by John Sanford
“If I watched some more—maybe another hundred years—I’d learn why you wanted a child that was half-me.”
“Would it take that long?” she said. “Would you really be so slow to understand?”
“I doubt that I’ll ever understand. Men everywhere are doing great things and living out great lives, and you’re thankful to them, and you give them respect and admiration, but you show them no love. I do poor things, and each day I use up a little more of a poor life, and although I never mean to, I make small of you, and I disappoint you, and I offend you with my commonness and my sour jokes, but I enjoy the same gratitude as the great, and the same deep respect—and all your love. Why is that, Mary? Why don’t the great things count with you? Why should a nobody like me go to Heaven?”
“I had a tough old lady for a grandmother” Mary said. “Tough as bear-meat, Ed used to call her, but she didn’t fool me any, because she was mush underneath. Whenever she caught me out in anything wrong, she’d storm around, bawling herself red in the face, and she’d wind up with a terrible curse: ‘The devil shouldn’t take you!’ she’d always say. Shouldn’t, Dan—and my curse on you is the same.”
“I don’t know what to say, Mary,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”
THE DAY BEFORE LINCOLN’S BIRTHDAY
Through the window of the parlor, he watched snow chalk up a slate dusk. There were small sounds to be heard in the room, the flatulence of a radiator, footfalls on the floor above, and, from the floor below, music strained of melody by planks and plaster. There were trespassing savors to be aware of, the smell of neighbors’ food, the smell of neighbors, the smell of the street, and one mild but indefeasible fragrance, a flavor that no invasion would ever annul. He went to a wardrobe, and opening a door, he stood close to the rack of clothes within, and he thought [She would come home soon, and then something would happen to the gray gloom, something would enter the room with her, and the season would change, and what was dull would be bright, and what was cold would be warm, and all that was dead, including you, would seem to quicken. She would close the door behind her, and you would help her with her coat and rubbers, and she would comb out her pressed-down hair, and you would watch her until she turned, and then you would put your self hard against her mouth. She would come home soon, you thought.]. And because there was no doubt in his mind, he felt that he could run the risk of creating one, and therefore, as he awaited a sure and pleasant moment, he caused himself to wonder how he would wait if he knew that the moment would never arrive—and at once, without more, the thought was beyond control. He looked about him at the dull that would always be dull and the cold that would always be cold, and he knew that the dead, including himself, would never come alive, nor would the season change nor the gray gloom rise.
He opened the window, and a curtain of snow bloomed in the room. Leaning out, he scanned the street to both corners, but there were few people to be seen, and among them was no Mary. He found himself seated on a chair, but he could not remember the act of sitting down, and then he found himself standing without knowing that he had risen, and then he began to walk the length of the rug, and each time he passed a knob on the brass bedstead, he touched it with the palm of his hand and all five fingers (not two or three or four, but five), and he remained unaware of the ritual until he had performed it many times, and then suddenly he shivered. The window was still open, and he closed it, but the shivering did not immediately end.
When Mary entered, he gave her no help with her coat and rubbers, nor did he watch her while she combed her hair, for he had turned to the window on hearing her in the hall, and until she came to stand beside him, he stared down at plates of light on the table-cloth of the street. “There’s a present for you on the chiffonier,” he said.
“A present for me?” she said. “But it’s your birthday.”
“I really didn’t want anything, so I spent the money on you.”
“Why’ve you been standing here like this, Dan?”
“I thought you were never coming back.”
“Good Lord, what made you imagine that?”
“The same thing that brought you home.”
A VERRAY PARFIT GENTIL KNIGHT
Tossing a card across his desk, Peterson said, “Motion for a refund denied.”
“The woman isn’t asking for a refund,” Dan said. “All she wants is another job for the same commission.”
“Two beers for the same nickel,” Peterson said. “The Court finds that the applicant agreed to pay a commission out of her first month’s salary, that said salary was duly paid and said commission duly collected, and that shortly thereafter the applicant was discharged because she couldn’t cook water till it got hot.”
“So the employer says, but who the hell is the employer?”
“One of the best friends we have in the world.”
“This one would cut a throat to test a knife.”
“The way you take up all these complaints, anybody’d think we gave out guarantees. We guarantee nothing. All we do is stock people for certain jobs, and when a customer comes along, we try to make a sale. Keep that in mind: this is a store, a butcher-store.”
“It’s the only one I ever heard of where the meat pays to get taken away. The least we can do is see that it doesn’t come back every month and pay all over again.”
“What do you suggest—that we stand behind each piece of tripe that we sell?”
“I don’t say that, and you know it,” Dan said. “If you want to be strictly legal, this cook held her job long enough to entitle us to a commission, and she paid it, but while she didn’t expect to be fired the week after, we can’t honestly claim it was a surprise to us: the woman she was working for has had four cooks in six months, and she got them all from this agency. That’s what people call good business, I suppose, but I hate to hold my God damn nose when I get my pay-check.”
“Breathe through your mouth,” Peterson said.
“In a case like this, we ought to investigate the employer.”
