Strange Fruit, page 10
He drove discreetly through the edge of Colored Town, took an old road that cut across to the highway, brought her here. She slipped out of the car, walked to the edge of the bank, stood there looking down at the dark river, at the cliffs white in moonlight. Then she had turned, slowly pushed her hair off her face, and smiled. And he had been profoundly moved. It was a little thing, a quick turn of her body, the slow pushing of hair from her face, her smile. But he knew that she had never seen a river in moonlight before … that somehow he had conferred a great favor. And he felt shamed and confused. She took his hand and rubbed it against her lips, then left him and walked a few steps away, and stood with her back to him, looking at the river. The wind was blowing enough to sweep her dress against her body, and to push her hair away from her forehead. And she seemed a sweet lovely thing to him there in the moonlight.
He moved to her quickly and pulled her to him, shamed and deeply touched. He had slipped his hand back of her head as he held her, now kissed her face again and again and again. After a time she turned away, took his hand; held it tightly, suddenly. And when he pulled her around he saw that her chin was shaking and there were tears on her face.
“It’s a goddam mess!” he’d said and hushed abruptly.
She shook her head, smiled quickly, wiped her eyes. Then they had sat on the sand and neither had tried to talk. Neither liking to talk much. After a while he had drawn her to him and they were laughing together, for the sand was scratchy as the very devil. And everything seemed right and good, as it had always been.
But later, as they lay there, relaxed, looking up at the sky, she had pulled his hand to her breast. He felt her heart beating under it and suddenly, lying there, she seemed not the Nonnie whom he had a way of taking as for granted as you’d take a piece of cornbread, but a girl off somewhere by herself and sad about something. He drew her to him and ran his hand across her hair, not knowing what to say. Not knowing in this damned upside-down, devilish world what to say to a girl like this. He knew from the trembling through her body that she was crying, but there was no sound. Lying there, looking under the limb of that old tree sagged with moss, he thought about her. He remembered that when her mother died last winter, just after he’d come back from Europe, he’d hardly noticed. After that first night, he’d hardly noticed anything about her. For nothing in Nonnie’s life seemed a part of him, except herself. He’d hardly noticed, and it must have meant a hell of a lot to Nonnie. It made him a little sick to remember that now, as he lay on the sand holding the girl in his arms. And a day or two after the old woman had died and the funeral was over, he had gone out there—but to talk to Non about himself, having had another damned row at home. And she had sat under the arbor and listened to him talk, looking peaked and tired as she listened, making him feel good again and comforted by her listening. And the meeting with the Reverend and Roseanna had been almost forgotten as she listened to him.
“Would you like to talk to me, Non, about it?” It made him feel decent to say that to her. It made him feel almost as he had felt the night he danced with her. It was coming back, the feeling he had lost. He was finding it again. And his body and mind were quickening.
After a while she wiped her eyes, pushed back her dark hair. “I can’t talk, much,” she said low, “about things.” She smiled at him, and he knew that, somehow, she was pushing that trouble back from wherever it had come. “I think it’s like this—” she said quietly, “I’ve always known what I wanted. You; and Mummie, when I was little. I know people are supposed to want other things. I don’t seem to. I suppose the way I’ve always felt about—Mother, goes back to those long days I spent by myself, playing around on the edge of the swamp and fields. All day long … saying to myself: when the sun goes down she’ll be back … Sometimes I was afraid of the woods. I don’t quite know how to say it, for I loved them too. But I’d be out playing, whispering to myself, and something would rattle and I’d begin to run … not knowing where to run …” She laughed and wiped her eyes again. “But when I heard her step at dusk, down on the path by Miss Ada’s, things were—all right again. I suppose a lot of children are like that. Colored children,” she said, and stopped.
Negro. She’d said it. Now everything would be spoiled. Ruined as it always was!
