Ann Petry

by Ann Petry

  Abbie said, “You get right back in bed.”

  He went to sleep and when he woke up, Dr. Easter was leaning over him, saying “Hmmm—” Then Dr. Easter was gone but it couldn’t have been as fast a visit as that because he kept remembering the cool hard feel of a thermometer under his tongue.

  He went to sleep again. The ringing of the telephone woke him up. He heard Abbie say, “He’s very sick, Miss Dwight.” Silence. “Oh, no!” Her voice was crisp, cold. “Absolutely impossible. He can’t get out of bed.”

  He stared up at the ceiling. He had forgotten about the minstrel show. Was he really sick or had he made himself sick? Could you make yourself sick, not really meaning to? Not really meaning to? Then you could make yourself go crazy, too.

  He sat up, frowning. He hadn’t made himself sick. It had just happened. Maybe he had the mumps. But he didn’t ache anywhere. He felt strong, cool, comfortable. He wanted to get out of bed; he felt like going swimming.

  If he wasn’t sick any more, he ought to get dressed, and go down to the school auditorium and be Sambo, sittin’ in the sun. He’d sold out, hadn’t he? Sold what out?

  He got dressed. He went out of the front door very quietly so Abbie wouldn’t hear him. Miss pause Dwight would be happy. He would be unhappy. But he had to be Sambo, sittin’ in the sun. He walked slowly, up Dumble Street, over to Franklin, down Franklin to the school.

  He stood still. People were going up the long walk, in through the front door. Cars were parked on both sides of the school driveway. He couldn’t be Sambo sittin’ in the sun in front of all those people. Ain’t nobody in here but us chickens.

  If Abbie knew about this, she’d say that he’d let The Race down. She said colored people (sometimes she just said The Race) had to be cleaner, smarter, thriftier, more ambitious than white people, so that white people would like colored people. The way she explained it made him feel as though he were carrying The Race around with him all the time. It kept him confused, a little frightened, too. At that moment The Race sat astride his shoulders, a weight so great that his back bent under it. When he turned away from the school, he was walking fast.

  In school, the next morning, Miss pause Dwight said, “I thought you were sick, pause, Link.”

  “I was,” he said.

  “You know you ruined the minstrel show. We couldn’t have it. On account of you. I should have known that you’d fail me at the last minute.”

  He knew what she meant about failing her at the last minute. There wasn’t much about The Race that he didn’t know. Abbie kept telling him all the things he could, and could not, do because of The Race. You had to be polite; you had to be punctual; you couldn’t wear bright-colored clothes, or loud-colored socks; and even certain food was forbidden. Abbie said that she loved watermelons, but she would just as soon cut off her right arm as go in a store and buy one, because colored people loved watermelons. She wouldn’t buy porgies because colored people loved all the coarsefleshed fish, and were particularly fond of porgies. She wouldn’t fry fish, she wouldn’t fry chicken, because everybody knew that colored people liked fried food. She was always on time, in fact, way ahead of time, because colored people were always late, you could never count on them, they had no sense of responsibility. The funny thing about it was that when Abbie talked about The Race she sounded as though she weren’t colored, and yet she obviously was.

  All of this was why Miss pause Dwight had known that he’d fail her at the last minute. But she couldn’t have known. He had been sick, really and truly sick. Then he got better. He had got out of bed, and come all the way down to the school, yesterday; but then when he got here he just couldn’t be Sambo sittin’ in the sun. Not in front of all those people.

  All that morning Miss pause Dwight said: “I might have known”; “Sit still”; “Stop wriggling”; “Answer me!” “Are you asleep?” “Stand up!” “Sit down!”

  By the time the noon bell rang, he knew he wasn’t going back to school. Not ever. He spent the afternoon down on the dock. He found there were three other colored boys, older than he, who were playing hookey too. They figured out that if they showed up for meals, and got home just about the time the other kids came from school, and left their houses in the morning when the other kids were leaving, their families wouldn’t know they were playing hookey. The mail was delivered in the morning before they left for school, so if the principal sent a notice home, they could get it first, tear it up and that way—well, they’d stay out for a long long time.

