Dark Don't Catch Me (2 page)

The lady looks at him; nodding. “There now, like it?”

“Yes, ma'am! Yes, sir. We just — took off. Crazy!”

“Maybe you'd like to sit here by the window so you can see better.” She stops knitting. Smiles at him. “I'll be happy to change seats with you. I make this run all the time.”

Millard doesn't look her in the eyes, but he asks, “You sure?”

“Sure” she says, getting her belt loose.

T
HIS
is Paradise.

“Listen to them niggers laughin'!”

White faces across the street watch black faces.

“Yeah, niggers always got a joke.”

“What you s'pose make them laugh all the time?”

It's in the state of Georgia, right in the middle, where much of the land surrounding it is skeleton-poor, worn out and abandoned to gullies, broomstraw and scrub oaks. Black faces laugh up a storm:

“… so after Saint Peter say, ‘Look here, nigger, you can't get into heaven if you're walkin'. A body wants to get into heaven's got to ride into heaven!' — well, after that, this nigger strolls around heaven on the outside figuring how he gonna get in. Then he see a white man walkin' toward heaven, an he tell the white man, ‘can't nobody get into heaven walkin', boss.' An he say to the white man, ‘Mister, whyn't you ride me in, huh? That way we both get in … So the white man ride the nigger up to them pearly gates. An Saint Peter say, ‘White man, you walkin' or riding?' White man say, ‘Ridin'!' … An Saint Peter say, ‘Good! Park your horse outside and come on in!' “

It's a country seat in the gut of the red hill region, a little town where 906 people live; the warm and wary kind of little town where 896 of them know the other ten are going to a barbecue tonight out on Linoleum Hill, where Thad Hooper's place is.

“What's the matter with you, nigger! You heard every joke there is twice?”

“Don't say nigger to me. The name is Major.”

“That make me a nigger and you a Major, huh?”

“What's the matter with you, Jack? How you ever going to expect white folks to stop calling us niggers if we call ourselves that?”

“Boy, you expect to get white folks out of the habit, then you can stand worms on their tails.” “Still, Jack, don't call me nigger.”

“I'll call you Major Post who don't know his pee smells, nigger!”

Two of the Negroes laugh; not Major Post, though.

Tink Twiddy says, “How come you don't like the joke Jack told, Major? By goose eggs your big mouth going to break if it smile?”

“Tell the joke to the white crackers standing across the street and they'll think it's funny.”

“Well, it is funny. I liked to die laughing when Jack told it!”

“You crow-bellies going to die that way anyhow!”

“Trouble with you Major Post is since you quit Linoleum Hill and went to work at that she-yankee's you got hot pants for white quail!”

There goes Major Post; walks right away from them.

Linoleum Hill got its name from some of the colored in Paradise who couldn't say Magnolia Hill. An hour or so ago out in front of the county courthouse, loafing around on the well-whittled bench, Doc Sell, the county coroner; Colonel Pirkle, the editor of the
Paradise Herald,
and some other sitters there ribbed Thad Hooper about it when he passed by.

“Hey, Thad?” Doc Sell said. “You know I'da never thought it of you?”

“Yeah? Thought what wouldn't you have?” Hooper paused on his way to his car.

“That you was a goddam coon-coddler?”

“Aw, get!” Hooper guffawed. “You're drunk as a skunk at a moonshine still!”

“Well, boy, didn't black apes name your hill, huh?”

Hooper himself had led the laughter, his huge square hands hanging on to his large and solid hips; his long firm legs giving a little at the knees, as his wide and strong shoulders shook, and he tossed back his head, a broad grin cracking his wide and handsome countenance.

“Gee-on, y'old coot!” he'd called back, continuing to his car; then, waving, “See you all tonight, hey!”

• • •

In Paradise they say the reason Thad Hooper is so good-natured the whole time is because of her. And that's the same reason he's richer-acting than the real rich from the cities like Atlanta and Savannah and Macon — because of her; and why he's more informed than most in Paradise (outside of Hollis Jordan, who nobody
can
understand anyway) and why he's big-looking without being fat; and why he's so well-liked by everyone from the Reverend Joh Greene, in whose church he serves as elder, to old black Hussie Post, who doesn't like anyone, and whose family sharecrops on Hooper land. In a sentence, it's why he's Thad Hooper — because of her … In Paradise they say it's a psychological fact that a man with a wife like her has got luck's kiss to fire him on to doing anything he takes a notion to do, better than anyone else can.

