Black Boy (27 page)

I shook my head. Harrison sat, but still played with the open knife. I began to doubt. Was he really angry with me? Was he waiting until I turned my back to stab me? I was in torture.

“I suppose it’s fun for white men to see niggers fight,” I said, forcing a laugh.

“But you might’ve killed me,” Harrison said.

“To white men we’re like dogs or cocks,” I said.

“I don’t want to cut you,” Harrison said.

“And I don’t want to cut you,” I said.

Standing well out of each other’s reach, we discussed the prob
lem and decided that we would keep silent about our conference. We would not let Mr. Olin know that we knew that he was egging us to fight. We agreed to ignore any further provocations. At one o’clock I went back to the factory. Mr. Olin was waiting for me, his manner grave, his face serious.

“Did you see that Harrison nigger?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I lied.

“Well, he still has that knife for you,” he said.

Hate tightened in me. But I kept a dead face.

“Did you buy a knife yet?” he asked me.

“No, sir,” I answered.

“Do you want to use mine?” he asked. “You’ve got to protect yourself, you know.”

“No, sir. I’m not afraid,” I said.

“Nigger, you’re a fool,” he spluttered. “I thought you had some sense! Are you going to just let that nigger cut your heart out? His boss gave
him
a knife to use against
you!
Take this knife, nigger, and stop acting crazy!”

I was afraid to look at him; if I had looked at him I would have had to tell him to leave me alone, that I knew he was lying, that I knew he was no friend of mine, that I knew if anyone had thrust a knife through my heart he would simply have laughed. But I said nothing. He was the boss and he could fire me if he did not like me. He laid an open knife on the edge of his workbench, about a foot from my hand. I had a fleeting urge to pick it up and give it to him, point first into his chest. But I did nothing of the kind. I picked up the knife and put it into my pocket.

“Now, you’re acting like a nigger with some sense,” he said.

As I worked Mr. Olin watched me from his machine. Later when I passed him he called me.

“Now, look here, boy,” he began. “We told that Harrison nigger to stay out of this building, and leave you alone, see? But I can’t protect you when you go home. If that nigger starts at you when you are on your way home, you stab him before he gets a chance to stab you, see?”

I avoided looking at him and remained silent.

“Suit yourself, nigger,” Mr. Olin said. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I had to make my round of errands to deliver eyeglasses and I stole a few minutes to run across the street to talk to Harrison. Harrison was sullen and bashful, wanting to trust me, but afraid. He told me that Mr. Olin had telephoned his boss and had told him to tell Harrison that I had planned to wait for him at the back entrance of the building at six o’clock and stab him. Harrison and I found it difficult to look at each other; we were upset and distrustful. We were not really angry at each other; we knew that the idea of murder had been planted in each of us by the white men who employed us. We told ourselves again and again that we did not agree with the white men; we urged ourselves to keep faith in each other. Yet there lingered deep down in each of us a suspicion that maybe one of us was trying to kill the other.

“I’m not angry with you, Harrison,” I said.

“I don’t wanna fight nobody,” Harrison said bashfully, but he kept his hand in his pocket on his knife.

Each of us felt the same shame, felt how foolish and weak we were in the face of the domination of the whites.

“I wish they’d leave us alone,” I said.

“Me too,” Harrison said.

“There are a million black boys like us to run errands,” I said. “They wouldn’t care if we killed each other.”

“I know it,” Harrison said.

Was he acting? I could not believe in him. We were toying with the idea of death for no reason that stemmed from our own lives, but because the men who ruled us had thrust the idea into our minds. Each of us depended upon the whites for the bread we ate, and we actually trusted the whites more than we did each other. Yet there existed in us a longing to trust men of our own color. Again Harrison and I parted, vowing not to be influenced by what our white boss men said to us.

The game of egging Harrison and me to fight, to cut each other, kept up for a week. We were afraid to tell the white men that we did not believe them, for that would have been tantamount to
calling them liars or risking an argument that might have ended in violence being directed against us.

