Travels with Charley in Search of America (28 page)

“You’re not what the North thinks of as a Southerner.”

“Perhaps not. But I’m not alone.” He stood up and dusted his trousers with his fingers. “No—not alone. I’ll go along to my pleasant things now.”

“I have not asked your name, sir, nor offered mine.”

“Ci Gît,” he said. “Monsieur Ci Gît—a big family, a common name.”

When he went away I felt a sweetness like music, if music could pleasure the skin with a little chill.

To me, it had been a day larger than a day, not to be measured against other days with any chance of matching. With little sleep the night before I knew I should stop. I was very tired, but sometimes fatigue can be a stimulant and a compulsion. It forced me to fill my gas tank and compelled me to stop and offer a ride to an old Negro who trudged with heavy heels in the grass-grown verge beside the concrete road. He was reluctant to accept and did so only as though helpless to resist. He wore the battered clothes of a field hand and an ancient broadcloth coat highly polished by age and wear. His face was coffee-colored and cross-hatched with a million tiny wrinkles, and his lower lids showed red rims like a bloodhound’s eyes. He clasped his hands in his lap, knotted and lumpy as cherry twigs, and all of him seemed to shrink in the seat as though he sucked in his outline to make it smaller.

He never looked at me. I could not see that he looked at anything. But first he asked, “Dog bite, captain, sir?”

“No. He’s friendly.”

After a long silent while I asked, “How are things going with you?”

“Fine, just fine, captain, sir.”

“How do you feel about what’s going on?”

He didn’t answer.

“I mean about the schools and the sit-ins.”

“I don’t know nothing about that, captain, sir.”

“Work on a farm?”

“Crop a cotton lot, sir.”

“Make a living at it?”

“I get along fine, captain, sir.”

We went in silence for a stretch upriver. The trees and the tropic grass were burned and sad from the ferocious northern freeze. After a time I said, more to myself than to him, “After all, why should you trust me? A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it.” I remembered a scene—something that happened in New York—and was moved to tell him about it, but I quickly abandoned the impulse because out of the corner of my eye I could see that he had drawn away and squeezed himself against the far side of the cab. But the memory was strong.

I lived then in a small brick house in Manhattan, and, being for the moment solvent, employed a Negro. Across the street and on the corner there was a bar and restaurant. One winter dusk when the sidewalks were iced I stood in my window looking out and saw a tipsy woman come out of the bar, slip on the ice, and fall flat. She tried to struggle up but slipped and fell again and lay there screaming maudlinly. At that moment the Negro who worked for me came around the corner, saw the woman, and instantly crossed the street, keeping as far from her as possible.

When he came in I said, “I saw you duck. Why didn’t you give that woman a hand?”

“Well, sir, she’s drunk and I’m Negro. If I touched her she could easily scream rape, and then it’s a crowd, and who believes me?”

“It took quick thinking to duck that fast.”

“Oh, no sir!” he said. “I’ve been practicing to be a Negro a long time.”

And now in Rocinante I was foolishly trying to destroy a lifetime of practice.

“I won’t ask you any more questions,” I said.

But he squirmed with restlessness. “Would you let me down here, please, captain? I live nearby.”

I let him down and saw in the mirror how he took up his trudging beside the road. He didn’t live nearby at all, but walking was safer than riding with me.

Weariness flagged me down and I stopped in a pleasant motel. The beds were good but I could not sleep. The gray man walked across my eyes, and the faces of the Cheerladies, but mostly I saw the old man squeezed as far away from me as he could get, as though I carried the infection, and perhaps I did. I came out to learn. What was I learning? I had not felt one moment free from the tension, a weight of savage fear. No doubt I felt it more being newcome, but it was there; I hadn’t brought it. Everyone, white and black, lived in it and breathed it—all ages, all trades, all classes. To them it was a fact of existence. And it was building pressure like a boil. Could there be no relief until it burst?

