Original Sins (39 page)

“It is? Yes, it is.” He felt almost disappointed that she was so willing to descend from her pedestal. In a way, he'd hoped she might get angry with him for injecting the personal into the collective, for debasing ideology with common physical hunger. He'd hoped he might have to duel ideologically with Justin for her favors, that she might require proof of his worth and suitability.

“Well?” She put down her pen.

“What? You mean here?
Now?”
If she could accept him like this, without hesitation, who was so undereducated and inexperienced politically, maybe she wasn't so neat after all?

“Why not? I mean, we don't want our political work to suffer, do we?”

“No, I guess we don't.” With a trembling hand he took her arm and pretended he was leading her to the cushions. He was so terrified he couldn't even joke about his inexperience. Foreplay he could handle; after all, he'd had maybe six years of it. And eventually the rest began to seem remotely possible.

“I'm afraid I'm not very good at this,” he murmured.

“That's what you all say,” she moaned, her hips rising to meet his.

“We do?” Who was this “all”? Was he merely the most recent in a cast of hundreds? Was she comparing him to all those others? He started feeling like a fool. Then he realized that among those others were Justin and Morris.

They began spending their spare time in his crow's nest apartment, rocking on his moldy mattress while the winter winds whipping in off the Hudson howled around his windows. She lay in his arms as he talked about growing up an oddball in Newland and about his struggle to get away. She talked about being pushed in her stroller in May Day parades down Fifth Avenue by her father, who was a professor at the School for Industrial and Labor Relations at Columbia. She introduced Raymond to the concept that he was working class: “Do you realize how unusual you are, Raymond? You've purged yourself of the traditional prejudices of your class, all on your own, by sheer instinct.”

He smiled. “You make me sound so heroic, Maria. But I'm just a plain working man.”

She bought him new sheets, and poison for the cockroaches. He watched as she scrubbed his walls, maintaining that he preferred it as it had been.

“God, this place is revolting!” she insisted. He accused her of being middle class. “I bet your mother didn't grow penicillin on her walls,” Maria replied.

Raymond laughed. “She sure as hell didn't. Her kitchen was as clean as an operating room.”

“What was she like with you? Bossy, I bet.”

“Yeah, pretty overwhelming. But what makes you say that?”

“Well, there's something so remote about you, Raymond. As though you're protecting this secret inner chamber from assault. You're not going to let any woman near it.”

“Me? Remote?” He slid his hands under her sweatshirt and squeezed her breasts.

She laughed. “Go ahead. Change the subject”

Raymond felt Maria was a softening influence. He became more gentle and kind when he was with her. He whistled when he was alone in his room after she'd been there. He felt she was tempering the steel that formed his core. But he drew the line one afternoon when she brought him a bouquet of tulips. “I don't want to have to sit here and watch them die.”

“But Raymond …”

“That's final, Maria.” She nodded. They went out on the roof and tossed them one by one over the edge. Passers-by on the sidewalk looked startled as tulips fell at their feet.

Raymond and Emily were eating curry in a small Indian restaurant off Times Square.

“Well, I finally did it.”

“Did what?”

“It. With a girl.”

“Yeah? Well, good for you.”

“Guess I'd better not say who with.”

“Probably not. It wouldn't be very chivalrous. It isn't Maria, is it?”

He looked at her. “How did you know?”

“How could any of us not know?”

“It's been that obvious, huh?”

“Um.”

“I recommend it highly.”

“Thanks. I'll remember.”

“Or did you make it with that fraternity creep last year?”

“God, Raymond, that's none of your business, is it?”

“It isn't? But I just told you about Maria.”

“What is this—the Swap Shop?”

“You and Justin are certainly getting along well. He thinks you're fantastic. He told me so.”

“Well, he's right, of course.”

“He only thinks so because you listen to him endlessly, pretending to be enthralled.”

“But I am enthralled. I can't understand anything he says, but I'm enthralled. I think he's a beautiful person. The way he's devoted his life to the dispossessed.”

