Black Boy (23 page)

“Yes, sir.”

I even pitched my voice to a low plane, trying to rob it of any suggestion or overtone of aggressiveness.

Half an hour later Mr. Crane called me to his desk and ques
tioned me closely about my schooling, about how much mathematics I had had. He seemed pleased when I told him that I had had two years of algebra.

“How would you like to learn this trade?” he asked.

“I’d like it fine, sir. I’d like nothing better,” I said.

He told me that he wanted to train a Negro boy in the optical trade; he wanted to help him, guide him. I tried to answer in a way that would let him know that I would try to be worthy of what he was doing. He took me to the stenographer and said:

“This is Richard. He’s going to be with us.”

He then led me into the rear room of the office, which turned out to be a tiny factory filled with many strange machines smeared with red dust.

“Reynolds,” he said to a young white man, “this is Richard.”

“What you saying there, boy!” Reynolds grinned and boomed at me.

Mr. Crane took me to the older man.

“Pease, this is Richard, who’ll work with us.”

Pease looked at me and nodded. Mr. Crane then held forth to the two white men about my duties; he told them to break me in gradually to the workings of the shop, to instruct me in the mechanics of grinding and polishing lenses. They nodded their assent.

“Now, boy, let’s see how clean you can get this place,” Mr. Crane said.

“Yes, sir.”

I swept, mopped, dusted, and soon had the office and the shop clean. In the afternoons, when I had caught up with my work, I ran errands. In an idle moment I would stand and watch the two white men grinding lenses on the machines. They said nothing to me and I said nothing to them. The first day passed, the second, the third, a week passed and I received my five dollars. A month passed. But I was not learning anything and nobody had volunteered to help me. One afternoon I walked up to Reynolds and asked him to tell me about the work.

“What are you trying to do, get smart, nigger?” he asked me.

“No, sir,” I said.

I was baffled. Perhaps he just did not want to help me. I went to Pease, reminding him that the boss had said that I was to be given a chance to learn the trade.

“Nigger, you think you’re white, don’t you?”

“No, sir.”

“You’re acting mighty like it,” he said.

“I was only doing what the boss told me to do,” I said.

Pease shook his fist in my face.

“This is a
white
man’s work around here,” he said.

From then on they changed toward me; they said good morning no more. When I was just a bit slow in performing some duty, I was called a lazy black sonofabitch. I kept silent, striving to offer no excuse for worsening of relations. But one day Reynolds called me to his machine.

“Richard, how long is your thing?” he asked me.

“What thing?” I asked.

“You know what I mean,” he said. “The thing the bull uses on the cow.”

I turned away from him; I had heard that whites regarded Negroes as animals in sex matters and his words made me angry.

“I heard that a nigger can stick his prick in the ground and spin around on it like a top,” he said, chuckling. “I’d like to see you do that. I’d give you a dime, if you did it.”

I ignored him. Mr. Pease was watching me closely; then I saw them exchange glances. My job was not leading to what Mr. Crane had said it would. I had been humble, and now I was reaping the wages of humility.

“Come here, boy,” Pease said.

I walked to his bench.

“You didn’t like what Reynolds just said, did you?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s all right,” I said smiling.

“You didn’t like it. I could see it on your face,” he said.

I stared at him and backed away.

“Did you ever get into any trouble?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

“What would you do if you got into trouble?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Well, watch yourself and don’t get into trouble,” he warned.

I wanted to report these clashes to Mr. Crane, but the thought of what Pease or Reynolds would do to me if they learned that I had “snitched” stopped me. I worked through the days and tried to hide my resentment under a nervous, cryptic smile.

The climax came at noon one summer day. Pease called me to his workbench; to get to him I had to go between two narrow benches and stand with my back against a wall.

“Richard, I want to ask you something,” Pease began pleasantly, not looking up from his work.

“Yes, sir.”

Reynolds came over and stood blocking the narrow passage between the benches; he folded his arms and stared at me solemnly. I looked from one to the other, sensing trouble. Pease looked up and spoke slowly, so there would be no possibility of my not understanding.

“Richard, Reynolds here tells me that you called me Pease,” he said.

I stiffened. A void opened up in me. I knew that this was the showdown.

He meant that I had failed to call him Mr. Pease. I looked at Reynolds; he was gripping a steel bar in his hand. I opened my mouth to speak, to protest, to assure Pease that I had never called him simply
Pease
, and that I had never had any intention of doing so, when Reynolds grabbed me by the collar, ramming my head against a wall.

