Such Sweet Thunder

by Vincent O. Carter

  “YEAH!”

  “Eeeeeevrywhere — eeeeeeevery whicha way you look — you see Glo-ray! Gloray! Gloray! — An’-an’ —”

  “Talk to ’im, Jesus!”

  “An’ it makes you wanna go out into the street an’ stop ever’body you meet and ask: Do you see what I see? In the brilliant face of this glorious day, do you see the shining presence of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?

  “You wanna — speak out! Somethin’ within you won’ let you be still! You have to tell the world that you found Jeeee-suuus! Now I wanna ask you somethin’: Have you found ’Im? You! — who have come to worship in God’s new shinin’ temple. Have you found Him? If you have — stand up! Stand up an’ be counted!”

  The great mass of black, brown, beige faces rose around him like a great swelling wave, undulating in the alluvial heat of a great tension that agitated two thousand hearts into beating as one:

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  The tension swelled into a deep dark fomenting mass of sound that rose like a dense mist above churning waters, and the song without words swept upon the shores of his consciousness, like a river, like a sea — all seas. One Sea! — and slowly receded into the stillness from which it came.

  “Look around you!” the reverend commanded, “an’ see if you see a soul flounderin’ in a storm of doubt! Trapped in the whirlpools of sin! An unborn thing strugglin’ for eternal life: point-him-out!”

  Myriad black pink-nailed fingers pointed at him:

  Boom!

  “Who made you?” cried the reverend: “God! Who blew the breath of life into your body that you might become a livin’ soul? God! Who! aaaaaw who sent His only begotten Son upon the earth that you might know the bliss of life everlastin’? God! Don’t you love ’Im? Huh! Now I’m gonna utter the most beautiful words that the ears of man is ever likely to hear. For you! David — David wrote ’um, but I like to think of ’um as my own — your — ever’man’s — love song to God:

  “Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name.…”

  Two thousand voices spoke as one voice. The deep alluvial waters rose and flooded his heart and swam in the orbits of his eyes. He stood up and groped his black sinful way down the aisle like one gone blind and came to a halt when he could walk no more.

  “A-MEN!” rang throughout the great assembly.

  The reverend took him by the hand. And suddenly a great pain smote him in the heart, for while the reverend was extending the invitation to join St. John’s in Christian fellowship, his mind was filled with thoughts of her! His breast heaved with exhilaration in the thought: She’ll be proud of me! Now I’m like everybody else. She’ll see.

  A week later when the reverend declared: I now baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and the chilly waters swirled over his head and he emerged clean in the redeeming light of Sunday morning amid the jubilant chorus of hallelujahs and a-mens, he saw only her face reflected in the face of Viola who sat trembling in the pulpit, her eyes stained red with tears.

  When he was dry and saved he wondered: Will she love me now?

  Too tall, said the Voice after Rutherford had unfolded its pages the following Friday evening and read:

  Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Jennings of Denver, Colorado, wish to announce the engagement of their daughter, Ann, to.…

  “Boy!”

  He opened his eyes, though he had not been asleep, and looked at his father.

  He watched Rutherford step out the door. Then Viola, minutes later.

  “Bye, hon. You git up now, you don’ wanna be late on your first day.” She slipped a dollar into his hand. “Don’ tell your daddy,” she whispered with a confidential smile, and slipped out the door.

  Heel over toe, toe over heel, along the new way, the new way that his straining toes had rehearsed time out of mind.

  He came to a pause at the corner of Eighteenth and Woodland and looked up at the two-story house with the photographer’s shop on the ground floor, with the sign in white enamel letters that you couldn’t rub off, that read: J. B. THORNTON, PHOTOGRAPHER. There’s where she lives. He heard Miss Allie Mae describe the funeral parlor … with all them ferns an’ things in the windows … He looked for signs of her. Funny name. Cosima. He crossed the street.

  There was an old building on the opposite corner. The sign on the plate-glass window said, THE VOICE, and he unconsciously turned its pages down through the years, and heard Mr. Jordan say: “I’ll bet you want to be a schoolteacher when you grow up?”

