Strange Fruit, page 6
Anyone glancing at them would have known they were brother and sister, though the resemblance was one in which each face emphasized what was minimized in the other. Laura’s pale brown hair, gray eyes, were in sharp contrast with Tracy’s black hair and deep blue eyes—her square face, her serenity and calm; his thinness and the tired lines around mouth and eyes—his quick, amused, half-mocking glance; her steady, kind, intelligent appraisal. And yet anyone would have known that they had the same mother and the same father also.
She went with him to Pennsylvania Station, and while he bought his ticket, she walked over to the newsstand, bought an Atlantic Monthly, was halfway back, hesitated, turned around, bought a Saturday Evening Post and Life, gave them to him instead. They both laughed, and he kissed her more warmly when he told her good-by than he had when he greeted her at the docks. She stood there waving as he went down the steps to the tracks, peering at him through her bifocal glasses, and smiling a little vaguely.
She had stood here on the porch tonight, waving, after he asked her to go with him and Dot for a coke. He had driven her and his mother home from the service. Suddenly he asked Laura to go with them to the drugstore. He did not know why he asked her. It seemed to him that she should be with the crowd, with Harriet, with the others her own age, not here with Mother. She’ll be an old maid before she’s twenty-five, he thought, and found himself angry. I have a book I want to finish, she’d said. I have a book. And Mother looked on, quietly triumphant.
It seems to me, Tracy, Dorothy has been very patient. That was all Mother said. Why did she say it?
Going from Marseille, from two years of war and army, from those talks with the Newark guy, down to Maxwell, was something he never remembered. All he could remember about it was the knowing, the strange, urgent knowing that nothing must touch what he held in his mind.
He pushed the South from him as he went through it, pushed everything he had ever known or feared or hated or believed in, away from him on that trip down. It was in October that he returned, and the air was cooling. A thin blue haze was beginning to cling to the evenings. Leaves were falling … soon be time to go hunting. Gins were busy with the cotton. Trucks and wagons piled with bales jammed the roads. Hands still in the fields picking. He heard somebody say the rains had delayed the picking. He saw crowds of colored folks with lint in their hair and clothes, waiting to be paid off. A commissary. General merchandise stores with sheds piled with cotton. Somebody weighing bales. No feeling. The South was a picture full of things, people, smells, deeds, sounds. But no feeling. Things have changed, folks said. You won’t know the place. Niggers all going North. Hard to get help. Everybody biggety. War’s ruined em. Won’t work. Cotton slumping. Boll weevil been terrible.
He listened. They were words as familiar to him as his own name, but words with which he now refused identification. It was as if he were the only thing real. The rest was made up.
His mother and father met him at the depot—Mother dressed in a new fall suit, tailored and smooth, driving her new Buick; and Dad sloppy and rumpled as ever, and a little tired-looking. There was a moment when Tracy looked at Alma and Tut and knew he was their son … One moment. And then he was once more the only real thing, all the rest was shut away from him.
Eenie was at the door, beaming. A good cook, but he had never liked her and she had never liked him. Now she was beaming. And Big Henry, his old childhood friend, who lived in the back yard and was now houseboy, was there waiting, grinning, and it was good to laugh with him and greet him, and yet there was nothing real about the laughter or the greeting. All day he did the expected. He drank cokes with the young pretty girls and with Miss Belle, who sold perfumes, and Miss Sadie the telephone operator, and Miss Eva who clerked in Adams Store, and all the other old maids who had drunk cokes with him at ten o’clock every morning in the old days. He shook hands with his father’s friends, with Prentiss Reid, who was more his friend than his father’s. He had to do these things, there was no avoiding it. He was a home-town boy come back from the wars, and people were glad to see him.
When evening came and he could leave, he borrowed his mother’s car. Even as her face glazed, even as her eyes sharpened with the old unasked question, he did not let it reach him. It came toward him but glanced off of the wall he had closed himself in with. He drove through the back road slowly, enjoying the smooth shift of gears, the easy pull, after driving army trucks for two years. He stopped the car in the row of cedars near Miss Ada’s and walked from there, knowing Non would be at the gate waiting, for he had written.
The old two-story ramshackly house in which the Andersons lived was just as it had been two years ago, ten years ago, maybe twenty years—paint peeling, roof needing repairs, two posts out of the upper balcony. But he did not look at it.
