If He Hollers Let Him Go (2 page)

Hell, I oughta stay home today, I thought. I oughta go over and see Susie and take a quart of rum. She was fine if you were drunk enough. Once she told me, ‘I’m not pretty but I’m wonderful.’ I could picture her ducky black body with the tiny waist and round, bucket-shaped hips. I knew if I kept thinking about her I’d get up and go over and play it out and to hell with my job.

I tried to force my mind to a blank. I had to get myself together; I had to get up.

I could hear the baby still sucking. Lucky little rascal, I thought, didn’t know how lucky he was. I wished I had Ella Mae in bed with me; I could lose myself with her too. I remembered how she used to let me in the evenings when Henry was at work. That was during the time I was having so much trouble trying to get my journeyman’s rating at the yard and used to come home so burnt up all the time. When I found out she’d done it just because she felt sorry for me I quit speaking to her for a week. But she hadn’t let it bother her one way or the other.

I’d gone to the Lincoln Theatre last night and I began thinking of how the audience had applauded so loudly for the two white acrobats. The other acts had been all-coloured—singing and dancing and black-face comedy. I thought at the time how the white folks were still showing everybody how strong they were and how we spooks were still trying to prove how happy we were. But what got me was the way the coloured audience clapped their hands off for the white acrobats—not so much just because they were white, although that was reason enough in itself, I thought—but because one of the boys was blind.

‘He’s blind,’ I heard some woman in back of me whisper. ‘He is? Which one?’

‘The little one.’

‘Is dat so? Well, ain’t he spry?’

It went all through the audience: The little one’s blind.

We’re a wonderful, goddamned race, I thought. Simpleminded, generous, sympathetic sons of bitches. We’re sorry for everybody but ourselves; the worse the white folks treat us the more we love ‘em. Ella Mae laying me because I wasn’t married and she figured she had enough for me and Henry too; and a black audience clapping its hands off for a blind white acrobat.

I thought of Ben telling Conway out at the yard, ‘I was just asking the man a question, fellow, I ain’t going to steal your white man. I know that’s the one thing a Negro won’t forgive you for—that’s stealing his prize white man.’

What I was trying to do now was to keep from thinking about Alice, just to drift on my thoughts as long as they didn’t touch her. I was scared if I thought about her now I’d begin to wonder, maybe to doubt her. She’d broken a date with me last night; that’s why I’d gone to the Lincoln.

The next thing I knew I had opened my eyes and was looking at her picture on my dressing table. It was as if I was trying to catch some telltale expression in her eyes. But it wasn’t there; she had the same warm, intelligent, confident look. I just looked at her and didn’t think about her at all—I just laid there and enjoyed looking at a really fine chick. She had one of those heart-shaped faces with a cupid’s-bow mouth, and coal-black hair parted in the middle and pulled tight down over her ears.

Now I didn’t mind thinking about her—who she was; her position as supervisor of case work in the city welfare department. Her father was a doctor—Dr. Wellington L.-P. Harrison. He was the kind of pompous little guy you’d expect to have a hyphenated name, one of the richest Negroes in the city if not on the whole West Coast.

I jumped out of bed and went over and picked up the picture. It set me up to have a chick like her. It gave me a personal pride to have her for my girl. And then I was proud of her too. Proud of the way she looked, the appearance she made among white people; proud of what she demanded from white people, and the credit they gave her; and her position and prestige among her own people. I could knock myself out just walking along the street with her; and whenever we ran into any of the white shipyard workers downtown somewhere I really felt like something.

I didn’t want to think about her breaking our date. She’d called and said she ought to attend a sorority meeting she’d forgotten all about—she was president of the local chapter. And would I really mind? Of course I couldn’t mind; that was where the social conventions had me. If she’d been Susie I could have said, ‘Hell yes, I mind,’ but I had to be a gentleman with Alice. And I really wanted to be. Only thinking about it now gave me a tight, jealous feeling. Started me to wondering why she’d want to marry a guy like me—two years of college and a shipyard job—when she could pick any number of studs with both money and position. But she was trying so hard to make me study nights so I could go back to college after the war and study law, she had to be serious, I reassured myself.

Before I lost it again I put the picture down on the dresser and went into the kitchen to make some coffee. I didn’t know Ella Mae was there; I was barefooted and my pyjamas were open. She was standing before the small gas range and when I came in she turned to face me. Her robe was hanging open but at sight of me she pulled it together and fastened it, not hurried, but with finality.

