The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  And then there was a Negro blues singer. I never asked her if she knew my cousin, Ruby. She might have. I used to go and see her at four o’clock on Saturday afternoons. She would be getting up then and would be terribly cross. “Hey, you little son-of-a-bitch. Get me a black coffee, will you? Go down and get me some gin. And if you take one sip—one sip—I’ll tan your hide. Do you hear me? Where in the hell do you come from? If the cops ever come here looking for you, and sweetcakes, I know plenty of cops, they’ll put your little ass under the jail. Do you hear me?” She had many boyfriends and gave them all hell, throwing cups of coffee or empty gin bottles at them—“Yes, Goddamn it, I made a mess, but I pay the freight here, and that’s why I have a cleaning woman,”—But once we were in her pink convertible and started for the club, the bitchy woman vanished. “Sweetcakes, you’re gonna sit ringside tonight. At the best table in the joint. And if you want a whore, just say the word. Don’t blush. You’re a sassy little tomcat. . . .”

  In my sophomore year at school in Missouri I began to read everything that I could lay my hands on. I was the best customer at the Sedalia Missouri Public Library. I shall never forget those wonderful women at the library. They even allowed me to read the so-called adult books.

  But, after a while, Sedalia, St. Louis, and Kansas City weekends were not enough. The undiscovered world beckoned and one Sunday night, three months before graduation, I climbed out my bedroom window and with a carefully saved seventy-five dollars, I headed for California.

  I caught a ride with a pleasant truck driver who was going as far as Albuquerque, New Mexico. I remember passing through countless grim, quiet, small towns, and I remember when we swung into the wide open, sunny, dusty face of Texas. There wasn’t that “grand sweep” that I had read about. The landscape was a land of plains and rivers frozen over. Too many trees had been cut down and the towns all looked as if the hands of time had stopped. I remember driving down the short main street of one Texas town and reading a sign: “Nigger Don’t Let The Sun Set On You In This Town.” I closed my eyes, fell asleep, and when I awoke, it was the end of the line, Albuquerque.

  I got out of the truck and discovered that it was morning again. There was a brilliant, turquoise-blue sky, serene Rocky Mountains; a red-pink sun was coming up behind the mountains. A heavy wind rose and then a sandstorm. I thumbed vigorously at the speeding cars and trucks. No one stopped, not even Negroes. I stood there all day and toward evening two young guys in a beat-up coupe stopped. They were California-bound, searching for work. Things were bad all over, they said. However, California, the exception, was the land of milk and honey.

  But I remember Los Angeles as a version of hell.

  I checked my bag at the bus station and walked all the way along Sunset Boulevard that first day and on into Beverly Hills. A slick young man with a pockmarked face picked me up in a drugstore. I thought he was queer, but discovered later that he was junkie-prone. (It was in Korea that I realized that my large, brown, dazed eyes gave me that junkie look.) Pimps would point their slender fingers at me and ask what my kick was. This young man lived in an apartment house high above Sunset Strip with his sister, Maria, a vague girl with waist-length hair. We made love during those cool afternoons, while her brother was out. He took a liking to me, saying, “Dad, you’re a sensitive kid. My sister needs someone like you. Hell, I’ll give you a salary just to be with her.”

  And thus the country boy began to move through the subterranean junkie world where there is no day or night but an endless golden dusk if you are “on.” Without that saving fix, you did not even have the leftovers of dreams; black night of the soul when you tried to scale walls. You could buy two sticks of marijuana for the price of one as an introductory offer. I remember a teenage girl lying in an alley behind a jazz club screaming, “Hit me! Hit me! Won’t somebody please hit me. I can’t stand this pain.” And a seventy-five-year-old news hack folding five “caps” of heroin inside an early edition and passing it to a waiting taxi.

  California. Sleek-haired Mexican boys with loud sports shirts waiting for their rich keepers to come from Pasadena and Santa Monica—women paying for what they couldn’t get free at home. Old men and women sitting in parks, talking about home in drawling Midwestern accents. The incredible blue of the Pacific Ocean and the grotesque, candy-colored buildings and houses. Stark white, store-front Negro churches with holy roller music. An old Lincoln cabriolet in front of the Mocambo night club; the chauffeur spitting on his shoes, taking a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiping off his shoe, then saying, “Boy, would you like to make thirty bucks fucking an old white-haired woman?”

