Under the covers, Sam thought: And beside me. . .
He moved his hand with their thickened fingertips out from the depression his body had warmed to the cold place where no one lay. (A white woman in the heart of . . . a black woman in a city of light.) Somewhere a siren sounded, weaving together for him the possibilities of his vacant day.
Saturday at Corey and Elsie’s there was a short, sharp argument between Sam and Hubert: Sam was happy to do his tricks for Hubert—and even Clarice—back at Hubert’s, but Hubert suggested after dinner that Sam perform one of Cathay’s wonders for his sisters: a vanishing coin. Sam had brought the trick over, after all, in his inner jacket pocket, precisely for that. But Hubert’s request got only Sam’s refusal, first a quiet one, then an insistent one, then—with red-cheeked embarrassment—a loud one, when Hubert wouldn’t stop.
But, at least partly, it was because Mr. Carter, a Columbia Teacher’s College friend of Elsie’s, was there that afternoon for dinner—a mahogany-complected, articulate young man from Philadelphia, who cut all his food with his fork. But Mr. Carter displayed a smiling, inquisitive awe before Elsie and her siblings that Sam recognized: it was the air other ministers, especially white ones, displayed when they visited Papa socially at home. And nothing made a social situation more uncomfortable for Sam. It turned everything you did into a performance, and always left him somewhere between tongue-tied and belligerent.
“I’d like to see you do a magic trick,” Mr. Carter had prompted across the remains of dinner, in what clearly he thought was an encouraging way.
“Go on, Sam!” Hubert said. “That’s what you brought it over here for—to show people!”
“No!” Sam said. “Come on, now—I said No! Didn’t you hear me?” His voice was too loud, his hand was actually shaking, and the silence after it was much too long.
Corey rescued him: “Now Sam is still learning these things. And you’ve got to practice them before you do them for other people. He just needs to practice and will show us all his trick in his own time, now.”
Hubert dragged his forearm from the table, sucked his teeth—his turn to sulk.
But nothing dented Mr. Carter’s simple, irrepressible good will. “Can I ask you something seriously, though?” His dark fingers moved on the handle of his unused knife.
“I don’t know.” Corey smiled. “Can you?”
“Would you please tell me—because I have heard this story about you two ladies so many times before, but just in snatches and fragments, so that you never know what you’re really supposed to believe and what you’re not—just so I can tell other people when I get back to Philadelphia—what really happened at that movie, there—was it six or seven years ago?”
“What movie?” Elsie asked.
“That movie,” Mr. Carter said, “where you two got into all that trouble?”
“Six years ago?” Elsie said. “What movie does he—”
“Oh, I know what he means,” Dr. Corey said. “Arnold—” which was Mr. Carter’s name to Corey and Elsie, but not to Hubert, Clarice, and Sam—“that wasn’t six years ago. That was seven, eight—” she frowned. “That was nine years ago now!”
“But . . . what happened?”
“Might as well go ahead,” Hubert said. “After all this time, everybody ought to know.”
“What movie?” Sam said. Though he knew the outlines of the tale, the fragmentariness was as much there for him as for Arnold Carter—since, nine years ago, when Corey and Elsie had first gone up to the city, where they’d stayed for two years before coming home, Sam had been . . . well, nine.
“That great big movie they made, about the south—and the Ku Klux Klan and all,” Hubert said. “About the wonderful white south and the black devils who were raping all those white women—”
“Oh!” Elsie said. “That awful movie—that made everybody go out and start lynching all those people!”
“It didn’t start them lynching,” Corey said. “But it certainly made them go out and lynch more.”
“What did you have to do with it?” Sam asked.
“We were picketing—a peaceful picket line. With a lot of other Negroes.”
“With a lot of other angry Negroes, I bet,” Hubert said. “That’s what I heard.”
“We were angry,” Dr. Corey said. “Who wouldn’t be angry, at a movie like that?”
“How did a movie make people lynch people?” Sam wanted to know.
