Chaneysville Incident (45 page)

She looked at me for a long time. Then she moved, leaving the stove and coming over and putting her hands on me. But she didn’t rub my shoulders this time. She leaned over and wrapped her arms across my chest and held me tightly. She held me for long minutes. Then she spoke. “I’m sorry, John,” she said. “It’s still not good enough.”

I came up out of the chair, tearing her arms from around me, whirling around. “What the hell do you mean, it’s not good enough? Who the hell are you to tell me what’s good enough? That was my
brother
!” I knew I was shouting; I had to be—the lamp name flickered with the sound.

“Oh,” she said. “Aren’t we noble.
My
people.
My
brother. Next thing you’ll be telling me how you have a dream. And of course you’re going to shoulder the burden for all those poor dead darkies that got exploited to death, and for the ones that moved away and got good jobs too, the ones that don’t even know how beat on they were. That’s mighty big of you, Johnny boy. But I’m not sure you’re big enough.”

“What do you
want
from me?”

“The truth,” she said. “I want the truth.”

Suddenly I needed to be out of there. I went to the door and pushed it open and went outside and pushed the door shut behind me.

She had been right: it was beautiful out there. The sky was darkening, but the sun was strong enough to make sharp highlights in the clouds. The snow was stopping, gradually, and it seemed that I could make out the individual flakes. But I had been right too: it was cold out there. And as I stood looking at the tracks she had made going down to the outhouse, the south wind suddenly gusted fiercely, sweeping a cloud of snow over the ridge and dumping it down into the hollow. I turned and went back inside, shivering.

She was waiting for me, sitting in my chair, her back to the door. I went and stood by the stove, warming my hands. Then I turned to warm my back and looked at her.

“When I was six years old,” I said, “I went to school. Up until then I don’t think I had ever really talked to anybody white. Not really. And I know I had never played with any white kids. And it’s funny, nobody had ever said anything about white people that I can remember. I know there was a lot of bad feeling from time to time, and I know that sometimes older kids would get into trouble with white kids, but I just never paid much attention. Anyway, I went to school. I didn’t know what to do in school. For one thing, I had never been anywhere without Bill before. For another thing, I knew how to read already, so there wasn’t much to do for a long while, except color. I loved to color. I remember how every morning they’d give us something made with that purple ditto ink, and we’d color it. I was always the neatest in the class, except for this one girl, I think her name was Lisa…. I don’t know. But the other thing was the playground. It was stupid; they put guards at the crossings so we wouldn’t get hit by a car crossing the street, and they had blunt scissors so we wouldn’t cut ourselves, but they’d turn us loose on the playground and let us try and kill each other.”

“Did you get into fights?” she said.

“Fights? Me? No. No, I didn’t know how to fight. Not for a long time. For a long time it never even occurred to me that I ought to fight. I remember the first time a little boy punched me; I didn’t even know what he’d done. All I knew was it hurt.”

“Why did he punch you?”

“Because I was black.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” I said. “There was that kind of stuff, and name calling. I guess that’s supposed to be real traumatic. Maybe it was; I don’t remember it that way. They called you a nigger and chased you home; they called the little kids runt and chased them home. The teacher wouldn’t believe I could read all the way through the Dick and Jane book after two weeks and made me stand in the corner; she said I’d gotten somebody to read it to me and memorized it—that was worse than being called nigger. Or maybe it was the same thing. But what I remember from the playground was this joke. Stupid joke. You go up to somebody and say, ‘Shake hands with Abe Lincoln.’ After the other kid shakes, you say, ‘Congratulations. Now you’re a free nigger.’ ”

“I remember that one,” she said. “We all laughed. We didn’t know what it meant. And there weren’t any blacks in the school….” She stopped.

