A Different Drummer

  He could not stop Stewart. “And look at Undertaker Hagaman. He’s the only undertaker around now. We all got to get buried one day. I hear tell how even some white folks in Sutton used that nigger undertaker.”

  “I just ain’t sure it’s all to the good. You never had no WHITE folks sweeping around in stores, only colored. You getting a job sweeping now, Stewart? That’s the only job you really good for.”

  Some of the men laughed.

  Bobby-Joe snapped his fingers; the sound carried, echoed. “That’s it!”

  They all turned toward him. He had not been talking, though he had taken a few drinks. He sat with his feet planted at the edge of the Highway, resting one elbow on the naked knee showing through a hole in his coveralls. “I told you-all there was more to it than that.”

  “Look there, Loomis. Bobby-Joe’s talking to hisself already and he ain’t had but a couple swallows.” Thomason was sitting on a chair he had carried out of the store. “Son, you shouldn’t drink if you can’t hold your liquor no better than that.”

  “Shut up!” Bobby-Joe was savage. “You too drunk or stupid to see what’s really going on around here.” He paused. “Now, what you suppose he doing down here if it ain’t to carry in all this trouble? That’s it! I knowed there was more to it than that.”

  They stared at him, blinking, squinting, trying to see him better, as if seeing him better would help them to better understand what he was talking about. “Who’s doing what?” Thomason leaned over his stomach toward the boy. Stewart mopped his face nervously, as he did when he thought he was too dense to understand something that was supposedly easy to understand.

  Bobby-Joe twisted around. “That nigger preacher come driving by here and we just sat here watching him like he was the President. We should-a knowed; we could-a done something about it.” More excited now, he jumped to his feet, turned to face and lecture them. “We could-a stopped him; that was like having a naked girl in arm’s reach and not doing nothing about it but blush.”

  “Now, hold on, Bobby-Joe.” Thomason turned to Stewart for an instant: “No more for him,” then back to the boy. “We’ll listen to you, son, but you got to make yourself plain. Now, why don’t you just settle down and start all over again.”

  But Bobby-Joe just went on. “God damn! if we ain’t a stupid bunch of bastards! We could-a done something when we was a-gazing at that car, and at that driver, and all that money he was tossing around. We could-a done something, YESTERDAY, instead of just sitting there and looking, and then we wouldn’t be crying now because they’s all gone. We could-a done something!”

  All at once Thomason understood. “You talking about that nigger from the Resurrected Church, ain’t you.” It was not a question, rather a realization, as if the idea had suddenly popped into his head without Bobby-Joe’s help: about Friday and the Negro in the limousine.

  “Yeah. That’s what I’m talking about. That northern nigger preacher what came down here and started all the trouble. God damn! And we had him right here and didn’t do nothing about it, just stood around watching him flash all that money.”

  “Now hold on, boy. That man didn’t show up here until AFTER Tucker Caliban did all his business. He asked Mister Leland what he knew. He couldn’t-a knowed nothing about it.”

  “Did you believe that? Did you really believe that? You really think Tucker Caliban was smart enough to start all of what we got on our hands? I bet you did.” He spoke as if he believed Thomason had committed a crime. “Well, I didn’t believe it for a minute. I knew what that northern nigger was up to all the time.” Bobby-Joe was waving his arms now, striding up and down before them as if they were a jury, and he was a lawyer. “That African and his blood coming down to Tucker Caliban. That’s bull if I ever heard it!”

  Stewart, weaving a little from the waist, pointed a finger up at the boy. “Oh, sure you knowed all the time.” He smiled. “That’s why you said so much yesterday! Boy, don’t lie to me; you didn’t know nothing more about it than we did. So don’t lie to me because I’m apt to take it personal.”

  Bobby-Joe backed up a step. “Well, all right, so I didn’t know yesterday, but you-all heard me when I said I didn’t believe that blood business Mister Harper was trying to feed us. I didn’t believe that crap, and that’s what it was too: crap! How the hell can something what happened a hundred fifty years ago—if it happened at all—how can that have something to do with what happened this week? That ain’t nothing but tripe. No sir, it was that northern nigger, that agi…agi…what they call fellows what come in and stir up trouble?”

