“How much experience he had?” asked Mr. Peady.
“How much —” Mr. Hopkins began.
“None! I mean …”
“He means none,” said Mr. Hopkins, scooping up a handful of chopped parsley and dropping it into the can.
“I don’ think he kin wait,” said Mr. Peady.
“Aaaaaw — yes I kin! Just gimme a chance. I’ll show you!”
“How come?” asked Mr. Hopkins, looking at Mr. Peady, who flipped the severed half of the fish onto the table, revealing the fine white ribbing of bones that wove the pink flesh into a kind of a leaf.
“How come?” Mr. Hopkins was asking.
“He can’t even wait till he gits big enough to hold a tray —” said Mr. Peady, “let alone wait on the customers! Tell ’im, Mister Hopkins, that they got waiters waitin’ in line that been waitin’ forty years! Tell ’im that the one thing wrong with the world taday is that they got too damned many waiters! They the lyin’est! cheatin’est! stealin’est! no-goodes’! Snakes in the world! An’ don’ never leave one by hisself with your old lady!”
Mr. Hopkins grinned, revealing a mouth full of tobacco-stained teeth. “You heard Mister Peady. He’s the Chef. Been Cheffin’ a hundred an’ forty years! Mister Peady usta burn in heaven till the Lawd give ’im a job down here ’cause all them cute little angels started gittin’ fat! Now He didn’ mind it so much as long as them black angels got fat, but when them little blond, blue-eyed angels started gittin’ fat, too! Good Gawd-a-mighty! It looked like they just couldn’ git enough of Mister Peady’s good home cookin’ …”
“What kin you do, Mister — uh — I don’ believe I caught the name, sir?”
“A-merigo!”
“Uh — what-was-that?” asked Mr. Hopkins, cupping his palm behind his right ear.
“Amerigo Jones!”
“Aaaaaah! You one a the Jones boys! He says his name is Jones, Mister Peady, but he didn’ say what else he kin do. It’s a cinch he ain’ no waiter, like you say.”
“I kin cook!” He turned to Mr. Peady: “Just as good as you!”
“He kin what, Mister Hopkins?” Mr. Peady exclaimed.
“Mister Jones,” said Mr. Hopkins, “didn’ I tell you that Mister Peady usta burn in heaven?”
“Ain’ his momma’s cookin’ good enough for ’im?” asked Mr. Peady. “I bet he’s got a good-lookin’ momma! An’ a rich old man. Why — Mister Jones’s settin’ pretty! Cookin’ ain’ nothin’ but a lot a hard-assed work! Have to work like a dog all day an’ half the night — an’ the snakes gittin’ all the credit! I maybe could help ’im,” he said to Mr. Hopkins, “but I’d just have ’im on my conscience. I wouldn’ even condemn no waiter to be no cook!”
“You doin’ it!” he retorted.
“Yeah! But just take a good look at me! Old. Broken down before my time. An’ ain’ got a cryin’ dime to show for it! You take my advice, son, you git yourself a education. Finish high school. Go to college — if your old man’ll send you, an’ if he won’, work your way through. Learn to be one a them big-shot doctors! Yeah! Or a lawyer, so you won’ have to work so hard. Then you kin stay home nights an’ make your old lady happy.”
“I think Mister Peady done spoke his mind, Mister Jones,” said Mr. Hopkins with a kind thoughtful smile. “No bones, Mister Jones. What did you say your first name was?”
“Amerigo.”
“With a name like that you oughtta run for pres-a-dent — or at least a congressman!”
The naked glare of the bright bulb, the shimmering reflection of the aluminum pots and pans, the throbbing rhythm of the refrigerator motor, and the intermittent chopping sound of Mr. Hopkins’s knife whirred in a sickening constellation of dread, rage, and humiliation that growled from the pit of his stomach as the silent white door boomed softly to and fro. He followed the sun-blazed path through the darkened room of the Southern Mansion to the door.
Trembling as he half walked, half stumbled down the street, he grew dizzy, and the air that rushed into his hot lungs burst into a spray of icy coldness that permeated his whole body and chilled him to the bone. A cramping pain shot through his stomach and shocked him into a sense of urgency that propelled him down one dull street after another, heedless of the tarnished clouds that lowered blandly overhead while the indolent traffic droned indifferently through the dead hour of the morning.
