Such Sweet Thunder

by Vincent O. Carter

  “Git away, cat!” He raised his hammer threateningly. A chilling breeze wafted his body. The shade seemed darker, though the sun shone brightly.

  “Scat!” again raising the hammer. The cat retreated, but paused on the middle step halfway up the stair, and continued to stare at him.

  “Go away, cat!” The cat ran up to the porch. It sniffed at the clean spot. Then it sat on and stared at him, as before.

  How does he know? He threw the hammer at the cat, but missed and tore a hole in the bottom of the screen. The cat leaped in three bounds from the porch onto the shed and into the lot of the empty house and disappeared into the hole into which he had thrown her!

  “What your momma a-gonna say abouta that, Tony, ey?”

  Mrs. Crippa stood on her porch looking at him.

  She knows! She’ll tell! “About what?” he exclaimed desperately.

  “That hole in the door!” waving her forefinger at him, her face wrinkling into a smile. “Ah Tony, you a bad boy, but I gonna geeva you somatheeng just the same!”

  He went over to her porch and she handed him two over-ripe peaches.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  She went back into the kitchen and he threw the peaches over the fence. Just then a swarm of flies swooped down upon the lid of the garbage can.

  Two o’clock slipped into three o’clock. But not before many leaves had fallen from the elm trees, and Bra Mo had made several trips to the neighboring houses burdened with heavy cakes of ice, not before many sparrows had scavenged crumbs from the porch banisters and windowsills and pigeons had made love on the hot roofs. From the alley came the smell of burning tar, which meant that Mr. Harrison was repairing the roof of Aunt Nancy’s house. Shorty had made several sorties up from the ground floor and had finally disappeared within the shadows of the neighboring back porch. Unc Dewey had come to the back door and looked out and then returned to the middle room where he lay across the bed and cooled himself with a palm-leaf fan. Now Miss Sadie appeared on the back porch in her slip.

  “Kin you go to the store for me, honey?”

  “No’m, Mom told me not to go out a the yard.”

  “I’ll give you a nickel, baby.”

  “I can’t.”

  “That’s right, honey, you do what your momma tell you. Bless your li’l heart!” She stepped back into the house. Then Mrs. Derby came out on her porch.

  “My, my! What a good little boy you is, ’Mer’go! Just a-playin’ all by yourself, just like a li’l man, so quiet an’ peaceful. Your momma gonna be proud a you one a these days. Heah, baby, I got a piece a choc’lit cake I been savin’ for you.” She started into her kitchen.

  “I can’t!”

  “What? You can’t eat no choc’lit cake? Your momma won’ eat you if’n you take a little piece. Just a teeny-weeny li’l piece!”

  He took the cake.

  Policeman Jackson’s dog, Sammy, a mongrel hound with a long body, short legs, and a half-chewed-off right ear, trotted casually through the shoot from the Campbell Street side, paused at the gate, and stuck his head through the space at the bottom. Then he cut through the yard of the empty house, hoisted his right leg, and emitted a stream of urine against the door frame and then sniffed into the hole. He growled menacingly, baring his teeth, snorted, and backed away. After he had disappeared around the side of the house he heard familiar voices:

  “Aw man, how do you know!”

  “You don’ know neither!”

  “Don’ none a you niggahs know?”

  The voices grew louder, accompanied now by the sound of scuffling feet and a stick scraping against the bricks of Mrs. Crippa’s house.

  “Man, I done s-e-e-n it!” exclaimed the first voice, as four boys and a girl finally issued from the shoot.

  “Turner Grey an’ Carl, his brother, an’ Tommy, Sammy Hilton — an’ Etta, his sister!”

  “What you say, ’Mer’go?” Carl said with a friendly smile.

  He’s blacker than I am, he thought, looking at his coarse black shiny hair. Better than Turner’s — he glanced quickly at Turner’s hair — and mine. It shines like r-e-a-l black feathers. He followed with his eyes the glistening arches of hair above Carl’s eyes and the silken brushes of hair that issued from the lids. There was a line of soft fuzz over his upper lip. He wanted to touch it, the smooth skin of his face.

  “What you say, ’Mer’go,” he was saying, as though his tongue were made out of butter.

  “What you say, m-a-n?” said Turner with an amused sneer.

