The Outsider

by Richard Wright

  Long ago, in his fourteenth year, while standing waiting for her preachments, he had demanded to know why she always pinioned him in solitude before handing down her moral laws, and she had replied that it was to make him develop the habit of reflecting deeply, that he knew as well as she when he had done wrong and she wanted to teach him to be his own judge. Anger now rose in him and he sought for some way to make her feel it. He grew suddenly resentful of the rickety furniture of the room. It’s her own damn fault if she lives like this…She could be living comfortably with Gladys…

  Yet, even as he thought it, he knew that he was wrong. Gladys and his mother hated each other; once, when they had lived together during the early days of his marriage, Gladys and his mother had vied for female dominance in the home and it had ended with his mother’s packing and leaving, declaring that she preferred to live alone rather than with a wilful daughter-in-law who did not respect her.

  “Why do you insist on living like this?” he broke the ice.

  “We’re not going to talk about how I’m living,” she countered.

  “No matter. But why do you live like this?” he asked again.

  “And why do you live as you’re living?” she demanded bitterly turning to him. “You’re drinking again. I can smell it.”

  “Not much,” he said; his voice was clipped but controlled.

  Her right hand dabbed clumsily at a tear on her wrinkled cheek. She slid into a chair and cried, her withered lips twisting, her false teeth wobbling loosely in shrunken gums.

  “You’ve started spoiling little girls, taking advantage of children…Son, can’t you control yourself? Where’s all this leading you? Why in God’s name do you lie to a little girl like Dot and seduce her?”

  “I didn’t lie—”

  “You did!” she blazed. “You let her hope for what you couldn’t do, and that’s lying. I’m no fool! If you didn’t lie to her, that’s worse. Then she’s just a little whore. And if she’s a whore, why did you take up with her? Cross, it’s easy to fool a young girl. If you’re proud of this cheap trick, you’ve fallen lower than I thought you had.”

  She had done it; she had evoked in him that shameful mood of guilt born of desire and fear of desire. He knew that she was not lamenting for him alone, but for her own betrayed maidenhood, for how she had once been so treacherously beguiled into trusting surrender; she was blaming him somehow for its having gone wrong, confusedly seeking his masculine sympathy for her sexually blighted life! Goddamn her! Hadn’t she no sense of shame? He imagined himself rising and with a single sweep of his palm slapping her to the floor. And in the same instant a poignant pity for her seized him. Poor, lost, lonely woman clinging for salvation to a son who she knew was as lost as she was. He was too close to her and too far from her; much too warm toward her and much too cold. If only he understood her less! But he was cut off from that; he was anchored in a knowledge that offended him. And this image of his mother’s incestuously-tinged longings would linger with him for days and he could curse her for it, and finally he would curse himself for living in a crazy world that he could not set right.

  “Promising a child and knowing you don’t mean it,” she sobbed in despair. “How can men do that?”

  He knew that now she was reliving her own experience, grieving over the thwarted hopes that had driven her into the arms of religion for the sake of her sanity. And he? Where could he be driven? Nowhere. His mother was lucky; she had a refuge, even if that refuge was only an illusion. But he could only get out of this world or stay in it and bear it. His anger waxed as he saw that she had a balm, however delusory, and he had none. And yet she was complaining to him! If she knew what he lived each day, she would be horrified. But his mother was convinced that he was hardhearted, that he was withholding his help out of selfish malice. An ironic smile stole across his lips.

  “You can laugh!” she stormed at him. “But God’ll punish you! He will! You’ll see before you die! You’ll weep! God is a just God! And He’s a hard and jealous God! If you mock Him, He’ll show you His Power!”

  He shuddered and again projected his pity out upon her, then his pity recoiled back upon himself, for he knew that she would never understand him. A second later he pushed even this self-pity from him, realizing that it too was useless, would only depress him.

  “I’m sorry, Ma,” he sighed.

  “Sorry for what?” she railed. “You can’t undo what you’ve done. You’ve sinned, Cross, and it’s to God you must confess with a contrite heart. Even if that girl gets rid of her child, she’ll be forever hurt. She’ll remember what you promised—”

  “But I didn’t promise her anything,” he protested.

