The 42nd Parallel (18 page)

Winters the brick sidewalks were icy and there were colored women out spreading cinders outside their doors when the children went to school mornings. Joe never would walk with the rest of them because they were girls, he lagged behind or ran ahead. Janey wished she could walk with him but she couldn’t leave her little sisters who held tight onto her hands. One winter they got in the habit of walking up the hill with a little yaller girl who lived directly across the street and whose name was Pearl. Afternoons Janey and Pearl walked home together. Pearl usually had a couple of pennies to buy bullseyes or candy bananas with at a little store on Wisconsin Avenue, and she always gave Janey half so Janey was very fond of her. One afternoon she asked Pearl to come in and they played dolls together under the big rose of sharon bush in the back yard. When Pearl had gone Mommer’s voice called from the kitchen. Mommer had her sleeves rolled up on her faded pale arms and a checked apron on and was rolling piecrust for supper so that her hands were covered with flour.

“Janey, come here,” she said. Janey knew from the cold quaver in her voice that something was wrong.

“Yes, Mommer.” Janey stood in front of her mother shaking her head about so that the two stiff sandy pigtails lashed from side to side. “Stand still, child, for gracious sake . . . Jane, I want to talk to you about something. That little colored girl you brought in this afternoon . . .” Janey’s heart was dropping. She had a sick feeling and felt herself blushing, she hardly knew why. “Now, don’t misunderstand me; I like and respect the colored people; some of them are fine self-respecting people in their place . . . But you mustn’t bring that little colored girl in the house again. Treating colored people kindly and with respect is one of the signs of good breeding . . . You mustn’t forget that your mother’s people were wellborn every inch of them . . . Georgetown was very different in those days. We lived in a big house with most lovely lawns . . . but you must never associate with colored people on an equal basis. Living in this neighborhood it’s all the more important to be careful about those things . . . Neither the whites nor the blacks respect those who do . . . That’s all, Janey, you understand; now run out and play, it’ll soon be time for your supper.” Janey tried to speak but she couldn’t. She stood stiff in the middle of the yard on the grating that covered the drainpipe, staring at the back fence. “Niggerlover,” yelled Joe in her ear. “Niggerlover ump-mya-mya . . . Niggerlover niggerlover ump-mya-mya.” Janey began to cry.

Joe was an untalkative sandyhaired boy who could pitch a mean outcurve when he was still little. He learned to swim and dive in Rock Creek and used to say he wanted to be motorman on a streetcar when he grew up. For several years his best friend was Alec McPherson whose father was a locomotive engineer on the B. and O. After that Joe wanted to be a locomotive engineer. Janey used to tag around after the two boys whenever they’d let her, to the carbarns at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue where they made friends with some of the conductors and motormen who used to let them ride on the platform a couple of blocks sometimes if there wasn’t any inspector around, down along the canal or up Rock Creek where they caught tadpoles and fell in the water and splashed each other with mud.

Summer evenings when the twilight was long after supper they played lions and tigers with other kids from the neighborhood in the long grass of some empty lots near Oak Hill Cemetery. There were long periods when there was measles or scarlet fever around and Mommer wouldn’t let them out. Then Alec would come down and they’d play three-o-cat in the back yard. Those were the times Janey liked best. Then the boys treated her as one of them. Summer dusk would come down on them sultry and full of lightningbugs. If Popper was feeling in a good mood he’d send them up the hill to the drugstore on N Street to buy icecream, there’d be young men in their shirtsleeves and straw hats strolling with girls who wore a stick of punk in their hair to keep off the mosquitoes, a rankness and a smell of cheap perfume from the colored families crowded on their doorsteps, laughing, talking softly with an occasional flash of teeth, rolling of a white eyeball. The dense sweaty night was scary, hummed, rumbled with distant thunder, with junebugs, with the clatter of traffic from M Street, the air of the street dense and breathless under the thick trees; but when she was with Alec and Joe she wasn’t scared, not even of drunks or big shamblefooted colored-men. When they got back Popper would smoke a cigar and they’d sit out in the back yard and the mosquitoes ’ud eat them up and Mommer and Aunt Francine and the kids ’ud eat the icecream and Popper would just smoke a cigar and tell them stories of when he’d been a towboat captain down on the Chesapeake in his younger days and he’d saved the barkentine
Nancy Q
in distress on the Kettlebottoms in a sou’west gale. Then it’d get time to go to bed and Alec ’ud be sent home and Janey’d have to go to bed in the stuffy little back room on the top floor with her two little sisters in their cribs against the opposite wall. Maybe a thunderstorm would come up and she’d lie awake staring up at the ceiling cold with fright, listening to her little sisters whimper as they slept until she heard the reassuring sound of Mommer scurrying about the house closing windows, the slam of a door, the whine of wind and rattle of rain and the thunder rolling terribly loud and near overhead like a thousand beer-trucks roaring over the bridge. Times like that she thought of going down to Joe’s room and crawling into bed with him, but for some reason she was afraid to, though sometimes she got as far as the landing. He’d laugh at her and call her a softie.