  During that long wonderful week, F. K. Jackson and Abbie and The Race and Miss pause Dwight disappeared from his world, dispelled by sun and wind and fog. He forgot there was something wrong, bad, about the color of his skin. When it rained they went, all of them, single file, quietly, quickly, around the back of The Last Chance, and sat inside the old unused chicken house, and played cards and read comic books. Even when it was raining they went swimming in the river.

  Abbie found out, finally, by the most unforeseen, the most appallingly unforeseen, of accidents. She went to see the principal, without saying anything to Link, suddenly, on impulse, because she wasn’t satisfied with Link’s reading. She kept telling him that when she was ten years old she could read and understand poetry, the Bible, Shakespeare; and he said that he could read better than any kid in his grade; and she said, “Well, in that case they must all be morons and idiots because you can barely spell out the words in a primer, and you can’t write so that anybody can read what you’ve written.” They usually stopped right there—but he felt so free, the river seemed to have soaked into his bones and blood, he felt like air and water and sun, and The Race no longer sat astride his shoulders, Miss pause Dwight no longer prodded him and The Race, at one and the same time, that he said, “Well, Aunt Abbie, other people can read my writing. Maybe you need to get new glasses.” And she got mad and went to the principal’s office to find out if something couldn’t be done to improve his reading.

  About three-thirty in the afternoon, he came in through the back door, as usual, so he wouldn’t muddy up the front hall floor, came in through the back door, whistling, not a care in the world, feeling as though there were a grin inside him that was spreading, spreading, and he kept telling himself to be careful so the grin wouldn’t show in his face.

  Abbie and F. K. Jackson were waiting for him, in the sitting-dining room, dining-sitting room, both looking as though they were sitting up with a corpse; he knew instantly that he was the corpse and that they had been waiting for his arrival. He could tell by the way Abbie sat in the Boston rocker, her hands folded in her lap, and she never sat still like that, she was always crocheting or knitting, as though she would not, could not, waste even so much as a moment of time; and F. K. Jackson was leaning against the marble mantel; one bony elbow on the mantel. They were both frowning. F. K. Jackson’s pince-nez had more glitter than usual.

  Abbie said, “Link—”

  F. K. Jackson interrupted her. She said, “Why haven’t you been in school this week?”

  He went straight to the point, just like F. K. Jackson, and said, just as abruptly, “I got tired of it.”

  That was a mistake. F. K. Jackson said that his staying away from school was an evasive dishonest action which could lead to other larger kinds of dishonesty, far more serious than this; that it already had because he had tampered with the United States mail; and thus he had taken the first step straight toward the door of a reform school. She kept walking up and down, and frowning at him, as she talked. Finally, she shook one of her long, bony, forefingers, practically under his nose, and said, “You’re an ingrate. That’s what you are—an ingrate!”

  Then Abbie talked and talked and talked. About The Race. She said that there had been a time (she always avoided mention of slavery) when it was a crime in this country to teach a colored person to read and write; and, because of that period in the history of The Race, it behooved all pers
ons of color to take advantage of the free education now available to everybody. (He smiled because he thought about Fishmouth Taylor and Fishmouth’s comment on practically everything: free schools, pretty white teachers, and dumb niggers. Abbie must have got mad because he smiled; otherwise she would not have said what she did.)

  She said it particularly behooved Link Williams, orphan, adopted out of the goodness of the Major’s heart (she wiped away a tear) and her heart, to go to school, every day, and learn, and learn, and learn, so that he would stand at the head of his class, in everything, so that he would be a credit to The Race.

  The stage show came to an end in a whirling spectacular finale, composed of dancing girls, and dancing colored comedians, brilliant lighting, and music that sounded as though it had been lifted whole from the swoop of the “William Tell Overture,” and the curtains closed. The lights came up, all over the theatre, then went down. The curtains opened again. The movie started.

