Black Like Me (15 page)

“No, sir.”

“Well, they sure as hell do. We figure we’re doing you people a favor to get some white blood in your kids.”

I wondered what moral and ethical difference there was between this sort of rape by coercion that threatened to starve a person, and rape by coercion that threatened to knife or shoot a person. Newspapers play up as sensational every attempt by a Negro to rape a white woman. Yet this white rape of Negro women is apparently a different matter. But it is rape nonetheless, and practiced on a scale that dwarfs the Negro’s defaults.

The grotesque hypocrisy slapped me as it does all Negroes. It is worth remembering when the white man talks of the Negro’s lack of sexual morality, or when he speaks with horror about mongrelization and with fervor about racial purity. Mongrelization is already a widespread reality in the South - it has been exclusively the white man’s contribution to the Southern Way of Life. His vast concern for “racial purity” obviously does not extend to all races.

(Later I encountered many whites who freely admitted the same practices my companion described. In fairness, however, other Southern whites roundly condemned it and claimed it was not as typical as my informants suggested. None denied that it was widespread.)

This aspect of Southern life does not hit the newspapers
because, as my companion said, “Alabama nigger women are good about that - they won’t never go to the cops or tell on you.”

It was obvious what would happen if one of them tried it.

As I feared it would, my lack of “cooperation” nettled the driver. He took my silence, rightly, for disapproval.

“Where you from?” he asked.

“Texas.”

“What’re you doing down here?”

“Just traveling around, trying to find jobs.”

“You’re not down here to stir up trouble, are you?”

“Oh, God, no.”

“You start stirring up these niggers and we sure as hell know how to take care of you.”

“I don’t intend to.”

“Do you know what we do to troublemakers down here?”

“No, sir.”

“We either ship them off to the pen or kill them.”

He spoke in a tone that sickened me, casual, merciless. I looked at him. His decent blue eyes turned yellow. I knew that nothing could touch him to have mercy once he decided a Negro should be “taught a lesson.” The immensity of it terrified me. But it caught him up like a lust now. He entertained it, his voice unctuous with pleasure and cruelty. The highway stretched deserted through the swamp forests. He nodded toward the solid wall of brush flying past our windows.

“You can kill a nigger and toss him into that swamp and no one’ll ever know what happened to him.”

“Yes, sir …”

I forced myself to silence, forced myself to picture this man in his other roles. I saw him as he played with his grandchildren, as he stood up in church with open hymnal in hand, as he drank a cup of coffee in the morning before dressing and then shaved and talked with his wife pleasantly about nothing, as he visited with friends on the front porch Sunday afternoons. This was the man I had seen when I first got into the truck. The amiable, decent American was in all his features. This was the dark tangent in every man’s belly, the sickness, the coldness, the mercilessness, the
lust to cause pain or fear through self-power. Surely not even his wife or closest friends had ever seen him like this. It was a side he would show no one but his victims, or those who connived with him. The rest - what he really must be as a husband, devoted father and respected member of the community - I had to supply with my imagination. He showed me the lowest and I had to surmise the highest.

His face was set hard in an attempt to regain his equilibrium, when he pulled off the main highway and stopped on a dirt road that led into the jungle. We had engaged in a subtle battle of which I think he had only then become aware. He needed to salvage from it something. “This is where I turn off. I guess you want to stick to the highway.”

I thanked him for the ride and opened the door. Before I could get out, he spoke again. “I’ll tell you how it is here. We’ll do business with you people. We’ll sure as hell screw your women. Other than that, you’re just
completely off the record as far as we’re concerned
. And the quicker you people get that through your heads, the better off you’ll be.”

“Yes, sir …” I stepped out and closed the door. He drove down the side road scattering fine gravel behind his wheels. I listened until his truck was out of hearing distance. The heavy air of evening, putrid with swamp rot, smelled fragrant. I walked across the highway, sat on my duffel and waited for another car. None came. The woods issued no sound. I felt strangely safe, isolated, alone in the stillness of dusk turning into night. First stars appeared in darkening skies still pale and the earth’s heat escaped upward.

