At the station Richard gave his name and address and age and occupation. Then for the first time he stated that he was not involved, and asked one of the other boys to corroborate his testimony. This they rather despairingly did. They might, Elizabeth felt, have done it sooner, but they probably also felt that it would be useless to speak. And they were not believed; the owner of the store was being brought there to make the identification. And Richard tried to relax: the man could not say that he had been there if he had never seen him before.
But when the owner came, a short man with a bloody shirt—for they had knifed him—in the company of yet another policeman, he looked at the four boys before him and said: “Yeah, that’s them, all right.”
Then Richard shouted: “But I wasn’t there! Look at me, goddammit—I wasn’t there!”
“You black bastards,” the man said, looking at him, “you’re all the same.”
Then there was silence in the station, the eyes of the white men all watching. And Richard said, but quietly, knowing that he was lost: “But all the same, mister, I wasn’t there.” And he looked at the white man’s bloody shirt and thought, he told Elizabeth, at the bottom of his heart: “I wish to God they’d killed you.”
Then the questioning began. The three boys signed a confession at once, but Richard would not sign. He said at last that he would die before he signed a confession to something he hadn’t done. “Well then,” said one of them, hitting him suddenly across the head, “maybe you will die, you black son-of-a-bitch.” And the beating began. He would not, then, talk to her about it; she found that, before the dread and the hatred that filled her mind, her imagination faltered and held its peace.
“What we going to do?” she asked at last.
He smiled a vicious smile—she had never seen such a smile on his face before. “Maybe you ought to pray to that Jesus of yours and get Him to come down and tell these white men something.” He looked at her a long, dying moment. “Because I don’t know nothing else to do,” he said.
She suggested: “Richard, what about another lawyer?”
And he smiled again. “I declare,” he said, “Little-bit’s been holding out on me. She got a fortune tied up in a sock, and she ain’t never told me nothing about it.”
She had been trying to save money for a whole year, but she had only thirty dollars. She sat before him, going over in her mind all the things she might do to raise money, even to going on the streets. Then, for very helplessness, she began to shake with sobbing. At this, his face became Richard’s face again. He said in a shaking voice: “Now, look here, Little-bit, don’t you be like that. We going to work this out all right.” But she could not stop sobbing. “Elizabeth,” he whispered, “Elizabeth, Elizabeth.” Then the man came and said that it was time for her to go. And she rose. She had brought two packs of cigarettes for him, and they were still in her bag. Wholly ignorant of prison regulations, she did not dare to give them to him under the man’s eyes. And, somehow, her failure to remember to give him the cigarettes, when she knew how much he smoked, made her weep the harder. She tried—and failed—to smile at him, and she was slowly led to the door. The sun nearly blinded her, and she heard him whisper behind her: “So long, baby. Be good.”
In the streets she did not know what to do. She stood awhile before the dreadful gates, and then she walked and walked until she came to a coffee shop where taxi drivers and the people who worked in nearby offices hurried in and out all day. Usually she was afraid to go into downtown establishments, where only white people were, but today she did not care. She felt that if anyone said anything to her she would turn and curse him like the lowest bitch on the streets. If anyone touched her, she would do her best to send his soul to Hell.
But no one touched her; no one spoke. She drank her coffee, sitting in the strong sun that fell through the window. Now it came to her how alone, how frightened she was; she had never been so frightened in her life before. She knew that she was pregnant—knew it, as the old folks said, in her bones; and if Richard should be sent away, what, under Heaven, could she do? Two years, three years—she had no idea how long he might be sent away for—what would she do? And how could she keep her aunt from knowing? And if her aunt should find out, then her father would know, too. The tears welled up, and she drank her cold, tasteless coffee. And what would they do with Richard? And if they sent him away, what would he be like, then, when he returned? She looked out into the quiet, sunny streets, and for the first time in her life, she hated it all—the white city, the white world. She could not, that day, think of one decent white person in the whole world. She sat there, and she hoped that one day God, with tortures inconceivable, would grind them utterly into humility, and make them know that black boys and black girls, whom they treated with such condescension, such disdain, and such good humor, had hearts like human beings, too, more human hearts than theirs.
But Richard was not sent away. Against the testimony of the three robbers, and her own testimony, and, under oath, the storekeeper’s indecision, there was no evidence on which to convict him. The courtroom seemed to feel, with some complacency and some disappointment, that it was his great good luck to be let off so easily. They went immediately to his room. And there—she was never all her life long to forget it—he threw himself, face downward, on his bed and wept.
She had only seen one other man weep before—her father—and it had not been like this. She touched him, but he did not stop. Her own tears fell on his dirty, uncombed hair. She tried to hold him, but for a long while he would not be held. His body was like iron; she could find no softness in it. She sat curled like a frightened child on the edge of the bed, her hand on his back, waiting for the storm to pass over. It was then that she decided not to tell him yet about the child.
By and by he called her name. And then he turned, and she held him against her breast, while he sighed and shook. He fell asleep at last, clinging to her as though he were going down into the water for the last time.
