by John Ridley
“You don't think I help out around my place?”
“Help what? Help buy your pop's booze, help pick him up after he drinks himself down?” No slip of the tongue, Mo threw that jab with a boxer's timing, quick and sharp. He threw it so it hurt.
“I help out plenty,” I said. “I'm the man of my house.”
“Then why don't you be a man an' help yourself to some cash. I'm going down to apply for this here job. You coming, or aren't you coming?”
Was I going, or wasn't I?
I went. Not so much because I wanted to go wherever and cut trees, or even because I wanted that money I knew would feel so warm and spend so well. I went because I wanted to show Li'l Mo the man I was.
The recruiting office was in Midtown. Afternoon of the morning of the day the ad ran, and already there was a string of people stretching from the office door. Boys way younger than Mo and me. Old men whose years were surpassed only by their desperation for a job. We waited among all of them—a millipede of people doing a slow shuffle for the office—thinking there was no way there'd be anything left for us by the time we applied. That's if they didn't just toss us on our black behinds for trying to pass for eighteen. We shuffled … we shuffled. … Men came out of the office smiling. Men came out of the office crying. We shuffled an hour and a half of the day away. We shuffled like a bunch of characters waiting to see the wizard who'd grant us the great and good favor of giving us work. But once inside the office, all that happened was we got looked up and down by one of a number of white fellows sitting behind one of a number of desks. He asked when could we start work.
For the both of us Mo said: “Right away.”
The white fellow filled in a couple of slips of paper, handed one each to me and Mo, told us to be at Penn Station nine o'clock sharp in the A.M. in two days' time. Those slips of paper were like tickets, he told us, so don't lose them.
Just like that me and Mo were lumberjacks.
Just like that … except, I had to tell my father.
That first day after I got the job I didn't tell my father anything. Would he let me go? Would he not let me go? If I just went, would he even notice I was gone? I worked at convincing myself that if I was man enough to go off to wherever and cut trees, I was man enough to tell my father about it. A few hours of kicking around the logic of that, and I was as unconvinced as ever.
I decided against telling my father just then. I decided instead to tell Nadine that I would be leaving. My good-bye had purpose. Nadine and me had been going steady for a couple of semesters. She was my girl. She got taken to movies as my girl. She got taken for sweets and ice cream as my girl. As her guy, I got the privilege of publicly holding her hand and kissing her in private. I got little else. And over time I got less and less satisfaction from hand-holding and kissing. As I matured, I wanted other things. When I held Nadine's hand I thought only of petting her thighs. When I kissed her, I imagined undoing the buttons of her home-knit sweater, peeling it back, and peeling back the shirt underneath, revealing breasts I'd watched ripen one school year into the next. She was my girl. I felt entitled to explore my girl. But I'd never had the courage to try, and Nadine had never offered. I was left with my adolescent wonderings of how she looked raw. Like the old bum woman Mo and I had seen bathing in Central Park? Like that but with skin that was smooth, not ashy. Firm without sags. Certainly, but I wanted to see for myself. Now I had a way into Nadine: the lumber job across the country. The way it happens in some war movie—soldier going off to battle, maybe to come home again, maybe not—I was determined to give Nadine a good-bye that would make her want to offer herself to me. If I wasn't a man in age, if I wasn't a man in the way I approached my father, I at least wanted to go to the lumber camp a man in experience.
Two blocks south, one block east. I made the walk to Nadine's building. From the street I called up to her apartment. City communication. I used to throw little rocks up at her window. Once I broke one. A new window cost twelve dollars, and Nadine's father went two weeks without letting her see me. I called up to her window. She opened it and leaned out. Her breasts, pert in their youthfulness, shouted down to me. One minute later we got comfortable on the stoop of her building. After a little talk I began my performance piece. I would be going, I told her, to the Pacific Northwest to do hard work for good money. The twelve weeks I would be gone turned into “Who knew how long.” The work would be dangerous. There was the possibility I could get … I let that hang. No need to frighten the girl, my girl, too much. All that got wrapped in the promise I would return home, return to her, as soon as possible and that while I was gone I would think of her daily.
At the end of my talk she asked me how much I was supposed to be earning.
I told her.
She repeated the sum toward a building across the street. She took my hand in hers, told me that she hoped I would be all right out … wherever, and that I'd come back as soon as I could.
I kissed her.
She kissed me.
I kissed her.
She kissed me.
I kissed her again, and slid a hand across her waist to her stomach, then started it on an upward journey.
Nadine made a motion to stand that came off as being very casual. From above me she told me she would miss me and hoped that I wouldn't be gone too long. I got a quick, final kiss on the cheek. She went inside.
Twenty-five dollars, she had repeated wistfully when I told her how much I would be making a week. For all her hand-holding and friendly kissing, it was the only emotion she had shown me. She was my girl. I had been her boy. Just then, for the first time, I understood the nature of our relationship. Not in the way intended, Nadine had matured me.
Next day. My last day of school. That night I had dinner with my father. Anyway, we sat at the table eating at the same time. The way he spaded down his meal I could tell it was a grass high he was working off of. But if he was straight enough to eat, I figured he was straight enough to talk to.
