Dark Don't Catch Me (3 page)

• • •

For the most part in Paradise people lead a quiet kind of routine existence that keeps them over-all content. But like people anywhere they sometimes get a hankering for some excitement. A barbecue, like the one the Hoopers are throwing tonight, is one way of satisfying the yen; and there are others with other ways. Maybe the colored get together out at Moccasin Gap and “whup it up” on stumpwater; or maybe some of the poor white “lintheads” that work the mill in nearby Galverton pay a call on Miss Mary Jane Frances Alexander's establishment, where even if the humping isn't as wild as Macon tail, it's cheaper and easier to get at. Individuals, like Hollis Jordan, might work it off by strolling through Awful Dark Woods and belting out a lot of high-sounding poetry for the oaks and black gums to bounce off their trunks; or some, like black Bryan Post, might ease it out of the system by somersaulting clear down Main Street on a bellyful of homebrew beer, while folks standing around gawk and giggle and guffaw.

There are ways and ways to provide Paradise with this excitement it sometimes craves; and one of the best and most popular ways is to get the band out and playing. When fireworks don't faze folks much any more and county fairs begin to wear off, the Paradise Bigger Band brings almost everyone back into the fold of 906 citizens of the city; proud and pleased as punch with life in Paradise. Folks say even if the only piece the P.B.B. could play was “Marching Through Georgia,” there'd be a crowd on hand glad to hear it.

Over at the Methodist Church where Kate Bailey is waiting to rehearse the band, the atmosphere is tense. The members of the P.B.B., all women, sit cradling their saxophones, trumpets and clarinets; nervously smoothing their hands along the gaudy silkiness of their bright gold satin band blouses; while Kate Bailey stands in that stick-straight way she does when anything upsets her, with her small hands folded together in front of her, and her tiny round eyes peering furtively at the Reverend Joh Greene's wife, trying to stop her from continuing.

“… and at the crossroads, as I was saying,” Guessie Greene, who has just arrived, goes on, depositing a bunch of autumn leaves on one of the folding chairs, and beginning to unbutton her blue angora sweater, “Hollis Jordan himself was ahead of me in his car, heading out for the woods, no doubt, and — ”

More intensely, Kate fixes her eyes on Guessie's face, trying to warn Guessie, trying to tell Guessie who is there, who just materialized at the band rehearsal unannounced — but Guessie does not see the visitor and continues too rapidly and haphazardly to get the message:

“… when the train came along, you know what he did? He just sat there in his car with his hand on the horn, blowing that horn the whole time it took for the train to go by, blowing it like a crazy man, as though his blowing was going to affect that train any. I had to laugh to myself to see him sitting there mad as anything blowing that horn!”

“All right, everybody, all right,” Kate starts screeching frantically. “Even though Marianne's late, we'll start right now. Get set! ‘Loch Lomond' first! Get set!”

“I swear sometimes I think that man is missing upstairs,” Guessie adds. “Hoo, I do! I liked to die laughing when I saw that crazy old Hollis Jordan — ” and then she stops, because while she was saying this, she was seeing for the first time, that Ada Pirkle is sitting there in the chair by the wall, sitting and listening; and Guessie's words just trail off like air seeping slowly out of a rubber tire; and there is this awful moment of sudden, sick silence.

Then Bigger Band members rattle their sheets of music, shift in their seats, shuffle their shoes on the cement floor, while Kate Bailey begins tapping her feet and shaking her fingers, singing in that squirrel-high squeaky voice of hers:

Until everyone in the basement puts their instrument in position, trying desperately to deprive the moment of any significance by immersing it in the clamorous noise of the Paradise Bigger Band.

And typical awful, Ada Pirkle thinks; I live only for Dix.

W
ALKING AWAY
from Jack Rowan and the others down on Main, Major Post sees Dix Pirkle being stopped at the corner by the Reverend Joh Greene. Passing the pair, Major hears Joh Greene say, “Hey, now, Dix, that was a right smart editorial you wrote for your father about Senator Henderson. You know you're right, Dix, the Senator may be old, but he's still a good man.”

