Black Like Me (8 page)

“It’s your ass,” Joe said. “But I sure hate to see you do it.”

“You’re going to come back and see us sometime, aren’t you?” Sterling said.

“You bet,” I said, walking away. A clumsy good-by.

My money was running low so I decided to cash some traveler’s checks before leaving. The banks were closed, since it was past noon on Saturday, but I felt I would have no difficulty with traveler’s checks in any of the larger stores, especially those on Dryades where I had traded and was known as a customer.

I took the bus to Dryades and walked down it, stopping at the dime store where I’d made most of my purchases. The young white girl came forward to wait on me.

“I need to cash a traveler’s check,” I said smiling.

“We don’t cash any checks of any kind,” she said firmly.

“Look, you know me. You’ve waited on me. I need some money.”

“You should have gone to the bank.”

“I didn’t know I needed the money until after the banks closed,” I said.

I knew I was making a pest of myself, but I could scarcely believe this nice young lady could be so unsympathetic, so insolent when she discovered I did not come in to buy something.

“I’ll be glad to buy a few things,” I said.

She called up to the bookkeeping department on an open mezzanine. “Hey! Do we cash traveler’s ch – ”

“No!” the white woman shouted back.

“Thank you for kindness,” I said and walked out.

I went into one store after the other along Dryades and Rampart Streets. In every store their smiles turned to grimaces when they saw I meant not to buy but to cash a check. It was not their refusal - I could understand that; it was the bad manners they displayed. I began to feel desperate and resentful. They would have cashed a traveler’s check without hesitation for a white man. Each time they refused me, they implied clearly that I had probably come by these checks dishonestly and they wanted nothing to do with them or me.

Finally, after I gave up hope and decided I must remain in New Orleans without funds until the banks opened on Monday, I walked toward town. Small gold lettering on the window of a store caught my attention: CATHOLIC BOOK STORE. Knowing the Catholic stand on racism, I wondered if this shop might cash
a Negro’s check. With some hesitation, I opened the door and entered. I was prepared to be disappointed.

“Would you cash a twenty-dollar traveler’s check for me?” I asked the proprietress.

“Of course,” she said without hesitation, as though nothing could be more natural. She did not even study me.

I was so grateful that I bought a number of paperback books - works of Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas and Christopher Dawson. With these in my jacket, I hurried toward the Greyhound bus station.

In the bus station lobby, I looked for signs indicating a colored waiting room, but saw none. I walked up to the ticket counter. When the lady ticket-seller saw me, her otherwise attractive face turned sour, violently so. This look was so unexpected and so unprovoked I was taken aback.

“What do you want?” she snapped.

Taking care to pitch my voice to politeness, I asked about the next bus to Hattiesburg.

She answered rudely and glared at me with such loathing I knew I was receiving what the Negroes call “the hate stare.” It was my first experience with it. It is far more than a look of disapproval one occasionally gets. This was so exaggeratedly hateful I would have been amused if I had not be so surprised.

I framed the words in my mind: “Pardon me, but have I done something to offend you?” But I realized I had done nothing - my color offended her.

“I’d like a one-way ticket to Hattiesburg, please,” I said and placed a ten-dollar bill on the counter.

“I can’t change that big a bill,” she said abruptly and turned away, as though the matter were closed. I remained at the window, feeling strangely abandoned but not knowing what else to do. In a while she flew back at me, her face flushed, and fairly shouted: “I
told
you - I can’t change that big a bill.”

“Surely,” I said stiffly, “in the entire Greyhound system there must be some means of changing a ten-dollar bill. Perhaps the manager - ”

She jerked the bill furiously from my hand and stepped away
from the window. In a moment she reappeared to hurl my change and the ticket on the counter with such force most of it fell on the floor at my feet. I was truly dumfounded by this deep fury that possessed her whenever she looked at me. Her performance was so venomous, I felt sorry for her. It must have shown in my expression, for her face congested to high pink. She undoubtedly considered it supreme insolence for a Negro to dare to feel sorry for her.