My mouth was dry and my stomach began to ache for food. I realized I had not eaten or had a drink of water all day. Cold surrounded me rapidly. I got up and began to walk along the highway in the darkness. It was better to walk than to freeze. My duffel pulled heavily at my arms and I knew I could not go far without food and rest.

I wondered at the lack of traffic on Alabama highways. No cars passed. My footsteps on the roadside gravel sloughed in echo from the wall of trees and brush.

After a while a light flickered among the foliage. I hurried forward around the curve of highway until I saw it came from an isolated service station at the top of the hill. When I arrived opposite it, I stood for some time across the highway and watched. An elderly white couple sat inside, surrounded by shelves of groceries and auto supplies, by soft drink machines and cigarette dispensers. They looked kind, gentle, and I framed in advance what I should say to allay any fears they might have of a large Negro appearing out of the night, and to convince them that they should sell me food and drink. Perhaps I might even ask them to let me spend the night sleeping on the floor there.

The woman saw me approach past the lighted gasoline lamps. I whistled to give them warning. She met me at the door. I felt an outgush of warm air and heard country music from a radio when she opened. I glanced through the glass to see the man seated in a chair, his ear close to his small radio.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” I said, nodding low. “I’m traveling through to Montgomery. I got stranded on the highway and can’t seem to get a ride. I wonder if I could buy something to eat and drink?”

She studied me with suspicion, her eyes hard in their wrinkles.

“We’re closing up,” she said and stepped back to shut the door.

“Please,” I pleaded, not needing to feign abjection. “I’ve been without food and water all day.”

I could see her hesitate, her caution and repugnance struggling against instincts of common decency. She obviously wanted to refuse me. She was undoubtedly afraid not only of me but of having someone drive up for gasoline and see her waiting on me. But I recalled the driver’s statement: “We’ll do business with you people.” I waited. The night was cold, the country lonely. Even animals had to eat and drink.

“Well, I guess it’s all right,” she said with disgust. She turned back into the room. I stepped inside and closed the door. Neither of them spoke. The old man glanced up at me from a lean, seamed face devoid of all expression.

I bought an orange drink and a package of cracker sandwiches. The atmosphere was so inhospitable I stepped outside where they could watch me and drank the orange. When I finished, I returned the empty bottle and quickly bought another. The store had little to offer in the way of food that I could manage. The only two cans of sardines had no keys and the owner stared at the floor, nodding no when I asked if he had a can opener. I bought a fried pie, a loaf of bread and five Milky Way bars.

The woman stood in front of the gas heater and picked the dirt from under her thumbnail with the third finger of the other hand. When I mumbled my thanks, she was so absorbed in her task that she acknowledged my departure only by staring at her hands with a deeper frown. The husband stuck the money in his shirt pocket.

I walked down the highway into the darkness again, carrying both duffel bags in my left hand and feeding myself the tasteless pineapple fried pie with my right.

A distant hum behind me caught my attention. I turned to see a yellow glow on the road’s horizon. It grew stronger and headlights appeared. Though I dreaded riding with another white man, I dreaded more staying on the road all night. Stepping out into full view, I waved my arms. An ancient car braked to a halt and I hurried to it. To my great relief, the reflections from the dash light showed me the face of a young Negro man.

We discussed my problem. He said he lived back in the woods, but had six kids and only two rooms. He wouldn’t even have a bed to offer me. I asked him about some other house in the area where I might rent a bed. He said there were none any better than what he had to offer.

However, we could find no other solution.

“You can’t stand out here all night. If you don’t mind sleeping on the floor, you’re welcome to come with me,” he said finally.

“I don’t mind sleeping on the floor,” I said. “I just wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble.”

As we drove several miles down a lane into the forest, he told
me he was a sawmill worker and never made quite enough to get out from under his debts. Always, when he took his check to the store, he owed a little more than the check could cover. He said it was the same for everyone else; and indeed I have seen the pattern throughout my travels. Part of the Southern white’s strategy is to get the Negro in debt and keep him there.