  “Agitators.” Loomis stuck in his answer though Bobby-Joe had hardly paused.

  “That’s right, Mister Loomis, them agi-TAT-ors. He came down here, him in that big black car, and got all the niggers to move off, go somewhere else instead of staying here where they belongs.”

  “But he didn’t know nothing about it, Bobby-Joe.” Thomason did not know why he kept resisting an idea that seemed so easy to accept. Perhaps it was his store-keeping mentality, the numbers and figures he had to tally and carry, keeping him from believing something he probably wanted to believe. “Or else why did he come back here? Ain’t no man dumb enough to come calling on you after he raped your wife or knocked up your daughter. He’ll leave you alone, or run, or hide, but he won’t come knocking on your door.”

  Bobby-Joe put one foot on the porch and leaned forward. “I always thought you was plenty smart, Mister Thomason. You been smart enough to fool folks into thinking your prices is fair, but you ain’t smart enough to see he’d come back here just out of ordinary, everyday meanness to crow over us, and see how his plans worked out. That’s why he come back.”

  “Say now, maybe the boy’s got something.” Stewart turned his head to look up at Thomason, nodding.

  Thomason was speaking to them all, trying to bring some reason into the conversation. He was beginning to sense, almost smell in the air, that they were listening and believing Bobby-Joe. “But we ain’t seen him today, boy. He ain’t drove by here at all after yesterday; he ain’t been hanging around the colored section helping them pack. And there ain’t been no other fellows around here making sure they all had a way to travel.” He was losing them, like grain between his fingers and wished Mister Harper was there to keep reason, or Harry to slow them down.

  “He didn’t have to see that,” Bobby-Joe went on. “Why should he? Them northern niggers don’t really care about the niggers down here. They just want to give us white folks trouble and make us all, white and black, unhappy. His job was over when he started them off. Then all he had to do was sit in the back of that car and laugh his ass off, all he had to do was watch the fun. What he care about how they got away? They all traveled without any help from anybody anyways.”

  Thomason sighed. “Well, all right then. So what? So he caused it. Can’t do nothing about it now.”

  This silenced them all for a moment. Bobby-Joe sat again and lit a cigarette. The rest stared off above the roof tops at a few bright stars. Someone asked for a match. Someone else gave it to him.

  “It’s all over now.” Thomason went on. “There ain’t no reason to get all bothered about it. If he did it, I reckon he did himself a good job. There ain’t nothing more to say.” Give a little to get a little, Thomason was thinking.

  The men nodded, murmured agreement.

  “Boy, if I could get my hands on him, I’d surely have something to do.” Bobby-Joe pounded his fist into his hand. “I’d punch that smile right off his face.”

  Had they been sitting across the Highway, they might have seen the car come over the Ridge, its lights tilted upward as it climbed through Harmon’s Draw, illuminating a small rim of the horizon like a tiny, cold rising moon. Then it gained the crest, tipped downward like a delicately balanced scale, bathed the road in front of it in one long stream. The light was visible and the car behind it dark, so had they bee
n looking, they would have seen only the shaft swooping toward town, until they would no longer have seen the shaft either, just one ball of light made up of the lamps and the grill. Then as it got closer, they would have seen, not the one ball, but two distinct head lamps and finally the lamps and above them the faint patch of green with a light-skinned Negro’s face in the right corner. It was that close when they noticed the stream in the street in front of them, lighting the buildings across the way, and they turned toward its source to count, as the car sped by, the number of Negroes they expected to find inside, not that they were tallying any totals, just counting individual carloads only to forget them almost immediately. But there was only the light-skinned Negro in front of the limousine, and in back, two figures, the nearer, a Negro with long graying hair and dark circles for eyes, sunglasses, reclining as if in a beach chair. Then Bobby-Joe hopped to his feet, rushed into the middle of the Highway in enough time to be obscured by the dust and exhaust and the shadows, and the men on the porch could hear him screaming out of the veil of dirt: “Hey you, you God-damn preaching son of a black bitch, stop that car! You hear me, nigger? STOP THAT CAR! I WANT TO TALK TO YOU! STOP THAT CAR!”

