Fairbairn, Ann

by Five Smooth Stones

  Gramp laughed. "I'm listening, son. Swear to God I am."

  "But you're not hearing me. You don't want to hear me. What did you tell me the guys say on the docks about mules and niggers? Kill a mule, buy another; kill a nigger—"

  "It's just a saying, David. Just an old-time—"

  "Saying! Shit! It's true and you know it. If I ain't nothing but a chile, you ain't nothing but a nigger—a two-legged mule—on the docks. Now you've got a chance, now in your old age, to be something besides just a two-legged nigger mule on the damned New Orleans docks—"

  "Nigra, son. You ain't got it quite right."

  David slammed his fist down on the mantel so hard that pain shot up his arm. "One way they're right. One way they're right! You're a mule!"

  Joseph Champlin laughed again, not unkindly but with genuine amusement. David tried to hold his anger and his irritation back, to keep calm for a final spurt of entreaty. Gramp might be softening.

  "Look, Gramp, look. It makes sense, it does make sense. It's not foolishness."

  Gramp leaned forward, ran a long finger under the vamp of one leather house slipper, eased his foot out, then slipped it back in. "Getting me a blister," he said.

  "Oh, God!" said David. "Oh, sweet Jesus!"

  CHAPTER 15

  He did not really hear the slam of the front door behind his furious charge to the street until he was on the ferry. Then the sound of the door and the memory of the typewriter came all at once, and he was sick with shame. He wondered what the little man sitting in the house in Beauregard had that could fill him with shame for slamming out in a fit of anger. Perhaps it was because he could still remember, young as he had been, the sound of a low voice that said "So-so, little man, so-so—" when he had awakened frightened and crying in the dark.

  On the New Orleans side he did not leave the ferry, but turned in his ticket and remained on board. On the upper deck, on the colored side, he stood leaning on the rail, watching a big Negro down below as he directed the cars that came aboard. Funny, he thought, a white man will take orders from a Negro when the Negro is doing something like that; obey like a heeling dog the "This way, that way," the directions of an imperious black hand, no time for "sirs" or "ma'ams."

  When the cars were all parked, the gates closed, and the ferry groaning reluctantly away from the slip, the man below leaned for a moment on the rail, looking across the wide river. The cars seemed like well-trained circus animals, quiet in the places allotted to them. David looked again at the big man below, and wondered if he had seen the animal picture at the Lyceum or if he, like Gramp, got "the shorts" when he climbed the Jim Crow stairs to nigger heaven. Or if maybe he was planning to go to the late show when his shift was over.

  There was a glow on the town they were leaving, and ahead of them a brighter glow was drawing closer. David had not known where he was going when he had stormed out of the little white house. Part yours now, boy, part yours. Gramp had sounded proud when he said that. He knew he wasn't going to that movie. Seems like when colored gets old they ain't supposed to want to see no good movies. It was the last time he'd spend his good money, money he'd worked for, to help a damned son-of-a-bitching Jim Crow movie house get rich.

  Under his feet the ferry groaned and complained. People were saying there'd be a bridge over the river one of these days. What kind of a bridge? Bridge a colored man could walk across? Bridge a colored man could drive across? It would have to be a long bridge, thought David, an almighty long bridge, and there would have to be an almighty lot of men working on it, white and black, to make a bridge across the river that would take a colored man and his grandson to a good seat in a movie.

  "It's coming," said David. "It's gotta come."

  "You speaking to me, son?"

  He whirled, the blood hot in his cheeks because he had been caught talking to himself when he had thought he was alone, leaning on the rail of the ferry, watching the dark water, listening to his own thoughts, and trapped into talking out loud to himself.

  The man leaning on the rail beside him was a man about Gramp's age, wearing work clothes. On the deck beside him was a lunch bucket just like Gramp's. The smell of liquor was strong on his breath, but his eyes were as bright and alert as a squirrel's.

  "No, sir. I'm sorry, sir. Guess I was talking to myself. Got to be crazy to do that."

  "I don't know," said the old man. "I don't know 'bout that Go crazy if you don't sometimes."

  "Hope I didn't scare you."

