Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Minnie too will be leaving in a few minutes. Has to catch the 7:50 uptown bus.

  Outside it's that mean spirited damp cold, the worst kind for arthritis. A low sky, clouds soaking up the light like soiled cotton.

  This exasperating habit of Minnie's! waits till Jinx gets out on the street, then calls after him from the doorway, a high pitched drawling yell more volume than substance. Jinx isn't sure what she's asking: Is he eating out that night? What time will he be back?

  Jinx laughs and waves. Be home sometime, Momma!

  Whether Minnie has heard clearly or not she waves energetically back, big happy smile, love in her face so plain it pierces his heart, Jinx Fairchild's black heart. like Minnie Fairchild is taking her rightful seat in that special row of the bleachers, where mister Breuer saves seats for VIPs, as he calls them, right there in the first row.

  That white girl, Graice Courtney.

  Now she's at the high school, Jinx Fairchild sees her frequently. And she sees him.

  That look in her eyes, so raw in appeal, so without guile or girlish subterfuge. or pride. Jinx Fairchild is fearful of it even as he's excited, sexually stirred. She has told him, No one is so close to me as you, no one is so close to us as we are to each other.

  Jinx supposes, yes, it's true. But he doesn't want to think why it's true or what he can do about it.

  Over five hundred students at Hammond Central High School but somehow it happens that Jinx Fairchild, a senior, and Graice Courtney, a sophomore, are thrown together often, by accident is it accident? and in any room or field of vision, however vast, they are never unaware of each other.

  There's a blindness in their perception of each other. As if, where each stands, the world is too suddenly flooded with light.

  On the stairs. in the corridors. at the bus stop in front of the school. In the school auditorium where, each Friday morning like clockwork, the homerooms file into their respective rows of seats.

  Jinx Fairchild, down front with the other seniors, can't resist glancing over his shoulder to where, at the rear Graice Courtney will be sitting with her classmates. And in the school cafeteria, that place of clamorous hilarity, romance, hurt feelings, ceaseless melodrama , where, from time to time, Graice Courtney will approach Jinx Fairchild at a table if he happens to be alone or in company hospitable to her, a white. Do you mind? Is it all right? Graice asks quietly, not lowering her tray to the table until Jinx gives her permission.

  It's a free country, girl! he says. Baring his teeth in a mirthless smile.

  No one is so close to me as you.

  No one is so close to us as we are to each other.

  At basketball games, this final season of Jinx Fairchild's at the school, 1957 58, Jinx will quickly seek out the white girl before the game begins. not to make eye contact with her, still less to wave and grin at her, as his teammates do with their friends and relatives, but simply to locate her, fix her in place. OK, girl.

  There you are.

  Once he'd wanted her dead; now he's worried he's going to fuck her.

  In Hammond, the races don't mix much. Course they do but not in a good way.

  White trash, says Minnie. You get you a good decent neighborhood colored folks owning their own homes, working to keep them up; then it's these hillbillies falling down drunk on the street, beating their wives and children as bad as any niggers, any of the worst cutthroat niggers. White trash moving in cause the whites that can afford it won't.

  During the basketball game, ofcourseJinx Fairchild is wholly indifferent to Graice Courtney, never so much as glances in her direction. But then it's this cool black boy's style not to glance in anyone's direction off the court, except Hank Breuer.

  sometimes not even him. Though he's well aware of the eyes riveted to him the white eyes how he appears through the prismatic lenses of their vision. He understands that whites study him as if he were not even a specimen of sorts but an entire category. They study him, amazed at his athletic gifts, admiring of his personal style, deceiving themselves they are learning something about this category when in fact they aren't even learning anything about Jinx Fairchild the specimen.

  Except for Graice Courtney: she's the only white who sees him, knows him.

  There's this mournful jazz song keeps winding through Jinx Fair child's head, sharp and poignant as actual memory though it's just a song he has heard on the radio, doesn't even re member the Negro singer, a man, he'd heard sing it, Went down to the St. James Infirmary saw my little baby there slow dirgelike lyrics with a clarinet behind stretched on a long white table, so sweet, so cold, so bare. And if he allows the song to continue, a snaky sort of caress that brushes across his very genitals, flooding blood and strength and purpose into them, Went down to the St. James Infirmary. all was still as night. My gal was on the table. stretched out so pale, so white.

  St. James Infirmary has got to be a Negro song, Jinx Fairchild thinks, doesn't it? Sure sounds like it. And if it isn't, should be.

  So pale so white.

  So dead.

  When he hears this song in his head he finds he's thinking of Graice Courtney without knowing it. Sometimes, watching the girl anhet notkno hA$wA, he stY heMP the 5onE v his head.

  So too do dreams continue their autonomous narratives be neath the threshold of consciousness, apart from our volition.

  The dreaming self beneath the thinking I.

  That I I I we can't imagine ceasing to exist even as, like Jinx Fairchild on the basketball court, we sense how precariously it's there: how provisional, even nominal, the terms of its existence.

