by John Sanford
“Do you know why?” the woman said.
“Sure, I know why. Because they’re no good at it.”
“But why are they no good at it?”
“Because the colored people are better at it, that’s why.”
“Why are they better at it?”
“Because they do it more.”
“Ah!” the woman said. “And why do they do it more?”
“What do you mean—ah?” the hack-driver said. “They do it more because they’re better at it.”
“Dan,” the woman said, “would you mind if I called you a dunce?”
“Not at all. I’d like it.”
“Well, you’re a dunce!” she said.
The boy thought [“I am going to try and be equal, but they are not going to let me be equal, and I am going to get in trouble about that”], and then he said, “The colored people do it more because they have to,” and as he stared at the place in the air where his words seemed to be hanging, he felt his mother’s fingers lightly brush his face.
She put her voice out with care, as if it were fragile. “Why do they have to?” she said.
He thought [“I am black, so I am going to be a dishwasher, and a window-cleaner, and a price-fighter”], and he said, “Because people won’t let them be anything better.”
“What people?” the woman said.
“The white people.”
The woman glanced at her husband, but joy changed to pity when she read the words written in his eyes [My own kid knew, and I didn’t.], and turning again to Danny, she said, “Get me the bank.” When the boy handed her a miniature cupboard of inlaid wood—sent from Ecuador by Uncle Web—she sprang a secret panel in the base and dumped a pile of coins on the table. Making a stack of nine quarters topped by a nickel, she set it before her son and said, “You’re in business.”
“Wait a minute,” the hack-driver said. “He ain’t proved he can handle that kind of money.”
“Test him,” the woman said.
“Damn if I don’t,” the hack-driver said. “Danny, if you gave a guy a ten-cent shine, and he handed you a dollar-bill, how much would he have left?”
The boy said, “Eighty-five cents.”
The hack-driver sought clemency for his idiot son from an imaginary guest occupying the fourth chair at the table. He said, “What can you expect, Mr. Nobody? He’s the only child of a dunce and a dame named after a cigar.”
The woman said, “Danny, ten from a hundred leaves what?”
“Ninety,” the boy said.
“Then why did you just tell us the man would have eighty-five?”
“I figured him for a five-cent tip.”
Now the woman turned to the imaginary guest. “Mr. Nobody,” she said, “my old man got stung.”
“Hold your horses,” the hack-driver said. “The kid ain’t passed the whole test yet. Danny, supposing you gave the guy a ten-cent shine, and he handed you a twenny-dollar-bill. How much would he have left?”
“Nineteen dollars and eighty-five cents.”
“Wrong! He wouldn’t have nothing left!”
“Why wouldn’t he?” the boy said.
“Because you’d stick the bill in your pocket and run like hell on fire!” The hack-driver reached out and shook hands with Mr. Nobody. “Who’s stung now?”
The woman glared at him until his glee toppled, and he lay about himself in ruins, and then, abandoning the wreck, she said to her son, “He didn’t mean that. He was only talking for the benefit of Mr. Nobody.”
* * *
For some hours now, Danny’s shoe-shine outfit, neatly arranged alongside one of the downtown kiosks of the 125th Street subway station, had been ready for the transaction of business, but as yet no one had placed a foot on the box and requested the proprietor to kneel on the cushion for a dime’s worth of labor. In contrast, a colored boy with a rival enterprise only a yard distant had served a succession of patrons, both white and black, throughout the morning, and Danny had noted his trade with envy and his skill, particularly his closing flourish—the playing of Yankee Doodle on the finish-rag—with admiration.
[You wished that Gil and Harry and Monroe would go some place else, instead of parading up and down in front of you and getting off killing remarks. They weren’t helping you any.
[“Say, guys” Monroe said, “I’m thinking of getting a shine. Know any good bootblacks?”
[Gil said, “I heard of one down Lenox a ways that can make your shoes say, ‘Hot dog, man!’”
[“I got a job off of him the other day,” Harry said “and I’m here to tell you he’s the bootblackingest bootblack that ever bootblacked.”
