Black Like Me (5 page)

He reached behind the shine stand and brought out a gallon lard can with wires looped through holes in each side to make a handle. A flake of ash floated on the water’s surface. I up-ended the bucket and drank.

“Well, well, we’re going to have company,” Sterling said. “That nice widow woman’s coming this way.”

I glanced down the street. Past the metal upright shoe racks I saw her walk gracefully toward us. She was carefully looking across the street.

She ignored me and asked Sterling if he had any peanuts to sell.

“No, dear heart. Joe’s out looking for some now. They’re hard to find this time of year.” He spoke unctuously, as though he had no idea why she really came down; but all three of us knew he knew and that we knew he knew. But the game had to be played.

Then she turned and saw me, apparently for the first time. She looked startled, then delighted. “Why how do you do?” she said with a magnificent smile that illuminated not only her face but the entire quarter.

I bowed and returned the smile, spontaneously, because the radiance of her expression took me by surprise. “Why, just fine. How do you do?”

“Fine,” she bowed. “Nice to see you around.”

I bowed again, confused. “I thank you, daughter.”

After an awkward, grin-filled pause, she turned to walk away. “Well, I’ll be seeing you,” she sang out over her shoulder.

I looked dumbly at Sterling. He lifted his cap and scratched into the gray hairs of his head, his eyes wise and wide with amusement.

“Did you get that, eh?” he asked. “She liked you. You’re in a fix now.” He burst out laughing. “You hadn’t counted on something like
that
, eh?”

“I sure hadn’t,” I said.

“She ain’t no slut,” he said. “She’s a widow looking for a mate, and you’re well dressed. She ain’t going to pass up a chance like that.”

“Oh Lord - this complicates things,” I groaned. “Tell her I’m already married, will you?”

“Well, now, I don’t know,” he smiled. “That might just spoil the fun. I think I’ll just tell her you’re a widow man, a preacher visiting here in New Orleans. I feel like she’s the kind that would love to be a preacher’s wife.”

“Look - you know I can’t fiddle around with things like that. It’ll be no fun for her when this project gets known and she finds out I’m a white man.”

Customers came - whites, Negroes and Latin Americans. Well-dressed tourists mingled with the derelicts of the quarter. When we shined their shoes we talked. The whites, especially the tourists, had no reticence before us, and no shame since we were Negroes. Some wanted to know where they could find girls, wanted us to get Negro girls for them. We learned to spot these from the moment they sat down, for they were immediately friendly and treated us with the warmth and courtesy of equals. I mentioned this to Sterling.

“Yeah, when they want to sin, they’re very democratic,” he said.

Though not all, by any means, were so open about their purposes, all of them showed us how they felt about the Negro, the idea that we were people of such low morality that nothing could offend us. These men, young and old, however, were less offensive than the ones who treated us like machines, as though we had no human existence whatsoever. When they paid me, they looked as though I were a stone or a post. They looked and saw nothing.

Sterling’s partner, Joe, returned from his peanut hunt around two. We explained my presence and he welcomed me. Slender, middle-aged, though he looked young, Joe impressed me
as a sharp but easygoing man. He lamented the lack of peanuts. Sterling told him many drunks had stopped by wanting to buy some and that they could have made a pocketful of change had they been able to supply them.

Joe began to cook our lunch on the sidewalk. He put paper and kindling from an orange crate into a gallon can and set it afire. When the flames had reduced to coals, he placed a bent coat hanger over the top as a grill and set a pan on to heat. He squatted and stirred with a spoon. I learned it was a mixture of corn, turnips, rice, seasoned with thyme, bay leaf and green peppers. Joe had cooked it at home the night before and brought it in a milk carton. When it was heated through, Joe served Sterling and me portions in cut-down milk cartons. He ate directly from the pan. It was good, despite the odor of rot that smoked up from it.

Joe leaned over to me and pointed with his spoon to a man across the street. “Watch that wino,” he said. “He’ll sit right there - he wants some of this food, but he won’t come over till I tell him to.”

Sitting on the curb across the street, the man stared feverishly at us, tensed, ready to come for the food when called. His eyes burned in his black face and his fists were doubled hard, as though he had to control himself from rushing over and grabbing the food.