“Yeah, and Thad knows it too,” one of the bench-sitters said after Hooper had left and they were all discussing him and her. “He knows it, cause even now after two kids he's still always got his hands on her somewhere — on some part of her only he's got the right to touch!”

“So what?” Storey Bailey, Thad Hooper's best friend, put in. “What's that prove?”

“Proves,” the sitter said, “he's sort of letting everybody know she's his property. It's like another man having an Indian-head nickel he's got to touch for luck.”

Storey said, “Hell, you kidding? Hell!”

A second sitter spoke up, “I noticed that about Thad too. Oh, he don't do it obvious, mind, but I seen him do it. Out at the Friday dances, I seen him holding her so that his right arm kind of dangles down her back around her fanny — or even down here on Main Street when she's standing talking to someone with him. I seen him with his arm around her waist and one of his fingers sorta snaking up around her boobies. I seen him do it too.”

Storey Bailey's face got red. “Aw, hell!” He acted disgusted.

“Well, what's the difference anyhow.” Doc Sell shrugged. “Man's got a right to feel up his own wife!”

“But I'm telling you if Thad does do it, he don't even
know
he's doing it!” Bailey said.

The sitter sighed; spat. “She sure is beautiful, Vivian Hooper.”

“All I'd have to do to tell a corpse,” Sell said, “would be to stand Vivie over it. If it didn't move then, that'd be a dead man, all right.”

Colonel Pirkle mopped his brow with his shirt sleeve. “Yep! She's like irrigation to these drought-swollen parts.”

“Half-past twelve. I got to get me back to my mill.” Storey Bailey turned away abruptly.

“Don't go away mad,” the coroner shouted at his back; then chuckling to the others said, “I think ole Storey's got a thing for Vivie Hooper.”

“Maybe so, Doc,” the sitter said, “but Kate Bailey sure ain't gonna let him do a dong-damn thing about it!”

It is hot in Paradise this Tuesday noon; hot and still humid from yesterday's brief shower — a warm, sticky drizzle that did little more than stir the dust on the redclay-caked roads; It is far too hot to quarrel, Bill Ficklin decides as he parks in the circle before the courthouse.

“All right,” he tells his wife, cutting the engine, “I'll ask the boys if they've seen Major. But — ” he starts to add; then decides against it. He pushes down the door handle to get out.

She says, “But
what?”

“But I think you're making too much of the matter.”

“Fick, I tell you it's in little ways like this we've got to be firm with him. Now you know I think the world and all of Major, but — ”

Bill Ficklin answers, “All right. Okay,” slams the door shut, and crosses to the square.

Ficklin is superintendent of schools in Paradise; a chunky, happy-faced fellow who favors tweeds, smokes a pipe, and looks a young forty-five. Before he came back to his home town, he taught civics at the University up in Athens, and the first time he ever saw the girl who became his wife, she was wearing bobby socks, leaning seductively against his desk, and asking him questions about the next day's assignment. She stood out from all of his other students, not only because she was a Northerner, but because she was more flamboyant; less unsure of herself, and almost patronizing toward Ficklin, at those times when she would corner him before or after class, or encounter him on campus. There was always a streak of bright color about her; a fire-colored scarf, an angora sweater of deep azure, or a brilliant kelly-green stripe down a quiet gray dress; something arresting in her attire that seemed to parallel the wild streak of independence in her personality.

She would meet him on the library steps quite by accident, knowing him no better than any of his other students; and stopping, smiling up at him with her large shining green eyes, she would say something like: “Why, hello, Professor Ficklin! Isn't it a gorgeous day. But you look a little tired, hmmm? I think you ought to just relax a little more.”

