Dark Don't Catch Me (16 page)

Colonel muses, looking into the fire. “Well,” he says, “I don't know about Christian or not Christian. The way I feel is folks got to stand by their own, that's all. I believe a man's got to stand by his own.”

“Amen!” Joh exclaims. “That's selling my product, Colonel. Amen!”

• • •

At the top of Linoleum Hill, Major pauses, the pail hanging in his hand. He looks down on the circle lit by the fire, listens to the noise white folks make, and thinks of Mrs. Hooper.
I'm really hurt; I
can't
be doctored for this one, Major.
He says in his mind, neither can my sister, white lady, not by Doc James, not by any doctor. But don't you think little Mister Thad is all to blame, no, like you said not
all
to blame; but the other half ain't sister's fault either, like you think. Blame's other name is South, the land where a proud Negro man's got to hold his head up cause if he look down he sees his sister on the ground under a cracker he feels like killing, but can't kill, can't even say nothin' to, or he gets himself killed and takes food outa his sister's mouth. A dead nigger can't keep the cowpeas and fatback on the table, and if the nigger can't feed his own, the white man ain't going to.

Like Hus said when she told him about Marilyn Monroe and he told Hus he'd wring that white neck for little Thad: “Sure enough, Major, s'good idea to choke that little devil, but you'd go and get your own neck a rope and what good that do for us? Posts ain't got no corner on brains as ‘tis, widout you gettin' your neck in a noose.”

And, “Oh, yeah,” Major had said. “Oh, yeah! Where there's life there's hope. Where's there's a tree, there's a rope.”

“My, my,” Hus had said. “How smart you're gettin' to be.”

When he thinks mad, Major thinks it in that way of his that makes it more ironical to use the words and expressions and easy-sounding jargon the white man thinks
niggers
use; because when he thinks mad there's always a white man behind the curtain, raise the curtain and find the reason: white man jumped a colored girl in an
alley, Lord, couldn't say a mumbalin' word;
white man stared a colored boy off the sidewalk to the gutter,
keep him in his place, damn coon;
white man built a new white school that looks like a goddam palace, gave the old desks to the colored barn on the hill,
see how good we is to our little black Samboes learning their wool head the A.B.C.'s so they can spell cotton some day;
white man complained,
Nigger what the hell you mean you only picked a hundred and seventy pounds t'day, you know we're in a hurry, God damn it, now git back, you ain't through by a long shot!
Sing out
Can't pick cotton, massa — whine it like a nigger would — Cotton seed am rotten, haw, haw, haw!
Raise the curtain, Rastus, and find the reason, but
keep yo big mouf shut!

I'm sorry for you, Miz Hooper, Major thinks — turning from his view below him at the brow of the hill, heading to Hus with the stew pail — but my tear ducts ain't workin' or somethin'. Maybe nigger ducts done gone dry back in Year One. Lawd, dog-gawd, she sure got herself a swat though. Big goddam bull dog with his boy, boy, “Hey, boy! You!
Nigger!”

Trudging toward his grandmother, the old lady watches him, studying him while he sets the pail down beside her with a clatter and a
whew!

“Yeah, Major, you don't look any other way but like you was gonna cut somebody up in small pieces and send ‘em to the coroner in a crocus sack, col-lect.”

“G'wan, Gran, I love slavery. Ain't had so much fun since the hogs et up Harriet Tubman!”

“Here.” Hussie pokes her pipe toward the stew. “Take a spit, Major. Get the taste outa yo mouth.”

“Gran, I'm going to worry that stew some, but not by
spittin'
in it, I tell you. It's not spit I'm intending for that stew.”

The old lady looks up at him. “You ain't goin' to do nothin' else in it while
I'm
lookin',” she says with a gleam in her eye, poker-faced. “So you gotta hold yourself till I turns around.”

While the moon comes up over Linoleum Hill and a clock strikes eight in Paradise, down below the brow of the hill Kate Bailey leads them singing:

Jim Crow's brass rail divides the grimy yellow-brick-walled station; sign says
Manteo
over the paint-peeling wooden ticket window on the white side, and the rows of wooden benches, all empty.

And a dopey-eyed old Negro porter standing by the bulletin boards that post the train schedules, peers out disconsolately from the peak of a faded red cap, and asks Millard Post: “You looking fo somethin' particular?”

“I just got off the bus from Athens. I'm supposed to be met here.”

The old man shrugs, spits a yellow stream of chaw over his shoulder into the spittoon, then shuffles along the floor that reeks of coal-tar disinfectant, to the door, and out.

