by Alan Duff
He and his partner Jake McRory, both men of average intelligence who yet understood the fundamentals of this earth-shifting game: that it was to drive men and machines to the utmost every hour every day, and to work men beyond paid hours, machines past manufacturers' best-usage recommendations. And when things came inevitably to occasional sudden halts, with busted engines, working parts pushed too far, then to blame the men. Machines sat dumb and useless and with most operators being Negro, easier to assault, abuse, deduct from his pay, hurt his family with total forfeiture of owed wages, fire him on the spot for negligence. Or put him on the next available machine and work hell out of both. And if any fired man came back demanding his pay, stick a gun in his face and ask to be reminded of how much was owed.
Our contract was to build a fixed distance of levee the east side of the Mississippi River, another contractor completing the other side, spring and summer months best before the flooding season risk increased. A crew only thirty strong, we sometimes did achieve the impossible, if for no thanks from our hard-nosed bosses.
Including a man said to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan — and he was crying?
Something made me ask, everything all right, boss? When usually I would never be so impertinent. He told me to come inside the office, he had coffee brewing.
Jess, he began as he poured the black liquid into my metal cup, then his own. Y'all got family members outside your own you truly love?
Yes, sir, guess we all have those. You meaning like, cousins and nephews, uncles and aunts?
Yeah. And nieces too. Well, I lost mine on Saturday. My brother Elmer's girl. Took her own life. Nineteen years of age and she doesn't want to live? She was like my own child.
Tears started rolling down. I knew out of habit to show him I was looking away, but decided the hell with that and took eyes back and kept them there, steady as a machine working a delicate line, seeing he had made such a personal confidence in me by crying openly.
You're a good worker, Jess Hines. You never stand around windbaggin' and complaining. Just do your job. And you saw death in the war. Think I don't know you're a veteran? You must have seen close buddies die in front of your eyes. Did you?
I sure did.
Does a man ever get over it?
Boss, depend who the man is. How close the bond.
We was close. In fact, Jenny-May said she loved me more than her own daddy. I guess on account of my brother's drinking, being twice as bad as mine which my ex-wife said was bad enough.
My boss gave this weird grin. Guess from not used to talking to a nigger like an equal.
Like to offer my heartfelt condolences, boss. Admire you still here on the job, I do.
Appreciate it, Jess. Last time I felt like this was losing my best hunting dog, got ripped by a wild hog up in the hills back of where you live. Died in my arms carrying him out to the truck. You hunted Pushaw Hills?
Yessir. As a youngster, before I discovered dancing and girls was better.
Nothing better than your dogs bailing up a hog. Working the hairy beast into a spot it can't escape from. Don't know many white men love dancing like you niggers. The girls, well, sure. They a different hairy beast. We all men, even you guys. Grinning knowingly, like two old buddies doing chick talk. Motherfuckers hung like mules. You born that way, son?
Born with what I was born with, boss. Don't know if I'm blessed or just ordinary. Never did the womanizing thing.
He pointed. I could tell. You used to be a drinker, right?
Yessir, something bad.
Ain't bad if you got charge of it. Drink is the cheapest ride from a man's true troubled soul there is. My niece she hated it, my brother's drinking. A beautiful girl she was too, very sensitive. You failed to notice a new dress or shoes she was wearing, she'd run off to her room and sulk. Old Uncle Albert here learned to go after her when I overlooked her female vanity needs, say sorry and what could I buy my favourite niece to make up? Was going to pay her wedding costs myself. Now, she's gone. Just gone.
His tears spilled openly, no pretense at playing a-man-don't-cry, he just cried.
Well, naturally I got up and went round the table and took him up and just hugged my boss. Hell, like he said, some things we're just men the same are we not?
And he took it, my gesture, for what it meant. Just a simple gesture of a human to another. In a few minutes, a few hours at most, things would be back to the same: he'd be yelling at me, I'd be either pretending not to hear because of my machine noise, or falling over myself to please him.