“Thank you, sir. Glad you liked it.”

Joh Greene chuckles and rubs his hands together.

“You know, Dix, I'd like to have a little chat with you, if you can spare the time. We could walk over to the vestry if you got the time to spare. Got a radio over there we can hear the game on. What do you say, Dix? Can I see you on it?”

“Well, sir — ” Dix interrupts his conversation with the Reverend as Major passes them.

Dix says, “Hi, Major.”

“Dix.”

“Who you rooting for, Major?” “I'm not following it, Dix.”

“You're the only one that isn't, Major,” Dix calls after him.

Dix Pirkle is all right, Major thinks, but always goes out of his way. Why? Like his father, some; following in his father's footsteps; working for the
Herald;
chairing committees to raise funds for a new Negro school — the progressive type of Southerner, too progressive to say nigger; not progressive enough to say Negro; so say Nigra. He's all right, though, as all right as a white can get and live in Georgia too. Had his share of troubles besides; losing his wife like that to cancer — and still so young, only nineteen or so; the both of them married right out of High and then she died, leaving him a son under two years … God, and everybody in Paradise knows Dix Pirkle's mother is a mess.

Major forgets Dix and turns up Church Street, remembering again Jack Rowan's joke. He's still mad at it; mad at Jack for telling it; mad at himself for stopping long enough to listen to it.
Park your horse outside and come in.
Yeah, nigger, you never will get to heaven; even if a white man tries to ride you in. That's funny, sure enough, like all Jack's jokes are; Jack's and nine out of ten of the Negroes' in Paradise; always got to feed their bellies with crow in that insidious way; make it a joke they're nothing but “niggers;” take all the traits the white folks say they got — hear
them
tell it all Negro men sleep under tents for thinking about white tail — and make it a joke, and tell it and haw-w, gaw-dog, laugh!

Major sinks his long hands into his khaki-colored cotton trousers, kicks a stone off the sidewalk on Church Street as he heads off in the direction of Brockton Road, the good part of “The Toe,” colored town. He is a strong-looking, six-foot Negro; sixteen, with a straight, sure gait, and dark, alert, solemn eyes. He has an hour to kill before he's due at Hooper's to help Hussie with the barbecue, and he kills such saving hours with Betty James when he can; when she's off on a break from the department store on Main, closed this afternoon because of the World Series.

All along Church, radios and TV sets blare; and down on Main the loudspeaker at the County Courthouse is carrying the game, so the bench-sitters don't have to move a muscle to know the score. Even over at the mill in Galveston, where Major's dad, Bryan, works as a “doffer,” pushing carts of bobbins around and dodging the lint, the game is being piped into the loom and spinning rooms.

The early October sun shines on the pavement, before the pavement ends and the dust and dirt of the red clay of Georgia begins as Major comes into Brockton Place; at the head of The Toe in Paradise. Here there are the rows of nondescript houses huddling near one another, less like the shacks in the tip, where Major himself lives; but still carrying the stigma of the colored in their backyards, for save for a few, the outhouses look and reek the same anywhere, and only a few know plumbing. Not even the James house knows it: Betty calls it James Manor; “Well, welcome to James Manor, Mr. Post,” she always says; and Betty's father is a doctor.

“The point isn't to leave Paradise, Major,” he tells Major when they talk about how Major wants to get the money somehow, God knows
how!
to go off to college and learn to be a doctor himself; then get free from toting for white folks; working sun-up to sundown from one job to the next, even doing sharecropping out at Hooper's when he couldn't get out of it; “The point is, Major, to leave, learn, and then return. Our people here can't spare your kind.”