We ate slowly while the man stared. It was a strange game. We, who were reduced to eating on the sidewalk, were suddenly elevated in status by this man’s misery. We were the aristocrats and he the beggar. It flattered us. We were superbly above him and the comedy gave us a delusion of high self-respect. In a while, the magnanimity of the rich would complete the picture. We would feed our scraps to the poor.

Our servings were ample. When we had eaten our fill, we scraped the remains from our cartons onto Joe’s plate.

The man trembled with expectation as Joe leisurely smoothed the food with the back of his spoon. Then, without looking at the wretch, Joe held out the pan. In a strangely kind tone of voice he said: “Okay, dog ass, come get some food.”

The man bolted across the street and grabbed the pan.

“If there’d been a car coming, he’d have been killed,” Sterling remarked.

“Now, listen, winehead - I want that pan back
clean
, you hear?” Joe said.

The beggar’s gaze riveted on the food, his face crumpled as though he were about to weep and he hurried into the alley without answering.

“He comes here every day … it’s the same thing,” Sterling said. “I guess he’d starve if it weren’t for Joe.”

Business died. We sat on boxes in the sunlight with our backs against the wall and watched traffic come and go in the French Market. I stared into the broken windows of a deserted stone building across the street. Sterling snored loudly and then awoke with a strangled snort.

The beggar returned the pan, still wet from being washed. He handed it to Joe.

“Okay, winehead,” Joe said.

Without speaking, the man drifted away.

I listened to the easy and usually obscene give-and-take between Joe and the men of the quarter who passed the sidewalk.

“Hey, dog nuts, what’s your hurry?”

“I got business, man.”

“What business you got? Hey - where can I get some peanuts.”

“They ain’t a peanut in this whole town. I been all over.”

“Me, too,” Joe said.

Odors of sweat, tobacco, coffee and damp stone surrounded us, overladen always by the smell of fish and nearby salt water.

I felt the wall warm against my back, making me drowsy. My first afternoon as a Negro was one of dragging hours and a certain contentment.

After a while Joe took a pocket Bible from the green serge army shirt he wore and began reading the Psalms to himself. His eyes drooped but he formed the words silently with his lips. From force of long habit, whenever anyone walked by, he said, “Shine?” without raising his head from the page.

Two pigeons flew down to the sidewalk at our feet. Joe
tossed them some bread scraps. The sun sparked iridescence from their purple necks as they pecked. They provided us deep pleasure, an anodyne to the squalor and clutter of the street.

Joe got stiffly up, dusted his seat and ambled across to the fish market. When he returned, he had a sack of catfish heads and some green bananas. He told me the catfish heads were free and that tomorrow we would have them for lunch - catfish-head stew over spaghetti.

It sounds good,” I said, looking into the sack at dozens of glittering eyes.

We wrapped the green bananas he had retrieved from the market waste-bins in newspapers. “They’ll be ripe enough to eat in about two or three days,” he said.

By four o’clock the street was in shadow. Sunlight rimmed the buildings above us and the air chilled rapidly. I decided to go find a room for the night. Sterling suggested I go to the Negro YMCA on Dryades, some distance across town. “You better drink some water before you go,” he said. “You might not find any before you get to Dryades.” I up-ended the bucket and saw brass-colored circles at the bottom through the clear water.

A bluish haze hung over the narrow streets of the French Quarter. The strong odor of roasting coffee overwhelmed all others. The aroma and the scene reminded me of my school days in France. This was like the old quarter of Tours, where they roasted coffee at the spice shops each afternoon.

I emerged on Canal Street to a more modern scene, a crowded scene. I deliberately stopped many white men to ask the direction to Dryades in order to get their reaction. Invariably they were courteous and helpful.

