“Do you know this one, Annjee?” asked Jimboy, calling his wife’s name out of sudden politeness because he had forgotten to eat her food, had hardly looked at her, in fact, since she came home. Now he glanced towards her in the darkness where she sat plump on a kitchen-chair in the yard, apart from the others, with her back to the growing corn in the garden. Softly he ran his fingers, light as a breeze, over his guitar strings, imitating the wind rustling through the long leaves of the corn. A rectangle of light from the kitchen-door fell into the yard striking sidewise across the healthy orange-yellow of his skin above the unbuttoned neck of his blue laborer’s shirt.
“Come on, sing it with us, Annjee,” he said.
“I don’t know it,” Annjee replied, with a lump in her throat, and her eyes on the silhouette of his long, muscular, animal-hard body. She loved Jimboy too much, that’s what was the matter with her! She knew there was nothing between him and her young sister except the love of music, yet he might have dropped the guitar and left Harriett in the yard for a little while to come eat the nice cold slice of ham she had brought him. She hadn’t seen him all day long. When she went to work this morning, he was still in bed—and now the blues claimed him.
In the starry blackness the singing notes of the guitar became a plaintive hum, like a breeze in a grove of palmettos; became a low moan, like the wind in a forest of live-oaks strung with long strands of hanging moss. The voice of Annjee’s golden, handsome husband on the door-step rang high and far away, lonely-like, crying with only the guitar, not his wife, to understand; crying grotesquely, crying absurdly in the summer night:
I got a mule to ride.
I got a mule to ride.
Down in the South somewhere
I got a mule to ride.
Then asking the question as an anxious, left-lonesome girl-sweetheart would ask it:
You say you goin’ North.
You say you goin’ North.
How ’bout yo’ . . . lovin’ gal?
You say you goin’ North.
Then sighing in rhythmical despair:
O, don’t you leave me here.
Babe, don’t you leave me here.
Dog-gone yo’ comin’ back!
Said don’t you leave me here.
On and on the song complained, man-verses and woman-verses, to the evening air in stanzas that Jimboy had heard in the pine-woods of Arkansas from the lumber-camp workers; in other stanzas that were desperate and dirty like the weary roads where they were sung; and in still others that the singer created spontaneously in his own mouth then and there:
O, I done made ma bed,
Says I done made ma bed.
Down in some lonesome grave
I done made ma bed.
It closed with a sad eerie twang.
“That’s right decent,” said Hager. “Now I wish you-all’d play some o’ ma pieces like When de Saints Come Marchin’ In or This World Is Not Ma Home—something Christian from de church.”
“Aw, mama, it’s not Sunday yet,” said Harriett.
“Sing Casey Jones,” called old man Tom Johnson. “That’s ma song.”
So the ballad of the immortal engineer with another mama in the Promised Land rang out promptly in the starry darkness, while everybody joined in the choruses.
“Aw, pick it, boy,” yelled the old man. “Can’t nobody play like you.”
And Jimboy remembered when he was a lad in Memphis that W. C. Handy had said: “You ought to make your living out of that, son.” But he hadn’t followed it up—too many things to see, too many places to go, too many other jobs.
“What song do you like, Annjee?” he asked, remembering her presence again.
“O, I don’t care. Any ones you like. All of ’em are pretty.” She was pleased and petulant and a little startled that he had asked her.
“All right, then,” he said. “Listen to me:”
Here I is in de mean ole jail.
Ain’t got nobody to go ma bail.
Lonesome an’ sad an’ chain gang bound—
Ever’ friend I had’s done turned me down.
“That’s sho it!” shouted Tom Johnson in great sympathy. “Now, when I was in de Turner County Jail . . .”
“Shut up yo’ mouth!” squelched Sarah, jabbing her husband in the ribs.
The songs went on, blues, shouts, jingles, old hits: Bon Bon Buddy, the Chocolate Drop; Wrap Me in Your Big Red Shawl; Under the Old Apple Tree; Turkey in the Straw—Jimboy and Harriett breaking the silence of the small-town summer night until Aunt Hager interrupted:
“You-all better wind up, chillens, ’cause I wants to go to bed. I ain’t used to stayin’ ’wake so late, nohow. Play something kinder decent there, son, fo’ you stops.”