“Now, be careful, nigger,” snarled Reynolds, baring his teeth. “I heard you call ’im
Pease
. And if you say you didn’t, you’re calling me a liar, see?” He waved the steel bar threateningly.

If I had said: No, sir, Mr. Pease, I never called you
Pease
, I would by inference have been calling Reynolds a liar; and if I had said: Yes, sir, Mr. Pease, I called you
Pease
, I would have been pleading guilty to the worst insult that a Negro can offer to a southern white man. I stood trying to think of a neutral course that
would resolve this quickly risen nightmare, but my tongue would not move.

“Richard, I asked you a question!” Pease said. Anger was creeping into his voice.

“I don’t remember calling you
Pease
, Mr. Pease,” I said cautiously. “And if I did, I sure didn’t mean…”

“You black sonofabitch! You called me
Pease
, then!” he spat, rising and slapping me till I bent sideways over a bench.

Reynolds was up on top of me demanding:

“Didn’t you call him
Pease
? If you say you didn’t, I’ll rip your gut string loose with this f-k-g bar, you black granny dodger! You can’t call a white man a liar and get away with it!”

I wilted. I begged them not to hit me. I knew what they wanted. They wanted me to leave the job.

“I’ll leave,” I promised. “I’ll leave right now!”

They gave me a minute to get out of the factory, and warned me not to show up again or tell the boss. Reynolds loosened his hand on my collar and I ducked out of the room. I did not see Mr. Crane or the stenographer in the office. Pease and Reynolds had so timed it that Mr. Crane and the stenographer would be out when they turned on the terror. I went to the street and waited for the boss to return. I saw Griggs wiping glass shelves in the jewelry store and I beckoned to him. He came out and I told him what had happened.

“Then what are you standing there like a fool for?” he demanded. “Won’t you ever learn? Get home! They might come down!”

I walked down Capitol Street feeling that the sidewalk was unreal, that I was unreal, that the people were unreal, yet expecting somebody to demand to know what right I had to be on the streets. My wound went deep; I felt that I had been slapped out of the human race. When I reached home, I did not tell the family what had happened; I merely told them that I had quit, that I was not making enough money, that I was seeking another job.

That night Griggs came to my house; we went for a walk.

“You got a goddamn tough break,” he said.

“Can you say it was my fault?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Well, what about your goddamn philosophy of meekness?” I asked him bitterly.

“These things just happen,” he said, shrugging.

“They owe me money,” I said.

“That’s what I came about,” he said. “Mr. Crane wants you to come in at ten in the morning. Ten sharp, now, mind you, because he’ll be there and those guys won’t gang up on you again.”

The next morning at ten I crept up the stairs and peered into the office of the optical shop to make sure that Mr. Crane was in. He was at his desk. Pease and Reynolds were at their machines in the rear.

“Come in, Richard,” Mr. Crane said.

I pulled off my hat and walked into the office; I stood before him.

“Sit down,” he said.

I sat. He stared at me and shook his head.

“Tell me, what happened?”

An impulse to speak rose in me and died with the realization that I was facing a wall that I would never breech. I tried to speak several times and could make no sounds. I grew tense and tears burnt my cheeks.

“Now, just keep control of yourself,” Mr. Crane said.

I clenched my fists and managed to talk.

“I tried to do my best here,” I said.

“I believe you,” he said. “But I want to know what happened. Which one bothered you?”

“Both of ’em,” I said.

Reynolds came running to the door and I rose. Mr. Crane jumped to his feet.

“Get back in there,” he told Reynolds.

“That nigger’s lying!” Reynolds said. “I’ll kill ’im if he lies on me!”

“Get back in there or get out,” Mr. Crane said.

Reynolds backed away, keeping his eyes on me.

“Go ahead,” Mr. Crane said. “Tell me what happened.”

Then again I could not speak. What could I accomplish by telling him? I was black; I lived in the South. I would never learn to operate those machines as long as those two white men in there stood by them. Anger and fear welled in me as I felt what I had missed; I leaned forward and clapped my hands to my face.

“No, no, now,” Mr. Crane said. “Keep control of yourself. No matter what happens, keep control…”

“I know,” I said in a voice not my own. “There’s no use of my saying anything.”

“Do you want to work here?” he asked me.

I looked at the white faces of Pease and Reynolds; I imagined their waylaying me, killing me. I was remembering what had happened to Ned’s brother.

“No, sir,” I breathed.

“Why?”

“I’m scared,” I said. “They would kill me.”

