The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  Grandma’s voice rose slightly. I looked up out of the corner of my eye and saw Grandma rubbing her hands together. She was looking at the faded, flower-printed back of the porch swing. Even in the darkness her eyes sparkled and I knew tears were in them. “Father, I want you to have mercy upon my grandson, that he may see the light and come over on your side before it’s too late. Father, dear, sweet Jesus, I want you to throw your strong arms around him as he goes off to war. Guide him . . . he’s only a child. Guide him, and bring him home safely to me. Help him and all the other young men and women in this wicked world.”

  My clasped hands were sweaty; I dug my nails hard into the palms of my hands as I continued to listen to Grandma’s low chant: “Father, Father, there is so little time left. Children are born into this world of sin, and before you know it, they are grown. They drift away from home and from the church. They stumble along the byways of life. Blessed Jesus, let your light shine that my boy might see it and come unto you before it is too late and that he may have life everlasting. I ask this in your name, through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.”

  Grandma paused briefly and said, “Your turn, Sonny.”

  I turned my head and stared out at the dark night. There was nothing out there. Darkness. Fireflies. Street lights beaming through the trees, and against the shadowy houses.

  “Your turn, Sonny,” Grandma repeated. Then she turned toward me. “My child, have you forgot how to pray?”

  I did not say anything. I looked at Grandma and blessed the darkness so I would not have to meet her tear-filled eyes.

  “Sonny,” Grandma said. “Pray.”

  I bowed my head again and opened my mouth. The words would not come. I looked up at the porch ceiling. It seemed as if the ceiling was between me and God.

  “Well,” Grandma said finally, rising, “You might as well get up. I’ll pray for you and you try to pray yourself and then it will be all right. If you believe, it will be all right.”

  I got up and kissed Grandma on the forehead. “Goodnight, Grandma,” I said.

  “Goodnight, Sonny. Don’t stay out too late. You’ll have to get up early. . . .”

  I heard her cry for the first time in my life as I walked off the porch.

  I am glad for Grandma that I returned safe from Korea. I was all that she had in this world and I knew what the loss of me would mean to her.

  Korea did not turn out to be my personal salvation as a man, nor a field of glorious exploits and adventures. It was simply and deeply my first rude lesson that most men and women suffer unbearably.

  THE VIEW FROM the fifth-floor window is very fine. The temperature is a balmy seventy-nine degrees; the sky black, starless. There are tiers of lights beaming from the Empire State building, the revolving search lights, Pizza House, rainbow-hued neon, Hertz car rental, Tip Top Parking, and the hotel’s blue-white signature. My FM radio plays respectable cool jazz. Bellowing above the jazz is the cry of the jukebox bars, and the aching churn and clunk of the garbage truck.

  Three sailors pass, doing the Jersey bounce in their tight, white suits. A six-foot, grayhaired whore walks by like a white, proud, Viennese horse. The Amazon whore slaps one of the sailors on the back heartily. They move off down the street.

  Next on view is little Miss Dumpty-Dump with her great rouged cheeks, working the midnight shift. I see her each morning getting off the BMT subway with her cannister in a brown paper bag or under the folds of her flaring raincoat. She solicits for every known and unknown charity, and I know she has been with her chapter seven years. She is one of those old, sweet-voiced, motherly women, all of whom have a profitable con game. Their organization is a strict and exclusive one, run on the lines of the D.A.R. Not just anyone can get in. Their meetings are held in Horn and Hardart over tea and rolls, once a week, between two and four p.m.

  L. C., the Tip Top attendant, has just bought a Pepsi Cola from the machine in the garage, and is staring intently at a seven-year-old boy who is walking hand and hand with his parents, ogling that mirage, Rockefeller Center.

  I wonder about Tip Top. There is an open doorway between Pizza House and Tip Top Parking. It is deep and dark, almost the width of my narrow room. Men enter this dark, brooding tomb to urinate or to take long nips from a hip-pocket pint. The brilliant neon signs and streetlights create only a gray haze there; it’s a kind of island in evening fog. If you are not too particular and don’t mind standing up, it is a fine place to have sex, and quite a number of people do just that. The people passing are locked in a dream world, their eyes focused elsewhere. The island is a safe and secret place.