Jimboy, to tease the old woman, began to rock and moan like an elder in the Sanctified Church, patting both feet at the same time as he played a hymn-like, lugubrious tune with a dancing overtone:
Tell me, sister,
Tell me, brother,
Have you heard de latest news?
Then seriously as if he were about to announce the coming of the Judgment:
A woman down in Georgia
Got her two sweet-men confused.
How terrible! How sad! moaned the guitar.
One knocked on de front do’,
One knocked on de back—
Sad, sad . . . sad, sad! said the music.
Now that woman down in Georgia’s
Door-knob is hung with black.
O, play that funeral march, boy! while the guitar laughed a dirge.
An’ de hearse is comin’ easy
With two rubber-tired hacks!
Followed by a long-drawn-out, churchlike:
Amen . . . !
Then with rapid glides, groans, and shouts the instrument screamed of a sudden in profane frenzy, and Harriett began to ball-the-jack, her arms flopping like the wings of a headless pigeon, the guitar strings whining in ecstasy, the player rocking gaily to the urgent music, his happy mouth crying: “Tack ’em on down, gal! Tack ’em on down, Harrie!”
But Annjee had risen.
“I wish you’d come in and eat the ham I brought you,” she said as she picked up her chair and started towards the house. “And you, Sandy! Get up from under that tree and go to bed.” She spoke roughly to the little fellow, whom the songs had set a-dreaming. Then to her husband: “Jimboy, I wish you’d come in.”
The man stopped playing, with a deep vibration of the strings that seemed to echo through the whole world. Then he leaned his guitar against the side of the house and lifted straight up in his hairy arms Annjee’s plump, brown-black little body while he kissed her as she wriggled like a stubborn child, her soft breasts rubbing his hard body through the coarse blue shirt.
“You don’t like my old songs, do you, baby? You don’t want to hear me sing ’em,” he said, laughing. “Well, that’s all right. I like you, anyhow, and I like your ham, and I like your kisses, and I like everything you bring me. Let’s go in and chow down.” And he carried her into the kitchen, where he sat with her on his knees as he ate the food she so faithfully had brought him from Mrs. J. J. Rice’s dinner-table.
Outside, Willie-Mae went running home through the dark. And Harriett pumped a cool drink of water for her mother, then helped her to rise from her low seat, Sandy aiding from behind, with both hands pushing firmly in Aunt Hager’s fleshy back. Then the three of them came into the house and glanced, as they passed through the kitchen, at Annjee sitting on Jimboy’s lap with both dark arms tight around his neck.
“Looks like you’re clinging to the Rock of Ages,” said Harriett to her sister. “Be sure you don’t slip, old evil gal!”
But at midnight, when the owl that nested in a tree near the corner began to hoot, they were all asleep—Annjee and Jimboy in one room, Harriett and Hager in another, with Sandy on the floor at the foot of his grandmother’s bed. Far away on the railroad line a whistle blew, lonesome and long.
SIX
* * *
THE sunflowers in Willie-Mae’s back yard were taller than Tom Johnson’s head, and the hollyhocks in the fence corners were almost as high. The nasturtiums, blood-orange and gold, tumbled over themselves all around Madam de Carter’s house. Aunt Hager’s sweet-william, her pinks, and her tiger-lilies were abloom and the apples on her single tree would soon be ripe. The adjoining yards of the three neighbors were gay with flowers. “Watch out for them dogs!” his grandmother told Sandy hourly, for the days had come when the bright heat made gentle animals go mad. Bees were heavy with honey, great green flies hummed through the air, yellow-black butterflies suckled at the rambling roses . . . and watermelons were on the market.
The Royal African Knights and Ladies of King Solomon’s Scepter were preparing a drill for the September Emancipation celebration, a “Drill of All Nations,” in which Annjee was to represent Sweden. It was not to be given for a month or more, but the first rehearsal would take place tonight.
