A Conversation with the Mann (8 page)

So, instead, the races got stirred. Me and Mo, maybe because we had signed up together, got assigned to the same koogie along
with another young black named Kevin. Three of us, which meant as we walked into our cabin there were seven pairs of white
eyes to give us some broiling stares.

Me and Mo and Kevin just took them, happy for the moment that was all we were taking, picked out three beds, and put what
belongings we had down. It was a simple act we very instantly found out was strictly wrongheaded.

“What you niggers doin'?” a white boy said more than asked, and said with all the casual menace he could put together. Following
so quickly after the complimentary slur I'd gotten back at the train station, I had the feeling black-hating whites were going
to be easy to come by.

This black-hating white was tall and thin, pale so the blue/green veins that laced his arms—raised up and pulsing hot—were
as easy to read as lines on a Jim Crow map. All roads led to trouble.

Again the white boy wanted to know: “What you niggers doin'?”

Li'l Mo and Kevin said nothing to that, having no strong desire to respond to being called niggers. At the same time, I had
no strong desire to get handed a beating for not answering a question that was, real obviously, directed at us.

I said: “Picking out bunks.”

The long, tall white boy seemed to find that funny. He laughed.

The other whites laughed.

“No you ain't. That ain't the nigger section. Ain't no niggers allowed over there. Now, you best pick up all your darkie shit,
move it out of the white section and on over to the nigger part of the cabin.”

Sure. That'd be fine. But nobody bothered to tell us just where exactly the non-white part of the koogie was. We three blacks
gathered up our things, took a guess, and moved over to another bunch of bunks. We guessed wrong.

“That look like the nigger section to you?”

And the chorus of white boys started in again with their cackling.

We moved again. Me leading the way, then Kevin. Mo brought up the rear, deliberately slow about it.

“Naw, that ain't the nigger section.”

More laughing.

I was getting the idea; far as these boys were concerned, there was no place for us. Inside the koogie or anywhere else.

That wasn't quite true.

“That's where you niggers go. Over there.” The white boy pointed at the far corner of the koogie. “Now, you all coons just
move your bunks on over there.” He laughed again.

The other white boys laughed.

I wasn't sure if any of them had traveled up together, or even knew each other previously. I didn't think so. I figured instead
they were just seven white strangers who'd formed a fast friendship over the mutual pleasure that came with the opportunity
to rough around some blacks.

Me, Mo, and Kevin stood heads down but not moving. At least, outside of some nervous twitching from me, not moving for the
corner where we'd been directed.

“You all hear what I'm tellin' you?” The white boy wasn't chuckling anymore, wasn't laughing. Neither were his new gang of
pals. They were popping their knuckles, twisting their fingers, squeezing their fists… . Their hands, impatient with all the
taunting, anxious to get in on some of the fun.

“What? Y'all too stupid to move a bunk? Lemme show you how to move a bunk.” The tall white boy grabbed up the bunk closest
to me, slung it for a corner of the cabin, slung it hard so that it crashed to its side, the mattress and linens flying off.
“That” —the white boy huffed, breathless from the physical explosion—“is how you dumb-ass niggers move a bunk.”

“Maybe we're dumb, but you're the one doing the moving for us.” I was trying to be funny. I was thinking a laugh might just
lighten things up. If I had been thinking at all, I would've kept my mouth shut. As it was, I just sounded like I was trying
to be wise.

For a long couple of ticks nobody said anything, everybody stunned silent by my unintentional uppitiness. It would take the
white boys only a moment to recover. It would take them only a moment to decide they needed to hammer some obedience into
me. My body, working one step ahead of my thoughts, started to go for a bunk and move it over to where the other was strewn
in the corner—the nigger section of the cabin. I refused to feel embarrassed or humiliated by my actions. My thinking? I could
get beat at home. I didn't need to travel cross-country for more of the same. So if moving a bunk kept me bruise-free …

I heard more fingers cracking. Not the whites'. Now it was Mo's fists that were getting impatient. He wasn't about to do any
bunk moving. He was fixing to have a go at these boys like he was Char-lie Bad-Brother, all set to mess them up, solo if he
had to, one-hundred-percent-style.

