“You want a ride?” he asked.
“I sure do.”
He opened the door on the other side and I got in. He was about my age. An older man and woman sat together on the back seat with a black lap rope pulled up to their waists. The car started moving and gravel ground under the wheels.
“Where are you going, boy?” the woman asked.
“Texarkana, ma’am.”
“What are you going there for?”
“To get me a job. Work. Make me some money.”
She looked at me, at the man beside her, and back at me, and I could see a change in her face.
“You’re running away, aren’t you?”
“No, ma’am. Nothing for me to run away from.”
“There must be something. You’ve got to tell us so we’ll know. We don’t want to be helping boys run away from home.”
Out of the wind and weather, with a ride all the way to Texarkana, I talked and answered their questions. Better to talk than walk. I told them about Pin Hook—mostly about school in Pin Hook—my job at Sears, Roebuck and why I lost it—the job I hoped to get in Texarkana cutting timber.
“You’re a peart boy,” the woman said. She looked at the man. “Don’t you think he ought to go to school some more?”
“It never hurt anybody.”
They were right but I had to say something.
“I quit school to work. All I need is a job.”
They let me out in Texarkana, not far from the post office, and I had not told them how hungry I was or how little money I had. They might have given me something and that would have been begging.
Hungry as I was, I went straight to the post office and up the front steps. A cold wind shipped around the brick building. Pat would be inside where it was warm. I went the length of the building but did not see him. I went through again slowly, looking in every possible place. Pat was not there. For the first time I was scared. I asked at the general delivery window but there was no letter for me—nothing. That meant he would be there later in the day.
At an alley cafe I bought a bowl of chili. A girl set a bowl before me and shoved a tray of crackers and a bottle of catsup down the counter. The smell of chili made my mouth water and my stomach growl. With shaking fingers I crumbled in crackers and covered them with catsup. I could fill myself up with chili and crackers and catsup. But the waitress was watching me. She let me have crackers and catsup once and moved them out of reach. What I got was enough to hold me but not to fill me.
Back at the post office I sat in a corner waiting for Pat. There were men close to me, bums in to keep out of the cold, rod riders on the way south from places like Chicago to places like New Orleans. From them I learned that Texarkana was a tough town on hoboes. Police arrested hoboes and made them work out their fines.
“You better warm up and move on,” they told each other. “The law’ll get you if you don’t keep moving.”
Pat did not come. I walked up and down, keeping away from the bums, but he did not come.
A policeman came in one door and I went out another, into the cold and gathering darkness. There was no other place for me to go and I did not have enough money for a bed. Cold and afraid, I started walking out the street I had come in on that morning, with nothing in mind now but to get away from the police. I walked past the edge of town and out on the highway, and felt safe in the dark on the highway.
When I knew that I could not walk another mile the road passed through heavy woods. Build a fire, I thought. Build a fire and get warm. I would feel better warm and not cough so much. Back from the road, I piled up leaves and sticks and struck a match to them. Soon I had a good fire going and bright flames whipped in the sharp wind.
The fire could warm my body, but it could not take the chill from me. I was sick, hungry, and with no place to go. It was not my fault; it was that I had been born poor, and at Pin Hook. Then I was warm through and I sat up looking into the fire. I was sick and hungry now, but, by God, the time had to come when I would not be. I had been soft—too soft. I had to be hard—hard enough to make what I needed to fill my belly and warm my back. I had to do it by myself, without Pat or anybody.
Before daylight a fine drizzle fell on my face and woke me. I put more wood on the fire but the rain turned heavy enough to wet me and put out the fire. I went back to the road and walked west till I came to a country store. The owner was building a fire in the stove. I bought a piece of candy and waited by the stove for the rain to stop.
“You mind if I stay awhile?” I asked.
“You ain’t bothering me none.”
I sat on a keg of nails with my head against a counter and slept through the morning. When I woke up the rain had stopped, and I went on the road again, walking west, thinking only of getting back to Dallas. There had to be a job of some kind for me in Dallas.
Water stood in ruts deep enough to bog a car. I got a ride on a wagon that took me half the way to Avery. At Avery I bought a loaf of bread and warmed myself in the railroad station. Then I walked on the tracks. I would not get lost in the dark if I kept on the tracks.
When daylight came I was still walking; it was not a night for the open. The sky was clear and a cold wind blew from the north. Rainwater froze where it stood on the road and in the fields. There would be no rides that day, maybe for three or four days. I could be in Dallas in that time, if I could hold up to walk forty miles a day.
I went from the Texas Pacific to the Santa Fe tracks at Paris, stopping only to buy a piece of cheese to go with the bread I had left. It took the last of my money, so I put half of each in my pockets for the next day. To keep down hunger and thirst, and to ease my burning throat, I broke pieces of ice from the ditches to suck on as I walked. They helped my throat but not my cough. I had nothing for it or for the rawness in my armpits and crotch.