  I remember finally a bearded man with a tarnished silver crown who said he was the son of Jesus and a woman in a man-tailored suit, built like a boxer, saying: “Come unto me, son. This is the day of your salvation.” And in a sense she was right. I discovered Maria was pregnant, and my cousin, Ruby, came for me from Missouri. We rode back to Missouri on the Greyhound bus and didn’t say one hundred words to each other. I never knew whether or not Maria had the baby.

  Back home, I worked on and off, hitchhiking back to Kansas City on weekends. I read a great deal and tried to avoid the kids I had grown up with. At eighteen, I had had my first slice of life and I wanted more.

  I was searching for something, I would tell Ruby. What? She would ask. I don’t know, I would say. But I’ll know when I find it. Shit, Ruby would say.

  RUBY STONEWALL, my cousin, used to say, “The blues ain’t nothing but just sitting and rocking and feeling too miserable to get out of that chair.”

  I remember the first time I saw Ruby. She came to visit me and Grandma in Missouri that lonely summer after my grandfather died. She came in late August to visit, and stayed.

  I can see her now, sitting in the hot, small living room, rocking in Grandpa’s cane-backed, oak rocking chair. She was a cigarette addict, and I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her light brown skin was smooth and the aquiline nose was a surprise in her Negro face. Her wide, red mouth always seemed to be on the verge of a smile that never appeared. She wore her blue-black hair page boy, and it fell softly to her shoulders. She had bags under her gunpowder eyes that never seemed to give off any warmth. She gave people a quick, seemingly cruel glance. I heard neighbor women say, “That Ruby is one mean woman. She don’t give or take nothing from nobody. Why, them eyes of hers could look a hole through you.”

  “I’m played out, Grandma,” Ruby said that summer, in a voice that was not bitter but cold and impersonal, as if she were reciting from an old newspaper. “My baby had the summer flu and died. Some bitching husband left me, and I got into a mess with a white man in Kansas City.”

  “Sonny, you’d better go outside,” Grandma interrupted.

  “Let him stay,” Ruby said, blowing smoke rings. “It’s no good hiding things from kids. They’ll only get the dope from the streets.”

  Ruby had been a singer up in Kansas City and now her voice was shot. She couldn’t make twenty-five a week in a ginmill unless she hustled on the side, and she wasn’t ready for that. Grandma suggested she sing at the Hughes Chapel Methodist Church until she got her voice back in shape. No. Ruby would get a domestic’s job and if her voice came back, fine and dandy. She had had a good voice; she no longer had a voice. Everything with Ruby was black and white, no buts and ifs.

  The next day, Ruby and I both looked for jobs. Ruby found a job in a hotel as a chambermaid. I would need money as school was nearing. I saw an ad in the paper: busboy. I went to the back door wearing my white-folks smile and was told the job had been taken.

  The ad continued for another week. I returned to the café, thinking the new busboy had quit. The man met me at the back door again and bellowed, “Boy, can’t you get it through your thick skull, we don’t hire niggers.” It was like being slapped hard across the face or dashed with a bucket of ice water. I was standing on the back stoop of the café and the man was looking down at me. He slammed t
he door in my face because I couldn’t move. It was a heavy, old-fashioned screen door and slammed shut like a giant mousetrap.

  Next stop was a large store, the nearest thing to a department store in that Missouri town. I got the runaround there too.

  So I made it to the hotel where Ruby was working. She was in the linen room, sitting on a pile of dirty sheets. She counted sheets and she listened to my tale of woe.

  Finally I became furious and jumped up from the box where I had been sitting.

  “The sons-of-bitches. I’d like to kill’m all!”

  “Kill’m?” Ruby asked. “There ain’t enough time.”

  “Yes, kill’m,” I sneered. “Kill’m, line’m up. All the white bastards. I’d go BANG BANG BANG until I couldn’t see another living white face.”

  “Oh. Talk that talk,” Ruby mocked.

  “Well, that’s just the way I feel.”

  Ruby continued counting sheets, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. Finally she tossed the sheets aside frowning and looked up at me with her cold eyes and began talking in that ice-water voice.

