Life is, after all, a search for adventure, and I had had precious little of that in Boston. Life is a search for adventure, yes, and you sure don’t get adventure alone, by yourself. You get it with other people, but first you’ve got to get to know those people. The last time I had seen any of them, I was still a schoolboy, still practically a kid with no real understanding or insight or compassion or simple savoir faire. Now I had grown up a little, emotionally if not physically, and I could pry into them, I could find out who all these people really were, I could take the whole town apart piece by piece and examine it meticulously and put it back together again. A creeping quidnunc, an inquisitive gadfly, I would worm my way through every street of that town, and through every heart, and learn everything anew.
The quadrennial homecomer, the sporadic wayfarer, discovered in reaching his native shore that he had come a long way in both space and mind, turning, changing, returning into somebody Pamela would not know, somebody who, even better, would not know her. But only his own, of which she was not one. The voyageur, making port, became the voyeur.
Chapter five
The soul of the air of Little Rock is often the big brown smell of baking bread: the tang of roasting wheat, of dough well done, toasty whiffs of the sharp biscuity savor of many loaves, the tawny nips of the staff of life so sharp they assault the senses: the gentle pain of pain. On Sunday night especially, and on into Monday morning, the bakeries—Colonial, Meyer’s, Wonder Bread, Mrs. Wright’s and others—are stuffing their ovens to freshen the shelves of a thousand groceries, and the breath of that work escapes those buildings, seeping out through their windows and doors, drenching the air of all the streets. I have noticed that essence in no other town, but it has always been that way in Little Rock. Walking off into that fragrant air, I became hungry.
Dawn had not yet broken. The air was still cool, but growing warmer. I would walk home; although it was more than a mile, my one suitcase wasn’t heavy, and I wanted to see the town, to watch the simple houses of my street as the morning light crept onto them. My house—I mean my father’s house—is on Ringo, which, if not one of the oldest streets in town, has the little-known distinction of being, except for University Avenue, the longest north-south passage in the city, beginning in the mud of the riverbank and running over two miles to end in the scalloped-oak jungles beside the Rock Island tracks. It is a thoroughly pedestrian street, and by that I mean both meanings: firstly it is fit more for walking than for driving; secondly it is commonplace. It is not fit for driving because it has too many stop signs, one at every corner in some stretches; it takes forever to traverse it by car, stopping and starting and stopping again. It is commonplace because, like Cross Street on one side and Chester on the other, it has nothing really conspicuous or special anywhere on its two miles, amalgamate of many different types and sizes of structures, none of them distinguished or circumstantial. Ringo in several ways is like the city itself, and I like to think of it as a typical street, although I realize it is rather seedy, shabby, and haggard in contrast to the newer streets farther west. It is a mellow and manly street, soft, easy, and casual. It may be sullen and rather splendidly splenetic but it is not melancholy like those streets east of Main, which seem to groan, “How weary we are! How jaded and sunk in sorrow, enduring days which are too long!” And it is self-respecting, but it has none of the reproachful hauteur of those proud but bored avenues and boulevards and circles and terraces of Pulaski Heights and the lavish additions, the opulent streets which laugh a laugh that sounds like “Ho-hum” and say, if you ask them, “We are not, after all, of Little Rock, but rather so far west of it that we manage very well, thank you, to establish our own independent coteries.” No, Ringo is neither sad nor snotty; if it says anything at all, should you ask, it says, “Buddy, I don’t give a shit, what’s it to you?”
