A hush fell on the room. Doctor Copeland jerked the cuff of his sleeves and cleared his throat. His pulse beat too fast and his throat was tight Sitting in the corner of the room he felt isolated and angry and alone.
‘Has any of you ever had a sign from Heaven?’ asked Grandpapa.
‘I has, sir,’ said Highboy. ‘Once when I were sick with the pneumonia I seen God’s face looking out the fireplace at me. It were a large white man’s face with a white beard and blue eyes.’
‘I seen a ghost,’ said one of the children--the girl ‘Once I seen--’ began the little boy.
Grandpapa held up his hand. ‘You childrens hush. You. Celia--and you, Whitman--it now the time for you to listen but not be heard,’ he said. ‘Only one time has I had a real sign.’
And this here the way it come about. It were in the summer of last year, and hot. I were trying to dig up the roots of that big oak stump near the hogpen and when I leaned down a kind of catch, a misery, come suddenly in the small of my back. I straightened up and then all around went dark. I were holding my hand to my back and looking up at the sky when suddenly I seen this little angel. It were a little white girl angel--look to me about the size of a field pea--with yellow hair and a white robe. Just flying around near the sun. After that I come in the house and prayed. I studied the Bible for three days before I went out in the field again.’
Doctor Copeland felt the old evil anger in him. The words rose inchoately to his throat and he could not speak them. They would listen to the old man. Yet to words of reason they would not attend. These are my people, he tried to tell himself--but because he was dumb this thought did not help him now. He sat tense and sullen.
‘It a queer thing,’ said Grandpapa suddenly. ‘Benedict Mady, you a fine doctor. How come I get them miseries sometime in the small of my back after I been digging and planting for a good while? How come that misery bother me?’
‘How old are you now?’
‘I somewhere between seventy and eighty year old.’
The old man loved medicine and treatment Always when he used to come in with his family to see Daisy he would have himself examined and take home medicine and salves for the whole group of them. But when Daisy left him the old man did not come anymore and he had to content himself with purges and kidney pills advertised in the newspapers. Now the old man was looking at him with timid eagerness.
‘Drink plenty of water,’ said Doctor Copeland. ‘And rest as much as you can.’
Portia went into the kitchen to prepare the supper. Warm smells began to fill the room. There was quiet, idle talking, but Doctor Copeland did not listen or speak. Now and then he looked at Karl Marx or Hamilton. Karl Marx talked about Joe Louis. Hamilton spoke mostly of the hail that had ruined some of the crops. When they caught their father’s eye they grinned and shuffled their feet on the floor. He kept staring at them with angry misery.
Doctor Copeland clamped his teeth down hard. He had thought so much about Hamilton and Karl Marx and William and Portia, about the real true purpose he had had for them, that the sight of their faces made a black swollen feeling in him. If once he could tell it all to them, from the far away beginning until this very night, the telling would ease the sharp ache in his heart. But they would not listen or understand.
He hardened himself so that each muscle in his body was rigid and strained. He did not listen or look at anything around him.
He sat in a corner like a man who is blind and dumb. Soon they went into the supper table and the old man said grace.
But Doctor Copeland did not eat. When Highboy brought out a pint ,bottle of gin, and they laughed and passed the bottle from mouth to mouth, he refused that also. He sat in rigid silence, and at last he picked up his hat and left the house without a farewell. If he could not speak the whole long truth no other word would come to him.
He lay tense and wakeful throughout the night. Then the next day was Sunday. He made half a dozen calls, and in the middle of the morning he went to Mr. Singer’s room. The visit blunted the feeling of loneliness in him so that when he said goodbye he was at peace with himself once more.
However, before he was out of the house this peace had left him. An accident occurred. As he started down the stairs he saw a white man carrying a large paper sack and he drew close to the banisters so that they could pass each other. But the white man was running up the steps two at a time, without looking, and they collided with such force that Doctor Copeland was left sick and breathless.
‘Christ! I didn’t see you.’
Doctor Copeland looked at him closely but made no answer.
He had seen this white man once before. He remembered the stunted, brutal-looking body and the huge, awkward hands. Then with sudden clinical interest he observed the white man’s face, for in his eyes he saw a strange, fixed, and withdrawn look of madness. ‘Sorry,’ said the white man. Doctor Copeland put his hand on the banister and passed on.
WHO was that?’ Jake Blount asked. ‘Who was the tall, thin colored man that just come out of here? ‘ The small room was very neat. The sun lighted a bowl of purple grapes on the table. Singer sat with his chair tilted back and his hands in his pockets, looking out of the window. ‘I bumped into him on the steps and he gave me this look--why, I never had anybody to look at me so dirty.’ Jake put the sack of ales down on the table. He realized with a shock that Singer did not know he was in the room. He walked over to the window and touched Singer on the shoulder.
‘I didn’t mean to bump into him. He had no cause to act like that.’
Jake shivered. Although the sun was bright there was a chill in the room. Singer held up his forefinger and went into the hall.
When he returned he brought with him a scuttle of coal and some kindling. Jake watched him kneel before the hearth.
