampwick needed trimming. Someone was walking in the back room.

  "I came to get my fortune told," F. Jasmine said.

  While Big Mama talked to herself when alone, she could be very silent at other times. She stared at F. Jasmine for several seconds before she answered: "Very well. Draw up that stool before the organ."

  F. Jasmine brought the stool close to the bed, and leaning forward, stretched out her palm. But Big Mama did not take her palm. She examined F. Jasmine's face, then spat the wad of snuff into a chamberpot which she pulled from underneath the bed, and finally put on her glasses. She waited so long that it occurred to F. Jasmine that she was trying to read her mind, and this made her uneasy. The walking in the back room stopped and there was no sound in the house.

  "Cast back your mind and remember," she said finally. "Tell me the revelation of your last dream."

  F. Jasmine tried to cast back her mind, but she did not dream often. Then finally she remembered a dream she had had that summer: "I dreamed there was a door," she said. "I was just looking at it and while I watched, it began slowly to open. And it made me feel funny and I woke up."

  "Was there a hand in the dream?"

  F. Jasmine thought. "I don't think so."

  "Was there a cockroach on that door?"

  "Why—I don't think so."

  "It signifies as follows." Big Mama slowly closed and opened her eyes. "There going be a change in your life."

  Next she took F. Jasmine's palm and studied it for quite a while. "I see here where you going to marry a boy with blue eyes and light hair. You will live to be your threescore and ten, but you must act careful about water. I see here a red-clay ditch and a bale of cotton."

  F. Jasmine thought to herself that there was nothing to it, only a pure waste of money and time. "What does that signify?"

  But suddenly the old woman raised her head and the cords of her neck stiffened as she called: "You, Satan!"

  She was looking at the wall between the parlor and the kitchen, and F. Jasmine turned to look over her shoulder also.

  "Yessum," a voicc replied from the back room, and it sounded like Honey.

  "How many times is I got to tell you to take them big feets off the kitchen table!"

  "Yessum," Honey said again. His voice was meek as Moses, and F. Jasmine could hear him put his feet down on the floor.

  "Your nose is going to grow into that book, Honey Brown. Put it down and finish up your supper."

  F. Jasmine shivered. Had Big Mama looked clear through the wall and seen Honey reading with his feet up on the table? Could those eyes pierce through a pure plank wall? It seemed as though it would behoove her to listen carefully to every word.

  "I see here a sum of money. A sum of money. And I see a wedding."

  F. Jasmine's outstretched hand trembled a little. "That!" she said. "Tell me about that!"

  "The wedding or the money?"

  "The wedding."

  The lamplight made an enormous shadow of them on the bare boards of the wall. "It's the wedding of a near relation. And I foresee a trip ahead."

  "A trip?" she asked. "What kind of a trip? A long trip?"

  Big Mama's hands were crooked, spotted with freckly pale blots, and the palms were like melted pink birthday candles. "A short trip," she said.

  "But how—?" F. Jasmine began.

  "I see a going and a coming back. A departure and a return."

  There was nothing to it, for surely Berenice had told her about the trip to Winter Hill and the wedding. But if she could see straight through a wall—"Are you sure?"

  "Well—" This time the old cracked voice was not so certain. "I see a departure and a return, but it may not be for now. I can't guarantee. For at the same time I see roads, trains, and a sum of money."

  "Oh!" F. Jasmine said.

  There was the sound of footsteps, and Honey Camden Brown stood on the threshold between the kitchen and the parlor. He wore tonight a yellow shirt with a bow tie, for he was usually a natty dresser—but his dark eyes were sad, and his long face still as stone. F.
Jasmine knew what Big Mama had said about Honey Brown. She said he was a boy God had not finished. The Creator had withdrawn His hand from him too soon. God had not finished him, and so he had to go around doing one thing and then another to finish himself up. When she had first heard this remark, the old Frankie did not understand the hidden meaning. Such a remark put her in mind of a peculiar half-boy—one arm, one leg, half a face—a half-person hopping in the gloomy summer sun around the corners of the town. But later she understood it a little better. Honey played the horn, and had been first in his studies at the colored high school. He ordered a French book from Atlanta and learned himself some French. At the same time he would suddenly run hog-wild all over Sugarville and tear around for several days, until his friends would bring him home more dead than living. His lips could move as light as butterflies and he could talk as well as any human she had ever heard—but other times he would answer with a colored jumble that even his own family could not follow. The Creator, Big Mama said, had withdrawn His hand from him too soon, so that he was left eternally unsatisfied. Now he stood there leaning against the door jamb, bony and limp, and although the sweat showed on his face he somehow looked cold.