It begins, as I say, in the mud of the riverbank, beneath the Baring Cross bridge, but leaps up the bank quickly and becomes macadamed and curb-lined, getting a good running start where the old Capitol City Coach Company bus and trolley yards used to be and where the sprawling red-brick edifice of the car barn still reposes in a kind of obsolete, preterit splendor, and then it dashes on for another block before the limited-access La Harpe Boulevard cuts rudely across its path and closes it; but it opens again on the other side and continues on to Markham, where I stood on the corner several blocks up from the MoPac station and looked down Ringo toward the river for a moment before turning south, past Tanner’s Café with its White Entrance on Markham and its Colored Entrance on Ringo, on up to West Second and West Third, past Mrs. Wright’s big bakery, where all of tomorrow’s bread for the Safeway Stores was amaking in its ovens, to West Fourth and Capitol Avenue and beyond, walking slowly and easily on my slow and easy street, letting the dawn come up on my left, the night fade away on my right, the street lights blink out. Ringo Daytime: on to West Ninth, the Little Rock Harlem, where for several blocks Ringo would be the exclusive property of the Negroes and would contain, at intervals, three Negro Baptist churches, the small shack of Ballard’s Bar-BQ (where the best sandwiches in town are made, I am told, having never been allowed to buy any, because I am white, ofay) and the Dunbar Community Center and Dunbar Junior High School for Negroes, and several small grocery stores now abandoned because one of the few places in town where Negroes can rub shoulders with the whites is the supermarket. In a newly cleared lot, high with pungent weeds, there was a sign I passed: a new sign stuck into the earth, saying, in large blue and white letters, mysteriously: “Who’s Happy?” I paused to ponder this strange sign, decided I was happy, and walked on.
On the other side of the Dunbar neighborhood, but in a block shared almost half and half by white and black, is my father’s house. Beyond it Ringo becomes increasingly white again and stays white until it goes past Roosevelt Road, which is Twenty-fifth Street, and gradually shades again from white to black, and ends, entirely black, no longer paved, almost like a country road lined with modest sharecropper-type houses, at West Thirty-sixth. My father’s house is extremely commonplace, so familiarly plain and usual that it is beyond description. It has six rooms, a front porch and screened back porch, is perfectly symmetrical, and is painted white. I feel strangely proud and exonerated, like a reconstructed liberal who thinks of himself as a staunch, enlightened integrationist, that there is a dwelling occupied by a Negro family just a few doors down the street which is exactly like my father’s house, detail for detail except the pigmentation of the occupants’ flesh. My father knows this and does not care; if somebody were callous enough to point this likeness out to him he would undoubtedly respond, “Buddy, I don’t give a shit, what’s it to you?” For my own part I will never understand that gross hypocrisy whereby all the black folks of Manhattan are consigned to Harlem and all the coloreds of Boston are stuck in Roxbury, whereas in Little Rock, apart from the pseudo-ghettos of West Ninth, the South End and East Side, black and white live side by side in many places.
I entered the house by way of the back door, because the front door is used only at Christmas or when my grandmother is visiting, and because the key to the back door is kept under a flower pot on the back porch while the front door has no key and can be opened only from the inside. I was very quiet because it was too early to wake my father; he is a technician for the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company and would have to put in a hard day’s work that day, as on any Monday, and needed all the sleep he could get. He used to beat hell out of me if I ever made any noise before breakfast. The back door led directly into the kitchen; I let my suitcase down gently inside the door, and, closing the door softly behind me, tiptoed across the room and closed the other door which opened onto the hall and his bedroom beyond. Then, as though it were an act I had been performing at that same hour in all the recent days, I opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of milk, then opened a cabinet door and removed a glass bowl, and then, my hand reaching automatically for the correct door in flagrant forgetfulness of
the fact that four years had passed since last I had done it, I opened still another cabinet and breathed a thrilled sigh of relief to discover there the box of Rice Chex in its proper place. But I slipped in getting a spoon: by mistake I pulled out the drawer which contained the heavy utensils, knives and spatulas and tea strainers, but forgave myself that error because those drawers look so alike and there are so many of them. I got the right drawer on the next try, extracted a spoon, and sat down at the table to mix myself a bowl of cereal. This simple performance, and especially my ingestion of the result, gave me a warm feeling of audacious pleasure, of defiance, because Pamela will not tolerate cereal either hot or cold, will not allow it in her pantry, will even prevent me from ordering it in restaurants, by reason of her firm conviction that the manufacture of breakfast foods is America’s most dishonorable racket, a clear swindle which returns insipid pap for precious dollars. Fortunately neither my father nor I subscribe to that estimate, and consequently I could philander that bowl of Rice Chex, secure in the knowledge that Pamela was two thousand miles away. While I ate I watched the neighbor’s cat, a spayed marmalade whose name as I recalled was Dundee, preening itself in the new morning sunlight in the back yard next door. The back yards of our neighborhood are not ample but neither are they cramped; there is enough room for a garage, an incinerator, a badminton court, two garbage cans, a small vegetable garden, a miniature thruway built by the toy road-graders of junior engineers, a mumble-de-peg arena, three sleeping dogs, six children playing hide-and-go-seek, a dozen preening cats, and a partridge in a pear tree. I grew up in one of them; in fact, in that very yard behind this house.