  For example: A Negro night-cleaning woman passes the doorway, weighed down with two large packages wrapped carelessly with white tissue paper, like two giant white roses. The Negro woman has the left foot up, right foot down, flat-footed stride of a duck. She seems very tired and looks neither to the right nor left. The knowledge of more work at home clings to her body like sweat. More shirts to iron? Is Junior off the streets? Tomorrow is Saturday, but she cannot afford to sleep late.

  As she passed the doorway, the man within stands back from the woman. He stretches out his long arms and fondles the woman’s breasts. He is smiling, talking, very sure of himself. I can’t see the woman’s face, but she is short.

  Four young men amble by. They are tourists: All of them wear colorful, short-sleeved summer shirts and blue jeans. There are deep cuffs in their blue jeans. Suddenly, one of the young men raises his arm and points at the tall buildings.

  Now the man in the open doorway has his body pointed tight against the woman. His hands are clasped on her buttocks like a vise. The woman doesn’t move. The man lowers his head and plants a kiss on her forehead.

  Ah! The woman has sprung to life. Her skirt is pushed up around her hips. I can see where her stockings end. The man is in her but his trousers are not down. The woman flings her arms around the man, but her movements are delicate, as if the hormones in her body were frozen.

  And then the man and woman came to a jerking halt and it is over. He releases himself from her very quickly, reaches in his pocket, and pulls out a handkerchief. Then, he lights a cigarette and, like a gentleman, offers it to the woman. She refuses. He looks away as she arranges herself.

  The man and woman emerge out of the darkened doorway and into the light. He takes her arm and kisses that forehead again. He is a big man with gray, curly hair and ruddy face. His olive drab suit fits him well. The woman is very young with short, clipped hair, a pleasant face, devoid of makeup. She is staggering slightly. She has the look of a model for petite fashions and she wears short white gloves.

  I look out at the wonders of the sky’s black face. A sharp, autumnal breeze circles through this stone Hades, this island on the Hudson. Those tired old tramps, those neon signs! Even when I close the shutters, I can see them blinking on and off like a pretty bitch who likes to tease.

  The lunatic music continues to scream from the bars. In a country noted for its wealth, the mass music is not even hybrid corn. Why can’t I live in Forest Hills or Fairfield County where, I suppose, all is quiet and ordered. I don’t really know. There I would be lulled to sleep by the whisper of leaves, the sprinkler jetting on the green lawn. Why am I here, why New York?

  After the two years in the army, I went to St. Louis. I wanted to try to write, and set up shop in that city on the Mississippi. It was the spring of 1956 and for a season I was the darling of a heterogeneous group of the arty and the literary. I moved among them in a state of spectral wonder. In time, they tired of me and I of them.

  There was nothing to do but move on to New York. I arrived in August of 1957. A visit only, I had told myself, but there was something that held me powerless. The pace, the variety, the anonymity, the sense of walking on glittering glass eggs, walking in a city like a big-time prostitute with her legs cocked open. A challenging, wondrous city, fit for a wide-eyed country boy. But do I really belong here?

  TONIGHT I CAUGHT the A train, went up t
o Harlem. Kenya, the Iron Curtain, I thought. When I first got off the train at 125th Street, there seemed to be nothing foreign or menacing about the Saturday night street. But after a while, I felt a certain violence hovering in the air, as if a great symphony of dark emotions was keyed, waiting for the maestro’s exploding baton. The great black mass is restless. If you doubt this sense of imminent violence, watch the few uneasy whites who live in Washington Heights, upper Broadway, and the Bronx.

  As I walk down 125th Street, I see young men, sharp as diamonds in suits that they can’t afford, leaning against flashy cars that don’t belong to them, or stepping smartly as if on their way to a very high-class hell. 125th Street is Forty-second Street, Broadway, Times Square, Fifth Avenue all combined in a jungle of buildings. It is a prayer meeting with a hand-clapping, tambourine “Yes Lawd.” It’s Blumstein’s Department Store, the Harlemite’s Macy’s. It’s the Apollo, with the only live stage show in Manhattan. It’s the smart bars catering to Big Time wheeling and dealing Negroes and downtown whites, who want a swinging Harlem night.