“It makes it hard, doesn’t it?” I said.

“Yeah, but you can’t stop,” he answered quickly. “That’s what I tell the men at the mill. Some of them are willing just to sit there. I told them, ‘Okay, so you’re going to give up just because you get no butter with your bread. That’s no way to act. Go ahead and eat the bread - but work, and maybe someday we’ll have butter to go with it.’ I tell them we sure ain’t going to get it any other way.”

I asked him if he could not get together with some of the others and strike for better wages. He laughed with real amusement.

“Do you know how long we’d last, doing something like that?”

“Well, if you stuck together, they sure couldn’t kill you all.”

“They could damn sure try,” he snorted. “Anyway, how long could I feed my kids? There’s only a couple of stores in twenty miles. They’d cut off credit and refuse to sell to us. Without money coming in, none of us could live.”

He turned off the lane into a rutted path that led through dense underbrush up to a knoll. The headlights fell on a shanty of unpainted wood, patched at the bottom with a rusting Dr. Pepper sign. Except for the voices of children, a deep silence hung over the place. The man’s wife came to the door and stood silhouetted against the pale light of a kerosene lamp. He introduced us. Though she appeared embarrassed, she asked me in.

The subdued babble of children mounted to excited shouts of welcome. They ranged in age from nine years to four months. They were overjoyed to have company. It must be a party. We decided it was.

Supper was on a makeshift table. It consisted entirely of large yellow beans cooked in water. The mother prepared mashed beans and canned milk for the infant. I remembered the bread and
offered it as my contribution to the meal. Neither parent apologized for the meagerness of the food. We served ourselves on plastic dishes from the table and sat where we could find places, the children on the floor with a spread-out newspaper for a tablecloth.

I congratulated them on such a fine family. The mother told me they had been truly blessed. “Ours are all in good health. When you think of so many people with crippled or blind or not-right children, you just have to thank God.” I praised the children until the father’s tired face animated with pride. He looked at the children the way another looks at some rare painting or treasured gem.

Closed into the two rooms, with only the soft light of two kerosene lamps, the atmosphere changed. The outside world, outside standards disappeared. They were somewhere beyond in the vast darkness. In here, we had all we needed for gaiety. We had shelter, some food in our bellies, the bodies and eyes and affections of children who were not yet aware of how things were. And we had treats. We cut the Milky Way bars into thin slices for dessert. In a framework of nothing, slices of Milky Way become a great gift. With almost rabid delight, the children consumed them. One of the smaller girls salivated so heavily the chocolate dribbled syrup-like from the corner of her mouth. Her mother wiped it off with her fingertip and unconsciously (from what yearning?) put it in her own mouth.

After supper, I went outside with my host to help him carry water from a makeshift boarded well. A near full moon shone above the trees and chill penetrated as though brilliance strengthened it. We picked our way carefully through fear of snakes down a faint footpath to the edge of the trees to urinate. The moon-speckled landscape exhaled its night rustlings, its truffle-odor of swamps. Distantly the baby cried. I listened to the muffled rattle of our waters against damp leaf loam. A fragment of memory returned - recollection of myself as a youngster reading Lillian Smith’s
Strange Fruit
, her description of the Negro boy stopping along a lonely path to urinate. Now, years later, I was there in a role foreign to my youth’s wildest imaginings. I felt more profoundly than ever before the totality of my Negro-ness, the immensity of
its isolating effects. The transition was complete from the white boy reading a book about Negroes in the safety of his white living room to an old Negro man in the Alabama swamps, his existence nullified by men but reaffirmed by nature, in his functions, in his affection.

“Okay?” my friend said and we turned back. Moonlight caught his protruding cheekbones and cast the hollows beneath into shadow.

“Okay,” I said.

The house stood above us, rickety, a faint light at the windows. I could hear the whites say, “Look at that shanty. They live like animals. If they wanted to do better they could. And they expect us just to accept them? They
like
to live this way. It would make them just as miserable to demand a higher standard of living as it would make us miserable to put us down to that standard.”