Black Like Me (9 page)

“Thank you,” I said.

“I’m not pure Negro,” he said proudly. “My mother was French, my father Indian.”

“I see. …”

“She was Portuguese, my mother - a lovely woman,” Christophe sighed.

“I see. …”

The man across the aisle smiled broadly at the obvious admission of a lie from Christophe. I gave him a warning glance and he did not challenge our friend’s French-Portuguese-Indian background.

“Let’s see,” Christophe said, eyeing me speculatively. “What blood have you got? Give me a minute. Christophe never makes a mistake. I can always tell what kind of blood a man’s got in him.” He took my face between his hands and examined me closely. I waited, certain this strange man would expose me. Finally, he nodded gravely to indicate he had deciphered my blood background. “I have it now.” His eyes glowed and he hesitated before making his dramatic announcement to the world. I cringed, preparing explanations, and then decided to try to stop him from exposing me.

“Wait - let me - ”

“Florida Navaho,” he interrupted triumphantly. “Your mother was part Florida Navaho, wasn’t she?”

I felt like laughing, first with relief and then at the thought of my Dutch-Irish mother being anything so exotic as Florida Navaho. At the same time, I felt vaguely disappointed to find Christophe no brighter than the rest of us.

He waited for my answer.

“You’re pretty sharp,” I said.

“Ha! I never miss.” Instantly, his expression degenerated to viciousness. “I hate us, Father.”

“I’m not a Father.”

“Ah, you can’t fool Christophe. I know you’re a priest even if you are dressed in civilian clothes. Look at these punks, Father. Dumb, ignorant bastards. They don’t know the score. I’m getting out of this country.”

His anger vanished. He leaned to whisper in my ear, his
voice suddenly abject. “I’ll tell you the truth, Father. I’m just out of the pen - four years. I’m on my way to see my wife. She’s waiting with a new car for me in Slidell. And God … what a reunion we’re going to have!”

His face crumpled and his head fell against my chest. Silently he wept.

“Don’t cry,” I whispered. “It’s all right. Don’t cry.”

He raised his head and rolled his eyes upward in agony. His face bathed in tears, all of his arrogant defenses gone, he said: “Sometime, Father, when you say Mass, will you take the white Host for Christophe?”

“You’re wrong to believe I’m a priest,” I said. “But I’ll remember you next time I go to Mass.”

“Ah, that’s the only peace,” he sighed. “That’s the peace my soul longs for. I wish I could come back home to it, but I can’t - I haven’t been inside a church in seventeen years.”

“You can always go back.”

“Nah,” he snorted. “I’ve got to shoot up a couple of guys.”

My surprise must have shown. A smile of glee lighted his face. “Don’t worry, daddy. I’m going to watch out. Why don’t you get off with me and let’s shoot up this town together.”

I told him I could not. The bus slowed into Slidell. Christophe got to his feet, straightened his tie, stared furiously at the man across the aisle for a moment, bowed to me and took off. We were relieved to have him gone, though I could not help wondering what his life might be were he not torn with the frustrations of his Negro-ness.

At Slidell we changed into another Greyhound bus with a new driver - a middle-aged man, large-bellied with a heavy jowled face filigreed with tiny red blood vessels near the surface of his cheeks.

A stockily built young Negro, who introduced himself as Bill Williams, asked if I minded having him sit beside me.

Now that Christophe was gone, the tensions disappeared in our Negro section. Everyone knew, from having heard our conversations, that I was a stranger in the area. Talk flowed easily and they surrounded me with warmth.

“People come down here and say Mississippi is the worst place in the world,” Bill said. “But we can’t all live in the North.”

“Of course not. And it looks like beautiful country,” I said, glancing out at giant pine trees.

Seeing that I was friendly, he offered advice. “If you’re not used to things in Mississippi, you’ll have to watch yourself pretty close till you catch on,” he said.

The others, hearing, nodded agreement.

I told him I did not know what to watch out for.

“Well, you know you don’t want to even look at a white woman. In fact, you look down at the ground or the other way.”