I was born in this house. Thus it was to some extent disconcerting, not to say utterly confounding, to look up from my bowl of cereal and see entering the kitchen a strange woman, a woman whom I had never seen in this house before. Without the security of that familiar bowl of Rice Chex, I would have panicked into supposing that I had entered the wrong house. But of course it was the right house. Only the wrong woman. She did not see me immediately, but took a teakettle off the stove, filled it with water at the sink, then returned it to the stove, turned on the burner under it, and then, still standing there, half facing me, she began an elaborate yawn-and-scratch: with her mouth stretched agape all the while, she raised a thin hand to her head and scratched her hair, then lowered it to her abdomen and scratched the neighborhood of her navel through the thin rayon of her chemise, then, lowering her hand once more, began a prolonged friction of her pudendum, deciding apparently that that was the best of the three scratching-places. I could hardly breathe, I was so embarrassed. I had no courage for voice, as any sound from me would have parted her from her senses. I waited, witless. The ecstasy of her act had closed her eyes, but now finally she opened them. When they came open the first thing they saw was my flabbergasted face. But for several seconds after she had seen me, brain messages being as slow as they are at that time of day, her hand kept on scratching. Then it, too, stopped.
“Christ all Jesus,” she said, not too loudly, but then she flung both arms ceilingward and screamed, a banshee’s furious wail, and ran off into the hall toward the bedroom, ululating, “Man sakes alive! WES! There’s a prowler out there! Get up, Wes! Quick! A prowler! Quick, Wes! Help!”
Because she called him Wes, I knew I was in the right house, that she was yelling at my father, Wesley K. Stone, and that possibly the old bastard had gone and gotten himself married without telling me about it. Or else she was another one of his concubines, his keptive floozies.
I was standing when he came rushing in to confront me. He was stark naked, and I didn’t think he looked much like my father because I had rarely seen him looking that way. In his left hand he held a .38 pistol of such ancient make that probably it was too rusty to fire, but I was frightened because he had neglected to put on his glasses. To a man with extreme myopia, a son is no better than a burglar.
“Daddy,” I said quickly before he could pull the trigger, “It’s me, Cliff!”
“What?” he mumbled and squinted fiercely at me. “Who?”
“It’s Cliff, Daddy. Put on your glasses.”
It is a wise father that knows his own child. “Clifford?” he said and lowered the pistol, and, suddenly aware of his nakedness, placed his other hand over his parts. He turned his head to his woman: “Sybil, damn your tough tits, don’t just stand there! Fetch me my specs and my bathrobe!”
Chapter six
We waited, my father and I, for the small eternity of time which, like the beginning of a curtainless in-the-round drama, leaves the spectator and the performer facing each other in an imagined timelessness and placelessness until the play can properly begin, until my father’s shady lady returned, and he put on, first the robe, then the glasses. Then saw me clearly.
“Hot diggety!” he said. “It is, aint it? When did you turn up?” He pumped my hand mightily and clapped me on the back. “Sybil, I want you to meet my boy. This here’s Clifford, my own boy.”
“Well, I swan,” said Sybil. “You sure give me a turn, sittin there at the table like that.”