And it was the last time. That night he cut his wrists with his razor and he was found in the morning by his landlady, his eyes staring upward with no light, dead among the scarlet sheets.
And now they were singing:
“Somebody needs you, Lord,
Come by here.”
At her back, above her, she heard Gabriel’s voice. He had risen and was helping the others to pray through. She wondered if John were still on his knees, or had risen, with a child’s impatience, and was staring around the church. There was a stiffness in him that would be hard to break, but that, nevertheless, would one day surely be broken. As hers had been, and Richard’s—there was no escape for anyone. God was everywhere, terrible, the living God; and so high, the song said, you couldn’t get over Him; so low you couldn’t get under Him; so wide you couldn’t get around Him; but must come in at the door.
And she, she knew today that door: a living, wrathful gate. She knew through what fires the soul must crawl, and with what weeping one passed over. Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead; how, all garments rent and cast aside, the naked soul passed over the very mouth of Hell. Once there, there was no turning back; once there, the soul remembered, though the heart sometimes forgot. For the world called to the heart, which stammered to reply; life, and love, and revelry, and, most falsely, hope, called the forgetful, the human heart. Only the soul, obsessed with the journey it had made, and had still to make, pursued its mysterious and dreadful end; and carried, heavy with weeping and bitterness, the heart along.
And, therefore, there was war in Heaven, and weeping before the throne: the heart chained to the soul, and the soul imprisoned within the flesh—a weeping, a confusion, and a weight unendurable filled all the earth. Only the love of God could establish order in this chaos; to Him the soul must turn to be delivered.
But what a turning! How could she fail to pray that He would have mercy o
n her son, and spare him the sin-born anguish of his father and his mother. And that his heart might know a little joy before the long bitterness descended.
Yet she knew that her weeping and her prayers were in vain. What was coming would surely come; nothing could stop it. She had tried, once, to protect someone and had only hurled him into prison. And she thought tonight, as she had thought so often, that it might have been better, after all, to have done what she had first determined in her heart to do—to have given her son away to strangers, who might have loved him more than Gabriel had ever loved him. She had believed him when he said that God had sent him to her for a sign. He had said that he would cherish her until the grave, and that he would love her nameless son as though he were his own flesh. And he had kept the letter of his promise: he had fed him and clothed him and taught him the Bible—but the spirit was not there. And he cherished—if he cherished her—only because she was the mother of his son, Roy. All of this she had through the painful years divined. He certainly did not know she knew it, and she wondered if he knew it himself.
She had met him through Florence. Florence and she had met at work in the middle of the summer, a year after Richard’s death. John was then over six months old.
She was very lonely that summer, and beaten down. She was living alone with John in a furnished room even grimmer than the room that had been hers in Madame Williams’s apartment. She had, of course, left Madame Williams’s immediately upon the death of Richard, saying that she had found a sleep-in job in the country. She had been terribly grateful that summer for Madame Williams’s indifference; the woman had simply not seemed to see that Elizabeth, overnight, had become an old woman and was half mad with fear and grief. She wrote her aunt the driest, and briefest, and coldest of notes, not wishing in any way to awaken whatever concern might yet slumber in her breast, telling her the same thing she had told Madame Williams, and telling her not to worry, she was in the hands of God. And she certainly was; through a bitterness that only the hand of God could have laid on her, this same hand brought her through.
Florence and Elizabeth worked as cleaning-women in a high, vast, stony office-building on Wall Street. They arrived in the evening and spent the night going through the great deserted halls and the silent offices with mops and pails and brooms. It was terrible work, and Elizabeth hated it; but it was at night, and she had taken it joyfully, since it meant that she could take care of John herself all day and not have to spend extra money to keep him in a nursery. She worried about him all night long, of course, but at least at night he was sleeping. She could only pray that the house would not burn down, that he would not fall out of bed or, in some mysterious way, turn on the gas-burner, and she had asked the woman next door, who unhappily drank too much, to keep an eye out for him. This woman, with whom she sometimes spent an hour or so in the afternoons, and her landlady, were the only people she saw. She had stopped seeing Richard’s friends because, for some reason, she did not want them to know about Richard’s child; and because, too, the moment that he was dead it became immediately apparent on both sides how little they had in common. And she did not seek new people; rather, she fled from them. She could not bear, in her changed and fallen state, to submit herself to the eyes of others. The Elizabeth that she had been was buried far away—with her lost and silent father, with her aunt, in Richard’s grave—and the Elizabeth she had become she did not recognize, she did not want to know.
But one night, when work was ended, Florence invited her to share a cup of coffee in the all-night coffee shop near by. Elizabeth had, of course, been invited before by other people—the night watchman, for example—but she had always said no. She pleaded the excuse of her baby, whom she must rush home to feed. She was pretending in those days to be a young widow, and she wore a wedding ring. Very shortly, fewer people asked her, and she achieved the reputation of being “stuck up.”
