Great Short Stories by American Women (33 page)

That night he did not return at all, and the next day being Sunday, Delia was glad she did not have to quarrel before she hitched up her pony and drove the four miles to Woodbridge.

She stayed to the night service — ‘love feast’ — which was very warm and full of spirit. In the emotional winds her domestic trials were borne far and wide so that she sang as she drove homeward,

Jurden water, black an’ col
Chills de body, not de soul
An’ Ah wantah cross Jurden in uh calm time.

She came from the barn to the kitchen door and stopped.

“Whut’s de mattah, ol’ Satan, you ain’t kickin’ up yo’ racket?” She addressed the snake’s box. Complete silence. She went on into the house with a new hope in its birth struggles. Perhaps her threat to go to the white folks had frightened Sykes! Perhaps he was sorry! Fifteen years of misery and suppression had brought Delia to the place where she would hope anything that looked toward a way over or through her wall of inhibitions.

She felt in the match-safe behind the stove at once for a match. There was only one there.

“Dat niggah wouldn’t fetch nothin’ heah tuh save his rotten neck, but he kin run thew whut Ah brings quick enough. Now he done toted off nigh on tuh haff uh box uh matches. He done had dat ’oman heah in mah house, too.”

Nobody but a woman could tell how she knew this even before she struck the match. But she did and it put her into a new fury.

Presently she brought in the tubs to put the white things to soak. This time she decided she need not bring the hamper out of the bedroom; she would go in there and do the sorting. She picked up the pot-bellied lamp and went in. The room was small and the hamper stood hard by the foot of the white iron bed. She could sit and reach through the bedposts — resting as she worked.

“Ah wantah cross Jurden in uh calm time.”
She was singing again. The mood of the ‘love feast’ had returned. She threw back the lid of the basket almost gaily. Then, moved by both horror and terror, she sprang back toward the door.
There lay the snake in the basket!
He moved sluggishly at first, but even as she turned round and round, jumped up and down in an insanity of fear, he began to stir vigorously. She saw him pouring his awful beauty from the basket upon the bed, then she seized the lamp and ran as fast as she could to the kitchen. The wind from the open door blew out the light and the darkness added to her terror. She sped to the darkness of the yard, slamming the door after her before she thought to set down the lamp. She did not feel safe even on the ground, so she climbed up in the hay barn.

There for an hour or more she lay sprawled upon the hay a gibbering wreck.

Finally she grew quiet, and after that came coherent thought. With this stalked through her a cold, bloody rage. Hours of this. A period of introspection, a space of retrospection, then a mixture of both. Out of this an awful calm.

“Well, Ah done de bes’ Ah could. If things ain’t right, Gawd knows tain’t mah fault.”

She went to sleep — a twitch sleep — and woke up to a faint gray sky. There was a loud hollow sound below. She peered out. Sykes was at the wood-pile, demolishing a wire-covered box.

He hurried to the kitchen door, but hung outside there some minutes before he entered, and stood some minutes more inside before he closed it after him.

The gray in the sky was spreading. Delia descended without fear now, and crouched beneath the low bedroom window. The drawn shade shut out the dawn, shut in the night. But the thin walls held back no sound.

“Dat ol’ scratch is woke up now!” She mused at the tremendous whirr inside, which every woodsman knows, is one of the sound illusions. The rattler is a ventriloquist. His whirr sounds to the right, to the left, straight ahead, behind, close under foot — everywhere but where it is. Woe to him who guesses wrong unless he is prepared to hold up his end of the argument! Sometimes he strikes without rattling at all.

Inside, Sykes heard nothing until he knocked a pot lid off the stove while trying to reach the match-safe in the dark. He had emptied his pockets at Bertha’s.

The snake seemed to wake up under the stove and Sykes made a quick leap into the bedroom. In spite of the gin he had had, his head was clearing now.

“Mah Gawd!” he chattered, “ef Ah could on’y strack uh light!”

The rattling ceased for a moment as he stood paralyzed. He waited. It seemed that the snake waited also.

“Oh, fuh de light! Ah thought he’d be too sick” — Sykes was muttering to himself when the whirr began again, closer, right underfoot this time. Long before this, Sykes’ ability to think had been flattened down to primitive instinct and he leaped — onto the bed.

Outside Delia heard a cry that might have come from a maddened chimpanzee, a stricken gorilla. All the terror, all the horror, all the rage that man possibly could express, without a recognizable human sound.

