by John Updike
“Skeeter,” Jill says, “the selections.” A prim clubwoman calling the meeting to order. “Thirteen minutes to Laugh-In,” Nelson says. “I don’t want to miss the beginning, it’s neat when they introduce themselves.”
“Ree-ight,” Skeeter says, fumbling at his forehead, at that buzzing that seems sometimes there. “Out of this book here.” The book is called Slavery; the letters are red, white, and blue. It seems a small carnival under Skeeter’s slim hand. “Just for the fun of it, to give us something more solid than my ignorant badmouthing, right? You know, like a happening. Chuck, this gives you pretty much a pain in the ass, right?”
“No, I like it. I like learning stuff. I have an open mind.”
“He turns me on, he’s so true to life,” Skeeter says, handing the book to Jill. “Baby, you begin. Where my finger is, just the part in little type.” He announces, “These are old-time speeches, dig?”
Jill sits up straight on the sofa and reads in a voice higher than her natural voice, a nice-girl-school-schooled voice, with riding lessons in it, and airy big white-curtained rooms; territory even higher in the scale than Penn Park.
“Think,” she reads, “of the nation’s deed, done continually and afresh. God shall hear the voice of your brother’s blood, long crying from the ground; His justice asks you even now, ‘America, where is thy brother?’ This is the answer which America must give: ‘Lo, he is there in the rice-swamps of the South, in her fields teeming with cotton and the luxuriant cane. He was weak and I seized him; naked and I bound him; ignorant, poor and savage, and I over-mastered him. I laid on his feebler shoulders my grievous yoke. I have chained him with my fetters; beat him with my whip. Other tyrants had dominion over him, but my finger was on his human flesh. I am fed with his toil; fat, voluptuous on his sweat, and tears, and blood. I stole the father, stole also the sons, and set them to toil; his wife and daughters are a pleasant spoil to me. Behold the children also of thy servant and his handmaidens – sons swarthier than their sire. Askest thou for the African? I have made him a beast. Lo, there Thou hast what is thine.’” She hands the book back blushing. Her glance at Rabbit says, Bear with us. Haven’t I loved you?
Skeeter is cackling. “Green pickles, that turns me on. A pleasant spoil to me, right? And did you dig that beautiful bit about the sons swarthier than their sire? Those old Yankee sticks were really bugged, one respectable fuck would have stopped the abolition movement cold. But they weren’t getting it back home in the barn so they sure gave hell to those crackers getting it out in the slave shed. Dark meat is soul meat, right? That was Theodore Parker, here’s another, the meanest mouth in the crowd, old William Lloyd. Nellie, you try this. Just where I’ve marked. Just read the words slow, don’t try for any expression.”
Gaudy book in hand, the boy looks toward his father for rescue. “I feel stupid.”
Rabbit says, “Read, Nelson. I want to hear it.”
He turns for help elsewhere. “Skeeter, you promised I wouldn’t have to.”
“I said we’d see how it went. Come on, your daddy likes it. He has an open mind.”
“You’re just poking fun of everybody.”
“Let him off,” Rabbit says. “I’m losing interest.”
Jill intervenes. “Do it, Nelson, it’ll be fun. We won’t turn on Laugh-In until you do.”
The boy plunges in, stumbling, frowning so hard his father wonders if he doesn’t need glasses. “No matter,” he reads, “though every party should be torn by dis-, dis –”
Jill looks over his shoulder. “Dissensions.”
“– every sest –”
“Sect.”
“– every sect dashed into fragments, the national compact dissolved —” Jill says, “Good!”
“Let him ride,” Skeeter says, his eyes shut, nodding.
Nelson’s voice gains confidence. “– the land filled with the horrors of a civil and a servile war – still, slavery must be buried in the grave of infantry –”
“Infamy,” Jill corrects.
“– in-fa-my, beyond the possibility of a rez, a razor–”
“A resurrection.”
“If the State cannot survive the anti-slavery agitation, then let the State perish. If the Church must be cast down by the strugglings of Humanity, then let the Church fall, and its fragments be scattered to the four winds of heaven, never more to curse the earth. If the American Union cannot be maintained, except by immolating – what’s that?”
“Sacrificing,” Jill says.
Rabbit says, “I thought it meant burn.”
Nelson looks up, uncertain he should continue.
The rain continues at the windows, gently, gently nailing them in, tighter together.
Skeeter’s eyes are still closed. “Finish up. Do the last sentence, Babychuck.”
“If the Republic must be blotted out from the roll of nations, by proclaiming liberty to the captives, then let the Republic sink beneath the waves of oblivion, and a shout of joy, louder than the voice of many waters, fill the universe at its extinction. I don’t understand what any of this stuff means.”
Skeeter says, “It means, More Power to the People, Death to the Fascist Pigs.”
