If He Hollers Let Him Go (10 page)

We went out and got into the car and I drove down to the beach. I parked and we sat for a time looking out over the Pacific Ocean. There were two bright red spots in Alice’s cheeks and she clenched and unclenched her hands.

‘You could kill ‘em, couldn’t you?’ I said. Suddenly I felt sorry for her. I put my arm about her shoulder and tried to pull her to me. ‘Don’t let it get you down, baby,’ I said, trying to turn her face around to kiss her. ‘You’re not just finding out you’re a nigger?’

She jerked away from me. ‘I wish I was a man,’ she said.

‘If you were a man what would you do?’ I asked.

Suddenly she began crying. ‘I never had anybody talk to me like that,’ she sobbed. ‘People have always respected me. My father’s known all over California.’

I reached for the key, kicked on the motor. ‘Too bad they don’t know me,’ I said.

I turned the car and drove down to Venice, came back into Los Angeles on Venice Boulevard. By the time we reached the city Alice had stopped crying and repaired her make-up. I glanced at my watch. It was eleven-thirty.

‘Shall I take you home?’ I asked.

‘No, let’s go by some friends of mine,’ she said. ‘I want some excitement.’ Her voice had a hard dry gaiety and her face kept breaking apart like glass.

I followed her directions, drove over to a little cottage on San Pedro, past Vernon. A short, dumpy, brown-skinned girl with slow-rolling eyes and a tiny pouting mouth let us in.

‘Alice,’ she greeted, then to the others in the room, ‘Her Highness.’

A light-complexioned, simple-looking girl with a pretty face and dangling hair sat on the arm of an empty chair, the skirt of her loud print dress pulled high over her thighs. She looked at Alice and jerked her head disdainfully.

A slim, good-looking fellow about her colour with conked yellow hair and a hairline moustache sat on the middle of the davenport. He was dressed in tan slacks, tan and white sport shoes, and a cream-coloured rayon shirt. His face was greasy and his eyes were muddy from drinking. I followed Alice into the small, cramped room, wondering how she knew such people; they were more the kind of people I should know.

‘Stella, Bob,’ she said. I nodded to the dumpy girl.

Stella said, ‘Bob, Chuck,’ waving her finger.

The blond boy stuck up a sweaty languid hand. I dropped it as soon as possible.

‘Bob, Dimples,’ Stella went on.

I nodded to the long-haired girl. She didn’t look at me; she was eyeing Alice with a petulant, jealous look. I flopped down on the chair beside her and looked at her smooth yellow thighs. ‘Nice gams,’ I commented. She stood up and let her dress fall.

A gallon bottle of wine and three dirty glasses sat among the littered ashtrays and half-emptied cigarette packages on the little cocktail table in front of the davenport. Against the back wall was a Philco combination player with records stacked on its top. Beside this was a door leading into the bedroom. Across the room was another door into the kitchen, where Alice had gone with Stella. After a moment they came back with two clean glasses and Stella filled them with the cheap warm Tokay.

‘Champagne?’ I murmured facetiously. Stella rolled me a look, grinned, showing a gaping hole in the middle of her upper teeth.

She moved over to the player and said, ‘We were just getting ready to play some jive.’ She had a husky liquor voice with queer undertones and she wasn’t even half pretty. But there was an animal sensuousness in her actions and she moved with a slow slinky grace. My gaze followed her on its own.

She put on Harry James’s ‘Cherry,’ stacked several other records on the arm drops, and did a slow-motion boogie to the hot licking lilt of James’s trumpet, rolling her body from breasts to knees in undulating waves. Near the end of the piece she broke the slow, smooth motion of her boogie and put frenzied jerks in it.

‘Well, knock yourself out, girl,’ Dimples muttered.

‘Goddamn, that knocks me out!’ Stella said with feeling when the piece came to an end. Then she asked suddenly, ‘Where you kids been, all sharpened up?’

Dimples said, ‘Doesn’t Alice look lovely?’ in a saccharine voice.

‘We had dinner and went for a drive,’ Alice murmured affectedly.

I stuck a cigarette in my mouth and said, ‘Alice had a wonderful time,’ talking around it. I looked up just in time to catch her furious glance.

Stella looked curiously from one to the other of us. ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Didn’t they want to serve you?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Men are such boors,’ Alice commented acidly.