  When they passed Thomason’s store, Dewey did not see the boy, close to his own age, his hair hanging shaggy and straight around his ears, lunge into the street behind them, waving his fist at the car, but the chauffeur saw, and heard the boy yelling after them, and smashed the brakes so the car came to a skidding, screeching halt just under the General’s gaze. Bradshaw bent to his microphone. “What’s wrong, Clement?”

  “Someone back there was yelling at us. I didn’t see anyone, Reverend. I don’t think I hit anything.” Before he finished the men from the porch pounded down the street to them, surrounded the car, tore at the handles, opened the doors, and a young face, that Dewey recognized, but could not name, was peering in at them through the open back door nearest Bradshaw. Even across the seat, Dewey could smell the stench of stale liquor.

  “Well, look-a-here. We got him. It’s him. Look, Mister Stewart.”

  Another face joined the boy’s, an older face, with red, flabby, sagging jowls which almost obscured a thick-lipped mouth. “Well, God damn! Is this him, Bobby-Joe? So that’s the nigger what started all the trouble.” He smiled.

  The boy nodded. “It surely is. What’d I say? You remember? I wanted to get my hands on this one, didn’t I? And some angel must-a heard me, because here he is.”

  Dewey leaned across Bradshaw up into the boy’s face. “Wait just a minute. What’s wrong with you?”

  The boy grinned down at him; his teeth were uneven, several front ones chipped and broken off short. “If it ain’t one of them nigger-loving Willsons what let Tucker Caliban work for them until he was rich enough to start this trouble. Did you help your nigger friend plan this, MISTER WILLSON, SIR?”

  “Plan what?” Dewey could feel his body beginning to shake; he tried to steady his voice.

  “Plan WHAT?” The boy nudged the fat man with his elbow. “Plan what, Mister Stewart? What he talking about? You reckon he’s talking about all the niggers running off? Yes, I reckon that’s what he’s talking about.”

  The fat man grinned. “Must be what he talking about, Bobby-Joe.”

  Behind these two, Dewey saw two or three others, then four and then five materializing out of the shadows, standing quietly, listening, their faces alike, unfriendly, in the leftover light of the head lamps.

  “He didn’t have anything to do with that.” Dewey tried to remain calm, hoping that his own calmness would calm them, as he would try to remain calm when approaching a cornered animal. “It wasn’t planned at all.”

  “How do you know? You been talking to somebody? You been talking to your nigger friends, MISTER WILLSON?”

  “This man didn’t have anything to do with it. It was completely spontaneous.”

  “Oh, it was spon-TAN-eous, was it?” The boy turned to the fat man. “You hear that, Mister Stewart. They sent him North to learn some big words and I reckon he come back with a carload. What’s spon-TAN-eous mean—planned?”

  “No, not planned. It means it just happened all by itself.” Dewey reached out and tried to pull the door shut. The boy punched his hand away from the upholstered handle.

  “You better watch yourself, MISTER Willson, unless you want a piece of this nigger’s pie.”

  “Come on, don’t be ridiculous. He didn’t have a thing to do with any of this.”

  “He tell you that?” The boy leaned into the car; the liquor smell became stronger, intoxicating.

  “Yes, of course. He doesn’t even know Tucker Caliban. He told me he didn’t have anything to do with it.” He looked into the boy’s eyes. In the eight months he had been away, he had almost forgotten the gaze he found there, the gaze which came in moments like this, for it was not one of the looks that New Englanders use or have ever used to express a turn of mind or heart; it was a gaze more cold, more mean, more cruel even than the gaze a Vermont farmer gives a stranger asking directions; more cold, more mean, more cruel because it was completely blank, that very blankness a sign of the renunciation of alternatives, of tenderness or brutality, of pleasure or pain, of understanding or ignorance, of belief or disbelief, of compassion or intolerance, of reason or unswerving fanaticism; it was a gaze which signals the flicking off of the switch which controls the mechanism making man a human being; it said: Now we must fight. There is no more time or need for talking; violence is already with us, part of us.