On Dryades, the whites thinned and I saw more and more Negroes in the street. A church came into view on my right, its tower rising up past a bridge heavy with traffic. A sign told me it was St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, one of the oldest in New Orleans. I mounted the steps and pulled open one of the heavy doors. Street noises were muffled with its closing. A faint
fragrance of incense drifted to me in the deep silence. Soft, warm light filtered through magnificent stained-glass windows in the church proper. Far to the front I saw the dim figure of a Negro woman making the Stations of the Cross. A few men knelt here and there in the vast structure. Votive candles burned feebly in blue and red clusters before statues of St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary. I rested in a pew, leaning forward, my forehead against the bench in front, my hands in my lap. At home my wife and children were probably having their evening baths, safe against the dusk and the cold. I thought of the house, so full of light and talk, and wondered what they would have for supper. Perhaps even now soup simmered on the kitchen stove. Opening my eyes, I looked down at my hands and saw each dark pore, each black wrinkle in the hairless flesh. How white by contrast the image came to me of my wife and children. Their faces, their flesh shimmered with whiteness and they seemed so much a part of another life, so separated from me now that I felt consumed with loneliness. Rosary beads rattled against one of the pews, loud in the stillness. Perceptibly the light dimmed through the windows and the candles grew brighter.

Dreading the thought of spending another night in some cheap hotel if I could not get a room at the Y, I considered hiding in the church and sleeping there in one of the pews. The idea appealed to me so strongly I had to cast it off by force. I got to my feet and walked out into the dusk shot with car lights rushing in each direction.

The YMCA was filled to capacity, but the young man behind the desk suggested they had a list of nice homes where a man could rent a room. He kindly offered to telephone some of these. While waiting, I had a cup of coffee in the YMCA Coffee Shop, an attractive, modern place run by an elderly man who spoke with great elegance and courtesy. The young man at the desk came and told me he had arranged for a room in a private home next door to the Y. He assured me it was nice there, and that the widow who owned it was trustworthy in every way.

I carried my bags next door and met Mrs. Davis, a middle-aged woman of great kindness. She led me upstairs to a back room
that was spotlessly clean and comfortably furnished. We arranged for a brighter lamp so I could work. She told me she had only one other roomer, a quiet gentleman who worked nights and whom I should probably never see. The kitchen was next to my room, and beyond that was the bathroom. I paid the three-dollar charge in advance, unpacked and returned to the YMCA Coffee Shop, which turned out to be the meeting place of the city’s important men. There I met a much more educated and affluent class, older men who brought me into the conversation. We sat around a U-shaped counter drinking coffee. The talk was focused exclusively on “the problem” and the forthcoming elections. The café proprietor introduced me to the Reverend A.L. Davis and one of his colleagues, Mr. Gayle, a civic leader and bookstore-owner, and a number of others.

My feeling of disorientation diminished for a time.

When asked what I did, I told them I was a writer, touring the South to make a study of conditions.

“Well, what do you think?” the Reverend Mr. Davis asked.

“I’ve only begun,” I said. “But so far it’s much better than I expected to find. I’ve been shown many courtesies by the whites.”

“Oh, we’ve made strides,” he said. “But we’ve got to do a lot better. Then, too, New Orleans is more enlightened than anyplace else in the state - or in the South.”

“Why is that, I wonder?” I asked.

“Well, it’s far more cosmopolitan, for one thing. And it’s got a strong Catholic population,” he said. “A white man can show you courtesies without fearing some neighbor will call him a ‘nigger-lover’ like they do in other places.”

“What do you see as our biggest problem, Mr. Griffin?” Mr. Gayle asked.

“Lack of unity.”

“That’s it,” said the elderly man who ran the café. “Until we as a race can learn to rise together, we’ll never get anywhere. That’s our trouble. We work against one another instead of together. Now you take dark Negroes like you, Mr. Griffin, and me,” he went on. “We’re old Uncle Toms to our people, no matter how much education and morals we’ve got. No, you have to be almost a
mulatto, have your hair conked and all slicked out and look like a Valentino. Then the Negro will look up to you. You’ve got
class
. Isn’t that a pitiful hero-type?”

“And the white man knows that,” Mr. Davis said.

“Yes,” the café-owner continued. “He
utilizes
this knowledge to flatter some of us, tell us we’re above our people, not like most Negroes. We’re so stupid we fall for it and work against our own. Why, if we’d work just half as hard to boost our race as we do to please whites whose attentions flatter us, we’d really get somewhere.”