A tremendous stir inside there, another series of animal screams, the intermittent whirr of the reptile. The shade torn violently down from the window, letting in the red dawn, a huge brown hand seizing the window stick, great dull blows upon the wooden floor punctuating the gibberish of sound long after the rattle of the snake had abruptly subsided. All this Delia could see and hear from her place beneath the window, and it made her ill. She crept over to the four-o’clocks and stretched herself on the cool earth to recover.

She lay there. “Delia, Delia!” She could hear Sykes calling in a most despairing tone as one who expected no answer. The sun crept on up, and he called. Delia could not move — her legs had gone flabby. She never moved, he called, and the sun kept rising.

“Mah Gawd!” She heard him moan, “Mah Gawd fum Heben!” She heard him stumbling about and got up from her flower-bed. The sun was growing warm. As she approached the door she heard him call out hopefully, “Delia, is dat you Ah heah?”

She saw him on his hands and knees as soon as she reached the door. He crept an inch or two toward her — all that he was able, and she saw his horribly swollen neck and his one open eye shining with hope. A surge of pity too strong to support bore her away from that eye that must, could not, fail to see the tubs. He would see the lamp. Orlando with its doctors was too far. She could scarcely reach the chinaberry tree, where she waited in the growing heat while inside she knew the cold river was creeping up and up to extinguish that eye which must know by now that she knew.

Nella Larsen

(c. 1893-1964)

NELLA LARSEN was born in Chicago. Her mother was Danish, her father West Indian. After her father’s death, Larsen’s mother remarried; with her half-sister, Larsen attended a private school with other students of Scandinavian and German descent. Larsen later attended Fisk University and the University of Copenhagen. From 1912 to 1915, she studied nursing at the Lincoln School for Nurses in New York. After graduating she worked in a teaching hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, but returned north after one year. In 1919 Larsen married Elmer Samuel Imes, a promising young physicist. Two years later, Larsen left nursing to work for the New York Public Library system.

Larsen began writing while recuperating from an illness that resulted in early retirement.
Quicksand
(1928), her first novel, won immediate acclaim, and Larsen was hailed as one of the most promising writers of the Harlem Renaissance. A second novel,
Passing,
came out in 1929. The following year Larsen was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship — the first awarded to a black woman writer. Her marriage was failing, and she used the fellowship money to travel to Europe to research a third novel. By the time she returned to the United States, the Harlem Renaissance was in decline, and Larsen did not publish any more work.

“Sanctuary” was published in 1930 in
Forum
magazine. Because of its similarity to a story published in 1922, Larsen was accused of plagiarism. She produced manuscript drafts of her work and attributed the story to an elderly woman who told Larsen the tale when she was studying nursing. The plagiarism charges were never substantiated, but they contributed to the end of Larsen’s literary career.

Sanctuary

I

ON THE SOUTHERN coast, between Merton and Shawboro, there is a strip of desolation some half a mile wide and nearly ten miles long between the sea and old fields of ruined plantations. Skirting the edge of this narrow jungle is a partly grown-over road, which still shows traces of furrows made by the wheels of wagons that have long since rotted away or been cut into firewood. This road is little used, now that the state has built its new highway a bit to the west and wagons are less numerous than automobiles.

In the forsaken road a man was walking swiftly. But in spite of his hurry, at every step he set down his feet with infinite care, for the night was windless and the heavy silence intensified each sound; even the breaking of a twig could be plainly heard. And the man had need of caution as well as haste.

Before a lonely cottage that shrank timidly back from the road the man hesitated a moment, then struck out across the patch of green in front of it. Stepping behind a clump of bushes close to the house, he looked in through the lighted window at Annie Poole, standing at her kitchen table mixing the supper biscuits.

He was a big black man with pale brown eyes in which there was an odd mixture of fear and amazement. The light showed streaks of gray soil on his heavy, sweating face and great hands, and on his torn clothes. In his woolly hair clung bits of dried leaves and dead grass.

He made a gesture as if to tap on the window, but turned away to the door instead. Without knocking he opened it and went in.

II

The woman’s brown gaze was immediately on him, though she did not move. She said, “You ain’t in no hurry, is you, Jim Hammer?” It wasn’t, however, entirely a question.

“Ah’s in trubble, Mis’ Poole,” the man explained, his voice shaking, his fingers twitching.

