The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (37 page)

‘The extremity of our need?’

‘Yes.’

‘The lack of justice? The bitter inequality?’

Doctor Copeland coughed and spat into one of the squares of paper which he kept beneath his pillow. ‘I have a program. It is a very simple, concentrated plan. I mean to focus on only one objective. In August of this year I plan to lead more than one thousand Negroes in this county on a march. A march to Washington. All of us together in one solid body. If you will look in the cabinet yonder you will see a stack of letters which I have written this week and will deliver personally.’ Doctor Copeland slid his nervous hands up and down the sides of the narrow bed.

‘You remember what I said to you a short while ago? You will recall that my only advice to you was: Do not attempt to stand alone.’

‘I get it,’ Jake said.

But once you enter this it must be all. First and foremost.

Your work now and forever. You must give of your whole self without stint, without hope of personal return, without rest or hope of rest.’

‘For the rights of the Negro in the South.’

‘In the South and here in this very county. And it must be either all or nothing. Either yes or no.’

Doctor Copeland leaned back on the pillow. Only his eyes seemed alive. They burned in his face like red coals. The fever made his cheekbones a ghastly purple. Jake scowled and pressed his knuckles to his soft, wide, trembling mouth. Color rushed to his face. Outside the first pale light of morning had come. The electric bulb suspended from the ceiling burned with ugly sharpness in the dawn.

Jake rose to his feet and stood stiffly at the foot of the bed. He said flatly: ‘No. That’s not the right angle at all. I’m dead sure it’s not. In the first place, you’d never get out of town. They’d break it up by saying it’s a menace to public health--or some such trumped-up reason. They’d arrest you and nothing would come of it. But even if by some miracle you got to Washington it wouldn’t do a bit of good. Why, the whole notion is crazy.’

The sharp rattle of phlegm sounded in Doctor Copeland’s throat. His voice was harsh. ‘As you are so quick to sneer and condemn, what do you have to offer instead?’

‘I didn’t sneer,’ Jake said. ‘I only remarked that your plan is crazy. I come here tonight with an idea much better than that. I wanted your son, Willie, and the other two boys to let me push them around in a wagon. They were to tell what happened to them and afterward I was to tell why. In other words, I was to give a talk on the dialectics of capitalism--and show up all of its lies. I would explain so that everyone would understand why those boys’ legs were cut off. And make everyone who saw them know.’

‘Pshaw! Double pshaw!’ said Doctor Copeland furiously. I do not believe you have good sense. If I were a man who felt it worth my while to laugh I would surely laugh at that.

Never have I had the opportunity to hear of such nonsense first hand.’

They stared at each other in bitter disappointment and anger.

There was the rattle of a wagon in the street outside. Jake swallowed and bit his lips. ‘Huh!’ he said finally. ‘You’re the only one who’s crazy. You got everything exactly backward.

The only way to solve the Negro problem under capitalism is to geld every one of the fifteen million black men in these states.’

‘So that is the kind of idea you harbor beneath your ranting about justice.’

‘I didn’t say it should be done. I only said you couldn’t see the forest for the trees.’ Jake spoke with slow and painful care.

‘The work has to start at the bottom. The old traditions smashed and the new ones created. To forge a whole new pattern for the world. To make man a social creature for the first time, living in an orderly and controlled society where he is not forced to be unjust in order to survive. A social tradition in which--’ Doctor Copeland clapped ironically. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘But the cotton must be picked before the cloth is made. You and your crackpot do-nothing theories can--’

‘Hush! Who cares whether you and your thousand Negroes straggle up to that stinking cesspool of a place called Washington? What difference does it make? What do a few people matter--a few thousand people, black, white, good or bad? When the whole of our society is built on a foundation of black lies.’

‘Everything!’ Doctor Copeland panted. ‘Everything! Everything! ‘Nothing!’

‘The soul of the meanest and most evil of us on this earth is worth more in the sight of justice than--’

‘Oh, the Hell with it!’ Jake said. ‘Balls!’