“It was a movie about those damned Ku Klux Klansmen—” Corey didn’t use language like that and it startled Sam to hear her cuss like Louis—“and told how wonderful they were and how they were protecting southern white womanhood.”
What came back to Sam was a memory of his cousin, or a woman whom his mother had called their cousin: yes, he’d been nine, eight, maybe younger, when her and her husband’s mutilated bodies, under gray canvas, had been brought, in the creaking wagon, back through the evening trees, to the campus—
“We were picketing,” Corey said. “That’s all. With the others, across the street from the theater.”
“Well, that wasn’t quite all,” Elsie said.
“Then what else did we do?” Dr. Corey asked, indignantly.
But Elsie had some devilment in her eye.
And there was a grin back of Dr. Corey’s indignation. “We certainly didn’t do very much else—that anyone with a grain of sense wouldn’t have done. There’s no forgiving a movie like that—stirring people up to violence against their fellow man!”
“What did she do, Miss Elsie?” Mr. Carter asked.
“Well, we were picketing, there across the street. The policemen were keeping us back. And you could see that it wasn’t doing anything to keep people from going into the movie—”
“The thing we wanted to do,” Corey said, “was to stop them from going to see it, you see. That’s what we were trying to do.”
“So finally,” Elsie said, “Corey says to me, ‘Come on.’ Well, I didn’t know where she was going.”
“You did too!” Corey said. “I told you—”
“After we got in line,” Elsie said, “you told me. We left the pickets, went down to the end of the block, crossed over, came back, and got on the ticket line to the movie. That’s when I asked you, what we were going to do. And you told me, ‘We’re going to go inside and see that movie!’ Well, I was afraid to leave her, because I knew she was probably going to do something foolish—and I didn’t want her to get in trouble.”
“You went into the movie?” Clarice asked. From her tone, Sam realized this was new to her as well.
Corey nodded.
“We went into the movie,” Elsie said, “took our seats, and waited for the lights to go down and the man at the organ to start his playing—and I asked: ‘Corey, what are we going to do now?’ And she whispered, ‘Hush!’ and just to sit there and to do what she did. Well, I thought, dear Lord, give me strength! What has this crazy girl, my own little sister, got it into her head to do?”
“Then what happened?” Sam asked.
“The lights went off, the man started to play the organ, and the movie began—and Corey jumps up, scoots out into the aisle, with those long dresses we used to wear back then, catching on everybody’s knees, saying real loud, ‘Excuse me—excuse me, please!’ and I’m coming right after her. I think people thought she was sick—and had to use the facilities. So they were making room.
“But then, when she got into the aisle, she ran right down toward the front of the theater—and I’m running to keep up. And she climbed onto the stage—”
“I jumped onto the stage,” Corey said. “I got hold of the edge, and I went up like a boy over a fence—though I don’t know whether I could do it today—”
“And she grabbed hold of the edge of the screen, with the light from the projector all over us, and people starting to stand up and call out to ask if something was wrong, and she ripped it—”
Corey laughed. “I certainly did. I remember, you stood
there, on the stage, in front of all those people, and you said, ‘Oh, Corey—!’ ”
“Then I grabbed hold,” Elsie said, “and started ripping too!”
“Once we began, she ripped more than I did,” Corey said. “I really think Elsie was having fun.”
“I was scared to death,” Elsie said. “But, by then, I figured it didn’t make much difference. I knew we were going to end up in jail, no matter—so I decided it’d be better at least to do what we’d come for. Yes, I got hold of it—and I ripped it too. In about a New York minute, the two of us tore the whole screen down!”
Clarice hooted, hands over her mouth.
“But then what happened?” Sam said, between his own guffaws.
“I mean,” Clarice said, “how did you two get out of there?”
“Very quickly,” Corey said. “We were lucky. Someone in the audience by that time had started fighting. There were other people on the stage now—you remember that man who asked us, so politely, while we were ripping, if something was wrong? But the fist fight in the audience, that was taking up all the ushers’ attention. So even while they were putting the lights on, we rushed backstage and down some steps and around through a door that opened right into the alley—and got out!”