Presently he had turned into a broad street that looked familiar, and his thoughts quickened to a growing excitement caused by a subtle sense of recognition. Minutes later he was standing on a bridge looking down upon a great network of rails that glistened like a great silver cobweb. And then his eyes, in excited anticipation of his thought, beheld the great Union Station!
His face brightened with a vision of new possibilities: To be a waiter-or-a-porter-or-a-cook on the railroad!
He gazed up at the high ceiling where the great chandelier hung and realized at that instant that the station reminded him of a church, not like St. John’s, but like the ones in the books at the library with a huge lobby and great wings on either side giving onto a long center hall filled with strong rays of sunlight that streamed down through the great windows upon the little people below — moving around like ants, Ant Rose, Ant Tish, Ant Jamima — aunt! — and standing in long lines in front of the cages where the ticket sellers sold tickets to places written in chalk that you could rub off with your fingers — if they wasn’t — weren’t — so high up — on the blackboards, numbered: One-Two-Three-Four-Five-Six-Seven-Eight-Nine-Ten. I’m ten. He looked up to see what route the tenth pair of rails had indicated.
Meanwhile people sat nervously or resignedly on the long wooden benches, surrounded by bags and packages, smoking cigarettes, eating fruit and candy, while redcaps pushed heavy luggage carts or followed passengers dressed up in their Sunday clothes to and from the tracks. People of all sizes, ages, and colors, he noted unconsciously, selecting one, a policeman:
“ ’Scuse me, could you tell me where to go to be a porter-or-a-waiter-or-a-cook — to ask somebody, I mean?”
“Why, you’d have to go to one of the commissaries down on the track, sonny,” he said. “Now, you go —” pointing to a staircase.
“Thanks!” he gasped over his shoulder, rushing toward the staircase, which he descended until he reached a landing covered by a roof. His eyes swept along the rails and there, on the first pair, right in front of his eyes stood a big beautiful streamlined train!
“Hot dog!” he cried out. “The Silver Streak!”
At that instant he saw its long graceful coaches speeding through the pages of the Star and through the red-and-black-lettered months of last year and this year and next year’s calender hanging on the walls of barbershops and pool halls.
Quietly, patiently it lay couched under the roof, eyes dim, windows dark, like a loooooooong pretty snake! A big overgrown pussycat — Grrrrrr! — waiting for the numbered blackboard upstairs to make up its signifying mind which way to go. Go fly to the eas … t, go fly to the west, go fly to the one you love the best!… Realleh!
“Peeeeeeeeeeep — peeeeeeeeeep!” tooted a piercing horn accompanied by the whine of a motor and the rumble of a chain of baggage wagons, causing him to jump behind a pole in order to avoid being run over.
“Uuuuuuga! Uuuuuuuuga!” Another noisy caterpillar sped by, pinning him to the pole just as he tried to escape. And in its wake a loud swishing sound subsumed by a low rumble, rushing down through the shed, setting its steel housing a-tremble! It grew louder … like a big hot wind! — and shot out into the sun, its tail wagging under the bridge, and under the water — to France and England! Like a fish! Like a whale! Silver!
“Watch me, sonny!” A voice crashed through the worn wooden panels of a swinging door giving onto the platform. A graying brown-skinned man was pushing a tall metal rack containing many trays laden with all sorts of pies and cakes: brown and red-pink-white-egg-whitewithcherry titties … aaaaaaw!
He pushed through the swin
ging doors and looked into a big steamy room full of dirty pots, baking pans, and tall metal racks like the one that had just rolled out the door and yelled at him. A young round-faced Negro with green eyes, reddish nappy hair, and pouting lips, dressed in a wet smudged-white … was white … jacket, a pair of dirty brown pants, and run-over shoes was scrubbing a big fat dirty pot.
“ ’Scuse me …”
The young man kept on scrubbing without looking up.
“Eh. Aye beg yohar pahdon, could-you-tell-me wheah theh hiah cooks, waitahs, or portahs?”
“NAW!”