And the whites can't spare you either, doctor of medicine or not, Major had thought when the doctor had first said it to him; thought that, and remembered an afternoon nine years back when he and Betty stood on the James porch and heard the short, square-shouldered, heavy-set plantation manager from over in Manteo tell the doctor: “Mr. Robertson's got to have extra hands right off. Got a truck waiting on Main to haul you over there.”

The doctor saying: “I'm a doctor. I have my work at the clinic to do.”

The answer barked: “That's what the trouble's all about,
Doctor!”
Fury registered in the cracker's voice, snapping
doctor
snidely. “You boys all go up North and leave the crops to die while you study books to teach you how to come back and sass-ass the land that gave you your breath; and sass-ass the white man that shared everything but his wife with you. Maybe you're holding out for that,
Doctor!”

And the doctor said tiredly: “Sick folks are at the clinic right now waiting for — ”

“Sick niggers sick of doing honest day's work.
Sick?
Plantation's sick too,
Doctor!
Sick because sick niggers don't want to pick. Very, very sick! And you're a doctor,
Doctor,
so c'mon and quit assing around!”

“All right. Yes …” Sighing the ghost sigh of the slave, sighing, “Well, all right,” and starting down the steps.

“And bring them two sassy-assed doctor's coons over there!”

“The boy isn't mine. Please, sir — the girl is only sev — ”

“Bring them, Doctor Black Buck!”

Then Major had his first cotton-picking lesson; in late summer when he was seven; over in Manteo, gotten to by a truck jammed black like sardines. Stoop before the plant, pull from the bolls, slap in the sack, and sing defiance:

But just
sing
it. If you ain't singing keep yo big mouf shet.

“Leave, learn and return … Where'd it ever get you, Doc?” Major had asked him.

“I got two pretty daughters I raised right. Right and well. Now you
know
that. And I got my work over at the clinic, and I got — ”

Plenty of nothin; nothin's plenty for me, Major had finished it in his thoughts.

Two pretty daughters. “One as near white as pidgeon droppings,” Tink Twiddy said once about Betty's big sister, Barbara. “Now how you spose that happen? Musta been one nigger wasn't in the ole woodpile, by goose eyes!”

And Major had told Tink hotly, “She was Doc's by his first wife that died.”

“Oh yeah! By goose eyes I nebber nebber knowed ole Doc James had him white tail before black.”

“Haven't you ever heard of a light-skinned Negro; haven't you ever heard of anything but white tail, black tail! Don't you ever stop thinking of — ”

And then Major Post had turned away from Tink Twiddy, disgusted with himself for bothering to justify anything about Doc James before the likes of Tink Twiddy — and the Tinks, all of them, in Paradise, Georgia, with their perpetual palaver hinting at interracial sexual doings. Major hated the way just everything seemed to get turned into talk like that; everything from a simple conversation about the Jameses to an epithet chalked on an outhouse wall, to a joke told on a street corner.

Major's own family carried on that way; all of them; all except his grandmother, Hussie; and sometimes Major wondered why in hell it was; because as a kid, before he'd grown to hate that talk, he'd gone right along with the rest of them; singing things like:

Before he'd grown to hate that talk; before he'd even known the significance of the talk; when he was no higher than a field weed and still sat in the tin tub with his older sister to bathe, not even sure what the difference was if there was any, he'd learned to sing rhymes like that, tell jokes like that and giggle at them, side by side with learning not to look white folks in the eye; to call them
mister
and expect to be called “boy” by them your whole life long because in their minds Negroes never became men, no matter years.

Why in hell was it, he wondered; where in hell did that talk belong; why? Once he asked Betty's father.

Who said, “Well, Major, well, I know. Now how can I explain?”

“What I don't see, Doc, is why Negroes say it. Who wants white women?”

“Well, Major, well — look at it this way. Since the Negro got to this country, Southern men have been worrying about protecting Southern white womanhood, see. You know how they say, ‘Well, if we let the rule get broken; next thing we know one of them Nigras is marrying our sister.' “