Blues for Mister Charlie (3 page)

JO
: That’s Parnell.

LYLE
: It’s about time you showed your face in here, you old rascal! You been so busy over there with the niggers, you ain’t got time for white folks no more. You sure you ain’t got some nigger wench over there on the other side of town? Because, I declare—!

PARNELL
: I apologize for your husband, Mrs. Britten, I really do. In fact, I’m afraid I must deplore your taste in men. If I had only seen you first, dear lady, and if you had found me charming, how much suffering I might have prevented! You got anything in this house to drink? Don’t tell me you haven’t, we’ll both need one. Sit down.

LYLE
: Bring on the booze, old lady.

PARNELL
: Well, I seem to have switched territories. I haven’t been defending colored people this week, I’ve been defending you. I’ve just left the Chief of Police.

LYLE
: How is the old bastard?

PARNELL
: He seems fine. But he really
is
an old bastard. Lyle—he’s issuing a warrant for your arrest.

LYLE
: He’s going to arrest
me
? You mean, he believes I killed that boy?

PARNELL
: The question of what he believes doesn’t enter into it. This case presents several very particular circumstances and these circumstances force him to arrest you. I think we can take it for granted that he wouldn’t arrest you if he could think of some way not to. He wouldn’t arrest anybody except blind beggars and old colored women if he could think of some way not to—he’s bird-brained and chicken-hearted and big-assed. The charge is murder.

JO
: Murder!

LYLE
: Murder?

PARNELL
: Murder.

LYLE
: I ain’t no murderer. You know that.

PARNELL
: I also know that somebody killed the boy. Somebody put two slugs in his belly and dumped his body in the weeds beside the railroad track just outside of town. Somebody did all that. We pay several eminent, bird-brained, chicken-hearted, big-assed people quite a lot of money to discourage such activity. They never do, in fact, discourage it, but, still—we must find the somebody who killed that boy. And you, my friend, according to the testimony of Joel Davis, otherwise known as Papa D., were the last person to see the boy alive. It is also known that you didn’t like him—to say the least.

LYLE
: Nobody liked him.

PARNELL
: Ah. But it isn’t nobody that killed him.
Somebody
killed him. We must find the somebody. And since you were the last person to see him alive, we must arrest you in order to clear you—or convict you.

LYLE
: They’ll never convict me.

PARNELL
: As to that, you may be right. But you
are
going to be arrested.

LYLE
: When?

PARNELL
: Monday morning. Of course, you can always flee to Mexico.

LYLE
: Why should I run away?

PARNELL
: I wasn’t suggesting that you should run away. If you did, I should urge your wife to divorce you at once, and marry me.

JO
: Ah, if that don’t get him out of town in a hurry, I don’t know what will! The man’s giving you your chance, honey. You going to take it?

LYLE
: Stop talking foolishness. It looks bad for me, I guess. I swear, I don’t know what’s come over the folks in this town!

PARNELL
: It doesn’t look good. In fact, if the boy had been white, it would look very,
very
bad, and your behind would be in the jail house now. What do you mean, you don’t understand what’s come over the people in this town?

LYLE
: Raising so much fuss about a nigger—and a northern nigger at that.

PARNELL
: He was born here. He’s Reverend Meridian Henry’s son.

LYLE
: Well, he’d been gone so long, he might as well have been a northern nigger. Went North and got ruined and come back here to make trouble—and they tell me he was a dope fiend, too. What’s all this fuss about? He probably got killed by some other nigger—they do it all the time—but ain’t nobody
even thought about arresting one of
them.
Has niggers suddenly got to be
holy
in this town?

PARNELL
: Oh, Lyle, I’m not here to discuss the sanctity of niggers. I just came to tell you that a warrant’s being issued for your arrest.
You
may think that a colored boy who gets ruined in the North and then comes home to try to pull himself together deserves to die—
I
don’t.

LYLE
: You sound like you think I got something against colored folks—but I don’t. I never have, not in all my life. But I’ll be damned if I’ll mix with them. That’s all. I don’t believe in it, and that’s
all.
I don’t want no big buck nigger lying up next to Josephine and that’s where all this will lead to and you know it as well as I do! I’m against it and I’ll do anything I have to do to stop it, yes, I will!

PARNELL
: Suppose
he
—my godson there—decides to marry a Chinese girl. You know, there are an awful lot of Chinese girls in the world—I bet you didn’t know that. Well, there are. Let’s just say that he grows up and looks around at all the pure white women, and—saving your presence, ma’am—they make him want to puke and he decides to marry a pure Chinese girl instead. What would you do? Shoot him in order to prevent it? Or would you shoot her?

LYLE
: Parnell, you’re my buddy. You’ve
always
been my buddy. You know more about me than anybody else in the world. What’s come over you? You—you ain’t going to turn against me, are you?

PARNELL
: No. No, I’ll never turn against you. I’m just trying to make you think.

LYLE
: I notice you didn’t marry no Chinese girl. You just never got married at all. Women been trying to saddle old Parnell for I don’t know how long—I don’t know what you got, old buddy, but I’ll be damned if you don’t know how to use it!
What about this present one—Loretta—you reckon you going to marry her?