She turned, opened the gate. He saw her, cool and slim, dark hair brushed back from her temples, exactly as he had dreamed her, waiting. She was laughing softly, to keep the tears back, as he kissed her. Then she held him away from her and looked at him, his eyes, his face, hair, his eyes again—looked so long, so steadily, that he smiled finally and said, “Maybe you don’t know me?” He began to guess then something of the emptiness his coming back had filled, and it surprised him, for never in all his thinking had he remembered that his coming back might mean something to her also.
“The old cabin?”
“Later—when Bess comes.” She told him of her mother’s long illness, how she could not be left alone for more than a few minutes. She was now sleeping. Bess would be home soon from the Stephensons’. After supper, after their mother and Jackie were settled for the night, she could leave.
He drove down Back Street, took the road toward Rushtons’ farm, driving the hours away until she would be free to go with him. Swamp and pine and road grew dark, grew light again as a waning moon rose. The air was good to smell here, heavy with rotting roots and falling leaves and pond water, air he had breathed as a boy, good to breathe now. His eye moved over familiar flat country, moved with ease along slow-rising contour of fields and road, of sand hill and swamp, followed the road that stretched so flatly through pine trees … eye muscles resuming old movements learned long before he could remember. But no feeling returned with them.
In the car he had put his old portable phonograph and a record. Not a special record, just music he liked, a slow waltz. Everything he did now was as predetermined as the events of a dream.
When he drove back, closer to the gate, she was there. She did not ask why he carried the phonograph. She accepted it as she had always accepted him. Down the old path, beyond the grape arbor, through the field, to old Aunt Tyse’s deserted cabin. The grass had grown high around it, as if no one had been there the years he had been away. He put the phonograph down, turned to her as she stood in the doorway. There was a shining in her eyes; he’d never forget it. “I’ve dreamed,” he said and felt shy, as youngsters feel with each other, “of dancing with you. Seems a little crazy, doesn’t it?” He laughed to make the words easy, for they seemed important and heavy with significance, and he did not want them to seem so. He put on a record, came to her. The room was dim, only a little light sifting through the broken roof. He touched her, she was in his arms, and they danced together. In that old funny cabin with a floor that sagged at the left end and walls covered with cobwebs, they danced. Tracy and his image. And there was no dust, no dirt anywhere.
It was easy to stop, though the record played on until there was nothing but a scratching noise left, and finally she looked at the machine, half smiling, and he leaned across her and clicked it off …
Afterward they talked. He talked. They went out, sat on the steps of the cabin, and he talked more than he had ever talked in his life to anyone. Not of the important things, not much, not of the old worries with the family that he used to talk so much to her about, but of the little things. The trite, ordinary things that make one life so different from another. He told her about the men in his company, the guy from Newark and the boy who wanted to mow his grass, the way he’d think of Sulphur Springs when he was thirsty, though he had never liked sulphur water; time he picked up an officer in his truck who had known his grandmother in Macon, and they had talked of her. With shells bursting around them, truck bumping through holes and rain, they’d talked of the sharp-tongued vivacious preacher’s wife who would never be forgotten by her husband’s congregations. Then he talked of the future. Things he wanted to do. For the first time he wanted to do for Non. And he knew he could do it. Whatever he did she would like it, it would seem right, it would be enough, but she would believe he could do more if that was what he wanted, and he would want it. He talked of going into business. A chain of filling stations. Might make money at that. He laughed. Might be a good idea to make some money. Might go into politia also … things needed doing … never thought much about it until he talked with men in the army, but things had to be done in the South—in the whole country—and nobody but the young men could do them.
“Or,” he said suddenly, “we might go back to France—I made friends—I could work in a bank there—we—”
When he said the word something happened to Nonnie’s face and he was startled—as if he had lighted ten thousand candles with one small half-thought-out word.
Then they stood to go, for it was late, and he kissed her. And there was between them that luminous moment caught and forever stamped on a memory, when every desire, every fantasy of one person meets and blends with those of another.
He left her at the gate, walked down to the car, sat for a while before he turned the switch, trying as he sat there to bend his whole life around that one moment. The old cedars behind him blackened out the moonlight, but between him and Miss Ada’s house the path was as light as day, and the two rows of bottles that outlined the path glittered and winked in the brightness.