One morning a few days later Mr. Olin and a group of white men came to me and asked me if I was willing to settle my grudge with Harrison with gloves, according to boxing rules. I told them that, though I was not afraid of Harrison, I did not want to fight him and that I did not know how to box. I could feel now that they knew I no longer believed them.

When I left the factory that evening, Harrison yelled at me from down the block. I waited and he ran toward me. Did he want to cut me? I backed away as he approached. We smiled uneasily and sheepishly at each other. We spoke haltingly, weighing our words.

“Did they ask you to fight me with gloves?” Harrison asked.

“Yes,” I told him. “But I didn’t agree.”

Harrison’s face became eager.

“They want us to fight four rounds for five dollars apiece,” he said. “Man, if I had five dollars, I could pay down on a suit. Five dollars is almost half a week’s wages for me.”

“I don’t want to,” I said.

“We won’t hurt each other,” he said.

“But why do a thing like that for white men?”

“To get that five dollars.”

“I don’t need five dollars that much.”

“Aw, you’re a fool,” he said. Then he smiled quickly.

“Now, look here,” I said. “Maybe you
are
angry with me…”

“Naw, I’m not.” He shook his head vigorously.

“I don’t want to fight for white men. I’m no dog or rooster.”

I was watching Harrison closely and he was watching me closely. Did he really want to fight me for some reason of his own? Or was it the money? Harrison stared at me with puzzled eyes. He stepped toward me and I stepped away. He smiled nervously.

“I need that money,” he said.

“Nothing doing,” I said.

He walked off wordlessly, with an air of anger. Maybe he will stab me now, I thought. I got to watch that fool…

For another week the white men of both factories begged us to
fight. They made up stories about what Harrison had said about me; and when they saw Harrison they lied to him in the same way. Harrison and I were wary of each other whenever we met. We smiled and kept out of arm’s reach, ashamed of ourselves and of each other.

Again Harrison called to me one evening as I was on my way home.

“Come on and fight,” he begged.

“I don’t want to and quit asking me,” I said in a voice louder and harder than I had intended.

Harrison looked at me and I watched him. Both of us still carried the knives that the white men had given us.

“I wanna make a payment on a suit of clothes with that five dollars,” Harrison said.

“But those white men will be looking at us, laughing at us,” I said.

“What the hell,” Harrison said. “They look at you and laugh at you every day, nigger.”

It was true. But I hated him for saying it. I ached to hit him in his mouth, to hurt him.

“What have we got to lose?” Harrison asked.

“I don’t suppose we have anything to lose,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s get the money. We don’t care.”

“And now they know that we know what they tried to do to us,” I said, hating myself for saying it. “And they hate us for it.”

“Sure,” Harrison said. “So let’s get the money. You can use five dollars, can’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s fight for ’em.”

“I’d feel like a dog.”

“To them, both of us are dogs,” he said.

“Yes,” I admitted. But again I wanted to hit him.

“Look, let’s fool them white men,” Harrison said. “We won’t hurt each other. We’ll just pretend, see? We’ll show ’em we ain’t dumb as they think, see?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s just exercise. Four rounds for five dollars. You scared?”

“No.”

“Then come on and fight.”

“All right,” I said. “It’s just exercise. I’ll fight.”

Harrison was happy. I felt that it was all very foolish. But what the hell. I would go through with it and that would be the end of it. But I still felt a vague anger that would not leave.

When the white men in the factory heard that we had agreed to fight, their excitement knew no bounds. They offered to teach me new punches. Each morning they would tell me in whispers that Harrison was eating raw onions for strength. And—from Harrison—I heard that they told him I was eating raw meat for strength. They offered to buy me my meals each day, but I refused. I grew ashamed of what I had agreed to do and wanted to back out of the fight, but I was afraid that they would be angry if I tried to. I felt that if white men tried to persuade two black boys to stab each other for no reason save their own pleasure, then it would not be difficult for them to aim a wanton blow at a black boy in a fit of anger, in a passing mood of frustration.