About once a week Joe would get spanked. Popper would come home from the Patent Office where he worked, angry and out of sorts, and the girls would be scared of him and go about the house quiet as mice; but Joe seemed to like to provoke him, he’d run whistling through the back hall or clatter up and down stairs making a tremendous racket with his stub-toed ironplated shoes. Then Popper would start scolding him and Joe would stand in front of him without saying a word glaring at the floor with bitter blue eyes. Janey’s insides knotted up and froze when Popper would start up the stairs to the bathroom pushing Joe in front of him. She knew what would happen. He’d take down the razorstrop from behind the door and put the boy’s head and shoulders under his arm and beat him. Joe would clench his teeth and flush and not say a word and when Popper was tired of beating him they’d look at each other and Joe would be sent up to his room and Popper would come down stairs trembling all over and pretend nothing had happened, and Janey would slip out into the yard with her fists clenched whispering to herself, “I hate him . . . I hate him . . . I hate him.”

Once a drizzly Saturday night she stood against the fence in the dark looking up at the lighted window. She could hear Popper’s voice and Joe’s in an argument. She thought maybe she’d fall down dead at the first thwack of the razorstrop. She couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then suddenly it came, the leather sound of blows and Joe stifling a gasp. She was eleven years old. Something broke loose. She rushed into the kitchen with her hair all wet from the rain, “Mommer, he’s killing Joe. Stop it.” Her mother turned up a withered helpless drooping face from a pan she was scouring. “Oh, you can’t do anything.” Janey ran upstairs and started beating on the bathroom door. “Stop it, stop it,” her voice kept yelling. She was scared but something stronger than she was had hold of her. The door opened; there was Joe looking sheepish and Popper with his face all flushed and the razorstrop in his hand.

“Beat me . . . it’s me that’s bad . . . I won’t have you beating Joe like that.” She was scared. She didn’t know what to do, tears stung in her eyes.

Popper’s voice was unexpectedly kind:

“You go straight up to bed without any supper and remember that you have enough to do to fight your own battles, Janey.” She ran up to her room and lay on the bed shaking. When she’d gone to sleep Joe’s voice woke her up with a start.

He was standing in his nightgown in the door. “Say, Janey,” he whispered. “Don’t you do that again, see. I can take care of myself, see. A girl can’t butt in between men like that. When I get a job and make enough dough I’ll get me a gun and if Popper tries to beat me up I’ll shoot him dead.” Janey began to sniffle. “What you wanna cry for; this ain’t no Johnstown flood.”

She could hear him tiptoe down the stairs again in his bare feet.

At highschool she took the commercial course and learned stenography and typewriting. She was a plain thinfaced sandyhaired girl, quiet and popular with the teachers. Her fingers were quick and she picked up typing and shorthand easily. She liked to read and used to get books like
The Inside of the Cup, The Battle of the Strong, The Winning of Barbara Worth
out of the library. Her mother kept telling her that she’d spoil her eyes if she read so much. When she read she used to imagine she was the heroine, that the weak brother who went to the bad but was a gentleman at core and capable of every sacrifice, like Sidney Carton in
A Tale of Two Cities
, was Joe and that the hero was Alec.

