There are two chances. There is a chance that the two languages are one—that the place may be a person. Then I need only give these pages to Ruth; she need only take them. Is that what I sometimes fancy I see between others—a person-place where, circled in safety, one need not speak at all?
Or there is the other chance—do I long for it?—that some night, raising my head to hear, I shall recognize—not whom—but
where.
It is getting light. Hours must have gone by since I wrote that.
I do not walk away. I see that clear. I do not walk away.
I walk toward.
Bit by bit I shall drag myself up, out of the stream. Haply I think on—there.
I walk toward.
F
ACING ME, THROUGH THE
warped door of the privy, a stretch of mongrel fields led behind the town, along past the Negro quarter, to the railroad line. In the half-luminous Indian summer night the weeds looked of an even height, as if they were some bearing crop. Beyond their motionless rim, over near Johnny’s place, the red signal-eye burned and waned, blinking for the 8:38 freight, still a mile away.
I went outside and waited. It was a quiet night for market day; near us there were no houses close enough for me to see, but over in the black-brown jumble of niggertown, in “the backs” where they paraded in the evenings, all seemed nested down. I could hear the train coming now, but the hour must be later than I thought; this was not the slow freight, creaking along like an endless cradle, to the jerk and settle of its couplings, but an undertow that shook my belly with the ground. This was the 9:50 coming up from the South, all the way from the Gulf maybe, north to the next big city whose name I did not even know; this was the passenger-flyer, going north.
A huge white core grew toward me, splaying the dark. It rushed past, whistle mute. Under its hard breath, the weedy sidings stood up like wheat. Then it vanished, with a sound of squeezed air, and I heard it for a while far off, running on to all the other small towns ahead that burned and waned. This was the “to-from Memphis” train.
I put my head on my knees and wept. I wept for my mother, who, having let me see that I was not enough for her, had made me see that she was no longer enough for me. This is the real parting; when she died I did not need to weep.
I wept for things as they were. The stars, hanging low, crept golden into my tears, and I wept on because I might never know how things ought to be. And when I was done, I went looking for Johnny, because he knew both.
The signal light lay straight across field, but I took the long way round, delaying. As I walked, I kept touching the envelope of money in my pocket, seeing the two of us, Johnny and me, sitting almost like men together, while I treated him down at the café. As I went on, the image failed me—but I went on. This is how actionless people thrust themselves into action—first the wild image of what will never believably come to be, then the plodding, steadfast as a clerk’s, to make it come to be.
Ahead, in the backs, it was dark as a cave, but I had often walked there of an evening, for the sake of the distant demi-company of the blacks. Their company—veiled glances and a soft return to their own concerns—was a kind of music to me, a negligent night music to which I need only half listen, and the short, blocked lane of their lives, blurred with oil lamps and people leaning, was a place where I need not watch. It was a painting I walked through, velvet unison of skin and dark and the candle-spurt of voices. This is the power of the ghetto for others; it releases from the friction of kin. The eye of the ghetto absolved me from being the eye; it was not possible to enter here.
But when I came to the lane it was still, so still that I stood in wonder. Here was the street that never went to bed, all of it, all the night long—tin battling paper in the yard heaps, doors flung and visiting, smells and shadows in a chutney mingle. And now it was like a space where a lane should have been. I heard the leaves scuttling like small animals, and my own breath in my throat. Then, as my eyes widened, the houses pearled toward me out of the dark, chimneys quiet, porches hanging akimbo, like people come upon in the sprawl of sleep, and all the blinds were drawn.
They are at the fair, I thought, but there was no fair that I knew of anywhere near. A street that was a fair to itself, where did such a street go?
I walked down the length of it, almost to the end. Then, behind me, I felt it, a sigh of breath relayed from house to house, a rustle like the great, parting lashes of a single eye, and I knew that they were there.
When I was almost to the last house, I heard a screen door wheeze. I stood in my tracks, behind a bush.
“Louie-lamb?” a woman’s voice said. “’at you, chile, Louie-lamb?”