‘Blasphemer!’ screamed Doctor Copeland. ‘Foul blasphemer!’ Jake shook the iron bars of the bed. The vein in his forehead swelled to the point of bursting and his face was dark with rage. ‘Short-sighted bigot!’

‘White--’ Doctor Copeland’s voice failed him. He struggled and no sound would come. At last he was able to bring forth a choked whisper: ‘Fiend.’

The bright yellow morning was at the window. Doctor Copeland’s head fell back on the pillow. His neck twisted at a broken angle, a fleck of bloody foam on his lips. Jake looked at him once before, sobbing with violence, he rushed headlong from the room.

Now she could not stay in the inside room. She had to be around somebody all the time. Doing something every minute. And if she was by herself she counted or figured with numbers. She counted all the roses on the living-room wall-paper. She figured out the cubic area of the whole house. She counted every blade of grass in the back yard and every leaf on a certain bush. Because if she did not have her mind on numbers this terrible afraidness came in her. She would be walking home from school on these May afternoons and suddenly she would have to think of something quick. A good thing--very good. Maybe she would think about a phrase of hurrying jazz music. Or that a bowl of jello would be in the refrigerator when she got home. Or plan to smoke a cigarette behind the coal house. Maybe she would try to think a long way ahead to the time when she would go north and see snow, or even travel somewhere in a foreign land. But these thoughts about good things wouldn’t last. The jello was gone in five minutes and the cigarette smoked. Then what was there after that? And the numbers mixed themselves up in her brain. And the snow and the foreign land were a long, long time away. Then what was there? Just Mister Singer. She wanted to follow him everywhere. In the morning she would watch him go down the front steps to work and then follow along a half a block behind him. Every afternoon as soon as school was over she hung around at the corner near the store where he worked. At four o’clock he went out to drink a Coca-Cola. She watched him cross the street and go into the drugstore and finally come out again.

She followed him home from work and sometimes even when he took walks. She always followed a long way behind him. And he did not know.

She would go up to see him in his room. First she scrubbed her face and hands and put some vanilla on the front of her dress. She only went to visit him twice a week now, because she didn’t want him to get tired of her. Most always he would be sitting over the queer, pretty chess game when she opened the door. And then she was with him.

‘Mister Singer, have you ever lived in a place where it snowed in the winter-time?’

He tilted his chair back against the wall and nodded.

‘In some different country than this one--in a foreign place?’

He nodded yes again and wrote on his pad with his silver pencil. Once he had traveled to Ontario, Canada--across the river from Detroit Canada was so far up north that the white snow drifted up to the roofs of the houses. That was where the Quints were and the St. Lawrence River. The people ran up and down the streets speaking French to each other. And far up in the north there were deep forests and white ice igloos.

The arctic region with the beautiful northern lights.

‘When you was in Canada did you go out and get any fresh snow and eat it with cream and sugar? Once I read where it was mighty good to eat that way.’

He turned his head to one side because he didn’t understand.

She couldn’t ask the question again because suddenly it sounded silly. She only looked at him and waited. A big, black shadow of his head was on the wall behind him. The electric fan cooled the thick, hot air. All was quiet. It was like they waited to tell each other things that had never been told before. What she had to say was terrible and afraid. But what he would tell her was so true that it would make everything all right. Maybe it was a thing that could not be spoken with words or writing. Maybe he would have to let her understand this in a different way. That was the feeling she had with him.

‘I was just asking you about Canada--but it didn’t amount to anything, Mister Singer.’

Downstairs in the home rooms there was plenty of trouble.

Etta was still so sick that she couldn’t sleep crowded three in a bed. The shades were drawn and the dark room smelled bad with a sick smell. Etta’s job was gone, and that meant eight dollars less a week besides the doctor’s bill.

Then one day when Ralph was walking around in the kitchen he burned himself on the hot kitchen stove. The bandages made his hands itch and somebody had to watch him all the time else he would bust the blisters. On George’s birthday they had bought him a little red bike with a bell and a basket on the handlebars. Everybody had chipped in to give it to him. But when Etta lost her job they couldn’t pay, and after two installments were past due the store sent a man out to take the wheel away. George just watched the man roll the bike off the porch, and when he passed George kicked the back fender and then went into the coal house and shut the door.

