Sons (14 page)

“Huh?” the deputy asked.

“Yes,” Luke said.

“What you going to Clayton for?” the deputy asked.

“We’re going there on business,” Luke said.

“What kind of business?”

“Personal business.”

“Nigger business?” the deputy asked. Glancing at Larry in the back seat, he grinned and said, “Oh, ’scuse me, boy. Didn’t see you sitting there in the dark and all.” Turning his attention back to Luke, he said, “Been a lot of agitation down this way, maybe you heard about it. I think y’all be safer with us tonight, ’stead of cruising the roads.”

“We’re not cruising the roads,” Luke said. “We’re driving directly to Clayton.”

“No,” the deputy said, and shook his head. “Maybe you
was
driving to Clayton, but you ain’t driving to Clayton no more. What you’re doing is you’re letting my partner there take the wheel, and you’re coming along with us. Now
that’s
what you’re doing, you see?” The deputy smiled again. “I think you sec,” he said.

Casually, he sauntered over to the other car and whispered a few words to his partner behind the wheel. The front door opened. His partner, wearing identical gray trousers and white shirt open at the throat, came out of the car and tugged at his undershorts. He was almost entirely bald, a fringe of reddish hair circling his tanned pate. A dead cigar stub was clamped between his teeth. He ambled over to our car, smiled at Luke, and said, “Evening. My partner says I’m to drive you into town.”

“I guess so,” Luke said, and sighed.

“It’s for your own p’tection,” the second deputy said, almost apologetically, and then looked into the back seat. “Nigger,” he said, “you mind getting out?”

“What for?” Luke asked.

“I don’t like riding with niggers. He’ll have to walk.”

The first deputy, who had come back to the car and was standing casually and angularly near the fender, the heel of his right hand resting lazily on the butt of his revolver, said, “Come on now, Fred, be democratic.”

“Oh, I
am,
Curly,” Fred said, “I am that. It’s just I can’t stand the stink of niggers, that’s all. You mind getting out, boy?”

“You stay where you are,” Luke said, without glancing into the back seat.

“Now that’s not wise,” Fred said, chewing on his cigar. “Not wise at all. You don’t want to be adding a more serious charge to a tiny little traffic violation, now do you?”

“What’s the more serious charge?” Luke asked.

“Resisting an officer.”

“No one’s resisting an officer.”

“Well now, I just heard you advise that black nigger back there to stay where he is, whereas I asked him to get out of the car.” Fred leaned into the open window and said, directly to Larry, “Nigger, didn’t I ask you polite and nice to get out of that friggin’ heap? ’Scuse me, miss,” he added, and touched his index finger to his eyebrow, as if in salute.

“Well, what do you say, fellas?” Curly asked.

“If
he
gets out, we
all
get out,” Luke said.

“It’s a long walk to town,” Fred said.

“Close to four miles,” Curly said.

“Past dam sites and everything,” Fred said.

(Another jagged lance of fear. Wat Tyler remembers the farm where the bodies of the three workers were discovered, bitterweed and scrub pine, the hole left by the dragline in the earthen dam, the men buried in shallow graves while the dam was still in construction, and week after week the unsuspecting builder had covered them with yards of red Mississippi clay.)

“He’s not getting out of this car alone,” Luke said.

“Suit yourself,” Curly said. “You want to
all
get out?
Please?”

We got out of the car. We all stayed close to Luke. The one called Curly (though his hair was as straight as my own) seemed the least menacing of the two deputies, and our eyes kept wandering to his face for reassurance. Jennifer was petrified. The stench of fear rose from her body as though emanating from her crotch, strong and female and feral. She was not a pretty girl, but there was a look of ready availability about her, combining now with the fear on her face and in her eyes, to create an impression of extreme vulnerability, the willing rape victim. I sensed it was a dangerous look to be wearing on this deserted highway, and I felt my own fear rising again as Fred’s eyes traveled over the outline of her full white brassiere beneath her white cotton blouse. Jennifer turned slightly sideways, into my shoulder, to avoid his gaze.

“You ain’t afraid, are you, miss?” Fred asked.