  “You make me sick. You go to that department store and ask to be interviewed and they tell you to wait outside. So you wait and wait and then some white boy comes along and gets the job. And you get hurt and mad as hell. Start hating the white people again. If you had gotten the job, the white folks would be just fine. Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself because you’re black. No, not black, but black just the same. Nobody has the tough luck that us colored people have. And you’re too Goddamn miserable feeling sorry for yourself to get up out of the gutter.”

  “Since when did you hit the big time?” I snapped.

  “Since I stopped feeling sorry for myself. Since I learned there ain’t nothing really bad. There ain’t nothing that can really hurt you. Like the other night when I was waiting for a taxi. A bunch of white boys drove past me and threw a beer bottle on the curb. They yelled, ‘Hey, a black bitch! Jump for joy ’cause we want some of that black poontang.’ Did I want to kill those boys? Did I call them white bastards? No. I gave them my best toothpaste smile and said, ‘Sorry, boys, you got the wrong bitch.’”

  I kicked at the pile of dirty sheets and said bitterly, “Can it. You know you love white folks.”

  “I don’t love anybody,” Ruby replied quickly. “White or black.”

  “What about that white man in KC?”

  “Oh, him,” Ruby said indifferently. “That was nothing. A one-night stand that went sour after a week. Only I didn’t know it at the time. Black men, white men, they’re alike in the dark. I’m a good-looking black woman and I know it. But there ain’t nothing the whole lot can do for me. I’ve had enough black and white men pawing me. How old are you?”

  “Almost fifteen,” I lied.

  “Your father is a louse. I know Grandma hasn’t told you anything. But she could, believe me. You’re a good-looking kid. Women are going to be after you. White, black, all kinds. They’re going to be dying to get into your pants. But if you take the advice of an old fool, you’ll play it cool. When you get into the prime of life, you’ll be a played-out tomcat. I’ve spent thirty-five years discovering how rotten life is if you waste it on nothing. Never be bitter, Sonny. Only people who can’t face life and hate themselves are bitter. Maybe I was born black and lost my voice to teach me a lesson. Well, kid, I learned. I know damn well I learned something being born black that I could never have learned being born white.”

  I looked at her in wonder, listening to the clear flow of words, turning them over in my mind, which was not a boy’s mind, nor a man’s mind, but something in between.

  Ruby lit another cigarette with the butt of one that was only half gone. I saw the wrinkles on her forehead and her eyes which now gave off a light, warm and small as a candle.

  “Being black taught me humility,” Ruby said, beginning to sound tired. The fire had gone out of her voice. “Another thing I learned was the meaning of compassion. I sang at the Blue Room in KC. We had so many white country-club folk coming in that we had to turn them away. Can you imagine? Rich white folk, wanting to hear colored blues. They weren’t slumming. I know that kind. I asked Finkelstein who owned the joint. He said, ‘Ruby, you know true blues is about suffering. Troubles. They know about these things too. That’s what true blues have, compassion. Ruby gal, you reach the people.’ And Sonny, I started watching those white faces out front. They were like the faces of you and me. Anybody.”

  I am brought back to the present by a neon light shining in on the seven-by-nine photograph tacked above my fireplace. It shows a boy, aged one-and-a-half, in a white knitted suit with matching knitted beret and white shoes and socks. He is standing in a peeling wicker chair. He’s a cute, fat, healthy-looking kid. A golden teddy bear. But the eyes, large, too beautiful, are strangely adult. They seem to be staring beyond the photographer. Great, sad eyes. I would like them to tell me what they see, but they are silent.

  BRUCE, THE DIVINITY STUDENT of soothing tones and quiet beliefs, stormed into my place at four this morning, dead drunk. “I’m pieeyed,” he blurted out and fell flat on his healthy, hairless face, knifed between the subway kitchenette and the living room. I managed to drag him to the sofa and shut my ears to his pleading, “No, no, no.”

  Half of his twenty-three-year-old body was still on the floor; the other half was resting uncomfortably in my arms. Long, drawn-out sobs shook his body. Tears slithered down my bare chest. Gone was the Ivy-League charm, the young Episcopalian grace. I hoped God heard his painful cries which keyed my taut nerves. The cries of men are almost like dying. I sat there silently, lit a cigarette, and tried not to think.