“This is so funny,” Clarice said, recovering herself. “A couple of months ago, I was reading in Opportunity about the ‘riot’ they had at the premier of Birth of a Nation. And you mean you two were the riot?”
“I guess we were pretty much most of the riot. It was in the newspapers,” Elsie said, “the next day. But I wouldn’t think they’d still be talking about it now. It was nine—almost ten years ago; and it was just a movie, after all. Who’d want to remember something like that?”
“A low down, dirty, rotten movie,” Dr. Corey said, “that made people go out and kill each other!”
“Mama and Papa never talked about that,” Sam said. “I don’t think they’d like something like that, you all being in the newspapers for gettin’ in some kind of trouble!”
“We didn’t want to worry Mama and Papa,” Elsie said. “So we didn’t tell them. But I guess other people told them just this bit and that bit—and it all gets out of hand.”
“But we didn’t do anything to be ashamed of,” Dr. Corey said. “I thought it was right then. And I’d do it again today, if I had to. The lynchings went up all over the country in nineteen fifteen—because of that movie. That’s probably why they’re up now. Not a man or woman, black or white, Christian or Jew, with free-thinking ideas and care for his fellows was safe anywhere in the country while that movie was on.”
“Jews?” Sam said. “They don’t lynch Jews.” Back home, John and his brother had told Sam that, because Jews had all the money, everybody was afraid to cross them and that’s why they were taking control of just everything. “They got too much money.”
“Don’t lynch Jews?” Dr. Corey declared. “And just what makes you think they don’t, boy? That poor Jew, Mr. Frank, he was lynched down in Georgia, right near where Papa was born, the very summer that movie was showing. Don’t lynch Jews? Where have you been, boy? Back when the Jim Crow laws came in, everybody was getting lynched. That was the crime of it, see? That’s what taking the law into your own hands is all about. Anybody they didn’t like, got lynched—for any reason. You think they didn’t lynch Jews? They lynched white people, they lynched black people—they lynched women, children, and Jews. Don’t let me hear you talkin’ nonsense like that anymore, Sam. Sometimes I think you don’t know anything!”
“Now they did lynch more colored than anybody else,” Elsie said. “You know that, Corey.”
Corey just humphed.
“You remember that sign they put up in the park in downtown Raleigh, when the Jim Crow laws came in? ‘No Jews or Dogs Allowed’?” Elsie laughed. “They didn’t even think enough of niggers to put up a sign to keep us out.”
Sam had heard about the sign; but by the time he’d got to go downtown, there were just the usual signs for where coloreds were supposed to go and the water fountains you were supposed to drink from and where whites were supposed to go and drink. There’d been a mysterious time, Sam knew, that had ended just around his birth, when everyone went to the theater together; when people even went to school together. His older brothers and sisters—Lemuel and Elsie and Corey and Lucius—often spoke of it, when everyone in Raleigh had gone to the Jackson Theater and sat wherever they’d wanted to and watched plays by Shakespeare and dastardly melodramas and uproarious comic skits, in which people sang and danced and minstrels Tommed in black-face, and men in top hats did magic tricks. (Mr. Horstein had said that, personally, he’d never played the Jackson in Raleigh—but magicians had come to Cathay who had.) But now all the theaters in Raleigh were segregated, and Papa wouldn’t let him go at all. A few times he’d snuck in with Lewy and John. (John’s mother taught Mathematics and Women’s Deportment at the college—his father had died three years ago—and didn’t care.) In the balcony, John’s brother’s crutches leaning over the seat back, the boys sat with the other colored children—nigger heaven, everybody called it—to watch Mary Pickford and William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks . . . Though Corey probably had her point, John was pretty smart, and Sam was not yet ready to dismiss completely John’s judgment of the Jews . . .
“That’s true,” Corey said, uncharacteristically pensive, “that’s true . . . .” And for a moment Sam wasn’t sure if memory had made him miss something important in the present.
That night, after Hubert came back from taking Clarice home and went into his own room to study, then to sleep, Sam got up, moved the drape and curtain back, to hang them in a great down-descending arch over the wing of the chair. Then he got back in bed and lay awake, covers over his mouth and ears, blinking at the moonlight out the window.