  Turner must have been about seven because Carl was only in the kindergarten while Turner was in the second grade. A long skinny raw-boned boy with tobacco-brown skin and kinky hair. He smiled at Amerigo with a sly knowing expression that made him fidget uneasily. Now Amerigo’s eyes darted among the faces of the others. Measuring their reactions, as though he were peering through a web of schemes and plans behind their eyes while concealing his own.

  “Hi,” he said, greeting Sammy Hilton obliquely because he was the oldest and the meanest. Eight, with a thick crop of hair that he slicked down already. He glanced at the girl. She’s mean, too. Six.

  “Them’s tough little jokers, Amerigo,” he heard Rutherford saying. “You stay away from ’um, you heah? You git to fightin’ with one of ’um — an’ you have to fight ’um both! They momma was like that, too. An’ still is! Tougher’n a bunch a rattlesnakes! Li’l black skinny gal!”

  “You’d never think it to look at ’er now,” said Viola, “she’s fat an’ squat as a mushroom!”

  “An’ fight!” said Rutherford, “Why, you’d have to kill ’er to stop ’er! The whole family — the whole kit an’ kaboodle — black, ugly, an’ mean!”

  “Hi, ’Mer’go,” said Tommy.

  “Hi,” looking at his hands to prevent their five pairs of eyes from discovering his thoughts.

  “You cats comin’ or ain’t you?” Sammy scowled impatiently. His brow wrinkled in three vertical lines between his eyebrows. He shrugged his little square shoulders, as though to reinforce his plea.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “What you care, niggah?” cried Sammy, sticking his thumb in the shoulder strap of his dirty overalls. “We don’ want no little eggheaded niggah like you followin’ us around!”

  “Tee! hee!” giggled Etta showing her big white rabbit’s teeth, with her nappy hair standing all over her head.

  She looks like something between a cat and a bird, he thought, observing her small face: sharp eyes, sharp nose, wide thin-lipped mouth — like Toodle-lum’s — and a sharp tongue.

  “Aw, let ’im come!” said Carl soulfully.

  “Yeah, let the li’l niggah come,” Turner encouraged. “Your momma won’ care if you come out a the yard just a little while, will she, buddy?” He smiled a devilish smile, eyes twinkling.

  “Where?”

  “Tell ’im, smarty!” said Tommy.

  “Yeah! Yeah, I’ll tell ’im!” Sammy replied. All eyes were immediately fixed upon his face. His little round eyes grew so bright that all of the meanness seemed to have burned out of them. Slowly, majestically, he raised his skinny little arms and lifted his head beyond the tops of the tall trees, as though he beheld a great vision in the sky.

  “Yeah, I’ll tell ’im!” Sammy was saying: “I know a place! A r-e-a-l pretty place! Where you kin git a-l-l you want to eat! Anything you want! All you have to do is ask for it!”

  “Aw, you crazy!” Tommy said.

  “Crazy nothin’! I’m tellin’ you, you kin have — have — fried chicken, if you want it!”

  “What you mean, if you want it?” Etta exclaimed. “Huh?”

  “An’-an’ —” Sammy stammered, “ice cream! An’ cake, man!”

  “Hot dog!” Carl said, licking his lips.

  “Yeah!” Sammy continued, “an’ chili, an’ ice-cold watermelon! An’ dill pickles an’ wineballs —”

  “Let’s go!” he declared.

  “Yeah! Let’s go!” Etta
cried.

  “Shucks!” Tommy declared, “you niggahs is crazy!”

  “Don’ go then!” Sammy yelled angrily. “Come on, gang!”

  “Where is it?” he asked, moving anxiously, timidly through the gate, surveying the forbidden world outside with fear and wonder.

  “I’ll show you, man!” said Sammy.

  They walked through the lot behind the empty house. The sun burned hotly on the grass. Grasshoppers crawled along the fuzzy stems of the tall sunflowers and settled on the leaves. Flies buzzed in and out of the cool cellar, which had a musky rotting smell from garbage thrown into the caved-in lower floor. His eyes sought out the hole where he had thrown the cat. He saw the edge of the paper. It had a bright pink bloodstain on it. Flies swarmed around the paper.

