Another Country (16 page)

The driver turned in his seat resignedly, and turned on his meter. “You go on in, Vivaldo,” Cass said again. “I’m sorry. I’ll be right back.”

“You have enough money on you?”

“Yes. Go on in.”

He got out of the cab, looking helpless and annoyed, and turned into the chapel as the cab pulled away. The driver left her at the corner of 125th Street and Eighth Avenue and she realized, as she hurried down the wide, crowded street, that she was in a strange, unnameable state, neither rage nor tears but close to both. One small, lone, white woman hurrying along 125th Street on a Saturday morning was apparently a very common sight, for no one looked at her at all. She did not see any stores with ladies hats in the window. But she was hurrying too fast and looking too hard. If she did not pull herself together, she might very well spend the day wandering up and down this street. For a moment she thought to stop one of the women— one of the women whose faces she watched as though they contained something it was necessary for her to learn— to ask directions. Then she realized that she was mysteriously afraid: afraid of these people, these streets, the chapel to which she must return. She forced herself to walk more slowly. She saw a store and entered it.

A Negro girl came toward her, a girl with red, loosely waved hair, who wore a violently green dress and whose skin was a kind of dusty copper.

“Can I help you?”

The girl was smiling, the same smile— as Cass insisted to herself— that all salesgirls, everywhere, have always worn. This smile made Cass feel poor and shabby indeed. But now she felt it more vehemently than she had ever felt it before. And though she was beginning to shake with a thoroughly mysterious anger, she knew that her dry, aristocratic sharpness, however well it had always worked downtown, would fail of its usual effect here.

“I want,” she stammered, “to see a hat.”

Then she remembered that she hated hats and never wore them. The girl, whose smile had clearly been taught her by masters, looked as though she sold at least one hat, every Saturday morning, to a strange, breathless, white woman.

“Will you come with me?” she asked.

“Well— no,” Cass said, suddenly— and the girl turned, impeccably made up eyebrows arched— “I mean, I don’t really want a hat.” Cass tried to smile; she wanted to run. Silence had fallen over the shop. “I think I’d just like to get a scarf. Black”— and how the word seemed to roll through the shop!— “for my head,” she added, and felt that in another moment they would call the police. And she had no way of identifying herself.

“Oh,” said the girl. Cass had managed to wipe away the smile. “Marie!” she called, sharply, “will you take care of this lady?”

She walked away and another, older and plainer girl, who was also, however, very carefully dressed and made-up, came over to Cass, wearing a very different smile: a bawdy, amused smile, full of complicity and contempt. Cass felt herself blushing. The girl pulled out boxes of scarves. They all seemed sleazy and expensive, but she was in no position to complain. She took one, paid for it, tied it around her head, and left. Her knees were shaking. She managed to find a cab at the corner and, after fighting a small duel with herself, gave the driver the address of the chapel: she had really wanted to tell him to take her home.

The chapel was small and there were not many people in it. She entered as silently as she could, but heads turned at her entrance. An elderly man, probably an usher, hurried silently toward her, but she sat down in the first seat she saw, in the very last row, near the door. Vivaldo was sitting further up, near the middle; the only other white person, as far as she could tell, in the place. People sat rather scattered from each other— in the same way, perhaps, that the elements of Rufus’ life had been scattered— and this made the chapel seem emptier than it was. There were many young people there, Rufus’ friends, she supposed, the boys and girls who had grown up with him. In the front row sat six figures, the family: no amount of mourning could make Ida’s proud back less proud. Just before the family, just below the altar, stood the bier, dominating the place, mother of pearl, closed.

Someone had been speaking as she came in, who now sat down. He was very young and he was dressed in the black robes of an evangelist. She wondered if he could be an evangelist, he did not seem to be much more than a boy. But he moved with great authority, the authority indeed of someone who has found his place and made his peace with it. As he sat down, a very thin girl walked up the aisle and the boy in black robes moved to the piano at the side of the altar.

