Such Sweet Thunder

by Vincent O. Carter

  Mr. O’Casey was a kind gray-headed man of fifty-four with gallstones and brown eyes, but Irish just the same.

  “Now porter —” he began no sooner than he had arrived, continuing yesterday’s conversation, Friday, because today was Saturday, the big day in a barbershop. “Now porter, I know you’re a fine young colored boy, gittin’ an education an’ all, but you gotta smile an’ say sir to the customers when they come in. The minute they hit the door you gotta be on your feet! Standin’ there, greetin’ ’um with a smile. ‘Wanna shine, sir,’ you gotta say, or: ‘Good evenin’, Mister So-an’so! How about a shine, there!’ Or somethin’ with a spark to it! An’ then you’ll make money, an’ I will, too! But when you set over there in that corner, there, readin’ books — an’ don’ pay ’um no mind, porter, waitin’ for ’um to ask you — you never will git nowhere!”

  “I caun’t dew it!” he exclaimed to Rutherford that evening at supper.

  “You caun’t dew what!” Rutherford asked, slipping into his house shoes, while Viola fried the hamburgers.

  “I caun’t say all that, play no Uncle Tom for no white man, an’ I ain’ — I’m nottt — going to, eithah. I went there, theah … and sat in a cornah and waited. I didn’t mind asking the customer if he wanted a shine. ‘Would you like a shine, sir?’ I asked them, and if they said yes, I gave them a shine, the best shine I could. Then I went back and read my book. There was nothing else to do.”

  “Unh! Did you talk to ’um with a English accent? Hot damn!” he laughed. “No wonder you done lost your job, talkin’ to the white folks like you better’n they are. You gotta learn to hustle, boy. Use psychology. You gittin’ to be a man! It ain’ no shame to shine shoes. It’s honest work. It won’ kill you to smile an’ be nice to people. One a these days you’ll have to. I mean — do it when you don’ feel like it! You think I like to run the elevator, humorin’ drunks an’ crackers that think that just because they tip you a lousy quarter you got to kiss they behind? You know what a white woman said to me the other day? She said, Rutherford, you know one thing, if you was a white man, I’d marry you. She thought she was payin’ me a compliment! I had to just smile an’ say nothin’. Some things you got to just take an’ go ahead on an’ keep your dignity. Ain’ nobody in that hotel is more respected than me! From ol’ man Mac on down!”

  “Well, I ain’ gonna play no happy niggah for nobody!”

  “You didn’ understand what your daddy said,” said Viola. “Wash your hands.”

  “You’re young yet,” said Rutherford, sitting down to the table. “You’ll learn, or end up dead before your time. It’s fine to git a education an’ all that — talkin’ all fancy — but you gotta git along with people, ’cause as long as you need the money they payin’ you to live on — they don’ have to understand you!”

  “Supper’s gittin’ cold,” said Viola.

  “I’m Amerigo Jones!” he muttered under his breath, “an’ I kin be anything I wanna be … to be — and I don’ care!”

  He sat down to the table with a feeling of dread, fear, and anxiety because of the facts of life that lurked outside the kitchen walls, beyond the walls of North High, and the invisible walls of Next Year, rising higher with the heat.

  “Well, sir,” said Aunt Rose as he entered the house on a sultry Sunday afternoon near the end of August. “Well, sir! I see you didn’ forgit your auntie after all!”

  “Aw Aunt Reose!” he grinned guiltily.

  “I know how it is. You ain’ got no time for a old broken-down woman like me. But I don’ blame you none. Only I would like to hear from you once an’ a while — just to know how you doin’ an’ what you learnin’ at school.” Her eyes twinkled mischievously, and he observed that her health had improved, though she still moved heavily and with that economy of effort typical of the aging.

  Older still, he thought, but at least she isn’t sick — ill — anymore. He stared at her, marveling at her strength, remembering how worn out and used up she had seemed when he last saw her. Like — as though — she were going to die. He suppressed the sad feeling as she sat down on the stairs with a heavy grunt and drew him to her. Like an old, old lady. He wondered if she, too, had seen Abraham Lincoln.