He drove home, put up the car, started upstairs. He wanted a smoke, had no cigarettes, decided to walk down to the drugstore for them. He wanted to walk, he was filled with energy, with a power he had never felt before, an absolute certainty. Whisky had never made him feel like this. He wasn’t drunk. He was clearheaded, quiet, sane. For the first time that he could remember there was nothing pulling—no confusion, no two ways, no three ways. He knew what he wanted, knew what he needed, knew what he had. He knew for the first time who Tracy Deen was and what he was after—and he believed for the first time in his life in Tracy Deen’s strength to get it.
College Street was dark. The homes where his neighbors lived were silent. As he walked opposite the Pusey cottage he did not even remember that Dottie lived there. It was still Tracy’s new world and Nonnie stood in its doorway.
He heard voices. After the stillness they seemed loud, noisy, although hardly above the usual conversational level. Under the street lamp near the drugstore he met the Reverend Livingston and Roseanna. The Reverend had on his preacher coat and Roseanna, his wife, was dressed in some kind of blue finery and a hat. Apparently they were coming from lodge meeting. They were laughing heartily, having the street to themselves at this late hour, and the Reverend’s black face was crinkled with laughter as he walked along, spryly whirling the cane that usually he leaned on before white people. Roseanna was floating beside him, being one of those fat women so light on their feet that their weight seems to act as a sail filled with a stiff breeze. Her light-yellow face was merry now with her joking.
“If it isn’t Mr. Tracy!” Roseanna’s voice curved to the ground as she spoke his name, though he heard, too, the razor edge of mockery that cut a swath through her humility. He had caught Roseanna without her white-folks manner, and it was as if she were hastily buttoning it on as she spoke to him.
“Well, well, howdy, Mr. Tracy,” said the Reverend, in the voice he reserved for pulpit and white folks. “Welcome home.”
Although he had never liked him, Tracy decided he should shake hands with the Reverend. It was his family’s custom to shake hands with a few of the colored folks on special occasions—their own house servants, certain ones, the Reverend, and the very aged. He shook hands with the Reverend, said, “Howdy, Roseanna, how are you?”
“Very well, Mr. Tracy, except for my blood pressure. Very well indeed,” sighed Roseanna.
Roseanna knew her place and hushed after that, and let the men do the talking.
“When you git in, Mr. Tracy?”
“This morning.”
“Just fresh home, then?”
“That’s right.”
“Mighty glad you’re home. Mighty glad to have you back in Maxwell.”
And that should have ended matters. In the old world that would have been all. They would have gone on to Negro Quarters, to be forgotten, and he would have stayed in White Town, forgetting.
But that was not all. As they stood there, between the speaking and the turning away, Tracy felt as if the blood were draining from his veins.
He went into the drugstore, lighted a counter lamp, took a package of cigarettes, sat down at one of the tables.
All the feeling he had was a physical sensation. He was tired as hell, that was all, and nothing was worth doing. There was not a word in his mind that explained his feeling. All he knew was that thirty minutes ago he had been with the woman he loved. Now there was a colored girl named Nonnie. That was all there was to it.
He did not sit there, piling facts here and facts there, weighing one pile against another. The anthropologists had proved there was no superior race. Sure, he knew that. Guys in the army had said the South wasted half its money and energy and time keeping the Negro in his place; if they’d stop doing it, things might not be so bad down here. He knew that too. Books were written showing this, telling it, proving it even. He didn’t read books all the time, as Laura did, but he knew what the world was thinking. He knew what the facts were. They had no more to do with his feelings than knowing the facts about bone structure or the reproductive process has to do with your feeling about the mother who bore you.
There was a colored girl named Nonnie. That was all there was to it.
Why it was so, why the accidental meeting with the Reverend and Roseanna could have done this, he did not know. All he knew was, as he stood there looking at them, a door slammed in his mind, shutting out the new world, shutting out Nonnie with it. He was just there on the sidewalk, where he had always been, feeling the feelings he had always felt. He had been somewhere … in a dream maybe; maybe crazy. Maybe it had been shell-shock. He laughed. Or plain amnesia. That’s better! Maybe he’d lost, not his memory, but his white feelings. Ought to be thankful he hadn’t lost his memory too. Well, he was sane now—the dream was over. Whatever he had forgot how to feel, Roseanna had made him remember. He had come back to Maxwell. Yes, the Reverend had said it, he had come back home.