The fight took place one Saturday afternoon in the basement of a Main Street building. Each white man who attended the fight dropped his share of the pot into a hat that sat on the concrete floor. Only white men were allowed in the basement; no women or Negroes were admitted. Harrison and I were stripped to the waist. A bright electric bulb glowed above our heads. As the gloves were tied on my hands, I looked at Harrison and saw his eyes watching me. Would he keep his promise? Doubt made me nervous.

We squared off and at once I knew that I had not thought sufficiently about what I had bargained for. I could not pretend to fight. Neither Harrison nor I knew enough about boxing to deceive even a child for a moment. Now shame filled me. The white men were smoking and yelling obscenities at us.

“Crush that nigger’s nuts, nigger!”

“Hit that nigger!”

“Aw, fight, you goddamn niggers!”

“Sock ’im in his f—k—g piece!”

“Make ’im bleed!”

I lashed out with a timid left. Harrison landed high on my head and, before I knew it, I had landed a hard right on Harrison’s mouth and blood came. Harrison shot a blow to my nose. The fight was on, was on against our will. I felt trapped and ashamed. I lashed out even harder, and the harder I fought the harder Harrison fought. Our plans and promises now meant nothing. We fought four hard rounds, stabbing, slugging, grunting, spitting, cursing, crying, bleeding. The shame and anger we felt for having allowed ourselves to be duped crept into our blows and blood ran into our eyes, half blinding us. The hate we felt for the men whom we had tried to cheat went into the blows we threw at each other. The white men made the rounds last as long as five minutes and each of us was afraid to stop and ask for time for fear of receiving a blow that would knock us out. When we were on the point of collapsing from exhaustion, they pulled us apart.

I could not look at Harrison. I hated him and I hated myself. I clutched my five dollars in my fist and walked home. Harrison and I avoided each other after that and we rarely spoke. The white men attempted to arrange other fights for us, but we had sense enough to refuse. I heard of other fights being staged between other black boys, and each time I heard those plans falling from the lips of the white men in the factory I eased out of earshot. I felt that I had done something unclean, something for which I could never properly atone.

One morning I arrived early at work and went into the bank lobby
where the Negro porter was mopping. I stood at a counter and picked up the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
and began my free reading of the press. I came finally to the editorial page and saw an article dealing with one H. L. Mencken. I knew by hearsay that he was the editor of the
American Mercury
, but aside from that I knew nothing about him. The article was a furious denunciation of Mencken, concluding with one, hot, short sentence: Mencken is a fool.

I wondered what on earth this Mencken had done to call down upon him the scorn of the South. The only people I had ever heard denounced in the South were Negroes, and this man was not a Negro. Then what ideas did Mencken hold that made a newspaper like the
Commercial Appeal
castigate him publicly? Undoubtedly he must be advocating ideas that the South did not like. Were there, then, people other than Negroes who criticized the South? I knew that during the Civil War the South had hated northern whites, but I had not encountered such hate during my life. Knowing no more of Mencken than I did at that moment, I felt a vague sympathy for him. Had not the South, which had assigned me the role of a non-man, cast at him its hardest words?

Now, how could I find out about this Mencken? There was a huge library near the riverfront, but I knew that Negroes were not
allowed to patronize its shelves any more than they were the parks and playgrounds of the city. I had gone into the library several times to get books for the white men on the job. Which of them would now help me to get books? And how could I read them without causing concern to the white men with whom I worked? I had so far been successful in hiding my thoughts and feelings from them, but I knew that I would create hostility if I went about this business of reading in a clumsy way.

I weighed the personalities of the men on the job. There was Don, a Jew; but I distrusted him. His position was not much better than mine and I knew that he was uneasy and insecure; he had always treated me in an offhand, bantering way that barely concealed his contempt. I was afraid to ask him to help me to get books; his frantic desire to demonstrate a racial solidarity with the whites against Negroes might make him betray me.

Then how about the boss? No, he was a Baptist and I had the suspicion that he would not be quite able to comprehend why a black boy would want to read Mencken. There were other white men on the job whose attitudes showed clearly that they were Kluxers or sympathizers, and they were out of the question.

