If He Hollers Let Him Go (21 page)

She backed against the door. ‘Well, wait till I get dressed, can’t you? Are you in all that big a hurry?’

I put the bottle on the floor by the bed and stood looking at her a moment. She had on a nubby maroon robe and her blonde hair, dark at the roots, was done up in metal curlers tight to her head. Without lipstick or make-up she looked older; there were deep blue circles underneath her eyes and blue hollows on each side of the bridge of her nose. Tiny crow’s-feet spread out from the outer corners of her eyes and hard slanting lines calipered obliquely from her nostrils, dropping vertically from the edges of her mouth. Her mouth was big, hard, brutal, with lips almost colourless; and her eyes were wide, blue, staring, almost popping, but now there was a muddy look in them. Beneath her robe her breasts seemed lower, big and loose, and her hips lumped out from her waist like half-filled sacks. For bedroom slippers she wore a pair of worn-out play shoes that had once been red. She had big feet and her ankles were very white, laced with blue veins, and dirty on the bone.

Then I moved in, trapped her against the door.

She jerked to one side, turning, and went half across the room. I lunged, grabbed for her, caught her wrist, and pulled her back. She got rougher and began struggling in earnest. I got her by both arms, put my one-eighty pounds into it, and pushed her down across the bed. She twisted out from underneath me, turned on her stomach. I grabbed her by the shoulder and tried to turn her over toward me; but she rolled clear over me on the other side, and then started fighting with her fists. I grabbed her arms again and pinned them to her sides. She started kicking at me. We tussled silently back and forth across the bed until we were both panting for breath.

She was big, strong, and quick, and it was all I could do to hold my own. ‘Gawddamn you!’ she grated once, but that was the only time she spoke. I didn’t say anything. We stopped for a moment by common accord, resting. Her face was a hard, glowing red and her blue eyes were dark and furious. Her mouth was a hard brutal line.

I relaxed my hold and she snatched a hand loose and hit me in the face. I made a sudden rough grab for her and we both rolled over on the floor. We kept rolling until we were in the middle of the floor and I got her flat on her back and pinned her down.

She stopped struggling and went limp, and the strangest look came into her eyes.

‘I dare you to, nigger,’ she said. ‘Just go ‘head. I’ll get you lynched right here in California.’

‘Aw, go to hell,’ I growled.

‘My Gawddd, now you wanna beat me,’ she said, and all of a sudden started crying. ‘I don’t know what made me let you in, you cruel black bastard.’

She looked like hell. She was really a beat biddy, trampishlooking and pure rebbish; and since I’d already lost my livewire edge, I wondered what the hell I’d seen in her in the first place. I just stood there and looked at her and wondered.

And on top of all of that she began acting coy. ‘Take off my shoes,’ she said, holding out her feet.

‘Take off your own goddamned shoes.’

‘You think ‘cause I let you in you can do anything you want,’ she flared. ‘Well, let me tell you—’

‘Aw, go wash your face,’ I said. ‘You look beat.’

That startled her. She must have thought her being white made her look good to me under any circumstances.

‘Wanna drink?’ I offered, waving toward the bottle on the floor by the bed.

‘That’s all you niggers do,’ she said, getting up. ‘Lie up and get drunk and dream of having white women.’

‘Now listen, don’t start that—’

‘I don’t drink noway,’ she cut in. ‘I’m a Christian woman.’

I started laughing.

She opened her robe. She was naked except for her shoes.

‘Ain’t I beautiful?’ she said. ‘Pure white.’

She had a big mature body With. large sagging breasts and brownish-pink nipples the size of silver dollars. Her stomach was soft and puffy and there were bulges at the top of her big wide thighs. Once upon a time she had had a good figure, but age was in it now.

‘This’ll get you lynched in Texas,’ she said.

Just the notion; just because she was white. But it got me, set me on edge again. I sat down on the bed and reached for the bottle.

She kicked off her shoes and ran across the room, big, gawky, awkward, and grotesque, but with a certain wild grace in her every awkward motion.

‘You can’t have none unless you catch me,’ she teased.

I watched her through lowered lids. My tongue was thick and swelling and my stomach was hollow and weak.

‘Sit down,’ I choked in a thick voice. ‘This ain’t Texas.’