The tall white boy saw what Mo was doing, saw the fire stoking in him, and got with a peckerwood grin. Nigger wanted trouble?
Fine. He'd give the nigger trouble.

Violence was coming. It was crowding up the joint, shoving aside logic and reason.

“Hey!”

All of us, black same as white, turned and looked. In the door was another man. White. Tough-looking. Not tough as in big
and beefy but like he'd spent a lot of years doing the kind of hard labor that gives the whole body durability. He had on
a shirt, the camp's logo sewn on the breast.

“What ya doin'?” the man in the door asked, his voice a mixture of annoyance and Southern drawl. The drawl made me think the
annoyance came from him almost being deprived of the chance to lay in a few I-hate-coons-too licks.

For whatever reason, because no one else did, I started to answer the man. “We was told t—”

“What ya doin'?” the camp man asked again, ignoring me and talking directly to the tall white boy directing the confrontation.

“Just having some play with the niggers,” he said all happy with himself. He might as well have been recounting fishing stories
with drinking buddies. “Niggers don't know where niggerville is. I told them to put their bunks—”

“Ah'll tell yew where their bunks go.” The camp man came down hard with that, using his voice as a cleaver to cut the boy
off.

The boy started up again. “But he was—”

And again he got shot down. “Their bunks go jus' where they were.” Tone underlined the camp man's words.

The white boy sucked at his lip, grumbled: “Shit.”

The camp man took a step for the boy. One strong step that the boy backed from. Maybe propped up by his cackling gallery he
thought he was big enough to stir up trouble with a few far-from-home blacks, but under his pomp of rage the boy was just
a boy, and knew better than to try the same with this man.

The man: “Yew say somethin'?”

“No, sir.” The white boy's eyes flitted around the cabin as if trying to keep track of a buzzing fly.

All the other white boys did some looking around. They looked around, looked down. Generally they looked pretty stupid. Their
leader getting corrected took the fight out of them.

“All right then,” the man said just strong enough not to invite any challenge. “Le's git this heyah place cleaned up, and
ah don't wanna heyah about no mo' trouble outta this cabin.”

The man, whose name, or at least the name he went by, I would later come to know was Dax, started back to whatever he'd been
doing before taking the time to referee a race riot.

Kevin, the other one of the three of “us” said as Dax passed: “Thank you, sir.”

“Don't yew niggrahs think nothin' 'bout it,” he said without even looking at us. Then he was out the door.

Not more than a couple of hours in Washington and my work trip was turning into a living classroom. I'd thought Dax had done
what he'd done, stopped the fight, because he was a decent person. He wasn't. To him me, Mo, and Kevin were nothing more than
a few niggers. Not people to be treated equally, just animals that shouldn't be treated badly for no good reason.

T
HE WAR WAS OVER
. The boom was on. Families left cities. Suburbs were born. Houses weeded up across the country, giving birth to entire towns
overnight. Cedar Hill. Cockrell Hill. Levit-town. Lakewood. One hundred houses a day were started at each. One hundred houses
a day, and still not enough for all the people who rat-raced after their piece of the American dream: hi-fied dens and pink-flamingoed
lawns. The camp ran full throttle six days a week to fill the demand for lumber. Dawn to dark the forest rang with the sound
of chopped trees screaming as they twisted and snapped against their trunks before thudding dead to the earth. There were
a dozen different tasks to be done, each tagged with their own slang: donkeys, donkey punchers, skidders, whistle punks, high
climbers. They all sounded unique and exciting. They all amounted to the same thing—moving trees. Chopping trees and moving
trees. Milling trees and moving trees. Clearing the land of every tree that stood. Nothing fancy about it. The sweat was ordinary.
The muscle ache was the same that came with any other grind. The only thing special about logging was that you learned to
respect the boss. The boss
was
the trees. Douglas firs, Sitka spruces, western red cedars, Port Orford cedars. Some three hundred feet tall and over a thousand
pounds. When the boss got felled, when it was being skidded, you learned to get out of its way. Get out or get hurt. Hurt
if you were lucky. Otherwise all you got was dead for your twenty-five dollars a week.