  I began to doze, then jerked up again suddenly as Bruce moved slightly in my arms. He blinked his eyes and lapsed back into what appeared to be a troubled sleep. The cigarette had gone out in my hand and I relit it, watching the black sky turn to electric blue, solid as stone. The air was moist, the day would be a scorcher. There was no sound from the street. There was nothing to do but sit and try not to think and wait for the dawn.

  Bruce, turning fitfully, came to life the following afternoon. He sat up groggily on the sofa and shook his head. “Boy,” he said, like a sad announcement, running his pale hand through his mushroom-colored hair.

  I had the bromo, orange juice, and black coffee ready. He wanted none of it. He wanted a drink.

  So I gave the former teetotaler a water glass of gin straight and he put it down nicely, wincing slightly.

  “The bastards,” Bruce said with finality.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “My family,” Bruce said, eyeing me steadily. “Give me another drink.” He nursed his second straight gin bent over, resting his arms on his legs. He had the somnolence of a frog basking in the sun.

  The afternoon was cloudless and humid, with the promise of rain; the room had a murky gloom.

  “The bastards,” Bruce said again, rising, and saying no more except, “Thanks, and I’ll see you later.”

  THE GREAT DROUGHT has arrived. Dusty pollen falls like snow over this city; the skies are a washed-out blue. Listless, suspended days, baked streets. An insane jungle of voices day and night. It is never quiet here, not even in the soft hours before dawn. I do not go out unless I have to. We tenants leave our doors open, ears pricked, alert to footsteps on the stairs: “Are you going to the store? Walking the dog? How soon will it be before you return?”

  I have an urge to stay in this white-walled room until the summer is ended, and then march out, leave the city and, unlike Lot’s wife, never look back. The messenger service during the day, and at night I stagger back here, sweaty, exhausted, my Achilles feet throbbing like an inflated heart. I ask, what is wrong with me? I’m one of the boys, I’m as American as apple pie. But no. I cannot, simply cannot, don a mask and suck the c—of that sweet, secure bitch, middle-class American life.

  Sometimes I sit in my fifth-floor window and watch the young Americans out on the town, healthy, l
aughing, contented as mother hens. Their faces indistinguishable as blades of grass. Look how happy they are! They are united and one. Yes, I could become one of the horde, despite the fact that I am Negro. (Remember the black dots on the great white field?) I could stop worrying about writing, about the corruption of this city, the world, and the fate of mankind. I could get a soft, safe, white-collar job, save the coins, marry, and all in the name of middle-class sanctity.

  I remember one Monday I played hookey from the messenger service. I shaved very close that morning, glued on my average, boyish, American smile. This smile is no different from the average, boyish, white-American smile. After all, the Negro has been fucked through the years and in many different positions in this country. He has been the faithful, unpampered watchdog of the whites. Above all, he knows that white is right. Witness skin tighteners and all those magical oils, lotions, creams. They will not only take away blackheads and pimples, but your dark skin as well. Hence, the average, boyish, American smile. I donned my only good suit, white shirt, dark silk tie, picked up the Sunday New York Times classified section, and made it.

  There were twenty or more men around, waiting for the fifty-seven-dollar-a-week midtown mailroom flunky job. All types, races, ages, backgrounds. It was a cross section of America. Several looked extremely intelligent and several were very well-dressed.

  I filled out the application and middle-aged Mr. Personnel called me first. Twenty-three envious faces were on me. How did I rate? Nowhere, baby. I knew nothing about mail rates and they wanted someone experienced. Personnel was sorry. He would have liked to take me on; I seemed bright, on the ball. Personnel and I exchanged shitty grins. I exited and went down to Wall Street and applied for a brokerage house trainee. Seventy dollars every Thursday. The company paid the agency fee. Before reporting to Personnel, I dug the sorry-looking jokers in the “cage,” sorting stocks and bonds like so many automatic monkeys with their white shirts, sleeves rolled up, and wearing impossible ties. They were the kind of young men who went bowling and, after four beers, became “cards,” the kind of young men who took their girlfriends to Chinese restaurants on Saturday nights, the kind of young men who would say, “Let’s get a couple of beers and pick up some dames.” The only thing they could pick was their noses. I have double-dated with them and their vague pigs, and I know.