Stella took her cue and dropped it. The box was playing ‘All For You’ by the King Cole Trio, and I closed my eyes to listen. ‘… life would be a symphony, waiting all for you…’ It went off into an instrumental trio and I opened my eyes again. For an instant my vision was out of focus and I knew I was getting drunk. I got up to fill my glass again.

‘Who wants some more wine?’ I asked, then began filling everybody’s glass without waiting for an answer. I quoted:

‘
A Jug of Wine … and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
’

Stella gave me a quick darting look and stood up. ‘I’ve got a pint of Sunnybrook stashed if you want some,’ she said, looking at Alice.

‘Fine,’ I said, starting to get up. She stepped past me and put her arm about Alice’s waist and they went into the kitchen. I looked at Dimples and said, ‘Wanna dance?’ The box was blaring Erskine Hawkins’ ‘Don’t Cry, Baby.’

‘Not with you,’ she said in a harsh, sullen voice, looking sidewise into the darkened kitchen.

Things began getting a little blurred. It was hot and sticky in the room and my eyes began to burn. Stella and Alice returned from the kitchen.

‘It’s hot in here,’ Stella said. ‘Why don’t you take off your coat, Bob?’

I slipped out of my coat. Alice and Stella were sitting side by side on the davenport, whispering. Dimples sat on the arm of the davenport watching them, her face a mask of sullen envy.

I got slowly to my feet. The room began spinning and my stomach peeled into my mouth. I caught it a couple of times, my mouth ballooning, then Chuck jumped up and helped me into the kitchen and I let it go into the sink. I stood there and retched for what seemed like an hour.

I knew what was going on and I wasn’t having any of it. I felt shocked, sickened. I went back into the room and said to Alice, ‘You can’t do this to me.’

She gave me a look of raw hatred. I’d slapped her before I knew it. She half fell, caught herself, and went over and lay on the davenport, burrowing her face in her hands, and began crying as if her heart would break.

My mind went into a stupor when I tried to figure out why she should be mad at me. When I came out of it I noticed that she was crying. I felt like a dog. I lurched toward the davenport and stood over her. ‘I didn’t mean to make you cry,’ I began.

She raised her head and looked at me and all the frustration in the world was bottled up in her eyes. ‘Don’t think you made me cry,’ she said in a cold, level voice, spacing the words apart. ‘You can’t make me cry. You never could make me cry. Every time I cry, I cry for many reasons.’

I stood there swaying drunkenly for a moment, trying to figure out what she meant, I gave it up.

Chuck stood up then and said, ‘Take it easy, Jack.’

I looked at him a moment. I knew I had to hit something, so I drew back and hit him. He fell back against the wall, slumped to the floor.

Stella said, ‘What’d you have to hit Chuck for?’

I picked up my coat, put it on without replying. I lifted my my hand and waved foolishly, then I went to the door and went out and got into my car. I remember turning around; I banged the curb hard with my front tyres and cursed.

I dreamed I was lying in the middle of Main Street downtown in front of the Federal Building and two poor peckerwoods in overalls were standing over me beating me with lengths of rubber hose. I was sore and numb from the beating and felt like vomiting; I was sick in the stomach and the taste was in my mouth. I was trying to get up on my hands and knees but they were beating me across the back of my head at the base of the skull and every now and then one would hit me across the small of my back and I could feel it in my kidneys. Every time I got one knee up and tried to get the other one up I couldn’t make it and would fall down again and I knew I couldn’t last much longer. But when the peckerwoods started to stop, a hard cultured voice said peremptorily, ‘Continue! I will tell you when to stop.’ I turned my head and looked up to see who was talking and it was the president of the shipyard corporation dressed in the uniform of an Army general and he had a cigar in one side of his mouth and his eyes were calm and undisturbed. One of the peckerwoods said: ‘The nigger can’t take much more.’ The president of the shipyard said, ‘Niggers can take it as long as you give it to them.’ Somebody laughed and I looked around and saw two policemen standing by a squad car to one side nudging each other and laughing. There was no one else on the street. The other peckerwood said, ‘It ain’t right to beat this nigger like that. What we beating this nigger for anyway?’ The cops stopped laughing and looked at him and the president of the shipyard got hard and said, ‘Continue! It’s an order!’ So they started beating me again and I was hoping I would become unconscious but I couldn’t.