There remained only one man whose attitude did not fit into an anti-Negro category, for I had heard the white men refer to him as a “Pope lover.” He was an Irish Catholic and was hated by the white Southerners. I knew that he read books, because I had got him volumes from the library several times. Since he, too, was an object of hatred, I felt that he might refuse me but would hardly betray me. I hesitated, weighing and balancing the imponderable realities.

One morning I paused before the Catholic fellow’s desk.

“I want to ask you a favor,” I whispered to him.

“What is it?”

“I want to read. I can’t get books from the library. I wonder if you’d let me use your card?”

He looked at me suspiciously.

“My card is full most of the time,” he said.

“I see,” I said and waited, posing my question silently.

“You’re not trying to get me into trouble, are you, boy?” he asked, staring at me.

“Oh, no, sir.”

“What book do you want?”

“A book by H. L. Mencken.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know. Has he written more than one?”

“He has written several.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“What makes you want to read Mencken?”

“Oh, I just saw his name in the newspaper,” I said.

“It’s good of you to want to read,” he said. “But you ought to read the right things.”

I said nothing. Would he want to supervise my reading?

“Let me think,” he said. “I’ll figure out something.”

I turned from him and he called me back. He stared at me quizzically.

“Richard, don’t mention this to the other white men,” he said.

“I understand,” I said. “I won’t say a word.”

A few days later he called me to him.

“I’ve got a card in my wife’s name,” he said. “Here’s mine.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Do you think you can manage it?”

“I’ll manage fine,” I said.

“If they suspect you, you’ll get in trouble,” he said.

“I’ll write the same kind of notes to the library that you wrote when you sent me for books,” I told him. “I’ll sign your name.”

He laughed.

“Go ahead. Let me see what you get,” he said.

That afternoon I addressed myself to forging a note. Now, what were the names of books written by H. L. Mencken? I did not know any of them. I finally wrote what I thought would be a fool-proof note:
Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy
—I used the word “nigger” to make the librarian feel that I could not possibly be the author of the note—
have some books by H. L. Mencken?
I forged the white man’s name.

I entered the library as I had always done when on errands for whites, but I felt that I would somehow slip up and betray myself. I doffed my hat, stood a respectful distance from the desk, looked as unbookish as possible, and waited for the white patrons to be taken care of. When the desk was clear of people, I still waited. The white librarian looked at me.

“What do you want, boy?”

As though I did not possess the power of speech, I stepped forward and simply handed her the forged note, not parting my lips.

“What books by Mencken does he want?” she asked.

“I don’t know, ma’am,” I said, avoiding her eyes.

“Who gave you this card?”

“Mr. Falk,” I said.

“Where is he?”

“He’s at work, at the M—Optical Company,” I said. “I’ve been in here for him before.”

“I remember,” the woman said. “But he never wrote notes like this.”

Oh, God, she’s suspicious. Perhaps she would not let me have the books? If she had turned her back at that moment, I would have ducked out the door and never gone back. Then I thought of a bold idea.

“You can call him up, ma’am,” I said, my heart pounding.

“You’re not using these books, are you?” she asked pointedly.

“Oh, no, ma’am. I can’t read.”

“I don’t know what he wants by Mencken,” she said under her breath.

I knew now that I had won; she was thinking of other things and the race question had gone out of her mind. She went to the shelves. Once or twice she looked over her shoulder at me, as though she was still doubtful. Finally she came forward with two books in her hand.

“I’m sending him two books,” she said. “But tell Mr. Falk to come in next time, or send me the names of the books he wants. I don’t know what he wants to read.”

I said nothing. She stamped the card and handed me the
books. Not daring to glance at them, I went out of the library, fearing that the woman would call me back for further questioning. A block away from the library I opened one of the books and read a title:
A Book of Prefaces
. I was nearing my nineteenth birthday and I did not know how to pronounce the word “preface.” I thumbed the pages and saw strange words and strange names. I shook my head, disappointed. I looked at the other book; it was called
Prejudices
. I knew what that word meant; I had heard it all my life. And right off I was on guard against Mencken’s books. Why would a man want to call a book
Prejudices?
The word was so stained with all my memories of racial hate that I could not conceive of anybody using it for a title. Perhaps I had made a mistake about Mencken? A man who had prejudices must be wrong.