  “No sir.”

  “What then?”

  Now, all of a sudden, he felt himself caught up in a stream of faces mostly new, moving up the hill. He gazed shyly, excitedly around him, questioning the shimmer of a flashing eye, a dazzling smile, the quick movement of a nervous hip that knew it was being looked at: creamy beiges and dusky browns, a choice of copper-reds, balancing dangerously upon the high heels of new shoes, startling the crowds of fresh curls adorning their heads. Wondering if she were one of them, he walked straighter, with his head high and his shoulders back.

  He came to Nineteenth Street where the Methodist church stood on the northeast corner and the Attucks School opposite it. Crispus … the first man to … gunshot wound … single … It looks like Garrison, William Lloyd.

  Freedom!

  Meanwhile the crowd grew thicker, the voices louder.

  He stopped at the bridge a little past Nineteenth Street and looked down at the shining rails that led to Denver, Colorado, west, and New York, east — and over the sea and over the sea to France and England.

  Presently he came to a stone wall about four feet high, at the edge of a gentle green lawn that swelled into a large hill to the southeast, leading his eye to the great redbrick building that sprawled out upon its summit: stately, immutable, immaculate, efficient, i’s dotted and t’s crossed, replete with the resolution to every if.

  He stopped and stared at the long rows of polished windows three stories high, seeing within every room a desk, a blackboard, and rows of seats flushing with noisy pupils toeing the parallel crevices between the floorboards running side by side at the sound of a bell:

  Rrrrrrrrring!

  And he followed the crowd into the large auditorium, very much like the one at the art gallery — only bigger, much bigger, but the floor’s just the same. Several men sat on the stage, modest, intelligent-looking men with unslicked-down hair, serious attitudes, and golden keys dangling from the buttonholes of their vests. Like the men on the pulpit at St. John’s, only different, not as expensively creased nor as shiny. Edmond Clapps! Give ’um the …

  The middle man stood up and moved to the front of the stage.

  “Mr. Bowles?”

  “Sssssssh!”

  He gave a sign like the reverend for the student body to rise.

  Like Mr. Powell.

  “Let us sing the Negro National Anthem!” he said, and his face suddenly sprouted a grizzly beard and his eyes grew fierce. He raised his master’s whip into the air and brought it down with a crash against his knee: Boom!

  “Lift every voice and sing!… till earth and heaven ring —”

  Rrrrrrrring!

  “loud as the rooooooooolling sea!”

  The aftertones of the song burning in the air, the assembly sat down. The little man in the middle with the thick mustache and yellow skin, the gray suit that was half a size too large and a little wrinkled smiled like a shy boy and prepared to speak.

  Mr. Cook … H. O.… In-tel-la-gent!

  “We, the members of the administration and faculty of North High, welcome you! To those of you who are new among us, we hope that an important phase of your life will begin here. There will be many things to learn —”

  The history of the whole human family.

  “— and many feelings to explore. And for those of you who pass successfully through these doors, the knowledge afforded by an even greater institution of learning lies before you, that of the university!”

>   Harvard and Yale and — God damned! Aaaaaaaw! Tee! hee!

  “Opportunities for Negroes in America are slowly but steadily increasing. With hard work, patience, and perseverance — we are entering the mainstream of American life.”

  “Places that you and I will never see!…” cried the reverend.

  Dead!

  “The continuation of that advance is up to you! The future belongs to those who are prepared. Don’t let your color hold you back, don’t let it cramp your imagination, cripple your initiative! We do not know what the next few years will bring. There is hunger and poverty and political unrest in the world. The possibility of war is not unseemly though we still have time to hope and pray that reason and love can influence the hearts of men. And that is all the more reason why we must make these moments here at North High count —”

  … of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas — Basie!

  “We must live them to the full. We must learn all we can. There is no substitute for a good education. There is no substitute for love, compassion, and human understanding. But life is not all work. It means playing, too. Here at North High we hope that you will avail yourselves of every opportunity to partake of as many extracurricular activities as common sense will allow in order that you may round out your personalities and …”

  Clapclapclapclapclapclapclapclapclapclap!