A man’s whisper came, rough. “Hesh, you. He sure to be in safe somewhere. Crazy, you hesh.”
The door closed. And then I heard the woman’s voice again, outside it, nearer, low on the same words and the same note. I hid my face from it. She came by me and went down the lane, and all the way along it I heard her interval, like a mourning dove, like bubble with a break in it, “Louie-lamb? Louie-lamb?”
Then I cut and ran, running across the remaining fields, almost up to the main line, out into the light, until I no longer felt afraid. I had never had it before, the fear that eats the South; I never had it again. But I remember well how it feels to have to cover the white face, and in justice to Semple I will set it down here. This is how it feels—I remember it yet. I felt—that a dove is a bird that should speak only by day. That, behind their drawn blinds, the demi-people doubled, and became a company of men. And that, wherever their blind was drawn, it was drawn against me.
Yonder, as people said down here, was Johnny’s house; near it, the signal light, steady now until dawn. It must be pleasant, I thought, living under that unwavering glow; waking in the false damp of the mornings here one might take it for the fresh, fogbound glow of coals. I knew the outside of his house the way everyone in Tuscana knew it, all of us coins rubbing together in the same pocket. But the never-entered house of a friend is a special mystery—it is his deshabille. Whatever his truth is, it lies there.
Where I had come to was the old front of what might once have been a stationmaster’s shed—it was blank and closed, all the openings boarded up with faded red planks the railroad must have put there long ago. Someone had shored up the roof with two-by-fours, cross-hatched over the huge, peeling letters of a painted hoarding for cattle feed. In the rear, in front of a number of lean-to’s added on, one to the other, like dominoes, the way the Negroes did, was the yard where I had seen Johnny’s blue-eyed brothers and sisters, in their Hunky pinafores limed with fowl droppings, staring out at passers-by from coveys of dock and creeper, or chattering in their own language at the guinea hens that roosted in the trees.
I walked around the shed to the center lean-to, where light seamed around a door and came faintly through the pocked shade in a window to one side. There were no steps. Standing there, in the quiet smell of the sty, I put my hand on the door. I touched his door, and I could not knock.
I took my money out then, squeezing it for the courage in it. He had never come looking for me so; I knew well that in our afternoons together I served only as a point from which he might go looking for himself. With my fist raised and silent, I thought of how he had never once exchanged with me that precious bit of magic: “Call for me.” Stroking his door with noiseless knuckles, I whispered it aloud. “Call for me.” Standing there on the brink of his mystery, I wanted for once to show him mine.
The whispers we speak so intensely to ourselves, or to the untelepathic air, do they in the end erode us with our own impotence, or sometimes, bearing us forward on the potent scent of ourselves, send us part of the way toward where we reach? When I put my hand back in my pocket, it brushed a small telephone-address book that, phoneless and with nothing to record, I had bought some months before and had carried everywhere with me since. In the pink light shining over my shoulder, I turned its bare, dog-eared pages until I came to one with a tab marked F—for Fortuna. I tore it out and wrote upon it. He might know my writing or guess who it was from. But if he did not come in answer I should never know why; I could pretend to myself that I had given nothing away. So I wrote down my whisper and left it unsigned:
Johnny. Call for me.
There was a broken mail basket hanging by a string from a nail in the top of the window frame to the right of the door. I stepped up on the uneven sill of the window and stuck my message on the nail. And as I did so, I saw into the upper pane, where there was no shade. At a table in the foreground, old Frazer, the night watchman, in for a visit during his stint, sat over a cup and saucer. In the oil lamp light his huge, dewlapped face brooded like a hound’s, but everyone knew him for a happy, fluting old man who had come to the end of a snug life with his berth assured, who leaned against the railroad hierarchy—that had brought him so safely to its bottom rung—like an old, moronic prince leaning against his ladder of kings. At the side, in the back, there were dim pallets where the children must be sleeping, and on a rag rug near the table a boy of about seven slept with his arm flung across a glinting toy.