Half a foot shorter than me, the man I was hugging yet a strong man physically. What he was mentally — this unfathomable redneck normally a nigger-hater — I do not know. Me comforting was nothing new: our Negro women had been mammies to their children ever since we got here from Africa, our house-servant men intimate confidants to hear their masters' every secret even the most awful. Been taking these people in our embrace a long time. Wiped their baby bums and wiped their adult eyes, blinded our own when they committed murder, never blinked when the murdered was one of us. Though never was it the other way round, that they had comfort and unseeing, forgiving eyes to give us.
How did she pass on, boss?
Hanged herself. My brother found her in the garage, called me up screaming. I drove like a maniac over, had to cut her down. Just nineteen years young. Had to slap my brother out of going for another bottle of whiskey: not this time, big brother. We owe to be sober, give this innocent a proper farewell. All day yesterday at the funeral parlor preparing her for tomorrow's funeral. I find my brother's so much as sniffed a drink, be his funeral next.
I'm so sorry, boss. Almost called him Albert.
Have to make a speech, in church. When I'm no God-fearing man even if I been raised on hellfire and brimstone. Knew too many crotch-grabbing preachers and money-making shysters to believe. What kind of thing would you say, Jess? So I can see her off right.
I suggested he talk about the troubled spirit in every person, male and female. Just like the beast dwells in each and every heart. And who of us knows which can take control of our minds, when we get caught with defenses down, in a time most vulnerable. Or succumb to the weakness every person carries, even the strongest.
I appreciate your advice. I tell you, seeing a hanged body is not a pretty sight. You know, the neck stretched, eyes bulging, a God-awful color.
Almost languidly I said, no, sure ain't a pretty sight. In my mind seeing that lynched Negro sister. And looking at my distressed boss recalling what he saw of his beloved niece. Passing before my mind's eye endless line-up of Negroes hanging, like strange fruit, from a vast plantation of poplar trees.
A course you niggers are more used to death than we are. Guess you get kind of immune to it, do you?
Feels like we are immune, sometimes, boss. It does. Down to my fawning nigger talk, so to tolerate the sublimely ridiculous.
I figured that. I loved that girl something special, I did.
She leave a note, boss? Make us understand better when they say why. But sadder when the why is just plain misdirected thinking.
Hines, you done read my mind exactly. She didn't leave a note, not even to say farewell to her favourite uncle, or accuse her daddy of drinking away her life by being too drunk to see his girl in trouble. You got children your own?
Wondering for one split second if to mention my son in New Zealand, real enough in my mind to proudly claim. But the rule was, you never get too close to a white person, hurts less when it turns sour as it always does. That river of difference is wider than Old Miss.
Got two daughters live in Biloxi last I heard, I told him.
Like that, huh? Been a while since you seen them?
A long while, yes.
One of the nigger curses, you find it hard being daddies 'cause you can't be husbands.
I heard that. Yeah. What slavery did? You know, being sold and traded, moved everywhere, split asunder my momma used to say of my daddy and her own, grandfath
ers too.
Could be, Jess Hines. Could be. Albert rubbed his chin. He was not an attractive specimen, mostly in need of a shave, pot belly from the beer he and his partner drank to quench their day thirst. The harder stuff at night.
And could be it's just the way your race is.
Then Albert looked at his watch, said, I thank you for sharing this moment with me, but the show must go on. You can move to helping Larry. And listen, how many times I have to tell you, make that machine scream in reverse, it's when you lose so much time going backwards on slow. Let's get going now.
Sure thing, boss.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
THIS IS NOT A VILLAGE — it's a dump. As I move from the sealed to a dirt road, muddy from rain, in front of me a cluster of shacks in a pine clearing revealed in a dawn sun. People moving around, yet to notice me.
