Travels with Charley in Search of America (27 page)

Nellie was received with shouts of greeting. I don’t know how many Cheerleaders there were. There was no fixed line between the Cheerleaders and the crowd behind them. What I could see was that a group was passing newspaper clippings back and forth and reading them aloud with little squeals of delight.

Now the crowd grew restless, as an audience does when the clock goes past curtain time. Men all around me looked at their watches. I looked at mine. It was three minutes to nine.

The show opened on time. Sound of sirens. Motorcycle cops. Then two big black cars filled with big men in blond felt hats pulled up in front of the school. The crowd seemed to hold its breath. Four big marshals got out of each car and from somewhere in the automobiles they extracted the littlest Negro girl you ever saw, dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round. Her face and little legs were very black against the white.

The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering shrieks went up from behind the barricades. The little girl did not look at the howling crowd but from the side the whites of her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned her around like a doll, and then the strange procession moved up the broad walk toward the school, and the child was even more a mite because the men were so big. Then the girl made a curious hop, and I think I know what it was. I think in her whole life she had not gone ten steps without skipping, but now in the middle of her first skip the weight bore her down and her little round feet took measured, reluctant steps between the tall guards. Slowly they climbed the steps and entered the school.

The papers had printed that the jibes and jeers were cruel and sometimes obscene, and so they were, but this was not the big show. The crowd was waiting for the white man who dared to bring his white child to school. And here he came along the guarded walk, a tall man dressed in light gray, leading his frightened child by the hand. His body was tensed as a strong leaf spring drawn to the breaking strain; his face was grave and gray, and his eyes were on the ground immediately ahead of him. The muscles of his cheeks stood out from clenched jaws, a man afraid who by his will held his fears in check as a great rider directs a panicked horse.

A shrill, grating voice rang out. The yelling was not in chorus. Each took a turn and at the end of each the crowd broke into howls and roars and whistles of applause. This is what they had come to see and hear.

No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted. It was indicated that they were indelicate, some even said obscene. On television the sound track was made to blur or had crowd noises cut in to cover. But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate. In a long and unprotected life I have seen and heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before. Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow?

The words written down are dirty, carefully and selectedly filthy. But there was something far worse here than dirt, a kind of frightening witches’ Sabbath. Here was no spontaneous cry of anger, of insane rage.

Perhaps that is what made me sick with weary nausea. Here was no principle good or bad, no direction. These blowzy women, with their little hats and their clippings, hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired. They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness much more heart-breaking. These were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience.

The crowd behind the barrier roared and cheered and pounded one another with joy. The nervous strolling police watched for any break over the barrier. Their lips were tight but a few of them smiled and quickly unsmiled. Across the street the U.S. marshals stood unmoving. The gray-clothed man’s legs had speeded for a second, but he reined them down with his will and walked up the school pavement.

The crowd quieted and the next Cheerlady had her turn. Her voice was the bellow of a bull, a deep and powerful shout with flat edges like a circus barker’s voice. There is no need to set down her words. The pattern was the same; only the rhythm and tonal quality were different. Anyone who has been near the theater would know that these speeches were not spontaneous. They were tried and memorized and carefully rehearsed. This was theater. I watched the intent faces of the listening crowd and they were the faces of an audience. When there was applause, it was for a performer.

My body churned with weary nausea, but I could not let an illness blind me after I had come so far to look and to hear. And suddenly I knew something was wrong and distorted and out of drawing. I knew New Orleans, I have over the years had many friends there, thoughtful, gentle people, with a tradition of kindness and courtesy. I remembered Lyle Saxon, a huge man of soft laughter. How many days I have spent with Roark Bradford, who took Louisiana sounds and sights and created God and the Green Pastures to which He leadeth us. I looked in the crowd for such faces of such people and they were not there. I’ve seen this kind bellow for blood at a prize fight, have orgasms when a man is gored in the bull ring, stare with vicarious lust at a highway accident, stand patiently in line for the privilege of watching any pain or any agony. But where were the others—the ones who would be proud they were of a species with the gray man—the ones whose arms would ache to gather up the small, scared black mite?

I don’t know where they were. Perhaps they felt as helpless as I did, but they left New Orleans misrepresented to the world. The crowd, no doubt, rushed home to see themselves on television, and what they saw went out all over the world, unchallenged by the other things I know are there.

The show was over and the river of us began to move away. Second show would be when school-closing bell rang and the little black face had to look out at her accusers again. I was in New Orleans of the great restaurants. I know them all and most of them know me. And I could no more have gone to Gallatoir’s for an omelet and champagne than I could have danced on a grave. Even setting this down on paper has raised the weary, hopeless nausea in me again. It is not written to amuse. It does not amuse me.

I bought a poor-boy sandwich and got out of town. Not too far along I found a pleasant resting place where I could sit and munch and contemplate and stare out over the stately brown, slow-moving Father of Waters as my spirit required. Charley did not wander about but sat close and pressed his shoulder against my knee, and he does that only when I am ill, so I suppose I was ill with a kind of sorrow.

I lost track of time, but a while after the sun had passed top a man came walking and we exchanged good afternoons. He was a neatly dressed man well along in years, with a Greco face and fine wind-lifted white hair and a clipped white mustache. I asked him to join me, and when he accepted I went into my house and set coffee to cooking and, remembering how Roark Bradford liked it, I doubled the dosage, two heaping tablespoons of coffee to each cup and two heaping for the pot. I cracked an egg and cupped out the yolk and dropped white and shells into the pot, for I know nothing that polishes coffee and makes it shine like that. The air was still very cold and a cold night was coming, so that the brew, rising from cold water to a rolling boil, gave the good smell that competes successfully with other good smells.

