There really wasn’t enough work anyway, Hubert explained that evening back at home—trying to make it easier for sulky Sam. People wanted their houses painted in spring and summer, when they could keep the place open and air it out. Not in winter. That’s why the fellows had been so touchy, because they weren’t making any money themselves.
Three days later Sam got another job as stockboy in Mr. Harris’s men’s haberdashery over on a Hundred-seventeenth Street—mostly packing things down in, and getting things up from, the cellar. The wreath on the door and the tinsel strung in front of the counter surprised him. And the heavy black girl who worked there and who looked like Milly Potts down home—though she had none of Milly’s sense of humor—wore a Christmas pin on her blouse. But then, Christmas was less than two weeks away.
When Sam came in, Clarice was sitting in the wing chair, in her purple blouse, reading aloud:
“ ‘Evidently the author’s implication is that there must be a welding into one personality of Kabnis and Lewis: the great emotionalism of the race guided and directed by a great purpose and a super-intelligence.’ ”
Chin still prickling from the cold, Sam could hear, in the other room, Hubert thumping books on his desk. Clarice looked up, smiled, then went back to her peroration:
“ ‘ . . . In the south we have a “powerful underground” race with a marvelous emotional power which like Niagara before it was harnessed is wasting itself. Release it into proper channels, direct its course intelligently, and you have possibilities for future achievement that challenge the imagination. The hope of the race is in the great blind forces of the masses properly utilized by capable leaders.’ ” She looked up again, frowning. “Lord, Montgomery does go on about him, doesn’t he . . . ?” Clearly she spoke to Hubert, behind the wall against which Sam’s bed stood—still unmade from this morning.
“What’s that?” Sam began to shrug off his coat.
Clarice smiled again. “It’s about my friend I said looked like you . . . ?” She held up Opportunity. “Jean . . . ?”
From inside, Hubert said: “Sam, if that’s you, would you please clean up in there a little!”
“I was going to spread your bed up,” Clarice said softly from the chair, “only he wouldn’t let—”
But, coat back on his shoulders and ears hot with embarrassment, Sam was already across the room, tugging up the sheet, swinging over the quilt.
Indeed, Sam was astonished at how little of Christmas stayed with him that year: he and Hubert celebrated it, of course. He gave Hubert an embossed leather notebook, which cost two dollars. Hubert gave him three sets of long johns, which was supposed to be kind of funny, but Sam started wearing them that morning: they were a pretty good idea. And Corey and Elsie had a tree hung with both glass and colored-paper ornaments, strung with cranberries and yarns of popcorn and cotton wool all around its base, just like at home; but (and it was the first time Sam had ever experienced this, so that for a few days it really bothered him) it just didn’t feel like Christmas.
When it was over, the only thing that remained with any vividness was a pre-Christmas Saturday morning trip to the post office for Elsie and Corey, to mail the three shopping bags full of gifts back to Raleigh. (One bag was Hubert’s and his.) The building like a fort—
The lines of people—
Within, pine bows were draped all around the upper molding on the marble walls—
Bells of shiny red and silver paper hung, soundless, in each corner. Black rubber mats were splayed over the floor, slopping with the slush people tracked about in rundown shoes and open galoshes with jingling clasps. Wreaths with red berries and red ribbon were wired to the doors. But even inside, the marble room was chill and damp enough for your breath to drift away in clouds.
Were all these black and yellow and tan and brown faces, in all these lines in front of all the brass-barred windows, sending presents back to some ever-shifting, generalized, and hopelessly unlocatable place (but never baffling the postal readers of the carefully printed or clumsily scrawled addresses on brown paper under twine) called home? Certainly, to look at the bags and parcels they carried, it seemed so.
The clerks behind the bars, Sam had noticed, were all white.
Postal clerks were white at home too, but there were only three windows in the post office he went to in Raleigh. Here, between marble columns—and it wasn’t even the central post office—ten windows lined the wall, so he’d just expected, well . . . maybe some dark faces behind the squared brass bars.
