Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (47 page)

From the worn central butte round which the colony
swarmed, the panting voices of the Calvary Baptist Church mounted, in
an exhausting and unceasing frenzy, from seven o'clock until two in
the morning, in their wild jungle wail of sin and love and death. The
dark was hived with flesh and mystery.  Rich wells of laughter
bubbled everywhere.  The catforms slid.  Everything was
immanent. Everything was far.  Nothing could be touched.

In this old witch-magic of the dark, he began to know
the awful innocence of evil, the terrible youth of an ancient race;
his lips slid back across his teeth, he prowled in darkness with
loose swinging arms, and his eyes shone.  Shame and terror,
indefinable, surged through him.  He could not face the question
in his heart.

A good part of his subscription list was solidly
founded among decent and laborious darkies--barbers, tailors,
grocers, pharmacists, and ginghamed black housewives, who paid him
promptly on a given day each week, greeting him with warm smiles full
of teeth, and titles of respect extravagant and kindly: 
"Mister," "Colonel," "General,"
"Governor," and so on.  They all knew Gant.

But another part--the part in which his desire and
wonder met?were "floaters," young men and women of
precarious means, variable lives, who slid mysteriously from cell to
cell, who peopled the night with their flitting stealth.  He
sought these phantoms fruitlessly for weeks, until he discovered that
he might find them only on Sunday morning, tossed like heavy sacks
across one another, in the fetid dark of a tenement room, a
half-dozen young men and women, in a snoring exhaustion of
whisky-stupor and sexual depletion.
 
 

One Saturday evening, in the fading red of a summer
twilight, he returned to one of these tenements, a rickety
three-story shack, that cropped its two lower floors down a tall clay
bank at the western ledge, near the whites.  Two dozen men and
women lived here.  He was on the search for a woman named Ella
Corpening.  He had never been able to find her: she was weeks
behind in her subscriptions.  But her door stood open to-night:
a warm waft of air and cooking food came up to him.  He
descended the rotten steps that climbed the bank.

Ella Corpening sat facing the door in a rocking
chair, purring lazily in the red glow of a little kitchen range, with
her big legs stretched comfortably out on the floor.  She was a
mulatto of twenty-six years, a handsome woman of Amazonian
proportions, with smooth tawny skin.

She was dressed in the garments of some former
mistress: she wore a brown woollen skirt, patent-leather shoes with
high suede tops pearl-buttoned, and gray silk hose.  Her long
heavy arms shone darkly through the light texture of a freshly
laundered white shirtwaist.  A lacing of cheap blue ribbon
gleamed across the heavy curve of her breasts.

There was a bubbling pot of cabbage and sliced fat
pork upon the stove.

"Paper boy," said Eugene.  "Come
to collect."

"Is you de boy?" drawled Ella Corpening
with a lazy movement of her arm.  "How much does I owe?"

"$1.20," he answered.  He looked
meaningfully at one extended leg, where, thrust in below the knee, a
wadded bank-note gleamed dully.

"Dat's my rent money," she said. 
"Can't give you dat.  Dollah-twenty!"  She
brooded.  "Uh!  Uh!" she grunted pleasantly. 
"Don't seem lak it ought to be dat much."

"It is, though," he said, opening his
account book.

"It mus' is," she agreed, "if de book
say so."

She meditated luxuriously for a moment.

"Does you collec' Sunday mawnin'?" she
asked.

"Yes," he said.

"You come roun' in de mawnin'," she said
hopefully.  "I'll have somethin' fo' yuh, sho.  I'se
waitin' fo' a white gent'man now. He's goin' gib me a dollah."

She moved her great limbs slowly, and smiled at him. 
Forked pulses beat against his eyes.  He gulped dryly: his legs
were rotten with excitement.

"What's--what's he going to give you a dollar
for?" he muttered, barely audible.

"Jelly Roll," said Ella Corpening.

He moved his lips twice, unable to speak.  She
got up from her chair.

"What yo' want?" she asked softly. 
"Jelly Roll?"

