Robert was looking at Lena, and I could tell something bad had happened.
“No,” Lena started screaming. “No. Lord, no.”
“Take her home,” Robert said.
“We got a right to know, Mr. Robert,” Etienne said.
“Where’s my boy?” Lena asked Robert. “I want to see my boy.”
“You’ll see him tomorrow,” Robert said. “I’ll take you there tomorrow.”
“Is he dead?” Etienne asked.
“They shot him eight o’clock this morning,” Robert said.
Then she fell. Even with Mary and them holding her up she fell. They picked her up and took her inside the house.
“Who shot him?” Etienne asked.
“Who knows?” Robert said.
“Somebody knows,” Etienne said. “Somebody knows, Mr. Robert.”
“Well, I didn’t shoot him,” Robert said. “I didn’t know nothing about it till they called the house.”
He stood by the car looking at all us standing there.
“Go back home,” he said.
“You mean get off, don’t you?” I said.
“I mean go on back home,” he said.
“I’m going to Bayonne, me,” Strut’s boy said.
“I’ll follow Alex,” I said.
“Them who want go to Bayonne, let’s go to Bayonne,” Alex said. “Let’s go to Bayonne even if we got to come back here to nothing.”
“What you think you go’n find in Bayonne, boy?” Robert said.
“Jimmy,” Alex said.
“Jimmy is dead,” Robert said. “Didn’t you hear me say Jimmy was killed at eight o’clock?”
“He ain’t dead nothing,” Alex said.
“You know better,” Robert said to me.
“Just a little piece of him is dead,” I said. “The rest of him is waiting for us in Bayonne. And I will go with Alex.”
Some of the people backed away from me when I said this, but the braver ones started for the road. They had forgot about bus fare again, and since I didn’t have enough money for everybody I sent one of the children in the house to Olivia. He came back with a ten dollar bill and said Olivia said she would be up there later. I stuck the money in my pocketbook. Me and Robert looked at each other there a long time, then I went by him.
This book is dedicated
to the memory of
My grandmother, Mrs. Julia McVay
My stepfather, Mr Ralph Norbert Colar, Sr.
and
to the memory of
My beloved aunt, Miss Augusteen Jefferson,
who did not walk a day in her life
but who taught me the importance of standing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ERNEST J. GAINES was born on a Louisiana plantation in 1933 and can remember working in the fields for fifty cents a day as a child of nine. He is a graduate of San Francisco State College and a recipient of a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship to Stanford University.
Mr. Gaines’s first novel, Catherine Cormier (1964), was awarded the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Prize. His other works include a novel, Of Love and Dust (1967), and a collection of short stories, Bloodline (1968). His stories have appeared in Southern Writing of the Sixties, The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers and American Negro Short Stories.
Mr. Gaines lives in San Francisco but returns to his boyhood home in Louisiana once a year.
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman Page 26