“Sandy,” his mother said, shaking him early in the morning as he lay on his pallet at the foot of Aunt Hager’s bed, “listen here! I want you to come out to Mis’ Rice’s this evening and help me get through the dishes so’s I can start home early, in time to wash and dress myself to go to the lodge hall. You hears me?”
“Yes’m,” said Sandy, keeping his eyes closed to the bright stream of morning sunlight entering the window. But half an hour later, when Jimboy kicked him and said: “Hey, bo! You wanta go fishin’?” he got up at once, slid into his pants; and together they went out in the garden to dig worms. It was seldom that his father took him anywhere, and, of course, he wanted to go. Sandy adored Jimboy, but Jimboy, amiable and indulgent though he was, did not often care to be bothered with his ten-year-old son on his fishing expeditions.
Harriett had gone to her job, and Hager had long been at the tubs under the apple-tree when the two males emerged from the kitchen-door. “Huh! You ain’t workin’ this mawnin’, is you?” the old woman grunted, bending steadily down, then up, over the wash-board.
“Nope,” her tall son-in-law answered. “Donahoe laid me off yesterday on account o’ the white bricklayers said they couldn’t lay bricks with a nigger.”
“Always something to keep you from workin’,” panted Hager.
“Sure is,” agreed Jimboy pleasantly. “But don’t worry, me and Sandy’s gonna catch you a mess o’ fish for supper today. How’s that, ma?”
“Don’t need no fish,” the old woman answered. “An’ don’t come ma-in’ me! Layin’ round here fishin’ when you ought to be out makin’ money to take care o’ this house an’ that chile o’ your’n.” The suds rose foamy white about her black arms as the clothes plushed up and down on the zinc wash-board. “Lawd deliver me from a lazy darky!”
But Jimboy and Sandy were already behind the tall corn, digging for bait near the back fence.
“Don’t never let no one woman worry you,” said the boy’s father softly, picking the moist wriggling worms from the upturned loam. “Treat ’em like chickens, son. Throw ’em a little corn and they’ll run after you, but don’t give ’em too much. If you do, they’ll stop layin’ and expect you to wait on ’em.”
“Will they?” asked Sandy.
The warm afternoon sun made the river a languid sheet of muddy gold, glittering away towards the bridge and the flour-mills a mile and a half off. Here in the quiet, on the end of a rotting jetty among the reeds, Jimboy and his son sat silently. A long string of small silver fish hung down into the water, keeping fresh, and the fishing-lines were flung far out in the stream, waiting for more bites. Not a breeze on the flat brown-gold river, not a ripple, not a sound. But once the train came by behind them, pouring out a great cloud of smoke and cinders and shaking the jetty.
“That’s Number Five,” said Jimboy. “Sure is flyin’,” as the train disappeared between rows of empty box-cars far down the track, sending back a hollow clatter as it shot past the flourmills, whose stacks could be dimly seen through the heat haze. Once the engine’s whistle moaned shrilly.
“She’s gone now,” said Jimboy as the last click of the wheels died away. And, except for the drone of a green fly about the can of bait, there was again no sound to disturb the two fishermen.
Jimboy gazed at his lines. Across the river Sandy could make out, in the brilliant sunlight, the gold of wheat-fields and the green of trees on the hills. He wondered if it would be nice to live over there in the country.
“Man alive!” his father cried suddenly, hauling vigorously at one of the lines. “Sure got a real bite now. . . . Look at this catfish.” From the water he pulled a large flopping lead-colored creature, with a fierce white mouth bleeding and gaping over the hook.
“He’s on my line!” yelled Sandy. “I caught him!”
“Pshaw!” laughed Jimboy. “You was setting there dreaming.”
“No, I wasn’t!”
But just then, at the mills, the five-o’clock whistles blew. “Oh, gee, dad!” cried the boy, frightened. “I was s’posed to go to Mis’ Rice’s to help mama, and I come near forgetting it. She wants to get through early this evenin’ to go to lodge meeting. I gotta hurry and go help her.”
“Well, you better beat it then, and I’ll look out for your line like I been doing and bring the fishes home.”