“Yeah, I agree. Are you sleeping with him?” He felt jealousy and couldn't imagine why. He was besotted with Maria, was convinced she was the most wonderful woman in existence. He just didn't like Emily doing things without first seeking his blessing. In a way it was a good thing, though. A time or two he'd noticed Justin studying him at meetings with scarcely concealed belligerence. But Justin's claiming Emily maybe compensated for Raymond's taking up with Maria. Though as far as Raymond could see there was no contest. But let Justin think what he liked.

“God, Raymond, why do I let you talk to me like this? It's really no concern of yours.” “Yeah, but I need to know.”

“You're obsessed, is what you are. Like a kid with a new toy. Hey, you heard about our new niece, didn't you? Laura?”

“Yeah.”

“Sally phoned last night. Seven pounds, six ounces. Twenty-one inches long. Sally said the birth was much more difficult than Joey's. Her water broke about 4 a.m., and …”

“So the kid got born and has all her fingers and toes. That's all I'm interested in.” “Huh?”

“Christ, Emily, what does any of that garbage have to do with me?”

“But she's my sister, Raymond. Your sister-in-law. Your brother's wife. You've known her all your life.”

“My boring bigoted baby brother and his boring brainless bouffanted wife are leading their bland boring blighted lives in Newland, Tennessee. If you know that much, you can fill in the blanks.” He stood up and shrugged on his dirty trench coat. “Oh, for Christ's sake, stop looking at me like that. You don't care about that scene any more than I do.”

“That's not true.”

As he walked into the street, he glanced in both directions for the FBI tail he was sure would one day be there. Maria was waiting for him by a streetlight near the IRT entrance. It was Berlin. During the war. He'd sidle up to her. She'd offer him a cigarette. He'd take it, pocket it; the paper, unrolled and heated over a flame, would reveal information that would save hundreds of lives …

Maria, smiling, buttoned his trench coat and fastened the belt. “You'll freeze to death, you silly Southern boy.”

He looked at her and didn't respond when she kissed him. “Now what?” she asked with a smile.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing her hand and descending into the subway.

Back at his room, he phoned Emily. “Look, I'm sorry about what I said about Sally.”

Emily sounded disappointed. “No, after you left, Raymond, I decided you were right. It's ludicrous talking about Sally's labor pains when half the world is going to bed hungry tonight. Sally was lucky not to have to drop her baby in a furrow, get up, and keep picking cotton.”

Raymond was irritated. He wanted Emily to be annoyed with him, threaten never to speak to him again. Then he could say to her what she'd just said to him.

Justin and Morris, Maria and Raymond, were going to training sessions in a church basement, for their trip to Tennessee. A Negro in overalls instructed the two dozen volunteers on how to roll into a ball to protect the head and vital organs during a beating. A night stick, a cattle prod, a piece of hose, brass knuckles, were brought out—their uses described and demonstrated. How to behave when attacked by police dogs. Raymond felt pleasure to be preparing to do something real at last. Sending out mailings, sitting in on ideological disputes, weren't what he had in mind. He wanted to be in on making change happen. Frankly, as amusing as it was, he was even getting weary of lying around in bed all weekend with Maria. He was ready for some action.

The man described having been beaten in jail by fellow prisoners, on instructions from the sheriff. He pointed out scars on his face. He warned about cars without license plates, cops without badges. They did role-playing, practicing how to avoid responding to taunts, how to answer state troopers, how to approach potential voters.

As a woman sociology professor lectured on the folkways of the Negro and white communities of his home state, Raymond scarcely recognized the place. He'd been brutalized down there, conditioned not to question the status quo, to accept that status quo as the only possible reality. Well, there were alternatives, and he'd devote his life to bringing them to fruition.

The car hurtled down the valley of Virginia, the vagina of the South. As Raymond watched the greening pastures, he reflected on how many groups had penetrated the South via this route—wave after wave of warring Indian tribes, German and Scotch-Irish settlers from Pennsylvania, Yankee troops. The atmosphere in the car was that of a kamikaze plane. They all knew they might die down here in the struggle for justice for all the people. Until now people spoke about Brotherhood and Equality, and everyone agreed. But there were people out there who would just as soon kill them as look at them. This knowledge permeated them, making them feel deep kinship with each other. Raymond told himself that once you realized that death wasn't something that happened only to strangers, you were an adult.