Millard glances at the clock. Nine-thirty. Bus was late, maybe they came and went already thinking he wasn't coming after all, leaving him stranded in the Manteo station — Christ!

The ticket window on the white side is open; on his side, closed. Millard sees a man standing behind the bars of the open window, flicking through a copy of the
Atlanta Constitution,
an eye shield hiding his face and his view of Millard.

Millard says, “Sir?” Millard says, “Pardon me, sir. I wonder if you could tell me — ”

But the man does not raise his head from the newspaper.

Millard sets his suitcase down; looks around him and sees no one else. He looks at the benches, then again at the clock, frowns, and finally walks by the brass rail and up to the window.

“Sir?”

The man raises his head slowly, seeing Millard for the first time.

“What're you doing over here?” he demands, pushing his eye shield back on his head. “This isn't the colored side.”

“Yes, sir, I know, but — ”

“Well, then, what're you doing here? Get on back, boy.”

“I have a question, sir. I just want to know something.”

“Look, dark boy, you got no business wanting to know something over here. Now make tracks! You go over there if you want to know something,” he says, pointing a skinny finger at the opposite side of the station.

Millard says, “Yes, sir.”

He turns and goes back behind the rail, stands looking around him, then picks his suitcase up and carries it to the wooden bench. The white man at the ticket window across from him disappears from sight. Millard sits down, exhausted, weeping-Jesus miserable. He shuts his eyes, rubs them with his hand and then just sits. Wonders what in hell to do now; what in hell should I do?

Fifteen minutes drag up the clock before a door opens on the white side, the man with the eye shield comes out; crosses the rail, and comes up to Millard.

“You're not from around here, are you, boy?”

“No, sir”

“You're from up North, aren't you?” “Yes, sir.”

“You like neckties, boy?”

Millard's hand touches his necktie unconsciously, straightens the knot in it. Must look plenty ugly to this white man, ugly and sloppy after a day's traveling.

“Yes, sir,” Millard says. “I've been a day traveling.”

“I didn't ask you that. I asked you about your necktie.”

“Yes, sir, I know. I straightened it.”

The white man raises an eyebrow, skinny little white man, standing in his shirt sleeves eying Millard, a burnt-down cigarette caught between his long, bony fingers. “Around here there's an expression, boy. They say around here a nigger with a pocket handkerchief better be looked after. Same with neckties, I reckon.”

Millard just looks at him, scared.

“I wouldn't wear that around here if I was you, boy. Folks going to get the wrong idea about you, boy.”

“Yes, sir,” Millard says weakly, and pauses while the white man looks at him, looks away from the white man, then slowly undoes his necktie, bunches it up in his hand, and shoves it into his coat pocket.

“You get that suit up North?”

“Yes, sir. In New York,” Millard says; sweat on his brow — oh Jesus, what'd I do?

“You must be a big shot coming from up in N'yawk, huh, boy?”

“No, sir!”

“I hear the buildings in N'yawk are so tall they rock. That true?”

“No, sir.”

“I hear the niggers up there act just about as tall and loose as those tall buildings that rock. That true?” “No, sir.”

“You know in some places you walk over to the white side wanting to learn information, they learn it to you.” “Please, sir, I'm sorry, sir.”

“Oh, I'm not saying this place is like the next. I'm just saying some places don't cotton to pocket-handkerchief niggers.” The skinny man drops his cigarette, grinds it out with his heel, and regards Millard thoughtfully. “But you just don't know no better. Up there they don't learn niggers how to act none.”

“Yes, sir.”

“All you gotta do down here to get along, boy, is remember you're a nigger. We got nothin' against niggers.” “Yes, sir.”

“Treat our niggers better than they do up North, but our niggers are niggers and our niggers know it.” “Yes, sir.”

“I'm tellin' you for your own good. That little nigger boy works here as a porter been here long as I have, and I feel right fond of that boy and he'll tell you so himself, but I don't like a nigger don't know how to keep his place. That kind of nigger stirs up trouble.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“You're welcome, boy. Now what you want to know?”

Millard feels a wave of warm relief flood through him, feels almost grateful to this white man. He says softly, “I was supposed to be met, sir, by my uncle. I was late. I wondered if he came and went.”

“Who's he?”

“Mr. Post, sir”

“I don't know no mister niggers, boy. And I don't know

no niggers that got last names. Now you got to learn yourself how to conduct proper. What's your uncle's first name?”

“Bryan, sir.”

“Nickname?”

“I — I don't know, sir.”