PARNELL
: I doubt it.

JO
: Parnell, you’re just awful. Awful!

PARNELL
: I think I’m doing her a favor. She can do much better than me. I’m just a broken-down newspaper editor—the editor of a newspaper which
nobody
reads—in a dim, grim backwater.

LYLE
: I thought you liked it here.

PARNELL
: I don’t like it here. But I love it here. Or maybe I don’t. I don’t know. I must go.

LYLE
: What’s your hurry? Why don’t you stay and have pot-luck with us?

PARNELL
: Loretta is waiting. I must have pot-luck with
her.
And then I have errands on the other side of town.

LYLE
: What they saying over there? I reckon they praying day and night for my ass to be put in a sling, ain’t they? Shoot, I don’t care.

PARNELL
: Don’t. Life’s much simpler that way. Anyway, Papa D.’s the only one doing a whole lot of talking.

JO
: I told you he wasn’t no good, Lyle, I told you!

LYLE
: I don’t know what’s got into him! And we been knowing each other all these years! He must be getting old. You go back and tell him I said he’s got it all
confused
—about me and that boy. Tell him you talked to me and that
I
said he must have made some mistake.

PARNELL
: I’ll drop in tomorrow, if I may. Good night, Jo, and thank you. Good night, Lyle.

LYLE
: Good night, old buddy.

JO
: I’ll see you to the door.

LYLE
: Well!
Ain’t
that something! But they’ll never convict me. Never in this world.
(Looks into crib)
Ain’t that right, old pisser?

LORENZO
: And when they bring him to trial, I’m going to be there every day—right across the street in that courthouse—where they been dealing death out to us for all these years.

MOTHER HENRY
: I used to hate them, too, son. But I don’t hate them no more. They too pitiful.

MERIDIAN
: No witnesses.

JUANITA
: Meridian. Ah, Meridian.

MOTHER HENRY
: You remember that song he used to like so much?

MERIDIAN
: I sing because I’m happy.

JUANITA
: I sing because I’m free.

PETE
: For his eye is on the sparrow—

LORENZO
: And I know he watches—me.

JUANITA
: There was another song he liked—a song about a prison and the light from a train that shone on the prisoners every night at midnight. I can hear him now: Lord, you wake up in the morning. You hear the ding-dong ring—

MOTHER HENRY
: He had a beautiful voice.

LORENZO
: Well, he was pretty tough up there in New York—till he got busted.

MERIDIAN
: And came running home.

MOTHER HENRY
: Don’t blame yourself, honey. Don’t blame yourself!

JUANITA
: You go a-marching to the table, you see the same old thing—

JIMMY
: All I’m going to tell you: knife, a fork, and a pan—

(Music stronger)

PETE
: And if you say a thing about it—

LORENZO
: You are in trouble with the man.

MERIDIAN
: No witnesses!

RICHARD
: You treating me like royalty, old lady—I ain’t royalty.

MOTHER HENRY
: You better learn some respect, you know that neither me nor your father wants that kind of language in this house. Sit down and eat, you got to get your strength back.

RICHARD
: What for? What am I supposed to do with it?

MOTHER HENRY
: You stop that kind of talk.

RICHARD
: Stop that kind of talk, we don’t want that kind of talk! Nobody cares what people feel or what they think or what they do—but stop that kind of talk!

MOTHER HENRY
: Richard!

RICHARD
: All right. All right.
(Throws himself on the bed, begins eating in a kind of fury.)
What I can’t get over is—what in the world am I doing
here?
Way down here in the ass-hole of the world, the deep, black, funky South.

MOTHER HENRY
: You were born here. You got folks here. And you ain’t got no manners and you
won’t
learn no sense and so you naturally got yourself in trouble and had to come to your folks. You lucky it wasn’t no worse, the way you go on. You want some more milk?

RICHARD
: No, old lady. Sit down.

MOTHER HENRY
: I ain’t got time to be fooling with you.
(But she sits down.)
What you got on your mind?

RICHARD
: I don’t know. How do you stand it?

MOTHER HENRY
: Stand what? You?

RICHARD
: Living down here with all these nowhere people.

MOTHER HENRY
: From what I’m told and from what I see, the people you’ve been among don’t seem to be any better.

RICHARD
: You mean old Aunt Edna? She’s all right, she just ain’t very bright, is all.

MOTHER HENRY
: I am not talking about Edna. I’m talking about all them other folks you got messed up with. Look like you’d have had better sense. You hear me?

RICHARD
: I hear you.

MOTHER HENRY
: That all you got to say?

RICHARD
: It’s easy for you to talk, Grandmama, you don’t know nothing about New York City, or what can happen to you up there!

MOTHER HENRY
: I know what can happen to you anywhere in this world. And I know right from wrong. We tried to raise you so you’d know right from wrong, too.

RICHARD
: We don’t see things the same way, Grandmama. I don’t know if I really
know
right from wrong—I’d like to, I always dig people the most who know
anything
, especially right from wrong!

MOTHER HENRY
: You’ve had yourself a little trouble, Richard, like we all do, and you a little tired, like we all get. You’ll be all right. You a young man. Only, just try not to
go
so much, try to calm down a little. Your Daddy loves you. You his only son.