I have been to a place kind of similar, when I was about ten and went with Mum and her friend to a funeral in a remote Maori community way up in the bush. Her first cousin had been beaten to death by a drunken husband. We got to this ramshackle settlement, found the meeting house down the end of a pot-holed dirt road, a neglected building that in any Maori community is supposed to be its heart, proudly kept in pristine order.
We weren't greeted in the traditional way with respect and formal welcome. Instead made our own way past groups of drinking men calling out lewd comments on Mum's good looks and what they'd do to her given a chance. Kids my age and older gave me the evils and held up clenched fists. I heard Mum tell her friend for once she wished Henry was here; he'd sort out these ugly violators of Maori culture and human dignity. But she was determined to pay her cousin last respects.
The corpse looked like it was: beaten to death. A woman near the coffin told my mother she better not stick around long or someone would scratch her pretty face to ribbons. Mum said to her friend in not the quietest voice, I think they're inbred.
At the community dining room we found more people drinking than preparing food for guest mourners. Mum paid her customary contribution and took us out of there. We drove out over a rutty dirt road with houses that bush grew right up to, strewn with rubbish and car wrecks, dangerous dogs running loose, untended toddlers roaming loose. Mum crying for her cousin having to suffer in death as she did in life.
Well, this place here looks worse, even with the sun rays split ten thousand times by the pines and birds in song, a woman singing as if at church.
Chooks run loose, mean dogs growling at me get told to stay, snorting pigs in crudely built enclosures suggest the source of an awful stench. This is just after six in the morning and kids, black as night most of them, are already up and running around in the puddles from last night's heavy rain—
That is, till they see me. And all movement halts and so does human sound.
I must look a sorry sight, desperate for a shower or bath, clothes I've slept in and bits of straw all over me from the hay barn I dossed down in last night. And the blinding realisation these people are seeing me as a white person. Me, a white.
Men who had been standing around scratching genitals, picking noses, honking and spitting, smoking cigarettes are now frozen poses staring at me. At this ghostly figure arrived with a suitcase. My utter dislocation no doubt showing like any neon sign in the towns our bus passed through.
In my worsening confusion at going from one town to the next, I'd missed the Greyhound bus due to arrive in daylight hours. I always knew the two and a half miles from Whitecave to here could be the hard part, as there would surely not be taxis in a town with a population of 1700. I planned to hitch a ride or just walk. The bus I did catch arrived just before midnight, dropped me alone in a strange town with a suitcase and no hotel showing an open sign, no lights showing life. I had stuffed up. Wandering the few streets wondering what to do then after a while a truck pulled up and two men demanded to know who I was.
Had my lie ready. I'm from New Zealand — where's that? Well, it's kind of close to Australia. A country they had heard of. Told them I was on a mission for my dying father to say goodbye to a man he made close friends with during World War Two. Lives in a place called Piney Woods. Waited for the explosion.
Which almost came — literally. A gun came out the driver's window. The passenger sighting me down a rifle barrel. That's nigger country, he said.
My father did tell me. But he is dying and they were like brothers.
With a nigger?
Yes, sir.
After checking me out by torch light and it being declared I was definitely what I claimed to be, with my accent, and fact I passed for white in their eyes, they took me to a barn nearby so I could delay my arrival to a respectable hour. Warned, don't be boasting about no nigger friend of your daddy's, not round here. Others might not be so understanding.
An older man takes a cigarette from his mouth to ask, can we be heppin you, suh? You must be lawse.
Somehow I get his way of speaking, that heppin means helping and lawse means lost. Kids are shouting my presence, that a white man is here! People pour out from the high houses, up on log foundations; they spill down wooden steps, leap from verandas, and quickly surround me. In the crowd a large woman exclaims, Lordy be! Everyone is open-mouthed in disbelief. A kid says, It's a ghost! Though I can't feel hostility.