“What’s there to be afraid of?” she asked, intending the words to come out boldly and with just the proper touch of Vassar hauteur, surprising even herself when she heard the tremulous sound that issued from her mouth.

“Nothing.” Fred said. “Any white girl who ain’t afraid of riding with a nigger sure ain’t got nothing
else
to be afraid of, has she, Curly?”

“Nothing at all,” Curly answered.

“You just trot your sweet little ass up ahead of the car there,” Fred said, and grinned around his cigar. “We’ll drive nice and slow all the way to town.”

(In Wat Tyler’s camera eye, the eye of a generation, he sees himself in a filthy jailhouse, winos and bums holding kangaroo court over his sodomized form inert on an insect-ridden, excrement-befouled floor. Courageously he bears the weight of a bearded redneck who calls him nigger lover and screaming faggot pansy while outside a deputy holds a water hose at the ready and the black-and-white film cuts fitfully in orgasm not his own.)

The holding cell I occupied with Larry and Luke was perhaps eight feet long by five feet wide, a washbasin in one corner, an exposed toilet bowl in the other. The cell, the corridor outside were scrupulously clean, smelling of disinfectant; even the water in the toilet bowl was tinted green and smelled of pine. A deputy sat at the far end of the long corridor, reading a magazine under a caged light bulb. An air conditioner hummed somewhere serenely.

(An old Negro condemned to death for raping a white girl strums on his guitar while next door Jennifer sobs out her fears to the two Negro girls from Howard who share the cell with her. She is afraid that the deputies will force her to strip and stick their fingers into all her apertures. On black-and-white film, Wat Tyler sticks his lingers into at least one of her apertures. Her milky white breasts, nipple-tipped, fill the screen, and Larry Peters’ black face is superimposed on them while the offscreen Negro strums his guitar and mournfully laments the fact that he was caught
in flagrante delicto.)

A television set was going at the far end of the corridor, the turnkey alternately dozing and glancing up at the movie which had come on at eleven-thirty. Luke was asleep in one of the hanging berths against the right-hand wall of the cell. I was sitting on the lower berth, and Larry was on a straight-backed chair opposite me. I had had to move my bowels from the moment the deputy stopped us on the highway, but now I was embarrassed to do so on a toilet bowl that could be seen from the corridor outside the cell. They had officially charged us with the motor vehicle violation, as well as with resisting a public officer in the discharge of his duty (the judge had said something about willfully delaying and obstructing) both of which heinous crimes were admittedly only misdemeanors but apparently serious enough to warrant the setting of bail for each of us at a hundred dollars.

“The idea is to keep us here long enough to miss the Clayton meeting tomorrow night,” Larry said. “Everybody’ll arrive at eight o’clock, waiting for the fearless rights workers from the North, but the fearless workers won’t show. So they’ll all drag their asses back to their shanties, and shake their heads, and mutter in their pone about how there isn’t any hope for the Negro in this country, they jes’ ain’ no
hope
for us pore ole niggers, Amos,” he mimicked in a thick watermelon dialect, and then scowled in despair.

He was very black, no, that’s not true, he was very brown, a good chocolate fudge brown color, with thick lips showing pink inside, and wide nostrils, and a huge brow, and hair cropped very close to his skull. You could not mistake him for anything but a Negro. I mean, there was not the slightest possibility that he would have been cast as Santa Claus in a high school play. Considering his somewhat obvious coloration (he was one of two Negroes at Talmadge High, the other being a sort of mocha color, like the drapes in my father’s office), I should have noticed him sooner. The fact is, however, that I was busy with my own friends and my own pursuits and didn’t become aware of him until
he
made the approach.

He introduced himself on the steps outside Main one day, and told me he was a piano player and was interested in getting himself an organ, did I think he could come over to the house to try mine out before he bought one? I said sure he could, and he came over one spring day after school, we were both juniors then, the forsythias lining the drive were in full flower, I remember how rich his skin looked against the riotous yellow as we went into the house.