  "Do you wish anything before I go?" he asked.

  There was something about Honey that evening that struck F. Jasmine; it was as though, on looking into his sad, still eyes, she felt she had something to say to him. His skin in the lamplight was the color of dark wistaria and the lips were quiet and blue.

  "Did Berenice tell you about the wedding?" F. Jasmine asked. But, for once, it was not about the wedding that she felt she had to speak.

  "Aaannh," he answered.

  "There's nothing I wish now. T.T. is due here in a minute to visit with me for a while and meet up with Berenice. Where you off to, boy?"

  "I'm going over to Forks Falls."

  "Well, Mr. Up and Sudden, when you done decide that?"

  Honey stood leaning against the door jamb, stubborn and quiet.

  "Why can't you act like everybody else?" Big Mama said.

  "I'll just stay over through Sunday and come back Monday morning."

  The feeling that she had something to say to Honey Brown still troubled F. Jasmine. She said to Big Mama: "You were telling me about the wedding."

  "Yes." She was not looking at F. Jasmine's palm, but at the organdie dress and the silk hose and the new silver slippers. "I told you you would marry a light-haired boy with blue eyes. Later on."

  "But that's not what I'm talking about. I mean the other wedding. And the trip and what you saw about the roads and trains."

  "Exactly," said Big Mama, but F. Jasmine had the feeling she was no longer paying much mind to her, although she looked again at her palm. "I foresee a trip with a departure and a return and later a sum of money, roads and trains. Your lucky number is six, although thirteen is sometimes lucky for you too."

  F. Jasmine wanted to protest and argue, but how could you argue with a fortune-teller? She wanted at least to understand the fortune better, for the trip with the return did not fit in with the foreseeing of roads and trains.

  But as she was about to question further, there were footsteps on the front porch, a door knock, and T.T. came into the parlor. He was very proper, scraping his feet, and bringing Big Mama a carton of ice cream. Berenice had said he did not make her shiver, and it was true he was nobody's pretty man; his stomach was like a watermelon underneath his vest and there were rolls of fat on the back of his neck. He brought in with him the stir of company that she had always loved and envied about this two-room house. Always it had seemed to the old Frankie, when she could come here hunting Berenice, that there would be many people in the room—the family, various cousins, friends. In the wintertime they would sit by the hearth around the draughty, shivering fire and talk with woven voices. On clear autumn nights they were always the first to have sugar cane and Berenice would hack the joints of the slick, purple cane and they would throw the chewed, twisted pieces, marked with their teeth-prints, on a newspaper spread upon the floor. The lamplight gave the room a special look, a special smell.

  Now, with the coming of T.T., there was the old sense of company and commotion. The fortune was evidently over, and F. Jasmine put a dime in the white china saucer on the parlor table—for, although there was no fixed price, the future-anxious folks who came to Big Mama usually paid what they felt due.

  "I declare I never did see anybody grow like you do, Frankie," Big Mama remarked. "What you ought to do is tie a brickbat to your head." F. Jasmine shriveled on her heels, her knees bent slightly, and her shoulders hunched. "That's a sweet dress you got on. And them silver shoes! And silk stockings! You look like a regular grown girl."

  F. Jasmine and Honey left the house at the same time, and she was still fretted by the feeling that she had something to say to him. John Henry, who had been waiting in the lane, rushed toward them, but Honey did not pick him up and swing him around as he sometimes did. There was a cold sadness about Honey this evening. The moonlight was white.

  "What are you going to do in Forks Falls?"

  "Just mess around."