“An' he's from here in Manteo? What's he do?” “No, sir, he's from Paradise.”

The skinny man sighs. “Hell, whyn't you say so in the first place! Naw, I wouldn't know him anyways. But I don't guess he's been around here. Not tonight. Been real quiet.”

“Can I get to Paradise on a bus, sir?”

“Naw, hell no! Only one a day goes there.” The skinny man starts to walk away, says before he turns, “You best hitch or walk, dark boy. You g'wan out on the highway and get along's best you can. It's twenty miles, but there's trucks on the route this time night. Sometimes those drivers like company.” He looks again at Millard. “But if you're hitching, you better get that New York coat off'n your back and roll up them sleeves, or you're not gonna get no place, nigger, but into a peck of trouble.”

“Yes, sir,” Millard says. “Thank you, sir.”

“You got a long way further than Paradise to go, nigger. Better not be forgetting it.”

“Yes, sir,” Millard says. “Thank you, sir.”

There's the sound of a door slamming, the sudden eery emptiness of a combination train-and-bus station in a small strange town — how many miles from home? — and a clock ticking too loud, and Jim Crow's brass rail shining so Millard Post can see his face in it, at night, in Manteo, Georgia, U.S.A.

Millard picks up his suitcase.

“J
UST
what would I be giving up?” he says, knowing even his tone bespeaks the futility of trying to make her believe that what he is saying
is
possible; trying to make himself believe it too, as though now at this moment when they have finished and rest lying beside one another in the Naked Hag, he must promise her something more, and make himself believe he means to keep the promise. And I
do,
Dix thinks, and feels the softness of her long fingers explore his flank, creep upward languorously, loving his flesh.

“Hush, Dixon, darling, hmm? Hush and let's not talk about it now. What's this?”

“A birthmark … We've got to talk about it. We can go up North.”

“I never noticed. Cute. Looks like a little strawberry.”

“Barbara, I mean it. I'm not a kid. Younger than you, maybe, but not a kid. You know it too.”

“Yes indeed, darling. You have a child too, hmm, Dixon? You don't want to forget that.”

“We'll take him with us.”

“Lift up, baby, will you? I want to pull the blanket around us. This is a chilly barn, isn't it?” “Won't you even listen?” “Oh, should I, Dixon?” “I swear we could. I swear it!”

The moon coming in the window high above them is girdled with a crystal rim, giving its light to their bodies, both young and supple and white-looking in the white night rays; but the floor of the Naked Hag is hard as life, Barbara James muses. Out of the beaver-wood walls, and belly stoves with their black claw legs, the blackboards with their chalk dust smell, and the worn hand-me-down desks from the white school, they have made a boudoir; and out of Dixon Pirkle's auto robe, the love bed, with the cracked plaster ceiling its canopy.

She is a small, slender girl of twenty-six, with light golden skin and straight black hair; wide brown eyes, and lips that curve generously through her delicately featured, fair, lovely face.

Pulling the blanket's edge half over her body, she covers one side, leaving the half next to Dix uncovered, showing in the moonlight the crescent thigh, smooth-skinned slim waist, and one of the round pendulous breasts, wondering how long in time it will be before Dixon forgets to mention going up North together so they can live man and wife. Thinking just thank God for Dixon and me being together now; letting her palm travel the strong hardness of his stomach, and not expecting any more than this ever. Thinking that even this is ephemeral, will be taken away too, soon, like everything else, like in the beginning her mother was, and like, as she grew, her color was taken away — she was white in color, but it was taken away by fact; she was Negro. And like Neal was taken, taken away by war, his young, good body made dead by a bullet, his fine mind just stopped, useless.

• • •

After college, when she had come back to Paradise to teach at the Naked Hag, her hope had been taken away, too, many times — a day when a student shouted defiantly, “Well what we need an education
fo?
So we gonna be educated cotton-pickers?” Life in back county land left little honest optimism, that day and other days. And a night Doc Sell made an appointment with Barbara James to meet him at his house to talk about new books for the shelf in the Naked Hag, laughingly called the library; and when she went there, and found him alone there with books not on his mind at all, and a two-word greeting when the door shut behind her and he stood leering at her: “Get naked!” She had known optimism was white man's cake, not food for colored, known it that night even while she tried to keep hope married to reason.

Arguing: “Now, Doctor Sell, sir, you're a good man, sir. You don't — ” “Get naked,
teacher,
and teach me every way you know to do it. We got all night to do it in and you gonna stay here!”

Pleading: “Please, Doctor Sell, please have some pity!”