Neatly he broke the sticks of kindling over his knee and arranged them on the foundation of paper. He put the coal on according to a system. At first the fire would not draw. The flames quivered weakly and were smothered by a black roll of smoke. Singer covered the grate with a double sheet of newspapers. The draught gave the fire new life. In the room there was a roaring sound. The paper glowed and was sucked inward. A crackling orange sheet of flame filled the grate.
The first morning ale had a fine mellow taste. Jake gulped his share down quickly and wiped his mouth with file back of his hand.
There was this lady I knew a long time ago,’ he said. ‘You sort of remind me of her, Miss Clara. She had a little farm in Texas. And made pralines to sell in the cities. She was a tall, big, fine-looking lady. Wore those long, baggy sweaters and clodhopper shoes and a man’s hat. Her husband was dead when I knew her. But what I’m getting at is this: If it hadn’t been for her I might never have known. I might have gone on through life like the millions of others who don’t know. I would have just been a preacher or a linthead or a salesman.
My whole life might have been wasted.’
Jake shook his head wonderingly.
To understand you got to know what went before. You see, I lived in Gastonia when I was a youngun. I was a knock-kneed little runt, too small to put in the mill. I worked as pin boy in a bowling joint and got meals for pay. Then I heard a smart, quick boy could make thirty cents a day stringing tobacco not very far from there. So I went and made that thirty cents a day.
That was when I was ten years old. I just left my folks. I didn’t write. They were glad I was gone. You understand how those things are. And besides, nobody could read a letter but my sister.’
He waved his hand in the air as though brushing something from his face. ‘But I mean this. My first belief was Jesus.
There was this fellow working in the same shed with me. He had a tabernacle and preached every night. I went and listened and I got this faith. My mind was on Jesus all day long. In my spare time I studied the Bible and prayed. Then one night I took a hammer and laid my hand on the table. I was angry and I drove the nail all the way through. My
hand was nailed to the table and I looked at it and the fingers fluttered and turned blue.’
Jake held out his palm and pointed to the ragged, dead-white scar in the center.
‘I wanted to be an evangelist. I meant to travel around the country preaching and holding revivals. In the meantime I moved around from one place to another, and when I was nearly twenty I got to Texas. I worked in a pecan grove near where Miss Clara lived. I got to know her and at night sometimes I would go to her house. She talked to me.
Understand, I didn’t begin to know all at once. That’s not the way it happens to any of us. It was gradual. I began to read. I would work just so I could put aside enough money to knock off for a while and study. It was like being born a second time.
Just us who know can understand what it means. We have opened our eyes and have seen. We’re like people from way off yonder somewhere.’
Singer agreed with him. The room was comfortable in a homey way. Singer brought out from the closet the tin box in which he kept crackers and fruit and cheese. He selected an orange and peeled it slowly. He pulled off shreds ‘ of pith until the fruit was transparent in the sun. He sectioned the orange and divided the plugs between them. Jake ate two sections at a time and with a loud whoosh spat the seeds into the fire. Singer ate his share slowly and deposited his seeds neatly in the palm of one hand. They opened two more ales.
‘And how many of us are there in this country? Maybe ten thousand. Maybe twenty thousand. Maybe a lot more. I been to a lot of places but I never met but a few of us. But say a man does know. He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all come about.
He watched the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house.
He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live.
He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted.
He sees war coming. He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it’s as plain as the shining sun--the don’t--knows have lived with that lie so long they just can’t see it.’
The red corded vein in Jake’s forehead swelled angrily. He grasped the scuttle on the hearth and rattled an avalanche of coal on the fire. His foot had gone to sleep, and he stamped it so hard that the floor shook.
‘I been all over this place. I walk around. I talk. I try to explain to them. But what good does it do? Lord God!’ He gazed into the fire, and a flush from the ale and heat deepened the color of his face. The sleepy tingling in his foot spread up his leg. He drowsed and saw the colors of the fire, the tints of green and blue and burning yellow. ‘You’re the only one,’ he said dreamily. ‘The only one.’
He was a stranger no longer. By now he knew every street, every alley, every fence in all the sprawling slums of the town.
He still worked at the Sunny Dixie. During the fall the show moved from one vacant lot to another, staying always within the fringes of the city limit, until at last it had encircled the town. The locations were changed but the settings were alike--a strip of wasteland bordered by rows of rotted shacks, and somewhere near a mill, a cotton gin, or a bottling plant. The crowd was the same, for the most part factory workers and Negroes. The show was gaudy with colored lights in the evening. The wooden horses of the flying-jinny revolved in the circle to the mechanical music. The swings whirled, the rail around the penny throwing game was always crowded.
From the two booths were sold drinks and bloody brown hamburgers and cotton candy.
He had been hired as a machinist, but gradually the range of his duties widened. His coarse, bawling voice called out through the noise, and continually he was lounging from one place on the show grounds to another. Sweat stood out on his forehead and often his mustache was soaked with beer. On Saturday his job was to keep the people in order. His squat, hard body pushed through the crowd with savage energy. Only his eyes did not share the violence of the rest of him, Wide gazing beneath his massive scowling forehead, they had a withdrawn and distracted appearance.