I had seen so little of the whole. I didn’t see a great deal of World War II—one landing out of a hundred, a few separated times of combat, a few thousand dead out of millions—but I saw enough and felt enough to believe war was no stranger. So here—a little episode, a few people, but the breath of fear was everywhere. I wanted to get away—a cowardly attitude, perhaps, but more cowardly to deny. But the people around me lived here. They accepted it as a permanent way of life, had never known it otherwise nor expected it to stop. The Cockney children in London were restless when the bombing stopped and disturbed a pattern to which they had grown accustomed.

I tossed about until Charley grew angry with me and told me “Ftt” several times. But Charley doesn’t have our problems. He doesn’t belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself. He doesn’t even know about race, nor is he concerned with his sisters’ marriage. It’s quite the opposite. Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully. It would be difficult to explain to a dog the good and moral purpose of a thousand humans gathered to curse one tiny human. I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

I didn’t choose my first customer the next day. He picked me. He sat on a stool next to me eating a hamburger whose twin I held in my hand. He was somewhere between thirty and thirty-five, long and stringy, and nice-looking. His long lank hair was nearly ash-blond, worn long and treasured since he whopped it with a pocket comb unconsciously and often. He wore a light gray suit that was travel-wrinkled and stained; he carried the jacket over his shoulder. His white shirt was open at the collar, permitted so by pulling down the knot of his pale paisley tie. His speech was the deepest south I had heard so far. He asked where I was going and, when I told him I aimed toward Jackson and Montgomery, begged a ride with me. When he saw Charley he thought at first I had a nigger in there. It had got to be a pattern.

We settled ourselves comfortably. He combed back his hair and complimented me on Rocinante. “Of course,” he said, “I could tell right off you’re from the North.”

“You’ve got a good ear,” I said, I thought facetiously.

“Oh, I get around,” he admitted.

I think I was responsible for what happened. If I could have kept my mouth shut I might have learned something of value. There’s the restless night to blame and the length of the journey and the nervousness. Then, too, Christmas was coming and I found myself thinking of getting home more often than was helpful.

We established that I was traveling for pleasure and that he was on the lookout for a job.

“You come up the river,” he said. “Did you see the doings in New Orleans?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Wasn’t they something, especially that Nellie? She really ripped the roof off.”

“Yes, she did.”

“Does your heart good to see somebody do their duty.”

I think it was there that I went haywire. I should have grunted and let him read what he wanted in it. But a nasty little worm of anger began to stir in me. “They doing it out of duty?”

“Sure, God bless them. Somebody got to keep the goddamn niggers out of our schools.” The sublimity of self-sacrifice activating the Cheerleaders overwhelmed him. “Comes a time when a man’s got to sit down and think, and that’s the time you got to make up your mind to sell your life for something you believe in.”

“Did you decide to do it?”

“I sure did, and a lot more like me.”

“What do you believe in?”

“I’m not just about to allow my kids to go to school with no niggers. Yes, sir. I’ll sell my life first but I aim to kill me a whole goddamn flock of niggers before I go.”

“How many children do you have?”

He swung around toward me. “I don’t have any but I aim to have some and I promise you they won’t go to school with no niggers.”

“Do you propose to sell your life before or after you have children?”

I had to watch the road so I only got a glimpse of his expression, and it wasn’t pleasant. “You sound to me like a nigger-lover. I might of known it. Troublemakers—come down here and tell us how to live. Well, you won’t get away with it, mister. We got an eye on you Commie nigger-lovers.”

“I just had a brave picture of you selling your life.”

“By God, I was right. You are a nigger-lover.”

“No, I’m not. And I’m not a white-lover either, if it includes those noble Cheerladies.”

His face was very near to me. “You want to hear what I think of you?”

“No. I heard Nellie use the words yesterday.” I put on the brake and pulled Rocinante off the road.

He looked puzzled. “What you stopping for?”

“Get out,” I said.

“Oh, you want to go round.”

“No. I want to get rid of you. Get out.”