“I swear I'll rip every stitch of clothing you got on your frame
off
your frame if you don't get busy.”

Thinly threatening: “If anyone ever found out, Doctor Sell, sir, they wouldn't like what you're trying to do, sir.”

“Didn't them niggers teach you the facts of life in that black college you went to,
teacher?
You think you're white? Who the hell'd blink an eye if they heard you come up to my house and got naked and spread your nigger legs for me? Here, I'll rip ‘em off you — ” He reached for her —

Resignedly: “I'm sorry you're doing this to me, Doctor Sell. I never thought you were that kind.”

“Any man's the kind when it comes to gettin' what a nigger gal can give. Hurry it, up, teacher! Work them hands faster on them buttons!”

• • •

Dix Pirkle moves beside her, fumbling on the floor for his shirt and the pack of cigarettes in the pocket; he takes one and sticks it in his mouth and scratches a match. “Barbara?”

“Hmmm?”

“What are you thinking about? You're so quiet all of a sudden.”

“Just being quiet. Not thinking, Dixon.”

“I mean what I say about us going up North, Barbara. Don't you believe that?” He leans on his side, propping himself on his elbow, watching her as she lies on her back; the blue smoke from his cigarette dancing up above them. “And as far as Dickie's concerned, any place would be better than home is now … That's why I was late again tonight, honey. My mother!”

“Drinking more, Dixon?”

“Yeah. Yes. God … She was already flying when I got home from Joh Greene's. Then Dad went off to Hoopers' without her, and I had to see that Cindy'd stay with Dickie. My mother was acting real crazy; not drunk — crazy. You know what she was doing, Barbara?”

“What, darling?” She reaches out again to touch him, his fingers close tightly on hers.

“Well, she was calling someone up in the telephone. She'd get him to answer, listen to him say hello, hello; then she'd hang up, wait, and do it all over again. I heard it on the extension.”

“Calling who?”

“I don't know. Christ, she probably didn't know either. Just bothering the bejesus out of someone. Real insane-acting.”

“Poor Dixon.”

“And I got mad at her before that, when Dad was leaving for the barbecue. I got mad because Dad said maybe he wouldn't go, maybe he hadn't ought to; and she said, ‘You go on. Dixon and me are going to spend an evening without you.' I said, ‘I wouldn't spend an evening with you if I had to go to hell to keep from it!' “ Dix sucks in on the cigarette; sighs the smoke out, shaking his head. “I shouldn't have said that. I know I shouldn't have, but God, I love my dad. In a lot of ways Colonel's narrow, but I love him, Barbara. You don't know!”

“I think I do, Dixon,” she says. “I feel the same about mine.”

Her words conjure up in Dix's mind a vision of the doctor; a remembrance of how the doctor was conspicuous in the white people's eyes when Dix was a kid, and the Jameses first moved to Paradise. He sees the small Negro as he saw him hundreds of times, heading down to The Toe for that strange one street in The Toe where the better-off colored live, colored whose backyards aren't waving white folks' wash every Monday, and colored whose hands don't pick cotton, or clutch scrub brushes and mop handles for a living: a colored plumber, a colored insurance man, a colored dentist; oddities in Paradise — and oddest of all, mild-mannered, wise and gentle Doctor Edward James, carrying a black physician's bag, smiling at passersby and speaking in that same way all the Jameses speak, casually and affably, but not presumptuously so, without the hesitating lapses, the slurring inflections and the haphazard Negro expressions coloring his sentences; and remembering Clint Green or some other boy in Paradise pointing him out to Dix, “See him?”

“Yeah?”

“That nigger's a doctor.” “Yeah?”

“Yeah, he's a bona fide M.D. — that nigger!” “No kidding.”

“Yeah, he's got a degree in medicine.” Dix remembering that as he lies after love with the daughter of Paradise's one colored doctor, feeling a sudden alienation from Barbara James then as she said:
“I feel the same about mine.”
Thinking of the worlds apart they are from one another, wondering with some unaccountable awe why it is that her mention of herself as a daughter who has a father she loves, just as Dix loves his own, wedges their two worlds even wider apart. It suddenly shows Dix in a new light with her, brighter than the moonlight bathing their satiated limbs, love-wearied and young; a new harsh light that calls color, not even seen, into view: black as opposed to white. Her black family; his white one; forgotten by them both in those moments they had fed on one another's lips and stayed kissing in exquisite pulsation through to the long last kiss; forgotten in the lingering aftermath, as they stayed together in that fond and late embrace; and forgotten, but pushing for recollection, in their conversation when they drew away from each other's worshipped bodies, and Dix swore to himself he could take her North with him the way he was saying he would; marry her; be husband to her….