“I remember Rufus,” the girl said, “from when he was a big boy and I was just a little girl—” and she tried to smile at the front-row mourners. Cass watched her, seeing that the girl was doing her best not to cry. “—me and his sister used to sit around trying to console each other when Rufus went off with the big boys and wouldn’t let us play with him.” There was a murmur of amusement and sorrow and heads in the front row nodded. “We lived right next door to each other, he was like a brother to me.” Then she dropped her head and twisted a white handkerchief, the whitest handkerchief Cass had ever seen, between her two dark hands. She was silent for several seconds and, once again, a kind of wind seemed to whisper through the chapel as though everyone there shared the girl’s memories and her agony and were willing her through it. The boy at the piano struck a chord. “Sometimes Rufus used to like me to sing this song.” the girl said, abruptly. “I’ll sing if for him now.”

The boy played the opening chord. The girl sang in a rough, untrained, astonishingly powerful voice:

I’m a stranger, don’t drive me away.

I’m a stranger, don’t drive me away.

If you drive me away, you may need me some day,

I’m a stranger, don’t drive me away.

When she finished she walked over to the bier and stood there for a moment, touching it lightly with both hands. Then she walked back to her seat.

There was weeping in the front row. She watched as Ida rocked an older, heavier woman in her arms. One of the men blew his nose loudly. The air was heavy. She wished it were over.

Vivaldo sat very still and alone, looking straight ahead.

Now, a gray-haired man stepped forward from behind the altar. He stood watching them for a moment and the black-robed boy strummed a mournful hymn.

“Some of you know me,” he said, finally, “and some of you don’t. My name is Reverend Foster.” He paused. “And I know some of your faces and some of you are strangers to me.” He made a brief bow, first toward Cass, then toward Vivaldo. “But ain’t none of us really strangers. We all here for the same reason. Someone we loved is dead.” He paused again and looked down at the bier. “Someone we loved and laughed with and talked with— and got mad at— and prayed over— is gone. He ain’t with us no more. He’s gone someplace where the wicked cease from troubling.” He looked down at the bier again. “We ain’t going to look on his face again— no more. He had a hard time getting through this world and he had a rough time getting out of it. When he stand before his Maker he going to look like a lot of us looked when we first got here— like he had a rough time getting through the passage. It was
narrow
.” He cleared his throat and blew his nose. “I ain’t going to stand here and tell you all a whole lot of lies about Rufus. I don’t believe in that. I used to know Rufus, I knew him all his life. He was a bright kid and he was full of the devil and weren’t no way in the world of keeping up with him. He got into a lot of trouble, all of you know that. A lot of our boys get into a lot of trouble and some of you know why. We used to talk about it sometimes, him and me— we was always pretty good friends, Rufus and me, even after he jumped up and went off from here and even though he didn’t never attend church service like I— we— all wanted him to do.” He paused again. “He had to go his way. He had his trouble and he’s gone. He was young, he was bright, he was beautiful, we expected great things from him— but he’s gone away from us now and it’s us will have to make the great things happen. I believe I know how terrible some of you feel. I know how terrible I feel— ain’t nothing I can say going to take away that ache, not right away. But that boy was one of the best men I ever met, and I been around awhile. I ain’t going to try to judge him. That ain’t for us to do. You know, a lot of people say that a man who takes his own life oughtn’t to be buried in holy ground. I don’t know nothing about that. All
I
know, God made every bit of ground I ever walked on and everything God made is
holy
. And don’t none of us know what goes on in the heart of someone, don’t many of us know what’s going on in our own hearts for the matter of that, and so can’t none of us say why he did what he did. Ain’t none of us been there and so don’t none of us know. We got to pray that the Lord will receive him like we pray that the Lord’s going to receive us. That’s all. That’s
all
. And I tell you something else, don’t none of you forget it: I know a lot of people done took their own lives and they’re walking up and down the streets today and some of them is preaching the gospel and some is sitting in the seats of the mighty. Now, you remember that. If the world wasn’t so full of dead folks maybe those of us that’s trying to live wouldn’t have to suffer so bad.”