He stepped quietly back through the door and onto the platform. He walked on until he came to an office. A white man sat behind the window in a summer hat that was shoved back on his small gray head. He wore metal-rimmed glasses with bifocal lenses. A long yellow pencil stuck out from behind a big red ear. He looked out over the upper lenses of his glasses and pursed his lips at him.
“Do you need a cook-or-a-waiter-or-a-porter?”
“Nope.”
“Or somebody to do somethin’ else?”
“Nope.”
“Are you the one that does the hirin’?”
“Yep.”
“Maybe next week?”
“Nope.”
“Next year!”
“Uhmn.”
He stood on the sidewalk with his back to the station and contemplated Memorial Hill. He walked through the parking lot, crossed the busy boulevard, and ascended the steps that led to the path up the hill to the terrace where the fountains were. He beheld the monumental figures on the great wall who stood in warlike attitudes. Boom! Boom! Boom! resounded the fierce cannon. Bayonetted, muddy-booted men with bandaged legs peered through the hollow eyes of gas masks as they clambered over the top.
He climbed the staircase on the right and peeped into the windows of the adjacent rooms where he saw plaster-of-paris no-man’s-lands hovering between barbed-wire defense positions of battles the names of which he had heard, but which he had already forgotten.
Finally the general reached the top of the stairs and stood upon the battlement in front of the towering torch of Freedom and looked down over his city. The streets south to north swept straight through to the river and were cut into neat little squares by the streets running east to west; crystal-like clusters of redbrick and gray stone buildings stood in the squares bordered by slate-gray strips of asphalt and cement.
His weary eye wandered over the skyline. It was broken by the Power & Light Building with its tower and ball of light turning lollipop-red, then off-white, like the grate of the gas stove in the front room, and then Christmas-green — but not in the daytime. A little to the west of the center of town, the Telephone Building, City Hall, and the courthouse huddled close together, as if they were in cahoots.
“Vote!” cried Rutherford, “for what?”
He cupped his palms and shaded his eyes like the vigilant Indian Scout atop his pinto pony to the rear and to the left of him and scanned the windows of all the buildings, row on row, square on square, east to west and north to south, in an attempt to divine the room that reverberated with the monumental question:
Now?
He looked at the sky. A subtle tinge of red stained the clouds. A sense of five o’clock urgency rose in a sudden swell of dinning sound that rippled through the trees and echoed within the chambers of his heart.
His eyes swept along the banks of the river. He tried to discover his coming-out place. He tried to measure the distance up through ten years of garrulous pulsating sounds, smells, shapes, and colors, which had fired the leaflike shades of many rented rooms floored with parallel planks between which the fathomless crevices had run side by side — beyond the walls of St. John’s and the schoolroom and the art gallery and the Union Station — into the large voluminous room that was the future, where the reverend and Mr. T. Wellington Harps and Rutherford would never go — to the ticking of clocks!
Four … four a — o’clock, he thought.
And now he saw his own towering bearded figure striding up out of the river: Amerigo Frederick Douglass Booker T. George Washington Jones! He stepped majestically, whip in hand, from square to square! Leaping over City Hall, the courthouse, and the Telephone Building in one bound!
He stood at the foot of Memorial Hill. At his back the swarm of cars crawled around the station. The clouds were streaked with blood and the sun-shattered trees torn into shreds of quivering light. Just as he reached the battlement the windshield of an unseen automobile, swerving into a curve somewhere on a distant hill to the east, deflected a volley of golden fire that blew a hole through his chest:
Boom!
“If he’d a been a white man!” said Rutherford.
General Douglass half stumbled, half fell down Memorial Hill.
Boom!
If I’d been a white boy they’d a — would have given me a job!
Cast down thy bucket where thou art.
Gallery.
The weight of a heavy blackness pressed him down through the busy streets, squeezing him within the minimal bounds of some arbitrary modicum of undignified space reverberating with a terrifying boom!
At last he stood in front of the courthouse. He walked up the steps and entered the building. It was full of offices. He entered the first one he came to. A white man with his hat on and a burning cigarette dangling from his lips sat back in a chair with his brown-shoed feet propped up on a desk, reading a newspaper.
A detective! Amerigo studied the dark round spot on the sole of his right shoe and then his blue half-length socks with their fine diagonal stripes. A crust of ash fell from his cigarette. He looked at him as he brushed it away, and returned to his newspaper.