[“You got to watch some of these beginners” Monroe said. “They could roon a pair of wing-tips in one shine.”
[“Some of’em couldn’t shine an apple with spit,” Harry said.
[“I know one that couldn’t even shine a thing that was shiny” Gil said.
[Monroe said, “Nobody can touch my shoes unless he can play My Country Tears Of Thee.”
[“Danny couldn’t even play that on a victrola,” Harry said.]
“Your name Danny?” the colored boy said.
Danny smiled.
* * *
They were friends at the end of the first day, partners at the end of the first week, and still friends at the end of the first month. They called themselves The Black & White Polishing Company—Tudor (Tootsie) Powell and Daniel Johnson, owners, and they divided the profits as follows: two-thirds to the senior member of the firm and one-third to the junior. This had been a fair arrangement at the outset, and it was still fair now at midsummer, even though Danny had begun to snap out an occasional bar of music with his shoe-rags: he knew little that Tootsie had not taught him, and he could do nothing that Tootsie could not do better.
“Getcha shine!” Danny was saying.
Nearby, Tootsie was crouched over a pair of oxfords, and with the job nearly over and payment in sight, his hand was sweeping a brush in a yard-long arc. Now he tapped a few drops of water on a toe-cap, and flirting the dust from a rag, he began to ride it up into the realm of song.
“Getcha shine!” Danny was saying.
A man in riding-breeches set a boot on Danny’s box and said, “Touch ’em up.”
Danny surveyed the expanse of muddied leather and said, “A riding-boot is a quarter.”
“A quarter!” the man said. “Your sign says a dime!”
“Yankee Doodle went uptown, riding on a pony.”
“A riding-boot and a shoe is two different things,” Danny said.
“Stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni.”
“I’ll shop around,” the man said, and stepping down from Danny’s box, he moved on to Tootsie’s, now free.
Tootsie made a frowning inspection of the boots, squinted at the sky, where his eyes added an invisible column of figures, and brought the total down to earth. “Fifty cents,” he said.
“What!” the man said. “That boy over there’ll do the job for a quarter!”
“No, he won’t,” Tootsie said.
“I’ll show you,” the man said, and he returned to Danny’s box.
“Fifty cents,” Danny said.
“Damn it, you said a quarter before!”
“A quarter a boot.”
“We’re partners,” Tootsie said.
* * *
“And called it macaroni”
Snap! And Tootsie had finished his last shine of a late-August day. “Ten cents,” he said to his customer.
“Ten cents what” the man said.
“Ten cents for the shine,” Tootsie said.
“Ten cents for the shine what” the man said.
“Just ten cents for the shine.”
“Now you don’t get a cent, you fresh little nigger bastard!”
Tootsie rose. “You don’t have any right to talk like that,” he said. “I gave you a shine, and I only asked you to pay for it.”
“To pay for it what,” the man said.
“He don’t have to say ‘Please’ to you,” Danny said.
The man strode over to Danny and looked down at him, saying, “You want to get into this?”
“I am in it. He’s my partner.”
“Get him to say ‘Please,’ or you’re out a dime.”
“I wouldn’t get him to do that if you owed us seventeen dollars!”
“Then say it yourself, nigger-lover!”
“Nobody has to say ‘Please!’” Danny said.
The man sowed a backhander along Danny’s jawbone, and, driven against the wall of the kiosk, the boy struck his head on the heavy glass. As he sagged to the sidewalk, the man went away.
[Tootsie was going away too. Everything was going away. It was all tipping and sliding away downhill. But now it was tipping back. And now it was all straight again. And it stayed straight.]
Tootsie was on his knees, holding him up with an arm under his shoulders. “You all right, Danny-boy?” he was saying.
“Nobody has to say ‘Please’ to nobody,” Danny said, and he wiped away a teardrop of blood wept by his mouth.
* * *
In the Johnson parlor, The Black & White Polishing Company sat full and staring before an empty milk-bottle, two empty glasses, two fudged-up plates, and the remaining third of a layer-cake. Chocolate dyed the corners of a white mouth, and there was chocolate on a chocolate cheek.