  "Me? Scare me? Lawd, son, it'd take more than Li'l Joe Champlin's grandbaby to scare Henry Clay. Now, if you'd been one of these here delinquents, these here teens, all hipped up, smelling of weeds, mebbe I would of been scared. Soon hit an old man or cut him and take everything he's got as spit. But I ain't scared of Li'l Joe's grandson."

  "How come you know me?"

  "Seen you with your grandaddy, plenty of times. I been knowing Li'l Joe more'n forty years. Worked with him plenty. Just never happened to meet you. He said you was a fine boy. And I sez, 'You saying it, Li'l Joe; you the one saying it.' " He laughed. "Damned if he wasn't right."

  David squirmed. It always made him squirm when people said things like that, unless it was a girl. There was quiet for a moment, the boy and the man leaning on the rail of the boat, looking across the widest river on the continent, and David remembered his childhood's half-waking, half-dreaming fantasy of a wide, flowing river, its banks lined with people, all black, all singing. The banks were lined with people now, he thought, in broken-down old houses with slave quarters in the rear, in rat-ridden rooms, in shacks, and he wasn't a child anymore and they weren't singing.

  He forgot the old man, began to hum, patting his hand on the rail in time. "Oh, Mary, don't you weep—" In a moment the old man took up the tune, singing the words while David hummed. The old man can sing, thought David. That old man can really sing. When David joined the other in the words, the big Negro below heard them and looked up and smiled, teeth showing strong and white and clean in the dark face.

  ***

  David had finally convinced his grandfather that the overhead light with the pink glass shade wasn't enough to read by. Protesting every inch of the way, Joseph Champlin had bought a gooseneck lamp at a secondhand store. It was on the end table now, its light coming over his left shoulder the way David said it should. He had read the paper from front to back, trying to dispel the small devils of worry that dwelt in the back of his mind those nights when his grandson was away from home. He had lingered over the sports news, wishing again that his first wife hadn't been the ruination of their son Evan, thinking that if she hadn't, Evan's name might have been in the sports pages, and he wouldn't have to look for it, half fearfully, in the crime roundup.

  The rattle of the paper as he was folding it covered the sound of David's entrance. The soft click of the latch as the boy closed the screen door made him jump. "Lawd, David! Might as well shoot a man to death with a gun as scare him to death! Wasn't looking for you. Not till way late."

  David turned his eyes away from the shining relief in his grandfather's. Now that he was home, there was a lot he wanted to say, nothing that he could say.

  "You forget something?" asked Gramp.

  "Nope. Just didn't want to go anywhere once I got started. I got a lot of studying to do."

  "You already done that, David. Young fella like you can study too much. You going to get up to that collidge with your mind all tuckered out. Get yourse'f a beer and set a while. Does a man good just to set sometimes. Too damned hot setting outside, listening to Bucky and that woman of his fighting. They still fighting when you come up the street?"

  "Some. Didn't sound too bad."

  " 'Bout time they got to bed. Reckon that's what they fight for. Going to bed's better for some after a good fight."

  David laughed. The shame was gone now; he was easy, relaxed. "You sure know a lot for a little guy," he said.

  "Watch yourse'f, boy! Watch what you're saying. I ain't so little I can't
take you on."

  "Aw, come on, Gramp." David was in the kitchen now. The muted slam of the refrigerator door sounded good, and the chill of the bottle of beer felt good in his hand. "You wouldn't hit a guy with a gimpy leg." He was walking toward the living room.

  "I'd give him a whupping," said Li'l Joe Champlin. "Sure would if he was my bigmouth grandson."

  David stopped in the dining room and stripped off his shirt, laying it across the back of a chair. He walked into the living room and sat on the overstuffed divan, balancing beer bottle and glass on its arm. He stretched out long legs, feet wide apart, and held the bottle of beer high, looking through it, smacking his lips, then opened it and poured it carefully into the glass, tilting the glass to control the collar. Li'l Joe had not spoken again, did not speak until his grandson had taken a deep swallow of the beer, sunk his long body lower on the divan, pushed wide brown shoulders against its back, and crossed his ankles. Then Li'l Joe smiled, just widely enough to deepen the long wrinkles in his thin cheeks, etch finer ones at the corners of his eyes.