Mr. Crane turned and called Pease and Reynolds into the office.

“Now, tell me which one bothered you. Don’t be afraid. Nobody’s going to hurt you,” Mr. Crane said.

I stared ahead of me and did not answer. He waved the men inside. The white stenographer looked at me with wide eyes and I felt drenched in shame, naked to my soul. The whole of my being felt violated, and I knew that my own fear had helped to violate it. I was breathing hard and struggling to master my feelings.

“Can I get my money, sir?” I asked at last.

“Just sit a minute and take hold of yourself,” he said.

I waited and my roused senses grew slowly calm.

“I’m awfully sorry about this,” he said.

“I had hoped for a lot from this job,” I said. “I’d wanted to go to school, to college…”

“I know,” he said. “But what are you going to do now?”

My eyes traveled over the office, but I was not seeing.

“I’m going away,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m going to get out of the South,” I breathed.

“Maybe that’s best,” he said. “I’m from Illinois. Even for me, it’s hard here. I can do just so much.”

He handed me my money, more than I had earned for the week. I thanked him and rose to leave. He rose. I went into the hallway and he followed me. He reached out his hand.

“It’s tough for you down here,” he said.

I barely touched his hand. I walked swiftly down the hall, fighting against crying again. I ran down the steps, then paused and looked back up. He was standing at the head of the stairs, shaking his head. I went into the sunshine and walked home like a blind man.

For weeks after that I could not believe in my feelings. My personality
was numb, reduced to a lumpish, loose, dissolved state. I was a non-man, something that knew vaguely that it was human but felt that it was not. As time separated me from the experience, I could feel no hate for the men who had driven me from the job. They did not seem to be individual men, but part of a huge, implacable, elemental design toward which hate was futile. What I did feel was a longing to attack. But how? And because I knew of no way to grapple with this thing, I felt doubly cast out.

I went to bed tired and got up tired, though I was having no physical exercise. During the day I overreacted to each event, my banked emotions spilling around it. I refused to talk to anyone about my affairs, because I knew that I would only hear a justification of the ways of the white folks and I did not want to hear it. I lived carrying a huge wound, tender, festering, and I shrank when I came near anything that I thought would touch it.

But I had to work because I had to eat. My next job was that of a helper in a drugstore, and the night before I reported for work I fought with myself, telling myself that I had to master this thing, that my life depended upon it. Other black people worked, got along somehow, then I must,
must
, MUST get along until I could get my hands on enough money to leave. I would make myself fit in. Others had done it. I would do it. I had to do it.

I went to the job apprehensive, resolving to watch my every move. I swept the sidewalk, pausing when a white person was twenty feet away. I mopped the store, cautiously waiting for the white people to move out of my way in their own good time. I cleaned acres of glass shelving, changing my tempo now to work faster, holding every nuance of reality within the focus of my consciousness. Noon came and the store was crowded; people jammed to the counters for food. A white man behind the counter ran up to me and shouted:

“A jug of Coca-Cola, quick, boy!”

My body jerked taut and I stared at him. He stared at me.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Well, move! Don’t stand there gaping!”

Even if I had tried, I could not have told him what was wrong. My sustained expectation of violence had exhausted me. My preoccupation with curbing my impulses, my speech, my movements, my manner, my expressions had increased my anxiety. I became forgetful, concentrating too much upon trivial tasks. The men began to yell at me and that made it worse. One day I dropped a jug of orange syrup in the middle of the floor. The boss was furious. He caught my arm and jerked me into the back of the drugstore. His face was livid. I expected him to hit me. I was braced to defend myself.

“I’m going to deduct that from your pay, you black bastard!” he yelled.

Words had come instead of blows and I relaxed.

“Yes, sir,” I said placatingly. “It was my fault.”

My tone whipped him to a frenzy.

“You goddamn right it was!” he yelled louder.

“I’m new at this,” I mumbled, realizing that I had said the wrong thing, though I had been striving to say the right.

“We’re only trying you out,” he warned me.

“Yes, sir. I understand,” I said.

He stared at me, speechless with rage. Why could I not learn to keep my mouth shut at the right time? I had said just one short sen
tence too many. My words were innocent enough, but they indicated, it seemed, a consciousness on my part that infuriated white people.

Saturday night came and the boss gave me my money and snapped: “Don’t come back. You won’t do.”