With broad, brown cheekbones, brown eyes large and crossed, and wearing an old black coat, a girl settled herself next to him, to stare up. From within her blunt, strabismic gaze, a glint of blue surfaced in Sam’s mind—from the staring boy back on the train. Then it sank into the estuary of her curiosity, to swirl away. Looking down at her and in a voice more friendly than he felt, Sam asked her age-absent stare (was she eleven? was she fifteen?): “Now who are you?”
She held up her hand to him, or rather her wrist—with her fingers bent down. The hand was deformed—or at least . . . its deformity surprised, even shocked, him: the forefinger was thumb-thick and longer than the middle, which was, in turn, longer than the ring finger, which was longer than the little—all of them, indeed, fatter than fingers were supposed to be. The nails were dirty, spiky. Her teeth were set apart in bluish gum—some of the lower ones, Sam realized, missing. “What’s your name?” he asked again, of this unappealing child.
The woman behind him said, “She’s showing you her wrist beads.” Then—small, brownskinned, with nicely done hair and a green cloth coat (the child’s hair stuck out in tufts, from under a gray kerchief tied not under her chin but off center by her cheek, the cloth ends frazzled like something someone had sucked on)—the woman took the girl’s wrist and held it up. Black-gloved fingers moved a band of white beads from under the threadbare cuff. “Baby beads—just like when you’re born. In the hospital.” (Sam had been born at home, and had had the details of Doctor Haley’s three-in-the-morning visit, when they’d thought there might be complications—but there weren’t—recounted to him many times.) Each bead had a black letter on it.
“See,” the woman said. “E-L-L-A A-B-L-I-R . . . this is Ella Ablir.” Each lettered bead had two holes in it. Running through were, Sam saw, not threads but wires, twisted together below the pudgy wrist. The woman smiled. “She’s looking at you because you’re white.”
“No.” Sam smiled. “I’m afraid I’m not. I’m colored, too, just like everybody else here.”
“Oh, I’m sorry . . . !” The woman was suddenly and greatly distressed—while again Sam glanced at the white clerk behind the bars and at the woman at his window in red coat and red hat, with thick-heeled shoes buttoning inches up stockings white as some nurse’s: she seemed to be buying many small stamps for a penny or two pennies, but wasn’t sure how many she wanted; now she asked for two more, no three more—well, maybe another two; and one more please? Thank you. Now, if I could just have two more of this kind—please?
“Sometimes,” Sam said, “when people first meet me, they think I am. But I’m not.”
“Yes. Of course,” the woman said. “If I had just been paying attention, I would’ve seen it.”
Sam looked down at the girl, who still stared up: “Hello, Ella,” he said, becoming aware that, behind the woman, five or six other children shuffled—girls, most of them. No, all of them. Ragged, unkempt, each had something distinctly wrong with her.
“Where’re y’all from?” Sam asked.
“We’re from the Manhattan Hospital,” the woman said, indicating a rectangle of cardboard pinned to her lapel, with something printed on it, “for the Insane.” The girl had the same cardboard pinned lopsidedly to her coat. So did the girls behind. The eyes of a tall and stoop-shouldered girl did not look in the same direction. “Over on the island. But they ain’t really insane at all.” She smiled. “Not even a little bit of it. They’re just some very nice little girls�
�who all been very, specially good. And I been out with them since eight o’clock this morning, taking them around on a Christmas pass.”
Their young women goe not shadowed (clothed) amongst their own companie, until they be nigh eleven or twelve returns of the leafe old, nor are they much ashamed thereof, and therefore would the before remembered . . . sometymes resorting to our fort . . . but being over twelve years, they put on a kind of semecinctum lethern apron before their bellies, and are very shamefaced to be seen bare.
—wantons before marriage and household drudges after, it is extremely questionable whether they had any conception of it.
The woman in red finished at the window. So Sam said:
“You go on ahead there. I’m not in that big a rush.” He hefted the three shopping bags, two in his right hand, so that the handle cords moved half an inch across his stinging palms.