I stooped to pick up my change and the ticket from the floor. I wondered how she would feel if she learned that the Negro before whom she had behaved in such an unladylike manner was habitually a white man.

With almost an hour before bus departure, I turned away and looked for a place to sit. The large, handsome room was almost empty. No other Negro was there, and I dared not take a seat unless I saw some other Negro also seated.

Once again a “hate stare” drew my attention like a magnet. It came from a middle-aged, heavyset, well-dressed white man. He sat a few yards away, fixing his eyes on me. Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. Yo u feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man’s face. I felt like saying: “What in God’s name are you doing to yourself.”

A Negro porter sidled over to me. I glimpsed his white coat and turned to him. His glance met mine and communicated the sorrow, the understanding.

“Where am I supposed to go?” I asked him.

He touched my arm in that mute and reassuring way of men who share a moment of crisis. “Go outside and around the corner of the building. You’ll find the room.”

The white man continued to stare, his mouth twisted with loathing as he turned his head to watch me move away.

In the colored waiting room, which was not labeled as such, but rather as COLORED CAFÉ, presumably because of interstate
travel regulations, I took the last empty seat. The room was crowded with glum faces, faces dead to all enthusiasm, faces of people waiting.

The books I had bought from the Catholic Book Store weighed heavily in my pocket. I pulled one of them out and, without looking at the title, let it fall open in my lap. I read:

… it is by justice that we can authentically measure man’s value or his nullity … the absence of justice is the absence of what makes him man
. - Plato.

I have heard it said another way, as a dictum:
He who is less than just is less than man
.

I copied the passage in a little pocket notebook. A Negro woman, her face expressionless, flat, highlighted with sweat, watched me write. When I turned in my seat to put the notebook in my hip pocket, I detected the faintest smile at the corners of her mouth.

They called the bus. We filed out into the high-roofed garage and stood in line, the Negroes to the rear, the whites to the front. Buses idled their motors, filling the air with a stifling odor of exhaust fumes. An army officer hurried to get at the rear of the white line. I stepped back to let him get in front. He refused and went to the end of the colored portion of the line. Every Negro craned his head to look at the phenomenon. I have learned that men in uniform, particularly officers, rarely descend to show discrimination, perhaps because of the integration of the armed forces.

We sweated through our clothes and I was ready to leave and try for a later bus when they allowed us to board. Though nominally segregation is not permitted on interstate buses, no Negro would be fool enough to try to sit anywhere except at the rear on one going into Mississippi. I occupied a seat to myself not far from the back. Muffled conversations sprang up around me.

“Well, here we go into Mississippi - the most lied-about state in the union - that’s what they claim,” a man behind me said.

“It’s the truth, too,” another said. “Only it’s Mississippi that does all the lying.”

We drove through New Orleans under an overcast sky. Air
conditioning in the bus cooled us comfortably. As we crossed the bridge, the water of Lake Pontchartrain reflected the sky’s gray tone, with whitecaps on its disturbed surface.

The bus stopped at the outskirts of town to take on more passengers. Among them was a striking Negro man, tall, slender, elegantly dressed - the “Valentino” type. He wore a mustache and a neatly trimmed Vandyke beard. He walked toward the rear, giving the whites a fawning, almost tender look. His expression twisted to a sneer when he reached the back and surveyed the Negroes.

He sat sidewise in an empty seat across the aisle from me and began to harangue two brothers behind him. “This place stinks. Damned punk niggers. Look at all of them - bunch of dirty punks - don’t know how to dress. You don’t deserve anything better.
Mein Kampf
! Do you speak German? No. You’re ignorant. You make me sick.”

He proceeded to denounce his race venomously. He spoke fragments of French, Spanish and Japanese.

I averted my head to the window and watched the country fly past as we traveled through an area of sunlight. I did not want to become involved in any discussion with this strange man. He was soon in a violent argument with one of the two brothers. They quarreled to the point of rage over whether Juárez was in Old Mexico or New Mexico.