  “Oh, stop lying,” she said. “You did! You promised by the way you acted…”

  A hopeless silence rose between them. Through the years his mother had related to him how, when she had been a country school teacher in a tiny southern community, she had met his father during the early days of the First World War. A Negro regiment had been camped nearby and excitement was everywhere. Her heart was ready and full of love. They first met at a church dance and he had straightaway declared his love. In her romantic eyes he was a huge boy going away to die on some distant battlefield and her heart had gone impulsively out to him, and finally her body also.

  They married a month after they met and his regiment moved northward. She followed, feeling glad that she was giving him her life. But she soon learned that there were other girls foolish enough to look at him through romantic eyes and give him their hearts and bodies too. She finally upbraided him and he was cynical and defiant; then, more to avoid her than from motives of patriotism, he had, after returning from France, joined the army as a regular soldier. She trailed him dismally from army camp to army camp, begging for an understanding. Instead, the gap grew wider. Even before her son was born in 1924, she knew that she was only in his way, a worrisome wife. It was then that she took her sorrow and her infant son to God in copious tears. A year later she learned that somewhere in the reaches of Harlem, in a dirty, vacant lot at midnight, the police had found him lying wounded. He had been in a drunken street brawl, had lain unconscious in subzero weather, and had died a day later in an army hospital…

  With Cross in her arms, she had returned South and resumed her teaching, but her real profession was a constant rehearsal in her memory of her tiny but pathetic drama, a continuous clutching of it to her heart in the form of a blend of complaint and accusation.

  Cross looked at her; tears were still streaming on her cheeks.

  “Son, can’t you deny yourself sometimes and not hurt others?” she begged of him humbly; she was again, in the evening of her life, supplicating the fateful world of man. “You’re destroying yourself. I know you believe only in your own pleasure, but must you hurt other people? If you feel you can’t master yourself, then take your problem to God. He’ll teach you how to live with others before it’s too late. Life is a promise, son; God promised it to us and we must promise it to others. Without that promise, life’s nothing…Oh, God, to think that at twenty-six you’re lost…What’re you going to do, Cross?”

  He stood and gazed solemnly down at her.

  “I don’t know, Ma.”

  “Is it really over between you and Gladys?”

  “Yeah. There’s nothing there.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. We can’t make it.”

  “But your children? They need you…Cross, you can lose your job. Gladys can ruin you, and so can that girl. A wronged woman is a hard woman, Cross.”

  On wobbly legs he waited for her to grow quiet; he was frantic to see Gladys.

  “To think I named you Cross after the Cross of Jesus,” she sighed.

  “I got to go,” he said brusquely. The longer he stayed the more she would bewail the past and grate her heart as well as his nerves. “You need anything, Ma?”

  “I need to know that you’ve found God, Cross,” she whispered. “For months now ever
ything I’ve heard about you is bad.”

  “I’ll—” He felt the need to be kind. “See you tomorrow, hunh?”

  “And pray, son.”

  He went out of the door quickly to escape this fountain of emotion that made him feel guilty. He had to see Gladys and attempt to arrange a roughshod compromise to curb any rashness she might be contemplating as a result of Dot’s crazy visit. But the thought of Gladys made him quail; he knew that she would grasp eagerly upon his predicament and turn it against him, would try to use it to hold him at her mercy. Goddammit, if necessary, he would threaten to throw up his job…That ought to make her think a little. After all, the only thing Gladys really wanted was money.

  Of all the mad things on earth, the maddest was Dot’s talking to Gladys. Damn…He paused in the snow and stared. He ought to see Dot first and learn what had happened between her and Gladys. And he would give Dot the dressing down of her life! Didn’t she know that Gladys was her enemy, that she would never befriend her, would do all in her power to humiliate her? Yes; instinct should have warned Dot not to reveal her plight to the wife of the man she claimed to love. He stopped at a street corner and looked at his watch. He had three hours before reporting to work; he had to hurry.