‘I was just getting ready to wake you,’ she said.

She was a full-bodied, slow-motioned home girl with a big broad flat face, flat-nosed and thick-lipped; yellow but not bright. She had the big, brown, glassy eyes that went along with thç rest of her; and her hair was short and straightened and she had it in curlers.

‘Good morning,
Mrs
. Brown,’ I said facetiously, then, lowering my voice, I added, ‘I was just thinking about you, baby.’

She smiled self-consciously, but her look made me button my pyjamas. ‘Your clock woke the baby up,’ she said.

‘He’s cute,’ I said. ‘I heard him.’

She turned back to the stove so I couldn’t see her face. ‘She’s a
she
,’ she corrected.

‘I forgot.’ I ran my finger down her spine.

She pulled away and began making coffee in her silex.

‘Goon and get dressed,’ she said. ‘You’ll be late again.’ When I didn’t move she added, ‘I’m making your coffee. You want anything else?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. She didn’t answer. ‘I’d get married if I could find somebody like you,’ I went on. ‘Then I wouldn’t mind waking up in the mornings.’

‘Go on and get dressed,’ she said again. I made another pass at her and she said, ‘Oh, go on, Bob! You’ll be over it in a minute. Everybody wakes up like that.’

‘So!’ I said, putting my arm about her waist and trying to pull her to me. ‘You oughtn’ to told me that, baby.’ I put my right hand on her shoulder and tried to face her to me. ‘Come on, baby, be sweet.’

She gave me a hard push, sent me off balance. ‘Go on now! Don’t be so crazy. Hurry up or you’ll be late.’

I stood back and looked at her with a sudden hard soberness. ‘Do you ever wake up scared?’ I asked.

She turned and looked at me then. There was a queer expression on her flat yellow face. She stepped over to me, reached up, and put her hands about my head, drew me down to kiss her. Then she pushed me away again, saying, ‘Now hurry up, you’ll make all your riders late too.’

‘Okay, little sister,’ I said. ‘When Henry’s gone to the Army, and you get all hot and bothered and come running to me, just remember.’

She gave a slow laugh and stuck out her tongue. I felt differently now. All the tightness and scare, even the lingering traces of jealousy, had gone out of me. I just felt pressed for time.

I hurried back to my room and put on my shirt and shorts, crossed the kitchen to the bathroom, still barefooted. It was a small, four-room cottage sitting back in a court off of Wall Street in the middle fifties, and the rooms opened into one another so there wasn’t any way of getting out of a certain casual intimacy, even if I’d never had Ella Mae. My room was in the back, off from the kitchen, and the bathroom was on the other side. Their bedroom was on one side of the front, and the parlour on the other.

When I’d finished brushing my teeth and washing up I started back through the kitchen in my underwear and almost bumped into Ella Mae as she was returning to bed. I patted her on the hips and said, ‘Stingy.’ She switched on through the parlour into her bedroom.

I got a clean pair of coveralls out of the dresser drawer, slipped them on over my underwear, pulled on my high-heeled, iron-toed boots, slanted my ‘tin’ hat on the back of my head, and slipped into my leather jacket. Something about my working clothes made me feel rugged, bigger than the average citizen, stronger than a white-collar worker—stronger even than an executive. Important too. It put me on my muscle. I felt a swagger in my stance when I stepped over to the dresser to get my keys and wallet, identifications, badge, handkerchief, cigarettes. I looked to see if I had enough money, saw a ten and some ones. Then I went into the kitchen and drank two cups of black coffee. All of a sudden I began rushing to get to work on time.

I went out to the garage, threw up the door, backed halfway out to the street on the starter, telling myself at the time I oughtn’ to do it. I had a ‘42 Buick Roadmaster I’d bought four months ago, right after I’d gotten to be a leaderman, and every time I got behind the wheel and looked down over the broad, flat, mile-long hood I thought about how the rich white folks out in Beverly couldn’t even buy a new car now and got a certain satisfaction. I straightened out and dug off with a jerk, turned the corner at forty, pushed it on up in the stretch on Fifty-fourth between San Pedro and Avalon, with my nerves tightening, telling me to take it slow before I got into a battle royal with some cracker motor-cycle cop, and my mind telling me to hell with them, I was a key man in a shipyard, as important as anybody now.

Homer and Conway were waiting in front of the drug-store at the corner of Fifty-fourth and Central.

‘You’re kinda tardy, playboy,’ Homer said, climbing in beside Conway.