  I turned down a side street where children were playing hide-and-seek, with families gathered on the stoops, or leaning out of brightly lighted windows. Here the sense of violence was in abeyance. It was Saturday night and there was a happy peace about the block. Gone was the blue world of Monday morning and Mr. Boss Man. Gone were the loudmouthed, cigar-smoking Negro leaders who try to rouse the great black mass to glory at the meeting of the waters in America.

  “That bitch scorched my head with them hot irons. And these curls have got to last me two weeks, honey,” I heard a woman laugh to her friends, who were leaning out a second-floor window. The woman was unconcerned with the world at large. There was too much to think about, what with the lousy tenement where you lived, and that job where you worked too hard and were underpaid. Now a bitch used too-hot combs and tried to burn your scalp. This woman would listen to a black leader simply because he was black, but distrusting even him, knowing that he was really the white man’s mouthpiece—and that he couldn’t do a damn thing about the bitch with the red-hot straightening comb.

  Nearby was a storefront church with a painted window resembling stained glass. There was a crudely printed legend that said: THE HOLINESS SUNDOWN CHURCH, and in small letters: The right Rev. Stokes D. Masfield, Pastor. This house of worship is open twenty-four hours a day like the eyes of God.

  A bold, large, black and white eye emblazoned the door. I entered to find this congregation in a silent prayer. The pastor looked up, nodded, and I sat down in a folding chair near the door. There were about twenty adults in the church, more women than men, and about a dozen fidgeting children, and there was a sweet smell about the place but no flowers except a few gleaming, green leaves from the five-and-ten.

  “Sis-tas and bro-thers! We prayed silently. . . .”

  “Yes, now! Didn’t we pray!” the congregation cried.

  “Prayed to da LAWD, silently . . .”

  “Silently! Praise da Lawd!”

  “Praise da Lawd. He hears us when we don’t hear ourselves.” “Yes,” cried the refrain, “he hears me. Oh, yes he does!”

  “Let us make a joyful noise unto da Lawd. Unto da almitey on high . . .”

  A tall dark young woman rose and with head lifted high, hands clasped, and the most serene expression I had seen on a face in a long time, opened her mouth and began to sing, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” It was a pure, powerful contralto, the words flowing as easily as a mother talking to a sick child. The woman sang the verse and then the rest of the congregation took up the chorus and the sweating fat man showed that the organ was meant not only for cathedrals.

  I found myself singing in a small voice. Something stirred inside me. Perhaps it was remembering Wednesday prayer meeting and Grandma and Grandpa. Perhaps it was just a corny emotion; I don’t know. I only know that something stirred, touched me, and for a few minutes, sitting in that whitewashed-walled, storefront church, listening to that beautiful voice, I had a feeling that all was not lost. Somewhere there was such a thing as peace of mind and goodness.

  I didn’t, couldn’t, stay long; too many things would start playing hell with my mind. I went up, shook the pastor’s hand, and gave him a dollar. He smiled and said, “God bless you, son,” and then I left.

  It was almost midnight now. Everything was alive on 125th Street. This was Saturday night, the time when the Negroes let their hair down, relax, get drunk, fight and grumble about Mr. White Man and the price of pork and eggs and the troubles of their cousins down south, knowing that, come Monday morning, it will all be the same.

  I went into a bar, had a couple of two-for-one drinks, and then a couple more, and headed for the subway. The drinks were terrible and bucked uneasily in my stomach. As I was going down the steps a Jew in a pre-Warsaw suit was coming up, mopping his lined red face. He looked up at me and smiled: “Kinda hot tonight, ain’t it, boy?”

  “Yes, Lawd,” I said, and suddenly and uncontrollably vomited all the way down the subway steps.

  I DRIFTED THROUGH FRENZIED, hot days and nights, drunk much of the time, despondent. August is working itself out slowly; time is a miser with an eyedropper. Summer. Summer’s end. Will the summer ever end? I look at the picture of me above the fireplace, the baby in the white-knitted suit, standing in the old wicker chair. At one-and-a-half years old, the child poised, alerted for the takeoff. The large, soft eyes are unblinking and locked as ever. The boy would grow, become shy, secretive, and later would stand at a distance from life.