Rabbit says, “To me it means, Throw the baby out with the bath.” He remembers a tub of still water, a kind of dust on its dead surface. He relives the shock of reaching down through it to pull the plug. He loops back into the room where they are sitting now, within the rain.
Jill is explaining to Nelson, “He’s saying what Skeeter says. If the System, even if it works for most people, has to oppress some of the people, then the whole System should be destroyed.”
“Do I say that? No.” Skeeter leans forward from the mossy brown wings, reaching a trembling thin hand toward the young people, all parody shaken from his voice. “That’ll come anyway. That big boom. It’s not the poor blacks setting the bombs, it’s the offspring of the white rich. It’s not injustice pounding at the door, it’s impatience. Put enough rats in a ’cage the fat ones get more frantic than the skinny ones ‘cause they feel more squeezed. No. We must look past that, past the violence, into the next stage. That it’s gonna blow up we can assume. That’s not interesting. What comes next is what’s interesting. There’s got to be a great calm.”
“And you’re the black Jesus going to bring it in,” Rabbit mocks. “From A.D. to A.S. After Skeeter. I should live so long. All Praise Be Skeeter’s Name.”
He offers to sing but Skeeter is concentrating on the other two, disciples. “People talk revolution all the time but revolution’s not interesting, right? Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another and that’s bullshit, that’s just power, and power is just guns and gangsters, and that’s boring bullshit, right? People say to me Free Huey, I say Screw Huey, he’s just Agnew in blackface. World forgets gangsters like that before they’re dead. No. The problem is really, when the gangsters have knocked each other off, and taken half of everybody else with them, to make use of the space. After the Civil War ended, there was space, only they let it fill up with that same old greedy muck, only worse, right? They turned that old dog-eat-dog thing into a divine law.”
“That’s what we need, Skeeter,” Rabbit says. “Some new divine laws. Why doncha go up to the top of Mt. Judge and have ’em handed to you on a tablet?”
Skeeter turns that nicely carved knife-handle of a face to him slowly, says slowly, “I’m no threat to you, Chuck. You’re set. Only thing I could do to you is kill you and that matters less than you think, right?”
Jill delicately offers to make peace. “Didn’t we pick out something for Harry to read?”
“Fuck it,” Skeeter says. “That won’t swing now. He’s giving off ugly vibes, right? He’s not ready. He is immature.”
Rabbit is hurt, he had only been kidding. “Come on, I’m ready, give me my thing to read.”
Skeeter asks Nelson, “What say, Babychuck? Think he’s ready?”
Nelson says, “You must read it right, Dad. N
o poking fun.”
“Me? Who’d I ever poke fun of?”
“Mom. All the time you poke fun of Mom. No wonder she left you.”
Skeeter gives Harry the book open to a page. “Just a little bit. Just read where I’ve marked.”
Soft red crayon. Those Crayola boxes that used to remind him of bleachers with every head a different color. This strange return. “I believe, my friends and fellow citizens” Rabbit reads solemnly, “we are not prepared for this suffrage. But we can learn. Give a man tools and let him commence to use them, and in time he will learn a trade. So it is with voting. We may not understand it at the start, but in time we shall learn to do our duty.”
The rain makes soft applause.
Skeeter tips his narrow head and smiles at the two children on the sofa. “Makes a pretty good nigger, don’t he?”
Nelson says, “Don’t, Skeeter. He didn’t poke fun so you shouldn’t.”
“Nothing wrong with what I said, that’s what the world needs, pretty good niggers, right?”
To show Nelson how tough he is, Rabbit tells Skeeter, “This is all bleeding-heart stuff. It’d be like me bellyaching that the Swedes were pushed around by the Finns in the year Zilch.”
Nelson cries, “We’re missing Laugh-In!”
They turn it on. The cold small star expands, a torrent of stripes snaps into a picture, Sammy Davis Jr. is being the little dirty old man, tapping along behind the park bench, humming that aimless sad doodling tune. He perks up, seeing there is someone sitting on the bench. It is not Ruth Buzzi but Arte Johnson, the white, the real little dirty old man. They sit side by side and stare at each other. They are like one man looking into a crazy mirror. Nelson laughs. They all laugh: Nelson, Jill, Rabbit, Skeeter. Kindly the rain fastens them in, a dressmaker patting and stitching all around the house, fitting its great wide gown.
Nights with Skeeter, they blend together. Skeeter asks him, “You want to know how a Ne-gro feels?”
“Not much.”
“Dad, don’t,” Nelson says.
Jill, silent, abstracted, passes Rabbit the joint. He takes a tentative puff. Has hardly held a cigarette in ten years, scared to inhale. Nearly sick after the other time, in Jimbo’s. You suck and hold it down. Hold it down.
“Ee-magine,” Skeeter is saying, “being in a glass box, and every time you move toward something, your head gets bumped. Ee-magine being on a bus, and everybody movin’ away, ’cause your whole body’s covered with pustulatin’ scabs, and they’re scared to get the disease.”