“Yeah,” I said. “You have to have a nigger handy to make the joke funny. I don’t think the kids who were doing it knew what it meant, either; they knew about calling people nigger but they didn’t know who Abe Lincoln was. I knew who he was, but I didn’t understand the joke any better than they did, so I laughed too. And I went home and tried it on my mother. She just about went crazy. She wanted to know exactly who had told me that joke, and where they lived, and she told me not to worry about it, she was going to call their mother, and I still didn’t know what was going on. But right in the middle of all of it, Moses Washington came in. He’d been up in his attic and he came down I don’t know why. Maybe he heard all the noise she was making. And he wanted to know what was happening. And she told me to tell him the joke. So I did. Or I tried. I got as far as ‘Now you’re a free…’ and he laid one up against the side of my head…. Well, I guess it wasn’t that hard, really, because he didn’t knock me down, but my ears sure did ring, and I could barely hear him, which was funny since he was shouting. He shouted a good while; I don’t know what he said. And then he picked me up and carried me out into the back yard and he set me down, and he said to me, ‘Don’t you ever say anything like that again.’ I tried to tell him that I was just repeating what a white boy said, and I wasn’t calling him a nigger, but he didn’t want to hear it. He said, ‘I don’t care about words, or white boys; but I want you to know this: your great-grandfather had his freedom before Abraham Lincoln was out of short pants. He didn’t beg for it and nobody gave it to him. He didn’t even buy it. He took it. And if some white man ever looks at you and says, “Congratulations, boy, now you’re free,” you look right back at him and say, “Jackass, I
been
free.” ’ And then he started to go away and leave me there, but he turned around and came back and picked me up and carried me back inside, and he set me down on the floor and he kissed me and he said, ‘I’m sorry I hit you. I didn’t mean to do it.’ And I said, ‘That’s all right.’ And he said, ‘No it isn’t. A man shouldn’t hit another man unless he means to do it.’ And then he went back to the attic.

“I went to school the next day and that same boy came up to me and tried that joke on me, and I let him deliver the punch line, and then I said, ‘Jackass, I
been
free.’ And that’s when I learned how to fight. I didn’t like it. I got beat. And I knew I’d have to do it all over again. I was right. The next day, first thing in the morning, he came up to me. There were a whole lot of other kids around. He went through the joke. Did the punch line. Only nobody laughed; they were waiting to see what I’d do. What I did was wait until the silence got real heavy, and then I said, ‘My great-grandfather was free before Abraham Lincoln was out of short pants. And he didn’t beg for it, and nobody gave it to him, and he didn’t buy it. He took it.’ And nobody said anything. Because they didn’t know what to say. And that boy didn’t know whether to hit me or not. So he had to let me walk away. That’s when I learned about knowing. That’s when I learned that knowing nothing can get you humiliated and knowing a little bit can get you killed, but knowing all of it will bring you power. A few years later I read some of Lincoln’s speeches and I found out he was about as much an emancipator as George Wallace, and it was a good thing too, because as soon as I got to high school they started in with that Emancipation Proclamation nonsense, and I was ready for them. I just about gave the American history teacher heart failure. I loved it. I just gobbled history right up, and after a while it didn’t have anything to do with protection or getting even. It just had to do with history. And just about that time I found somebody just like me. His name was Robert. He was a little runty white kid with thick glasses and pop eyes and hair about the shade of dishwater, but he was just like me: he loved history. The Civil War was what got him going. He knew everything about the Civil War, right down to the times of the charges and the three-hour delay at Gettysburg. It was funny; otherwise he wasn’t very smart at all. He was in Special Education. Couldn’t read anything but history, and he couldn’t read that very well, but he studied and he worked, and he never forgot a thing. And he had history books all over the place. I don’t think anybody in the school even knew it. I forget now how I found out. But I did, and we’d spend hours talking. We’d sit down by the creek and he’d set up the whole battlefield and move the rocks around: this was somebody’s cavalry, that was somebody’s infantry. He lent me books. And I lent him a few; I didn’t have many, but he took a long time with them so it didn’t much matter. And I could get books out of the library; they wouldn’t let him in. Well, everything was fine. I think I was even happy. And then school ended for the summer. But I had a whole bunch of his books, and I knew he had a whole lot more, so one day I went over to his house. He lived over in the Scott Edition—well, it wouldn’t mean anything to you. A pretty good section of town. Not the best, but pretty good. They complained when the truckdrivers started making enough money to move in. Anyway, I went over there with the books. He wasn’t home, but I left the books. Later that night, it must have been about nine o’clock because it was dark, there was a knock on the door, and I opened it, and he was standing there with the books of mine he’d had. He hadn’t had them long; I knew he couldn’t have finished them. So I said to him, ‘Just because I brought yours back, it doesn’t mean you have to bring mine back.’ And he said, ‘I’m done with them.’ But I knew he was lying; he couldn’t read that fast. But he handed me the books and he turned away. I remember it was so dark he disappeared right away. But I could hear him going down the Hill. I was just about ready to go back inside when I heard him stop. And he said, ‘Johnny?’ and I said, ‘Yeah?’ and he said, ‘My mother said for you not to come to the house no more.’ And then he went on down the Hill. I listened to him going all the way to the bottom, and then I heard a door slam and a car start up, and then I heard it drive away.”