“That’s awful nice of you. They do get restless sometimes, when they have to stand still so long. I appreciate it a lot.” She turned and announced to the shuffling gaggle: “Now you all stay with this nice colored gentleman right here. I’m going to the window there to get you your penny postcards.” She smiled at Sam in turning and stepped toward the bars.
The girls moved up around him. One, though in another torn coat and with the same kind of rag over her hair—and her expression just as vacant—, was actually pretty, as she looked off to the side. Her face was the darkest. The bones in it were fine. Her figure, beneath her poor coat, seemed fit. For a moment Sam imagined her some displaced tribal princess, stepped from an ancient African sect to be dazzled by the modern day—till she turned: the far part of her face was a scarred cascade from a burn.
There was not even an eye in it.
Tides of black and brown made a torrent down her skull. So as not to stare, Sam dropped his eyes—and saw, beneath her torn hem, her ankles and the legs above them were as badly burned as her face. She wore only some sort of slippers, which her heels had slid over the edge of, onto the mat slewed with snot-colored slush. Sam turned a little, lifted his eyes again—and caught a whiff of unwashed sourness. Could that be one of them?
Really, he thought, the things that could be wreaked on the body!
Sam’s bags were weighty with Hubert’s and Elsie’s and Corey’s—and his own—gifts. But the floor was too wet to set them down.
Just then the Ablir girl ran forward to the window beside theirs, shouldering aside the generous-breasted, humus-skinned woman who had just handed in a package as the bars had been, for a moment, unlocked and swung aside.
The bars clicked closed; the woman said, “Hey, you—!”
With all her brachydactylic fingers, Ella pointed through.
Inside, the white clerk brought forward a toy horse, that Ella must have seen. He stuck one plush hoof through the bars and waved it at her. Ella took a breath, grabbed it, and tried to tug it out—but, still smiling, the clerk pulled it from her grip and raised it higher between the bars, beyond her reach, to wave the leg once more.
Silent, determined, Ella jumped, missed, jumped again. She didn’t jump very high; and the little lift she managed suggested her physical coordination was deeply impaired.
The woman who’d just handed her package through looked down now, frowned, then began to smile.
From behind the bars, the clerk said with a notable brogue: “All right, little girl. Now you have to let the other people mail their letters.”
Biting her broad underlip, Ella Ablir backed from the cage, gazing within.
A bunch of penny postcards in one hand, not yet put into her pocket book, the woman in the green coat stepped away from the next window over to receive the child’s shoulders with guiding gloves. At the contact, the woman’s worried look relaxed. “All right,” she said. “Let’s all behave. Come on, now—let’s go. I got your penny postcards for you. We’re going to take them back home and draw pictures of what we want for Christmas and send them to Santa Claus at the North Pole. That’s what we’re going to do now.” As she stepped by Sam, she smiled her gratitude for his brief vigil—and explained: “They won’t never get nothing. And they can’t write. But they like to draw the pictures and send them to Santa.” She turned to the girls. “Now all of us. Let’s go!”
Their cardboard tags at their several levels on threadbare cloth (the tall one’s coat was ludicrously too small), they shuffled before the woman, like wounded angels or emissaries from another world, up between the lines of Christmas mailers loaded with letters and packages to be sent by sea and rail and air to where and wherever.
Postage on all Sam’s three shopping-bags full came to two dollars and seventeen cents.
Turning from the window, the bags at his side empty and all in one hand now, flapping like wind-abandoned sails, Sam saw the big clock on the wall above the door. It was circled in eight concentric rings of metal, each one set back from the next (for the eight planets, perhaps?), the face a ninth and central wafer, whiter than ice, arrow-tipped hands upthrust, long one right and short one left, telling him it was five past eleven.