  The sun had waned and already a touch of darkness was in the sky. It was growing rapidly colder and an icy wind swept through the streets. Hunger and emotional tension had drained him; he had to eat to stave off that incessant grinding in his stomach. He saw a dingy lunchstand with a sweaty plate glass window. He’d grab a bite to eat…He turned, crossed the ice-packed pavement, pushed through a narrow doorway and saw a crowd of working class Negroes and heard babbling voices. He perched himself atop a high stool and propped his elbows upon a greasy counter.

  “A hamburger and a cup of coffee,” he told the girl who came toward him.

  “Right,” she sang out.

  The girl turned to prepare his order and his eyes, trained by habit, followed the jellylike sway of her sloping hips. At once his imagination began a reconstruction of the contours of her body, using the clues of her plump arms, her protruding breasts, the gently curving shape of her legs, and the width of her buttocks. Through the bluish haze of tobacco smoke and amidst the hub of laughter coming from the rear of the cafe, his senses dreamily seized upon woman as body of woman, not the girl standing by the steam table, but just woman as an image of a body and he drifted toward a state of desire, his consciousness stirring vaguely with desire for desire. His feelings, set off by the sight of the girl, now turned inward, then they projected themselves outwardly again, not so much upon the girl but in a seeking for a girl, to an image that fetched him toward something to embrace as desirable: woman as body of woman…The girl came toward him now and he looked fully at her; she slid the plate with the hamburger to him and he saw her face: hard, with small reddish eyes; a full, coarsely formed mouth; huge cheek bones that slanted to a stubborn chin; sullen lips…An intractable bitch, he thought. He sighed as the girl’s too-solid reality eroded his deepening mood of desire for the desirable: woman as body of woman…

  He munched his hamburger and fell into a melancholy brooding upon the mysterious movements of his consciousness. What was this thing of desire that haunted him? It seems that I just desire desire, he told himself. And there’s no apparent end or meaning to it…And then there came to his mind the memory of the many sultry, smoky nights when he had been drunk with his friends in cheap dives and had seen girls like this. And, on those times, like today, a drive toward desire had risen imperiously in him and he had been just drunk enough for this desire for desire to hold fast to itself in spite of the girl’s blatant ugliness and he had sordidly bargained with her and had had her; and, like now, in the end, he had recoiled from her in self-disgust while lying beside her in bed just as he had recoiled a moment ago from this one without ever having gone to bed with her. On those drunken occasions he had gone back alone to his empty room to reflect moodily upon the obscurity of what he had been seeking when he had wanted the girl. Surely it had not been that girl he had so ardently wanted. No. But, yes, it had been the girl and it had not been the girl; he saw clearly that he had wanted the girl because his desire-impulse had pointed to her; but after having had her, desire was still not satisfied, still sought to encompass something within desire and hold it steady, to possess it, to become one with it. And that’s impossible, he told himself. One’s crazy to try to do it…Yet, he did try, and his trying seemed to be the essence of living. And marriage, could he build a marriage upon desire? Should one give pledges, make promises, swear vows the sacredness of which depended upon such running sands of feelings as desires…?

  And what about his desire for Dot? Although she was carrying his child, his desire for her had already gone…God in Heaven! What could he do? When he had been a child he had thought that life was a solidly organized affair, but when he had grown up he had found that it had the disorganized character of a nightmare. What crazy fool had thought up these forms of human relations? Or had men and women just drifted blindly through the centuries into such emotional arrangements? He was convinced that an idiot could have conceived of better ways of establishing emotional alliances, and men must have felt uneasy about it too, for they had sought to make desire and passion stable by subjecting them to legal contracts! If human emotions fail to remain constant, then draft laws stipulating that that which will not remain constant must remain constant…As he brooded over the problem of desire a quiet sense of awe drenched him. Moods like these were the nearest he ever came to religious feelings.

  He jerked to attention as a wave of guffaws rose from the crowd of Negroes in the rear of the cafe. Most of them were young and they were bent double with mirth. A tall Negro lifted his voice with loud authority over the rolling laughter.

