Invisible Man (26 page)

Chapter 12

When I came out of the subway, Lenox Avenue seemed to careen away from me at a drunken angle, and I focused upon the teetering scene with wild, infant's eyes, my head throbbing. Two huge women with spoiled-cream complexions seemed to struggle with their massive bodies as they came past, their flowered hips trembling like threatening flames. Out across the walk before me they moved, and a bright orange slant of sun seemed to boil up and I saw myself going down, my legs watery beneath me, but my head clear, too clear, recording the crowd swerving around me: legs, feet, eyes, hands, bent knees, scuffed shoes, teethy-eyed excitement; and some moving on unhalting. And the big dark woman saying,
Boy, is you all right, what's wrong?
in a husky-voiced contralto. And me saying,
I'm all right, just weak,
and trying to stand, and her saying,
Why don't y'all
stand back and let the man breathe? Stand back there y'all,
and now echoed by an official tone,
Keep moving, break it up.
And she on one side and a man on the other, helping me to stand and the policeman saying,
Are you all right?
and me answering,
Yes, I just felt weak, must have fainted but
all right now,
and him ordering the crowd to move on and the others moving on except the man and woman and him saying,
You sure you okay, daddy,
and me nodding yes, and her saying,
Where you
live son, somewhere around here?
And me telling her Men's House and her looking at me shaking her head saying,
Men's House, Men's House, shucks that ain't no place for nobody in your condition
what's weak and needs a woman to keep an eye on you awhile.
And me saying,
But I'll be all right
now,
and her,
Maybe you will and maybe you won't. I live just up the street and round the corner,
you better come on round and rest till you feel stronger. I'll phone Men's House and tell 'em where
you at.
And me too tired to resist and already she had one arm and was instructing the fellow to take the other and we went, me between them, inwardly rejecting and yet accepting her bossing, hearing,
You
take it easy, I'll take care of you like I done a heap of others, my name's Mary Rambo, everybody
knows me round this part of Harlem, you heard of me, ain't you?
And the fellow saying,
Sure, I'm
Jenny Jackson's boy, you know I know you, Miss Mary.
And her saying,
Jenny Jackson, why, I
should say you do know me and I know you, you Ralston, and your mama got two more children,
boy named Flint and gal named Laurajean, I should say I know you --me and your mama and
your papa useta --
And me saying,
I'm all right now, really all right.
And her saying,
And looking
like that, you must be worse off even than you look,
and pulling me now saying,
Here's my house
right here, hep me git him up the steps and inside, you needn't worry, son, I ain't never laid eyes
on you before and it ain't my business and I don't care what you think about me but you weak and
caint hardly walk and all and you look what's more like you hungry, so just come on and let me do
something for you like I hope you'd do something for ole Mary in case she needed it, it ain't
costing you a penny and I don't want to git in your business, I just want you to lay down till you
rested and then you can go.
And the fellow taking it up, saying,
You in good hands, daddy, Miss
Mary always helping somebody and you need some help 'cause here you black as me and white as
a sheet, as the ofays would say --watch these steps.
And going up some steps and then some more, growing weaker, and the two warm around me on each side of me, and then inside a cool dark room, hearing,
Here, here's the bed, lie him down there, there, there now, that's it, Ralston, now put his
legs up --never mind the cover --there, that's it, now go out there in the kitchen and pour him a
glass of water, you'll find a bottle in the ice-box.
And him going and her placing another pillow beneath my head, saying,
Now you'll be better and when you git all right you'll know how bad a
shape you been in, here, now taka sip of this water,
and me drinking and seeing her worn brown fingers holding the bright glass and a feeling of old, almost forgotten relief coming over me and thinking in echo of her words,
If I don't think I'm sinking, look what a hole I'm in,
and then the soft cool splash of sleep.

I saw her across the room when I awoke, reading a newspaper, her glasses low across the bridge of her nose as she stared at the page intently. Then I realized that though the glasses still slanted down, the eyes were no longer focused on the page, but on my face and lighting with a slow smile.

"How you feel now?" she said.

"Much better."

"I thought you would be. And you be even better after you have a cup of soup I got for you in the kitchen. You slept a good long time."

"Did I?" I said. "What time is it?"

"It's about ten o'clock, and from the way you slept I suspects all you needed was some rest . . . No, don't git up yet. You got to drink your soup, then you can go," she said, leaving. She returned with a bowl in a plate. "This here'll fix you up," she said. "You don't get this kind of service up there at Men's House, do you? Now, you just sit there and take your time. I ain't got nothing to do but read the paper. And I like company. You have to make time in the morning?"

"No, I've been sick," I said. "But I have to look for a job."

"I knowed you wasn't well. Why you try to hide it?"

"I didn't want to be trouble to anyone," I said.

"Everybody has to be trouble to
somebody.
And you just come from the hospital too." I looked up. She sat in the rocking chair bent forward, her arms folded at ease across her aproned lap. Had she searched my pockets?

"How did you know that?" I said.

"There you go getting suspicious," she said sternly. "That's what's wrong with the world today, don't nobody trust nobody. I can smell that hospital smell on you, son. You got enough ether in those clothes to put to sleep a dog!"