But it wasn’t ruined. Out there on the lime cliff, brown water swirling below you, sky paled out by the moon above you, great oaks with sagging moss draping your nakedness, hiding you from the world, you could think that word without getting sick at your stomach. You could say it, say Nonnie’s name after it, and still believe in her and yourself. The world’s wrong, you could say. Dead wrong.
She’d turned then, as if she had read his thoughts. “Race is something—made up, to me. Not real. I don’t—have to believe in it. Social position—ambition—seem made up too. Games for folks to—forget their troubles with. Bess says I’m crazy, that I live in a dream world.” She’d smiled and looked up at the sky and both of them had watched a cloud drop behind the great oaks.
God! You could hear that damned word and not mind it. You didn’t give a goddam what the world thought. She was yours, that’s all! She’s my girl. She’s lovely and beautiful, and she’s mine. He’d laughed, and pulled her to him again. Holding her there, he knew he loved her—as a man loves the woman who fits all his needs.
And he felt good. He watched a cloud pull across the moon and break in two afterward, he looked at the shadows under the oaks, and felt good inside. He felt he could help Nonnie through her trouble, whatever it now was, as she had helped him … all her life long.
She had her arm behind her head now, and the moss was there on her breast, rising and falling in the clear light. “The way things have to be … I don’t—see much of you. It has to be that way,” she said quickly, “I’ve accepted that. But tonight … maybe you shouldn’t have brought me,” she smiled at him, “it is so beautiful here and I—”
Yeah. The bluff belonged to white folks and every nigger in the county knew it.
“—I suddenly thought if we were—the same—color,” she said the words very low, “this separation wouldn’t have to be. We could play together—this tonight—drive places in the car—play tennis, maybe … I know it sounds funny,” she laughed and her breath caught sharply, “but I’ve never played except by myself. And it suddenly seemed as if it would be—nice—to play with you.” She stopped for a moment and they both watched a bird fly slowly from one tree to another. “It’s sleep walking,” she’d whispered. She went on again, “This evening before you came. I’d been out weeding Mama’s grave. It’s been hot today too—and Boysie cried so much—maybe all of it together—”
“God … I can’t let you put up with it!”
“It’s all right, Tracy. I want you to know that,” she spoke earnestly now. “I like having you come out to me … just as you do … I like being there—whenever you need me. Those things that mean so much to Eddie and Bess, and meant so much to Mummie, don’t mean the same to me. I decided that, when I was a little thing—playing by myself. White boys, people, would try to—bother me … and I had to decide things. Maybe that doesn’t make sense to you. But one day when I was a little girl, a boy tried to take off my clothes in a gallberry patch, and you stopped him. It sounds funny, saying it out loud, like this, but there you were, and I knew I was—all right. I’ve felt that way … ever since. All those things people think matter, don’t matter.”
She seemed like a little girl, talking so freely—like this; not the calm, quiet Nonnie who knew somehow always what to give you when you needed something, though she never said much. More the little tike in the gallberry patch. Yes, he remembered it, vaguely. Now Nat Ashley was mayor of some town up in North Carolina, he’d heard, getting ready to run for governor.
They’d gone back to town late. And he had taken her home and driven back to College Street. But the moment he opened the screen door of his house and entered that hall, things changed as if he had found his sense of direction out in the swamp—and lost it again. He had done that when hunting. Many a time. You know you’re going right, and suddenly you don’t know where you’re going. The moment he opened that door, tiptoed through that dark hall and up the steps, past Laura’s door, he heard the whole town—been out all night with a nigger gal … wasting your life … getting something you can’t get here in White Town … Well, they’ve got plenty of that!
Maxwell talking. All the world talking, maybe.
It’s like an obsession. Seems true to you, but everybody else says it isn’t. You can’t love and respect a colored girl. No, you can’t. But you do. If you do—then there must be something bad wrong with you. It’s like playing with your body when you were a kid. You had to touch yourself. It felt good. It was good. But everyone told you it wasn’t good. Said it would drive you crazy or kill you. Decent people didn’t do it. Well … you did. You did it and liked it. And felt like hell, afterward. You’d outgrown that. Now the preacher said time to outgrow this other. Past time.
