Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Part 21

'And it behooves us to strive with care and not endanger this amicable relations.h.i.+p already established. Then by gradual means a better condition will come about.'

Jake turned from one to the other. 'I don't seem to follow you.'

The heat was suffocating him. He wanted to get out. A film seemed to have settled over his eyeb.a.l.l.s so that all the faces around him were blurred.

Across the room Willie was playing his harp. Buddy and Highboy were listening. The music was dark and sad. When the song was finished Willie polished his harp on the front of his s.h.i.+rt. 'I so hungry and thirsty the s...o...b..r in my mouth done wet out the tune. I certainly will be glad to taste some of that boogie-woogie. To have something good to drink is the only thing m-made me forget this misery. If I just knowed where my f-feets are now and could drink a gla.s.s of gin ever night I wouldn't mind so much.'

'Don't fret, Hon. You going to have something,' Portia said.

'Mr. Blount, would you care to take a peach puff and a gla.s.s of wine?'

'Thanks,' Jake said. 'That would be good.'

Quickly Portia laid a cloth on the table and set down one plate and a fork. She poured a large tumblerful of the wine. 'You just make yourself comfortable here. And if you don't mind I going to serve the others.' The fruit jars were pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth. Before Highboy pa.s.sed a jar to Willie he borrowed Portia's lipstick and drew a red line to set the boundary of the drink. There were gurgling noises and laughter. Jake finished his puff and carried his gla.s.s back with him to his place between the two old men. The home-made wine was rich and strong as brandy. Willie started a low dolorous tune on his harp. Portia snapped her fingers and shuffled around the room. Jake turned to Marshall Nicolls. 'You say Portia's father is a doctor?'

'Yes, sir. Yes, indeed. A skilled doctor.'

'What's the matter with him? ' The two Negroes glanced warily at each other. 'He were in an accident,' said John Roberts. 'What kind of an accident? ' 'A bad one. A deplorable one.' Marshall Nicolls folded and unfolded his silk handkerchief. 'As we were remarking a while ago, it is important not to impair these amicable relations but to promote them in all ways earnestly possible. We members of the colored race must strive in all ways to uplift our citizens. The Doctor in yonder has strived in every way. But sometimes it has seemed to me like he had not recognized fully enough certain elements of the different races and the situation.' Impatiently Jake gulped down the last swallows of his wine. 'Christ' sake, man, speak out plain, because I can't understand a thing you say.' Marshall Nicolls and John Roberts exchanged a hurt look. Across the room Willie still sat playing music. His lips crawled over the square holes of the harmonica like fat, puckered caterpillars. His shoulders were broad and strong. The stumps of his thighs jerked in time to the music. Highboy danced while Buddy and Portia clapped out the rhythm. Jake stood up, and once on his feet he realized that he was drunk. He staggered and then glanced vindictively around him, but no one seemed to have noticed. 'Where's Singer?' he asked Portia thickly.

The music stopped. 'Why, Mr. Blount, I thought you knowed he was gone. While you were sitting at the table with your peach puff he come to the doorway and held out his watch to show it were time for him to go. You looked straight at him and shaken your head. I thought you knowed that.'

'Maybe I was thinking about something else.' He turned to Willie and said angrily to him: 'I never did even get to tell you what I come here for, I didn't come to ask you to do anything.

All I wanted--all I wanted was this. You and the other boys were to testify what happened and I was to explain why. Why is the only important thing--not what. I would have pushed you all around in a wagon and you would have told your story and afterward I would have explained why. And maybe it might have meant something.

Maybe it--' He felt they were laughing at him. Confusion caused him to forget what he had meant to say. The room was full of dark, strange faces and the air was too thick to breathe. He saw a door and staggered across to it. He was in a dark closet smelling of medicine. Then his hand was turning another doork.n.o.b.

He stood on the threshold of a small white room furnished only with an iron bed, a cabinet, and two chairs. On the bed lay the terrible Negro he had met on the stairs at Singer's house. His face was very black against the white, stiff pillows.