I knew what was wrong with me, but I could not correct it. The words and actions of white people were baffling signs to me. I was living in a culture and not a civilization and I could learn how that culture worked only by living with it. Misreading the reactions of whites around me made me say and do the wrong things. In my dealing with whites I was conscious of the entirety of my relations with them, and they were conscious only of what was happening at a given moment. I had to keep remembering what others took for granted; I had to think out what others felt.

I had begun coping with the white world too late. I could not make subservience an automatic part of my behavior. I had to feel and think out each tiny item of racial experience in the light of the whole race problem, and to each item I brought the whole of my life. While standing before a white man I had to figure out how to perform each act and how to say each word. I could not help it. I could not grin. In the past I had always said too much, now I found that it was difficult to say anything at all. I could not react as the world in which I lived expected me to; that world was too baffling, too uncertain.

I was idle for weeks. The summer waned. Hope for school was now definitely gone. Autumn came and many of the boys who held jobs returned to school. Jobs were now numerous. I heard that hallboys were needed at one of the hotels, the hotel in which Ned’s brother had lost his life. Should I go there? Would I, too, make a fatal slip? But I had to earn money. I applied and was accepted to mop long white tiled hallways that stretched around the entire perimeter of the office floors of the building. I reported each night at ten, got a huge pail of water, a bushel of soap flakes and, with a gang of moppers, I worked. All the boys were Negroes and I was happy; at least I could talk, joke, laugh, sing, say what I pleased.

I began to marvel at how smoothly the black boys acted out
the roles that the white race had mapped out for them. Most of them were not conscious of living a special, separate, stunted way of life. Yet I knew that in some period of their growing up—a period that they had no doubt forgotten—there had been developed in them a delicate, sensitive controlling mechanism that shut off their minds and emotions from all that the white race had said was taboo. Although they lived in an America where in theory there existed equality of opportunity, they knew unerringly what to aspire to and what not to aspire to. Had a black boy announced that he aspired to be a writer, he would have been unhesitatingly called crazy by his pals. Or had a black boy spoken of yearning to get a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, his friends—in the boy’s own interest—would have reported his odd ambition to the white boss.

There was a pale-yellow boy who had gonorrhea and was proud of it.

“Say,” he asked me one night, “you ever have the clap?”

“God, no,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“I got it,” he said matter-of-factly. “I thought you could tell me something to use.”

“Haven’t you been to a doctor?” I asked.

“Aw, hell. Them doctors ain’t no good.”

“Don’t be foolish,” I said.

“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded of me. “You talk like you’d be ’shamed of the clap.”

“I would,” I said.

“Hell, you ain’t a man ’less you done had it three times,” he said.

“Don’t brag about it,” I said.

“’Tain’t nothing worse’n a bad cold,” he said.

But I noticed that when he urinated he would grab hold of a steam pipe, a doorjamb, or a window sill and strain with tear-filled eyes and a tortured face, as though he were attempting to lift the hotel up from its foundations. I laughed to cover my disgust.

When I was through mopping, I would watch the never-ending crap games that went on in the lockers, but I could never become
interested enough to participate. Gambling had never appealed to me. I could not conceive of any game holding more risks than the life I was living. Curses and sex stories sounded round the clock and blue smoke choked the air. I would sit listening for hours, wondering how on earth they could laugh so freely, trying to grasp the miracle that gave their debased lives the semblance of a human existence.

Several Negro girls were employed as maids in the hotel, some of whom I knew. One night when I was about to go home I saw a girl who lived in my direction and I fell in beside her to walk part of the distance together. As we passed the white night watchman, he slapped her playfully on her buttocks. I turned around, amazed. The girl twisted out of his reach, tossed her head saucily, and went down the hallway. I had not moved from my tracks.

“Nigger, you look like you don’t like what I did,” he said.

I could not move or speak. My immobility must have seemed a challenge to him, for he pulled his gun.

“Don’t you like it, nigger?”

“Yes, sir,” I whispered with a dry throat.

“Well, talk like it, then, goddammit!”

“Oh, yes, sir!” I said with as much heartiness as I could muster.

I walked down the hall, knowing that the gun was pointed at me, but afraid to look back. When I was out of the door, my throat felt as though it were swelling and bursting with fire. The girl was waiting for me. I walked past her. She caught up with me.

“God, how could you let him do that?” I exploded.

“It don’t matter. They do that all the time,” she said.

“I wanted to do something,” I said.

“You woulda been a fool if you had,” she said.

“But how must you feel?”

“They never get any further with us than that, if we don’t want ’em to,” she said dryly.

“Yes, I would’ve been a fool,” I said, but she did not catch the point.