Coming from any other co-ed, Bill Ficklin would have simply ignored the remark and the searching look. He was one of the youngest members of the faculty; and he was a bachelor, so he was accustomed to the whims and fancies of many of the girls he taught; accustomed and somewhat heavily resigned — but Marianne Powell affected him vaguely, though from the very beginning he was not certain why that was.

“It's quite simple,” a colleague remarked one evening in the faculty lounge, after he had been chiding Bill about his “tender tête-à-têtes” with a student — and Bill Ficklin had admitted his fascination with Marianne — ”she's pretty. She's gay. And you're falling in love with her.”

Ficklin's marriage to Marianne at the year's end created a mild scandal in university circles. There was seventeen years' difference in their ages; and while Bill Ficklin was a rather conscientious, serious, but by no means timid or puritanical, man — she was a quite frivolous, capricious nineteen years old.

Whenever they had a disagreement, such as the one this morning about Major Post, Bill Ficklin always thought as he thinks now: nine years have sobered her considerably beyond the point he had expected when he had first married her. At twenty-eight she is still pretty and young and gay; yet more and more an irritating rigidity is cropping into her personality, coupled with a vague restlessness. It still irks Ficklin to recall her last summer's suggestion (which he had rejected with an unprecedented burst of temper) that they take separate vacations, even though she had insisted, after his rage was spent, that she had only been thinking of him.

This noon he had come home for lunch and found her near to angry tears because young Major Post, after emptying trash, had not replaced the cans in the cellar. She had demanded that while Bill Ficklin drove her to the band rehearsal at the Methodist Church, they stop off in town and try to find Major and make him return and finish his chore. Often, in between the Negro's morning job at the Ficklins and his afternoon job up at the Hooper's, he ate his lunch down under the trees across the street from the county courthouse. The small area there where the local Negroes were prone to gather was known in Paradise as “Black Patch”; but when Ficklin glanced over there as he was parking his car, he saw no sign of Major Post.

“Get out anyway,” his wife said, “and ask Doc Sell. He's right there, Fick.” She had pointed out the coroner on the bench. “He knows Major.”

So Ficklin is doing as she directed now — reluctantly, and somewhat puzzled at her determination in such a small matter; but it is too hot to argue.

In Paradise, people like Bill Ficklin; but they say he's got a weakness that could make him unpopular: when the Supreme Court ruling ordered desegregation in the public schools, Ficklin called it progress. Of course he didn't start any campaign to enforce the law — he isn't a radical — but he did speak out in favor of putting the Negroes on an equal footing with the whites, and that alone was enough to make a lot of folks in the town wary of him. Doc Sell, for one, became not only wary of him, but disgusted with him; and even now, as he watches Ficklin approach, he feels a twinge of fury. He thinks: Fick married himself a goddam Yankee and turned himself into one of these nigger-lovers; and smiling, touching a finger to his brow in a salute, he says: “Hi, boy!” “Hi, Doc. Colonel. Hi.”

“Who you rooting for in the series, boy?” Colonel asks. “Dodgers, I guess. Feel sorry for them. Nice to see them win one.”

“Yep!” Sell muses, “you're partial to the underdog. But I thought you'd be for the
Yankees,
boy.”

Ficklin is oblivious to the masked insinuation. “You seen Major Post around?” he asks.

“I saw him a while back. Wasn't an hour ago, was it, Colonel? Wasn't he over there in Black Patch laughing up a storm with them other niggers?”

“Yes,” says Colonel, “but I guess he went on.”

“You going to Hoopers' tonight, Colonel?” Ficklin lights a cigarette before turning back to his car.

“I wouldn't miss one of Thad's barbecues.”

“Well, I'll see you there then. Ada coming?”

As he pauses to suck in some drags on his cigarette, the horn of his automobile honks.

“Wife's in a hurry, eh?” Sell smiles. “All them Yankees rush.”

“Yes, Ada'll be along,” Colonel nods.

“Well, got to get my spouse over to the band rehearsal!” Ficklin waves and starts back to the car.

Watching him go, Doc Sell says, “Ain't it just like Fick to hire the uppitiest nigger around to work for him!”

“Hmmm?” Colonel murmurs abstractly, thinking. They all know about Ada. Funny I never realized until right now that they all know about her.