The elegant one shouted. “You can’t lie to Christophe. Christophe’s got brains. No ignorant punk like you can fool him. You never been to Juárez!”

He jumped abruptly to his feet. Fearing violence, I turned toward him. He stood poised, ready to strike the other, his eyes narrowed into slits of hatred.

“If you hit me, you’ll be hitting me in the wrong,” the poorly dressed Negro said, looking calmly up at Christophe. His seat companion added with a gentle smile, “He’s my brother. I’d have to take his part.”

“You threatening me?” Christophe whispered.

“No, now look,” the brother placated. “Why don’t you two agree just not to talk.”

“He won’t say another word to me? You promise?” Christophe said. He lowered his fist, but his face did not relax.

“No, he won’t - will you?”

The poorly dressed one shrugged his shoulders pleasantly. “I guess - ”

“Don’t speak! Don’t speak!” Christophe shouted into his face.

“Okay … Okay …” he said, glancing toward me as though to say the elegant Christophe must be insane.

Christophe glared at him for some time before moving over into the seat next to me. His presence set my nerves on edge. He was cunning and apparently vicious and I did not know what kind of scene he might start. I stared out the window, turning so far he could see only the back of my head.

He slouched far down in the seat and, working his hands wildly in the air as though he were playing a guitar, he began to sing the blues, softly, mournfully, lowering his voice at the obscene words. A strange sweetish odor detached from him. I supposed it to be marijuana, but it was only a guess.

I felt his elbow dig into my ribs. “How you like that, pappy?”

I nodded, trying to be both polite and noncommittal. He had pulled his hat down over his eyes. He lighted a cigarette and let it dangle from his lips. I turned back to the window, hoping he would leave me alone.

He nudged me again and I looked around. He bent his head far back to gaze at me under his lowered hat brim. “You don’t dig the blues, do you, daddy?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He studied me with narrowed eyes. Then, as though he had found some answer, he flashed me a magnificent smile, leaned hard against me and whispered, “I bet you dig this, daddy.”

He punched his hat back, concentrated, stiffened his hands, palms upward, in a supplicating gesture and began softly to chant
Tantum ergo sacramentum, Veneremur cernui
in as beautiful Latin as I have ever heard. I stared at him dumfounded as he chanted the Gregorian version of this famous text.

He glanced at me tenderly, his face soft as though he were on the verge of tears. “That got you, didn’t it, dad?”

“Yes,” I said.

He made a huge sign of the cross, lowered his head and recited, again with perfect Latin diction, the
Confiteor
. When it was over, he remained still, in profound introspection. Above the hum of the bus’s wheels on the pavement, silence surrounded us. No one spoke. Doubtless those nearest us who had witnessed the strange scene were perplexed.

“You were an altar boy, I guess,” I said.

“I was,” he said, not raising his head. “I wanted to be a priest.” His mobile face revealed every emotion. His eyes darkened with regret.

The man across the aisle grinned and said: “Better not believe anything he tells you.”

Christophe’s handsome face congealed instantly to hatred.

“I told you not to talk to me!”

The man’s brother intervened. “He just forgot.” Then to the poorly dressed one, “Don’t say
anything
to him. He can’t stand you.”

“I was talking to the other fellow, the one in the dark glasses,” he said.

“Shut up!” Christophe shouted. “You were talking
about
me - and I don’t even want you to do that.”

“Just be quiet,” the man’s brother said. “He’s going to be mad at anything you say.”

“Goddamn, it’s a free sonofabitching country,” the other said feebly, the smile remaining unchanged on his face. “I’m not afraid of him.”

“Well, just hush - no need in you talking to him,” his brother pleaded.

“You keep him quiet - or else,” Christophe said haughtily.

My stomach contracted with uneasiness, certain there would be a fight. I was astonished to see Christophe cut his eyes around to me and wink, as though secretly he were amused. He glared his “enemy” down for some time before turning back to me. “I came to sit by you because you’re the only one here that looks like he’s got enough sense to carry on an intelligent conversation.”