I turned the corner into Central and started digging. ‘She wouldn’t let me go,’ I said.

‘You mean you had that last dollar left,’ Conway said.

I squeezed between a truck and an oncoming streetcar, almost brushing, and Homer said, ‘See that. Now he’s tryna kill us. He don’t mind dying hisself, but why he got to kill you and me too?’

‘Just like that safety man said, gambling thirty seconds against thirty years,’ Conway said.

I pulled up in front of the hotel at Fifty-seventh and my other three riders, Smitty, Johnson and Pigmeat climbed in the back.

Before I started I turned to Pigmeat and said, ‘I own some parts of you, don’t I, buddy?’

‘Get over, goddamnit!’ Johnson snarled at Smitty in the back seat and pushed him. ‘You want all the seat?’

‘Don’t call me no “buddy,” man,’ Pigmeat said to me. ‘When I escaped from Mississippi I swore I’d lynch the first sonabitch that called me a “buddy”.’

‘There these niggers is fighting already,’ Homer said, shaking his head.. ‘Whenever niggers gets together that’s the first thing they gonna do.’

Smitty squirmed over to give Johnson more room. ‘By God, here’s a man wakes up evil every morning. Ain’t just
some
mornings; this man wakes up evil
every
morning.’ He looked around at Johnson. ‘What’s the matter with you, man, do your old lady beat you?’

Homer thought they were going to fight. He decided to be peacemaker. ‘Now you know how Johnson is,’ he said to Smitty. ‘That’s just his way. You know he don’t mean no harm.’

As soon as Smitty found out somebody was ready to argue he began getting bad sure enough. ‘How do I know how he is?’ he shouted. ‘Does he know how I is? Hell, everybody evil on Monday morning. I’m evil too. He ain’t no eviler’n me.’

‘Shut up!’ Conway yelled. ‘Bob’s tryna say something.’ Then he turned to me. ‘Don’t you know what a “buddy” is, Bob? A “buddy” drinks bilge water, eats crap, and runs rabbits. That’s what a peckerwood means when he calls you “buddy”.’

‘I ain’t kidding, fellow,’ I told Pigmeat.

He started scratching for his wallet. ‘Now that’s a Senegalese for you,’ he complained. ‘Gonna put me out his car ‘bout three lousy bucks. Whatcha gonna do with a fellow like that?’ He passed me three ones.

‘This is for last week,’ I said, taking them. ‘What about this week?’

‘Aw, man, I’ll give it to you Friday,’ he grumbled. ‘You raise more hell ‘bout three lousy bucks—’

I mashed the starter and dug off without hearing the rest of it. Johnson had started beefing about the job, and now they all had it.

‘How come it is we always got to get the hardest jobs?’ Smitty asked. ‘If somebody’d take a crap on deck Kelly’d come and get our gang to clean it up.’

‘I been working in this yard two years—Bob’ll tell you—and all I done yet is the jobs don’t nobody else wanta do,’ Conway said. ‘I’m gonna quit this yard just as sure as I live and nothing don’t happen and get me a job at Cal Ship.’

‘They don’t want you over there neither,’ Pigmeat said.

‘They don’t even want a coloured man to go to the school here any more,’ Homer put in. ‘Bessie ask Kelly the other day ‘bout going to school—she been here three months now—and he told her they still filled up. And a peck come right after—I was standing right there—and he signed him up right away.’

‘You know they don’t want no more nig—no more of us getting no mechanic’s pay,’ Pigmeat said. ‘You know that in front. What she gotta do is keep on after him.’

‘If I ever make up my mind to quit,’ Johnson said, ‘he the first sonabitch I’m gonna whup. I’m gonna whup his ass till it ropes like okra.’

Conway said, ‘I ain’t gonna let you. He mine. I been saving that red-faced peckerwood too long to give ‘im up now. I’m gonna whip ‘im till he puke; then I’m gonna let ‘im get through puking; then I’m gonna light in on him and whip ‘im till he poot… .’ He kept on as if it was getting good to him. ‘Then I’m gonna let ‘im get through pooting; then I’m gonna light in on ‘im and whip ‘im till he—’ They were all laughing now.

‘You can’t whip him until you get him,’ I called over my shoulder.

‘You tell ‘em, Bob,’ Smitty said. ‘We gonna see Kelly in a half-hour, then we gonna see what Conway do.’

‘I ain’t said I was gonna whip the man this morning,’ Conway backtracked. ‘I said when I quit—that’s what I said.’