  “He didn’t have anything to do with it.” Dewey tried one last time, softly. “Reverend Bradshaw, tell them.” He grabbed the Negro’s arm, looked into his face and found not fear was keeping him silent, but disillusionment. He was not thinking of the present danger at all, only of the Negroes, his Cause, riding out from under him. If anything, Dewey realized, Reverend Bradshaw wishes he could say he had been the instigator, wishes he could say he planned it by himself, got Tucker to buy the farm and destroy it, told the Negroes this was their example, exhorted them to follow. But he could not. And this was no time for disillusionment and self-pity. “God damn it, tell them!”

  The fat man too was leaning into the car. “Why don’t he say something?”

  The boy chuckled. “Could be he’s too honest to tell no lies.” He grabbed the collar of Bradshaw’s shirt. “Tell the truth, nigger! Did you have anything to do with it?” He lifted him partly off the seat.

  “No! I’m sorry to say I did not.”

  It was as if the second had swelled, and was about to burst. All seemed to solidify into an instant of violence like a statue depicting the moment a warrior’s blade enters the body of his adversary, and the stricken man is about to fall but has not yet fallen, is lying flat out on the air itself, defying balance. And then the moment burst, and the boy took a firmer hold on the shirt—“You’re a liar!”—pulled Bradshaw forward, dragged him from the car, out of Dewey’s vainly reaching arms, and onto the pavement. Five men surrounded him quickly all flailing, punching, kicking.

  Dewey slid across the seat, looked down, and saw Bradshaw lying face up, a strange, twisted, fearful smile on his face; he did not seem to be struggling or resisting, as if he realized it was no use. His eyes were open, watching, active, looking up almost disinterestedly into the dark and grotesque faces of his assailants, following the punches as they came down from high above him and broke on his face and body, seeming to possess no more concern for them and whatever pain they caused than a man sitting in a warm room watching snow fall by his window. But Dewey was screaming, trying to pull the men away. “It was Tucker Caliban! It was Tucker Caliban!” He was silenced by an elbow which swung back at him, stung his mouth, and made blood ooze from a cut on the inside of his cheek.

  “Get him away from the car!” someone yelled. “Give me some punching room too! Get him over here!” The man who yelled reached down into the midst of the flying fists, gr
abbed Bradshaw by his legs, dragged him toward the sidewalk. The rest, not to be cheated, followed their target.

  Dewey followed the mob, still clutching at arms and backs, then saw the boy turn to him, his jagged mouth grinning, saw, but could not duck the blow which landed flush on his temple, saw then the blackness broken into flecks of white and red. An instant after, he found himself on the pavement, his hands in the same defensive position he had thrown up against the oncoming blow. The boy stood over him for a second, then turned away to where the men had gathered around Bradshaw, driving their fists into his face, and kicking him as one kicks a tin can down a dark street, with absent-minded savagery.

  “Hey, hold it! Hold on for a second, fellows!” The boy was running toward the men, waving his arms. “Hold it!”

  Dewey, still sitting on the ground, saw some of the men turn around. “Why? What?”

  He pulled himself to his knees, still groggy; perhaps the boy, who seemed to be their leader, did believe him after all. Perhaps he would persuade them to stop now.

  “Hold it, fellows. I just thought of something.” All of the men had stopped now, were standing up straight, listening. Bradshaw lay groaning softly at their feet. “You fellows know this is our last nigger? Just think on that. Our last nigger, ever. There won’t be no more after this, and no more singing and dancing and laughing. The only niggers we’ll ever see, unless we go over into Mississippi or Alabama, will be on the television and they don’t sing none of the old songs, or do the old dances no more. They’s high-class niggers with white wives and big cars. I been thinking that while we still got one, we ought to get him to do one of the old songs for us.”

  The men stood blankly, not quite understanding what the boy was talking about, trying to decide if he was serious or not. A few, who wanted to get on with what they had started, looked down at Bradshaw.

  Then the fat man spoke up. “I get your meaning, Bobby-Joe. I get your meaning.” He started to laugh uproariously. “Our last nigger! That’s good. He weren’t really ours when he come down in his big car, but he is now, and we can have him do anything we want him to do.”