"Want to see--to see!" he gasped.

She closed the door opening on the bank and locked
it.  The stove cast a grated glow from its open ashpan. 
There was a momentary rain of red cinders into the pit.

Ella Corpening opened the door beyond that, leading
to another room.  There were two dirty rumpled beds; the single
window was bolted and covered by an old green shade.  She lit a
smoky little lamp, and turned the wick low.

There was a battered little dresser with a mottled
glass, from which the blistered varnish was flaking.  Over the
screened hearth, on a low mantel, there was a Kewpie doll, sashed
with pink ribbon, a vase with fluted edges and gilt flowers, won at a
carnival, and a paper of pins.  A calendar, also, by courtesy of
the Altamont Coal and Ice Company, showing an Indian maid paddling
her canoe down an alley of paved moonlight, and a religious motto in
flowered scrollwork, framed in walnut: God Loves Them Both.

"What yo' want?" she whispered, facing him.

Far off, he listened to the ghost of his own voice.

"Take off your clothes."

Her skirt fell in a ring about her feet.  She
took off her starched waist.  In a moment, save for her hose,
she stood naked before him.

Her breath came quickly, her full tongue licked
across her mouth.

"Dance!" he cried.  "Dance!"

She began to moan softly, while an undulant tremor
flowed through her great yellow body; her hips and her round heavy
breasts writhed slowly in a sensual rhythm.

Her straight oiled hair fell across her neck in a
thick shock.  She extended her arms for balance, the lids closed
over her large yellow eyeballs.  She came near him.  He
felt her hot breath on his face, the smothering flood of her
breasts.  He was whirled like a chip in the wild torrent of her
passion.  Her powerful yellow hands gripped his slender arms
round like bracelets.  She shook him to and fro slowly,
fastening him tightly against her pelt.

He strained back desperately against the door,
drowning in her embrace.

"Get-'way nigger.  Get-'way," he
panted thickly.

Slowly she released him: without opening her eyes,
moaning, she slid back as if he had been a young tree.  She
sang, in a wailing minor key, with unceasing iteration:
 

    
"Jelly Roll! 
Je-e-e-ly Roll!"--
 

her voice falling each time to a low moan.

Her face, the broad column of her throat, and her
deep-breasted torso were rilled with sweat.  He fumbled blindly
for the door, lunged across the outer room and, gasping, found his
way into the air.  Her chant, unbroken and undisturbed by his
departure, followed him up the flimsy steps.  He did not pause
to get his breath until he came to the edge of the market square. 
Below him in the valley, across on the butte, the smoky lamps of
Niggertown flared in the dusk.  Faint laughter, rich,
jungle-wild, welled up from hived darkness.  He heard lost
twangling notes, the measured thump of distant feet; beyond, above,
more thin, more far than all, the rapid wail of sinners in a church.
 
 

23
 

[Greek text]
 

He did not tell the Leonards that he was working in
the early morning.  He knew they would oppose his employment,
and that their opposition would manifest itself in the triumphant
argument of lowered grades.  Also, Margaret Leonard, he knew,
would talk ominously of health undermined, of the promise of future
years destroyed, of the sweet lost hours of morning sleep that could
never be regained.  He was really more robust now than he had
ever been.  He was heavier and stronger.  But he sometimes
felt a gnawing hunger for sleep: he grew heavy at mid-day, revived in
the afternoon, but found it difficult to keep his sleepy brain fixed
on a book after eight o'clock in the evening.

He learned little of discipline.  Under the care
of the Leonards he came even to have a romantic contempt for it. 
Margaret Leonard had the marvelous vision, of great people, for
essences.  She saw always the dominant color, but she did not
always see the shadings. She was an inspired sentimentalist. 
She thought she "knew boys": she was proud of her knowledge
of them.  In fact, however, she had little knowledge of them. 
She would have been stricken with horror if she could have known the
wild confusion of adolescence, the sexual nightmares of puberty, the
grief, the fear, the shame in which a boy broods over the dark world
of his desire.  She did not know that every boy, caged in from
confession by his fear, is to himself a monster.