“More cake, partners?” Mrs. Johnson said.
The boys looked at each other and grinned. Their teeth were tiles in chocolate stucco.
“I’ll give you a slice to take home, Tootsie,” the woman said.
“Next year, the party’ll be at my house,” the colored boy said.
* * *
After supper that evening, the woman brought her old ledger to the table, and turning to a section reserved for her son, she added and verified a long list of entries. Then, reaching down alongside her chair, she lifted a bulging flour-sack from a basket and poured pounds of coins over an outspread newspaper, and these she began to sort and stack while her son watched her above a chin-rest of crossed arms. From time to time, he glanced at his father, but the man sat sideways to the circle of the table, and gazing at the map, he was tangent to all that the circle contained.
“Write what I tell you, son,” the woman said, “and we’ll see what we have.” The boy took up a pencil and drew a dollar-sign in the blank space of an ad. “Ten stacks of twenty quarters: write fifty dollars. One stack of thirty halves: write fifteen dollars. Nine stacks of twenty-five dimes: that’s twenty-two and a half. Two stacks of twenty nickels: two dollars. One stack of fifty pennies: fifty cents. And seventy cents in loose change. What do you get?”
The boy added. “Ninety dollars and seventy cents,” he said.
The woman turned the ledger to him and put her finger on a sum. “Ninety dollars and seventy cents,” she said.
“I didn’t know I made that much. That was a pretty good business.”
“And to think it all started with a graduation-present.”
“That didn’t start it; I started it. The present didn’t make the money; I made the money.”
“But without the present, you couldn’t’ve bought the outfit.”
“I know,” the boy said, “but without me, the outfit would still only be an outfit. It didn’t get down and shine the shoes; I shone the shoes.”
“What would you’ve shined them with if you had no outfit?”
“I guess I wouldn’t’ve done any shining.”
“And if you did no shining,” the woman said, “you’d have no ninety dollars and seventy cents.”
“That’s what I been saying! If I didn’t do any shining, there would still be only the graduation-present here on the table—two dollars and thirty cents. It was the shining turned that into ninety dollars and seventy cents. It was the shining turned a mishrable little two dollars and thirty cents into something that’s eighty-eight dollars and forty cents bigger—and I done the shining!”
“I’m not trying to take away from your work,” the woman said. “You did better than anyone would’ve expected. But somebody made the work possible, and the profits as well. That somebody was your father: he put you in business.”
[Did that mean he owned the whole business, or only the amount of the graduation-present? Did you owe him the ninety bucks, or the difference between the two bucks and the ninety, or only the two bucks—or nothing?]
“Where did he get the money to put me in business?”
“He earned it,” the woman said. “He worked for it with his outfit—the cab.”
“Where did he get the money for his outfit?”
“He borrowed it from the bank.”
“How much did he pay back?”
“What he borrowed, plus interest.”
“Did he pay the bank all he made with the outfit?”
“No, only what he’d borrowed.”
Danny counted out nine quarters and a nickel, added a few pennies for interest, and put the coins aside. “I will do the same thing as Pop done with the bank,” he said.
His mother came to her feet, and saying nothing, she held the maw of the sack against the table-edge and raked the stacks into it one by one. She left for last the little pile that Danny had sequestered, and when this too had vanished, she knotted the sack and let it fall clanking in front of the boy. Then, holding her hands in quarantine, as if contaminated, she walked out of the room.
“She’s mad at me,” Danny said to his father. “What did I do?”
The hack-driver tapped a clot of ash from his pipe-bowl. “You and Mom was talking about some money I borrowed to buy the Pope-H,” he said. “You know when that was? Nineteen-o-eight. That makes it a year older than you, kid.”
“A year older than a kid is still a kid.”
“For a car, it’s a goat—and it runs like one. Falls all over its beard.”
“Can’t you fix it?”
“You can’t fix a thing that’s old except by making it young, which even God ain’t done yet. You can give it a coat of paint and a new set of shoes, but inside it’ll still be the same wheezy works that ran a half a million miles.”
“I guess you’ll have to buy a new outfit.”