Mrs. Fortuna came out from somewhere in the rear—the old closed-off shed it must be—accompanied by a lantern-chinned man I did not recognize as one of Semple’s crowd. Her earringed moon-face looked the same as it had the times I had seen her on the street, above the same man’s jersey and Mother Hubbard; her feet were bare. The man let his arm drop from her shoulder, strutted across the room in a silent buck and wing, and sat down near Frazer. She brought two more cups and the three of them sat there, sipping; once the man got up and scooped the sleeping boy from the floor, bore him into the rear, and returned with the toy, a harmonica, in his long palm. He put the harmonica to his lips, blowing it without making a sound, and sat down again, shuffling his feet and digging his head to some rhythm he carried inside. Frazer snuffled in his cup and protruded his lips in reverie.
It was the pantomime of people too easy to bother talking, and I noted, too, the easy, mindless way they all touched one another, Johnny’s mother leaning a hand on old Frazer’s nape while she served him, Frazer staying the pot she held, and brushing her a thank-you, the second man picking up the boy or setting straight an askew comb in Mrs. Fortuna’s hair. It was not just male-female touching but something else, something I remembered of Fulham, of certain neighbors there from whom my mother had schooled me away—the congruous group-touch of those so beneath class as to be only people. At home, the higher the caste the more socially untouchable, and it was toward this that people of my mother’s class froze themselves, in the end even exceeding their betters, and losing the other thing forever, even in their awkward, two-by-two congruities of love.
It could not have been long, yet it seemed a long time that I stayed there, a valve in my heart opening and closing, recognizing even then something that would not remain in the picture if I entered, but was only present when seen from outside. Voyeur—that smart sneer of our nerve-triggered salons—we are all voyeurs to the limits of our talent and understanding; even my own habit is only a fortune grown out of bounds. What we see in the scene in the window frame, in the flat across the areaway, in the farmhouse ridden past at twilight, these scenes of people moving with grave, unconscious sweetness at mealtime, impermanence arrested with the holiness of a Vermeer, is the sweet kernel of the human condition—man budded domestic for a moment, on a wild planet. I rested my arms on the window frame and watched them, the reason why I had come forgotten, in this first eavesdropping of so many others to be.
“Get down from there, you!” A clout from behind knocked me into the darkness below. I fell on my ribs, the wind out of me, my cheek against the greasy earth. Somebody hulked over me, swinging a bucket. I had not caught whose voice it was, and I could not yet see his face. Then, as I raised myself on my elbow, I saw his outline—Johnny’s—looming over me the way it had the day I had asked him the question on the hill. He bent over me, breathing hard.
“I told Lemon, he, any more you peepers sneak around here again—” he said, and then, peering, he knew me. His jaw fell. He stared at me, betrayed.
I could not look straight back at him, the way an animal cannot. When we are accused, guiltless of we know not what, we have still a great nameless flow of residual guilt that rushes toward the accused spot the way blood rushes toward pricked skin.
He reached down slowly and helped me to my feet. “Y’ oughtn’t to listen to Lemon,” he said. Something, no noise, made him glance back at his own house. And when he turned again, he could not look at me.
I knew Lemon and his crowd at school, old as Johnny or older, boys who were thinly tall or stunted, who swaggered tobacco-chew between teeth still green with childish tartar, and claimed the pustules on their cheeks for a more manly disease. As I lagged behind their undercover ferment of talk, I had sometimes got a piece of what half-knowledge I had, but they had never deigned to notice me.
He bit his lip, looking down. “Don’t listen to them,” he said. And even I could hear what else he was saying without saying it.
Listen to me.
“I don’t go with Lemon,” I said quickly.
“You mean, you come by here on your own?”
I nodded. I wanted him to ask me why now. I felt happy at his asking me anything.
He stepped back, squinting, the bucket dangling from his hand. “What you come here for?”
I didn’t know what to say. I hung my head, not knowing how to say it.
“What you come for!”
“I—”
“What you come sneaking at the window for? Going to write something on it, maybe?”
I didn’t want to say why I had come now. I wanted to hide it.
He stretched his neck. “Just passing by, whyn’t you knock at the door?”