I took him up to my room and he fooled around with the Farfisa a little, and then hesitantly asked me how much it had cost. When I told him, he nodded solemnly and then said maybe he ought to take a few lessons before he spent that kind of money. Then, unexpectedly, he asked if
I
would like to give him lessons, and offered to pay me for them. I told him I’d be happy to teach him what I know (I wasn’t happy at
all)
and that he certainly didn’t have to pay me, which pleased him enormously and which doubtless qualified me for membership in the NAACP. Anyway, I gave him three lessons and discovered he was absolutely without talent. He didn’t even have a sense of rhythm, which sounds like a sick joke, but which happened to be absolutely true. After the fourth lesson, I told him he was a hopeless case, and he got mad as hell and didn’t speak to me for a month afterward. Then, I forget what happened, I think we were working together on the junior variety show, that’s right, Dawn Patrol was playing and Larry was running the switchboard, and we got to talking again, and he admitted he couldn’t even
hum
in tune in the shower, and that was how we got to be friends.

Well, I say friends, but we weren’t really friends, not then.

I don’t think I was using Larry as my Show Nigger, but I do think he became my Guinea Pig Nigger, and I’m sure now that my curiosity was a bit overbearing at times, yes, I’m positive. There were too many things I wanted to know about Negroes, and Larry was the only Negro I knew, so I pursued him relentlessly, asking him whatever came to mind, even if I felt or knew the question would embarrass him. That sounds terrible now, I’m really quite ashamed of it, like superior white massa asking bare-ass pickaninny do he stand when he pee like de white man do. But I had the idea then (or at least this is what I told myself in defense of my own position) that the only way Larry and I could explore our samenesses was to understand our differences. We had to do this, I told him, because the Negro as we had invented him in America simply was
not
the equal of the white man.

The first time I told Larry he was not my equal, he punched me in the mouth. That was when we were still getting to be friends. The second time I told him was when we were both seniors and feeling like big shots with our orange-and-black senior beanies, the big T for Talmadge on the front superimposed with the hopeful date of our graduation, ’64. We were coming past the playing field where the soccer team was practicing head shots, Coach Lambert throwing the ball repeatedly at the skulls of his players, and they dizzily batting it back to him. It was a bright fall Connecticut day, clear and sharp and invigorating. Larry was wearing his team sweater (he was on the swimming team and had earned his varsity letter as a freshman) over a white turtleneck — brown skin, black sweater, orange arm stripes and letter T, orange-and-black beanie, and behind him the riotous plumage of autumn, red, orange, gold, tan — color was everywhere around us, and very much on my mind.

I opened the subject cautiously this time; he had a devastating right jab, and I was very fond of my teeth. I also opened it guiltily, wondering whether all my talk about equality or the lack of it wasn’t merely a coverup for what was actually prejudice. Was I, in effect, simply taking an unpopular position (You are not my equal, Larry, and I will explain why) to screen an even less popular position? (I do not like the color of your skin, Larry, nor the way you talk, or walk, or smell. In short, I envy the size of your cock.) I had, for example, never been able to stand the complexion of Indians (not
American
Indians; I had never seen one — but
Indian
Indians) who always seemed to me to be the color of dried anemic dog shit.

Well, I said, and Larry listened, ready to take offense, what I meant when we talked about this in June, you see, is that the white man has forced this goddam peculiar situation...

Oh, peculiar, Larry said. Is that what it is? Peculiar?

Yes, because it’s unnatural. Well, you know what I mean, Larry, all the business, for example, of not allowing slaves to marry. How can we expect the Negro male today to accept responsibility if his ancestors...

He’s lazy and shiftless, right? Larry said.

Look, I said, I’m trying to be serious here. I’m talking about not allowing the Negro to get a good education or a meaningful job. I’m talking about
all
the crap the white man’s forced upon the Negro in order to create an inferior human being.

Here we go again, Larry said.

Larry, I’m trying to say that the white man’s task in the next generation...

The white man’s burden, you mean.

I mean
our
task, all right, yours and mine, not only the white man’s,
ours,
okay?
Our
task in this next generation’ll be to cut through all that crap and create a new American Negro who...