  "You sure a lot of boy," he said. "You sure one hell of a lot of boy."

  "I'm a man now," said David. "At least that's what you're always saying: 'You a man now, son.'"

  "Look, David." Gramp's voice was so low it scarcely carried across the room. "I'm sorry I got you so riled up."

  David's eyes grew round. He hadn't expected that. He sure as heck hadn't expected that. He opened his mouth to say something, he didn't know what, but Gramp was talking:

  "When you gets older, David, you forgets sometimes what it was like, how you thought when you was young. Then it comes back. Yessir, it comes back. Someday, son, you're going to find out fifty-nine ain't so old. Gawd knows, I feels a hundred and nine sometimes, but fifty-nine ain't so old. But when you're young, fifty-nine seems like the grave's yawning."

  Li'l Joe Champlin straightened the square ashtray so that its edge was true with the edge of the end table beside him, and leaned back. "Well," he said, "the grave ain't yawning yet for Joseph Champlin. But it ain't right for an older man to brush off a young un, not paying any attention to what's troubling him. Because things troubles young uns worse'n they does us older folks. Wouldn't want you to think the old man didn't understand what was worrying you."

  "Sure, Gramp," said David. "Sure. I know you understood. Only it seems as if things like—well, things like that damned Jim Crow balcony don't make any difference to you folks, seems as if they don't bother you. And they're bad."

  "I knows that, son. Lawd, don't no one knew it better than what we does! You going to see changes, son. You can feel 'em coming. But there's going to have to be a coupla generations, yessir, a coupla generations white and colored die off before they's any big changes."

  David sighed, took another long swallow of beer. Any way you looked at it, it was bad. It was bad talking about it too much, because that way you were like a chicken getting its

  neck rung, just squawking. It was bad not doing anything about it, because that way meant you'd given up hope. The only thing that wasn't bad was doing something about it.

  Gramp went on. "But seems like there's a difference now, some. Ain't no one hardly in my generation didn't have someone got lynched or treated bad. Like my daddy, burned alive. You can't fault the colored, David, if they was a frightened people, and they was. Wasn't no crime, wasn't nothing, to kill a nigger. Ain't no bad crime now. But it still seems like there's a difference, a feeling coming up that ain't fear, among the young folks. But it ain't different for us."

  When David didn't answer, Li'l Joe went on, his voice soft as silk in the warm room. "It's like this," he said. "All your life you remembers what you was taught by your mammas and daddies, and you keeps hold of yourself. You knows what you got to take and you takes it. Then one day something comes along and you can't keep hold no longer. You're a human being and you ain't no color, and you acts like a human being. And the whites don't like that. Lots of colored gone to their Maker many a time because they acted like a natural man. It ain't right to be too hard on us older folks, son; we got memories of bad things, and bad things still happening."

  Without speaking David got up and went into the kitchen for more beer for them both. A license to kill, he thought. That was what the whites had been handed in their cradles. And not only a license to kill; a license to rape, to rob, to break into a man's home, a license to ease their lust on a black woman's body and abandon their bastards like Rudy, half-Negro, half-white, all Negro in the eyes of their world. It was a license that said for everyone to read: "Know ye by all these presents that this man is in no way bound by any laws of decency, written or unwritten, and is free to go his way of evil without let or hindrance insofar as his relationships with those of the Negro race are concerned."

  Gramp was right, though, when he said there was less fear; he could feel it, an undercurrent of something stronger than fear flowing deep, deep under the darkness of their lives, but a felt and real thing.

  When he came back from the kitchen he sat again on the divan, legs outstretched, shoulders squared against its back, head on one of Tant' Irene's antimacassars. When he finally spoke, it was a single word: "Jungle," he said.

  "That's what the whites think," said Gramp. "Really think, down deep. We nothing but jungle critters who can talk. Talking animals."

  "That's not what I meant. I meant it the other way round. The Negro's not the critter from the jungle. Nope, it's the white. They're closer to it than we are. Way closer. Living off the weak. The lion on the veldt, he's got 'em all scared. That's why they call him the King of the Beasts. Living off the flesh of little animals. Getting fat on it. Teaching the cubs to kill."