When I showed the books to Mr. Falk, he looked at me and frowned.

“That librarian might telephone you,” I warned him.

“That’s all right,” he said. “But when you’re through reading those books, I want you to tell me what you get out of them.”

That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened
A Book of Prefaces
and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority. What was this? I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay behind the meaning of the words…Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes, for here they were. Then, maybe, perhaps, I could use them as a weapon? No. It frightened me. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.

Occasionally I glanced up to reassure myself that I was alone in the room. Who were these men about whom Mencken was talking so passionately? Who was Anatole France? Joseph Conrad? Sinclair
Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Dostoevski, George Moore, Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant, Tolstoy, Frank Harris, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Stephen Crane, Zola, Norris, Gorky, Bergson, Ibsen, Balzac, Bernard Shaw, Dumas, Poe, Thomas Mann, O. Henry, Dreiser, H. G. Wells, Gogol, T. S. Eliot, Gide, Baudelaire, Edgar Lee Masters, Stendhal, Turgenev, Huneker, Nietzsche, and scores of others? Were these men real? Did they exist or had they existed? And how did one pronounce their names?

I ran across many words whose meanings I did not know, and I either looked them up in a dictionary or, before I had a chance to do that, encountered the word in a context that made its meaning clear. But what strange world was this? I concluded the book with the conviction that I had somehow overlooked something terribly important in life. I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

As dawn broke I ate my pork and beans, feeling dopey, sleepy. I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white men were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book. I felt vaguely guilty. Would I, filled with bookish notions, act in a manner that would make the whites dislike me?

I forged more notes and my trips to the library became frequent. Reading grew into a passion. My first serious novel was Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street
. It made me see my boss, Mr. Gerald, and identify him as an American type. I would smile when I saw him lugging his golf bags into the office. I had always felt a vast distance separating me from the boss, and now I felt closer to him, though still distant. I felt now that I knew him, that I could feel the very limits of his narrow life. And this had happened because I had read a novel about a mythical man called George F. Babbitt.

The plots and stories in the novels did not interest me so much as the point of view revealed. I gave myself over to each novel without reserve, without trying to criticize it; it was enough for me to see and feel something different. And for me, everything was something different. Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. But I could not conquer my sense of guilt, my feeling that the white men around me knew that I was changing, that I had begun to regard them differently.

Whenever I brought a book to the job, I wrapped it in newspaper—a habit that was to persist for years in other cities and under other circumstances. But some of the white men pried into my packages when I was absent and they questioned me.

“Boy, what are you reading those books for?”

“Oh, I don’t know, sir.”

“That’s deep stuff you’re reading, boy.”

“I’m just killing time, sir.”

“You’ll addle your brains if you don’t watch out.”

I read Dreiser’s
Jennie Gerhardt
and
Sister Carrie
and they revived in me a vivid sense of my mother’s suffering; I was overwhelmed. I grew silent, wondering about the life around me. It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them.

Steeped in new moods and ideas, I bought a ream of paper and tried to write; but nothing would come, or what did come was flat beyond telling. I discovered that more than desire and feeling were necessary to write and I dropped the idea. Yet I still wondered how it was possible to know people sufficiently to write about them? Could I ever learn about life and people? To me, with my vast ignorance, my Jim Crow station in life, it seemed a task impossible of achievement. I now knew what being a Negro meant. I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate. But to feel that there were feelings denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else hurt, wounded me. I had a new hunger.

In buoying me up, reading also cast me down, made me see what was possible, what I had missed. My tension returned, new, terrible, bitter, surging, almost too great to be contained. I no longer
felt
that the world about me was hostile, killing; I
knew
it. A million times I asked myself what I could do to save myself, and there were no answers. I seemed forever condemned, ringed by walls.

I did not discuss my reading with Mr. Falk, who had lent me his library card; it would have meant talking about myself and that would have been too painful. I smiled each day, fighting desperately to maintain my old behavior, to keep my disposition seemingly sunny. But some of the white men discerned that I had begun to brood.