“That’s not a bad idea. Next time we place a janitor at the Ford plant, go over and give Ford a good stiff test. Check his disposition, habits, bank-account, and spark-plugs. Look into his morals and political beliefs, and if you can make him say ‘Ah,’ I’d like a report on his tonsils. No janitor leaves here without the fullest protection.”
But Dan was looking beyond Peterson, and gently tapping the card against the desk-edge, he said, “Yes, sir—we ought to investigate these employers….”
* * *
On the fourth floor of an apartment-building near Washington Square, Dan stopped before a door that bore a metal name-plate reading: EMMA JAMES. Pressing the bell-button, he produced within a muted chime, and after a moment, he heard footsteps, and the door opened to reveal the figure of a woman in the dim entry.
She said, “Yes…?”
[The single word (or the way in which the word had been spoken, or the speaking voice alone, or nothing more than your own unfomented memory) brought Julia back to dwell in the forefront of your mind, and through her image, as through a substance with texture, color, and dimensions, you stared at the woman in the doorway, hearing all the while a prolongation of the same single word, as if she had not yet finished saying it. In her presence, Julia seemed to become more than an exhumation and more than a revival: she seemed to thrive.]
“What do you wish?” the woman said.
“I spoke to you this morning on the telephone,” Dan said. “I’m from the employment-agency.”
“I’m afraid I have no time for you just now. I’m about to leave.”
“I understood I was to call around five o’clock.”
“And you’ve been quite prompt,” the woman said, “but the truth is, the appointment slipped my mind. You’ll have to forgive me.”
“If you can spare a few minutes….”
“I don’t believe you heard me. I said I was about to leave.”
“I heard that,” Dan s
aid, “and I also heard that you forgot about the appointment.”
“Are you going to take it on yourself to rebuke me?”
“I’m certainly not going to take it on myself to come back at your convenience.”
“Be good enough to give me your name.”
“It’s the same as it was this morning: Dan Johnson. Address your complaints to my employer, Mr. Peterson.”
“You may go now, Mr. Johnson.”
“Not without a word of advice, Miss James: you’d better lay in a stock of canned goods or learn how to cook, one or the other.”
“Exactly what do you mean by that?”
“I mean we’re not sending any more of our people down here. It’s only too clear why they leave.”
“Aren’t you something of a son-of-a-bitch, Mr. Johnson?”
Dan laughed. “As one to another, yes,” he said.
[Julia, you thought as you walked away. Where was she at that instant and with whom? What was she doing, saying, thinking, feeling, and when had she last looked back, as you were looking back, on the days and nights of a winter now seven years gone? Julia, you thought]
WHO TOOK DAT ENGINE OFF MAH NECK?
On a card-table, there were four coffee-cups, three of them holding the sea-green lees of cigarette-ash. Lying near the fourth was a manuscript in a binder that bore a pasted-on label reading: Eight-ball, a novel by JULIAN POLLARD.
“So far,” Julie said, “all you been talking about is the story. The hell with the story. When you going to quit meeching long enough to trot out some philosophy?” He glanced from Dan to Mary and from Mary to Tootsie. “I finally break down and let you read the book, and what happens? I get my punctuation corrected.”
“You’ve gotten more than that,” Dan said. “Any talk about the story is bound to take in some of the meaning.”
“The choice of material is meaning,” Tootsie said.
“Julie’s right,” Mary said. “We’re meeching.”
“Only honest man in the room is a woman,” Julie said.
“I know what I want to say,” Tootsie said. “The trouble is, I don’t know exactly how to say it.”
“How-to-say ought to come easy for you, Mr. Tuskegee.”
“I can’t just open my face and hope something smart’ll fall down out of my brain.”
“You can say if the book’s good or bad,” Julie said, and he bounced a cake-crumb off the cover. “Shoot, you could’ve done that ’way back at De Witt.”
“Eight-ball is no Ivanhoe, Julie. If it was, I could tell you straight out what I thought of it.”
“Tell it crookedy. I won’t like it, anyway.”
“Maybe that’s the block: you don’t really care what anybody thinks. You didn’t write Eight-ball for me, or Dan, or Mary, or whoever. You wrote it for yourself.”
“That’s how a man does a plenty of things.”
“You could’ve written it for people, but you wrote it for a person. You could’ve written it for Negroes, but you wrote it for one nigger name of Julie Pollard. A book’s got to talk for big hunks of people all at once, and in my humble opinion, yours doesn’t.”
“Phrig your humble opinion,” Julie said. “There’s thirteen million blacks in America, and they got humble opinions too—too God damn humble, you ask me.”
“That’s truer than truth, but you didn’t get it down on paper, and you know full well you never even tried to.”
“Only thing I know full well is, I’m black.”
“Then why do you write like you’re a no-good white?”
“You crazy?” Julie said. “Or what?”
“You couldn’t be doing worse for us if you were a Kluxer.”
“How much I have to listen to before I can get mad?”
“You can get mad any time you get mad enough,” Tootsie said. “But tell me something first: did Jesus Christ Hill see any of this book while you were writing it?”
“Some,” Julie said. “About what you did.”
“Why didn’t you show him all?”
“Got sick of that Mr. Eddie.”
“The way I heard, he was frying you in that Russian love-fat.”