My guest was satisfied, and he warmed his hands against the plastic cup. “By your license, you’re a stranger here,” he said. “How do you come to know about coffee?”

“I learned on Bourbon Street from giants in the earth,” I said. “But they would have asked the bean of a darker roast and they would have liked a little chicory for bite.”

“You do know,” he said. “You’re not a stranger after all. And can you make diablo?”

“For parties, yes. You come from here?”

“More generations than I can prove beyond doubt, except classified under
ci gît
in St. Louis.”

“I see. You’re of that breed. I’m glad you stopped by. I used to know St. Louis, even collected epitaphs.”

“Did you, sir? You’ll remember the queer one, then.”

“If it’s the same one, I tried to memorize it. You mean that one that starts, ‘Alas that one whose darnthly joy. . . ?’ ”

“That’s it. Robert John Cresswell, died 1845 aged twenty-six.”

“I wish I could remember it.”

“Have you a paper? You can write it down.”

And when I had a pad on my knee he said, “Alas that one whose darnthly joy had often to trust in heaven should canty thus sudden to from all its hopes benivens and though thy love for off remore that dealt the dog pest thou left to prove thy sufferings while below.”

“It’s wonderful,” I said. “Lewis Carroll could have written it. I almost know what it means.”

“Everyone does. Are you traveling for pleasure?”

“I was until today. I saw the Cheerleaders.”

“Oh, yes, I see,” he said, and a weight and a darkness fell on him.

“What’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t dare think about it. Why do I have to think about it? I’m too old. Let the others take care of it.”

“Can you see an end?”

“Oh, certainly an end. It’s the means—it’s the means. But you’re from the North. This isn’t your problem.”

“I guess it’s everybody’s problem. It isn’t local. Would you have another cup of coffee and talk to me about it? I don’t have a position. I mean I want to hear.”

“There’s nothing to learn,” he said. “It seems to change its face with who you are and where you’ve been and how you feel—not think, but feel. You didn’t like what you saw?”

“Would you?”

“Maybe less than you because I know all of its aching past and some if its stinking future. That’s an ugly word, sir, but there’s no other.”

“The Negroes want to be people. Are you against that?”

“Bless you, no, sir. But to get to be people they must fight those who aren’t satisfied to be people.”

“You mean the Negroes won’t be satisfied with any gain?”

“Are you? Is anyone you know?”

“Would you be content to let them be people?”

“Content enough, but I wouldn’t understand it. I’ve got too many
ci gîts
here. How can I tell you? Well, suppose your dog here, he looks a very intelligent dog—” dog—”

“He is.”

“Well, suppose he could talk and stand on his hind legs. Maybe he could do very well in every way. Perhaps you could invite him to dinner, but could you think of him as people?”

“Do you mean, how would I like my sister to marry him?”

He laughed. “I’m only telling you how hard it is to change a feeling about things. And will you believe that it will be just as hard for Negroes to change their feeling about us as it is for us to change about them? This isn’t new. It’s been going on a long time.”

“Anyway, the subject skims the joy off a pan of conversation. ”

“That it does, sir. I think I’m what you might call an enlightened Southerner mistaking an insult for a compliment. As such a new-born hybrid, I know what will happen over the ages. It’s starting now in Africa and in Asia.”

“You mean absorption—the Negroes will disappear?”

“If they outnumber us, we will disappear, or more likely both will disappear into something new.”

“And meanwhile?”

“It’s the meanwhile frightens me, sir. The ancients placed love and war in the hands of closely related gods. That was no accident. That, sir, was a profound knowledge of man.”

“You reason well.”

“The ones you saw today do not reason at all. They’re the ones who may alert the god.”

“Then you do think it can’t happen in peace?”

“I don’t know,” he cried. “I guess that’s the worst. I just don’t know. Sometimes I long to assume my rightful title Ci Gît.”

“I wish you would ride along with me. Are you on the move?”

“No. I have a little place just off there below that grove. I spend a lot of time there, mostly reading—old things—mostly looking at—old things. It’s my intentional method of avoiding the issue because I’m afraid of it.”

“I guess we all do some of that.”

He smiled. “I have an old Negro couple as old as I am to take care of me. And sometimes in the evening we forget. They forget to envy me and I forget they might, and we are just three pleasant . . . things living together and smelling the flowers.”

“Things,” I repeated. “That’s interesting—not man and beast, not black and white, but pleasant things. My wife told me of an old, old man who said, ‘I remember a time when Negroes had no souls. It was much better and easier then. Now it’s confusing.’ ”

“I don’t remember, but it must be so. It is my guess that we can cut and divide our inherited guilt like a birthday cake,” he said, and save for the mustache he looked like the Greco San Pablo who holds the closed book in his hands. “Surely my ancestors had slaves, but it is possible that yours caught them and sold them to us.”

“I have a puritan strain that might well have done so.”

“If by force you make a creature live and work like a beast, you must think of him as a beast, else empathy would drive you mad. Once you have classified him in your mind, your feelings are safe.” He stared at the river, and the breeze stirred his hair like white smoke. “And if your heart has human vestiges of courage and anger, which in a man are virtues, then you have fear of a dangerous beast, and since your heart has intelligence and inventiveness and the ability to conceal them, you live with terror. Then you must crush his manlike tendencies and make of him the docile beast you want. And if you can teach your child from the beginning about the beast, he will not share your bewilderment.”

“I’ve been told the good old-time Negro sang and danced and was content.”

“He also ran away. The fugitive laws suggest how often.”