So the little fellow balanced himself across the jetty, scrambled up the bank, and ran down the railroad track towards town. He was quite out of breath when he reached the foot of Penrose Street, with Mrs. Rice’s house still ten blocks away, so he walked awhile, then ran again, down the long residential street, with its large houses sitting in green shady lawns far back from the sidewalk. Sometimes a sprinkler attached to a long rubber hose, sprayed fountain-like jets of cold water on the thirsty grass. In one yard three golden-haired little girls were playing under an elm-tree, and in another a man and some children were having a leisurely game of croquet.
Finally Sandy turned into a big yard. The delicious scent of frying beefsteak greeted the sweating youngster as he reached the screen of the white lady’s kitchen-door. Inside, Annjee was standing over the hot stove seasoning something in a saucepan, beads of perspiration on her dark face, and large damp spots under the arms of her dress.
“You better get here!” she said. “And me waiting for you for the last hour. Here, take this pick and break some ice for the tea.” Sandy climbed up on a stool and raised the ice-box lid while his mother opened the oven and pulled out a pan of golden-brown biscuits. “Made these for your father,” she remarked. “The white folks ain’t asked for ’em, but they like ’em, too, so they can serve for both. . . . Jimboy’s crazy about biscuits. . . . Did he work today?”
“No’m,” said Sandy, jabbing at the ice. “We went fishing.”
At that moment Mrs. Rice came into the kitchen, tall and blond, in a thin flowered gown. She was a middle-aged white woman with a sharp nasal voice.
“Annjee, I’d like the potatoes served just as they are in the casserole. And make several slices of very thin toast for my father. Now, be sure they are thin!”
“Yes, m’am,” said Annjee stirring a spoonful of flour into the frying-pan, making a thick brown gravy.
“Old thin toast,” muttered Annjee when Mrs. Rice had gone back to the front. “Always bothering round the kitchen! Here ’tis lodge-meeting night—dinner late anyhow—and she coming telling me to stop and make toast for the old man! He ain’t too indigestible to eat biscuits like the rest of ’em. . . . White folks sure is a case!” She laid three slices of bread on top of the stove. “So spoiled with colored folks waiting on ’em all their days! Don’t know what they’ll do in heaven, ’cause I’m gonna sit down up there myself.”
Annjee took the biscuits, light and brown, and placed some on a pink plate she had warmed. She carried them, with the butter and jelly, into the dining-room. Then she took the steak from the warmer, dished up the vegetables into gold-rimmed serving-dishes, and poured the gravy, which sme
lled deliciously onion-flavored.
“Gee, I’m hungry,” said the child, with his eyes on the big steak ready to go in to the white people.
“Well, just wait,” replied his mother. “You come to work, not to eat. . . . Whee! but it’s hot today!” She wiped her wet face and put on a large white bungalow apron that had been hanging behind the door. Then she went with the iced tea and a pitcher of water into the dining-room, struck a Chinese gong, and came back to the kitchen to get the dishes of steaming food, which she carried in to the table.
It was some time before she returned from waiting on the table; so Sandy, to help her, began to scrape out the empty pans and put them to soak in the sink. He ate the stewed corn that had stuck in the bottom of one, and rubbed a piece of bread in the frying-pan where the gravy had been. His mother came out with the water-pitcher, broke some ice for it, and returned to the dining-room where Sandy could hear laughter, and the clinking of spoons in tea-glasses, and women talking. When Annjee came back into the kitchen, she took four custards from the ice-box and placed them on gold-rimmed plates.
“They’re about through,” she said to her son. “Sit down and I’ll fix you up.”
Sandy was very hungry and he hoped Mrs. Rice’s family hadn’t eaten all the steak, which had looked so good with its brown gravy and onions.
Shortly, his mother returned carrying the dishes that had been filled with hot food. She placed them on the kitchen-table in front of Sandy, but they were no longer full and no longer hot. The corn had thickened to a paste, and the potatoes were about gone; but there was still a ragged piece of steak left on the platter.
“Don’t eat it all,” said Annjee warningly. “I want to take some home to your father.”
Not Without Laughter Page 5