Sitting there under the big oak tree by the preacher, who breathed deep and steadily now, sweat rolling down his neck and forehead, legs spraddled out in comfort—Tracy tried to feel again what he had felt that night two months ago under the same oak tree, on the same old riverbank. But it wouldn’t come. He remembered every word they had said, every moment they had been here—as if it had happened to someone else a hundred years ago. Nonnie was only a name today. A name and an obstacle. A colored girl blocking a white path.
I’ve never asked much of you—you haven’t given—anything. There’s Dorothy … we’ve all wanted that—and you treat her like a cheap thing.
There’s Dorothy. Puseys lived across the street and you’d dated her all your life because she was near, and seemed to like you all right. And now they blame you because she hasn’t married—because she is twenty-five years old and has never married!
He touched the preacher’s arm. “Reckon we better be going back,” he said, and smiled at the startled face.
Reckon we better be going back to White Town. It hadn’t worked. He’d come to the river to find her but she wasn’t here.
Tracy drove quickly over the eight miles of pavement, slowed down as he once more entered the sand road. “I don’t have much of a feeling for God,” he said, “and all it seems to stand for in folks’ minds. As for the church, it’s not important to me. I don’t know that I even believe in God.”
“I know,” the preacher said, and his heavy brows came together. “That’s just what I was saying. That’s the way it is with men like you. You’re going cross-country—sort of cruising by yourself something you don’t know what you’re cruising … or won’t do you any good to cruise, for there’s no good timber there—climbing through palmettos, over fences and ditches, through the hammock. And along comes somebody and says, Son, you’ll wear yourself out, plumb to death, fighting woods like that! Here, come round this thicket. There’s the road, right before you. It’s a lot easier on you to travel the road men have hewed out and made for themselves. It’s a lot more satisfaction. And you might say, But I don’t know where it leads. And I say, You don’t know where this other leads either. But I know. And other white men know. It leads to death and worse than death. It leads to hell and damnation. And this road leads to life everlasting … and peace. And you can say back, Can you prove it? And I’ll say No. I can’t prove it. But I’ve tried it. It works. Thing to do is to git goin. When you once get going, faith comes. How it comes, I don’t know. It’s a mystery of God. But it comes. There’re men all along the way that can tell you the same.”
Tracy drove on. The preacher was silent now.
“If I didn’t believe in God,” he said after a time, “in a personal God, not just some theory—Deen, if I didn’t believe in God the Father watching over me day and night, I’d be the meanest man in Georgia. I’d go on such a rampage …” The preacher suddenly sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. “You know, some men have the devil in them from the day they’re born. And I’m one of them. Broke my poor mother’s heart before I gave in. God help me, I put her in an early grave with my wild ways. Sometimes now when I get to thinking about it, I wonder how God has been so merciful to me, how He’s been willing to reach down and save a good-for-nothing scoundrel like me.”
Tracy was looking straight down the sand road.
“You haven’t got that on your conscience. Don’t get it there, boy, it’s a hard thing to bear.”
“I don’t believe—anything,” Tracy suddenly laughed, and his hand trembled as he lit a cigarette. “But if you did believe—how does a man get going?”
“For you, seems to me, would be like this: join the church, marry that fine little Pusey girl, set up housekeeping and make her a good living. That would be your way to begin. For other folks it might be different. Some I tell to get down on their knees and stay there until God lays His hand of mercy on their black hearts. Some I call to the altar, so they can prove to men that they mean what they say and in the proving give themselves strength to mean it. There’s a way for every man. I’ve learned that.”
Tracy turned the car into Oak Street, suddenly cut into Elm Street, headed toward the Harris home, where Brother Dunwoodie was staying.
“There’s a colored girl—” he spoke abruptly, stopped.