The dark eyes were hot with hatred but the heavy, bluish lips were composed. His face was motionless as a black mask except for the slow, wide flutters of his nostrils with each breath.

'Get out,' the Negro said.

'Wait--' Jake said helplessly. 'Why do you say that?'

'This is my house.'

Jake could not draw his eyes away from the Negro's terrible face. 'But why?'

'You are a white man and a stranger.'

Jake did not leave. He walked with c.u.mbersome caution to one of the straight white chairs and seated himself. The Negro moved his hands on the counterpane. His black eyes glittered with fever. Jake watched him. They waited. In the room there was a feeling tense as conspiracy or as the deadly quiet before an explosion.

It was long past midnight. The warm, dark air of the spring morning swirled the blue layers of smoke in the room. On the floor were crumpled b.a.l.l.s of paper and a half-empty bottle of gin. Scattered ashes were gray on the counterpane. Doctor Copeland pressed his head tensely into the pillow. He had removed his dressing-gown and the sleeves of his white cotton nights.h.i.+rt were rolled to the elbow. Jake leaned forward in his chair. His tie was loosened and the collar of his s.h.i.+rt had wilted with sweat Through the hours there had grown between them a long, exhausting dialogue. And now a pause had come.

'So the time is ready for--' Jake began. But Doctor Copeland interrupted him. 'Now it is perhaps necessary that we--' he murmured huskily. They halted. Each looked into the eyes of the other and waited. 'I beg your pardon,' Doctor Copeland said.

'Sorry,' said Jake. 'Go on.'

'No, you continue.'

'Well--' Jake said. 'I won't say what I started to say.

Instead we'll have one last word about the South. The strangled South. The wasted South, The slavish South.'

'And the Negro people.'

To steady himself Jake swallowed a long, burning draught from the bottle on the floor beside him. Then deliberately he walked to the cabinet and picked up a small, cheap globe of the world that served as a paperweight. Slowly he turned the sphere in his hands. 'All I can say is this: The world is full of meanness and evil. Huh! Three fourths of this globe is in a state of war or oppression. The liars and fiends are united and the men who know are isolated and without defense. But! But if you was to ask me to point out the most uncivilized area on the face of this globe I would point here--'

'Watch sharp,' said Doctor Copeland. 'You're out in the ocean.'

Jake turned the globe again and pressed his blunt, grimy thumb on a carefully selected spot. 'Here. These thirteen states. I know what I'm talking about. I read books and I go around. I been in every d.a.m.n one of these thirteen states. I've worked in every one. And the reason I think like I do is this: We live in the richest country in the world. There's plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle--the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars--and hundreds of thousands of people who don't get to eat. And here in these thirteen states the exploitation of human beings is so that--that it's a thing you got to take in with your own eyes. In my life I seen things that would make a man go crazy.

At least one third of all Southerners live and die no better off than the lowest peasant in any European Fascist state. The average wage of a worker on a tenant farm is only seventy-three dollars per year. And mind you, that's the average! The wages of sharecroppers run from thirty-five to ninety dollars per person. And thirty-five dollars a year means just about ten cents for a full day's work. Everywhere there's pellagra and hookworm and anemia. And just plain, pure starvation. But!' Jake nibbled his lips with the knuckles of his dirty fist. Sweat stood out on his forehead. 'But!' he repeated.

Those are only the evils you can see and touch. The other things are worse. I'm talking about the way that the truth has been hidden from the people. The things they have been told so they can't see the truth. The poisonous lies. So they aren't allowed to know.'

'And the Negro,' said Doctor Copeland. 'To understand what is happening to us you have to--' Jake interrupted him savagely. 'Who owns the South? Corporations in the North own three fourths of all the South.

They say the old cow grazes all over--in the south, the west, the north, and the east. But she's milked in just one place. Her old teats swing over just one spot when she's full. She grazes everywhere and is milked in New York. Take our cotton mills, our pulp mills, our harness factories, our mattress factories.