  "Do you put any faith in those fortunes?" When Honey did not answer, she went on: "You remember when she hollered back to you to take your feet off the table. Gave me a shock. How did she know your feet were on the table?"

  "The mirror," Honey said. "She has a mirror by the door so she can see what goes on in the kitchen."

  "Oh," she said. "I never have believed in fortunes."

  John Henry was holding Honey's hand and looking up into his face. "What are horsepowers?"

  F. Jasmine felt the power of the wedding; it was as though, on this last evening, she ought to order and advise. There was something she ought to tell Honey, a warning or some wise advice. And as she fumbled in her mind, an idea came to her. It was so new, so unexpected, that she stopped walking and stood absolutely still.

  "I know what you ought to do. You ought to go to Cuba or Mexico."

  Honey had walked on a few steps farther, but when she spoke he stopped also. John Henry was midway between them, and as he looked from one to the other, his face in the white moonlight had a mysterious expression.

  "Sure enough. I'm perfectly serious. It don't do you any good to mess around between Forks Falls and this town. I've seen a whole lot of pictures of Cubans and Mexicans. They have a good time." She paused. "This is what I'm trying to discuss. I don't think you will ever be happy in this town. I think you ought to go to Cuba. You are so light-skinned and you even have a kind of Cuban expression. You could go there and change into a Cuban. You could learn to speak the foreign language and none of those Cubans would ever know you are a colored boy. Don't you see what I mean?"

  Honey was still as a dark statue, and as silent.

  "What?" John Henry asked again. "What do they look like—them horsepowers?"

  With a jerk Honey turned and went on down the lane. "It is fantastic."

  "No, it is not!" Pleased that Honey had used the word fantastic to her, she said it quiedy to herself before she went on to insist. "It's not a particle fantastic. You mark my words. It's the best thing you can do."

  But Honey only laughed and turned off at the next alley. "So long."

  The streets in the middle of the town reminded F. Jasmine of a carnival fair. There was the same air of holiday freedom; and, as in the early morning, she felt herself a part of everything, included and gay. On a Main Street corner a man was selling mechanical mice, and an armless beggar, with a tin cup in his lap, sat cross-legged on the sidewalk, watching. She had never seen Front Avenue at night before, for in the evening she was supposed to play in the neighborhood close to home. The warehouses across the street were black, but the square mill at the far end of the avenue was lighted in all its many windows and there was a faint mill humming and the smell of dyeing vats. Most of the businesses were open, and the neon signs made a mingling of varied lights that gave to the avenue a watery look. There were soldiers on corne
rs, and other soldiers strolling along with grown date girls. The sounds were slurred late-summer sounds—footsteps, laughter, and above the shuffled noises, the voice of someone calling from an upper story down into the summer street. The buildings smelled of sunbaked brick and the sidewalk was warm beneath the soles of her new silver shoes. F. Jasmine stopped on the corner across from the Blue Moon. It seemed a long time since that morning when she had joined up with the soldier; the long kitchen afternoon had come between, and the soldier had somehow faded. The date, that afternoon, had seemed so very far away. And now that it was almost nine o'clock, she hesitated. She had the unexplainable feeling that there was a mistake.

  "Where are we going?" John Henry asked. "I think it's high time we went home."

  His voicc startled her, as she had almost forgotten him. He stood there with his knees locked, big-eyed and drabbled in the old tarletan costume. "I have business in town. You go home." He stared up at her and took the bubble gum he had been chewing from his mouth—he tried to park the gum behind his ear, but sweat had made his ear too slippery, so finally he put the gum back in his mouth again. "You know the way home as well as I do. So do what I tell you." For a wonder, John Henry minded her; but, as she watched him going away from her down the crowded street, she felt a hollow sorriness—he looked so babyish and pitiful in the costume.

  The change from the street to the inside of the Blue Moon was like the change that comes on leaving the open fairway and entering a booth. Blue lights and moving faces, noise. The counter and tables were crowded with soldiers, and men, and bright-faced ladies. The soldier she had promised to meet was playing the slot machine in a far corner, putting in nickel after nickel, but winning none.