"I couldn't remember telling you that I had been in the hospital."

"No, and you didn't have to. I smelled that out. You got people here in the city?"

"No, ma'm," I said. "They're down South. I came up here to work so I could go to school, and I got sick."

"Now ain't that too bad! But you'll make out all right. What you plan to make out of yourself?"

"I don't know now; I came here wanting to be an educator. Now I don't know."

"So what's wrong with being an educator?"

I thought about it while sipping the good hot soup. "Nothing, I suppose, I just think I'd like to do something else."

"Well, whatever it is, I hope it's something that's a credit to the race."

"I hope so," I said.

"Don't hope, make it that way."

I looked at her thinking of what I'd tried to do and of where it had gotten me, seeing her heavy, composed figure before me.

"It's you young folks what's going to make the changes," she said. "Y'all's the ones. You got to lead and you got to fight and move us all on up a little higher. And I tell you something else, it's the one's from the South that's got to do it, them what knows the fire and ain't forgot how it burns. Up here too many forgits. They finds a place for theyselves and forgits the ones on the bottom. Oh, heap of them
talks
about doing things, but they done really forgot. No, it's you young ones what has to remember and take the lead."

"Yes," I said.

"And you have to take care of yourself, son. Don't let this Harlem git you. I'm in New York but New York ain't in me, understand what I mean? Don't git corrupted."

"I won't. I'll be too busy."

"All right now, you looks to me like you might make something out of yourself, so you be careful."

I got up to go, watching her raise herself out of her chair and come with me to the door.

"You ever decide you want a room somewhere beside Men's House, try me," she said. "The rent's reasonable."

"I'll remember that," I said.

I was to remember sooner than I had thought. The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men's House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility. My overalls were causing stares and I knew that I could live there no longer, that that phase of my life was past. The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with Utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community "leaders" without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil-War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed nothing beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; the younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream --the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah's Ark but who yet were drunk on finance. Yes, and that older group with similar aspirations, the

"fundamentalists," the "actors" who sought to achieve the status of brokers through imagination alone, a group of janitors and messengers who spent most of their wages on clothing such as was fashionable among Wall Street brokers, with their Brooks Brothers suits and bowler hats, English umbrellas, black calfskin shoes and yellow gloves; with their orthodox and passionate argument as to what was the correct tie to wear with what shirt, what shade of gray was correct for spats and what would the Prince of Wales wear at a certain seasonal event; should field glasses be slung from the right or from the left shoulder; who never read the financial pages though they purchased the
Wall Street Journal
religiously and carried it beneath the left elbow, pressed firm against the body and grasped in the left hand --always manicured and gloved, fair weather or foul --with an easy precision (Oh, they had style) while the other hand whipped a tightly rolled umbrella back and forth at a calculated angle; with their homburgs and Chesterfields, their polo coats and Tyrolean hats worn strictly as fashion demanded. I could feel their eyes, saw them all and saw too the time when they would know that my prospects were ended and saw already the contempt they'd feel for me, a college man who had lost his prospects and pride. I could see it all and I knew that even the officials and the older men would despise me as though, somehow, in losing my place in Bledsoe's world I had betrayed them . . . I saw it as they looked at my overalls.

I had started toward the elevator when I heard the voice raised in laughter and turned to see him holding forth to a group in the lobby chairs and the rolls of fat behind the wrinkled, high-domed, close-cut head, and I was certain that it was he and stooped without thought and lifted it shining, full and foul, and moved forward two long steps, dumping its great brown, transparent splash upon the head warned too late by someone across the room. And too late for me to see that it was not Bledsoe but a preacher, a prominent Baptist, who shot up wide-eyed with disbelief and outrage, and I shot around and out of the lobby before anyone could think to stop me.

No one followed me and I wandered the streets amazed at my own action. Later it began to rain and I sneaked back near Men's House and persuaded an amused porter to slip my things out to me. I learned that I had been barred from the building for "ninety-nine years and a day."

"You might not can come back, man," the porter said, "but after what you did, I swear, they never will stop talking about you. You really baptized ole Rev!"

So that same night I went back to Mary's, where I lived in a small but comfortable room until the ice came.

It was a period of quietness. I paid my way with my compensation money and found living with her pleasant except for her constant talk about leadership and responsibility. And even this was not too bad as long as I could pay my way. It was, however, a small compensation, and when after several months my money ran out and I was looking again for a job, I found her exceedingly irritating to listen to. Still, she never dunned me and was as generous with her servings of food during mealtime as ever. "It's just hard times you going through," she'd say. "Everybody worth his salt has his hard times, and when you git to be somebody you'll see these here very same hard times helped you a heap." I didn't see it that way. I had lost my sense of direction. I spent my time, when not looking for work, in my room, where I read countless books from the library. Sometimes, when there was still money, or when I had earned a few dollars waiting table, I'd eat out and wander the streets until late at night. Other than Mary I had no friends and desired none. Nor did I think of Mary as a "friend"; she was something more --a force, a stable, familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face. It was a most painful position, for at the same time, Mary reminded me constantly that something was expected of me, some act of leadership, some newsworthy achievement; and I was torn between resenting her for it and loving her for the nebulous hope she kept alive.