“You heard slantways. I let him tin-ear me for a while, and then I give him the chuck. He started out like maybe he had an idea in his mouth, but it turned out to be warmed-up spit. Talked up love like Solomon talked up the Church: ‘Behold, thou art fair, my love.’ But that’s all he ever did, was behold. He never went inside. It was dirty inside. He was a beholding-type man.”
“If you quit Hill because his love-talk wasn’t enough, why did you go back to hating?”
“All whites are Hills at heart.”
Tootsie indicated Dan and Mary, saying, “What about these two pinks?”
“Different,” Julie said.
“Oh, Christ and carry six! Why do all my people make the same mistake?”
“We each of us know maybe one-two buckras that don’t want to knock our trotters off—but one—two ain’t enough, God damn it!”
“But look, you dumb dinge,” Tootsie said. “Add up all those one-twos, and you have millions! Can’t you see that? Get ’em all together, and you have power!”
“Slurp,” Julie said. “Get ’em together, and you got a lynch-mob. I been hearing about soft whites all my life, but ear-hearing ain’t eye-seeing, and the only soft whites are in the mind of soft jigs like you.”
“We had this same argument ten years ago—when we got kicked out of that stamp-club. Remember?”
“I got a good rememberer,” Julie said, “better than yours. The way you have it, it’s us kicked the others out.”
“Somebody pass me a cig,” Tootsie said.
Julie grinned. “What you plotting, boy—to Marx me?”
“I’m going to Marx you blond.”
“I don’t Marx too easy.”
“Funny about you and me,” Tootsie said. “I’m the one was going to write books, not you, but that got bent around some place, and you’re the writer, and I only teach English to shines: funny how things turn out. All the same, I’m glad, because you’re twice the writer I’d’ve been—yet you could be twice the writer you are and still be wrong to run our people down to dirt. I always thought I knew our people. Except for color, I always thought we were just like everybody else: good and bad. to read you, though, we’re a race of pimps, drunks, footless bums, clapped-up hired-girls, happy-dusters, and bolito-players. to you, that’s us, but to me, it’s only some of us. Where are the Robesons in your book? Where are you? And if you don’t mind, where am I?”
“Always the Robesons,” Julie said. “You pick the one all-America spade and say, ‘Why not write about him?’ Us blacks don’t have to write about the Robesons. Any time one of us gets good like Paul, there’ll always be whites to hold him up on a stick, saying, ‘Wasn’t for his color, you couldn’t hardly tell him from a white man.’ But Paul would get the point, because he ain’t no soft-headed smoke like you want me to be. Wasn’t for his color! That’s just it: he’s good, but being black, he’s only black-good. The rest of us, like I say in the book, we’re pimps and candy-sniffers, not Rutgers baritones, and who would know why better than Paul?”
“Not you,” Tootsie said, “and that’s a sure bet.”
“You’d lose,” Julie said. “We’re pimps and the rest because we’re inferior.”
“So far, I lose—but who keeps us inferior?”
“The whites.”
“I still lose—but which whites?”
“All whites.”
“Now I win,” Tootsie said.
“If that’s Marxing, I ain’t Marxed yet.”
“You’re Marxed all over. If you said all the rich keep the poor down, you’d be right, but when you say all the whites keep the blacks down, you’re wrong, because all the whites aren’t rich.”
“Who’s taking the engine off mah neck—the poor whites?”
“If we ever get together with them, yes,” Tootsie said. “The engine isn’
t only on our necks; it’s on the necks of all the poor, black and white both; and even if the poor whites were simply out to help themselves, to get the engine off their necks, they couldn’t do it without getting it off ours at the same time.” He stared away at a scene in the mind, saying, “‘And when Ah was in dat railroad-wreck, who took dat engine off mah neck? Nobuddy.’” Then he shook his head, as if to break the connection between the words and his mouth. “I wonder how many times Bert Williams sang that song—thousands, I guess—and I wonder if he ever realized it was wrong. ‘Nobuddy rich,’ he should’ve said, but what about the poor—the white poor, the black poor, the red, the yellow, the brown? Make believe we couldn’t do something about that rail-road-wreck! Man, oh, man, when we sang, ‘Who took dat engine off mah neck?’ the answer would be, ‘Damn near ever’buddy!’”
Julie said nothing. He picked idly at the edge of the label on the manuscript, and then he looked up at Tootsie, and after a moment he smiled.
A SACCO WHO LIVES to GET RICH
They had spent the week-end at Red Bank, and on their way home now, they were standing on the rear platform of a Jersey Central local. The cars were crowded and warm, but no other passengers had joined them in the vestibule, and side by side at the crisscross gate, for a long while they watched the darkening country recede.
“When’re you going to leave me, Mary?”
“I’m never going to leave you.”
“Why do I have this feeling, then?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “What feeling?”
“That we’re getting near the end.”
“I don’t have that feeling, Dan.”
“What feeling do you have?” he said. “Do you have any?”
“I think I do, but I’d like to know about yours. Why would I leave you? Where would I go?”
“Where everybody goes when they leave—away.”
“But they have to have a reason for going, don’t they?”
“The best one is that there’s no reason to stay.”