“Beats the devil. Where’s your wife?” he asked.
“She wouldn’t come,” I said.
“Never mind. Glad to see you. Boy, you look good.”
“I’m sorry I woke you up,” I said.
“Hell, don’t mention it. Weren’t your fault. Sit down. Go on there, sit down, make yourself at home. Sybil, close your mouth and stir us up some grub. This is my boy Clifford.”
“Law me,” Sybil said and began banging some pots and pans around in the sink.
My father and I sat down across from each other at the table, and he jerked his thumb at his woman and said, “That’s Miss Sadie Thompson, my own horny hussy. Aint she a fine-lookin piece?”
“Aw…” Miss Sadie, overhearing, protested.
“Actually her name’s Sybil Samuels. Can you beat it? Lookit what big dinners she’s got!”
“Shush it, you,” Sybil put in. “How do you guys want your eggs fixed?” She held an open carton in her hands.
“Clifford?” my father said.
“Oh, sunny side up, I guess,” I said.
“Bacon?” she said.
“Yes, thank you.”
Turning, she said to herself, “Grunt and two cackles lookin at you.”
“Used to work in a hash-house,” my father explained. “That’s where she learned that kind of talk. Thinks she’s smart.”
“Listen to him!” she said to me. Then to him, “How you want yours, hon?”
“Same way, on toast,” he said.
“Bride and groom on a raft,” she said to the stove.
Boston is a long way off, I thought, I have come a fur piece. But oddly enough, I did not feel dislocated, out of place, but instead a warm gladness, an almost joyful satisfaction, at being able so easily to slip back into the bosom of my people, sloughing off the fusty nimbus of my sophisticated Boston self as though it were the anomalous nature, so that, a moment later when Sybil poured the coffee and dangled the cream pitcher over my cup and asked “Mud with?” it was easy for me to retort “Without” and to wink at her.
“My, my,” Sybil said, appraising me with a roving eye, “I do believe this boy is littler even than you, Wes, and you’re a dinky runt.”
“Don’t let that fool you,” he said to her. “This here kid used to be one of the finest bruisers for his size in the country. Why, I’ve seen times when Clifford would take on three or four of the neighborhood punks all at once and send ever goddamned one of em home to their mommas in short order. And he won the Golden Gloves, didn’t you, son?”
Grateful to the old guy for spieling me, I murmured modestly, “Yeah,” and gave Sybil a wry smile.
“But now he’s just one of them no-account Boston perfessors,” my father went on, ill-concealing his disappointment that his only son, who with disciplined training might well have become Featherweight (or, now, Lightweight) Champion of the World, had
developed into a mere broad-browed scholar, a most unmanly calling.
“Not exactly,” I said, and then explained to Sybil, “I work in a sort of museum. I’m not a teacher, just a researcher.”
“How’d they let you off?” my father wanted to know.
“Well, I haven’t had a real vacation since I got married, so I figured it was high time I took one.”
“Glad to see you anyway,” he said, leaving me to wonder what his “anyway” implied. My father and I, despite our perseveringly friendly connection, implemented all these years by his loose jocular charm, have never been able to talk to each other on equal and equable terms, probably because the purview of his small, complacent world, satisfying though it may be to him, has recurrently estranged me with its strangeness, that mystery of a life so obviously squandered yet in its own way so unsquanderable that I will never understand it. Physically, as Sybil had already noted and insinuated, my father and I are quite alike, and I fully expect some day to acquire that same beady squint of his, that slightly curled upper lip so delicately suggestive of an approaching sneer, that smooth baldness of the forecrown, and that thoroughly bibulous profile of the abdomen. But my parlous mind, my intrepid intellect which at times in Boston seemed to me should have been stamped like a sweatshirt “Property of Yale University,” had long since been so emendated by cultural enlightenment that I feared I would never ever be able any more to probe the meaning of his simple pleasures, to learn what joy his trifling strife engendered. And that would be the sorriest failure of my faculties.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 147