She came over and stood beside the bed. ‘You know what I’ll do?’ she began. I didn’t answer and she started laughing. ‘You dare me.’ I still didn’t say anything.

‘The preacher said niggers were full of sin,’ she said. ‘That’s what makes you black. Take off your clothes.’

I laid there and called her everything but a child of God, talking in a slow, slightly slurred voice.

When I reached for her, she jumped back and wriggled free. ‘You know what you got to do first,’ she teased.

Then I grabbed her and we locked together in a test of strength in the middle of the floor; I had her by the wrists, trying to break her down.

‘Take it, you can have it,’ she hissed, bunching her shoulders and trying to break my hold by bulling.

Someone knocked at the door and said in a low, hard voice, ‘Cut out that racket or I’ll throw you out.’

We didn’t pay any attention. I took a deep breath and bore down. She began getting blood-red all down from the face in her neck and shoulders. She was almost as strong as I, but not quite. I slowly broke her down to the floor, and she looked me in the eyes, hers buck-wild.

‘All right, rape me then, nigger!’ Her voice was excited, thick, with threads in her throat.

I let her loose and bounced to my feet.
Rape
—just the sound of the word scared me, took everything out of me, my desire, my determination, my whole build-up. I was taut, poised, ready to light out and run a crooked mile. The only thing she had to do to make me stop was just say the word.

I gave her one last look, saw her mouth come open as though she were going to scream. Then I got the door unlocked, hit the stairs fast, and was just getting in my car when I heard her call my name.

I looked up. She had the blinds drawn back from the window.

‘Wait,’ she whispered.

I climbed in the car without replying, snapped on the juice and mashed the starter, then snapped it off just as the motor caught. My passion was gone; I was tired, sore, and deflated; a hangover was taking ahold fast. I hated her guts. But I waited anyway.

In a few minutes she came down, made up like a hustler, and putting her foot on the running board fluttered her mascaraed lashes at me. ‘Gawd,’ she said peevishly, ‘you’re sure a scary nigger. Let me in.’

That one really burned me. I was through and I knew it; the white folks had won again and I wanted out. But I couldn’t let her get away with it. I didn’t want her to have that satisfaction. So I said coldly and deliberately in a hard, even voice: ‘You look like mud to me, sister, like so much dirt. Just a big beat bitch with big dirty feet. And if it didn’t take so much trouble I’d make a whore out of you.’

She turned a dull dirty red and I could see her eyes getting ugly even in that light. I saw her look up and down the street, then she said, ‘Just let me see a policeman, you nigger …’

I dug off and didn’t even look back.

That night I dreamed that a white boy and a coloured boy got to fighting on the sidewalk and the coloured boy pulled out a long-bladed knife and ran at the white boy and began slashing at him and the white boy broke and ran across the street digging into his pocket and at a grocery store on the other side the coloured boy caught up with him and it looked as if he was going to cut him all to pieces but the white boy brought his hand out of his pocket and every time the coloured boy slashed at him he hit at the back of the coloured boy’s hand. The white boy was crying and hitting at the back of the coloured boy’s hand with his fist and the coloured boy was screaming and cursing and jumping in at the white boy to slash at him with the knife; but he couldn’t cut the white boy because the white boy kept ducking and dodging and hitting at the back of his hand. Finally the white boy hit the back of the coloured boy’s hand that held the knife and made a slight cutting movement and the knife fell from the coloured boy’s hand. When I saw the blood start flowing from the back of the coloured boy’s hand I knew the white boy had a smallbladed knife gripped in his fist. The coloured boy picked up the knife with his left hand and began slashing again and the white boy kept on ducking and dodging until he hit the back of the coloured boy’s left hand and cut the tendons in that one also. Then the white boy began chasing the coloured boy down the street stabbing him all about the head and neck with the tip of the small-bladed knife. Everybody standing around looking at the white boy chasing the coloured boy down the street thought he was beating him with his fist, but I knew he was digging a thousand tiny holes in the coloured boy’s head and neck and that it was only a matter of time before the coloured boy fell to the street and bled to death; but the white boy wasn’t crying any more and he wasn’t in a hurry any more; he was just chasing the coloured boy and stabbing him to death with a quarter-inch blade and laughing like it was funny as hell.