The North owns them. And what happens?' Jake's mustache quivered angrily. 'Here's an example. Locale, a mill village according to the great paternal system of American industry.

Absentee owners.h.i.+p. In the village is one huge brick mill and maybe four or five hundred shanties. The houses aren't fit for human beings to live in. Moreover, the houses were built to be nothing but slums in the first place. These shanties are nothing but two or maybe three rooms and a privy--built with far less forethought than barns to house cattle. Built with far less attention to needs than sties for pigs. For under this system pigs are valuable and men are not. You can't make pork chops and sausage out of skinny little mill kids. You can't sell but half the people these days. But a pig--'

'Hold on!' said Doctor Copeland. 'You are getting off on a tangent. And besides, you are giving no attention to the very separate question of the Negro. I cannot get a word in edgeways. We have been over all this before, bat it is impossible to see the full situation without including us Negroes.'

'Back to our mill village,' Jake said. 'A young linthead begins working at the fine wage of eight or ten dollars a weeks at such times as he can get himself employed. He marries. After the first child the woman must work in the mill also. Their combined wages come to say eighteen dollars a week when they both got work. Huh! They pay a fourth of this for the shack the mill provides them. They buy food and clothes at a company-owned or dominated store. The store overcharges on every item. With three or four younguns they are held down the same as if they had on chains. That is the whole principle of serfdom. Yet here in America we call ourselves free. And the funny thing is that this has been drilled into the heads of sharecroppers and lintheads and all the rest so hard that they really believe it. But it's taken a h.e.l.l of a lot of lies to keep them from knowing.'

'There is only one way out--' said Doctor Copeland.

'Two ways. And only two ways. Once there was a time when this country was expanding. Every man thought he had a chance. Huh! But that period has gone--and gone for good.

Less than a hundred corporations have swallowed all but a few leavings. These industries have already sucked the blood and softened the bones of the people. The old days of expansion are gone. The whole system of capitalistic democracy is rotten and corrupt. There remains only two roads ahead. One: Fascism. Two: reform of the most revolutionary and permanent kind.'

'And the Negro. Do not forget the Negro. So far as I and my people are concerned the South is Fascist now and always has been.'

'Yeah.'

'The n.a.z.is rob the Jews of their legal, economic, and cultural life. Here the Negro has always been deprived of these. And if wholesale and dramatic robbery of money and goods has not taken place here as in Germany, it is simply because the Negro has never been allowed to accrue wealth in the first place.'

'That's the system,' Jake said.

'The Jew and the Negro,' said Doctor Copeland bitterly. The history of my people will be commensurate with the interminable history of the Jew--only bloodier and more violent. Like a certain species of sea gull. If you capture one of the birds and tie a red string of twine around his leg the rest of the flock will peck him to death.'

Doctor Copeland took off his spectacles and rebound a wire around a broken hinge. Then he polished the lenses on his nights.h.i.+rt. His hand shook with agitation. 'Mr. Singer is a Jew.'

'No, you're wrong there.'

'But I am positive that he is. The name, Singer. I recognized his race the first time I saw him. From his eyes. Besides, he told me so.'

'Why, he couldn't have,' Jake insisted. 'He's pure Anglo-Saxon if I ever saw it. Irish and Anglo-Saxon.'

'But--'

'I'm certain. Absolutely.'

'Very well,' said Doctor Copeland. 'We will not quarrel.' Outside the dark air had cooled so that there was a chill in the room. It was almost dawn. The early morning sky was deep, silky blue and the moon had turned from silver to white. All was still. The only sound was the clear, lonely song of a spring bird in the darkness outside. Though a faint breeze blew in from the window the air in the room was sour and close. There was a feeling both of tenseness and exhaustion.