  Rrrrrrrrring!

  The assembly broke up into patterns of light and movement through which he ran, frantic with the fear that he could not fully embrace the total volume of the moment.

  “Amerigo Jones?” A little old lady with off-white purple skin, good gray hair coiled into a little tower held in place with combs, looked at him expectantly as he entered the office. He stood before the desk in front of the sun-filled window.

  Like the Queen! in her old-fashioned navy-blue dress with lace trimming around the neck and sleeves, and the long golden chain hanging from her neck and a brooch at her throat.

  “Amerigo Jones?” the lady was asking. She drew her leg toward her chest and smiled at him.

  “Yes’m … Yes.”

  “Won’t you sit down?”

  He sat down.

  “I’m Miss Birdie, the student counselor. It’s my job to decide what courses you should take. Do you intend to go to college?”

  “Eh — yes’m. I’d-I would like to go. Yes.”

  “Do you think your parents will be able to send you?”

  “Eh.”

  “What is your father’s profession?” She took up her pen and prepared to write upon the white card in front of her.

  “He’s —”

  The Father of the Country. But not because …

  “A maintainance man — at a hotel.”

  “Does your mother work?”

  “Yes’m. She works — is employed — at — at a hotel — an apartment hotel, as a head maid.”

  “I see.…” She tapped the point of her pen gently against the edge of the large green ink blotter that partially covered her desk. “Amerigo, don’t you think it would perhaps be wiser to learn a trade? And prepare yourself for some practical profession, in case you might not be able to go to college?”

  Cast down thy Booker T. began, but before he could get it out the angry voice of Frederick Douglass had overpowered his senses with the word Freedom! and he blurted out:

  “No’m! I’m gonna go to-to college!”

  “In that case, are you interested in the sciences or the humanities?”

  “Eh.”

  “I mean, would you like to become a doctor, or a chemist, a mathematician, or would you like to teach, or perhaps be a lawyer or a social worker or something like that?”

  He dropped his eyes and studied the floor for a moment, trying to take in the myriad possibilities that flashed and popped in his mind like the movie reel on the silver screen just before it got dark and the pictures filled his eyes: Ten! Eleven! Twelve! Thirteen! Boom!

  “— or something like that?” her voice was saying.

  “I don’t know yet.…”

  “You have time, son.”

  She’s saying something else.

  “I suggest the general college preparatory course for now — and then we’ll see how you do.”

  Rrrrrrrring!

  The red room divided itself into long rows of rooms. Within each room a woman, lying upon a white bed at the foot of which he stood, trembling:

  Rrrrrrrrring!

  They drew their legs toward their chests and articulated the question — which resounded upon the air like the myriad-timbred voice of a Great Host:

  What do you want to be when you get to be a man?

  The word MAN boomed in his ears with a deafening sound. It overwhelmed his senses and set his body to trembling so violently that he could hardly contain himself. And he ran, desperately, frantically, from room to room, confronting the upturned faces whose smiling lips intoned the pregnant question:

  English?

  — A soft dark-eyed woman with a deep autumnal smile who spoke of the beauty of the literary idiom “… over the sea and over the sea and over the sea to France and England.”

  Dramatics?

  Ruth Regal and Lillie Bryant and he among unknown heads bent toward the black soft-spoken iron-gray-headed little man with the face of a lovable bulldog: Mr. Larson, founder of the Larson Players who gave plays at Lincoln Hall where Principal Powell played in The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill. Like Ira Eldridge! Like I’m gonna-going to be … do-when … if I wanna-wish to. After the first two years, we’ll see.

  Algebra?

  Pretty little Miss Dark-brown Thin-lipped Big-eyed Forty-year-old Algebra, taxing the star-crossed imagination with the enigma of the infernal X.

  That means Hell, son.

  General Science?