“I been thinking the very identical thing. I got my eye on a Pierce-Arrow.”
“That’s the kind with lamps on the mudguards.”
“It’s a 1920 model, but it’s as good as new, because it’s broke in. A Pierce-Arrow, you don’t break it in till you’ve drove it a couple of years.”
“A Locomobile is got the best hubcaps.”
“I told the man I’d take her for a whirl some time, and he said, ‘You better hurry. I expect to move this job in a week.’ I said, ‘ What’s the best you’ll give me on the Pope-H?’ and he said, ‘Four hundred bucks—and grab it before they drag me back to the asylum.’”
“A Stutz goes the speediest.”
“I said, ‘Four hundred from a price of seven hundred is three hundred, and I only got two hundred. Where in hell am I going to raise that extra century?’ He said, ‘Try the bank,’ and I said, ‘I ain’t loaning no money off no bank,’ and he said, ‘Mister, if you need this Pierce-A as bad as you say, you’ll get the dough some place, even if it’s your father-in-law.’”
The hack-driver rose suddenly, and shaking his head, he went into the bedroom and closed the door behind him. The boy sat where he was for a moment, idly poking at the lumpy sack of coins. He heard his mother’s voice through the transom, but the words were blurred and lost. His father’s, in reply, were not. “I couldn’t do it!” the man said. “So help me God, I couldn’t do it!” The boy thought [It was like you were a tight suit of clothes around yourself. It was like your skin was a crowd.].
He went to the bedroom door and knocked.
“Come in,” his mother said.
The hack-driver was seated on the bed, facing away. “What is it, kid?” the man said.
Danny offered him the sack.<
br />
[All of a sudden, your clothes weren’t tight any more.]
What’s Your Name in American?
Danny’s first lecture at De Witt Clinton High School had not yet begun, but the class had gathered, and filling every seat in the room and all the sitting-space afforded by the lockers along the walls, it awaited the ringing of the bell and the resurrection of the instructor, Dr. Jesse Knox. It was one minute before nine, and Doc Knox, three hundred pounds of pneumatic flesh, slumbered at his desk.
The bell rang.
The instructor came to life, but it was a life that he seemed to live chiefly in his mouth, a valve-like hole in a mass of distended fat; the rest of his body, a gasbag dressed in blue serge, remained dead. “The first of you sprats to draw a picture of a fat man,” he said, “the first one even to use the word ‘fat,’ in my presence—I promise to throw him out in the hall without bothering to open the door. I don’t like people to make fun of me. I’ll go further: I don’t like people. I’ve given this course twice a year for twelve years, and I always start with the same warning, but every term some fool from Missouri puts me to the test. I don’t like people to make fun of me!”
“Fat slob,” someone said.
An expanding expanse like smoke rolled up one of the aisles and then rolled back, dragging a suit that contained a boy. Only because the boy managed to open the door for himself did he make his exit without breaking wood, and then Doc Knox resumed his seat, and his body was dead again.
“The subject of this course is Political Science,” he said, “and the worst way to learn it is to believe the trash in your textbooks. The real meaning of the Bill of Rights you’ll have to absorb from me, and the real effect of the Constitution, and the real difference between Jefferson and Hamilton—from me, not from the books. Listen to me, and you’ll know the truth. If you’re ready, we’ll start.” His eyes made steppingstones of the upturned faces. “You, there,” he said to Danny. “What’s your name in American …?”
A Man’s Ambition must be Small
At a table in the Clinton lunchroom overlooking the Hudson, Danny sat before two sandwiches, an apple, a pint-bottle of milk, and a chocolate bar. The boy bit a chunk from one of the sandwiches, and sucking a rod of milk up a straw, he stared through a window at warehouses, docks, water, sky, and the United States. Clouds sailed west below clouds standing still, and with them, under sealed orders, sailed a cargo of rain. The boy watched them for a moment, wondering where the rain would fall, and for no reason that he knew, the name Juniata accosted his mind. He bit another half-moon from the sandwich, drowned it in another draw of milk, and turned absently to a scribbled-on section of plaster wall. Tangled trails of graphite became words.