Rabbit exhales, lets it out. “That’s not how it is. These black kids on buses are pushy as hell.”
“You’ve set so much type the world is lead, right? You don’t hate nobody, right?”
“Nobody.” Serenely. Space is transparent.
“How you feel about those Penn Park people?”
“Which ones?”
“All those ones. All those ones live in those great big piecrust mock-Two-door houses with His and Hers Caddies parked out by the hydrangea bushes. How about all those old farts down at the Mifflin Club with all those iron gates that used to own the textile mills and now don’t own anything but a heap of paper keeps ’em in cigars and girlfriends? How about those? Let ’em settle in before you answer.”
Rabbit pictures Penn Park, the timbered gables, the stucco, the weedless lawns plumped up like pillows. It was on a hill. He used to imagine it on the top of a hill, a hill he could never climb, because it wasn’t a real hill like Mt. Judge. And he and Mom and Pop and Mim lived near the foot of this hill, in the dark next to the Bolgers, and Pop came home from work every day too tired to play catch in the back yard, and Mom never had jewelry like other women, and they bought day-old bread because it was a penny cheaper, and Pop’s teeth hurt to keep money out of the dentist’s hands, and now Mom’s dying was a game being played by doctors who drove Caddies and had homes in Penn Park. “I hate them,” he tells Skeeter.
The black man’s face lights up, shines. “Deeper.”
Rabbit fears the feeling will be fragile and vanish if he looks at it but it does not; it expands, explodes. Timbered gables, driveway pebbles, golf clubs fill the sky with debris. He remembers one doctor. He met him early this summer by accident, coming up on the porch to visit Mom, the doctor hurrying out, under the fanlight that sees everything, in a swank cream raincoat though it had just started to sprinkle, that kind of dude, who produces a raincoat from nowhere when proper, all set up, life licked, tweed trousers knife-sharp over polished strapped shoes, hurrying to his next appointment, anxious to get away from this drizzling tilted street. Pop worrying his teeth like an old woman in the doorway, performing introductions, “our son Harry,” pathetic pride. The doctor’s irritation at being halted even a second setting a prong of distaste on his upper Up behind the clipped mustache the color of iron. His handshake also metal, arrogant, it pinches Harry’s unready hand and says, I am strong, I twist bodies to my will. I am life, I am death. “I hate those Penn Park motherfuckers,” Harry amplifies, performing for Skeeter, wanting to please him. “If I could push the red button to blow them all to Kingdom Come” – he pushes a button in mid-air – “I would.” He pushes the button so hard he can see it there.
“Ka-boom, right?” Skeeter grins, flinging wide his sticklike arms.
“But it is,” Rabbit says. “Everybody knows black pussy is beautiful. It’s on posters even, now.”
Skeeter asks, “How you think all this mammy shit got started? Who you think put all those hog-fat churchified old women at the age of thirty in Harlem?”
“Not me.”
“It was you. Man, you is just who it was. From those breeding cabins on you made the black girl feel sex was shit, so she hid from it as quick as she could in the mammy bit, right?”
“Well, tell ’em it’s not shit.”
“They don’t believe me, Chuck. They see I don’t count. I have no muscle, right? I can’t protect my black women, right? ’Cause you don’t let me be a man.”
“Go ahead. Be one.”
Skeeter gets up from the armchair with the silver threads and circles the imitation cobbler’s bench with a wary hunchbacked quickness and kisses Jill where she sits on the sofa. Her hands, after a startled jerk, knit together and stay in her lap. Her head does not pull back nor strain forward. Rabbit cannot see, around the eclipsing orb of Skeeter’s Afro, Jill’s eyes. He can see Nelson’s eyes. They are warm watery holes so dark, so stricken that Rabbit would like to stick pins into them, to teach the child there is worse. Skeeter straightens from kissing, wipes the Jill-spit from his mouth. “A pleasant spoil. Chuck, how do you like it?”
“I don’t mind. If she doesn’t.”
Jill has closed her eyes, her mouth open on a small bubble.
“She does mind it,” Nelson protests. “Dad, don’t let him!”
Rabbit says to Nelson, “Bedtime, isn’t it?”
Physically, Skeeter fascinates Rabbit. The lustrous pallor of the tongue and palms and the soles of the feet, left out of the sun. Or a different kind of skin? White palms never tan either. The peculiar glinting luster of his skin. The something so very finely turned and finished in the face, reflecting light at a dozen polished points: in comparison white faces are blobs: putty still drying. The curious greased grace of his gestures, rapid and watchful as a lizard’s motions, free of mammalian fat. Skeeter in his house feels like a finely made electric toy; Harry wants to touch him but is afraid he will get a shock.
“O.K.?”
“Not especially.” Jill’s voice seems to come from further away than beside him in the bed.