Florence had scarcely ever spoken to her before she arrived at this merciful unpopularity; but Elizabeth had noticed Florence. She moved in a silent ferocity of dignity which barely escaped being ludicrous. She was extremely unpopular also and she had nothing whatever to do with any of the women she worked with. She was, for one thing, a good deal older, and she seemed to have nothing to laugh or gossip about. She came to work, and she did her work, and she left. One could not imagine what she was thinking as she marched so grimly down the halls, her head tied up in a rag, a bucket and a mop in her hands. Elizabeth thought that she must once have been very rich, and had lost her money; and she felt for her, as one fallen woman for another, a certain kinship.
A cup of coffee together, as day was breaking, became in time their habit. They sat together in the coffee shop, which was always empty when they arrived and was crowded fifteen minutes later when they left, and had their coffee and doughnuts before they took the subway uptown. While they had their coffee, and on the ride uptown, they talked, principally about Florence, how badly people treated her, and how empty her life was now that her husband was dead. He had adored her, she told Elizabeth, and satisfied her every whim, but he had tended to irresponsibility. If she had told him once, she had told him a hundred times: “Frank, you better take out life insurance.” But he had thought—and wasn’t it just like a man!—that he would live forever. Now here she was, a woman getting along in years, forced to make her living among all the black scum of this wicked city. Elizabeth, a little astonished at the need for confession betrayed by this proud woman, listened, nevertheless, with great sympathy. She was very grateful for Florence’s interest. Florence was so much older and seemed so kind.
It was no doubt this, Florence’s age and kindness, that led Elizabeth, with no premeditation, to take Florence into her confidence. Looking back, she found it hard to believe that she could have been so desperate, or so childish; though, again, on looking back, she was able to see clearly what she then so incoherently felt: how much she needed another human being, somewhere, who knew the truth about her.
Florence had often said how glad she would be to make the acquaintance of little Johnny; she was sure, she said, that any child of Elizabeth’s must be a wonderful child. On a Sunday near the end of that summer, Elizabeth dressed him in his best clothes and took him to Florence’s house. She was oddly and fearfully depressed that day; and John was not in a good mood. She found herself staring at him darkly, as though she were trying to read his future in his face. He would grow big one day, he would talk, and he would ask her questions. What questions would he ask her, what answers would she give? She surely would not be able to lie to him indefinitely about his father, for one day he would be old enough to realize that it was not his father’s name he bore. Richard had been a fatherless child, she helplessly, bitterly remembered as she carried John through the busy, summer, Sunday streets. When one set of folks got tired of me they sent me down the line. Yes, down the line, through poverty, hunger, wandering, cruelty, fear, and trembling, to death. And she thought of the boys who had gone to prison. Were they there still? Would John be one of these boys one day? These boys, now, who stood before drugstore windows, before poolrooms, on every street corner, who whistled after her, whose lean bodies fairly rang, it seemed, with idleness, and malice, and frustration. How could she hope, alone, and in famine as she was, to put herself between him and this so wide and raging destruction? And then, as though to confirm her in all her dark imaginings, he began, as she reached the subway steps, to whimper, and moan, and cry.
And he kept this up, too, all the way uptown—so that, what with the impossibility of pleasing him that day, no matter what she did, what with his restless weight, and the heat, and the smiling, staring people, and the strange dread that weighed on her so heavily, she was nearly ready to weep by the time she arrived at Florence’s door.
He, at that moment, to her exasperated relief, became the most cheerful of infants. Florence was wearing a heavy, old-fashioned garnet brooch, which, as she opened the door, immediately attracted John’s eye. He began reaching
for the brooch and babbling and spitting at Florence as though he had known her all of his short life.
“Well!” said Florence, “when he get big enough to really go after the ladies you going to have your hands full, girl.”
“That,” said Elizabeth, grimly, “is the Lord’s truth. He keep me so busy now I don’t know half the time if I’m coming or going.”
Florence, meanwhile, attempted to distract John’s attention from the brooch by offering him an orange; but he had seen oranges before; he merely looked at it a moment before letting it fall to the floor. He began again, in his disturbingly fluid fashion, to quarrel about the brooch.
“He likes you,” said Elizabeth, finally, calmed a little by watching him.
“You must be tired,” said Florence, then. “Put him down there.” And she dragged one large easy chair to the table so that John could watch them while they ate.
“I got a letter from my brother the other day,” she said, bringing the food to the table. “His wife, poor ailing soul, done passed on, and he thinking about coming North.”
“You ain’t never told me,” said Elizabeth, with a quick and rather false interest, “you had a brother! And he coming up here?”
“So he say. Ain’t nothing, I reckon, to keep him down home no more—now Deborah’s gone.” She sat down opposite Elizabeth. “I ain’t seen him,” she said, musingly, “for more than twenty years.”
“Then it’ll be a great day,” Elizabeth smiled, “when you two meet again.”
Florence shook her head, and motioned for Elizabeth to start eating. “No,” she said, “we ain’t never got along, and I don’t reckon he’s changed.”
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