At Ben Franklin I warmed myself in the station and watched a train pull out for Dallas. I knew that hoboes rode the blinds and the rods. I found the blinds but was afraid to swing on when the train started moving. I watched it out of sight and then followed it down the tracks.
Somewhere in the darkness I saw the shape of a barn close to the tracks. Knowing I had to stop and rest, I went inside the barn and climbed up to the hayloft. There was no loose hay, and I was afraid to break the bales that stood in straight stacks. I could get in trouble breaking bales. I crawled between stacks of bales and shut myself in with others to keep out the wind and cold. It was not warm enough but I could rest and sleep a little.
By daylight I was on the track again, eating the last of my bread and cheese, knowing that I should keep some of it for the time when I would be hungrier. I felt weak and my legs wobbled when I stepped from tie to tie. I thought of trying to find a highway but the fields were sheets of ice and I could not see where to go. I took to the ditch when freight trains passed. Nobody riding the rods, I could see. Anybody would freeze to death riding the rods on a day like that.
At times I saw houses across icy fields and thought of going to them for help. “Don’t steal. Don’t beg.” I had never lowered myself that much, and I was not ready to begin.
Sundown came and darkness, but I went on, finding it harder and harder to make my feet move. They were sore and swollen—too swollen for me to take off my shoes.
“A little piece more,” I kept telling myself. Then I could rest in a barn or haystack. The next night I would be in Dallas.
It was bare prairie and there were no barns or haystacks, or a patch of woods where I could build a fire. I had to keep walking or freeze.
Then I stopped and rubbed my eyes. Ahead of me and off the tracks a light shone at the level of the barbed-wire fence. Without thinking, I started toward it. I crossed the ice-covered ditch, climbed a frozen bank, and rolled under the fence. After crossing a narrow stretch of prairie I came to a small house. The light was shining through a window. Inside I could see people sitting in front of a fireplace.
“Hello,” I called.
I could
see them leave their chairs and look out the window.
“Hello.”
A man came to the door and opened it.
“What you want this time of night?” he asked.
“I want to warm myself.”
He might not let me. I had not thought before that he might not let me.
“Who are you?” he asked. “What’s your name?”
I gave it, and then gave it again.
“Never heard tell of you. Where do you live?”
“Nowheres right now. I was walking down the tracks and saw your light. I’ve got to get warm.”
He closed the door and I could see him with the others around the fireplace. Then he opened the door again.
“Come on in.”
He held the door open for me to pass. I went past him and straight to the fire.
“You cold?”
A woman in a rocking chair asked the question.
“Yes’m.”
“Don’t stand too close. It’ll hurt if you stand too close.”
I stood back a little, on the other side from her chair. She was older than my mother, thin, and wrapped in quilts—sickly looking but friendly. The man sat beside her. On her other side there was a young man in a blue suit and a boy my age in a blue shirt and overalls. She handed each an apple from a bowl in her lap.
“Want an apple?” she asked me.
“Yes’m.”
I took it and ate it down to the core without stopping, with all of them watching.
“You ain’t et for a spell,” the woman said.
“No’m.”
“We’ve got bread and milk.”
The young man brought a glass of milk and a piece of corn bread from the kitchen. The man pulled a chair up to the fire for me.
“Eat and warm yourself,” he said. “Then tell us how you got to Celeste.”
Celeste. Closer to Dallas than I thought.
While I ate they told me about themselves. The woman was a cripple and had to do most of her work from her chair. When she was by herself the man had to come in from the field to move her from one job to another. The young man was a teacher in a country school. The boy went to high school in Celeste.
“We could make a bed for you if you want to stay all night,” the man said.
The way he said it, I was not begging. It was not like being a tramp coming in begging for a place to stay.
“I’d be thankful.”
They gave me warm water for washing and cough syrup for my cold. Then they let me sit by the fire and talk. It was easy to tell them about Pin Hook and the jobs in Dallas. It was easy to talk to a teacher about how I wanted to go to school. I could not tell them about my days on the road. They could see that I was hungry and cold.
“What will you do tomorrow?” the man asked.
“Go on to Dallas.”
“Walking?”
“It’s not so far now.”
But they would not let me walk. The man would let me have money for a ticket and pay him back when I could. The teacher would take me to the station and put me on the train.
When I could keep awake no longer they put a mustard plaster on my chest and put me to bed in a featherbed.
When I woke up again it was late morning and the man was in the kitchen helping the woman cook dinner. We ate and talked again of what I would do.
“You c’n work your way through school,” the woman said. “Anybody can if he wants to bad enough.”
After school the teacher came in his Ford and took me to Celeste. On the way he told me what it was like to go to school at Commerce, and what he said made me want to go there more than ever.
He bought my ticket and when the train came in he gave it to me and shook my hand.
“I’m glad you saw our light,” he said.
I knew he meant it—they all meant it.
“Me, too.”
Then I was on the train looking out at the ice-covered fields.
It was warm in the Union Station, cold and dark outside. I thought of sitting on a bench all night and going from there in the morning to look for a job, but I went out and walked down Commerce Street. They were going to fuss at me anyway. Better to get it over with.