A large, pleasant Negro woman smiled at me across the aisle. “They’re awful touchy on that here. You may not even know you’re looking in a white woman’s direction, but they’ll try to make something out of it,” she said.

“If you pass by a picture show, and they’ve got women on the posters outside, don’t look at them either.”

“Is it that bad?”

He assured me it was. Another man said: “Somebody’s sure to say, ‘Hey, boy - what are you looking at that white gal like
that
for?’ ”

I remembered the woman on the bus in New Orleans using almost the same expression.

“And you dress pretty well,” Bill continued, his heavy black face frowning in concentration. “If you walk past an alley, walk out in the middle of the street. Plenty of people here, white and colored, would knock you in the head if they thought you had money on you. If white boys holler at you, just keep walking. Don’t let them stop you and start asking you questions.”

I told him I appreciated his warning.

“Can you all think of anything else?” he asked the others.

“That covers it,” one of them said.

I thanked him for telling me these things.

“Well, if I was to come to your part of the country, I’d want somebody to tell me,” Bill said.

He told me he was a truck driver, working out of Hattiesburg. He had taken a load to New Orleans, where he had left his truck
for repairs and caught the bus back to Hattiesburg. He asked if I had made arrangements for a place to stay. I told him no. He said the best thing would be for me to contact a certain important person who would put me in touch with someone reliable who would find me a decent and safe place.

It was late dusk when the bus pulled into some little town for a stop. “ We get about ten minutes here,” Bill said. “Let’s get off and stretch our legs. They’ve got a men’s room here if you need to go.”

The driver stood up and faced the passengers. “Ten-minute rest stop,” he announced.

The whites rose and ambled off. Bill and I led the Negroes toward the door. As soon as he saw us, the driver blocked our way. Bill slipped under his arm and walked toward the dim-lit shed building.”

“Hey, boy, where you going?” the driver shouted to Bill while he stretched his arms across the opening to prevent my stepping down. “Hey, you, boy, I’m talking to you.” Bill’s footsteps crunched unhurriedly across the gravel.

I stood on the bottom step, waiting. The driver turned back to me.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked, his heavy cheeks quivering with each word.

“I’d like to go to the rest room.” I smiled and moved to step down.

He tightened his grip on the door facings and shouldered in close to block me. “Does your ticket say for you to get off here?” he asked.

“No, sir, but the others - ”

“Then you get your ass back there like I told you,” he said, his voice rising. “I can’t be bothered rounding up all you people when we get ready to go.”

“You announced a rest stop. The whites all got off,” I said, unable to believe he really meant to deprive us of rest-room privileges.

He stood on his toes and put his face up close to mine. His nose flared. Footlights caught silver glints from the hairs that
curled out of his nostrils. He spoke slowly, threateningly: “Are you arguing with me?”

“No, sir …” I sighed.

“Then you do like I say.”

We turned like a small herd of cattle and drifted back to our seats. The others grumbled about how unfair it was. The large woman was apologetic, as though it embarrassed her for a stranger to see Mississippi’s dirty linen.

“There’s no call for him to act like that,” she said. “They usually let us off.”

I sat in the monochrome gloom of dusk, scarcely believing that in this year of freedom any man could deprive another of anything so basic as the need to quench thirst or use the rest room. There was nothing of the feel of America here. It was rather some strange country suspended in ugliness. Tension hung in the air, a continual threat, even though you could not put your finger on it.

“Well,” I heard a man behind me say softly but firmly, “if I can’t go in there, then I’m going in here. I’m not going to sit here and bust.”

I glanced back and saw it was the same poorly dressed man who had so outraged Christophe. He walked in a half crouch to a place behind the last seat, where he urinated loudly on the floor. Indistinguishable sounds of approval rose around me - quiet laughter, clearing throats, whispers.

“Let’s all do it,” a man said.

“Yeah, flood this bus and end all this damned foolishness.”

Bitterness dissolved in our delights to give the bus driver and the bus as good as they deserved.

The move was on, but it was quelled by another voice. “No, let’s don’t. It’ll just give them something else to hold against us,” an older man said. A woman agreed. All of us could see the picture. The whites would start claiming that we were unfit, that Negroes did not even know enough to go to the rest room - they just did it in the back of the bus - never mentioning, of course, that the driver would not let us off.

