Going to Meet the Man

A
CROSS THE STREET
from their house, in an empty lot between two houses, stood the rockpile. It was a strange place to find a mass of natural rock jutting out of the ground; and someone, probably Aunt Florence, had once told them that the rock was there and could not be taken away because without it the subway cars underground would fly apart, killing all the people. This, touching on some natural mystery concerning the surface and the center of the earth, was far too intriguing an explanation to be challenged, and it invested the rockpile, moreover, with such mysterious importance that Roy felt it to be his right, not to say his duty, to play there.

Other boys were to be seen there each afternoon after school and all day Saturday and Sunday. They fought on the rockpile. Sure footed, dangerous, and reckless, they rushed each other and grappled on the heights, sometimes disappearing down the other side in a confusion of dust and screams and upended, flying feet. “It’s a wonder they don’t kill themselves,” their mother said, watching sometimes from the fire escape. “You children stay away from there, you hear me?” Though she said “children,” she was looking at Roy, where he sat beside John on the fire escape. “The good Lord knows,” she continued, “I don’t want you to come home bleeding like a hog every day the Lord sends.” Roy shifted impatiently, and continued to stare at the street, as though in this gazing he might somehow acquire wings. John said nothing. He had not really been spoken to: he was afraid of the rockpile and of the boys who played there.

Each Saturday morning John and Roy sat on the fire escape and watched the forbidden street below. Sometimes their mother sat in the room behind them, sewing, or dressing their younger sister, or nursing the baby, Paul. The sun fell across them and across the fire escape with a high, benevolent indifference; below them, men and women, and boys and girls,
sinners all, loitered; sometimes one of the church-members passed and saw them and waved. Then, for the moment that they waved decorously back, they were intimidated. They watched the saint, man or woman, until he or she had disappeared from sight. The passage of one of the redeemed made them consider, however vacantly, the wickedness of the street, their own latent wickedness in sitting where they sat; and made them think of their father, who came home early on Saturdays and who would soon be turning this corner and entering the dark hall below them.

But until he came to end their freedom, they sat, watching and longing above the street. At the end of the street nearest their house was the bridge which spanned the Harlem River and led to a city called the Bronx; which was where Aunt Florence lived. Nevertheless, when they saw her coming, she did not come from the bridge, but from the opposite end of the street. This, weakly, to their minds, she explained by saying that she had taken the subway, not wishing to walk, and that, besides, she did not live in
that
section of the Bronx. Knowing that the Bronx was across the river, they did not believe this story ever, but, adopting toward her their father’s attitude, assumed that she had just left some sinful place which she dared not name, as, for example, a movie palace.

In the summertime boys swam in the river, diving off the wooden dock, or wading in from the garbage-heavy bank. Once a boy, whose name was Richard, drowned in the river. His mother had not known where he was; she had even come to their house, to ask if he was there. Then, in the evening, at six o’clock, they had heard from the street a woman screaming and wailing; and they ran to the windows and looked out. Down the street came the woman, Richard’s mother, screaming, her face raised to the sky and tears running down her face. A woman walked beside her, trying to make her quiet and trying to hold her up. Behind them walked a man, Richard’s
father, with Richard’s body in his arms. There were two white policemen walking in the gutter, who did not seem to know what should be done. Richard’s father and Richard were wet, and Richard’s body lay across his father’s arms like a cotton baby. The woman’s screaming filled all the street; cars slowed down and the people in the cars stared; people opened their windows and looked out and came rushing out of doors to stand in the gutter, watching. Then the small procession disappeared within the house which stood beside the rockpile. Then, “
Lord, Lord, Lord!
” cried Elizabeth, their mother, and slammed the window down.

One Saturday, an hour before his father would be coming home, Roy was wounded on the rockpile and brought screaming upstairs. He and John had been sitting on the fire escape and their mother had gone into the kitchen to sip tea with Sister McCandless. By and by Roy became bored and sat beside John in restless silence; and John began drawing into his schoolbook a newspaper advertisement which featured a new electric locomotive. Some friends of Roy passed beneath the fire escape and called him. Roy began to fidget, yelling down to them through the bars. Then a silence fell. John looked up. Roy stood looking at him.

“I’m going downstairs,” he said.

“You better stay where you is, boy. You know Mama don’t want you going downstairs.”

“I be right
back.
She won’t even know I’m gone, less you run and tell her.”

“I ain’t
got
to tell her. What’s going to stop her from coming in here and looking out the window?”

“She’s talking,” Roy said. He started into the house.

“But Daddy’s going to be home soon!”

“I be back before
that.
What you all the time got to be so
scared
for?” He was already in the house and he now turned,
leaning on the windowsill, to swear impatiently, “I be back in
five
minutes.”

John watched him sourly as he carefully unlocked the door and disappeared. In a moment he saw him on the sidewalk with his friends. He did not dare to go and tell his mother that Roy had left the fire escape because he had practically promised not to. He started to shout,
Remember, you said five minutes!
but one of Roy’s friends was looking up at the fire escape. John looked down at his schoolbook: he became en-grossed again in the problem of the locomotive.

When he looked up again he did not know how much time had passed, but now there was a gang fight on the rockpile. Dozens of boys fought each other in the harsh sun: clambering up the rocks and battling hand to hand, scuffed shoes sliding on the slippery rock; filling the bright air with curses and jubilant cries. They filled the air, too, with flying weapons: stones, sticks, tin cans, garbage, whatever could be picked up and thrown. John watched in a kind of absent amazement—until he remembered that Roy was still downstairs, and that he was one of the boys on the rockpile. Then he was afraid; he could not see his brother among the figures in the sun; and he stood up, leaning over the fire-escape railing. Then Roy appeared from the other side of the rocks; John saw that his shirt was torn; he was laughing. He moved until he stood at the very top of the rockpile. Then, something, an empty tin can, flew out of the air and hit him on the forehead, just above the eye. Immediately, one side of Roy’s face ran with blood, he fell and rolled on his face down the rocks. Then for a moment there was no movement at all, no sound, the sun, arrested, lay on the street and the sidewalk and the arrested boys. Then someone screamed or shouted; boys began to run away, down the street, toward the bridge. The figure on the ground, having caught its breath and felt its own blood, began to shout. John cried, “Mama! Mama!” and ran inside.

“Don’t fret, don’t fret,” panted Sister McCandless as they rushed down the dark, narrow, swaying stairs, “don’t fret. Ain’t a boy been born don’t get his knocks every now and again.
Lord!
” they hurried into the sun. A man had picked Roy up and now walked slowly toward them. One or two boys sat silent on their stoops; at either end of the street there was a group of boys watching. “He ain’t hurt bad,” the man said, “Wouldn’t be making this kind of noise if he was hurt real bad.”

Elizabeth, trembling, reached out to take Roy, but Sister McCandless, bigger, calmer, took him from the man and threw him over her shoulder as she once might have handled a sack of cotton. “God bless you,” she said to the man, “God bless you, son.” Roy was still screaming. Elizabeth stood behind Sister McCandless to stare at his bloody face.

“It’s just a flesh wound,” the man kept saying, “just broke the skin, that’s all.” They were moving across the sidewalk, toward the house. John, not now afraid of the staring boys, looked toward the corner to see if his father was yet in sight.

Upstairs, they hushed Roy’s crying. They bathed the blood away, to find, just above the left eyebrow, the jagged, superficial scar. “Lord, have mercy,” murmured Elizabeth, “another inch and it would’ve been his eye.” And she looked with apprehension toward the clock. “Ain’t it the truth,” said Sister McCandless, busy with bandages and iodine.

“When did he go downstairs?” his mother asked at last.