“Pop,” I started, “I've got this real good opportunity to make some money. Real good money. I could be making twenty-five dollars a week. More than that.” I hit the money theme hard, figuring that angle to be the most attractive to my father. The more I made, the more he'd get. “Probably a whole lot more than that. And I could send it back regular. That's the thing, I would have to send it back. The job's in … it's out in the Northwest. But like I said, I can have the money sent back regular, and it's only going to be for a few—”
“You ain't going nowhere.” Between mouthfuls of food, I could barely make him out.
“… Wha—”
“You ain't going nowhere.”
“But … it's twenty-five dollars a week. More tha—”
“Don't care how much it supposed to be. Need you around here.”
Need me? Need me for what? To day-labor for the money for his drink and drugs? To make sure his supply was fresh when he was too strung out to go cop his own? I'd had years of that already. I was sick of every one of them.
I sucked a breath. I said: “I'm going.”
“Better shut your mouth, boy.”
“I'm not a boy. I'm eighteen. Just about. I'm a man, and I can do whatever I wa—”
I was on the ground, I was holding my stinging face and crying before I even knew my father had landed the first blow.
I looked up at him.
His fingers went to his belt. One tug, and it slithered from around his waist. The leather of it creaked in the twist of his hands. Light jumped off the metal buckle, distorted to look huge by my frightened eyes.
I'd been hit by my father before, taken everything from a mindful spanking to a good punishing. What he gave me then was a beating. He rained a thrashing on me I'd never previously known. The first smack of the belt, the buckle clipping my head, drove me farther to the floor. The second and third cut easily through my pitiful defense of outstretched hands. All I could do about the blows that followed was curl in a ball and take them. Any of tha
t high talk I had about being a man, about doing as I pleased, was battered from me lash after lash. The sound of the belt cutting through the air, the crack of the leather and thud of the metal on my body was answered in full by moans and whimpers. It was an ugly duet that got lost under the din of babies crying, blues singers and trumpet players out on fire escapes, girls laughing, and car horns arguing with each other. The sounds of my beating got lost among the sounds of the city—just another noise.
As much from being worn out as from having burned off his anger, my father eventually stopped. Sweating, huffing, he dropped the belt down by my face, gave me a good look at his tool of correction.
“Whatcha got to say 'bout being a man now?” he said at me. “Whatcha got to say now?”
I didn't have anything to say. I was shaking too hard to even speak.
I heard Pop lumber from the kitchen out to the couch and lower his tired-from-giving-a-whupping self down into it. I heard a bottle of booze get cracked open. Pop got to drinking. He drank the rest of the night, not moving from where he sat and me not moving from the floor. It was dawn by the time the juice had dropped him into a stupor.
I got off the floor, packed a few things, went and waited on the stoop of Li'l Mo's apartment.
Later that morning, Pop still passed out I imagine, me and Li'l Mo went off for Penn Station.
EXCEPT FOR THE SUBWAY, I'd never been on a train before. Except for most of Manhattan, I'd never been anywhere before. Now, at seventeen, I was traveling clear across the country to do work I knew nothing about. The ride itself was, to that point, the most amazing experience of my life; besides just the thrill of the journey, the bald-faced joy generated by each mile traveled opposite of my father. The rhythm of the California Zephyr—the gentle swaying, the steel wheels rolling over the joins of the rails in a syncopated beat—lulled you into a relaxed and mellow condition over the nearly three days it took to travel to Washington state, which me and Li'l Mo came to find out was specifically the Pacific Northwest the lumbermen were talking about in their ad.
Along the way America passed just outside the Vista-Dome: city melting into farmland blending with plains, desert, and mountains. To a young man who'd only had the world projected to him thirteen inches diagonally in black and white, it was a wondrous thing. It was almost worth being on the receiving end of my father's belt just to have the chance to see it. For the final leg north, we had a change of trains in Los Angeles. It was a short stop. Long enough for a hot dog and Coca-Cola but not nearly long enough to see any of the city. Not much of it, at least. I did steal myself a minute to go outside of Union Station. L.A. was different from New York. Flat. With few buildings of any height, there was nothing to block out the sunlight. Spread out. It stretched as far as you could see and had room to grow. That was my first impression of Los Angeles: nothing but sunshine and possibilities. I tried to catch sight of the Hollywood sign. I just wanted to look at it for a second or two. Look at it and know that while it was shining down on me, it was shining down on all those wonderful, glamorous stars that made Hollywood their dreamland home. I couldn't see the sign from where I was, wasn't even sure which direction to look.
I went back in the station. Me and Mo got on our train and finished our journey north.
WE GOT OFF THE TRAIN in Seattle, not only me and Mo, but us and a few dozen or more other men—young to late-middle-aged, mixed in race—who had collected along the way. Men who I could tell were going where we were headed for reasons besides just the fact they de-trained the same place as us. I knew where they were going because, also same as us, they looked poor and desperate. They looked like they would travel halfway—or all the way—across the country just to earn money.