He walked up and down behind the altar, behind the bier.

“I know there ain’t nothing I can say to you that sit before me— his mother and father, his sister, his kinfolks, his friends— to bring him back or to keep you from grieving that he’s gone. I know that. Ain’t nothing I can say will make his life different, make it the life that maybe some other man might have lived. It’s all been done, it’s all written down on high. But don’t lose heart, dear ones— don’t lose heart. Don’t let it make you bitter. Try to understand. Try to understand. The world’s already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world.”

He looked down, then over to the front row.

You got to remember,” he said, gently, “he was
trying
. Ain’t many trying and all that tries must suffer. Be proud of him. You got a right to be proud. And that’s all he ever wanted in this world.”

Except for someone— a man— weeping in the front row, there was silence all over the chapel. Cass thought that the man must be Rufus’ father and she wondered if he believed what the preacher said. What had Rufus been to him?— a troublesome son, a stranger while living and now a stranger forever in death. And now nothing else would ever be known. Whatever else had been, or might have been, locked in Rufus’ heart or in the heart of his father, had gone into oblivion with Rufus. It would never be expressed now. It was over.

“There’re some friends of Rufus’s here,” said Reverend Foster, “and they going to play something for us and then we going to go.”

Two young men walked up the aisle, one carrying a guitar, one carrying a bass fiddle. The thin dark girl followed them. The black-robed boy at the piano flexed his fingers. The two boys stood directly in front of the covered corpse, the girl stood a little away from them, near the piano. They began playing something Cass did not recognize, something very slow, and more like the blues than a hymn. Then it began to be more tense and more bitter and more swift. The people in the chapel hummed low in their throats and tapped their feet. Then the girl stepped forward. She threw back her head and closed her eyes and that voice rang out again:

Oh, that great getting-up morning,

Fare thee well, fare thee well!

Reverend Foster, standing on a height behind her, raised both hands and mingled his voice with hers:

We’ll be coming from every nation,

Fare thee well, fare thee well!

The chapel joined them, but the girl ended the song alone:

Oh, on that great getting-up morning,

Fare thee well, fare thee well!

Then Reverend Foster prayed a brief prayer for the safe journey of the soul that had left them and the safe journey, throughout their lives and after death, of all the souls under the sound of his voice. It was over.

The pallbearers, two of the men in the front row, and the two musicians, lifted the mother-of-pearl casket to their shoulders and started down the aisle. The mourners followed.

Cass was standing near the door. The four still faces passed her with their burden and did not look at her. Directly behind them came Ida and her mother. Ida paused for a moment and looked at her— looked directly, unreadably at her from beneath her heavy veil. Then she seemed to smile. Then she passed. And the others passed. Vivaldo joined her and they walked out of the chapel.

For the first time she saw the hearse, which stood on the Avenue, facing downtown.

“Vivaldo,” she asked, “are we going to the cemetery?”

“No,” he said, “they don’t have enough cars. I think only the family’s going.”

He was watching the car behind the hearse. Ida’s parents had already entered the car. She stood on the sidewalk. She looked around her, then walked swiftly over to them. She took each of them by one hand.

“I just wanted to thank you,” she said, quickly, “for coming.” Her voice was rough from weeping and Cass could not see her face behind the veil. “You don’t know what it means to me— to us.”

Cass pressed Ida’s hand, not knowing what to say. Vivaldo said, “Ida, anything we can do— anything
I
can do—
anything
—!”

“You’ve done wonders. You been wonderful. I’ll never forget it.”

She pressed their hands again and turned away. She got into the car and the door closed behind her. The hearse slowly moved out from the curb, and the car, then a second car, followed. Others who had been at the funeral service looked briefly at Cass and Vivaldo, stood together a few moments, and then began to disperse. Cass and Vivaldo started down the Avenue.

“Shall we take a subway?” Vivaldo asked.

“I don’t,” she said, “think I could face that now.”

They continued to walk, nevertheless, aimlessly, in silence. Cass walked with her hands deep in her pockets, staring down at the cracks in the sidewalk.