She did not have knowledge.  But she had
wisdom.  She found immediately a person's quality.  Boys
were her heroes, her little gods.  She believed that the world
was to be saved, life redeemed, by one of them.  She saw the
flame that burns in each of them, and she guarded it.  She tried
somehow to reach the dark gropings toward light and articulation, of
the blunt, the stolid, the shamefast.  She spoke a calm low word
to the trembling racehorse, and he was still.

Thus, he made no confessions.  He was still
prison-pent.  But he turned always to Margaret Leonard as toward
the light: she saw the unholy fires that cast their sword-dance on
his face, she saw the hunger and the pain, and she fed him--majestic
crime!--on poetry.

Whatever of fear or shame locked them in careful
silence, whatever decorous pretense of custom guarded their tongues,
they found release in the eloquent symbols of verse.  And by
that sign, Margaret was lost to the good angels.  For what care
the ambassadors of Satan, for all the small fidelities of the letter
and the word, if from the singing choir of earthly methodism we can
steal a single heart--lift up, flame-tipped, one great lost soul to
the high sinfulness of poetry?

The wine of the grape had never stained her mouth,
but the wine of poetry was inextinguishably mixed with her blood,
entombed in her flesh.

By the beginning of his fifteenth year Eugene knew
almost every major lyric in the language.  He possessed them to
their living core, not in a handful of scattered quotations, but
almost line for line.  His thirst was drunken, insatiate: he
added to his hoard entire scenes from Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, which
he read by himself in German; the lyrics of Heine, and several folk
songs.  He committed to memory the entire passage in the
Anabasis, the mounting and triumphal Greek which described the moment
when the starving remnant of the Ten Thousand had come at length to
the sea, and sent up their great cry, calling it by name.  In
addition, he memorized some of the sonorous stupidities of Cicero,
because of the sound, and a little of Caesar, terse and lean.

The great lyrics of Burns he knew from music, from
reading, or from hearing Gant recite them.  But "Tam
O'Shanter" Margaret Leonard read to him, her eyes sparkling with
laughter as she read:
 

    
"In hell they'll roast
thee like a herrin'."
 

The shorter Wordsworth pieces he had read at grammar
school.  "My heart leaps up," "I wandered lonely
as a cloud," and "Behold her, single in the field," he
had known for years; but Margaret read him the sonnets and made him
commit "The world is too much with us" to memory.  Her
voice trembled and grew low with passion when she read it.

He knew all the songs in Shakespeare's plays, but the
two that moved him most were:  "O mistress mine, where are
you roaming?" which blew a far horn in his heart, and the great
song from Cymbeline:  "Fear no more the heat o' the sun." 
He had tried to read all the sonnets, and failed, because their woven
density was too much for his experience, but he had read, and
forgotten, perhaps half of them, and remembered a few which burned up
from the page, strangely, immediately, like lamps for him.

Those that he knew were:  "When, in the
chronicle of wasted time," "To me, fair friend, you never
can be old," "Let me not to the marriage of true minds,"
"The expense of spirit in a waste of shame," "When to
the sessions of sweet silent thought," "Shall I compare
thee to a summer's day?" "From you have I been absent in
the spring," and "That time of year thou mayest in me
behold," the greatest of all, which Margaret brought him to, and
which shot through him with such electric ecstasy when he came to
"Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," that
he could hardly hold his course unbroken through the rest of it.

He read all the plays save Timon, Titus Andronicus,
Coriolanus, and King John, but the only play that held his interest
from first to last was King Lear.  With most of the famous
declamatory passages he had been familiar, for years, by Gant's
recitation, and now they wearied him.  And all the wordy
pinwheels of the clowns, which Margaret laughed at dutifully, and
exhibited as specimens of the master's swingeing wit, he felt vaguely
were very dull.  He never had any confidence in Shakespeare's
humor--his Touchstones were not only windy fools, but dull ones.