Doctor Copeland leaned forward from the pillow. His eyes were bloodshot and his hands clutched the counterpane. The neck of his nights.h.i.+rt had slipped down over his bony shoulder. Jake's heels were balanced on the rungs of his chair and his giant hands folded between his knees in a waiting and childlike att.i.tude. Deep black circles were beneath his eyes, his hair was unkempt. They looked at each other and waited.

As the silence grew longer the tenseness between them became more strained.

At last Doctor Copeland cleared his throat and said: 'I am certain you did not come here for nothing. I am sure we have not discussed these subjects all through the night to no purpose. We have talked of everything now except the most vital subject of all--the way out. What must be done.'

They still watched each other and waited. In the face of each there was expectation. Doctor Copeland sat bolt upright against the pillows. Jake rested his chin in his hand and leaned forward. The pause continued. And then hesitantly they began to speak at the same time. 'Excuse me,' Jake said. 'Go ahead.'

'No, you. You started first.'

'Go on.'

'Pshaw!' said Doctor Copeland. 'Continue.' Jake stared at him with clouded, mystical eyes. It's this way. This is how I see it. The only solution is for the people to know. Once they know the truth they can be oppressed no longer. Once just half of them know the whole fight is won.'

'Yes, once they understand the workings of this society. But how do you propose to tell them? ' 'Listen,' Jake said. 'Think about chain letters. If one person sends a letter to ten people and then each of the ten people sends letters to ten more--you get it?' He faltered. 'Not that I write letters, but the idea is the same. I just go around telling. And if in one town I can show the truth to just ten of the don't knows, then I feel like some good has been done. See? ' Doctor Copeland looked at Jake in surprise. Then he snorted. 'Do not be childis.h.!.+ You cannot just go about talking. Chain letters indeed! Knows and don't-knows! ' Jake's lips trembled and his brow lowered with quick anger. 'O.K. What have you got to offer? ' 'I will say first that I used to feel somewhat as you do on this question. But I have learned what a mistake that att.i.tude is. For half a century I thought it wise to be patient.'

'I didn't say be patient.'

'In the face of brutality I was prudent. Before injustice I held my peace. I sacrificed the things in hand for the good of the hypothetical whole. I believed in the tongue instead of the fist. As an armor against oppression I taught patience and faith in the human soul. I know now how wrong I was. I have been a traitor to myself and to my people. All that is rot. Now is the time to act and to act quickly. Fight cunning with cunning and might with might'

'But how?' Jake asked. 'How? '

'Why, by getting out and doing things. By calling crowds of people together and getting them to demonstrate.'

'Huh! That last phrase gives you away--"getting them to demonstrate." What good will it do if you get them to demonstrate against a thing if they don't know. You're trying to stuff the hog by way of his a.s.s.'

'Such vulgar expressions annoy me,' Doctor Copeland said prudishly. 'For Christ' sake! I don't care if they annoy you or not' Doctor Copeland held up his hand. 'Let us not get so overheated,' he said. 'Let us attempt to see eye to eye with each other.'

'Suits me. I don't want to fight with you.' They were silent. Doctor Copeland moved his eyes from one corner of the ceiling to the other. Several times he wet his lips to speak and each time the word remained half-formed and silent in his mouth. Then at last he said: 'My advice to you is this. Do not attempt to stand alone.'

'But--'

'But, nothing,' said Doctor Copeland didactically. 'The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.'

'I see what you're getting at.' Doctor Copeland pulled the neck of his nights.h.i.+rt up over his bony shoulder and held it gathered tight to his throat. 'You believe in the struggle of my people for their human rights?'

The Doctor's agitation and his mild and husky question made Jake's eyes brim suddenly with tears. A quick, swollen rush of love caused him to grasp the black, bony hand on the counterpane and hold it fast. 'Sure,' he said.

'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 Was.h.i.+ngton. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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--'

'Hus.h.!.+ Who cares whether you and your thousand Negroes straggle up to that stinking cesspool of a place called Was.h.i.+ngton? 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 h.e.l.l with it!' Jake said. 'b.a.l.l.s!'