A hundred times I have planned and rehearsed this, introducing myself at my father's village, to his Negro community. I intended to say with great pride, I'm here to meet my father. His name is Jess Hines. Thought I'd be coming to a neat suburban community, colored-only, with oaks and elms and magnolias like in the library books I'd pored over on the South, and that my father's house would stand out as one of the best, if not the best. I wasn't expecting a mansion, had read up on the vast economic differences between blacks and whites, that here in the South they lived segregated. But I figured on a dwelling fit for a Negro of pride and, I had just presumed, of ambition; a man still going places, despite the racial obstacles.
Instead I can't speak. The trees are ugly pines. House is not the right description for a single one of these raised shacks. I'm trying not to show disbelief, hoping disgust is not betraying my forced effort at smiling. The smells are so bad I fear violent retching or throwing up. Somewhere the putrid smell of rotting meat. And about one hundred ebony-skinned people staring at me in shocked silence.
Is this Piney Woods?
It surely is. Looking me more than up and down, every set of eyes trying to slot me.
I think you got the wrong Piney, son.
Is there another Piney Woods in Whitecave?
Nope, this is it. You sure you got the right state? Maybe a different county? Lots of places called Piney Woods, like they got three towns called Cairo. Who you looking for? This is a coloured community.
Man by the name of—
I am suddenly so overcome I cannot say my father's name. Everyone's waiting for the announcement. I wish my father would appear. This is ridiculous, madness itself. What was going through my head to come all this wearying, confusing, life-changing way without letting my father know?
A woman steps forward. Claims my voice with her smile.
Well, if you sure this is the right Piney, then we bid you welcome. I'm figuring I know who you looking for. She looks to my right, at a figure closing quickly, though I dare not show alarm or defensiveness, even if at an intending attacker. It would look bad, and like I was scared. I know the rules of manhood.
The woman beams at me. But I cannot reciprocate, just too dislocated. Not a child moves nor any other adult. The woman has hands clasped together, head cocked at an odd angle, as if I am a spiritual apparition. Never felt so alone. The approaching figure is now in my peripheral view.
Then I hear my name — not that I'm very familiar with it.
You can't be Mark, surely?
My first thought is, I'm called Yank.
I turn and there's the man, the face I know so well from photographs. It is him. Recognition instant, yet an apparition himself
: as if he doesn't belong here either. As if this is but a pausing place on his way to great achievement, a resting place on a great life journey. It has to be.
For he is all over with pure presence. Tall, fine looking, dark but not quite ebony.
Are you Mark?
The voice is rich — richer than I expected. I must have either nodded or said yes. For his face breaks open with smile that could light the darkness here, darkness not of skin complexion nor night but the place these people have been put: at the bottom of the heap.
Jess?
Mark? Are you Mark? Oh God, but this cannot be happening. I don't believe this.
Did you say Mark . . . ? Lena's son . . . ? From New Zealand?
I can only nod to his checklist. Relief coming over me like imminent fainting spell. I have been saved by this imposing figure, better looking than the photographs, familiar yet a complete stranger. I can hear the years racing to meet right here in the woods-shaded dirt. Yet see his confusion, even a little anger at my stupid surprise arrival.
I'm sorry. I should have let you know.
No. No, he cries. Grabs me in his arms.
Father oh father, I was told you died, that you were killed in the war. You were the unmentionable in the house I grew up in; I had to invent you in my mind. Till one day you sprang to life in written words. You weren't the all-American white hero I assumed: you were what is standing before me now. Tall, dark and beautiful. These years of exchanging through letters were never real. No flesh, no real meaning.
It was worth it, every moment of doubt and confusion and fear about coming here: in my own father's arms for the first time.
And everyone is cheering and clapping and whooping in happiness for us. That woman's beaming face. A son has come home.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
THIS IS NOT ME, YOU got to understand this. He is close to pleading, yet I do understand. My father is on another journey, this is but temporary abode, and now I'm here maybe we can share that journey. I don't care he lives here, not now. We are one in our happy disbelief, father and son united. And with the community all excited it transforms my perceptions.