Twenty-five dollars that we didn't really get anyway. Every worker had a passbook, and at the end of each week a company man
would write in it what we earned to be settled up at summer's end. We never got cash. The company men figured if you didn't
have cash you couldn't get into any trouble. You couldn't go into town and get drunk. You also couldn't take what you earned
and run off in the middle of the night. All you could do was keep working. Keep up your respect for the boss six days out
of seven.

On the seventh day we rested. We spent the mornings gathered in various worship groups praying or singing or whatever. Once
religion was out of the way we sat around playing cards, smoking, paging through mail-order skin magazines. For lack of booze,
a few guys shook up a cocktail of Aqua Velva and Kool-Aid. Some got high off the mix. Some got a free ride to the hospital.

Almost always we stayed segregated. You might see the occasional white with blacks, or the rarer black with a bunch of whites.
Mostly the races kept to themselves and the whites—generally the southern whites—made it plain they wanted things that way.
You could hear them talking together about something or other—the weather, a story about back home, how somebody earlier in
the day, not paying attention, almost got taken out by the boss. They'd be talking about nothing in particular; then you'd
hear it from them, the word: nigger. Nigger or coon or jig or darkie. You'd hear the word in a sentence, not spoken in anger,
but used as if it were just another part of the language. Apple. Sky. Boat. Nigger. That was the frightening thing, how easy
it came to them. How commonplace their hate was. How rooted racism was in them. They were good whites, and we were black dogs
and that's all there was to it.

Race mixing was not encouraged. Race mixing was not tolerated.

There was one young fellow from Michigan, white boy, who didn't much seem to care if someone was white or black or otherwise.
He'd sit and talk and spend time with one person as equally as he would another. One night he got taken—got dragged—out into
the woods by some other whites. He was found the next morning naked, freezing, and spilling blood from where he'd had a fat,
coarse tree branch repeatedly, violently shoved into his butt-hole. All the management had to say about things was: “Should've
known better than stir up race trouble,” then sent the fellow back to Michigan.

Race mixing was not encouraged. Race mixing was not tolerated.

After spending most the day resting up from the week that'd passed, getting ready for the week to come, we'd all go to the
main hall for dinner, eat segregated, then go back to our same color-correct groups and spend the evening entertaining ourselves
with songs and music from guitars and harmonicas and Jew's harps. I couldn't play any of those. I couldn't sing. I could tell
jokes, though. That I could do. I would bust up the boys with some bits I'd heard from comics on
Toast of the Town
and observations about working at the camp. It was enough to give everyone a fair laugh. I guess I was funny. Anyway, I was
funny enough to get some notice. One Sunday after joking around, Dax pulled me aside. He told me he was putting together an
amateur show for the following Sunday, a chance for the guys with talent to entertain the ones without. He'd heard me telling
jokes and asked if I wanted to do a few bits. I didn't even have to think about it. Just the idea of being in front of a crowd,
having people hoot and clap for me same as they did for the TV comics, gave me a jazz.

“Real glad to hear that,” Dax said. “Figure we ought have one of you for the rest of the colored boys.”

The next couple of days got spent trying to work up a routine. Excitement kept me from thinking of much else. Not thinking
of much else almost got my head taken off when I got into “the bite of a line,” the snap of a tow cable that sent it flailing
like a steel whip. To this day I believe ducking my father's blows gave me the speed to dodge the line. Most of it. While
I was getting stitches where the cable had torn my shoulder, I made the obvious decision to save my joke-arranging for nights
as I lay in bed. I'd mumble bits to myself while my worn-out body begged me for sleep.

Sunday night came around. The main hall was packed with people—workers, management. Everyone wanted to see the show, sup port
their friends. That, and in the middle of a forest in Washington State with no money to spend and nowhere to spend it, an
amateur night was the best and only bet. Some of the boys in the camp were not untalented, and the ones Dax had picked for
the show were very good. Good singers. Good instrument players. The excitement I'd been feeling through the week got dialed
over to nervousness, only then the gap between being funny for a few people and being horribly unfunny for several hundred
becoming obvious to me. I felt something tapping against my leg. I looked down. It was my shaking hand.