I was afraid to go to work the following night. What would the watchman think? Would he decide to teach me a lesson? I walked
slowly through the door, wondering if he would continue his threat. His eyes looked at and through me. Evidently he considered the matter closed, or else he had had so many experiences of that kind that he had already forgotten it.

Out of my salary I had begun to save a few dollars, for my determination to leave had not lessened. But I found the saving exasperatingly slow. I pondered continuously ways of making money, and the only ways that I could think of involved transgressions of the law. No, I must not do that, I told myself. To go to jail in the South would mean the end. And there was the possibility that if I were ever caught I would never reach jail.

This was the first time in my life that I had ever consciously entertained the idea of violating the laws of the land. I had felt that my intelligence and industry could cope with all situations, and, until that time, I had never stolen a penny from anyone. Even hunger had never driven me to appropriate what was not my own. The mere idea of stealing had been repugnant. I had not been honest from deliberate motives, but being dishonest had simply never occurred to me.

Yet, all about me, Negroes were stealing. More than once I had been called a “dumb nigger” by black boys who discovered that I had not availed myself of a chance to snatch some petty piece of white property that had been carelessly left within my reach.

“How in hell you gonna git ahead?” I had been asked when I had said that one ought not steal.

I knew that the boys in the hotel filched whatever they could. I knew that Griggs, my friend who worked in the Capitol Street jewelry store, was stealing regularly and successfully. I knew that a black neighbor of mine was stealing bags of grain from a wholesale house where he worked, though he was a stanch deacon in his church and prayed and sang on Sundays. I knew that the black girls who worked in white homes stole food daily to supplement their scanty wages. And I knew that the very nature of black and white relations bred this constant thievery.

No Negroes in my environment had ever thought of organizing, no matter in how orderly a fashion, and petitioning their white employ
ers for higher wages. The very thought would have been terrifying to them, and they knew that the whites would have retaliated with swift brutality. So, pretending to conform to the laws of the whites, grinning, bowing, they let their fingers stick to what they could touch. And the whites seemed to like it.

But I, who stole nothing, who wanted to look them straight in the face, who wanted to talk and act like a man, inspired fear in them. The southern whites would rather have had Negroes who stole, work for them than Negroes who knew, however dimly, the worth of their own humanity. Hence, whites placed a premium upon black deceit; they encouraged irresponsibility; and their rewards were bestowed upon us blacks in the degree that we could make them feel safe and superior.

My objections to stealing were not moral. I did not approve of it because I knew that, in the long run, it was futile, that it was not an effective way to alter one’s relationship to one’s environment. Then, how could I change my relationship to my environment? Almost my entire salary went to feed the eternally hungry stomachs at home. If I saved a dollar a week, it would take me two years to amass a hundred dollars, the amount which for some reason I had decided was necessary to stake me in a strange city. And, God knows, anything could happen to me in two years…

I did not know when I would be thrown into a situation where I would say the wrong word to the wrong white man and find myself in trouble. And, above all, I wanted to avoid trouble, for I feared that if I clashed with whites I would lose control of my emotions and spill out words that would be my sentence of death. Time was not on my side and I had to make some move. Often, when perplexed, I longed to be like the smiling, lazy, forgetful black boys in the noisy hotel locker rooms, with no torrential conflicts to resolve. Many times I grew weary of the secret burden I carried and longed to cast it down, either in action or in resignation. But I was not made to be a resigned man and I had only a limited choice of actions, and I was afraid of all of them.

A new anxiety was created in me by my desire to leave quickly. I had now seen at close quarters the haughty white men who made the laws; I had seen how they acted, how they regarded black peo
ple, how they regarded me; and I no longer felt bound by the laws which white and black were supposed to obey in common. I was outside those laws; the white people had told me so. Now when I thought of ways to escape from my environment I no longer felt the inner restraint that would have made stealing impossible, and this new freedom made me lonely and afraid.

My feelings became divided; in spite of myself I would dream of a locked cupboard in a near-by neighbor’s house where a gun was kept. If I stole it, how much would it bring? When the yearning to leave would become strong in me, I could not keep out of my mind the image of a storehouse at a near-by Negro college that held huge cans of preserved fruits. Yet fear kept me from making any move; the idea of stealing floated tentatively in me. My inability to adjust myself to the white world had already shattered a part of the structure of my personality and had broken down the inner barriers to crime; the only thing that now stood in the way was lack of immediate opportunity, a final push of circumstance. And that came.