That noon was the first time Sam tried to find the underground magic shop at Forty-second Street. For most of his exploration, he kept making the same turns and going along the same underground alleys, even as he tried to get somewhere new, finally to give up: he didn’t want to be late for dinner at Corey and Elsie’s. When he was unsure of what train he was actually supposed to take to get back to Harlem, he asked an elderly Negro in a suit with baggy knees and the jacket and vest grayed with powdered plaster, who was carrying a chest of tools on the platform—and came home.
New Year’s Day was practically balmy. For a while Sam retained a memory of strolling down Lenox Avenue, just a sweater under his suit jacket. Hands in his pants pockets, he whistled jets of music and condensed breath, ambling by the pine trees discarded that morning at the curb over soiled snow clutching the sidewalk’s rim. Wooden stands were still nailed to the trunks: crossed planks, a board square, or some more complicated contrivance with braces. The needle-bare branches transformed the trees into long-slain carcasses.
The next day the temperature dropped to a previously unknown and, till then unbelievable, paralytic cold. What had been snow and slush became a rind of ice over the city. That night, ears stinging and face a mask of pain from the wind, Sam hurried toward Mount Morris past a mound of trees, delicately afire in the corner lot, one still with ornaments on its charring branches, black before crackling flame.
Late in February’s icy circuit, when Sam answered the door, Clarice came in, waving a newspaper, cheeks blotched red with cold. “You’ve got to see this. This is too much. This is, I tell you, the living end!”
Hubert got up from the wing chair. “What is it?”
“What is it?” The room was chill; and though Clarice’s coat was open, she didn’t shrug it off. “Here—now did you believe you were ever going to live to see something like this in a paper—even a New York City paper?”
The picture took up a quarter of the second page.
White actress Mary Blair knelt on the ground beside a seated, twenty-six year old Negro actor, Paul Robeson, kissing his hand! The play was Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, scheduled to open at the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village sometime that spring. Robeson played a young, Negro law student—
“See. He was a lawyer, Hubert—like you.”
“He plays a lawyer,” Hubert corrected. “In the play.”
Sam read over Clarice’s shoulder.
“No, he really was a lawyer,” Clarice said. “Before. But he gave it up for the theater!”
“He wasn’t a lawyer; he was a football player!” Sam said. “See.” Football was Sam’s own sport—he had played center in high school, till Papa—when John’s brother broke his leg in the game, the sharp bone coming through his brown, bloody shin—decided it was too rough and had forbidden him: everyone at home had encouraged him to go out for basketball, for which Sam had no particular
love. “It says he was All-American Halfback in 1917 and 1918.”
“First he was a football player—when he was at Rutgers,” Clarice explained. “Then he was a lawyer. Then he became an actor.”
“Well,” Hubert said, “I can’t imagine his being a very good lawyer, then. Where’d he go to law school?”
“Columbia.”
“People are going to try and stop that play from going on,” Hubert said. “You just watch.”
“There’s a statement in here by the actress,” Clarice said. “She thinks it’s an honor to be in the play.”
The picture was . . . well, uncomfortable making. But maybe that was because you just didn’t see pictures like that.
“Is that man dreamy—or is he dreamy?” Clarice asked. “Oh, Hubert—!” she added. Because Hubert was frowning. “I’m teasing you!.”
Still, in March Clarice dragged them off to see Robeson in Nan Stevens’ Roseanne, over at the Lafayette Theater. “We’ve got to go!” she insisted. “It’s only playing for a week!” On Saturday afternoon they met before the yellow, horizontally striated walls with the other Negroes at a Hundred-thirty-second Street and Seventh Avenue. In their gloves, scarves, hats, a lot of people must have read the articles that had been appearing. There’d been a slew of them since the first one—and the picture had been reprinted by now in half a dozen papers. Clarice said: “This is surely a lot more people than usually come to this sort of thing.” She took a hand from her fox muff to rub one knuckle on her nose.
The tickets were thirty-five cents. The matinee was supposed to start at two-thirty, but it was almost quarter to three before they let people in. And a tall, West Indian looking—and sounding—man called out something, very loudly, about “a C.P.T. matinee,” which made some people laugh.
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