  “What you starin’ at, boy?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed, “I know, your auntie’s gittin’ old. Every time I look at you I think about your mamma an’ poppa an’ ’em, when you wasn’ no bigger’n a pup. Me an’ your gran’ma. Seems like yestiddy. But it wasn’ yestiddy — it was a long time ago.” She straightened his tie. “You glad to be goin’ back to school next month?”

  “Yes’m. I’m going to be a junior. They know but they don’t know they know.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a sayin’ … g. A freshman don’ — doesn’t — know and he knows he doesn’t know, a sophomore doesn’t know, but he thinks he knows, a junior knows but doesn’t know he knows, and a senior knows and he knows he knows!”

  “Ha! Well, sir! It looks like I been a freshman all my life! ’Cause the older I git the less I seem to know! The best I kin do is try not to make the same mistakes over agin an’ put my trust in the Lord! Been to church lately? Your momma’s been tellin’ me that she can’t hardly make you go no more.”

  “Aw …”

  “What’s the matter, you gittin’ too educated to go to church?”

  “No’m, but all they do is a whole lot a hollerin’ … g and shouting and saying the same thing over and over again … and calling that preaching! The reverend says he’s got an education, but that he likes to talk plain because he’s got that old-time religion that was good enough for his dear old mother! But we’re living in this time! Splitting infinitives over all that stuff about Eve coming from Adam’s rib and all … all that, like he’s never heard of physiology and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution — or the Republic of Plato and … and Shakespeare and all of them.”

  “Well, your auntie ain’ got much education, neither, but I know one thing, there ain’ no fool like a educated fool! An’ that there’s more to the Bible than’s on the printed page, an’ that if you talkin’ to folks that a lot of ’um ain’ got much education, just plain simple workin’ folks, you gotta talk so’s they kin understand you — that is, if you know what you talkin’ about, yourself —”

  “Yeah!” he interrupted, “but if they keep on talking down to the people all the time, how are they ever going to learn something? If I were a preacher I’d go to Harvard or Yale or something and try to talk as well as I could and teach the people in an educated way. The Bible’s plain, but I never did see so many big words I couldn’t understand!”

  “That’s right, son, you all right!” throwing up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Your auntie’s got to do it her way an’ you got to do it yourn. I reckon that if it’s the truth we’re after, an’ we look hard enough, we gonna end up in the same place, God willin’.” She flashed a wink at him, and he felt a little silly, like a child, when he was six or seven years old.

  “Had your dinner?”

  “Yes’m … Yes.”

  “Come on.”

  They proceeded to the kitchen where she served him up a piece of apple pie and a glass of milk. He raised the glass to his lips.

  “How many girls you got?”

  He choked and almost spattered the whole table with milk.

  “None!”

  “Now you kin tell your auntie! You kin tell me. I bet you a little devil!”

  “Honest! I haven’t got a girl. I wouldn’t have any of them … eneh! You oughtta … to see the way they act — carry themselves — doing it in the halls behind the lockers by the gym and —”

  “Doin’ what?”

  “And letting them feel all over them and everything. That’s not the kind of girl I want! I want a lady! Somebody … somebody that you kin respect and take her flowers an’ … and kiss her hand. Treat her nice —”

  “Don’t you know no girls like that?”
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  “No’m. They all stuck up! No’m …”

  A feeling of wonder and humility came over him, as he thought of a certain two-story house. Too tall.

  “Eh … your momma tells me that you’re mighty keen on that little Thornton girl —”

  WHO — meeeeeeee! How does she know? He was unbearably surprised to hear it uttered as a fact for the first time, stamped upon his consciousness by the certainty of Aunt Rose’s voice, retelling a known fact in a disinterested tone, as of some happening in yesterday’s newspaper, as though she had possibly said: It looks like the Germans really mean business, placing her hopes, however, on the strength of the Maginot Line and the diplomatic skill of the British statesman with the umbrella, thankful that we, America, were safely insulated by the two oceans and the Monroe Doctrine and a group of screechy politicians called the Isolationists. Your momma tells me that you’re mighty keen on that little Thornton girl.

  WHO — meeeeeee! rang in his ears like the happy bells of Let’s Pretend and shook him with their titillating vibrations, forcing his mouth ajar, his eyes to shine, the piece of apple pie on his plate to remain uneaten.