  I remember Grandpa’s lament, “This world is not my home.” I think: You are the last branch of the tree. As in a novel by Faulkner, except that the family is Negro. For me, at the end of the line, nothing to look forward to but my own death, which I do not fear. But this, this doomed air of the present; what will happen to me before I die? What could possibly happen after all that has happened?

  In the fall of 1958, I had a dream about Grandma. She was riding a bicycle and had stopped at the one-room, redbrick schoolhouse where I had gone for eight years. Grandma wore a black chiffon dress and a large, wheat-colored straw hat. It was a very hot day and Grandma was smiling at me as if we shared a delicious secret. I woke up in a sweat and this dream haunted me for days. Her most recent letters, written in her neat small script, had not been cheerful, which was unlike her, for even when ill or depressed, she feigned an air of happiness.

  I decided to go home.

  I remember walking through the courthouse square as the clock tolled six a.m. and broke the small-town quiet. The street was deserted. I knew, without looking up toward the November hills, where the landscape of cottages and big Victorian houses rose to meet a soft dawn, that there would be no movement, no lights in the windows. But somewhere in the brown hills a rooster crowed, and the chill morning air revealed a column of smoke; an early riser burning leaves.

  I crossed the gravelled square with its moldy, bronze statue of Captain Zimmerman, the town’s founder. The old-fashioned bandstand had a fresh coat of blue-green paint and looked as if it had been abandoned by a touring tent show. (The Toby Ward tent shows of my childhood; the Midwest’s summer Broadway.) The slat and iron benches had not changed. They formed a forlorn semicircle. I sat down wearily on one, which was damp with early morning frost, and I looked out across the wide muddy Missouri. My eyes followed the flat river-bottom lands and the thrush-brown jungle of trees, the sparsely populated farms with blue lines of smoke rising from the chimneys, the windmills turning gently in the river wind.

  Home.

  I was born here, two miles from town in a little valley surrounded by sloping dogwood and blackberry-covered ridges. Now the house where I was born is gone and there are only the wild orange tiger lilies. Cows graze in that cup of a valley. The redbrick schoolhouse and Bette Sue Estill, the little girl with the laughing black eyes, and Grandpa fishing and hunting rabbits when the cornfields were covered with sheets of frozen snow. The Red Dog Café, the Royal
movie house, and the Hughes Chapel Methodist Church (named after a great-great-uncle who was a famous Missouri Negro preacher). The whites moved further out from town and the Negroes moved into the town together with the church.

  Sitting in the open space of the courthouse square, I found myself suddenly murmuring a solemn, desperate “Oh Jesus.” My life seemed like that of a tomcat who had slunk down too many alleys and had gotten nothing but a whore’s bag of experience. I was on the run, and fatigued, played out. And now I wanted to turn around and flee the town. I didn’t want to face Grandma, face the moment of recognition. We were too much alike—silent, reading each other’s minds, a painful blessing. Somewhere across the railroad tracks was my father, sleeping, as Grandma would say, like a big dumb ox, and there also were the countless girls I had loved in another time when this town had been my world, except for dreams. I had lost whatever I had had in those days, a shy lonely boy, veteran of a small war at twenty-one, who had made the bohemian pilgrimage without finding a roosting place.

  I got up from the bench slowly, yawned and stretched lazily, and summoned up a grin for Captain Zimmerman: “Good morning, Cap. The dead welcoming the dead.”

  I walked through the tranquil fir trees, saddled with two heavy leather bags which held everything I possessed, and on down Main Street. Already the sun was up, a warm buttery yellow. And there was the lusty, muddy song of my childhood, the Missouri River, rushing to join the Mississippi a hundred miles away in St. Louis. I felt strange and hollow being back, but I strode briskly, long-legged, a voyager in a fresh green land.

  I saw it: East Cooper Street, house number four, a mound of weathered clapboard. A porch circled the house like a crazy horseshoe; dried, frostbitten vines covered the porch like a cape. The windows of the second floor were shuttered and my eyes travelled down the first floor. Yellowed lace curtains framed the living room’s bay window; the sill supported a group of potted plants and a tattered, pink-shaded lamp.