RICHARD
: That’s a good reason, Grandmama. Let me tell you about New York. You ain’t never been North, have you?

MOTHER HENRY
: Your Daddy used to tell me a little about it every time he come back from visiting you all up there.

RICHARD
: Daddy don’t know nothing about New York. He just come up for a few days and went right on back. That ain’t the way to get to know New York. No ma’am. He
never
saw New York. Finally, I realized he wasn’t never
going
to see it—you know, there’s a whole lot of things Daddy’s never seen? I’ve seen more than he has.

MOTHER HENRY
: All young folks thinks that.

RICHARD
: Did
you?
When you were young? Did you think you knew more than your mother and father? But I bet you really did, you a pretty shrewd old lady, quiet as it’s kept.

MOTHER HENRY
: No, I didn’t think that. But I thought I could find
out
more, because
they
were born in slavery, but
I
was born free.

RICHARD
:
Did
you find out more?

MOTHER HENRY
: I found out what I had to find out—to take care of my husband and raise my children in the fear of God.

RICHARD
: You know I don’t believe in God, Grandmama.

MOTHER HENRY
: You don’t know what you talking about. Ain’t no way possible for you not to believe in God. It ain’t up to you.

RICHARD
: Who’s it up to, then?

MOTHER HENRY
: It’s up to the life in you—the life in you.
That
knows where it comes from,
that
believes in God. You doubt me, you just try holding your breath long enough to die.

RICHARD
: You pretty smart, ain’t you?
(A pause)
I convinced Daddy that I’d be better off in New York—and Edna, she convinced him too, she said it wasn’t as tight for a black man up there as it is down here. Well, that’s a
crock, Grandmama, believe me when I tell you. At first I thought it was true, hell, I was just a green country boy and they ain’t got no signs up, dig, saying you can’t go here or you can’t go there. No, you got to find that out all by your lonesome. But—for awhile—I thought everything was swinging and Edna, she’s so dizzy she thinks everything is
always
swinging, so there we were—like
swinging.

MOTHER HENRY
: I know Edna got lost somewhere. But, Richard—why didn’t
you
come back? You knew your Daddy wanted you back, your Daddy and me both.

RICHARD
: I didn’t want to come back here like a whipped dog. One whipped dog running to another whipped dog. No, I didn’t want that. I wanted to make my Daddy proud of me—because, the day I left here, I sure as hell wasn’t proud of
him.

MOTHER HENRY
: Be careful, son. Be careful. Your Daddy’s a fine man. Your Daddy loves you.

RICHARD
: I know, Grandmama. But I just wish, that day that Mama died, he’d took a pistol and gone through that damn white man’s hotel and shot every son of a bitch in the place. That’s right. I wish he’d shot them dead. I been dreaming of that day ever since I left here. I been dreaming of my Mama falling down the steps of that hotel.
My
Mama. I never believed she fell. I
always
believed that some white man pushed her down those steps. And I know that Daddy thought so, too. But he wasn’t there, he didn’t know, he couldn’t say nothing, he couldn’t
do
nothing. I’ll never forget the way he looked—whipped, whipped, whipped, whipped!

MOTHER HENRY
: She fell, Richard, she
fell.
The stairs were wet and slippery and she
fell.

RICHARD
: My mother
fell
down the steps of that damn white hotel? My mother was
pushed
—you remember yourself how them
white bastards was always sniffing around my mother,
always
around her—because she was pretty and
black!

MOTHER HENRY
: Richard, you can’t start walking around believing that all the suffering in the world is caused by white folks!

RICHARD
: I can’t? Don’t tell me I can’t. I’m going to treat everyone of them as though they were responsible for all the crimes that ever happened in the history of the world—oh, yes! They’re responsible for all the misery
I’ve
ever seen, and that’s good enough for me. It’s because my Daddy’s got no power that my Mama’s dead. And he ain’t got no power because he’s
black.
And the only way the black man’s going to
get
any power is to drive all the white men into the sea.

MOTHER HENRY
: You’re going to make yourself sick. You’re going to make yourself sick with hatred.

RICHARD
: No, I’m not. I’m going to make myself well. I’m going to make myself
well
with hatred—what do you think of that?

MOTHER HENRY
: It can’t be done. It can never be done. Hatred is a poison, Richard.

RICHARD
: Not for me. I’m going to learn how to drink it—a little every day in the morning, and then a booster shot late at night. I’m going to remember everything. I’m going to keep it right here, at the very top of my mind. I’m going to remember Mama, and Daddy’s face that day, and Aunt Edna and all her sad little deals and all those boys and girls in Harlem and all them pimps and whores and gangsters and all them cops. And I’m going to remember all the dope that’s flowed through my veins. I’m going to remember everything—the jails I been in and the cops that beat me and how long a time I spent screaming and stinking in my own dirt, trying to break my habit. I’m going to remember all that, and I’ll get well. I’ll get well.

MOTHER HENRY
: Oh, Richard. Richard. Richard.

RICHARD
: Don’t Richard
me.
I tell you, I’m going to get
well.