  Meanwhile Aunt Rose merely grinned at him. Finally she said:

  “Well, you picked a good one, son.” A serious, even grave expression passed over her face, causing him to search for a deeper meaning in her words when she added. “You show them society niggahs who you are.”

  She’s thinking of Ardella, he thought.

  “You gotta aim high if you want to amount to somethin’.”

  He wondered if she knew!

  She’s got to know!

  The full impact of Aunt Rose’s knowing, of Viola’s knowing, dawned upon him as he stepped into the redeeming light of Sunday afternoon and headed for the art gallery. He looked into the face of the knowing sky, listened to the whispering trees. He trembled with excitement, with the embarrassment, the joy, of one who was being talked about.

  Clapclapclapclapclapclap …

  He wandered through the polished halls of the art gallery, among the living pictures, the living statues, through the living atmosphere of historic times that he knew by heart, but which he now beheld as if — not for the first time, but for a first time — for the first time in the glorious age of her knowing. Lost within its pleasant aura, he was suddenly confronted by Old Jake with his golden helmet.

  “She’s got to know!” he said.

  And as he passed quickly out of the gallery, he decided not to look at the fiery Greek’s face, but upon gaining the door, he felt compelled to put his feeling to a final test. He looked back.

  “Eh — your momma tells me that you’re kinda keen on that little Thornton girl,” said the great man, and Amerigo burst blindly through the door and buried his sensibility in the soft breast of evening, which lay waiting, burning with all the virulent colors of autumn, tingeing his delirium with a fearful apprehension of sadness. The thought: “It’s too good to be true” would have articulated itself into words had he not done his utmost to suppress it.

  Speeding northward on the streetcar, the gradual shabbiness of the streets had a sobering effect upon him. He became aware of where he lived, and where she lived. And that she had already won a scholarship, according to the Voice and that he would probably have to stay at home and attend junior college, and work as well, and then, if things went well, if he won a scholarship, he might hope to attend whatever university it designated, because, although Rutherford had finally gotten a raise, which was not very much, he could never afford to send him to Harvard or Yale.

  His shoulders sank deeper under the weight of impending reality. Gradually the noisy rumor about him and Cosima seemed a mockery. The thought of her knowing struck fear in his heart and caused him to walk straighter than ever after he had stepped down from the streetcar at Eighteenth Street. I must not let them see! he thought.

  After the movie he strolled indifferently past her house, but she and her parents were not sitting out front, so with a casual air he glanced up at the windows. They were dark. Disappointed that he could not show his indifference he turned down the avenue, and then thought: Maybe she’s at church! He turned back toward Nineteenth Street, and when he arrived at the church he eased the door open and peeped in. There was no sign of her. Feeling foolish, guilty, even ridiculous, he turned down Nineteenth Street and interested himself in the men and women he met, and in the unique way in which the shadow from the lamppost fell across the broken bricks in the sidewalk. Then he observed that the YWCA was dark, and then watched with an air of superiority a couple talking on the corner. The boy held the girl by the waist and spoke softly to her and the girl smiled at the boy as though he were the only boy in the world. He began to sing softly as he approached them, but they did not notice him, so he resentfully left them to their folleh and grew more intensely involved in his song, a song with no words, with meaningless words he made up himself, sad autumnal articulations of pain, filling a melody that he had never heard before, but was familiar just the same. At Eighteenth Street he gazed left and right at the banal procession, turned right and followed the persistent sound of the Boom! Boom! Boom! that came from Lincoln Hall. Now he was getting the hang of it, could ask the right girl in the right tone of voice at the right time and move in any direction at will to the beat — and s-m-o-o-t-h — of the rhythm and grind of the axising hip and release from quivering lip a flow of nervous images gleaned from the better movies and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and smile with discreet sarcasm upon the primitive machinations of the mob: an aristocrat in a class of his own, proudly, defiantly alone.

  The eyes of the world were upon him as he marched to school, a junior who knew with a desperate pounding of the heart, but knew not that he knew, a lieutenant in the ROTC, a member of the North High Choir, Quartet, Special Singers, and Glee Club, nervously contemplating the hazards of Chemistry! History! Geometry! French! And gladdened by the prospect of English Literature and Sociology: Tramp tramp tramp tramp, through the foggy morning.