Silently watching the smoke from his cigarette curl above their intertwined hands, Dix imagines voices of people he won't know any longer say in the future: “Sure, Dix Pirkle went and married that colored doctor's daughter. Went on up North with her, f'Chrissake. Imagine Dix and a nigger living under the same roof like anybody ought to do it! Wonder what color their kid'll be?” And Joh's voice crouching in his memory, whispering:
A man that turns a colored girl, a decent, intelligent, fine colored girl into the object of his lust, turns that lovely girl, whose color is not his, into a nigger in the eyes of all the world.

I don't want Barbara just for that! I think of Barbara James the way I'd think of — well — Suzie!

Suzie. Suzie and their tender, ripe love marriage, Dix thinks of it with a certain aching sadness; Suzie sweet and naive and silly, whom he had loved less passionately, but more proudly, than he loves this girl beside him. Suzie whom he could take by the hand into the sunlight and see Paradise smile on them together; innocent, shy Suzie, whom Dix had never seen naked in a bright light until he stared at the dead flesh of her corpse, that morning, when she died in the upstairs bedroom and a nurse in white bathed her for the grave.

Suzie and the long dragging days and weeks immediately after Joh had blessed her coffin into physical oblivion; the dragging days and weeks that Dix emerged from, in time, for the sake of his son, wrecking his grief then in work, consoling himself in “causes,” until the afternoon he drove the hill to the Naked Beggar-Hag to interview a colored teacher, and found a white-looking, lovely woman.

“Yes, I'm Barbara James. Are you Mr. Pirkle?” and said for the first time ever to any Negro, “Yes, ma'am. I am.” He remembered even as he said it, a voice from his boyhood: “My God, Dix, do you know what happened to me today? I was hurrying down Church Street not looking where I was going and I bumped into a woman, and I said, ‘Oh, excuse me, ma'am, and my God, Dix, I'd a like to died when I looked
up
and saw she was a nigger I was ma'am-ing.”

• • •

An interview, and another; and then a committee formed with Negroes and whites looking across a table at one another in the county courthouse, with fund-raising talk; and Dix Pirkle's eyes fixed on the pure, strong face of Barbara James, until, aware of it, her eyes met his, and Race couldn't stop them looking at one another that way; and Race couldn't tell them they were wrong in thinking more was going to come out of that committee meeting than a proposed program of action for building a new Naked Hag, and a vote of confidence; because that night Dix dropped her off in his car in The Toe, neither one saying a blessed word to the other until she was halfway out of the back seat.

Then: “Barbara?”

“Yes, Mr. Pirkle,” she said, not looking at him but at the pavement of Brockton Road; his motor running; headlights on, ready to go on.

“If you'd like — it's a nice night. We could drive.”

“I don't think so, thank you, Mr. Pirkle.”

“You could call me Dix. I wish you'd call me Dix.”

“I don't think I can do that either, Mr. Pirkle.”

“I'm sorry. I'm — s-sorry.”

“So am I,” she had said; and that should have been the end of it. She had gone up the gravel path and into the house; and Dix had driven on home; and it should have stopped there.

But the next afternoon Dix had an errand near the hill right at the close of school time; and he “happened” on her walking down the hill, and drove her home again. That time and times after that, until one night she agreed to meet him out near Awful Dark Woods, and both were so uncommonly shy and silent walking near where he had parked his car in the shadows of the black pines that each one knew it would be a long time and a lot of trouble before their love would feel real, before they would even speak of it, or do one single thing for it but realize it.

• • •

I don't want Barbara just for that!
Dix hears his own words, spoken that afternoon, echo again as he lies smoking beside her; thinks of what else he wants her for; a wife living with him, where? Once he had said: “We could go somewhere nobody'd know. You could pass, Barbara. You're white enough to! Who'd ever know?” And she'd said, “The only two that really matter, Dix. Us. We'd know.”

A mother to Dickie? Yes; with her goodness growing around his son; a goodness better than he could give his son — stronger, and his own stronger for it; and the subtle, sharp clean keenness of her mind; this and the infinitesimal little things about Barbara James he wanted her for. God, what kind of a belly laugh is sounding in hell for the joke of her blackness and Dix Pirkle's whiteness making stripes out of them that can't be people, black and white stripes; a study in color contrast, instead of just the one difference that there is between a man and his woman….