  Li'l Joe was quiet. When his grandson talked like that he listened, not always agreeing, but always with pride. Boy sure can study a thing out, he thought.

  "But that's only half true," said David. "There's more. A lion's not scared of—oh, say an antelope. Not one bit scared. He doesn't know enough to know that when he's fattening himself up on a nice young antelope, the other antelopes could get together and kill him. They could tramp him to death in five minutes." David poured beer in his glass, watched the collar settle. "Hell of it is," he said, "the antelope doesn't know it either."

  Joseph Champlin uncrossed the ankles he had propped on the hassock, eased the leather house slipper off one foot with the toe of the other, let the slipper drop to the floor. "Reckon so," he said.

  "And," said David, head back again, "there's the difference. Right there's the difference. The white man has a different brain from the lion. The lion doesn't know the antelopes could kill him, but the white, he knows. The lion's the King of Beasts, he never doubts it; the white man wonders, worries—he sure as hell isn't going to give the antelope—the colored—a chance to find out that he's not. See what I mean?"

  Joseph Champlin saw what his grandson meant; he had been seeing it for half a century. He had never defined the insight with words, because he did not have the facility with words. Those things were known the way it was known that rain was hovering, the way it could be told by the look of a stream that fish would rise to the bait. Now a seventeen-year-old who had, it seemed to Joseph Champlin, stood by his bed only a few nights ago and said, "If I bring my pillow, Gramp, can I sleep in your bed?" was putting these things in words, was defining instinct and insight, and a knowledge so hidden as to be almost arcane.

  They couldn't answer it, the boy and the man, sitting together in the sweltering heat of a New Orleans summer night. But Joseph Champlin, whenever he talked like this with his grandson, had a feeling that there was an answer and that it was coming. He did not know why he had this feeling, but it was there.

  Later in the evening Li'l Joe said to his grandson: "Never did get a chance to tell you what I started to say before we went lion hunting. I never said I wouldn't come away from here to see you, David. Never did say that. I wants to come see you. But I sure as hell ain't going with you. There's a difference. Lawd, boy, a
fter you been there a while and settled in, I can get me a bus—"

  "Train, Gramp. F' Gawdsake, train!" David had never told his grandfather how he had been Jim Crowed on the bus.

  "You think train's best, I'll take the train. Always did like being on a train. Maybe a plane. Now that's something I really wants to do. We'll see how the money is. Plane or train, it don't matter." Gramp started to hum, then sing. " 'Tell 'em I wuz flyin'—Tell 'em I wuz flyin'—'" He looked at his grandson hopefully. "Feel like making a little music, son?"

  CHAPTER 16

  Two months later, Bjarne Knudsen stood before the tall window in his study, looking down at the boy in the big chair as he so often had looked down at Li'l Joe Champlin. But where Li'l Joe had been almost lost in the chair's depth, David Champlin filled it. "Your grandfather is a small, stubborn man," said Knudsen. "And you are a large, stubborn boy."

  David, who had not looked directly at the Professor since he had come in twenty minutes earlier, clasped and unclasped his hands for the hundredth time and said, "Yes, sir."

  "David! Stop saying 'yes, sir,' like a parrot that knows nothing else! What did the doctor say to you about Li'l Joe?"

  "That—that he'd have to be careful. That he might have another—"

  "Wait! He said, did he not, that the heart attack was not a major one? A critical one? That many people have had far more severe attacks and lived for many years? Did he not say this? Do not lie to the Prof—"

  "Well—yes, sir—"

  "So! He is not a fool, your grandfather."

  "Yes, he is too. A hardheaded old fool. That's—that's what I'm saying. Going back to the loading gang on the docks, doing work he'd no business doing, little and old as he is—"

  "Bah! Not quite sixty and you say he is old! And he will not do it again. Believe me, I am sure of this. A heart attack of that kind leaves a residue of fear. An instinctive thing. The doctor will tell you. Men will go back again and again to hazardous jobs on which they have received serious injuries. Few will court a second heart attack. Did the doctor not tell you that many people who have had such attacks actually live longer than those who have not because they do take care?"