The driver’s bullish voice attracted our attention.

“Didn’t you hear me call you?” he asked as Bill climbed the
steps.

“I sure didn’t,” Bill said pleasantly.

“You deaf?”

“No, sir.”

“You mean to stand there and say you didn’t hear me call you?”

“Oh, were you calling me?” Bill asked innocently. “I heard you yelling ‘Boy,’ but that’s not my name, so I didn’t know you meant me.”

Bill returned and sat beside me, surrounded by the approval of his people. In the immense tug-of-war, such an act of defiance turned him into a hero.

As we drove more deeply into Mississippi, I noted that the Negro comforted and sought comfort from his own. Whereas in New Orleans he paid little attention to his brother, in Mississippi everyone who boarded the bus at the various little towns had a smile and a greeting for everyone else. We felt strongly the need to establish friendship as a buffer against the invisible threat. Like shipwrecked people, we huddled together in a warmth and courtesy that was pure and pathetic.

The threat grew as we penetrated deeper toward the center of the state. The distance between the whites and the blacks grew tangibly greater, even though we saw only the backs of their heads and shoulders, their hats and the cigarette smoke rising from them as night fell and the bus lights switched on. They said nothing, did not look back, but hostility emanated from them in an unmistakable manner.

We tried to counter it by being warm and kind to one another, far more than strangers usually are. Women discussed where they lived and promised to visit one another, though all knew that such visits would never take place.

As we neared Poplarville, agitation swept through the bus. Everyone’s mind was on the Parker youth’s lynching and the jury’s refusal to consider the FBI evidence against his lynchers.

“Do you know about Poplarville?” Bill whispered.

“Yes.”

Some of the whites looked back. Animated Negro faces
turned stony.

Bill pointed out places in a quiet expressionless voice. “That’s the jail where they snatched him. They went up to his cell - the bastards - and grabbed his feet and dragged him down so his head bumped against each stair step. They found blood on them, and blood at the bottom landing. He must’ve known what they were going to do to him. He must’ve been scared shitless.”

The bus circled through the streets of a small Southern town, a gracious town in appearance. I looked about me. It was too real for my companions, too vivid. Their faces were pinched, their expressions indrawn as though they felt themselves being dragged down the jail stairway, felt their own heads bumping against the steps, experiencing the terror …

Bill’s voice cut through, sourly: “That’s the courthouse where they made that decision.” He looked at me to see if I understood what decision he meant. I nodded.

“That’s where they as much told the whites, ‘You go ahead and lynch those niggers, we’ll see you don’t get in any trouble.’ ”

I wondered what the whites in front were thinking. The lynching and the callous decision of the Pearl River County Grand Jury were surely on all their minds. Perhaps the injustice was as nightmarish to them as it was to those surrounding me.

We drove through wooded countryside into the night. Bill dozed beside me, his snores adjusted to the hum of the tires. No one talked. After a while Bill roused himself and pointed out the window. “That’s where they fished his body out of the creek,” he said. I cupped my hands to the window but could see only black masses of foliage against a dark sky.

We arrived in Hattiesburg around eight thirty. Most of the Negroes hurried to the rest rooms. Bill gave me instructions with such solicitude that I was alarmed. Why, unless there was real danger, would he be so careful to help me avoid it? I wondered. He told me where I should go first, and whom I should request to see.

“What’s the best way to get there?” I asked.

“Have you got some money?”

“Yes.”

“Take a cab.”

“Where do I catch one?”

“Any of those cabs out there,” he said pointing to a string of parked cabs driven by white men.

“You mean a white driver’ll take a Negro passenger?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“They wouldn’t in New Orleans … they said they weren’t allowed to.”

“They’re allowed to do anything to get your dime here,” he said. We walked to one of the cabs.

“Yessir, where can I take you?” the driver said. I looked through the window to see a pleasant young man who showed no hint of animosity. Bill told him the address where he should deliver me.

“Wait just a second, will you?” Bill told the driver. He grabbed my arm and walked away.