“So where are the shacks?” asked Morris.

“They'd tear them down along main roads,” Justin assured him. “P.R.”

Hour by hour the fields got greener. Buds on trees became tiny chartreuse leaves. It was like a Walt Disney time-lapse movie. Maria and he sat in the back seat pressing their thighs together. He had his hands folded over his hard-on, and Maria kept looking down and grinning. As they crossed into Tennessee, small white crosses by the roadside marked traffic deaths. Raymond knew he was home.

Passing through Newland, Raymond didn't mention that it was his hometown. He looked out of the corner of his eye at the stoplight and saw his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Moody, stooped and walking with a cane. She'd had a portable organ in her room, and they'd sung “Heaven Is Closer Cause Mother Is There.” He'd loved her as she sat at her organ warbling and pumping the pedals. But no, he wouldn't allow petty personal affections to taint his awareness that the world she inhabited, and had tried to train him to inhabit, had to go.

Wilbur sat in the same valley that contained Newland, but Raymond had never been there. Newlanders, like iron filings in a magnetic field, oriented themselves northward, since their economic survival depended on it. Raymond knew Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland. He did not know Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, or the southern part of his own state. Yet this was the South of legend, the rural South. His own South, the New South of the industrialists, was too mountainous for large farms. There'd been few slaves, were now few Negroes. In the War between the States, East Tennessee had tried to secede from Tennessee when Tennessee seceded from the Union. Cherokee County in turn planned to secede from East Tennessee. Life wasn't as simple as people imagined. It'd seemed much simpler sitting in that loft on the Lower East Side of New York than now, confronted with actual earth and trees, skin and bones. He was surprised to find himself gazing at the others, his chin jutting out defiantly.

He reprimanded himself. Some things were simple to those objective enough to see them. The Negro population of this region had been systematically starved, exploited, and abused for far too long, and it was time to put a stop to it, which was why he was here. What's complicated about that, Raymond Redneck? he asked himself.

The major place of work in Wilbur was a canning factory. Houses and services for its workers comprised the town. Surrounding it were farms that grew vegetables for the factory. On the outskirts of the farms were rows of two-room cottages on red clay roads in which lived the Negroes who picked the crops. Farther out, scattered through the red clay hills, were the tenant farmers, white and Negro.

Raymond's carload joined another in the basement of a Negro church on the edge of the cottages. They slept all together, boys and girls, Negroes and whites, on the floor in sleeping bags. The project director was a Negro woman from Atlanta named Glenda. At the first staff meeting Justin began quoting Marx.

Glenda dismissed him with a shrug. “Honey, I don't give a shit bout no Marx. I got to get me six crates of baked beans out to Taloosa, Tennessee, by early this evening.” They were divided into teams and assigned areas to canvass. Glenda made suggestions on how to approach people, and described the actual mechanics of getting someone registered.

Morris and Justin and a couple of others argued about the “manipulation of community people.”

Glenda interrupted. “All right, white boys, who's gon drive the Ford into Newland for groceries tomorrow?” Raymond was aghast. People screamed at Justin, struggled to outquote him. But no one had ever shrugged him off like an annoying puppy. And certainly not a woman, not a Negro woman, not a Southern Negro woman.

Maria suppressed a smile as Justin's face turned grey. Glenda glanced at him. He gave her a tight smile. She continued assigning chores, not smiling. Weakly, Justin turned his profile to her. She looked away.

To Raymond's astonishment Justin began hanging around Glenda all the time. Raymond overheard her say, “Listen, baby, white boys don't want but two things from nigger women: housework and pussy. And Justin honey, I
know
you ain't got you no house.” This only seemed to spur Justin on. Raymond couldn't figure it out. He himself stayed as far away from her as possible. He was a mass of anxious confusion around her. Ruby and Kathryn had cuddled him when he was a child, but he was no longer a child, and the role of the white male in Negro women's lives in the South was that of rapist. Yet he found himself wanting to sit on her lap, his head resting on her breast, while she tied his shoes. And he hated himself for seeing her like this.