Coming out of one of the train cars was a white fellow, young, but still a bit older than me, struggling with a suitcase. A big one. The guy would've been just as well off carting a Frigidaire with him from wherever he came.
Don't know why I did it—he was struggling like I said, and maybe I figured it wouldn't hurt any to make a few friends since I was all of the U.S.A. away from home—but I went over to the fellow, asked: “Use a hand?”
He looked up at me, sweaty in face, red more than white from all the effort he was putting into things. “That'll be the day when I need help from a coon.”
He said it plain and simple. The white fellow said what he said about not needing help from a coon and went right back to struggling with his suitcase same as if all that'd passed between us was a quick conversation on the time or temperature. The comment was nothing to him.
Men from the lumber mill gathered us up into some trucks and we all got driven to the camp. As we made our way I saw that Washington was a whole other kind of joint, the exact opposite of the city. The air was scented with rain and pine instead of exhaust and soot. Trees instead of buildings. Grass instead of people. And what people there were, I noticed right off, were almost all white. Wasn't as if I wasn't used to being around white people. New York brimmed with them. But just about everywhere you went in the city, where you saw a white face, you could turn around and see people of color. All colors. Black people, brown people. People from the Orient and India. Up there, up there in Washington, there was me, there was Li'l Mo, there were a few dozen more blacks who made the trip, and that was it. Realizing my isolation, thinking of the man I'd tried to help with his trunk and the slur I'd gotten as a thank-you, I was just then beginning to think that summer would not pass quickly.
We drove a long way, drove until what city there was got left far behind. Drove until it seemed—having already ridden a train farther west and north than I'd ever been—like we had just about run out of America to drive through. We drove until there was nothing but trees, thick and lush and tall; brown and green pillars you'd have thought were holding up the sky. It almost seemed a shame to cut them down. I figured my first paycheck would help me get over the concern.
We arrived finally in the city of Everett. We arrived at Pemberton Mills, the logging camp where we'd be working. And a camp is what it was, not much more. A building where all the milling and shipping was done, another that served as offices. There was another where we would eat and gather for anything we needed to gather for. Sprinkled around all that were the cabins where we would bunk down—koogies they called them. Long, narrow structures like railroad flats. Able to fit ten men, they were good in size, but they were hardly big enough to house the trouble that came with mixing unfamiliar whites and blacks in them together. In the climate of the day it would've been better, safer, to segregate the white and black workers. For both races it would have been just one more comfort of home. But for some reason the management had the bright idea to jumble everybody together. Some kind of Pacific Northwest liberalism, I figured at first. The more I considered the subject, the more I thought the owners didn't want all the blacks in one place for fear they might come up with some crazy, militant plot to overthrow the Anglo world from a cabin in a logging camp.
So, instead, the races got stirred. Me and Mo, maybe because we had signed up together, got assigned to the same koogie along with another young black named Kevin. Three of us, which meant as we walked into our cabin there were seven pairs of white eyes to give us some broiling stares.
Me and Mo and Kevin just took them, happy for the moment that was all we were taking, picked out three beds, and put what belongings we had down. It was a simple act we very instantly found out was strictly wrongheaded.
“What you niggers doin'?” a white boy said more than asked, and said with all the casual menace he could put together. Following so quickly after the complimentary slur I'd gotten back at the train station, I had the feeling black-hating whites were going to be easy to come by.
This black-hating white was tall and thin, pale so the blue/green veins that laced his arms—raised up and pulsing hot—were as easy to read as lines on a Jim Crow map. All roads led to trouble.
Again the white boy wanted to know: “What you niggers doin'?”
Li'l Mo and Kevin said nothing to that, having no strong desire to respond to being called niggers. At the same time, I had no strong desire to get handed a beating for not answering a question that was, real obviously, directed at us.
I said: “Picking out bunks.”
The long, tall white boy seemed to find that funny. He laughed.
The other whites laughed.
“No you ain't. That ain't the nigger section. Ain't no niggers allowed over there. Now, you best pick up all your darkie shit, move it out of the white section and on over to the nigger part of the cabin.”
Sure. That'd be fine. But nobody bothered to tell us just where exactly the non-white part of the koogie was. We three blacks gathered up our things, took a guess, and moved over to another bunch of bunks. We guessed wrong.
“That look like the nigger section to you?”
And the chorus of white boys started in again with their cackling.
We moved again. Me leading the way, then Kevin. Mo brought up the rear, deliberately slow about it.
“Naw, that ain't the nigger section.”
More laughing.
I was getting the idea; far as these boys were concerned, there was no place for us. Inside the koogie or anywhere else.
That wasn't quite true.
“That's where you niggers go. Over there.” The white boy pointed at the far corner of the koogie. “Now, you all coons just move your bunks on over there.” He laughed again.
The other white boys laughed.
I wasn't sure if any of them had traveled up together, or even knew each other previously. I didn't think so. I figured instead they were just seven white strangers who'd formed a fast friendship over the mutual pleasure that came with the opportunity to rough around some blacks.
Me, Mo, and Kevin stood heads down but not moving. At least, outside of some nervous twitching from me, not moving for the corner where we'd been directed.