  He watched it for a few minutes. It bored him. He wondered why women liked movies. What had Camilo said, on the trip down? Something about the dark handsome lover. Maybe the female was always hunting for him, maybe in the back of the female mind was the belief that he could be found, even after the female was married and had six children. Hollywood knew this. So the demon lover, the dark, handsome, rapacious lover, showed up in all the movies; and the females could believe he was theirs for about an hour and a half. So right after they finished the supper dishes, they went around to the neighborhood theatre, and sat there, legs apart, mouths open, panting a little, because now they were young again, and there was no fat around their waists, no varicose veins marred the flawless beauty of their legs, and the demon lover took them in his arms. They always looked dazed when the picture ended and the lights came up.

  Camilo was watching the screen just as she had watched the stage show, with the same degree of concentration. He wondered how she could identify herself so completely with the action that took place in a movie. When he was eight, a movie could carry him straight into another world but he’d seen a hell of a lot of different worlds since then, and he’d had far more at stake in all of them than he’d ever have in anything they cooked up in Hollywood. Demon lover, he thought. Was Camilo still hunting for one? It seemed doubtful. But if a theory was going to hold water, wouldn’t you have to try applying it? Abbie? Had she hunted for one? She found one, in the person of the Major. She lost him when he died, and she was never quite the same afterwards. F. K. Jackson? Impossible to think of her hunting a mate, handsome or otherwise. She was too brusque, too selfsufficient. Perhaps she, in her own person, was the dark handsome lover, and to her Abbie had been the ChinaCamiloWilliams that the male hunts for and rarely ever finds; and even if he finds her, never quite manages to capture her.

  Ah, the hell with it, he thought.

  Ten years old. And he played hookey. A week later he was back in school, feeling ashamed and resentful. He wasn’t an ingrate. Nobody had told Abbie and the Major to adopt him. He would have been better off if they hadn’t.

  Miss pause Dwight was still mad about his ruining the minstrel show, was furious because he’d played hookey. All day long, or so it seemed, she said: “I might have expected it”; “Link, will you please wake up?” “Are you deaf? I asked you a question.”

  He stopped trying to learn anything. There wasn’t any use. He thought she might forget about him if he acted as though he were deaf, dumb, blind. So she told the principal that he was totally unresponsive. The principal sent for him and urged him to make an effort, “You’re a bright boy, Link. You can do anything you want to do.”

  Miss pause Dwight complained about him again, saying that he could no longer stay in her class. The principal sent for Abbie, and sent for Link too; and told them both that Link would soon have to go in the class for the mentally retarded, the dummies as the kids said, because he was now behaving as though he were halfwitted. He kept right on acting as though he were deaf, dumb, blind.

  Abbie cried. F. K. Jackson scolded. They talked about him, discussed him, all the time, even when he was in the same room with them.

  Abbie: Maybe he’s sick.

  F. K. Jackson: I don’t believe it. He eats like a horse. If he were sick he wouldn’t eat like a horse.

  Abbie: I’m going to send for Dr. Easter.

  F. K. Jackson: Don’t be foolish. Take the boy around to his office. It costs a dollar less. Besides there isn’t a thing wrong with him.

  Dr. Easter poked at him, pried at him, weighed him, measured him, said: He’s as fine a specimen as I’ve ever seen. Not a thing wrong with him, Mrs. Crunch.

  Abbie reported this to F. K. Jackson and said, a quaver in her voice: Maybe there’s something wrong with his mind, Frances. Do you think there’s something wrong with his mind?

  F. K. Jackson snorted: It’s just stubbornness. He’s just like a mule. Somebody ought to—and didn’t finish whatever she was going to say.

  He wasn’t supposed to go in The Last Chance except on Saturdays, because of some kind of compromise that F. K. Jackson had worked out with Bill Hod. But he went anyway. On a Wednesday. Late in the afternoon.

  Weak Knees said, “Hiya, Sonny. You got here just in time. I got red rice in this here pot. In the middle of the afternoon, like now, a man could eat up all this rice and then turn around and start in all over again.” He put a plate of red rice on the table. “Come on, Sonny, start layin’ your lip over it, just start right in.” Then he looked at Link, really looked at him and he said, “Whatsamatter, Sonny? You don’t look so good.”