  Looks like smoke. That’s corny! He became aware somewhere in the half-sleeping part of his mind of the clouds of smoke that followed in the wake of the Great War that boomed overseas, that had shaken the Maginot Line, obscured the boundaries of half a dozen little countries, and caused a whirl of speculation as to whether England would get into it, and Russia, and what would happen if they did, now that Italy, Il Duce, had made a pact with Hitler. The wind moaned through the trees and broke up into a din of articulate whisperings that mingled with the rumble of the streetcar that sped across Fifteenth Street.

  “What you say, Dad?”

  He looked into the raw-boned handsome face of Roy Earle. Earle looked down at him with a smile that revealed a broken front tooth, and struggled beside him with the lazy movements of a natural athlete.

  “Oh!… eh hello theah!” thinking: “He’s in the Golden Gloves, and on the football and basketball teams. Goes with Betty Love. Betty Love with long black curly hair with sideburns and slightly bow legs.” His resentment of Roy’s intrusion upon his thoughts deepened, as he struggled to suppress the image.

  They turned into Eighteenth Street. A knot of girls passed them just in front of Street’s Hotel.

  “Hi Roy!”

  “Hi Roy!”

  “Hi Roy!”

  “Hi Roy!”

  They looked back with seductive smiles.

  “What you say, baby!” grabbing the nearest one by the waist. Loraine Turner, freshman. Her bosom bounced when she walked, short little peach-colored girl with lipstick and high-heeled shoes. “Look at that f-i-n-e bitch!” Earle exclaimed with a grin. “Ha — ha!… How’d you like to have a piece a that, dad?”

  His mouth flew open.

  “Aaaaaaaw! Roy Earle!” Loraine giggled.

  She likes it! Amerigo observed with bewildered amazement as she struggled loose from him and he patted her on the behind. When she caught up with the others she whispered something to them and they burst into shrills of laughte
r, and looked back at him and giggled and switched their hips, at which Amerigo’s face grew hot with rage, disgust, and envy.

  They were stepping off the curb at Eighteenth and Vine. Roy asked:

  “How you makin’ out with Cosima?”

  “Why — what — what-do-you-mean!”

  “Aw-haw haw haw! Man. I know you stuck on that hinkty chick! Eeeeevery time I see ’er in the cafeteria or in the hall I see you, standin’ or sittin’ not too far away! Just gazin’ at ’er — like she was Lena Horne!”

  “Aaaaaaaaw, maaaannn!”

  “She’s a fine chick!” Roy said. “Goddamned virgin! Has to stay home a-l-l the time. Her ol’ man got the key to that pussy belt hisself! Ain’ nobody gittin’ none a that cock! Gotta have dough. Be a doctor’s son or one a them big-shot niggahs!”

  He wants me to hit him, he thought. He’d like that, him being in the Golden Gloves and all.

  “Ha!” Roy laughed to himself.

  “What are you laughing at!”

  “Old Chubby Collins tried to take ’er to the dance last year. He’s a cock-hound!”

  “His old man’s a lawyer,” he said, “why didn’t her old man let her go?” He tried to control the tremor in his voice.

  “He was afraid he’d try to git in them drawers! Ever’body knows Chubby! An’ his ol’ man’s worse than him! Comin’ to school in that bad Oldsmobile — all shaaaaarp! — like he was a movie star or somethin’!” They walked on quietly a few yards. “But that don’ cut no ice with me!” Roy continued, as if to himself.

  “Whaat?”

  “Foolin’ around with these virgin queens. I ain’ tryin’ to win no home, I just wanna lie up between a cool pair of thighs an’ git my rocks off!” He grinned with apparent satisfaction at the agitated expression on his face.

  Everybody knows! he thought with a heavy heart, just as they were turning up Woodland Avenue. He was glad that he remembered not to look at the house. But now they heard voices from behind, girls’ voices, her voice among them, laughing and talking gaily. He and Roy shifted to one side to let them pass, a little beyond the bridge. The sudden thought of Miss Jennings threw him into confusion.