It was money, money, money all the time. They owed to the grocery and they owed the last payment on some furniture.

And now since they had lost the house they owed money there too. The six rooms in the house were always taken, but nobody ever paid the rent on time.

For a while their Dad went over every day to hunt another job.

He couldn’t do carpenter work any more because it made him jittery to be more than ten feet off the ground. He applied for many jobs but nobody would hire him. Then at last he got this notion.

‘It’s advertising, Mick,’ he said. I’ve come to the conclusion that’s all in the world the matter with my watch-repairing business right now. I got to sell myself. I got to get out and let people know I can fix watches, and fix them good and cheap.

You just mark my words. Fm going to build up this business so I’ll be able to make a good living for this family the rest of my life. Just by advertising.’

He brought home a dozen sheets of tin and some red paint. For the next week he was very busy. It seemed to him like this was a hell of a good idea. The signs were all over the floor of the front room. He got down on his hands and knees and took great care over the printing of each letter. As he worked he whistled and wagged his head. He hadn’t been so cheerful and glad in months. Every now and then he would have to dress in his good suit and go around the corner for a glass of beer to calm himself. On the signs at first he had: Wilbur Kelly Watch Repairing Very Cheap and Expert. ‘Mick, I want them to hit you right bang in the eye. To stand out wherever you see them.’

She helped him and he gave her three nickels. The signs were O.K. at first. Then he worked on them so much that they were ruined. He wanted to add more and more things--in the corners and at the top and bottom. Before he had finished the signs were plastered all over with ‘Very Cheap’ and ‘Come At Once’ and ‘You Give Me Any Watch And I Make It Run.’

‘You tried to write so much in the signs that nobody will read anything,’ she told him.

He brought home some more tin and left the designing up to her. She painted them very plain, with great big block letters and a picture of a clock. Soon he had a whole stack of them. A fellow he knew rode him out in the country where he could nail them to trees and fenceposts. At both ends of the block he put up a sign with a black hand pointing toward the house.

And over the front door there was another sign.

The day after this advertising was finished he waited in the front room dressed in a clean shirt and a tie. Nothing happened. The jeweler who gave him overflow work to do at half price sent in a couple of clocks. That was all. He took it hard. He didn’t go out to look for other jobs any more, but every minute he had to be busy around the house. He took down the doors and oiled the hinges--whether they needed it or not. He mixed the margarine for Portia and scrubbed the floors upstairs. He worked out a contraption where the water from the ice box could be drained through the kitchen window. He carved some beautiful alphabet blocks for Ralph and invented a little needle-threader. Over the few watches that he had to work on he took great pains.

Mick still followed Mister Singer. But she didn’t want to. It was like there was something wrong about her following after him without his knowing. Two or three days she played hooky from school. She walked behind him when he went to work and hung around on the corner near his store all day. When he ate his dinner at Mister Brannon’s she went into the cafe and spent a nickel for a sack of peanuts.

Then at night she followed him on these dark, long walks. She stayed on the opposite side of the street from him and about a block behind. When he stopped, she stopped also--and when he walked fast she ran to keep up with him. So long as she could see him and be near him she was right happy. But sometimes this queer feeling would come to her and she knew that she was doing wrong. So she tried hard to keep busy at home.

She and her Dad were alike in the way that now they always had to be fooling with something. She kept up with all that went on in the house and the neighborhood. Spare-rib’s big sister won fifty dollars at a movie bank night. Baby Wilson had the bandage off her head now, but her hair was cut short like a boy’s. She couldn’t dance in the soiree this year, and when her mother took her to see it Baby began to yell and cut up during one of the dances. They had to drag her out of the Opera House. And on the sidewalk Mrs. Wilson had to whip her to make her behave. And Mrs. Wilson cried, too. George hated Baby. He would hold his nose and stop up his ears when she passed by the house. Pete Wells ran away from home and was gone three weeks. He came back barefooted and very hungry. He bragged about how he had gone all the way to New Orleans.