  The rice cooled on his plate while he told Weak Knees about the pigeons and the black birds, about Miss pause Dwight and the minstrel show and Sambo sittin’ in the sun; and Bill came in and scooped up an enormous plateful of rice, pulled up a chair and sat, listening, not saying anything, just eating red rice, as Link told about The Race, and how he was responsible for all other members of The Race even though he did not know them; and how he couldn’t do it any more, it sort of paralyzed him because he never knew whether he was doing something because he, Link, wanted to do it; or whether he did something because of the undesirable color of his skin, and that meant he had no control over what he did—it just happened.

  All of a sudden Bill started talking. He was talking about the Chicago riots. Link leaned forward, listening, listening. He’d never heard anything like this before.

  Bill told about Ma Winters, an old woman who ran a rooming house on the South Side, in Chicago; and how white men broke down the door and surged into the downstairs hall; and how Ma Winters stood at the top of the stairs with a loaded shotgun in her hand, not shouting, not talking loud, just saying, conversationally, “I’m goin’ to shoot the first white bastard who puts his foot on that bottom step.” And did. And laughed. And aimed again. “Come on,” she said, “some of the rest of you sons of bitches put your white feet on my stairs.” And they backed out of the door, backed out of the door, kept backing out of the door, and left a white man, a dead white man, there in the hall, lying on his back, a bloody mess where his face had been.

  It seemed to be just a story, a good story, an exciting story, yet he was certain it had some other deeper meaning that he couldn’t quite grasp. Certainly the old woman who stood at the head of the stairs firing the shotgun, killing a white man, threatening to kill other white men, didn’t carry The Race around on her shoulders. The burden of race lifted a little from his own shoulders.

  The next day Abbie told him that if he wanted to he could go back to The Last Chance to live. He didn’t know why this should be so but he gladly moved back across the street.

  Shortly after that, Bill visited the school. Right after that Link noticed that Miss pause Dwight started being nice to him; oddly enough she referred to Bill as his uncle, Mr. Hod.

  Weak Knees and Bill re-educated him on the subject of race. After supper Weak Knees sat down at the kitchen tabl
e and read the newspaper, a tabloid newspaper. He spread it out flat in front of him, fingering his way down the columns. When he found something that was especially interesting, he picked the paper up. Link could see the pink outer sheets, the big black type, and Weak Knees’ dark hands like a pattern on the pink paper. “Name-a-God, Sonny, lissen to this. Here’s a bank teller, just a ordinary smart white boy, free of course ’cause he’s white so he done stole hisself thirty-five hunnerd dollars. Done fixed himself so he ain’t goin’ to be able to cuddle any little gals and he’s goin’ to have to eat that slop they throw at ’em in jailhouses for the rest of his natural—all for thirty-five hunnerd dollars. White folks sure is smart. Tee-hee-hee.” The kitchen was filled with his highpitched cackling laugh. Link had never heard white people laughed at before and it made him uncomfortable at first.

  Weak Knees bought a bird feeder, and hung it in a tree in the yard in back of The Last Chance, hung suet in the tree, scattered crumbs.

  “That’s for my black boys,” he said. “Watch them black boys, Sonny. They drives all them other birds away. Tee-hee-hee. Bestlookin’ birds of any of ’em. Look how them tail feathers and them breas’ feathers shine in the sun. Lookithat big one peck that other bird. Lookithat! Lookithat! Tee-hee-hee.”

  Black was bestlooking. It was a new idea. He mulled over it. Not possible. Black is evil. Satan is black. Abbie said, Black people, and there was disapproval in her voice. Black was undesirable. Black sheep—the bad one. Black cat—bad luck. Black was ugly, evil, dirty, to be avoided. It was worn for funerals. It meant death, too.

  They proved to him, Weak Knees and Bill Hod, that black could be other things, too. They did it casually. Ebony was the best wood, the hardest wood; it was black. Virginia ham was the best ham. It was black on the outside. Tuxedos and tail coats were black and they were a man’s finest, most expensive clothes. You had to use pepper to make most meats and vegetables fit to eat. The most flavorsome pepper was black. The best caviar was black. The rarest jewels were black: black opals, black pearls.