Amerigo pushed open the swivel gate behind which the detective sat and walked through the open door of the rear office. He studied the disorderly desk, the books in the bookshelves, the typewriter, the telephone. He searched for guns, blackjacks, rubber hoses, seeing the mangled face of a young man whose name he could not remember on the front page of the Voice.
“Ain’ that a shame!” Rutherford had said.
A sudden sense of fear whisked him out of the office into the hall.
He mashed down on the clutch and took a sip of water from the electric water cooler, and then made his way to the upper floor where he discovered a Negro woman dusting the panels of a big double door.
She looked at him and kept on dusting. A white cloth was tied around her head. He observed that she had Chinese eyes and bad feet. He hesitated before the door and cleared his throat. She continued to work.
“Eh … ’scuse me. Kin I go in?”
“You a citizen ain’t you?”
“Aw — I meant —”
“What?” She stretched her ailing old body to its full imposing height and fixed her gaze upon him.
“Nothin’ … ing.”
He pushed the door open and entered the beautiful courtroom. It was furnished with dark brown highly polished wood, solid, sturdy, and new looking as though it had never been used, and yet was old, unmovable, as though it had been there forever.
He studied the imposing throne where the judge sat, the gavel he held in his hand, the Boom! Boom! Boom! of which seemed to be validated by the flag of the United States of America hanging from the pole behind the bench.
Boom! Boom! Boom! went the gavel — through the loudspeaker of the little table-model radio in the front room of 618:
“I see you’re back again, Sam,” the judge was saying.
“Well, ya honah, sah, I —”
“Just wait a minute now, I’ll ask the questions and you just give the answers. You’re charged with disturbing the peace again, and beating up your wife, Sarah. You broke her nose and knocked out four of her teeth. Now, what have you got to say for yourself?”
“I’m jus’ sorry ’bout the whole thing. I … I —”
“I what?” asked the judge.
“I was jus’ drunk, I guess. An’ if you jus’ let me
off this time I promise I won’ do that no mo’! Naw, sah! I mean that! I take a dirty oath on my —”
“Just a minute!” the judge broke in. “You’re on the air, you know …”
“Yessah.”
“Sarah, you got anything to say? It was your nose he broke.”
“An’ he blacked both a … both of my eyes, too, Judge! Eeeeevah Saaaaad’y night he come home all drunked up an’ eeeevul! Done spen’ all his money an’ then he start beatin’ up on somebody! An’ I told ’im last time, if he do it agin, I was gonna call the law an’ have ’im locked up! An’ —”
“Is that what you want us to do, lock him up?” asked the judge.
“Well,” said Sarah, “he ain’ no bad man, Judge. He’s a good man when he’s sober. An’ … eh …”
“Well now, you called the officers and had him brought in. What do you want us to do?”
“Like I say —” said Sarah, “he’s a good man when he’s sober an’ all that.”
“All what?”
“When he straighten up an’ fly right. You know what I mean, Judge. An’ if he promus … promus to act right — I’m willin’ to give ’im anothah chance.”
“You gonna straighten up an’ fly right, Sam?” asked the judge.
“Yessah,” Sam muttered.
“What’s that? Speak up so all the listeners can hear you!”
“YES, SAH!”
“Yes, sah what?”
“Yes, sah I sho’ is gonna straighten up an’ fly right!”
“All right,” said the judge, “I’m going to let you off light this time. The fine will be twenty-five dollars. You take Sarah home and get her teeth fixed, and don’t let me see you before this bench again!”
“Naw, sah!” said Sam.
Amerigo stepped out into the corridor, descended the stairs, and entered the street. His body writhed uncomfortably in his tight black skin. It pressed in upon him, as though it were a suit of rubber many sizes too small. His thoughts, trying to expand, strained against the contracting wall of skin.
He turned eastward down Twelfth Street. The buildings loomed ominously around him at dizzying heights, plunging him into the cool depths of late-afternoon shade. He stepped into the driveway near the corner and was wafted back onto the sidewalk by a buffeting breeze set in turbulent motion by a black van that swerved into the drive. Black Mariah! he thought, as fear caused the skin to draw still tighter around the struggling tension within him.
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