  They trooped down the alley, and he looked left and right in wonderment, regarding it with the reckless and yet wary abandon of a prisoner just escaped from prison. His eyes ravished the houses and faces of the lower half of the alley, which he had only seen until now under quite peculiar circumstances: when he went to the store or to the movies or for a walk with Viola and Rutherford, or when he went to pay Aunt Rose a Sunday visit. From the standpoint of adults he had seen it, from the vortex of the lower end of a triangle, or looking down from the unstable height determined by the length of a pair of masculine or feminine legs. Fleetingly he had seen it, from the front porch in the evening after supper, once from the floorboards of a little one-story house to the ticking of a silver clock blazing in the sun.

  Down the alley he moved, toward the avenue end, a cobblestoned corridor bordered by squatting half-pint houses with little two-chair porches and four or five or seven steps leading to the alley.

  They passed Old Jake’s house, a condemned one-story house with windows of cardboard. And Old Lady’s house, a two-story house with a huge sprawling roofless porch that ran the building’s full length.

  Th-th-th that o-o-ol’ wu-wu woman’s at least at least a hundred an’ tw-tw-twenty! he heard Unc Dewey declare.

  “Aw Unc!” Viola had exclaimed, “you oughtta be ashamed of yourself for tellin’ ’um like that!”

  “Th-th-th-think I-I’m lyin’ huh? Huh? Well, le-le-let me tell you one thing, bbbbaby, when mmmmy momma was ssstilla a a li-li-little girl, th-th-th-that ol’ woman was was st-still a ol’ woman! She had gr-gr-gray hair an’-an’-an’ gran’-gran’-children!”

  “She is pretty old, Babe!” said Rutherford. “They say she was a slave, even, an’ I heard Mr. Simpson say he knew her when he was a boy! An’ he ain’ no spring chicken! I don’ think she knows how old she is herself. But she kin tell about things can’t nobody else remember. Git to drinkin’ that catnip an’ she’ll tell you ’bout the time she saw Lincoln!”

  “I sure wish I had a nickel for every lie you told, boy! I’d be settin’ pretty for the rest of my life!”

  “No stuff, Babe! That old woman kin drink more’n me! Yes, sir! She just sets there in that old rockin’ chair — for centuries, Jack! — just a rockin’ an’ swattin’ flies. An’ every now an’ then you see ’er duck down under that old apron an’ come up with a jug an’ take a li’l nip! Wipe ’er mouth with the back of ’er hand. Ahhha — hey! Hey! As far back as I kin remember eeeeever’body called ’er Old Lady!”

  “Well,” said Viola, “I ain’ gonna tell no lie. I don’ know how ol’ that ol’ woman is, but she’s the oldest human bein’ I’ve ever seen!”

  He was directly in front of the house now. He looked up at the old woman with awe. Her thin white hair was braided in little braids. Patches of scalp shone through the thin matting of hair and the skin on her face was saddle-leather brown and smooth, tightly drawn into the hollows of her cheekbones, which stood out strong and severe and puckered around her mouth.

  Looks like a baby. He grinned, but then checked himself when her gaze fell fully upon his face. One large brown eye and one clouded snot-green eye froze him with terror.

  She knows! Staring her image out of focus, her face took on a sinister air. He saw her ancient figure shrouded in a faded blue dress as though underwater. The waves washed her back and forth in her rocking chair. It creaked against the floorboards of the porch, which seemed to sway as though it might collapse under her weight at any moment. He stared into the cool reaches of the porch beneath her and waited for her to fall.

  Under the porch on the ground floor were two apartments. Mrs. Farnum lived in one and Mrs. Clark lived in the other. Miss Milly Clark was a big yellow woman with a sad plain face and a wide pink bruised-looking mouth. She wrote numbers and had three daughters. Annie was the smallest, four maybe. Cornelia, six, and Blanche, the oldest, about ten or eleven: eyes didn’t match, feet didn’t match, a big kindhearted, loudmouthed buxom girl. And Willie Joe. Willie Joe, the only boy. Four, or three. Little! Fudge-colored, snotty-nosed, barefoot, and dirty. He had big, sad, wet eyes.

  They ran out onto the cement porch and looked up over the concrete wall that gave onto the floor of the alley, four pairs of eyes, and said in unison:

  “Hi, ’Mer’go, Sammy, Etta, Carl, an’ Turner, an’ Tommy!”

  “Girls!” cried the boys in disgust.

  “Girls!” shrieked Etta louder than all the rest.

  “Et-ta’s a tom-boy!”