“W’at you done done now?”

“Shot a man, Mis’ Poole.”

“Trufe?” The woman seemed calm. But the word was spat out.

“Yas’m. Shot’im.” In the man’s tone was something of wonder, as if he himself could not quite believe that he had really done this thing which he affirmed.

“Daid?”

“Dunno, Mis’ Poole. Dunno.”

“White man o’ niggah?”

“Cain’t say, Mis’ Poole. White man, Ah reckons.”

Annie Poole looked at him with cold contempt. She was a tiny, withered woman — fifty, perhaps — with a wrinkled face the color of old copper, framed by a crinkly mass of white hair. But about her small figure was some quality of hardness that belied her appearance of frailty. At last she spoke, boring her sharp little eyes into those of the anxious creature before her.

“An’ w’at am you lookin’ foh me to do ’bout et?”

“Jes’ lemme stop till dey’s gone by. Hide me till dey passes. Reckon dey ain’t fur off now.” His begging voice changed to a frightened whimper. “Foh de Lawd’s sake, Mis’ Poole, lemme stop.”

And why, the woman inquired caustically, should she run the dangerous risk of hiding him?

“Obadiah, he’d lemme stop ef he was to home,” the man whined.

Annie Poole sighed. “Yas,” she admitted slowly, reluctantly, “Ah spec’ he would. Obadiah, he’s too good to youall no ’count trash.” Her slight shoulders lifted in a hopeless shrug. “Yas, Ah reckon he’d do et. Emspe-cial’ seein’ how he allus set such a heap o’ store by you. Cain’t see w’at foh, mahse‘f. Ah shuah don’ see nuffin’ in you but a heap o’ dirt.”

But a look of irony, of cunning, of complicity passed over her face. She went on, “Still, ‘siderin’ all an’ all, how Obadiah’s right fon’ o’ you, an’ how white folks is white folks, Ah’m a-gwine hide you dis one time.”

Crossing the kitchen, she opened a door leading into a small bedroom, saying, “Git yo‘se’f in dat dere feather baid an’ Ah’m a-gwine put de clo’s on de top. Don’ reckon dey’ll fin’ you ef dey does look foh you in mah house. An Ah don’ spec’ dey’ll go foh to do dat. Not lessen you been keerless an’ let ‘em smell you out gittin’ hyah.” She turned on him a withering look. “But you allus been triflin’. Cain’t do nuffin’ propah. An’ Ah’m a-tellin’ you ef dey warn’t white folks an’ you a po’ niggah, Ah shuah wouldn’t be lettin’ you mess up mah feather baid dis ebenin’, ‘cose Ah jes’ plain don’ want you hyah. Ah done kep’ mahse’f outen trubble all mah life. So’s Obadiah.”

“Ah’s powahful ‘bliged to you, Mis’ Poole. You shuah am one good ’oman. De Lawd’ll mos’ suttinly — ”

Annie Poole cut him off. “Dis ain’t no time foh all dat kin’ o’ fiddle-de-roll. Ah does mah duty as Ah sees et ‘thout no thanks from you. Ef de Lawd had gib you a white face ’stead o’ dat dere black one, Ah shuah would turn you out. Now hush yo’ mouf an’ git yo’se‘f in. An’ don’ git movin’ and scrunchin’ undah dose covahs and git yo’se’f kotched in mah house.”

Without further comment the man did as he was told. After he had laid his soiled body and grimy garments between her snowy sheets, Annie Poole carefully rearranged the covering and placed piles of freshly laundered linen on top. Then she gave a pat here and there, eyed the result, and, finding it satisfactory, went back to her cooking.

III

Jim Hammer settled down to the racking business of waiting until the approaching danger should have passed him by. Soon savory odors seeped in to him and he realized that he was hungry. He wished that Annie Poole would bring him something to eat. Just one biscuit. But she wouldn’t, he knew. Not she. She was a hard one, Obadiah’s mother.

By and by he fell into a sleep from which he was dragged back by the rumbling sound of wheels in the road outside. For a second, fear clutched so tightly at him that he almost leaped from the suffocating shelter of the bed in order to make some active attempt to escape the horror that his capture meant. There was a spasm at his heart, a pain so sharp, so slashing that he had to suppress an impulse to cry out. He felt himself falling. Down, down, down ... Everything grew dim and very distant in his memory ... Vanished ... Came rushing back.