  Graice Courtney is saying in a rapid lowered voice, just loud enough so that Jinx Fairchild, beside her, can hear over the rattling bus noises, a bad dream about it last night, and I woke up so scared, thinking it was all ahead, and going to happen again. She pauses, not looking at Jinx. The two are sitting side by side, stiff as strangers.

  Do you think about it, much? I mean.

  Jinx Fairchild makes a wincing, shrugging gesture, staring out the window. It's an overcast March afternoon, descending jaggedly toward dusk: not yet five o'clock and already deep in shadow.

  Yah. Sure. All the time.

  Graice asks shyly, Do you think there'll ever be a time when.

  we won't?

  Jinx shrugs again.

  If we each leave Hammond, live somewhere else I'm sure as hell gonna live somewhere else.

  You're going to college next year, and after college. ?

  Jinx shrugs and doesn't re ply. He's sitting with his arms folded awkwardly across his Hammond school jacket, hands gripped be neath his armpits. The green and white knit cap is pulled down low on his forehead, to his eyebrows: makes his long lean face look pushed together. Graice Courtney blows her nose in a crumpled pink Kleenex.

  Says, as if they'd been arguing, But we did the right thing, back then.

  Any other thing would have been a terrible mistake.

  Jinx says, almost too loudly, What right thing' you talking about, girl? Not telling anybody what happened, you mean, or killing the fucker himself?

  Graice Courtney leans forward suddenly as if she has become lightheaded. There's a small pile of schaolbooks in her lap, a red simulated leather purse, a badly soiled duffel bag of the kind gym clothes are carried in; she leans her elbows on the duffel bag and presses her fingertips hard against her eyes, stretching the skin.

  It's a gesture Jinx Fairchild has seen before. She says so softly, Not telling anybody what happened, that Jinx almost doesn't hear.

  They're on the East Avenue bus plummeting to Lowertown in a sequence of short, steep hills. Jinx was on the bus first, sitting in a double seat near the rear directly over the wheels, his cap pulled low on his forehead and his jaws grinding an enormous wad of gum, a cold crinkly steely look of Iceman's that means he isn't in the mood for company.

  If passengers on the bus recognize him he isn't in the mood for their praise or congratulations or questions about what comes next, now the Ha
mmond team is set for play offs.

  maybe for a state championship. But Graice Courtney, entering the bus at the front, alone, with no girl companions this afternoon and no boyfriend Jinx seems to know that Graice has a white boyfriend, he's seen them together at basketball games , made her way to him unerring as a sleepwalker, murmuring, Can I sit here, is it all right? even as the bus swerved and pitched her into the seat.

  Jinx Fairchild said, as he always says, It's a free country, girl!

  The first time Graice Courtney sat with Jinx Fairchild on the city bus, as if they were old friends, as if, maybe, they were going out together, pretty white girl and her brown skinned boyfriend, Jinx was annoyed, upset, embarrassed; in fact he was desperate to escape, wanted nothing more than to jump up, yank the bus cord, get off at the first stop. Wasn't she asking for trouble? Wanting people to see them together and to wonder?

  He'd remained where he was, of course. Hot faced and trem bung and resentful

  Feeling the eyes crawl over them. Whites, mainly. But a few blacks too.

  Though this is the North, not the South. And it's 1958. All Hammond public schools are declared officially integrated.

  even if most of the residential neighborhoods, de facto, are not.

  Jinx Fairchild hadn't guessed he was in the mood for talking, but seems he is. Practically poking his nose in Graice Courtney's bushy hair, breathing warm and damp as a dog in her ear. I did the right thing, I didn't have any choice. We talked about this before.

  Once it got started, only way it was going to end was that peckerhead bastard dead, or me. He's so riled up he nudges the girl, closes his big hard fingers around her elbow; if they weren't in full view of a crowded bus of passengers, he'd sling his arm around her neck and catch her in a vise hold. just in play, like you'd throw a hold on a younger brother or sister. Jinx Fairchild is the kind of boy who likes to touch and sometimes to touch hard.

  He's saying, And every hour of every fucking day I'm gonna give thanks it wasn't me.

  Graice Courtney continues to stretch the skin around her eyes in that old looking gesture. Like she's thought the same thoughts so many times and can't get free of them. Jinx wants to slap her hands down.

  He sees the nails are bitten, especially the left thumb. To the quick.

  She says, If only. I had it to do over again. It was my decision, it was my Jinx says, Yah, honey, but you did, didn't you. As my daddy says of certain things, It is writ. It is writ, Amen.

  Graice Courtney says, as if suddenly calmed, placated, It is writ.

  Amen.

  They sit for some minutes not speaking, a kind of equilibrium between them.

  Jinx sees Graice has a tiny cold sore on her upper lip. Her eyes are strange to him: icy, pewter colored, deep set beneath her brows.