He reached home between twelve and one in the morning. The house where he lived was squared into four rooms and the rent was a dollar fifty per person. There was a privy in the back and a hydrant on the stoop. In his room the walls and floor had a wet, sour smell. Sooty, cheap lace curtains hung at the window. He kept his good suit in his bag and hung his overalls on a nail. The room had no heat and ho electricity. However, a street light shone outside the window and made a pale greenish reflection inside. He never lighted the oil lamp by his bed unless he wanted to read. The acrid smell of burning oil in the cold room nauseated him.
If he stayed at home he restlessly walked the floor. He sat on the edge of the unmade bed and gnawed savagely at the broken, dirty ends of his fingernails. The sharp taste of grime lingered in his mouth. The loneliness in him was so keen that he was filled with terror. Usually he had a pint of bootleg white lightning. He drank the raw liquor and by daylight he was warm and relaxed. At five o’clock the whistles from the mills blew for the first shift. The whistles made lost, eerie echoes, and he could never sleep until after they had sounded.
But usually he did not stay at home. He went out into the narrow, empty streets. In the first dark hours of the morning the sky was black and the stars hard and bright. Sometimes the mills were running. From the yellow-lighted buildings came the racket of the machines. He waited at the gates for the early shift. Young girls in sweaters and print dresses came out into the dark street. The men came out carrying their dinner pails.
Some of them always went to a streetcar cafe for Coca-Cola or coffee before going home, and Jake went with them. Inside the noisy mill the men could hear plainly every word that was spoken, but for the first hour outside they were deaf.
In the streetcar Jake drank Coca-Cola with whiskey added. He talked. The winter dawn was white and smoky and cold. He looked with drunken urgency into the drawn, yellow faces of the men. Often he was laughed at, and when this happened he held his stunted body very straight and spoke scornfully hi words of many syllables. He stuck his little finger out from his glass and haughtily twisted his mustache. And if he was still laughed at he sometimes fought. He swung his big brown fists with crazed violence and sobbed aloud.
After such mornings he returned to the show with relief. It eased him to push through the crowds of people. The noise, the rank stinks, the shouldering contact of human flesh soothed his jangled nerves.
Because of the blue laws hi the town the show closed for the Sabbath. On Sunday he got up early in the morning and took from the suitcase his serge suit. He went to the main street.
First he dropped into the New York Cafe and bought a sack of ales. Then he went to Singer’s room. Although he knew many people in the town by name or face, the mute was his only friend. They would idle in the quiet room and drink the ales.
He would talk, and the words created themselves from the dark mornings spent in the streets or hi his room alone. The words were formed and spoken with relief.
The fire had died down. Singer was playing a game of fools with himself at the table. Jake had been asleep. He awoke with a nervous quiver. He raised his head and turned to Singer.
‘Yeah,’ he said as though in answer to a sudden question.
‘Some of us are Communists. But not all of us. Myself, I’m not a member of the Communist Party. Because in the first place I never knew but one of them.
You can bum around for years and not meet Communists.
Around here there’s no office where you can go up and say you want to join--and if there is I never heard of it. And you just don’t take off for New York and join. As I say I never knew but one--and he was a seedy little teetotaler whose breath stunk. We had a figh
t. Not that I hold that against the Communists. The main fact is I don’t think so much of Stalin and Russia. I hate every damn country and government there is. But even so maybe I ought to joined up with the Communists first place. I’m not certain one way or the other. What do you think?’
Singer wrinkled his forehead and considered. He reached for his silver pencil and wrote on his pad of paper that he didn’t know.
‘But there’s this. You see, we just can’t settle down after knowing, but we got to act And some of us go nuts. There’s too much to do and you don’t know where to start It makes you crazy. Even me--I’ve done things that when I look back at them they don’t seem rational Once I started an organization myself. I picked out twenty lint-heads and talked to them until I thought they knew. Our motto was one word: Action. Huh! We meant to start riots--stir up all the big trouble we could.
Our ultimate goal was freedom--but a real freedom, a great freedom made possible only by the sense of justice of the human soul. Our motto, "Action," signified the razing of capitalism. In the constitution (drawn up by myself) certain statutes dealt with the swapping of our motto from "Action" to "Freedom" as soon as our work was through.’
Jake sharpened the end of a match and picked a troublesome cavity in a tooth. After a moment he continued: ‘Then when the constitution was all written down and the first followers well organized--then I went out on a hitch-hiking tour to organize component units of the society. Within three months I came back, and what do you reckon I found? What was the first heroic action? Had their righteous fury overcome planned action so that they had gone ahead without me? Was it destruction, murder, revolution?’
Jake leaned forward in his chair. After a pause he said somberly: ‘My friend, they had stole the fifty-seven dollars and thirty cents from the treasury to buy uniform caps and free Saturday suppers. I caught them sitting around the conference table, rolling the bones, their caps on their heads, and a ham and a gallon of gin in easy reach.’
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Page 15