Brother Dunwoodie let the car move a hundred yards before he answered. Let Deen drive slowly across the little wooden bridge that spanned the branch which ran through the Harrises’ back field.
“Reckon when the merciful Lord listens to sinners down here. He hears that right often.”
“She’s going to have a baby.”
“And what if she is? They all have em! Almost before they have their first sick-time!”
Tracy flushed. “I wouldn’t want her to—have trouble.”
“As far as I’ve been able to figure out—they don’t.” The preacher laughed shortly.
“I wouldn’t want her to have trouble,” Tracy said again low, and stopped the car at the Harrises’ side gate.
“Then fix things! Find some good nigger you can count on to marry her. Give—”
God! If any nigger dared touch her, if any dared—
“—her some money. They all like money—all women like money, no matter what color! Give him some money too. To kindle a fire under him and get him moving fast. Get your Dorothy a ring. Go to her with your hands as clean as that fine little girl deserves, and ask her to marry you and marry you quick.”
Tracy half smiled. “That the way you figure things out?”
“That’s the way, Deen. And git goin.” He said it a little roughly, but turned quickly and smiled and shook hands with the man who had forgotten to start the car. “There’s a lot of important folks on your side,” he called as he walked up the path under the big oaks in the Harrises’ lawn, “and God’s among them. Don’t forget that.”
“I’m much obliged to you, Brother Dunwoodie,” Tracy said courteously and, starting the car, drove slowly around the corner to College Street and on to the yellow house where the Deens lived. He left the car in the driveway for his mother, skirted the house, quickly went to Henry’s cabin.
SEVEN
Henry was sprawled on the steps of the shed, sharpening pencils. He could no more than read his name and write it, but he liked pencils and kept one or two sharp ones on his bureau and on Tracy’s desk no less than four or five.
Tracy did not stop but went inside. “Henry,” he called, and sitting down near the window he opened his shirt. “Pour me a drink and be quick about it, for I reckon it’s my last.”
Henry laid his pencils on the step, eased through the door like a big black shadow.
“I’m joining the church,” Tracy watched Henry’s face.
Henry’s mouth sagged until his bottom teeth showed. He reached for the jug, felt around with his big hand for the cup, never let his eyes leave the white man’s face.
“We bof need plenty—ef dat what we doin. When us join up?”
Tracy drained the cup, threw back his head and laughed. He looked at big, black Henry a long time before he answered. “Boy, boy,” he said softly, “whatever else …” He stared out of the back door, thin face sobered. Kept staring out the back door.
“Yassuh,” Henry whispered.
“I don’t reckon, you damned jackass, whatever else I did, I could do without you.” He turned, smiled quickly at the Negro.
“Nossuh. I knowed dat since I kin remember.”
Tracy lighted a cigarette.
Henry brought in the pencils. Laid them on the bureau. “When us join up?” Squatting now in front of the white man.
“Don’t know.”
“Why us got it to do?”
“God knows.”
“But us is.”
“Well, there’s no hurry about it.” He stared into Henry’s wall, papered with a dozen years of funny papers.
Began to talk, still staring at the paper, “Things get you after a while. Everybody expecting you to—I’ve heard so damned many sermons—listened to so damned many revival songs all my life. It’s not that you believe in all that—It’s like ghosts and hants—you don’t believe in them either.”
Henry nodded a feeble negative.
“You know—your mind tells you they’re impossible—they don’t fit in with real life—in the sunlight it’s easy but at night, if you were passing the graveyard and you saw a figure moving about among the graves you’d run your tail off, wouldn’t you?”
“Gawd yes,” Henry breathed.
Tracy laughed. “And like as not I would too.”
“These things—hants—hell, they stand for something. I wish I knew what. There’s an argument, a damned good argument against all this revival stuff, but trouble is, I don’t know what it is. You’d think after we made fools of ourselves in the war, folks would be ashamed to hold revivals. And right now there’s one going on in almost every town in the state. Henry, you ought to know the answer to all this.”