  Her skin is pale, smooth, thin, sprinkled with freckles like dirty raindrops. She could be a plain hard looking girl or she could be beautiful; Jinx can't judge, sitting so close. He's nervous, excited, this close. Smelling the girl's warm, slightly yeasty odor. A stab of desire sharp as pain between his thighs.

  No one is so close to me as you.

  No one is so close to us as we are to each other.

  Since April 1956, Graice Courtney has matured a good deal, has the features of an adult woman set in that girl's face. Jinx can't re ally remember her, what she'd been like, before the trouble with Little Red Garlock: just a neighborhood girl, very young. Pretty, flirty, reckless seeming. The kind any intelligent black boy would have sense enough to avoid.

  Jinx wonders if she's a little crazy.

  Jinx wonders what she wants with him, after the trouble she's already brought him.

  These conversations, these breathless improvised meetings, are entirely at Graice Courtney's initiative. Left to himself, Jinx Fair child wouldn't touch her to use a frequent expression of Minnie's with a ten foot pole.

  The previous summer, she'd telephoned him at home. Called three times, the first two times getting Minnie, since Jinx was out.

  Who's that girl pestering you? Wouldn't leave her name, like she's ashamed? Did sound like some pissy little white girl to me! Jinx was astonished by the call and touched: near as he could determine, Graice was in tears because of some unhappiness in her family; she'd told him she didn't deserve to live because she was fated.

  just no good. Jinx had talked with her for almost an hour, and when he hung up he'd felt as exhausted as if he'd been working out in the gym for that long.

  Next day, and the days following, he'd been on the lookout for her.

  meaning to avoid her.

  She's rummaging now in her purse. Says she has something for him.

  How come you always giving me things? Jinx laughs.

  His laughter, with Graice Courtney, sounds to his own ears like wire scraping concrete.

  Graice laughs too, as if happily. Must be, she says, with a sidelong smile, you're the kind of boy people like to give things to.

  Several times in the past year or so Graice has embarrassed Jinx by pressing little gifts on him. He's accustomed to being given things by his mother, and relatives, and certain black girls, and neighbor ladies who think he's sweet. but there's an intensity in Graice's behavior that makes him uncomfortable. Is she thinking of him all the time?

  Plotting things to give him, things with droll little meanings, all the time? Once she gave him a key chain with a thimble sized brass basketball. another time a rhinestone stickpin Jinx hadn't known what the damn thing was supposed to be another time a slim gold fountain pen, very elegant. Jinx wonders if he's supposed to re member her sometime, give her something.

  He never has and never will.

  Nor is he fool enough to touch her; he knows how that would end up.

  Huh! What's this?

  It's a sepia tinted photograph, very old, measuring about six inches by eight, on stiff cardboard backing. a photograph of the Civil War.

  Stiffly posed across a rural bridge, reflections sharp in the water and sky, in the background massed with j unglelike foliage, are a band of Union soldiers, some on horseback, most on foot, and among the foot soldiers are several black men, uniformed like the rest. The caption, in faded ink, re ads Military bridge across the Chickahominy, 1864.

  Jinx Fairchild whistles faintly. This the re al thing? I mean so old?

  He's holding the photograph up to the light. The way he stares, it might be he's looking at something hurtful.

  It always scares Jinx, stirs him to an emotion he can't name, when he sees the images of people long since dead, considers their strange composure in the face of destiny and dissolution. Contemplating the past, you know there's no Heaven, no place for all those dead to end up. Also, these are Union soldiers, freed slaves among them, in the Man's uniform: just as husky, just as manly, just as composed though their uniforms are all shabby as the whites. A photograph is a puzzle, Jinx Fairchild thinks, but what's it a puzzle of? And what's the solution? He's just staring and staring, like a small child.

  Graice is saying excitedly, leaning against him, My uncle, he's a photographer, he has drawers of things like that, things he collects.

  He goes all around the state, to auctions and junk shops, collecting.

  I told him about you and I said. and he said, Please take it and give it to your friend. I told him you were my friend. I said.

  I work for my uncle sometimes, if there's enough work to be done.

  The thing about photography that's so surprising, it's that when a negative is being developed, a print made from a negative, there isn't any true light or color to it except what you make of it.

  From a single negative you can get a thousand different prints. Not many people know that. Graice is chattering happily, leaning against Jinx's arm, but Jinx isn't paying much attention until she says, I thought, you know, when I found it. one of your actual ancestors might be there. On the bridge.

  Jinx looks up sharply. One of my what?

  'Ancestors.

  Jinx Fairchild j
ust stares at her. Ancestors?

  She says, faltering, When Lincoln freed the slaves, I mean.

  And they helped fight the.

  Slaves?

  Jinx Fairchild stares at the white girl until she looks away, chilled and re buffed.

  He doesn't say another word to her until she gets off the bus at Jewett Street, then only mumbles, G'bye, and doesn't look after her, as if they were strangers who'd sat together by accident, sure won t peer back to see where she's standing on the sidewalk staring after him.