I had to step away from the stove then; I could smell my clothes starting to scorch. But I didn’t feel the heat.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why… Oh.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You don’t have to hate, John,” she said. “I’ll do it for you.”

“For us,” I said. I turned to the stove and mixed myself a toddy. When I had mixed it I stood there, feeling the warmth of the stove but not being warmed by it. “There was a girl.” I listened, waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t; there was nothing for me to do but go on. “Her name,” I said, “was Mara. She was the younger daughter of Miss Linda Jamison. Miss Linda was…well, you couldn’t call her the town whore, since there were other women—white women—who did that kind of work. Miss Linda was more of a courtesan. She didn’t have customers, or even clients; she had friends. Powerful friends. She had a house on the Hill, but Miss Linda never had anything to do with colored men. Strictly white trade. I don’t think she had anything against colored men; it was just that she didn’t think white men wanted their women having anything to do with black men, even if the women were black themselves. I suspect she was right.

“Anyway, she had two daughters, both by white men—nobody knew exactly who, and Miss Linda wasn’t about to tell them, if she knew, because she was collecting money from five or six different men who were all afraid she might be able to prove one of those girls belonged to one of them. She didn’t try to hide it, either—they knew about each other, and they liked it that way, because then they each had something on the others. And if one of them got a little behind, they’d cover for him for a month or so; but if he decided he wasn’t going to pay at all, they’d jump on him real fast, because they were afraid Miss Linda would expose them all. It was beautiful; she never even had to threaten. And she kept it quiet. Nobody on the Hill even knew about it. They thought Miss Linda made all her money on current fees; they didn’t know she was collecting royalties.”

I stopped then, and sipped at the toddy. It didn’t seem hot enough, somehow, and I poured in more hot water, sipped again. I heard her move, and again I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. “Mara was a year younger than I was,” I said. “I knew her; there weren’t many children on the Hill, and we all played together. My mother didn’t like it, Bill and I playing with Miss Linda’s daughters. She and Moses Washington had a fight about it; she wanted him to make us stop, and he said he would, if she would explain to us exactly what it was that Miss Linda did that made it bad for us to play with her children. That ended the whole thing real fast. I don’t know what she was worried about. And I think if she had known me better, she wouldn’t have worried at all. Because about that time, Mara started school. I was in the second grade; Bill didn’t go to school yet. So it should have been natural for Mara and me to go to school together. But we didn’t. I took her down the first day with me, but after that she walked down by herself, and so did I. And even though we’d play together in the afternoon, she’d walk home by herself and so would I. Sometimes I’d see her a block ahead, walking, and I knew she knew I was there behind her sometimes, but I never hurried up to catch her, and she never stopped to wait. I never knew if she wanted to, but she didn’t. And during the day, we didn’t talk at all, on the playground, or anywhere.”

I stopped, sipped at the toddy. She still didn’t say anything. I wished she would, but she didn’t. “After Moses Washington died, my mother told us not to play with the Jamison girls anymore. It didn’t matter much to me—I was busy with other things. So I didn’t see Mara at all, really—she didn’t come to Sunday school or church. It was sort of funny. In a lot of ways Mara Jamison was the girl next door. God knows she was pretty enough for anybody. Even for the Town. They made her a cheerleader. It wasn’t all that simple; there were some folks who didn’t think a black girl ought to be a cheerleader. But Miss Linda talked to some of her ‘friends,’ and that was enough to get Mara on the junior high cheerleading squad. That was about the only thing I knew about her. Until one day—I was sixteen, so she would have been fifteen—she came to the house. My mother wasn’t home from work and Bill was at football practice or something. So I answered the door. She stood on the porch and said she wanted to talk to me. I told her to come in, but she didn’t want to talk there. She told me to meet her in the woods. She told me where, and when. So that night after supper I went out and met her. It was fall, September maybe; it was just dusk when we met. It was up along the ridge, above the graveyard. She was there waiting for me, sitting on a log. I sat down beside her. I didn’t know how to ask her what she wanted, so we just sat there until it got dark, not saying anything. Just sitting. Finally she told me what it was. Her mother wanted her to sleep with a white man. He was a lawyer. Big in the town. He was married, and he had a wife and a daughter a year younger than Mara. She didn’t say who he was, but I knew. And her mother wanted her to go with him, and get pregnant, and have his child, and be set for life. I said I didn’t know what to tell her to do. She said she knew what to do if I’d help her. I said I would. So she explained Miss Linda’s theory about white men, how they wouldn’t want a woman after she’d been with a black man, and she asked me if I’d be with her.