I woke up and I couldn’t move, could hardly breathe. The alarm was ringing but I didn’t have enough strength to reach out and turn it off. My hangover was already with me and my body trembled all over as if I had the ague.

Somewhere in the back of my mind a tiny insistent voice kept whispering,
Bob, there never was a nigger who could beat it
. I blinked open my eyes, closed them tight again. But it kept on saying it. And I knew it was a fact. If I hadn’t had the hangover I might have gotten it out my mind. But the hangover gave me a strange indifference, a weird sort of honesty, like a man about to die. I could see the whole thing standing there, like a great conglomeration of all the peckerwoods in the world, taunting me,
Nigger, you haven’t got a chance.

I agreed with it. That was the hell of it. With a strange lucid clarity I knew it was no lie. I knew with the white folks sitting on my brain, controlling my every thought, action, and emotion, making life one crisis after another, day and night, asleep and awake, conscious and unconscious, I couldn’t make it. I knew that unless I found my niche and crawled into it, unless I stopped hating white folks and learned to take them as they came, I couldn’t live in America, much less expect to accomplish anything in it.

It wasn’t anything to know. It was obvious. Negro people had always lived on sufferance, ever since Lincoln gave them their freedom without any bread. I thought of a line I’d read in one of Tolstoy’s stories once—‘There never had been enough bread and freedom to go around.’ When it came to us, we didn’t get either one of them. Although Negro people such as Alice and her class had got enough bread—they’d prospered from it. No matter what had happened to them inside, they hadn’t allowed it to destroy them outwardly; they had overcome their colour the only way possible in America—as Alice had put it, by adjusting themselves to the limitations of their race. They hadn’t stopped trying, I gave them that much; they’d kept on trying, always would; but they had recognized their limit—a nigger limit.

From the viewpoint of my hangover it didn’t seem a hard thing to do. You simply had to accept being black as a condition over which you had no control, then go on from there. Glorify your black heritage, revere your black heroes, laud your black leaders, cheat your black brothers, worship your white fathers (be sure and do that), segregate yourself; then make yourself believe that you had made great progress, that you would continue to make great progress, that in time the white folks would appreciate all of this and pat you on the head and say, ‘You been a good nigger for a long time. Now we’re going to let you in.’ Of course you’d have to believe that the white folks were generous, unselfish, and loved you so much they wanted to share their world with you, but if you could believe all the rest, you could believe that too. And it didn’t seem like a hard thing for a nigger to believe, because he didn’t have any other choice.

But my mind kept rebelling against it. Being black, it was a thing I ought to know, but I’d learned it differently. I’d learned the same jive that the white folks had learned. All that stuff about liberty and justice and equality… . All men are created equal… . Any person born in the United States is a citizen… . Learned it out the same books, in the same schools. Learned the song too: ‘… o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave… .’ I thought Patrick Henry was a hero when he jumped up and said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ just like the white kids who read about it. I was a Charles Lindbergh fan when I was a little boy, and thought George Washington was the father of my country—as long as I thought I had a country.

I agreed with the Hearst papers when they lauded the peoples of the conquered European countries for continuing their underground fight against ‘Nazi oppression’; I always bought the Los Angeles Sunday
Times
too, and the
Daily News
; read the
Saturday Evening Post
and
Reader’s Digest
sometimes out at Alice’s house while I was waiting for her to dress; I even got taken in by Pegler plenty times. Like the guys said out at the yard, ‘Ah believe it.’

That was the hell of it: the white folks had drummed more into me than they’d been able to scare out.

I knew the average overpatriotic American would have said a leaderman was justified in cursing out a white woman worker for refusing to do a job of work in a war industry in time of war—so long as the leaderman was white. Might have even called her a traitor and wanted her tried for sabotage.

It was just that they didn’t think I ought to have these feelings. They kept thinking about me in connection with Africa. But I wasn’t born in Africa. I didn’t know anyone who was. I learned in history that my ancestors were slaves brought over from Africa. But I’d forgotten that, just like the aristocratic blue bloods of America have forgotten what they learned in history—that most of their ancestors were the riffraff of Europe—thieves, jailbirds, beggars, and outcasts.