  “Et-ta’s a tom-boy!”

  “Et-ta’s a tom-boy!”

  Whereupon Etta and the boys started throwing rocks at them. Willie Joe managed to escape while his sisters’ attention was being absorbed by the barrage, and followed the boys down the alley.

  “Willie Joe!” cried Blanche, “you come back here, boy! I’m gonna tell! I’m gonna tell Momma on you, just as soon as she comes home! You just wait an’ see if I don’!”

  A stray rock cracked against the window of the house next door. A tall lean iron-gray-haired woman appeared in the door with a small white naked baby in her arms. His hair was a mass of fibrous golden waves and his eyes were blue. Little Delbert! And Mrs. Farnum’s his grandmother.

  “I seen you throw that rock, Sammy!” she was yelling in a trembling voice that was too weak to give vent to her anger, as though she had been sick and was still weak. “You li’l demon!” shaking her forefinger at him.

  “Look at ol’ Delbert!” exclaimed the child, excited by the strange-looking baby.

  “Shame on you, Tony!” cried Mrs. Farnum, “I’m sure surprised at you! Your momma an’ daddy tryin’ to bring you up decent, an’ you runnin’ the streets with them bad li’l hoodlums!”

  His gaze fell nervously upon the cobblestones. He was suddenly shaken by a sense of fatality that smote him in the pit of his stomach. It made him dizzy and caused his heart to beat violently and his lips to quiver.

  “I’m gonna tell your momma on you!” Mrs. Farnum was saying, “This evenin’ when she comes home! Just you wait and see!”

  He grinned foolishly in a reflex of fear that was very near panic.

  “What?” cried Mrs. Farnum, “You laughin’ at me, young man? Well you just wait till your momma come home!”

  With that she banged the screen door shut and hooked it: Boom! He felt the sting of his father’s razor strap on his arms and legs.

  “You comin’ or ain’t you!” Carl yelled, and he realized that the others were already at the foot of the alley. He hesitated for a minute and then started after them. He stumbled on a brick, which threw him off his balance and made him tear his pants on a nail sticking out of the telephone post that stood a few feet from Mrs. Farnum’s house. He felt a throbbing pain in his knee. He had reopened the bruise. A fine trickle of blood ran through the bandage. He wanted to cry.

  “Come on, man,” said Carl, helping him up by the arm. When he tried to walk he discovered that he had stubbed his toe. The brick had torn a thin sheaf of skin from his big toe just under the nail. Even the air that rushed against it when he hobbled along was painful.

  The gang entered the avenue. The pavement was hot and burned his feet so badly that he could only make progress by seeki
ng out the shaded spots. Men in overalls stood in front of The Blue Moon and dummies with clothes on stood in front of a store that had three big golden balls hanging over the door. That’s the pawnshop, he heard Rutherford say, as he limped past Jew Mary’s dry-goods store where there were a lot of clothes and shoes in the window. There’s where Katie works. Old Lady’s ’er gran’ma.

  The other side of the street was lined with stores: Wineberg’s ice cream parlor, Magedy’s grocery store, Goldman’s grocery store, the Green Leaf restaurant. John Henry was sitting outside Magedy’s beside his bicycle. He delivered the groceries.

  “Hi, John Henry!” he shouted.

  John Henry, a strong, black, bright-eyed boy of fourteen with a big handsome smile, looked condescendingly in his direction. He grinned mischievously, bearing his large white perfect teeth: “Aaaaaw, I’m gonna tell your momma you out a the yard!”

  He laughed a little frantic laugh and ran on, with Carl’s help, after the others. The moist raw flesh on his toe was drying fast. There was already a thin coating of dirt on it. Although it throbbed every time he took a step, he was getting used to the pain. His feet were gradually toughening to the pavement and a sort of hysterical exhilaration drowned out the pain from his knee.

  They came to a large storefront. The bottom of its big plate-glass window was painted black and the upper half was painted tan. They peered through the cracks scratched in the surface of the glass with a penknife.

  “What’s this?” he asked, able to see only a few empty tables and the long legs of a woman whose dress was raised well above her knees sitting near a piano.

  “What’s this!” cried Turner. “You don’ know nothin’, man! This is a fine broad!”

  “Aw, I don’ mean that, I mean this place!”

  “The Black an’ Tan — a nightclub,” said Tommy patiently.