  Tall, thin-lipped, off-white, smiling and laughing and joking, pumping the little hand generator that made the lightbulb light up like the lightbulbs in the alley … His son’s a freshman, too. Smart. Off-white. Plays tennis. Him and-He and Cosima!-in-the-paper.

  Reserve Officer’s Training Corps?

  “T-a-l-l and s-t-r-a-i-g-h-t!” A nut-brown, strong-lipped, plainnosed, sharp-eyed, straight-talking, curly-headed man. The general! Sergeant Shores of the regular army: “Tramp! tramp! tramp!” I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice — for all!”

  Physiology?

  Miss! — Tall, dark, healthy and robust, but fine, dignified, well poised upon the square heels of low-quartered shoes, enveloped by an aura of perceptible sadness that intensified her forty-three-year-old explanations of the circulation of the blood and the functions and interactions of the eye, the ear and the heart: Preachers! She’s been waitin’ on that cat to marry’er for forty years — an’ ain’ nothin’ happened yet!

  Rrrrrrrring!

  Rrrrrrring!

  Suddenly the door swung open.

  “Whatttt do you want?”

  He stood gaping at a little man not much taller than he, who looked more like a boy than a man, with a clean hairless face and closely cut hair and a slightly humpbacked nose. His lips were fleshy and there was a nervous twitch in his right eye. A trace of mischievousness in his smile gave the lie to the aggressive attitude suggested by his tenacious grip on the door handle.

  He looks sort a like a chipmunk … or a rabbit!

  “Whatttt do you want?” he was saying.

  “I-I-I want to join the choir. They tol’-d teold me at the office to come, but I-I couldn’t find it.”

  “Caun’t you read! What’s your name?”

  “Jones.”

  “What Jones!”

  “Amerigo Jones!”

  He began to laugh in an exaggerated manner, his large boyish teeth flashing, his nervous but sturdy little frame trembling beneath his eggwhite shirt, which was too large.

  He’s Mr. Rogan, he thought admiringly. He got a scholarship to
the university. The youngest teacher on the faculty.

  “A — merigo Jones!” Mr. Rogan cried, tugging comically at his oversized pants. The belt had been drawn to the last notch, but they still gathered around his flea-sized waist like a sack, sagging in front, while the cuffs stacked in several folds over the insteps of his oversized shoes.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” he exclaimed to the members of the class. “This fine-looking young man — who has interrupted our rehearsal by snooping outside the door! — is Mister A-merigo Jones! And I know he sings! Because with a name like thattt — and being late, too, he’d better sing! SING!”

  Boom!

  — In a flash Mr. Rogan had sprung to the piano, a loud chord resounded from the keyboard.

  “… Sing!…”

  The pupils only smiled at first, but now their smiles deepened, laughter bubbled from every throat. Amerigo’s mouth was standing wide open, but no sound escaped. His ears filled to overflowing with the peals of laughter that animated all the faces with the bared teeth and sparkling eyes, faces that were mostly new.

  “That’s a c-chord, Mister Jones!” Mr. Rogan screeched. “Sing: ah”

  “Ah …”

  “Ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — aaaaaaaaah!”

  “Ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — aaaaaaaaaah!”

  “Sit — ohav theah,” said Mr. Rogan, looking down his nose at him, “with the tenors.”

  He took his seat with the tenors.

  With the second tenors, he reflected with a pang of regret, consoling himself, however, with the thought that Paul Robeson sang baritone. But tenor’s the highest.

  He looked around at the new faces except for Carrol T., who was sitting back with the baritones and Ruth Brashears and Lillie Bryant who sat with the altos and little Clista Jones with the sopranos, the tenors and basses were brand-new.…

  He watched Mr. Rogan, his rimless glasses mirroring fragments of the windows and the globular light overhead, now banging away at the piano, now waving his arms frantically, as they, the choir, he too, strained to produce the high notes and the quick that rippled from the tips of his fingers and flickered from the pupils of his eyes and quivered upon his lips, which made him smile or frown, or fold a phrase gently within the palms of his fine hands and cuddle it, as though it were a bird, and suddenly release it, send it flying, soaring through the air, beyond the southern windows!