  “Where there’s lots of rumors, there’s bound to be some truth in ’em,” he pronounced.

  “You mean to tell me you believe Flying Saucers are real?” a short, brown boy demanded with indignation. “You got better sense than that!”

  Cross had heard a hundred such arguments in bars and cafes and he was primed to relax and listen to yet another one, to see to what heights of fantasy it would soar.

  “I say these white folks is hiding something,” the tall Negro maintained, “and what they’re hiding scares ’em!”

  “And what’re they hiding?” the waitress asked.

  “Things they don’t want you to know,” the tall Negro said cryptically.

  Teasing laughter full of suspense went from man to man. Cross could feel that they wanted to believe this high mystery, but they needed more fantastic facts before their beliefs could jell. Their attitude was one of laughing scepticism underscored with seriousness.

  “Know what they found in one of them Flying Saucers?” the tall man demanded. “One of ’em was full of little men, about two feet high, with skin like peach fuzz—”

  A waterfall of laughter showered in the cafe. Men rose and stomped their feet, tossed back their heads, and bellowed.

  “But what the white folks so scared about?” someone asked. “Little men can’t hurt nobody.”

  Silence. All eyes were turned expectantly to the face of the tall man.

  “THEM LITTLE MEN THE WHITE FOLKS FOUND IN THEM SAUCERS WAS COLORED MEN AND THEY WAS FROM MARS!” the tall man spoke in deep solemn tones. “That’s why they hushed up the story. They didn’t want the world to know that the rest of the universe is colored! Most of the folks on this earth is colored, and if the white folks knew that the other worlds was full of colored folks who wanted to come down here, what the hell chance would the white folks have?”

  Screams of approval, leaping from chairs, and clapping of hands.

  “You ought to be shot to think of a thing like that!”

  “It fits in with the way white folks act!”

  Laughter died slowly. The men wiped their mouths with the backs of their hands, gazing at one another with sly joy.

  “But it cou
ld be true,” a man said soberly. “White folks in America, France, England, and Italy are the scaredest folks that ever lived on this earth. They’re scareda Reds, Chinese, Indians, Africans, everybody.”

  “But how come you reckon they so scared?” an elderly man asked.

  “’Cause they’re guilty,” the tall man explained. “And guilty folks are scared folks! For four hundred years these white folks done made everybody on earth feel like they ain’t human, like they’re outsiders. They done kicked ’em around and called ’em names…What’s a Chinese to a white man? Chink-Chink Chinaman with pigtails down his back and he ain’t fit for nothing but to cook and wash clothes. What’s a Hindoo to a white man? A nigger who’s in love with ghosts, who kisses cows and makes pets of vipers. What’s a black man to a white man? An ape made by God to cut wood and draw water, and with an inborn yen to rape white girls. A Mexican? A greasy, stinking rascal who ought to be worked to death and then shot. A Jew? A Christ-killer, a cheat, a rat. A Japanese? A monkey with a yellow skin…Now our colored brothers are visiting us from Mars and Jupiter and the white folks is sweating in a panic—”

  Negroes rolled in laughter, feeling that the powerful white world had been lowered to their own humble plane by the magic of comic words. One black boy danced ecstatically, then, holding his hands over his mouth as though he felt it unseemly to vent his savage mirth indoors, ran out of the cafe, leaving the door open. Upon the snowy sidewalk he screamed and howled and flapped his arms in the icy wind. For a moment he paused, then ran back to the door and, gasping for breath, said:

  “Man, that’s sure cool!” He lifted his eyes to the grey sky. “You colored brothers on Mars, come on down here and help us!”

  Cross found himself joining in the laughter. His heart went out to these rejected men whose rebel laughter banished self-murder from his thoughts. If only he could lose himself in that kind of living! Were there not somewhere in this world rebels with whom he could feel at home, men who were outsiders not because they had been born black and poor, but because they had thought their way through the many veils of illusion? But where were they? How could one find them?