“You going to make me?”

I reached into the space between the seat and the door where there is nothing.

“Okay, okay,” he said, and got out and slammed the door so hard that Charley wailed with annoyance.

I started instantly, but I heard him scream, and in the mirror saw his hating face and his open spit-ringed mouth. He shrilled “Nigger-lover, nigger-lover, nigger-lover, ” as long as I could see him and I don’t know how long after. It’s true I goaded him, but I couldn’t help it. I guess when they’re drafting peacemakers they’d better pass me by.

I picked up one more passenger between Jackson and Montgomery, a young Negro student with a sharp face and the look and feel of impatient fierceness. He carried three fountain pens in his breast pocket, and his inner pocket bulged with papers. I knew he was a student because I asked him. He was alert. License plate and speech relaxed him as much as he is ever likely to relax.

We discussed the sit-ins. He had taken part in them, and in the bus boycott. I told him what I had seen in New Orleans. He had been there. He had expected what I was shocked at.

Finally we spoke of Martin Luther King and his teaching of passive but unrelenting resistance.

“It’s too slow,” he said. “It will take too long.”

“There’s improvement, there’s constant improvement. Gandhi proved it’s the only weapon that can win against violence.”

“I know all that. I’ve studied it. The gains are drops of water and time is passing. I want it faster, I want action—action now.”

“That might defeat the whole thing.”

“I might be an old man before I’m a man at all. I might be dead before.”

“That’s true. And Gandhi’s dead. Are there many like you who want action?”

“Yes. I mean, some—I mean, I don’t know how many.”

We talked of many things then. He was a passionate and articulate young man with anxiety and fierceness just below the surface. But when I dropped him in Montgomery he leaned through the window of the cab and he laughed. “I’m ashamed,” he said. “It’s just selfishness. But I want to see it—me—not dead. Here! Me! I want to see it—soon.” And then he swung around and wiped his eyes with his hand and he walked quickly away.

With all the polls and opinion posts, with newspapers more opinion than news so that we no longer know one from the other, I want to be very clear about one thing. I have not intended to present, nor do I think I have presented, any kind of cross-section so that a reader can say, “He thinks he has presented a true picture of the South.” I don’t. I’ve only told what a few people said to me and what I saw. I don’t know whether they were typical or whether any conclusion can be drawn. But I do know it is a troubled place and a people caught in a jam. And I know that the solution when it arrives will not be easy or simple. I feel with Monsieur Ci Gît that the end is not in question. It’s the means—the dreadful uncertainty of the means.

In the beginning of this record I tried to explore the nature of journeys, how they are things in themselves, each one an individual and no two alike. I speculated with a kind of wonder on the strength of the individuality of journeys and stopped on the postulate that people don’t take trips—trips take people. That discussion, however, did not go into the life span of journeys. This seems to be variable and unpredictable. Who has not known a journey to be over and dead before the traveler returns? The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, endlessly traveling to Honolulu.

My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned. I know exactly where and when it was over. Near Abingdon, in the dog-leg of Virginia, at four o’clock of a windy afternoon, without warning or good-by or kiss my foot, my journey went away and left me stranded far from home. I tried to call it back, to catch it up—a foolish and hopeless matter, because it was definitely and permanently over and finished. The road became an endless stone ribbon, the hills obstructions, the trees green blurs, the people simply moving figures with heads but no faces. All the food along the way tasted like soup, even the soup. My bed was unmade. I slipped into it for naps at long uneven intervals. My stove was unlighted and a loaf of bread gathered mold in my cupboard. The miles rolled under me unacknowledged. I know it was cold, but I didn’t feel it; I know the countryside must have been beautiful, but I didn’t see it. I bulldozed blindly through West Virginia, plunged into Pennsylvania, and grooved Rocinante to the great wide turnpike. There was no night, no day, no distance. I must have stopped to fill my gas tank, to walk and feed Charley, to eat, to telephone, but I don’t remember any of it.