She thought Alec was the bestlooking boy in Georgetown and the strongest. He had black closecropped hair and a very white skin with a few freckles and a strong squareshouldered way of walking. After him Joe was the bestlooking and the strongest and the best baseball player anyway. Everybody said he ought to go on through highschool on account of being such a good baseball player, but at the end of his first year Popper said he had three girls to support and that Joe would have to get to work; so he got a job as a Western Union messenger. Janey was pretty proud of him in his uniform until the girls at highschool kidded her about it. Alec’s folks had promised to put him through college if he made good in highschool, so Alec worked hard. He wasn’t tough and dirty-talking like most of the boys Joe knew. He was always nice to Janey though he never seemed to want to be left alone with her. She pretty well admitted to herself that she had a terrible crush on Alec.

The best day of her life was the sweltering summer Sunday they all went canoeing up to Great Falls. She had put up the lunch the night before. In the morning she added a steak she found in the icebox. There was blue haze at the end of every street of brick houses and dark summergreen trees when before anybody else was awake she and Joe crept out of the house round seven that morning.

They met Alec at the corner in front of the depot. He stood waiting for them with his feet wide apart and a skillet in his hand.

They all ran and caught the car that was just leaving for Cabin John’s Bridge. They had the car all to themselves like it was a private car. The car hummed over the rails past whitewashed shanties and nigger cabins along the canal, skirting hillsides where the sixfoot tall waving corn marched in ranks like soldiers. The sunlight glanced in bluewhite glare on the wavingdrooping leaves of the tassling corn; glare, and a whirring and tinkling of grasshoppers and dryflies rose in hot smoke into the pale sky round the clattering shaking electric car. They ate sweet summerapples Joe had bought off a colored woman in the station and chased each other round the car and flopped down on top of each other in the cornerseats; and they laughed and giggled till they were weak. Then the car was running through woods; they could see the trestlework of the rollercoasters of Glen Echo through the trees and they piled off the car at Cabin John’s having more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

They ran down to the bridge to look up and down the river brown and dark in the white glary morning between foliage-sodden banks; then they found the canoe that belonged to a friend of Alec’s in a house by the canal, bought some cream soda and rootbeer and some packages of neccos and started out. Alec and Joe paddled and Janey sat in the bottom with her sweater rolled round a thwart for a pillow. Alec was paddling in the bow. It was sweltering hot. The sweat made the shirt cling to the hollow of his chunky back that curved with every stroke of the paddle. After a while the boys stripped to their bathingsuits that they wore under their clothes. It made Janey’s throat tremble to watch Alec’s back and the bulging muscles of his arm as he paddled, made her feel happy and scared. She sat there in her white dimity dress, trailing her hand in the weedy browngreen water. They stopped to pick waterlilies and the white flowers of arrowhead that glistened like ice and everything smelt wet rank of the muddy roots of waterlilies. The cream soda got warm and they drank it that way and kidded each other back and forth and Alec caught a crab and covered Janey’s dress with greenslimy splashes and Janey didn’t care a bit and they called Joe skipper and he loosened up and said he was going to join the navy and Alec said he’d be a civil engineer and build a motorboat and take them all cruising and Janey was happy because they included her when they talked just like she was a boy too. At a place below the Falls where there were locks in the canal they had a long portage down to the river. Janey carried the grub and the paddles and the frying pan and the boys sweated and cussed under the canoe. Then they paddled across to the Virginia side and made a fire in a little hollow among gray rusty bowlders. Joe cooked the steak and Janey unpacked the sandwiches and cookies she’d made and nursed some murphies baking in the ashes. They roasted ears of corn too that they had swiped out of a field beside the canal. Everything turned out fine except that they hadn’t brought enough butter. Afterwards they sat eating cookies and drinking rootbeer quietly talking round the embers. Alec and Joe brought out pipes and she felt pretty good sitting there at the Great Falls of the Potomac with two men smoking pipes.

“Geewhiz, Janey, Joe cooked that steak fine.”

“When we was kids we used to ketch frogs and broil ’em up in Rock Creek . . . Remember, Alec?”

“Damned if I don’t, and Janey she was along once; geewhiz, the fuss you kicked up then, Janey.”

“I don’t like seeing you skin them.”

“We thought we was regular wildwest hunters then. We had packs of fun then.”

“I like this better, Alec,” said Janey hesitatingly.