He sat there in the drugstore, forgetting to go home. And after a time, he realized that someone was tapping on the window. Looking up, he saw Crazy Carl’s face pressed against the glass. “Agh,” the boy called, “let me in.” Tracy opened the door. Crazy Carl clumsily pulled himself in. He was tall and big—heavier, taller than two years ago, when Tracy had last seen him.
“Acy,” Crazy Carl’s big hand stroked Tracy’s shoulder, “Acy,” he said, “Acy.” And Tracy knew that Crazy Carl was welcoming him home also.
“Come in, boy.” He spoke gently to the creature. “How about something to drink?” He went to the soda fountain, opened a bottle of Coca-Cola, handed it to Carl, who sucked and slobbered happily until the bottle was empty; then pulled himself to the candy counter and stared at its contents so quietly that Tracy forgot him.
The one dim light Tracy had turned on left most of the store in shadow. The soda fountain looked almost as new as when he had persuaded his father to install it six months before he left for the army. In the show window were the same powders and perfumes and toilet articles he had arranged there long ago. As long as he could remember before that, the window had been full of rows of Black Draught bottles. Tut was too busy with his patients to give thought to such things as show windows, and it would not have been like him to change things much, anyway. But the powders and perfumes and cold creams seemed to be a relief to folks, after ten years of Black Draught, and Maxwell’s girls had been quick to express their pleasure. Tracy had also organized a curb-service that made the drugstore the social center of the town. He’d used schoolboys who had not only quick legs but tongues quick enough to hand out a line of talk, edgy, yet never brash enough to annoy older women who liked manners with their sodas and Coca-Colas. The soda-fountain business increased, and with it, the drug business. Tracy had thought for a while that this was what he could do the rest of his life without too much displeasure. He did not mind the long hours—after all what can one do with hours? He had enjoyed the casual meeting with town and county friends, and it was as easy for him to be deferential to an old country woman who still thought the drugstore sold snuff as to his mother’s College Street friends. People noticed it and said, “Well, Tut’s boy seems to have got hold of himself. Doing all right. Drugstore’s making good money.”
Yes, he thought, as he sat there that first night after his return from the army, it’s the same old drugstore. Same old world. It had to happen: like a time bomb, ticking off the minutes. Time comes—new world blows to pieces. Everything same as it used to be. Only it is never the same.
Tracy lighted another cigarette; looked at the Pusey home across the street. Dark. Yeah … everything dark.
The big old yellow house behind him was dark. And still. Upstairs, Mother sleeping. Dorothy, prayers said, sleeping. Preacher Dunwoodie, job done, sleeping.
Funny—how he used to feel about the drugstore. After coming home from college when he flunked out at mid-years, it hadn’t been easy to settle down to anything. Helped around the store, loafed some, bought cotton for Adams Mercantile Company in the fall, played the cotton market, even made enough money to buy a car, wrecked it the next week one night when he was drinking. Loafed around and grew tired … studied law one winter. One day Tut had called him in and asked him to take over the drugstore. “Run it your own way,” he said. “I’ve too many patients and the store needs a young mind. It’s yours, Son, take it.” Then one afternoon he had found his mother going through the books in the office. “Anything I can do for you, Mother?” he asked carefully, gently, as he watched his tall, grave mother adding up figures. “No, Son,” she said without looking up, “I’m just running over the books.” “Why, Mother?” She had looked at him calmly, her square jaws in high relief against the dim light of the room. “I’ve always audited your father’s books for him—I’ve always managed his money. I’m sure that I can be of help to you too.” And Tracy had stared at the wall, then turned, walked out of the office and out of the store. That night he stayed in the cabin with Henry, drinking the whisky Henry poured out for him from time to time. The next day he was drunk. He did not go back to the store. Never discussed it with his father, just didn’t go. Told him he was tired, thought he’d sell cotton with Adams for a while. Yeah … he took the drugstore, and then Mother took it back, one afternoon. Long time ago.