When I got to the house, Maggie, Cain, and the two girls were sitting in front of an open gas stove in the front room. I could see them through the window and went in without knocking.
“Where’ve you been?” Maggie asked.
“Rambling.”
I had made up my mind to tell them that and no more—nothing of the places I had been, the hard times on the road.
“Did you find Pat Swindle?”
“No’m.”
“I don’t see why you thought you would. You know how long he’s been hoboing it. It’s a good thing you didn’t. Next thing you hear, he’ll be behind bars. You could a been with him.”
I thought of the bums in the Texarkana post office, and the policeman walking through. I knew better than to tell them how close I had come to being arrested because of Pat. It was bad enough to have to think of it myself.
As I got warm again my coughing got worse.
“You sure caught a cold all right,” they said.
They gave me warm milk, soup, and salve to open my head and ease my throat.
“You want us to take you in again?” Cain asked.
“Yes, sir. For a little while—till I get a job.”
“Or go off bumming agin?”
“I won’t. Not any more. I’ll get me a job and pay you every cent I owe you.”
“What do you think, Cain?” Maggie asked.
“It’s all right with me if he gets a job. I won’t have him hanging around the house in the daytime.”
“You c’n make your pallet tonight,” Maggie said. “In the morning you’ve got to look for a job and you cain’t be choosy.”
The girls had got their laundry jobs from an employment agency on Lamar Avenue.
“I’ll show you in the morning,” one of them said. “They’re bound to have something.”
They helped me make my pallet. Then they went to bed.
“Get a good night’s sleep,” they said. “You’ve got to look peart in the morning.”
RALPH ELLISON (1914-1994)
Ralph Ellison was born and raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where a public library now bears his name. In 1933, he enrolled as a music major at Tuskegee Institute. After graduation, he worked for five years as a researcher and writer on the Federal Writers’ Project in New York City. It was on this research job that he met the coal-shovelers he describes in this narrative.
In 1953, his novel, Invisible Man, won the National Book Award. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1969 and the National Medal of Arts in 1985. At New York University, he was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities from 1970 to 1979.
Shadow and Act, a collection of biographical and critical essays, appeared in 1964. A second collection, Going to the Territory (1986), includes “The Little Man at the Chehaw Station,” which first appeared in The American Scholar. This story comes from that autobiographical essay.
Chehaw Station is a railroad stop near Tuskegee, Alabama. Hazel Harrison, a concert pianist, headed the piano department in Tuskegee’s school of music. From her Ellison learned to expect high standards everywhere. In his essays and lectures he refers to her frequently.
from GOING TO THE TERRITORY
It was at Tuskegee Institute during the mid-1930s that I was made aware of the little man behind the stove. At the time I was a trumpeter majoring in music and had aspirations of becoming a classical composer. As such, shortly before the little man came to my attention, I had outraged the faculty members who judged my monthly student’s recital by substituting a certain skill of lips and fingers for the intelligent and artistic structuring of emotion that was demanded in performing the music assigned to me. Afterward, still dressed in my hired tuxedo, my ears burning from the harsh negatives of their criticism, I had sought solace in the basement studi
o of Hazel Harrison, a highly respected concert pianist and teacher. Miss Harrison had been one of Ferruccio Busoni’s prize pupils, had lived (until the rise of Hitler had driven her back to a U.S.A. that was not yet ready to recognize her talents) in Busoni’s home in Berlin, and was a friend of such masters as Egon Petri, Percy Grainger, and Sergei Prokofiev. It was not the first time that I had appealed to Miss Harrison’s generosity of spirit, but today her reaction to my rather adolescent complaint was less than sympathetic.
“But, baby,” she said, “in this country you must always prepare yourself to play your very best wherever you are, and on all occasions.”
“But everybody tells you that,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “but there’s more to it than you’re usually told. Of course you’ve always been taught to do your best, look your best, be your best. You’ve been told such things all your life. But now you’re becoming a musician, an artist, and when it comes to performing the classics in this country, there’s something more involved.”
Watching me closely, she paused.
“Are you ready to listen?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right,” she said, “you must always play your best, even if it’s only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country there’ll always be a little man hidden behind the stove.”
“A what?”
She nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “There’ll always be the little man whom you don’t expect, and he’ll know the music, and the tradition, and the standards of musicianship required for whatever you set out to perform!”
Speechless, I stared at her. After the working-over I’d just received from the faculty, I was in no mood for joking. But no, Miss Harrison’s face was quite serious. So what did she mean? Chehaw Station was a lonely whistle-stop where swift north-or southbound trains paused with haughty impatience to drop off or take on passengers; the point where, on homecoming weekends, special coaches crowded with festive visitors were cut loose, coupled to a waiting switch engine, and hauled to Tuskegee’s railroad siding. I knew it well, and as I stood beside Miss Harrison’s piano, visualizing the station, I told myself, She has GOT to be kidding!
Modern American Memoirs Page 33