At work a few days later, Sam asked: “Mr. Harris, you seen Mr. Poonkin?”
“Awww . . .” Mr. Harris said, like someone with something real sad he’d forgotten to tell you: “Last week, Poonkin—he got the pee-neumonia. I guess it was on the Tuesday you didn’t come in. They took him over to Manhattan Hospital on Ward’s Island—”
“—for the Insane?”
Mr. Harris frowned. “Well, they got a lot more people out there than just the looneys now, you know. I guess they got pretty much everybody over there who can’t pay for hisself. But Poonkin got the pee-neumonia—the old people’s friend.”
Sam looked puzzled.
“That’s what they call it.” Glare slid left to right across Mr. Harris’s gold tooth. Denting green silk, Mr. Harris’s tiepin was gold. “At least it’s the friend of old people like Poonkin who ain’t got nobody to care for ’em. It takes ’em quick and, as dying goes, goes pretty easy. I wouldn’t be surprised if old Poonkin’s dead by now—though nobody’s told me that, yet. Though why they’d come and tell me, I don’t know. I’m no kin of his. Poonkin been around here long before I got here. Now he’s gone.”
While he worked in the cellar, sometimes looking over at the boards against the cement wall, Sam thought about going to visit old Poonkin on Ward’s Island. He tried to picture himself in a great public hospital, endless dividing sheets rippling white between the beds, talking to the old man, propped on his pillow: “Mr. Poonkin, tell me about what you did in the War—about the rifle and the barn—behind the spruce, before you could read—what of it you can remember . . . ?” But he didn’t really know if Poonkin were first name or last. (Those idiosyncratic memories of the War, what it was to be a fifteen-year-old black boy with a rifle in a barn, not to mention everything that had brought that child to the cellar two doors away, an aged, half-blind, brief and taloned guardian to those magazines—suddenly winking out. Memories—like spume from a broken wave . . . ) In the hospital, weakly he calls to me. I start to leave, he calls again, but before I turn . . . there was Hubert, chained to the water pump, and Papa gasping, drawing back the orange crate in his brown hands, his collar loose and no shirt under his
black vest, the arms of a man in his fifties, yes, but deeply dark in the evening blue. “You are not a man—you are a little animal!” Papa shouted. “And if you will live like an animal, I will treat you like an animal! I will beat you like a beast till you beg to be a man again . . . !” Crate slats splintered against Hubert’s shoulder; he remembered the precise sound of his father’s grunts. “Ah . . . !” The slats splintered again. “Keh . . . !” On the next blow they smithereened. “Dah . . . !” Hubert fell, pulled himself backward, shouting: “Papa! No, Papa . . . ? No—!” Papa hit him with the stump of what hung from his hands, then hurled the bottom, missing Hubert, gouging grass. No. . .
No. (Sam walked slowly through the cold street.) For suppose he went over there and Mr. Harris was right: Poonkin was already dead.
“You shouldn’t do that!” Clarice said one day. “You don’t do it at Elsie and Corey’s. I’m sure you didn’t do it in front of your Mama and your Papa at home.” Which was true.
“If he’s going to do it,” Hubert said from the wing chair where he’d begun to read, “I’d just as soon he did it in front of me. You don’t want the boy sneaking off to do it behind my back, now.”
Sam was surprised at Clarice’s upset. He’d thought her unconcerned about the matter till now.
“Hubert, you should speak to him—you said you were going to speak to him. Oh, I’m sorry—it isn’t any of my business! And I shouldn’t have said anything.” Then, with her coat still unbuttoned, she went to the door and out.
As she pulled it after her, it stuck—with a noise like Pra, then, when she opened it an inch and pulled it to again, with a Ja. Outside, she yanked it, and it closed on two beats: Pa-Ti. The tensions of her leaving turned the sound into a kind of thunder that left the room whispering its silence. Sam thought about saying: Hubert, you said you didn’t mind if I—
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