Then I felt myself rolling over in bed, struggling with the covers, but I couldn’t wake up, and the dream kept right on with the two peckerwoods beating me not quite to death. Then two old coloured couples in working clothes on their way to work came up and the peckerwoods stopped beating me and the cops came up and stood over me with their hands on their guns and their chins stuck out as if they were scared I might get up and hurt somebody. The coloured people looked at the peckerwoods with dull hatred and then the president of the shipyard smiled at them and said, ‘There should be something done about this,’ and they looked at him gratefully and said: ‘Yassuh, it’s a shame to go beating a man like that,’ and the president of the shipyard said, ‘All of us responsible white people are trying to keep these things from taking place, but you boys must help us.’ I tried to tell the coloured people what he had been doing before they came but my voice wouldn’t come out and they just looked at him as if he was a good kind god and said, ‘Yassuh, some of these heah boys do git out of their place, but usses don’t cause no trouble at all. We working in defence and we don’t cause nobody no trouble.’ The president of the shipyard said, ‘I knew the minute I saw you that you were good coloured folks,’ and they went away feeling good toward him and hating the peckerwoods. The cops picked me up and threw me into the squad car and when I asked them where they were taking me they said they were taking me to jail. When the squad car started with a jerk, I woke up.

I was lying in bed. Outside the sun was shining bright. I’ve overslept, I thought suddenly, and jumped out of bed. Pain shot through my head like summer lightning. My mouth was full of quinine and cottony-dry. I frowned, turning my head carefully to look into the mirror.

Then I remembered. I tried to stop it about Alice but it came back anyway. I felt an odd sort of embarrassment for her; a sort of mixture of shame and betrayal and repulsion. I hoped I wouldn’t have to see her for some time; not until I could get myself prepared to think about her again.

I sat slowly down on the bed and looked about. The night kept coming back in brown, dirty memories. Parts of my dream were mingled with them. I began feeling remorseful. I despised myself. I wondered if I would ever be able to face people again. I was too ashamed to leave the room.

All of a sudden I thought about my job. I could see it coming and couldn’t stop it. Danny Tebbel would be taking my place, bossing my gang around. The fellows in my gang would be sullen, resentful—ashamed too. Just ashamed of being black. They’d know what had happened to me; they’d see it in the white workers’ eyes.

When I thought about Madge that cold scare settled over me and I began to tremble. Just scared to think about her, about living in the same world with her. Almost like thinking about the electric chair. I knew if I kept sitting there thinking about her I’d get up and go out to the shipyard and kill her.

But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even stand up any more. I’d forgotten about the dice game and the white boy I was going to kill. It was just Madge and me in an empty world, with Alice pulling at me not quite hard enough to get me out.

I’m a goddamned coward, I told myself. I’m afraid to die, that’s my trouble. Afraid of getting hurt. Acting a fool. Being made ridiculous. Being offended, ignored, despised. Afraid to make the one final decision in my soul that would settle everything one way or another forever. I knew I was going to do it, but I was afraid to do it then.

I bowed my head in my hands and groaned. I felt like I was going to be sick a long, long time and never get well. I wrapped my robe about me and went in and took a quick shave and bath and put on some clothes.

The phone rang and I went to answer it.

‘Bob?’ It was Alice. Her voice was tense.

The bottom dropped out of my stomach. ‘Yes, this is Bob,’ I said.

‘I feel like a slut,’ she said.

I wanted her to stop talking about it; I wanted her to go on as if it’d never happened. ‘Look, can’t you forget about last night?’ I said tightly. ‘All it was, it just got me for a chick like you to go for a hype like that. But hell, I’ve forgotten about it already.’

‘But I’d die if anyone knew…’ She left it hanging.

So that’s it, I thought. ‘If you’re worrying about me talking— don’t,’ I grated. ‘I don’t talk about anybody—’

‘It’s not that, Bob, darling,’ she cut in quickly, but her voice sounded relieved. ‘I just want to atone, darling; I just want to prove to you I’m not really that type of person.’

I kept right on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘But if you’re trying to buy my silence it isn’t worth it. I know any number of chicks I can go to bed with, but I always thought of you—’ She hung up.